White Ribbon Day: Australia's Violent Undercurrent

Today is White Ribbon Day. It is a day when men are asked to stand up to violence against women. This is a great thing, focusing the nation on an important issue and asking men to be part of the solution.

But maybe focusing on violence in and of itself is too narrow. Perhaps, in order to truly address violence against women, we need to look more deeply at the issue, and attack the sexist norms, attitudes, values and systems that allow violence to occur. Unfortunately, many of us are unwilling to do that. Certainly, our media and our leaders are often unwilling to do that. We are quick to jump on the anti-violence bandwagon, but are we willing to look at ourselves and our nation and consider our own part in it?

When horrific acts of violence, abuse and death occur, our media is quick to report the perpetrators as animalistic, inhuman, depraved. These people are not us; they are not part of us; they are different.

It’s a response that allows us to separate ourselves from such abhorrence, to don a cloak of self-righteousness that protects us for any genuine introspection. It helps us to ignore the part that we play, that our collective society plays, in setting the conditions for violence, in promoting violence, and perhaps even in perpetrating what we might consider lesser acts of abuse, violence and control.

But are we really that different? Can we really maintain a pretence of separation from them.

On a basic philosophical level, it’s a very difficult line to maintain. The majority of world religions hold humanity as fallen; inclined towards evil¹. While we might default to a view that we are good and those people who beat their wives and rape women and kill people are bad, those of us who belong to religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam need to concede that there is a propensity towards evil within us all. We are all part of the same fallen humanity. “There, but for the grace of God, go I”, as the old adage goes.

Coming at it from another angle, an atheistic naturalism presents humans as nothing more than biological machines, driven by an innate survivalism. We are nothing more than children of chaos, born of chance, and surviving only through selfishness and determination. Acts of violence, from the rape of a woman to the genocide of a people, are part and parcel of our breeding. Our animalistic urges are constrained only by a constructed, self-imposed morality. Some of us hold to that construct better than others, but the underlying animalism is part of us all. When somebody forsakes the moral norms of society and gives in to that animalism, it does not make them any less human. In fact, those acts remind us what it is to be human: animals striving for our own interests.

This means that, for many of us, we should be willing to admit that acts of such evil are a part of our make-up.

Back in April, Tom Meagher wrote a powerful article for White Ribbon Ireland, in this vein. To the nation’s shock, Tom’s wife, Jill Meagher, was raped and murdered in Melbourne in two years ago. In his article, Tom writes about the experience of hearing his wife’s killer speak coherently in court, and how this challenged his view of perpetrators of extreme violence as lone monsters.

It was chilling. I had formed an image that this man was not human, that he existed as a singular force of pure evil who somehow emerged from the ether. Something about his ability to weave together nouns, verbs and pronouns to form real, intelligible sentences forced a re-focus, one that required a look at the spectrum of men’s violence against women, and its relation to Bayley [Jill’s killer] and the society from which he came. By insulating myself with the intellectually evasive dismissal of violent men as psychotic or sociopathic aberrations, I self-comforted by avoiding the more terrifying concept that 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.

Tom writes about how violence against women is far more prevalent than many realise or admit.

The more I felt the incredible support from the community, the more difficult it was to ignore of the silent majority whose tormentors are not monsters lurking on busy streets, but their friends, acquaintances, husbands, lovers, brothers and fathers.

And he argues that the “lone monster” myth of the most serious offenders only serves to legitimise “lesser” acts of violence and control.

One of the most dangerous things about the media saturation of this crime was that Bayley is in fact the archetypal monster. Bayley feeds into a commonly held social myth that most men who commit rape are like him, violent strangers who stalk their victims and strike at the opportune moment. It gives a disproportionate focus to the rarest of rapes, ignoring the catalogue of non-consensual sex happening on a daily basis everywhere on the planet. It validates a limitation of the freedom of women, by persisting with an obsession with a victim’s movements rather than the vile actions of the perpetrator, while simultaneously creating a ‘canary down the mine’ scenario. Men who may feel uncomfortable by a peer’s behaviour towards women, may absolve themselves from interfering with male group norms, or breaking ranks with the boys by normalising that conduct in relation to ‘the rapist’. In other words he can justify his friend’s behaviour by comparison – “he may be a ___, but he’s not Adrian Bayley.”

