You have probably heard the alarmist views of the anti-divorcers. Divorce does immense damage to children and society. According to the Prime Minister Tony Abbott there is no such thing as a happy divorce. The minister for Social Services, Kevin Andrews, goes even further. Recently he said the greatest threat facing the Western world is not climate change or radical Islam, but the “continuing breakdown of the essential structures of civil society – marriage, family and community”. Do pro-marriage politicians ever consider the harm caused when people stay together in difficult or toxic marriages? Marriages where there is violence and abuse?
Kevin Andrews has introduced a $20 million pilot project to begin in July where couples can get a $200 counselling voucher to encourage them to stay together. What is galling about the government allocating $20 million on this project, is that at the same time they propose to cut $7 million from domestic violence programs. Despite the fact Australia is facing what has been called an epidemic of domestic violence.
While men can be victims too, domestic violence is largely a problem of men’s violence against women. It is a leading cause of death and injury in women under 45, with more than one woman murdered by her current or former partner every week in Australia. About one in three Australian women over the age of 15 have experienced physical or sexual violence at some time in their lives, although what this doesn’t reveal is that a woman may experience violence with more than one partner.
It is important to highlight that there can be different dynamics at work when there is violence in intimate relationships. One perspective identified is “situational couple violence’, or “common couple violence”, which is where occasional outbursts of violence reveal an inability to handle conflict and anger from either partner or both. Another is what has been called “patriarchal terrorism”– violence that is a result of patriarchal traditions of men’s right to control “their” women. The latter may involve physical and psychological violence, economic subordination and isolation.
Common couple violence – while serious – may indeed benefit from counselling or programs in order to address effective conflict resolution and anger management. But counselling will not help women in relationships where there is patriarchal terrorism. This type of violence only gets worse.
I am no longer ashamed to admit that violence has occurred in four of my intimate relationships. It was my decade in hell. Two partners used “terrorist control” although one was mostly psychological. The worst one was called a sadistic psychopath by a police officer, although his friends said he was so nice he couldn’t hurt anyone and I was lying and on a “power trip”. He choked me; he belittled me and called me names; he asphyxiated my children’s cat on the exhaust of his motorbike; and after we broke up, he stalked me.
The other two do not fit into the category of common couple violence; the abuse in one occurred at the end of a long-term relationship when I decided to leave. The other had been supporting me through a rough time. There had been no conflict between us. Then out of the blue he forced himself on me, just as the other three had also done.
I had said “No”; “Stop”; “I am not ready”; “What are you doing?” when I was woken up in the middle of the night whilst sleeping in a downstairs bedroom. I was told: “It is my right”; “No woman has ever said no to me”; “This will make you feel better”. On three occasions I just lay there, didn’t move and said nothing afterwards. That it was rape never occurred to me. The fourth said “well, it didn’t last long”. Later I told a girlfriend who was angry with me for not shouting and struggling and trying to push him off. She said that’s not rape. But I knew it was, I was wising up.
When a woman is hurt by someone who says they love her, often she does not realise that what she is experiencing is abuse. This is complicated when the perpetrators themselves minimise or deny what they have done, refuse to accept responsibility and blame the victim – “you made me do it”. This is called gas lighting. Because of these things it took me many years to realise the abuse was not my fault. I did not make them hurt me. And no amount of counselling would have made things right.
I often asked my mother why she didn’t leave my father.She explained there was no option to leave a marriage unless one could earn an independent income and cope with the social stigma and alienation that divorce attracted in those times. My parents stayed in a miserable marriage for 50 years. It was a psychological prison. Despite knowing this, I never witnessed my father being physically violent towards my mother. It was only after he died in 1997 that she told me he used to regularly choke her. This was the reason she had to have part of her thyroid removed. Even her doctor asked her if someone had been choking her. Why did I not ask what her reply was?
Rape and sexual assault are two of the most under-reported crimes in Australia. Some researchers have estimated that as few as 10 per cent of rapes are reported to the police. Of these, only a small proportion are prosecuted in court and less than half of these result in a conviction. Little more than 20 years ago it was not an offence to rape your wife; only in July 1989 was rape within marriage made illegal in Queensland. I wonder how many women would tell a marriage counsellor they have been raped, especially if their husband is present and if they do not want to end their marriage?
In April Tom Meagher wrote a powerful piece attacking the monster myth. He pointed out that most rapists are “normal guys, guys we might work beside or socialise with, our neighbours or even members of our family”. Disturbingly, violent men are socialised by “the ingrained sexism and entrenched masculinity that permeates everything from our daily interactions all the way up to our highest institutions”. These “normal”, “nice” guys, however, become monsters behind closed doors.
What exacerbates, and enables, this façade is that far too often family and friends do nothing when someone they know tells them they are being abused. This is called the bystander effect. Dr Shannon Spriggs has spent the last ten years with Mentors in Violence Prevention and says bystanders sit on the fence, do not want to get involved. “When we say nothing, when we try to pretend it isn’t happening, when we mind our own business, we become part of the problem,” Spriggs says.
Both men and women are bystanders; anyone who enables, excuses, sides with the perpetrator or stays silent is a bystander. In the end it was men who stood up for me, supported me and gave me validation: that it was wrong and it wasn’t my fault. A woman, who was a victim of domestic violence herself in her first marriage, wrote to me a few years ago after the subject had come up during a dinner conversation: ‘I hope you respect my need to stay neutral in matters that have nothing to do with me’.
Just a few weeks ago I was reminded how insidious the effect of the bystander effect is.
I was at a talk Dr Spriggs was giving on the topic of violence and I shared with someone I had known for many years how triggered I was feeling just by being there. I mentioned that very few people had supported my children and me when I was caught up in the abuse. I had been called a liar, I said, but you’d think they would believe my children. She replied that children do make false accusations.
I walked away and wondered where are the counselling vouchers to help with this? To help support, educate and equip victims of intimate violence, and those around them, with the tools to cope properly. That is the conversation we need to have Minister Andrews.