Today is national White Ribbon Day, a day when good men and true are asked to make their stand against domestic violence — particularly affecting women — heartfelt, public and unconditional.
It needs to be more than a theoretical commitment. As anyone who has read Christos Tsiolkos' novel The Slap (or watched the serialisation on ABC television) would know, violence is intimately connected with power, ego, frustration and sex, and isn't easily abhorred, or even seen for what it is.
Earlier this week the chief justice of Western Australia, a contemporary of mine at law school and a champion of White Ribbon Day (as of many progressive and small 'l' liberal causes, bless) bemoaned as the major obstacle to eliminating domestic violence, women's reluctance to report it.
There is always, he said, a personal risk for any woman who protests, outside the inner family network, about being slapped, humiliated, micro-controlled or beaten up. The family power grid usually grills the protestor, the traitor, the persecutor, and further relationships fracture.
That's why so many Indigenous women do not complain to police about the thumpings they endure; to avoid family feuds, or police arresting and jailing or maybe even killing their men, leaving them even more impoverished and marginalised.
The Slap is a rather nasty, long and lascivious book, whose eight major characters — who drive the story in chapters of their own — are mostly self-focused, unempathetic and shallow. They reveal little or no insight into the childishness of their own supposedly mature attitudes and choices, yet seem to have focused their adult identities on children.
Far from addressing the issue of whether or not it is ever right for an adult to strike an obnoxious and disruptive toddler, the characters are by and large tellers of their own stories and preoccupations. The novelist and his characters are not in the least interested in the experience, feelings, confusion and furious humiliation of the three-year-old slap-ee, Hugo, with his entirely inappropriate sense of entitlement. They are solely concerned with their own aspirations and compulsive interests.
There is even some unpleasant sado-masochistic domestic violence in the sexual couplings of the principal characters, and a little wife-beating. The wives, sadly, are presented as collaborators in their own submission,