All Being Equal: Ending Violence Against Women and Children

Kelsey Hegarty and Cathy Humphreys lead MAEVe, the University of Melbourne’s new Research Alliance to End Violence Against Women and their Children. In this episode they define abuse and identify key strategies for ending it. In conversation with Katrina Skewes-McFerran.

This episode deals with family violence and describes types of violent behaviours. Listener discretion is advised. If you or somebody you know needs help, visit the Domestic Violence Resource Centre Victoria’s website for information on support services. You can also call 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) for 24-hour counselling.

MAEVe, the Melbourne Research Alliance to End Violence Against Women and their Children

i-Decide, Women’s Wellbeing Project

Never Alone, from the Luke Batty Foundation

‘Family violence victims need support, not mandatory reporting’, Prof Kelsey Hegarty in The Conversation, July 3 2015.

National Community Attitudes towards Violence Against Women Survey (NCAS)

Transcript

Katrina Skewes-McFerran
Family violence is the most pervasive form of violence perpetrated against women and children in Victoria, and it’s overwhelmingly committed by men. We know the causes of violence are complex but include gender inequality and rigid attitudes about gender roles, and can be exacerbated by financial pressure, alcohol and drug abuse, men illness and social exclusion. The economic cost is enormous – an estimated $3.4billion in Victoria alone each year.

But of course the impact of violence on the lives of those who survive it and their loved ones is immeasurable.

Saturday June 20 would have been Luke Batty’s 13th birthday. His mum, Our Watch ambassador and Australian of the Year Rosie Batty, marked the occasion with the launched of ‘Never Alone’, a campaign urging public solidarity with victims of family violence.

She said ‘I want us all to have uncomfortable conversations about the way family violence services are funded and about the way that police and judicial systems deal with both the perpetrators and the victims of this most pernicious crime.’

This is All Being Equal, from the Melbourne Social Equity Institute. I’m Professor Katrina Skewes-McFerran, and my guests today lead the new Research Alliance for Ending Violence Against Women and Children here at the University of Melbourne, Australia. From General Practice we have Professor Kelsey Hegarty, and from the Department of Social Work, Professor Cathy Humphreys.

Cathy Humphreys
Hello.

Katrina
Hello, welcome to you both. Thank-you so much for being here for this very important and hopefully slightly uncomfortable conversation. I wanted to ask you, to begin, if you could help us to understand what abuse really is.

Cathy
I guess one of the key messages that I want to get across from our research is the fact that when we interview women and when we interview children, it’s very clear that domestic violence or family violence is not just about physical violence. It seems as though that should be a bit of a no-brainer, that people do understand it’s wider than that, but when you look at community attitudes surveys, recent ones in Western Australia, not to mention the national one, it’s clear that there’s an awful lot of people that don’t understand and aren’t cognizant of the ways in which violence and abuse expresses itself.

Katrina
So if it’s not just hitting people, what do you mean by this.

Cathy
I guess it’s the different ways in which one person has control over another person. It’s usually but not always a man over a woman, in an intimate partner relationship, or in an ex-intimate partner relationship, and it is about the ways in which every aspect of their lives can be controlled and the ways in which this has enormous impacts on their physical and mental health. I know that that was part of Kelsey’s PhD thesis many years ago so over to you Kelsey.

Kelsey Hegarty
Yeah. Look twenty years ago I was going to measure how common domestic violence was  n ordinary women attending general practice. I went to the measures, and all the measures had physical violence – basically whether you’d been pushed or shoved or hit, and when you take that as a measure then in fact sometimes it looks like men push women and women push men equally, and that’s where some of the gender equality type of figures come from. But when you measure what Cathy’s just been talking about, where it’s combined physical, emotional and sexual abuse, particularly when you go to sexual abuse, and particularly when you go to that combination where there’s controlling and coercive tactics, and that’s the scale that I developed to measure all of those types of abuse, then you get a very different picture. Women certainly are more likely to be victims of that combined abuse – what Rosie Batty has called family terrorism. Particularly associated with that is that people are afraid of their partner. That’s less common for male victims to have that combined physical, emotional and sexual abuse, and to be afraid, and of course the severity for women is much worse because generally they’re not as strong, so even with the physical violence it is the severity but also the injuries and also the health impact that’s much worse for women who have experienced that sort of abuse.

Katrina
So when you say that you’re measuring it what kind of things were you asking?

