‘What Happens Next?’: How Do We Build a Future Where Everyone Feels Safe?

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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.

Fiona McCormack: And that's why it's so critical that everything in primary prevention, in early intervention, in responding to violence once it's already happened must take an intersectional view.

Charles Livingstone: Making it less ubiquitous, making it less well promoted would have a very positive effect on reducing the sort of crisis that we see, which tends to exacerbate intimate partner and gender-based violence.

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.

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Susan Carland: This is part two of our series addressing gender-based violence and we'll touch on some distressing topics. Please listen with care.

Last week, we began unpacking the complex issue of gender-based violence in Australia, discussing its prevalence, root causes such as gender inequality and hyper-masculine attitudes, its connections to gambling and addiction and its far-reaching effects.

Despite the solemn statistics, there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic about the future. Today, in our final episode of the season, we'll examine potential solutions and strategies for addressing this national crisis from policy changes to educational initiatives to actions you and I can take to keep our community safe as we advocate for gender equality. Keep listening to find out what happens next.

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Kate Fitz-Gibbon: We know that all forms of domestic family and sexual violence are inherently preventable, and there's hope in that.

Susan Carland: Professor Kate Fitz-Gibbon is a world-leading gender-based violence researcher based in Monash University's Faculty of Business and Economics. In over a decade of studying Australia's relationship with gender and violence, she's finally seeing some progress.

Kate Fitz-Gibbon: We can better address this and we can drive the rates down. What we've seen in Australia at the moment… We are two years into our 10-year strategy that the Commonwealth government and all states and territories have signed up to, our national plan to end violence against women and children, there's some really important features of that plan.

We have a focus across prevention, early intervention, response and then recovery and healing. And that's really important because prior to this plan there's never been a national focus on recovery and healing and what that means is that essentially, if you survive that crisis moment, that was considered success.

Susan Carland: Right. “You're on your own now.”

Kate Fitz-Gibbon: “You're on your own.” We have to want more than that. We don't want people to merely survive this abuse. We absolutely want them to survive it, but that's not the bar. That's such a low place to set it. We want people to be able to go on and thrive and live their fullest lives. So the recovery and healing piece is really important and we need to see significant action to realise the ambitions of that.

We know that across Australia now, compared to 10 years ago, children and young people receive education around respectful relationships, around awareness of what are acceptable and unacceptable behaviours. So that's a significant shift in how we're engaging young people and educating them about what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. There's still significantly more we need to do there, but it's really important to recognise the gains that have come.

We also know that across Australian states and territories now we have much more coordinated and consistent responses across the service system. The challenge there is that predominantly, our crisis services are not funded commensurate with the scale of the problem, and that's what we really need to see. 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: You mentioned obviously the money's probably the biggest thing. Are there any other hurdles that you think are getting in the way to Australia achieving its goals with gender-based violence?

Kate Fitz-Gibbon: I think a really big hurdle is that there's no quick fix. Politicians want something that they can achieve within the four-year political cycle, we always understand that, and you want an announcement often, and there's no one single announcement that is going to transform Australia's response to violence against women and children.

What we need is a whole program of reform from that full-spectrum prevention, early intervention, response and recovery. Tinkering at any one of those – tinkering with the criminal law, tinkering with bail laws, tinkering with policing – they may be important reforms in and of themselves, but we need to do the whole-of-system response, and we have to invest in prevention and early intervention because ultimately, that’s what gets us out of this.

Susan Carland: And I imagine that stuff is very tricky to measure in the four-year election cycle. You're probably only going to know what prevention strategies have worked in maybe 20 or 30 years.

Kate Fitz-Gibbon: Absolutely, and I think that is really challenging, is how long the prevention piece can take.

We know research internationally, research done by organisations like Our Watch in Australia shows that violence against women is underpinned by gender inequality and other forms of oppression. But we also know that challenging gender stereotypes, unhealthy attachments between male peers, looking at treatment of girls in the community, these things also can nudge and can improve. So it's really important for us to look at what the range of different interventions can be.

There are definite steps to progress that we can make in the shorter term, so we should be ambitious. We should want to do that. We need to engage and work with young men and boys. Importantly, we have to bring them along on the journey. Ostracising young boys, ostracising men is not going to help us.

We need every Australian to feel that they can play a role and that they know what their role is in helping us to address what is a national crisis. We all want more. We all want more for our children than this.

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

Susan Carland: Last week, Fiona traced the patriarchal roots of gender-based violence all the way back to ancient Rome. Can we change something so tightly woven into our social fabric?

Yeah, I remember hearing someone say, “All the things, all the structures we have in society to do with gender and gender inequality are the way they are because someone decided they were going to be that way. They're not this just inherent, immutable reality.”

Fiona McCormack: That's it. Susan Carland: And therefore we do have the capacity to change them.

