Mark Latham couldn’t be more wrong about domestic violence

This champion of “the poor” has not only tarred a whole “class” of men already struggling with joblessness but he has denied the experience of countless abused Australian women.

The lonely girl cries in the street

You have to feel for any female friend of Mark Latham’s who is not a member of the “underclass” but who is living with domestic violence. As far as she and her suffering are concerned to Mr Latham, they simply don’t exist.

According to Latham “there are two classes from which men are likely to abuse women; the political class and the underclass ... In the latter, the frustration of intergenerational unemployment often vents itself in wife bashing,” he writes.

In one click-baity generalisation this champion of “the poor” has not only tarred a whole “class” of men already struggling with joblessness and the stigmas and grinding pressures attached to it — suggesting they “often” end up as wife beaters — but he has denied the experience of countless abused Australian women.

When I next see a woman I know who felt it was easier to lie about how she got the purple swelling on her face received on the end of a flying (landline) phone lobbed by her volatile husband, I’ll let her know that since she lives in a posh house her experience and that of others like her is not authentic.

When I next talk to my close friend who works as school counsellor at a blue-chip Melbourne school in a suburb where the median house price is $1.6 million, I’ll remind her that the unending tide of secondary school kids washing through her and her colleague’s office at a rate almost too fast to handle — saying things like they don’t even consider family violence they witness in their homes to be unusual, that’s “just the way Dad behaves” — I’ll tell her too that all her clients are actually ghosts.

If Latham had bothered even the most cursory Google of the topic “domestic violence social demographics” or “middle class family violence” or bothered to run his latest attention-seeking edict past any qualified counsellor in a leafy suburb he would have been able to put a core to his doughnut of an argument.

Latham may not have first hand experience of the prevalence of non “lower class” family violence victims, possibly because so many prefer to cover the bruises (as evidenced by my friend who sees these mothers in her office). Or perhaps because it suits him to turn a blind eye.

But if he cares more about this issue than to use it as a tool to beat the Labor Party for allegedly losing touch with “the poor”, he could inform himself by reading the mountains of research on the real social demographics of family violence.

There may be less public sympathy for women who, at least on paper, can afford to leave but denying their existence is insidious. This dismissiveness can only serve to keep women stuck in situations they’re already too ashamed or afraid to leave. I know of cases where, when a “middle class” abuse victim does start talking about what’s really going on, the high-status husband has reacted by debasing her as mentally ill and making it up.

My friend at the coal face with the kids of families living with violence (a dab hand now at understanding how to navigate parenting plans that intersect with intervention orders) says the women she sees feel huge pressure to pretend life is rosy, even when they’re being harmed.

She says they often feel prevented by shame from coming forward. Perhaps they believe that given they live more privileged lives than “the underclass” they do not have the right.

When Charles Saatchi was photographed with his hand to the throat of Nigella Lawson, numerous women’s services came forward in Australia to remark on the fact domestic violence cuts across all social demographics but is more hidden among the demographic that would otherwise rarely come into contact with community services.

Among them was Karen Willis, executive officer at the NSW Rape Crisis Centre, who said that the shattering of a “perfect public image” can be devastating to women.

‘’We still look down on people who experience domestic violence,’’ Ms Willis said.

‘’This results in high levels of shame and embarrassment. It’s about their status in society being affected. My guess is that people of high socio-economic status don’t involve the police because they do have the capacity to pack up and leave.’’

It is an indictment on Mark Latham that he feels free to use confected and inaccurate claims about the prevalence of family violence as just one more missile in his war on his old party and “inner-city feminists” (whom he also accused this year of not loving their children).

Denying the lived and authenticated experience of women in violent relationships to pursue personal publicity, the former Opposition Leader’s favourite cause, puts this man up there with the venal elite.

Originally published as Mark Latham couldn’t be more wrong about domestic violence