Something is Changing

Before I say anything more, I want to send big hugs and solidarity to victim survivors, and the friends and family of intimate partner homicide victims. I’m sure these past few weeks have been especially difficult for you, and I know many of you have tried to avoid the news. Behind the scenes, advocates in this space are grasping this heightened moment and giving literally everything they’ve got to make sure it delivers meaningful change. Speaking personally: everything I do is informed by the emails you send me, the chats we have, the advocacy you do in public (whether that’s through traditional media or via social media posts). It’s your expertise and courage that makes me feel brave, and drives me to push for big, pragmatic interventions.

It has been a wild couple of weeks. Michael and I can barely believe the impact our paper has had on both the media and the political discourse on gendered violence. At last, we’re hearing commentators talk about the intersection between the perpetration of gendered violence and childhood trauma histories. We’re having national conversations about regulating industry harms - problem gambling, alcohol abuse, the underage consumption of mainstream porn. It feels like a brave new world.

National Cabinet has already signalled a willingness to broaden prevention efforts, which feels significant (though we’ll have to wait to see what that actually means). In the media release from that meeting:

National Cabinet agreed to a number of priorities for all our governments, building on efforts under way under the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022-2032, including:

• Strengthening accountability and consequences for perpetrators, including early intervention with high-risk perpetrators and serial offenders, and best practice justice responses that support people who have experienced violence.

• Strengthening and building on prevention work through targeted, evidence-based approaches.

• Maintaining a focus on missing and murdered First Nations women and children, and the impact of domestic and family violence in First Nations communities.
  

  … The Commonwealth will also deliver a range of new measures to tackle factors that exacerabate violence against women, such as violent online pornography, and misogynistic content targeting children and young people.

Because reading 12,000 words on complex public health policy is a punish for most people, Mike and I distilled some of our thoughts on prevention into shorter op-eds for the Guardian:

In a society where male violence seems inevitable we need much more than education and awareness (Mike)

We won’t stop violence against women with conversations about respect. This is not working. We need to get real (Me)

As this discussion has taken off, it has been particularly heartening to see the role of alcohol brought back into the frame. Alcohol has been sidelined from the gendered violence conversation for at least the past decade; largely because it was traditionally used as an excuse/explanation for all gendered violence, and an easy out for conservative commentators intent on ‘othering’ perpetrators as substance abusers from low socio-economic neighbourhooods. The big project over the past decade has been to prove that family/sexual violence and coercive control cuts across class; that it is endemic throughout our society, it is gendered, and that at its core, it is about power and control.

However, the omission of alcohol has been problematic, because we know that alcohol is an accelerant to gendered violence - particularly physical and sexual violence. Victim survivors commonly point that out, but the ideological constraints on this conversation have resulted in their voices being largely excluded from mainstream discourse.

In the words of Caterina Giorgi, the CEO of FARE (Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education), “We know that the more available and accessible alcohol is, the more violence we see. We know the later that alcohol outlets trade, the more violence we see… Governments know this too. But they’ve failed to act. The question we must be asking is why and whose interests are being prioritised?’

You can read FARE’s open letter to the National Cabinet here. In it, prominent survivor advocate Kym Valentine says that governments need to place onus for change on alcohol companies, not just individual Australians. “When perpetrators of violence can have alcohol delivered into their home at any time of day or night, with the push of a button, it makes a volatile situation infinitely worse.”

Chanel Contos wrote a great op-ed in the Saturday Paper backing in our regulation recommendations, and signaling the size of the fight. She writes:

“Recently, Jess Hill and Michael Salter wrote an article about rethinking primary prevention in which they say “regulation of industries who are engaged in harmful commercial behaviours is standard public health practice and needs to be factored into our strategies for reducing gendered violence.

The risk for women is we are relying on the government to make structural changes to systems that have proven lucrative to state coffers. Sport, gambling, alcohol and porn are multibillion-dollar industries that shape our society. Taxes from alcohol and sport alone provide the Australian government with $10 billion in revenue each year – more of which could be dedicated to interventions to prevent male violence. A complete reassessment of our country’s economic make-up and how this feeds our values is required to even begin to bring about change.”

