It was both heartening and saddening to see Wendy Tuohy’s great article in The Age/SMH on Tue 4 June. Heartening because it cites evidence from the Ten to Men study that you’re less likely to be a violent man toward your partner if you have (or had) a good dad, and good supports, and aren’t depressed or suicidal.
It’s not rocket science, but it is science, and it backs up what clinicians and researchers at Australian Fatherhood Research Consortium have known from listening to dads and their loved ones for years.
And that’s what’s saddening, is that we have known this all along, while family after family is traumatised by violence, while platitude after platitude is voiced by powerbrokers, and while article after interview after reel after meme points the finger at the brokenness and toxicity of men.
All along, while we have known from experience and reflection what grows safe and respectful men, men have continually been defined only by what they should not be:
Violent. Absent. Toxic.
This article tells us what they should be: Supported. Well-treated for mental health conditions. And well-cared for from the outset by their dads.
Granted, the article also includes disturbing upward trends in reporting of family violence by men, but that only adds urgency to the need to rethink the blame and shame approach that so clearly isn’t working.
Yes, men need to be held accountable. But what if they could hold themselves accountable because from boyhood onwards they have felt held?
What if we really could reduce family violence through this link to men’s and boys’ developmental and adult mental health needs?
Again, it’s not rocket science.
Start early. Make antenatal care an essential thing for dads to be part of. Appoint a Dads Worker for every Maternity Unit. Provide non-hilarious amounts of Paternity Leave that Emma Walsh would approve of. Rename Maternal and Child Health to include dads. Screen dads as well as mums as part of universal care, for their social support/isolation as well as mental health.
Run more great initiatives like Dads Group and SMS4dads and support other early life and mental health orgs like PANDA, ForWhen, Gidget Foundation, Tweddle Child and Family Health Service, Ngala, Centre of Perinatal Excellence, Beyond Blue and Bears Of Hope to keep developing their excellent dad-specific programs.
Work closely with Movember and Minderoo Foundation and other much-appreciated charities, but don’t expect charity to plug gaps – we won’t need charities if we get society properly paid for by us.
Finally, run programs to schools targeting boys’ wellbeing, the responsibility of having a man’s body, and the hidden risks of being male, alongside the wonders of it.
You prevent and relieve male shame that hides us from accountability for our actions, by shining gentle daylight on tender topics. As Brené Brown says, ‘shame dies when stories are told in safe places’.
We must be tender and nurturing as well as insistent on men’s behaviour change: men who harm women are so often hurting within, so many of them having been subject to violence themselves as boys.
It’s no excuse – let’s be clear – but it’s an essential explanation without which we have no hope of addressing the problem of the safety and wellbeing of our country’s women and children.
As this research shows, it’s also a problem – in a different way – of the safety and wellbeing of its men.
Please, enough zero-sum scarcity thinking on this. It’s not either help women and children or help men, it’s all of the above. And there’s no magic, it all has to be paid for. Fund the care of men and women and children, and of course each helps grow the other.
Rocket science it is not.
It’s clearly harder. Rockets into space we seem to be across, more or less.
Family violence, not so much. Not yet.
#psychiatrying
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