Can Violent Men Actually Be Reformed? Uncut with Dr Brian Sullivan
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This episode was recorded on Camaragal land. Hi guys and welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm Laura. I'm Brittany. Now, as you know, if you've been a part of the Life Uncut family for any length of time, domestic and male violence is something that we have spoken about for many, many years. We have spoken to so many experts.

on this podcast about this very thing. And it is really a conversation that over the last couple of years has been hugely thrust into the spotlight. And that's because it is something that has not improved and is not getting better. I mean, as we've all seen, women are screaming...

screaming out for reform and for changes to be made in this way. We've learnt that the most dangerous time for women fleeing violence is when she actually decides to leave the home and also how many times it can take a woman to actually leave a relationship where domestic violence is occurring. We've spoken to victim survivors and family members of victims of abuse and learned about the early warning signs of violent perpetrators.

But an aspect of violence that we haven't really had an in-depth conversation about is what happens after she leaves. What happens after a woman actually makes that choice to remove herself from that situation? And does the violence continue? And how does that violence transform?

Joining the podcast today is Dr. Brian Sullivan. Dr. Brian is an academic and the founder of Secura Domestic Violence Training and Support. He has been working with men who use violence in men's behavior change programs for almost 25 years. Brian has joined the third season of the podcast, There's No Place Like Home, to address the changes that are needed in our conversations about violence and to ask the right questions.

Questions like, why does he do it? And how do we help the next person leave safely? Brian, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Laura. Thanks, Britt. Great to be here with you. Such an important topic. And as we just said, you've been working in this industry for 25 years. Can you just explain

explain to us what is it exactly that you do? Well, that's a really good question because it hasn't been the same thing for 25 years. I got into this work quite by accident when I was studying in America. I needed money basically and I was doing a thousand hours of internship for this doctoral program in the University of Toledo, Ohio. And the only one I could find that would pay me was as a co-facilitator of a court-mandated program.

program for domestically violent men. And one of my colleagues, one of my friends over there was doing this work and she said, why don't you come and do this work with me? So poverty got the better of me. I was really up to that point. I'd avoided or thought I'd avoided domestic and family violence in my work as a school counsellor and as a counsellor. Anyway, I started the work and became quite fascinated with these men's stories of

how they justified and how they rationalized their violence to make them sound like the good guys. And the victim was the provocateur, the crazy bitch, to use their language, who was causing all this. And it became so weird to hear them trying to justify the unjustifiable in my book that I ended up doing my doctoral research in that. So I looked at the effectiveness of court-mandated programs for domestically violent men.

And when I came back to Australia, I started teaching in universities, University of New England in Armidale, University of Queensland,

And I was teaching courses on violence issues in counselling, but I was also doing some training on the side to those who wanted to learn how to work with these men in intervention groups. I went back to practice for a period of years where I was actually the program manager for an organisation in Logan up here south of Brisbane called YFS, the Responsible Men Programme.

And I worked there as a program manager for a number of years before returning to academia, where I was teaching and doing research into domestic and family violence, focusing on men's groups and violence.

interventions for men. And in about 2022, I think it was, I started Sakura, which is my own training consultancy where I do training for police, corrective services, men's behavior change groups, DV organizations. I've done training for lawyers and for magistrates, et cetera. So last year I was on the board of the Red Rose Foundation, and that's a foundation that

has been close to my heart for a number of years. I was on the board there for five or six years and then asked to be the CEO. When the founder, a legend, a woman called Betty Taylor, retired,

And I did that role for a year. I always said it was caretaker role. I always thought that position should be a role for a woman, of a woman's organization working with women who were victim survivors of non-lethal strangulation. So I stood down from that role at the start of this year and have gone back to my Sakura work where I'm continuing the training and education for those who work with male perpetrators of domestic violence. That's a long story short. Yeah.