Problem gambling has seldom been mentioned at all in connection to gendered violence, despite research that clearly shows that can ‘intensify the severity and frequence of intimate partner violence against women.’ So it is fantastic to see this being seriously talked about, too.

State governments are on the hook for this, as are the major sporting codes. It’s no coincidence that there are huge spikes in physical acts of domestic violence on Grand Final days: for example, Victorian Police report a 20 per cent increase in domestic violence incidents. The intersection between problem gambling and excessive alcohol use, at a time of heightened emotions, is central to this spike.

Anyone wanting to learn more about how sporting codes can do more to confront this should be following anti-violence campaigner and renowned Grandstand commentator, Charlie King, a proud Gurindji man who founded No More. I’ve had the honour of working with Charlie and the No More team in Darwin over the years, and cited his groundbreaking work (particularly in the predominantly Yolngu community of Ramingining) in my book five years ago. Charlie’s whole-of-community work is, as he says, not just for Aboriginal communities, but for any community/sporting code that wants to tackle gendered violence. I’m always surprised that he’s not better known - he is one of the most effective and committed campaigners I’ve ever met.

The Guardian’s Jonathan Horn wrote an excellent piece last week, citing our paper and calling for sporting codes to do more than just link arms. Real solidarity, Horn writes, means making hard decisions:

AFL platitudes are easy. Real action on gender-based violence is tougher but desperately needed

On-field activations, candlelight vigils, marches through inner city streets and partnerships with Our Watch are all well and good. Real action, like banning Tarryn Thomas from the AFL, is tougher, more complicated and in this instance entirely warranted.

There have been so many incredible advocates talking in the media this week - too many to mention. It truly has been blanket coverage. I want to draw particular attention to this interview on RN Breakfast with Antoinette Braybrook (CEO of Djirra) and Dr Anne Summers. Antoinette has worked at the frontline of Aboriginal women’s safety for 22 years, and as she explains, she’s only seen things get worse, not better:

“We’ve been calling year after year for increased funding to meet the demand for our services - our frontline legal and non-legal work - and that has not been forthcoming. We’re very clear that in order to addres violence against Aboriginal women, there must be an investment in Aboriginal women’s self determination, and our specialist family violence community organisations… Djirra together with the other Aboriginal Family Violence Prevention and Legal Services providers are the lowest funded of the four legal assistance providers in the country, and our core business is family violence and Aboriginal women’s safety.”

Mike and I are grateful to the many writers who have engaged with our paper (I’ve included a list at the end of this blog, in case you’re interested). I commented yesterday on Twitter and LinkedIn about one op-ed, written by Jacqueline Maley for the SMH. It was a thoughtful piece, and much of it I agree with, but I do have one very important point of contention that I want to repeat here.

Jacqueline writes:

“…the work of Jess Hill and Michael Salter, who have argued for a pragmatic focus on high-risk perpetrators and a get-real approach to accelerants of violence – gambling, alcohol and drug use, pornography and a family background of abuse and violence. All these factors are associated with low socio-economic status, which brings a tricky political element to the debate. They run counter to the awareness that advocates have been trying to bring about for decades – that abuse and violence can happen to anyone, regardless of wealth or social status.”

I disagree with this interpretation. Neither a history of family abuse nor the underage consumption of mainstream porn is associated primarily with low socio economic status. People with low socio-economic status are at greater risk for problem gambling and substance abuse, but it is by no means solely a problem of class.

It is absolutely the case that coercive control and gendered violence cuts across every class category, which is a truism I’ve advocated on for the past 10 years.

Our paper on prevention addresses a range of interventions - regulation for harmful industries is one category, but it is a complex picture. Different interventions will have impacts on various types of violence - there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Alcohol regulation, for example, may put downward pressure on the rates of physical violence, but not have as great an impact on the non-physical forms of coercive control, and so on.

If you’re interested in learning more about how FV cuts across class, read this report on pathways to intimate partner homicide, led by Hayley Boxall from the Australian Institute of Criminology for ANROWS.

