Today is national White Ribbon Day, a day when good men and true are asked to make their stand against domestic violence — particularly affecting women — heartfelt, public and unconditional.
It needs to be more than a theoretical commitment. As anyone who has read Christos Tsiolkos' novel The Slap (or watched the serialisation on ABC television) would know, violence is intimately connected with power, ego, frustration and sex, and isn't easily abhorred, or even seen for what it is.
Earlier this week the chief justice of Western Australia, a contemporary of mine at law school and a champion of White Ribbon Day (as of many progressive and small 'l' liberal causes, bless) bemoaned as the major obstacle to eliminating domestic violence, women's reluctance to report it.
There is always, he said, a personal risk for any woman who protests, outside the inner family network, about being slapped, humiliated, micro-controlled or beaten up. The family power grid usually grills the protestor, the traitor, the persecutor, and further relationships fracture.
That's why so many Indigenous women do not complain to police about the thumpings they endure; to avoid family feuds, or police arresting and jailing or maybe even killing their men, leaving them even more impoverished and marginalised.
The Slap is a rather nasty, long and lascivious book, whose eight major characters — who drive the story in chapters of their own — are mostly self-focused, unempathetic and shallow. They reveal little or no insight into the childishness of their own supposedly mature attitudes and choices, yet seem to have focused their adult identities on children.
Far from addressing the issue of whether or not it is ever right for an adult to strike an obnoxious and disruptive toddler, the characters are by and large tellers of their own stories and preoccupations. The novelist and his characters are not in the least interested in the experience, feelings, confusion and furious humiliation of the three-year-old slap-ee, Hugo, with his entirely inappropriate sense of entitlement. They are solely concerned with their own aspirations and compulsive interests.
There is even some unpleasant sado-masochistic domestic violence in the sexual couplings of the principal characters, and a little wife-beating. The wives, sadly, are presented as collaborators in their own submission, and in Hugo's parents' case, committed to nearly heroic, non-interventionist, laissez-faire parenting. Hugo wiill grow up with no survival skills, and a lot of bruises.
This nation first really noticed that violence to smaller, more physically and emotionally vulnerable human beings in a domestic setting was a serious matter in the mid 1980s.
It was 1985 when I attended my first domestic violence conference, hosted by the Australian Institute of Criminology in Canberra, but flooded with articulate and sometimes determinedly angry women from refuges, grassroots organisations and community groups who were vociferously committed to make the conference the fulcrum for a massive national swing to protecting all Australian women, rather than leaving intervention to individual police officers' discretion.
It changed my awareness ('consciousness raising' in the corridors; impromptu tutorials in 'protective behaviours'; ad hoc consultative groups and marchers on Parliament; barrackers at the back of the hall, willing to challenge the ways experts told their research conclusions to an audience that included actual rape victims as well as academics) and inspired my subsequent activity in the belief the law itself should change, rather than society expecting violent men to change their attitudes.
In the end, a common approach by men and women, and the institutions of the law, is essential. Police do get involved in domestic violence, and women still withdraw their evidence if their families get involved. Parents still do not see that witnessing domestic violence permanently damages children. Personal violence intervention orders have been used effectively and misused between family members using them to score points.
And the vast majority of sexual assaults, in particular intra-familial and 'date rape' assaults, are still not raised. Only sexual assault centres know about those who have to go somewhere. The victims know that the sympathetic officers in Channel 10's Law and Order: SVU bear no relation to the land of the blue heeler.
The most sympathetic characters in The Slap are the Indigenous Muslim convert, and the gay teenage boy, who are prepared to take on an adult world of subtlety and complication, on honest terms.
So let it be with violence in our homes.
Men need to show their mates that violence against women and children is disgraceful. Women need to learn better ways to teach their children self-discipline and survival skills than smacking them. Mothers need to leave any home that has become a place of fear.
Domestic violence will only ever shrivel away when we acknowledge both the woundedness of our inner child, and our inner capacity to defer the urge immediately to gratify our rawest needs, and to look for find more lasting gratification than the giving and reception of a slap.
Moira Rayner is a barrister and writer.