Lilith

Lilith 16: 2007

The Re-conceptualisation of Domestic Violence Under the Howard Government Since 1996

Amy Webster

Since its election in 1996, the Liberal Coalition Federal Government led by John Howard has engaged significantly with the issue of domestic violence in Australia. Throughout its administration the Howard government has distanced itself from the feminist structural approach to domestic violence, which had been widely legitimised and accepted by 1996: it de-gendered policies and the language of domestic violence and rejuvenated and extended the outdated ‘cycle of violence’ approach to understanding domestic violence. The Howard government’s re-conceptualisation of domestic violence intentionally avoids recognition of the ‘gender dynamic’ that is intrinsic to domestic violence in Australia. Recognising the gender dynamic to such violence is crucial, for as Jocelynne Scutt propounds in Women and the Law, while sometimes men are hit by their wives, ‘the level and frequency of sexual, physical and psychological violence against women in the domestic setting far exceeds violence inflicted on men’.1 The gender dynamic of domestic violence results directly from the broader oppression and inequality experienced by women in Australian society.

Prior to the Howard Re-conceptualisation: The Feminist Structural Analysis of Domestic Violence

While significant public and professional interest in the issue of domestic violence can be traced to before the First World War, debates around the appropriate way to understand the causes of domestic violence in Australia became most pronounced, controversial and sophisticated subsequent to the Women’s Liberation Movement which emerged in Australia during the 1970s. Feminist discourse on domestic violence in this period shifted popular, policy and theoretical emphases away from women’s supposed predisposition to victimisation and the public/private dichotomy towards a gender-based, structural analysis.2 During the early 1980s feminist advocates were able to work, to some degree, with the government in addressing the issue of domestic violence. In 1981 a committee was convened by the department of Premier and Cabinet to examine problems associated with domestic violence,3 resulting in the publication of Criminal Assault In The Home in 1985.4 The text is significant because it is the first attempt by feminists and the government to define the nature, prevalence and cause of domestic violence in Australia. It recognises the gender dynamic inherent to domestic violence in Australia:

Myth 4: “Men Are Also The Victims of Domestic Violence”: The victims of domestic violence are almost exclusively female. In part this is due to differences in the socialisation of men and women; men are trained to be aggressive and dominant whilst women are reared to be passive. It is also due to the relative economic and social powerlessness of women.5

This text identifies the two key elements of the feminist conceptualisation of domestic violence, an approach widely accepted prior to the Howard government’s re-conceptualisation: firstly, the fact that, in the vast majority of cases, men are the perpetrators of domestic violence and women are the victims; secondly, that this inequality results from broader inequalities experienced by women, and benefited from by men, in Australian society. These inequalities stem from the patriarchal structuring of society and manifest in the distinct and ongoing economic, social and political oppression and disadvantage of women.6

The Extent of Domestic Violence in Australia under Howard

Since 2003 the United Nations and Amnesty International have confirmed that domestic violence is the leading contributor to death, disability and illness for women aged between 15-44 years of age in Australia.7 Men perpetrate over ninety percent of intimate partner violence against women, and it is modestly estimated that ten times as many Australian women experience domestic violence from the age of fifteen than men.8 The vast majority of all female homicide victims are killed by their intimate partners in their homes, and these murders account for over a third of all homicides committed in Australia.9 Yet, as Anne Summers points out, a general disregard for domestic violence in Australia means that regular statistics on its occurrence are not collected by the government nor by the police: ‘There are guesstimates and estimates and scattered police records and hospital records but, basically, no one has a clue how many women are having the shit beaten out of them night after night in their homes in this country’.10 As the United Nations noted in 1997, there is an even greater absence of data concerning violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women.11 Despite the lack of official and regularly updated national databases on domestic violence, it is known that during the late 1990s around thirty thousand restraining (now intervention) orders were taken out per year, and, in the nine years to June 1998, 701 Australian women were killed by their intimate partners or other family member: seventy-seven women a year, over six every month, more than one a week.12 There were at least four-hundred thousand victims of domestic violence in 2002.13 Shockingly, the fact remains that in Australia 50 per cent of women killed in domestic homicides are killed while leaving their artners or after having left.14 The conviction rate for such violence is 2-4 per cent.15 The economic cost to Australian businesses and corporations, though besides the point in many ways, is estimated at one and a half billion dollars annually.16 The disturbing figures on the occurrence of domestic violence in Australia illuminate that, at the time the Howard government came into office in 1996, domestic violence was a serious problem, it was clearly gendered and the conviction rates for male perpetrators were low.

