Prime Minister Anthony Albanese must tackle Australia’s substantial problems with alcohol, gambling and children’s access to pornography if he wants to protect women, says an expert who helped shape the national plan to stop domestic violence.
Criminologist Michael Salter said policymakers must be prepared to take a wider view of prevention when national cabinet convenes for an urgent meeting on Wednesday to address growing community uproar about rates of violence against women.
In a challenge to Australia’s dominant strategy of changing men’s attitudes to prevent gendered violence, Salter said the government needed to be more practical about its policy opportunities.
“It’s one thing to say that men and boys need to change – and we can keep saying that – but telling them to change is not a strategy,” he said.
“Alcohol, pornography and gambling are clear accelerants to men’s violence … Why is it the responsibility of a 13-year-old boy to change the culture around sexual violence, when it’s not the responsibility of an adult man earning millions of dollars a year promoting violent pornography to that teenage boy?”
Both gambling reform and online pornography have been thorny issues for the Albanese government, which has been balancing community expectations with strong pushback from the gaming industry and social media giants.
Salter said the past decade had shown that changing attitudes was difficult and did not always correlate with changes in behaviour.
“Young people’s attitudes to gender equality are more egalitarian than their elders, but boys and young men are also perpetrating physical and sexual violence at quite high levels, and in some spaces we’re seeing increases in perpetration,” he said.
“Reducing perpetration is going to require other levers beyond attitudes, and what are they? We need to take a non-ideological look at the evidence of what works now. Our message to the community can’t be about what’s going to keep women safe in 10 or 20 years when we’re talking about murder. The question is what’s going to keep women safe next week and the week after?”
Source: 12ft