‘What Happens Next?’: What’s Behind the Gender-Based Violence Crisis?

[Music]

Fiona McCormack: When we look at the international evidence base about what drives violence, evidence consistently points back to gender inequality.

Jane Fisher: Violence is one of the biggest underpinning factors for all health problems experienced by women but in particular their mental health.

Stephanie Wescott: There has been a noticeable discernible shift in boys' attitudes and behaviours towards women and girls in the last couple of years, coinciding with a return from lockdown and remote schooling.

Susan Carland: Welcome back to What Happens Next?, the podcast that examines some of the biggest challenges facing our world and asks the experts: What will happen if we don't change? And what can we do to create a better future? I'm your host, Dr Susan Carland.

[Music]

Susan Carland: Gender-based violence is a pervasive and deeply entrenched issue in Australia. It encompasses physical, sexual, and psychological harm inflicted on individuals based on their gender disproportionately affecting women and children.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese: We know that ending gender-based violence is a priority for the Commonwealth and for every single jurisdiction.

Speaker 6: We know that there will be many people in this room, many of us who have personal experiences of domestic, family and sexual violence.

Speaker 7: We must make laws to identify and address the problem of domestic and family violence as early and as effectively as possible.

[Applause]

Susan Carland: As we recorded this episode in July 2024, the statistics were already grim. Tragically, by the time you're listening, those numbers will have only grown.

According to Our Watch, one woman in Australia is killed by a current or former partner every nine days on average. These aren't just numbers, they're lives shattered, families torn apart and communities left reeling.

This is a complex issue with far-reaching consequences and roots in long-standing cultural attitudes, systemic inequalities and a range of social factors that we'll explore today.

A word of caution, this episode discusses some very heavy topics, including violence against women and children, addiction and sexual assault. Please listen with care.

If you're experiencing gender-based violence, help is available. In Australia, call 1-800-RESPECT or visit 1-800respect.org.au to access a confidential counselling and support service for people who have experienced or are at the risk of experiencing domestic, family and sexual violence, their family and friends and frontline workers. Visit our show notes for additional resources recommended by our experts.

Today we'll examine the current state of gender-based violence in Australia, investigating its causes, impacts and the challenges we face in addressing it. We'll hear from leading experts who have dedicated their careers to understanding and combating the issue. While the picture they paint is often bleak, there are pathways forward. Keep listening to find out what happens next.

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Kate Fitz-Gibbon: Hi, I am Professor Kate Fitz-Gibbon. I work in the Monash Faculty of Business and Economics and have been researching violence against women and children for over a decade now.

Susan Carland: Kate, welcome.

Kate Fitz-Gibbon: Thank you so much for having me.

Susan Carland: Can you start by giving us a picture of what's happening with gender-based violence, particularly in Australia? Where are we at the moment?

Kate Fitz-Gibbon: We're in a pretty horrific spot. We know that earlier this year, yet again, violence against women has been declared a national crisis by our prime minister. And just in the first six months of this year, 49 women have been allegedly killed most commonly by men known to them.

Violence against women and children is prevalent across the entire Australian community. We know that it occurs in a range of different ways. This involves physical violence, sexual violence, coercive and controlling behaviours, financial abuse, economic abuse, a range of different stalking, but also technology-facilitated abuse. So we're seeing a range of different harms, extremely expansive, touching every corner of the Australian communities.

Susan Carland: And in what ways is the situation with gender-based violence unique in Australia? Are the ways it expresses unique? Are the rates unique? Or is it just uniform across the world?

Kate Fitz-Gibbon: There's definitely a global problem of gender-based violence. So in Australia, there are unique aspects as to how some of it may manifest or the impacts that it may have or the access to services and responses. But this is a global problem in that there's no communities around the world that we know of. It would be great to have communities that we could study and understand if they are violence-free, but there isn't.

We know that globally, the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime shows us that a woman is killed approximately one every 11 minutes around the world, which is pretty frightening when we think about how long this podcast episode will go for for example and the women that may be killed around the world while we're talking.

I think we've definitely got a better understanding of coercive and controlling behaviours than some other countries around the world. So by virtue of acknowledging it more clearly and understanding it, we might also look like we have an over-representation, but certainly what we know is that these behaviours occur in every country around the world.

Susan Carland: And that must make it actually tricky to look at global trends when there are cultural differences in what is deemed acceptable behaviour. In a marriage, for example, the way a husband treats his wife, what he does or does not control can be very different culturally. And so when we say in Australia, “No, that's controlling”, in other cultures it might be like, “But that's just how marriage works.”

Kate Fitz-Gibbon: Absolutely. And how control and coercion can be experienced may be different for everyone in every relationship, and what it's really important to focus on there is, what's the impact of the behaviour? Is that behaviour, that control and that coercion instilling fear in a person? Is it experienced as isolating them from their family and friends, from education and employment opportunities? Is it making them lesser in their every being?

