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Category: coercive control

  • Gender equality: The ‘drastically missing piece’

    Women’s rising educational achievements, greater workforce participation, stronger economic independence, and growing voices in leadership are all positive steps forward for society. Right?

    Well, maybe not in everyone’s view.

    Optimists among us have reason to believe that steps forward in women’s economic empowerment go hand in hand with greater support for gender equality and more egalitarian attitudes.

    But the reality is starkly growing that encouraging women to be “fearless”, and step into roles that are traditionally the domain of men, is not just a challenging path for many women – it could be a dangerous one.

    There are signs emerging that efforts to support women’s empowerment, and narrow gender gaps in economic outcomes, could be triggering resistance, retaliation and harm.

    According to the Gender Compass Survey conducted in 2023, one in four Australians believe that “when it comes to making things fairer for women, things have gone too far”.

     And one in six Australians believe that women outearning men is a problem for relationships. In other words, gender equality is far from an aspiration. Instead, it has become a threat.

    These impacts of these attitudes are borne out in women’s experiences.

    A recent economic study of Australian couples discovered when a woman begins to earn more than her male partner, her risk of partner violence and emotional abuse increases.

    The rate at which men are killing women, despite a declining long-term trend, accelerated in the past year. In 2021-22, we learnt of the chilling statistic that one woman in Australia had been killed by her current or former male partner every 14 days. In 2022-23, this statistic tragically worsened to one woman every 11 days. This year’s numbers are on a trajectory to worsen further.

    Having a voice in a public space – such as in the media, politics, and online forums – is igniting greater hostility, harassment and bullying against women. Research by the Australian e-Safety Commissioner affirmed “many women face online abuse simply because they have an active online presence as part of their working life”. The result is a silencing of women’s voices and a reversal of empowerment:

    “Many of these women took a backward step professionally, avoided leadership positions, … retreated from online spaces and lowered their public profiles because of online abuse.”

    Australian schoolgirls are sitting in classrooms now knowing their male peers are rating them in a sexually objectifying and violating way, and circulating this sickening information for all to see on social media. Instances recently surfaced at Yarra Valley Private School in Victoria and Foxwell State Secondary School in Queensland. These boys’ behaviours are in the same vein as the aggressively intimidating “chant” about the treatment of women that schoolboys from St Kevins College proudly belted out onboard a public tram in Melbourne.

    These are dynamics experienced by women and girls globally.

    In countries where the links between women’s empowerment and violence have been closely researched (including India, Pacific Island nations, Rwanda and Cameroon) efforts to boost women’s financial independence – such as microfinancing for women to start their own businesses and initiatives to encourage more women into education and paid work – have been found to trigger a higher rates of intimate partner violence and assault against women in the wider community.

    It’s even happening countries considered to be global front-runners in gender equality.

    Coined the “Nordic Paradox”, Norway’s world-leading outcomes on women’s economic advancement are at odds with its high rates of intimate partner violence relative to other European nations. In Sweden, improvements in women’s workforce participation and earnings have been linked to higher rates of assaults against women and destructive behaviour by men.

    These retaliatory backlash effects are pushing us in the opposite direction to the liberating outcomes that women’s economic progress is meant to bring.

    Businessman walking on arrow walking in the opposite direction to group businessmen.

    Picture: Adobe Stock 

    What explains these attitudes?

    Research suggests that a big part of it is men feeling left out while women’s opportunities expand. According to the Gender Compass survey, over one in three Australians believe that “men have been forgotten in the struggle for gender equality”.

    Men’s responses to gender equality initiatives reveals the sense of injustice and unfairness that some men report experiencing. For example, when asked about equality, this male participant in this US survey expressed: “I am worried that diversity efforts going too far become discrimination by another name.”

    We need to treat these feelings and responses from men seriously if we are to make any progress on gender equality.

    Psychological research suggests that men’s resistance to equality initiatives can stem from feeling that their own opportunities to achieve their pursuits and fulfil their purpose, are being stripped away.

    These responses can help us to understand how gender equality initiatives – by breaking down the gender norms that prescribe distinct roles and traits for men and women – can leave some men unsure of their role and identity, or searching for other ways to assert it.

    The traditional “male-breadwinner/female-caregiver” norm of society has long prescribed a role for men in leadership, decision-making, control and authority. And an expectation to hold back their emotions and fears.

    These cultural norms still strongly shape people’s ideas about the behaviours and roles men are expected to take in their relationships, household, workplace and community. Popular culture, sports and entertainment media all still convey a clear image of what it is “to be a man”.

