Chief Commissioner Ken Lay says more men need to stand up against domestic violence

Ellen Whinnett   Herald Sun


CHIEF Commissioner Ken Lay has put violent men who attack their wives and partners on notice: you will be vilified by the community.

Declaring family violence one of the most significant law-and-order problems in Victoria, Mr Lay said men of all socio-economic backgrounds had to face up to the consequences of their crimes.

"I know of some very high-profile people, some very well-respected people that bash their wives," he said.

"Some men are very good at hiding their violence from those outside the home."

Half of Victoria's 42,076 assaults last year were committed in the home. Family members - almost always women - were the victims of 16,046 of those assaults.

Mr Lay said these figures were completely unacceptable and the Victorian community would no longer tolerate the excuses men gave to explain away their violence.

In an uncompromising interview, Mr Lay called on all Victorians to reconsider what we believed was appropriate behaviour.

And he called on male community leaders to take a stand, saying it was time to change the public narrative on our treatment of women.

"Since I've been Chief Commissioner, when you think about key community issues you often think about who are the spokesmen? Who are the community advocates, who are the high-profile advocates? In the violence against women space, there's no one," he said.

"There's no male that stands up and says 'this is simply outrageous and it needs to stop'. And the message needs to be from the males.

"That's my level of frustration."

Asked if he was not that male advocate, Mr Lay replied: "I sense that I am.

"I need to take a much more active role in this. It's only in recent times that I have seen the lack of advocacy - now that's in the corporate area, it's in the community, it's right across society.

''There should be men, and they're usually leaders, who need to be able to stand up and take a stand, and it's not just me.

"It's It's corporate leaders, it's government. It's sporting leaders, it's people that actually can look men in the eye and say 'that is not appropriate'."

Mr Lay said the murders of young women Jill Meagher and Sarah Cafferkey, while not in a family violence context, had heightened public concern about violence against women, culminating in a march down Brunswick's Sydney Rd attended by 30,000 people.

"There's no doubt that since both of those tragedies there has been a shift (in public attitudes),'' he said.

"They're two very serious cases, two horrible cases, but in the last 12 months we've attended 50,000 incidents of family violence, many thousands of women have been assaulted in the street and we haven't had the public commentary of vilifying offenders for those.

"So we need to get better at actually calling men to account, not just for that outrageous, criminal behaviour but also the inappropriate behaviour.''

Mr Lay said violence against women was closely linked to general attitudes about how women could be treated.

"Now I see that all the time, I see where women are assaulted, and most often the narrative is around what she could have done to prevent it,'' he said.

''She was drunk, she was wearing a short dress, she was out at 2 o'clock in the morning.

''Nothing about the thugs, or the criminals or the piggish males that think it's their right to assault, insult, or threaten women.

"I guess this is the really frustrating part for me during this whole conversation.''

Mr Lay said he heard on a regular basis of instances where women in licensed premises, or walking down the street, were groped by men.

"That behaviour needs to be called. And that's not me - that's friends, that's work colleagues, that's associates of people who behave like that," he said.

"How did we get to a space where men think it's all right to reach out and grab a woman on the breast or pinch her bum in a hotel? How can we think that's all right?

''How do we challenge that sort of behaviour? How do we move a community's culture away from demeaning women like that? Because I'm not convinced that parts of our society think it's inappropriate."

Mr Lay rejected the suggestion that some women just accepted unwelcome physical touching as an unpleasant but unavoidable price of a night out with friends.

"If women think that's part of going out, do other women accept that being punched by their husband's OK? Do other women accept that being vilified or called a slut by some unknown male is OK?

It's not OK and it's a far broader problem I think than most of us are willing to accept.''

Mr Lay said women who were the victims of violence in their own homes needed strong advocates to speak up for them, and should not be pressured into believing it was up to them to somehow fix the violence.

"When you have these really high-profile cases, when you have issues within the media about women being assaulted, who stands up and actually challenges the behaviour of the men involved? It does my head in every now and again,'' he said.

"I say to people like the media, people like me, people out there at the water cooler. The discussion needs to be about the male. The discussion needs to be about the perpetrator.

"We can, as a community, change that narrative. We know that if we continue to talk about it, continue to push it out there, we've seen community attitudes change over the years in a whole host of areas.

"But it's incumbent on me, and I think other male community leaders, to actually lead that discussion. To be out there pointing out that this is not the woman's fault.

"We need to make sure (abusive) men feel like they're ostracised, they're vilified, that their behaviour is simply unacceptable.

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