Partnered with a Survivor: David Mandel and Ruth Reymundo Mandel

Season 6 Episode 3: Rethinking Gender-Based Violence Prevention: A Call to Action with Jess Hill and Michael Salter

• Ruth Reymundo Mandel & David Mandel • Season 6 • Episode 3

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"Single mothers are essentially the unofficial reserve army of prevention agents in this country and around the world." - Jess Hill

In this episode, David and Ruth speak with Australian experts Jess Hill and Professor Michael Salter about their groundbreaking paper challenging current approaches to preventing gender-based violence. With Australia's commitment to end gender-based violence within a generation, yet concerning increases in sexual violence and domestic homicides, this timely discussion explores why traditional prevention strategies focused on changing social norms and attitudes have fallen short.

Key points discussed include:

  • The limitations of measuring prevention success through attitude surveys rather than actual reductions in violence
  • Why structural interventions and accountability are essential alongside education efforts
  • The need to focus resources on high-risk scenarios and populations, particularly traumatized youth
  • How systems often fail to provide practical help when survivors, especially young people, disclose abuse
  • The importance of shifting from "calling out" to "calling in" approaches when addressing harmful behaviors
  • Why prevention efforts must acknowledge the reality that most people have been impacted by violence rather than assuming a "clean slate"

Related episodes:

Additional Resources:

Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real

Check out David Mandel's new book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence."

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Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And we're back.

David Mandel:

And we're back.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Hello there, hi there, how are? You, I'm good.

David Mandel:

We're already laughing and the show just started. You are joining us for this episode of Partner with Survivor. I'm David Mandel, CEO of the Safer Together Institute.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And I'm Ruth Ramunda Mandel and I'm the co-owner and business development officer.

David Mandel:

And we are coming to you from Tunxus, missoula land in the East Coast United States, where it is frigid, frozen. It is frigid Frozen, and when we look at and talk to our Australian colleagues they're in T-shirts and you know, and board shorts and sun tans. And sunnies, and sunnies, and sunnies, and we're just kind of here bundled up.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Are they flippers?

David Mandel:

Not flippers, not the flippers Okay.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

But I'm getting the Australianese wrong.

David Mandel:

But so, anyway, we're here, we want to acknowledge any indigenous elders, past, present, emerging, who are joining us, and just really honor the land that we're on, which has a long history that precedes colonization but has been colonized for centuries here in the United States, and we just want to acknowledge that history and the traditional owners of the land.

David Mandel:

So we're going to talk about coercive control, we're going to talk about primary prevention, we're going to talk about gender-based violence today and you know, I think this is a fascinating and really important conversation because I think people want to not only respond to gender-based violence when it happens, but they want to know how do we stop it. And you know, in Australia we're going to be talking to two leading experts in this area in a few minutes. You know that Australia there's been a commitment to really end gender based violence in a generation, which is tremendous, which is a tremendous commitment, and I love seeing that. And you know, and I think there's a lot of talk, like when I was on the and you saw this when I was interviewed after the press conference a few months ago there's sort of a question about culture, you know, and so I think there's this question about sort of culture and responses, and how culture is created, and so I'm really kind of curious to see where we go today with our guests.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Yeah, no, I'm excited to see as well. Curious to see where we go today with our guests. Yeah, no, I'm excited to see as well. And I think one of the things that I always try to keep in mind is that our interventions really have a time limited space where we've been trying to take different actions to impact a problem that we didn't even recognize as a problem for a long time, and so being super reflective about what's working and what's not working is just an honest way to do business. It's a good thing to do in general. That's right.

David Mandel:

So let's do a little more critical reflection. Let's do it With our guests. So we've got Jess Hill, who is a well-known author and advocate around course control. So Jess is joining us. Thanks, Jess.

Jess Hill :

Good day.

David Mandel:

author and advocate around course control. So Jess is joining us Thanks, jess. And she is joined by co-author of a paper on primary prevention, professor Michael Salter, who's a director of Child Light at the University of New South Wales. So, anyway, we really are very excited to have both of you here with us. So thank you, michael and Jess, for joining us.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And nice to see you both and one of the impetus for having you both on here is because you recently wrote somewhat of a groundbreaking white paper about primary prevention in Australia Rethinking Primary Prevention. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what was the inspiration for this really huge white paper that took on a lot of aspects of policy and funding and intervention around domestic abuse and intimate partner violence and IPV family violence.

Jess Hill :

Sure, look, I'll just. I'll throw in my two cents and then I'll let michael speak to his personal motivations. Um, because both of us had been speaking about this for many years um, michael, for longer than than I had um, he started talking about this a decade ago. His concerns with the approach, the, the way that we were trying to approach cultural change and how we were trying to reach men and boys. When I wrote well, when I published the book, the book took four years to write, but when it was published in 2019, I critiqued the primary prevention strategy in Australia at length, partly because I was concerned when I looked at the national plan, which was, at that point, aiming to reduce violence by 2022 and had been in place for a decade.

Jess Hill :

The measurements that we were using to assess whether violence was reducing was all about surveying community attitudes, so there were no targets for reducing violence, it was all like. So an indication of whether communities are safe and free from violence would be, for example, measuring how much understanding of domestic violence is improving across the community, and to me, that just felt so far removed, particularly when actually, you know, we don't have perfect data, but we do have a pretty good national survey on the incidence rate of physical and sexual violence and other types of violence. So it wasn't as though we couldn't use actual reductions in violence as a target, for you know, we want to see a 30% reduction in physical assaults, for example. You know the same that we would do in a strategy to reduce smoking. You wouldn't say we're going to assess the success of this smoking strategy by surveying people as to whether they think that smoking is dangerous for their health, because we know that many people who think smoking is dangerous for their health can still smoke three packs a day.

