DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

The need for integration for informed policy

SUSAN CASTLE, DANIELLE SULIKOWSKI, CARMELLA ACCIARITO, SARAH HOWE & PAUL READ

The story of domestic violence is a story of the tenderest parts of love, trust and family life inverted, perverted and undermined by the worst aspects of human nature. Story after heartbreaking story of agony, chaos, violence, financial abuse, rape, stalking, sexual assault, coercion, imprisonment, beatings, murder, narcissism, dehumanisation, and cruelty obliterate the faith of victims, not only their faith in love and humanity, but also their faith in the social systems and policies we put in place to support and protect them.

In this article we speak with three women with strong views on how policy should be designed and delivered to truly deal with the rising scourge of femicide in Australian society, we critically examine the recent data and the government’s response to it, and we examine the broader implications for what might one day become a more compassionate and inclusive brand of Feminism.

Susan Castle, a lived experience advocate, navigated a tortuous maze of narcissistic abuse by a male perpetrator yet still managed to lead in a global business, protect her adolescent son, support other victims, and come out the other side with her compassion for men intact. Girl boss she may be, firebrand activist in the space of family violence, to some a mentor in the sisterhood and a passionate advocate of girls and women, but she retains huge compassion and appreciation for what she describes as positive masculinity and denies the wholesale dismissal of men as useless or toxic.

For eight years, in between leading a growing and global business, work that she sustained through years of private agony and abuse, she has been a White Ribbon Advocate, consulted to both state and federal legal systems, presented her story and insights to a wide spectrum of rooms from big banks to the education system, and eventually graduated from Monash University in family violence prevention.

Susan says the major problem in the space is that two narratives are in opposition — the systems approach, top-down, and the community approach, bottom-up.

“Both need integrating,” she says.

You may be interested in the video below of a 2023 Fabian event featuring Dr Anne Summer, Australia's leading feminists, in conversation with WA';s Minister for Women.

In essence, the system of laws and protections and services need realignment with the insights of lived experience.

“Police do their work and the magistrates come to judgment, mostly with the best of intentions, but even here the laws and instruments they have to work with are counter-productive. Meanwhile, services, and even emergency services when women need to escape, are woefully under-funded.”

Susan says the major issue in revamping the laws to protect victims is that policy-makers need to understand that lived experience is not generic. Here she touches on another issue that needs to be made conscious in the space — that the empirical data upon which policy is built is too often relying on simplified descriptors such as means and averages and group deviations, to the extent that lived experience and the heterogeneity within groups is completely overlooked. This means policy driven by simplified heuristics fails because the people having to deliver the policy are never equipped with the funding or tools to tailor services on a case-specific basis.

“There are myriad forms of lived experience that need to inform policy,” she says. “I think the very core of failed policy is the inability to translate from the group-level heuristic to the lived experience of the individual within the group.”

A heuristic, as a mental short-cut, simply doesn’t work in a space rich with nuance.

This goes directly to the issue of using simple heuristics and summary data to make observations and inferences about what is truly going on.
But unlike extreme proponents of Fourth Wave Feminism, it does not throw out the empirical data wholesale — rather, Susan’s take is that both lived experience and empirical data need to be integrated properly to create good policy. 

“If I had my way,” says Susan, “the first thing I would do is create a national registry of expertise from lived experience advocates to inform policy-makers’ deliberations and decisions.”

“For example, I’ve sat in many rooms where disparate stories are told — horrific stories — where I can apply my own experience to many topics. I could be defined (by the sector) as an expert in one area of domestic violence — granted one that is broadly impactful and deeply informed by the effects of narcissistic abuse on partners and children — and it’s perhaps because I am solutions-focused and have the capacity to think laterally, that I can lean into other people’s experiences. But I recognise my limitations here in a way that some academic researchers and policy-makers, basing their conclusions solely on what amounts to summary data, sometimes fail to see.”

It’s important that lived experience becomes part of the dialogue as it adds depth to the context offered by data. By the same token, we should not overturn the utility of data to provide context, cleaving instead to an extreme postmodern position on the privilege of different forms of knowledge. Without empirical context, lived experience can devolve into intersectional shouting matches.

Here, Susan pauses a moment and says she needs to say something about the nature of privilege, parenting and family violence. Susan says we need to intercept the cycle of family violence by taking care of the next generation of men.