You just mentioned something, Brian, that you worked very closely listening to these perpetrators justify the unjustifiable. What is the main rationale that you hear from these perpetrators? And do you genuinely think that they believe what they're saying or do you think that they know what they're doing is not right but they're just trying to make an excuse for their actions? My experience over those years has led me to believe that

that when a man tries to justify his violence, it's really a strategy of image management. And that image management is a double-sided coin. So one side of the image management is to make him look good or even to make him look like the victim of this evil woman, of this psychotic woman, of this very unfair woman.

And the flip side, of course, is while making himself look good, he has to make her look bad. So he has to trash talk her. So when a man, and these are typical strategies that men use when they front a program and well into the program.

until for many men, the light goes on and they start to realize that their dishonesty is not working, that we're not buying it. So you think about yourself. If you deny you've done something, if you try to excuse it, if you try to blame someone else, if you try to minimize it, it wasn't so bad. I know when I do that, I know I've done something wrong and I'm trying to cover it up. It's a way of camouflaging what we know is wrong. So I think to answer your question,

I think that men have a belief system or these men have a belief system, which is all about male privilege, male entitlement, control over women and children. So when a woman challenges that or doesn't comply with that, then he ramps up.

And he then starts to get abusive or increases his controlling behaviors. And to me, that's a way of reinforcing or reestablishing his worldview over hers. But the fact that he's also minimizing, denying, blaming, justifying shows me that he knows that what he's doing is actually wrong. So

So that's where we want to get to in men's groups, get them to that point where they will honestly take responsibility and fess up and say, yep, I knew what I was doing. I knew the harm it was causing and I

I know it's wrong. And I think once we get to that level of honesty, then we can start to work with men for change. What is it? Because we know that, you know, it's not just people who have come from abusive households or who have come from drug addiction, or I think there's used to be this kind of

thought that domestic violence was quite othering and that it was only a specific type of male that would do it. But as we've seen, even recently, people who come from incredibly privileged backgrounds can be perpetrators of this violence. Or often are. And yeah, and I guess my question is, what is it that creates this type of monster in a man? What's happening in terms of the social upbringing or in terms of the exposure that they've had to think that they have this entitlement over women? Brilliant question.

I think if we knew comprehensively and deeply the answer to that question, we could work with these men maybe better than we're doing. But my take on that is that typically a man, when he was a boy generally or an adolescent, he's had a role model, whether it's mum's husband, his father or stepfather or living boyfriend or whoever it was, get what he wants by very disrespectful, abusive treatment.

of his partner, of the boy's mother. The boy realizes at an early age that this gets him what he wants, when he wants and how he wants. If this is how he treats a woman, he can fulfill, he thinks, all his needs. And the third part of that is he's gotten away with it.

And I think that's where societal interventions and courts, police, corrective services, child safety has to step up so that men, and really it goes back to families and communities at an early age, early intervention, that boys should not be getting away with this sort of stuff. We need to know what boys are up to, I think, at early age. And, you know, that recent series, Adolescence, is showing us that parents need to be far more aware of what their boys are getting up to.

When we know that boys are accessing porn at earlier and earlier ages, eight, nine, we've got a major problem in the way a boy's brain is developing in terms of his beliefs, in terms of his attitudes.

in terms of his values, in terms of his developing masculinity. And when we're dealing with these men in groups after they've been court-ordered or on probation and parole to do these groups, that belief system has been there for quite a while. I have a sign on my wall which says, first-time offender, long-time abuser. So even though that might be the first time he's been caught by police or first time he's ever been to court,

He's had this belief system. He's been doing these behaviours for a long period of time. Well, that's the thing, right? I mean, statistically, most people who, or most men, who use violence in the household never spend time in prison. They never, ever even face any repercussions for it. And the people who do end up in prison or do end up in these court-mandated programs are

The violence that they've used has to have been significant. It has to have been something that was able to be proven in court, which often it can't be. It has to be something that was... Beyond reasonable doubt. Absolutely. It's so enforced that it's like an undeniable place. I guess my question is then, you deal with the worst version of these abusers. Do these programs work?