It found that approx 1/3 were committed by ‘fixated threat’ offenders. These fixated threat offenders were mostly middle class, had low contact with the justice system, and used non-physical forms of coercive control. The majority of them killed their victim after she left them. They planned their murders for days/weeks, and were likely to try to conceal their crimes, plead not guilty, etc. (As an aside, part of the reason many advocates have pushed for coercive control laws is to make these largely invisible offenders visible to the system, and to enable earlier intervention.)

Another columnist who engaged with our paper this week was Waleed Aly, who wrote this column for the SMH/Age. It had mixed responses on Twitter - some supporting it, others saying it was a career-ending column and that Waleed should stop excusing men. Many people suggested he read my book.

Which I found curious, because little of what he said came as a surprise to me. In fact, I spent a whole chapter in See What You Made Me Do talking about the link between shame and coercive control/violence (which I co-wrote with my psychotherapist partner, David Hollier).

Waleed opens his column quoting former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who said in 2015: “Disrespecting women does not always result in violence against women. But all violence against women begins with disrespecting women.” It was a big, bold statement back then - particularly following the prime ministership of Tony ‘Minister for Women’ Abbott. But Waleed felt some disquiet when he heard it: “I just don’t think that’s correct,” he writes.

In my book, I also question whether Malcolm' Turnbull’s statement about disrespect captured the whole picture:

”There’s an epidemic of violence against women in this country, and to confront it we can’t just focus on gender inequality. We need to define and discuss the system that entraps both sexes, because domestic abuse doesn’t really start with men disrespecting women. Its roots go much deeper – into men’s fear of other men, and the way patriarchy shames them into rejecting their own so-called ‘feminine’ traits, like empathy, compassion, intuition and emotional intelligence. We need to talk about how, for too many men, patriarchy makes power a zero-sum game and shrinks the rich landscape of intimacy to a staging ground for competition and threat. This is the realm of men’s violence, with its underworld of male shame and humiliated fury.”

Waleed also goes on to cite the work of James Gilligan, the prison psychiatrist with more than 35 years experience working with perpetrators, whose (highly respected) theory connects all violence to shame. In my book, I also cite Gilligan extensively. I was especially moved to take a chance on providing a varied explanation of what motivates perpetrators by this comment from Gilligan: that “to simply condemn violence ‘is as irrelevant as it would be to “condemn” cancer or heart disease’.” Gilligan grew up with a violent father, and is married to ‘rock star’ feminist, ethicist and psychologist Carol Gilligan), so he is not naive to the differences between general violent offending and gendered violence.

I’ll quote from the book again:

(Gilligan) has arrived at a compelling idea: all violence begins with shame. In fact, he argues, the very purpose of violence is to banish shame and replace it with pride.

Shame is a concept few people understand, so Gilligan lists its synonyms – and there are dozens: being insulted, dishonoured, disrespected, disgraced, demeaned, slandered, ridiculed, teased, taunted, mocked, rejected, defeated, subjected to indignity or ignominy; ‘losing face’ and being treated as insignificant; feeling inferior, impotent, incompetent, weak, ignorant, poor, a failure, ugly, unimportant, useless, worthless. Envy and jealousy are siblings of shame, says Gilligan, since they trigger – and are underpinned by – feelings of inferiority.

Like Gilligan’s violent criminals, domestic abuse perpetrators are often exquisitely sensitive to the merest hint that they are being dissed, and commonly interpret harmless behaviour from their partners as a deliberate personal attack. Phone counsellors on the National Men’s Referral Service helpline hear this kind of talk from offenders all the time….

Phone counsellors here call men who have recently been charged with a domestic abuse–related offence. Their numbers are provided to the helpline by police. Guy Penna is the helpline’s team leader, and he’s heard every excuse under the sun. ‘I’ve had guys have [violent] incidents – where the police have been called – about how their partner’s put the rubbish bin out. “It wasn’t straight to the kerb, it wasn’t square.”’ The real cause almost never gets written on the police report. ‘Sometimes it takes you a little while to get to the why, and the “why” might be that, oh, she disrespected my mother three weeks ago,” adds counsellor Brett Tomlinson. ‘Or, “She went out with her girlfriends four months ago and didn’t say sorry, and I just haven’t let it go since.”’