    Gender equality initiatives can, for some men, destabilise their opportunity to fulfil this role and demonstrate their sense of masculinity. Their acts of violence, intimidation and dominance over women can be interpreted as their attempt to reclaim a sense of masculine identity and assert control.

    Gender equality means fearlessness among all

    This all points to a drastically missing piece in our approach to gender equality: If we are going to economically empower women, we need to nurture a society that is not afraid of women being empowered.

    If we’re going to tell women to be “fearless”, we need for men to not fear women being their equal.

    We need for men to admit to their fears. And learn not to fear the changes that would make our world a more gender equitable place.

    Gender equality policy, understandably, has focused intensively on women, especially to support women in crisis circumstances. This year’s Budget brought together an extensive set of measures to address women’s safety, the centrepiece of which was $925.2 million for the Leaving Violence Program.

    These are vitally important initiatives that form part of the Australian Government’s National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children. This sits alongside the government’s new national strategy for gender equality, titled Working for Women.

    But the next chapters of gender equality will need policy, and our mindset, to do more.

    Firstly, policy has not focused enough on how men fit into the gender equality picture.

    This is where we need to expand opportunities for men and boys to step into non-traditional roles. To be more involved in caregiving. To find fulfilment and purpose beyond the narrow script of authority and power.

    This is why the expansion of paid parental leave policy to fathers – as a lever to dismantle traditional norms and legitimises caregiving among men – is crucial.

    There is a vital need to invest more in initiatives to support men and boys to develop healthy, holistic ideals of masculinity and support men in care.  Excellent programs exist, such as The Man Box, The Fathering Project and Equimundo, and Australia has expert researchers informing these issues such as the work of Professor Michael Flood. But these healthy masculinities initiatives are mostly small-scale in Australia and reliant on philanthropic or community funding. The opportunity, and desperate need, is there for governments to uplift and upscale.

    By awakening men and boys to many other wider ways to achieve purpose and fulfilment, beyond the narrow traditional template of masculinity, women’s economic empowerment becomes less of competitive threat.

    These initiatives are also vital investment in men’s health and wellbeing. Research published by Our Watch has found that men who ascribe to traditional ideals of masculinity have worse rates of depression, suicide, risk-taking behaviours and poor mental health.

    The announcement by the Victorian Government to create a Parliamentary position dedicated to supporting men’s and boys’ behavioural change exemplifies a government that is brave enough to embrace this approach.

    The other big limitation on progress is the funding amount. Many people in the women’s safety sector attest that the dollars – a total spend of $3.4 billion on women’s safety since the Albanese Government came into office – fall short of the magnitude of the crisis.

    Contrast this, for instance, to the additional $50.3 billion allocated to defence over the next decade. This will see defence spending reach an annual $100 billion by 2033-34.

    This is where a gender lens matters

    Conventional policy thinking considers “defence” a matter of safeguarding our national borders against foreign threats.

    Statistically for a woman in Australia, it is not an enemy on the national border who poses the greatest threat to her wellbeing, freedom and life. It’s more likely to be the stalkers, trolls, abusers, former or current partners, the men looking to intimidate and claim control, who have intruded into her neighbourhood, her streets, her phone, her bedroom, her own home, her own private space.

    Defence does not come in the form of long-range missiles. It comes from extinguishing the threats that loom on home ground.

    Like the Defence Budget, eliminating men’s violence against women needs be elevated to non-negotiable priority. Metrics on women’s safety – and, for that matter, men’s suicide rates – need to sit firmly alongside other benchmark measures of national prosperity such as economic growth.

    Australians are now counting on our governments, community leaders, and men themelves, to be fearless in this next step.

    • This is an extended version of the article that was first published by Financy in its Finance Women’s Index March 2024 Edition “Fearless For All”. Read the original here.

    Please note: picture at top is a stock image

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    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • Tackling the undercurrents of coercive control on stage

    If you’re lucky enough to live in Canberra, there’s a new play you need to catch. It’s called, After Rebecca. Critics are describing the work – which tackles all the undercurrents and complexities of coercive control – as “Beautiful and raw and heartbreaking.” 

    The work tells the story of an unnamed woman who is swept away by handsome millionaire who stars in a reality TV show. He takes her to a remote outback property. It’s there she encounters an unsettling undercurrent of violence, gaslighting and complicit bystanders.

    I caught up with the play’s creator, Emma Gibson, to have a chat. 

    Firstly, tell us who you are.

    I’m a playwright, writer and dramaturg based in Melbourne now, but spent almost half my life living in Canberra. I moved to Canberra to study at ANU and then stayed. I fell into playwriting accidentally. I was a keen writer and an amateur actor and it took me an embarrassingly long time to combine the two.

