Australia’s domestic, family and sexual violence commissioner, Micaela Cronin, said this week that the scourge of violence against women and children in this country should be treated with the same degree of seriousness as terrorism.
She is right.
Her comments come as the number of women alleged to have been killed this year through family and domestic violence reaches 35, on top of the deaths of another 17 women allegedly by male perpetrators.
“We need to be using all of the tools that are available to us that we use for terrorism,” Cronin said in her speech to the National Press Club. She suggested the use of standard counter-terror measures like monitoring social media, tracking purchases and engaging surveillance.
Why wouldn’t we? A brutal tally of lost lives demonstrates that death and injury from terrorist acts are minimal in comparison to women’s suffering. The local terrorist “threat level” is set at “probable”, yet there have been zero deaths in Australia from terrorism so far this year.
The last lethal terrorist event in this country was the Wieambilla shootings in 2022. We are currently holding a coronial inquiry into it. We insisted more could be done because it was horrific and intolerable to have an event like that on the national consciousness.
The murders of every woman and child are also horrific. Women and their allies in this country do not want any murders on the national consciousness. So we have marched. We have wept. We have screamed in frustration. We have felt numb and abandoned and yet we have stood up again and again and again and again demanding intervention because it is morally unbearable when deaths are preventable.
Yes, there has to be behavioural change in a society that still raises men to believe they have a proprietary claim over women and children. Yes, there has to be cultural change to end a persisting cultural belief in male entitlement to anger and a construct of masculinity that asserts itself in violence. But to make the very idea of violence against women and children intolerable, behavioural and cultural change has to be affirmed by the full force of policing, the judicial system and the law.
When the legal framework for sanction and punishment is weak, the messaging of consequence is weak.
We are overwhelmed by stories of murdered Australian women. Histories of escalating abuse and violence have become familiar tropes. The patterns are consistent, the “red flags” are well known. So, summon an image of the perpetrator to your mind wearing a Nazi armband, or waving an Isis flag and ask yourself: if these weren’t gendered crimes, would we have ever let the violence get this far?
Aspirational terrorists are not provided the luxury of believing they have any social permission for their crimes. We don’t treat terrorism as a defect of an individual character, but as the manifestation of behaviours fomented in and by radicalising channels. So, in Australia, counter-terrorism measures address those channels, too.
Can we really say our systems apply equally resounding discouragement to misogynists whose own socialised and shared beliefs convince them of entitlement to violence? Fifty-two women are dead. How is gender-based murder anything apart from the end of a radicalisation process for these men? Their every channel of influence must be held accountable, through the law and the state as expressions of the public will. That’s how unambiguous social messaging works.
In the UK, the new Labour government is proposing to include extreme misogyny alongside violent political ideology and murderous religious fundamentalism as one of the “harmful and hateful beliefs” addressed by counter-extremist measures. “It’s not OK any more to ignore the massive growing threat caused by online hatred towards women and for us to ignore it,” said the home office minister, Jess Phillips. A strategic review will examine the role played by social forces – including social media platforms, influencers, communities – in an apparatus of incitement to misogynistic violence.
The UK’s plan is “to identify any gaps in existing policy which need to be addressed to crack down on those pushing harmful and hateful beliefs and violence”.
We have those gaps in Australia, and Micaela Cronin has suggested a way to address them.
We can ignore her, of course – and continue to bury women’s murdered bodies, to scream and to weep.
Or we can choose to stare at what makes us uncomfortable, and affirm what we claim to believe. That misogyny is unconscionable. That violence intolerable … and that Australia finally has the stomach to keep women and their children alive.
Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