Fiona McCormack: That's it, and that's the good news, I guess. Particularly, we know that attitudes can change and attitudes affect behaviours, and so that's the positive light, I guess, that there is opportunities and we can see change happening. We can see… Even though it is really disheartening, it's so traumatic to see the number of women and children slain in our community and the extent to which they experience violence. But at the same time, we can see awareness and attitudes are changing, which is good.

Susan Carland: A whole-of-system response will require more than attitude change, however, and must touch every part of Australian society, from our justice system to our healthcare and support services, to the way we raise and educate our children. And it has to work for everyone affected by gender-based violence regardless of their background or circumstances.

Fiona McCormack: And that's why it's so critical that everything in primary prevention, in early intervention, in responding to violence once it's already happened must take an intersectional view that is considering all those things.

So the work of addressing gender-based violence that's targeting Aboriginal women also needs to include the other ways in which her status as a citizen is because she's Aboriginal in Australia, the structural ways in which she's discriminated against. We need culturally safe and alternate ways for women to report.

Sometimes women don't necessarily want to go through the justice system. They want what's happened to them to be recorded. That can be used as intelligence by police.

I think in the long run, it might mean that women might make a report and say, “Look, I just want this recorded right now and I might come back and make a formal complaint later on.” Women could complain in their own language. It would support women with disabilities if they have limited access to be able to communicate online, range of different options so that this is made more visible, the intelligence is gathered and used.

But in broader social attitudes, we've got to get rid of this idea that this only happens within certain communities or this happens because they've got cultural beliefs. We have got cultural beliefs across the board, across the world. This is a worldwide challenge. Yeah, it's really, really important. We are always thinking through that lens.

Susan Carland: I want to ask you now about the costs of gender-based violence for the perpetrators, and do you think the costs are high enough? Do you think that a man is aware that if he's violent with his partner or a woman that he knows or anything like that, is there a commensurate cost that is off-putting?

Fiona McCormack: No. I think it's important to point out, first of all, there are different types of perpetrators and there, I think, it's not necessarily one, blanket approach. I think we need a range of ways of engaging with men, men who are more likely to change, say, versus the men who are really high risk.

I think, just coming from working as a Victims of Crime Commissioner, what really stands out to me in the context of what we know about the importance of speedy and assured responses to men when they use violence, they need the message immediately that this is unacceptable. It's unacceptable not just because their partner is telling them or a family member, which is important, the broader community, but the law. Us as a society are saying this is unacceptable.

Our model of justice is offender-focused, and that means that it's a contest between the person accused of a crime and the state. And there are a range of things put in place to ensure that somebody who is innocent isn't found to be guilty when they haven't actually undertaken that crime. That's really, really important.

Susan Carland: Innocent until proven guilty.

Fiona McCormack: Innocent until proven, and fair trial, all those things really, really important.

The problem is that structurally and culturally, victims are often left out of the picture. We have a focus on vulnerable offenders, which is important, but the courts, apart from seeing people who perpetrate crime because of poverty, drug and alcohol issues, mental health issues, cognitive disability, don't think we need to lock everybody up.

The courts also see some of the most dangerous men in our community, and we need to be ensuring that victims, without compromising the rights of an accused, also has stronger legal rights and also the ability to enact them.

I think we desperately need a victim's legal service. I think there's a range of ways I put in my report that I undertook on victims' experience of the justice system to make the justice system safer and easier for victims to participate.

But when you think about those speedy and swift assured processes, the courts don't get funded anywhere nearly enough. We've got such a backlog. So there's that difficulty. I think offenders have the right to be protected from unnecessary delay. I think victims should have the same rights.

There has been training for judicial officers and police prosecutors in better understanding risk. I think that work needs to continue and we need a range of other different interventions for men who are likely to perpetrate violence or who are more likely to change.

Susan Carland: If you could wave a magic wand right now and reform just one part of the justice system when it comes to gender-based violence, what would you do? Is it just a trillion dollars dumped into the system?

Fiona McCormack: Into the justice system, I think it definitely is funding, and I think it's a victim's legal service. The government have introduced… We've had a pilot begun for victims of sexual assault, and I think that's fantastic. That needs to go beyond a pilot and that needs to be broader for victims, particularly of gender-based violence.

And as I said, we need stronger rights for them and we need the court's processes to be more trauma-informed, more victim-centric. I think there's a range of different ways we can do that.

Susan Carland: So we need better and ongoing support for the survivors of gender-based violence. But what about the perpetrators of this violence? Can the justice system intervene sooner to prevent violence from escalating to a fatal endpoint?

Kate Fitz-Gibbon: Increasingly, we're understanding the opportunity we have with effective risk identification, assessment and management.

So a study that I recently led with colleagues at Monash University, we looked across 235 cases of women who had been killed by males sentenced in Australian courts by their partners. And what we saw there was that there were significant points prior to those women's deaths where they had access with different points of the system.