In research that I've done with victim-survivors of coercive control, it's always struck me how many have described life in a coercively and controlling relationship as like walking on eggshells. You're nervous, you're afraid, you're scared in your everyday life. So I think it's really important there to be focusing on the impact that the behaviours has, and that's what tells us that it's unacceptable.

Susan Carland: Yeah, that's a great measure actually, because that you can apply across the board.

Kate Fitz-Gibbon: One-hundred per cent, and it means that might be accepted within the confines of one intimate partner relationship because of the way that they manifest, what they sit alongside, in another relationship they instil fear, and that's not okay.

Susan Carland: Charles Livingstone is an associate professor at the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University, and a long-time addiction researcher specialising in gambling addiction.

Charles Livingstone: Gender-based violence has many characteristics and many factors which go into instances of violent activity. Obviously, being female means you're much more likely to experience gender-based violence or intimate partner violence, I don't think there's much doubt about that. How can I put it? Being someone who doesn't suffer gladly means that you're also more likely to experience harm. If you speak up for yourself, if you feel that you're being wronged, then I think that leads to more harm. I mean, it shouldn't clearly, but there's clearly evidence that it does.

So there's no real psychology that guarantees that person A in situation B is going to carry out the violent attack on their partner or their children or whatever. So it's not something that's unique to the poor or to Indigenous people or to people who have specific ethnicity, it's something which can cut across all communities.

Susan Carland: Gender-based violence affects people across all demographics, but it can exacerbate the challenges and stresses already being faced by vulnerable communities.

Professor Jane Fisher, a global health expert also based in Monash's School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, is a chief investigator on the new Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women in the Indo-Pacific.

Jane Fisher: Look, I think there's no doubt that all problems, all social problems are worse when families are dealing also with enormous economic stress, and families living on a low income where there's not sufficient to secure their housing or their food or the care of their children or education costs. We know that in these situations there can be more angry conflict, which can lead to violence.

It's not by any means the only reason. There are some cultural traditions which have maintained a longer-term view about women's roles and responsibilities and men's roles and responsibilities, and where these are divided along very traditional lines where women are confined to the domestic sphere, they're held to be responsible for domestic labour and the care of children, it does seem to be more problematic in those settings.

And especially as women in a context like Australia, and they might be experiencing this after migration, they can see that there are actually other choices and that there are other ways of combining their ambitions, aspirations, responsibilities, and this can be threatening in a relationship as couples negotiate this.

So it does seem to be problematic in people who've come from cultural settings with a very conservative or traditional view about roles and responsibilities, and migration itself is stressful when people are lonely, trying to navigate a new system, but it's been documented at much higher rates in refugee communities than in non-refugee communities. Not that it's zero in the non-refugee, but it is higher in those communities.

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Fiona McCormack: My name is Fiona McCormack. I just recently finished being Victoria's Victims of Crime commissioner. Before that, I headed up the peak body for family violence services in Victoria. I feel very passionately about the issue of gender-based violence and of creating healthy communities for everyone.

Susan Carland: Fiona, welcome. We know Indigenous women are overrepresented in the rates of gender-based violence compared to non-Indigenous women. How do we understand that? Is it a systemic issue? What do we do about that?

Fiona McCormack: So women aren't homogenous, women are diverse, and there are groups of women far more likely to be targeted as victims of crime. Aboriginal women are one, they're 45 times more likely to be targeted as victims of crime. And it's important –

Susan Carland: Of all crime, not just gender-based violence?

Fiona McCormack: Of gender-based violence, sorry, and 10 times more likely to be murdered. So we know in the Yoorrook Justice Commission, Djirra, our Victorian Family Violence legal service reported that 72 per cent of Aboriginal women who come to them seeking support are partnered with non-Aboriginal men, and 90 per cent of sexual assault and intimate partner abuse victims that they support won't report.

So here's the thing, men who choose to use violence target women. They can target women more broadly, but they target women. And there are some women who face additional barriers, additional forms of discrimination. Aboriginal women, women with disability, far higher rates than women without disability. Women newly arrived to Australia, women with limited English, in part because they're unlikely to report.

Susan Carland: While gender-based violence can occur in all communities, the overwhelming majority of perpetrators are men. The drivers behind this violence are complex and numerous.

Fiona McCormack: I have been working in this area long enough, and it wasn't that long ago when if I was contacted by media, constantly I'd be told, “But women are as violent as men, aren't they?”

Susan Carland: “Oh, but he was a good guy.”

Fiona McCormack: “He's a good guy.” And also we would see women murdered, women and children, and there'd be news reports and people saying in the news report, “We don't know why he went mad and killed his family and killed himself. He was such a great bloke, he raised money for the local footy club, he was a pillar of society, et cetera.”

And to anyone working in this space, it was so obvious that it was gender-based violence for the longest time. And there've been a lot of theories about the causes of violence, theories that have mainly looked at single factor. Fairly simplistic issues that focus on often the perpetrator, so his childhood – whether he is exposed to violence, or his circumstances – if he's just lost his job and he's under financial pressure, or his behaviours – if he's got an alcohol problem or a drug problem, et cetera, et cetera.