Howard Ideology and Domestic Violence

The ideological context for the changes that have taken place in policy, expenditure and, most relevantly, representations of domestic violence by the Howard government relates directly to the government’s fundamentally neo-liberal, politically and socially conservative make-up. Two sub-trends are notable in the government’s treatment of domestic violence: its extremely conservative ‘family values’ identification and agenda, and its anti-political correctness stance.17

The neo-liberal perspective of the Howard government is incompatible with structurally-based or feminist analyses of the cause or cure for domestic violence. John MacDonald has studied this conflict in relation to the provision of services to victims of domestic violence;18 he anticipates that the silencing of structural analyses of domestic violence will depoliticise and ‘clinicalise’ the provision of support for its victims.19

The Howard government’s ‘family values’ or ‘pro-family’ stance has directly informed its conceptualisation of domestic violence over the past ten years. At the centre of the government’s ‘white picket fence’, socially conservative family values agenda is a specific model of the functioning Australian family. This model is limited to a heterosexual married couple, with the woman as primary carer for the children and the man as the primary, if not sole, breadwinner for the family. As expressed by Anne Summers in The End of Equality, under the Howard government, ‘women’s equality is no longer on the agenda. Instead, all the talk is of families, and of women’s role as mothers, actual or potential’.20

The ‘Breeding Creed’, as it is understood by Summers, was partially motivated by the Howard government’s fear of the declining birth-rate in Australia. This dimension of the Howard government’s ideology is not new, but rather re-articulates a social goal that has existed in Australia since, at least, the catchphrase ‘Populate or Perish’ was popularised one-hundred years ago.21 Marion Maddox believes Howard’s ‘family values’ result from his Christian conservatism and is connected to the rise of the religious right in Australia.22 She argues that the Howard government’s conservative, anti-feminist family values agenda has repeatedly justified the restriction of women’s rights so that children have access ‘to the care and affection of both a mother and a father’;23 yet, ‘once ensconced in heterosexual couples, fathers vanish from the policy landscape as suddenly as they entered it, their care and affection of their children required only when it offers a route to restrict the rights of single mothers’ and same sex couples.24

The second of the Howard government’s ideological sub-trends relevant to its handling of domestic violence is its war on political correctness. Prominent public intellectual, Robert Manne, traces the Howard government’s articulated crusade against what it labelled political correctness to the United States’ neo-conservative movement. By the federal election in 1996, Howard had convinced Australians that the Labor Keating government consisted of left-wing elites, who bullied ordinary people into submission on questions concerning class, gender and race (understood as minority issues) by a process known as ‘political correctness’.25 Howard intended to release Australians from their thrall.26 In June 1995, Howard made a speech to the Menzies Research centre, which has been cited by historian of the Australia Liberal Party, Judith Brett, as encapsulating his approach to special interest and minority groups in Australia. Howard argued that:

There is a frustrated mainstream in Australia today which sees government decisions increasingly driven by the noisy, self-interested clamour of powerful vested interests with scant regard for the national interest … Many Australians in the mainstream feel utterly powerless to compete with such groups, who seem to have the ear of the government completely on major issues.27

When Howard claimed victory for the Liberal Party in 1996, he did so under the campaign slogan ‘For All of Us’, setting himself up as governing for the Australian mainstream, rather than ‘the chattering Chardonnay set and their gaggle of minority and special interest groups’.28 By establishing and legitimising this Them/Us dichotomy, Howard could justify the exclusion and marginalisation of ‘minority’ interest groups in the name of preserving the rights of the deserving majority.