    What inspired you to write “After Rebecca”? 

    I’m a big reader and was raised on the classics. Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca is (was?!) one of my favourite books, alongside Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre – so I am drawn to atmospheric, gothic novels.

    In 2020, I was working on a play that also draws heavily on the gothic and did a lot of reading. I re-read Rebecca and was really struck by how problematic the ending is – I won’t spoil it in case you haven’t read the book, and you don’t need to have read it to see the play. The hook for me though, was the idea that if the book had been written today, it could not have ended the same way.

    Indeed, Hitchcock did change the ending in his film adaptation. (Let’s not even go into the hugely problematic Netflix adaptation. The idea started brewing from there – what would a contemporary, Australian post #metoo version of that story look like? As it was 2020/2021 and I was living in Melbourne, I was initially thinking about developing an audio play or podcast, rather than live theatre. But as I got further into the story, I knew I wanted it to be a solo performance to allow the central character the space to speak – something she’s never had before in her own story, but also something that is often denied when women attempt to speak up.

    A mentor once said to me that all playwrights have one story that they keep telling over and over, trying to get right – and I think that’s true of me. Almost all of my plays could be described as being about a woman who is trapped in one way or another. Where they differ is what happens next.

    Sometimes it’s hard to keep the issue of domestic abuse on the agenda. Why did you want to tackle this issue in the form of a play?

    My day job is writing speeches on gender equality, so it’s a challenge that I grapple with regularly – how can we engage with people who may be resistant to these types of conversations? How can we educate without being didactic and bring people into these conversations?

    Storytelling is powerful here, and I wanted to consciously bring together my skills and knowledge from my creative and professional careers to use theatre for social change – or at least as a starting point for conversations in the foyer afterwards!

    Having a relatable character we connect with and who takes us on a journey provides an invitation for people to engage with this issue – in a way they may not otherwise.

    To outsiders, coercive control can be difficult to capture. Some people can’t understand why it’s so insidious and dangerous. How have you tried to depict it? 

    It’s absolutely insidious. I’d read Jess Hill’s book “See What You Made Me Do” and as part of the research for the play, I listened to her podcast, The Trap. That really made me think about how coercive control escalates. In drama, you also want escalating tension, so I wrote out a list for myself of red flags and how I could show them in the narrative in a way that built over time.

    Separately, I’d looked at the key plot points in the original novel, and realised there’s a clear story of coercion – beginning with love bombing and then isolation. My intention is that it works on two levels – that the plot is propelled forward, but also people can identify red flags, even if retrospectively. This helps to make it visible – I sometimes joke that we could do a show and give the audience actual red flags to wave when something coercive occurs.

    Why is your main character someone whose name no one remembers? Is this an attempt to convey “every woman?”

    Daphne Du Maurier’s book deliberately doesn’t name the narrator, which both conveys that she is an “every woman” character, but also strips her of her identity – she is inconsequential until she marries Maximillian De Winter and becomes the second Mrs De Winter (and even in wearing the same name, fears she will never live up to her predecessor, Rebecca, who died under mysterious circumstances). I could have given the Narrator a name, but her namelessness not only conjures the idea of the every woman, but also the way women have been historically (and still are) overlooked.

    In contrast, the man in this story is someone glamorous and larger than life. He partakes in love bombing. What does this show?

    Ultimately, this is about power and systems of oppression. The man in this story not only benefits from male privilege, but comes from a rich family, had a private education, and has influential connections. In contrast, the woman in the story was raised by a single mother in a low socioeconomic status environment, where no one in her family has gone on to higher education – which was my own background. There’s a sense sometimes that normal rules don’t apply for those with power – that they can escape accountability.

    I also really wanted to challenge the ‘happily ever after’ romance narratives, and for that reason, the play begins on the set of a reality TV show, where ‘Max’ is one of the eligible bachelors. While a guilty pleasure for some of my friends, I’ve never really been swept up in those types of reality TV shows – with grand romantic gestures that are selling a fantasy but are far from realistic. There’s also this sense of elevating the leading men to these idealised characters, where they are valorised for their success (usually being rich and/or good looking) and often fed lines (or roses) they wouldn’t come up with on their own.

    Tell us about the setting (the outback) and undercurrents in this play.

    I love writing about place and evoking place as a character – in fact, I have a MA in Place Writing, which is quite a niche degree. The original novel is set in a manor house in the English countryside. I wanted to amplify the idea of isolation – a tactic often employed by those who use abuse – and give it a uniquely Australian setting, so I chose a remote cattle station in the Australian outback.

