by Jess Hill
The No More campaign has been praised by influential figures within the anti–domestic violence movement, like Marcia Langton and Josephine Cashman, and there was even a plan to build a national campaign around No More, backed by all seven major sporting codes, Our Watch and White Ribbon Australia. Yet despite efforts to get ministerial backing, there has been little support from Canberra.
But the message is clear: when power is placed in the hands of communities, and not just the powerful few, incredible things can happen. It’s time for Canberra to acknowledge that First Nations people have their own sophisticated strategies for healing and reducing violence. All they need is for governments and police to stop undermining them, and to start backing them.
*That figure is much higher in urban centres (over 75 per cent) but lower in regional areas; Port Hedland had the lowest rate, at 27 per cent.
#Non-Indigenous mothers with Aboriginal children are also at greater risk.
†These are the words of the Northern Territory coroner, Greg Cavanagh, who hammered senior NT police for their ‘lack of urgency, intent and competence’.
§As this book went to print, the Western Australian government signalled that by mid-2019, it would abolish laws that jailed people for defaulting on fines. But as Hodgson has explained, even if women in other states are not being jailed for unpaid fines, they are still being threatened with arrest when they call the police for help.
‡Despite historians Henry Reynolds and Richard Broome opening the burgeoning field of colonial and frontier history in the 1980s, this scholarship is only now starting to transfer through to mainstream reportage.
**As historian Liz Conor notes, these stories can be shunned not only because white Australians don’t want to hear them, but sometimes because they can be deeply shaming for surviving Aboriginal women and their families, who are already dealing with the complexity of their often fragmented family origins. Such stories tend to be shared in trusted research partnerships and other safe scenarios, to ensure they aren’t appropriated by right-wing elements in government to justify discriminatory policies, as was seen with the 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Intervention.
##Langton’s question was answered when the Australian government prohibited using ‘culture’ as a defence in 2007.
††In a fascinating corollary, Judge Advocate Collins appears in another story about domestic violence, just months after the arrival of the First Fleet. In December 1788, Sydney woman Deborah Ellam Herbert went to court to complain about her husband, who had attacked her after their next-door neighbour’s pigs had overrun their vegetable patch. Judge Advocate Collins wasn’t so perturbed by this man’s cruelty: he sentenced her to twenty lashes, and ordered her to return to her husband.
§§Other early accounts of the ‘savage barbarity’ inflicted on Aboriginal women came from many other well-known observers, like Watkin Tench and John Hunter (love-making, wrote Hunter, was ‘always prefaced with a beating, which the female seems to receive as a matter of course’). The proof for this brutality, they said, was found in the scars on the bodies of Aboriginal women. But scars were generally not evidence of brutality: they were often self-inflicted wounds of grief, for example, or done for other ritual purposes.
‡‡Lest Aboriginal women be rendered worthy of compassion, however, there was a trope to erase their humanity, too. As Conor documents, the Irish social worker Daisy Bates introduced a story that was particularly tenacious: that Aboriginal mothers were cannibals who murdered their children and ate their flesh, because they enjoyed the taste. Bates, appointed by the Western Australian government to research the state’s Aboriginal tribes, used a small skull found near an Aboriginal campsite to prove her theory, but was so unqualified she couldn’t tell that the skull was not from a small child, but a domestic cat.
***As the Australian Law Reform Commission identified in 1987, transgressions to Aboriginal law included unauthorised homicide or physical assault, as well as intimate acts like incest, adultery and the enticement or abduction of women.
###Though its exact prevalence is unknown, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) – caused by mothers drinking during pregnancy – is a contributing factor to perpetration that needs further study. During my research, FASD was raised time and again as a background factor to violence in Indigenous communities; in some communities, it is thought to be as high as 12 per cent. A cursory look at FASD symptoms shows how it puts men and women at greater risk of becoming perpetrators: delayed social development; difficulty controlling anger or frustration; a lack of impulse control and an inability to predict consequences, link cause and effect or learn from their mistakes.