And these theories have often been used to obscure the behaviour of men who choose to use violence and justify them.

Susan Carland: Alcohol consumption and drug use aren't the only addictive behaviours that contribute to gender-based violence. Unfortunately, Australia's wrestling with another vice – gambling. Here's Charles.

How do you see addiction intersecting or connecting to gender-based violence?

Charles Livingstone: There's lots of ways in which you might imagine that it could connect, but in my case, because I'm focused on gambling addiction, the driver generally is... Well, there are multiple drivers, but a key driver, for example, is the impact that it will have on the financial situation of a family or a couple, the erosion of trust and sympathetic understanding that it incurs on a relationship, and the immense frustration that many people feel when they encounter the difficulties that harmful gambling has brought into their situation, and that's not just the people who gamble.

I mean, people who gamble have enormous shame, regret, experience a great deal of stigma, and feel these harms continue forever. That's very well documented now that people who gamble excessively, who go through a period of such activity will end up regretting it forever, because it means often that they've lost major assets.

[Poker machine noises and coins clinking]

Charles Livingstone: So that frustration, embarrassment, shame, and indeed anger, especially if it's experienced by people who are not the gambling member of the family, that can really trigger difficulties and tension and stress, and unfortunately, that often ends up being carried out or articulated through violence, which is very, very, very common unfortunately.

Susan Carland: You focus on gambling, as you said. Do you know if there are other addictions that seem to come up more commonly as connected to gender-based violence?

Charles Livingstone: Well, the obvious one is alcohol. Alcohol fuels enormous amounts of gender-based violence, I don't think there's any doubt about that. And drug addictions or addictions to illicit substances can also be responsible for a lot of intimate partner violence and a lot of discord in a family situation.

The problem with addiction is that people look at it and think, “Well, why can't you just stop? Why can't you just not go to the gambling joint? Why do you have to take this drug all the time? Why do you drink so much?” And until you understand that addiction is something which really, people get immersed in it, it becomes an incredibly important part of their life, and indeed, it becomes a relationship. People have a relationship with their addiction, and I think that relationship can often seem to be more important to them than their primary relationship in life with their partner, even with their kids.

And that itself is a cause of significant harm and damage to relationships and can result in violence, as I'm sure you and your listeners will understand or can imagine quite readily.

And I think what we've also got is, the problem is I think that with addiction, very few people understand how hard it is to stop. It becomes something which is always an issue in a relationship once it's exposed, and it is something which, until it's properly addressed, it'll continue to erode relationships and cause enormous friction.

So obviously someone who has a raging gambling habit doesn't necessarily end up beating their partner up. Often people who are themselves experiencing a harmful addiction will end up being the ones that are assaulted. And again, if you imagine a situation where someone is spending a great deal of time and money on gambling, that is to the detriment of the family finances and the integrity of the family, then that is often the trigger for an episode of violence and separation.

One of the major consequences of gambling addiction is that people end up separating, they end up losing major assets, they end up experiencing considerable grief and anxiety about what they've done to their family, and unfortunately, that can often be carried out or acted out as an episode of violence.

So most people that end up with gambling problems tend to be from socioeconomically disadvantaged communities because that's where all the gambling opportunities are focused. But as we know from alcohol, gender-based violence, which has its roots in alcohol consumption, is something that transcends all classes and social group. The same is true of gambling.

Gambling, as I say, is focused, it is provided most readily in communities of disadvantage, but it's readily available across the board. And if you think about how people often use the stock market as a form of gambling, many people do that. They're not the poor people that are doing that because you've got to have a fair bit of spare money to do it, but it can also have the same consequences, you can lose everything.

It's not something that you can categorise neatly, it's something that occurs across the board and it does now appear is very strongly linked to domestic violence, intimate partner violence in Australia and in other countries where it's been studied.

Susan Carland: Do you think, is it because of the immense stress that gambling or a gambling addiction places on a person and a family? Is that why it seems to be so heavily linked to domestic violence, or is it something else about the gambling addiction or gambling that seems to exacerbate this?

Charles Livingstone: I was talking previously about how people who have an addiction to gambling tend to see that as a relationship or to experience it as a form of relationship. Now, my sense is that that's also true of people who use illicit drugs or people who drink, it's a key player in their sense of self. But with gambling, the relationship appears to be almost tangible, it's something that you can almost see and breathe.

In Australia, most harm associated with gambling is from poker machine gambling, well, over half is attributable to poker machine gambling because of the ubiquity of availability in Australia. And in order to engage in poker machine gambling, you're away from the household. And it's not uncommon for people to spend hours, literally hours, out of the house in a gambling environment.

Now, interestingly enough, some women who escape family violence by going to the pokies because it's a relatively safe space, it's bright, you're unlikely to get beaten up there, unfortunately, those women will end up spending more money than they intended to, and that will be a trigger for further violence.

