Why are men who murder women considered less of a threat than terrorists? | Van Badham

AAustralia's Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commissioner Micaela Cronin said this week that the scourge of violence against women and children in this country should be treated with the same seriousness as terrorism.

She is right.

Her comments come at a time when the number of women allegedly killed as a result of family and domestic violence this year has risen to 35. In addition, 17 other women are believed to have been killed by male perpetrators.

“We need to use every tool at our disposal to combat terrorism,” Cronin said in her speech to the National Press Club. She suggested using standard counterterrorism measures such as monitoring social media, tracking purchases and conducting surveillance.

And why not? A brutal tally of lives lost shows that the number of deaths and injuries from terrorist attacks is minimal compared to the suffering of women. The local terrorist “threat level” is set at “likely,” yet there have been zero deaths from terrorism in Australia so far this year.

The last deadly terrorist attack in this country was the shooting of Wieambilla in 2022. We are currently conducting a judicial inquiry into this. We insisted that more could be done because it was appalling and intolerable that such an event should weigh on the national consciousness.

The murders of every woman and child are also horrific. Women and their allies in this country do not want murders to be in the national consciousness. That is why we marched. We cried. We screamed in frustration. We felt numb and abandoned, and yet we kept standing up and demanding intervention because it is morally intolerable when deaths are preventable.

Yes, there needs to be a behavioural change in a society that still raises men to believe they have a right to ownership of women and children. Yes, there needs to be a cultural change to end the persistent cultural belief in the male right to anger and a construct of masculinity that is enforced in violence. But to make the very idea of ​​violence against women and children intolerable, a behavioural and cultural change needs to be enforced with the full force of the police, the justice system and the law.

If the legal framework for sanctions and penalties is weak, the consequences will not be clearly communicated.

We are overwhelmed by stories of Australian women being murdered. Stories of escalating abuse and violence have become familiar tropes. The patterns are consistent, the “red flags” are well known. So conjure up an image of the perpetrator wearing a Nazi armband or waving an ISIS flag and ask yourself: if these were not gender-based crimes, would we have ever allowed the violence to get this far?

Budding terrorists do not have the luxury of believing that they have any social license to commit their crimes. We do not view terrorism as an individual defect, but as an expression of behaviours fuelled in and through radicalising channels. In Australia, counter-terrorism measures are therefore also directed at these channels.

Can we really say that our systems are equally forceful in confronting misogynists whose own socialized and shared beliefs persuade them to commit violence? 52 women are dead. What is gender-based murder but the end of a radicalization process for these men? Every channel of their influence must be held accountable, through the law and the state as an expression of the public will. This is how clear social messaging works.

In the UK, the new Labour government is proposing to include extreme misogyny alongside violent political ideology and murderous religious fundamentalism as one of the “harmful and hateful beliefs” to be tackled through anti-extremism action. “It is no longer OK for us to ignore the massive growing threat of online hatred towards women, and for us to ignore it,” said Home Secretary Jess Phillips. A strategic review will examine the role that social forces – including social media platforms, influencers, communities – play in an apparatus of inciting misogynistic violence.

The UK's plan is to “identify any gaps in existing policy that need to be filled to tackle those who promote harmful and hateful beliefs and violence”.

We have these gaps in Australia and Micaela Cronin has proposed a way to close them.

We can, of course, ignore them – and continue to bury the murdered bodies of women, scream and cry.

Or we can choose to stare at what makes us uncomfortable and reinforce what we claim to believe. That misogyny is unconscionable. That violence is intolerable… and that Australia finally has the courage to let women and their children live.