And so while we're never going to prevent all deaths, unfortunately, what that shows us is that if we are effectively identifying risk, assessing and managing that risk, if we have effective referral points, if we're working with people who use violence to de-escalate their risk to prevent future harm, some of those cases, some of those deaths will be preventable.

So we need to ensure that we are identifying risk, that we're identifying a risk that a victim-survivor is facing, but also that when we have points with those men… Because in these cases, predominantly over 70 per cent of cases, those men were known to the criminal justice system, so these are not cases where men kill out of the blue. These are not men that snap and that were otherwise fantastic fathers, good men in the community. Despite what the media quite often will tell us, these are men that were known to the criminal justice system.

So what could have been done there? Is our decision-making from police officers, from judicial officers who are granting bail and parole, who are determining sentencing, is that risk-sensitive? Do they understand domestic and family violence and the true dangers that some of these men may pose?

But the prevalence of violence against women, we can't jail our way out of this. We don't want a jail our way out of this. It's not the answer. We know that more punitive responses will always disproportionately impact our marginalised communities, and particularly our First Nations communities. So we also need to look at what the whole-of-system response is.

Susan Carland: As we discussed last week, alcohol and drug use aren't the only addictive behaviours that play a part in this crisis. Research increasingly shows a clear connection between gambling and gender-based violence.

Charles Livingstone: My name is Charles Livingstone. I'm an Associate Professor at the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University. I'm a long-time gambling researcher.

I've been researching gambling policy since the last century, and it often feels like it, and I have to say that I see light on the horizon, but it's been a long struggle to get us to a stage where we might look for positive reform in gambling.

I can say that, as I say, there is reform in scope, but it's going to be a bit of a struggle. And what we need, I think, is for more people to this as a serious issue and to understand the implications it has for all of us.

Susan Carland: Do you think if we could change our attitudes in Australia towards gambling to be the same way that we would view really drugs that have a similarly detrimental social impact – ice, heroin… If we could see gambling in the same way, and just on the cold heart facts of it, the negative social impact of gambling we see, as akin to these terrible drugs that no one would feel comfortable – a footy club or the local pub – setting up a heroin-selling operation inside the pub. Do you think we need to shift our thinking about gambling to actually see it in line with the social harm that it's causing or is that too extreme?

Charles Livingstone: No. Comparing gambling to heroin is something I've done a lot of times. I mean, when you think about it, having a pokie joint on every street corner in every pub is a little bit like the government sitting up licenced street stalls to sell cocaine at every corner. Now, we would never coutenance that in a million years, I suspect, because we've got this ingrained hatred of illicit drugs for whatever reason.

Having said that, I think it is possible I believe to instigate a shift in our regulatory systems which could reduce substantially the amount of harm that gambling causes. Now, that will mean that the super profits that addiction provides to gambling operators will dry up if done properly.

Now, in the case of poker machines, something like 60 per cent of the revenue that goes through poker machines comes from those people who are effectively addicted. So if we could stop addicted people in the first place getting addicted and make sure that there are the treatments and so forth available for those who are already addicted, then we would take out at least half of the revenue that the gambling industry is getting now.

That would have two effects: Firstly, it would mean some operators would get out of the business because their money could be better used elsewhere. But it would also mean that our obsession with gambling, our national obsession with gambling, would start to reduce because the products on offer would be much less addictive. So I think that we could definitely do that, but it requires a great deal more political will than has been on display in Australia in recent years.

Susan Carland: In your research, have you seen any programs that have been effective at tackling addiction, and particularly addiction to gambling in relation to gender-based violence?

Charles Livingstone: Well, gender-based violence, as I said at the outset, has many roots and we're not going to solve it by addressing one of those only. But given the extent to which we now understand the links between violence and gambling addiction, what we would be doing is we would be eliminating a really substantial component of the causes of intimate partner violence, particularly amongst people who are experiencing financial squeezes, such as many people in Australia at the moment are very squeezed financially.

So making gambling less addictive, making it less ubiquitous, making it less well-promoted would have a very positive effect on reducing the crisis that we see, which tends to exacerbate intimate partner and gender-based violence.

So can we do it? We can do it. There's no question. We know exactly what to do. There's programs around the world which have reduced gambling harm substantially. The most notable examples are mostly in Europe. The Norwegians, for example, have implemented a series of reforms which have, over the years, reduced the rates of gambling harm by 75 per cent.

Norway's a different sort of country to Australia. It's much more communitarian. It has a much more collectivist outlook. It also has a vast amount of money stashed away as a consequence of its North Sea oil reserves. But nonetheless, it's provided us with a template.