The Howard Government’s binary of ‘us’ and ‘them’ reconceptualised domestic violence in two ways. Firstly, it marginalized women and children experiencing or escaping from domestic violence; in relation to Howard’s model of the functioning family, such individuals are positioned as ‘Them’ in opposition to the ‘Us’ defined by Maddox as ‘the sepia-toned traditional family’. Although children affected by domestic violence are not explicitly denigrated, they are imagined as being embattled by their often fatherless upbringing by single mothers.29 Secondly, the Howard government has constructed and advanced the understanding that the perpetration of domestic violence is ‘un-Australian’. In this way nationalism, and the idea of national identity, is used to move representations of domestic violence into ‘un-Australian’ households or communities. Domestic violence is thereby associated with ethnic and cultural minorities (Them), enabling the mainstream to avoid responsibility for the occurrence of such violence in Australia (Us).30

The Re-conceptualisation of Domestic Violence under Howard

The Howard government’s re-conceptualisation of domestic violence occurred in several stages. Institutional changes began the process of removing the gender dynamic from understandings of domestic violence. Before slashing funding for significant ‘women’s’ services such as childcare, in 1996-7 Howard began disintegrating those government agencies whose job it was to ensure that women’s interests were protected.31 Such offices included the Women’s Bureau, the Sex Discrimination Officer, the Affirmative Action Agency, and most prominently the Office of the Status of Women (OSW), each of which had been established, or survived, as a result of the agitation, activism and advocacy of the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s. By 1998 the Women’s Bureau had been shut down, the Sex Discrimination Officer forced out of office and the position left unfilled. In addition, the Howard Government had cut 40 per cent of funding from the Human Rights and Equal opportunity Commission.32 By 1998 the influence and effectiveness of the OSW had been reduced from briefing the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet on the effects of all cabinet submissions in relation to women, to merely commenting on submissions understood by the department to be of relevance to women. In addition, by 1999 the OSW, which had by this time suffered extensive budget and staff cuts, was removed by the Howard government and integrated into the Department of Community and Family Affairs. The shift reflected Howard’s understanding that women’s concerns are family concerns rather than structural issues. Howard appointed as head of the OSW the notoriously conservative and anti-feminist Prue Goward.33 By 1999, with significant repercussions for future domestic violence and women’s policies in Australia, the Howard government had effectively dismantled the internal bureaucratic infrastructure designed to guarantee feminist advocacy within the government.

By limiting resistance to subsequent policy and conceptual reforms, Howard silenced structural analyses of domestic violence pre-emptively: when in 2002, Howard infamously proclaimed that we, as a nation, had entered the ‘post-feminist’ era of the debate on domestic violence, he was simultaneously stating his own conservative ideological perspective and literally describing the changed situation within Australian government policy making.

Changing Terminology: From Intergenerational Transmission to Integrated Systems

During the 1980s in Australia the Intergenerational Transmission of Violence (ITV) theory emerged as a competing gender-neutral conceptualisation of domestic violence. The ITV approach now forms a significant component of the Howard Government’s conceptualisation of domestic violence in Australia. Originally a sociological perspective on the causation of violence in the home, the ITV approach contends that violence within familial relationships, including, although not particular to, that between intimate partners, is transferred from one generation to the next.34 At particular odds with the feminist conceptualisation, the ITV theory argues that women are equally likely to be violent to their partner and children as men (whilst also stating that victimisation is similarly transferable); it subsequently denies that domestic violence results from the social and economic oppression of women more generally. Importantly, this ‘monkey see-monkey do’ interpretation of domestic violence lends itself to supporting a ‘cultural’ transmission of violence. It can be easily manipulatedto mean that violence is inevitable in families with particular behaviours, backgrounds and beliefs, while it is unlikely to occur in families or groups of families who share different circumstances (read cultures).

Research and statistical evidence supporting the ITV theory has been repeatedly discredited. Refuge worker and feminist advocate Laura Cornwell recently argued that the idea of the intergenerational transmission of violence ‘remains popular because it is intuitively sensible’.35 While the ITV model appears logical, is easily defined, is understood by the general population and carries the promise that violence can be stopped if the cycle is broken, current information suggests that the vast majority of parents who have suffered abuse from family members as children do not themselves become abusive and neglectful parents.36

Men’s and father’s groups in Australia contest concepts of domestic violence that consider the gendered reality of the occurrence and perpetration of such violence. This has been done, with very limited success, by challenging research which asserts that women are more often the victims of domestic violence than men.37 Increasing membership as well as ideological compatibility with the Howard Government’s social conservatism, particularly with its ‘pro-family’ stance, has facilitated several victories for these groups, who had previously received very little serious attention.

