Abortion extremism in decline, study finds

Posted on November 17, 1999 by Karen Kissane

Fifteen per cent of Australians surveyed believe a woman should be allowed to abort a foetus if it is the “wrong” sex, a survey has found.

Asked if abortion should be permitted if parents wanted a child of the other sex, 6per cent said it should be allowed and 9per cent said it should probably be allowed. And 2per cent said parents should be allowed an abortion in order to choose a child who would be a great athlete or intellectually brilliant.

The figures are based on an analysis of the 1996-97 International Social Science Surveys Australia by researchers from the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research.

The national sample of 2151 people was compared with a sample of 3012 people taken in 1984-85.

Researchers found only 1per cent “definitely” thought abortion should never be available, and a further 2per cent “probably” opposed abortions under all circumstances.

Extremism of both kinds has declined over the past decade, with fewer people holding absolute views for or against abortion.

“Instead of an intractable conflict between entrenched positions pro and con, we see a full spectrum of opinion with the majority near the centre,” said a report on the findings in the Australian Social Monitor.

A big majority said abortion should definitely or probably be allowed in dire circumstances such as danger to the mother’s health (97per cent), pregnancy following rape (92per cent) or strong likelihood of a serious birth defect (88per cent).

Most also supported the availability of abortion in difficult social circumstances such as poverty (69per cent), unwed motherhood (68per cent) or couples wanting no more children (65per cent).

The report said: “Very few Australians think abortions should be prohibited (although many theologians would disagree) but, equally, very few believe that a woman has an absolute right to an abortion (although many feminists and some moral philosophers would disagree).

“Rather, most Australians view abortion as somewhat of a bad thing in itself but justifiable if it avoids something even worse.”

Older people were less opposed to abortion than younger people.

A co-author of the report, Dr Mariah Evans, a senior research fellow with the Melbourne Institute, speculates that people’s views might change as they age and become exposed to more life experiences.

First published in The Age.

Free at last, with little to celebrate MENTAL HEALTH

Posted on November 2, 1999 by Karen Kissane

“JOHN” supposes, rather tiredly, that he should buy a bottle of champagne to celebrate the 14th anniversary of his release from a mental hospital. A man with severe schizophrenia, he was locked up from the ages of 17 until 31 in his home state of Western Australia.

He spent most of those years either being forced to make toys, or sit around aimlessly watching television, watching the world go by. He is now free of the petty cruelties of that institutionalised world, such as the injections from a nurse who liked to blunt needles on a concrete floor before using them.

But he can’t see much reason to celebrate his new life. He spends most of his time sitting in a small, bare housing ministry flat, smoking, his only regular visitor the psychiatric nurse who brings his fortnightly injections.

John is quietly spoken, but looks dishevelled and often scratches himself, a legacy of rashes he caught while sleeping rough. For 11 of his 14 years of “freedom” he wandered homeless on the nation’s highways, sleeping in parks or on roadsides.

His appearance today does not go down well with the locals. “You walk down the street and people call you names,” he says. “You don’t go into places because they say you’re bad for business. One caf owner threatened to put a false charge against me because I used to have a pot of tea, but nothing to eat.”
John does not want his real name used because he fears it could lead to abuse.

He would not want to go back to hospital, but says he is not really happier now than when he was institutionalised. “No, not really,” he says. “They got it all wrong. They just threw everybody out on the streets, and when the community know you have a psychiatric problem, they don’t want to help you at all. Sometimes I think, would I rather be in, or would I rather be out?”

He feels he has too little to show for his 45 years of life. “I should have something of my own, not something I get for free. I used to earn $350 a week as a rouseabout on a sheep station when the wool industry peaked. I could have been a shearer, a wool presser, anything.”

But he sees little hope now of his situation improving. “The medicine makes me very sleepy, low energy. I can’t imagine myself driving a car. I will never be able to understand or know the real me because I’m sedated 12 months of the year.”

Ask him about his symptoms and his manner remains matter-of-fact but he starts telling bizarre stories that, on some level, he recognises as being part of his illness. “I got picked up by a dead person in a ghost truck,” he says. “There’s one between Sydney and Melbourne. I shook his hand and it was freezing, his body was ice cold. He definitely was dead as a doornail.”

Then there are the voices in his head: “They are looking for something,” he says. “They are questioning where we are living, where we should go from here.”

His plans, then? “I don’t know, really. I suppose I should get my act together to buy this bottle of champagne. I don’t know.”

First published in The Age.

Has a well-intentioned policy gone too far? MENTAL HEALTH

Posted on November 2, 1999 by Karen Kissane

MAUREEN O’BRIEN reels off the stories. There was the young man who killed himself by ramming a car into a tree, after support services had been withdrawn because he was considered well enough to manage without them. Her own son, Paul, who had severe schizophrenia, once took a knife to his brother-in-law but was kept in hospital for only three days. Eight hours after Paul was admitted, the hospital rang to tell his mother to come and pick him up, saying: “He’s had a good sleep now.”

O’Brien refused, arguing that her son needed more help to stabilise his mental condition. He was discharged anyway. A week later he tried to kill himself with an overdose.

O’Brien, who is convenor of a support group for carers of schizophrenia sufferers, talks of another mother whose son “was so out of it” that his one bent in life was to kill his father. “The hospital staff … told the father not to come anywhere near him. A new psychiatrist came in on the Friday and the boy was discharged on the Monday. On another occasion this boy had gone on a suicide run and ended up in a four-car pile-up. They had to helicopter four people out.”

It wasn’t meant to be like this. Victoria has been hailed as a national and even world leader in providing modern mental health services. It has moved away from institutionalisation and into community care faster and more fully than anywhere else in Australia.

No one wants a return to the big, isolated psychiatric hospitals in which people were shut away in Dickensian conditions. But, both here and overseas, people are asking whether deinstitutionalisation of people with psychiatric illness has gone too far, depriving some seriously ill people of the intensive help they need.

In Britain, it was not compassion for sufferers but anxiety over public safety that triggered a new look at the issue. There was a public furore after 150 killings in six years by people with mental illness.

A former mental health worker, Jayne Zito, campaigned passionately for policy change after her husband, Jonathan, was stabbed in a tube station in 1992 by a patient with a history of psychosis and violence.

The British Government concluded that “community care” had left too many wandering the streets and sleeping rough. (In Australia, an estimated 25per cent of the homeless have a psychiatric disability.) It promised a network of nursed “safe haven” hostels and more psychiatric beds. But it did not take up advocates’ demands for legislation to give people with mental illness a right to treatment.

Britain’s swing back to a more punitive and custodial mentality disturbs Australian observers, who worry that deinstitutionalisation, there and here, has been blamed for problems that are really due to inadequate resourcing.

The man with paranoid schizophrenia who killed Jonathan Zito because he thought he was a devil “had also knocked on the doors of services begging to be admitted for days before it happened”, according to Bill Healy, head of social work and social policy at LaTrobe University. “That’s an example of an absolutely tragic event that can be distorted out of all proportion and finish up serving frightening political ends, such as the conclusion that we should lock people up.”

Deinstitutionalisation aims to give people the support they need to live in the community. In Victoria, acute care has moved from old psychiatric hospitals to general hospitals. Mobile support teams and emergency teams treat psychiatric patients in their home. Sixty per cent of Victoria’s mental health resources are now allocated to community care compared with 32 per cent in 1992-3. The number of registered clients of services has increased by 40 per cent, and Victoria now spends more per capita on specialist mental health services than other states ($76.20 compared with a national average of $68.78).

Community care dovetails with human rights goals to treat people with mental illness in the least restrictive and stigmatising way possible. Medically and socially, it is better for most patients and their families. But Australian carers say that while the problem used to be that some people with mental illness could not escape hospital, now they often can’t get in, even when they beg for help. Isabell Collins, director of the Victorian Mental Health Awareness Council, knows of people who have slashed their wrists or taken overdoses in order to get a hospital bed. Says one woman who has schizo-affective disorder (a combination of schizophrenia and what used to be called manic depression): “Basically, to get into hospital now, you don’t talk suicide. You talk homicide.”