“By opening up about my own pain, I allow others to sit in the space with me and ask questions about what can be done about domestic violence. When I studied family violence at Monash, I consistently saw that male recovery, especially among adolescents, was completely overlooked. It was so hard to find real, trauma-focused recovery support for adolescents, especially boys. Our mental health sector and healing modalities are simply not identifying the needs of boys and men.

“Policy and services must be trauma-informed and there’s also an increasing misdiagnosis of trauma. What we see is an overlap between symptoms of neurodivergence and symptoms of complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which means young boys, girls and recovering adults are being misdiagnosed and treated with sedatives or Methylphenidate. This is tragic as it only hides the symptoms for a short time and eventually the trauma will assert itself over their lives.

“The jails and remand centres are full of former child victims of family violence, the data supports this. It also tends to show a large overlap with about 70% of prisoners being neurodivergent. But very few being truly antisocial.”

“The final thing I want to say is that passion prompts change. Often, one of the things men ask me face-to-face is ‘what can I do’? So, what I want to say is that being a single mum, what men can do is watch out for us. If you see a single mum in your network, especially if they have a teenage boy, look out for them. 

“Our boys need men.”

“They are the sons of the mums who are victims, and victims themselves. For the men around us — the uncles, teachers, old school mates — involve those young men in your lives and give them what they need from a male perspective.”

“This is positive masculinity, and it needs to be recognised, celebrated and encouraged for what it is, and all good men have the means and capacity to participate in positive change.”

Dr Danielle Sulikowski completely agrees. After decades studying the psychology of gender and intrasexual competition at Charles Sturt University, Danielle says the focus on femicide as the dominant narrative is taking away from the needs of women in those more complicated and nuanced situations that lead up to femicide, including coercive control, and that a more nuanced understanding of the full spectrum of domestic violence affecting both genders is sorely needed.

“This is not just about recognising men as perpetrators and installing wholesale behavioural change initiatives for men, and it’s not just about reinforcing the dominant narrative that all men are rapists and evil.” Danielle picks up a thread in what Susan is saying by pointing out that both men and women are victims of domestic violence, and likewise both have equal propensity for psychopathy. When policy focuses on the amplification and empowerment of extreme views on both sides, it can seem as if whole groups are toxic.

“This is simply not the case,” says Danielle.

“Positive masculinity exists and so too does toxicity within women. There is overwhelming evidence for toxic forms of both patriarchy and matriarchy., and both are feeding into domestic violence in different ways.”

If the systems are focused on gender or race, sexual orientation or ability, then the groups being marginalised or demonised will be judged based on group identity rather than true individual character. This is when some victims get completely overlooked, offered no services whatever.

“It’s a form of ecological fallacy to wrongly attribute good or bad aspects of a group to an individual, or vice versa. In fact, it’s the very essence of racism or sexism to do so. The very essence of intersectionality and Fourth Wave Feminism is supposed to be the opposite of this — as Susan says, it aims to amplify the voices of the marginalised as individuals and respect their heterogeneity. By cleaving to this older Feminist notion, it further incites gender wars, as we see in the Red Pill movement across social media, and this conceivably fuels domestic violence itself.”

As a long-time statistical analyst Danielle understands only too well how statistics can be selectively highlighted to alter perceptions. She says the great majority of women are not so anti-male as the narrative would have it, and some examination of the data is warranted, if only to give context to the debate around family violence more specifically.

The Australian Institute of Criminology recorded 34 women killed by end of April, a crisis first recognised as 26 women were killed in the first 114 days of 2024. This represents a major increase in the murder of women by men. That said, there is a broader timeframe for reporting, less well known, in which femicide has dramatically fallen since the 1980s, as has most crimes, and even this year remains much lower than previous decades. So, what was happening in previous decades?

One of the strongest studies of femicide by the Australian Institute of Criminology was led by Jenny Mouzos (1999), and still begs further elaboration in the current era. The data covers the decade of the 1990s and tends to be supported by another study of 53 countries by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC, 2000), which also showed male perpetrators represented 95% of homicides.

In Jenny’s study, women in the 1990s were more likely to be killed in their own homes (70%), because of jealousy or desertion (29%) or a domestic fight (44%), usually with a knife (33%) by an older (52%) white (75%) male (94%) intimate partner (58%) averaging 35 years old. In 66% of cases no alcohol was involved. The gender breakdown from her study is shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Australian homicide victims and perpetrators by gender, 1989-98 (Mouzos, 1999).

Looking at these statistics, men are definitely more likely to kill than women — it can be said they are almost eight times more likely — but they are not more likely to kill women. Rather, men are 1.7 times more likely to kill other men than women and women are three times more likely to kill men as well. Whether the perpetrator is a man or a woman, men are more likely to be victims in both cases.

