Preventing family violence

Dr Emma Partridge, Special Advisor, Primary Prevention at Our Watch, Australia’s national primary prevention organisation, is interviewed by Cat Schofield (Executive Director of Nursing and Director of Services, Statewide Mental Health Services) for our Family Violence Prevention Month series.

During the conversation, Emma speaks about Change the Story - the world’s first national framework for the primary prevention of violence against women. The framework, which Emma helped write, explores the underlying, gendered drivers of violence, as well as the actions we must take to address them.

Emma explains that preventing violence requires shifting deep-rooted inequalities, rather than relying solely on crisis responses. However, she reassures us that change is possible through long-term, collective effort.

Emma also explores what effective prevention looks like in practice. She speaks about empowering both women and men to be part of the solution, and what we can do as individuals, organisations, and a society to stop violence before it happens. 

Resources:

• Change the story – our national framework for the prevention violence against women.
• Changing the picture – which focuses on the prevention of violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and their children
• Changing the landscape - our framework to prevent violence against women and girls with disabilities
• The Line – a behavioural change campaign that helps young people negotiate healthy, respectful and consensual relationships.
• Men In Focus - addressing masculinities and working with men in the prevention of men’s violence against women
• Workplace Equality and Respect - a guide to embedding gender equality in your workplace and preventing gender-based violence

Support:

If this episode has raised any concerns for you, you can call 1800 RESPECT, that’s 1800 737 732, to talk to a counsellor from the national sexual assault and domestic violence hotline.

Alternatively, you could call Tasmania’s Family Violence Counselling and Support Service on 1800 608 122.

If you have concerns about your safety or that of someone else, please contact police or call 000 for emergency help.   

Transcript

Dorian Broomhall:

This episode contains reference to acts of family and sexual violence. If you have experienced violence or sexual assault and need immediate or ongoing help, contact 1-800-RESPECT. That's 1-800-737-732 to talk to a counsellor from the National Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence Hotline. If you have concerns about your safety or that of someone else, please contact police or call 000 for emergency help.

Molly Hanson:

This episode was recorded on the land of the Palawa people. We acknowledge and pay respect to all Tasmanian Aboriginal people and to their deep history of storytelling. We also acknowledge the disproportionate rates of violence faced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women.

Cat Schofield:

Hi, my name is Cat Schofield and I'm the executive director of Nursing and Directive Services for Statewide Mental Health Services at the Department of Health here in Lutruwita, Tasmania.

This Family Violence Prevention Month, we're speaking with experts about the prevalence and impact of family violence in our community, how to recognise the signs of family violence, and how we can respond to family violence as well as prevent it from occurring in the first place.

For this final episode of the series, I spoke via Teams with Dr. Emma Partridge, Special Advisor, Primary Prevention at Our Watch. 

Our Watch is our National Primary Prevention Organisation, leading an evidence-based approach to preventing violence against women. Emma led the development of Change the Story, a shared framework for the primary prevention of violence against women and their children in Australia. First released in 2015, Change the Story is the world's first national framework focused on preventing violence against women.

During our conversation, we discussed the framework and the underlying gendered drivers of violence against women it lays out. We also spoke about the actions we must take as individuals, organisations, and as a society to stop violence before it happens. Let's begin.

Well, I'm really keen to hear about Our Watch.

Dr Emma Partridge:

Our Watch is a national prevention organisation set up to be the expert voice and experts on preventing violence against women. We were established under Australia's first National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women, which ran for 10 years from 2012 to 2022. And Our Watch was funded under that and set up to guide that and provide support and build an evidence-based for prevention under that first National Plan that all governments signed up to. So they all put in some funding, including the Tasmanian government, put in some funding to Our Watch and they have member representatives who we connect with and we have a network, so we are constantly talking to all the governments around the country, providing advice, new evidence and new frameworks and that kind of thing.

So it's had that government support across partisan and across jurisdiction from the beginning. And we're now 13 years old. We've now got a second National Plan to reduce violence against women and children. And again, Our Watch has been positioned under that National Plan as the national prevention body. And part of the work that we did over those first few years of our existence was to develop the evidence-based for prevention.

So it was to review all of the international and national literature on violence against women and particularly to understand what drives that violence in the first place. What are the underlying reasons why we see such high levels of gendered violence? But that was really how we started, was building the evidence-based about if you want to prevent something and stop it from happening in the first place and shift away from just treating it as a crisis and an emergency forevermore. If you want to stop it from happening in the first place, all the principles of prevention from health and from other fields say that you need to identify why it is occurring in the first place. What are those social and cultural and economic and all the other factors that are driving it in the first place.