Foreshadowing the Howard government’s ‘family violence’ policies, Dr Robyn Seth- Purdie argued in her 1996 submission Domestic Violence: In Search of Well-Informed Policy38 that, rather than simply viewing the perpetrators of this kind of violence as criminals and punishing them accordingly, ‘reducing the incidence of family violence requires … changes in social child-rearing practices … It also needs significant changes in attitudes towards partnership in marriage’.39 Government policy reflected this conservative ideological approach in 1997 when fifty thousand dollars per year for two years was given to the national Lone Fathers Association, who in turn fund local Blackshirts associations,40 while funds from the National Council of Single Mothers and Their Children were cut.41

The Howard Government’s move in terminology and conceptualisation away from ‘domestic violence’ towards ‘family violence’ represents the initial phase of what can now be recognised as a characterising trend. From 1996 the Howard government has harnessed and manipulated specific terminology used in relation to domestic violence, incompatible with the feminist structural analysis of such violence, to advance an ideologically motivated reconceptualisation of the issue. Previous to the Howard government’s adaptation of the term ‘family violence’ in 1996, it had been used in mainstream white Australia to differentiate child abuse from domestic or intimate partner violence, as in the book Family Violence: Everybody’s Business Somebody’s Life,42 or, more prominently, to signify Indigenous conceptualisation and control of violence between family members and domestic violence within Indigenous communities.43

In 1995 the OSW conducted a national survey into community attitudes to Violence Against Women.44 It found that the term ‘domestic violence’ was widely understood and recognised by the public as signifying physical and to a lesser extent psychological abuse of which women were much more likely to be victims than men.45 Ignoring these findings in 1996, Seth-Purdie, as Consultant to the Social Policy Group of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, justified replacing the term ‘domestic violence’ with ‘family violence’, arguing that ‘there is no common definition of the term domestic violence in use throughout Australia’; though, in apparent contradiction, she adds that ‘the label “domestic violence” carries certain offending and outdated connotations … [most prominently] that of violence by men toward their female partners’.46

Seth-Purdie’s 1996 submission was highly influential, both reflecting and legitimising the Howard plan to tackle domestic violence in Australia by re-conceptualising the phenomenon. The submission denies the gender dynamic of domestic violence; its reliance on the ITV theory also diminishes perpetrator responsibility for such violence. Seth-Purdie’s work provides an excellent synopsis of the reasons that the Howard government re-labelled ‘domestic violence’ as ‘family violence’. She recognises the gender dynamic inherent in the term ‘domestic violence’ and uses this to justify its disuse. In line with subsequent government policy, she states that ‘“Domestic Violence” is a misleading label … It is redolent of the dim, recent, past when, as the head of the household, a man would dispense physical chastisement, to his wife’.47 Approaches and terms, she argues, which focus on one aspect of violence between family members, such as male partner violence against women (as per the 1993 National Strategy on Violence Against Women) without taking into account other forms, such as child or elder abuse, may not lead to a proper (read gender neutral) understanding of the role violence plays in relationships between family members, individuals and social institutions generally.48 She advocates a coherent approach to family violence by treating its different forms as related aspects of the same phenomenon encompassed under the umbrella term ‘family violence’.

Seth-Purdie’s argument goes against the findings of the OSW in 1995 that ‘the community finds it more meaningful to talk about specific types of violence rather than to use a general, all-encompassing term such as “family violence”’.49 Although Seth-Purdie’s submission negates the gender dynamic intrinsic to domestic violence, she allows that ‘aggressive, non-caring models of masculinity combined with highly submissive models of femininity are possibly implicated in producing family violence’.50 This offensive concession demonstrates the continued social and state perception that male intimate partner violence against women is not ‘real’ violence: the submissiveness of the victim cannot justify their being attacked.

