Men who kill their partners were little boys once. What went wrong?  SMH   David Leser  Senior freelance writer   April 29, 2024    174 Comments

So, now it’s a national crisis because – following the alleged murder of Molly Ticehurst in Forbes last week and Erica Hay four days later in Perth, both in their homes – politicians, advocacy groups and the media have decided it’s a national emergency.

Who in their right mind could not agree with that description, given that 27 women have been killed so far this year in Australia, 12 more than for the corresponding time last year?

Molly Ticehurst, left, and her accused murderer Daniel Billings.

But wasn’t it also a national emergency in 2001, when the Australian Institute of Criminology reported that more than 1.2 million adult women had experienced an incident of sexual violence since the age of 15, and that one woman was being killed by a current or former partner every week?

What about when 29-year-old Jill Meagher, an ABC staffer, was raped and strangled to death while walking home from a bar in Brunswick in Melbourne in 2012? That was a crime that shocked the nation, but perhaps not shocked enough to be declared a “national crisis”, as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese did on Sunday when labelling the calamity of domestic violence today.

What about when 22-year-old Melbourne comedian Eurydice Dixon was raped and murdered in Carlton North six years ago and her body dumped in Princes Park? “I’m almost home safe,” she messaged her partner shortly before her life was taken.

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Surely, that was a national emergency given the outcry, the despair, the nationwide vigils, and given, particularly, the Victorian police’s less than helpful messaging that women ensure they have “situational awareness” and awareness for their “own personal security”.

The response to these clumsy words was predictably outraged because it read to many as code for victim blaming. One woman countered on Facebook with a response that I have kept because of its eloquent fury: “You know what would be great?” she wrote. “If an instance of a young man murdering a woman was seen as the opportunity to talk about what’s going wrong with our boys and men. That we keep seeing them ‘snap’ and take their frustration and damage and dysfunction out on women and girls. That they harm them. That they rape them. That they kill them. The questions we should be asking are not ‘how can girls make themselves safer?’ Or ‘why do women take these risks [walking home]?’ Or ‘when will women be more aware of their surroundings and take some responsibility?’ That is all bullshit.”

“The questions we SHOULD be asking are ‘how are our boys connecting to other people? Are they showing respect for the girls and women in their lives? Do they seem withdrawn and hostile? Are you ever worried about their ability to regulate anger, control their temper, admit when they’re in pain? Should my son be getting professional support? Is my brother dangerous? Is my father stable? What options are available to me if I think any of the men in my life pose a risk to someone else, or themselves?’”

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And then, in a final devastating challenge, she asked: “How do men get to this point? Where in their boyhood do they start to view girls as less than them? What is fuelling this endless and toxic hatred of women?”

The answers to these questions are complex and ancient and no short opinion piece can possibly do justice to them. However, it wouldn’t hurt to try. Let’s start with misogyny, pure and simple, because it can be found in religious and philosophical texts that have helped shape Western beliefs and values for centuries.

Aristotle, for example, a towering figure in Greek philosophy, once famously said that “a female is female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities”. He also claimed women had fewer teeth than men, which British philosopher Bertrand Russell countered more than 2000 years later by suggesting that Aristotle would “never have made this mistake if he had allowed his wife to open her mouth once in a while”.

Trying to trace the history of hatred is no simple task, as Jack Holland, the Irish journalist and author of Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice, discovered. But what he concluded was that, of all the hatreds that human beings can feel for one another, misogyny is possibly the most complex because it includes a profound need and desire that many men have for women.

“This is what makes misogyny so complex,” he wrote. “It involves a man’s conflict with himself. Indeed, for the most part, the conflict is not even recognised.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to join thousands of marchers protesting against domestic violence.

In a column last week, Jenna Price took issue with the prime minister because he’d said that men and boys “need to discuss these issues and give support to women who are in this situation.” “At this stage,” Price retorted, “I am less than interested in what men and boys have to say about violence against women because it will be some idiotic gaslighting.”

Price is a writer whom I admire, but I disagree with her in this instance. Yes, a legion of men will continue to follow the Andrew Tates and Jordan Petersons of this world down their very dark and hateful road, often gaslighting women in the process. Others, however, want to talk about what it means to be a man and to re-examine many of the instructions they were given as boys.

Who taught us that being vulnerable, sensitive, full of wonder was weak? Who – or what – managed to shame those qualities out of us when we were young? What gave us the idea that it was unmanly to express emotion, that, as a man, we should always act strong? How did so many of us get stuck in so-called “boy psychology” and never grow up?

These are questions that many good men I know are addressing – with their sons, fathers, brothers, friends, colleagues – and none more lucidly than through the Jesuit Social Services’ “Man Box” Study, which was published this year by The Men’s Project. The study shows that men who subscribe to rigid, outdated versions of manhood will be eight times more likely to perpetrate sexual violence against an intimate partner, and 28 times more likely to use fear to coerce a partner into having sex. Crucially, men who adhere to the old masculinity playbook are also eight times more likely to have suicidal thoughts than men who don’t.

Three years ago, I co-authored a cover story for Good Weekend with Herald writer, Natassia Chrysanthos, on the wave of sexual assault allegations implicating male students from some of Australia’s top private schools.

A young man told me that one day he’d taken chocolates and flowers to a sick [female] friend and that when his male friends heard about it, they labelled him a “simp”. I asked him what a “simp” was and he said someone who was “nice to a woman”. He said he’d never again make that gesture.

I understand women are furious and fed up with talking. They want action, as I heard loud and clear on Saturday at the march in Sydney protesting the continued scourge of male violence.

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The federal Attorney General Mark Dreyfus has rejected the idea of holding a royal commission into domestic violence, while this masthead has called strongly for two, one being a long-overdue national inquiry into the causes that drive male attitudes towards women.

I support that stance. Yes, changing attitudes is hellishly slow, but it is action nonetheless. And changing the destructive way some men think and act surely has to be part of the national emergency we are being forced to reckon with.

Yet again.

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