    Not only is there a harsh landscape and extreme isolation (some cattle stations are bigger than European countries) but they can be quite unwelcoming environments for women, as they can often be heavily male dominated, and with outdated gender stereotypes around men’s work and women’s work. The setting is evoked through sound design by Daniel McCusker, which really creates a sense of place as another character. The score – and the use of silence at certain points – helps convey mood and at times, tension.

    What can you tell us about Michelle Cooper and how she handles this complex work? 

    Michelle Cooper is a Canberra born and bred actor and the solo performer of the show. She is an absolute powerhouse. I wrote this script with her in mind – she signed on to the project with just the first couple of pages and a pitch from me, which was a leap of faith I’m very grateful for. The show is a thriller, so it’s a high-octane show for Michelle and she holds the audience in rapt attention for 65 minutes, which is no mean feat. It’s also challenging content to work with every day.

    We were very intentional in taking a collaborative, feminist and trauma-informed approach to developing the show as it contains challenging content.

    As Michelle said early in the process, ‘the body doesn’t know the difference between performing trauma and actual trauma’ so at the end of the show she’s holding a lot of physical tension, which is why she usually dances it off at the curtain call. We’ve also made self care a priority. Rehearsals and producing a show can be exhausting or stressful, but we really focused on accessibility and accommodating our disability/health needs (I have Long Covid and we have neurodivergence in the team) so I’m really proud of our approach here.

    Michelle Cooper performing in After Rebecca.

    Michelle Cooper performing in After Rebecca. Picture: Supplied

    I also wanted us to have equal share in the creation, so Michelle and I co-direct the show. Daniel McCusker is our production designer and also provided additional perspective throughout rehearsals and is now keeping it all on track as stage manager too, including supporting Michelle (or as I like to call it, with tongue firmly in cheek ‘wrangling the talent’).

    What do you hope audiences take from the show? How has it been received so far?

    We really want this to be a starting point for conversations and for people to think about kinds of behaviour that they might observe in their own relationships and those of loved ones that could be red flags. As well as that, it’s just a powerful piece of theatre. I’ve been blown away with all the positive feedback we’ve received from audiences. On our opening night at Adelaide Fringe, we got a 5-star review, and it was so affirming to read the reviewer’s insights and see that he was clearly picking up on our intentions with the piece.

    As a reformed reviewer, I can tell you that’s a rare and special thing! We have also had a phenomenal response from audience members – many have stopped to chat afterwards, while others have posted on social media or the Adelaide Fringe feed. At a recent show, an older man came up to me afterwards to say ‘Bloody brilliant’. Then as he left the theatre, he turned to his companions and said ‘Wow.’ I wish I could have heard the conversation that followed. An audience member from our development season at La Mama Theatre also bumped into Michelle three months later and said they were still thinking about the show! You can see the ‘Fringe feed’ audience contributed reviews here. 

    Anything else you want to say? 

    When we discussed bringing Daniel on board as our designer, I had initially wanted an all-women team, but as Michelle rightly pointed out, we need men engaging with this content too. She said “Fundamentally, a man supporting women to tell this story has a beautiful echo of exactly how we need to work in this space, discussing these topics.”

    Some of the most insightful feedback we’ve received (and our best review) are from men too, which I think is really testament to the importance of bringing people of all genders into this space.

    While this particular story focuses on a woman’s experience of violence perpetrated by an intimate partner, we’ve been reminded all too recently that men are also at risk of violence or death at the hands of an intimate partner.

    After Rebecca is on in Canberra from March 19-23.

    • Picture at top: Michelle Cooper performing in After Rebecca. Image: Supplied

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  • Data breaches can be extraordinarily dangerous for victim-survivors

    A suite of recent cybersecurity data breaches highlight an urgent need to overhaul how companies and government agencies handle our data. But these incidents pose particular risks to victim-survivors of domestic violence.

    In fact, authorities across Australia and the United Kingdom are raising concerns about how privacy breaches have endangered these customers.

    The onus is on service providers – such as utilities, telcos, internet companies and government agencies – to ensure they don’t risk the safety of their most vulnerable customers by being careless with their data.

    A suite of incidents

    Earlier this year, the UK Information Commissioner reported it had reprimanded seven organisations since June 2022 for privacy breaches affecting victims of domestic abuse.

    These included organisations revealing the safe addresses of the victims to their alleged abuser. In one case, a family had to be moved immediately to emergency accommodation.

    In another case, an organisation disclosed the home address of two children to their birth father (who was in prison for raping their mother).

