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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| Post subject: Domestic violence is not just about misogyny |  |
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Brilliant and timely article by Gay Alcorn.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/08/our-response-to-domestic-violence-must-go-beyond-cries-of-misogyny
| Quote: | Feminist group Destroy the Joint has a project to count the number of women killed violently in Australia. So far this year its up to 42. The group doesnt just count deaths resulting from domestic violence because they believe all these deaths are the result of societal misogyny.
Surely this is a stretch. In some cases the perpetrator is unknown, and in four cases listed it is women accused of killing other women. In two cases it is the womans own daughter accused of murder. If everything is about misogyny, then it risks becoming as much a hindrance to understanding as a help.
We cant deal with this crime until we understand the detail of it, and its as complicated as any other. For a start, murder rates are at their lowest for 25 years, and the proportion of murders that are family related (this includes killings by any family member, not just an intimate partner) are also down. According to a recent Australian Institute of Criminology report, in 2007-08, they comprised 52% of all homicides; now, its 38%.
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The top five were in remote areas and all but one of the top 20 were regional or remote towns. Campbelltown was the only metropolitan area in the top 20 for rates of domestic assault.
The argument that wealthier, better-educated women have more options than to call police makes sense. But why is there resistance to accepting that if violent assault and murder is more common in areas of severe disadvantage and stress, then the same is likely to apply to domestic violence?
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The most disadvantaged Australians are likely to experience much higher rates of violence generally, including domestic violence, but here the generalised cry of misogyny is not so loud. In many Indigenous communities, epidemic and crisis are accurate words to describe whats happening and few argue the primary cause is sexism.
There is debate among leaders about whether courts are too lenient on male Aboriginal offenders and the notion that violence against women is cultural is rejected. But if were going to tackle domestic violence, this is where the most urgent action is needed, particularly providing safe places for women to go. To ignore the role of disadvantage, lack of jobs, despair and chronic alcohol abuse would be to see domestic violence in isolation. If we can accept the complexity in Indigenous communities, we need to see it in non-Aboriginal communities, too. |
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watt price tully 
Joined: 15 May 2007
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| Post subject: Re: Domestic violence is not just about misogyny | |
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Thank you captain obvious 
It's about power & powerlessness. Sexism & misogyny are a significant & integral part of that but sexism & misogyny are insufficient reasons to explain it in full.
I dealt with a woman who gets beaten up by her now ex partner. She has left her accommodation (which is in her name) because her violent ex says if you go to the cops or anyone I will kill you. "If I can't have you no one will" he explicitly told her.
We need far more resources to go to Women's shelters & refuges & crisis services. The Mad Misogynist Monk of course has cut their services.
That woman was raped by a male at 11, turned to drugs at 12.
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“I even went as far as becoming a Southern Baptist until I realised they didn’t keep ‘em under long enough” Kinky Friedman |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| watt price tully wrote: | | It's about power & powerlessness. |
And often at least partially about the powerlessness of the perpetrators.
You may think this is stating the obvious, but in my view a good deal of the current discourse on domestic violence takes the wrong approach. A lot of people are unwilling to acknowledge systemic factors because they think that it's an exercise in "excuses". You can't tell me you're not aware of the prevalence of that viewpoint.
Preventative intervention and support services for perpetrators and potential perpetrators absolutely has to be near the top of the priority list. And mis-diagnosing the problem, as some feminist groups have done, isn't helping.
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watt price tully
Joined: 15 May 2007
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So why not talk about the issues per se rather than use another agenda to blame the so called feminists - your "bogey-man" dare I say to discuss the topic? Is this a "straw woman" argument?
It's as though you're blaming the group labelled as feminists (which I know you're not) for killing/ maiming/harming women in domestic violence situations.
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“I even went as far as becoming a Southern Baptist until I realised they didn’t keep ‘em under long enough” Kinky Friedman |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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I don't think any ideological group should be above criticism, and feminists (like anyone else with an ideological agenda) can sometimes get it wrong.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that I (or the writer of that article) am 'blaming' feminists for domestic violence. That's total nonsense: I'd be the first to acknowledge that the progress we've made to date on the issue has been more or less solely the result of work from feminists. But that doesn't mean that everything every feminist has ever said on the topic has been sensible or accurate.
In this instance, the claim (referenced in the article) that misogyny is the sole or primary cause of domestic violence is both prevalent and clearly wrong. For me, it's clear that the primary causes of domestic violence are socioeconomic disadvantage and social/psychological dysfunction, the same things that lie behind most criminal behaviour. The discourse needs to shift away from "personal responsibility", and that's something that many feminists, including the author of this article, would agree with me on.
If we're at all interested in reducing the incidence of domestic violence, we need to be willing to analyse and discuss its causes.
_________________
All watched over by machines of loving grace
Last edited by David on Tue Jun 09, 2015 7:29 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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think positive
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Joined: 30 Jun 2005
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| David wrote: | | watt price tully wrote: | | It's about power & powerlessness. |
And often at least partially about the powerlessness of the perpetrators.
