There has never been, at least in my lifetime, so much focus on and concern about violence against women. The horrors are relentless. On the weekend, 19-year-old Laa Chol was stabbed to death during an out-of-control party in Melbourne’s CBD. Michelle Petersen and two of her children were murdered in a Perth suburb, with her 19-year-old son charged with the crime on 16 July.



The week before, Amanda Harris, a 36-year-old mother of three, was found dead after a neighbour pulled her from a house fire in Melbourne’s south-east. Her partner has been charged with murder.

And who could forget two teenagers murdered by their father in Sydney early this month after a long custody battle, a slaughter that seemed designed to inflict unthinkable pain on their mother?

Or earlier this year in Margaret River in Western Australia, when Peter Miles shot dead his daughter and her four children as they slept, and then killed his wife?

All these murders are shocking, and it is normal that we would try to work out what on earth is going on, even just to convince ourselves that everything that can be done to prevent something like that happening again will be done.

I am a lifelong feminist, and it is feminists we should thank for insisting that violence against women came out of the shadows

But at this point, perhaps we need take a collective breath. At this point, it seems as though every act of violence or murder – especially against women – is too quickly used as evidence to make a political or ideological point, however well-meaning. At this point, maybe that doesn’t always help all that much, or only helps to confuse.

One day after Laa Chol died, when her family’s grief was raw, home affairs minister Peter Dutton used it as evidence that Melbourne had an “African gangs” problem – police have said the fight involved people of African descent. “There is a major law and order problem in Victoria ... we don’t have these problems with Sudanese gangs in NSW or Queensland,” Dutton told the Age.

That remark was political opportunism at its most cynical. The ethnicity of the perpetrators of all the other murders in recent month have never been highlighted in such a way. Police say that there is no indication that the fight was between “warring factions” among the South Sudanese. “This happens unfortunately from time to time, it’s not related to ethnicity,” said commander Stuart Bateson, the head of the African-Australian community taskforce in Victoria.

Premier Daniel Andrews dripped with contempt when he responded that “I am not engaging with anything said by that person (Dutton)”. Yet for more benign reasons, Andrews also sought to make this death about more than we know it was about. “It reminds us that we have a long way to go when it comes to attitudes towards women and violence against women,” he told the ABC.

But we have no idea whether this killing had anything to do with attitudes towards women, or whether, as has been suggested, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. We do know that men are far more likely to be killed in brawls than women are. And that nearly two out of three victims of murder are men. And just for perspective, we know that the murder rate is the lowest it has been for a quarter of a century.

What has happened – and I stress, for the most honourable of reasons – is that the feminist framing of violence against women as caused by gender inequality, or disrespect for women, with the way to prevent it a generation-long eradication of rigid gender stereotypes now dominates debate and policy responses.

It is repeated without question, with next to no scrutiny bar anti-feminist rants from far rightwingers. Laying a feminist template over every instance of violence against women does not fit in all cases, and does not allow for the nuance needed to understand and reduce these crimes.

I know that is a heretical statement. I am a lifelong feminist, and it is feminists we should thank for insisting that violence against women came out of the shadows. But talking about the stabbing of a teenager at a violent brawl as caused by lack of respect for women is glib, particularly when we have no knowledge yet of what happened. (A 17-year-old boy has been charged with murder).

Equally frustrating was the fact-free culture war debate following the death of Eurydice Dixon, the 22-year old raped and murdered as she walked through a Melbourne park last month. This was a nightmarish crime, but to say, as prime minister Malcolm Turnbull did, that the lesson we should take out of it was to “ensure that we change the hearts and minds of men to respect women’’ lacked rigour.

There are on average two or three random rapes and murders of women a year in Australia, and those who have dealt with these killers say to suggest that respectful relationships programs or encouraging broader respect for women or “calling out” sexist behaviour – however laudable those measures are – will prevent them is fanciful.

“There are very naive discussions about teaching about respect in schools and that somehow that will stop these crimes,’’ James Ogloff, an experienced clinical forensic psychologist, told the Australian recently. “That is not my experience at all.”

Where crime is clearly gendered is in the home, where too many controlling men terrorise women emotionally, financially, and physically. In almost 80% of domestic homicides, the victims are women, with perpetrators overwhelmingly men.

The government-funded violence against women prevention body, Our Watch, has a clear position that domestic violence has one “driver” – it is caused by gender inequality. There is plenty of research suggesting that attitudes towards women’s roles influences people’s tolerance of violence towards women.

Yet even here the framework, in my view, is too rigidly applied, with other factors such as serious disadvantage, substance abuse, alcohol, and a history of violence downplayed because the domestic violence sector fears they excuse men for their behaviour and because of the insistence that this can only be tackled if the entire culture – not just the views of the small number of perpetrators – is transformed.

This is a radical approach untried anywhere in the world, and there are at least some serious researchers who say it is too ideological, and pushes away other ideas that might have a real impact to reduce especially physical intimate partner violence.

The limitations of Our Watch’s approach are painfully obvious in its new report on violence against Indigenous women, Changing the Picture.

