See What You Made Me Do

by Jess Hill

  Because its success is not measured in actual reductions in violence (despite that being the explicit aim), there is no clear sense in the National Plan of what ‘reducing domestic violence’ would actually look like. For example, progress on that first priority – ‘Communities are safe and free from violence’ – is not measured by reviewing police data or hospitalisation rates. Instead, it is measured by tracking community attitudes: for instance, what percentage of the community understands that control is a form of domestic violence?

  This approach – to tackle domestic violence as an attitude problem – was sketched out more than twenty years ago by the American academic Lori Heise. ‘Violence is an extremely complex phenomenon with deep roots in power imbalances between men and women, gender-role expectations, self-esteem and social institutions,’ she wrote in her influential 1994 paper. ‘As such, it cannot be addressed without confronting the underlying cultural beliefs and social structures that perpetuate violence against women. In many societies women are defined as inferior and the right to dominate them is considered the essence of maleness itself. Confronting violence thus requires re-defining what it means to be male and what it means to be female.’10 As the theory goes, gender inequality is at the root of domestic violence; ipso facto, gender equality is the cure. The way to get there is through changing social attitudes: in sporting clubs, in schools, through the media and so on. This approach is endorsed by many of Australia’s leading minds on gendered violence, several of whom were consulted for the National Plan. But in measuring something as vital as the safety of our communities, how on earth is surveying people on their attitudes to violence considered adequate? Why is changing community attitudes the central plank of this strategy?

  In every interview with experts, I’ve asked the same question: why are we prioritising long-term attitude-change when the problem is so dire right now? Criminologist and trauma expert Michael Salter agrees there is a jarring disconnect between the horrific reality of domestic violence and our response to it. ‘On the one hand we’re being told that it’s a national emergency, but on the other hand this softly-softly approach increasingly accepts that women who are currently being victimised will continue to be, and that new women will be victimised in the future, and that at some magic point we can bring that to an end,’ he says. ‘When you look at other public health issues, like HIV or Hepatitis C, you can bet that agencies have a vision of the world where that’s stopped. They know what that looks like. How will we know when we’ve got to this point? Are we really aiming for it?’

  The mission to transform attitudes to gender inequality and violence is laudable, and will no doubt produce important cultural changes. But as a primary strategy for reducing domestic abuse, it is horribly inadequate. Why do we accept that it will take decades – possibly generations – to reduce domestic abuse? Why isn’t long-term prevention work paired with a relentless focus on doing everything possible to reduce violence today? Why do successive governments insist that reducing domestic abuse is a matter of changing attitudes – or, at best, parking the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff? How on earth did public officials decide that surveying community attitudes was the best way to measure whether their strategy to reduce violence was working? When random breath-testing was introduced, did politicians decide that if the majority of men surveyed in bars agreed drink-driving was a bad idea, the policy would be deemed a success? No – they would have been laughed out of parliament. The only way to prove that RBTs were working was to measure their actual impact: a reduction in road fatalities. Why do we accept anything less when it comes to domestic abuse?§

  There’s another serious problem with this approach: community attitudes may reflect public understanding, but they don’t reliably predict behaviour. Let’s say a bunch of policy wonks had surveyed men on barstools. How many of those men would tick a box saying drink-driving was foolish, finish their beers and drive home drunk? We all have issues on which we think one way, and behave another – I, for one, would happily tell a survey that it’s terrible to look at your phone right before bed or first thing in the morning, and yet I do it anyway. Psychologists have a term for this: ‘attitude-behaviour inconsistency’. Basically, it means that a stated attitude doesn’t necessarily match or predict that person’s behaviour. As Joan Didion once wrote, ‘it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level’.11 We see this with perpetrators who condemn violence in one breath, and assault their partners in the next. This disconnect is well known to professionals who work with perpetrators; it is just one of many gaps between their stated attitudes and their actual behaviour.

  There’s no question that damaging ideas around gender – and more specifically, patriarchy – are at the heart of domestic violence, as this book makes clear. But to reconfigure attitudes and behaviour is the work of generations. Such work will not prevent women and children from dying tomorrow, or even next year, and it certainly won’t see domestic violence significantly reduced by 2022. This is made clear in the most recent evaluation of the National Plan by auditing firm KPMG in 2017. ‘Significant progress’ had apparently been made against the National Outcomes, but there was no indication that domestic violence was itself being reduced. In fact, the evidence suggested just the opposite: ‘the incidence and severity of domestic and family violence,’ the report declared, ‘is increasing.’12

  This is not the fault of advocates. Without their tireless campaigning and determination, we wouldn’t even have a national plan to reduce domestic violence, and it’s thanks to them that governments have put the gendered nature of domestic violence at the heart of their response. But ultimately, this is a plan to reduce domestic violence. If such violence is increasing, the National Plan to Reduce Violence Against Women and Their Children is failing.