So that's what we sought to do with Change the Story, was to identify what we clustered together and called drivers. So what are the drivers of violence? And then we could come up with a framework for how do you tackle all of those drivers one by one at every level. That's really how Our Watch started, and we've been building that evidence-based ever since. We've added other frameworks about preventing violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women. We've added frameworks on addressing men and masculinity, on violence against women with disability. And then we've developed all sorts of tools and resources that can be used across society to tackle all of these drivers.

Cat Schofield:

So the big question that I have from what you've just said then, what are those drivers?

Dr Emma Partridge:

I would obviously encourage for people to have a look at Change the Story for a proper explanation of all of this, but I'll try and give a quick overview. We cluster them into four drivers, and these are what we found in the international and national literature. The four factors that are really most closely correlated with violence or predict why gendered violence occurs. And unsurprisingly, the drivers for gendered violence are all gendered. They are located in patriarchy, in gender inequality, in the unequal power relationships between men and women, in the social and cultural norms, that maintain those gendered inequalities and gendered stereotypes and gendered roles and so on, that always see women in the hierarchy at the bottom.

One of those, the four drivers as they play out are the way in which violence against women is condoned. It's trivialised or it's downplayed or it's dismissed. It's condoned in lots of different ways. And we see that from individual men who hold those attitudes that condone violence. They're the men that are more likely to actually use violence. We also see it above the individual level. We see it in courts when defence lawyers try to say that women were asking for it or what had she been drinking or what was she wearing? And those sexual assault trials where we see those kinds of condoning or normalising or trivialising of violence happen in the legal system.

We heard from an emergency doctor recently at a conference who spoke about how some people in hospitals don't take domestic violence as seriously as other forms of injuries that people present with. So there's all sorts of ways in which violence is condoned, violence against women is condoned or justified or excused or trivialised or downplayed. And we know that that in itself is a driver of violence because if it is seen to be condoned or able to be excused or justified, it's more likely to happen. So the condoning of violence against women is the first driver.

The second one is about those unequal relationships of power between men and women, where we still see men controlling most of the decisions and power and resources in our society, both at a public level, in politics, in business, and at a private level where too many private relationships or personal relationships between men and women rely on men being in control and women having lesser status. They rely on those.

The third driver is actually around stereotyping. And a lot of relationships rely on those stereotypical ideas that it's women's role to do the housework, to stay at home, to look after the children. It's men's role to be the breadwinner, to be the head of the household. Some of those things that we think are really outdated notions that are actually still playing out very heavily in Australian society. If you look at data around who stays home when couples have children, who does the most housework, all sorts of data like that, who earns more, who has bigger superannuation, the gender pay gap, all of that is still very strong.

The third is, as I've said, it's about gender stereotyping, but particularly stereotyped ideas about men's and women's capacities, their roles in life. But the particularly harmful on is those stereotypical ideas about masculinity, about the idea that masculinity involves, or the right normal form of masculinity, involves men being in control, men being more powerful, men being powerful verging on aggressive, assertive, stronger, dominant, all of those ideas about masculinity that in and of themselves may not be harmful, but you can see from all of that language can very easily slip into coercive control abuse and violence for some men.

The fourth driver is also related to masculinity, and it's about the way that male peer groups relate to each other in situations where there are cultures of masculinity or male friendship groups that again put value on those ideas of aggression and dominance and control where men in groups put women down, tell sexist jokes, harass women on the street. And it's not just social groups, it can also be workplaces, white collar workplaces, men in boardrooms, where those environments really support those ideas of masculinity as being about control over or power over women.

So those are the four gender drivers that we talk about. And obviously I've really simplified them. And in Change the Story, there are lots of different examples that probably do a better job of spelling out what they look like. And those are the things that we've highlighted as underlying the reason why we have so many men perpetrating violence against women in our society and why patterns of violence are so gendered, why it's overwhelmingly perpetrated by men against women.

Cat Schofield:

All right. I just find that fascinating because I was going to, I suppose, initially ask you a question in relation to perhaps some of the challenges of a very diverse multicultural society. But in some ways, you've answered that question for me because it isn't culturally based as in different cultures. It's actually based in the gendered, which are norms really, the gendered norms that have been expected or accepted and perpetrated for thousands of years in cultures, regardless of where they have developed in which country, in which religion. So this is the common denominator across all of them.