Kelsey
So many women do not, they’re not labelling their relationship as abusive. So they may, the way that I asked it was to ask what behaviours were happening from their partners. Had their partner locked them in the bedroom, had their partner taken their wallet and left them stranded, had their partner tried to turn their family and friends against them, had they had a knife or gun used against them, had they been forced to have sex. So you’re answering a question about a behaviour not a label. Now some of these women said yes to some of those awful things but would still not say they were in an abusive relationship or that they were experiencing domestic violence. Those sorts of questions aren’t good for women to start to reflect on what’s happening in their relationship, it’s more that they need to think about what the behaviours are and what they’re adding on to.

Katrina
So I can imagine that if women aren’t even able to report on abusive behaviours that much occur in a context of society not actually perceiving those kinds of behaviours as abusive

Cathy
I think that’s right, that in fact the community attitudes surveys show that particularly among young people actually there’s quite a high tolerance of ways in which they see violence and abuse in relationships occurring. So this isn’t across the board but there’s certainly a significant minority who are seeing violence in relationships as part of a relationship. That it is being normalised. I think that that is profoundly worrying when we think about the sort of society we want both now and in the future. And we have to think about where young people are picking up these sorts of violence-supportive attitudes from.

Kelsey
Of course they might be coming from families where it’s occurring and so that’s commonly what you know they’ve seen it at home and that intergenerational effect

Katrina
So they might be living in a home where there’s abuse occurring but it isn’t physical so they’re not seeing mum being hit, they’re seeing mum being controlled and they’re seeing their mum involved in a coercive relationship – do you think, what does it look for young people then if they’re accepting and tolerating these views, what might they be seeing?

Cathy
I think they’re seeing that it’s normalised and it’s the way in which stereotypically masculinity is expressed or femininity is expressed. Now we know that there are many counter arguments to that but we also know that we need to be challenging it because it is very clear that the messages are getting through particularly when young people are living with domestic violence. I also think that they’re often living in contexts where other aspects of violence are being normalised, whether it’s through bullying, whether it’s through what’s happening on the internet, whether it’s happening through pornography, when we think about the amount of information that particularly young men are picking up for their sexual education from pornography, that’s where you’re picking up very violent attitudes, very denigrating attitudes towards women in most of that. So we just need to be thinking more generally about how community attitudes are getting circulated and we want respectful relationships, we want equality in relationships between men and women, and we don’t want attitudes that are violence-supportive.

Katrina
So that kind of mutually empowering relationship is obviously what we aspire towards in a world that is evolving toward a more equitable stance. Some people would say that Australians have a pretty masculinised view of what men should be but how does that look in an international context?

Kelsey
Yes I’ve done some work with the World Health Organization. They ‘ve recently done a very large study globally to look at domestic violence, intimate partner violence and sexual violence, and of course the range is from 15% to 70% in some countries. Some countries around India, Pakistan and some countries in Africa. Our prevalence is around the 17% by a partner. Really, that probably reflects our community attitudes here, although we do a have masculine culture to some extent we have probably less bad gender attitudes than in some countries where patriarchy is probably more prevalent.

Katrina
Wow, they’re profound figures. 70% in some countries. So Australia’s doing okay. How do we compare to other countries such as Scandinavia, where there’s known to be more equitable attitudes and less stereotyping behaviours.

Kelsey
Yes, I mean I think that everybody looks to Scandinavia for everything. I think that there’s some issues in Scandinavia because in fact, although the gender say, measured by the level of females in politics and also other equality measures like that, are quite good in Scandinavia. Some of the attitudes may not be – it’s when you’re looking at a whole ray of gender equity measures it’s not necessarily that all of them translate into much less violence.

Cathy
And also I think too that it’s hard to say what a particular Australian male is. We live in a very diverse society so I guess the standard picture is of Australian mateship culture, and a way in which it has developed certain attitudes towards masculinity, but that’s also changing as we know. But also we’re a very multicultural society as well, so I think it raises issues about how we impart messages to both our current population as well as new migrant populations around the attitudes towards violence against women. So it raises a whole lot of issues around the prevention agenda that are incredibly important about the sort of society that we want in Australia.

Katrina
Mmm. So in an Australian society is it fair to say that this a women’s issue, or a children’s issue, or is this also a man’s issue?

Kelsey
Oh it’s definitely a man’s issue as well. I’m associated with White Ribbon, I’m on the research group there, and of course they’ve spent a lot of time trying to get  men to stand up and speak out on this issue, and with some success. I think it’s always a tension, because of course we don’t want men standing up and leading and speaking for women, when we’re actually talking about gender equitable things, but I think it’s definitely men, women and children. And of course, the thing that we’ve started doing is starting to look at intervening or trying to do early intervention with men, and certainly what you mentioned before about respectful relationships in schools, it’s certainly where we can’t be just talking to women, or talking to children, we need to be addressing this issue with men.