These are the real stories behind ludicrous headlines like ‘Man Murders Wife for Burning Toast’. Consider the very public throttling of celebrity chef Nigella Lawson by her art collector husband Charles Saatchi, at an upmarket London restaurant in 2013. Lawson later testified in court that she had noticed ‘a sweet baby’ in a stroller nearby and had casually mentioned to Saatchi that she was looking forward to becoming a grandmother. At that, Saatchi grabbed her by the throat, growling, ‘I am the only person you should be concerned with – I am the only person who should be giving you pleasure.’ He described the incident to the press as a ‘playful tiff ’.

That violent men feel shamed for such trivial reasons further compounds their shame, writes Gilligan, and drives it deeper underground, to a place where, deeply concealed, it is even less likely to be acknowledged, and more likely to manifest as violence. They feel ‘acutely ashamed, over matters that are so trivial that their very triviality makes it even more shameful to feel ashamed about them, so they are ashamed even to reveal what shames them’. Penna says one of the most common phrases the phone counsellors hear is ‘pushing my buttons’. ‘If you’re not agreeing with me, if we’re not in 100 per cent solidarity in everything I say and do, then you’re challenging me,’ he says, describing the mindset of many male callers. ‘If you’re challenging me, you’re undermining and attacking me. There’s this sense that my worldview is the only view, and any challenge to that is automatically unsettling and requires [them] to react, as opposed to respond.’

This is a very long chapter, and I won’t quote it all here! However, if you are interested in hearing more about the connection between shame (and pathological entitlement/disregard), you can listen to Episode 3 of The Trap (which I made with Georgina Savage and the Victorian Women’s Trust), Why Do They Do It?

In this episode, we interview several men who are trying to address their need for control, and even hear a recorded verbal attack from a typical coercive controller. To background this, I zero in on the concept of ‘humiliated fury’:

Humiliated fury is basically a cocktail of shame, rage and entitlement that gives abusive people, particularly men, a way to protect themselves against feeling powerless and defective. By blaming others, by abusing and oppressing them, they are able to regain a sense of power and avoid unbearable feelings of shame… I’m the real victim here. I could have been somebody. They stole it from me. She stole it from me. If she’d just been loyal, if she’d just listened, if she’d just done what I needed her to do—none of this would have happened. Look what she made me do.

I routinely talk about ‘humiliated fury’ when I deliver education about coercive control.

In fact, the day Waleed’s article was published, I was in Perth delivering education with the National Judicial College. My brilliant colleague on that program, Magistrate Jay Pandya, reminded me (like she always does) not to run out of time before I can get to the part about humiliated fury. It’s important, because this is what magistrates see in so many of the offenders that stand in their courtrooms. If you’ll excuse this self-indulgence, I’ll include here a bit of what I told that room:

‘Humiliated fury’ was coined in the 1970s by the psychoanalyst Helen Block Lewis - the first psychoanalyst to clinically study guilt and shame. She introduced the idea that some men used ‘humiliated fury’ to protect themselves against feeling powerless and defective; by blaming others, they were able to regain a sense of power and avoid unbearable feelings of shame. Picture, for example, the schoolyard bully who gets up in a smaller boy’s face, daring him to repeat what he just muttered under his breath; this is the schoolyard version of the man who abuses his wife for daring to challenge his opinion.

Today, many theories suggest that shame underpins all intimate partner violence. Essentially, they are variations on the same theme: that in order to shield oneself from shame, one attacks others with insults, ridicule, or physical violence. The primary function of this response is to increase self-esteem at the expense of someone else. When men are unable to process negative emotions and soothe themselves, they are more likely to project them onto their partner – a safe container for their worst impulses.

Shame should not be confused with guilt. When we feel guilt, we can apologise and, if we are forgiven, we may be absolved of our guilty feeling. But nobody can absolve you of shame. You have to do that work yourself. That’s because shame is not just a feeling that we’ve done something bad, it’s the unspeakable (and often deeply buried) feeling, ‘I am bad’ – the feeling that we are ‘unloved and unlovable’.