And that template has now been copied by other Nordic countries, by Germany, by, I believe, France and Spain, and by Belgium and the Netherlands. So in each of those countries now, there are compulsory limits on how much you can gamble. In Germany, for example, there is a nationally agreed limit of 1,000 euros per month for depositing into online gambling accounts. Once you reach that, you can't gamble anymore.

In the Netherlands, the promotion of gambling has been substantially reduced, including by prohibiting influencers, sports stars and others from promoting gambling products. And indeed, there was a case not long ago where a famous footballer was fined substantial amounts of money for appearing in a gambling ad which was aired in the Netherlands.

So they seem like slightly draconian solutions, but what we have to recognise is that the social consequences of allowing unbridled gambling expansion are extreme, and they include the separation of families. They include both physical and mental health problems. They include intimate partner violence and other crimes, white-collar crime and crimes against a person, and in extreme cases, they include suicide. We know that a substantial proportion of intimate partner violence can be attributed to gambling.

We know that mental health problems are exacerbated by gambling and indeed induced by gambling and we now know that physical health problems are also linked to excessive gambling. So how much more evidence do we need?

[Laughter]

Jane Fisher: Hello. My name's Jane Fisher. By profession, I'm a clinical psychologist, but I am much more interested in the prevention of problems rather than detecting and treating them once they've occurred.

Violence is one of the biggest underpinning factors for all health problems experienced by women, but in particular their mental health. So this has been a long-standing interest of mine in both my research and my clinical practise.

I'm Professor of Global Health in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash, and I'm very pleased to be a Chief Investigator on the new ARC Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of violence against women in the Indo-Pacific, which is led by Professor Jacqui True at Monash, and I have responsibility for part of that program.

Susan Carland: Jane emphasises that healthcare professionals play a crucial role in addressing gender-based violence given its far-reaching impact on health.

Jane Fisher: We need much higher awareness among providers of health and social care, that this is something in the confidentiality of a consulting room or other places which should be inquired about. And it's known that there are strong associations between experiences of violence and some particular health problems.

And in my opinion, health providers should ask routinely about experiences of violence in women who are seeking care for depression because it is such a common risk factor. And there are certainly risks like an unintended or unwanted pregnancy that can have been the consequence of forced sex, women wanting to seek options for managing an unwanted or unintended pregnancy that, really I think we should be asking routinely about the safety of their domestic situation.

And to be sensitive but able to follow up, not just to take a response that says, “No, that's not a problem, everything's fine.” But to ask in more behaviourally specific ways what women are experiencing.

Susan Carland: What do you think are the long-term consequences if we don't get a better handle on gender-based violence in Australia?

Jane Fisher: Well, I'm on the one hand very pleased that this is now the subject of much more public discussion. We have much more public awareness of it. There is much more public recognition.

What I think we really do need though is to understand much more about, what are the most effective responses? And there have been active responses to build more services, so for services to be made available to women where they can get safe care. And there have been big efforts to try to change the attitudes and behaviours of men and boys, programs in schools, programs that can be court-ordered, men's behaviour change programs.

What we are yet to see, and what we really need to see, is evidence of a reduction in the prevalence of this problem. And at the moment, we don't have a dramatic indicator that this is improving. And so I think we need to keep going with these efforts, but we have to build evidence as we go to really understand, how common is the problem? Where is it distributed in the community, and what is it we can do to monitor whether these kinds of programs and policies are really making a difference, or should we be putting our efforts into something else?

Susan Carland: As Fiona points out, this isn't the first time that Australia has tackled a pervasive public health issue that required successfully changing societal norms.

How do you see social attitudes towards gender and violence influencing, or, how do you think they maybe need to change in a way that will reduce gender-based violence? And how can we change them? Attitudes are hard to change, especially as you said, attitudes that have been around for thousands of years.

Fiona McCormack: When we think about the public health approach that we used to reduce rates of smoking, there was a range of different ways. It wasn't one-off events that was just awareness raising. There was a systematic approach to concentrated efforts in places where people live, work and play.

So there was still work at a structural level, like changing the laws, make it more difficult for people to smoke in different areas. But there was also work to make it less socially acceptable and also education around the health benefits of not smoking, that we saw a gradual decrease in smoking. That's the theory around how we actually tackle this, is that we need efforts concentrated where people live, work and play.

Currently, there's things like respectful relationships in schools. That's great, but it also needs to be reinforced over and over in that educational setting, in terms of the kind of leadership that's shown by teachers, by the principal around gender equality. That that's reflected in all the policies, the approaches that they do that if somebody's being sexually harassed in the workplace, that they can be confident that that will be dealt with. There's a transparent process that's utilised immediately. That the education is supported in a range of different ways.

We need to ensure the community, and particularly men, are getting those messages from zero, age zero, all through their lives in workplaces, in their sporting clubs, in their media, in their schools, a range of different ways.