    The UK Information Commissioner has called for better training and processes. This includes regular verification of contact information and securing data against unauthorised access.

    In 2021, the Australian Information Commissioner and Privacy Commissioner took action against Services Australia for disclosing a victim-survivor’s new address to her former partner.

    The commissioner ordered a written apology and a A$19,980 compensation payment. It also ordered an independent audit of how Services Australia updates contact details for separating couples with shared records.

    An earlier case involved a telecommunications company and the publisher of a public directory.

    The commissioner ordered them each to pay $20,000 to a victim of domestic violence whose details were made public, which jeopardised her safety.

    More recently, the Energy and Water Ombudsman Victoria reported a case where an electricity provider inadvertently provided a woman’s new address to her ex-partner. The woman had to buy security cameras for protection. The company has since revised its procedures.

    The Energy and Water Ombudsman Victoria has also reviewed complaints received in 2022-23 related to domestic violence. These include failing to flag accounts of victims who disclosed abuse, as well as potentially unsafe consumer automation and data governance processes.

    The Victorian Essential Services Commission accepted a court-enforceable undertaking from a water company that it would improve processes after allegations its actions put customers affected by family violence at risk.

    The commission found the company failed to adequately protect the personal information of two separate customers in 2021 and 2022, by sending correspondence with their personal information to the wrong addresses.

    In both cases, the customer had not disclosed their experience of domestic violence. Nevertheless, the regulator noted these “erroneous information disclosures put these customers at risk of harm”.

    Australia’s Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman received about 300 complaints involving domestic violence in 2022-23, with almost two-thirds relating to mobile phones.

    Complaints included instances of telcos disclosing the addresses of victim-survivors to perpetrators or of frontline staff not believing victim-survivors. There were also cases of telcos insisting a consumer experiencing family violence contact the perpetrator of family violence. The report noted:

    For example, one person was asked by her telco to bring her abusive ex-partner into a store to change her number to her new account. We’ve also had complaints about telcos disconnecting the services of a consumer experiencing family violence – sometimes at the request of the account holder who is the perpetrator of the violence – despite access to those services being critical to the consumer staying safe.

    The Australian Financial Complaints Authority resolved more than 500 complaints from people experiencing domestic and family violence in 2021-22, including those related to privacy breaches.

    Change is slowly under way

    In May, new national rules came into force to provide better protection and support to energy customers experiencing domestic violence.

    These rules mandate retailers prioritise customer safety and protect their personal information. This includes account security measures to prevent perpetrators from accessing victim-survivors’ sensitive data.

    They also prohibit the disclosure of information without consent. In issuing its rules, the Australian Energy Markets Commission noted the heightened risk of partner homicides following separations.

    The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman has called for mandatory, uniform and enforceable rules. The current voluntary industry code and guidelines fall short in protecting phone and internet customers experiencing domestic violence.

    New rules should include training, policies and recognition of violence as a cause of payment difficulties. They should also factor in how service suspension or disconnection affects victim-survivors.

    The Australian Information and Privacy Commissioner said last year:

    Sadly, we continue to receive cases of improper disclosure of personal information off line by businesses to ex partners who target women in family disputes and domestic violence. All of these issues reinforce the need for privacy by design.

    In its response to a review of the Privacy Act, the government has agreed the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner should help develop guidance to reduce risk to customers.

    We must work harder to ensure data and privacy breaches do not leave victim-survivors of domestic violence at greater risk from perpetrators.

    The National Sexual Assault, Family and Domestic Violence Counselling Line – 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for any Australian who has experienced, or is at risk of, family and domestic violence and/or sexual assault.The Conversation

     

     

    Please note: Picture at top is a stock photo. Used under the Pixabay Content License. Credit: antonynjoro

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  • DV literacy: a necessary tool in combatting coercive control

    The following article is a condensed version of a research paper delivered at the ANU Gender Institute symposium on ‘Understanding Coercive Control’ that explored coercive control from multiple inter-disciplinary perspectives.

    I deal with issues of coercive control almost daily. In my role as a family lawyer I’ve “seen a lot”: needless to say, I was heartened by the recent legislative changes criminalising coercive control in NSW (see: Crimes Legislation Amendment (Coercive Control) Act 2022 (NSW)).  While new amendments to the Crimes Act 1900 (NSW) have created an offence of coercive control, the family law system has been dealing with (or trying to deal with) coercive control for some time.

    There is no overarching definition of “coercive control” in the Australian jurisdiction. The Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia (FCFCA), in their Best Practice Guidelines, define coercive control as: “an ongoing pattern of use of threat, force, emotional abuse and other coercive means to unilaterally dominate a person and induce fear, submission and compliance in them”.

