by Rosie Batty
If we were to broadcast the family-violence death toll on the TV news each night, like we do with the road toll, would that shock us into understanding how prevalent this violence is and how pressing is the need for us to do something about it? If we were to put up posters, like we do with road safety campaigns, would that work? And why do we put so much money into those kind of campaigns and virtually nothing into a far bigger, far more pernicious problem?
I would never seek to diminish the suffering of others, but isn’t it telling that the nation can get behind a one-punch (coward’s punch) campaign – and in one state, at least, completely overhaul the liquor licensing system – and we can’t even speak openly about the problem of family violence?
It’s not a problem that is going to be solved by one woman. Nor indeed by one government advisory panel or department. It’s a whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society solution.
The former governor-general Quentin Bryce recently delivered a damning report into family violence in Queensland. Called Not Now, Not Ever, it found that 180 cases of family violence were reported in Queensland every single day. Speaking to the report and its findings, Bryce said: ‘The truth is that domestic and family violence is caused by unequal distribution of power and resources between men and women. It’s about the rigid gender roles and stereotypes that characterise our society.
‘For all of us, we must be asking ourselves, “What can we do as neighbours, family and friends? What can each one of us do about this appalling scourge in our society?”
‘We don’t want to confront these things, we want to turn away and say, “That’s not my business,” but it certainly is everybody’s business.’
This is why I have established the Luke Batty Foundation. This is why I have launched the Never Alone campaign. So that we can start to have the conversations that will finally drag this issue out of the shadows. And that is why I speak out and tell my story. I’ve spoken at more than 110 events to more than 35,000 people since January 2015. I know that my and Luke’s story is just one of many, many stories of family violence out there, and I know some people are critical of me, saying that maybe I’m too much in the public spotlight, or that I should grieve in private. But I’m not going to do that. And I will not let my grief limit or define me. For reasons that are beyond me, I am the one that people seem to want to hear from. And I know – people tell me – that I inspire them and give them courage. But what people don’t know is that speaking out also empowers and inspires me. It’s bittersweet, knowing this has happened because of Luke’s death, but I feel I am making a difference. That gives me the impetus to keep going, which is important, because my sense is that if I keep doing this, and keep the public spotlight on the issue of family violence, things will change. Because they have to change.
Ken Lay, the former Victorian police commissioner and my co-chair on the advisory panel on family violence, and the former senator Natasha Stott Despoja, chair of the family-violence advocacy group Our Watch, gave a joint address to the National Press Club last year. Ken told how for many years violence against women has been one of Australia’s filthy little secrets. Natasha called it a national emergency. In Australia, it is both.
I sat with Quentin Bryce in her Brisbane office recently. It was just after her report had been released in Queensland. In anticipation of my arrival, she had baked a delicious date and walnut teacake. As well as being whip smart and determined, she’s a generous woman and an excellent cook. She congratulated me on the momentum I had helped to create around the subject of domestic violence in this country, but worried that it could dissipate just as quickly as it has developed. And I share her concern. Today’s headlines can so easily be tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappings. And we owe it to our mothers, sisters and daughters to make sure that doesn’t happen. We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make some real change – but we need to pull together as a society to make it happen. Because while I can travel around the country speaking at every community event on the calendar, while Ken and I can chair an advisory panel and do interviews, and while Quentin Bryce can author reports and campaign, real change will only come about when society accepts this is a fundamental, entrenched, systemic problem. And just as importantly, when governments prioritise it as an issue, when legislators start to craft new laws or alter existing ones to properly deal with it, and when – crucially – we have greater accountability of perpetrators.
Because the way things are now: we are enabling the violence. For as long as we as neighbours or family members or friends continue to turn a blind eye or, worse, write off incidences of family violence as ‘just another domestic’, then the physical assaults, the psychological torment, the unfettered harassment and the killings will continue. The media has a role to play here too. How many times have you watched the evening news and seen the murder of a woman in her home downplayed as a ‘domestic dispute’ – as if death at the hands of a partner is somehow less serious?
Murder is murder. Is it any less terrifying if it is committed by someone you know intimately? I’d suggest it’s quite the opposite.
We talk a lot in this country about the war on terror – and certainly, the eradication of international and home-grown terror threats is a worthy cause. But what about the terror that one in six women are living daily? What about the terror that means they are too scared to leave the house or too scared to go home? What about the terror that seizes them every time their partner walks in the door – never knowing what mood he might be in, what eggshells will have to be trod, what evasive action they are going to have to take to protect themselves? Or worse, protect their children?
What about the terror of the woman who is too scared to leave because either she or her children have been threatened with death if they do? Or the terror of the woman who has been so totally stripped of financial independence that even if she wanted to leave, she wouldn’t have the means? What about the terror of the woman whose partner has so carefully, methodically, isolated her from her friends and family that she wakes up one day and realises she has nowhere to go – no one to turn to?
