May 29, 2025 • 49 mins
TV shows like Adolescence, conversations about the ‘Lost Boys Report’ and Red Pill Men have contributed to society trying to understand what makes boys and men becoming violent perpetrators so that we can end men’s violence. Domestic and male violence is something that we have spoken to many experts about on this podcast over the past 6 years. We’ve learnt that the most dangerous time for a woman fleeing violence is when she actually leaves. We’ve spoken to victim survivors and family members of victims of abuse and learnt about the early warning signs of violent perpetrators. But, today’s conversation addresses the belief systems that violent men have and the programs and systems in place to keep women and children safe and whether they actually work.
Joining the podcast today is Dr Brian Sullivan. Dr Brian is an academic and the founder of Sicura Domestic Violence Training and Support. He has been working with men who use violence in men’s behaviour change programs for almost 25 years. Brian has joined the 3rd season of the podcast ‘There’s no place like home’ to address the changes that are needed in our conversations about violence and ask the right questions - why does he do it? And how do we help the next person leave safely?
We speak about:
- How perpetrators use ‘justifications’ to control their image management
- The underlying belief systems of male privilege, entitlement and control
- Can violent men be truly rehabilitated?
- The systemic barriers that need to be addressed to actually reduce violence
- The measures we can take right now to stop children going down dangerous paths and following dangerous influencers
- There are more reports about former partners than current ones
- The problem with how ‘breaches’ are currently handled
- How perpetrators use children as a weapon
You can find more information from Dr Brian Sullivan here
You can find season 4 of ‘There’s No Place Like Home’ podcast
If you or a loved one are experiencing violence, help can be accessed https://1800respect.org.au/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode was recorded on Cameragle Land. Hi guys, and
welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
I'm Laura, I'm Brittany.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Now, as you know if you've been a part of
the Life Uncut family for any length of time, domestic
and male violence is something that we have.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Spoken about for many, many years.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
We have spoken to so many experts on this podcast
about this very thing, and it is really a conversation
that over the last couple of years has been hugely
thrust into the spotlight. And that's because it is something
that has not improved and is not getting better. I mean,
as we've all seen, women are screaming, screaming out for
reform and for changes to be made. In this way,
(00:47):
we've learnt that the most dangerous time for women fleeing
violence is when she actually decides to leave the home,
and also how many times it can take a woman
to actually leave a relationship where domestic violence is occurring.
We've spoken to victim survivors and family members of victims
of abuse and learn about the early warning signs of
violent perpetrators. But an aspect of violence that we haven't
(01:08):
really had an in depth conversation about is what happens
after she leaves? What happens after a woman actually makes
that choice to remove herself from that situation, and does
the violence continue and how does that violence transform. Joining
the podcast today is doctor Brian Sullivan. Doctor Brian is
an academic and the founder of Secure Domestic Violence Training
(01:30):
and Support. He has been working with men who use
violence in men's behavior change programs for almost twenty five years.
Brian is joined the third season of the podcast There's
No Place Like Home to address the changes that are
needed in our conversations about violence and to ask the
right questions questions like why does he do it? And
how do we help the next person leave safely? Brian,
(01:51):
Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Thanks Laura, Thanks Britt. Great to be here with you.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
Such an important topic. And as we just said, you've
been working in this industry for twenty five five years.
Can you just explain to us what is it exactly
that you do?
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Well, that's a really good question, because it hasn't been
the same thing for twenty five years. I got into
this work quite by accident. When I was studying in America.
I needed money basically, and I was doing one thousand
hours of internship for this doctoral program in the University
of Toledo, Ohio, and the only one I could find
that would pay me was as a co facilitator of
(02:23):
a court mandated program for domestically violent men. And one
of my colleagues, one of my friends over there, was
doing this work and she said, why don't you come
and do this work with me? So poverty got the
better of me. I was really up to that point.
I'd avoided, or thought i'd avoided domestic and family violence
in my work as a school counselor and as a
counselor anyway. I started the work and became quite fascinated
(02:47):
with these men's stories of how they justified and how
they rationalized their violence to make them sound like the
good guys and the victim was the provocateur, the crazy bitch,
to use their language, who was causing all this. And
it became so weird to hear them trying to justify
(03:07):
the unjustifiable in my book that I ended up doing
my doctoral research in that so I looked at the
effectiveness of court mandated programs for domestically violent men, and
when I came back to Australia, I started teaching in
universities University of New England in Armadale, University of Queensland,
and I was teaching courses on violence issues in counseling,
(03:28):
but I was also doing some training on the side
to those who wanted to learn how to work with
these men in intervention groups. I went back to practice
for a period of years where I was actually the
program manager for an organization in Logan up here south
of Brisbane called YFSS, the Responsible Men Program, and I
(03:50):
worked there as a program manager for a number of
years before returning to academia where I was teaching and
doing research into domestic and family violence, focusing on men's
groups and interventions for men. And in about twenty twenty two,
I think it was, I started Secura, which is my
own training consultancy where I do training for police, corrective services,
(04:13):
men's behavior change groups, TV organizations. I've done training for
lawyers and for magistrates etc. So last year I was
on the board of the Red Rose Foundation and it's
a foundation that has been close to my heart for
a number of years. I was on the board there
for five or six years and then asked to be
the CEO when the founder a legend a woman called
(04:36):
Betty Taylor retired and I did that role for a year.
I always said it was caretaker role. I always thought
that position should be a role for a woman of
a women's organization working with women who were victim survivors
of non lethal strangulation. So I stood down from that
role at the start of this year and have gone
(04:57):
back to my securer work, where I'm continuing the train
an education for those who work with male perpetrators of
domestic violence. That's a long story.
Speaker 4 (05:06):
Short You just mentioned something, Brian, that you worked very
closely listening to these perpetrators justify the unjustifiable. What is
the main rationale that you hear from these perpetrators And
do you genuinely think that they believe what they're saying
or do you think that they know what they're doing
is not right, but they're just trying to make an
(05:27):
excuse for their actions.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
My experience over those years has led me to believe
that when a man tries to justify his violence, it's
really a strategy of image management, and that image management
is a double sided coin. So one side of the
image management is to make him look good, or even
(05:51):
to make him look like the victim of this evil woman,
of this psychotic woman, of this very unfair woman. And
the flip side, of course, is while making himself look good,
he has to make her look bad, so he has
to trash talk her. So when a man, and these
are typical strategies that men use when they front a
(06:11):
program and well into the program, until for many men,
the light goes on and they start to realize that
their dishonesty is not working, that we're not buying it.
So you think about yourself, if you deny you've done something,
if you try to excuse it, if you try to
blame someone else, if you try to minimize it, it
(06:32):
wasn't so bad. I know when I do that, I
know I've done something wrong, and I'm trying to cover
it up. It's a way of camouflaging what we know
is wrong. So I think, to answer your question, I
think that men have a belief system, or these men
have a belief system which is all about male privilege,
male entitlement, control over women and children. So when a
(06:56):
woman challenges that or doesn't comply with that, then he
ramps up and he then starts to get abusive or
increases his controlling behaviors, and to me, that's a way
of reinforcing or re establishing his worldview over hers. But
the fact that he's also minimizing, denying, blaming, justifying shows
(07:21):
me that he knows that what he's doing is actually wrong.
So that's where we want to get to in men's groups.
Get them to that point where they were honestly take
responsibility and fess up and say, yeah, I knew what
I was doing, I knew the harm it was causing,
and I know it's wrong. And I think once we
get to that level of honesty, then we can start
(07:42):
to work with men for change.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
What is it?
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Because we know that, you know, it's not just people
who have come from abusive households, or who have come
from drug addiction or I think there's used to be
this kind of thought that domestic violence was quite othering
and that it was only a specific type of male
that would do it. But as we've seen and recently,
people who come from incredibly privileged backgrounds can be perpetrators
(08:05):
of this violence all often. Ah yeah, And I guess
my question is what is it that creates this type
of monster in a man? What's happening in terms of
the social upbringing or in terms of the exposure that
they've had to think that they have this entitlement over women.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
Brilliant question. I think if we knew comprehensively and deeply
the answer to that question, we could work with these men,
maybe better than we're doing. But my take on that
is that typically a man, when he was a boy
generally or an adolescent, he's had a role model, whether
it's mum's husband, you know, his father or stepfather or
(08:41):
living boyfriend or whoever it was, get what he wants
by very disrespectful, abusive treatment of his partner, of the
boy's mother. The boy realizes at an early age that
this gets him what he wants, when he wants, and
how he wants. If this is how he treats a woman,
he can fulfill he thinks all his needs. And the
(09:02):
third part of that is he's gotten away with it.
And I think that's where societal interventions and courts, police
corrective services, child safety has to step up so that
men and really it goes back to families and communities
at an early age, early intervention that boys should not
be getting away with this sort of stuff. We need
(09:23):
to know what boys are up to I think at
earlier and you know that recent series Adolescence is showing
us that parents need to be far more aware of
what their boys are getting up to. When we know
that boys are accessing pawn at earlier and earlier ages
eight nine, we've got a major problem in the way
a boy's brain is developing in terms of his beliefs,
(09:45):
in terms of his attitudes, in terms of his values,
in terms of his developing masculinity. And you know, when
we're dealing with these men in groups after they've been
court ordered or on probation and parole to do these groups,
that beliefs system has been there for quite a while.
I have a sign on my wall which says first
time offender, long time abuser. So even though that might
(10:08):
be the first time he's been caught by police or
first time he's ever been to court, he's had this
belief system. He's been doing these behaviors for a long
period of time.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Well that's the thing, right, I mean, Statistically, most people
who almost men who use violence in the household never
spend time in prison. They never ever even face any
repercussions for it. And the people who do end up
in prison or do end up in these court mandated programs.
