Wendy Waters

The below is written by a man on Facebook -Graigus McVegus. I honestly can’t say this any better than him, so I won’t. He gets it. Please read. CW: men's violence against women. “In case you missed it, last week in Charleville, outback Queensland, police pulled an 18-month-old girl out of a house, covered in blood. Dead inside were Julia Brunsdon, 23 and pregnant, and her partner Michael Waltke, 45. Police are investigating it as a murder-suicide. At 4am the next morning, journalist Sherele Moody would have added Julia to her ledger. Moody keeps the count of Australian women killed by men because no govt agency does, and she funds it by selling tshirts. She has been doing it since 2015. Here is one of the patterns she records. When a man is murdered, he is almost always killed by someone who is not his family. When a woman is murdered, the killer is usually a male partner or relative. Considering this, I came to the following realisation: Men are terrorists. I use the word "terrorist" very consciously. Terror is violence whose purpose is to create fear in those watching. This is what men do, and it is far more prevalent than most people realise. Men terrorise women with dominance and violence. In March, the Bureau of Statistics recorded 97,800 family and domestic violence proceedings in a single year, the highest this country has ever seen, and 78% of them were men. There was no emergency declared and no national reckoning, just a media release on a nondescript Wednesday. But it doesn't end there. Men also terrorise other men with shame and physical violence. Men are 90% of homicide suspects worldwide and 81% of the victims. The culture that teaches a boy to dominate is the same culture that eventually kills him, and it forbids him from ever admitting he is frightened. Men terrorise everyone with less power by turning weakness into a character flaw. The poor, the sick, the elderly, the disabled, and the newly arrived. If you cannot produce economic value, you get treated as a cost to be managed, and the fear of ending up in that category keeps the rest of us quiet and compliant. Men terrorise the living world with the same logic that treats women's bodies as resources to be owned and used. Land exists to be taken, and defenders get punished when they resist. Finally, and it's important to raise this as the planet burns, men terrorise the future. This is the purest form of violence, because people not yet born cannot vote, cannot sue and cannot fight back. The most replicated finding in climate denial research is that conservative white men deny it more than anybody else, and researchers traced the cause to "system justification". These men are defending a system they sit on top of. Which brings me back to Sherele Moody. She has a petition open for a royal commission into the killing of Australian women and girls, signed by over 140,000 people. In May, Albo, the most disappointing PM in history, waved it away on-air, saying: "there are calls for a royal commission about everything". If you haven't already, please sign the petition. Link in the first comment. Fragile men will descend upon this post with "not all men". This is not the argument we're having. We're talking about a culture that runs on domination and recruits from birth. An individual being personally kind inside this culture is not the same as taking it apart. If you are a man who already knows this, saying so out loud is worth more than you think. Comment, share and save this post. Write your own. Let other men know this has to end. It's up to us to dismantle the machine. And tell me, what is one thing you were taught to be ashamed of feeling, and who taught you?” Note: If violence is happening in your house, 1800RESPECT is on 1800 737 732, available 24/7. If you know it is happening in someone else's house, you can also call.