10 women in 22 days - wtf Australia?

[cheminotte]

womensagenda.com.au/latest/we-despair-10-women-murdered-in-22-days/

DP helpfully suggested UK was probably no better. 2 per week is obviously not great but then I googled Australia population and there are only 25m of them so that’s even worse.

That's a devastating number. Personally I'm finding Hannah Cornelius's murder in South Africa absolutely devastating to read about in the press too.

It’s pretty fucked. 1 shark is a national emergency but 22 women in 10 days no one cares.

Can you imagine men's uproar if it were THEM dying at the hands of women. As it is just women, they will no doubt blame feminist women for not doing enough to stop men from killing us.

Horrendous. This is exactly what researcher Jackson Katz writes and talks about when he says violence against women is a men's issue.

The section in the talk about language specifically addresses what happens with language to take men out of the equation.

If you scroll down to this section of the transcript and click - it will take you to the correct section of the video:

I want to share with you this exercise that illustrates on the sentence-structure level how the way that we think, literally the way that we use language, conspires to keep our attention off of men. This is about domestic violence in particular, but you can plug in other analogues. This comes from the work of the feminist linguist Julia Penelope.

03:07
It starts with a very basic English sentence: "John beat Mary." That's a good English sentence. John is the subject, beat is the verb, Mary is the object, good sentence. Now we're going to move to the second sentence, which says the same thing in the passive voice. "Mary was beaten by John." And now a whole lot has happened in one sentence. We've gone from "John beat Mary" to "Mary was beaten by John." We've shifted our focus in one sentence from John to Mary, and you can see John is very close to the end of the sentence, well, close to dropping off the map of our psychic plain. The third sentence, John is dropped, and we have, "Mary was beaten," and now it's all about Mary. We're not even thinking about John, it's totally focused on Mary. Over the past generation, the term we've used synonymous with "beaten" is "battered," so we have "Mary was battered." And the final sentence in this sequence, flowing from the others, is, "Mary is a battered woman." So now Mary's very identity Mary is a battered woman is what was done to her by John in the first instance. But we've demonstrated that John has long ago left the conversation.

www.ted.com/talks/jackson_katz_violence_against_women_it_s_a_men_s_issue/transcript?language=en

Wow that was such a poorly written article. But the over use of the word despair aside, as an Australian, I really don’t find the statistic that surprising. There is a large element of Australian society where violence is a daily occurrence that goes unnoticed. Many of the women who died would have been a part of this. Their deaths wouldn’t have been particularly visible to people outside their immediate social circle. Occasionally there will be an event that shocks the nation like double/triple homicides involving children or gun murders (gun crime in not that common and has a shock factor). But women being beaten to death by boyfriends etc just seems to be the way some people like be there. As the population has risen and no one has bothered to do anything about it it’s inevtuabke that the figures are getting very high.

I came across an interesting Australian Facebook campaign a while ago trying to change reporting of these incidents away from the passive.

Ie Men killed 10 women in the last 22 days

Since I read it I've realised it is always reported in the passive tense. Those silly women getting themselves killed.

I can't I see it now!

I can't UNsee it now!

Oh arrafan cross post! If you're says it so much better!

interesting point aranfan and FFS .
Maybe men killed isn’t used as it’s too obvious?

It's a big problem (bigger, actually) in New Zealand. The disproportionate rates of domestic violence among indigenous groups in these countries is a big part of the statistics. I don't think people in the UK understand how difficult an issue this is to address in a country with constant cultural conflict and resentment.

Why would they want to obfuscate something obvious? That's the point.

Men are taken out of the equation when reporting violence against women or the killing of women because, over time, the sheer repetition would mean we couldn't avoid questioning the harm of our patriarchy and social structures.

The patriarchy is harmful to so many groups and very probably underpins an amount of male on male violence and death. And it's certainly expensive in so many ways (the financial cost pales into insignificance when contrasted with the emotional, civic, social, familial and other costs).

