No Place For Sheep

Having now published two articles on ABC’s The Drum on the topic of the Gillard government’s National Plan to prevent violence against women and their children, I’m convinced  that there are an awful lot of people who believe that there’s only one kind of family violence worth talking about, and that’s male violence against women.

The number of times I’ve been attacked for “distracting attention” from this form of violence because I’m pointing out that there are also female perpetrators of family violence against women and children, and this should not be ignored by  any National Plan. This gives a troubling insight into an established truth regime created and perpetuated by the  Plan through its own definition of domestic and family violence.

“Truth regime” is a term coined by French thinker and philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault argued that we conduct our lives under the largely unacknowledged control of  “truth regimes.” A truth regime is a construct of political and economic forces that command majority power in society, with which we are obliged to conform to varying degrees, if we want to be accepted and stay out of prison.

Among other things, truth regimes circulate statements that are prescriptions for what populations should consider to be the “natural” order of things.  One of the ways this control is achieved is by ignoring and thus silencing any other perspective when designing and legislating public policy.

The National Plan is a brilliant example of a dominant ideology constructing a truth regime under which we must all labour, in this case, for the next 12 years. The truth they’ve consructed is: domestic and family violence is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men on women and “their” children. No matter how many voices are raised with stories of family abuse they’ve experienced at the hands of women, they don’t count. They’re invalid. They’re not in the Plan’s agenda.

Note the possessive, “their children.”According to the truth regime, children belong to women. Never mind that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which we are signatory, has set out a whole raft of children’s rights, including the right for children to have rights entirely separate from their parents. The National Plan says children belong to women.

Responses to my criticisms of the inadequacies of the Nation Plan, which are basically that it will achieve little until it addresses FAMILY violence and not just male violence in families, indicate that there are many subscribers to this truth regime who have a great deal invested in denying all other family violence. This is extraordinary when one considers how hard feminists and others have fought for decades to open the door on domestic violence and give victims a voice.

It seems that we are selective about which victims to whom we grant a voice. Victims of women are out of luck.

The reality is that we’ve been trying for forty years to address family violence from the position that it is all male perpetrated. We have achieved nothing in terms of preventing domestic violence, we’ve just become better at band-aiding the wounds. While one type of family violence never justifies another, it defies all logic that we focus our entire attention on one aspect of a complex situation and expect that we can change it.

Then there’s the common belief that if we acknowledge female family violence we’ll somehow detract from and minimize that perpetrated by men. Are we really so incapable of holding more than one form of violence in our consciousness at the same time? Are we obliged to live under a George Bush type ideology that states the truth as: women are always victims and men are always perpetrators?

The ideology on which the National Plan is based is silencing domestic violence victims and survivors who do not fit into it’s narrow definitions. The truth regime is firmly in place. There are sporadic protests against its dominance, and one can only hope that resistance to the ideology will increase over time, until a more realistic and holistic understanding of family violence takes its place.

Guest post today by Gerard Oosterman, artist, farmer and blogger.

Turkey promised to keep it’s borders open for the people fleeing the violence in Syria. Many thousands of Syrians have crossed into Turkey. TV footage shows men, women and children walking into that country.

Even though Turkey is a country with a large population of over seventy million and already coping with an overflow of many other nationalities, it has not lost its humanity in doing the right thing by extending its hospitality to those so much worse off.  They are quickly opening disused buildings and building camps, and constructing a temporary hospital.

If Turkey can do it, where is our compassion?

Lack of ‘humaneness’ is what seems to doggedly divide Australia from most of the rest of the world, with a deeply ingrained hostility towards others. It is especially directed to those hapless victims of endless wars that somehow managed to make it anywhere near our shores.

Our present minister and previous government ministers have exalted in, ‘we must make conditions here as harsh as possible as a deterrent’. The general gist of the messages from our governments has been constant: “No-one, we repeat, no-one should come here on the understanding they will be treated with compassion or care if they jump the ‘queue’ or come ‘illegal’ by boat,”  is what they are saying. The political leaders are well aware that those sentiments will be well rewarded with the approval of thousand of voters.

The latest threat of sending at least 800 refugees to Malaysia just about takes the cake in the manoeuvring of our desperate government keen to further our whipped up xenophobia. The fact that this whipping might be translated to a caning in Malaysia is seen as a mere bagatelle, easily overcome with a few soothing words of a promise that it would most likely not happen. The UNHCR seems less convinced.

While the conversation is continuing and a flurry of visits to New Guinea and Nauru are intended to underline our tough stance once again, some might question where this dreadful fear comes from. Is there something in our history that gives us clues?

We couldn’t do much wrong by visiting our most recent history of how we treated children, both in our mother country of the UK and in our own.

Having just seen the film “Oranges and Sunshine” and previously read David Hill’s “The Forgotten Children”, I wonder if  one day we might admit there was something rotten going on in our culture dating back perhaps hundreds of years. I know of no other country that deported over 130, 000 children in recent times. I also know of no other country that then allowed the further destruction of those children in the Australian institutions that were supposed to care for them.

Is it is the history of bullying children and sending them into the hierarchical system of English boarding schools? The public (private) schools with their corporal punishment, and the degrading treatment of those who grew up in the ‘British system’ of parenting and educating?

This seems to go to the very heart of why Australia has never managed to shake off that bullying that defined us from the very start.

Yet, when it comes to cattle or suicidal whales we get teary-eyed, ban the export of cattle or stand in the sea for days stroking dying whales. Where is the stroking for the flotsam of humans cast on our shores?

Last Monday’s ABC’s Four Corners showed bullying and degradation at the very core of our armed forces. It is totally ‘us’ and not just the isolated few of ‘them’.  Howard, Ruddock, Abbott, Gillard, Morrison, Bowen. What chance did they all have growing up if they were indoctrinated into a system of bullying?

For Australia to regain its humanity it needs to take a good look in the mirror and reject the notion that we are somehow a fair and just nation. We are not. We might become fair, hospitable and friendly only if we dare to look at our inherited demons and reject the bad and accept and nurture the hidden good.

In the meantime we should take a leaf out of Turkey’s book. We will not turn them away, is what the Turkish Minister for Immigration is reported as saying. They are human beings in distress.

I can’t even imagine one of our politicians saying that.

Gerard blogs at  Oosterman Treats Blog

Related articles

• You: Turkey breaks with Syria over crackdown (latimes.com)