Dr Emma Partridge:

Yeah. That's absolutely right. And that's why violence against women is a global problem and it happens across so many different cultures because unfortunately those patriarchal ideas play out. They play out in different ways in different cultures, but they still play out in ways that are harmful to women and girls.

I guess the caveat to that is that many and First Nations people say in this country that those patriarchal ideas about gender were brought with colonisation. They were not actually part of traditional-

Cat Schofield:

I've heard that.

Dr Emma Partridge:

... Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. And many First Nations, indigenous communities around the world will also say that their traditional cultures were... Some of them were matriarchal. And many of them were much more equal and respectful of genders. Many of them had third and fourth genders, so they didn't have that binary hierarchical idea of men controlling and being aggressive over women. So indigenous cultures do seem to be something of an exception, but apart from that across the world, we see many different cultures playing out these patriarchal ideas of women that can lead to violence.

Cat Schofield:

And in some ways it's... I mean, this is just my perception, I suppose, from what you've just said, but it's the same almost dominance that then asserts itself in relation to the suppression of those cultures around, say, a male supremacy coming in from what is seen as a more advanced or powerful culture, which actually is not necessarily true.

Dr Emma Partridge:

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And we have a framework called Changing the Picture, which really focuses on how to prevent violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women. And it goes a lot into the history of what colonisation did to indigenous cultures in this country and how it introduced colonial patriarchy. So colonial ideas of patriarchy that were imported from Europe and imposed on Aboriginal cultures who had already been violently dispossessed and disrupted to introduce some of those ideas into those cultures, but that has happened since colonisation in this country.

Cat Schofield:

So this is a quite a personal question that I have because I have two young grandsons. And I'm very cognizant of, I suppose, my contribution to their cultural development and their social development in relation to consent and that relationship.

What kind of advice would you have for me in that space to make a change around what you've described as being the cultural norms that we expect that we would like to see changed?

Dr Emma Partridge:

Yeah, look, it's a good question and it's one that we get asked a lot, I guess, what can I do about this? And I think the first thing I'd say, I'm a policy person. And then the first thing I'd say is that it's not up to an individual to do all of this change on their own. We need change right across society. And we need governments to take key responsibility for some of this.

So in relation to children and young people, for example, something we'd like to se is our respectful relationships education programme or approach rolled out in every school at every year level across every state and territory so that we know that our children and young people are getting that consistent education about equality, respect, relationships. When they're old enough, sex and consent, so that we know that that's built into our systems, our education system so that children are growing up with some of that.

So there's some systemic work that we think needs to be in place to support then the individual work that parents and grandparents and so on can do. But I think at the individual level, there's still a lot that families can do particularly when raising boys and young men. And a lot of that is to model gender equality from the beginning, to model respect, and to also model the wide range of different options and ways of being a boy and a girl that are available, and to not rely on those narrow hierarchical stereotypes of what boys do and what girls do and what boys play with and what girls play with and what jobs a boy might want to think about and what a girl might want to think about. So a lot of that is just working all the time to challenge your own gender stereotypes that you may carry unconsciously and to give all children a wide range of non-gendered options for what they can do and be and how they can feel.

One of the other things that people who are working with boys and young men in particular have found is the importance of teaching them empathy, teaching boys, in particular, empathy, care, concern for others and empathy for women and girls because that is often what young men by the time they become adults are somewhat missing, that capacity to really think about what's it like for girls and what's it like when girls experience that and how does it feel to be a girl who is subject to that kind of abuse or that kind of sexist joke or that kind of harassment on the bus. So teaching boys to develop that kind of empathy for girls and for young women is really key when raising young men.

And there's a lot of resources, some good resources developing now about working with boys and young men. Our Watch has an online campaign called The Line that has a lot of resources for older kids, for teenagers, around dating, sex and consent and relationships and equality and so on that I would highly recommend. But yeah, just keeping those conversations open and really role modelling all the time equality for both boys and girls and for kids of all genders for that matter, but also particularly focusing on teaching boys that level of empathy.