The violence that they've used has to have been significant,
has to have been something that was able to be
(10:40):
proven in court, which often it can't be. It has
to be some reasonable about absolutely so inforce that it's
like an undeniable place. I guess my question is that
you deal with the worst version of these abusers, do
these programs work and is there a way of rehabilitating
men who have such violent behaviors and such long systemic
(11:00):
belief systems around the value of women.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
To your questions, both of you are really on the mark.
I would say, well, I wouldn't be doing this work,
and I wouldn't have been doing this work for twenty
five years if I didn't carry a deep hope within
me that men can change. These men can change high risk,
high harm men can change under the right constraints, under
the right context, under the right conditions. Now, whether we've
(11:26):
got that constraint, context, and conditions in place at the moment,
I'm not so sure about that. But if you're dealing
with a man who has these entrenched beliefs and behaviors,
if you're dealing with a man who's a serial abuser.
If you're dealing with a man who has a long history,
then obviously we need to go at this holistically. So
(11:47):
he's got to have an intervention that's going to deal
with his stopping of violence, stopping of abuse, stopping of
coercive control. That's long term work. It's not a quick fix.
It's not an easy solution. But he may have also,
and not in all cases, but he may have mental
health issues from potentially trauma that he's suffered in his life,
(12:08):
so he may need that trauma addressed. He may have
alcohol and drug issues that he's dealing with. He may
need that addressed. He may have employment, housing problems. He
may have a whole suite of problems which he needs
addressed in it with a whole suite of interventions. So
sticking a man in one program, let's say a men's
(12:30):
stopping violence program, I don't call a men's behavior change programs.
I don't like that terminology. Because you can change your
behavior of courts and police are looking at you, and
he might stop your overt physical abuse of your partner
or your ex partner. But that doesn't mean she's not terrified. Still,
she's not intimidated she's not living in fear because of
(12:52):
the emotional violence, the verbal violence, the psychological violence, the
coercive control can be very non physical that it can
be extremely terrifying, and it can still be his tyrannical
hold over her even without the physical So I don't
call them behavior change. I think we need to go
deeper than behavior. We need to be really delving into
(13:13):
that deep belief system. So it will need a long
term stopping violence program. You know, in Queensland they can
range from between twelve sixteen twenty twenty six weeks. Is
that long enough? I potentially don't believe, so I think
you know, And certainly in America there's forty weeks, there's
fifty two weeks, there's two year programs. So I would like,
(13:36):
if I had my way, and if I had my
power to change the system, I would love to see
a high risk, high harm men do stopping violence program,
do an abuse of Dad's program, do alcohol and drug interventions,
and also do mental health interventions too if needed. So
when you add all those programs up, it may actually
(13:59):
take more than a year, and that's going to cost
a lot, and it's going to require skilled personnel who
can do that. I'm not sure about your neck of
the woods, but we have trouble at times being able
to staff men's intervention programs up here due to the
location where they may not be skilled staff to do that.
So there's lots of systemic barriers and blockages too that
(14:23):
need to be addressed. So again, long story short, Yes,
I believe these programs can be effective, but in and
of themselves less so they need to be part of
an integrated, coordinated community response to domestic violence and they're
a very important component of that. But they're not a
standalone They should never be a lone ranger program alone
(14:46):
ranger solution. That's asking too much of it. It's got
to be tied and tied tightly with other responses, other interventions,
other work from outside that space too. So you know,
program are good, but they also need to have individual
work with these men. I believe.
Speaker 4 (15:05):
It's hard not to feel and I think the world
right now off the back of Netflix, is feeling this
collective sense of helplessness and despair and how we're ever
going to change the system. And I think what adolescence
did really well is highlight the fact that this is
starting from childhood this is starting from adolescence and it's
coming from and this was a very conscious decision that
(15:27):
I really loved that they did. It came from a
really stable home with loving parents that had had a
marriage for twenty years. The dad was so respectful and
so hard working and loved his children and gave them
everything they needed. And this child ended up being a perpetrator.
How are we supposed to do? And I know there's
not an answer to this, but I don't have kids.
And I finished that series and I was petrified to
(15:48):
have a child. I was petrified to bring a child
into this world now when it highlights that teachers cannot
do anything at school anymore. And I read an article
this morning in Australia that was saying, with the likes
of the Andrew Tates and the Kanye West that are
coming out with social media, the prevalence of social media,
there are teachers saying I have never seen the disrespect,
(16:09):
like from twelve years old that I have in the
past couple of months. And they're like, we do not
know what to do. How are we supposed to stop
what is happening? I know we're supposed to say, well,
it's all in education. But if teachers are throwing their
hands up and saying I can't do anything because of
these external sources like social media, what the hell are
we supposed to do? And that's a bit of a
rhetorical question because nobody has the answer, or we wouldn't know.
(16:32):
But I feel like you've been in the industry for
twenty five years, we have actively been working so hard
towards trying to make change and trying to make a
safer world for women, trying to educate, and we have
gone backwards.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
This year.
Speaker 4 (16:44):
We have seen a high increase in domestic violence against
women than we ever have before.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
What are we supposed to do?
Speaker 3 (16:51):
Again? The sixty four million dollar questions, isn't it? If
I may, can I give some thoughts that I've had
around this. Absolutely, there's been a pro to the federal
government to have age restrictions on access to pornography. We
don't have that. There are countries that do have that.
So you know, a nine can twelve year old boy
(17:12):
can access extreme violent porn and not can, but ah
and do, and so I think we have to have
restrictions there. There's women on Pornhub and other porn sites
that are trafficked, that are drugged, that are abused, that
are underage, and there's no check. You know, they say
(17:33):
they have checks, they say they have assessments, but they're
dealing with so much of this stuff and parents don't
take responsibility. I mean parents, as you say, from hard working,
long lasting relationships that seem stable on the outside. But
I think there are parents who just say, well, you know,
I can't stop screen time. It's just out of control.
(17:54):
If I stop it, he's going to she's going to
be very upset and their behavior is going to deteriorate.
So you know, it takes a concerted effort, right from
our federal government to state governments, to local governments. And
then I would love to see people doing parenting courses
and learning how to monitor and manage and I guess
rain screen time usin for young kids especially, And I
(18:17):
know that's a hard task. It's almost like the horse
has bolted. It's out there, it's gone. But you know,
I don't believe that we can just throw our hands
up and say, well, this is the world we live
in now, this is what kids are. They're innocence, childhood's
gone because of mobile phones and because of porn access.
I don't want to live in a world like that
because I don't think we've to tell you the truth.
(18:39):
I don't think we've seen the worst of it. I
don't think we've seen the full impact of how extreme
pornography usage for a young mind, how that affects well,
I think we're starting to see it, aren't we, how
that affects a boy's brain development into full adulthood. And
in terms of still coming from stable families. You're right,
Brick to a identify the peer group can be very,
(19:02):
very influential, especially at that early teenage time when boys
want to fit in, when boys don't want to be different,
when boys can be shamed because you know, he was
a thirteen year old boy who was mocked because he
was a virgin in that adolescent show. So I think, parents, really,
and it's highlighting we need to be having conversations with
(19:23):
our children about sex, about sexuality, about masculinity, about all
of that. Well before I mean, I know, when I
was a boy, it didn't happen. It didn't happen. I
remember coming home once and Mum, and to her credit,
she left some brochure on my bed. Yeah, and I
think I was about seventeen at the time.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
You're like too late month, you know, Brian. We had
a situation. We spoke about it on the podcast last year.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
It was I was away on holiday with my two
little girls and they were sitting next to me and
they were doing an activity on the phone. We're on
a boat at the time, going on like a day
snorkel or something, and they were on my phone doing
a coloring inactivity, and I could see that someone was
trying to air drop something to the phone. I just
I didn't even think I had air drop on and
(20:12):
there was a group of young boys they would have
been about nine years old, and I took the phone
off my three year old and I was like, what's
going on?
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Who's air dropping?
Speaker 1 (20:19):
I thought for a second my husband was air dropping
something to me, so I accepted it. And this little
boy sitting across from us, this group of them laughing
about it was sending hardcore porn to people on the boat.
And we went and approached the parents and we spoke
to them and said, you know, we told them what
was happening. Firstly, they got super defensive and were like,
how do you know it's my children doing that?
Speaker 2 (20:38):
And I was like, well, look at them.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
They're sitting there laughing and looking over to see who's
received the air drop. But it was the defensiveness and
the lack of accountability from that family that was truly shocking.
And the thing to me, I was like, and the
dad very much said, oh, you know, boys will be boys,
and I was like, you were creating boys who think
that this is normal, and they lent nature of the
(21:01):
pawn that they were air dropping to me was horrifying
that someone that young would have any exposure to it
or any understanding, let alone think it's funny. So I
really deeply understand what it is that you're saying. And
as much as as parents we don't want to think
that we could be producing or contributing this. There has
to be this deeper connection that we have with our
(21:23):
kids and knowing what it is that they're consuming and
who they are becoming. I do have a question for
you in terms of what has been reported recently. This
is something that was discussed on There's No Place Like Home.
In the last four years, Victoria Police revealed that there
was more reports about former partners than current ones.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Why do you think that this is the case.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
You know, why is it that people are either more
scared of their former partners or more willing to report
what's going on with them than what it is with
their own current partners that might be equally as violent.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
The fact is, when you're an ex partner, he's lost
control if he has that, and these men do have
that sense of sexual possessiveness that you're my sexual property.