Many carers say services are so overstretched that “community care” has become code for “saving money by dumping the problem on families”. It is parents and spouses who often now look after someone having a psychotic episode, and they say they often cannot get crisis assessment teams even to visit.

In 1997, The Age reported on Keryn Gordon, 35, who was repeatedly sent home from casualty units after suicide attempts without any psychiatric assessment. Shortly before her death, doctors advised her to stop her medication. Despite family protests, she was released into the care of her elderly parents while going through withdrawal. She held her mother at knife-point before grabbing two carving knives and escaping in a car. Some time later she was admitted to hospital, where she apparently suffocated herself.

Says O’Brien, “The biggest problem is that they don’t listen to carers when they ring. But this is not just like nursing someone who is ill; many times we are dealing with horrific problems that most of us are untrained to deal with.”

Roma Drummond’s son has had schizophrenia for 21 years. She says it is crucial that sufferers get medical help early in an episode of psychosis to try to minimise the damage of an attack. Yet patients and families are often told that the person is not yet ill enough to justify hospital admission. She says it’s a Catch-22. Experienced patients know they are becoming unwell and have enough insight to want help, but the psychiatric teams who act as gatekeepers to hospital beds often say if patients have insight they are not sick enough to justify admission.

Yet Professor Peter Doherty, director of psychiatry at the Alfred Hospital, says acute psychiatric beds are always available in Victoria. If a particular region is full to capacity, it refers patients out to services in another area. Doherty believes carers might misinterpret as bed shortage a refusal to hospitalise that is based on a clinical team’s assessment that admission is not appropriate.

In 1995 the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists called for a moratorium on psychiatric bed closures in Victoria, saying that deinstitutionalisation had gone too far. Today’s president of the college, Dr Jonathan Phillips, says there are still not enough beds.

Phillips says lack of community housing is another major problem. “Where do people live who are deinstitutionalised? Most unfortunately, many will be living in sub-standard boarding houses, others will be living on park benches and others will be in jails.”

Up to 2 per cent of Australians will suffer a psychotic disorder, most commonly schizophrenia. John Farhall, senior lecturer in LaTrobe University’s school of psychological science, has researched Victoria’s switch to community care. Preliminary findings from his joint research with Monash and Melbourne Universities show that the vast majority of those released from long-term hospitalisation into community care units have done well. ” I am absolutely convinced that we have a better system than we used to have,” Farhall says. “But … there’s never been enough money to meet the reasonable needs of people with psychiatric illness, so both before and after deinstitutional-isation there were people who are underserviced.”

Isabell Collins says concentration on only the most basic needs can have tragic consequences. “A young man suicided and I was asked by his parents to look at his file to see if there was anything that indicated that the system had contributed to his death. He was a university student who developed paranoid schizophrenia. He was treatment-resistant; he didn’t respond well to the drugs. As a consequence of the illness he had to stop studying for his degree, he lost his girlfriend and his friends, he became homeless and he couldn’t get a job.

“There was not one single sentence in the whole of his file that would indicate that any member of the clinical team looked at the impact on his life of having this mental illness. When he came into hospital suicidal, the care plan was `Contain, medicate, allow to ventilate (talk about his anxieties)’. Collins says the man was allowed leave from hospital, despite his mother warning that he was suicidal. He walked in front of a tram.

Still, there are people receiving help now who did not before. For psychiatric nurse Graham Doidge, who until recently managed a homeless outreach service in the inner city, community care meant the freedom to conduct his consultations in alleyways, parks and the back seats of cars. His team looked after “Ian”, who was living in a city garden. They left appointment notes in a cup under his favorite park bench and gave him his medication injections in the toilet block. Eventually he began to trust them and they coaxed him into moving to a nearby rooming house.

Letting people out of custodial care is only half the answer. Accepting them into the community might take longer. The Reverend Marie Macdonald, a Uniting Church minister who works with residents of rooming and boarding houses in Kew and Hawthorn, tells of an attempt by a young man with serious mental illness to share one of life’s simple pleasures. “Victor loves cappuccinos. One pension day I saw him mid-morning, dressed in his fineries and on his way down to a local coffee shop to buy `a cappuccino, a coffee scroll and a packet of fags’. He looked really pleased with himself.”

She was surprised to see him again soon afterwards. The cafe owner had told him to come back later, when there were no other customers.

Not all the walls have come tumbling down.

Finding happiness in adjusting to everyday life

PSYCHIATRIC social worker Robyn Humphries had never seen patients like some of those she met on her first day as manager of a service for newly de-institutionalised people. “They were feral,” she says now. “Their appearance, their gait, their grooming – or rather lack of – no eye contact, no verbal communication except for a grunt, didn’t relate to each other at all. Pacing, shouting, wandering; some were defecating inappropriately. I was shocked. I can remember thinking, ‘What have I done?’.”
Four years, a new environment and a change of medication later, most of the former patients have changed for the better, some dramatically. Many of the people she met that first day have “graduated” from the community care unit that Humphries runs into more independent accommodation.

A big factor in their improvement was new anti-psychotic medication. They have also responded well to their new homes. They left large hospitals such as Larundel and Mont Park for the Northern Community Care Unit – small houses and units on a large green block in Preston. The 20 patients have 24-hour supervision by 23 staff. The aim is to stabilise their medical conditions and teach them the skills to live more independently.

“You can see the change in people here,” Humphries says. “They like being more normal, going to the shops and out to the cinema or the bank. The old way was a very artificial way of living.”

“Alex” used to be totally directed by staff because he had little control over his behavior. He had poor hygiene, smoked everything from teabags to rolled-up newspapers and vomited often because he ate out of rubbish bins.

Now he is relaxed and cheerful. He plays the piano accordion, can make eye contact and talk briefly about what he has been doing. After a year-long slow-eating program, he can put down his fork between mouthfuls and control his urge to shovel food. Humphries suspects that in a big, noisy setting he might have grabbed his food quickly to stop others snatching it.

Patients can now choose what to wear and eat and do. And their families look at them differently. “You don’t see them any longer as a mad person in a mad place,” Humphries says.

First published in The Age.

The fall of Kennett: from realpolitik to real politics

Posted on October 23, 1999 by Karen Kissane

THE WORDS “authoritarian” and “Victorian” were a natural pairing long before Jeff Kennett came to embody them in his premiership. He ran the state the way a Victorian-era papa ran his family: rigidly, with no questioning tolerated, no challenge unpunished.

Papa knew best and, for Kennett, anyone who did not accept so was “un-Victorian”. What will Victoria be like with Papa gone?

There will certainly be less political invective to amuse us, but perhaps Steve Bracks’ excited malapropisms will help compensate. He talked at a press conference this week of “garnishing support”, as if he planned to adorn his backers with sprigs of parsley. Decent he may be; smooth he ain’t, at least not yet.

Televisually, Kennett won this week’s performances. He wore better suits than Bracks. He was articulate, assured, and at times graceful (in the athletic sense of the precision with which he aimed rhetorical kicks at various heads during his exit speech).

He continued the smooth sell of what he saw as his Government’s achievements right up to the death knock. This, too, was “Victorian” in the historic sense; that era valued oratory highly, and its middle and upper classes expended a lot of energy on preserving face in public.

Bracks-the-giant-killer is not a traditional papa. He makes quiet, dogged points rather than sweeping pronouncements. He talks about wanting to take people with him. He’s more like a 1990s dad: authoritative rather than authoritarian, trying to balance everyone’s needs, willing to admit he doesn’t know it all but promising that he’s open to learning.

These are not just differences of style. They stem from differences of substance. They point to the way dogmatic realpolitik in this state is about to be replaced by real politics, involving public debate and negotiation and compromise. It will be messier and more uncertain than what has gone before, but it should be more open to human values and – dare I say it? – idealism.

Kennett was not entirely lacking in either. He spared us some of the most socially damaging aspects of the neo-liberal agenda. While he was aggressive and uncompromising about economic policy, he did not inflict on us the punitive preoccupation with “traditional family values” of many of America’s conservative leaders.

He also broke with the traditional right in his passionate support of multiculturalism and immigration and his dislike and condemnation of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation policies. He understood the importance of social cohesion around these issues, and his stance made the lives of many ethnic Victorians a little easier.

