Emily Henderson: What is at the root of family violence?

If we reduce family violence, we also free massive amounts of police time. Currently, police respond to a family violence callout every three minutes. There were 519 ram-raids last year; there were 175,000 family violence callouts. Photo / 123rf

Opinion

Albert Einstein once said if he had an hour to solve a problem, he’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.

Around Mother’s Day this year, I marched in a protest against violent crime on our streets. Yet at the rally that followed, none of the speakers focused on denouncing street crime. Instead, they spoke about family violence, arguing that the main cause of violence on our streets is violence in our homes. And they’re right.

Over the last three years as your MP, I’ve listened through many Select Committee hearings on crime and, from the Police Commissioner to the Children’s Commissioner to the academics, that’s the message they all bring.

Last year, a police study of child and teen ram-raid offenders found that 95 per cent had first come to police attention as preschool victims of family violence. Exposure to violence does terrible things to developing brains, hard-wiring children into fight-or-flight mode and damaging their ability to learn, socialise and remain calm under pressure.

It doesn’t take an Einstein to figure out what to do if we really want to reduce violent crime, and it isn’t harsher sentences, which (as all the experts agree and all the studies show) just do not work.

What’s more, if we reduce family violence, we also free massive amounts of police time. Currently, police respond to a family violence callout every three minutes. There were 519 ram-raids last year; there were 175,000 family violence callouts. Fix family violence, fix society.

But, as Einstein said, to fix it, we must first understand it. What is at the root of family violence?

When I was a Family Court lawyer, women often told me it was that being hit or abused was the easy part.

Worse were the days and weeks spent walking on eggshells around a man they knew was spoiling for a fight, while they did whatever it took to keep him calm.

They were locked in a cycle of appeasement-attack-appeasement. I believe that appeasement is the key: a vast amount of family violence isn’t about the violence. It isn’t about people who lash out, who lack the self-control not to hit. It’s about control: the use of violence to trigger in your victim that desperate need to appease and please you - to be the undisputed king of your castle. Violence is just a tool.

Where that need to control comes from is another story.

Not all family violence is committed by men towards women and children, but most of it is, so let’s start there: could those men’s need to control come from beliefs about their ‘rights’ over women and children, and from how their self-worth is tied up in being ‘in control’ of what is ‘theirs’, so an independent, assertive partner becomes a threat? These are hard, difficult questions, and they touch every aspect of society.

That realisation is why in 2020, we created the role of our first dedicated Minister for the Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence.

Our first long-term strategic plan looks not three or five but 25 years ahead, reaching across everything from teens dating to how we raise our babies to rehabilitation and prison policy. It’s the opposite of the quick-fix, reactionary answers to crime being peddled elsewhere, but in 20-plus years of involvement in criminal and family law, I cannot see any other practical way forward than to - finally - tackle the root causes.