You don't get to leave, you don't make that call
your mind. So when a woman doesn't comply, when a
woman fights back. You know, even in this context, the
(22:14):
word separation sounds so civilized, doesn't it to me? And
in my experience and in talking to victim survivors, separation
is actually escape. It's fleeing. It's not some sort of
mutual decision that we, well, when this isn't working out,
we don't want to be together. There's no mutuality there.
She's trying to stay safe, she's trying to stay low,
(22:36):
she's not putting up with this horrendous behavior anymore. And
she's resisting, she's reacting, and she's not only fighting against
his violence, she's fighting for her life. And we know
that not only post separation abuse increases at that time,
because separation doesn't equal safety. And I'm on the Domestic
(22:58):
Family Violence Fatality View Committee up here in Queensland, which
is out of the Coroner's office. We know that the
majority of fatalities happened post separation. So that's why the
escalation occurs. He's losing control, he's trying to bring back
control and this is not a relationship for him. This
(23:19):
is a war. This is a war. He's got a win.
That's the script. Males win, females lose. So that's why
I think we have family annihilations where the man will
kill her and the children and then take his own
life in many cases because if I can't have you,
no one else can, and I'll have you in death.
(23:41):
That's my final act of definitive control over you is
to kill you and then to kill myself.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Do you think you know in all your experience, Often,
and you see this in media and how domestic violence
is reported on, there is this sense that it is
a man who's lost control. They were so bereft by
losing their family or the grief, and as you've said,
this villainizing of the woman who has left that it's
often communicated in a way that infers that the man
(24:09):
had a snap of reality and lost control in your experience,
is that the case, or is this violence so premeditated
and predetermined and it is a very conscious decision to
try and enact the most violent and revengeful acts that
can possibly be done.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
Twig snap, branch's snap, rice, bubbles, snap, crackle, and pop.
Human adults don't snap. They make decisions. And while they
might use that excuse or that language, you know, I
saw read, I snapped, I exploded.
Speaker 4 (24:41):
She pushed my buttons, something came over me.
Speaker 3 (24:44):
Yeah, yeah, you know, the devil made me do it.
These are all ways of obfiscating the fact that he's
making decision after decision after decision. These are very controlling men.
These are not men out of control. This violence, this
is not accidental. It's not random, it's not isolated. It's deliberate,
(25:06):
it's strategic, it's purposeful, and it's planned. There were some
research done some years ago, and while there's been you know,
maybe some conjecture around this research, to me, it still
makes sense to a degree. Jacobson and Gotman did this
research in the nineties where they wired violent men up
(25:27):
and they looked at their physiological reactions, so brain waves
and blood pressure and skin galvanic skin responses and heart
rates and all that sort of physiological reactions. And they
showed men violent episodes of violent scenes against women, and
they broadly categorized there being two kinds. One was kind
(25:50):
of impulsive and loud and aggressive and in your face
and almost impulsive, and they call those the pit bulls
and the other kind and their heart rates apparently dropped
and they became very cool and very calm and very calculated,
and they call them cobras. And you know, you can
(26:12):
guess which ones are the most dangerous. And so I think,
you know, for our high risk, high harm guys, they
tend to be the cobras. They tend to be the
very very purposeful, very deliberate, very strategic use of behavior
and words and actions. You know, I remember working with one.
(26:33):
This happened in a court where the magistrate wasn't looking,
and she was in the court with him, and when
the magistrate looked away, this man just went cross at hurt.
No one saw it but her and the DV workers
of course too. So that isn't accidental, that's very deliberate.
(26:55):
He picked his moment when the magistrate was distracted doing
something else and he made that sign to her, and
obviously she knew what that meant. And one thing I
have learned is you take threats seriously. That's not just
a man who's ranting and raving and who's angry at
being in court because of her calling the police and
(27:16):
him getting a devo and him breaching a devo. That's
a man with planned intentionality. To do a sign like
that is a death threat. So I would believe that
he would be a very dangerous character. That man would
need very close containment and constrainment. And I talk about
the lethal essays. One of them I'm adding to that
(27:39):
now is sending a message. When a man sends a message,
whether it be subtle, covert, or whether it's quite overt
and obvious, we need to believe that he means business.
He is not just blowing off steam, or he's not
just in some form of rage. He's actually sending a message.
(28:02):
And again, through the fatality review committees, not just in
Queensland but around Australia, we know that men before they
will commit murder do send some kind of message.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
The essays that you speak of, I've got them.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
Here there's separation, stalking, sexual violence, strangulation, and suicidality. Why
were these so important and how are these indicators of
such extreme violence?
Speaker 3 (28:30):
Well, I think you know, again, the research around men
who commit murder, domestic violence murders has shown that those
ESS's are prevalent prior to the murder. There's a number
of people who've done that research. So those lethal ESS's
tend to be prevalent in many cases. And if you
see them in a report of a man, and you
(28:52):
can see an accumulation of these essays, well that means
our systemic response should be ramped up very very quickly,
very urgently to contain that man and to keep that
victim safe. So they're really essential part of risk assessment
and risk management. And if we want to keep women
alive and we want to stop these men from murdering women,
(29:14):
then we have to pay very close attention to those
risk factors.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Why is the system when you speak about that, I mean,
there are so many parts of this, there's so many precautions,
and there's so many evident signs that would indicate that
someone could be a very violent perpetrator. Why is the
system failing women so repetitively and so fundamentally.
Speaker 3 (29:37):
Again, if I had any power or any sway in
this response, I would want to see a system overhaul.
I would want to see courts and lawyers better trained
in understanding perpetrators behavior and intentionality. I would love to
see courts and lawyers and police better trained in understanding
victim responses, so that a woman who might view force
(30:00):
herself that's a trauma response. Remember we talk about freeze,
flight and fight and form, those sort of responses to trauma,
and yet when a woman fights back, she can be
misidentified as a perpetrator. So we seem to forget that
fighting back is a trauma response. And when women fight back,
that's not abuse, that's a reactive resistant force to the
(30:23):
male violence, the abuse of violence. So you know, identifying
a woman as a perpetrator actually makes her far more
at risk of his violence. And very sadly not so
low ago in Queensland we had eight Indigenous women killed,
and each of those women that year had been identified
as a perpetrator. But each of those women had been
(30:46):
hospitalized from his violence. None of the men had been hospitalized,
and yet each of those women ended up dead. Terrifying
isn't it It is? You know, when you get courts
who've identified their court lists, who've identified accord to a
third I've seen in Queensland some courts this is four
or five years ago. I think the numbers have improved somewhat.
(31:07):
But when I saw those court lifts lists and there
was thirty percent twenty five percent of perpetrators respondents they're
called in Queensland identified were women, then we know we've
got misidentification happening there and we need to increase the training.
So if I had my way, it'd be a far
(31:28):
more focused and well trained understanding of domestic violence, effects
on the victim and strategies of offenders, and then far
more consequences for non compliance for the offender. When I
worked with men in group and they've been court ordered
and they turn up two or three times and then
they don't front anymore, I'll report that to the court.
(31:51):
This bloke's being court ordered. He was here for what
was going to be something like forty hours of intervention
and he's ended up doing doing six or seven and
he's not here anymore. Then there doesn't seem to be
any response to that. There's no consequence for his non compliance,
so he knows he can get away with it. So
until men realize that they can't get away with this,
(32:15):
that there are going to be consequences. So it's going
to be I think a really wholesale reappraisal of our
approach to victim survivors and to domestic violence offenders if
we want to change the statistics with misidentification.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
In your experience, do you think that there is a
skewed racial element to this, because it does seem as though,
and in so many stories that we have heard and
we've spoken about at different times, that Indigenous women are
more inclined to be booked as a perpetrator or seen
as a perpetrator than what a white woman would be
if they were the victim of domestic violence.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
I think that's what the research would suggest. Yes, absolutely, Again,
that means more training, more understanding of way in Indigenous
women might use force more so than someone from a
different racial background. I was talking to people who work
in Indigenous communities and the complexity of the violence and
the lateral violence and the context of the violence there
(33:16):
is culturally different, and I think police courts and non
indigenous workers on those communities need to have a very
nuanced understanding of that before working in those spaces.
Speaker 4 (33:27):
But when we talked before about how we can go
about change and what are we going to do, like
what are we going to actually put in place, and
how we do feel helpless? I want to link this
because I think for everybody, I think it's a really,
really great example. There's a Scottish comedian, his name's Daniel Sloss,
and at one of his shows he did a whole
piece at the end, very very seriously on rape and
(33:49):
how the issue and the change needs to come from men.
Obviously there's plenty of male perpetrators, but there's plenty of
amazing men to women are doing everything they can, screaming
out and doing absolutely everything to instill change, but the
real change has to come from other good men speaking out.
And he does this whole piece on how he blames
himself for somebody he knows, like his friend raping a woman.
(34:12):
He completely owns the fact and says, I didn't know
he was a rapist, but I saw the signs over
the years, all those deadly essas that you spoke about.
He's like, as a friend, there were things that were
said that weren't right. There were signs that I saw
that I ignored because I was a man that didn't
want to speak up. And his message is men are
the ones that need, like the good men are the
ones that need to be having these conversations in their
(34:34):
male circles. And sometimes I think, as much as we
have these reforms and these changes in these programs, which
we absolutely need, we need to be encouraging our husbands
to be having these conversations with their friends and our
sons to be having these conversations with their friends, because
they're the people that are going to actually instill the change.
It's not the women that are saying, please don't rape me.
That's that's not what's going to change anything.