Jess Hill :

So for me it felt like the danger of well, first of all, not having these really specific targets was a reduced sense of accountability for actually reducing violence, but then the danger of this attitude behavior gap, where what you say to a surveyor when they're on the phone to you is very different from what you do in the moment and when you're being affected by all sorts of different things in your personal context.

Jess Hill :

So that was what I critiqued in the book. And then, really, because we were under a fairly hostile federal government at the time, it felt like it wasn't the right time to really push this forward. But when we had the new national plan, which is the second national plan launched in 2022, when the ambition was to end violence, as David said, within a single generation, and when, at the same time, we started seeing this data emerge that, actually, sexual violence was increasing, domestic and family violence had not reduced and, after a 30-year decline in domestic homicides, we started to see the rate of domestic homicides spike by 30 percent each year, and that's continued on for the last three years. It just felt like the approach that we're taking is not showing results and we have an obligation to critically assess whether the approach that we decided on in 2010 is still appropriate for the 2020s.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Right. Right, it's very interesting because I think, from a health perspective, very few studies would be done where they would survey the attitudes of the patients about their care if they really were trying to impact health measures. So there's this consistency in governments addressing domestic abuse, where they do things that they would never do for any other type of crime or problem. That is mind boggling of success was leveraged instead of measuring whether or not domestic violence had actually gone down, or sexual violence. Even just asking men and boys how often they had engaged in violence would be a better way to measure that than asking them their attitudes about violence. So do you all have any reflection about why that was the measurement that was used?

Professor Michael Salter:

I mean I'll jump in on that, Ruth. I mean I think, to be honest, there's an inbuilt pessimism within the prevention strategy that focuses on social norms that simply doesn't expect to see dramatic change. And we've seen that inbuilt pessimism articulated multiple times in policy documents that say we don't expect to see behaviour change in the next 10 years. We don't expect to see behaviour change within quite a long kind of horizon within which we're supposed to accept that women and children are going to continue to be victimised and murdered, but we're going to make improvements on attitudes murdered, but we're going to make improvements on attitudes. So, to be really honest, I think it speaks to a lack of ambition and I think it also speaks to a lack of confidence that the social norms approach will ultimately triumph.

Professor Michael Salter:

I came to this area of work originally before I worked in Vanskin's Children. I actually worked in the primary prevention of blood-borne viruses, particularly HIV, and it's actually over the course of my career and obviously my career's changed a little bit. But we've seen the transposition of a primary prevention public health framework from other areas of health into violence against women and in the process of that transposition what we've also seen is certain previous elements of public health learnings have been lost, and particularly the weakness of the social norms approach. Australia has quite a proud record of public health success across a range of social problems that many people would have believed would be impossible to resolve. That includes things like HIV, which we are now talking about ending in the next 10 years in Sydney, which historically has been a global epicentre of HIV, but also in relation to matters like road deaths, drink driving, smoking.

Professor Michael Salter:

We are a world leader and it's always been a mixture of structural interventions that target behaviour, as well as a social norms and educative approach that's often designed to soften the blow and build community support for those structural interventions. When it comes to violence against women, what we've often seen is the structural component of the work has dropped away. There's a focus on social norms and attitudes, and the final point that I'll make is often the intensive work around social norms. Change is coming to vest in children and all of a sudden it's children who have to transform their norms and their values to achieve this broader goal. So big questions about who is being forced to take responsibility for this massive project of social transformation.

Jess Hill :

And can I just leave it there on the back of Michael, because I think there was certainly there's a lack of ambition in terms of actually reducing the incidence of violence, but I think if you were to talk to people who really like devised this framework, they actually see this as a whole of population, almost a social engineering project. And I just quickly quote really, what is the founding ethos, which comes from a 1994 paper from the American academic Laurie Heiser, who I'm sure you're familiar with, and she said violence is an extremely complex phenomenon with deep roots in power imbalances between men and women, gender role, expectations, self-esteem and social institutions. As such, it cannot be addressed without confronting the underlying cultural beliefs and social structures that perpetuate violence against women, and confronting violence thus requires redefining what it means to be male and what it means to be female. Now, that has been the project that has been underpinning Australia's plan to reduce and now end gendered violence since 2010. And when you hear the people who are, you know, who are leading this project, describe how they want to achieve that, it's really about going into all the settings that particularly young people go to, like schools, like sporting clubs, like, you know, even churches, what they see on television, etc. That was what was really they were targeting making sure that those were, as one leader in the Australian space said, that young people were being saturated in examples of healthy relationships in those other areas and having respect modelled for them.

Jess Hill :

So you know, if you're doing that in the 1960s and you're in, let's say, china, where you have complete control over the culture and you have every lever at your disposal, then that is, I guess that's potentially achievable. But when you're talking about a social engineering project of that scale in a democracy, in an increasingly globalised world, and particularly in the last few years, at a time when the you know online has the connectivity across the world, has just fundamentally transformed the scope of cultural persuasion and the access that governments have to influence their citizens on any subjects, let alone something like gender equality and gendered violence, which has such deep roots in our own affect systems, that's where I think that this is. This was a, I think, for them. It was very ambitious, but I think it no longer suits the world that we live in. I'm not sure that the way that they approached it it would have ever worked, but certainly now there is. We just do not control the levers of culture anymore.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Right.

