Managing director of Ebono Institute and major sponsor of The Generator, Geoff Ebbs, is running against Kevin Rudd in the seat of Griffith at the next Federal election. By the expression on their faces in this candid shot it looks like a pretty dull campaign. Read on
When he came in with the shovel I realised he was going to kill me. He told me so. If Sammy had not blocked him at the doorway, I would be dead now.
I took the second of hesitation to jump across the kitchen table and run out the front door. I owe you Sam.
I abandoned my four little children. It was no use dying for them. They were his. He was not going to kill them. Though some dads do. Imagine. Imagine that.
I have no family here. We had met backpacking through Australia. I am an immigrant.
A part-time, registered nurse, I did not earn enough money to feed and house them. I was trapped.
The violence, though, was unbearable.
I felt embarrassed to tell anyone. I told lies. My medical colleagues believed the lies despite their training. It was easier. My best friends know all about my sex life but never the beatings.
A well-educated, professional woman does not get beaten up by her husband. What a naïve, elitist, stuck-up girl was I.
The police helped stem the flood of violence. My parents helped me buy a house. I started my own life and now this.
He did not have a key, so he raged outside until he found an implement that could smash the door and then me.
I was not going to let this bastard kill me. I had to break the cycle. But I did not know how.
An outsider, I did not know about court orders, ousting, women’s shelters or other agencies.
They hid me, and my children, for three months: While tempers subsided and I got my life on track. If it weren’t for that, I would be dead now. I owe you all.
The author wishes to remain anonymous. She still struggles with the injustices of a system designed to protect the status quo and the men, at all levels, who abuse it to protect their fellows.
Daisy Lola is a blogger and activist for ending rape-culture online
When it comes to rape culture and its relationship to domestic violence, we unfortunately have a lot to talk about in 2014.
From August’s biased news reports regarding adult entertainment superstar Christy Mack’s brutal assault at the hands of her MMA fighter ex-boyfriend Jonathan ‘War Machine’ Koppenhaver; to the erasure of black womens’ role in the Ferguson, Missouri protests; to earlier this year when 22-year-old Elliot Rodger killed two female students at his university in Isla Vista.
Fueled by an online community of Men’s Rights Activists, or ‘MRAs’ who maintain the notion that his victims deserved to be attacked because of Rodger’s continued status as a virgin.As a young woman around Elliot Rodger’s age, I have no doubt that I am also within the age bracket of a number of these MRAs, who exist predominantly within password-protected communities on the Internet. It is terrifying to think that as a society, our median age of ignorance is gradually lowering itself to centre around men in their twenties.
Men whose parents were likely around for second-wave-feminism. Men who have the entire world at their fingertips underneath a Google search bar. Instead these men have chosen not ignorance, but active aggression and hatred towards women.
Many members of older generations will pass this online war against women off as unimportant. This however is in no small part due to a lack of understanding when it comes to just how much of our lives are now lived vicariously through computer screens.Rodger’s manifesto My Twisted World, a 141-page rant he posted online, detailed his misogynistic nature and homicidal desires towards women. It then becomes apparent just how quickly this dangerous mindset can jump from a laptop screen right down to the barrel of a smoking gun.
Men’s Rights Activism is a misnomer. The vast majority of MRAs are wholly aware of the privileges men hold within our society. Their efforts and emotions are largely focussed not on raising their own position, but on lowering those of women. Using women, even those in their own lives, as scapegoats for their personal failures and emotional trauma.
At the end of the day, what this comes down to is personal unhappiness. Elliot Rodger couldn’t come to terms with his identity as a young man who had never kissed a woman. Instead of trying to change himself, he lashed out against women – in no small part because the MRA community provided him with an outlet to do so.
The women Elliot Rodger shot dead had never personally rejected his sexual advances, but to him that wasn’t the point. An unfathomably large group of his peers had been encouraging the idea that women operated as a hive mind of sexual torment since his teenage years. Whether they thought he would ever go as far as he did is often brought into question, but it shouldn’t be. Similarly, the fact that he killed men as well does nothing to ameliorate his hatred of women. Ideas do not exist within the vacuum of the Internet, and neither does violence against women.
Like it or not, this online ‘activism’ is becoming more and more prevalent, with various subcultures latching onto Men’s Rights to further their personal agendas. Last month, MMA fighter Jonathan ‘War Machine’ Koppenhaver tried his absolute hardest to beat his ex-girlfriend Christy Mack to death, becoming the catalyst for a media shitstorm centring around the notion that the former adult star brought the attack upon herself by becoming involved with a man with a violent history.