Cat Schofield:

Because it's very interesting because they're not born with it. They're not born with this concept at all. And I note that from my... certainly the youngest grandchild, because at three he wanted to have dresses and princess dresses made for him. And I think on his first day at school, they have this, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And he wanted to be a princess when he grew up. And we've seen very quickly that that has left him in some ways, that even with our attempts to not suppress that or whatever, but that side of him has suddenly become hidden to himself almost because of the peer pressure, I don't doubt, and then that socialisation that occurs within schools to quite quickly, almost probably unconsciously, separate through gender and play and games and conversation or whatever. And it happens almost overnight. It's been quite sad.

So what have you seen that has shifted? I mean, obviously there's been a lot in the policy space, but it is slow to change culture, I think.

Dr Emma Partridge:

Yeah.

Cat Schofield:

That would be my observation.

Dr Emma Partridge:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's why when you asked what can I as an individual do, my first answer was actually about what governments can do. Because as you've observed, there's only so much that one parent or one grandparent can do to support a child in developing their own sense of themselves and their own gender identity or their idea of who they want to be or what kind of boy or girl or person they want to be when the rest of the culture is bombarding them with some very stereotyped, rigid, binary ideas of boys do this, men do that, women do this, girls, this is a colour for boys, et cetera, et cetera. So it's very hard for individuals to work against those social or cultural norms.

And that's one of the things we say, one of the reasons our approach to preventing violence against women is about working right across what we call the socioecological model. And that really just means right across society. So yes, we need individuals to take action, but we also need schools to develop programmes and approaches to gender equality and respect that are about working across the whole school with all the teachers in all the classes with all the parents. And then we need sporting clubs to play a role in developing programmes around respect and mentoring and role modelling for boys and young men. And then we need local councils to work on making public spaces accessible and safe. And we need workplaces to have programmes in place around gender equality and preventing sexual harassment. And we need governments, of course, to change policy and legislation and regulate advertising and media.

So we need change at all those levels of society, the structural level, the individual level, the organisational level, workplaces, institutions, police. We need all of that to be happening at the same time to really make such a huge cultural and social shift as trying to shift something that's so entrenched as the idea that women are less valued than men and that violence against women is not important. So that's why all of our work is trying to simultaneously work across the individual, community, organisational, institutional and governmental levels to address these drivers of violence.

Cat Schofield:

What have you been most excited about in your time working in this organisation around the change that you have seen?

Dr Emma Partridge:

I mean, I think when I first started... So I've been here over 11 years now, so that's a long time. And when I first started, there actually was a very little understanding of what prevention meant. We had spent so many decades in Australia responding to domestic violence, sexual violence, sexual assault, violence against women, violence in the home. I mean, we spent many decades ignoring it. And then we'd spent many decades, thanks to the women's movement, feminist movement, women's refuges, building a response system, response services so that now if you are sexually assaulted, there is somewhere to go. If you need a refuge from a violent man or a violent partner, there is somewhere to go. If you report it to police, there are criminal codes that apply to this. None of this was always the case. That response system was all been built up by the women's movement largely.

So that's been a wonderful thing. But what it meant was, what I'm talking about 11, 12 years ago, there was not really a language around preventing this from happening in the first place. And so we did a lot of work to build up the idea that we don't have to accept that level of violence and just keep on throwing billions of dollars at responding to it with hospitals and police and courts and refugees. If we just start there, that far down the river, if we just start there, we will be doing that forever and the cost is only going to get higher and higher.

If we can walk a little bit further back up the river before people fall into that river of crisis and work back up on the riverbank to try and work out what is causing the problem in the first place and why men are perpetrating violence against women and try to stop that from happening in the first place and reduce the numbers of people who are falling into that cycle of violence, that river of violence, A, we will reduce harm and deaths and injury and all of the impacts that come for women and their children, from violence against women. But B, maybe less important but significantly, we will massively reduce the cost of responding to violence. And I don't just mean the economic cost, but all of the social costs.

So that was a real argument that we had to keep on having at the beginning that, no, we can prevent this. We can prevent this. Yes, we need to keep all those response services in place, but if we start investing in prevention, we can prevent at least some of this violence from happening in the first place.

So we spent a lot of time explaining what we meant by that primary prevention, addressing the primary reasons this occurs in the first place, and convincing governments and workplaces and sporting clubs to start putting some money and some effort and some attention into prevention.