David Mandel:

So let me.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Yeah, the culture question is really important.

David Mandel:

Yeah, it is. And I guess the way I'm thinking about this and listen, I want to make sure that I'm hearing it is and I mean, I read the paper and I know both of you. You know, know the work you do. So you're not chucking out the project of gender equality and you're not saying that's. You know that you're not in alignment and supportive of that. What you're saying is, if we want to end violence against gender-based violence— we need to focus on violence and the drivers of violence. We hope they're safer, versus saying we want survivors to be safe wherever they are, whether they're in their own home or they're on the street or they move to another apartment. Those may sound like the same thing to some people, but they're very different kind of directions for policy and intervention. So am I getting this right in terms of my understanding of where you guys are pointing us?

Professor Michael Salter:

I'd just clarify two points I mean. I think, firstly, the broader project of gender equality is really fundamental and integral to violence prevention. The issue is in the Australian context. It's been narrowed down to a social norms measure. So from my point of view, I mean the majority of female-fronted households in this country, the majority of the poor and low-income families in this country, are female-fronted households. A gender equality and violence prevention project is adequate welfare and income support to single mothers, for example.

Professor Michael Salter:

The unaffordability of childcare is a fundamental piece of gender equality infrastructure that we don't have in place at the moment, and yet it's also a fundamental violence prevention and child abuse prevention initiative. So I think the the actual task of achieving gender equality is needs to be much larger than a social norms revolution. But I would also say that practical interventions that target violence are integral to achieving gender equality. I don't understand how you can achieve gender equality without reducing violence against women. So I don't see a difference here. There's almost like what we're looking for is a virtuous cycle whereby reduction of violence at the front line, as it were, and then prevention of violence through structural intervention sort of has this broader social effect. But we're not seeing that connection at the moment, seeing that connection at the moment.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

I just it's so funny because when we talk I'm really aware that we're flipping between domains of responsibility. We're focusing on the individual behavioral domain and then we're flipping really rapidly over to the systemic governmental domain, and that's a dichotomy that I think has been created in believing that it's the full responsibility of the individual to enact the change, in sort of a vacuum of behavioral reality where, number one, they're existing inside of a family context where that behavior is being modeled. That's what somebody is learning from a developmental standpoint. Then they leave that place and they may go experience similar behaviors in a school setting or in a institutional setting. None of that is held accountable Along the way.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

What happens is that individuals learn that there are certain behaviors that they can use to mitigate their discomfort, their lack of control, their fear and gain power. And that's, if that's something that's being modeled and displayed in multiple domains, is very difficult to social. Norm that because the messaging is confusing. Social norm that because the messaging is confusing. So I, you know, I really honed in on the paper's assessment that it's lack of accountability at the end of the day, within professionals and systems that is really supporting the continuation of these behaviors, because it does nothing to place the burden of change and social change on our children when we ourselves are unwilling to change. In fact, it's cruel. It's cruel and it's wrong because we have to be willing to display the behaviors that support that type of change as well. So you know, that's what I'm hearing is flipped between the personal and the systemic, and when really, in reality, if we're talking about public policy, we should be moving towards what the public domain's responsibility is to respond to the problem.

Jess Hill :

Yeah, and I think one of the you know an example of that. There's a school education program like a Respectful Relationship Education Program in the States called Shifting Boundaries, and it sought to bring in what was considered quite a successful education model from a group called Safe Dates which was talking about like role modeling, how to deal with conflict, you know really about how to build respect and good behaviour into your personal intimate relationships. But shifting boundaries what it did is it brought in that education element, but it also made changes at the building level of the school. So they asked the students like where are the hotspots for like sexual harassment or even sexual assault? And they asked the students like where are the hot spots for like sexual harassment or even sexual assault? And they increased the number of faculty and teachers there. They introduced building-level intervention orders so that students who'd been assaulted by other peers would feel safe on the school grounds.

Jess Hill :

Tangible, not just about trying to change hearts and minds, but showing, exactly as you just said, ruth, that the school is going to back you with tangible changes that will help keep you safe, because we can't actually bank on a hope that our education is going to stop some young men from using sexual violence or sexually harassing you.

Jess Hill :

So in the meantime we will step in as the adults and make it less likely for that to happen.

Jess Hill :

And that's something that is, I would say, almost completely missing from the Australian approach to respectful relationships, except with some individual programs that go and visit schools and may sort of really bring in more of that accountability feeling. But on that structural level of schools saying we're going to bring in and in Australia we're going to mandate respect for relationships, education across the country, well, one of the things that we know is going to happen as a result of that is that kids will realize they've been sexually assaulted or they're growing up in family violence backgrounds. What are schools going to do when those disclosures start to roll out and intensify? What are their plans for protecting students from other students? And we know that peer-on-peer sexual assault is rising in schools, or at least the reports of it are. That's what's missing. As you're saying, ruth, we're talking about respect, but then, when it comes to kids disclosing, we don't have enough respect for them to actually change the conditions in which they'll be met.