Another thing we need to address is this simplistic idea that women in family violence situations only have themselves to blame, because, after all, why don’t they just get up and leave? I hear it all the time. I’ve heard people say it about me. And it makes me so, so angry. The ignorance from which this attitude stems is frankly staggering.
I rather famously had a stoush live on air with a TV presenter who, in a throwaway comment that was breathtaking in its ignorance, suggested that there were no excuses for women victims of family violence – especially those with children – to stay in a relationship. ‘They just need to leave,’ he said.
So let’s just firstly call this what it is: it’s victim-blaming. Once again putting the onus on the victim to remedy the situation. Inherent in that is an acceptance that men are fundamentally violent, fundamentally incapable of controlling their base instincts, and therefore it is up to women to take all the precautions and accept all the responsibility. It is up to the woman to report it to police, to pursue it through the courts, to take out an IVO and report again to the police when it is breached – as it almost inevitably is. It’s up to the woman to go into a refuge, to change her identity, to flee interstate or overseas. All of which means leaving behind your friends, family, your home, your job, your community. And all the while, the perpetrator is allowed to get on with his life, to go down to the local pub and, without a word of protest from his mates, describe himself as having ‘women troubles’.
More crucially, let’s pause for a moment to think about this notion of ‘leaving’. As anyone who has worked on a family-violence crisis helpline will tell you, that’s when victims are at their most vulnerable. The point of leaving is when perpetrators of violence are at their most dangerous and unpredictable. That’s why Greg killed Luke. He had come to understand that both Luke and I were no longer under his control. He began to appreciate th
at I was no longer in fear of him – that we were pulling away. And so he killed our son – in a final act of control and vengeance. He killed Luke so that he would win, and so that I would suffer for the rest of my life.
So the next time you are reading a story in the newspapers or watching or listening to a story on the TV or radio about violence perpetrated on a woman, apply a little bit of critical analysis. Is there an undertone that because the girl was wearing headphones as she walked through the park in daylight, she somehow had it coming? Is there a suggestion that a woman’s decision to walk across a park at night on her way home from work means she deserved to be stabbed to death? Is there an intimation that the short skirt or the fact she had one drink too many automatically means she forfeited any rights to be treated as a human being and deserved to be raped?
We tend to sometimes focus in a sensationalistic way on the details of individual acts of violence without joining the dots to a culture of gender-based violence. And think also about the way the media is quick to assign a narrative to a story, irrespective of the bald facts. I am reminded of the case of the farmer in rural New South Wales who murdered his wife and three children before turning the shotgun on himself. Was he decried in newspaper headlines as a mass murderer? No. He was eulogised by the media as a hardworking farmer who had battled bravely with the burden of caring for a brain-injured wife. His decision to put bullets into his three kids and his wife was reported on as some kind of act of humanity. I have also seen atrocious headlines that openly disrespect victims. ‘Monster Chef and the She Male’ springs to mind. We need to challenge this every time. Perpetrators must be held accountable for their actions. Women are not to blame.
According to VicHealth’s latest attitude survey, a significant proportion of Australians still excuse, trivialise and justify violence against women. A growing number of Australians think that a victim is at least partially to blame for an instance of domestic and family violence. One in six think that women who say no really mean yes. Attitudes among young people are particularly bad. According to recent research commissioned by Our Watch, one in four young men believed that controlling and violent behaviours are signs of male strength. One in six people aged twelve to twenty-four believe women should know their place. If we want to tackle this violence, to stop it before it starts, we need to tackle these attitudes and beliefs in our schools, in our homes, around our dinner tables. And men, especially, bear the brunt of the responsibility here. Men are especially sensitive to the approval and respect of their peers. If you are a man and you hear a friend or associate talking about controlling behaviour or violence against a woman in any kind of boastful way, you need to challenge it. You need to tell them that what they are doing is not okay. To not do so is to be complicit in the violence itself.
Importantly, what we also need is a greater appreciation of – and greater funding for – the frontline service providers: the women’s shelters, the helplines, the people who go to women’s homes and physically extract them from situations of extreme violence and danger. I have been to several of these frontline service providers and have stood by and watched trained professionals field calls from women in various states of terror from all over the country. I have watched a large TV screen in a call centre show the number of women on hold, waiting to speak to a professional. Women who have already taken a huge step by dialling the number – who then have to sit on hold. And I have watched with a sinking heart as some of those calls drop out before a counsellor can get to them.
Last year alone, the government’s 1800 RESPECT helpline missed an estimated 18,000 calls because of a lack of adequate resources. That’s 18,000 women whose cries for help went unanswered. One of them may have been your sister, your mother, your daughter.
