Culture and domestic violence

The scourge of domestic violence has come out of the shadows of Australian society in recent years, and for the better. The campaigns to reduce its incidence have a resonance and authority that other efforts to achieve social change can learn a lot from. But the reluctance of some involved in working to stop domestic violence to look beyond one-size-fits-all solutions is self-defeating. A case in point is the lack of plain thinking around how to confront the disproportionate incidence of domestic violence among indigenous communities. Nicola Berkovic reported in The Australian this week that, across the 10 years to 2015-16, 23 per cent of intimate partner homicide victims were indigenous. The Australian Institute of Criminology data also revealed that another 22 per cent of these victims came from an overseas-born background. Obviously, such outcomes indicate strongly where the investment in preventing domestic violence should be directed.

However, as Jacinta Nampijinpa Price pointed out in The Australian’s commentary pages on Wednesday, there is a prevailing view among organisations campaigning against domestic violence that suggests indigenous men who hurt their partners and family members should not be held wholly to blame for their actions. This despite the fact indigenous women are likelier to be the targets of violence, tend to suffer more severe abuse than non-indigenous women and find it harder to overcome community resistance to addressing the violence they are subjected to. Why should colonisation and not the cultural drivers in indigenous communities themselves be the reason for this?

Ms Price, a Warlpiri-Celtic woman from Alice Springs, knows something about domestic violence. “As a girl growing up I saw other girls my age reach adolescence and then be married off to much older men while still too young to be legally married under Australian law,” Ms Price said. “I witnessed women being brutally beaten by their husbands, but the cultural acceptance of it was so strong no one besides my immediate family supported the victim or reported the abuse.” It is difficult to see how the historical impacts of colonisation were working to create such circumstances.

The Institute of Criminology figures also suggest that a disproportionate number of women from a migrant background are subjected to domestic violence. That should encourage more questions over whether issues of culture can explain such an outcome. Instead, asking such questions is condemned immediately as pushing an agenda that somehow denies violence against women is an issue that all cultures should address.

Reflecting on the high incidence of partner homicides among indigenous and overseas-born Australians is not a means to excuse domestic violence occurring in any other part of Australian society. Family violence is a national disgrace that the nation as a whole must own and work to reduce. But that makes it doubly important that the programs and funding aimed at stopping domestic violence, no matter where it occurs, are as effective as possible. Ms Price points out that official audits of some programs have found there has been scant attention paid to what works to reduce domestic violence and what does not. Surely proper evaluation will encourage safer families.