Cathy
I guess one of the key issues that I’m interested in and have a large research program in at the moment is thinking about how we respond to men who are fathering in the context of domestic violence. This is men who are perpetrating domestic violence, what are we doing in our men’s behaviour change programs or our parenting programs to address the  issues for men who are violent to their partners and the ways in which that impacts on the parenting of children. That in fact that’s a really important issue, and many many men are very motivated to want to do much better with their children, they want to be good fathers. They want to be seen and experienced as a good father. So thinking about the fact that actually most of these men, or a very large proportion of these men who are using violence against their partners are also having a lot of contact with children, so thinking also about how do we galvanise their issues for men who are using violence to recognise the impact on the children.

Katrina
It sounds as though there are a lot of actions that need to be taken. So now that we’ve got an understanding of the context here in Australia and a little bit of understanding of how we compare to the rest of the world, and indeed of how we are made up of people from all around the world, what is it that you’re hoping to achieve through the Research Alliance for the Prevention of Violence Against Women and Children, here at the University of Melbourne.

Kelsey
Well we were very excited, myself and Cathy are leading this across the University, that the University has invested in an interdisciplinary group. We’ve got people from law, education, gender studies, criminology, journalism, as well as social work and general practice and population health, and really this is a wicked problem. It’s a wicked, complex problem, so it’s not like my area of health is going to be, you know, one thing that can solve it. What Cathy was talking about before, intervening with men, it’s not one of these things that will do it, it’s actually us all putting our minds together around the issue and looking at interventions and responses that would be better for the whole family. So what we’re hoping to achieve by joining together to really look at some of the more difficult areas, and the things that we were hoping to prioritise with the alliance, was this idea of perpetrators and we’re doing some work in general practice around early intervention in general practice. But also, Indigenous populations, because we really haven’t tackled – it’s a sad indictment on our country that the 60-70% level is prevalent in our Indigenous populations in this country. So there’s a lot of work to do in that area. But we’re hoping, as a group, to end violence against women and children, to be looking at all the different sectors that need to intervene to make it safer for women and children in our communities.

Katrina
Oh, it sounds great.

Cathy
I think we’ve got a few specific projects, and one of the ones that is active right at the moment, apart from the fathering challenges project, is also one which is what we call the i-Decide project, which is looking at a self-assessment tool for women to be able to think through the sort of relationship that they’re in at the moment. Kelsey’s leading on that project. I think it’s a really important one.

Kelsey
Yeah. That’s an exciting thing, because we previously have done some face-to-face interventions with women, through health practitioners. But of course that doesn’t reach all women. Women who are disabled, women who are rural, women who can’t go to the doctor you know – a whole set of things. So we’ve developed an internet-based safety decision aid and health relationship tool, where women self-inform, self-reflect and self-manage. It’s targeted, they answer some questions, they get some feedback, they then get an action plan with strategies. So yeah, that’s one of the key projects at the moment and people can register for that on i-decide.org.au if they would like to do that. We’re currently recruiting for that.

Katrina
It sounds like a very important project.

Cathy
I guess the other issue that has been really top of mind, not only for Kelsey and me but also for the whole of the family violence sector in Victoria has been the royal commission. So we’ve spent a lot of time over the last few months writing our submissions. I guess for Kelsey and me it’s about thinking about how the research that we’ve been doing over many years informs the royal commission so that that research is being done with many of our participant organisations and family violence organisations in Victoria, how we can use that research to the best effect. So we’ve spent a lot of time, we’ve done briefing papers on risk assessment, on children and domestic violence, on issues in relation to family law, on issues to keeping more women and children safe in their own homes. So all those sorts of issues we’ve put in about ten briefing papers from social work and Kelsey has put in a large..

Kelsey
Yeah, we focussed a lot on the health response and made many recommendations around that area, but also around the area of technology. There is more abuse happening through technology, so the coercive and control tactics we talked about earlier, obviously people can really use technology to monitor and control and to abuse through that medium. But also this building on the i-Decide project about my relationship, building on technological responses as well.

Katrina
So it sounds as though the research you’ve been doing over the past decades has really informed not just individuals who you’ve worked with, not just programs, but that you’re also trying to have an impact at the highest of levels by responding to things like the royal commission.

Cathy
Yeah, we’re very applied researchers. We really aren’t blue sky researchers, we’re researchers who are very keen to be part of a social movement that informs the policy and practice agenda in this area. And so that’s why seizing opportunities as they come along seems a very important thing to be doing.

Kelsey
And I think the alliance will help us with that. Obviously if it’s something to do with health it’s really easy for me to respond, and similarly with sector things for Cathy, but in fact prevention is an area that we’re both excited about, we want to support, and so forming the Alliance, part of that was to extend our work in preventing violence against women by connecting with others who can play a bigger part in that.

