Australian of the year Rosie Batty has endorsed a union push for workers to be entitled to domestic violence leave of 10 days a year to help them, for instance, navigate the court system. Batty is a wise and inspiring advocate for domestic violence victims, yet something about the Australian Council of Trade Unions’ proposal is off-kilter.

Apart from business groups questioning why they should pay for leave for domestic violence victims, why should we distinguish this crime from other serious offences?



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Why, for instance, should a woman who has been raped not be entitled to leave so she can deal with the police and the courts? Or a man beaten up outside a pub? Perhaps extra leave for victims of serious and violent crime of all sorts might have merit, but somehow the focus is now so strongly on violence within the home that it has become a special case, a crime apart.



One reason is that like rape, domestic violence is a gendered crime, now so burdened with gender politics that makes it hard to talk about it with any nuance.



It seems churlish to raise the illogicality of domestic violence leave. It is especially tricky to challenge the orthodoxy that domestic violence impacts everyone pretty much equally, because it’s about misogyny – the contempt for women at the heart of the culture. There’s something that doesn’t ring entirely true about that, but question it at your peril.



Former Labor leader Mark Latham often flails around in fury, and the way he suggested in a recent column that entrenched disadvantage was a key driver of domestic violence was as agenda driven as the “privileged feminists” he so loathes.

It’s become easy to dismiss Latham, and on cue, his statement that “the best way of minimising domestic violence is to minimise poverty” was was rightly howled down as simplistic, but also because it doesn’t fit the acceptable narrative around this crime.

News Corp columnist Wendy Tuohy wrote in response to Latham about a woman she knows who lives in a “posh house” in a wealthy Melbourne suburb and who lies about the purple bruises her husband inflicts.



“When Charles Saatchi was photographed with his hand to the throat of Nigella Lawson, numerous women’s services came forward in Australia to remark on the fact domestic violence cuts across all social demographics but is more hidden among the demographic that would otherwise rarely come into contact with community services,” she wrote.

Former Victorian police commissioner Ken Lay says much the same thing: “Violence against women is not limited to any suburb, or to the poor, or to any fixed, imagined type of person you have in your head.”



Feminist group Destroy the Joint has a project to count the number of women killed violently in Australia. So far this year it’s up to 42. The group doesn’t just count deaths resulting from domestic violence because they “believe all these deaths are the result of societal misogyny”.



Surely this is a stretch. In some cases the perpetrator is unknown, and in four cases listed it is women accused of killing other women. In two cases it is the woman’s own daughter accused of murder. If everything is about misogyny, then it risks becoming as much a hindrance to understanding as a help.



We can’t deal with this crime until we understand the detail of it, and it’s as complicated as any other. For a start, murder rates are at their lowest for 25 years, and the proportion of murders that are family related (this includes killings by any family member, not just an intimate partner) are also down. According to a recent Australian Institute of Criminology report, in 2007-08, they comprised 52% of all homicides; now, it’s 38%.



What’s happening is a big jump in the reporting of domestic assaults, because of a shift in attitudes

What’s happening is a big jump in the reporting of domestic assaults, because of a shift in attitudes by police, the legal system and the courts and by women themselves being less willing to put up with violence behind closed doors.



And domestic assaults undoubtedly happen everywhere, to all kinds of women – and some men – whether rich or poor, educated or uneducated, young or old. It’s not just physical violence, it’s psychological oppression and control, too.



But drill down and, like other crimes, it is heavily concentrated in certain areas. If we are going to respond other than in feel-good ways, we’re going to have to target it where it’s most likely to happen, both for victims and perpetrators.



Tuohy’s affluent city friend is a victim of domestic violence, but she would be far more likely to be so if she lived in a rural or remote community. A NSW study over 10 years ranked the local government areas where domestic assaults were reported.



The top five were in remote areas and all but one of the top 20 were regional or remote towns. Campbelltown was the only metropolitan area in the top 20 for rates of domestic assault.



The argument that wealthier, better-educated women have more options than to call police makes sense. But why is there resistance to accepting that if violent assault and murder is more common in areas of severe disadvantage and stress, then the same is likely to apply to domestic violence?



One study, the Voice Against Women Survey in 2006, conceded its findings were out of step with others, but concluded that intimate partner violence “varied little according to education, labour force status or household income.” Yet there are many studies that suggest the opposite.

A NSW Office for Women’s Policy report in 2008 identified “age, low academic achievement, low income or exclusion from the labour market, social disadvantage and isolation and exposure to, or involvement in, aggressive or delinquent behaviour as an adolescent” as associated with domestic violence perpetrators.

A 2001 study said certain factors increased the risk, including “financial problems or unemployment and recent stressful events or circumstances, such as the death of a family member”. Latham was not entirely right, but he was at least half right.



One factor that nobody disputes is the role of alcohol. Again, it’s not an excuse for violence, but we’d be kidding ourselves if we denied that our heavy alcohol consumption was unrelated to assaults of every kind. Politicians of all stripes refuse to deal with our booze-soaked culture because vested interests lobby so hard against it.



One NSW study found that 41% of incidents of domestic assault reported to police between 2001 and 2010 were alcohol related. Close to half of intimate partner murders were alcohol related, and that rises to 87% among Indigenous Australians.



The most disadvantaged Australians are likely to experience much higher rates of violence generally, including domestic violence, but here the generalised cry of “misogyny” is not so loud. In many Indigenous communities, “epidemic” and “crisis” are accurate words to describe what’s happening and few argue the primary cause is sexism.



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There is debate among leaders about whether courts are too lenient on male Aboriginal offenders and the notion that violence against women is “cultural” is rejected. But if we’re going to tackle domestic violence, this is where the most urgent action is needed, particularly providing safe places for women to go. To ignore the role of disadvantage, lack of jobs, despair and chronic alcohol abuse would be to see domestic violence in isolation. If we can accept the complexity in Indigenous communities, we need to see it in non-Aboriginal communities, too.



None of this is to say that misogyny doesn’t play a role – there’s enough evidence that it does, and that men who are sceptical about gender equality are also less concerned about domestic violence. And there is little doubt that this is a male dominated culture in any area you’d care to look at. But we seem to be denying the obvious by treating domestic violence as something entirely separate from other forms of violence, subject to none of the usual stressors we know are associated with crime.

It’s easier to demand higher sentences – a rally about violence against women last month in Melbourne heard calls for a return of the death penalty. Or for the union movement to campaign for a new leave entitlement to make itself look progressive. Or for those who see sexism everywhere to refuse to discuss it in any other way, as though to do so would complicate the issue.