There are still problematic attitudes towards women, and we can see that really playing out in the online hemisphere where those hyper-masculine attitudes are being reinforced, and I think that's really challenging.

Stephanie Wescott: My name's Stephanie Wescott. I'm a lecturer in humanities and social sciences at the Faculty of Education here at Monash.

Steve Roberts: Hi. I'm Steve Roberts, professor of education and social justice at the Faculty of Education here at Monash University.

Susan Carland: Steph and Steve are researching the way hyper-masculine messaging such as that shared by “manfluencers” including Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan has found footing among male students in Australian classrooms. Last week, they told us this rhetoric may be a backlash against MeToo and other recent feminist movements. The best way to challenge these attitudes may be to expose the underlying misconceptions.

Everyone seems to be grappling with, what do we do? and why are things not improving when so much time and money has been invested into this? I read in an interview not long ago that Julia Gillard did saying “feminists need to be more self-critical and we need to really ask ourselves, honestly, why are we not bringing young men and boys along with us?” Why do you think we're not? Or do you think there's a problem with the premise?

Stephanie Wescott: Those comments are really disappointing because I don't think it's an issue of feminism and all feminists, who haven't been doing what she's saying we haven't been doing.

I think that the counter-narratives are doing the damage. I also think that there's a reputational and definitional issue with feminism because of the counter-narrative and counter-campaigns. And I have an issue grappling with the idea that you could struggle to understand feminism when TikTok literally exists, and Google –

[Laughter]

Stephanie Wescott: – And you can find out what it's about, and find out how it has been always about freeing all of us from the patriarchy, not freeing women from men and taking whatever we can, whatever scraps men are willing to give us. Never been about that.

I think that narrative that Julia Gillard has shared is really common, but I think it's just so unhelpful and insulting to boys and men to suggest that they need a special narrative and a special conversation, and softened language, and “How can we talk about this in a way that boys will understand that women's lives are of equal value to them”. I mean, that's insulting.

Steve Roberts: I think it's the opposite as well. I think actually, we have brought boys with us. That's why we have seen a transformation of masculinity across the generations.

And so what we're seeing is the fightback, the backlash again from the other side who have felt that their power is being eroded, felt that boys are being feminised. I mean, that's their logic. They say feminism has gone too far. If feminism has gone too far, the very logic is that it's had an impact. It's done something to the boys of today.

So I think it's odd for us to be on this side of the fence to think we haven't done enough, we haven't been having the conversations. If anything, the backlash is evidence of the effect of the good conversations that we've been having.

Susan Carland: And then, I guess also, I think about young men who are on TikTok or Instagram and the insidious way that the algorithm works. And the only definitions of feminism that they probably are being fed are the ones from people like Andrew Tate who say, “Oh, no, feminism isn't about equality for us all. Feminism is about women hating men and you are never having access to your kids and they're going to divorce you and take everything you own.”

And so I can imagine if you're a young man who knows no better and hears that, you'd be like, “Well, yeah, oh my gosh.” And so then when the girl sitting next to you in class says, “I'm a feminist,” you're like, “What?”

[Laughter]

Stephanie Wescott: “You're my enemy.”

Susan Carland: Yeah. And I don't know how you fight back against an algorithm that's so pervasive.

Stephanie Wescott: Yeah. One thing that we've been talking about in education for a long time is critical media and critical digital literacy and how equipping students with the right set of critical thinking skills to go, “Hold on a minute. What am I seeing? Why am I seeing this? Is this real? How is it trying to manipulate me and hold my attention for longer so that someone down the line can make some money from my attention?”

We need to be doing a lot more of that because we can't really win against the algorithms. They're too powerful and we can never really individualise a problem like that. But I do think that we aren't perhaps putting the right tools in kids' hands.

Susan Carland: We also need to equip young people with the knowledge to identify the types of beliefs and behaviours associated with gender-based violence. Here's Kate.

Kate Fitz-Gibbon: We need to reflect on the ways in which young boys are living their lives both in person and online. Of course, we know the influences online are significant.

We also know that we have a generation of young boys and girls that are coming out of such a significant disruption and challenge in their lives with the COVID years. So we need to be thinking about how we now bring communities of young boys and girls together, how we challenge some of those harmful, and they are incredibly harmful, stereotypes, behaviours, activities that they're seeing online.

There's so much more research now on, just take for example, the acceptance of acts of non-fatal strangulation in the daily sexual activities of young boys and girls in the Australian community. Because it's seen online, it's seen as part of this is what we do to have a bit of fun. That can be incredibly harmful, and that's just one example.

So we need to be working with young boys and girls together to bring them along about what are acceptable and unacceptable forms of behaviour.

Susan Carland: Here's Jane again.