But his attempts to run the state as a corporation rather than as a community amounted to an economic experiment that went too far, untrammelled by the oversight of an ethics committee.

The first rule of ethical scientific experimentation is that subjects used in it must not be injured by it. Kennett did not ensure this for many of the Victorians – particularly those in the bush – whose loyalty he demanded throughout the turmoil of his massive downsizings, privatisations and cuts to services.

The second rule of ethical experimentation is that subjects give informed consent to the processes they are about to undergo. Victorians were not warned of the extent of Kennett’s planned revolution before he was elected to Government and, during his premiership, polls indicated that many people opposed privatisation of public utilities and were concerned about the resourcing of schools and hospitals.

For those who loathed him, and they are many, Kennett’s collapse is akin to the fall of the Berlin Wall. There is relief and exhilaration that this huge and apparently insurmountable symbol of division is no more. But, like the German Government, the incoming Labor administration faces a long, hard struggle to rebuild.

Most urgently in need of renovation is the current dispirited belief that we cannot afford to look after each other any more; that economic responsibility necessarily means turfing new mothers out of hospital too early, leaving old people waiting on casualty trolleys and jamming children into overcrowded schools. Economic “success” should not require that we live with two Victorias, one booming and the other a resentful underclass.

Kennett has changed the political landscape in a way that makes it essential for future Labor governments to address fiscal responsibilities. It is up to Bracks to change the political landscape in a way that makes it essential for future Liberal governments to address social responsibilities.

Forget “un-Victorian”. The notion that decency is too expensive is un-Australian.

First published in The Age.

Life on the other side of the wall

Posted on November 17, 1998 by Karen Kissane

Brigid was a legend. She lived in an institution for people with intellectual disability. Staff called her “the devil’s child”; some claimed that a scar on her stomach marked where Satan had entered her. In fact, she was their baby, not the devil’s.

Brigid, 26, had Downs syndrome and had been institutionalised since birth. As an adult she shared a locked unit with 20 other women who had what are euphemistically called “challenging behaviors”.

Brigid’s “challenges” included smearing and throwing faeces, stripping off her clothes and hitting and biting other inmates and staff. She was as brutal to herself as she was to others; she headbanged violently, throwing herself backwards into the wall or forwards on to tables or the floor, and punched and slapped herself.

In an effort to control her biting, authorities had removed her front teeth. Many of the women with whom she lived also had been subjected to this discipline-by-dentistry. It was one of the first things researcher Dr Kelley Johnson noticed about them.

Johnson, a senior lecturer in human services at Deakin University, spent hundreds of hours working in the locked unit in the early 1990s as part of a research project. She wanted to study why people were still kept in large institutions such as this and whether the push for greater rights for people with disabilities had forced such places to change.

Johnson has written about that time in Deinstitutionalising Women, in which she explores the lives of the 21 women in the unit and the way the institution dealt with them in society’s name. (To protect the women’s privacy, she has given them false names and renamed the institution “Hilltop”.)
Her first impressions were of a large room in which the women milled about, aimlessly, all day: “There was no furniture. The noise hit me, a wall of sound … One woman was standing in the centre of the room screaming … Others were shouting. The television was going. Some women walked around the room. Others sat on the floor. Some were undressed. One was naked … I was instantly surrounded by women who wanted to touch me or put their arms around me.”

Then there was “the smell of 27 women living and working in two rooms”. “It was the smell of food distributed in a closed space. It was the underlying smell of urine and faeces and the disinfectant used to clean the floors. It was the smell of breath tainted with drugs. The smell permeated everyone’s hair and clothing.”

Johnson says she abandoned her planned role of impartial observer in the first week to work with the staff. She found it impossible to stand back and not respond to need. “I would come home exhausted, hyper, stressed out,” she recalls.

The women were confined in this way ostensibly because they were unmanageable in a more open environment. But when Johnson searched their files, trying to piece together their histories, she found the original reasons for their incarceration were often undocumented.

The system abused human rights, she says: “Their families were not involved in the decisions around their entrance to a locked unit. There wasn’t one family I interviewed who knew precisely why their relative was placed in that unit.”
There was no regular independent review of individual’s situation to determine whether incarceration could still be justified: “I don’t know of any other group of people who could spend 10 to 15 years locked away somewhere without some sort of review
or questioning.”
Two women had been moved to the unit from other parts of the institution simply because they were thought to be sexually “at risk” of rape or pregnancy; one was suspected of having been abused by a male inmate. And there was no expectation that any of the women could be helped; rather, there was an understanding that they should be controlled. Several staff acknowledged that cramming the women together intensified their problems because they learnt bad habits from each other.
No attempt had been made to discover the causes of the women’s original problem behaviors (such as running away or screaming), and there were no systematic program in place to help them improve. “That was the thing that most devastated me in that unit – the lack of things to do,” Johnson says. “Such incredible boredom, day after day after day.”

By the time the women inmates had been there for some time, she says, it would have been almost impossible to disentangle their original problems from the effects of the environment and the side-effects of medications.

Grim as it sounds, life in the unit was not totally devoid of kindness. The structure of the institution was rigid and controlling, but many of the staff were warm and patient with the women. Some loved even Brigid, for her spirit and humor, although they took care only to accept her kisses when blown from the other side of the room.

“There was always a lot of affection,” Johnson says. “There were massages, there were hugs. It was a very feeling place, in a lot of ways. I have memories of staff sitting with some women who were in pain for hours, just stroking them, trying to make them comfortable.”

Johnson, too, came to see the women’s humanity and individuality, where at first she had seen undifferentiated chaos. She sensed in them a longing to be womanly and live normal lives. “One of the things that really catches at me now was their desperate attempts to match the societal stereotypes of women – to look pretty, to be attractive,” she says. “The women who could use at least a few words articulated that they wanted to have kids, to work. Where they couldn’t articulate it, they would sit to have their hair done or makeup put on.”

Johnson believes her time in the unit allowed her to understand how “normal” people can treat those with disabilities as fundamentally different. There were moments when she became caught up herself.

“These women had terrible lives. I think it was very painful for anyone to confront those lives and the decisions that had been made in relation to them. You look for ways to protect yourself from that guilt and anxiety, and so you depersonalise them.

“It’s very difficult to know what these women made of the lives they led, what they felt about it, or what their inner desires were, because they couldn’t articulate them.”

During Johnson’s study, the then State Government announced Hilltop’s closure. Some of the women were relocated to community residential units, four- or five-bedroom houses staffed by carers. But not everyone was so fortunate. Brigid finished up in a country institution not unlike Hilltop.

“Some are better off now, but it’s not a fairy story; they don’t live happily ever after,” Johnson says. “The women who went into the community – I would have to say that their living conditions are incredibly better. They went into largely new housing where they had their own bedrooms and didn’t have to go through three locked doors to get a glass of water; where there were things to do.

“One woman took me out into the garden and showed me the strawberries and rhubarb she had helped plant. Another had helped make the cake we had for afternoon tea. ‘Laura’ had screamed a lot in the unit, but her screaming reduced considerably and then stopped some weeks after moving. That’s not true of all the woman. Others carried their behaviors with them.”
Johnson’s work cannot be consigned to history. Successive governments have continued to pursue a partial policy of returning people with disabilities to the community, but several large institutions remain, including those at Kew and Colac. Some have locked units, and others have units that are locked in all but name (“They remove the doorknobs from the inside,” Johnson says.)

She is concerned that there is a trend for governments worldwide to move back towards large institutions and says Victoria has recently committed resources to refurbishing some old institutions and building new ones.

She would like to see all large institutions closed. The living conditions at those remaining are probably better than at Hilltop, she says, but they share a similar structure and style. Johnson believes big institutions inevitably develop a culture in which the individual’s difficulties are viewed only from the administration’s perspective, as “management problems”.

She acknowledges there will always be some people so severely disabled that they require high levels of support. “But for the life of me, I can’t see why that has to happen in big places,” she says. She grimaces. “Other than for economic reasons.”

* Deinstitutionalising Women: An ethnographic study of institutional closure, by Kelley Johnson, Cambridge University Press, $29.95.