Speaker 3 (34:54):
Absolutely right. You know, the number of men who are
abusive who have access or get access to an intervention
program is a drop in the ocean. I'll just cite
some figures here, their ballpark figures. In Queensland last year,
I believe that we had something like sixty five thousand
(35:14):
domestic violence orders issued. We had something like forty five
thousand breaches of domestic violence orders. And when an order
is breached in Queensland, it becomes a criminal offense. So
it moves from the civil code into the criminal code,
So breaching a DV order is a criminal offense. Forty
five thousand. Now, I can't accurately ascertain how many men
(35:38):
start a domestic violence intervention group, start, not finish, because
we know there's an attrition rate to those groups. But
I would estimate maybe fifteen hundred men. But you can
see the disparity between the forty five thousand breaches, and
we know who these breaches are because that's the criminal offense,
and then the number who actually get an intervention for transformation,
(36:00):
for rehabilitation, for change. So we can't rely just on
a small men's intervention program to solve the whole problem.
That's not going to happen, not at this point in time.
So you're right. I think good respectful men who've done
their own work, who won't collude, who won't exonerate, who
won't turn a blind eye to the disrespect and abusive
(36:23):
ways of other men, we really need to call on
that resource. And it's not easy because you know, often
men find it difficult to stand up to other men
because men tend to police each other. You know about
what you can do and what you can't do, you know,
the man box, of course. So it takes a man
who's not willing to be contained in that man box,
(36:47):
who's not willing to put his head in the sand
or turn a blind eye or turn his back on
disrespectful behavior from another man, and to stand up and
be who he should be as a good respectful man
and call it. We need to really focus on that.
And I think, as you say, that's got to come
from a male community. That's got it comes from men's groups,
(37:08):
and not men's rights groups, but from men who understand
that this is unjust, this should not be happening.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Brian, what you just mentioned said that domestic violence case
can turn from being a civil case to a criminal case.
What would constitute a breach to change it to a
criminal case?
Speaker 3 (37:27):
Any breach, Any breach should mean officially, and it is
officially a criminal act. So case in point, a man
I worked with texted his partner and phoned his partner
multiple times over one weekend when there was a no
contact order. So let's say he did it two hundred times.
Theoretically that's two hundred breaches. Action should have been taken,
(37:50):
but it was a no contact order. Oh, he just
breached by contacting her when he shouldn't. That's technically a breach.
You know, I've heard that term use a technical breach.
No such thing is a technical breach. Is a breach?
Is a breach? No action was taken. Next breach this
man committed. He turned up drunk on her doorstep, bashing
on the door. She was hiding in fear inside. Eventually
(38:13):
he left. She reported that breach, no action taken.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Crazy.
Speaker 3 (38:18):
Third breach, very hot evening in Queensland. Security door locked,
the doggy door left open. He was a small guy.
He squeezed through the doggy door and he was at
the end of her bed at two am in the morning.
Third breach. So you can see an escalation there. When
we don't react, when we don't respond to the initial breach,
(38:41):
he's going to see how far he can go. Each
of those breaches was an escalation to the previous breach.
So you know, we need to have swift and certain
consequences for breaches of behavior, for any non compliance.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
But my question to that is, why is it that
we see domestic violence as a civil case, whereas if
someone was to do this to someone who they weren't
in a romantic relationship with Like if I was to
harass someone with two hundred phone calls after physically abusing them,
that wouldn't ever be a civil case. That would be
a criminal case to start with. If I broke into
(39:17):
someone's house, if I showed up on their door drunk,
smashing on the door, like breaking into We treat domestic
violence cases as though they are not as violent, or
that they are more acceptable than what we would if
it was a stranger and it wasn't an intimate partner relationship.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
Yeah, we do, that is true. I agree with you completely, Laura.
But having said that, we have other laws. We have
stalking legislation, we have torture legislation, we have deprivation of
liberty legislation, we have non lethal strangulation legislation here in Queensland.
We've got other legislative acts that we could respond to
(39:56):
his behavior with other than just the domestic violence legislation.
So my question is, with all these legislation, why aren't
we able to contain these men better? And my only
concern with the making DV legislation criminal behavior, as you
write so rightly say, when we have misidentification of women
(40:20):
and she's identified as an offender, does she get criminalized
because of that behavior? So I think we need to
be very very cautious and careful about that. I agree
with you. I agree that it is criminal behavior, and
I agree that we need to respond better than we're
doing to contain his abusiveness. But it's part of that
(40:42):
unintended consequences sometimes conversation that we need to have around
how this may impact on her. I agree totally with you, though,
I think if it's criminal behavior initially, and if it's
done right, an investigation clearly identifies him as the abuser,
then maybe her safety is a should more quickly, more urgently,
(41:02):
more comprehensively than if we leave it under the civil code.
Speaker 1 (41:06):
I would really love to know as well. How is
it the perpetrators weaponize children in these sorts of situations
when a woman leaves and they take their kids with them,
and they try to protect their kids, which is usually the.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
Main priority for mums.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
What is it and how is it that men are
able to use the children in order to gain access
and to further terrorize the women who have left.
Speaker 3 (41:30):
Men will weaponize anything and everything. They weaponize courts, they
weaponize children, They weaponize their own sons are radicalized very
often to committing horemendous behavior against the mother. So the
use of children is particularly horrific, I think, because it
just continues and lengthens the time of abuse that children
(41:55):
have to experience. You know, there's awful cases of fathers
giving access to children when the clear indications were that
this was a sexual predator, this was a dangerous a
dangerous man, and yet all that was overlooked because men
have a right, their right to fatherhood because they fathered
(42:15):
this child. Men will get access to kids through courts
and then they've won the battle. And so she hasn't
been able to protect these children as she wants to.
The court has dismissed their right to safety virtually in cases,
and children become just another means to get back to punish,
(42:37):
to have revenge against the partner for having the temerity
to want to live in safety from his violence. You know,
I remember I was talking about weapons and what weapons
men had at home in a group one night. Some
of these men were living on properties where they had
access to guns, of course, and use guns as part
of their lifestyle, their livelihoods. You know, the discussion became
(43:01):
around men who use crossbows for hunting on these properties
and hunting knives. And then one man just very clearly
and very calmly cut across the conversation and said, Brian,
you know what, I can use anything I want as
a weapon. And I thought, you are being very honest
(43:22):
and very truthful. And the truth he was talking about
was kitchen knives or chairs or tools at home. But
the reality is that he's not only talking about implements
in the home. He's talking about courts, is talking about police,
is talking about school. He can use anything as a
weapon in his strategy of coercive control to create misery
(43:46):
and to increase his tyranny over this woman's life.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
Absolutely petrifying is what it is.
Speaker 3 (43:52):
It's petrifying, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (43:53):
But it also, I mean, it's such an almost depressing
conversation to have because everything that we've spoken about comes
back to this idea that the systems in place they're
not protecting victims. The systems in place are broken, they
don't work, and there needs to be a radical overhaul
of how we manage and take care of victim survivors,
(44:15):
but also how we punish, rehabilitate. What it is that
we do for perpetrators as well. It seems like the
system itself is fundamentally broken and there isn't a way
out of this yet, and how is it going to
be fixed?
Speaker 3 (44:29):
Well, I think that's a conversation we need to have
nationally with politicians, with academics, with practitioners, with people with
lived experience with children. And it's not about having another
report or another investigation. It's got to actually lead to
what you're calling a systemic overhaul. When we know the
(44:50):
risks of fatalities that high risk high harm perpetrators have,
we need to have some kind of task force within
the police that deals specifically with high risk high harm
domestic violence offenders. And I know there are certain areas
which are moving potentially towards that. I think we need
to have what's called focus to terrans in our police force,
(45:12):
where we focus on the highest risk HALM guys, and
then we have other levels of intervention for men who
may not be at that stage as imminent a risk
as the high risk I harm. I think we've got
to really focus on the early intervention that we were
talking about before, in terms of young boys, young girls
access to social media. What are we doing in our
(45:34):
schools in terms of respectful relationships. And let's also remember
that schools are there to educate and to socialize our children,
but they can't do at all. I think we need
to have parental programs which are teaching parents how to
be maybe more engaged, more involved in their children's lives,
and not to shrug their shoulders and give up parenting
(45:56):
for mobile phones or for social media. I think courts,
as I said previously, need to be far more nuanced
in their understanding and be far more trauma informed about
the effect of trauma on women and children, far more
nuanced in understanding the tactics and how perpetrators manipulate courts
too and weaponize courts and call that and see through that.
(46:20):
So it's got to be a multi leveled approach. It's
going to take a lot of personnel, a lot of resources.
You know, people sort of governmental levels cry poor often
that there's not enough money to do this. Well, if
we prioritize and value the lives of women and children,
and let's remember it's not only women we want to
(46:41):
keep safe. It's the next generation. It's the potential perpetrators
who are growing up now, the potential victims who are
growing up now that we want to block or disrupt
that pathway to being a perpetrator or that pathway that
may lead to being a victim survivor. I want to
interrupt that in ways that are going to keep people
(47:02):
healthy and safe. It's a wicked problem, and wicked problems
have to be addressed at multiple levels. I don't believe you, know,
as some people do, that this can be defeated within
a generation. I'm sorry, I just don't see that happening.
I don't think that understands the nature of the problem
we're dealing with. Really, I don't want to be a
pessimist or appear to be negative, but I think when
(47:25):
we deal with this wicked problem, we have to be
realistic and we have to throw the resources that are
needed at it. But understand that this is going to
take time.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
Brian, thank you for coming and for being a part
of the podcast and having what is such an important conversation,
and for all the work that you do in trying
to rehabilitate, trying to enact reform. Yeah, it really is
such It's such a hard conversation to have because it
does as we just kind of landed on it does
(47:55):
feel as though change is not happening fast enough. But
we so deeply appreciate you being a part of the
pod and everything that you're doing to try and make
that happen.