David Mandel:

You know I'm thinking about a couple of things. One is the magic that we put in education, the magical powers we infuse education or training. You know that if we teach these concepts, that people will, it acts like the impediments will fall away. If you just know enough and we see this in the domestic violence world you know, if you just know enough, if you're educated enough, you're aware enough what the problem is, then all the impediments to safety, all the impediments to leaving, all the impediments to change, will magically melt away, which is just not real and it can increase people's frustration. But what this is really honing in for me is a number of years ago I read, when I was developing some of my work around domestic violence-informed systems. I read some work about trauma-informed systems and there's this really simple definition that I really liked, which was that trauma survivors, as it relates to trauma-informed systems, that on balance, that they're going to experience the system as helping them versus harming them when they reach out to the system. Basically it's in a preponderance like 51% of the time, let's say I'm going to use a number that you're going to get something that makes your situation better if you disclose or ask for help. And it's not about attitudes. It's about my experience of reaching out and part of just as you're talking about that school example I'm really thinking about.

David Mandel:

Do young people, children, young people who are in danger of being stalked, harassed, receiving dating violence, whatever else it would be do they believe and do they have the experience of schools helping them and making their situation better, or do they live like a survivor? I experienced years ago in a case I worked with child welfare where she was a kid in foster care, going to a private school. She was dating and maybe being preyed upon by the US football captain of the team who was abusing her. So he was high status. She was low status in school because she was a foster care kid and when she disclosed they both got kicked out of school.

David Mandel:

That is not the experience of a school being accountable and intervening and if anybody else was watching that. The message to those other victims was don't disclose, you're going to get punished. That does much more, I think your argument I would agree with you does much more to teach norms than sitting in a classroom, in a health class or communications class or whatever it is, and being told this is what healthy communication looks like and and I think that's what healthy communication looks like, and I think that's what you're saying, right, that you're really kind of pointing us in that direction.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Yeah.

Professor Michael Salter:

We've done the legal analysis here in Australia, looking across the legislation for schools at states and territories about actually what principals and schools are allowed to do and are not allowed to do when one student accuses another student of sexual assault and in some of the states it's extremely limited so you can have a school that's rolling out respectful relationships and consent education, but where a girl is raped by a male classmate, the school actually cannot take any action against him in the absence of a criminal conviction.

Professor Michael Salter:

So there can be an ongoing police investigation and if she doesn't want to encounter that classmate at school, it's up to her to leave the school. And that is what we see. We consistently see girls dropping out of school and often they may transfer, but if they go to another school, sometimes the rumour about what happened follows them. We see girls drop out of school because the structural kind of impediments to just a baseline of respect and justice are not there at the legislative level. So we need legal change in some of these states and territories while kids are being taught stand up, speak out, disclose, take a stand, yeah.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

It's quite an injustice to put pressure on victims to disclose when you're going to be victimized again for it or kicked out of your school or lose your employment or be harassed by your employer.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

It's very, quite cruel of an action and ultimately, at the end of the day, I feel like we often get embroiled in these conversations of who has the right to make social change, parental rights, what parents have the right to teach their children, and that we haven't really doubled down, like adults and people who are in leadership, to say these behaviors are absolutely not acceptable parenting. None of this falls under your parental right to do. If you're causing instability, if you're causing unhousedness in your children, if you're causing them injuries and disabilities, if you're causing unhousedness in your children, if you're causing them injuries and disabilities, if you're causing them unsafety, physical harm, and you are the problem and all of us now need to focus on you because this is your poor parenting. Instead of asking that child to take the fall to disclose their family member, it's all of us that are supposed to stand up and look at that person and say these are unacceptable behaviors. We're now going to assess you, address you and we're going to intervene with you.

David Mandel:

So can I use it to pivot off of that comment to one of your points, which is saying learning from HIV prevention, learning from these other efforts? Right, and there's, you know what I learned primary, secondary, tertiary interventions, and you know sort of you know, do you target universal groups or at-risk groups, or you know, or groups that have already engaged in this behavior? You're suggesting or you're pointing us to again in the paper, saying, well, maybe let's take a step back from this universal prevention strategy and target certain and this is where even I start getting screamers certain populations, certain groups of people, right Even to say that I go oh, wait a second, you know and and um, well, what does that look like and is that fair? And and so I'm just speaking to for our listeners, and I know that that's part of the argument or the discussion Can you speak to that part of what you're, uh, you're speaking to in the Rethinking Primary Prevention paper?

Jess Hill :

Can I just paint a bit of a picture and I think Mike will be, you know, best placed to really go into detail about this but just so that we get a sense of we're talking about like particular populations Really. I mean this is particularly true amongst young people, and I just want to give a sense in Australia of how badly neglected the scene is for children and young people who have experienced harm, who might have experienced sexual violence or have grown up in family violence, and that is that if you are under 18 and you are using violence, there is nothing for you. There might be, if you can afford private practice, you probably get medicated. You know that might be for you, but we don't have men's behavior change programs or anything for you until you turn 18, right? So if you're under 18 using violence, then probably you know the best help we can give you is if police catch up with you and then we can jail you from the time that you're under 18 using violence. Then probably you know the best help we can give you is if police catch up with you and then we can jail you from the time that you're 10.

Jess Hill :

If you are fleeing family violence on your own and you do not have a protective parent. There is no specialist family violence sector that is going to catch you. You have youth homelessness services. One in two children are turned away every night from a crisis refuge. They do not have a specialist response and so you get so many young people who are living on the streets alone for almost 40,000 last year who reported to services who will trade survival sex for a roof over their head. So then they get in intimate partner violence relationships. Now we know from a pilot program that's running in Melbourne, which literally is only funded to attend to 44 kids in over the year, that when they get to kids who are 15 or 16, and in their first or second intimate partner violence relationship, almost all of them left the relationship and did not return to violence within two years after that happening. So we know that if you intervene early with adolescents who are using violence or who are being subjected to violence, the chances are you are going to interrupt patterns that would otherwise get deeper and deeper as they grow older and interrupt relationships that may just become more and more severely violent as they grow older.