    Professor Evan Stark, American sociologist and forensic social worker, developed the concept of “coercive control.” He suggests it is “a pattern of domination that includes tactics to isolate, degrade, exploit and control” on the part of the perpetrator; it is a “liberty crime” rather than a “crime of assault”.

    The Australian family court system recognises coercive control as a serious form of domestic violence. This is reflected in the case law as well as in the legislation (that is, the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth) (Family law Act)). In the matter of Morton & Beatty[2022] the Court commented that: “Coercive control, as a nebulous sub-species of conduct within the meaning of family violence, is plainly anticipated by the words of s 4AB(1).” Section “4AB(1)” of the Family Law Act defines “family violence”.

    It also sets out examples of behaviour that may constitute coercive controlling behaviour such as “repeated derogatory taunts” to “unreasonably withholding financial support” to preventing a person from “making or keeping connections with…family, friends or culture.” Whilst the Family Law Act sets out some guidance as to what constitutes coercive control, it does not strictly define or limit what it may entail.

    As such, what will be determined as coercive and controlling behaviour will turn on the evidence before the Court and the context in which events take place (see, e.g. Carter & Wilson [2023] FEdCFamC1A 9).  Alas, herein lies a significant problem which may impact prosecuting, and indeed identifying, coercive control: that is, the evidence (or lack of evidence).

    While the Court has long accepted “where domestic violence occurs in a family it frequently occurs in circumstances where there are no witnesses other than the parties to the marriage, and possibly their children…” and as such, does not necessarily require “corroborative evidence from a third party or a document or an admission” (see, e.g. Amador & Amador (2009) 43 Fam LR 268), it nevertheless can be difficult for victims, in an adversarial court system, to prosecute their case in circumstances where there is no corroborating evidence and the evidence is in affidavit form only, consisting of “he said – she said” allegations, and where perpetrators may flatly deny any allegations of family violence.

    In my time as a family lawyer, I have seen several cases where victims of coercive control have been left helpless and re-traumatised.  Coercive control can be “missed” or underplayed by actors working in the Court system (including the judges, lawyers, psychologists, police and others).

    This “misidentifying” of coercive control can occur for several reasons; including, but not limited to:

    • there may be fear of the perpetrator, or legal institutions themselves, which may, in turn, lead to a lack of engagement by the victim or a partial engagement where a client may not be forthcoming with their instructions, possibly fearful of potential ramifications;
    • cultural (mis)understandings of the legal system (including language barriers). It is known that women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds are less likely to report domestic violence;
    • a lack of support and/or isolation: the victim may be disinclined to tell his or her story in circumstances where he or she does not have family (or other) support with “nowhere to go”;
    • poor legal representation or no legal representation: a self-represented litigant may not fully understand the nuances of presenting evidence to the Court, and indeed, poor legal representation, where a legal practitioner is not attuned to the nuances of domestic violence, may have a similar effect – this risks a victim not setting out his or her version of events and evidence adequately prosecuting his or her case;
    • mental health: victims may be suffering from mental health issues, including situational pressures which impact on their ability to engage with the legal system and supports.

    The legal system is not perfect. Although the FCFCA, to their credit, have developed protocols around early identification of domestic violence and specialised case management; aimed at mitigating the risk of harm to parents and children; and minimising systems abuse. Recent legislative changes removing the cross examination of victims by alleged perpetrators has also come into force (see section 102NA, Family Law Act). But, is more needed?

    Cases involving coercive control require the legal actors – the lawyers, the family consultants, the judges – to be seriously attuned, and literate, to the nuances of this type of domestic and family violence.

     

     

     

    Alexandra presenters her paper at the ANU Gender Institute symposium on ‘Understanding Coercive Control’ that explored coercive control from multiple inter-disciplinary perspectives.

    Alexandra presents her paper at the ANU Gender Institute symposium on ‘Understanding Coercive Control’. Picture: Supplied

    Legal academic, Professor Heather Douglas has suggested the possibility that “increased funding and training of police, lawyers and judges will afford better outcomes than law reform.” If coercive control cannot be identified and thoughtfully managed by “legal actors”, in a timely way, this, as we have seen can have dire consequences for victims and their families (see, e.g. the Edwards and Clarke coronial inquests).

    Repeated (and regularly updated) training is needed in this sphere; training where practitioners meaningfully engage with the concepts of domestic and family violence in order to give them the best tools possible to identify coercive and controlling behaviours, support victims, and in turn run their legal case appropriately.

