"Is Domestic and Family Violence Preventable?
[Michael Salter: Associate Professor of Criminology, School of Social Sciences, University of NSW]
Over the last five years the community in Australia has really gotten behind the issue of domestic and family violence and has become really committed to the support of domestic and family violence victims and that’s been an amazing sea change. Before then, domestic and family violence was seen, I think, as something quite stigmatising and embarrassing. There was a lot of shame there for victims and now people are understanding this is a massive social problem. It has a huge cost and a human cost, and emotional cost, and economic cost and it is everyone’s responsibility and particularly the workplace. The workplace is an area where we can make a lot of change for domestic violence victims.
[Patty Kinnersly: Chief Executive Officer, Our Watch]
Domestic and family violence is certainly preventable. The evidence is really quite clear now that the largest driver of violence against women in this country is gender inequality. What we understand about prevention is that we need to change the underlying environment where these particular forms of gender inequality come to life. We need to make change to that underlying environment in the places where people spend most of their time: at work, at sport, at church, where they play, where they meet with people, the media has a huge influence.
[Matt Pronger: Programs Manager, Australia’s CEO Challenge]
Traditionally what we’ve done is we’ve focused attention on the emergency services and the human services and we’ve made them both responsible or we’ve made the individuals responsible, we’ve victim blamed this person, why don’t you just leave? But none of that has been looking at the broader strategy: how do we actually engage in the landscape across the board. So it’s not just about the emergency services of that workplace, it’s about neighbourhoods, it’s about communities taking responsibility for this topic, because a whole lot of people are affected, not just those experiencing or those using, there’s children, there’s neighbours, there’s friends, there’s family who get deeply affected by this topic too. So we definitely need a more unified strategy in this space. We really need some more understanding and we need more engagement in early intervention and primary prevention: so how we can actually look at hosting these conversations at a very very early stage. By the time we’re talking about the really pointy end of domestic and family violence, there’s been a whole lot of warning signs along the way and we’ve missed the boat, we’ve missed the opportunity to engage. So how we can engage earlier and earlier on to try and break some of these cycles so we don’t end up with generations of people having forms of experiences in their life.
[Michael Salter: Associate Professor of Criminology, School of Social Sciences, University of NSW]
So as a society we pay attention to sexist and misogynist attitudes, we pay attention to the way in which male aggression and male violence is normalised and often seen by many men as a problem-solving tool, as a way of resolving conflict in their relationships. We want to expand the opportunities that are available to girls and women to participate as equals in social life and to participate as equals in the workforce as well; and women’s economic empowerment, closing the gender gap ensuring that women are accumulation the same amounts of assets, superannuation, all these things over the course of their lives puts women on an equal playing field where they are just as empowered as a man to make decisions that they need to make to keep themselves and their kids and their families safe. And there’s a broader bigger picture here: the bulk of parenting and child rearing, it falls to women, the bulk of house work falls to women, there are things that men can do at home in terms of contributing to rebalancing that gendered division of labour but child rearing and parenting remains a real obstacle for women as they’re trying to hold their position in the workforce and progress in their careers as well. That’s a key public policy issue.
[Patty Kinnersly: Chief Executive Officer, Our Watch]
We want a young person as they track through life to see equal and respectful relationships at home where they’re treated equally at kinder and they don’t have to play with pink or blue. Where when they go to sport, they’re really encouraged for the athletic ability not for the things that people typically say are boys and girls. Where when they go to work, they can work through an organisation with equal opportunity from when they work into the organisation to when they leave either as the CEO or somebody who has fulfilled other roles. We need our politicians to be making sure that policies reflect gender equality and that we make sure that in every part of the Australian community women and men have equal opportunity.