So I think, if you like, the interesting thing about a gambling addiction is that it can be readily recognised as a relationship, it can be readily recognised by the non-gambling partner as a betrayal, not just because of the amount of money that you might be putting through it, but because of the amount of time that you devote to it. And that can be a trigger for quite substantial anger, distrust, and in many cases, unfortunately, violence.

Susan Carland: How would you describe Australia's relationship with gambling? Do you think it's healthy?

Charles Livingstone: Australia's relationship with gambling is the worst in the world, we spend more per capita than any other country on earth, over US$1200 per annum per adult. That's twice the next biggest country in terms of gambling expenditure.

Susan Carland: Oh my god, twice?

Charles Livingstone: Twenty-six billion dollars a year. Yeah, 26. The country that comes second is Singapore, but they only like gambling in their casinos.

We have seen gambling increase quite dramatically in the wake of the pandemic, consistent with the cost of living crisis becoming worse, and that's a wicked problem to have, it's a devil's brew, if you like, of potential harm.

What we have to remember is that as people say, “Well, Australians would bet on two flies crawling up the wall”. Perhaps they would. But the reason we gamble so much is because we have more gambling opportunities than any other place on Earth.

Susan Carland: But Fiona believes that the root of gender-based violence lies even deeper. It's embedded in our patriarchal cultural history.

You've written in the past that violence against women is deeply cultural. What do you mean by that?

Fiona McCormack: I mean, in a bad way, not good culture. I mean in a bad way. [Laughs]

Susan Carland: Okay, okay,

Fiona McCormack: Cultural and structural. So there's a really long history of men's violence against women that can be linked to gender inequality between women. So you think about the history of the origins of a patriarchal family that actually began in Roman days when men were the head of the family and women and children were included as chattels, men's chattels, along with slaves and cattle. And that continued right down to Victorian era as women were still considered chattels, unable to get a divorce, unable to inherit property or title.

And you think about all the gains that have been made for gender equality and challenging those social norms over the years, the right to vote, for rape to be recognised in marriage, the no-fault divorce, the way in which the right for women to work in different employment places or even to continue to work after they married, which was a thing in my mother's day. All those gains right up until today are hard fought and won against those cultural norms of the natural way of being things about men in charge of resources, of decisions, both at a social level and also within families.

That's the challenge. That's been the challenge over the years, and that's the challenge going forward. When we look at the international evidence base about what drives violence, and when I say international evidence base, I'm talking about World Bank, European Commission, World Health Organisation, UN, research conducted by them. The evidence consistently points back to gender inequality as being a focus.

And in that research, there's four problematic areas that are most highly, consistently associated with high rates of violence in any community. First is condoning of violence, so community attitudes that either make excuses for violence or are ambivalent about it. And sometimes we see the way in which police can or don't respond to violence is that ambivalence. Rigid stereotypes between men and women, so those social norms around what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman. Men's control of decision-making and limitations to women's independence, which we've just talked about. And the last one is hyper-masculine attitudes, violence-supportive attitudes that particularly support disrespectful attitudes towards women.

Susan Carland: So what does a hyper-masculine attitude look like?

Fiona McCormack: So we know that the best evidence on the likelihood of perpetration, so the difference between a man who will likely perpetrate violence and one who's unlikely to choose that path is his adherence to attitudes that men should be… have the final say in decisions in the family, that men should be tough, that resolving conflicts through violence is acceptable, even if it's something like somebody knocks you at a pub or somebody looks at your girlfriend or talks to your girlfriend.

There was some excellent research undertaken by The Man Box that highlighted these kinds of pressures that men can be under that some men adopt, and it also included things like the belief that men should have the right to know where a woman is at any given time. Thirty-five per cent of the sample of men surveyed believed that that was an entitlement for men.

This isn't about men not being men, this is just about shedding aspects of masculinity that are unhealthy in terms of their relationships with women, but also unhealthy to themselves.

These are often men who were more likely to perpetrate violence in other ways. Ninety-five per cent of victims of crime, whether they're men or women, are more likely to have that violence perpetrated against them by a man. So those, and also against themselves, really unhelpful, unhealthy behaviours.

Susan Carland: Professor Steven Roberts and Dr Stephanie Wescott both work in Monash's Faculty of Education. Their research has uncovered a concerning trend – school-age boys are increasingly exposed to misogynistic rhetoric online through communities collectively known as the manosphere.

What on earth is the manosphere? Steph, I'll ask you for a definition first.

Stephanie Wescott: Okay. The manosphere is a term used to describe a range of figures and groups that exist online, and they're typically characterised by anti-feminist and anti-women content.

Susan Carland: Okay. So then what's a manfluencer?

Steven Roberts: A manfluencer is a leading figure in that configuration, so in the manosphere. It's an even newer term than manosphere. And yeah, it's this weird portmanteau that we or some people have conjured, and it refers to these key toxic figures who are social media influencers in the realm of masculinity and toxic masculinity material.

Susan Carland: So are they mostly on social media? Do they have websites? Do they do podcasts, or is it mostly Instagram, TikTok? Are people still on Twitter? I don't know.

