Mark Speakman: We’ve become desensitised to domestic violence
Government minister Mark Speakman says Australia needs ‘a quantum leap in its awareness and response to domestic violence’ and the first step is to recognise that Hannah Clarke’s death was murder, nothing less.
NSW
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Hannah Clarke’s death was “murder, plain and simple” and must not be dismissed as just another act of domestic violence, NSW’s Prevention for Domestic Violence Minister said.
“We need to call it for what it is,” Mark Speakman said in the wake of the killings of Ms Clarke, 31, and her three children in Brisbane this week.
“It’s murder. Plain and simple. We’re so used to hearing about domestic violence that I think we’ve been desensitised to it. That needs to stop. These lives matter.”
In an exclusive interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Speakman said the country “needs a quantum leap in its awareness and response to domestic violence”.
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“We’ve had tragedies — one-punch tragedies, Lindt cafe tragedies — awful events in themselves, but if someone was killed with a one-punch knockout at a pub every week or if someone was killed in a Lindt cafe siege every week, there’d be outrage,” he said.
“Yet we don’t seem to have that ongoing level of outrage in Australian society.
“When something dreadful happens, like this week in Queensland, there’s a spike in talking about it but then people seem to forget about it and move on. I wonder whether people think that’s what happens to other people rather than what’s happening everywhere but we know that no part of society is immune from domestic violence.”
The murders of Ms Clarke, 31, and her three children — Aaliyah, 6, Laianah, 4, and Trey, 3, — on Wednesday morning by her estranged husband Rowan Baxter has left Australians reeling.
With a “lack of male leadership” on the epidemic, Mr Speakman said it was now time for every man in Australia to step up.
“Typically it’s left to women to bear the burden, and the burden of calling things out,” he said. “As a society we react in the wrong way to these horrendous incidents and say: ‘I would be heartbroken if that happened to my daughter or my wife or my sister’, and I think men now should be saying: ‘I would be ashamed if that were my brother or my son or my friend’.
“We’ve got to have men be far more vocal and far more active in this space.”
Latest figures from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research show the number of apprehended violence orders (AVO) breached increased by 6.4 per cent between October 2014 and September last year while the number of domestic AVOs issued also rose by 5.1 per cent.
The state government is developing a new strategy to tackle the epidemic and Mr Speakman said he would fight for more funding in the state budget to expand intervention programs targeting men.
He said the government was also looking closely at laws in England, Wales and Scotland after the countries broadened the definition of domestic violence to cover financial abuse.
When asked if enough was being done, Mr Speakman said: “Nothing is ever enough if a woman is dying at the hands of a current or former intimate partner, on average, every week in Australia.
“There’s no magic wand, no one solution.”
Originally published as Mark Speakman: We’ve become desensitised to domestic violence