We need to look 'up-river' if we are to resolve domestic violence

D

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.