Steven Roberts: It's a bit of everything. So yeah, emerging from the manosphere is just an online presence typically, but then everything that's captured within that as we've moved forward into a pervasive social media environment, that's increasingly what we're talking about when we talk about manfluencers. So stemming from the term social media influencer, and then man, man influencer.

So typically these guys are on Insta and Twitter as well, and TikTok especially, but also other social media platforms such as Telegram, which people don't know about so much, but it's actually quite prominent and a bit more hardcore.

Susan Carland: The more extreme stuff is on Telegram because it's more private?

Steven Roberts: It's unfiltered as well, so it's not a conversation on Telegram. So you get the likes of Andrew Tate, who I'm sure we'll talk about, and on his Telegram channel, he broadcasts to about 500,000 people unfiltered content that is not two-way, so he's just telling them his thoughts.

Stephanie Wescott: But I think podcasts are really important to these figures too, like someone like Joe Rogan for example, because what podcasts can maybe do for your audience is legitimise your perspectives. I think some audiences tend to believe that if you have a podcast, you're an expert.

Susan Carland: Okay, so the manosphere has blown up. It's really big. It's influencing mostly young men, from what I understand. Why has this happened? Because I remember, when we spoke four years ago, I don't think we were talking about people like Andrew Tate, so this is relatively recently. Why are they capturing the hearts and minds of young men?

Steven Roberts: It's a really good question. I think just before we get there, I think it's also important to note that the manosphere has been a long time in the making. So it's been around for 10 or 15 years, probably even a bit longer and it starts as being a concern with men's rights, so men's rights associations and father's rights and this kind of stuff.

And you're right, it's morphed over the last few years, and we think, and I think probably others consider this as well, that it's in part a backlash to the MeToo movement and gender equality generally.

So I think the reason it's become so sharp is technological advancement, backlash to MeToo all happening at the same time and creating this perfect storm amplified again by COVID actually. So if we think about what happened during the lockdown, so young, all kids of course, not being at school, being on their screens a bit longer at a time when there's more and more content available.

So you've got this confluence of different things happening at the same time and it becomes more prominent. But I think that the discourse that Tate and others but Tate especially have really gripped onto is that feminism has gone too far, and so the post-MeToo moment is really, really crucial. And if you do a little trace these two lines of inquiry, you'll see that Tate becomes super prominent just after 2016, 2017, so it's not a coincidence.

Susan Carland: Why do you think some men, obviously not all men, felt threatened by MeToo? Is it that they felt personally like maybe they were being attacked? Why was MeToo the impetus, I guess is what I'm asking?

Stephanie Wescott: I think part of the fear is linked to cancel culture in that you at any moment could have something very important taken away from you, and it's possibly unjust.

So that's part of it, but I think men also extend that to themselves and then think they can be unjustly tried without evidence and without justification. So a bit of maybe reverse witch-hunting in a way, but also the narrative about, “Well, that was a long time ago. He deserves a second chance. What if someone comes and takes everything away from me?”

Perhaps it's that fear of being unjustly robbed of what belongs to you, what you feel is your entitlement.

Steven Roberts: So we definitely see more inclusive and more egalitarian masculinities coming to the floor with this young generation, but there's always been a quarter – maybe 25, 27 per cent when we look at national level attitudinal data – that suggests that a quarter of young men have these problematic attitudes towards women and girls and gender equality generally. And that core seems to have become even less immovable and really doubled down in this current moment.

Stephanie Wescott: There's probably also a belief that feminism isn't really relevant anymore. It's not needed, because “Look, women have equality now. What are you asking for? What you actually want is to take men's rights away and men's power away.”

Susan Carland: This rise in misogynistic attitudes is not just troubling in itself, but also serves as a driver of violence. In extreme cases, this mindset can have lethal outcomes. Even if things don't escalate to that level, the impact of these attitudes and actions on victim-survivors is profound. Here's Fiona.

Fiona McCormack: So if you think about a woman who maybe she's experienced intimate partner abuse, she's been in an abusive relationship, or maybe she's been sexually assaulted, often that really affects women's mental health. That might mean that she starts drinking or using other kinds of drugs to manage the trauma she might be experiencing as a result of the abuse.

In the long term, that will have impacts on her physical health, things like it could affect her ability to work, which might affect her stability in her workplace. There's lots of financial costs, medical costs, costs of relocating if she needs to, costs of getting legal advice, legal representation in court if she's going to court, range of different things. So in that sense, we can see that gender-based violence is not just a consequence of gender inequality, but also contributes significantly to the overall status of women when you consider the extent to which women experience violence in our community.

Susan Carland: So it's both an effect and cause of gender discrimination.

Fiona McCormack: That's it.

Susan Carland: Online-driven misogyny is impacting Australian teachers and their classrooms too, say Steve and Stephanie.

So you mentioned that you're doing research in schools, and I'm really interested to hear what teachers are telling you.

Stephanie Wescott: We put a call out on social media last year to speak to women about what we were calling and what we are calling misogynist radicalisation. And we were inundated with women wanting to talk to us. We spoke to 30 women representing all sectors and states and no territories, but primary and secondary, so we are also talking about primary teachers being affected by this.