Katrina
It’s wonderful that the University is actually contributing dollars and resources into this and it certainly aligns with the values of the Melbourne Social Equity Institute as well. I wanted to finish by wondering if I can bring you back to where we began, which is the conversation about abuse looks like. Having heard all of your descriptions about coercive behaviours and manipulation and stereotypes, they’re very big notions. What would you say to people who are wanting to be able to identify abuse, what kinds of behaviours have you seen in the people that you’ve worked with, with fathers, with women who’ve been abused, that people should actually be looking for and noticing that ‘this is what abuse looks like’?

Kelsey
I think it’s a combination of behaviours. The Domestic Violence Resource Centre Victoria, I chair the governance group there, have a really good list on their website. So if anybody is listening they should certainly go to Domestic Violence Resource Centre Victoria website, and 1800 RESPECT similarly. It’s the national website and line, they have really good lists. When people read the scale that I talked about before, the behaviours, some women say to me – how did you know that was happening? And I say well it’s every woman’s story. It’s very similar. There is physical violence – pushing and shoving and kicking and biting. There is these control tactics of isolating from family and friends, verbally abusing, humiliating. Then it’s often combined with the sexual violence.

Then someone, one woman I spoke to recently from the i-Decide project, she said that also it’d be good to have a list of what the man says in these situations. What the list involved was things like ‘Oh, no no, I won’t do that again. Oh no, I didn’t mean that. No, I ‘ll get better, it won’t’ – you know, there was a whole list of excuses as to why it happened. That’s a common pattern as well, she was talking about that and I thought ‘Oh, that would be a good thing to add on.

Cathy
I think too that we need to be just going back to thinking also about the impact on children. That as we’re finishing off we need to be really thinking about the fact that this impacting profoundly on the next generation. Bringing children up in an environment where they’re living in fear, bringing them up in an environment where they’re constantly walking on eggshells, bringing them up in an environment where they’re scared to be themselves or to be with one parent or the other, have long term effects. It has long term effects on their long term and physical health but also on their attitudes into their future relationships. We know that there’s a lot of children who are brought up violent households, where there’s someone perpetrating domestic violence, who go ‘Never again, I will not be like that’, and aren’t, and there’s another group where those violence supportive attitudes become profoundly embedded and they do. So there’s not a direct transmission of violence but sometimes there’s a transmission of violence supportive attitudes that we do want to counter, that we do want to make a difference to, we do want to say no to.

Katrina
Well that certainly is uncomfortable to hear about, as we promised at the beginning. It’s really important to name what abuse looks like beyond physical abuse so thank-you for giving us those lists  and for measuring it, and thank-you for making a difference in the lives of children and in helping and supporting fathers and mothers to actually work towards a more mutually empowering future for all people.

Cathy
I don’t think that we’ve mentioned the issues of stalking. That in fact a lot of people think that once a woman separates, that that’s the end of it, that her children are safe and that she is safe. We know from the Rosie Batty case that that’s not true, and actually she would always say over and over again that she’s representative of many many women in her situation. She speaks for many women who are living with post-separation violence. It involves a lot of stalking, a lot of harassment, and it involves a lot of violences and abuses witnessed by children because it often happens at handover or contact. So we do know that it doesn’t all finish with separation and so we need to be thoughtful about the way in which we respond and actually continue to tackle post separation violence.

Katrina
Yes, is it true to say that one of the most dangerous moments for women is when they try to leave a dangerous relationship? Which kind of answers the questions about ‘why don’t women just get out’.

Kelsey
Yes, that’s a very dangerous time. Of course, when I’m teaching practitioners, health practitioners, they sometimes feel frustrated that the woman doesn’t leave, and we spend a lot of time on that issue. And for many women they just, they actually want to stay. They did at one point fall in love with this partner, they did have children with them. Sometimes he’s not always abusive, so for many of them their goal is not to leave but to stay but for themselves and their children to be safer and for the violence to stop. It’s responding to the woman’s needs. If she’s saying clearly that that’s what she wants, then saying that she should leave and not knowing that it’s the most dangerous time is very bad. We spend a lot of time in training talking about those issues.

Katrina
Sounds as though there’s still a lot that we need to learn and a lot of topics that we need to discuss further on this programme.

My guests today were Professor Kelsey Hegarty from General Practice and Professor Cathy Humphreys from the Department of Social Work. They lead the University of Melbourne’s Research Alliance for Ending Violence against Women and Children. If today’s episode has triggered any issues for you please call 1800 RESPECT to get support. I’m Katrina Skewes-McFerran, thanks for listening.