And then I think that's what's most exciting is that over that decade we've really seen that understanding grow. Prevention is taken for granted. Of course, we should be trying to prevent this. We now have Commonwealth government and many state and territory governments that have prevention strategies. We have a minister for the prevention of violence against women or prevention of family violence in all jurisdictions. And we have really taken for granted now that our governments should be trying to prevent this violence from happening in the first place. So that's been a real shift I think in the last decade and it's certainly something that Australia is still leading the world in. And we get calls and emails from various other countries all the time saying, how did we get to this place, how did we develop this prevention framework, how did we get government commitment to prevention? because, "Our government's still only funding response. Our government doesn't have a prevention strategy." That's still the case. It's still a world-leading approach to even have got prevention on the table.

That said, there's still a really, really long way to go in building all of the foundation for prevention to last and to be enduring to actually have change over time. It's a really long-term social change agenda. It's very deeply entrenched, as we said at the beginning across the world. And so it's not something you can just fix overnight. But we are seeing encouraging signs. I mean, some of the programmes at that small programme level have been evaluated really well so that children who experience, say, a respectful relationships education programme are able to develop better attitudes about gender and respect. We are seeing attitudes at the national level. A mixed bag. We're seeing some positive shifts, but then there's also some backlash and some falling back. And obviously, there are some well-documented forces at play in social media and across the world that are fighting back against gender equality and against women's rights. So there's constantly, I think, two steps forward and one step back. But yeah, I think we are seeing some positive potential.

I mean, what we still need to see is investment in all of those positive potentials-

Cat Schofield:

Yeah.

Dr Emma Partridge:

... so that they can be implemented at scale so that we don't just have one little pilot programme that works well over here. We scale it up, we fund it properly, we roll it out across the country. We make sure that nobody escapes that messaging and that it's reinforced in their school as well as in their football club, as well as by their local council. And then the messaging that you as an individual, grandparent, actually is reinforced by the society at whole. So that's the challenge is, that it's such a big task and we need to do that at scale for it to really be effective.

Cat Schofield:

So the question is, what are the essential actions that we can take to address the gender drivers of violence?

Dr Emma Partridge:

Yeah. So I mean, our framework Change the Story that I'd refer people to for a lot more detail on this, it outlines for essential actions that we think will address the four gender drivers. And so they are the flip side really. So action one is challenge the condoning of violence against women. And there are many examples of how that can happen, by reforming legal and policy and institutional systems that condone violence, by reforming, shifting community attitudes that condone violence, challenging kind of media reporting that condones violence. So there's lots of examples of how you can challenge the condoning of violence depending on what your sphere of influence is if you're a journalist or if you are an individual or if you are an employer, for example. And that applies as well. All of these apply to lots of different levels of people's lives and of society.

So the second one is promoting women's independence and women's decision-making both in public life and in relationships. So again, that is addressing all of those gender inequality indicators like unequal pay and the representation of women in decision-making and public life. But it's also in that interpersonal level, challenging all of those attitudes and social norms that will normalise male control and limit women's independence that we see at worst can lead to some of those forms of coercive control that are now becoming more widely understood. So it's challenging, those gender power relationships, both at a interpersonal level and at a social and political level.

The third one is described as building new social norms that foster identities not constrained by rigid gender stereotypes about how we can encourage and support children to embrace a wide range of forms of ways of being that are not limited to those binary hierarchical gender stereotypes. And again, that can happen by individuals, but also by early childhood centres, by children's books, by schools, by children's TV, or lots of different levels at which that can happen.

And the fourth one is really about working specifically with men and boys and supporting men and boys to develop healthy, respectful masculinities, because there's not just one masculinity. There's many different forms of masculinity. They vary a little bit across cultures. Some of them are harmful and some of them are positive. So it's about offering and encouraging boys to take up positive ways of being a man. And that involves challenging some of those intersecting issues like homophobia that is often a part of dominant masculinity. Homophobia and sexism often go hand in hand. So some of those harmful dominant forms of masculinity end up supporting both violence against women and violence against gay men, for example. So it's an intersectional approach there to challenging some of those harmful attitudes.

And specifically, as I said before, working with men and boys to challenge some of those norms around sexual entitlement, sexual dominance, hypersexuality, teaching about understanding of sexual consent and mutuality and agency once boys are old enough to be engaging in those kinds of conversations, but teaching men more healthy, respectful, and equal ways of being a man. Those are really the key actions that we talk about about addressing those gender drivers.