Jess Hill :

But the other side of it is and this is a side that you, david and Ruth know very well, is that well, okay, if you do stay home and your mum actually does leave the violent partner there with, well, what we have for you children is you could well.

Jess Hill :

First of all, family court might get involved and if you're lucky, you'll get a job, a judge who understands violence, and you won't be ordered to live with your abuser. Child protection might get involved and if your mum's been struggling a bit after being subjected to years of trauma and degradation, unfortunately child protection probably won't offer much to actually help your mum, but they will threaten to take you away from her and, if you're lucky, you won't end up in residential care or living in a hotel supervised by a labour hire on eight-hour rotating shifts. So I mean, when we talk about talking to particular, focusing on particular populations and you see the totally barren response service and systems that perpetuate violence against children where there has been violence in the home or in their relationships, that's what we're really. I mean, that's part of what we're really talking about is like we have paid almost no attention in this area and this is the area where we need to be really putting resources into.

David Mandel:

Yeah, you know it's. Oh, go ahead, michael, and then I'll comment.

Professor Michael Salter:

I mean just to jump off from this. You know I work in child abuse and you know in 2008, I did a project looking at the experience of women with a history of child sexual abuse in alcohol and drug treatment, because it's very well understood that often alcohol and drug use is a way of self-medicating trauma, medicating trauma. And every woman who we interviewed in rehab or detox had not only been sexually abused but literally every woman had experienced domestic violence and sexual assault in adulthood. And then when we spoke to the professionals, they said to us of course, of course, all of our clients have been sexually abused. Of course all of our clients have experienced domestic violence and sexual assault. And for that group of women, that particular cohort, as it were, you know they weren't protected as kids. We see the onset of self-harm, eating disorders, really vulnerable behaviours in early puberty. They're then targeted by really predatory men once they're teenagers and so on and so forth. I don't see what a respectful relationships intervention is going to do for that girl. She needed we failed her when we didn't protect her as a child. She needed much more intensive therapeutic support as a teenager. And, as Jess said, actually you know programs that work with that group of girls. They have fantastic success, they turn their lives around and they ensure a range of better life outcomes for her, but also for her kids.

Professor Michael Salter:

I'll tell you the story of a young man who I know, you know, grew up in family and sexual violence removed, taken into foster care, abused in foster care, exited foster care at the age of 18. His behaviour is not illegal, but it's sexually inappropriate, right. He has a clearly dysregulated sexual behavioural pattern. It is only a matter of time before he hurts somebody. No services, there's no services for him at all. There's nowhere for him to go to actually sit down with a therapist and say I haven't done anything wrong yet, but I'm probably going to.

Professor Michael Salter:

He then gets a payout because of all of the sexual abuse in foster care, gets targeted by a bikie gang who knows where he is now? I don't, but I would be very, very concerned about a female partner and any kids that he has in that relationship. So you know, the prevention intervention says we will turn the trajectory of this kid. And let's be clear, this is intergenerational trauma. Why was he raised so poorly and removed? Because his parents were abused. Or why were his parents abused? Probably their parents were abused right, and so the idea that a respectful relationships curriculum in and of itself is going to take a cohort like this and turn their lives around and prevent the onset of violence, it's just not convincing.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

I think there's a couple of other challenges inherent in formulating the response, and that is that we've formulated the responses around arrest and judicial processes, and the fact of the matter is is that if we were to arrest every single person engaging in family violence, every single person engaging in sexual violence, we would grind to a halt and our judicial system would be overrun with people. We can't actually do it. And so, with that knowledge, with that awareness, knowing that the social problem is so prevalent, knowing that the health impacts to our communities and our countries is very high because of the trauma and the abuse and the violence, knowing that the cost is tremendously high, and we would be much better suited to create a range of responses that are really within the purveyorship of government services. It's our responsibility we're the adults in the room, not that it's some child's responsibility to change the environment in themselves and in their family of origin where they're experiencing violence and nobody's intervening in it. Not when police and law enforcement services arrest victims still because they're confused about who's the perpetrator and who's the victim.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And not when we have such systemic problems with victim blaming and creating more vulnerabilities for people who have been abused and traumatized, and you know this thought that family separation is a solution for intergenerational trauma is one of the most ridiculous beliefs ever, because family separation, though it may keep a child from immediately being murdered if there's a very severe situation, is not going to improve the long-term safety and stability of a child, and that's been shown in research over and over and over again. In very few cases it will. So I just you know. I think that part of it is the way that we've framed the responses that we're willing to do and who believes they have responsibility when they encounter a family or a child who's being abused, because a lot of people can just throw their hands up and say this is not my job, it's not my job to talk to this parent, it's not my job, I don't have the skills, I don't know how, I don't even have the words, I have no mandate. I have no mandate. I have no mandate.

Jess Hill :

It's very difficult, oh, totally, and you hear this from young survivors and I'm writing something. You know I'm pretty extensive on this at moment and so I've been talking to a lot of people and you know one young survivor advocate is saying that you know you'd reach out to a family violence service, for example, as a young teenager and if you don't have a protected parent with you, sorts of advice you get is like call kids helpline and they're like but kids helpline can't come to my house and help me pack my things and get out of a situation in which I fear being killed. You know, like there's this and and so many kids who are surveyed um in studies in australia will talk about this. It's like, you know, when I needed help, they gave me counseling, and one young woman says it so well, it's like you know deep breaths aren't helping me do shit, babe.