†††The young were not spared. Child abuse in England was not only endemic, it was endorsed by the state: poor and orphaned children as young as four were sent to industrial towns to work in dangerous factories, were routinely beaten, and often died. Throughout much of the 1800s, the notion that a child had any rights at all was a foreign concept. The age of consent was twelve (until 1875, when it rose to thirteen), and child prostitutes were a common sight on London streets.
§§§There was a spectrum of relationships between white fathers and Aboriginal women: from mutually devoted relationships to one-off sexual encounters that ranged from sexual coercion to prostitution and rape.
‡‡‡These removals were fought by parents, who did everything they could to try and protect their children – from petitioning politicians to searching institutions for them (almost always in vain; administrators changed the children’s names so they could not be found). Some sought to disguise their mixed-blood children as full-blooded Aboriginals. Said one survivor: ‘Every morning our people would crush charcoal and mix that with animal fat and smother that all over us, so that when the police came they could only see black children in the distance.’ (Confidential evidence 681, Bringing Them Home report)
****It’s not only remote communities where football triggers violence. Research from the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education has found that when the State of Origin finals are played between New South Wales and Queensland, domestic assaults spike by 40 per cent, and non-domestic assaults by 70 per cent. The chief executive for FARE, Michael Thorn, is blunt: ‘It’s crystal clear that the State of Origin fixtures are leading to a surge in domestic violence. It’s happening on the National Rugby League’s watch and women and children are being harmed as a direct consequence of these games.’
11
FIXING IT
We’ve got so much awareness. We’re sick of talking about it. This is not a ribbon, it’s not a colour, it’s not a hashtag. Just think: how many women and children this year have had to face the last moment of their life? That terror. That moment of going, fucking hell, make it quick. Yeah, you’re gonna kill me right now, I get it. But please don’t make me suffer. How can I not do something?
NICOLE LEE, SURVIVOR-TURNED-CAMPAIGNER
For four years I’ve squinted hard at the phenomenon of domestic abuse, grasping for the perfect combination of words to make you feel it so acutely, with such fresh horror, that you will demand – and keep demanding – drastic action from our leaders. I’ve agonised over how to make these words fierce and definitive enough to convince every politician, judge and police officer that they must do everything in their power now to make sure no perpetrator ever feels comfortable again. But always I have had the crushing sense of futility. The thought of penning yet another ‘call for action’ – one more on the teetering pile – is nauseating.
Even the proposed solutions feel futile. At the heart of our response to domestic abuse – a ‘national emergency’ – is the project to achieve gender equality and change community attitudes: a strategy that could take decades to yield results. Don’t get me wrong: the pursuit of gender equality is critically important. Perhaps, when the patriarchy is finally overthrown, domestic abuse will indeed be a thing of the past. But in the meantime, abusers remain largely out of sight, run systematic campaigns of deg
radation and terror, and commit acts that regularly escalate to murder.
Why have we tolerated this? Why aren’t we confronting perpetrators as our first and most urgent priority? How did we come to accept that until we change attitudes and achieve equality, there’s little we can do to stop perpetrators abusing today, tomorrow, this week, this year?
We are a nation famed for courageous responses to public health problems. From thwarting the tobacco industry to criminalising drink-driving, Australian governments have shown they are willing to burn political capital to save lives. By doing this, they have achieved results many believed impossible. What would happen if a government were to bring the same zeal to tackling domestic abuse?
*
It’s been almost half a century since feminists opened the first domestic violence shelters. Ever since, they’ve had to beg for every dollar to keep women safe. The furious words of these women have, in recent years, been stolen by self-serving politicians, who wax lyrical about ending domestic abuse while dabbling with piecemeal initiatives, gutting essential services and forcing the sector to plead for basic funding. No matter how many prime ministers ‘commit’ to ending domestic violence, the fact remains: Australia is a rich nation that tolerates abuse towards women and children.