This isn’t about men’s rights, this is about removing women’s bodily autonomy and the freedom to make our own choices; it’s about creating a culture where, when abused women do speak up, their stories are shrouded in doubt and suspicion.
I was raised in the 90s, and was expressly taught that my body was my own, that no-one was to touch it without my permission and I should scream and shout if anyone hurt me. As we continue to move backwards regarding our treatment of domestic abuse survivors, I wonder, what will the parents of my generation tell their little girls?
Across Australia, on average, one woman is killed every week by a violent partner or ex-partner.
In Queensland this year, to date, domestic violence has been responsible for 18 deaths.
The most dangerous time for women and children attempting to leave violent partners is at the time of separation; of those women killed, it is usually within three months of their leaving the relationship. Women’s refuges provide a safe space for women and children who need to escape from persistent and dangerous perpetrators.
Women’s refuges in Australia have a proud legacy and wealth of experience and skills in working with women and children who have experienced violence and abuse. Refuge workers have a well developed understanding of the nature and impact of violence against women and children. They understand that women are not to blame for the violence perpetrated against them and that rather, it is part of a much wider systemic problem.
Refuges provide more than just a bed. They provide 24 hour support to vulnerable and isolated women who may be facing harassment and pursuit by controlling ex-partners.
Domestic violence refuges support women to obtain Domestic Violence Protection Orders (DVPO) and address the issue of lack of police response to breaches of DVPOs. They provide advocacy to enable access to housing, healthcare, independent income and relief from debt caused by DV.
Refuges provide assistance to women whose visas make them ineligible for social security support or public housing and assist with immigration issues. They provide advocacy in relation to children with Child Protection authorities’ involvement due to domestic violence, assistance to deal with continuing violence post separation, including the abuse of children on contact visits.
Further, refuges offer assistance to women whose DV experience is compounded by drug and alcohol issues, mental health issues or intellectual/physical disabilities which make it more difficult to establish a life free from violence.
Women’s refuges aim to be responsive to the needs of women whose lives have been affected by domestic violence and therefore will attempt to provide advocacy to access everything needed to build an independent and violence free life.
In addition to advocating on behalf of individuals, women’s refuges have a strong tradition of lobbying and campaigning for law reform and improved institutional responses to domestic violence (e.g. CentreLink, Police, Immigration, Child Safety etc.), as well as providing community education about domestic violence. From their activism and inspiration, other specialist domestic violence services have emerged, laws have been established and lives have been saved.
Women’s House opened the first domestic violence refuge in Queensland in 1974. It has a public office in Woolloongabba and provides services for women who have experienced domestic violence and sexual assault.
Women’s House is outraged at the recent loss of many valuable services for women and children, in particular, domestic violence refuges in New South Wales. Staff at Women’s House believe that women’s refuges in Queensland will be put out to tender next year.
Women’s refuges were put out to tender earlier this year in NSW. This process saw the redirection of funding away from smaller specialist domestic violence refuges to big generic religious charities (which, as the recent Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has revealed, have an appalling record in relation to survivors of violence).
These organisations are able to submit cheaper tenders by cutting specialised support available to women and children. Over 20 women’s refuges have been defunded. In stripping funding from specialist domestic violence refuges, the NSW government has put the lives of women and children at risk.
Without specialist domestic violence support, women and children are less likely to leave abusive relationships and far more likely to return to abusive relationships, thus compounding the devastating effects that violence has on their lives. Ironically, for a government focused on cutting costs, this will, in the longer term, result in greater costs to statutory services including police, health departments and social services.
For the sake of women and their children who are desperate to break free from abuse, Women’s House urges the Queensland government not to follow the course taken by NSW. It is essential that the Queensland government funds refuges that have a specialised focus on women and children and a diversity of services which meet the variety of needs required by those affected by violence.
Womens House is a cooperative that runs Women’s Shelters in and around Woollongabba in Brisbane’s inner South.
1804: that was the year the world population reached one billion, after hundreds of thousands of years of human existence. Today, just a couple hundred years later, we’re primed to hit 8 billion.
It’s well-documented that humanity’s numbers have surged exponentially—and relatively recently. A chart from populations scientist Joel Cohen’s book, How Many People Can the Earth Support?, makes that startlingly clear:
But what about the foundations of that boom? The Industrial Revolution was at its height when we hit the one billion mark, and that’s partly why it’s often cited as the spike’s origin. Seismic changes in agriculture, manufacturing, technology, and communication facilitated unprecedented growth in average life expectancy and in the world’s population.