You may think this is stating the obvious, but in my view a good deal of the current discourse on domestic violence takes the wrong approach. A lot of people are unwilling to acknowledge systemic factors because they think that it's an exercise in "excuses". You can't tell me you're not aware of the prevalence of that viewpoint.
Preventative intervention and support services for perpetrators and potential perpetrators absolutely has to be near the top of the priority list. And mis-diagnosing the problem, as some feminist groups have done, isn't helping. |
Yep totally agree, wish my old man had had more support growing up, but then his silly parents who did not discipline him or teach him respect may not have had anything to fear, fancy being afraid of your son, the 6 foot 110 kg bully, when your only about 5'9 as my grandfather was, or 5'2 my nan was. Certainly, wish he had had more support after knocking my mum senseless, or beating me up so bad as a three year old I couldn't walk, yep the poor bastard really needed that support.
Powerlessness of the perpetrators! OMFG!
Why was he powerless, poor bugger couldn't help his temper? Poor mite, hope he didn't hurt his knuckle when he smashed it into my mums face and knocked her out cold, RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME!
He was kind afterwards though, got a bucket of cold water and woke her up with it. Then dropped the bucket on her, told me as a ten year old, to mop it up, then clean up the vomit my sister had all over her, cos you know, it might be fun to get a twelve year old drunk! Then I got to rock my 2 year old sister back to sleep.
It is all about excuses and putting the blame elsewhere. It was her fault, she egged me on. Dinner wasn't ready. My short wasn't ironed well enough. The telly is on the wrong channel. The kid got in the way of my fists.
Misdiagnosis? I'll give you a diagnosis, he was a spoilt, indulged, selfish brat, with a heathen temper, and a stinking bad attitude. A bully. Pure and simple, a $$%^%%$ bully.
Save your sympathy for the victims, oh wait, **** them, $$%^%%$ feminists.
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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think positive
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Joined: 30 Jun 2005
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| David wrote: | I don't think any ideological group should be above criticism, and feminists (like anyone else with an ideological agenda) can sometimes get it wrong.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that I (or the writer of that article) am 'blaming' feminists for domestic violence. That's total nonsense: I'd be the first to acknowledge that the progress we've made to date on the issue has been more or less solely the result of work from feminists. But that doesn't mean that everything every feminist has ever said on the topic has been sensible or accurate.
In this instance, the claim (referenced in the article) that misogyny is the sole or primary cause of domestic violence is both prevalent and clearly wrong. Foe me, it's clear that the primary causes of domestic violence are socioeconomic disadvantage and social/psychological dysfunction, the same things that lie behind most criminal behaviour. The discourse needs to shift away from "personal responsibility", and that's something that many feminists, including the author of this article, would agree with me on.
If we're at all interested in reducing the incidence of domestic violence, we need to be willing to analyse and discuss its causes. |
If not personal responsibility, who's is it?
Quit the $$%^%%$ excuses.
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Jo, I understand that this is a very personal topic for you, and I hope that you don't take what I'm writing here the wrong way. But I'd bet my house that your Dad had way more problems than just not getting spanked enough as a kid. The kind of horrible violence he committed is not the sort of thing that comes from a happy or balanced place.
The trouble with "personal responsibility" discourse is that it was exactly the sort of viewpoint that was dominant when you were growing up. What happened in the family home largely stayed in the family home, and the job of being a good father and husband was largely seen as a moral one be a good bloke and you'll be fine. There was little concept of pointing out the darkness that often lurked behind the nice happy white picket fence facades, and as far as I know not that much in the way of support for people with violent or sexually deviant tendencies, or their victims.
I think things are changing for the better, but I still feel that if we don't really get to the root of violent behaviour what you call "making excuses" we'll only be papering over the cracks.
Protecting and helping victims and bringing offenders to justice is important, but it's just one side of the story. The other side is preventing the violence from happening in the first place, and for that we're going to need to get serious about recognising the risk factors and helping potential perpetrators lead better lives. That starts with "making excuses".
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I watch enough of criminal minds and csi to know a lot of perpetrators are copying what was don't to them. I don't get that, I'm the total opposite. I've shielded my kids from as much as possible, probably to the extreme. I don't care. My mind is irrepariably damaged, and yet I function way better than my sisters, neither has had a lasting relationship.
My father grew up an only child, not in a wealthy suburb, but not dirt poor either. He went to catholic school, so they could obviously afford the fee.my grandpa was strict, but not abusive, I'm sure he got the strap, probably at school too. But nothing will ever excuse the sheer brutality of his treatment of my mother, and to a lesser extent, me and nothing will give back the childhood he stole from me.
To this day he is still a bully, not physically, because his so fat and his knees are so bad, he can't be, but the mental abuse is never far away. if my mum had of killed him some how, I would have fought to keep her out of jail. My one regret with life, is that the day I went home at the age of 19, and found her crying in utter defeat, I was too young to help her. I wish I was stronger, more mature, more brave. She suffered another 12 years before she finally walked out with nothing, rang me and said I can't go back. My older sister and I had to tell my father and collect her things without setting him off. I can still feel the sheer terror of that day, all these years later.