  *

  To combat public health issues and shift social behaviour, you need strong and consistent deterrents, and you need to pursue your objective with unerring focus. Like other public health strategies, the National Plan has three major elements: primary prevention (stopping it before it starts through education in schools and workplaces, awareness campaigns, and promoting gender equality); secondary prevention (preventing violence from escalating, through initiatives like men’s behaviour change programs); and tertiary prevention (minimising the impact of violence, restoring health and safety, and preventing violence from recurring, through the provision of crisis accommodation, counselling and advocacy, and adequate criminal justice responses to perpetrators).13

  Primary prevention is the backbone of the National Plan. So let’s imagine that by 2022, we have made enormous progress on the goal of increasing gender equality. In fact, let’s imagine that by 2022 Australia is ranked number one in the world for gender equality. Undoubtedly, this would be a fantastic outcome. But would it reduce domestic abuse? The evidence on that is unclear, to say the least.

  As we read in Chapter 5, Nordic countries – world leaders on gender equality – still have shocking rates of domestic abuse. In Iceland – ‘the best place to be a woman’14 – domestic abuse seems to be growing, according to Icelandic feminist and anthropology professor Sigríður Dúna Kristmundsdóttir. ‘Maybe [it’s] the anxiety that men are feeling, which can increase violence in the home.’ Speaking to SBS Dateline, she compared men’s experience of shifting gender norms to watching a game of football they believed their team would win: ‘Now the position is 3–4, and it’s not quite sure if their team wins, or the women’s team. So they’re very scared and very anxious.’15 This backlash effect has also been observed in Australia, as we’ve seen. This tells us is that if we succeed in improving gender equality, we may actually see domestic abuse get worse in the short term. This means it’s urgent that the secondary and tertiary prevention parts of the National Plan are evidence-based, coordinated and securely funded.

  But there is no such coordinated approach to domestic violence. ‘It’s been a real scatt
ergun approach, and it changes with each budget cycle,’ says Lara Fergus, former director of policy and evaluation at Our Watch, the federally funded body assigned to promote primary prevention. ‘A lot of it has been funding ad hoc programs with limited duration, and with no consistent or coordinated set of objectives across those projects.’ Individuals and groups are often successful in winning grants for programs in sporting clubs, says Fergus, but often there is no expertise attached to these programs, and no clear indication of how they will actually reduce violence. ‘If the bureaucrats and the minister decide they like the look of this program, and – dare I say – if they’re in “interesting” electorates, the program gets funded. That’s not a way to reduce violence against women.’

  Fergus says despite all the strong talk from politicians, they’re still not willing to do what it takes to reduce violence against women. ‘There’s this sense that you can do these half-baked measures, and that it will fly. And it will fly – it will fly with the community and the electorate, and that’s probably all that matters to a lot of politicians,’ says Fergus. ‘There’s a switch that hasn’t been flipped, even in the post–Rosie Batty era, that says this is a serious problem that requires us to take it seriously.’

  What’s infuriating – and telling – about this haphazard approach is that we know what it takes to run a successful public health campaign. Take cigarettes.‡ Since governments became serious about reducing smoking, Australia has introduced some of the world’s toughest smoking laws, rendering cigarettes inconvenient, expensive and unfashionable. If you get caught smoking in the wrong place, you don’t just get a slap on the wrist: in Western Australia, for example, smokers can be fined as much as $2000.16 Fines aren’t the only deterrent: the federal government has also made smoking prohibitively expensive by ratcheting up cigarette excise year after year; by 2020, a pack of cigarettes is likely to cost more than $45.17 But governments haven’t stopped there: to make cigarette brands homogenous and unfashionable, the Gillard government courageously legislated mandatory plain packaging, making every cigarette pack drab olive-green, adorned only by a gory and graphic health warning. That world-leading policy change landed it in a multi-million-dollar legal battle with tobacco company Philip Morris, from which the Australian government eventually emerged triumphant.

  Some might consider this kind of government intervention over the top, punitive or even a sign of ‘creeping socialism’. But it’s working. Smoking rates for Australian men have halved since the 1980s,18 and today Australians smoke at a rate of 13 per cent, compared to a global average of around 20 per cent.19 The national plan to reduce smoking has clear process to achieve specific goals: in 2008, it set goal to reduce the smoking population by a further 3 per cent (to 10 per cent), and to halve the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adult daily smoking rate, by 2018.20

  So why aren’t we setting measurable goals for reducing domestic abuse? Is the current approach – with its long-range goals – popular with government because it avoids accountability?

  When I asked Lara Fergus this, she paused. ‘Initially I resisted [what you were saying],’ she said slowly ‘and I thought no, we have more of an ideological struggle with primary prevention, because we’re talking about gendered drivers and no-one wants to hear it. But I do see what you’re saying. Holding perpetrators to account, and putting in place the legislative and regulatory mechanisms that will make it impossible for them to continue perpetrating; we haven’t taken that as seriously as we should have. There’s a resistance to doing that in a way that there isn’t for, say, terrorism offences … We could do a hell of a lot more.’