Howard’s policy of marginalising minority interest groups in Australia in the name of preserving the rights of the deserving mainstream majority has profoundly influenced his administration’s conceptualisation of domestic violence. The Howard government has constructed and advanced a conceptualisation that is consistent with its ‘family values’ agenda and which promotes a gender-free analysis of such violence; by adopting the ITV approach, the problem is also dismissed as being a minority group issue. The integration of the Howard government’s gender-free conceptualisation of domestic violence with the ITV or ‘cycle of violence’ approach is clearly evidenced in the government’s Partnerships Against Domestic Violence (PADV) taskforce initiative established in 1998. The first report of the PADV taskforce examined five theoretical approaches to understanding domestic violence in Australia, including the theories of individual pathology, sociological theories of social stress and individual risk, and early feminist theories focussed on male structural power.51 Despite identifying these theories, the PADV propounded its own theoretical approach, the ‘Interactive Systems’ approach. The interactive systems, it is explained, ‘resists dichotomies [such as] good/ bad or victim/ perpetrator’,52 that are crucial within the Australian justice system and to the individuals affected by such violence. This approach is aimed toward ending the ‘cycle of violence’ in families.53

‘Australia Says No’: Domestic Violence as un-Australian and the Cultural Transmission of Violence

The Howard government’s widespread advertising campaign ‘Violence Against Women: Australian Says No’ (VAWASN) constituted the most public aspect of its revamping of domestic violence. The campaign was unveiled by the Prime Minister in 2004 with a budget of twenty-three million dollars, allocated to the campaign through PADV.54 It included a help line, television, cinema and radio advertisements, a national mail-out and advertisements in the indigenous and ethnic press.55 This campaign’s conceptualisation maintained that if women behaved responsibly after an assault, by either leaving their partners or disclosing such violence to the police, domestic violence would stop in Australia.

The government’s failure to acknowledge the harm of domestic violence is amplified when compared to its advertising campaigns to tackle drink-driving or smoking in Australia. Despite the fact that intimate partner violence is the highest cause of death and disability of women in Australia between the ages of eighteen and fifty-four, in the VAWASN advertisements, women appear calm, well presented, made-up and without the physical injuries caused by violence—bruises, cuts, broken bones or, more seriously, brain injuries. In contrast to these sanitised depictions, government advertisements to tackle drink-driving and smoking are far more realistic, brutal and gory—they represent the serious repercussions of such activities. In response to the Howard government’s launch of the campaign, the opposition spokeswoman for women, Tanya Pilbersek, argued that the Government had ‘put its logo’ on a television advertising campaign about domestic violence but had not committed real money to the provision of accommodation and emergency services for victims of domestic violence.56

By using the unsubstantiated ITV approach in its own Integrated Systems approach, the government has publicised a gender-free understanding of domestic violence and has also legitimised the idea that domestic violence is culturally transmittable. Rather than as a gendered phenomenon, domestic violence is understood as a cultural value passed from one generation to the next as part of the transmission of a culture as a whole. The campaign slogan ‘Violence Against Women. Australia Says No’ suggests that domestic violence is incompatible with the Australian national identity (ignoring incalculable evidence to the contrary) and that Australians reject such violence. Domestic violence becomes associated with ethnic and cultural minorities (Them), enabling mainstream families (Us) to avoid responsibility for the occurrence of such violence in Australia. For a new arrival in Australia and for people and communities who feel isolated from mainstream Australians, the VAWASN slogan might sound more like a racist threat than an acknowledgement of the prevalence of such violence in the Australian community.57 In 1994 (previous to the Howard Administration) the Family Violence Professional Education Taskforce stated, ‘Too easily, false assumptions that family violence is the preserve of particular racial or cultural groups can lead to the stigmatisation of those groups in an attempt to exempt the dominant culture from the need to address the issue’.58 In February 2006, three Queensland Labor backbenchers called for an end to multiculturalism and cited wife-beating as an example of cultural diversity that should not be allowed in Australia.59 This sentiment demonstrates the demonisation of ethnic minorities and their use as scapegoats for the cause of domestic violence, a shift in attitude clearly encouraged by the VAWASN Howard government campaign.

