Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video I’ve spent the past 2½ years trying to investigate the historical causes of these universal crimes against women, not – as Bettina Arndt suggested when my recent book was published – because I was trying to "virtue signal" to women. Rather, because in the wake of the #MeToo movement, I’ve wanted to understand better what millions of women were testifying to: stories of being slapped, stalked, groped, assaulted, raped, degraded, silenced and disbelieved. Loading I wanted to understand – as a man, a father, a son, a brother and friend to many wonderful women – what causes this murderous male contempt to rage across the world. And I wanted men – even those who profess to be good men – to join me in this investigation, for the simple reason that it is men who are perpetrating most of the violence. This is the greatest human rights violation on the planet, with the World Health Organisation reporting that a billion women will be raped or beaten in their lifetime. Here in Australia, according to the Australian Institute of Criminology, 1.2 million adult women have experienced an incident of sexual violence since they were 15 while, according to Our Watch, one woman a week on average is killed by her current or former partner.

Add to this the hundreds of thousands of women requiring medical attention or hospitalisation, who fear daily for their lives, who are controlled menacingly by partners and former partners, whose children are weaponised by their fathers, and this is the national emergency we can no longer ignore, if ever we could. In his masterful book Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice, the late Irish journalist Jack Holland wrote that “on the depressing list of hatreds that human beings feel for each other, none other than misogyny involves the profound need and desire that most men have for women". “Hatred co-exists with desire in a peculiar way,” he wrote. “This is what makes misogyny so complex [because] it involves a man’s conflict with himself." Loading Moved by the murder of Hannah Clarke and her three children on February 19, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said family violence would be on the agenda for the upcoming meeting of state and territory leaders, while opposition leader Anthony Albanese renewed his calls for a national domestic violence summit.

I would like to offer another suggestion – a national education program that starts with boys, perhaps as young as two or three, that teaches them skills such as empathy and self-regulation, and unpacks the crippling stereotypes that socialise boys to feel superior to girls so they grow into men who objectify women and see them as their property. A program built around a new model of manhood that embraces the work of men such as Tom Harkin at Tomorrow Man, Hunter Johnson at The Man Cave and Arne Rubinstein at the Rites of Passage Institute, as well as the Jesuit Social Services 2018 "Man Box" study, all of which address how boys and young men might be taught to treat girls with the same respect and kindness that they would wish for themselves. A program, that explains to them there is nothing "manly" about dominating others, nothing impressive about pretending not to be in pain, and nothing meaningful in this world without the capacity to be vulnerable. You start out in life sensitive and full of wonder, open to the world and all its possibilities, but, then, after a certain age, these qualities are shamed, beaten, bullied out of you by the culture and, often, by the men who run our nations, corporations, legal firms, sporting clubs, schools, advertising agencies, film industries and media outlets. Is it any wonder that men are never taught to deal with their emotions in a healthy way? Loading Perhaps this is at the heart of men’s rage, whether expressed through murder, rape, domestic violence, suicide, alcoholism, reckless driving or simply sullen withdrawal from the world. If men attack – or are in conflict with – women in the outer world, it is because they are at war with their inner world. Don’t be a sissy. Suck it up. Stop your crying now. All the stock definitions of masculinity that prevent boys from dealing with – as Steve Biddulph puts it – “the storms and subtleties” inside our hearts.