Jane Fisher: I think one of the other things that I hope ultimately happens is that women enter adult life with a really well-developed capacity to detect danger. Because all too often I hear from women that, “I didn't really realise those early signs were signs of coercive control or intimidation.” And I think if you do detect these early in a relationship, it's really wise not to progress with it. And that's something I think that we can have more education about. “What should I have recognised early and what should have introduced a note of caution into my planning?”

Susan Carland: Yes, that's such a good point because I think often… Thinking about young people, not only can they be on the receiving end of something and not realise that that's actually quite controlling and that that's not okay, because you have no experience and you think you're in love with this person at 15 or whatever, and “they just do it because they love me” or whatever it is.

So it's about teaching people, young people, to be aware of it when you're on the receiving end. But also I imagine teaching young people not to do it – that they may inadvertently be doing it and thinking that they're just expressing how obsessed they are with you and how they'll die without you, and that that's just part of teenage passion. And not realising that their behaviour is actually controlling and that they shouldn't be saying these things or doing these things. I imagine this is education that everyone needs.

Jane Fisher: I think we all need it. And I think you're absolutely right with these examples, that declaring your passion for somebody doesn't mean you need to know where they are all the time, where they need to get permission from you to do what they wish to do, that you don't own them. They're not property that you somehow can control.

So absolutely right, and I think ideally that people are learning this at home, they're learning it online, and hopefully, through respectful relationships programs at schools, they're also learning it there – that these possessive behaviours, monitoring behaviours, coercive behaviours are early signs of danger and should not be tolerated.

Susan Carland: Steve says there's evidence that educating children about these issues in a mixed-gender setting may be more effective than the traditional masculinity-focused programs often offered by schools.

Steve Roberts: These programs typically have boys as their audience because there's, again, an investment in the binary that boys have to be separated from girls. I think, actually – and some of the data shows us – that working with boys and girls together would be an appropriate method to allow boys to develop empathy, rather than just have another man come in and tell them what's what and show them another version of manhood.

Susan Carland: And I imagine, in some ways, the schools must also feel a bit up against it because they can do all the right things, I imagine – bring in great speakers, have amazing teachers, demonstrate from the top – but in the end, the kids are at home, they're on social media. They're also in their own family environments.

How much influence, I guess, I wonder can schools have in overcoming the other external forces that the kids bring to the classroom every day?

Stephanie Wescott: Well, I mean, the influences on how young people shape their identity is… There are many, many influences, and school is just one site. But we do expect schools to educate young people. Schools talk about values, and school culture, and expectations, and we expect them to prepare young people for a world, a particular type of world, and we have hopes for schools and hopes for young people. So I think we do speak often quite idealistically and generously about schools' potential to transform. But I don't know if we're really often thinking critically about what that actually means and what that looks like.

Many schools are trying really hard with what they have and what they know, so doing things like bringing external speakers and programs in. We really do need schools to have a transformative approach, and to take a really good look at the culture within the school from leadership down and ask, what are we doing to keep the women and girls here safe? What are we allowing? What are we enabling? What is the school culture itself perpetuating? So these are deep-seated cultural issues that are embedded.

Susan Carland: Children are often the victims of domestic and family violence, and changing the way we work with them will be the key to eliminating gender-based violence in future generations.

In the analysis Kate and her colleagues conducted on the hundreds of cases of women killed by male partners, there was a trend in a significant number of the perpetrators’ personal histories.

Kate Fitz-Gibbon: We also need to understand that for so many children and young people growing up in Australia, they have grown up in homes where not only is disrespect, coercion and control considered the norm, but violence towards women has been what they have grown up seeing.

So it's about understanding that children and young people are victim-survivors in their own right. We need to have child-centred age-appropriate supports for them. We need to see them and respond to their crisis and recovery needs.

All too often, where we engage with children is when they become problematic. We are talking about young boys who are using violence, but we're not looking back and saying, “Well, do we actually need to be supporting the trauma needs and the traumatic experiences of these young people?” If we did that better, I suspect the next part around working with young boys who display problematic behaviours or working with men who use violence might be more achievable.

With young boys and men who have had victimisation experiences, were those interventions effective? We found in 28 per cent of those 235 cases, the perpetrator had a history of victimisation as a young person. So that prevalence of intergenerational violence tells us, again, let's work with children. Let's make sure that we are addressing their trauma experiences, their trauma needs, supporting them to recover and heal. That is also early intervention that is also going to drive down the rates.

Susan Carland: Here's Jane.

Can you discuss the importance and maybe also the strategies of fostering gender-equitable attitudes and behaviours in kids from a young age? What can parents or caregivers do to try to promote respectful relationships in the environments that they're in?

Jane Fisher: Look, it's crucial because really this begins at home. And we know that one of the risks for adult perpetration of violence is that they've observed it at home in their childhood or formative years.