I wanted to say that there's also an action around addressing intersectional forms of discrimination, which I just touched on with the way homophobia is so bound up indominant masculinity, but it's also about addressing racism, ableism, colonialism, all of these other forms of discrimination that drive particularly high rates of violence against women of colour, against First Nations women, against women with disabilities. So it's important to remember that women are a diverse group as are men and many of these other forms of discrimination and discriminatory attitudes and structures apart from sexism are also really driving high rates of violence against particular groups of women. So it's really important that we take that intersectional approach to addressing those factors as well.

Cat Schofield:

How does all of this then translate into what occurs in the workplace? And what can we do within the workplace? How can we address these things in the workplace?

Dr Emma Partridge:

Yeah. Obviously our work lives have a significant influence on us all. Professionally and personally, we spend a lot of time at work and with our colleagues. Workplaces both reflect social norms and help perpetuate them and support them or challenge them and change them.

We also know we have certain workplace behaviours that are forms of violence against women like sexual harassment, for example. So violence against women also occurs in the workplace or can occur in the workplace. And then forms of violence that women experience in their interpersonal lives, interpersonal violence, intimate partner violence can also impact their working lives because it impacts their health and wellbeing, their productivity, they need to take time off to attend court cases or counselling and so on. So it can have a massive impact on women's work lives.

So Our Watch does have a whole programme of work called Workplace Equality and Respect, which is a series of tools and resources for workplaces and employers to help identify the kinds of actions that they can take to promote gender equality, to support respect, to build respectful and healthy social norms and cultural norms in the workplace, and to make sure that workplace is free from violence and somewhere that promotes gender equality and respect. So that is called Workplace Equality and Respect. There's a whole subsection of our website that includes a whole lot of standards that we think workplaces should meet: tools, checklists, resources, and things that employers can go through to try and work through becoming a more respectful and equal workplace and preventing sexual harassment and violence in the workplace, supporting employees who are experiencing violence and so on.

And I think that the Tasmanian State Service is in the process of rolling out Workplace Equality and Respect I think in some departments or across all departments. I'm not too sure. But that's certainly a really key programme that workplaces can implement to play their part as part of that whole social approach to preventing violence against women.

Cat Schofield:

Particularly white males now feel that they're a marginalised group and that they're being discriminated against on this basis and that they're giving things away. Something's going to be taken away from them if they actually concede in this space. Do you have any advice in relation to that as to how we can challenge that?

Dr Emma Partridge:

That is a really emerging narrative and a popular narrative. And I think it's one of the things we've seen with feminism and with women's rights is that once there are some advances, there is then a form of backlash. And we see that with other forms of rights as well, that once we make some inroads on racism, things turn around and racism increases. So it's not an uncommon pattern. But I think there is a really strengthening discourse or narrative that suggests that men are new victims and that men are actually disadvantaged now.

I think the first thing I'd say to anyone is to really look honestly and genuinely at the data, which will show you that that is not the case, that on pretty much every measure of equality, women are coming out worse than men, particularly economic measures around unequal pay, unequal superannuation, homelessness, employment, and all of those sorts of things. So in terms of the data, that doesn't hold up. We do still have documented statistically verifiable gender inequality in this country.

But I guess the more positive way of thinking about that is that some of this discourse at the moment is talking about the problems that men face, the rates of suicide for men, mental health problems for men, loneliness, all of those issues that are coming up as, "Look at this. Men are the real victims." I would not want to downplay any of those issues for men. But what I would want to say and what we've found that the research bears out is that many of those issues for men are also caused by rigid adherence to harmful ideas about masculinity. So men who think they always have to be in control are more likely to be violent against women and more likely to cause harm to women and children in their lives. But they're also more likely to cause harm to themselves because they think they have to always be in control, which means they don't seek help for their problems, they don't talk to a professional, they don't get therapy or counselling, they don't open up to people about what they need. And so their mental health problems or their loneliness get worse.

Men that think they have to be stoic all the time or that they have to be in charge or that they have to be aggressive, all of these ideas do men themselves a disservice And really don't allow men to live lives that are full and emotionally rich either, which is a lot of the research that sits behind... A lot of the psychological research shows that these exact same traits or ideas or beliefs that men have are the same ones that are causing themselves harm.

I think if we could reframe that, that that's the problem, not feminism or women wanting equality, but those rigid ideas of what men need to be and how the box that men need to fit into, that's the problem. It's a problem for men and it's a problem for women. So I think that would be a much more healthy and interesting way of reframing it that could see men really become part of the solution to challenging those ideas. And there are many men out there who are role modelling much more open and gentle and expressive and emotive ways of being a man and showing how much richer that lives can be for themselves and for the women and children in their lives if they adopt those other ideas and other ways of being a man.