Conclusion

Since 1996, the Howard government has adapted an ‘Integrated Systems’ approach to domestic violence, radically shifting the ideological basis, structural facilitation and articulation of domestic violence in government policy. The government’s articulation of domestic violence is characterised by two approaches: firstly, the de-gendering, or negation of the gender dynamic so important to understanding domestic violence in Australia; secondly, the rejuvenation and extension of the ITV or ‘cycle of violence’ approach. The government’s employment of the ‘cycle of violence’ approach rejuvenates and re-legitimises the understanding of individual episodes of violence within families as being caused by pre-determined patterns of family behaviour; in so doing, it undermines the well-supported structural feminist approach, which argues that domestic violence is an extensive social phenomenon generated by systemic inequalities between men and women. The second trend in the government’s domestic violence conceptualisation, encapsulated by the VAWASN advertising campaign, revived the ITV approach to understanding domestic violence and reinforced a belief that domestic violence is transmitted culturally. As suggested by the Australian Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR), representing male intimate partner violence against women in this way disguises the reality that such violence is primarily perpetrated by male family members against women. It also portrays domestic violence as a problem of dysfunctional families, culture or communities, rather than emanating from a broader national social context that condones violence against women in many ways.60

Amy Webster
University of Melbourne

Endnotes

  1. Jocelynne Scutt, Women and the Law (Sydney: The Law Book Company, 1990), 444.
  2. Gail Mason, ‘Violence’, in Australian Feminism; An Oxford Companion, ed. Barbara Caine (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998), 343.
  3. Women’s Policy Coordination Unit, Department of Premier and Cabinet, Victoria. Criminal Assault in the Home: Social and Legal Responses to Domestic Violence (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1985), Preface.
  4. Ibid.
  5. Ibid., 13.
  6. Although a more specific engagement with the current trends of inequality in Australia is not within the scope of this article, Ann Summers’ 2004 book, The End of Equality, provides an excellent engagement. Ann Summers, The end of equality: work, babies and women’s choices in 21st century Australia (Milsons Point, N.S.W: Random House Australia, 2003).
  7. VicHealth. The health costs of violence: Measuring the burden of disease caused by intimate partner violence (Melbourne: Victorian Health Promotion Foundation, 2004). Cited in ‘Health Services for Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault in the United States and Canada,’ Australian Domestic and Family Violence Clearinghouse Newsletter, no. 21 (2005): 3-4.
  8. ‘A report from Access economics which estimated, based on extrapolations from US and Australian data, that 1.6% of Australian men had experienced domestic violence since the age of 15, compared with 21.5 per cent of women’. Access Economics, The Cost of Domestic Violence to the Australian Economy (Canberra: Australian Government Printing Service, 2004), 25.
  9. Kerry Carrington, ‘Domestic Violence in Australia – An Overview of the Issues’, Australian Parliamentary Library, available from http://www.aph.gov.au/library/intguide/SP/Dom_violence.htm; accessed March 24, 2006.
  10. The lack of information on incidences of domestic violence, despite the high number of fatalities resulting from this type of violent crime, compares with the national database on stolen vehicles which, since 1996, is updated four times daily. Summers, 80.
  11. Assessments of programmes directed at reducing such violence in Indigenous communities in Australia are also lacking. See CEDAW report to the United Nations 1997, paragraph 38. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, ‘Retreating from the Full Realisation of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in Australia: A Gendered Analysis’, Shadow Report to Australia’s Third Periodic Report to the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, covering the period 1990-1997: available from http://home.vicnet.au/-wrana/advocacyfiles/escr.html; accessed July 19 2005, 1-33, 21.
  12. Summers, 79.
  13. Carrington.
  14. Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1999), 3.
  15. Amnesty International. ‘Violence Against Women and Human Rights Fact Sheet 2’, 2006 Fact Sheet Series, Australia, July 2006, 1-4.