Resources in these frontline services are stretched, counsellors working around the clock to meet demand. And like doctors in an ER, they are forced to make decisions on the spot about which cases are in most pressing need of the finite resources that are available. Does the professional woman in the city who says she has been threatened with violence but insists on downplaying it take precedence over the mother of two in a rural outpost who is calling for the fourth time that month following a sustained history of violence? Do they allocate what meagre resources they have to getting that rural woman and her children on a charter flight to the nearest urban shelter as soon as possible? Or do they put that money into expanding the number of beds available in the overstretched, under-resourced women’s shelters that already exist? It is not uncommon for these helpline counsellors to work fourteen-hour days, carefully listening to each caller, methodically assessing the level of risk, prioritising dwindling resources and doing their best day after day to ensure what little money they have is spent in the most efficient way possible. And all the while, the calls keep coming. The number on the TV screen showing the women on hold ticks inexorably up.
Once we have looked at this first-responder side of the family violence equation, we need to review what happens next – inevitably at the judicial level. What happens when, once a victim has summoned the courage to stand up to their partner, she finds herself in front of a magistrate? Is she going to be means-tested for Legal Aid, as I was, no matter her situation? No matter that the very finances on which that judgement is being made might be controlled almost wholly by the man who is abusing her? If she gets to court, is she going to be treated with disdain by an out-of-touch judiciary long used to categorising domestic violence situations as low-risk and relatively minor in the scheme of things, legally speaking? Is it acceptable that magistrates seem to believe that an IVO is worth the paper it is printed on? Or that some judges (not all, but definitely some) have so many ingrained prejudices when it comes to women victims of family violence that their response to it is negligent at best and criminal at worst? Is it okay that our court system routinely minimises risk to female victims of family violence and fails to recognise the red flags that continue to put women and children in grave danger?
And what of the Family Court, this most influential institution whose deliberations and decisions cannot be reported on by the news media? Go to the United States, and stories of family disharmony and domestic violence appear regularly in the news media. Why? Because the media there is not subject to the same constraints when it comes to reporting on matters before the Family Court. Assuredly, some of these rules exist in Australia for very good reason: there are often excellent reasons for not reporting on custody disputes, reasons that usually involve the privacy and welfare of any children involved. But what we lose is a most important sense of transparency and accountability when it comes to the activities of the Family Court and the Federal Circuit Court. And as a society we need to ask ourselves if this sort of secrecy is part of the problem. Often victims’ experiences are not reported in the media because the people involved cannot be identified. This makes it too difficult for the media, which, frightened of being sued, puts such stories in the too-hard basket.
These are the sorts of questions we need to ask. And if I achieve nothing else in my tenure as Australian of the Year – or beyond that, as an advocate for change in the way we deal with family violence in this country – then forcing these issues out from the shadows will have been a job well done.
Isn’t it terrible that your young son might think it is okay to be violent and controlling because it’s a sign of strength? Or that it’s okay for your daughter to accept controlling or derogative behaviour or the occasional slap because her partner’s drunk and he apologised? We need to challenge these attitudes each time they arise so our children grow up understanding there is no grey area when it comes to family violence. It is not okay in any of its forms. Not ever.
So much of it is entrenched gender inequality. As men and as women we are born with our views of life, from the moment we take our first breath. Men have their male sense of privilege and entitlement, and that’s the lens through which they view life. They don’t know any different. As women, we know
our place. And I’m not suggesting centuries of gender roles and stereotypes can be overturned in a couple of years: but certainly acknowledging that disparity is a start.
Think of it as a basic economic issue, if nothing else. Police commissioners around the country estimate that 40 percent of their forces’ time and resources is taken up dealing with family violence issues. And that’s not to mention the time and resources dedicated to the issue in our courts and public health systems. Think of how fruitfully these resources could otherwise be deployed.
Because the sad reality is it’s far more common to be affected by family violence in this country than not. That’s what I realised after Luke died. Even the children who were close friends of Luke’s and who came from great homes and lovely families have now had their entire world rocked because, not only did a friend of theirs die, but he died at the hands of his own father. Some of those kids were playing cricket with him earlier that same day. That suddenly makes the world a very dangerous place for a small child in a very safe community in a lovely little pocket of Victoria.
I remember in the weeks after Luke’s death, one of my friends told me about an exchange she had with her son. She and her ex-husband had always struggled to agree on access visits, and there had been instances of arguing in front of the children. And her son spoke about Luke and asked her if she thought his father might do the same thing to him. She was horrified. She told her husband, and he was devastated. But it forced him to take a look at his actions and assess the impact it was having on the people closest to him.
