FixedIt: Homes are not violent

Violence has no perpetrator apparently. Neither does the housing crisis.

This ia a lie, of course. Violence is mostly perpetrated by men.

Given the disproportionate number of middle aged white men in parliaments over the last four decades, you could make an argument that the housing affordability crisis was also perpetrated by men.

Thousands of women and children in Australia tonight are choosing between domestic violence crisis and homelessness crisis.

Thousands of men in Australia tonight are making sure those women and children have no other options.

If this makes you angry, good. Stay that way until we’ve fixed it.

A few bits and pieces of data that look unconnected but aren’t because power, money, and violence feed and sustain each other.

In 1970 there were three women in federal parliament (about 1%). In the more than 50 years since then, we’ve pushed that up to 39% – mostly due to Labor’s quotas. The Coalition are still stuck at about 25%, as they were for most of their years in government, during which they introduced a raft of tax law to help wealthy people increase their wealth and punish everyone else for being to lazy to be born rich, white, able bodied, neurotypical and straight, to parents who could afford to waste money on expensive schools.

All those decades of short-term thinking, neo liberal policy, increasing wealth disparity, and abject failure to investing social housing or infrastructure caused this:

Add to that, the persistent gender pay gap – which is slowly improving but is still much greater than the official figure indicates.

Total Average Salary (ATO Data 2020/2021)
Women:  $48,400
Men: $70,468
Difference: $22,069
$22,069 / $48,400 = 46%

Why is the official pay gap only 22%? Because it assumes everyone works full time.

ABS Data August 2022
46% of women work part time
18% of men work part time

The official data also talks about how the differences between men and women earn, not how much they are paid, which is a fun way to think about the gender pay gap.

Also, another fun little side note – check out this little gem from the notes on the ATO data download:

Let’s have a bit more fun with the very inclusive ATO data: here’s the (binary) gender breakdown of each tax bracket:

Here’s a racial breakdown of income data…

?

Nope. Both the US and the UK measure and report racial economic inequality. We don’t do it in Australia, which means we can’t see it, talk about it, or act on it. One more thing white people don’t have to worry about, I guess.

Anyway, to continue…

Most of us like to think our salary will increase as we get older, gain more experience and learn more skills. This is true for most people who are men.

Women are not struggling to pay rent on their own because they’re not working hard. The most recent ABS survey on how Australians use their time separates paid and paid work by gender and family type. In heterosexual relationships with children under 15, women work almost 2 hours more per day than men – they just don’t get paid for it.

A few things to note about violence statistics

When you see any data about violence that includes the phrase “since the age of 15” it comes from the Personal Safety Survey.

This survey excludes everyone who is homeless, in hospital, living in a refuge, staying with friends/family, and all the people (mostly women) who are unwilling or unable to tell a stranger about their trauma.

It also struggles to include people with profound disabilities and people who don’t speak English.

Even after excluding all the people most likely to have survived domestic violence, they still find that 1 in 4 of the women who were asked and could answer all the questions have “experienced physical or sexual violence by a current or former intimate partner since the age of 15”.

Skyrocketing housing prices, no social housing, persistent gendered violence and gendered economic disadvantage don’t just happen by chance. They are the result of choices, perceptions, attitudes, and priorities of the people who wield power. Which circles neatly back to that graph up the top and all the class, gender, and racial divides buried within it.

This is not a perpetratorless crime.