First published in The Age.

The kids who don’t know they are too young to die

Posted on October 27, 1998 by Karen Kissane

He was a teenage boy threatening to kill himself. He didn’t want to live any more, he said, and everyone would be sorry when he was gone. She was a teenage girl, his friend, desperate to talk him out of it. Her best effort belied her naivete: “You’ll be sorry if you do it!” (A week later, he tried and failed to kill himself).

“Neither of them understood that death was final,” says suicide researcher Dr Kate Blackmore. To such overwhelmed young people, suicide seems just one of many possible responses to life’s problems: “Suicide is just (another) act; it’s not something they separate from cutting yourself or taking drugs or driving a car too fast … They don’t really understand what death is.”

Australia has among the highest rates of male youth suicide in the world, with about 500 deaths in the 15 to 24 age group each year – a rate that has tripled since the 1950s. In contrast, the rate for young women has not changed since the 1960s.

Blackmore, a research fellow at Wollongong University’s department of public health, is part of the national effort to stem the tide. As part of the National Youth Suicide Prevention Strategy, her task has been to work out how to best educate young people, as well as professionals, in ways to minimise youth suicide. Her approach incorporated some revolutionary material – the views of the kids themselves.

Talking to focus groups of 30 city, semi-rural and rural teenagers in NSW, Blackmore found they did not want suicide prevention education for themselves. They wanted to be taught coping skills so they could better deal with crises in their own lives and help friends survive their problems. Forget the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, they seemed to be saying – teach us how to keep from falling off it.

Most of the young people interviewed were from groups at high risk of suicide. They had emotionally or materially deprived or abusive backgrounds and many were unemployed or school dropouts. Several had attempted suicide.

Blackmore says she was floored by their insight: “Probably the most humbling part of the experience was the gradual dawning on me of how much wisdom actually resides with these young people and how appalling it is that they haven’t been listened to in the past.”
Their debates mirrored academic discourse about the issue, including arguments about whether the topic should even be raised with young people for fear of giving them ideas they may not otherwise develop.

“Most of the kids we interviewed said: ‘Don’t use the word suicide with younger kids’,” Blackmore says. “A lot of them had younger brothers and sisters still at home that they were very worried about. They said if they talked to them, they used language that they understood, and that didn’t scare them, like: ‘You must be feeling really, really bad’.

“Most felt that (classroom discussion about suicide) was not an issue for kids in the older levels of high school. But several said: ‘If you’re really depressed, if you have lost your job or your relationship has broken down, and someone says to you that suicide is what people do when they are really desperate, it can give you the idea’.”
But the teenagers did believe youth suicide prevention education for adults was a good idea. They wanted grown-ups to know what they needed. Top of the list, even with the toughest kids, was the need for a sympathetic adult who could truly listen.

Said one: “Parents just have to be able to, like, sit there and listen. Don’t get mad with what the kid says, or anything like that … I’ve been through it. I got kicked out of home and everything. It’s just … it’s scary.” Another talked about the need for understanding friends: “You just want them to talk to. Just make sure that someone can understand you, so then you won’t go any further.”

They also wanted help to see things more clearly: “I was 14. Sitting at the bus stop, waiting to go home, cutting my arms up with bits of broken glass because . . . just because of some of the things that happened, you know. I got abused when I was 11 and I didn’t tell no-one for years, because I thought it was me . . . Someone needs to be there to say something, you know? (To say) ‘It isn’t your fault’.”

Asked what else they wanted from a friend, parent or other adult in a crisis, the young people listed understanding and sympathy (free of blaming or judgmental attitudes) and information about where to go for help. They wanted professionals to be adequately trained, to have a uniform approach and to offer continuity of care.

Many were scornful of professionals with whom they had come in contact, particularly psychiatrists and school counsellors. They mistrusted school counsellors, Blackmore says, because they saw them as people who could get them transferred away from their friends to another school.

They saw continuity of care as central. Some had been shunted from one counsellor to another as a result of developing suicidal tendencies, after having sought help. Said one: “Why should a counsellor, because they feel uncomfortable all of a sudden, say: ‘Oh, I don’t know what to do with you no more. I’m scared of you now’? And then you’re dumped, like that . . .

“(You’ve) put your trust in them. You’re saying: ‘Help me; I don’t know what to do’. And they’re saying: ‘Well, I don’t know what to do with you either’. I’m not blaming them, but I am saying that can’t help the situation.”
They were also highly critical of hospital casualty staff. “Some casualty nurses see suicides as a waste of time,” says Blackmore, “You’re holding up this bed for someone who has had a heart attack or a severed limb, you self-indulgent little wanker!”‘

Blackmore knows one young woman who was slapped by her treating nurse. Another, an unstable schizophrenic who frequently overdosed when she had a psychotic episode, found herself in the hands of a sadistic nurse who gave her a gastric lavage three times in one visit to punish her for her frequent trips to casualty. One young woman told of being left on the floor until regaining consciousness after an overdose; another, of being called a “useless little slut”.

“It reinforces the kids’ idea that they are garbage and that no one cares what they do,” Blackmore says. She believes there is an urgent need for education about suicide in undergraduate courses for doctors and nurses.

But she is wary of some suicide prevention courses aimed at teachers and students. Programs that talk to kids about suicide in class are no longer seen as appropriate, she says, and she is concerned by some teacher training programs. “It’s important that teachers are conscious of risk factors,” she says. “Teachers probably know kids almost as well as parents; they spend every day with the same kids. If you have a kid whose performance suddenly drops off, who suddenly withdraws, or who does something about death in art or writing, it’s important to recognise that (as a warning sign).

“But to expect the teacher to take responsibility for anything more than that is dangerous. They must be told to refer on to someone who is trained to deal with a very depressed child.”

The young people interviewed, like Blackmore, were staunchly opposed to suicide education programs based on fear, which present horrific details about violent means of suicide and the potential physical consequences of failed attempts (such as warnings that a young person who survives hanging might be left with a paralysed face). Such stories might be scary, they said, but they were no help to a person in despair.

Blackmore says: “They also thought it was inappropriate to say that suicide is the morally wrong thing to do, because that just loads up kids with more guilt, potentially making someone who is borderline feel even worse about themselves.”

What they did want for themselves was easily accessible, easily understandable, practical advice on what to do in a crisis. And they had great ideas about how to distribute it. “We posed the question: ‘You have just hit Wollongong, you’re unemployed, you have nowhere to go, and you would like to get some information. What do you need?” Their answer: graffiti the name and phone number of a refuge on the wall of the local cop shop.

Says Blackmore, “These focus groups were very funny at times, but they also came up with some very sound ideas.”

* If you need someone to talk to about your troubles or are worried about a friend or relative, contact Lifeline, tel: 13 1114, or Suicide Helpline, tel: 1300 651 251.

Young people are at a higher risk of suicide if they:

* Live in rural or remote areas

* Are unemployed

* Have a profound mental illness

* Are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander

* Lack a trusted adult in whom they can confide

* Are struggling with their sexual identity

* Have suffered a recent loss or a shaming experience that is significant to them, even if it does not appear so to others

* Have previously attempted suicide

* Were victims of physical or emotional abuse as children

Signs that a young person may be suicidal:

* A sudden change in behavior, as when an extrovert becomes very quiet

* Obvious depression

* Excessive ongoing anger

* Loss of interest in things that used to give pleasure

* High-risk behavior, such as excessive drinking, dangerous driving or drug-taking

* Isolation from others, including a lack of friends, or a withdrawal from networks and activities at work or at school

* A preoccupation with giving away belongings and setting their affairs in order (a phase in which they can appear very calm) — Sources: Kate Blackmore and Lynn Bender, manager of Lifeline and Suicide Helpline.

First published in The Age.

The good son

Posted on October 11, 1998 by Karen Kissane

HE WAS a nice Baptist boy from Blackburn with an urge to do good. She was a prostitute, the first of many to enter his life. She arrived at his office in St Kilda with her face all bruised. She wanted his help as a lawyer to get her off charges she faced in court that day. The night before, anxious and unable to find a vein in her arm, she had injected heroin into her face.

