NATASHA STOTT DESPOJA On Violence. Reviewed by Justine Ettler
Natasha Stott Despoja makes a compelling case for more action to confront the attitudes at the heart of domestic violence.
Don’t let this book’s diminutive size fool you: Despoja’s On Violence packs a powerful punch and carries a big message. It’s a manifesto of sorts, complete with confronting statistics, that sets out to challenge a public that remains largely unmoved and a government that prefers bandaid action to real change.
As informed readers will know, approximately one Australian woman a week is murdered in her home by a man she knows (October 2018 was a record-breaker with 11 women murdered in 27 days). One in four Australian women over the age of 15 have experienced physical violence, and 95 per cent of perpetrators are men. What I didn’t know, however, is that police get calls every two minutes relating to domestic matters, which adds up to 657 calls a day. That’s a lot of calls!
Despoja’s argument takes its cue from the World Health Organisation, which claims violence against women has not only reached epidemic proportions globally but is entirely preventable. Each chapter of On Violence looks at one thing we can do to prevent domestic violence.
Given the statistics, why, Despoja demands, is nothing done about it? If people were dying in these numbers of almost anything else it would be declared a national emergency (Covid-19 being a case in point). Firstly, Despoja argues, in order to change the statistics we need to change the story. Equality and respect for all women is the necessary first step. Shamefully, as a society, we still don’t seem to care much about domestic violence or sexual assault because most of the victims are women and the perpetrators male. Clearly, in 2020, women’s lives still don’t matter enough (truly an issue worth taking to the streets for).
Despoja rightly points out that if this many men were being attacked and killed, or even threatened, leaders would respond with alacrity. She cites the way policy is changed and massive public engagement generated when it comes to trivial issues – a slip-up at a Bunnings sausage sizzle, for example. If the issue were strawberry growers or farmers, the perpetrators would be facing heavy penalties and jail time. But women dying every few days?
Part of the problem is the way public interest waxes and wanes and Senate inquiries and royal commissions recommend change but fail to deliver results fast enough. With Rosie Batty’s advocacy it seemed something might finally be done and gendered violence in Australia declared an emergency. Then nothing.
Perhaps the most compelling reason for change is this chilling statistic: the biggest killer and cause of illness and disability in women aged between 15 and 44 years is intimate partner violence.
Given the deaf ears to this at the top, Despoja pointedly adds: you’d think the massive cost of gendered violence, $21.7 billion per year, might prove persuasive with the mostly blokes in power. But nope. Despoja’s incomprehension is palpable.
My personal opinion is that public denial and government inaction comes from victim blaming that wrongly views women as equal perpetrators of domestic violence, a misapplication of the old two-sides-to-every-story logic. But all you need to do is look at the death statistics to refute this.
One of my favourite chapters is ‘Backlash’. Despoja’s observation of the way perpetrators today often get more attention in the media (and on social media) for how being prosecuted is affecting them than is given to the impact their crimes have had on their victims, is both perceptive and timely. This and the chapter ‘Blame the Victim’ deliver a compelling jolt of reality, the perfect antidote to contemporary society’s steadfast denial. Despoja’s deconstruction of the whole if-you-wear-short skirts-you-deserve-what-you-get trope is both pithy and persuasive.
I applaud her argument that men and women experience violence differently. Whereas women are often attacked by men they know at home, men are mostly attacked in public places by other men who are strangers. The degree of fear for women is greater, as are the stakes (back to those death statistics again). The controversial One in Three movement’s bogus claim that one in three victims of domestic violence is male is not supported by the death statistics, though I suspect arguments like these go a long way to getting male perpetrators off the hook. Of the 20 per cent of murders committed by women each year, two-thirds of them are women murdering their male abusers.
Domestic violence is deplorably ignored because it is ‘primarily’ perpetrated by men and ‘overwhelmingly’ experienced by women. It is caused by men’s faulty belief systems that assume women are inferior and that it is part of male privilege to dominate, control and punish them. To change this we need more than the odd advertisement. We need a comprehensive approach that tackles the topic in schools, in sport, as well as in the media and social media.
While Despoja could have spent some time addressing the nature side of the argument – the idea that some psychopathic perpetrators are born, not made – most garden-variety domestic violence results from dysfunctional nurturing and is therefore preventable.
On Violence is a stirring, fact-driven call to arms. We all need to work together because, sadly, the incidence of men inflicting pain on those closest to them remains undiminished.
Natasha Stott Despoja On Violence Hachette Australia 2020 PB 128pp $16.99
Justine Ettler has a PhD in American fiction and is the author of three novels, including the controversial bestseller The River Ophelia (a new edition was released in 2017) and Bohemia Beach (published by Transit Lounge in 2018). She has worked as an academic and a freelance journalist, and her work is available in bookshops, online and from her website.
You can buy On Violence from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.