Susan Carland: Which is very young, the kids that they're working with.

Stephanie Wescott: But we've spoken to someone recently in early childhood who has said that there is some of these sentiments coming from boys in early learning centres, which is obviously concerning.

But the key messages we were receiving from the women that we spoke to was that there has been a noticeable discernible shift in boys' attitudes and behaviours towards women and girls in the last couple of years, coinciding with a return from lockdown and remote schooling. Women noticed that boys, the way they were speaking to them, the way they were treating them was very different, was aggressive, misogynist, sexist. And also, the girls in their class too were receiving this behaviour also when witnessing it.

But there was also an infiltration of what we call Tate tropes, which are Tate's body language, his ideas, his I guess, symbols that he's most commonly associated with. And women who were across internet culture, I guess, were able to identify them, but there may be of course teachers in schools who don't know what those things are, possibly.

But this is obviously very disturbing for women and is affecting them profoundly because they're at work and they're trying to do their job. The teachers who expressed interest in the study are obviously aware of this behaviour and across it and possibly also feminists identifying and because they were obviously seeing this as an issue. But it was very disturbing and distressing for the women to see this, and two of the 30 women we spoke to left their jobs because of boys' behaviour.

Susan Carland: I can't actually imagine how distressing it would be to be confronted with that kind of… Anything you say as a woman to try to assert your authority as the teacher in the classroom, I imagine just ramps up exactly what they're pushing up against. If you become obsequious and then you back down, well then you're not the teacher in the classroom anymore, you lose the control of the classroom. What does work? What can they do? Is there anything?

Stephanie Wescott: You've captured it really well that it's an impossible position to be in.

Because from the outset, your authority is not being respected because of this atmosphere of disrespect towards women. So the stricter and firmer you are, then you become the bitch that they think you are. But then if you ignore it, then you are allowing a culture of disrespect and misogyny to flourish in your classroom. Teachers feel a lot of pressure to model to the girls in front of them how to respond to this, so that's an additional pressure.

But teachers are incredible, obviously, in responding to difficult situations in their classroom and challenges to them. But they also have the tools of their school support system to use, so they'll often draw on those and escalate and report. But women are reporting that they're not being believed or that the consequences that they feel are adequate and commensurate to the issue are not being delivered.

So it really is so difficult and impossible for them and it can be a breakdown of the relationship between the student and the teacher, which is something that teachers work really hard to cultivate. But if you feel like you're constantly meeting disrespect and just blatant misogyny when you are trying to establish a relationship with a young person, it's very difficult to continue that relationship. And one of our participants did say that this sort of behaviour was making her hate her job and feel differently about her students who she'd always adored. So that's just a really tough part of the job.

Susan Carland: How pervasive were the teachers saying it was in your research? Is it a handful of kids in each class? One? But would it be half?

Steven Roberts: It's a significant minority. We don't want to really get into that “not all men” stuff, but it is not all men and it's not all boys. But if we imagine like three or four kids out of a class of 20 to 25, we've heard this in other types of research that we've done where teachers are saying this little hardcore of kids is causing the damage for the girls and other boys and kids of all genders in that class are having their learning time disrupted. So three, four, five kids causing the trouble, that takes 30, 40 minutes to manage.

Susan Carland: One hundred per cent. And it's not just the learning that's being disrupted, it's the way those boys, girls and kids of all genders feel when they hear that. It's not just that we didn't get to cover the maths chapter.

Steven Roberts: Absolutely.

Susan Carland: It's that the boys that don't agree, it's a way of controlling the masculinity in the room as well. “Well, you're one of them. You're a cuck, you're gay…” Those insults, it forms the way the girls think about themselves and how they can behave. And then particularly I imagine, it would be even worse if you are transgender, gender non-binary. I imagine you would just be shrinking in the face of that.

Steven Roberts: Yeah, that's why it's so dangerous. Those boys are consolidating dominance hierarchies.

Susan Carland: The current state of gender-based violence is grim and progress is slow. One of the first hurdles is getting victims to report the violence they've experienced. Here's Jane. What are some of the common barriers to seeking help or to reporting instances of gender-based violence?

Jane Fisher: Look, I think there are many, it's such an important question.

First, there is recognition that “What is happening to me is wrong, is a form of violence, and that these behaviours are not what should normally be happening in a healthy, intimate partnership.”

Then there is some understanding of, “Who can I call? What services might assist me?”

And then there is contemplating, “What does this mean? Does this mean that I have to contemplate leaving, separating, finding another domestic setting, separating our finances, managing custody of children?” And these are big barriers as people contemplate what this means. So I think together, these are really inhibiting factors in people seeking help.

Susan Carland: And as Fiona points out, each victim survivor's unique background has accompanying barriers.