  16. Victorian Community Council Against Violence. ‘The Workplace Impact of Family Violence’, Domestic Violence and Incest Resource Centre Newsletter, vol. 3, no. 1 (Autumn 2004): 3.
  17. For a more in-depth analysis of the rise and nature of each of these trends within Howard government ideology, see David McKnight, Beyond Right and Left: New Politics and the Culture Wars (Crows Nest, N.S.W. Allenand Unwin, 2005).
  18. J. McDonald, ‘Neo-liberalism and the Pathologising of Public Issues: The Displacement of Feminist Service Models in Domestic Violence Support Services’, Australian Social Work, vol. 58, no. 3 (1999): 276-284.
  19. Vig Geddes, ‘Don’t Forget Gender!: Why Gender Specific Services Need to be Maintained’, Australian Domestic and Family Violence Clearinghouse Newsletter, vol. 3 (Spring 2005): 17.
  20. Summers, 7.
  21. Ibid. For a brief analysis of the historical context and significance of the ‘Populate or Perish’ policy see Tony Griffiths, Beautiful Lies; Australia from Howard to Menzies (South Australia: Wakefield Press, 2005).
  22. In her work, Maddox argues that the rise of the religious right in Australia, embodied by Howard since 1996, emanated from the United States. Marion Maddox, God Under Howard; The Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics (Crows Nest N.S.W: Allen and Unwin, 2005).
  23. In order to evidence this point Maddox in particular traces the development of the 2002 Sex Discrimination Amendment Bill. Maddox, 79.
  24. Ibid., 86.
  25. Ibid., 6.
  26. Ibid., 6.
  27. Judith Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable: The Liberal Party’s Australia (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2005), 23.
  28. Maddox, 77.
  29. Ibid., 88.
  30. Ideas of ‘UnAustralianness’ are most often mobilised in relation to refugees and migrants to Australia as well as the ‘War on Terror’.For an exposition of the growth of the ideology of ‘unAustralianness’, see John Frow, ‘UnAustralia: Strangeness and Value’, Australian Humanities Review, no. 41 (February 2007); available from http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-February-2007/Frow.html, accessed 24 September 2007.
  31. Summers, 126.
  32. Ibid., 142.
  33. Notably, in comparison, Anne Summers had been head of OSW from 1983-1986.
  34. Kaufman and Zigler contend that ‘It has commonly been found that abused children are at risk for later becoming abusive parents (‘Do Abused Children Become Abusive Parents?’ Journal of American Orthopsychiatry, no. 57 (1987): 186.) and observational learning has been discussed as a mechanism that perpetrates this intergenerational cycle. D.S. Narang and J.M. Contreas, ‘Dissociation as a mediator between child abuse history and adult abuse potential,’ Department of Psychology, Kent State University, available from http:// www.ncbi.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi cmd=retrieve&db=PubMed&list=_uids=1081909&dopt=Abstract; accessed 12 December 2005, 1.
  35. Laura Cornwell, ‘Transmitting Family Violence: A Theory in Need of a Reality Check.’ Domestic Violence & Incest Resource Centre Newsletter, no. 3 (Spring, 2004): 4.
  36. This ITV theory was popularised in the late 1980s. Advocates depended heavily on Kaufman and Zigler, Ibid., 186-92. See, for example: Narang and J.M. Contreas, ‘Dissociation As a Mediator Between Child Abuse History and Adult Abuse Potential,’ Child Abuse and Neglect, vol. 24, no. 5, May 2000, 653 65. However, as noted by Cornwell, ‘Six years after their findings were published, Kaufman and Zigler acknowledged their own and fellow researchers’ errors. They declared that ‘many papers cited in support of the intergeneration hypothesis do no more than make assertions of its validity, without providing any substantive evidence’ (Cornwell, 4). The findings of Kaufman and Zigler’s 1993 work, ‘The Intergenerational Transmission of Abuse is Overstated,’ in Current Controversies on Family Violence, eds. R.J Gelles and D. R. Loseke (London: Sage, 1993), indeed demonstrates that ‘most people who experienced and/or witnessed family violence as children do not go on to inflict violence on to their own families’. Furthermore, family violence is ‘a complex, multifactorial phenomenon which can not be adequately explained by a simple cause and effect theory’, Cornwell, 4.
  37. Lone Fathers’ Association of Australia, ‘Resolution Regarding the UN study on Violence Against Women,’ Policy Submissions, available from www.lonefathers.com.au/policy_submissions_comments.php?id=57_0_11_0_C accessed September 23, 2007.
  38. Presumably, Seth-Purdie is suggesting through the title of her submission that prior to 1996, federal government policies relating to domestic violence, informed by the feminist structural approach, were, in fact, uninformed. (Robyn Seth-Purdie, ‘Beyond the Domestic Curtain: Domestic Violence: In Search of Well-Informed Policy’, Social Policy Group Research Paper 27 (1995-1996); available from http://www.aph.gov. au/library/pubs/rp/1995-1996rp27.htm; accessed 26 May 2005.
