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| Australia's PM, Malcolm Turnbull - he sees the solution to domestic violence in a "rich spend", while it is really an 'up-river' problem. |
omestic violence is
an “up-river” problem.
Malcolm Turnbull’s plan to spend richly to slow what is
mostly men attacking women and the “up-river” theory arrived personally about
the same time.
The $100 million spend was something about which I was
inherently uncomfortable for it seemed about mistaking the poison for the cure.
Domestic violence arises for a host of reasons, but prime
among them is our market-driven consumerist based society that creates mostly
unfilled aspirations manifesting frustration and anger that frequently erupt as
domestic violence.
The PM’s market driven-like response to domestic violence was
unveiled on the same day as the co-founder of the world’s Healthy-Cities
movement, Professor Trevor Hancock from Canada’s University of Victoria, talked
about the “up-river” problem to a room of about 150 people.
He told of a small river-side town that hauled a floating
body from the water; day after day the bodies kept floating down the river and
so the town developed a complex rescue and morgue infrastructure to remove the
bodies and decently dispose of them, until someone suggested maybe the town
should lift is gaze and look up-river and see if the source of the problem
could be found.
The scenario discussed by Professor Hancock and proposed
resolution of domestic violence sound strikingly similar – the PM’s approach to
domestic violence focusses on the symptoms and so sees a change in the
behaviour of men as resolving the difficulty.
Many of those assumptions are correct, but the actual
violence is naught but a symptom for there is a deeper malaise.
There is a broad and sweeping societal malignancy that can
be directly related to the profit and growth society that already exists in Australia
and one Mr Turnbull wants to further strengthen.
Many directly link domestic violence to the less than
honourable male behaviour and of course they are correct, but what causes that
corrupt conduct, what frustrates men, why does our way of life disturb personally
held understandings of status, erode aspirations, or contort their confidence
to such an extent that they seek control by physically lashing out at those
nearest them, mostly their female partner?
Existing systems epitomized by the commercial success of our
PM promise much, but are analytically foreign to human betterment for they
discriminate against equality, while celebrating individuality.
Each of us is of course an individual, but the individualism
encouraged and almost enforced throughout modern western societies is foreign
to what we really need, which is a sense of belonging, purpose, friendship, collaboration,
fellowship and a belief that you are an integral and vital part of your
community.
The perpetrator of domestic violence is estranged from his
community, and despite appearances, probably frightened, emasculated, lonely
and socially impotent and in accessing the only power he has left, he physically
or emotionally damages his partner.
Yes, it is up-river; many of our men are thrashing about in
a society created pool of frustration, disappointment and powerlessness that
causes them to exercise the worst feature of their maleness - violence.