And is there a way of rehabilitating men who have such violent behaviors and such long systemic belief systems around the value of women? To your questions, both of you are really on the mark. I would say, well, I wouldn't be doing this work and I wouldn't have been doing this work for 25 years if I didn't carry a deep hope within me that men can change. These men can change. High risk, high harm men can't.

can change under the right constraints, under the right context, under the right conditions. Now, whether we've got that constraint, context and conditions in place at the moment, I'm not so sure about that. But if you're dealing with a man who has these entrenched beliefs and behaviours,

If you're dealing with a man who's a serial abuser, if you're dealing with a man who has a long history, then obviously we need to go at this holistically. So he's got to have an intervention that's going to deal with his stopping of violence, stopping of abuse, stopping of coercive control. That's long-term work. It's not a quick fix. It's not an easy solution.

But he may have also, and not in all cases, but he may have mental health issues from potentially trauma that he's suffered in his life. So he may need that trauma addressed. He may have alcohol and drug issues that he's dealing with.

He may need that addressed. He may have employment, housing problems. He may have a whole suite of problems which he needs addressed with a whole suite of interventions. So sticking a man in one program, let's say a men's stopping violence program, I don't call them men's behaviour change programs. I don't like that terminology because you can change your behaviour if courts and police are looking at you and you might stop your...

overt physical abuse of your partner or your ex-partner, but that doesn't mean she's not terrified still. She's not intimidated. She's not living in fear.

Because of the emotional violence, the verbal violence, the psychological violence, the coercive control can be very non-physical, but it can be extremely terrifying. And it can still be his tyrannical hold over her, even without the physical. So I don't call them behavior change. I think we need to go deeper than behavior. We need to be really delving into that deep belief system.

So it will need a long-term stopping violence program. You know, in Queensland, they can range from between 12, 16, 20, 26 weeks. Is that long enough? I potentially don't believe so. I think, you know, and certainly in America, there's 40 weeks, there's 52 weeks, there's two-year programs. So I would like, if I had my way and if I had my power to change the system,

I would love to see our high-risk, high-harm men do a stopping violence program, do an abuse of dads program, do alcohol and drug interventions, and also do mental health interventions too, if needed. So when you add all those programs up, it may actually take more than a year. And that's going to cost a lot. And it's going to require skilled personnel who can do that.

I'm not sure about your neck of the woods, but we have trouble at times being able to staff men's intervention programs up here due to the location where there may not be skilled staff to do that. So there's lots of systemic barriers and blockages too that need to be addressed. So again, long story short, yes, I believe these programs can be effective, but in and of themselves, less so.

They need to be part of a integrated, coordinated community response to domestic violence. And they're a very important component of that.

but they're not a standalone. They should never be a lone ranger program, a lone ranger solution. That's asking too much of it. It's got to be tied and tied tightly with other responses, other interventions, other work from outside that space too. So, you know, programs are good, but they also need to have individual work with these men, I believe.

It's hard not to feel, and I think the world right now off the back of Netflix is feeling this collective sense of helplessness and despair and how are we ever going to change the system? And I think what adolescence did really well is highlight the fact that this is starting from childhood. This is starting from adolescence and it's coming from, and this was a very conscious decision that I really loved.

that they did, it came from a really stable home with loving parents that had had a marriage for 20 years. The dad was so respectful and so hardworking and loved his children and gave them everything they needed. And this child ended up being a perpetrator.

are we supposed to? And I know there's not an answer to this, but I don't have kids. And I finished that series and I was petrified to have a child. I was petrified to bring a child into this world now when it highlights that teachers cannot do anything at school anymore. And I read an article this morning in Australia that was saying with the likes of the Andrew Taits and the Kanye West that are coming out with social media, the prevalence of social media,

There are teachers saying, I have never seen the disrespect from 12 years old that I have in the past couple of months. And they're like, we do not know what to do. How are we supposed to stop what is happening? I know we're supposed to say, well, it's all in education. But if teachers are throwing their hands up and saying, I can't do anything because of these external sources like social media, why?

What the hell are we supposed to do? And it's a bit of a rhetorical question because nobody has the answer or we wouldn't know. But I feel like you've been in the industry for 25 years. We have actively been working so hard towards trying to make change and trying to make a safer world for women, trying to educate, and we have gone backwards. This year we have seen a higher increase in domestic violence against women than we ever have before. What are we supposed to do? Again, the $64 million question, isn't it?