Speaker 3 (48:02):
Well, thanks to your word too, Laura and brit because
I think podcasts are a way of hopefully, you know,
people may learn something. I'm only one voice, so I
realize that. But when people listen to podcasts that talk
about this awful reality, the impossible lives that some women
are living, hopefully it deepens their awareness. They're understanding, and
(48:23):
who knows, it may actually instill a motivation to be
able to do something about it in their neck of
the woods, in their family, in their area. They may
be able to speak up and shine a light on
where it needs to be shone. So you're part of
the community responds too. So the work you do is
valuable and valued. So thank you very much and for
the invitation to be here today.
Speaker 4 (48:44):
These are definitely the conversations. You say, you're only one
voice and we're only one podcast, but they are the
conversations that could potentially save a life, and if they
do save one life, then that's what matters. So thank
you so much brain.
Speaker 3 (48:53):
Absolutely, the con the Cobany, the conta, my membay, b
This episode was recorded on Cameragle Land. Hi guys, and
welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
I'm Laura, I'm Brittany.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Now, as you know if you've been a part of
the Life Uncut family for any length of time, domestic
and male violence is something that we have.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Spoken about for many, many years.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
We have spoken to so many experts on this podcast
about this very thing, and it is really a conversation
that over the last couple of years has been hugely
thrust into the spotlight. And that's because it is something
that has not improved and is not getting better. I mean,
as we've all seen, women are screaming, screaming out for
reform and for changes to be made. In this way,
(00:47):
we've learnt that the most dangerous time for women fleeing
violence is when she actually decides to leave the home,
and also how many times it can take a woman
to actually leave a relationship where domestic violence is occurring.
We've spoken to victim survivors and family members of victims
of abuse and learn about the early warning signs of
violent perpetrators. But an aspect of violence that we haven't
(01:08):
really had an in depth conversation about is what happens
after she leaves? What happens after a woman actually makes
that choice to remove herself from that situation, and does
the violence continue and how does that violence transform. Joining
the podcast today is doctor Brian Sullivan. Doctor Brian is
an academic and the founder of Secure Domestic Violence Training
(01:30):
and Support. He has been working with men who use
violence in men's behavior change programs for almost twenty five years.
Brian is joined the third season of the podcast There's
No Place Like Home to address the changes that are
needed in our conversations about violence and to ask the
right questions questions like why does he do it? And
how do we help the next person leave safely? Brian,
(01:51):
Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Thanks Laura, Thanks Britt. Great to be here with you.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
Such an important topic. And as we just said, you've
been working in this industry for twenty five five years.
Can you just explain to us what is it exactly
that you do?
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Well, that's a really good question, because it hasn't been
the same thing for twenty five years. I got into
this work quite by accident. When I was studying in America.
I needed money basically, and I was doing one thousand
hours of internship for this doctoral program in the University
of Toledo, Ohio, and the only one I could find
that would pay me was as a co facilitator of
(02:23):
a court mandated program for domestically violent men. And one
of my colleagues, one of my friends over there, was
doing this work and she said, why don't you come
and do this work with me? So poverty got the
better of me. I was really up to that point.
I'd avoided, or thought i'd avoided domestic and family violence
in my work as a school counselor and as a
counselor anyway. I started the work and became quite fascinated
(02:47):
with these men's stories of how they justified and how
they rationalized their violence to make them sound like the
good guys and the victim was the provocateur, the crazy bitch,
to use their language, who was causing all this. And
it became so weird to hear them trying to justify
(03:07):
the unjustifiable in my book that I ended up doing
my doctoral research in that so I looked at the
effectiveness of court mandated programs for domestically violent men, and
when I came back to Australia, I started teaching in
universities University of New England in Armadale, University of Queensland,
and I was teaching courses on violence issues in counseling,
(03:28):
but I was also doing some training on the side
to those who wanted to learn how to work with
these men in intervention groups. I went back to practice
for a period of years where I was actually the
program manager for an organization in Logan up here south
of Brisbane called YFSS, the Responsible Men Program, and I
(03:50):
worked there as a program manager for a number of
years before returning to academia where I was teaching and
doing research into domestic and family violence, focusing on men's
groups and interventions for men. And in about twenty twenty two,
I think it was, I started Secura, which is my
own training consultancy where I do training for police, corrective services,
(04:13):
men's behavior change groups, TV organizations. I've done training for
lawyers and for magistrates etc. So last year I was
on the board of the Red Rose Foundation and it's
a foundation that has been close to my heart for
a number of years. I was on the board there
for five or six years and then asked to be
the CEO when the founder a legend a woman called
(04:36):
Betty Taylor retired and I did that role for a year.
I always said it was caretaker role. I always thought
that position should be a role for a woman of
a women's organization working with women who were victim survivors
of non lethal strangulation. So I stood down from that
role at the start of this year and have gone
(04:57):
back to my securer work, where I'm continuing the train
an education for those who work with male perpetrators of
domestic violence. That's a long story.
Speaker 4 (05:06):
Short You just mentioned something, Brian, that you worked very
closely listening to these perpetrators justify the unjustifiable. What is
the main rationale that you hear from these perpetrators And
do you genuinely think that they believe what they're saying
or do you think that they know what they're doing
is not right, but they're just trying to make an
(05:27):
excuse for their actions.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
My experience over those years has led me to believe
that when a man tries to justify his violence, it's
really a strategy of image management, and that image management
is a double sided coin. So one side of the
image management is to make him look good, or even
(05:51):
to make him look like the victim of this evil woman,
of this psychotic woman, of this very unfair woman. And
the flip side, of course, is while making himself look good,
he has to make her look bad, so he has
to trash talk her. So when a man, and these
are typical strategies that men use when they front a
(06:11):
program and well into the program, until for many men,
the light goes on and they start to realize that
their dishonesty is not working, that we're not buying it.
So you think about yourself, if you deny you've done something,
if you try to excuse it, if you try to
blame someone else, if you try to minimize it, it
(06:32):
wasn't so bad. I know when I do that, I
know I've done something wrong, and I'm trying to cover
it up. It's a way of camouflaging what we know
is wrong. So I think, to answer your question, I
think that men have a belief system, or these men
have a belief system which is all about male privilege,
male entitlement, control over women and children. So when a
(06:56):
woman challenges that or doesn't comply with that, then he
ramps up and he then starts to get abusive or
increases his controlling behaviors, and to me, that's a way
of reinforcing or re establishing his worldview over hers. But
the fact that he's also minimizing, denying, blaming, justifying shows
(07:21):
me that he knows that what he's doing is actually wrong.
So that's where we want to get to in men's groups.
Get them to that point where they were honestly take
responsibility and fess up and say, yeah, I knew what
I was doing, I knew the harm it was causing,
and I know it's wrong. And I think once we
get to that level of honesty, then we can start
(07:42):
to work with men for change.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
What is it?
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Because we know that, you know, it's not just people
who have come from abusive households, or who have come
from drug addiction or I think there's used to be
this kind of thought that domestic violence was quite othering
and that it was only a specific type of male
that would do it. But as we've seen and recently,
people who come from incredibly privileged backgrounds can be perpetrators
(08:05):
of this violence all often. Ah yeah, And I guess
my question is what is it that creates this type
of monster in a man? What's happening in terms of
the social upbringing or in terms of the exposure that
they've had to think that they have this entitlement over women.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
Brilliant question. I think if we knew comprehensively and deeply
the answer to that question, we could work with these men,
maybe better than we're doing. But my take on that
is that typically a man, when he was a boy
generally or an adolescent, he's had a role model, whether
it's mum's husband, you know, his father or stepfather or
(08:41):
living boyfriend or whoever it was, get what he wants
by very disrespectful, abusive treatment of his partner, of the
boy's mother. The boy realizes at an early age that
this gets him what he wants, when he wants, and
how he wants. If this is how he treats a woman,
he can fulfill he thinks all his needs. And the
(09:02):
third part of that is he's gotten away with it.
And I think that's where societal interventions and courts, police
corrective services, child safety has to step up so that
men and really it goes back to families and communities
at an early age, early intervention that boys should not
be getting away with this sort of stuff. We need
(09:23):
to know what boys are up to I think at
earlier and you know that recent series Adolescence is showing
us that parents need to be far more aware of
what their boys are getting up to. When we know
that boys are accessing pawn at earlier and earlier ages
eight nine, we've got a major problem in the way
a boy's brain is developing in terms of his beliefs,
(09:45):
in terms of his attitudes, in terms of his values,
in terms of his developing masculinity. And you know, when
we're dealing with these men in groups after they've been
court ordered or on probation and parole to do these groups,
that beliefs system has been there for quite a while.
I have a sign on my wall which says first
time offender, long time abuser. So even though that might
(10:08):
be the first time he's been caught by police or
first time he's ever been to court, he's had this
belief system. He's been doing these behaviors for a long
period of time.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Well that's the thing, right, I mean, Statistically, most people
who almost men who use violence in the household never
spend time in prison. They never ever even face any
repercussions for it. And the people who do end up
in prison or do end up in these court mandated programs.
The violence that they've used has to have been significant,
has to have been something that was able to be
(10:40):
proven in court, which often it can't be. It has
to be some reasonable about absolutely so inforce that it's
like an undeniable place. I guess my question is that
you deal with the worst version of these abusers, do
these programs work and is there a way of rehabilitating
men who have such violent behaviors and such long systemic
(11:00):
belief systems around the value of women.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
To your questions, both of you are really on the mark.
I would say, well, I wouldn't be doing this work,
and I wouldn't have been doing this work for twenty
five years if I didn't carry a deep hope within
me that men can change. These men can change high risk,
high harm men can change under the right constraints, under
the right context, under the right conditions. Now, whether we've
(11:26):
got that constraint, context, and conditions in place at the moment,
I'm not so sure about that. But if you're dealing
with a man who has these entrenched beliefs and behaviors,
if you're dealing with a man who's a serial abuser.