So I think probably the first thing is to ensure that your relationships at home are respectful. You speak to your partner in respectful terms, and if someone does not speak respectfully to you, you feel brave enough to say, “That's not acceptable and I'm not going to accept you speaking to me like that or threatening me like that.” To make it very clear that in our family we don't accept that kind of behaviour. And there's all sorts of other ways in which we solve problems. We seek to understand each other. We seek to encourage and care for each other, but not by that.

Susan Carland: Resolving the gender-based violence crisis will take a community approach.

Jane Fisher: Communities are essential and people take their cues very much from the communities in which they participate. And if they experience within those communities – especially the views of senior leaders, of elders in communities, of influential figures – that these behaviours are wrong and there are other ways of behaving, these are not behaviours that are aligned with any faith tradition, these are behaviours that have to be changed… I think this is a very powerful thing for people to experience.

We know, of course, that communities can constitute people who have already experienced these things themselves, and it can be difficult for them to speak out, to talk about how harmful it was to them, how much they wish they'd had a life in which this was not part of it, but those accounts, those narrative accounts can be very powerful. And so all the mechanisms we now have available to make those more widely accessible, I think are very useful, too.

We have to have dramatic change, but we know that dramatic social change of this kind doesn't usually happen through a single intervention.

So we need public policies that support change. We definitely need programs and services that support change, and we definitely need change in people's private behaviours, so in their domestic settings, in their workplaces where behaviours that are coercive, controlling, threatening, intimidating, are no longer tolerated in any setting.

And it's not that victim-survivors have to speak up in their own defence, it's that everyone in the community – so bystanders, colleagues and others – feel able to comment on it and say, “That's not acceptable. We can't have that happening.” I think there is more awareness now, but I think there is still a lot of inhibition about speaking up and that it's tempting to avert our gaze.

Susan Carland: What do you think are some practical steps that individuals can take who maybe are trying to support people they know, maybe friends, neighbours that are survivors or experiencing gender-based violence? What can they do? How do they support without overstepping the line? What is the right thing to do? It can be a very tricky position to be in.

Jane Fisher: Look, I think you're right. It's an area in which people feel a lot of uncertainty. I think the first step is, if a friend or colleague has confided in you, that means they perceive you as being a safe and trustworthy person.

And the first thing I think is to listen, but without offering an opinion – to invite people to tell you what is happening, how long it has been happening before, what it is about it that they've already sought help for or not. I think the next thing is not to presume that you're being asked for help, but more to say to them, “What can I do that might be helpful? Is there anything you'd like me to do?”

And not to act without the person's consent or direction, but to really convey to them, “This is wrong. There is no justification. It's not that you have invited this behaviour or you deserve it, or you are in some way responsible for this.” But to really convey this is wrong, and also to convey an optimistic message: “We know that this can end, you don't have to have this as part of your future, and I'd like to help you in whatever way I can to achieve that.”

Susan Carland: Saying something to a friend or neighbour who's in an abusive situation can be incredibly uncomfortable, but it could well be the first step to helping them to safety. Kate says the key is to offer support in a way that empowers victim-survivors to make their own decisions.

Kate Fitz-Gibbon: As a family member or a friend, hearing from someone that they're in an abusive relationship, that they've experienced violence, or that they don't feel safe at home can be really challenging and confronting.

Susan Carland: Why do we find it challenging, do you think?

Kate Fitz-Gibbon: It makes people nervous. They don't know what to say.

Unfortunately, in that discomfort, they may try to either excuse it, explain it away, talk over the victim-survivor and actually disempower them in doing that, or to offer a really simplistic response that may not be at all achievable. “Just leave him. You can go. Come sleep at mine tonight.” And that may not be possible. That may not be what that victim is wanting in that moment.

A lot of people want to stay in their relationship, but they want to stay in it safely. They want the abuse to end. And that can be hard for a family or friend to understand – that they're not asking for help to leave but they are asking for an understanding and a listening ear.

The best thing that I always say to people that you can say if someone discloses violence to you is, “I believe you. I'm sorry that happened to you.” You may be the first person they've ever told, and you certainly may be the first person that has ever believed them, and that is so powerful.

And then ask, “What can I do to help you?” Because often the ask might be very small. They want you to sit with them while they look up what services they can access. They'd love you to come along to a counselling session with them. It might be that they are ready and they do want to report to police, and maybe they want to talk through what that looks like. They'd love for you to take their child for the afternoon while they navigate some of these different needs.

So it's really important to listen. Put the control and the power back in their hands, because by virtue of the abuse they've experienced, they don't have control. They don't have power within their lives. So it's really important to help them rebuild that, if nothing else in that moment.

Susan Carland: We should speak up when we see misogynistic attitudes in any setting, too. For example, when it comes to the small but disruptive groups of young Andrew Tate wannabes in schoolrooms, Steve recommends marginalising their behaviours to help other students see that most of the world doesn't subscribe to those beliefs.