I still talk to him, not often, because of who I am, not who he is. I'm a born peacemaker. I wish I wasn't. I wish I could just erase him from my memory. I went and looked after him when he was sick last year, I won't be going back. I've done my share.
Watching the news and I see Oscar is out, after serving just 10 months for killing his girl friend. I don't believe he is innocent and made a mistake, any more than I believe OJ. It's on indisputable record she was terrified of him. And now, he has got away with murder. I hope someone takes him out, and I hope he suffers.
There has been times I've applauded, or been amazed at least by your empathy for 'the other side" but not with this. It all comes down to respect. My father respects nobody. Not even himself now. He's an obese, pathetic, lonely old man, with not a friend in the world. Literally. He had a friend who helped him out, but he told the guy to **** off, and now all he has is the council worker who mops the floor twice a week, a service I arranged for him.
I know he's in pain, I know he gets lonely, but when I saw him last year, I was there an hour and he was cracking jokes in front of the council guy 'she's driving me mad already, when will she **** off?" So I said I'd change my ticket. Oh no I'm only joking. But you can't undo that. I just hope that when he goes, he just rolls over and dies, because I know in my heart, having to look after him, will destroy me. And quite frankly, I don't deserve that.
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| How do you get along with your parents? |
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think positive
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Joined: 30 Jun 2005
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| HAL wrote: | | How do you get along with your parents? |
Not bad with my dead mother
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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That's sad to hear that, TP.
The levels matter in response to these things. Over a certain level of trauma, it's pretty hard to find a compartment to put people in to view them at a distance or from different perspectives.
My late father sits right on the edge of insufferable, so I still have two compartments for him: The one I despise, and the one I love. I move between them in my mind depending on the circumstances. I guess that means there was no complete break.
Actually, the third compartment is the man I pity but can't quite access; the man who sobbed to me in regret and despair. The man who gave me glimpses of a private torture I didn't want to access as his son, but which was real enough.
So it is we learn to face the world. No wonder you and I conflict in how we approach society.
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my dad has never expressed guilt, remorse, shame, regret, or despair. i think he once said he didnt smack my younger sister enough!! yeah there's a regret for ya! he was nice to her, she was an olympian, and a dual commonwealth game medalist, so he played daddy dearest!
his mum spoiled him rotten, he never heard the word no.
you remember the song, nice legs shame about the face. he once told me they sing it to me as nice face shame about the legs. i got 36 out of 37 on a maths test, he asked me where the other 1 was. i wanted so much to be daddys girl. the only time i made him proud was when i got an award at trade school. he didnt deserve to have a daughter like me. and it took me too many years to realize i deserve better. as i type this, stone cold sober, the pain cuts through me like a knife, but ill be buggered if he will get any more tears out of me.
im sorry you also didnt have the unconditional love of your father. kids deserve to have a happy childhood. cheers
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Guy Rundle just wrote a fantastic series of articles on this issue. They're paywalled, so I'm just going to paste them here in full. Apologies in advance for the long post, but they're well worth reading from beginning to end it's by far the strongest challenge I've read to the current dominant paradigm on domestic violence.
http://www.crikey.com.au/2015/10/08/rundle-the-ruling-myths-of-our-domestic-violence-debate/
| Quote: | The ruling myths of our domestic violence debate
Guy Rundle
To paraphrase Brendan Behan, there is no problem so bad that the arrival of Miranda Devine cannot make it worse. When La Devine turned her attention to the subject of domestic violence/partner violence (DV/PV hereafter) she did not disappoint in disappointing, sheeting at least some of the blame home to you know who:
If you want to break the cycle of violence, end the welfare incentive for unsuitable women to keep having children to a string of feckless men.
Nasty stuff, but not unusual. The right cant pretend DV/PV doesnt exist, so they get angry with those who keep reminding us of problems deep in the social fabric. Yet part of the reason Devine can get some traction is because there has been a near-ban among many progressives about talking about social factors such as class and race in the occurrence of DV/PV.
Countless news and op-ed pieces over the past year have asserted a simple model of DV/PV that it is based on power and control along the line of gender only. Yet it is only one among several relatively unquestioned assumptions that have powered the debate and become received fact. The danger of this is that bad reasoning will take us along the wrong path in dealing with the issue and that, after a couple of years of op-eds, reports and grandstanding, well be right back where we started from. And by then, public attention will have moved on.
So, over the next couple of days, it seems worth considering some of these assumptions one by one, not with the aim of producing another neat theory, but seeing if dominant assumptions stand up to scrutiny.
1. Is violence against women on the rise? Is there an epidemic of domestic violence/partner violence?
The notion of an epidemic of DV/PV, and a rise in its occurrence, has become a standard observation on the problem, with the word epidemic much used all suggesting that the rates of occurrence, rather than the rates of reporting, have increased; the term epidemic suggests that something has blown out to massively greater numbers than was the case. In some reports, first-person evidence of womens refuges having unprecedented demand is added. The dominant idea is that some real social event has occurred, which many people appear to be taking as the cause of new attention being paid to the issue.