If you're dealing with a man who has a long history,
then obviously we need to go at this holistically. So
(11:47):
he's got to have an intervention that's going to deal
with his stopping of violence, stopping of abuse, stopping of
coercive control. That's long term work. It's not a quick fix.
It's not an easy solution. But he may have also,
and not in all cases, but he may have mental
health issues from potentially trauma that he's suffered in his life,
(12:08):
so he may need that trauma addressed. He may have
alcohol and drug issues that he's dealing with. He may
need that addressed. He may have employment, housing problems. He
may have a whole suite of problems which he needs
addressed in it with a whole suite of interventions. So
sticking a man in one program, let's say a men's
(12:30):
stopping violence program, I don't call a men's behavior change programs.
I don't like that terminology. Because you can change your
behavior of courts and police are looking at you, and
he might stop your overt physical abuse of your partner
or your ex partner. But that doesn't mean she's not terrified. Still,
she's not intimidated she's not living in fear because of
(12:52):
the emotional violence, the verbal violence, the psychological violence, the
coercive control can be very non physical that it can
be extremely terrifying, and it can still be his tyrannical
hold over her even without the physical So I don't
call them behavior change. I think we need to go
deeper than behavior. We need to be really delving into
(13:13):
that deep belief system. So it will need a long
term stopping violence program. You know, in Queensland they can
range from between twelve sixteen twenty twenty six weeks. Is
that long enough? I potentially don't believe, so I think
you know, And certainly in America there's forty weeks, there's
fifty two weeks, there's two year programs. So I would like,
(13:36):
if I had my way, and if I had my
power to change the system, I would love to see
a high risk, high harm men do stopping violence program,
do an abuse of Dad's program, do alcohol and drug interventions,
and also do mental health interventions too if needed. So
when you add all those programs up, it may actually
(13:59):
take more than a year, and that's going to cost
a lot, and it's going to require skilled personnel who
can do that. I'm not sure about your neck of
the woods, but we have trouble at times being able
to staff men's intervention programs up here due to the
location where they may not be skilled staff to do that.
So there's lots of systemic barriers and blockages too that
(14:23):
need to be addressed. So again, long story short, Yes,
I believe these programs can be effective, but in and
of themselves less so they need to be part of
an integrated, coordinated community response to domestic violence and they're
a very important component of that. But they're not a
standalone They should never be a lone ranger program alone
(14:46):
ranger solution. That's asking too much of it. It's got
to be tied and tied tightly with other responses, other interventions,
other work from outside that space too. So you know,
program are good, but they also need to have individual
work with these men. I believe.
Speaker 4 (15:05):
It's hard not to feel and I think the world
right now off the back of Netflix, is feeling this
collective sense of helplessness and despair and how we're ever
going to change the system. And I think what adolescence
did really well is highlight the fact that this is
starting from childhood this is starting from adolescence and it's
coming from and this was a very conscious decision that
(15:27):
I really loved that they did. It came from a
really stable home with loving parents that had had a
marriage for twenty years. The dad was so respectful and
so hard working and loved his children and gave them
everything they needed. And this child ended up being a perpetrator.
How are we supposed to do? And I know there's
not an answer to this, but I don't have kids.
And I finished that series and I was petrified to
(15:48):
have a child. I was petrified to bring a child
into this world now when it highlights that teachers cannot
do anything at school anymore. And I read an article
this morning in Australia that was saying, with the likes
of the Andrew Tates and the Kanye West that are
coming out with social media, the prevalence of social media,
there are teachers saying I have never seen the disrespect,
(16:09):
like from twelve years old that I have in the
past couple of months. And they're like, we do not
know what to do. How are we supposed to stop
what is happening? I know we're supposed to say, well,
it's all in education. But if teachers are throwing their
hands up and saying I can't do anything because of
these external sources like social media, what the hell are
we supposed to do? And that's a bit of a
rhetorical question because nobody has the answer, or we wouldn't know.
(16:32):
But I feel like you've been in the industry for
twenty five years, we have actively been working so hard
towards trying to make change and trying to make a
safer world for women, trying to educate, and we have
gone backwards.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
This year.
Speaker 4 (16:44):
We have seen a high increase in domestic violence against
women than we ever have before.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
What are we supposed to do?
Speaker 3 (16:51):
Again? The sixty four million dollar questions, isn't it? If
I may, can I give some thoughts that I've had
around this. Absolutely, there's been a pro to the federal
government to have age restrictions on access to pornography. We
don't have that. There are countries that do have that.
So you know, a nine can twelve year old boy
(17:12):
can access extreme violent porn and not can, but ah
and do, and so I think we have to have
restrictions there. There's women on Pornhub and other porn sites
that are trafficked, that are drugged, that are abused, that
are underage, and there's no check. You know, they say
(17:33):
they have checks, they say they have assessments, but they're
dealing with so much of this stuff and parents don't
take responsibility. I mean parents, as you say, from hard working,
long lasting relationships that seem stable on the outside. But
I think there are parents who just say, well, you know,
I can't stop screen time. It's just out of control.
(17:54):
If I stop it, he's going to she's going to
be very upset and their behavior is going to deteriorate.
So you know, it takes a concerted effort, right from
our federal government to state governments, to local governments. And
then I would love to see people doing parenting courses
and learning how to monitor and manage and I guess
rain screen time usin for young kids especially, And I
(18:17):
know that's a hard task. It's almost like the horse
has bolted. It's out there, it's gone. But you know,
I don't believe that we can just throw our hands
up and say, well, this is the world we live
in now, this is what kids are. They're innocence, childhood's
gone because of mobile phones and because of porn access.
I don't want to live in a world like that
because I don't think we've to tell you the truth.
(18:39):
I don't think we've seen the worst of it. I
don't think we've seen the full impact of how extreme
pornography usage for a young mind, how that affects well,
I think we're starting to see it, aren't we, how
that affects a boy's brain development into full adulthood. And
in terms of still coming from stable families. You're right,
Brick to a identify the peer group can be very,
(19:02):
very influential, especially at that early teenage time when boys
want to fit in, when boys don't want to be different,
when boys can be shamed because you know, he was
a thirteen year old boy who was mocked because he
was a virgin in that adolescent show. So I think, parents, really,
and it's highlighting we need to be having conversations with
(19:23):
our children about sex, about sexuality, about masculinity, about all
of that. Well before I mean, I know, when I
was a boy, it didn't happen. It didn't happen. I
remember coming home once and Mum, and to her credit,
she left some brochure on my bed. Yeah, and I
think I was about seventeen at the time.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
You're like too late month, you know, Brian. We had
a situation. We spoke about it on the podcast last year.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
It was I was away on holiday with my two
little girls and they were sitting next to me and
they were doing an activity on the phone. We're on
a boat at the time, going on like a day
snorkel or something, and they were on my phone doing
a coloring inactivity, and I could see that someone was
trying to air drop something to the phone. I just
I didn't even think I had air drop on and
(20:12):
there was a group of young boys they would have
been about nine years old, and I took the phone
off my three year old and I was like, what's
going on?
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Who's air dropping?
Speaker 1 (20:19):
I thought for a second my husband was air dropping
something to me, so I accepted it. And this little
boy sitting across from us, this group of them laughing
about it was sending hardcore porn to people on the boat.
And we went and approached the parents and we spoke
to them and said, you know, we told them what
was happening. Firstly, they got super defensive and were like,
how do you know it's my children doing that?
Speaker 2 (20:38):
And I was like, well, look at them.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
They're sitting there laughing and looking over to see who's
received the air drop. But it was the defensiveness and
the lack of accountability from that family that was truly shocking.
And the thing to me, I was like, and the
dad very much said, oh, you know, boys will be boys,
and I was like, you were creating boys who think
that this is normal, and they lent nature of the
(21:01):
pawn that they were air dropping to me was horrifying
that someone that young would have any exposure to it
or any understanding, let alone think it's funny. So I
really deeply understand what it is that you're saying. And
as much as as parents we don't want to think
that we could be producing or contributing this. There has
to be this deeper connection that we have with our
(21:23):
kids and knowing what it is that they're consuming and
who they are becoming. I do have a question for
you in terms of what has been reported recently. This
is something that was discussed on There's No Place Like Home.
In the last four years, Victoria Police revealed that there
was more reports about former partners than current ones.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Why do you think that this is the case.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
You know, why is it that people are either more
scared of their former partners or more willing to report
what's going on with them than what it is with
their own current partners that might be equally as violent.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
The fact is, when you're an ex partner, he's lost
control if he has that, and these men do have
that sense of sexual possessiveness that you're my sexual property.
You don't get to leave, you don't make that call
your mind. So when a woman doesn't comply, when a
woman fights back. You know, even in this context, the
(22:14):
word separation sounds so civilized, doesn't it to me? And
in my experience and in talking to victim survivors, separation
is actually escape. It's fleeing. It's not some sort of
mutual decision that we, well, when this isn't working out,
we don't want to be together. There's no mutuality there.
She's trying to stay safe, she's trying to stay low,
(22:36):
she's not putting up with this horrendous behavior anymore. And
she's resisting, she's reacting, and she's not only fighting against
his violence, she's fighting for her life. And we know
that not only post separation abuse increases at that time,
because separation doesn't equal safety. And I'm on the Domestic
(22:58):
Family Violence Fatality View Committee up here in Queensland, which
is out of the Coroner's office. We know that the
majority of fatalities happened post separation. So that's why the
escalation occurs. He's losing control, he's trying to bring back
control and this is not a relationship for him. This
(23:19):
is a war. This is a war. He's got a win.
