Tory Shepherd: Domestic violence exists. You can’t deny it, even if you want to
It should be shocking that more young men don’t see hitting a partner as domestic violence. But it’s not, writes Tory Shepherd.
Opinion
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I want to be shocked at the idea that young men don’t see punching a partner, or non-consensual sexual activity, as domestic violence. And I would be if it wasn’t for the rise of the DV deniers out there, who are helping men justify, minimise or ignore violence.
A recent survey by Essential Research, commissioned by White Ribbon Australia, found four in 10 Australian men aged 18-34 don’t see hitting or restraining a partner as domestic violence. And just as many, asked to think about non-consensual sexual activity, didn’t put it in the DV bucket.
The report showed women and older people tend to be better at recognising domestic violence, including coercive control.
Take non-consensual sexual activity, for example. Almost nine in 10 of those aged over 55 saw it as a type of domestic violence. Seven in 10 of those aged 35-54 agreed, compared with just six in 10 of those aged 18-34.
The same trend was true for supporting the criminalisation of coercive control, which is sometimes described as “intimate terrorism”.
This is a system of surveillance, threats and intimidation that can be more terrifying than a violent assault. I wanted to be shocked, but I wasn’t.
Younger people have less life experience and, therefore, less ability to recognise the many forms domestic violence takes. And men across all age groups have less recognition of domestic violence – again, probably from less experience of it.
But certain groups in our society are also learning to be domestic-violence deniers. They’re either denying that their own behaviour constitutes domestic violence, or they’re denying that it happens at all. We know the common phrases people use in their own lives: “She made me do it”, “I was drunk”, “I was high”, “I was having a bad day”, “It wasn’t that bad”.
There is a range of programs to educate people out of that denialism – and I hope they work.
But we also have to look at organisational deniers. Every time I think I’ve finally mapped the DV deniers, I find another group that has popped up on Facebook, or is running in an election.
As long as there is a parliamentary inquiry into family law – and there’s almost always one on the go – these deniers are working to swamp them with misinformation. And at least some people in parliament are listening.
The current Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Family Law System is no different. Set up to improve the court process and better protect women and children, it has quickly become a magnet for angry men. There’s the Australian Brotherhood of Fathers, the Family Law Reform Coalition, the Men’s Rights Agency and a stack more.
They have the usual grab-bag of claims, most of which have DV denialism at their heart. Some refer to the “domestic violence industry”, as though advocates are seeking to profit from being bashed.
They preach about the discredited, faux legal notion of “parental alienation”, which tries to argue that people are pretending to be victims in order to punish the perpetrator, which (dum-dahhh) makes the actual victim the perpetrator, and the perpetrator the victim – if you can follow that.
They fiercely argue that domestic violence allegations are often unfounded, and want to make it harder for victims to prove violence, and harder to take children away and harder to keep abusers away.
The Men’s Rights Agency, for example, calls DV concerns “anti-male propaganda dispensed under the claim of protecting women and children only from violence”.
As with other denialists, no fact-checking, no evidence and no statistics will dissuade them. The truth – that, overwhelmingly, violence is under-reported, rarely faked and usually man against woman – gets ignored or countered with random factoids pulled from the internet’s underbelly.
Those young blokes, who don’t recognise what constitutes domestic violence, are a worry.
I hope that they learn through education, not experience. The bigger danger is those who have no excuse, who are wilfully spreading the old trope of the vengeful, lying woman to assuage their own angers or cover their own guilt.
That’s because their voices are being heard by many in parliament, and believed by some. The victims are meant to be protected, not the perpetrator.