Cat Schofield:

That's fascinating because it just puts me in mind of personal conversations that I've had with a partner where very fierce, sort of like sounding very aggressive, particularly when something's gone wrong in the house and this very scathing blaming attitude. And it took me a long time in terms of conversation for the admission and the awareness for me to be that however bad that was on the outside, it was far worse on his insight. And the work that he's done that I've seen him done over years in terms of therapy, we have a regular men's group at my house on a Tuesday night where I vacate so that they can come, without alcohol, in just normal circumstances, talk about their emotions, whatever's going on for them, but in that very supportive environment has seen him become softer to not only himself but everybody else around him.

And that's been a hard journey, but it's also been a fabulous journey because our relationship is so much richer for that as is his way with grandchildren. And you realise it's not just a black and white issue, it's actually about development and equally supporting each other through emotional growth and change and challenge because you can't stop your early learning really. It's sort of like that instinct when you say, "Oh my God, I'm sounding like my mother. Oh my God, I can't believe it." But you have to become aware of those things for yourself to be able to then change them on the outside. But that was beautiful reframing. I really like that because I think that can be really useful.

Dr Emma Partridge:

Yeah. Yeah. Again, if people want to have a look on our website, we've got a range of resources called Men in Focus, which is an evidence review and a practise guide, but it's all focused on working in positive, constructive ways with men and boys to bring them in to this debate as part of the solution and to help and support men and people who are working with men to challenge those really harmful ideas of masculinity that are not serving them or the women in their lives well and to help men develop healthier and more expansive ways of being a man.

Cat Schofield:

Absolutely, because we can't do it in isolation. This has got to be that we've got to do this together.

Dr Emma Partridge:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Cat Schofield:

And it's nobody is the problem. It's the structural beliefs that have been forced upon us that we've continued to allow and to accept that are the things that we can absolutely change. The power is in our hands really, isn't it?

Dr Emma Partridge:

Yeah. And it's just asking more men to take responsibility for that. Maybe it's not their fault that they reign with these ideas throughout their life, but it is their responsibility to step up and to challenge them and change them. And that's how they become part of solution, is owning it, taking responsibility for it, and helping other men, calling out when other men are doing harmful things. Working with their sons, showing their sons ways of ... So it's about men doing the work and taking responsibility for doing the work. And that's a really positive constructive way that men can feel part of the solution and be part of the solution.

Cat Schofield:

Yeah. I'm quite excited about the future potential. Shame it won't probably happen in my lifetime, but anyway, that's... But it is small steps, isn't it? It is small steps.

Dr Emma Partridge:

It is.Yeah. And we do have a vision of a world without violence against women. And we do have a vision where men can be men in different ways. And that's what we're working towards because we do firmly believe that this violence is not inevitable.

Cat Schofield:

No.

Dr Emma Partridge:

It's preventable. Men and boys are not born violent. We don't believe that. We believe that there are a range of other social and cultural reasons why men become violent in so many in such numbers. And so they can be undone. They can be changed. It's definitely challenging and difficult and long-term, but we believe it's possible if people really commit to it.

Cat Schofield:

That was Dr. Emma Partridge, Dr. Emma Partridge, Special Advisor, Primary Prevention at Our Watch. 

All of the resources mentioned in this episode can be found on the Our Watch website, ourwatch.org.au and that includes Change the Story, Changing the Picture, The Line, Men in Focus, and Workplace Equality and Respect. We encourage you to explore these resources and consider the role you can play in prevention. You can also find links to these in the show's notes.

And that concludes our series for Domestic and Family Violence Prevention Month. If you miss them, please do go back and listen to our interviews with experts from the Tasmanian Family and Sexual Violence Alliance, Family Violence Counselling and Support Service, and Safe At Home. We hope that you've found something you can take away and put us on step closer to creating a Tasmania without family violence. Thank you for listening.

Dorian Broomhall:

If this episode has raised any concerns for you, you can call 1-800-RESPECT. That's 1-800-737-732 to talk to a counsellor from the National Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence Hotline. Alternatively, you could call Tasmania's Family Violence Counselling and Support Service on 1-800-608-122. If you have concerns about your safety or that of someone else, please contact police or call 000 for emergency help.