He kept her out of jail, that time. Delighted, she told him, rather indelicately, precisely how many clients she would have to service in order to pay the court’s fine. She invited him to lunch to celebrate the win; her choice of venue, a local soup kitchen. There she introduced him to the assembled street people as “the best legal eagle in town”. From a distant table came the wry observation: “God, things must be bad if lawyers have to eat here.”

The Reverend Tim Costello could have had no better introduction to St Kilda’s fringe-dwellers: their courage, their humor, their openness and their brokenness. The prostitute, Julie, told him she had been raped at 15 and had decided that no man would ever do that to her again. So she made them pay. “In a tragically coherent way, Julie was taking power back over her own life,” he writes. “Who was I to judge?”

“Who was I?” is the question central to autobiography. In Costello’s new memoir, Streets of Hope, he promises an answer, describing the book as a highly personal account of his life’s journey. In fact, the chapters that follow demonstrate what a private person such a public figure can be.

Costello gives a detailed picture of his social and political development; of how he came to be a lawyer, a preacher/prophet and, briefly, a politician. We hear much about his views on the dark forces rending Australian society; it is probably for his persistent critique of economic rationalism and its effect on community that he is best known – certainly to Premier Jeff Kennett.

But Costello offers only sketchy outlines of the forces that would have shaped him most profoundly: his relationships with his mother and father, with his wife and their children, and with his famous brother, Treasurer Peter. Costello shields them as carefully as he does his own deeper self; not for him the bruising intimacy of Frank McCourt or Nuala O’Faolain. “One of the reasons the book sat on the shelf for two years was that it was autobiographical,” Costello admits. “I actually have a fear of being too self-disclosing.”

He believes this is partly related to the fact that he wrote the book at 40: “It’s very difficult to be disclosing midway through your life. There’s this sense that it’s more appropriate at the end, when you have a better sense of what it all means and who you are.

“Secondly, it involves others. You aren’t just an individual who has this right to be open and vulnerable and show your wounds. You are in relationships with people. I knew that anything I said that was too revealing of family stuff would have all these ripple effects. I kept asking myself, `Is this fair to family, to wife, to colleagues?’ By the end of your life, your parents have gone, the kids can cope.”
The book was originally written as therapy, as a private exercise in finishing unfinished business. Costello is now a minister at the Collins Street Baptist Church, with a parish that covers street kids, the Stock Exchange and the Crown Casino.

But back in 1994, he faced the closing of several doors. His single term as St Kilda’s last mayor had been cut short by the council amalgamations he had fiercely opposed. Then the Democrats offered him a safe Senate seat. He initially accepted but later refused, for the sake of family harmony.

It must have hurt. Even now, a spasm passes over his face as he remembers. “It was about my parents, who would have found it just too painful,” he says, dragging his hands over his face as if suddenly tired. “We discussed how, once under a national spotlight where, potentially, the Democrats would hold the balance of power on Peter’s budget, the strains would be so great they’d blow family relations apart.

“It was also a bit about my wife – and she was right, I think, and now I accept this – saying, `Well, you’re not just a politician. In terms of calling and vision, there’s other aspects of who you are, and once you become a politician, that’s all you are’.”

He was sorely tempted because the Democrats allow conscience votes; he would probably have been as much his own agent as he is in his church. Unlike most other denominations, the Baptists have no central hierarchy to whom spokesmen are answerable. When Costello makes public comments, he is not representing any stance other than his own.

In religious terms, he says, “The Democrats have the prophetic role; that is, they’re not the priestly caste who governs and makes the laws. The prophets are always the ratbags who come from the margins and shake up the system …”
After the decision was made, there was still more emotional housekeeping to be done. Costello had already told the St Kilda community that he was leaving, and he stuck to this despite his grief at the prospect. His wife, Merridie, suggested he write it out of his system. The result is Streets of Hope, which he offered to Allen and Unwin two years later when they approached him to write a book.

He says he wants the book to answer the question he is most often asked: “Why do you see the world so differently to your brother, even though you’ve grown up with the same family and the same religious training and world view?”

The book provides a glimpse of one possible answer. He writes, “I remember my father often saying to me and my brother, `I do not care who is right or wrong; I am going to punish you both.’ As a parent, I now fully understand that it was borne of the weariness involved in adjudicating endless sibling disputes. But back then, that always struck me as flagrantly unfair.”

He thinks that this is what propelled him into law. But perhaps it also propelled both of them into struggling to differentiate themselves from each other, to be recognised in their separateness.

COSTELLO’S own answer to the question is that the family years are not the only formative ones, and that as a young man he was exposed to different people and ideas to Peter.

He writes of studying theology in Switzerland and discovering from his fellow seminarians that there are many perspectives: “The Italian students were always attuned to the revolutionary nuances and preferred Jesus in Che Geuvara garb. A Balinese student opened up the … possibilities of `the rocks crying out’, which resonated with an animistic world … The Africans never failed to observe the unmistakable struggle against imperialism in Jesus, a Jew, being executed by imperial Rome.”

It would have been an eye-opener for the boy from Blackburn. A minister who once lived in a Baptist community believes that Costello would have been exposed to rather a smug, narrow view of religion when growing up: “Blackburn Baptist is an enormous, wealthy community. Their theology is on the triumphalist side; because they are wealthy, they see that as a sign of God blessing them.”
If he needed any more to trigger a reaction against bourgeois complacency, he could not have picked a better place than St Kilda. He found himself passionately defending streetwalkers and abusing johns. He used his own car as an ambulance for locals having psychotic episodes, explained to his young children about the condoms and syringes littering the local park, and pacified residents when mentally ill parishioners ran naked down the street or urinated in letterboxes. His working life could not seem more removed from the power-suited world of his brother’s.

But some who know Tim Costello see him, too, as a very political character. A woman who worked in welfare at St Kilda at the same time he did says: “I’ve worked in social justice for years and in the main it’s made up of men like him, who are there because it provides them with a platform of sorts and fits in with their view of the world.

“It suits them to think there are forces of darkness and forces of good, and that the world is divided into people who care intensely about their fellow man and selfish bastards who don’t give a shit; it validates them because it puts them on the side of the angels.” Mind you, she admits, “He usually is on the side of the angels.”

And he does it with such style. Costello was recently up on the Gold Coast speaking to a gathering of 10,000 pentecostal and evangelical Christians. He’d caused a furore beforehand by telling the local paper that Hansonism was a form of paganism.

“There’s hysteria as I’m pulling up,” he says. “Churches have been pulling out; the organisers are upset and beg me not to say anything about Hansonism.

“Well, I preached a very evangelistic sermon. I said that in olden times, if we were Jews, we would take a goat here and we would ask the mayor to place all the sins of the Gold Coast on that goat, and then send the goat out into the wilderness. That was a scapegoat; that’s where the word comes from. And I said, `But we’re not Jews, and we’re not living in that period of time. We actually believe as Christians that Jesus is our scapegoat, that he bears our infidelities and lies and abuse of kids and drug abuse and crime; that he took them upon himself. And that, therefore, to scapegoat anyone, particularly the indigenous, Asians or single mothers, is actually to undermine the work of Christ.’

“And I saw these conservative people looking at each other, wondering, `Has he mentioned Hansonism or not?”‘

The preacher, the lawyer and the politician grin in mischievous solidarity.

Streets of Hope is published by Allen & Unwin at $19.95.

First published in The Age.

Hi Mum, I’m gay

Posted on September 25, 1998 by Karen Kissane

Here is a tale of two sons. The first, Peter Wood, is a 57-year-old gay Catholic priest. He works in AIDS pastoral care and education in the Northern Territory, and has co-authored a new book on the issues parents face when a child announces that he or she is gay.

Wood describes the defining moment of his life this way: “I was cursed by my mother. She was not an evil woman – on the contrary – and certainly didn’t intend to do anything so crude or so cruel. Nevertheless, that is what it felt like: a curse.

“One evening, when I was about 15 and we were gathered in the kitchen … she said, in response to nothing in particular that I can recall, that she would rather her sons dropped dead, right there and then, than grow up to be queer.

