Page 926 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 30 March 1993
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alarm us. We have violence in our entertainment on television, which is another issue that has been taken up recently at a Federal level. We have had political campaigns which highlight the feelings of terror felt by many in the community who feel that they are potential victims of violence.
Against this background, we need to address the issue of violence on several fronts. Many measures are being taken to lessen the occasions of violence in our society, but each night on the news we are greeted with yet another death, yet another violent attack, or a focus on overseas conflicts. All of these acts described are in fact acts of violence that affect women. Whether as victim, survivor, relative or friend, women are affected every day by violence. Men are also affected and are often the victims, but I feel that I have the support of a large body of research when I state that, by far, women suffer the consequences of societal violence more often than men. So it is important that at this time we have a report such as this, the National Strategy on Violence Against Women.
The problem would appear to be endemic. In August last year the Australian Society of Sex Educators, Researchers and Therapists was told by a Newcastle psychiatrist who works with domestic violence and incest offenders that one in three men abuse their partners sexually, financially, socially, physically or psychologically. Another speaker at the sex educators conference, a social researcher, admitted that so-called SNAGs, or sensitive new age guys, are few and far between. The speaker, Hugh Mackay, said that Australian males have great trouble coming to terms with women's changing roles. He said:
Most Australian men are clinging to fading hope that it will go back to how it used to be.
The issue is more complex than just returning to some idyllic pastoral setting, as the rosy picture most hold as the "good old days" never really existed. This is particularly true in relation to domestic violence. There has always been violence against women, especially in those societies that have always viewed women and children as possessions. At the very beginning of the second paper in the "Violence Today" series of the National Committee on Violence, the project manager, Jane Mugford, stated:
All societies have public mythologies to which a majority of their members pay at least lip service. In our society one myth concerns "families" and "homes". In this myth a family together in its home is a warm, supportive unit, a "haven in a heartless world". Of course the myth is not completely false ... But the family has a multi-faceted nature. It is an agency of social support, and has negative as well as positive features.
In this context of the nuclear family women can suffer a series of abuses and have society fail to recognise them because these acts are perpetrated by their closest relatives and friends. To date, victims have often been blamed for attracting violence. This doublethinking means that society holds women responsible for certain of their actions identified by their aggressors as provocative, while not holding men responsible for their violent behaviour. It appears that only in the arena of personal relationships do we hold these two views without seeing their inherent conflict of logic.
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