Yet the plain fact is, we have no real way of knowing whether the rate of DV/PV has increased, decreased or stayed the same from such stats. We certainly dont now whether it has gone up or down over decades, since public attitudes and police practice towards it have changed so much, but even recent year-on-year statistics dont tell us much, beyond an increase in reporting itself. The problem is well-illustrated in the Quentin Bryce report Not Now, Not Ever, for the Queensland government, which notes the increase in reporting in recent years:
In Queensland, reported occurrences of domestic and family violence have increased:
In 2010-2011 there were 52,889 occurrences, a 7.0% increase on the previous year
In 2011-2012 there were 57,963 occurrences, a 9.6% increase on the previous year
In 2012-2013 there were 64,258 occurrences, a 10.8% increase on the previous year
In 2013-2014 there were 66,016 occurrences, a 2.7% increase on the previous year. (p.46)
Further on, however, the Bryce report notes that police and legal approaches changed with the introduction of a new law in 2012. This considerably broadened the definition of violence to include, among other things:
The Act defines the conduct of domestic violence as including physical, sexual, emotional, psychological, and economic abuse or any other threatening, coercive, or controlling behaviour which causes the victim to fear for their safety or wellbeing or that of someone else. Examples of this type of behaviour include:
- Causing physical injury;
- Threatening physical injury or death whether towards the primary victim or others, including pets;
- Coercing or forcing the victim to engage in sexual activity or attempting to do so;
- Threatening to, or depriving a person of, their liberty;
- Damaging a persons property or threatening to do so;
- The perpetrator threatening to self-harm or suicide for the purpose of tormenting, intimidating or frightening the person to whom the behaviour is directed;
- Conducting unauthorised surveillance of the victim (may include following or tracking the victim, monitoring telephone calls, text messages or email) or unlawfully stalking the victim;
- Controlling or withholding the family assets and income which denies the victim economic or financial autonomy or the ability to pay the reasonable living expenses for the family; and
- Tormenting, intimidating or harassing the victim (may include repeatedly following or contacting the victim without consent, derogatory taunts, withholding medication, disclosing the victims sexual orientation without consent). (p. 68)
It is the inclusion of these last few points threatening self-harm, repeated contact, disclosing sexual orientation as violence that is worth more investigation. All hostile and menacing behaviours to be sure, but their inclusion as violence may well have caused an increase in incident reporting, which could have altered the nature and volume of call-outs and write-ups.
But there is no clear system of categorising police call-outs, even though these have become the standard by which we talk about domestic violence. A report in The Age attempting to break down police call-outs and reporting into categories demonstrated the problem, for while it could distinguish between call-outs that occasioned a safety notice being issued, intervention order applied for, or charges laid, the nature of the events themselves from physical assault to an out-of-control argument, which, 10 years ago, would not have met the standard for DV/PV remain unknown.
One figure that gives some possible counter-evidence to notions of a rise in occurrence is the rate of female victims of homicide. According to Destroy The Joints Counting Dead Women website, the number of female victims of homicide this year to date is in the mid-60s. With around 280-300 total murders in Australia per year, and women representing one-third of the victims (both fairly stable figures though the overall murder rate has dropped because of improvements in emergency medicine), that would suggest a total figure for the year in the mid-80s, and thus no change in that figure, year-on-year. (As Gay Alcorn noted going over some of this territory some months ago, one problem with the Counting Dead Women list in talking about DV/PV and gender is that it includes murder by strangers and women killing women and omits women killing men or children.)
Thats hardly conclusive since the ratio of non-lethal to lethal violence may shift over time, and non-lethal violence might have increased. Most researchers see the ratio of DV/PV murder to a wider rate of non-lethal violence to be stable over time, but it might well have altered in recent years. Its very difficult to tell.
The absence or presence of an epidemic or a rise in DV/PV shouldnt alter whether increased money and energy are devoted to public campaigns but it does alter our idea of what were up against. If there has been an increase in DV/PV, it may come from any number of causes the rise of an overt masculinist ideology (the so-called pick-up artist and mens rights activist movements), the spread of easily available violent pornography, or further shifts in class, culture and economy that have affected gender relations. But if there hasnt, then we are dealing with something far more resistant to change and reform a baseline level of violence that has been with us for years or decades. And that would demand a substantially different approach to incident reduction.
2. Is there a single root cause of DV/PV?
When DV/PV began to emerge as a public, criminal act and a focus of substantial research and action in the 1970s, a great deal of research focused on socioeconomic status and social power or lack thereof and also on the system dynamics of the families in question.
