I fear for
my daughters and I feel an onerous responsibility for my son.
Sixty-three women killed by violence in this country this year.
It’s still only September. Men who hate women so much they kill them with axes, burn them,
stab them, beat them to death. They kill their children too or otherwise ruin
their lives.
I want to
know the story of each, and I try to find out. I don’t mean the “story” in a
prurient “that’s a terrible/shocking/disturbing” story sense. I mean the set of
circumstances that gives rise to Australian men doing such things. And in the
end, despite the myriad personalities and the domestic circumstances involved,
the family court orders and anything else, it crystallises down to one thing:
entrenched gender imbalance.
Men assault, rape and kill women and their children because they
think they have a right to. And that is a terrifying, overwhelming problem that
should exercise all of us, but none more so than Australian blokes.
Men who murder women they know either don’t care or think they’ll
get away with it. And why wouldn’t they? Society fails women and children over
and over. The courts bail and grant custodial access to – give the benefit of
far too many doubts to – the most evil misogynists, men covered with danger
flags, so that they can inflict violence on the same woman or others. Women and children at risk aren’t protected.
Someone will always listen to the perpetrator’s “justification”,
argue mitigation if instructed. A judge will always consider the arguments,
such as they are.
The media, meanwhile, dwells on the victimhood of the dead
women, asks again and again what more they could have done to protect
themselves from murder.
As a man
watching all of this happen I feel I have one choice: to look inside myself and
at all the men I know and love, and ask: am I – are they – capable of this?
It’s a reasonable question. Australian men who look and sound
like all of us – regardless of colour and economic circumstance – kill the
women and children closest to them.
My answer: no. I don’t think so.
But I
still want to scream with frustration, sorrow, sympathy and anger for the dead
and injured, that I live in a place where attitudes towards gender are so
perversely skewed that one in five young people believe women are partly
responsible for rape, one in six think “no” might mean “yes”, many think
stalking a female partner is OK and that drunkenness can mitigate the
circumstances of forced sex and assault.
But I do think that one of the many things that must now happen
(beyond federal, state and territory governments spending whatever it takes to
protect women and children) is this: men have to call each other out on their
behaviour; name casual misogyny where they experience it; older men must mentor
the younger about the dangerous wrongs of the pervasive gender inequity in
Australian society and what they can do to ameliorate it; and society’s male
role models – cultural, sporting, commercial, educational and, yes, political –
have a duty to not only lead by example but to stamp on hatred of women and
violence against them, in their respective orbits.
Easier said than done, perhaps.
For where does a bit of biffo on the footy ground end after a
Saturday night session in the rooms? And who cares if nobody ever asks the WAGs
what they think rather than just dwell on their gowns and figures? What harm’s
really done, anyway, by a few sexist lyrics or a little desensitising screen
violence? And who cares if one of the country’s highest profile shock jocks
advocates tying the nation’s first female prime minister in a chaff bag and
drowning her or the man who’d replace her stands next to a sign calling her a
female dog?
I fear
more than ever for the women and the girls I know.
For my older adult daughter who must negotiate a society and an
urban landscape where there are
evidently so many men who would randomly, indiscriminately harm her,
just because she is a woman. For my little girl, who has all
this ahead of her – unless men take control and make sure things change.
And I feel an onerous responsibility for my son, as all men with
boys now must.
Somewhere in the next week or so in Australia, chances are that
a man will murder a woman he knows well and possibly his and her children.
What should we men tell our sons when they ask us: why?
Do we say the men were tied up in messy custody disputes? That
they were drunk? That they just “snapped”?
No. We must tell them that our fellow men kill women because
something about Australian society has conditioned them to think that they can.
And as overwhelmed and as frightened as that might make some men
like me feel, we have to somehow call it out and do anything we can to change
it.
Paul Daley
0 comments:
Post a Comment