This was first made clear to me in 2015. In the suffocating heat of a Melbourne summer, I met with Jocelyn Bignold, the CEO of McAuley Community Services for Women. There was only one 24-hour crisis shelter for domestic violence victims in Victoria, she told me, and she was in charge of it. As we spoke, Bignold was clearly preoccupied. She had good reason to be: as far as she knew, McAuley would have to close in six months’ time, on July 1. The immediate threat to her shelter – and many others around the country – was the expected cancellation of a funding arrangement called the National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness, introduced by the federal Labor government in 2009. After the Coalition was elected in 2012, it cut $44 million from the partnership’s already tightly stretched $159 million, and only promised to fund it until 2015.1 In January that year, no-one in the sector had been told whether their funding would be renewed. ‘I’ve got nothing to tell me on paper what the plan is for funding services after the 30th of June,’ said Bignold, her eyes flashing with anger.
That January, as Bignold waited nervously for news, 26-year-old Leila Alavi was working as a hairdressing apprentice in Auburn, in Sydney’s western suburbs. She was living a new, independent life; just a few months earlier, she’d left her abusive husband, Mokhtar Hosseiniamrei, after he threatened to kill her and ‘fix up’ her sister and friends. She knew he could do it: he’d already been fetishising her murder, repeating a routine where he’d pin her to the ground, choke her until she almost lost consciousness, then cover her face with a blanket and jump on her body. Alavi found the strength to flee their home and take out an apprehended violence order. Still afraid Hosseiniamrei would come after her, Alavi started calling domestic violence refuges, looking for a safe place to hide. But no room was available – not in Sydney, not even in nearby regional areas. She was given vouchers for a hotel in Kings Cross, but after a few nights on her own Alavi became scared, and went to stay with her sister. After calling up to a dozen refuges a day, Alavi gave up hope that she would find protection, and decided to return to work. In the salon that hired her, she was known for being kind and generous: once, when a client with cancer complimented Alavi on her wallet, Alavi emptied it and gave it to her.2
One day, Alavi was in the middle of giving a haircut when her co-workers told her Hosseiniamrei was standing outside. Alavi didn’t want there to be any trouble, so she went to talk to him. Hours later, she was found dead in her car in an underground garage, with fifty-six stab wounds to her head, neck, arms and torso. Speaking later to investigators, Hosseiniamrei explained why he did it: ‘She broke the contract.’ In her victim impact statement, Alavi’s sister, Marjan Lotfi, said her grief was almost unbearable. ‘I keep thinking: why didn’t someone help her? Why didn’t she receive the protection she needed?’
Two months after Leila Alavi was murdered, Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced a $30 million awareness campaign on domestic violence.3 ‘We need to end this tragic and deadly epidemic,’ read the media release. ‘Importantly, we must also ensure that any woman or child who may be suffering understands that this is not acceptable and support is available.’ But there was still no word on funding. Domestic violence shelters started planning for widespread redundancies. Finally, on 23 March 2016, just fourteen weeks before funding was due to run out, and as the homelessness sector met for national crisis talks, then social services minister Scott Morrison announced that the government would extend funding for shelters and other homelessness services for another two years.4 Asked why he had refused to give the sector certainty earlier, Morrison said such funding decisions weren’t ‘simply a matter of going to the ATM’.
But the nation does have an ATM. It’s called a budget, and governments have no issues finding money in it when it suits them. The Coalition government, for example, had no problem finding an extra $20 billion to build twelve submarines in Australia, rather than have them manufactured in Japan. This was all about creating Aussie jobs, it said: jobs that just happened to be located in marginal seats in South Australia.
When it comes to funding shelters and community legal services, governments don’t just cry poor, they run the fiction that if these services receive more funding, others in need will go without. As the economist Richard Denniss explains, making women’s groups feel poor is central to the political strategy of people determined to maintain the status quo. They don’t just want women’s groups to feel poor, he says; they want to make them feel greedy for even asking.5
Governments – state and federal – have the money. Withholding it is their choice. Forcing refuges to turn women away is a choice. Making the sector plead for funding is a choice.