This is a careful, nuanced report based on an advisory group of 11 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and involving consultations with hundreds of people across the country. It is a fraught topic, but an urgent one, given that Indigenous women are almost 11 times more likely to die due to assault than non-Indigenous women. Hospitalisation rates for family violence assaults against Indigenous women are 32 times the rate for non-Indigenous women and three times that for Indigenous men.

It is impossible to do this report justice in a few lines. It points out that violence against Indigenous women is not always at the hands of Indigenous men, particularly in urban areas. It lays to rest the myth that somehow assaulting women was “traditional” in Indigenous communities. It says that that too often Indigenous women are charged with assault themselves, when their actions were defensive.

And it acknowledges complexity – that many women fail to report assault for all kind of reasons – a normalisation of violence in some communities and a deep mistrust of the justice system, for instance. Sometimes threats or retaliation from the perpetrator’s family intimidates women into silence. And a “structural apathy” towards violence against Indigenous people exists in the broader society.

It is undoubtedly true, as the report points out, that violence against Indigenous women has to be seen in the context of the violence and racism of colonisation and its aftermath. But reading the report and its background paper, you can almost feel its authors twisting themselves into knots, so careful to say the right thing, not to be another white group imposing its white feminist solutions on Indigenous women.

It tries to make everything Our Watch has said about domestic violence consistent with this approach, but it fails, and you wonder what solutions it proposes at all, except “fix the legacy of colonisation”, which is about as helpful to women facing violence tonight as “end poverty now”.

It concludes there are three “drivers” of violence against Indigenous women (for non-Indigenous women, there is just one – gender inequality). The first is the “ongoing impacts of colonisation for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, families and communities”. The second is “ongoing impacts of colonisation for non-Indigenous people and society”. Number three is “gendered factors”, because it is obvious that women have suffered from colonisation and racism too, and they are not anywhere near as violent as Indigenous men.

They (the drivers) show that the oppressive and traumatic impacts of colonisation and the significant damage it continues to cause, are a key part of the explanation for this violence. In this sense, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men’s violence can be understood as one expression of internalised oppression and trauma.”

Racism and the legacy of colonisation is the main reason for non-Indigenous violence against Aboriginal women, too. “Racialised power inequalities, entrenched racism in social norms and attitudes, and a tendency for Australian society to condone violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people generally are a significant part of the explanation for non-Indigenous men’s violence.”

As for gender inequality, that’s about colonisation too, because it claims – contentiously – that patriarchy did not exist in pre-colonial Australia, but was introduced, destroying traditional laws and customs around gender.

“Post-invasion society has meant the permeation of one of the dominant culture’s most repugnant values into our own community — sexism,” Indigenous academic Larissa Behrendt is quoted as saying.

The report’s cursory dismissal of alcohol – “it can’t be simplistically seen as a ‘cause’ of violence” – verges on the criminal. To repeat the tired argument that many people consume alcohol and are not violent – yes, and most men are not violent, even though they live in a patriarchy – is mealy-mouthed when we know that almost 90% of Indigenous intimate-partner homicides involve alcohol.

To get into the tangled terminology of whether something is a “cause” or a “contributing factor” is rendered irrelevant by examples such as Fitzroy Crossing and Halls Creek in the Kimberley which introduced severe alcohol restrictions in 2007 and 2009. There was a dramatic decrease in assaults, domestic violence and presentations to hospital.

To some extent, any discussion of Indigenous violence is bound to be heated, and Our Watch set itself an impossible task. The report is at pains to point out that none of its analysis excuses disempowered Indigenous men beating up women, but it gets uncomfortably close to doing so.

National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples co-chairwoman Jackie Huggins said while the drivers of violence were “inextricably linked with the legacy of colonisation”, it was time to move on.

“Now peoples and communities need to come together to find solutions. Colonisation should never be used as an excuse for violence.”

In an essay in Griffith Review published in April, Professor Marcia Langton said that “at times it feels like there are more white feminists defending the indefensible – the violence of the perpetrators as an exceptionalist category of colonial impact – than those defending the women whose family life is torn apart by the violence, who are increasingly incarcerated, whose children who are removed into institutional care .”

And lawyer Josephine Cashman, a Worimi woman, said Indigenous men needed to take responsibly for their actions.

Male offenders need to say, ‘I punched that woman in the face, not colonisation’.”

In the jargon of our times, Our Watch takes an “intersectional” approach to violence against Aboriginal women. It is right to do so, although an approach that allows for such complexity would never be considered suitable to discuss domestic violence against non-Indigenous women.

It bends over backwards to explain violence against Aboriginal women as centred on colonisation. That is entirely well meaning, and sincere, and centred on a deep commitment to preventing domestic and family violence.

But in this era, whether we’re talking about family violence in Indigenous or non-Indigenous communities, there are too many ideological assumptions clouding the discussion. There’s nothing wrong with ideology – we all have belief systems and see the world through them – but they have to be challenged sometimes, or we’re trapped in them.

• Gay Alcorn is a Guardian Australia columnist

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