Jess Hill :

Like I need someone to come to my house, pack my shit and help me get out and then give me a safe place to live, and I'm like that's exactly what you need, but we don't. We don't offer that for exactly the reason you're saying ruth. It's like oh well, oh, you're a child, I that, that's not. That's. That's like not in my mandate, um, I only do this circumscribed set of actions. So really sorry, but you're just going to have to find someone else to help you with that, and there is not someone else.

Jess Hill :

That's the point and when that child comes to an agency like the one that we have here, like centrelink or somewhere where they think, oh, that's a government agency that's supposed to support people. You know it's incumbent on those agencies to be like this child has surfaced. If I don't offer some practical help or hold this child's hand through the process, this child may decide not to speak up about it for years. You know, I mean, that's the reality we see with victim survivors. They surface from underground, they disclose, they seek help or they, you know, try to solve a problem when no one helps them solve that problem, so often they just go right back underground because it just feels like there's no one. That can help me get out of this.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Yeah.

David Mandel:

It's really interesting. You know, I think about this and I want to kind of give you a scenario. I think this is a great conversation. I hope our audience is getting a lot from it. You know, what I'm hearing is sort of how do we focus ourselves practically on certain scenarios versus groups of people Maybe a different way to say it Certain scenarios and situations, right, or constellation of factors, and what I'm hearing you say, and I kind of want to give you, kind of ask you which one you'd pick if you'd have to pick the resources.

David Mandel:

This is kind of putting you in the position of government to make choices. You know that are because resources aren't limited. But I said to you okay, we want to create intervention, support, financial counseling, support for moms and kids who have left abusive relationships, to intervene, because we know those kids are at higher risk of repeating the cycle, either as a victim or perpetrator. So let's wrap ourselves around those kids, including the boys who may be a greater. So that's one choice you get to pick. So you get to pick one of the three.

David Mandel:

The second one is that you look at men coming into and this is based on research men coming into medical practices who acknowledge that they've been violent to a partner in the last year. And the research I go back to, one study said 13.5% of men were willing to admit ona piece of paper that they'd been violent to a partner, even severely, in the last year. So you wrap around that, right that and sort of. You do some sort of intervention in that medical setting. Or you look at new fathers. You know, we know the perinatal period is a really dangerous period and so we wrap ourselves and really say we're going to commit, because home visitors, health visitors are called different things in different places. Those mostly target women and kids. They've ignored men. So if I had to ask you to pick one of those three to invest in and I'm asking each of you because your answer may be different, Michael where would you choose to invest?

Professor Michael Salter:

if you're looking at prevention strategies, yeah, I mean, I think the inter, I think working with traumatized kids for me is going to get the biggest bang for your buck, just in terms of I'm sorry, just return on investment.

Professor Michael Salter:

I think that's where it really needs to be, however and no academic can answer a question in any short period of time but that piece around family support is so critical Getting in with first-time dads, especially the first time a man has a child, because we know that, you know, 95% of those guys want to be a good dad and often they don't want to be the type of father their father was. So if we can connect with him and support him to be a good dad, and even if he's not motivated to be a good partner, because he may have already initiated domestic violence, for example, but often they have a higher level of motivation around being a good dad so I think that early intervention piece and the family support piece is really critical, yeah, I mean not to be boring, but I do agree with Mike on that front, and you know like I sat on a government panel which was, you know, tasked with doing exactly that, you know, delivering priority areas for government to invest in.

Jess Hill :

Now, we did not keep those areas narrow, in fact, we identified 21, including all three of what you just suggested, and I guess the health sector, given that it's so huge in terms of its reach and in terms of who it employs that was a big focus for us that you need to activate that health sector to do exactly what you've just said, david, and that's been identified. On coronial reports. You know that we need to train GPs and we need to train psychologists, and I think it's so. There's two points I want to make in addition to saying yes, the work with adolescents and earlier is, I think, should be prioritized.

Jess Hill :

Um, the second part is that in areas particularly around child protection and child removal and what is so often the pipeline into the youth justice system, we are spending an inordinate amount of money on things that not only do not work but actually further entrench trauma and create more likelihood of offending down the line. So we had a report here in New South Wales, I think it was last year called Cage to Cage and it was basically showing that there were hundreds of kids who'd been removed from their families. They couldn't find somewhere for them to live so they were being accommodated in Airbnbs, in caravans, in hotels, looked after by staff from labour hire companies on rotating shifts. That was costing on average almost a million dollars a year for each child it was some children it was costing two million. Now, as the youth advocate for New South Wales explained to me when she was first looking at this, it's like the most expensive boarding school in Sydney costs $75,000 a year. So you know, like when you think about the amount of money that we are spending on removing children and putting them into deeply traumatic environments where they do not have anybody actually caring for them or providing any sense of familial sense or familiarity, that's for me, if we were to change our approach to child protection and, instead of going in with the immediate removal paradigm in child protection workers' heads, if they were to say look, we're going to give you the amount of money that, instead of what it would cost to remove this child, which might be about $400,000, we're going to give you $100,000 for this child to intervene, which might be that you need that family needs some help to come into the house a couple of hours a day.

Jess Hill :

It might be all sorts of things that could relieve stress in that household, and one child protection worker did that in New South Wales. She got $2 million in a slush fund which was supposed to go towards emergency accommodation, and instead she took 10 families who were at immediate risk of child removal and decided to spend that money on trying to make their situations better. And what she found was that nine out of the 10 families the children did not need to be removed. And one of those families was an Aboriginal grandmother who was having you know, who had early dementia. She was caring for her disabled grandchild who needed, you know, medication and obviously needed to be fed. The grandmother was forgetting to do that on a regular basis.