It's really tricky. It's demoralisingly tricky how hard these things are to change. I remember you saying earlier on in the interview that, I think, did you say there's around 20 per cent of boys?

Steve Roberts: About a quarter, yeah.

Susan Carland: Right. And that's been the case for a long time, you said.

Steve Roberts: Yeah.

Susan Carland: I mean, at what point do we have to go, “Maybe we will never be able to change this and we just have to focus on the other 75 per cent?”

Steve Roberts: Right.

Susan Carland: That's pragmatic, I suppose, but that also feels extremely grim.

Steve Roberts: It's so tricky. So the 50 per cent in the middle is typically where programs target because we call that “the movable middle”.

It's the same in politics. You have the core that are never going to move, the people that are at the opposite end, and then the bit in the middle that you're all fighting for. But the grim part is that the hardcore, the 25 per cent, is where most of the problem comes from.

Susan Carland: Yes.

Steve Roberts: So we can't ignore it.

Susan Carland: Outsize damage.

Steve Roberts: Absolutely. Yeah, the four or five kids who are in the classroom who are – again, in other research that we've done – who are contributing to school being a less safe and less happy environment for girls… We can't ignore that. What I think these other programs are trying to do is prevent the movable middle sinking into that negative end.

Susan Carland: Yes.

Steve Roberts: And that's a really admirable goal as well, and an important goal. And I think that helps build the process.

I've talked about this in some of my writing a few years ago, about trying to not minimise the damage, but minoritise the group that are doing it. So the 25 per cent is a significant minority though, of course, but if we can find a way of promoting and normalising more positive aspects and more gender-egalitarian approaches to gender behaviour, basically to boys' behaviour, then we might stand a chance of shining a more negative light on that 25 per cent.

And then maybe you erode that a little bit through just sheer force of will around what's good, what's positive, what we normalise and make normative.

I think it reminds us about the need for advocacy and activism in the moment as well, that we have to keep challenging and pushing back and exposing this for what it is. It can never stop.

It's the same with Pride. We have Pride. Sometimes I hear even relatively woke folks would say to me, “Why do we keep needing Pride every year?” Well, we need it because there's a core of people that will still push back and say, “Women should get back to the kitchen. Gay people shouldn't be in public spaces,” whatever. Those kinds of terrible tropes, even when we're relatively on top of them and we're minoritising them, we need to continue minoritising them.

Susan Carland: It's a bike. You've just got to keep pedalling.

Steve Roberts: Absolutely, yeah.

Susan Carland: Otherwise, it falls over.

Fiona says we have to keep pushing governments to make the changes we need.

Fiona McCormack: Now the community are recognising it and I don't know whether political parties across Australia have really understood that now community expectations will be different going forward. They're able to recognise it and they expect something to be done.

So what I'm saying is, the community recognise it, women and men far better at recognising it, and there's expectations governments do something about this. And people often feel really powerless to do something. That's something people can do: Really put pressure on their local members, on their political parties, to understand the extent to which this needs to be seen as an urgent matter in our community.

Susan Carland: And as dark as this moment feels, Kate believes the conditions are right and that the chance to turn things around is upon us.

What's giving you hope in this area?

Kate Fitz-Gibbon: That we're talking about it. This is so important. We are having significantly more conversations about it. Certainly, in 2024, it has been on the policy agendas of every Australian state and territory and the Commonwealth government. Yes, I'd like to see more action, but it would be remiss not to acknowledge that there is significantly more conversation, action than we've ever had before. So we have to use this moment for real change.

I think we're having really good and challenging dialogues. We're critically asking, what is going to move us forward? And there's different views on that, and that's important. We should be leaning into all of those because everyone wants to get to the same outcome.

There's no single answer, so let's sit. Let's sit. Let's toss around the ideas. Let's think about what can move us forward. Let's commit. Let's fund them. Let's fund them in the longer term.

And critically – of course, the academic's going to say this – but let's collect the data and evaluate what works. We don't want to sit here in 10 years’ time and go, “Oh, we did some good things there, but we don't really know what moved the dial.”

So that data piece is really important. And particularly data on perpetration. In no other area would we try and reduce or address something without looking at the root cause. So we need to be better understanding people who use violence, what's driving that violence and perpetration.

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Susan Carland: Kate, thank you so much for joining us.

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

Susan Carland: Thank you to all our guests on today's episode, Professor Kate Fitz-Gibbon, Professor Jane Fisher, Professor Steven Roberts, Dr Stephanie Wescott, Associate Professor Charles Livingstone and Fiona McCormack. You can also learn more about their work in the show notes.

This is the final episode of season nine of What Happens Next?, so thank you, too, for joining us.

To find out more about the research, advocacy and activism that's helping to tackle the global challenges we discussed throughout this season, and to catch up on the podcast's back catalogue of episodes, visit Monash Lens at lens.monash.edu.

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