From the perspective of the perpetrator, this tends to reflect gender rates across all crimes involving violence. As crimes become less violent, the arrest rates become increasingly similar between men and women. For example, in the US men are more likely to be arrested for homicide (95%), assault and robbery (80%), property crimes (63%), theft (63%), fraud (59%), and embezzling (52%).

Danielle says this reflects the proclivity of a small minority of the general population to be truly toxic. Around 1-1.5% of people, regardless of gender, are clinical psychopaths. This also suggests that a minority of both men and women — not all men — are prone to criminality, and it is a truism in the criminological literature that about 10% of violent offenders are responsible for 50% of crimes, following the Pareto effect.

It is also well-known that male and female violence is qualitatively different in manifestation, leading to greater physical, as opposed to emotional, violence among boys and men. In psychopathy, this emerges as higher rates of criminal acts among men, whereas women tend towards greater interpersonal manipulation and exploitation — acts that can be extremely destructive but rarely fall foul of the law. This suggests the largely physical default among males, combined with their greater strength, could result in more homicides, and not necessarily because of a characterological predilection to violence shared by all members of one gender. There is, for example, more equality in intimate partner and sexual violence among same sex couples, with same sex men actually less violent than same sex women.

“Women’s toxicity usually emerges in other domains,” says Danielle, “but it definitely exists.”

Recent analyses say past studies in which men predominated on psychopathy were largely biased, similar to racial studies on other measures, and that men now outnumber female psychopaths by a ratio of only 1:1.2. From another perspective, the average difference in its inverse correlate, agreeableness, is only 3.8 for men versus 4.1 for women. Neither of these gender differences are big enough to explain gendered differences in violence; indeed, the difference for agreeableness is much bigger between nations than for gender. Overall, these metrics tend to suggest that women and men are almost equally good or bad, but clearly in different ways.

Danielle, like Susan, concludes that we need to encourage positive, strong masculinity within the broader population of men to help tackle domestic violence and call out the minority of men who haven’t yet got the memo.

“Further, victim blaming holds no place in this more compassionate way forward that demands accountability of both genders in the domestic violence space,” she says. “However, we must also remember that there are men who are victims of women in this space, and so far we struggle to even accept a narrative that acknowledges this, let alone provides them with services.”

Twice elected chair of the national Fabians, Dr Sarah Howe, also agrees that policy needs to be informed by lived experience. A political economist with strong ties to the ALP and decades of experience in policy, Sarah crystallises the issue as a translational problem from empirical heuristics to policy, with a clear failure in recognising heterogeneity within groups.

“It’s absolutely a translational problem in policy implementation,” she says.

Moreover, Sarah argues that knee-jerk policy implementation is the most dangerous precisely because it is more prone to creating unintended consequences, especially if the bureaucracy becomes burdensome and insensitive.

Sarah agrees with Susan that lived experience needs to inform policy so blanket policy heuristics can be more carefully crafted and tailored on a case-by-case basis. This is where police, magistrates and frontline staff need to have more discretionary leeway to enact the spirit of the law.

This is an area where Carmella Acciarito, a family violence lawyer, practitioner, researcher and relationship educator, is especially passionate. Her recent PhD focused on homicide in intimate relationships in Australia. 

Carmella’s main point is that the current funding is focused on victim safety whereas the forgotten, and fast dwindling, focus on prevention and behaviour change must focus on the side of the perpetrators as well. Otherwise, the funding as it stands does what government policy always does and addresses the problem after the fact, after the violence has been unleashed, and not beforehand in terms of prevention.

Carmella says that, although the Federal government has recently increased its budget by near $1 billion in support services, the focus on men is being eviscerated. For example, she says that the Victorian Melbourne Magistrates Court will cease funding the men’s behavioural change program in June, which is a preventative program — “even though It’s been so beneficial as a result of a counselling order to assist men in identifying and making meaningful changes to intimate relationships.”

She says: “we understand and know that there are complex risk factors for men, but still much work needs to be done in the translational policy space in ways that mitigate and address the needs of both men and women.”

Victorian Attorney General Jacklyn Simes told the ABC that there needs to be changes on how men value women, and this needs to be the case while men are young in adolescence.

“Young men should learn about and be taught about respectful relationships and conflict resolution. Men need to take leadership and need to shut down inappropriate conversations and stop victim-blaming. These factors will come together slowly but they need oxygen in the form of funding, and hopefully, there will be a paradigm shift.”

