Violence is featured on the front pages of every major newspaper this morning, with the Daily Telegraph dedicating a special nine-page section to the fight that stopped a nation.
The “biff” or “fisty cuff” that captured everyone’s attention was fought between two of the country’s most powerful men and once good friends, James Packer and David Gyngell. It lasted less than a minute, according to some media reports, yet was intense enough that at least one of the two involved may have lost a tooth or denture during the brawl.
You’ll have to trawl through the media to find another major story on violence in Australia, one so far on the side of ‘dog bites man’ newsworthiness that it’s surprising it gets any attention at all.
The ABC is this week reporting on the prevalence and consequences of domestic violence in Australia.
According to Domestic Violence NSW chief executive Tracy Howe, domestic violence has reached such significant proportions that we need to declare a national emergency. She’s launched an online petition calling on Prime Minister Tony Abbott to hold a national summit on the issue with stakeholders across the country, telling the ABC that if it’s time we treated domestic violence like we would any other national disaster. At the time of publishing, almost 2,300 people had signed the ‘no excuses’ petition.
The stats tell the story. Every week at least one woman is murdered by a current or former partner. Domestic violence affects more than one million children according to the ABC. Forty per cent of police time is taken up dealing with domestic violence, costing $13.6 billion a year. During the Easter period alone, six women and children were killed as a result of domestic violence. There are 1.2 million women in Australia over the age of 15 who have experienced domestic violence.
While “high profile” incidents of domestic violence – such as photographs of Nigella Lawson and coverage of Simon Gittany’s murder trial over the death of Lisa Harnum – help push domestic violence into the headlines, they represent just a tiny segment of the women and children affected.
Domestic violence is an issue that belongs to everyone. It is much more relevant to all of us than a punch-up between two blokes, no matter how wealthy and powerful they are, or how public and intense they manage to make a personal matter go.
To put it in a workplace context in line with this publication, with domestic violence affecting one in three women at some point in her life – and two thirds of women being in the workforce – the domestic violence that’s going on behind closed doors at home is ultimately affecting the participation of women at work. It’s why businesses like NAB have introduced a ‘Domestic Violence Policy’ for its employees, offering counseling, flexibility and additional leave to those affected. Domestic violence is everyone’s responsibility at work, just as it is everyone’s responsibility in the community.
Perhaps if a billionaire v television mogul tiff broke out on the streets of Bondi every week, we too would lose interest.
But if just one billionaire or powerful well-known mogul died as a result, pressure would mount regarding the measures we should take to end such incidents of violence. It’d be a national emergency of its own.
Indeed, a handful of ‘king hit’ related deaths in Sydney over the last year have pushed the NSW government to change mandatory sentencing laws and the major metropolitan papers to launch a campaign to rebrand the term ‘King Hit’ to ‘coward’s punch’.
On Monday, Raynor Manalad, a 21-year-old nursing student died following an alleged single punch in the face during a birthday party on Saturday night. It too has featured heavily in the news, with reference to Daniel Christie and Thomas Kelly, two teenagers who were killed by single punches in Sydney’s King’s Cross.
Statistically, somewhere over the last week a woman will have been murdered by a current or former partner, an incident that may very well go unmentioned in the papers – unless of course it carries some kind of ‘newsworthiness appeal’, an abnormality of curious aspect that pushes it into the realm of the public’s attention.
If we could give domestic violence just a fraction of the attention the Packer/Gyngell fight received yesterday and will continue to receive in the coming days and weeks, we’d be well on the way to presented it as an issue broader than something occurring ‘over there somewhere’, behind the closed doors of those mysterious households.