“I had three brothers and I was the one who had (well-founded) doubts about my sexuality and who eventually came to understand myself as a gay man. I could never bring myself to tell her who and what I was. I feared she might have meant exactly what she said.” He now lives a celibate life.

The second son is the product of a different time and a very different family, although they, too, are Catholic. Andrew Dutton, 21, had known he was gay since he was 13 or 14. He did not come out until the end of secondary school. Like Peter Wood, his defining moment centred around a family meal.

He had invited his parents, Sylvie and Graham, to a restaurant, telling them he had something to announce. But when the time came he froze. Says Sylvie: “We were urging him to tell us and he shrank in his chair and looked terrified. He looked so sad and that’s when I knew … And I said, ‘You just answer yes or no to a few questions’.”

She made them silly ones, to make him laugh: “I needed that look to go away.” Did he want to become a priest? Was his girlfriend pregnant? Had he killed anybody?
Was he gay?

“He said this little ‘yes’,” she says, the thought of his distress upsetting her even now. “He couldn’t talk.” Her own first thought was of AIDS: “I’m going to have a dead son soon.” Her second was full of love: “If Andrew is gay, then gay is good.”

The foundations of this close family remained unshaken. Andrew was interviewed for this story in his parent’s home, his partner Douglas Leitch beside him, and his mother, father, sisters, aunt and grandmother all present. They are unswerving in their support of him and can laugh now about the funny aspects of his coming-out (Andrew’s aunt had asked him, “Why don’t you try kissing a girl?” to which he replied, “Why don’t you?”)

Andrew says his story is exceptional; he knows of few other gays whose coming out has been so untraumatic.

Peter Wood and his fellow author, Joan Golding, spend much of their time counselling parents who are struggling to cope with shock, rage, grief, guilt and shame. Their book, Coming Out, Coming Home: Growth in freedom for the parents of gay and lesbian children, is designed to inform and help people work through what is, for many, a complex process.

Joan Golding nursed her son Martin for three years before his death from AIDS in 1989. Martin was in his early 30s. Since then, his mother has become a volunteer worker with the Victorian AIDS Council, the Churches AIDS Pastoral Care and Education Program and the Victorian Department of Human Services.

Wood asked her to share writing the book, which includes chapters such as “First Reactions and Second Thoughts”, “God, Goodness and Gays”, “Homophobia” and “Parents of Gay Children”.

Golding says some parents, particularly fathers, react with extreme anger. “I remember a boy whose father went to his flat when he was out, took all his furniture out and burnt it on the nature strip outside.

“Some men feel there’s something terribly evil about homosexuality and they want to destroy anything connected with it. They also want to demonstrate that their own masculinity hasn’t been diminished by the revelation that their son is gay.”

While Golding says this is the worst response she has encountered, Wood believes that: “Anger expressed in action is probably easier to deal with than the ongoing coldness of ‘you are dead to me’.”

Both are critical of medical or religious figures who claim to be able to change a person’s sexual orientation. Wood once knew a man who had been a gifted pianist until his wealthy parents sent him to the United States for “treatment” for his homosexuality. He was lobotomised, his personality and his gifts destroyed.

Wood met him in a NSW psychiatric hospital: “The staff had a record of him playing the piano when he was a prodigy and that was the only thing that would quieten him when he was in his mania.”
Golding says some psychiatric treatments, such as aversion therapy, are sometimes as devastating to the subjects as surgical procedures: “They end up not knowing who they are.”

Golding and Wood’s book focuses on helping parents adjust to their child’s sexuality and to be wholehearted about it. In her list of unhelpful parental responses, Golding includes: “We told him we loved him anyway.”
She writes: “Better to say nothing at all! Families should love their children because of who they are, in every sense, otherwise their love cannot be said to be unconditional, which is the only sort worth having, isn’t it?”

Wood is similarly critical of his own church’s official attitude to gays, which is that homosexual activity is sinful and that homosexuals are deserving of compassion. “We don’t want compassion, we want respect,” he says.

But the book is also sympathetic to parents who find themselves pressured to deal with situations for which they are not ready. Children, says Golding, are often “not at all conscious of that and expect parents to snap to and be accepting”.

Wood writes: “I remember one fellow, who was himself very straight-looking and held a responsible job, who fell madly for an exotic and flamboyant character whom he insisted on taking home to his very middle-class parents for Christmas.

“He came to me in distress because the occasion had been extremely uncomfortable for everyone, loaded with pregnant silences, feigned attempts at joviality and even, at times, his mother weeping in other rooms. (His parents) had actually travelled quite a distance, but they had their limitations. We all do, in one way or another.”

Sylvie Dutton knows what hers are. She spent the first little while after Andrew’s coming-out in her own closet: “I told myself I was all right, but I was too scared to tell anyone.” So she joined P.Flag, a support group for families of homosexuals.

Now she has come to terms with homosexuality – Andrew jokes that she is more involved with the gay community than he is – but she finds homophobia extremely painful. “My child is hated by a lot of people and this has put a knife in my heart,” she says.

“I am still really sad that Andrew is gay, because he is in a minority group and no one wants their child to be in a minority group. And I worry about his safety; I would love for him and Douglas to be able to walk openly, hand in hand.”

But there is one place they are always welcome. Douglas’s parents are planning to come down from Queensland for a holiday soon. The Duttons will be having them to dinner so the families can get to know each other. It’s so nice when in-laws get on.

· Coming Out, Coming Home: Growth in freedom for the parents of gay and lesbian children, by Joan Golding and Peter Wood, Spectrum Publications, $14.95. P.Flag (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) offers information and support and can be contacted on 9511 4083.

First published in The Age.

Kiss or kill

Posted on September 5, 1998 by Karen Kissane

“Every woman adores a fascist

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you”
– Sylvia Plath, ‘Daddy’

MELBOURNE woman “Lorraine Brown” loved not wisely, but too well. She wrote to her husband of her passion for him: “The very thought of you and our love takes my breath away. My love for you, Trevor, is a tune, and every waking moment you are ‘Always on my mind’. My darling, your wants, needs, hurts are all mine. My very life is yours.”

The letter was read at her 1994 trial for his killing. She wept inconsolably throughout the hearing, which twice had to be adjourned when she could not contain her sobs. She told the court, “Yes, I wish I could have taken all his hurts … rather me have them than him … I loved that man. I would do anything for him.”

Her tenderness was rarely reciprocated. Trevor locked his wife naked in a cupboard, urinated on her, vomited on her and refused to let her clean herself afterwards. He raped her in their car in the street, forced large objects into her vagina, throttled her and dragged her around on the floor.

Yet, the night she was admitted to hospital after a fight in which he cut her fingers to the bone, she took off in a hospital gown to go home and make up with him. She found him drunk, stupefied, unresponsive. When he did acknowledge her attempt to embrace him, he called her a “f…… c…” and told her he would leave her. She stabbed him to death. She received a 28-month sentence, with a non-parole term of seven months.

The feminist analysis has it that such women are victims of their brutal men, who will not allow them to leave; that they are rejected and silenced by a community that does not want to have to deal with them; and that, when driven to kill in self-defence, they are dealt with harshly by a legal system that largely ignores the abuse they suffered.

The highest court in the land has now been asked to incorporate this view of gender politics into the Australian legal system. Bendigo woman Heather Osland has appealed against a 14-year sentence for her involvement in the killing of her sadistic husband, Frank, in 1991. Her case might set a precedent about the legal significance of battered women’s syndrome.

At present, as one lawyer told a jury, a battered woman cannot claim self-defence unless she kills while she’s “looking down the barrel of the only gun in the house, effectively”. That is, she must have killed while facing an immediate threat, and she must not have used any more force than was being used against her.

It is also difficult for battered women to claim provocation, which can reduce a murder charge to manslaughter, unless they can prove that they snapped in the face of an immediate provocation.

In reality, most abused women who kill attack their partner while he is unarmed, drunk, drugged or asleep, a reflection of differences in size and strength.

In the Osland case the main ground for the appeal is that Heather, who drugged Frank and held him as he twitched after her son David bludgeoned him to death, was convicted, while David, who struck the blows, was acquitted.

If the one who wielded the weapon did not commit murder, of what, then, can Heather be guilty?