“How many times do we hear of women and children who fail to meet the benchmarks for support and so end up in more danger. One example I know of is a young woman who cannot access any support in the domestic violence space despite the perpetrator being a decades-long and violent stalker who was recently arrested with an illegal firearm and illicit substances. Because she has never had any history of intimate involvement with him, she is cut off from standard domestic violence support networks despite being in very real physical danger.”

“This,” says Sarah, “needs case-by-case implementation at a level I’m not convinced is being offered at the service level as yet. We haven’t quite got the integration between empirical data and lived experience right and that’s because it’s relatively new as a way of systematising and honouring different forms of knowledge.”

This creates another tension within the narrative pointed out by Carmella, that respecting cultural beliefs in a multicultural society like Australia still enables frankly vicious patriarchal forms of violence to predominate among groups who come from highly masculine, hierarchal, and violent cultures.

“But we can’t talk about this either,” she says. “There is an implicit agreement in Australian citizenship that newcomers should hold and respect Australian values around equality, here gender equality.

“The problem is that men today are emasculated, and we have a collision of beliefs and expectations at a multicultural level, entrenched by patriarchal beliefs in religion, that fuel domestic violence. So, we’re fighting multiple triggers — the cultural, the religious, and the social. But we are not allowed to speak of the dominant role of ethnicity in this space.”

As a male who experienced three years of domestic violence with a narcissistic woman, Dr Paul Read treads warily in this space. His PhD focused on measuring human needs within planetary boundaries, but his results demonstrated gender equality was as important as basic needs like water and food. But he also comes from decades of experience in criminology examining and profiling the personalities of serial killers and bushfire arsonists.

Paul says that, in his understanding at least, Fourth Wave Feminism views empirical data with some suspicion, as a manifestation of post-Enlightenment patriarchy. This began with postmodern theorists like Foucault, among others, who superimposed Marxism over other forms of oppression, opened up dialogue about systematic oppression of women and races other than white colonialists, and drove the idea that there are other forms of relativistic knowledge outside of the purely rational ideal of the Enlightenment — knowledge ranging from intuition and lived experience to cultural or spiritual knowledge. These forms of knowledge have been collectively adopted as ‘Feminine’, such that empirical rationalism is dismissed as patriarchal.

“As Susan says, we must listen to the voices of the marginalised, and yet we use simplified group-level analysis to drive policy and its supporting bureaucracy. We need to listen to the case-by-case experiences, and be alert to when you’re being played by a narcissist. Otherwise, we do a profound injustice to the real victims, and we actually feed into more and more systemic violence by throwing fuel on the fire.”

The authors finish with a plea for policy-makers to use both empirical data and lived experience, the voices of the marginalised, to properly design policy, and go further to say that blanket heuristics based on group-level data then need decision trees put in place to deal with subgroups and individual cases. Moreover, funding needs to be in place that supports case-by-case analysis at a real, deeply engaged and personal practitioner level, and this also needs workforce training.

“We should be strengthening our ability to deal with individual differences at the coal face,” says Sarah. “Otherwise, we end up with profoundly counter-productive and inhumane systems like Robodebt.”

Paul adds for context that our men and boys are in trouble. As well as rising rates of femicide, the other side of the coin is youth suicide, where the violence is internally directed instead of externalised. Data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reveal that 12 children killed themselves aged under 14 in 2022, 57 aged 15-17 and 275 aged 18-24. This is a three-fold increase compared to previous generations, six-fold among indigenous communities, and is the leading cause of death among the young. This is also a heart-breaking manifestation of domestic and systemic violence, including bullying, that needs addressing as a matter of urgency.

“Rising rates of homicide, femicide and suicide,” says Paul, “are all emerging from a place of violence and what might be considered as systemic and economy-wide failures in support of our most vulnerable. From a Rawlsian ethical perspective, we are failing.”

The paradoxical tension within Fourth Wave Feminism itself is that when it applies an empirical heuristic to gender stereotypes in ways which vilify men it waters down its own impassioned dedication to the individual intersubjective truths that deserve their own sovereignty. Only by integrating both can we begin to move towards a more empowered and compassionate Fifth Wave Feminism where all voices have a place at the table, simultaneously mitigating the multiple and related hellscapes of femicide, domestic violence, narcissistic abuse, and suicide affecting both men and women. As Susan says, Fifth Wave Feminism is about looking through a lens by which we can identify everyday sexism regardless of gender.