By the late 1970s, this approach came under question from a number of researchers who argued that such approaches ignored the primacy of gender, and the uses to which acts of violence were put. They felt that the sociological approaches, if applied as a form of intervention, removed any notion of accountability by violent men. One model of intervention developed in Minnesota in the early 1980s put power and control at the core of a range of branching behaviours by violent men. This concept the Duluth model diagrammed out as the power/control wheel, became first the dominant and then the all-but-exclusive mode of understanding DV/PV in large sections of the English-speaking West. Its reproduced in the Bryce report. It dominates many of the dozens of op-eds that have appeared on the topic in past months. It appears to dominate the Australian imagination of DV/PV.
There are two problems with this. First the Duluth model schema was developed as a framework for intervention, a way of simplifying a complex reality during the state-managed encounter with violent men. Yet in its reproduction over the decades it has become a full social theory of domestic/family relations, and of gender relations more generally. What was designed to guide intervention has become a purported map of really occurring processes, which excludes vast areas of social life.
The second problem is the Duluth model does not appear to work particularly well. Multiple studies of its efficacy have found varying degrees of success with the model, from middling to worse compared with other approaches with Babcock et als meta-analysis in 2004 constituting a pretty comprehensive refutation of the Duluth models claim to efficacy.
Though there has been some indication that it is useful in some situations and many practitioners use it as one approach among many its dominance in the public mind, and its shaping of public understanding of DV/PV, is out of all proportion to its usefulness or application. In the Bryce report it is presented as simple fact, the sole model by which DV/PV occurs.
How did the Duluth model acquire such power? There are many reasons. Though it appears to be a radical approach, its implicit model of action is individualist and reductive. Any social categorical explanation as to how men might act violently is rejected as an excuse, and violent action is constructed as an individual choice. The aim of the intervention is to make men own it as a choice the effect of it as a social theory is to construct it as always having been a choice. The Duluth model cut with the grain of the traditional morality of the Reagan-Thatcher era, and the idea that there was no such thing as society, i.e. that explanation at a social and collective level had no meaning.
The model was popular in an era when feminism was still on the march, while other movements particularly anti-capitalism and anti-racism had stalled. It has been popular with social work/care professionals, and it appealed to politicians (illustrated by Martin McKenzie-Murrays illuminating inside story of its persistence in the Victorian government in The Saturday Paper) because it allowed them to talk tough and avoid terrible news stories about violent men getting soft treatment from other approaches, etc, etc. The Duluth model may well be steering us away from talking about class, race and many other factors playing a key role in DV/PV, and leading us down a false path. A theory of social action and one that not well-confirmed by evidence is being presented as more-or-less empirical fact in documents like the Bryce report.
So, to sum up, theres no clear evidence of the two pillars of current discussion of DV/PV: no clear picture of a new DV/PV epidemic, and no evidence that our single omnipresent power/control approach works. Which suggests as well see tomorrow that many of the calls to action may well be leading us in exactly the wrong direction.
Tomorrow, lets look at what were not looking at in DV/PV. |
http://www.crikey.com.au/2015/10/09/rundle-turnbulls-call-for-respect-might-not-prevent-domestic-violence/
| Quote: | Turnbull's call for 'respect' might not prevent domestic violence
Guy Rundle
Reading back through academic papers on an issue of crucial importance domestic and partner violence in this case, or violence against women more generally can make your hair stand on end. The phenomenon has been written of and studied for more than a century, but it was only in the late 1950s that it began to emerge as a distinct issue, then labelled battered-wife syndrome. Richard Gelles 1980 review of the field showed almost no dedicated articles in the major sociological journals until the mid-1960s. When a distinct notion of it does start to emerge towards the end of that decade, it is often talked of in the language of systems dynamics, of families as systems. The research of the time is often focused on violence as an out-of-control aspect of a dysfunctional dynamic it looks at escalation from verbal arguments to violence as a form of exchange, and, most confronting to our eyes, some researchers consider the role of women in escalating violence by means of initial petty violent action, such as a slap or a push.
Im not advocating for these studies, because, when examined in any depth, they appear to be partial, with limited samples of respondents, saturated in the systems thinking of the era, and perhaps with more than a whiff of political correctness, since much of the study, in the United States, was of African-American households.
What I am suggesting is that the moral urgency of an issue women and children being killed by their male partners and parents does not necessarily mean that the thinking about it will bust through a whole series of assumptions dictated by current ideas, or by political demands. The systems analysis bias is long gone, but not so the general attraction to groupthink. In Australia recently that group think has shifted to one notion: that violence against women could be lessened by inculcating a culture of respect. So thats number three in our great DV/PV demythologisation:
3. Would a culture of respect lessen violence against women?
The notion that such violence has, at its root, a want of respect for women appears to have become the official state ideology of DV/PV, canonised by new Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, clearly marking a visible difference in rhetoric between himself and previous prime minister Tony Abbott (who some history buffs may recall). Abbott had, in typical blundering way, entered the debate with the notion that real men (i.e. ideal men) dont hit women. Since there are two witnesses who claim Abbott punched either side of the head of a woman who displeased him in the 1970s, he isnt exactly a role model for the cause, and there was a collective groan when he made the issue once again about his own neurotic masculinity with the real men quote.