We know what it looks like when governments choose to act on domestic abuse. In 2015, the Victorian Labor government held a royal commission into family violence – an act with no global precedent. When the commission made 227 recommendations, the state government vowed to implement every one of them – at a cost of $1.9 billion over four years.6 ‘We’ll overhaul our broken support system from the bottom up,’ said Victorian Labor premier Daniel Andrews. ‘We’ll punish the perpetrators of this violence, we’ll listen to the people who survive it, and we will change the culture that created it.’7
For once, a politician’s solemn commitment to end domestic abuse meant something. It’s impossible to overstate the significance of what is happening in Victoria. I haven’t heard of anywhere else in the world that has committed to funding the domestic violence sector like this. Nowhere else in Australia has even come close.
Consider this: in 2015, the Victorian Labor government held a royal commission into family violence – an act with no global precedent. When the commission made 227 recommendations, the state government vowed to implement every one of them – at a cost of $1.9 billion over four years.*
‘We’ll overhaul our broken support system from the bottom up,’ said Victorian Labor Premier Daniel Andrews. We’ll punish the perpetrators of this violence, we’ll listen to the people who survive it, and we will change the culture that created it.’# For once, a politician’s solemn commitment to end domestic abuse meant something. It’s impossible to overstate the significance of what is happening in Victoria. No other government in the world has committed to funding the domestic violence sector like this. Nowhere else in Australia has even come close.
But ending domestic violence doesn’t just require money – it requires conviction and belief. Do we actually believe perpetrators can be stopped – not in generations to come, but right now?
Social problems often seem insurmountable, until they’re not. In the 1970s, police corruption in Sydney was so brazen that cops could be seen in broad daylight on city streets exchanging paper bags with pimps. Even though this was a common s
ight from the ABC building on William Street, the journalists there never thought to report on it: police corruption was just the natural way of things. By the late ’90s, however, that had all changed; the Wood Royal Commission named hundreds of dirty cops, who were then purged as the rest of the force was put on notice. Police corruption wasn’t magically eradicated after Wood, but it was much harder to get away with.
While pimps were handing paper bags to police on William Street, the citizenry was regularly driving home shitfaced. Drink-driving wasn’t a furtive, shameful act: it was done loud and proud, and often in the conviction that one could actually drive better with a skinful of wine. When random breath-testing (RBT) was introduced in 1982, the backlash was so hostile that clubs refused entry to local politicians, insisting it was an attack on working-class men. But the effect of those RBT units was immediate and undeniable: within two months, fatal road accidents in New South Wales dropped 48 per cent.†8
Like police corruption and drink-driving before it, domestic violence is a social ill that’s been hiding in plain sight for a long time. It seems intractable – just a tragic fact of life – and the broad consensus seems to be that in the short term there’s not much we can do to stop it.
It’s not that we’re not trying. We’ve decided to treat domestic violence as a ‘public health’ issue, placing it in the same category as smoking and HIV, and we’re confronting it on a national scale through the National Plan to Reduce Violence Against Women and Their Children. Signed by all state and territory governments, the national plan began in 2010, and aims to achieve ‘a significant and sustained reduction’ in sexual assault and domestic/family violence by 2022.9 But unlike strategies to reduce smoking and HIV, the national plan to reduce domestic abuse is missing a critical element: clear targets. No targets, for example, have been set for reducing domestic homicide or the rate of repeat assaults, or even for reducing the number of women and children turned away from crisis accommodation. Indeed, some of the outcomes in the plan are so amorphous it’s hard to imagine them ever being achieved, let alone reliably measured. Outcomes like ‘Communities are safe and free from violence’ and ‘Relationships are respectful’ don’t read like serious goals for reducing violence; they read like a wish-list for a feminist utopia. And yet, as the plan sets out, all governments are to deliver the six National Outcomes by 2022.