Holding all men responsible for a violent minority has failed to keep women safe

This is the column I’ve been deciding not to write for nearly a decade.

I think I first made that decision in 2015, when Malcolm Turnbull declared that “disrespecting women does not always result in violence against women. But all violence against women begins with disrespecting women”. Here, Turnbull echoed what seemed to be the dominant explanation of domestic violence at the time. But I couldn’t repress a simple thought when I heard Turnbull’s comment: I just don’t think that’s correct.

Illustration: Andrew Dyson

That’s because my academic work was studying the roots of violence, where research overwhelmingly identifies factors like humiliation, shame and guilt as motivating drivers, not a lack of respect. When the literature mentions respect at all, it isn’t about the perpetrator disrespecting the victim: it’s more about the perpetrator feeling someone had disrespected them. Thus could James Gilligan – a prison psychiatrist working with America’s most violent men for 35 years – conclude he was “yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed or humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed”. Gilligan’s language is strikingly absolute: “all violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem”, and direct: “the most dangerous men on earth are those who are afraid they are wimps”.

Still, I withheld my scepticism for a few reasons. For one, it felt momentous just to see a prime minister put this on the agenda. Also, the people emphasising disrespect almost certainly have expertise that I don’t. And, it can be possible to work gender into violence analysis, roughly as follows: hierarchical gender norms, in which women are assumed inferior, lead men to feel humiliation, shame and disrespect when women don’t behave like their supplicants. They also lead men to think violence is the best way to restore their self-esteem. By this logic, perhaps if we established a more gender-equal culture, the humiliation would dissipate and violence would reduce.

But the nagging feeling never left because there are still things the gender equality approach just cannot explain. The most famous is the “Nordic paradox”: where Scandinavian countries who are widely regarded to have the most gender-equal societies in the world also report some of the highest rates of sexual assault and gendered violence across the European Union. The frequent riposte is that Nordic women are better at recognising and reporting sexual violence, and while that might be true, it’s not clear enough to explain the data. It certainly doesn’t explain why, in a place like Iceland, which is consistently ranked the most gender-equal country on earth, every second murder is committed by a male partner: significantly higher than the EU average.

Similarly, if gendered disrespect was the fundamental engine of domestic violence, we would expect to see much lower levels of it in same-sex relationships. But we don’t. Current Australian statistics suggest that rates of domestic violence are similar or slightly higher in same-sex relationships compared to heterosexual relationships.

In factoring this out, you’d have to argue it’s a completely different, entirely parallel phenomenon that has nothing in common with heterosexual domestic violence, but which just so happens to occur with similar regularity and express itself in remarkably similar ways, running the now familiar gamut of coercive control, financial and emotional abuse and gaslighting. More plausible is that while there are some factors unique to same-sex and heterosexual cases respectively, their causes have much in common. An explanation that works only for one of them is unlikely to be much of an explanation at all.

Once disrespect becomes the heart of the argument, we begin connecting just about everything – and everyone – to violence. We’ve seen plenty of assertions that violence against women is the end of a continuum that begins with a sexist joke. We’ve seen pleas for men to “have the conversation”, unspecified as that directive may be, for the “good” men to set the “bad” men straight.

This delivers a conventional wisdom that this is ultimately a men’s problem, and one that every one of us has to own and solve. Yet, for all the national campaigns encouraging men to have conversations about sexism and gendered attitudes, the most recent National Community Attitudes Towards Violence Against Women survey shows there has been no improvement in attitudes towards domestic violence since 2017.

The more I heard this discourse, the more it reminded me of being told that it was up to Muslims to own the problem of terrorism and get serious about solving it. That the good Muslims had to set the bad Muslims straight, that Muslims needed to start challenging radical Islamism; that terrorism was the end of a continuum that began with anti-American discourse, or women wearing headscarves.

And here’s the thing: it didn’t work. Muslims didn’t suddenly call a meeting, agree that enough was enough and tell the terrorists to knock it off. Instead, they felt alienated from the conversation, and in many cases became defensive.

For all the obvious differences between these examples, they have something important in common: when you’re being associated with a crime you can’t even imagine committing and told it’s your problem to solve, you tend not to feel enlisted. Instead, you feel incapable. And when you cast a social problem like that as a problem of identity, lots of people will retreat and defend an identity they feel is unfairly maligned.

A decade on, the problems with this discourse are becoming clearer. Men are killing women at a faster rate. People under 24, the demographic with the most gender-equal attitudes, are perpetrating sexual abuse at greater rates.

And a decade on, I can write this because better minds than mine, like investigative journalist Jess Hill and criminologist Michael Salter, are pointing to the things we’ve never wanted to mention in their recent white paper, but with much clearer connections to violence: among them, alcohol, gambling, pornography and abusive and neglectful childhood environments – cycles we can try to break.

In short, they note much of this violence and abusive control comes from a minority of people, many of whom exhibit clear risk factors we have some hope of addressing. Accordingly, it makes little sense to treat every man as potentially violent and aim the national strategy at all of them.

And this, I think, offers some hope in a crushingly dark moment. It trades an approach that is so general, so large, so unwieldy for one that is focused, specific and coherent. It accepts the enormity of the task, but doesn’t drown in it. It makes the invincible intelligible. It is fierce, but restrained. In sum, it deserves the next decade of respect.

Waleed Aly is a regular columnist.

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