Turnbulls return to the central notion of respect, echoed that of Rosie Batty, in her evidence to the Victorian Commission, arguing that respect for women should be taught in schools, from primary level up. Battys developing role from outspoken victim of family violence to advocate of specific strategies raised the usual bitter hatred and scorn on the right (La Devine again, and Mark Latham getting himself sacked from a primo bully pulpit in the AFR, to be house gimp on a Channel Nine panel show).
But is there any evidence that high-respect cultures have less violence against women and children than low-respect cultures? Prior to exploring that we need to consider what the notion of respect means in this culture. One can take it that were not meaning the old patriarchal belief that women are valued out of notions of beauty, elegance, etc, and/or as mothers and the focus of love, care and protection. Its that standard that is so often used in reversal for a legitimisation of violence against women. By respect is meant a cultural shift whereby gender equality is completed, and men regard women as autonomous beings with their own intentions and rights, beyond their role as partner/wife/mother.
Trouble is, theres some evidence that high-respect cultures dont have any less violence against women and children than what are, in this framework, low-respect cultures, which tend to see women in terms of their family roles and obligations. Its easy to say that developed world societies have less such violence than say, Mexico or El Salvador. But violence against women there is part of a more general earthquake of violence with many causes, and so the comparison is too wide to be useful.
The useful comparison to be made is in Europe, where northern equalitarian cultures live side by side with southern traditionalist ones, with a reasonable degree of economic and social similarity. There we find that the division between high-respect/high-autonomy cultures such as those in Scandinavia and machismo/low autonomy cultures such as Spain is none at all. Both have similar levels of murders of women and, as far as one can tell, similar levels of non-lethal violence against women.
Why would different levels of respect for womens autonomy and rights make no difference to the levels of violence against women? There are many reasons, but the core take-away is that an act of violence against a woman by a male partner does not necessarily pivot on a lack of respect as would say, violence against an animal but may have all sort of motivations, real and imagined, which do not contradict the notion that a womans being is autonomous, or any supposition that she is defined by her relation to a male partner or to the family.
Theres another reason why the enforcement of notions such as respect might have no effect at all, or even an adverse one, on the occurrence of such violence, and that is the well-documented backlash effect. This occurs when people fail to take into consideration the notion that public campaigns for respect, etc, are a state-sanctioned discourse applied to classes of people who tend to be beholden to the state: the benefit-dependent poor, criminal groups, etc. Attempts to enforce a morality can quite easily produce a resistance among subject social classes, whose identity can only be gained by defining themselves against an attempt to reshape their subjectivity. It is more than possible that such forms of intervention can actually raise the incidence and level of violence while trying to reduce it.
Ones strong sense is that in Australian approaches to this issue there is now a double triad in place. The first is an explanation triad, which takes a gender-first approach, assumes the Duluth power and control first model as a real explanation of social action, and adds to that a want of respect assumption on the part of violent men, as part of a notion of how they legitimise their violent acts. This has now been overlaid with an action triad, which exclusively involves a set of state and academic institutions run by the social care/services/ enforcement professions, the left-liberal mainstream media, and politicians. The state/academic institutions provide a model of violence against women that reflects a series of ideological assumptions about society (and particularly the primacy of gender relations, over class or race ones) and projects it onto a far more complex and substantially unexamined reality: left-liberal journalism, through op-eds and features, reproduces much of that official line, or finds it in the field, and those two forces together give politicians something to react to, which allows them to look busy.
Yet through all of this, we have very little idea what is actually going on on the ground. We have no idea whether the rate of non-lethal domestic violence is rising, falling or static. We have a model of social action the Duluth model which is being reproduced as fact across numerous reports and the wider public discussion, and which has been discredited by research. We have almost no knowledge of what frameworks and methods authorities are actually using as the DSS 2013 Grealy report on DV interventions established, we not only dont know which methods are being preferred, but there is strong evidence that state agencies that believe themselves to be using the Duluth approach arent using it at all. This reflects a confusion across the Western world although the lack of information about what is actually being done is worse in Australia than elsewhere. Recent overseas meta-analyses of intervention (on a range of models) show that intervention itself may be have no effect whatsoever, or be counter-productive.
So this double-triad power-control-respect, institutions-media-politicians may well be pushing us in exactly the wrong direction, and all out of motives associated with their own stakeholding: the maintenance of unquestioned stable power for institutions (state and academic), the continued supply of an issue that combines gender, moral outrage and salacious crime for the media, and an easy actionable announceable for the politicians. How could we investigate this more radically, and what real conclusions and action we could come up with is something well look at in part three, next week. |
http://www.crikey.com.au/2015/10/13/rundle-our-domestic-violence-obsessed-misandric-media-ignores-male-murder/
| Quote: | Our domestic violence-obsessed, misandric media ignores male murder
Guy Rundle
Four weeks ago, a trio of murders of women in Queensland pushed policy action on violence against women into high gear. The most covered was the horrifying murder of Karina Lock shot in the head by her ex-partner in a car park on the Gold Coast. He then shot himself, dying later in hospital. The murder-suicide dominated the media for days, due mainly to its narrative and spectacular nature. Two other murders of women occurring in the state in the same week got more attention than they otherwise might have because of their proximity to that page-one grabber. Together, the three unrelated killings were framed as more evidence of an epidemic of violence against women.
