Action on violence could be a matter of words*
Domestic: it’s a nice word. It evokes images of hearth and home, family, children and pets. It infers the privacy of the home, a cozy entity behind whose closed doors the organisation of family and domestic life can be carried on away from the public gaze.
We have domestic animals, domestic plants, domestic work, domestic affairs. When ‘domestic’ is coupled with the word ‘violence’, however, we have a cognitive dissonance. This invariably means we also have a legislative dissonance.
With a few notable exceptions, governments are largely reluctant to impose on the privacy of domestic arrangements. Labelling something ‘domestic’ at once removes it from the public, and therefore visible and governable, domain.
The late philosopher, Val Plumwood posited a theory of ‘dualisms’, whereby contrasting concepts could be ranged in pairs, with one of each pair having automatic societal precedence.
For example, in dualisms such as man/nature; object/subject; masculine/feminine; body/spirit, the former of each pair is invariably afforded a higher status than the latter. This is the same principle on which our societal norms and, it follows, legislation, are based. In the dualism public/private, the public sphere is the important one. What happens in that domain affects everyone and therefore is subject to laws and boundaries. The domestic domain, private, is less so.
In July 2012, Thomas Kelly, then 18 years old, was out with his girlfriend in Kings Cross. Without provocation or reason, he was attacked and felled with a single punch to the head. Kelly died two days later without regaining consciousness. His attacker was convicted of manslaughter and jailed. Kelly’s death, shocking for its randomness, made not only headline news, but prompted widespread changes to legislation, including mandatory lock-out laws for licensed premises, ‘one-punch’ laws and minimum sentences of eight years for alcohol-related violence resulting in death.
Kelly’s death occurred in the public domain; and he was male.
In
2022-23, the rate of women killed by a current or previous intimate partner
rose by 30%**. This
violence does not play out in the public domain, but is
‘domestic’, and therefore private, hidden, anonymous. So far, in 2024, almost
30 women have been killed by men. That’s about one woman every five days. There
is public anger, as there was when Kelly was killed twelve years ago, but the
political will to act quickly and decisively is conspicuously absent. Why?
Public/domestic; male/female.
Already, in the wake of the most recent death, that of 28-year old Molly Ticehurst, and the nationwide rallies against violence last weekend, the mainstream media is shifting the focus away from the women killed and talking instead about ‘good’ men. Of course there are good men, but that’s hardly the point. Shifting the focus trivialises the deaths of the 30 women who have lost their lives so far this year.
Several years ago, journalist Annabel Crabbe wrote, regarding government inaction on the number of women killed, “If one bloke a week was killed in a shark attack, governments would be looking for ways to drain the oceans. How is this [the number of women killed by partners] not a tools-down emergency?”
Instead of throwing money at the problem and calling for a Royal Commission while the bodies pile up, governments could act as quickly and decisively as they did after Thomas Kelly’s death.
Change the laws. Change the language.
There is nothing domestic about violence. It must be called precisely what it is: assault, grievous bodily harm, and, in too many cases, murder.
*First published as the editorial in Braidwood's Changing Times 8 May, 2024
**Statistic from the Australian Institute of Criminology
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