But Heather Osland’s barrister, Dr Jocelynne Scutt, also told the High Court in April that judges should be required to tell juries to take into account the effects of years of battering, which can leave a woman feeling that the only way she can escape is to kill her jailer.
There is concern that such a change could be a licence for bedroom vigilantism. Justice Michael Kirby said he could understand someone reaching breaking point, “but that we would be laying down the legal principle that people can go around shooting sleeping people … I certainly could not agree to that … You can’t make people immune from the law of homicide”.

Scutt told him that her argument did uphold the sanctity of human life – it supported the battered woman’s right to preserve her own.

But is it as simple as that? Heather Osland left Frank eight times, but that means she went back to him eight times.

At least once she was rescued by others; her local minister and men from her parish descended on her house with station-wagons and trailers, packing up her, her children and her belongings and taking them to a safe place.

But she soon returned to her husband, as so many battered women do. How can you help women who seem to collude in their own abuse? Is there a moral obligation to rescue people who don’t want to be rescued? And why on earth do these women put up with it, anyway?

The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre would have accused them of living in bad faith, of not being true to themselves, of not taking responsibility for their lives. But then, Sartre did not believe that people can be driven by inner forces of which they are unconscious. He never came to terms with the fragility of human freedom.

THE High Court of Australia is a stolid, heavy-set building, the architectural embodiment of judicial gravitas. It dwarfs the couple of dozen women milling about its entrance this crisp Canberra morning in “Release Heather” T-shirts.

They have brought life-size cut-out figures made by women who have lived through domestic violence. A mother looks down at a small child clinging to her legs; her hand is tied to the child and the child is tied to her feet. Another female figure is hunched over a set of rosary beads: “I kept praying he would change, I kept praying he would change, I kept praying he would change . . .”
Inside the court, the issues face a different kind of scrutiny. Even some feminist lawyers privately believe that Osland’s case was not the best vehicle for the High Court action and regret that the sisterhood did not wait for a better one.

Frank Osland was undoubtedly a brute. He bashed Heather and her four children. He beat the dog so badly it had to be put down and he killed the children’s cat with a piece of pipe (perhaps it was no coincidence that this was the weapon Heather and her son chose for him).

Frank Osland raped Heather so fiercely that she suffered chronic urinary tract infections and tears to the vagina and anus. He tried to exercise complete control over the family and often threatened to kill them and chop them up. Late in Heather’s joint trial with her son, David haltingly, shamefacedly, revealed that Frank had also raped him when he was 14.

But Heather Osland and her son dug a grave for Frank before he was killed, and she later was recorded on police telephone intercepts saying that the killing had been planned for a week. This suggests premeditation.

Other feminists, such as lawyer and former equal opportunity commissioner Moira Rayner, say this case tests whether provocation and self-defence must relate to an immediate threat: “Because the killing was not that immediate, it’s really pushing the envelope. ”

Rayner’s trust, set up to help fund equal opportunity complaints, contributed to Osland’s appeal because it raised issues of access to justice for battered women, “who have never been able to avail themselves of the provocation defence”, Rayner says.
She cites the Western Australian case of “Nina”, a woman who shot her husband dead when he taunted her about how he had sexually abused her children.

“Everybody said the law of provocation was adequate. But on appeal, the judge couldn’t understand that she was acting in a state of automatism . . . The Nina case showed me that the judge didn’t understand that someone can suddenly snap after 30 years of being mild . . . because of what had happened over decades.”

Rayner is one of many who argue that the law’s “bar-room brawl” immediacy requirement, designed for the eruptions that typify male loss of control, does not allow for the “slow burn” experiences that drive women to lethal violence.

A lecturer in law at Melbourne University, Bronwyn Bartal, says that provocation privileges anger as a driving force over other emotions including fear and compassion (as in the euthanasia of a suffering spouse).

She also criticises the extent to which self-defence requires “proportionality”: that defensive force be no stronger than the force used by the attacker. It developed from the rules of honor and fair play regulating the duelling encounters of aristocratic males. But women are usually smaller and weaker than their partners, says Bartal, and have little choice but to use a weapon. (Women are far more likely to be killed by their partner than are men; a NSW study found that 73 per cent of spouse killings were committed by men.)
Forensic psychologist Dr Kenneth Byrne often gives expert evidence about the typical pattern of battering partnerships. He says the woman is often isolated, deprived of food or sleep, threatened with torture or death, sexually abused and instilled with a sense of terror that makes it difficult for her to think clearly. Severe batterings are administered unpredictably and have little relation to her behavior, which leaves her feeling helpless to avoid them.
Bashers tend to be men who blame others for their problems, deal poorly with stress, and believe that wives and children are there to serve them. They use sex as an act of aggression to humiliate women and bolster their own shaky self-esteem. They are also pathologically jealous.

But the theory of battered woman syndrome, as this cluster of characteristics is known, has its flaws. Many of the women supposedly suffering “learnt helplessness” try to escape, and it seems paradoxical to argue that a woman who killed her abuser felt helpless.

Mark Weinberg, then a QC for Victoria’s Office of Public Prosecutions, told the High Court in the Osland case that any change to the legal significance of the syndrome should be left to Parliament: “It’s too important.” Male fears of women’s untrammelled murderous impulses were alluded to more directly at Osland’s original trial, when Justice John Hedigan touched on the need for her sentence to be a warning to other women: “Perhaps it’s just generally deterring wives from killing husbands . . . There are certainly 48 per cent of the community who are in favor (of that), whatever I think.”
Phil Cleary cannot be counted among them. Cleary is the former independent MP whose sister, Vicki, was tracked down and knifed in 1987 by an ex-boyfriend she had left four months earlier. Cleary is astounded that Heather Osland received a 14-year sentence while his sister’s killer served only three-and-a-half years. “If provocation is no more than ‘A woman left a man, so he’s pissed off’, that is a barbaric view of the relationship between men and women,” he says. “That is looking at women as property.”
He holds the media partly responsible, citing newspaper stories about the murder of women by men that had dangerously euphemistic headlines, such as “Love pulls the trigger”. He also believes that there is a class element: “The killing of women is written off because they are usually working class, so they’ve got no political clout.”

But he wonders whether the imbalance is really due to an underlying force that is more pervasive but less tangible, perhaps the Judeo-Christian notion of woman as the root of all evil: “Is it Adam and Eve? Or is it deeper, something about the relationship between men and women?”
THE LOVE Lorraine imagined she had with her husband was not merely the fantasy of a disordered mind. There are intense ties in these couples, and such men can be charming, affectionate and convincing in their protestations that it will never happen again. “They are very loving and attentive, and the woman is so important to them,” says Rosalie Pattenden, a counsellor with Relationships Australia.

Associate professor of law at Melbourne University, Jenny Morgan, is impatient with the question, Why doesn’t the woman leave? She points out that most of them do leave, repeatedly, but are often obsessively pursued. “The real question is, ‘Why won’t he let her go?’ ” (And, however else these women’s perceptions might be distorted, their fear that the man will kill them if they leave is solidly founded: almost half the women murdered by their partners die as a result of trying to separate.)
Morgan says it is hard for women to leave because they are financially vulnerable and anxious about caring for their children alone – and, often, they love the man. “In all sorts of other circumstances we think love is a fine emotion,” she says. “Women are supposed to be sharing and caring, and we admire that elsewhere, but suddenly here, we think they’re stupid. All we can see from outside is the violence but relationships are always more complicated than that.”

Kerrie Collings, a Queensland psychotherapist who treats battered women, says these relationships are the result of disturbed childhoods. She says every child wants to perceive its parent as good in order to maintain a desperately needed sense of attachment: “If the parent is abusive, the child might cut off all feelings, so that they don’t feel anything at all, or they might idealise the other, as in ‘They’re doing it for my own good; I’m bad, I deserve this.’ ”
COLLINGS says about 4 per cent of people suffer “disorganised” attachment as children, in which emotional links with others are based on threats and fear of abandonment. This becomes a model that they carry into their adult relationships. (It is typical for battering to intensify whenever a woman tries to assert herself in a relationship, which increases the man’s fear that she might decide to leave him.)

