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ASHLYNNE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ashlynne McGhee. This is 7am.

It feels like hardly a week goes by where we don’t hear about a woman being killed by a man that she knows.

And that’s partly because of these grim statistics that reveal it is happening more often.

Intimate partner deaths increased by almost a third last year, and early counts by advocacy groups suggest that this year is going to be even worse.

The spike in killings has led to protests, national outcry and the prime minister declaring that violence against women is a national crisis.

Today, author of See What You Made Me Do and journalist Jess Hill, on what can be done to stop the violence, and why awareness just isn’t good enough anymore.

It’s Wednesday, May the 1st.

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ASHLYNNE:

Jess, whenever there's a cluster of murders that horrifies us, we see these rallies, and there's a whole lot of soul searching that goes on. As someone who's been pretty deeply embedded in this space for so many years, what's it like watching that unfold?

JESS:

Well, it's overwhelming, to a degree.

Audio excerpt — News Reporter (9News):

“Enough is enough.”

Audio excerpt — Protesters chanting:

“One, two, three, four, we won’t take it anymore!”

Audio excerpt — News Reporter (9News):

“Sydney taking a stand to stamp out violence against women.”

Audio excerpt — Protesters chanting:

“Men’s violence has to go!”

JESS:

And there's no question that homicides, unfortunately, place, family and sexual violence back on the front page.

Audio excerpt — News Reporter (7News):

“For a third day, Australians take to the streets…”

Audio excerpt — Protesters chanting:

“Hey hey ho ho men’s violence has to go!”

Audio excerpt — News Reporter (9News):

“Their demand: take action against domestic violence.”

Audio excerpt — Protest speaker:

“We want the government to acknowledge that this is a national emergency!”

JESS:

But there is a certain extent to which the nation is primed now to respond very strongly to a spate of men's violence against women.

Audio excerpt — Activist Grace Tame:

“This paradigm shift, of normalising the conversation of sexual abuse, you know where that started? It started here!”

JESS:

I think the March for justice in 2021, also explosive anger, that was much more to do with sexual violence, and centring a lot around federal parliament and the allegations there.

Audio excerpt — News Reporter (2021):

“Angry, tired and frustrated, they marched outside the people's house. Inside, the prime minister offered this observation…”

Audio excerpt — Scott Morrison:

“Not far from here. Such marches, even now, are being met with bullets.”

Audio excerpt — News Reporter (2021):

“Leaving some almost lost for words.”

JESS:

What occurred, I guess you could say, as a result of the Women's March 4 Justice, was the Morrison government got voted out. I mean, it's not as simple and clear a line, but certainly the women's vote was pretty decisive. And I remember the Sydney Morning Herald asking me back then and around the federal election campaign, what happened to all of that anger? And I'm like, it's not much point just continually marching in the streets, is there? Like, you got to do something with that anger. So the question is now we’ve had another just horror run of gender based violence and alleged domestic homicides.

Audio excerpt — Anthony Albanese:

“And just as I left Parliament House during the demonstration that was held a couple of years ago, I’m proud to be here.”

JESS:

And I think that the federal government's obviously having to respond in some way to say, this is what we are planning to do above and beyond what our ten year plan says we’ll do.

Audio excerpt — Anthony Albanese:

“To demand that governments of all levels must do better, including my own, including every state and territory government.”

JESS:

But obviously there was a very unfortunate encounter between the Prime Minister and the organiser of the rally, Sarah.

Audio excerpt — Anthony Albanese:

“To be clear we did ask to speak, myself and Katy, and were told that that wasn’t possible, and that’s fine. I respect the organiser’s right to do that.”

Audio excerpt — Sarah Williams (rally organiser):

“That’s a lie. That’s a full-out lie.”

Audio excerpt — Sarah Williams (2GB interview):

“I said to the audience ‘do we want him to speak?’ I wanted the audience to choose, not him. And whilst I was saying that, he said behind me, which many people heard: ‘I’m the prime minister, I run this country.’”

JESS:

Where that public anger will go now, well, I think the anger is quite directed and it wants to see some results. And I don't know, but I think that if I were the Albanese government and if I were state governments, particularly in New South Wales, I would be nervous. Because women have long memories and the federal election is not far away.

ASHLYNNE:

Talk to me about some of those platitudes, or promises we hear from politicians. Because it's pretty easy to jump in and say, yes, this is a crisis and yes, we want to do something. But what is it like hearing that?