This cluster of murders was the cue for Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk to fast-track the recommendations of the Quentin Bryce report, and for Malcolm Turnbull to do the same for the Northern Territory. The rhetoric of action was obvious: by implementing these recommended measures, this is the sort of thing we will stop. The move affirmed the way most of us would want to think abut violence against women: that they are evilly purposeful acts; that their cruel character determines the way we should shape social policy towards them; and their degree of particularity makes them substantially intervenable against, as expressed in the title of the Bryce report, Not Now, Not Ever: Putting An End To Domestic and Family Violence in Queensland.
Sadly, as a simple historical and statistical fact, none of those beliefs can be maintained. Lethal violence against women comes down slowly, if it comes down at all, it is stubbornly resistant to changing policy regimes, and there is little indication that the last 10-15 years years of steadily growing intervention have done much at all. Most worryingly there is no sign within the report or in other government documents such as the The National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children 2010-2022 that the absence of improvement warrants any radical criticism of process. Simultaneously we are being invited to believe that violence against women can be reduced because it must, and yet offered only a repeat of prior methods with some minor variations. My suspicion is that the public whose demand for action is what prompts politicians to suddenly look very busy are not aware of the degree to which these new initiatives are failing to challenge business-as-usual practices.
First off, we need to consider this one big fact, something every sociologist and criminologist knows, but few in the general public do: crime, especially violent crime, can be pretty static over long periods of time, even when different strategies of dealing with it are applied. Politicians and activists talk of abolishing violence against women: the stats tell a different story. They tell us that women form a third of victims of homicide, and that proportion hasnt changed in decades. They tell us that the murder and attempted murder rate in Australia has changed slowly over recent decades, and might have been stable for over a century or more (with a dip in the middle) standing at about 1.6 people per 100,000 per year (the murder rate has gone down, but mainly because emergency medicine has improved survival rates, pushing the attempted murder rate up). There are around 280 homicides per year, 80-90 of them of women. Counting Dead Womens tally for the year to date is 67, suggesting an end-year total of 85. Last years was 84. In 2008-2010, it was 87.5. Next year it will most likely be around 84-88 again. And so on. The overall homicide rate did come down in Australia around the early 2000s, but there is no sure reason as to why or why DV/PV murders came down with it.
It is horrifying that such intentional acts are as predictable as car crashes or cancer, but there it is. For years people have accepted that about murder, without knowing much about it. But when campaigns against violence against women began to revive in the early 2010s, there was a new attitude: the killing of women was an intolerable wrong, capable of abolition, demanding orientation to that goal. This new attitude appears in part to be the product of a more individualistic rights culture, but also of a media one.
The high-visibility murder of Jill Meagher and the exhaustive narrative and visual coverage of it made a rare event (stranger-murder accounts for no more than about five to 10 murders of women per year) an emblem for the much wider issue of violence against women, even violence of very different types. The question of gender and power has become the dominant one of our era as social change in gender roles continues to move forward, while questions of class and race power get far less attention than they once did. And as this campaign and movement grew, the reporting on the murders of women became extensive, while coverage of the murder of men all but disappeared. Thus, in the week of that trio of Queensland murders, it was possible to find reports of the murders of six men, without much trouble all of them consigned to a paragraph.
The lack of attention over those murders indicates a huge division thats opened up between how we treat these killings: we are happy to regard the murder of men as a sociological fact, part of a complex society, while we now treat the murder of women as a moral outrage that can be readily intervened against. Theres a number of reasons for that, which can be explored at another time: false ideas about the nature of male victims of murder; the ability of men to fight off an assailant, etc; and the particularly abhorrent nature of partner killings, given the betrayal of intimacy that represents.
The key point here is that the invisibility of male murder makes it look like women are the only ones being killed, and that makes such acts seem all the more arbitrary and preventable.
My suggestion would be that that is leading us down a policy path emphasising perpetrator intervention a business-as-usual approach because it has an implicitly moral sense to it, the idea that men doing evil should and can be managed towards not doing so. The moral imperative causes us to disregard a great deal of evidence that perp intervention has poor results and is continued year after year despite delivering such results. Furthermore, by applying the Duluth model of gender/power/control as a social theory, it focuses on changing male behaviour within an unchanged and unexamined society. Non-gender factors class, poverty, racism are held to amplify DV/PV, but not to in any way cause it. Here, for example, is part of the Bryce reports distilled account of violence in Queensland indigenous communities (there is no discussion on class as a distinct situation):
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Queenslanders have a unique history, very different from that of other sections of the Queensland population and characterised by successive generations of colonisation, dispossession, violence, and discrimination. A legacy of trauma arising from this history pervades the lives of individuals, families and communities and is seen as a causal factor for violence in the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and a causal factor for a range of other social, economic, psychological and emotional issues that themselves are situational factors contributing to violence. (p.120)
To construct such a situation, acknowledged as political-historical, as arising from trauma is immediately to depoliticise and psychologise it. Its such an automatic act of social intervention professionals and an interpretive one that it is not registered that it is being presented as fact. Even on the plain matter of gender, there is little airing of the discussion much covered in Australian Institute of Criminology papers that the female component of the fall in homicides might be due to the rising independent income of women, a possibility that would suggest that something non-interventionist like a higher mandatory living wage or a change in pink-collar job award rates might help. Such a report isnt required to reconstruct Australian society. But it should foreground more categorical possibilities for which there is evidence especially as its surveillance/intervention focus is now constructing policy response.