Fiona McCormack: Aboriginal women don't trust police, don't trust the justice system for very legitimate reasons, terrified of having their children removed if they've got children. Women with disabilities struggle to be taken seriously, struggle to physically report. Women newly arrived to Australia might not understand the laws, might also have had experiences of police where related to racist attacks, discriminatory behaviour where they haven't been taken seriously, where they've been dismissed by police, too terrified. The implications for them when the community is expecting them to remain in families, that happens across the board.

Susan Carland: When I was doing my PhD, I researched this concept in terms of sexism against women called the double bind, which is when, and as you were talking, it sounds exactly like a case of the double bind, where you will have Indigenous women, newly arrived migrant women, women with disabilities – what I was looking at was Muslim women – where they're in this double bind where they will experience sexism within their communities, like women in every community does. But to disclose or report or to try to do something about the sexism they experience, they actually reinforce the stereotypes that people have about them outside their community.

So Indigenous women will be like, “Well, you all think this about Indigenous men or Indigenous women or women.” Muslim women say the same thing: “You think we're all oppressed anyway, and if I tell you that my husband is being violent with me, that reinforces the idea that I'm oppressed, that Muslim men are all terrible sexist monsters. So what do I do?”

And the double bind is exacerbated by the fact that if I disclose this to you, I am more likely to be on the receiving end of your prejudice. So what do we do? Do we say nothing and this doesn't get addressed? Or do we disclose it knowing it will reinforce the negative stereotypes that you have about us, which women disproportionately bear the brunt of?

Fiona McCormack: Exactly.

Kate Fitz-Gibbon: If we have governments that proclaim to be committed to ending gender-based violence in one generation, which is the tagline of the national plan, then we need to be fully funded. We need to fund this commensurate with the prevalence across the Australian community.

Susan Carland: According to Kate, the government's efforts to address gender-based violence keeps falling short.

Imagine you’re prime minister and you can change one thing. And apart from just saying, “Okay, a trillion dollars to the cause,” if you could change one thing as prime minister in terms of how we tackle gender-based violence in Australia, what would you do?

Kate Fitz-Gibbon: I might be getting around here that I'm not allowed to just give a trillion dollars. I would make it a national priority, commensurate with submarines.

Susan Carland: Okay. How much do we spend on AUKUS?

Kate Fitz-Gibbon: Well, submarine commitment last year was around 14 billion.

Susan Carland: And what's the overall commitment to gender-based violence in Australia?

Kate Fitz-Gibbon: So in Victoria, we have committed 4 billion over the last eight years, which is more than every other state and territory and Commonwealth government combined.

Susan Carland: Okay.

Kate Fitz-Gibbon: So the commitment in Victoria has been huge.

But even then, we know the challenge that we're still experiencing here nearly 10 years on from the Victorian Royal Commission Into Family Violence. Each of the state and territory governments and Commonwealth government, if they're truly committed to a national plan which proclaims to end violence against women and children, we do need to make this a national priority in the same way that national security is.

Domestic family and sexual violence is the number one threat to the lives of women and children in Australia, yet we still see national security external threats are considered on a completely different level. They're committed to the immediate action that come from a national security threat.

Whereas time and time again, we see these little peak moments, and earlier this year we had a national cabinet meeting on the topic of violence against women. That's never happened before. So those moments are really important, but the actions lag.

Susan Carland: Why do you think that is? Why do you think as a nation, and maybe many countries are like this, we do seem to prioritise things like national security in a way that we don't violence against women and children? Is it the banality of evil? It's just so common and so every day that we have – awfully – become used to it in a way that we don’t with terrorism, for example?

Kate Fitz-Gibbon: I really worry that's right, and I think a lot about the fact over the last two, three years, the media has become a lot better at reporting violence against women more frequently. Some of that reporting is still highly concerning and problematic, but I look at the way in which…

Now, I don't think that statistic of “one woman dies on average every week” shocks people anymore. I think people have got very used to reading it. That one woman in Australia a week is killed; that in any given year, more women are killed by men known to them in Australia than Australians that have been killed by acts of terrorism since September 11.

Yet it is that… It is that disassociation. We are more scared of stranger danger. We are more scared of acts of violence that occur through things like terrorism, through public acts of violence than the fact that women in Australia are significantly more at risk of violence in their homes with the people that they should most trust.

We're still othering that, we're still feeling like it's someone else's problem when, for one in three Australians, it is their problem. It is their reality.

Susan Carland: Despite clear links between gambling and gender-based violence, Charles says the Australian government has been slow to address the government's gambling problem.

When you tell people about this link between, obviously gambling, but the other addictive behaviours or substances and gender-based violence, are people surprised? Is there pushback against the evidence?

Charles Livingstone: I remember some years ago when we first started recognising – and when I say we, I mean colleagues generally started recognising – the link between gambling and intimate partner violence. So it was a great deal of incredulity amongst, well, many in the media who simply refused to believe it, and certainly those people who benefit from the gambling operation. So the club operators, the pub operators, the casinos.

Many AFL clubs still derive significant funds from gambling. Indeed, the AFL gets, I'm told something in the range of $30 million a year just from sponsorship with one of the major betting companies, not to mention the money it gets as a proportion of the bets made on the game.