JESS:

Well, it's funny because there's a lot of behind the scenes, sort of, political back and forth about what terms should we use. Are we supposed to say it's a national crisis? Can we say it's an emergency, no we shouldn’t say it’s an emergency because then there are certain requirements put on. What is more telling, I guess, for me is once we say it's a crisis, what is said in the next breath. So many times in the last fortnight particularly, I guess, you know, really starting after the horrific run of alleged murders in Ballarat, was that you'd hear this thing about it. It's a crisis. And then you'd hear politicians and some prevention agencies saying, so what we need to do is we need to change harmful gender norms and attitudes.

Audio excerpt — Mark Dreyfus:

“Women cannot be expected to solve violence against women alone. It is time for men to step up.”

JESS:

We need to have better conversations with our boys about respect. We need men to step up. Kind of whatever that means. Sort of important, but vague.

Audio excerpt — Mark Dreyfus:

“It's our responsibility to educate ourselves, our sons, our colleagues and our friends.”

JESS:

And the vagueness of what follows from, whether we call it a crisis or an emergency, that is more important to me. And I don't think it's good enough. And it's kind of confusing because they're kind of different strategies, I mean, even when you're talking about homicide prevention, not all men who commit intimate partner homicide are the same, you know. And not all interventions to those men should look the same. Hayley Boxall, from the Australian Institute of Criminology did some work on this, I think it was last year, and what she looked at was what kind of men are killing their past or former intimate partners. So the study analysed almost 100 incidents of intimate partner homicide by men between 2007 and 2018. And what it found, in a nutshell, was that a third of those homicides were committed, what she called “fixated threat” offenders. Now, these are largely middle class offenders using high degree of coercive control, but not generally physical violence, so high degree of non-physical coercive control, stalking, monitoring. Then you've got 40% who are persistent and disorderly, and they have complex histories of abuse, comorbidities, significant histories of violence towards intimate partners and others, they have frequent contact with the criminal justice system, and there they escalate to murder when they face particular vulnerabilities. And the last category, which was about 11%, was deterioration or acute stressors. So basically, people who are older, often with significant mental health and physical problems, and they make this instantaneous decision to kill, following the onset or exacerbation of significant life stressors. So it's really important for us to have a clear picture of who is committing homicide in Australia, how can we intervene, who can we intervene with, who is visible to the criminal justice system, who is not and why. I go through that basically just to say that we need a really targeted and specific approach to the various types of men who use coercive control and sexual violence. And a spray gun approach of, you know, awareness campaigns and social media marketing and education, just will not cut it.

ASHLYNNE:

Obviously we're talking about the pointy end of domestic violence here but when you've got all of those different types of perpetrators and all of those different factors feeding into domestic violence, how does it then work to have one national strategy? Do you think there's much hope of much coming out of national cabinet today on that?

JESS:

Honestly, I always hope for the best and plan for the worst. Look, I don't know. I honestly don't know. At the moment, the messaging from the government has been, I think, disappointing in the sense that there's obviously a very clear directive to say over and over again, no one government or institution can fix this, ending gendered violence requires broad cultural change, it is everybody's responsibility. And all of that is objectively true. That is true. No one government or institution can fix this. But if you are in government, tell us the things you can fix. Because if it's everyone's responsibility, who is accountable? If it's everyone's responsibility to end global warming, who is accountable? You know, and it's like, we can get really caught up trying to say that, you know, every citizen has to change their behaviour, they have to have these, you know, fathers have to have better conversations with their sons. And it all leaves it up to the best intentions of individuals.

And I think that this messaging from government, whilst well intentioned, for me it's just evading accountability and it's kicking the can down the road to the change that, at the moment, is an experimental strategy that may or may not produce results in the long term.

ASHLYNNE:

After the break, is there anything that can be done to stop violence against women right now?

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ASHLYNNE:

Jess, you've spent a whole lot of time rethinking how we prevent domestic violence, particularly in that kind of short to medium term time frame. Talk me through some of those changes that we can make.

