Waleed Aly’s NotAllMen think piece published in the Nine Entertainment newspapers last week isn’t wrong on every point, but it fundamentally fails to understand men’s violence against women and the nature of prevention. As much as I’d like to ignore it, I’ve seen the article generate too much misinformation to be able to just pass it by.
Aly was right to point to shame as an underlying cause and targeted intervention as a necessary (and drastically underfunded) response. Anyone who has worked in the domestic violence sector will tell you how eerie the similarities can be across classes and other demographics. Women who drive up to refuges in a BMW tell the same stories of control, dehumanisation, humiliation, and isolation as the women who arrive with nothing, sometimes not even citizenship. People who work with violent men will tell you the same thing too: no matter what the background of the violent man, abuse is often about control, fear, and shame.
That this is true does not justify the tired but persistent strawman arguments and logic fallacies the article recycles. It does, however, provide a useful point of reference to debunk them, so let’s go through them.
All prevention is about “disrespect”
No, it isn’t. The vast majority of inquiries, including two royal commissions (this one and this one), along with community organisations, advocates, researchers, and experts have long been saying that the causes are complex and varied and that prevention measures must be equally complex and varied. To ignore all the work, time, effort, and energy all those people (most of them women) have expended on research, painstaking explanations, and doing frontline work on a budget that wouldn’t cover a Minister’s couch cleaning bill is breathtakingly ignorant and cruel.
The NotAllMen strawman
None of those experts have ever claimed that all men are violent. Many have said that all men need to be part of the solution, but I’ve not seen anyone suggest the way to do this is for all men to take the blame for violent men. Rather, men have been asked to take responsibility for themselves and participate in community action.
This is not an unusual or controversial request.
Men have no difficulty with this concept during a hot summer when fire danger is high. They don’t sit about complaining that the old man down the road couldn’t manage all his fuel reduction; they turn up with a ute and a chainsaw and get it done. A whole-of-community approach is how everyone stays safe and we include in the process professional fire fighters, volunteers, First Nations wisdom, weather and climate knowledge, hoses and safety gear, long-range planning, government funding at all levels, international experience, constantly updated technology, infrastructure, and probably a long list of other things I don’t know about.
I do, however, know about prevention work in men’s violence against women and none of it is based on the idea that all men are violent. All of it is based on the idea that men—all men—live, work, play, drink, eat, and talk with men who are violent to women. Most men don’t know it. Many of them don’t believe it. I’ve spent considerable time teaching the violence prevention curriculum (and beyond it) in schools and one small part of it is helping boys understand what it’s like to live in the world they don’t see, the world women, girls, trans and non-binary people live in every day, where violence is an ever-present threat.
This is not about disrespect, it’s about knowledge and empathy.
On its own, of course, this is not enough to end men’s violence against women, but more than half of young men believe the myth that domestic violence isn’t a problem in their town, and over a third believe a woman is more likely to be raped by a stranger than someone they know (another myth). It doesn’t help or reassure non-violent men to stay ignorant when their lives will inevitably intersect with women who still live with the effects of encountering men who are violent. Knowledge is always powerful.
The analogy fallacy
Everyone struggles to find an accurate analogy for men’s violence against women. Smoking and HIV don’t work because the people who are dying are the ones who could change their behaviour to prevent their untimely death. The HIV analogy also ignores and diminishes the dedicated work gay men did in their own communities to reduce the spread of HIV.
The good/bad Muslim analogy doesn’t work either. Violent men gain considerable benefit from the violence they choose to enact against their partners and other women. Violent, extremist Muslims do not get any such personal benefits from their actions and the vast majority of Muslims in Australia who are not violent extremists suffer “spitting at women, threats of gun violence”, threats to mosques and schools, “graffiti, property damage, hate mail and verbal abuse”. This is not happening to non-violent men who are asked to recognise the reality of men’s violence against women. The worst they suffer is discomfort.
Perhaps colonisation and what it did (still does) to First Nations people comes closest to reflecting the breadth and depth of men’s violence against women. Both are structural and systemic, hidden and blatant at the same time, burrowed into every aspect of our social, economic, cultural, judicial, medical, educational, familial, and recreational lives. Genuine, effective change will take a heroic effort by thousands of people, all working together in separate places. Part, but certainly not all, of the effort in reconciliation with First Nations people is making sure everyone knows the truth of our past, and the school curriculum plays a role in this. We need to understand what colonisation did, how it was done, and who did it so we can better understand the present and change the future. It is the same with men’s violence against women.
All white people in Australia benefit from colonisation, even if they did not themselves arrive on Captain Cook’s ship or participate in massacres of Aboriginal people.