  39. Ibid., 1.
  40. The Blackshirts men’s group is based in Melbourne and identifies as Christian and ‘pro-family’. The group’s aims are to illegalise divorce, abolish Restraining Orders and, significantly, Apprehended Violence Orders on the grounds that the family home is private and any intervention in it constitutes a blemish to individual freedom and democracy. John Abbott, ‘Marriage, Family, Children’, Blackshirts Homepage, available from http://www.blackshirts.info/ accessed 17 April, 2006.
  41. Eventually, due to public pressure, funding was restored to the National Council of Single Mothers and Their Children. Summers, 17.
  42. Family Violence Professional Education Taskforce, Everybody’s Business – Somebody’s Life (Sydney: Federation Press, 1994).
  43. The term ‘Family Violence’ emerged through the advocacy of Indigenous workers in the field of domestic violence in the early 1990s. It attempted to differentiate violence experienced in and amongst Indigenous families and communities from that experienced by white Australian women. The term ‘Family violence’ was deemed appropriate because it recognised the extended kinship family systems in which context violence in Indigenous communities in Australia is understood; this contrasts to the traditional white ‘nuclear family’ that the term ‘domestic violence’ has become aligned with. For more information on the use of the term ‘family violence’ in relation to Indigenous Australian communities see: Larissa Behrendt, ‘Aboriginal Women and the White Lies of the Feminist Movement; Implications for Aboriginal Women in Rights Discourse’, The Australian Feminist Law Journal, vol.1 (2003): 32; and Aboriginal Affairs Victoria, Final Report of the Victorian Indigenous Family Violence Taskforce (Melbourne: Aboriginal Affairs Victoria, 2003).
  44. Office of the Status of Women, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Community Attitudes to Violence Against Women. (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1995).
  45. Ibid., 7.
  46. Ibid., 1.
  47. This statement by Seth-Purdie reflects a shocking and wilful minimisation of the extent and nature of domestic violence against women today and in the past in Australia. By trivialising the psychological, sexual, physical and economic violence experienced by very large numbers of Australian women in the past as ‘chastisement’, and then by suggesting that the occurrence of such violence no longer exists, Seth-Purdie ignores the fact that such violence is, in fact, on the rise and that it is the single biggest cause of death and disability for the Australian women. Ibid., 2.
  48. Ibid.
  49. Office of the Status of Women, Community Attitudes to Violence Against Women, 6.
  50. Seth-Purdie, 1.
  51. Partnerships Against Domestic Violence, First Report of the Taskforce 1998-1999 (Canberra: Partnerships Against Domestic Violence), 1.
  52. Ibid., 1.
  53. Cornwell, 4.
  54. Funding of the ‘Violence Against Women. Australia Says No.’ advertising campaign was provided jointly by PADV and the National Initiative to Combat Sexual Assault. Both of these programs are administered by the OSW. Senator the Hon. Eric Abetz, Special Minister of State, Violence against Women. Australia Says No (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia and PMP Print, 2004).
  55. Tanya Plibersek, ‘Australia Says No to Violence Against Women, Howard Government Says No To Funding Refuges’ available from http://www.alp.org.au/media/0705/msword240.htp; accessed 10 January 2006.
  56. Adele Horin, ‘Acute Women’s Refuge Shortage Exposed’, The Sydney Morning Herald (24 November 2005); available http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/acute_womens_refuge_shortage_exposed/2005/11/23/ 1132703152709.html; accessed 14 January 2006, 3.
  57. See Frow.
  58. Family Violence Professional Education Taskforce, Family Violence: Everybody’s Business – Somebody’s Life (Sydney: Federation Press, 1994), 120.
  59. Sean Parnell, ‘Give Up On Multiculturalism: MPs’, The Australian, (9 February 2006): 4.
  60. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, ‘Retreating from the Full Realization of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in Australia: A Gendered Analysis’, Shadow Report to Australia’s Third Periodic Report to the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, covering the period 1990-1997; available from http://home.vicnet.au/-wrana/advocacyfiles/escr.html; accessed 19 July 2005, 20.

© Lilith Feminist History Journal 2010. This is a Blueprint site.