The report also seems a little loose in its use of research and adoption of calibrations. Thus, it uncritically accepts the absurd and counterproductive widening of definitions of violence to include insults and emotional conflict (in the easy-read version of the The National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children 2010-2022 hurt feelings constitute violence). Consideration of wider social causality that DV/PV may be a displacement of oppression and rage onto less strong people nearby, such as women, children and pets, and be little motivated by gender per se is absent.
Furthermore, at least some of the research process seems more than a little ad hoc. Papers are gathered to produce a plethora of suggestions and observations, without any consideration of their research base, or contradictory material. Sources range wildly. Yet all are given credence. Heres one example, spotted only because I was aware of it earlier.
In arguing for greater agency integration, the report cites approvingly the Massachusetts Domestic Violence High Risk Assessment Teams (DVHRAT), an intense monitoring and perpetrator intervention program for violent men with an assessed high risk of partner murder. Begun in 2005, the program was rolled out to all of Massachusetts over the next years. Its supporters trumpet the non-occurrence of homicide by the men under its watch. But the reduction in partner homicide in Massachusetts? Zero. Its steady at about 22-24 a year (actually it oscillates over a two-year range, 30/15, 30/15, for complex reasons). The program, taking a chunk of the states alleged high-risk offenders, could thus be a classic false positive seeing not its limited choice of field, but the success within that field. It proves nothing useful, yet had an appeal, in 2012-13, because it intervened heavily against perpetrator, rather than victim (i.e. tracking violent men with GPS, rather than obliging victims to move, etc). The Bryce reports source for this evidence? A Slate article, itself covering a New Yorker article. Despite that inadequate sourcing, one of its strategies, GPS tracking of some violent men, ends up in the introduction, as a highlighted possibility.
The 140 recommendations touted is something of an exaggeration by politicians, for single initiatives there are about 20 of them, ranging from womens/childrens refuges that take pets (to make leaving easier) to reforming court procedures, to a National Domestic Violence order are often spread over three or four recommendations (theres also standard stuff like a communications strategy and suggestions for around 10 more reports). The emphasis on surveillance and state monitoring and micro-intervention is not critically reflected on; discussion of backlash effect or studies that suggest that some forms of such intervention can increase DV/PV are not cited .
Some of this might be remedied in the plethora of reports and audits the Bryce report recommends Im not sure the public has cottoned on to the fact that this decisive response largely involves more reports or in the report that will come from the Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence (which has gone off on a frolic of its own, down a rather neurobiological emphasis, with the first two weeks largely occupied by such testimony, victims and perps as objects). I dont doubt the dedication of the people who put together the report, of course, but one does note that, while the report took many submissions, none of the nine people producing its final version are hard analytic criminologists or sociologists. The bias towards intervention is not unexpected of those drawn from intervention agencies, but there is no guarantee of improvement and no setting out of how we would know that some of these initiatives had worked.
Your correspondent began writing on this, with some misgivings, because it was no longer possible to bear the endless repetition of moralising articles and op-eds, which suggested that simply saying stop it or its not on, etc, was enough to reduce violence against women and other articles that reproduced the Duluth model as a social theory, when its interpretive failure is well known. I did this with some awareness that there is limited tolerance for men writing about this stuff. I was also disconcerted by the lack of criminological discourse in the debate (though that has been remedied to some small degree) to remind people how difficult it is to change social patterns (and also by the lack of interest in mens murder, which has become misandric, and, in the case of remote-area indigenous men 30 times more likely to be murdered than almost any non-indigenous woman clearly racist).
In writing about it, Ive become more dismayed, rather than less, by the deep desire there seems to be that violence against women shall only be seen through the lens of gender and moral accounting, even when there is evidence that other approaches might actually reduce it. There needs to be a process established that allows for harder thinking, more challenge to existing processes and their assumptions and more input from criminologists all directed at getting first a return to a clearer picture and then a range of more disruptive suggestions. If we could reduce the 40-50 partner homicides a year by five to seven a year (and concomitant non-lethal violence also) over a consistent period, and within the next five years, most people would regard it as a middling achievement, given the broad claims and the women still being killed. But criminologists would be on their desk cheering at this extraordinary achievement. Thats the challenge we face with this issue, and we are failing to rise to it. |
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All watched over by machines of loving grace
Last edited by David on Wed Jan 27, 2016 11:09 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Wokko 
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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