Jess Hill :

That child was going to be removed and instead they paid $70,000 or $80,000 a year to bring a nurse in to do the work the grandmother couldn't do and the child stayed at home. So like resources are definitely finite and we can't just creating this situation of insatiable demand, right, but there are so many areas we waste money on that if we were, and we can't just creating this situation of insatiable demand. But there are so many areas we waste money on that. If we were to take a much more domestic violence, informed trauma, informed child informed approach, we would save money.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Right, and I just want to double down on that just with some cranky survivor hot takes, because we're at the hour and we could talk to you for another hour but we might lose some listeners. So right now we are spending trillions of dollars globally telling people that violence is wrong and we are not backing it up with accountability and with concrete action in supporting people to adopt better behaviors and to also learn better relationship skills, and we are not backing it up with professional or system accountability either. So we have a couple of impediments to the messaging we've adopted, that we've spent money on, that we've invested in, and so the other thing, the other impediment to that is professional victim blaming and the way that our systems are set up so they don't feel responsible for the ultimate outcome of the care of that child or that family. They're not linked to that ultimate outcome. They have very limited mandates. So they can say we achieved our mandates, but at the end of the care of that child or that family, they are not linked to that ultimate outcome. They have very limited mandates. So they can say we achieved our mandates but at the end of the day, that child could still be unsafe, that person could still be unsafe and that is not an acceptable expenditure of government money and resources. To still spend that money and have zero accountability and knowledge that the person's situation was bettered, we're not being efficient.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

So Cranky Survivor is all on board with this white paper that we need to do better around practice and accountability within the systems and as governments and communities we have a responsibility. We've said that we're going to deliver certain types of social care. Now some governments are reneging on that and saying we're just not going to deliver social care at all. You guys are on your own. But in countries where there's a commitment to invest in the long-term stability and well-being of our communities, we actually do need to prove that the money we're spending is having the impact that we say it's having, and that's not happening Globally. That's not happening. So that's my hot take we need to change some of that stuff.

David Mandel:

You know, before we kind of move to wrapping up and asking you guys what you want the takeaways to be, I have a story that came to me recently.

David Mandel:

That kind of thing illustrates what you're both talking about, about the difference between raising awareness and actually creating interventions that are preventing of further violence, whether it's with somebody who's already been violent or preventing somebody from becoming violent.

David Mandel:

And it was somebody who was talking about somebody who was stalking an ex-partner and wasn't willing to accept that the relationship was over.

David Mandel:

And basically and so this won't work everywhere but they had a group of male friends and basically the male friend said you're going to stay with each one of us until this situation is better, which means you're going to come into my home like David's home for this week and Joe's home next week, and then Jim's home the week afterwards, and we're going to sit with you and when you start being like, I'm going to call her or you know, we're going to kind of basically confront you and say that's not good, that's not cool, and basically they showed up for this man and he eventually got it that the relationship was over, that he shouldn't be doing those behaviors and stopped and she was safer, and that's. That's a different. That's not a men's behavior change program. That's a community intervention focused on not just raising this guy's primary prevention, secondary prevention, tertiary prevention across the board. Let's really focus on stopping the behavior versus just measuring that attitudes have changed Right.

Jess Hill :

So that feels so important. That's the dichotomy, and if I was like to split it into a sort of binary, is that the primary prevention approach to date has been very much about calling out, calling out bad behaviour, calling out sexist jokes, intervening where you hear this bad behaviour and telling your mates that's not on. What we're, I guess, advocating for is calling in. You know the difference between calling in, not sort of suggesting that there's this, you know population of men who are completely absolved of any bad behaviour. They're the men that you have to aspire to be like, but to say that you know what. We are all in this soup together and we've all done things we're not proud of and we don't have to. There's no perfectness to aspire to. We need to work together to be the best people that we possibly can be and to understand that. You know we're not there. There.

Jess Hill :

There's not some sort of realm where, like in in prevention work, you have this image of a river where primary prevention is directed towards the people who are standing on dry land early directed towards the people who are standing on dry land, early intervention, the people who, like you know, you're going to throw life rafts to people who are already in the river and then the you know responses for people who are drowning and the ambulance is right at the bottom of the river.

Jess Hill :

Now, I think that's just a false understanding of how violence affects our society and affects us intergenerationally, and the fact that actually, if we're going to use a river analogy, then it's better to just describe it as a floodplain, and we're kind of most of us are already knee deep in that floodplain in one way or another. There is no pristine before space, and that's, I think, where what we're trying to sort of push forward was like don't imagine that we can sort of speak from this hygienic space where you can. You've got this tabula rasa that you can build all these, you know, the right kinds of behaviors and attitudes onto. You are coming to people who have a lived experience of violence, whether it be just through the society, through the intergenerations or directly in their own families, and we just need to be much more realistic about who we are as a society and how to speak to each other.

David Mandel:

So we would. We'd like to wrap up, and I, whenever we wrap up, I have 10 other things I'd love to be talking about, and, and and with wealthy. We'd love to wrap up and I, whenever we wrap up, I have 10 other things I'd love to be talking about, and, and and with both of you. We'd love to talk to you again, but I'm going to ask each one of you. I'll start with Michael. You know what do you want professionals to take away who are listening to this podcast? Take away from this.