The monster myth allows us to see public infractions on women’s sovereignty as minor, because the man committing the infraction is not a monster like Bayley. We see instances of this occur in bars when men become furious and verbally abusive to, or about, women who decline their attention. We see it on the street as groups of men shout comments, grab, grope and intimidate women with friends either ignoring or getting involved in the activity. We see it in male peer groups where rape-jokes and disrespectful attitudes towards women go uncontested. The monster myth creates the illusion that this is simply banter, and sexist horseplay. While most of us would never abide racist comments among a male peer-group, the trivialisation of men’s violence against women often remains a staple, invidious, and rather boring subject of mirth. We can either examine this by setting our standards against the monster-rapist, or by accepting that this behaviour intrinsically contributes to a culture in which rape and violence are allowed to exist.

The great irony, of course, is that our media, which so readily singles offenders like Bayley as inhuman monsters is the same media that wilfully prints and broadcasts messages of sexism, threats of violence, and a language that legitimises abuses against women. And so it is with the leaders of our nation – be they political leaders, business leaders, thought leaders, celebrities and sportspeople.

The most significant recent example of this is the way that former Prime Minister Julia Gillard was treated during her time in office. From the time Gillard assumed the leadership to the time that Rudd wrested it back from her, she was subject to the most vicious treatment by parts of the media and political class.

Its basis was a juvenile brand of humour used to mock the Prime Minister and reinforce a system of double standards for women. Taunts in the parliament that Gillard should "make an honest women of herself", or comments from high profile radio broadcasters that her father "died of shame" for her dishonest character, were designed to damage her character on the basis of her gender. These standards are simply not applied to men in power.

Then, from the seemingly innocuous “JuLiar”, the mildly sexist “ditch the witch” and the outright sexist “Bob Brown’s Bitch” to the explicitly violent suggestions that Gillard be given a noose for her birthday², be stuffed in a chaff bag and thrown out to sea³, or be kicked to death⁴, the treatment of Gillard by leading Australians and condoned (both directly or implicitly) by her political opponents was sadly all but part of a normalisation of abuse of women. Beyond the print and airwaves, bloggers and social media trolls labelled her an “evil slut” and drew pornographic cartoons of her.⁵ Young Liberals produced a fundraiser menu that made fun of her “big red box”. There was no end to it.

And the vitriol directed at Gillard cannot be excused as an isolated event. It is part of a violent, sexist vein that flows strongly through our nation. As Mary Delahunty writes in her book Gravity:

The abuse seemed to come from a panic about having a woman in power. It was the dominant dynamic in focus groups of swinging voters in Queensland in 2009 when Anna Bligh was seeking to win the premiership in her own right. “That bitch is not going to tell me what to do” was the refrain. Focus groups both measure and help shape modern politics. The raw, rancid sexism was too much for one witness, himself a political veteran, who heared middle-aged blokes angrily refer to Bligh as “that slut” and say “she’ll get what’s coming to her”. It struck him that they kept calling her “that bitch”.

Anna Goldsworthy, writing for the Quarterly Essay, summarises our cultural norms of violent language about women much more colourfully:

There is the unforgiving assessment of a woman’s appearance, frequently involving the word fat; there are threats or acts of violence, sexual or otherwise; there is the reminder of the fundamental shame of her sex, or her cunt. All are designed to silence her. The misogynist presents a remarkably consistent platform: shut up you fat cunt. Frequenly it is appended with or I’ll hurt you.

Some of the more extreme hateful and violent language comes from the lunatic fringe of our nation, who now have the ability to reach a wide audience through social media. But the failure of our political leaders and the mainstream of the media to call this behaviour makes them complicit in its spread. Of some it could not even be said that they were silent. Rather, they were active in spreading the hate. Of the press gallery, following Gillard's "misogyny speech", Delahunty writes:

They railed that the prime minister played the “gender card”, yet too many in the media and politics had collaborated in the abuse hurled at Gillard. Some had fostered rather than exposed the undercurrents of gendered judgments, feeding the resentment of women in power.

Are we, as a nation, at a point where we can rightly point to these events and rightly claim them as they are? Or will we go on pretending that violent men are not a part of us?

By all means buy a white ribbon today. And wear it. But before you pin it on, think about your own place in this mess. Don’t be satisfied with saying, “at least I’m not a monster who rapes women”, or even, “I would never lay a hand on a woman”. Make a pledge to speak out against the demeaning objectification of women, against sexism that legitimises the abuse of women, and against language that ignores or condones violence.

We should all ask of ourselves, as Gillard did during her speech on the floor of parliament, to “think seriously about the role of women in public life and in Australian society because we are entitled to a better standard than this.”

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¹ See, for example, Paul’s epistle to the Romans.
² NRL player Robbie Farah
³ Radio broadcaster Alan Jones
⁴ Political lobbyist Graeme Morris
⁵ Anne Summers: Her Rights at Work