That's the script. Males win, females lose. So that's why
I think we have family annihilations where the man will
kill her and the children and then take his own
life in many cases because if I can't have you,
no one else can, and I'll have you in death.
(23:41):
That's my final act of definitive control over you is
to kill you and then to kill myself.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Do you think you know in all your experience, Often,
and you see this in media and how domestic violence
is reported on, there is this sense that it is
a man who's lost control. They were so bereft by
losing their family or the grief, and as you've said,
this villainizing of the woman who has left that it's
often communicated in a way that infers that the man
(24:09):
had a snap of reality and lost control in your experience,
is that the case, or is this violence so premeditated
and predetermined and it is a very conscious decision to
try and enact the most violent and revengeful acts that
can possibly be done.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
Twig snap, branch's snap, rice, bubbles, snap, crackle, and pop.
Human adults don't snap. They make decisions. And while they
might use that excuse or that language, you know, I
saw read, I snapped, I exploded.
Speaker 4 (24:41):
She pushed my buttons, something came over me.
Speaker 3 (24:44):
Yeah, yeah, you know, the devil made me do it.
These are all ways of obfiscating the fact that he's
making decision after decision after decision. These are very controlling men.
These are not men out of control. This violence, this
is not accidental. It's not random, it's not isolated. It's deliberate,
(25:06):
it's strategic, it's purposeful, and it's planned. There were some
research done some years ago, and while there's been you know,
maybe some conjecture around this research, to me, it still
makes sense to a degree. Jacobson and Gotman did this
research in the nineties where they wired violent men up
(25:27):
and they looked at their physiological reactions, so brain waves
and blood pressure and skin galvanic skin responses and heart
rates and all that sort of physiological reactions. And they
showed men violent episodes of violent scenes against women, and
they broadly categorized there being two kinds. One was kind
(25:50):
of impulsive and loud and aggressive and in your face
and almost impulsive, and they call those the pit bulls
and the other kind and their heart rates apparently dropped
and they became very cool and very calm and very calculated,
and they call them cobras. And you know, you can
(26:12):
guess which ones are the most dangerous. And so I think,
you know, for our high risk, high harm guys, they
tend to be the cobras. They tend to be the
very very purposeful, very deliberate, very strategic use of behavior
and words and actions. You know, I remember working with one.
(26:33):
This happened in a court where the magistrate wasn't looking,
and she was in the court with him, and when
the magistrate looked away, this man just went cross at hurt.
No one saw it but her and the DV workers
of course too. So that isn't accidental, that's very deliberate.
(26:55):
He picked his moment when the magistrate was distracted doing
something else and he made that sign to her, and
obviously she knew what that meant. And one thing I
have learned is you take threats seriously. That's not just
a man who's ranting and raving and who's angry at
being in court because of her calling the police and
(27:16):
him getting a devo and him breaching a devo. That's
a man with planned intentionality. To do a sign like
that is a death threat. So I would believe that
he would be a very dangerous character. That man would
need very close containment and constrainment. And I talk about
the lethal essays. One of them I'm adding to that
(27:39):
now is sending a message. When a man sends a message,
whether it be subtle, covert, or whether it's quite overt
and obvious, we need to believe that he means business.
He is not just blowing off steam, or he's not
just in some form of rage. He's actually sending a message.
(28:02):
And again, through the fatality review committees, not just in
Queensland but around Australia, we know that men before they
will commit murder do send some kind of message.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
The essays that you speak of, I've got them.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
Here there's separation, stalking, sexual violence, strangulation, and suicidality. Why
were these so important and how are these indicators of
such extreme violence?
Speaker 3 (28:30):
Well, I think you know, again, the research around men
who commit murder, domestic violence murders has shown that those
ESS's are prevalent prior to the murder. There's a number
of people who've done that research. So those lethal ESS's
tend to be prevalent in many cases. And if you
see them in a report of a man, and you
(28:52):
can see an accumulation of these essays, well that means
our systemic response should be ramped up very very quickly,
very urgently to contain that man and to keep that
victim safe. So they're really essential part of risk assessment
and risk management. And if we want to keep women
alive and we want to stop these men from murdering women,
(29:14):
then we have to pay very close attention to those
risk factors.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Why is the system when you speak about that, I mean,
there are so many parts of this, there's so many precautions,
and there's so many evident signs that would indicate that
someone could be a very violent perpetrator. Why is the
system failing women so repetitively and so fundamentally.
Speaker 3 (29:37):
Again, if I had any power or any sway in
this response, I would want to see a system overhaul.
I would want to see courts and lawyers better trained
in understanding perpetrators behavior and intentionality. I would love to
see courts and lawyers and police better trained in understanding
victim responses, so that a woman who might view force
(30:00):
herself that's a trauma response. Remember we talk about freeze,
flight and fight and form, those sort of responses to trauma,
and yet when a woman fights back, she can be
misidentified as a perpetrator. So we seem to forget that
fighting back is a trauma response. And when women fight back,
that's not abuse, that's a reactive resistant force to the
(30:23):
male violence, the abuse of violence. So you know, identifying
a woman as a perpetrator actually makes her far more
at risk of his violence. And very sadly not so
low ago in Queensland we had eight Indigenous women killed,
and each of those women that year had been identified
as a perpetrator. But each of those women had been
(30:46):
hospitalized from his violence. None of the men had been hospitalized,
and yet each of those women ended up dead. Terrifying
isn't it It is? You know, when you get courts
who've identified their court lists, who've identified accord to a
third I've seen in Queensland some courts this is four
or five years ago. I think the numbers have improved somewhat.
(31:07):
But when I saw those court lifts lists and there
was thirty percent twenty five percent of perpetrators respondents they're
called in Queensland identified were women, then we know we've
got misidentification happening there and we need to increase the training.
So if I had my way, it'd be a far
(31:28):
more focused and well trained understanding of domestic violence, effects
on the victim and strategies of offenders, and then far
more consequences for non compliance for the offender. When I
worked with men in group and they've been court ordered
and they turn up two or three times and then
they don't front anymore, I'll report that to the court.
(31:51):
This bloke's being court ordered. He was here for what
was going to be something like forty hours of intervention
and he's ended up doing doing six or seven and
he's not here anymore. Then there doesn't seem to be
any response to that. There's no consequence for his non compliance,
so he knows he can get away with it. So
until men realize that they can't get away with this,
(32:15):
that there are going to be consequences. So it's going
to be I think a really wholesale reappraisal of our
approach to victim survivors and to domestic violence offenders if
we want to change the statistics with misidentification.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
In your experience, do you think that there is a
skewed racial element to this, because it does seem as though,
and in so many stories that we have heard and
we've spoken about at different times, that Indigenous women are
more inclined to be booked as a perpetrator or seen
as a perpetrator than what a white woman would be
if they were the victim of domestic violence.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
I think that's what the research would suggest. Yes, absolutely, Again,
that means more training, more understanding of way in Indigenous
women might use force more so than someone from a
different racial background. I was talking to people who work
in Indigenous communities and the complexity of the violence and
the lateral violence and the context of the violence there
(33:16):
is culturally different, and I think police courts and non
indigenous workers on those communities need to have a very
nuanced understanding of that before working in those spaces.
Speaker 4 (33:27):
But when we talked before about how we can go
about change and what are we going to do, like
what are we going to actually put in place, and
how we do feel helpless? I want to link this
because I think for everybody, I think it's a really,
really great example. There's a Scottish comedian, his name's Daniel Sloss,
and at one of his shows he did a whole
piece at the end, very very seriously on rape and
(33:49):
how the issue and the change needs to come from men.
Obviously there's plenty of male perpetrators, but there's plenty of
amazing men to women are doing everything they can, screaming
out and doing absolutely everything to instill change, but the
real change has to come from other good men speaking out.
And he does this whole piece on how he blames
himself for somebody he knows, like his friend raping a woman.
(34:12):
He completely owns the fact and says, I didn't know
he was a rapist, but I saw the signs over
the years, all those deadly essas that you spoke about.
He's like, as a friend, there were things that were
said that weren't right. There were signs that I saw
that I ignored because I was a man that didn't
want to speak up. And his message is men are
the ones that need, like the good men are the
ones that need to be having these conversations in their
(34:34):
male circles. And sometimes I think, as much as we
have these reforms and these changes in these programs, which
we absolutely need, we need to be encouraging our husbands
to be having these conversations with their friends and our
sons to be having these conversations with their friends, because
they're the people that are going to actually instill the change.
It's not the women that are saying, please don't rape me.
That's that's not what's going to change anything.
Speaker 3 (34:54):
Absolutely right. You know, the number of men who are
abusive who have access or get access to an intervention
program is a drop in the ocean. I'll just cite
some figures here, their ballpark figures. In Queensland last year,
I believe that we had something like sixty five thousand
(35:14):
domestic violence orders issued. We had something like forty five
thousand breaches of domestic violence orders. And when an order
is breached in Queensland, it becomes a criminal offense. So
it moves from the civil code into the criminal code,
So breaching a DV order is a criminal offense. Forty
five thousand. Now, I can't accurately ascertain how many men
(35:38):
start a domestic violence intervention group, start, not finish, because
we know there's an attrition rate to those groups. But
I would estimate maybe fifteen hundred men. But you can
see the disparity between the forty five thousand breaches, and
we know who these breaches are because that's the criminal offense,
and then the number who actually get an intervention for transformation,
(36:00):
for rehabilitation, for change. So we can't rely just on
a small men's intervention program to solve the whole problem.
That's not going to happen, not at this point in time.