If I may, can I give some thoughts that I've had around this? Absolutely. There's been approaches to the federal government to have age restrictions on access to pornography. We don't have that. There are countries that do have that. So, you know, a 9-, 10-, 12-year-old boy can access extreme violent porn and not can but are.

And do. And so I think we have to have restrictions there. There's women on Pornhub and other porn sites that are trafficked, that are drugged, that are abused, that are underprivileged.

underage and there's no check. They say they have checks, they say they have assessments, but they're dealing with so much of this stuff and parents don't take responsibility. I mean, parents, as you say, from hardworking, long-lasting relationships that seem stable on the outside...

But I think there are parents who just say, well, you know, I can't stop screen time. It's just out of control. If I stop it, he's going to or she's going to be very upset and their behavior is going to deteriorate. So, you know, it takes a concerted effort right from our federal government to state governments to local governments.

And then I would love to see people doing parenting courses and learning how to monitor and manage and I guess reign screen time news in for young kids especially. And I know that's a hard task. It's almost like the horse is bolted. It's out there. It's gone.

But, you know, I don't believe that we can just throw our hands up and say, well, this is the world we live in now. This is what kids are. They're, in a sense, childhood has gone because of mobile phones and because of porn access. I don't want to live in a world like that because I don't think we've, to tell you the truth, I don't think we've seen the worst of it. I don't think we've seen the full impact of how extreme pornography usage for a young mind happens.

how that affects, well, I think we're starting this year, don't we? How that affects a boy's brain development into full adulthood. And in terms of still coming from stable families, you're right, Brick, to identify the peer group can be very, very influential, especially at that early teenage time when boys want to fit in, when boys don't want to be different.

When boys can be shamed because, you know, he was a 13-year-old boy who was mocked because he was a virgin in that adolescent show. So I think parents really – and it's highlighting we need to be having conversations with our children

about sex, about sexuality, about masculinity, about all of that well before. I mean, I know when I was a boy, it didn't happen. It didn't happen. I remember coming home once and mum, and to her credit, she left some brochure on my bed. About sex or something. Yeah.

Yeah, and I think I was about 17 at the time. You're like, too late, Mum. You know, Brian, we had a situation. We spoke about it on the podcast. Last year it was. I was away on holiday with my two little girls and they were sitting next to me and they were doing an activity on the phone. We were on a boat at the time going on like a day snorkel or something and they were on my phone doing a colouring in activity and I could see that someone was trying to airdrop something to the phone. I didn't even think I had airdrop on.

And there was a group of young boys. They would have been about nine years old. And I took the phone off my three-year-old and I was like, what is going on? Who's airdropping? I thought for a second my husband was airdropping something to me. So I accepted it. And this little boy sitting across from us, this group of them laughing about it, was sending hardcore porn to people on the boat.

And we went and approached the parents and we spoke to them and said, you know, we told them what was happening. Firstly, they got super defensive and were like, how do you know it's my children doing that? And I was like, well, look at them. They're sitting there laughing and looking over to see who's received the airdrop. But it was the defensiveness and the lack of accountability from that family that was profound.

truly shocking. And the thing to me, I was like, and the dad very much said, oh, you know, boys will be boys. And I was like, you are creating boys who think that this is normal. And the violent nature of the porn that they were airdropping to me was horrifying that someone that young would have any exposure to it or any understanding, let alone think it's funny. So I really deeply understand what it is that you're saying. And as much as as parents, we don't want to think that we could be

producing or contributing this, there has to be this deeper connection that we have with our kids and knowing what it is that they're consuming and who they are becoming. I do have a question for you in terms of what has been reported recently. This is something that was discussed on There's No Place Like Home. In the last four years, Victoria Police revealed that there was more reports about former partners than current ones.

