She was asking for it. She pushed his buttons. She knows what he is like. Why does she dress like that. Why the short skirt, the see-through dress, why is she being so sexually promiscuous? It is her fault. Why didn’t she just leave?
Stop. Just stop.
We have been having this conversation for decades, and somehow, we are still having it.
Family violence is not a “two-way street” as Senator Pauline Hanson claimed on Wednesday. It is not a mutual failing, not a clash of two difficult personalities, not something a woman invites through what she wears or how she speaks or how long she stays. It is one person, statistically a man, choosing, again and again, to hurt another. Full stop. No qualifier, no “but,” no context that makes it make sense.
This year, 37 Australian women have been killed, and 28 of these women by domestic violence perpetrators, according to Australian Femicide Watch. Behind every one of those numbers is a name, a face, a family now permanently altered. Last week alone, four women were killed in four days. Four. In a week. And still, we are debating whether this is really a gendered problem.
And into that debate walks Pauline Hanson, suggesting family violence runs both ways. That everyone is sitting on some kind of time bomb because of cost-of-living pressure, as if a stretched grocery budget explains a man’s fists. I am sorry, but no. Everybody is under pressure right now. That is not, and has never been, a justification for violence against another human being.
A woman is at her most vulnerable, statistically and fatally so, in the act of leaving. And instead of building a wall of protection around her and her children in that moment, we have people in our own parliament muddying the waters, telling the country it is complicated, it is mutual, it is a “two-way street”.
It is not a two-way street. It is one person’s decision, made over and over.
We are often told not to give Hanson the oxygen, not to feed the outrage machine, and to let her comments die quietly. I understand that instinct. But I no longer think it is right. She has real supporters, people who hear this rhetoric and nod along, who will go into bat for her online, who will twist and reframe and soften what she actually said until it sounds almost reasonable. Silence does not starve that. It lets it grow in the dark. We have to call it out, loudly, specifically, every time.
And here is the harder question, the one that should keep us up at night: are we so disillusioned with our political leaders, so exhausted by all of them, that we are willing to hand real power to someone who suggests women are asking for it on top of everything else divisive and hateful she has built a career on? Because that is the trajectory we are on. That is not a hypothetical anymore.
Family violence advocates have spent decades doing the unglamorous, grinding work of changing this story, shifting the language, shifting how services respond, shifting what juries and judges and neighbours believe when a woman says she is afraid. They have fought for funding line by line, year by year, against governments that would rather cut a program than confront a crisis. All of that work, all of that hard-won ground, can be undone by one bitter politician deciding it is politically useful to throw petrol on the fire. That should make you angry. It makes me angry.
Perpetrators make a choice. They choose violence. They choose it over walking away, over counting to ten, over getting help, over simply not doing it. That choice belongs to them and nobody else, especially not the skirt, not the tone of voice, not the cost of living, not a bad day, not a grand final loss. Somewhere along the way, we let that basic truth get buried under a mountain of excuses, and it is long past time we dug it back out.
Enough is enough. Not as a hashtag. Not as a headline that fades by Friday. As a line we actually hold in our parliaments, in our pubs, in our own conversations when someone says “well, what was she wearing?” and we no longer let it pass.
Family violence is not a two-way street. It never was. Stop blaming women for men’s violence. Seriously stop.