“I JUST “I JUST “I JUST “I JUST “I JUST “I JUST
GRABBED GRABBED GRABBED GRABBED GRABBED GRABBED GRABBED
HER AND HER AND HER AND HER AND HER AND HER AND
WENT WENT WENT WENT
WHACK.”WHACK.”WHACK.”WHACK.”WHACK.”WHACK.”WHACK.”
I remember the screams
tugging me from sleep.
The worst sound in the world
- your mother, in pain.
Then, the sick, thick thud of violence
down the hall; a sound of ripping fabric.
And I remember that nightgown,
a flannelette favourite as soft and warm as
a mother’s hug. Weirdly, I think it was the
loss of the nightie that shook my seven-year-
old self the most.
That and the fact the words ‘you don’t hit
girls’, drummed into me from kindergarten,
would never again seem sacrosanct.
Statistically, I’m as much as 800 per cent
more likely to be talking to a relationship
counsellor about why I now knock my wife
around than I would be if I’d never
experienced domestic violence as a child.
Turns out charity isn’t the only thing that
begins in the home.
Even if you’re lucky enough not to have
been a witness, and you can solemnly say
you’ve never been physical, or threatening,
with a partner, then the sad fact is you almost
certainly work with, are related to, or even
quite like someone who’s assaulted a partner.
In 2015, Australian police were called to
239,846 domestic violence matters, or, 657
incidents, on average, every day of the year.
That’s one every two minutes – and it doesn’t
include the victims too terrified, or too
unconscious, to call for help.
It takes women, on average, between nine
and 11 attempts to finally leave a violent
relationship. And the ones who don’t make
it out the door fall into the most sickening
statistic of all. Somewhere around 80
Australian women will be killed by a partner
this year – that’s more than one a week.
It’s appalling. And as awful as it is, it’s sadly
not so much the tip of the iceberg as the pole
of the umbrella, according to Andrew King,
a campaigner, counsellor and writer
immersed in the dark subject matter of
domestic violence in this country.
“Domestic violence is one of the hardest
and most significant social issues we face
in our society today. I’d say it’s equal to the
impact which drug abuse or alcoholism has
on communities, probably even more so,
it just doesn’t get spoken about as much,”
offers King.
“And it’s happening in our homes –
the one place you’re meant to feel safe.
All those women dying, that’s a statistic
we’re not shifting, and when you talk about
the fire in the belly for people who work
in this area, it’s about trying to stop the
murders, the death, but that is just the pole
of the umbrella, it gives you a very limited
understanding. It’s only when you open
the canopy of that umbrella that you realise
the many different elements domestic
violence takes in – the sexual violence,
the psychological violence, the emotional
violence, the financial, people using children
against each other... And it’s about control
and coercion, not just violence. So you don’t
punch her, you just punch the wall, and break
your hand. But the threat is implicit: ‘Look
what I could do to you, next time, if you
make me angry’.”
Of course, you think, there’s nothing you
can do, because you don’t know anyone like
that. But that’s because you think you know
what a wife beater looks like. He’s a fighter,
not a lover, a bloke with menace in his
movements and dullness in his eyes.
Herb Cannon, 65, who’s been working in
domestic violence counselling for 18 years
and has seen thousands of blokes and
“countless horrors” in that time, will say
you’re wrong. In his experience, less than 50
per cent of the men he’s seen would identify
with being violent or confrontational outside
of their relationship.
“Blokes so often say, ‘Why is it that I’m
only like this to my partner, why don’t I do it
to anyone else?’ Or, ‘I’m really good at work,
people love me, but then I get home and the
monster appears’,” says Cannon.
“You can’t profile a DV guy – it cuts across
race, culture, religion, education, disability,and it’s got nothing to do with tattoos
or muscles. We had one group where 10
of the 14 people were from boardrooms,
white-collar, CEO types, and two of them
were tradies, but usually it’s more diverse.
We had an Italian guy last year, the most
physically violent guy in the group, but just
a tiny little guy. And he’d never been violent
outside of the home – you couldn’t even
imagine it, to look at him.”
King agrees: “It’s an interesting
human trait – we tend to show our worst
side tothe people we love the most. And we
continually see that, if you have a stressful
day at work you won’t go and tell the boss,
you go home and your wife or your child
does something that irritates you, and they
get to see those feelings.”
I meet with one of Cannon’s outwardly
unlikely clients – Kay, 43, a Buddhist from
Nepal, who’s dwarfed even by his tiny office,
and looks like he’s only using the middle
third of his executive’s chair.
Behind him, on a crammed bookshelf is
a picture of he and ex-wife, Karen, who hasn’t
spoken to him in years. On both shoulders,
he sports the crushing burden of being told
by a court that he’s too much of a threat to
her to be allowed anywhere near his three
children – a daughter who’s now almost 18,
and two boys, 11 and 10.
Worst of all, he lives near them, in a small
town, and regularly sees them from across
the street.
“I wave to them, sometimes they smile
to me. It’s very difficult, I miss them so much.
Imagine having to walk past your children
in the street and not being able to give them
a hug and a kiss. And I can see that they want
to run to me, but Karen just grabs them and
runs away,” Kay says, eyes downcast.
When he first attended a behavioural
change course with Cannon he was depressed- hating himself for being a “bad” man. But
then he met the other men in his group.
“There was this one guy, and I wondered
what he was doing there, he was even smaller
than me, just a normal bloke, and he seemed
really nice when you spoke to him. But he
told us how he’d just bash his wife, knock her
down, and she’d be unconscious... And then
he’d go and pick her up and put her on the
bed,” Kay recalls, still shaking in disbelief.
“Then he’d lie there and wait for her to wake
up, and in the morning everything would be
nice again. And nothing would be said.”
MEN OF THE YEAR 2017 GQ.COM.AU 213