If we experience shame as an ongoing state, it can create terrible distortions in our perceptions. Shame-obsessed people may see themselves as ‘objects of derision’ – even the former leader of the free world, spent much of his presidency getting into twitter fights with people he thought had slighted him. Shame-obsessed people hear ridicule even when none was intended, because they lose the ability to distinguish between their own feelings of worthlessness, and what their hearing or seeing their partners do and say. Picture headlines like ‘man kills wife over burnt toast’ – that’s humiliated fury. So abusive men commonly believe they have been shamed, disrespected, and/or abused by their partners – even if that is patently absurd and untrue. This is why perpetrators commonly see themselves as the victims, and are very persuasive in convincing authorities of that perceived fact. They project their inner feelings of degradation and worthlessness on their partners in order to regain a sense of security. They expect their partners and their kids to take their shame, to hold it, to contain it. And to never complain about it – never make it visible, so that the shame is visible to him, and to the world.

            But shame in and of itself does not necessarily lead to abuse. But what we see operating in so many men is not just shame, but a toxic shame combined with entitlement. The humiliated fury of believing that one is entitled to certain treatment, entitled to be the sole focus of the woman’s attention, entitled to sex, entitled to the care, acceptance and ongoing devotion of a partner they degrade, threaten, monitor and humiliate. As the sociologist Michael Kimmel said to me, ‘Women are humiliated and shamed as well, and they don’t go off on shooting sprees,’ says Kimmel. ‘Why not? Because they don’t feel entitled to be in power. [For men], it’s humiliation plus entitlement. It’s the idea that “I don’t feel empowered, but I should.”’

Men’s behaviour change programs engage with men’s shame, too. In the book, I profile the pioneering work of Kylie Dowse, a Saltwater woman based in NSW, whose overt work with men’s shame garnered remarkable results in her programs, including higher-than-average retention rates. There’s a lot to be said about addressing the deap-seated shame of men who feel the need to use coercive control and violence.

There’s so much more to say, but I think that’ll do for one post!

There’s a lot more to say. I will be attending the National Crisis Talks in Canberra on Tuesday May 7th, and will post some reflections from that later this week. There are many great minds and dedicated frontline leaders who will not be there, which is a damn shame, but I hope to represent some of their concerns and insights.

Lastly »

Some excellent thinkers have engaged with our paper over the past fortnight, and many journalists have used it as a jumping off point to talk about broadening prevention.

Some links here, if you’re interested:

Another woman killed and we are no closer to a solution

"Rethinking Primary Prevention" - Comments by Michael Flood

A multi-layered approach to the prevention of violence against women: Comments in response to Rethinking Primary Prevention

Rape myths are extremely dangerous. Did the Lehrmann verdict bust them? (Julia Baird in SMH)

As Australia screams for action against lethal male violence, this is a culture war for survival (Van Badham in The Guardian)

Ideology will not protect women from violent men (Claire Lehmann in The Australian)

Mike and I have also done a lot of media on this in the past fortnight - a dizzying amount. I haven’t even had time to share links to many of these, so here’s a list:

Talking isn’t working: Push for PM to tackle porn, gambling, booze to stop violent men (Mike in the SMH)

Conversations about respect aren't stopping domestic violence, is it time we rethink our approach? (Mike on RN Drive)

Jess Hill on what it will take to stop men killing women – Full Story podcast (with the excellent Nour Haydar)

Jess Hill on why we need more than ‘awareness’ to end the killing of women (7am podcast)

27 killed in 4 months: what’s it going to take to end violence against women? (Jess with Professor Heather Douglas on Life Matters)

Jess Hill discusses role of porn, gambling and alcohol on family violence (ABC News Breakfast)

I also did an interview with the brilliant Narelda Jacobs on Channel 10, but can’t find the link to that.

Here’s a clip from an interview Mike did with The Project (also featuring the fabulous Annabelle Daniel, chair of DVNSW and CEO Women’s Community Shelters, and Patty Kinnersly, CEO of Our Watch)

Here’s another with me, (also featuring the excellent Katherine Berney, head of the National Women’s Safety Alliance)