"Violence against women — it's against all the rules" is the name of the adverts broadcast on commercial radio and displayed on the back of buses on behalf of the NSW attorney-general's department.
The campaign is targeted at young men and features high profile sporting personalities, who are quoted as saying: "Sledging a woman: that's verbal abuse." (Michael Slater, Australian cricket team), and "Striking a woman: that's assault." (Dale Lewis, Sydney Swans football player).
Lewis is enthusiastic about the campaign: "It's great to be able to make a difference and put something back into the community."
Yeah, thanks. But the campaign does not argue that abuse of women is wrong. It only argues that it breaks an abstract set of rules which shouldn't be broken by tough-minded men with hair on their chests, however tempting or perhaps even justified such behaviour may seem to them.
The adverts actually reinforce the double standards of sex-role stereotypes. The athletes quoted, despite being described as "non-violent" by figures associated with the project, are associated with a sporting culture which promotes violence. The mainstream media coverage of football, and increasingly cricket, focuses on "highlights" — replays of the most violent incidents of striking, shepherding, marking, sledging and tackling (terms appropriated in the advertisements).
Australian cricket team skipper Steve Waugh has publicly justified sledging (making offensive remarks to an opposing player in order to break their concentration) and journalist Richard Hinds writing in the February 4 Melbourne Age described it as "inventive" and "witty".
Why is it abuse to sledge a woman, but not a man? The answer seems to be that the "sheilas" can't hack it. Because they are more sensitive, different "rules" apply to them.
This is in direct contradiction to the government's own policy, stated in the 1994 NSW government advisory committee report on boys' education, which stated: "The desired outcome is for gender-based stereotypes to be eliminated as a cause of disadvantage for boys and girls."
Sports jargon like sledging and marking are inadequate names for sexual harassment and domestic violence. The abuse of women does not take place on a level playing field. Sexual harassment and domestic violence work to keep women "in their place" and to deny them the same basic freedom of movement that most men take for granted. This abuse is supported by the systemic discrimination and sexist attitudes that women face in the workplace, at school, university and on work for the dole schemes.
It will take more than a hip PR strategy using virile role models to eliminate the oppression of women under capitalism.
It is certainly true that men perpetrate almost all individual violence in society. But this violence cannot be stopped by focussing purely on changing male attitudes, and ignoring the causes of this violence. This approach implies that violent men are just being bastards and can't help it.
Call me a Marxist, but there are structural issues here. Violence against women is caused by the alienation which capitalism produces combined with the promotion of sexist attitudes. It continues because of women's economic dependence on their male partners in the family and male bosses in the workplace.
A real campaign to end violence against women must address the economic inequality which forces women into abusive situations, and tackle sexist views of women. The NSW campaign does neither.
It is offensively superficial in the context of across-the-board cuts to rape crisis centres, women's shelters and counselling, as well as many other women's services. These cuts are making women even more vulnerable to violence, at the same time that this campaign portrays them as weaker than men.
Far from tackling the real problems, this campaign echoes the inane simplicity of Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" to drugs mantra.
I do agree, however, that men should be involved in supporting the women's liberation movement and I hope to see Michael Slater, and all the other feminists in the Australian cricket team, taking action on M1 and fighting for a feminist revolution.
BY NICOLE HILDER
[Nicole Hilder is a member of the socialist youth organisation, Resistance, in Wollongong.]