I also wanted to ask you about the issue many people, in society at large as well as in the police force and court system, have with the idea of a ‘perfect victim’ – there being only a specific kind of victim that they’re able to understand or sympathise with.
I guess in the 1970s that was quite a conscious decision the domestic abuse sector made, which was to specifically portray the type of woman that policymakers could feel some sympathy with, or could even imagine to be their own daughter or sister or mother. That woman was a white, middle-class woman who was almost always portrayed as cowering in fear. It’s backfired because now that’s what people expect to see, and if they don’t see that person they don’t know how to fit them into the victim paradigm that they have in their mind. When they see a woman who is violently resisting her partner – which, by the way, is incredibly important for a lot of women’s dignity – if they show that violent resistance, then they’re not a passive victim.
Women of colour, women with disabilities, poor women, women with substance abuse issues…The cowering woman in the corner is, I would suggest, almost nobody. I’m not saying that women don’t cower in the corner and they’re not afraid, but that’s not the totality of their experience. And when women look at those posters they don’t see themselves in that person. They see someone who is doing their best to survive, they see someone who is working as hard as they can to help the person they’re with to become a better man, to stop the abuse. They see themselves as much more than a victim, but that’s all we portray back at them. So many women will talk about the fact that for a long time they didn’t report because they didn’t see themselves as that victim.
When women look at those posters they don’t see themselves in that person. They see themselves as much more than a victim, but that’s all we portray back at them.
We’re talking largely in terms of perpetrators being men and the victims of abuse being women. You explain in the book that of course women can also be controlling, abusive and violent. But you take time to explore why the idea of equivalence between male and female abuse is a myth. Can you explain that a bit further?
It’s a myth because even though you have situations where females can be perpetrators of abuse, it’s very, very rare that they can hold a system of coercive control together. Though of course there may be fear from male victims, especially and absolutely validly about the threat the female perpetrators may pose to their children, it’s very unlikely and unusual for a female to be able to totally eradicate a man’s sense of self-worth and to degrade them into the state of total subservience that coercive control requires. The reason why that’s important is because those sorts of controlling relationships are really the most dangerous form of domestic abuse.
More reactive types of violence that we see most often coming from women are still incredibly traumatic for men and can be life-ruining. But it’s not the kind of violence that often sees men fleeing their home and needing to find crisis accommodation where they have to seek protection from someone who is meaning to kill them. It’s a very distinctive and different type of abuse. And I think particularly in terms of being pursued through the legal system after the relationship is over, that too is far less common than with male perpetrators. Once female perpetrators leave the relationship they rarely try to hang on and exert their control over years and years. Whereas male perpetrators can do that for decades… in any way they can find, with the family law system and various other legal avenues.
I think we absolutely do need to talk about what happens to male victims and not just footnote them, because I think up until now we’ve vacated the space and left it for ‘men’s rights’ groups to occupy with misinformation. But you just don’t have the same issue of domestic homicide towards men. And that frames the issue entirely differently.
One of the most terrifying and shocking sections of the book for me was learning about the Family Court, which seems to be incredibly dysfunctional. Can you explain a little about how it’s dysfunctional and why that is?
Essentially what you have is a system that is geared towards doing whatever is possible to get a child into contact with both parents. That’s the presenting ideology of the Family Court, and it’s based on research that shows that children do better when they’re in contact with both parents. Unfortunately, way too often family law judges treat family violence as though it’s just an inconvenience, a historical issue, an issue of relationship conflict that has occurred between the two parents and has not concerned the children, which just flies in the face of all the evidence that we have. It’s like we’ve got a system that is still 20-25 years in the past in terms of understanding the impact of domestic abuse on children, issues around primary attachment and the necessity of keeping children with their primary carers.
What’s also unfortunate is that there’s a system of expert report writers – often psychiatrists, psychologists or social workers – far too many of whom, in my opinion, have virtually no understanding of the dynamics of domestic abuse and child sexual abuse. And I can tell you, family violence is one of the most counterintuitive types of human behaviour that we have. If you don’t have a particular clinical experience or training in it you will come to the wrong conclusions about certain behavioural choices, the types of people are perpetrators or victims, the effects of trauma. Those reports are one of the most important pieces of evidence that the family court considers, and yet there are no standards or guidelines as to how qualified the people writing those reports need to be in their understanding of family violence.
