Comment: no sign of the practical commitment required on violence

While both parties are happy to talk about violence, they're less forthcoming with dedicating resources to frontline services, writes Jane Gilmore.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull with Rosie Batty and staff from the Eastern Community Centre, Melbourne. Source: AAP

As the world’s longest election campaign lumbers relentlessly on, both parties are still stuck on the worn out tactic of competing to use the most words to say nothing. The aim of every answer is only to avoid the actual question, based on the idea the electorate is so stupid that we’ll be fooled by such tactics.

We’re not.

Non-answers, stay-on-message interviews and crude diversions don’t work on a generation of people with access to more information in our back pockets than Bill Clinton had when he was President.

Particularly after the tornado effect Rosie Batty had on public debate, these tactics certainly won’t work on domestic violence. Framing it as a “women’s issue”, so it’s not a priority, something to be trotted out only at women’s events and in women’s spaces, does not hide the things we know to be true. Too many of us know about lives lost and the devastating impact violence has on hundreds of thousands of people. Highly problematic mouth noises from the Prime Minister about how “Real Men don’t hit women” doesn’t stop us seeing the federal government removing funding from refuges, legal aid, homelessness assistance and crisis services. It doesn’t stop us knowing that violence is an ongoing issue and it’s not getting any better.

Women’s Electoral Lobby spokeswoman Helen L’Orange neatly summed up the political response to a national crisis:

“The leaders of the major political parties appear to agree that ending the violence is a national priority but there’s been no sign of the practical commitment required.”

A report by Turnbull’s own government recently found that over half a million people sought help from homelessness services between July 2011 and June 2104, and more than a third of them did so as a direct result of domestic violence. According to Annabel Daniel, CEO for Women’s Community Shelters, those numbers are underestimated by around 20% because they don’t include non-government services. So roughly 120,000 women and children were forced from their homes by unbearable violence during that period, and only 9 per cent of them found help through current homelessness services. We will never know what happened to the other 91 per cent.

What help is available

1800 RESPECT is national hotline for victims of rape and domestic violence, currently it’s staffed by qualified, experienced therapists with specific training in trauma counselling. Their aim is not to get though calls quickly, but to do them properly. They take around 30,000 calls a year and although one in five calls go unanswered due to lack of resources, the people who do get through receive genuine assistance and expert advice on where to go next.

Sounds like a pretty valuable service, right? Something a government supposedly committed to “end the scourge of violence against women" might want to support?

You would think.

But no, the proposed solution to the under resourcing at 1800 RESPECT is not more funding for additional resources, it’s implementing a triage call centre, farmed out to a private contractor, the only one of the three options presented in a review by KPMG that, as reported in the Canberra Times, “mentions specific risks to callers.”

In other words, the solution is to answer more calls but provide less service. Form over function, bureaucracy over effectiveness, KPIs over real change.

Violence isn't a women's issue

And the underlying elephant in the room is still trampling around breaking everything. While violence is perceived as a women’s issue, men are not part of the solution. We know that violence is gendered. Women are most likely to suffer violence in their homes at the hands of men they know. Men, who are actually more likely to be the victims of violence, are more likely to experience it in public places, at the hands of men they don’t know. At a societal, systemic level, the one constant in violence is the gender of the perpetrators.

"The underfunding of these services costs lives and ruins futures"

Women and children need more services because the violence that happens to them in their homes, where it is much more difficult to escape. The underfunding of these services costs lives and ruins futures, but until we address violence at the source, which means we stop thinking of it as a women’s issue and start seeing it for what it really is – a men’s issue - nothing is ever going to change.

This is the lesson of modern politics and specifically of this election. Facts and details matter, empty rhetoric doesn’t fool anyone and politicians who think it does do a great disservice to themselves and the people they are supposed to represent.

Jane Gilmore is a writer from Melbourne. She writes about politics and feminist issues, and her work has appeared in Fairfax, The drum, The Guardian, and more. 

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