Wayne Carey still needs to learn the lesson of what constitutes domestic abuse

The fact that Wayne Carey labelled his affair with a teammate’s wife as his biggest regret and not his years of abusing women shows he still doesn’t get it.

Wayne Carey has not yet taken full of ownership of his abuse of women.

Otherwise, why would be take such great pains on SAS Australia to draw a distinction between mental and physical abuse?

Appearing on the Channel 7 show, Carey admitted to mentally abusing and intimidating his former partners.

But he also insisted that: “All my partners would say I’ve never been physically abusive” as if that makes it all okay.

Despite saying “you don’t have to hit someone to be abusive,” Carey seems to think mental abuse isn’t as bad as the physical kind.

Wayne Carey hasn’t yet taken full ownership of his abuse of women. Picture: Channel 7

The fact that Carey labelled his consensual affair with a teammate’s wife as “the biggest regret of my life as an adult” and not his years of abusing women shows he still doesn’t get it.

Carey accepted that he’d been guilty of years and years of psychological torment and intimidation towards women after a friend once pointed out his behaviour was “unacceptable”. But he is still making out that he’s not a violent man because he didn’t glass his ex-partner Kate Neilson.

Violence is still violence.

We’ve come a long way in understanding the impact of mental and emotional abuse on family violence victims.

While 17 per cent of women and five per cent of men are victims of physical and sexual

abuse from a previous or current partner, 23 per cent of women and 16 per cent of men are victims of emotional abuse. That’s 2.2 million women and 1.4 million men. Three quarters of the perpetrators are male.

Carey admitted to mentally abusing and intimidating his former partners.

Books like See What You Made Me Do by Jess Hill have helped shape a more nuanced and sophisticated narrative that no longer focuses solely on physical violence and overlooks psychological and emotional abuse.

But it seems the message hasn’t yet reached Carey.

Carey needs to realise that gas lighting, mental taunting, undermining, screaming, yelling and being physically aggressive and threatening – but not making contact – is just as damaging as hitting someone.

In fact, the two often go hand-in-hand, with abusers grooming their victims into accepting and even making excuses for physically violent actions.

On the show Carey says: “I’m not proud of some of the things I’ve done”.

“But I’ve done a lot of work on myself over the last 10 years and I take ownership of it.”

It doesn’t appear that he’s taking ownership of it at all.

Carey also repeated his claim that he didn’t intend to glass his former partner Kate Neilson in the face. The 2007 US incident left Neilson bloodied and with a cut lip and led to Carey’s arrest by Miami police.

Still playing down the effect of violence that isn’t physical, Carey said he threw wine in Neilson’s face but didn’t glass her.

This is despite the fact that Neilson has denied this, saying Carey “knows the truth”. She said he intentionally threw wine the glass of wine in her face and that “it looked like someone had been stabbed”.

As Neilson reminds us, Carey, who was intoxicated at the time, left the scene, fought with police and was arrested.

“If it was an accident he wouldn’t have fled the scene when glass smashed in my face,’’ Neilson said.

“There was a lot of blood, why wouldn’t you stay and aid someone you love when you can see they’re in a bad way?

As anti-violence campaigner Phil Cleary has pointed out, women don’t lie about being victims of violence.

The statistics tell the same story, with studies estimating only three to four per cent of claims are fabricated.

Carey said he’s a “perfect example of someone that’s been able to evolve”. It doesn’t seem to me that he’s evolved far enough.