The NotAllMen argument is the same sophistry as NotAllWhitePeople.
The sexist joke strawman
I don’t know anyone who has said that hearing, let alone telling, a sexist joke will cause good men to turn violent. Of course it won’t. But the dynamics of men telling and hearing jokes is complex, and what is often forgotten by purveyors of logical fallacies is that there is only one group of people who genuinely believe that all men are violent. It isn’t feminists. It isn’t even self-servingly shallow commentators. It’s violent men. They believe all men are violent because they believe all other men are just like them.
I’ve written about how this plays in the sexist joke dynamic in more detail here, but the summary is that both violent men and non-violent men believe all other men are just like them. The violent man hears laugher at a sexist joke as confirmation that everyone shares his beliefs. The non-violent man laughs because he believes all his friends are also incapable of hurting women. And there they are, all chuckling away in their own reality, comfortably believing they all think the same thing. Disrupting those beliefs is why it’s important to push back on sexist jokes, but only a fool would suggest that this alone will end men’s violence against women.
Prevention is structural change
Governments like to talk about individuals or communities when they talk about prevention, and it isn’t hard to see why. Such things are easily addressed with an advertising campaign and a hashtag. Cheap, easy stuff they can hand to the work experience kid and move onto the next press conference. Structural change is much more difficult and much, much more expensive because, as I noted above, it is burrowed into every aspect of our lives, most especially our legal and economic systems.
Our legal system was founded on the idea that men’s violence against women was a property crime, not a personal crime. While this has evolved, there is an unresolvable conflict between the principles of natural justice and the equally compelling need to respond to victims of rape and abuse with even a minimal level of kindness and healing. Tinkering around the edges won’t resolve this conflict. We need to look outside a legal system that has proved itself incapable of dealing with men’s violence.
Meanwhile, our entire economy is built on the premise that women’s work is unpaid ($2.2 trillion in 2016) or underpaid (the real gender pay gap is around 40%). Far too many women must choose between homelessness or staying with a violent man. Even women who can find accommodation need support to recover physically, psychologically, emotionally, and financially. As do their children. This is not new information. A royal commission told us this 50 years ago. And yet, the choice remains between the same rock and a violent place.
The same arguments apply to politics, healthcare, education, sport, the arts, business, human rights, housing, infrastructure, aged care, technology, entertainment, and the online world. And so we come full circle.
Some men have joined the fight, but not all men.
The NotAllMen argument and the men who are unwilling to be part of the solution are the barriers to structural change because they shift all responsibility to women and individuals. As well, governments almost never lead change, they follow it, and so it is left to advocates and activists to carry the burden of reform. If they can convince enough people to join them and make failure to change a political threat, governments will jump on board. Until then, our political leaders feel safe to ignore the matter, or continue with tokenistic responses.
Women have been fighting for change in prevention action for a long time. They have been marching, protesting, writing, advocating, volunteering, campaigning, crying, raging, and exhausting themselves in that fight. Some men have joined the fight, but not all men. Not nearly all of them. Some of them content themselves with writing ill-informed op eds about how change shouldn’t be their responsibility. Far too many others infest the spaces of exhausted, grieving women, furious that the pre-eminence of their feelings is being ignored.
I am as frustrated and angry as any woman who has been forced to watch (again) as politicians compete to see who can use the most words to promise the least action every time another man kills another woman. Another NotAllMen think piece is just a boring, pointless waste of everyone’s time. As much as I might wish I could just roll my eyes and ignore it, I can’t. I tried to, I really did, but all the men commenting and sharing the piece— “see, even the woke left are fed up with men being demonised”— means I can’t. Someone has to make that weary climb up the NOTALLMEN mountain (again) and patiently explain (again) that no one is saying all men are violent and point out (again) that this logic fallacy is not a reasonable excuse to do nothing.
There is no excuse for that.
Thanks to Jane for writing this piece, and a reminder that she has just started her own Substack.
https://janegilmore.substack.com/
Good article. There is another aspect to this. When the South Australian Government introduced mandatory reporting I was tasked with running inservice programmes in various schools. I conducted one session for some 250 staff members. I angered my audience when I stated that based on the statistical data there were at least two or three people in the audience who had perpetrated domestic violence either to their kids or partners. A not insignificant part of the problem is that we are quick to assume that it is others who are at fault. The other part of the problem is that no-one walks around with a label that states they are abusers and so we assume that they are just like us. Moreover we do not recognize it in ourselves that our behaviour can quite unintentionally intimidate others. If we operate in an environment when people can feel confident that they can say to someone when you do x it makes me feel... we will go a long way to addressing the problem.