JESS:

So, you know, for listeners who haven't been swatting away on gendered violence prevention strategies that just like quickly sum up where we've come from, which is that our national strategy to prevent gendered violence has very much focussed on the changing of harmful gender norms and the social drivers behind gendered violence. So to improve the community's attitudes about violence, improve their attitudes on, around things like victim blaming and those sorts of things. So that's been a real central plank of our prevention strategy for the last ten years and it's been invested in to, you know, a pretty serious degree, like tens of millions of dollars have gone into that strategy. But it is a strategy that could take decades to yield results. And I think in the meantime, we've identified four missing pieces that we think we should really be focusing on. The first is accountability and consequences for perpetrators and the systems that enable them. And we're saying that accountability is prevention. We talk about, you know, there's record levels of breaches for intervention orders in Victoria, for example. And so many of those breaches to intervention orders where, let's just say if we take the male female binary and the female as the usual victim in this case, that a woman has gone to court, taken a huge risk, said, I need a court to say he cannot come within how many metres of me, he cannot contact me. He goes away and says, ‘you know what? I am going to contact her anyway, or I'm going to send flowers to her work, or I'm going to text message her incessantly’. And when she goes and reports that breach, you get police and even prosecutors saying, oh it’s just a technical breach, or it's a low order breach. This idea of a low level breach or a technical breach, why aren't we setting consequences when a court says you can't do something, if you go and do it anyway, there's a consequence. It's just that simple. I think the second area that we really want to see much more focus, and I think this is really critical and it should be prioritised, is that recovery is prevention. So we talk about intergenerational cycles of violence, and child abuse and neglect. And that includes growing up with coercive control, being physically or sexually abused, being shamed or neglected by parents, this is... we know from the evidence that this can make children more prone to grow up to become either victims or perpetrators of abuse themselves. It's not a life sentence if you experience abuse as a child, but we do know that we see these intergenerational cycles. And I get asked questions about this from victim survivors around the country all the time, and they say there are no services. There's nowhere to take my son, for example, who started to repeat the same behaviours as his father did. And these mothers, who are also trying to recover from their own trauma and trying to rebuild their family's life, are basically this unofficial reserve army of prevention agents trying to do their best, to hold their family together and help their kids thrive and survive and not go into the same conditions that they’ve just escaped. I think the number three that we really want to see, and I think, you know, if National Cabinet wants to make some announceables on Wednesday, let's talk about regulating the damaging industries that we know exacerbate gendered violence and may be having a massive impact on social norms around gendered aggression. So we're talking about children's access to online pornography, which is unfettered. We're talking about problem gambling and the intersection between that and domestic and family violence, and particularly financial abuse. It doesn't have to happen tomorrow. But tell us that you are planning to put things in place to stop these damaging industries continuing to exacerbate violence.

ASHLYNNE:

These are all kind of big picture things that the government has to take the lead on, but I wonder what we can do in our own lives so that we can bring about some change in our own communities.

JESS:

I mean, if you're really enthusiastic, you can volunteer at a shelter. You can also educate yourself on the nature of coercive control such that when you see these sorts of disturbing behaviours in friends or family, you understand what they look like and you have an idea of maybe how to intervene or how to talk to someone who's either, you suspect is either perpetrating that or is being subjected to it. I think that if more and more people were to educate themselves about family violence and what it looks like, we would have much more meaningful interventions from friends and family.

And I guess, what I would like to see is probably more education around what would that interaction look like, you know, down to sort of like suggested scripts for how you talk to someone about concerning signs. Where do you refer them to, what do they do next? So those sorts of things, that is absolutely vital for the community to be onboard with that. You know, victim survivors have said one of the most important aspects of accountability for them, and the thing that they thought would, aside from the legal system, the thing that they thought would stop their perpetrator was friends, family and colleagues saying something to them, you know, intervening. So that's super important. And I don't want to minimise the importance of everyday actions, I just think that we want the best for our community and how our community is going to respond to these issues, we just can't put all our eggs in that basket that they will.

ASHLYNNE:

Jess, thanks so much for your time today.

JESS:

Thank you.

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ASHLYNNE:

Also in the news today...

The Australian government has been forced to launch a hotline for people left stranded by Bonza airlines.

The new budget airline suddenly cancelled all flights yesterday, with speculation mounting about its future.

Transport Minister Catherine King said she had spoken to the CEOs of Qantas and Virgin to secure their help in getting stranded Bonza customers home.

And,

Communications minister Michelle Rowland has announced the government will consider a pilot program for age verification technology, used by young people who attempt to access porn or create social media accounts.

Rowland accused social media algorithms of recommending misogynist rubbish to young men and boys.

I’m Ashlynne McGhee, this is 7am. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you again tomorrow.

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