But a new study in PLOS One argues that the Industrial Revolution’s advances are merely proximate reasons our numbers started to scale. Aaron Jonas Stutz, an anthropologist at Emory University, points to 1,500 to 2,000 years ago as when the essential groundwork to support our growth was laid.
“If you dig further in the past,” Stutz told Emory University, “the data suggest that a critical threshold of political and economic organization set the stage around the start of the Common Era. The resulting political-economic balance was the tipping point for economies of scale: It created a range of opportunities enabling more people to get resources, form successful families, and generate enough capital to transfer to the next generation.”
Stutz created a new population growth trajectory model that differed from previous models, in that it accounted for how consumption costs (i.e., amount of resources used and how that degraded the environment) influence carrying capacity elasticity (how many people the Earth can support) over time. Stutz’s model is a variation on one by Cohen, which posits population growth is determined by an elastic carrying capacity.
Or, to draw from Nathanael Johnson’s recent post, there’s a global pie, and a growing number of people. How many people can eat up that pie (population growth) depends on how we divvy it up (elastic carrying capacity): We make a bigger pie (i.e., we increase resource availability through scientific advances), we set out fewer forks (try to reduce population), or better table manners (demand a more equitable society).
Stutz used extensive demographic and archaeological data to show consumption patterns began shifting around the dawn of the Common Era, in ways that reflected changing political-economic mores.
“The increasingly complex and decentralized economic and political entities that were built up around the world from the beginning of the Common Era to 1500 CE created enough opportunities for individuals, states and massive powers like England, France and China to take advantage of the potential for economies of scale,” Stutz said.
For similar stories, visit the Climate Change Topic Guide
Enjoy the pause in global warming while it lasts, because it’s probably the last one we will get this century. Once temperatures start rising again, it looks like they will keep going up without a break for the rest of the century, unless we cut our greenhouse gas emissions.
Masahiro Watanabe of the University of Tokyo in Japan and his colleagues have found that, over the past three decades, the natural ups and downs in temperature have had less influence on the planet’s overall warmth. In the 1980s, natural variability accounted for almost half of the temperature changes seen. That fell to 38 per cent in the 1990s and just 27 per cent in the 2000s.
Instead, human-induced warming is accounting for more and more of the changes from year to year, says Watanabe. With ever-faster warming, small natural variations have less impact and are unlikely to override the human-induced warming.
“The implication is that we will get fewer hiatus periods, or hiatus periods that last for a shorter period,” says Wenju Cai at the CSIRO in Melbourne, Australia, who wasn’t involved in the work.
Stop it
According to another recent study, the current hiatus may be our last for a while. Matthew England and his colleagues at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, tried to quantify the chance of another pause. “It’s looking to us that it’s probably going to be the last one that we’ll see in the foreseeable future,” says England.
Using 31 climate models, they showed that if emissions keep rising, the chance of a hiatus – a 10-year period with no significant warming – drops to virtually zero after 2030. The current hiatus will probably be followed by rapid warming as the heat trapped in the ocean escapes back into the atmosphere, so we are unlikely to get another decade of no warming before 2030. England believes it could be another century or more before the next hiatus.
But that could change if we slow greenhouse gas emissions now. If we can reach peak global emissions by 2040, the temperature rise will slow by the end of the century, and hiatus periods will become more likely.
Hiatuses can also be triggered by volcanic eruptions that spew particles into the air, reflecting sunlight away from Earth, as happened after the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption. But even if a volcano erupts it will make little difference. “After 2030, the rate of global warming is likely to be so fast that even large volcanic eruptions on the scale of Krakatoa are unlikely to drive a hiatus decade,” says team member Nicola Maher.
Daily update: ACT’s Corbell to rally states on renewable targets
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ACT’s Corbell to rally states on renewable target; Australia opens largest solar farm, but solar future clouded; FRV says Australia solar pipeline worthless if RET changed; Interview with Simon Corbell; Coal industry should pay for costs to human health; Which will be first Oz Zero Net energy town?; With solar and storage, do energy markets need regulation?; Electricity grid go the way of sharing economy?; and how the IPCC is sharpening its language on climate change.
ACT Energy Minister Simon Corbell intends to rally state governments to implement their own renewable energy policies should the Abbott government adopt the ‘dismal” recommendations of the Warburton review
When he came in with the shovel I realised he was going to kill me. He told me so. If Sammy had not blocked him at the doorway, I would be dead now.