Why do you think that this is the case? Why is it that people are either more scared of their former partners or more willing to report what's going on with them than what it is with their own current partners that might be equally as violent? The fact is, when you're an ex-partner, he's lost control. If he has that, and these men do, have that sense of sexual possessiveness, that you're my sexual property,

You don't get to leave. You don't make that call. You're mine. So when a woman doesn't comply, when a woman fights back, you know, even in this context, the word separation sounds so civilized, doesn't it? To me and in my experience and in talking to victim survivors, separation is actually escape.

It's fleeing. It's not some sort of mutual decision that we, well, when this isn't working out, we don't want to be together. There's no mutuality there. She's trying to stay safe. She's trying to stay low. She's not putting up with this horrendous behavior anymore. And she's resisting. She's reacting. And she's not only fighting against his violence, she's fighting for her life.

And we know that not only post-separation abuse increases at that time, because separation doesn't equal safety. And I'm on the Domestic Family Violence Fatality Review Committee up here in Queensland, which is out of the coroner's office.

We know that the majority of fatalities happen post-separation. So that's why the escalation occurs. He's losing control. He's trying to bring back control. And this is not a relationship for him. This is a war. This is a war he's got to win. That's the script. Males win, females lose.

So that's why I think we have family annihilations where the man will kill her and the children and then take his own life in many cases. Because if I can't have you, no one else can, and I'll have you in death. That's my final act of definitive control over you is to kill you and then to kill myself. Do you think, you know, in all your experience often, and you see this in media and how domestic violence is reported on, there is often

this sense that it is a man who's lost control. They were so bereft by losing their family or the grief and, as you said, this villainising of the woman who has left, that it's often communicated in a way that infers that the man had a snap of reality and lost control.

In your experience, is that the case or is this violence so premeditated and predetermined and it is a very conscious decision to try and enact the most violent and revengeful acts that can possibly be done? Twigs snap. Branches snap. Rice bubbles snap, crackle and pop. Human adults don't snap. They make decisions.

And while they might use that excuse or that language, you know, I saw red, I snapped, I exploded. She pushed my buttons. Something came over me. Yeah, yeah. You know, the devil made me do it. These are all ways of obfuscating the fact that he's making mistakes.

Decision after decision after decision. These are very controlling men. These are not men out of control. This violence is not accidental. It's not random. It's not isolated. It's deliberate. It's strategic. It's purposeful. And it's planned. There was some research done some years ago. And while there's been maybe some conjecture around this research, it's

To me, it still makes sense to a degree. Jacobson and Gottman did this research in the 90s where they wired violent men up and they looked at their physiological reactions. So brain waves and blood pressure and skin, galvanic skin responses and heart rates and all that sort of physiological reactions.

And they showed men violent episodes or violent scenes against women. And they broadly categorized there being two kinds. One was kind of impulsive and loud and aggressive and in your face and almost impulsive. And they call those the pit bulls. And the other kind, their heart rates apparently dropped.

And they became very cool and very calm and very calculated. And they call them cobras. And, you know, you can guess which ones are the most dangerous. And so I think, you know, for our high risk, high harm guys, they tend to be the cobras. They tend to be the very, very purposeful, very deliberate, very strategic use of behavior and words and actions.

I remember working with one. This happened in a court where a magistrate wasn't looking and she was in the court with him. And when the magistrate looked away, this man just went cross at her. No one saw it but her and the DV workers, of course, too. So that isn't accidental.

That's very deliberate. He picked his moment when the magistrate was distracted doing something else and he made that sign to her. And obviously she knew what that meant. And one thing I have learned is you take threats seriously.

That's not just a man who's ranting and raving and who's angry at being in court because of her calling the police and him getting a DVO and him breaching a DVO. That's a man with planned intentionality. To do a sign like that is a death threat. So I would believe that he would be a very dangerous character. That man would need very close containment and constrainment.

And I talk about the lethal S's. One of them I'm adding to that now is sending a message. When a man sends a message, whether it be subtle, covert, or whether it's quite overt and obvious, we need to believe that he means business.

He is not just blowing off steam or he's not just in some form of rage. He's actually sending a message. And again, through the fatality review committees, not just in Queensland, but around Australia, we know that men, before they will commit murder, do send some kind of message.

