a violent act
male | perpetrator | victim
Domestic Violence:
Changing and challenging narratives
Domestic violence is dramatic. Crisis is dramatic. But, even for professionals in the fields of policy and support, the lines and numbers of what constitutes domestic violence and who suffers from it is not very clear.
Thanks to narratives by personalities such as Rosie Battie or campaigns by White Ribbon or other like organisations, Domestic Violence has gone from being a taboo topic reserved for late night phone calls and women’s bathrooms, to a commonplace narrative. I have witnessed a lot of tut-tutting, shaking of heads and “oh that’s terrible” or “He’s a monster. Someone needs to punch his lights out and throw away the key.” As dramatic and as sensational as these narratives may be, they are not helpful and give no room for just how complicated, nuanced and systemic the issues are.
Definitions of Domestic Violence
In Australia there is no agreement across organisations or individuals about what constitutes Domestic Violence. But Dr Michael Johnson from Pennsylvania State University has researched behaviours around the world, and has simplified these violent behaviours into four main categories.
While maintaining the idea that all violence is bad, as described above intimate terrorism is what we can term 'true domestic violence.' Most violence recorded by conflict tactic surveys, such as the 2012 Australian Bureau of Statistics' (ABS) Personal Safety Survey classifies situational couple violence as the same as intimate terrorism and violent resistance. Situational couple violence while potentially serious may only have occurred once only.
Counting the Blows
Surveys such as the ABS’s Personal Safety survey and police data only count violent acts. The survey asked questions like, “In the last 12 months have you experienced at least one incident of physical assault by a current or previous other sex partner?” The issue with this data does not reflect the nuance of true violence. The data does not reflect context, the impact of the abuse or the intensity. Behaviours such as intimidation, stalking, sexual assault or even homicide are not reflected.
Victims of domestic violence who are still in a situation of violence are known to have a high amount of survey refusal, which results in data that does not contain the very people who are most affected. Many of us know that husbands and wives quite often do not agree, so poor inter-spousal reliability is also and issue when you speak with one spouse and not the other.
Gender Asymmetry vs Gender Symmetry
Academic theories favour either statistics that result in gender symmetry (where both genders perpetrate violence at roughly the same rate) or gender asymmetry (where one gender perpetrates at dramatically different rates).
The growing counter-discourse of the men’s rights movement have been espousing the statistics of family conflict studies as it is favourable to them. Family conflict studies results skew towards gender symmetry, but have been criticised for their method. Advocate groups such as 1in3 claim that the public discourse on domestic violence has demonised all men. They also claim that there is gap in services for male victims of domestic violence.
Academics seem not to be able to agree—but that is their job. Whilst the public flails in reaction to the obscene numbers of infographics spouting both gender asymmetry (one gender abuses more than the other) to the men's rights camp who is backing the gender symmetry camp (women do it too).
Truths
The evidence seems to lie somewhere in the middle. Males overwhelmingly experience violence more often than females. It is usually perpetrated by another man, who is a stranger. Women almost always know their attacker.
Statistics are misleading, it is true. If we use the Johnson definition of Domestic Violence the numbers change. Sociologist Michael Flood estimates that the numbers of people who have suffered from true domestic violence in the past 12 months would drop from 95thousand to 19thousand. Of which men would make up about 5-10percent of victims.
about.
It is not good journalistic practice to place yourself in the story, but if I do it may create a space for us to hear these other stories that for some may bring up a great deal of resistance. I’m going to start at the beginning, with my story…
I was first punched in the face by my partner in 2009. We had been together for over eight years and had one child. My reaction was to protect my ten-month old baby from her father who was towering over us as we lay cowering on the floor next to my daughter’s cot in the sun-room of our Bondi Junction art-deco apartment. He was breathing hard, his eyes were bugging out of his head, and his body pulsed with an energy that I had only seen in street fights. I felt adrenalin pulse through my veins as I kicked at him from the ground trying to get him away from her and me.
In the following years, I went through the mill of AVO’s (Apprehended Violence Orders), counsellors, women’s domestic violence groups, women’s refuges, playgroups, parenting groups, children’s psychologists and rehabilitation programs for women. I personally have experienced the support of my community. As for my now ex-partner, he was jailed overnight, given an eighteen-month good behaviour bond and was sent out to start a new relationship, have more children and to cope on his own. This is the abridged version of events. But through my experience my distress and experience was validated and empathised with by both the system and society, whereas his experience and distress went wholly untreated by the system.
Even at the time, I was frustrated by the lack of help for a man I loved who was not able to regulate his own emotions and behaviour. You see, this fifty-four-year-old man had been traumatised many times throughout his life. Most importantly at six-years of age his mother had passed away of a brain aneurism in the bed beside him. His absent father subsequently would pay random people to look after him in boarding homes even though he lived only streets away. And unbeknownst to me he suffered from sexual-abuse as a child. Now faced with losing his family by his own actions his behaviour was escalating and he seemed unable to reflect or stop the behaviours.
As the target of the abuse I had to protect my now pregnant self and our two-year-old daughter. But, I never understood why he wasn’t referred onto support services at the point of crisis as I was.
He has gone onto create another abusive relationship with children involved. While I have profited from the relationship education that was so easy for me to access. Something has to change, and we as a society are accountable for changing it.
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