Violence at home must end

A POLICE decision to push ahead with charges against a man over a violent incident, despite the female victim’s refusal to lodge a complaint, should give heart to abused women across the Gold Coast.

The circumstances of the case, in which police are alleging the woman’s head was bashed against a wall and that she had to scramble over a 37th-floor balcony to seek help from a neighbour, have yet to be tested before the courts.

But the timing of the Gold Coast incident that sparked the police investigation, occurring as it did on the same day the Special Taskforce into Domestic and Family Violence report was released, has served to underscore the taskforce findings and to focus public attention on a serious threat to a large part of society.

Talkback radio was busy yesterday with callers wanting to have their say about the report and the seemingly never-ending litany of violent incidents that led to the taskforce being set up.

One caller questioned labels such as “domestic’’ or “family violence’’, suggesting incidents should be named for what they were in a huge majority of cases – male violence against a woman.

It is distressing that in this day and age in a society as supposedly advanced and mature as ours, there are men who still think they have a right to lash out at their female partners.

But it is also encouraging that people who see such incidents are outraged and act to try to avert tragedy by calling police, and that officers have the courage to protect victims and to push ahead in using the full force of the law against bullies.

Society in the past has been all too willing to look the other way, to ignore the black eyes in public and the sobbing overheard in the place next door. That has to stop, right now. As the Bulletin warned in its editorial yesterday, too often the findings of reports like that produced by the taskforce are consigned to the bureaucratic too-hard basket.

That head-in-the-sand attitude only aids and abets the cowards whose appalling treatment of women and children, while it can never be justified, have largely been able to get away with it.