Actions speak louder, but without words we can’t see the full horror

I was reminded last week of the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky’s explanation of how Tolstoy made old things seem fresh. On the subject of flogging, a punitive practice that no longer excited surprise, Tolstoy wrote: “Just why precisely this stupid, savage means of causing pain and not any other – why not prick the shoulders or any part of the body with needles, squeeze the hands or the feet in a vise…?”

To make us feel the pain of it, to see it with new eyes, Tolstoy did two things. The first was to tell us what flogging did in an unfamiliar way. Second, he did not use the word itself, which would trigger an automatic response, encouraging his readers to coast past the passage, and give it no further thought.

Of the two stabbing events last week, only one was labelled terrorism. Credit: X/@AustralianJA

The underlying point is that, often, when we hear a word, we think we know what it is, and therefore stop listening, or at least thinking properly about what we are being told.

Late last week, a 10-year-old boy killed himself. Reading that short sentence prompts anguish, sadness and perplexity. It opens you; it provokes questions. But if people have read this news, most will have read it in slightly different words: they will have read the accurate statement that an Indigenous boy killed himself while under state care. That should prompt no less anguish, sadness or perplexity. But the truth is it will not be treated as an urgent national crisis because, to too many, that single word “Indigenous” will stop their thinking.

It shouldn’t, of course; no extra word can explain something so awful. How then could the same event be described in a way that might wake people from their sleep or racist indifference? Not, surely, to skip the word “Indigenous”, which is crucial because it is Indigenous adults and children who keep on dying and suffering in terrible numbers. How to describe something accurately while encouraging people to see it new? (Non-Indigenous people, that is.)

Similar difficulties arose after the high-profile murders in Sydney last week. A debate began about whether the Bondi Junction killings should have attracted the word “terrorism” the way the stabbing in a church did two nights later. Different groups were exercised in different ways. Some were frustrated the Bondi attack did not attract the label. Others were frustrated the church attack did.

In fact, the frustrations arose for similar reasons. The immediate attachment of the label “terrorism” dulled more complex questions about what happened in western Sydney. In eastern Sydney, the term “mental health” played a similar role of answering questions before they had even really been asked – as though mental illness explained both the violence itself and the fact most victims were women.

In contrast, trying to introduce “terrorism” into the discussion around Bondi was a way of waking people up to yet another incident in which women seemed to be targeted. In a sense, it was an attempt to do what Shklovsky described Tolstoy doing: “defamiliarising” something that had become too common.

Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, in an interview on Friday, was asked about this. He insisted, not unreasonably, on leaving the definition of terrorism where it was. This would have been unremarkable, except he then went on to say, “violence against women in Australia is perpetrated by men. We’ve got a crisis of male violence in Australia. It’s a scourge, and we all need to act on it. And that’s not a matter of how we define it.” Except it was, of course, as Dreyfus’ own words made clear. The stock phrase “violence against women” has, bleakly, lost power with repetition. Redescribing it as “a crisis of male violence”, as Dreyfus did, is a way of refocusing us on the cause of the problem.

There is of course a distinction, one which is naturally important to an attorney-general: one involves a redefinition in law, the other only in public debate. All of these suggestions and complaints, though, point in a similar direction, towards a larger frustration: a deep disquiet at not being heard. Eighteen women had already been killed this year by the time of the Bondi killings. When the word “terrorism” was affixed to the church attack, frustrating some in Islamic communities, those communities were already feeling, as Labor frontbencher Ed Husic said last week in relation to Israel’s attacks on Gaza, “like their voice isn’t heard”.

Language can help us see things as if for the first time. When it fails, though, the problem does not really lie with language but with us. We know this because old words can still shock us. We experienced this during the judgment in the Bruce Lehrmann defamation case last week. Much has rightly been made of the nuance of the judgment. At the same time, it was a single word, not new at all, “raped”, which shocked the country out of sleep. What made Justice Michael Lee’s judgment remarkable was the way the two interacted. It was his willingness to deal with nuance that made it possible for Australian society – including its often cynical political classes – to grasp again the straightforward everyday horror of what had happened. And what made his findings difficult to dismiss, even for those most frustrated by the decision, was the sense that all voices had in fact been heard (even if, in the end, Lee decided some weren’t worth much).

In a statement on Saturday, Brittany Higgins made clear the limitations of language, too: the fact that reality, and in particular violence, exists outside it. “I was raped. No judgment was ever going to change this truth.” A 10-year-old Indigenous boy is dead, too, a fact now, impervious to language, and one that should perplex us and stop us in our tracks. On all these matters, it is up to all of us to think properly about what they mean, and to listen carefully to those who have already spent years thinking more about these things than you would wish on your worst enemy.

If you or anyone you know needs support, call Lifeline on 131 114 or Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636.

Sean Kelly is author of The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison, a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.

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