HairyStorm wrote something interesting in another thread:

When we're talking about oligarchy, we're not talking about the malesuperior/femaleinferior concept or the injustices of its manifestations. We're talking about a different sex of power relations. In an oligarchy, the elite is the particular small group of people who get the superior tag added to their group. Everyone else gets the inferiority tag. And what we see in the real world is: within oligarchies, even the males at the very bottom of the power heap still benefit from malesuperior being infused in everything, because there are still women around taking on everything associated with the femaleinferior concept.

So these men who want to "dismantle the patriarchy" because they don't like oligarchy aren't actually proposing the dismantle the malesuperior/femaleinferior dichotomy [do I mean dichotomy or binary? Not sure; but you get what I mean]. They're proposing to dismantle a separate power structure - but they've learned that the name for The Elite, The Powers That Be, The People Who Run The World etc etc is "patriarchy".

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3404163-Wheres-your-personal-feminist-analysis-currently-at?messages=100&pg=1

I don't think people in the UK understand how difficult an issue this is to address in a country with constant cultural conflict and resentment.

In the UK I think we would have people make the case that our understanding of the fraught nature of raising comparably difficult issues is reflected in the maladroit and shameful handling of Rotherham - and the fact that similar is still happening.

@arranfan that is not even remotely similar to issues with indigenous populations. Red draf is right. People in the up have no idea what it is like dealing with an problematic ethnic minority that owes most of its issues to historic abuse, abduction, systematic eradication, downright grnocide etc of the white majority. You can’t just go into one of these communities and even attempt to help them because outsiders are reasonably mistrusted but finding and supporting people within these communities to take on this kind of work is very difficult. Rotherham etc was simply an issue of the police force not bothering with the issue because the victims were not really important to anyone and there would have been a fuss kicked up about race relations. Where indigenous populations are concerned there is pretty much nothing to be done asides from throwing money at the population and hoping they sort themselves out.

Rotherham etc was simply an issue of the police force not bothering with the issue because the victims were not really important to anyone

I'm speechless. There were parents and girls who begged for help, for years.
There is an ongoing institutionalized support for abuse in our country.
If you think it doesn't happen here its because you have your eyes wide shut.

Yes, but Upstart, that's not what the situation is in Australia/NZ/other countries which were colonised and where the native populations were marginalised/where genocide occurred etc. It's just not the same.

Is the issue in Australia really ‘just’ the aboriginal population? It seems to be the wider culture?

Obviously it's not "just" the Indigenous population, but domestic violence rates are up to 40 times higher in Indigenous communities than they are in "white" communities, so I would say that the issue is far more prevalent in that population, and that makes it a much more issue thing to target because there are a myriad of factors which arguably play into the prevalence of domestic violence in those communities.

So whats the excuse for the white men?

It's not about excuses, Upstart, I was simply pointing out that saying "what the fuck Australia" about high domestic violence rates is displaying alarming ignorance as to the cultural disparity and challenges that Australia faces with its indigenous population on an ongoing basis. You cannot compare the UK to Australia/NZ, because they are vastly difference and face very different challenges in dealing with the issue of domestic violence. To ignore that when it's pointed out, and just say "but what about white men?" is ridiculous. What about white men in the UK? I doubt highly the rates of domestic violence by white men in Australia are higher than those of the UK. So what about your white men?

I am an Australian woman living in Australia and I can assure you that these statistics encompass the whole population. While statistically speaking, the Aboriginal population has a higher incidence of domestic violence/abuse/death from domestic violence, the rest of the population is shamefully high also. This is largely due to the culture associated with alcohol and drugs.

Thanks for clarifying justilou

Racecardriver Can I ask what is "the up"? Not heard the phrase before. Googling gets the Michigan Upper Peninsula!

red you sound racist.
This is a men problem. Not an aboriginal problem or a white problem.

Not sure how it's racist of me to acknowledge that there are cultural complexities in the country I live in, which make it a very difficult issue to address. To say that it is a more prevalent issue in Indigenous communities is not racist - it is statistically supported. If you have an issue with me pointing out that this post is lacking context, tough. You can continue looking daft by suggesting that the problems the UK face are indistinct from the issues Australia faces.