So you're right. I think good respectful men who've done
their own work, who won't collude, who won't exonerate, who
won't turn a blind eye to the disrespect and abusive
(36:23):
ways of other men, we really need to call on
that resource. And it's not easy because you know, often
men find it difficult to stand up to other men
because men tend to police each other. You know about
what you can do and what you can't do, you know,
the man box, of course. So it takes a man
who's not willing to be contained in that man box,
(36:47):
who's not willing to put his head in the sand
or turn a blind eye or turn his back on
disrespectful behavior from another man, and to stand up and
be who he should be as a good respectful man
and call it. We need to really focus on that.
And I think, as you say, that's got to come
from a male community. That's got it comes from men's groups,
(37:08):
and not men's rights groups, but from men who understand
that this is unjust, this should not be happening.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Brian, what you just mentioned said that domestic violence case
can turn from being a civil case to a criminal case.
What would constitute a breach to change it to a
criminal case?
Speaker 3 (37:27):
Any breach, Any breach should mean officially, and it is
officially a criminal act. So case in point, a man
I worked with texted his partner and phoned his partner
multiple times over one weekend when there was a no
contact order. So let's say he did it two hundred times.
Theoretically that's two hundred breaches. Action should have been taken,
(37:50):
but it was a no contact order. Oh, he just
breached by contacting her when he shouldn't. That's technically a breach.
You know, I've heard that term use a technical breach.
No such thing is a technical breach. Is a breach?
Is a breach? No action was taken. Next breach this
man committed. He turned up drunk on her doorstep, bashing
on the door. She was hiding in fear inside. Eventually
(38:13):
he left. She reported that breach, no action taken.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Crazy.
Speaker 3 (38:18):
Third breach, very hot evening in Queensland. Security door locked,
the doggy door left open. He was a small guy.
He squeezed through the doggy door and he was at
the end of her bed at two am in the morning.
Third breach. So you can see an escalation there. When
we don't react, when we don't respond to the initial breach,
(38:41):
he's going to see how far he can go. Each
of those breaches was an escalation to the previous breach.
So you know, we need to have swift and certain
consequences for breaches of behavior, for any non compliance.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
But my question to that is, why is it that
we see domestic violence as a civil case, whereas if
someone was to do this to someone who they weren't
in a romantic relationship with Like if I was to
harass someone with two hundred phone calls after physically abusing them,
that wouldn't ever be a civil case. That would be
a criminal case to start with. If I broke into
(39:17):
someone's house, if I showed up on their door drunk,
smashing on the door, like breaking into We treat domestic
violence cases as though they are not as violent, or
that they are more acceptable than what we would if
it was a stranger and it wasn't an intimate partner relationship.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
Yeah, we do, that is true. I agree with you completely, Laura.
But having said that, we have other laws. We have
stalking legislation, we have torture legislation, we have deprivation of
liberty legislation, we have non lethal strangulation legislation here in Queensland.
We've got other legislative acts that we could respond to
(39:56):
his behavior with other than just the domestic violence legislation.
So my question is, with all these legislation, why aren't
we able to contain these men better? And my only
concern with the making DV legislation criminal behavior, as you
write so rightly say, when we have misidentification of women
(40:20):
and she's identified as an offender, does she get criminalized
because of that behavior? So I think we need to
be very very cautious and careful about that. I agree
with you. I agree that it is criminal behavior, and
I agree that we need to respond better than we're
doing to contain his abusiveness. But it's part of that
(40:42):
unintended consequences sometimes conversation that we need to have around
how this may impact on her. I agree totally with you, though,
I think if it's criminal behavior initially, and if it's
done right, an investigation clearly identifies him as the abuser,
then maybe her safety is a should more quickly, more urgently,
(41:02):
more comprehensively than if we leave it under the civil code.
Speaker 1 (41:06):
I would really love to know as well. How is
it the perpetrators weaponize children in these sorts of situations
when a woman leaves and they take their kids with them,
and they try to protect their kids, which is usually the.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
Main priority for mums.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
What is it and how is it that men are
able to use the children in order to gain access
and to further terrorize the women who have left.
Speaker 3 (41:30):
Men will weaponize anything and everything. They weaponize courts, they
weaponize children, They weaponize their own sons are radicalized very
often to committing horemendous behavior against the mother. So the
use of children is particularly horrific, I think, because it
just continues and lengthens the time of abuse that children
(41:55):
have to experience. You know, there's awful cases of fathers
giving access to children when the clear indications were that
this was a sexual predator, this was a dangerous a
dangerous man, and yet all that was overlooked because men
have a right, their right to fatherhood because they fathered
(42:15):
this child. Men will get access to kids through courts
and then they've won the battle. And so she hasn't
been able to protect these children as she wants to.
The court has dismissed their right to safety virtually in cases,
and children become just another means to get back to punish,
(42:37):
to have revenge against the partner for having the temerity
to want to live in safety from his violence. You know,
I remember I was talking about weapons and what weapons
men had at home in a group one night. Some
of these men were living on properties where they had
access to guns, of course, and use guns as part
of their lifestyle, their livelihoods. You know, the discussion became
(43:01):
around men who use crossbows for hunting on these properties
and hunting knives. And then one man just very clearly
and very calmly cut across the conversation and said, Brian,
you know what, I can use anything I want as
a weapon. And I thought, you are being very honest
(43:22):
and very truthful. And the truth he was talking about
was kitchen knives or chairs or tools at home. But
the reality is that he's not only talking about implements
in the home. He's talking about courts, is talking about police,
is talking about school. He can use anything as a
weapon in his strategy of coercive control to create misery
(43:46):
and to increase his tyranny over this woman's life.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
Absolutely petrifying is what it is.
Speaker 3 (43:52):
It's petrifying, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (43:53):
But it also, I mean, it's such an almost depressing
conversation to have because everything that we've spoken about comes
back to this idea that the systems in place they're
not protecting victims. The systems in place are broken, they
don't work, and there needs to be a radical overhaul
of how we manage and take care of victim survivors,
(44:15):
but also how we punish, rehabilitate. What it is that
we do for perpetrators as well. It seems like the
system itself is fundamentally broken and there isn't a way
out of this yet, and how is it going to
be fixed?
Speaker 3 (44:29):
Well, I think that's a conversation we need to have
nationally with politicians, with academics, with practitioners, with people with
lived experience with children. And it's not about having another
report or another investigation. It's got to actually lead to
what you're calling a systemic overhaul. When we know the
(44:50):
risks of fatalities that high risk high harm perpetrators have,
we need to have some kind of task force within
the police that deals specifically with high risk high harm
domestic violence offenders. And I know there are certain areas
which are moving potentially towards that. I think we need
to have what's called focus to terrans in our police force,
(45:12):
where we focus on the highest risk HALM guys, and
then we have other levels of intervention for men who
may not be at that stage as imminent a risk
as the high risk I harm. I think we've got
to really focus on the early intervention that we were
talking about before, in terms of young boys, young girls
access to social media. What are we doing in our
(45:34):
schools in terms of respectful relationships. And let's also remember
that schools are there to educate and to socialize our children,
but they can't do at all. I think we need
to have parental programs which are teaching parents how to
be maybe more engaged, more involved in their children's lives,
and not to shrug their shoulders and give up parenting
(45:56):
for mobile phones or for social media. I think courts,
as I said previously, need to be far more nuanced
in their understanding and be far more trauma informed about
the effect of trauma on women and children, far more
nuanced in understanding the tactics and how perpetrators manipulate courts
too and weaponize courts and call that and see through that.
(46:20):
So it's got to be a multi leveled approach. It's
going to take a lot of personnel, a lot of resources.
You know, people sort of governmental levels cry poor often
that there's not enough money to do this. Well, if
we prioritize and value the lives of women and children,
and let's remember it's not only women we want to
(46:41):
keep safe. It's the next generation. It's the potential perpetrators
who are growing up now, the potential victims who are
growing up now that we want to block or disrupt
that pathway to being a perpetrator or that pathway that
may lead to being a victim survivor. I want to
interrupt that in ways that are going to keep people
(47:02):
healthy and safe. It's a wicked problem, and wicked problems
have to be addressed at multiple levels. I don't believe you, know,
as some people do, that this can be defeated within
a generation. I'm sorry, I just don't see that happening.
I don't think that understands the nature of the problem
we're dealing with. Really, I don't want to be a
pessimist or appear to be negative, but I think when
(47:25):
we deal with this wicked problem, we have to be
realistic and we have to throw the resources that are
needed at it. But understand that this is going to
take time.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
Brian, thank you for coming and for being a part
of the podcast and having what is such an important conversation,
and for all the work that you do in trying
to rehabilitate, trying to enact reform. Yeah, it really is
such It's such a hard conversation to have because it
does as we just kind of landed on it does
(47:55):
feel as though change is not happening fast enough. But
we so deeply appreciate you being a part of the
pod and everything that you're doing to try and make
that happen.
Speaker 3 (48:02):
Well, thanks to your word too, Laura and brit because
I think podcasts are a way of hopefully, you know,
people may learn something. I'm only one voice, so I
realize that. But when people listen to podcasts that talk
about this awful reality, the impossible lives that some women
are living, hopefully it deepens their awareness. They're understanding, and
(48:23):
who knows, it may actually instill a motivation to be
able to do something about it in their neck of
the woods, in their family, in their area. They may
be able to speak up and shine a light on
where it needs to be shone. So you're part of
the community responds too. So the work you do is
valuable and valued. So thank you very much and for
the invitation to be here today.
Speaker 4 (48:44):
These are definitely the conversations. You say, you're only one
voice and we're only one podcast, but they are the
conversations that could potentially save a life, and if they
do save one life, then that's what matters. So thank
you so much brain.
Speaker 3 (48:53):
Absolutely, the con the Cobany, the conta, my membay, b
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