The result of all of that is that even children who are really candid in their testimonies are disbelieved. They’re basically disregarded as though their testimonies don’t mean anything. Even when research shows that children don’t lie. They fabricate far less often than firstly fathers, and then mothers. When children are not believed…the court then sees a woman, most often, who is trying to break contact between the child and their other parent, which to the family law court is like a capital crime. And the consequences that can come down from the family law court for that kind of behaviour, if they don’t think it’s justified, can be horrific. We’re talking about custody being swapped with no warning, contact completely prohibited for months at a time.
A brilliant thing about See What You Made Me Do is that it offers concrete suggestions for ways we can tackle this issue. I think I’ve certainly been guilty of thinking that what we need to do to diminish domestic abuse is tackle gender inequality in the long term and bring about a generational cultural shift in attitudes. Which of course is necessary, but in the book you outline practical, immediate interventions that offer help to victims of domestic abuse now. Can you tell about some of the most successful short-term strategies you encountered while writing the book?
The two strategies that really stood out to me were the strategies of focused deterrence and justice reinvestment. The impacts of those two strategies, both in places that were experiencing way above average levels of domestic abuse and homicide, was not only radical in terms of reduction but was also relatively quick. Both systems took a couple of years to actually establish because they hinge on deep collaboration between groups that are not necessarily used to working together, but once the systems were in place there were enormous reductions in assaults and homicides within the space of a few years.
The system of focused deterrence in the United States was based on a strategy that was used to fight gun crime in Boston. One academic, a criminologist called David Kennedy, thought we should put more stock in the rationality of offenders. That if given the choice between choosing a better path and getting help, or continuing to offend and being locked up for a long period of time, they will choose to stop their offending. That was completely against the status quo understanding of how offenders worked. [So even] without necessarily solving the root issues of poverty, unemployment, racism…they were actually able to see reductions in the short term. Those are things we should be working on long term, no doubt, that is the root of these crimes. But we need to see reductions now. In High Point, which was the first city to trial this seriously, within 8 or so years their rate of domestic homicide had been cut by two thirds.
Then you’ve got a similar situation in Bourke, which was one of the top-rating towns in New South Wales for domestic abuse, with justice reinvestment again focused on collaboration, bringing agencies that had been working either individually or even at cross purposes together on a very regular basis. I’m talking about daily meetings with police and community groups, deep, qualitative data being collected on who the most dangerous offenders are and how the various service agencies can combine their efforts to address what’s going wrong in these people’s lives that may actually have an effect on their perpetration of violence. They found after two years of this project, and of police being much more proactive and working together with community, they had a reduction in the domestic assault rate of almost 40 per cent.
The sort of societal reform we would see if we really made domestic abuse the public safety issue that it is would be one of the greatest nation-building exercises in our history.
These are strategies that are achieving the unthinkable, and the unthinkable is that domestic abuse can be radically reduced in a short period of time. That’s really what I want people to come away from the book with, that there are a number of different strategies, if we pull together and really come at it from that community-level response, that radically reduce what is a core dysfunction in our society. Mass homelessness, the increase of women in prison, massive overburden of children in child protection services…the list of problems that are caused by the prevalence of domestic violence and domestic abuse is inestimable, it’s so huge. The sort of societal reform we would see if we really made domestic abuse the public safety issue that it is would be one of the greatest nation-building exercises in our history.
What are some of the key shifts in Australian policy you would like to see happen?
I’d like to see community-owned initiatives get a lot more support from government. I’d also like to see a much more serious consideration of how we can make coercive control a crime, because I think that would totally revolutionise our understanding of how domestic violence works. For most women the psychological aspects of abuse are worse than the physical aspect, and yet that’s not how our law responds. I would like to see a much more collaborative response to victims. I think we see that in the Orange Door initiative in Victoria at the moment, where service providers are all under the one roof for victims to access. In addition to service providers and all the other things that women need to access when they’re leaving an abusive relationship, I’d really love it if women could access police in that same place. And those police would be specifically trained in the dynamics of domestic abuse and applying a protective policing strategy, rather than trying to get the victim to fit into a punitive law enforcement system that often does not fit their needs. Really, at the heart of it, we need to see far greater education of our judiciary, our police, and of the lawyers that represent these women. The fact is that a lot of professionals are dealing with family abuse on a daily basis and yet still don’t really have the education or skills to deal with it properly.
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See What You Made Me Do is available now at Readings.
1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) offers confidential information, counselling and support services and is open 24 hours to support people impacted by sexual assault, domestic or family violence and abuse.
At a time of reduced government spending, Women’s Community Shelters offers a new ‘tri-partite’ funding model in which Government, philanthropy/business and community all work to provide funding to establish and operate crisis accommodation shelters. You can make a donation here.