  Most perpetrators of domestic abuse will never be held accountable. There is little reason for them to believe the law will come between them and their victim. By treating domestic abuse like a lesser kind of violent crime, we are not working to change our society at the level that counts.

  What would that change look like? What if we placed perpetrators at the centre of our prevention efforts? Domestic abuse is fiendishly difficult to measure, but there is one reliable statistic we could target. At least once a week, one perpetrator kills his current or former partner. Why don’t we commit to reducing that statistic? When will we see a brave politician step forward and say that, as a nation, we are going to halve the domestic homicide rate?

  Let me be clear: to eradicate domestic abuse we do need to change community attitudes, as well as behaviour. This means confronting and overturning the prejudices that underpin gender inequality, from unequal pay rates to our gendered responses to shame and anxiety. Teaching kids what respectful relationships look like, and confronting bullying at school, is an essential part of this. But while these and other such programs slowly progress, there are perpetrators out there, today and tomorrow, imposing their regimes of control in homes across the nation, with little in place to stop them.

  So can they be stopped? Most Australian experts I’ve spoken to say there is no strategy that has definitively reduced domestic abuse. But there is at least one. In the city of High Point, North Carolina, a dedicated coalition of police, community members and federal agencies have made it their top priority to stop perpetrators, using a strategy typically deployed against gang violence and gun crime. In just six years, they have achieved the unthinkable: they have more than halved the city’s domestic homicides. That’s in a city where the domestic homicide rate was twice the national average.

  Why did this strategy work, when so many others have failed? And could it work in Australia?

  *

  In February 2012, an extraordinary event took place in High Point.21 To the uninitiated, it looked like a regular meeting at City Hall, with bright orange chairs packed with the usual mix of local residents, church leaders and community representatives. But what made this meeting extraordinary was the row of twelve men down the front, shifting uncomfortably in their seats. These men, avoiding eye contact with each other and everybody else in the room, were domestic violence perpetrators. In what was perhaps a world-first, they were about to be called out in public.

  Calling the hall to order, Jim Summey stepped up to the microphone, and spoke to the men in the front row. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘you’re here this evening because you have been associated through your records with some form of domestic violence. The community is gathering here with law enforcement – we’re partners with them – to let you know that domestic violence is wrong, and it’s unacceptable.’

  Summey, an influential local reverend, is the leader of High Point Community Against Violence (HPCAV). He is a bear of a man, with a full beard and broad shoulders. ‘This has nothing to do with your victims,’ Summey cautioned. ‘They didn’t choose you – we did. But we care about you too. Don’t think this is something just to put you down – it’s not. It’s really an opportunity to lift you up. So take it. We care about you, but it’s gotta stop. If you don’t, it’s gonna be really bad.’

  Then, one by one, more than two dozen community members – victim advocates, church leaders, bikies, freemasons – stepped up to the microphone, introduced themselves and repeated the same message. ‘I too am against domestic violence,’ said pastor Sherman Mason, a portly African-American man in a grey vest crisscrossed with colourful stripes. ‘But if you are for the betterment of your city, I’m for you.’ Gretta Bush – a middle-aged woman with her hair in a tight bun and pearls around her neck – spoke with a direct kindness to the offenders. ‘HPCAV is a group that connects you with resources in the community. When you leave here tonight, you never have to see us again, if you do not need our help,’ she said. ‘But if you do, come with the mindset that I want to make a change. We can’t do it for you. But we will help, and connect you with resources. We love you, and we respect you – that’s why we brought you in tonight.’

  As the community members cleared the stage, a phalanx of law enforcement officers – from local police and prosecutors to federal agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms a
nd Explosives (ATF) – took their seats in a row overlooking the hall. In the middle of this daunting line-up sat High Point Police Chief, Jim Fealy. ‘As the chief of police, I’ve declared domestic violence our number one public safety threat,’ Fealy began. ‘We haven’t done a very good job in the past with domestic violence. All that changes tonight: as of tonight, our A-game is on.’ Fealy made it clear: domestic violence wasn’t just hitting, but ‘pushing, shoving, striking, slapping, intimidating, trespassing, vandalism, burglary, and all the other little games and tricks that domestic violence offenders play on their victims. Any of those actions will trigger actions from us.’

  Seated next to Fealy was his deputy chief, Marty Sumner, a bespectacled blond with a mild manner and a folksy Southern accent. ‘My officers, my detectives, will do anything in their power to make a case,’ he said calmly to the men in the front row. ‘If we have information that you’re abusing your spouse and we don’t have a misdemeanour case, we may buy dope from you, we might sell you a handgun, we might reinvestigate a case that was dismissed before and get it reinstated.’ Sumner wasn’t making idle threats. If these men committed even the most minor act of domestic violence, this row of officials would use anything they could find to make sure they were punished.