Domestic violence within the Australian community is a fairly well-documented instantiation of a much wider global phenomenon. The varieties of domestic violence include the following categories and concepts: physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, verbal abuse, social abuse, economic abuse, and spiritual abuse.

The Australian context is one in which gender roles and expectations have traditionally been quite well formed and clearly delineated. The caricatures of masculinity and femininity projected to the population through the national obsession with belligerent sporting activity, for instance, are inevitably some of the norms of behaviour which individuals adopt and emulate in their daily and interpersonal lives. The obsessions of a culture tell you as much by overt means as they do by covert means; that the only female role apparent in the main sporting (née gladiatorial) arenas of this country and as portrayed by the popular media is that of the sexy, seductive cheerleader.

The dearth of literal role-models within the predominant cultural narratives (of which I have only briefly indicated a sport-specific instance) defines a desert of social semiotic significance for the female victim of domestic violence. So, a woman who suffers domestic violence is always already twice excluded - once, by the actual experience of the domestic violence and it’s concrete psychological, corporeal and social consequences; and, a second time, by the symbolic violence of a system which, save a few token gestures, really does not allow her access to media (or for that matter - institutionally) generated roles which she may be able to comprehend as representing her own place in the world. Women’s alienation from cultural production has previously been identified by Sandra Bartky.

In relation to the strong gender stereotypes portrayed in the Australian media and their relationship to overtly belligerent masculinities as discussed in this essay, I am not suggesting removing sport from our television screens or societies. I am merely implying that the celebration of violent and competitive masculinities which tend to result in violence has a subsequent effect on the minds and expectations of both men and women in the community in relation to their roles and behaviour in relationships with one another. I think that we can trace in the development and maintenance of the centrality of such strong gender-biased definitions in the world of sport in Australia to an essential insecurity over sex and sexuality - only peculiar to this country in the specifics of it’s manifestation and replicated similarly in other cultures. The repetitive re-telling of the stories of a heroic masculine virility, triumphant in victory or noble in defeat, is a mythology (or semiotic sleight-of-hand) which draws our attention away from issues such as that if the culture of masculinity and its many proponents and devotees were truly secure in their sexuality and interpersonal relationships with other men and with women, it would not need to consistently reiterate such simple and Neolithic themes in its most overt narrative-generating structures.

The WHO Multi-country Study on Women’s Health and Domestic Violence against Women identifies that “...media strategies that encourage men who are not violent to speak out against violence and challenge its acceptability will help counter notions that all men condone violence. They also serve to provide alternative role models of masculine behaviour to those commonly portrayed by the media...” and that “...experience shows that general public awareness campaigns may have little effect by themselves, and must be accompanied by focused outreach and structural change.” (Page 93) Such primary prevention may be a perfect place for role models in the sports to step up and participate in a creative and healthy discourse on the behaviour and expectations of men in this country in the context of alleviating the community burden of domestic violence. The “Australia Says No” campaign run by the Australian Government Office for Women may have had a little more impact if sports stars and celebrities who were brave enough to speak in this context had done so.

The political and legal reform which lies at the heart of a liberal feminist (re-)interpretation of social reality is a much longer bow to draw - as an entry point to changing the current state of gender relations, roles and expectations in this country. As masculine power and various masculinities lie enshrined in (and in some cases as) the law, seeking to address the prevalence of domestic violence through political and legal reforms of this society can be imagined to be a very lengthy process indeed. I am starting to feel that this society needs some genuine “shock therapy” if it is ever going to be able to take the proverbial “good hard look at itself” that it needs in terms of domestic violence and gender power imbalances. Just what that shock therapy is, or may be, I do not know – but I feel that the media has a significant role to play in this.

Victims of domestic violence are marginalised precisely (and among other reasons) because they are so often characterised as “victims” in the media and the day-to-day language people use. We would do far better to consider them as survivors and in this simple act attribute at least a liminal degree of assertiveness and concrete social reality where none was previously attributed. To marginalise is to push someone to the social periphery and to exclude is to keep them there. Symbolic violence is as guilty of this marginalisation and exclusion as literal violence or physical, psychological or sexual abuse. How are we to transform the literal when it is so deeply underpinned by (and enmeshed with) the symbolic ? The social world is so infused by the pop-cultural and media mythologies of gender and social role that unravelling the symbolic world may just unravel the real one.

This is an excerpt from an essay I wrote about DV in Australia.