But if both partners have suffered similar childhood abuse, why is there a gender split in their response to it, with men growing up to batter and women to be battered?

Dr Jon Kear-Colwell, senior lecturer in forensic psychology at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, points out that all male mammals are more aggressive than females. Innate differences are then reinforced by child-rearing practices: “Often when boys are punished by their parents, they are given a smack on the leg; it’s the behavior that’s dealt with. When girls are naughty, guilt is used to make them feel responsible.”

It may not be that women love the fascist boot, but they do tend to feel responsible for having somehow provoked the kick (and, like Lorraine Brown, responsible for “healing” the emotional wounds of the man who delivers it).

The Wounded Prince and the Women who Love Him is a paper by two American family therapists, Gillian Walker and Virginia Goldner. They argue that many of our culture’s myths of female love (such as Cordelia’s for Lear) centre on the notion of the wounded male nursed by the compassionate woman.

Walker and Goldner say the violent man justifies himself by describing his partner as a bad woman: she is provocative, she is or will be unfaithful, she is insensitive to his vulnerabilities. “And then, in the honeymoon of contrition and forgiveness which follows the violence, this evil female figure transmutes into the longed-for, irreplaceable nurse/mother, who knows and cares for this hurt man/boy better than anyone else . . .”
The woman is beset by self-doubt. To protect the relationship, she holds on to seeing him as wounded and in need of care. This causes the man to get in touch with emotions that frighten him, such as his infantile terror of abandonment, so he feels that the woman’s love weakens him. The cycle of attack and contrition continues.

This kind of psychologising exasperates women’s activists, most of whom also dislike the concept of battered woman’s syndrome. They analyse the issue politically and see battering as an extreme outcome of the power imbalance between men and women in society. The battered woman is not mentally ill; she is having a normal human reaction to extraordinary stresses. They have a case. There is evidence that an abusive environment can reduce anyone to psychic rubble.

In 1973 a Californian psychology professor, Philip Zimbardo, recruited intelligent male middle-class university students to live in a mock prison for two weeks. The men were screened to ensure they were psychologically stable and randomly assigned the role of guard or prisoner.

The “guards” quickly turned sadistic. The abuse they meted out to the “prisoners” triggered in their captives symptoms including extreme depression, disorganised thinking, uncontrollable crying and fits of rage – classic responses of the battered woman. The experiment had to be aborted after only six days.

Zimbardo later wrote that a perverted symbiotic relationship had developed: “As the guards became more aggressive, prisoners became more passive; assertion by the guards led to dependency in the prisoners; self-aggrandisement was met with self-deprecation, authority with helplessness, and the counterpart of the guards’ sense of mastery and control was the depression and hopelessness (of) the prisoners.”

Zimbardo wondered whether this happens in the everyday social “jails” of racism, sexism – and bad marriages.

But the fact that they chose to flee their jail can be no comfort to women such as Vicki Cleary. The role of guard is much more powerful than that of prisoner, and in real life, there is often no outsider to call an end to the game.

“Sharon” had tried to leave her husband, “Pete”, many times. Once he caught her and beat her with a wheelbrace; another time he terrorised the refuge she was staying in. When she got right away and hid interstate, she made the mistake of sending a letter to her children in which she mentioned that it had been raining. Pete phoned meteorology to find out which part of the continent had been having wet weather and next day packed up the kids and drove from Queensland to Perth to haul her back.

Over the years he tied her to a tree and lashed her, aborted her with a teaspoon and forced her to drink his urine and her menstrual blood.

Sharon told the court that one baby, Molly, did not die of cot death as she had reported but had been smothered in her cot by Pete. He repeatedly raped another daughter, Jenny, from the age of eight through to 14, when Sharon finally found out and told police. “Got rid of one and f….. the other,” he would brag to her.

One morning an exhausted Sharon crawled out of bed to make Pete breakfast. He had been sick and bad-tempered for days. He refused the meal and snarled when she tried to return for more sleep: “What do you want to get back into f…… bed for, you dog?” She fetched his gun – she had always been terrified of guns – and shot him dead. She hid the body in her yard.

That’s another problem with these cases; the women often “snap” over a seemingly trivial incident.

In Sharon’s case the prosecutor, Tom Gyorffy, pointed out that “We, as a community, wrestle every February with our consciences over having an open season for shooting ducks. Human life is worth more than that. Nobody in this community, no matter how nasty they are, is shootable.”

Juries are often told that a trial is just a sifting of the relevant facts, not a search for the truth of everything that happened. Enough was prised from Sharon, in the clipped, stony questions and answers of the courtroom, to win her a verdict of manslaughter and a suspended sentence. But the police record of interview at her arrest gives hints of another aspect of the story, one not put to any jury.

A week before the shooting Sharon had received a letter from a friend who had lost a grandchild to cot-death. It brought back so many memories of her Molly, she told police. And she had no trouble remembering the date on which she had killed Pete, whose body had been decomposing in her yard for months. “It was the 21st of May because it was the day – it was the day – it was the day of me daughter that died’s birthday. Molly Rose. She would’ve been 25.”

But then, courts are not required to know the full truth about everything.

The names of Lorraine and Sharon and their families have been changed.

First published in The Age.

Clinton, Lewinsky and power

Posted on August 7, 1998 by Karen Kissane

“MONICA Lewinsky may be a dumb, fat girl. But she got the President,” Emma Forrest wrote on this paper’s opinion page on Wednesday, apparently elevating Lewinsky’s brief encounter to some kind of triumph.

What does “got” mean? That Monica “got” Bill in the way that Doris Day used to “get” Rock Hudson at the end of their movies together? How laughable. Or that Monica “got” Bill in that she has effectively shafted the President of the United States, possibly destroying his administration? How ugly.

Forrest was the second commentator in as many days to assert that Lewinsky personifies something important about womanhood and the way it is constructed today. In her “defence” of Lewinsky she took the opposite view to the first, Charles Laurence (on the features page on Tuesday), who saw the spoilt, greedy Monica as “an everywoman of her generation”.

By concentrating on personalities, both miss the point. This saga is as much about power structures as about individual frailty. This is a menage-a-trois of power junkies: Bill, Monica and Hillary. The problem for the women is that institutional power is held by men. Women who want a share of it, by and large, must do so indirectly through men. (And, as Lewinsky apparently knew, the way to a man’s heart is not always through his stomach.)

The indirect routes to power have traditionally been the only ones open to the talent-free. But the barriers are still in place even for skilled, clever women such as Hillary Clinton, who might herself be a presidential hopeful if not for her sex. If America was a matriarchy, with men largely locked out of institutional power, “bimbo eruptions” might be replaced by “himbo eruptions” as men tried to claw themselves some status by pleasuring powerful women. (Now there’s a concept.)

As it is, the Hillarys, when they stand by philandering men, seem to trade their self-respect for a power trip in much the same way as the Monicas.

It is possible to imagine a noble motivation for Hillary’s stance; perhaps she stands by her man because she cares about the ordinary people his policies protect. Perhaps they have a private arrangement about an open marriage.

But, at this stage, it is nearly impossible to find anything admirable in Lewinsky’s course of action. I don’t know whether she is dumb, and I don’t think she is fat. Americans analyse the looks of their sirens with the sniffy intensity of maiden aunts who think life is what they see on Days of Our Lives.

But I think Forrest got it wrong when she wrote of Lewinsky, “I don’t like you. But I do like what you did.”

I don’t know Monica, so I can’t presume to dislike her. But I do dislike what she did, as do many women who would like to be taken seriously in a man’s world.

Whichever way you interpret Forrest’s “what you did” – as referring to the sexual encounters, or the potential for their consequences to unseat a president – Lewinsky has done other women no favors. The image of Monica as the vengeful femme fatale whose sexuality could bring down a bastion of male power plays into male fears that female power is destructive. She will get no thanks from women hoping for promotion at work.

Clinton and Lewinsky have also done untold damage with the images they have embedded in public discourse: the iconic man of power, middle-aged and arrogant, with a young woman kneeling before him, worshipful not of him as a person, but of his dominance as a leader.

That’s some metaphor for future historians analysing the gender politics of public life at the end of the 20th century.

Karen Kissane

Journalist and Author

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