Women are sick of being afraid
having frantically given her nine-month-old baby to a man for assistance because both she and her baby had been stabbed by a man she did not know.
How could anyone stab a nine-monthold baby?
Why would a man target women going about their business in a shopping centre?
The man stabbed to death four other women – a university student, an artist, an architect and mother of two, an ecommerce assistant who was happily planning her wedding. Tragically, a 30-year-old refugee working his first day shift as a security guard at the centre was also killed.
Most of the people injured and hospitalised in the attack were also female, prompting the commissioner of New South Wales Police Force, Karen Webb, to say it was “obvious” the offender targeted women and avoided the men.
“The videos speak for themselves, don’t they?” Commissioner Webb told the ABC.
What was obvious to the most senior police officer in the state had not been so plain to armchair detectives, who jumped to incorrect conclusions about the offender’s motivation – that he was an Islamic extremist; that he was a young Jewish man, wrongly identified in media.
There was also, later, a focus on the perpetrator’s mental health – he’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
The mental health system in this country has been beset with problems for years, but as Professor Patrick Mcgorry, who has worked with people with schizophrenia for three decades, told the ABC’S Rafael Epstein, people with this diagnosis are less likely to commit acts of violence, not more.
Further, we typically don’t see acts of mass violence being perpetrated by mentally ill women.
Extreme acts of violence of any type perpetrated by women are extraordinarily rare.
On the other hand, our nation’s memory is stained by horrific attacks by male perpetrators – from the Bourke Street Mall car killings, to the Lindt Cafe siege, to Port Arthur, to the Hoddle Street massacre, to the Belanglo State Forest backpacker murders and now Bondi Junction.
It is improper to speculate about or discuss any of the Bondi Junction perpetrator’s motivations. They are a matter of a police investigation.
Yes, he was mentally ill. His actions are crushing for his dignified and empathetic family.
The bigger picture is the point. What we do know, and what’s not up for debate, is that the script he played out was one of male violence.
The male violence script is performed over and over by men with no mental health diagnosis, every day of every year.
When the news flashed up on my phone about Bondi Junction, I was watching the baby I had endlessly pushed around that place, now a 16-year-old onstage in Melbourne, playing a Smashing Pumpkins guitar solo.
As I read through the news clips I was instantly catapulted back into my new motherhood – a simultaneously magical and vulnerable time – in that same shopping centre.
Day after day, I sleepily walked around Bondi Junction, alone but feeling less alone. The point of this, of these memories that rushed back amid the terror of what had happened, is that I always felt safe.
Saturday’s incident was yet another reminder to women that we are not safe – in our homes, on the streets, in universities, in nightclubs, on bike tracks, in shopping centres.
Women are afraid. We are really, really sick of being afraid. Random attacks like that of last weekend are rare – they are the exception, despite the attention they receive – but that does not change the horrible frequency with which women are abused or killed by men they know.
Regardless of the sex of the victim, Australian Bureau of Statistics research shows 95 per cent of Australians who experience violence suffer at the hands of a male perpetrator.
When women are angry, or isolated, or depressed, or distorted by extremist ideology, or mentally ill, the statistics show that, overwhelmingly, they don’t resort to violence.
Last weekend ended a month where I had been touring the country talking about a novel, Pheasants Nest, which features a random act of violence – a brutal rape and kidnapping – perpetrated against a woman by a man, referred to as only “The Guy”.
The book says The Guy “doesn’t get to have a name”. This was inspired by Edith Mckeon, the lovely mother of murdered Irishwoman Jill Meagher, who was horrified every time she saw the name and face of Jill’s killer, whom I won’t name here.
Edith felt we shouldn’t show his face. He didn’t deserve to have a name. She wanted to see her daughter’s beautiful face, shining with the promise she never got to live out before she was savagely killed while walking home one night in Melbourne.
I wrote my novel, which features a strong female survivor, partially in response to my years covering courts, bearing witness to the grim aftermath of acts of male violence perpetrated against women and children.
There was the man who drugged his children with sleeping pills and drowned them in the bath to get back at his ex-wife. There was the man who tortured a toddler’s toes with a fan clamp. There was the man who killed his entire family; the man who deliberately ran over people in the street, including a little girl; the man who raped and murdered a popular and lively woman after a night out with her friends.
I will never scrub from my brain the forensic photos, the glassy-eyed detectives, the families slumped in court having to hear the awful details.
When I was working for the ABC’S 7.30,
I was sent to Tyabb, south-east of Melbourne, the day after Luke Batty was killed by his father with a cricket bat and a knife.
I’d been asked to see if his mother, Rosie Batty, wanted to comment.
I felt distinctly uncomfortable about this. The horror was so unspeakable; what mother would be in any position to form sentences after that?
But she did. Rosie Batty walked to the front of her house and gave the gathered reporters a speech for the ages, one that changed the national conversation about male violence. She was later named Australian of the Year.
That was a decade ago. The violence goes on.
The news from Bondi Junction just knocked the stuffing out of me, as it did so many women.
Here we were again.
When I posted online the words at the beginning of this piece, women, especially other mothers across the country who had wheeled their prams through similar shopping centres, got in touch to tell me it was precisely how they felt.
On social media, however, there were some men who insisted on surfing into the mentions with what-aboutery.
What about the fact the killer was mentally ill and didn’t know what he was doing? What about the fact men suicide? What about the fact there was a male victim, too? What about the fact men are upset, too? What about, what about, what about?
This is not the time for what-aboutery. At its most extreme, one man responded by calling me a “castrating, unfuckable man-hater”.
It feels almost fatuous to have to state that I love the company of men. My dad, my husband, my brothers, my son, my dear friends, my colleagues.
Over many years, my journalism has featured the stories of men – police with posttraumatic stress disorder, survivors of child abuse, sailors who suicided.
This does not change the fact that the statistics about male violence are a national shame.
There are many wonderful men from all walks of life who are doing something we used to refer to as “manning up”.
What those men do, and what all men should do, if this is to be solved, is not to look for excuses, but to say, “I’m so sorry. What can I do to help?”
Every time a man does that, I cannot say how much it fills women with hope. It makes us feel heard. It makes us feel less heartsick. It makes us feel safer.
It is only if men take the burden of male violence away from always being a problem for women, if they look into their hearts and acknowledge there is a problem, that we will
• ever move forward.
Yes, he was mentally ill. His actions are crushing for his dignified and empathetic family. The bigger picture is the point. What we do know, and what’s not up for debate, is that the script he played out was one of male violence.