Professor Michael Salter:

Well, One of the things that I really learnt over the last 12 months, particularly in the response to the paper, is that there is a kind of an unhelpful dichotomy between the right way to prevent violence and effective ways to prevent violence, and sometimes we've seen people double down on what they think is the right way to prevent violence, even though all of the evaluation data shows that it's not working, but they're doing it in the right way. The evaluation data shows that it's not working, but they're doing it in the right way. And some of the criticism that Jess and I have gotten is that we're arguing for effective ways to prevent violence, but ways that don't always accord with like a pre-existing set of convictions. For me, the prerogative, the moral prerogative, is to prevent one more victim. That's the moral prerogative. One more victim, one more death.

Professor Michael Salter:

However, we do that, I don't really care, you know, within a certain moral parameter. If it's cost effective, if it's feasible, then I think we have a moral obligation to do it. And if that means targeting the provision of alcohol, if that means targeting gambling as a form of financial abuse, if that means targeting the mass, a form of financial abuse, if that means targeting the mass availability of pornography on the internet, then we have to throw all of those things into the mix and I think sometimes the criticism Jess and I have got is even if that works, it's the wrong way to go about it. I think the right way to go about prevention is anything, within certain parameters, that protects women and children.

David Mandel:

And I know this hasn't been the audience necessarily for your paper. But, michael, if you were going to speak to survivors and what you will, because we get survivors we even get survivors who are listening with their kids. You know, we've heard this as we've traveled around the world Do you have a takeaway for them?

Professor Michael Salter:

One of the really powerful things that's totally transformed the field for us in the last 20 years has been the pressure from survivors to be heard. When I started doing this work 20 years ago, there was no obligation from policymakers and decision makers to listen to survivors. Bruce talked about accountability and I think that is also really critical for the survivor voice, because it's only survivors that can tell us how did this intervention feel. How did it feel when police came to my door? How did it feel when I reached out for mental health care? How did it feel when I went to the general practitioner and disclosed what was happening at home? And that information is so critical.

Professor Michael Salter:

I don't think in the system side we've actually figured out the right way to feed that information back in and make sure that there's that system accountability, because if survivors feel betrayed and let down and helpless, that is a fundamental failing that will perpetuate the cycle of violence. So I think for survivors out there it's about saying you know, there is so much has changed in the last 20 years and one of those really positive developments is there is now pressure on decision makers to listen to survivors. But I think we've still we've all got that collective work to do to really keep feeding that back in. So we've got systems that aren't just working effectively according to key performance indicators, but they're places where people feel really safe and comfortable and I think at the moment, with all due respect to your professional listeners, I think often it feels quite cold and bureaucratic.

David Mandel:

Okay, Jess, the same questions to you, and then we'll wrap up.

Jess Hill :

Can I start with speaking to survivors and I say this as survivors and practitioners so often overlap, and really the last 10 years of my work in this has been driven by their voice, or their voices, because they're not a homogenous group and they want different things.

Jess Hill :

But everything that I've done, everything I've advocated for, whether it be coercive control laws, whether it be changes to the um, it's all been backed by what they've told me, um, and what they are desperately hoping will change.

Jess Hill :

I think that and we wrote this in the paper that single mothers are essentially the unofficial reserve army of prevention agents in this country and around the world and they do so much work with their kids to try to prevent them either perpetrating violence or experiencing it themselves in the future, and so often that work is unsupported, um, I think where what michael says about the last 20 years, and particularly, I'd say, the last 10 years, and Rosie Batty in Australia really kick-started a focus on victim-survivors in a way that had only been at the margins before.

Jess Hill :

But what we're starting to see in the last two or three years is young victim-survivors finding a safe way to have their voices heard, and it's really not until we find a way to elevate the voices of those young victim survivors and start making visible their experiences, that people will start to really grapple with what we haven't done to help them so far and why we're seeing rates of gendered violence go up among the youngest generation, who has been the primary target of our prevention efforts for the past decade. So that's what I think it's. Obviously it's more complex and you have to be very careful talking to young victim survivors, but there are safe ways to do it and when it's done, it's explosive. These young people have so much to teach us and they have a clarity and often a moral clarity that can be lacking as we grow older and become adults.

David Mandel:

Right. Well, that is amazing and I'm going to walk away with that image of the survivors being with the Reserve Army in prevention, and that's one of my takeaways. So I want to thank you both, jess and Michael, for writing the paper, for being on the show, and, jess, this is your second or third time, I think you may be our top guest, so thank you again for doing the show.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Do I get a badge? You get a certificate. I'm going to get you some flair.

David Mandel:

But thank you both and you all have been listening to Partner with a Survivor and I'm still David Mandel, CEO of the Safer Together Institute.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And I'm still Ruth Ramundo Mandel, and you can check out some of the trainings online to improve your practice and help you to learn skills to engage with perpetrators as parents, especially when children are involved, and you can go to academysafeandtogetherinstitutecom to do that. And then also, just to let everyone know, we have a our conference coming up here soon in Melbourne, the course of control and children's conference, and we really encourage you. You know we have made sure that you can attend that, both in person but also virtually, because virtual attendance is equity when, especially in a big country with lots of bush area.

David Mandel:

So, yes, and it's recorded, which means if you're overseas and you don't want to get up in the middle of the night to listen or view the live stream, you can check out that recording for up to 12 months.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

One of the best uses of the recorded conference I've ever heard was a mom who contacted us. She said she had just had a baby and she was a worker and she was going to be watching that conference while she was on leave and she was really excited about it. So please join us any way you can, and we're out. We are out.