    Coercive control has been shown to be a prevalent precursor to serious and often deadly incidents of family and domestic violence.  It is right that a spotlight be shown upon this insidious form of domestic violence.  The recent criminalisation of coercive control in NSW will, if nothing else, surely bring awareness to this issue. What sort of practical impact it will have, we will have to wait and see.

    • Please note: image at top is a stock illustration 

     

     

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  • Coercive control is not a new phenomenon

    The following article is a condensed version of a research paper delivered at the ANU Gender Institute symposium on ‘Understanding Coercive Control’ that explored coercive control from multiple inter-disciplinary perspectives.

    The issue of coercive control – what is it, how do we recognise it, should it be criminalised – has been subjected to significant media and public attention in the last few years. This, in conjunction with the fact that the term ‘coercive control’ was only coined in 2007 by sociologist Evan Stark, contributes to the assumption that coercive control is a new phenomenon.

    However, the patterns of behaviours designed to intimate, control, and isolate an individual that Stark classifies as coercive control have been a feature of intimate partnerships since at least the nineteenth century.

    Notably, it was as early as the 1880s that these behaviours were beginning to be criticised and recognised as unacceptable masculine marital behaviours, or as abuses of patriarchal authority.  Through law and literature, wives and women were claiming that a husband’s unquestioned control over all aspects of his wife’s life was an unacceptable abuse of patriarchal power – with some divorce court judges supporting this assertion.

    The 1886 novel of Rosa Praed, The Right Honourable, is an enlightening example of how colonial women used literature to critique domestic violence in all its forms, including the non-physical and especially patterns of behaviour that would now be termed coercive control. Despite Praed being Australia’s most popular and well-known female author during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, renowned for her damning portrayals and critiques of marriage, few of her books have been reprinted since their original publication.

    The Right Honourable is no exception to this – despite being reprinted multiple times throughout the 1880s and 1890s, it has been out of print for a century.

    Zoe Smith believes the 1886 novel of Rosa Praed, The Right Honourable, is an enlightening example of how colonial women used literature to critique domestic violence in all its forms. Picture: Supplied

    Zoe Smith believes the 1886 novel of Rosa Praed, The Right Honourable, is an enlightening example of how colonial women used literature to critique domestic violence in all its forms. Picture: Supplied

    In The Right Honourable, Crichton Kenway is introduced as a man ‘who seemed fairly fitted to be a hero of romance of the conventional order. He was tall, upright, good-looking, well dressed, and had an air of breeding’. A politician who moves in all the right social circles, he and his Australian wife Koorali seemingly have the perfect relationship. However, Crichton’s marital behaviour means that the marriage between himself and Koorali is clearly no ‘romance of the conventional order’.

    The marriage is characterised by psychological and verbal abuse directed towards Koorali, with Crichton’s behaviour comprehensible to the modern reader as behaviour we would now term ‘coercive control’ and ‘gaslighting’.

    Crichton tells Koorali how to dress, he regulates her behaviour at balls to ensure she is constantly working to his advantage in using her feminine wiles to charm his superiors, he reads her letters over her shoulder, he criticises and monitors her expenditure. All this occurs in conjuction with his verbal abuse designed to belittle and demean her, ‘crude, hard things in a way that hurt her like a blow’.

    As Praed describes, ‘Crichton, though never absolutely rude or rough, had a rasping, overbearing manner at home – a way of harking upon mean detail, of fault-finding, and of attributing the lowest motive to every action, which often caused Koorali to wince, destroying her spontaneity and self-confidence, and making her timid and reserved, and less and less a thing of flesh and blood’. Resultantly, Koorali ‘began to believe that she was really stupid and wanting in common sense, as Crichton so often told her, and that he had reasonable cause for complaint’.

    Notably, these behaviours are the most prominent form of domestic violence depicted by Praed in the novel, and are judged by Praed and other characters in the text, both male and female, to be behaviours beyond reasonable patriarchal authority. It is insinuated that this form of abuse is inherently linked to other forms of domestic violence – later in the text when Koorali states that she will leave Crichton as a result of his controlling behaviour, he threatens her with legally sanctioned marital rape which is coupled with the first explicit hinting of an act of physical violence – ‘he made a gesture as if he would have fell upon her and throttled her there and then’.

    The acts of verbal and psychological abuse, and what we would consider coercive control, are the key feature Praed sought to emphasise in her critique of masculine marital behaviour – her fiction, situated in the romance and domestic realist genres, generally sought to highlight the myriad forms of abuse faced by wives in colonial marriages.