But at that stage, there was considerable pushback and people just couldn't understand why having a poker machine habit, for example, would lead to intimate partner violence. But the more research we've done and the more we've talked to people who've experienced this situation, I think the more we've realised that the links are actually quite clear and quite obvious.

Unfortunately, gambling is a very big business, and as we have seen in the last year since the report chaired by Peter Murphy, the inquiry chaired by Peter Murphy issued its report into online gambling, we've seen what appears to be resistance from the government based on intense lobbying from the gambling industry to avoid prohibiting gambling ads.

Speaker 11: Young Australians are being targeted and groomed to highly addictive, harmful gambling through constant advertising. Are you ignoring the vast majority of Australians' call to fully ban gambling advertising as soon as possible?

Speaker 5: We know that gambling advertising when it comes to sport is too prevalent. We know that it can be really annoying.

Charles Livingstone: So what we've got is we've got a system where we're copping all of the externalities, all of the negative consequences, and really reaping few benefits. The benefits are reserved for large corporations, large business owners, and the costs are being experienced in the suburbs, particularly the disadvantaged suburbs of our big cities.

Susan Carland: As Stephanie said, schools too are struggling to effectively address this issue.

Is there anything that schools are doing that you heard about in your research that was helpful, that was working?

Stephanie Wescott: I don't know if we can say it's working because the reason the women were coming to us was because it was an ongoing problem, but being believed is really important, and often that doesn't happen. So even when women report to the men in their offices or their colleagues, they're often met with, “Well, that doesn't happen to me. I've never seen him behave like that.” And that's gaslighting and denial of something that's very real.

But we had some instances of women reportedly going to leadership and being met with the same rejection of the experience that they were having. We write and say always that misogyny and sexism are longstanding issues in schools, this is just a particularly different wave.

So we are really calling for significant change in this area because we just don't think that what's currently happening is working at all.

Susan Carland: Steve, are you seeing anything in your work? You've been looking at this for a long time. Any programs, any initiatives, anything that when you tracked it you thought, actually that seems there's something in that?

Steven Roberts: I'm going to be really pessimistic here. So I work with, in this sector, a variety of stakeholders who are doing good work and they go into schools and deliver interesting programs. I'm not so sure about the effectiveness in the medium-term especially.

What happens with these kinds of things, when you get an external speaker in, especially a speaker that comes to talk to boys, breaks down the emotional barrier, somehow removes that layer of masculinity that is I can't be vulnerable in front of other boys, that's a really brilliant moment. And we hear reports and lots of these organisations talk about how boys are emotional and they cry for the first time and they reveal deeply, deeply vulnerable parts of their lives and experiences. And there's often a wave of a high by the end of the day, so the kind of evaluation data you get in the moment is this was really great, this was really breaking down those barriers.

Does it change attitudes towards women? Does it change behaviours towards people of other genders over the medium-term? I think not. And I think in the last few days, actually, there was a meta-analysis of 200 interventions, 200 types of interventions that demonstrates that attitudinal change is not sufficient for behavioural change.

And we know this. This is the secret, or the not-so-secret, logic of behaviour change programs for decades. We know that attitudes are not enough. They're a part of the equation, but our focus – and I think it's to do with how much money is invested in these types of programs – and attitudes has to come first before behaviour change.

There isn't enough investment, there isn't enough time. So these programs come in, they have one day with the boys typically, these short-term, low time-bearing in terms of number of hours.

This isn't sufficient, I think, to make the kinds of advances that we would want, and also I think they often have two different agendas. One is about men's, boys' mental health, social and emotional well-being – very, very important. We know there are high rates of male suicide in this country and in many countries, and boys and men, especially older men, are not very good at talking about their mental health.

So this is an important aspect of those programs, but the piggyback into gender equality I think seems to be slightly confused and speculative. So going back to the point, I am hopeful that in the moment, those programs do something to some kids, to some boys. I'm less hopeful that they have the required time and funding and scope and possibly expertise as well.

I hope that doesn't sound cruel to the kinds of organisations that I work with and advocate for.

Susan Carland: It's really tricky. It's demoralisingly tricky how hard these things are to change. I remember saying earlier on…

[Speaking fades out]

Susan Carland: As grim as the picture looks at the moment, experts like Kate Fitz-Gibbon still believe we can address the drivers behind gender-based violence and save lives. Find out how next week on our final episode of season nine.

If you are experiencing gender-based violence or struggling with addiction, help is available. Call 1-800-RESPECT or visit 1-800-RESPECT.org.au. You'll find additional resources recommended by our experts in our show notes.

Thank you to all our guests on today's episode. The show notes also have more information about their work.

We'll be back next week. In the meantime, you can listen to an in-depth discussion about the evolution of masculinity in episodes 19, 20 and 21 of What Happens Next?.

If you are enjoying What Happens Next?, don't forget to give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcast or Spotify and share the show with your friends. Thanks for joining us. See you next week.