HOW TO SAVE A LIFE

IN A WORLD REELING WITH CRISES, DOMESTIC VIOLENCE IS ONE WE CAN SOLVE. BUT IT WILL BE HARD, SAYS JANE GILMORE, A JOURNALIST WHO SPECIALISES IN THE TOPIC

Domestic violence is one crisis the world can solve. Writer Jane Gilmore explains exactly what we can do to help.

hannah Clarke did everything right. She left her abusive partner. She reported him to police. She took out an AVO. She tried to keep him in their children’s lives. And still, this self-proclaimed “loving father” murdered the Queensland mother and her children. Friends of his said they knew he was in trouble but never dreamt he would hurt anyone. Others said it wasn’t a surprise. None of them knew how to help her stay safe or help him choose something other than violence.

The statistics on men’s violence against women are repeated so often the meaning almost becomes lost. One woman a week is killed by a current or former partner in Australia. More than 1.5 million Australian women have been subjected to violence by a current or former partner since the age of 15. And with coronavirus making people self-isolate at home, reports of domestic violence are already rising.

No-one but the man himself is to blame for Hannah and her children being killed, but the circumstances of these murders force us to examine what we can do to reduce the frightening levels of violence some men inflict upon women. In simple terms, there are two key elements to reducing domestic abuse. One is prevention: changing the underlying factors that enable or even encourage violent men. The other is crisis response: improving the services and protection available to women trying to escape violence.

One of the vital factors in prevention is to stop thinking of it as a women’s issue. The unfortunate truth is that men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of lifethreatening domestic abuse. The NSW Domestic Violence Death Review Team’s 2015-2017 report showed that 79 per cent of intimate-partner homicides were women killed by abusive men. Almost all the men killed by women had been abusing the woman who killed them. There was not one single case where an abusive woman killed her male partner. Prevention, then, must focus on violent men and how we can help them choose another path.

At a very rough estimate, if you know seven men in Australia, you probably know a rapist or an abuser. It’s a confronting thought, but it does mean most Australians can have an impact on violent men – if we can bring ourselves to believe that a few men we know, or even love, are inflicting violence on women.

We also need to understand abuse as an ongoing pattern of behaviour rather than a series of standalone incidents. The legal system, which is only a small part of response and