    These patterns of behaviours were not a new form of unacceptable marital masculine behaviour for colonial female authors such as Praed to criticise. From 1880, Ada Cambridge, a popular writer of serial fiction in Australian newspapers, detailed the systematic regime of control and abuse wives could suffer at the hands of husbands in her fiction. In Cambridge’s ‘Dinah’, serialised in The Australasian from 1879-1880, Dinah’s husband subjects her to a regime of humiliation, economic control, and psychological abuse that would be recognised today as coercive control: ‘he watched over her expenditure with a suspicious watchfulness that pounced upon every sixpence wasted; and if she tore her dress, or knocked over a wineglass, he made her life a burden to her for hours afterwards’.

    As the narrator describes of Dinah’s experiences: ‘the humiliations to which she was subjected were petty, indeed, from an outside point of view – hints and slights and sneers that made no noise or scandal but they were nonetheless the cruellest that the ingenuity of an aggrieved husband, who was at once bully and coward, could devise’.

    In a similar state of marital relations to Koorali and Crichton, the psychological abuse and controlling behaviour perpetrated by Dinah’s husband is the only instance of domestic violence that Cambridge explicitly details, aside from hinting at an occasion of marital rape.

    By the mid 1880s then, there was certainly a growing awareness and criticism of the myriad of forms that domestic violence could take in marriages. The question of what to call this spectrum of behaviours was a difficult one – whilst ‘wife-beating’ was still the most popular term, connoting images of working class men perpetrating physical violence, courts and newspapers focused more broadly on what they termed ‘cruelty’, a legal term subjective to the discretion of individual judges. Acts that we would now consider to be economic violence, psychological abuse, and coercive control were either constructed as ‘mental cruelty’ or as constituting a broader ‘system of tyranny’ that a husband could subject his wife to.

    By 1890, the New South Wales case of Hume v Hume, presided over by Justice Windeyer, court cemented ‘mental cruelty’ and a husband’s ‘system of tyranny’ as a form of domestic violence cruel enough to warrant a wife a divorce without also declaring physical violence. Edward Hume had ‘cut his wife Ellen off from the intercourse of her friends; refused to speak to her for days and weeks, except in orders’ coupled with oaths and abuse, and refused to let her leave their property’.

    Yet, coercive control alone or accompanied by the ‘occasional’ blow was not enough to break the sacred bonds of marriage across the whole of Australia – Windeyer was the exception amongst his fellow judges in Victoria and Queensland. Dismissing a 1912 case in Queensland in which William Tredea had isolated his wife Laura on a rural pastoral station and controlled the amount of time she spent with her children, Justice Shand declared he had to be ‘careful not to go beyond the limits of legal cruelty’ and to not overly restrict a husband’s understood household authority.

    A husband’s ‘system of tyranny’ could therefore and still was tolerated and upheld, despite growing awareness and criticism, and it wouldn’t be until the 1970s that this broader pattern of abusive behaviours would again be brought to public attention by feminists criticising domestic violence more broadly. The establishment of women’s refuges such as Elsie in 1974, alongside the testimonies of wives to the Royal Commission on Human Relationships published in 1977, put a spotlight on domestic violence, with acts of coercive control given renewed public and feminist attention. See Michelle Arrow’s The Seventies for more on this.

    Yet, it has taken until 2007 for the pattern of behaviours to be given an official name and definition, and it is only in the last few years, in the wake of cases such as the murder of Hannah Clarke and the subsequent relevant of the nature of her husband’s abusive and controlling behaviour.

    Why? That I can’t answer, but it is high time that we acknowledge that coercive control in Australia has been the subject of feminist and legal attention for 150 years.

    As for what historians like myself can contribute to current discussions by historicising coercive control, openly acknowledging the cultural discourses and acceptability around contemporary forms of violence, and judging historical violence by current standards, allows for a revitalised and more complex understanding of domestic violence in the past – an understanding that is vital in thinking about domestic violence and coercive control in Australia and Australian society more broadly if we ever going to deal with our ‘national problem’.

    The post Coercive control is not a new phenomenon appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • Anti-domestic violence group warns proposed coercive control laws could escalate abuse

    NSW women’s organisations are calling for improvements to a coercive control bill so that it helps combat the behaviour rather than escalate it. Paul Gregoire reports.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Australia’s second pandemic — gendered violence

    A second pandemic is lurking in the shadows of COVID-19 — the pandemic of femicide and violence against women. Markela Panegyres looks at how the COVID-19 pandemic is fuelling an upsurge of domestic and family violence, including coercive control and sexual violence.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.