By Kim Spurway
"Sydney's Wife Bashers: More at Home in the West" proclaimed a front-page article in the Sydney Morning Herald on June 3. The article dealt with a report by the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.
In defining domestic violence, bureau research officer Elizabeth Matka includes physical assault; verbal, emotional and psychological abuse; sexual assault; financial and economic abuse (e.g. withholding money and other resources); and social abuse (such as preventing contact with family and friends).
Most studies have relied on statistics from police and from the legal and welfare systems. There is no reason to believe that a majority of women seek help from these agencies. Studies also show that women will stay in a situation for a long time before being able or willing to get official help. Generalising from these sample studies is therefore impossible — we just don't know how prevalent domestic violence is.
Using a 1990 Australian Bureau of Statistics survey of crime victims, Matka estimates the number of assaults on women in their own homes in NSW during one year at about 19,000. In the same period, there were only 2200 non-aggravated assaults involving the spouse or de facto reported to the police in that state.
Three times as many women as men were killed by their spouse or de facto in NSW from 1968 to 1986.
The report says there is a predominance of working class victims in most studies, but this could occur because the methods used have pinpointed that group — for example, by surveying women in refuges.
Matka points out that it is arguable that domestic violence is just as common amongst the middle classes but that "middle class women are less willing to report assault, or that they are more able to deal with the problem without the aid of welfare agencies, or that the violence they suffer is more likely to be psychological than physical".
Matka concludes, however, "that the actual incidence of domestic violence may also be lower for those of higher socioeconomic status". She uses the rate of protection orders sought by domestic violence victims in 1989 in NSW, and believes the discrepancy between the figures for those of higher and lower socioeconomic status cannot be explained solely by the middle class being less willing to seek orders. In Campbelltown, for example, 204 orders per 100,000 were sought, compared to 8 per 100,000 in Ku-ring-gai.
Matka suggests that, based on a study by the US National Crime Survey, "the normal operation of a capitalist society puts greater stresses on lower status men because their existence is more insecure and frustrating, and that, as a result, violence as means of venting that frustration, becomes more likely".
The Women's Electoral Lobby responded that "It's men not money that ", pointing out that we live in a violent culture and that the use of a single set of figures is insufficient.
WEL believes that women are "terrorised and subjected to physical and emotional abuse in households across the social spectrum but their responses differ ... The use of court protective orders is often the only response available to households with few financial resources".
WEL expressed concern that "a problem as big as domestic violence, which has its origins in social assumptions about male behaviour combined with assumptions about appropriate male/female behaviour, should be reduced to a financial problem".
Male attitudes to women obviously play an important role in domestic violence. Matka points this out by saying that those men who have a "traditional" view of the man as "lord and master" may be more likely to want assert their dominance in the home. She stresses the need to change "cultural attitudes to domestic violence" by challenging community acceptability, by active prosecution of offenders and by public education campaigns.
Domestic violence is such a hidden crime that it's hard to make any final conclusions. If the stress of poverty, combined with the attitude that women deserve what they get and that violence against women in the home is not a crime, produces higher rates of violence, then as the recession deepens so too will the problems women face.