Senate Inquiry Into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence Standing

Senate Inquiry Into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs --- Submission of Chris Howse Principal Solicitor, Whittlesea Community Legal Service This Submission addresses the following terms of reference: That the Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs inquire into and report on family, domestic and sexual violence, including with a view to informing the next National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children, the following: a) long-term measures to prevent violence against women and their children, and improve gender equality, and; j) The views and experiences of frontline services, advocacy groups and others throughout this unprecedented time. Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse Pandemic is upon us. It is 7:52 am in the year twenty-twenty, on the day after April Fools. I’m by myself in the office of Whittlesea Community Legal Service at Epping Plaza, because corona virus has burst upon the world and it’s dark outside and it’s raining and we’ve transferred our service out of this office and our clinics as well, that we run with students from La Trobe University, and the receptionist is booking our appointments now, on the phone at her house. Our solicitors and students are home and talking to our clients on the phone and so many of the women are beset by the violence of their men, that we must keep this show on the road. All Australia is doing this now, because our people are sick and our people are dying. I can hear outside, the sound of a car. But not many cars are here at Epping Plaza because illness and death are upon us and the message they bring, is stark: ‘It’s time.’ It’s time to reaffirm who we are, and exactly what the heck we have to do. Why now? Well, because of the pandemic and because also, on the 19th February 2020, a woman named Hannah Clark was burned in a fire in her car. She died. Her husband, Rowan Baxter, threw petrol in the car and set it alight. That’s how the fire occurred. There were three children in the car. They were sitting in the back with their seat belts done up. They were young. I suppose their mum might have helped them do up their seatbelts. They were his children. Baxter threw petrol on his children, as well as his wife. The children died in the flames and his wife died in hospital, a few hours later. So terrible in effect, so banal in motivation were these murders, that Senator Rex Patrick, in the Commonwealth Parliament, sought to establish an inquiry forthwith, to find out why this horror is upon us, and what we can do right now, to turn this situation round. Through his efforts, the Senate's Legal and 2 Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse Constitutional Affairs Committee was tasked to report on domestic and family violence in Australia, with wide scope to examine the adequacy of current measures, and how the Government could address cultural change. It is about the need for cultural change, that I have something to say. That is the nub of this submission. But it’s complicated. What is the antidote to the dearth of duty, the abysmal lack of responsibly toward women in this country, toward children, toward ignorance of the feminine in our very selves, that these deaths of Hannah Clark and her children, somehow epitomise? The scope of the inquiry sought by Senator Patrick, is wide. The width of that scope is essential. The gravity of our ignorance makes it so. Since the scope encompasses what sort of cultural change might fix this, let us workshop a hypothesis about violence to women. Is it a kind of heat that is found in other things as well? Is it in racism? Is it in greed and the will to fame, which abound around us today? Is it in our sacrifice of the forests and the animals that has brought us to the brink of suicide? Is it in other things also, that are symptoms of ignorance about the feminine? If it is, then what is at the core of this heat? That is the question. If this inquiry is to find out, it must take a deep look. A deeper look, than has ever been taken before. If the heat in violence to women in Australia is a symptom, we must understand the disease. What have we shattered? Of what are we ignorant? What have we considered to be of low worth, such that a man steps out in the sunlight of an Australian morning, with no inclination to examine his existential despair, with no signs or tokens at his disposal, to find a way through, save for petrol in hand, to douse his wife and children and incinerate them? This submission sets itself the task to find out. And to offer a way to put back together what is shattered. Such is the horror before us, that no lesser aim can be acceptable. But that’s a big task. It must needs draw upon experience in 3 Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse the law and procedure in Australia. It must look to the limits of the capacity of judges, of politicians and bureaucrats, to be of assistance in the matter before us. It must do all this, if it is to hope for an answer. And it must go further still. It must go back. Back to the time when manhood is formed. It must go back to childhood itself. There is no gene that makes men violent to women. Biologists have isolated nothing of the kind. Since none of us is genetically predisposed to be Rowan Baxter, every one of us is him, in potentiality. The psyche holds within it, every bit of nasty stuff, of which human beings are capable. All of us possess a psyche. Just like Rowan Baxter. That fact extends responsibly for this inquiry, beyond the purview Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee. It extends responsibility to fathom that psyche, to you and to me, to better understand the worst that we can do. How otherwise, are we to prevent atrocity? Me and my colleague Moses Florendo, are lawyers who work for the Whittlesea Community Legal Service. A while back, we got hold of a coffee van with an expresso machine in the back, and we called it ‘Expresso Legal’. Armed with the coffee machine and some mugs and coffee and milk and a pad and a pencil each, we drove out into the streets of Whittlesea to find out what was going wrong out there. Our credo? To seek out stories of violence to women, wherever they may be found, and offer legal advice and coffee. At 8:00 am on the streets of the Whittlesea, the wind is cold for Moses and me. Dressed in beanies, scarves and bluey jackets, we look like dags and our message that ‘We are one of you’, needs no words from us. 4 Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse ‘Chris,’ a social worker calls out, ‘there is a woman asking for emergency relief. She has bruises on her face and her upper arms.1 Can you talk to her?’ ‘What’s her name?’ ‘Jennifer.’ Out I come with the social worker. I see the bruises. She is in a summer dress, with short sleeves. She does not look up. ‘Hello Jennifer, I’m Chris.’ ‘Hello Chris.’ ‘Jenifer, tell me everything.’ ‘I’ve been with this bloke about ten years. I love him. But he’s got a bit erratic. He’s lost his job. He’s on the grog again. He’s been playing the pokies. My income has to support us both and it has been my money lost. He started hitting me. Last night was the worst time so far.’ ‘What happened last night?’ ‘I was in my nightie. I could not defend myself. I got away from him and I ran over to next door’s place. I knocked on the door and told them what happened and they let me in. I was embarrassed to go over to next door’s place. I was not so much embarrassed by the fact that he hit me. I was embarrassed that I lost control of my bowels and had to stand in front of my next door neighbour in my dirty nightie.’ Last year, Whittlesea had the highest family violence incident count in the City of Melbourne, standing at 3,057 reports. So says the Australian Bureau of Statistics. So I do not offer the story of Jennifer as an isolated case. I rather think she is a classic case. It being the task of the lawyer not to despair about horror, but to seek an antidote, we must be clear about the problem before us. So what is it? That I can tell you in one word. 1Names of clients of the Whittlesea Community Legal Service mentioned in this narrative, have been changed 5 Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence: Chris Howse ‘Fury.’ We have a problem of fury. It is the fury of men. Fury wrecks horror upon women and children. It wrecks horror also upon the men who succumb to it and hit the women and the children because the world of the men is also broken all to pieces.

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