It is more taboo to be a domestic violence victim than to have Aids, according to the New South Wales minister for the issue.
Speaking at the Domestic Violence NSW conference, the state’s first domestic violence minister, Pru Goward, did not promise any new money for programs but said new funding structures were being worked out by the government.
She said although the national conversation about domestic violence had become more prominent in recent years there was still much work to be done on getting people to recognise it was a gender equality issue.
A member of the audience spoke about working for a financial instituion and having her pro bono work for domestic violence causes taken off her bio for the website because it was a “bit much”.
“We need this continuing public conversation about perpetrators, who they are, what they are, to encourage business to think it’s OK to put that on their website,” Goward said.
“The fact is, if you said you had Aids, it would be more acceptable than to say you are a victim of domestic violence and we need to change that.”
Goward said the conversation about domestic violence had changed in recent years because people no longer saw it as a “poor people” issue and the conversation about perpetrators needed to move with it.
“Perpetrators are forgotten,” she said.
Goward said the motivations for perpetrators, particularly their feeling of entitlement to power over their victim, needed to be more widely acknowledged and said she could have kissed the state premier, Mike Baird, when he acknowledged it.
“The other conversation we have to have is that domestic violence is a crime driven by attitudes to women and we must not back off. When the premier said for the first time ‘it’s about power’, oh God, I could have kissed him,” she said.
“Fancy saying that? Sometimes I wonder if he knew what he said, to him it was so obvious but I don’t know whether he realised [to] many people listening it would have been ‘no it’s not, it’s about alcohol, and it’s about women nagging their husbands’, all the stuff you read in those surveys.
“So when he says that it’s about power, I thought that is a game-changer for men, to have a male leader say that with that level of confidence and determination. And we need to keep saying it. We need to keep reminding people it’s about taking the credit card, it’s about throwing your mobile away, it’s about putting devices on it, it’s about checking how many kilometres you’ve done on the car that day, it’s about where you eat your meal compared with the rest of your family. It’s about all those other signs that we don’t talk about much.”
Goward signalled some future policy shifts, endorsing a call for family law courts to be reformed.
She said the victims of domestic violence needed to be given more power in the court situation, such as giving evidence via video link rather than have to sit in the same courtroom as their abusers.
She also said the government would likely be putting into place new structures which would give more funding, but when asked for specifics she said “ask Gladys”, referring to the state’s treasurer, Gladys Berejiklian.
Goward recently launched the state’s $60m domestic violence strategy, which is aimed at prevention and minimising reoffending.
She said one of the biggest challenges of he ministership had been making people understand that domestic violence is a gender equality issue.
“Australians by and large think that we do respect sheilas and it’s really all OK and it’s just these odd blokes, who are either psychopathic or characterised as mentally ill or dysfunctional. I suspect there’s a huge group in the middle, who are perfectly normal, they just think it is OK,” she said.
The Domestic Violence NSW conference ran for two days and was used to launch a report revealing the high rates of domestic violence in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer communities.