The S's that you speak of, I've got them here. They're separation, stalking, sexual violence, strangulation and suicidality. Why were these so important and how are these indicators of such extreme violence? Well, I think, you know, again, the research around men who commit murder, domestic violence murders has...

has shown that those S's are prevalent prior to the murder. There's a number of people who've done that research. So those lethal S's tend to be prevalent in many cases. And if you see them in a report of a man, and you can see an accumulation of these S's,

Well, that means our systemic response should be ramped up very, very quickly, very urgently to contain that man and to keep that victim safe. So they're really essential part of risk assessment and risk management.

And if we want to keep women alive and we want to stop these men from murdering women, then we have to pay very close attention to those risk factors. Why is the system, when you speak about that, I mean, there are so many parts of this, there's so many precautions and there's so many evident signs that would indicate that someone could be a very violent perpetrator. Why is the system failing women so repetitively and so fundamentally? Yeah.

Again, if I had any power or any sway in this response, I would want to see a system overhaul.

I would want to see courts and lawyers better trained in understanding perpetrators' behavior and intentionality. I would love to see courts and lawyers and police better trained in understanding victim responses so that a woman who might use force herself, that's a trauma response. Remember, we talk about freeze, flight, and fight, and fawn, those sort of responses to trauma.

And yet when a woman fights back, she can be misidentified as a perpetrator. So we seem to forget that fighting back is a trauma response. And when women fight back, that's not abuse. That's a reactive, resistant force to the male violence, the abusive violence. So

You know, identifying a woman as a perpetrator actually makes her far more at risk of his violence. And very sadly, not so long ago in Queensland, we had eight Indigenous women killed. And each of those women that year had been identified as a perpetrator.

But each of those women had been hospitalized from his violence. None of the men had been hospitalized. And yet each of those women ended up dead. It's horrifying, isn't it? It is. You know, when you get courts who've identified their court lists, who've identified a quarter to a third I've seen in Queensland, some courts, this is phenomenal.

Four or five years ago, I think the numbers have improved somewhat. But when I saw those court lists and there was 30%, 25% of perpetrators, respondents they're called in Queensland, identified were women, then we know we've got misidentification happening there.

And we need to increase the training. So if I had my way, it would be a far more focused and well-trained understanding of domestic violence, effects on the victim and strategies of offenders.

and then far more consequences for non-compliance for the offender. When I worked with men in group and they've been court ordered and they turn up two or three times and then they don't front anymore, I'll report that to the court. This bloke's been court ordered. He was here for what was going to be something like 40 hours of intervention and he's ended up doing

six or seven and he's not here anymore, then there doesn't seem to be any response to that. There's no consequence for his non-compliance. So he knows he can get away with it. So until men realise that they can't get away with this, that there are going to be consequences. So it's going to be, I think, a really wholesale reappraisal of our approach to victim survivors and to domestic violence offenders if we want to change the statistics.

With misidentification, in your experience, do you think that there is a skewed racial element to this? Because it does seem as though, and in so many stories that we have heard and we've spoken about at different times, that Indigenous women are more inclined to be booked as a perpetrator or seen as a perpetrator than what a white woman would be if they were the victim of domestic violence.

I think that's what the research would suggest. Yes, absolutely. Again, that means more training, more understanding of why Indigenous women might use force more so than someone from a different racial background. I was talking to people who work...

in Indigenous communities and the complexity of the violence and the lateral violence and the context of the violence there is culturally different. And I think police, courts and non-Indigenous workers on those communities need to have a very nuanced understanding of that.

before working in those spaces. But when we talked before about how we can go about change and what are we going to do, like what are we going to actually put in place and how we do feel helpless? I want to link this because I think for everybody, I think it's a really, really great example. There's a Scottish comedian, his name's Daniel Sloss,

And at one of his shows, he did a whole piece at the end very, very seriously on rape and how the issue and the change needs to come from men. Obviously, there's plenty of male perpetrators, but there's plenty of amazing men too. Women are doing everything they can, screaming out and doing absolutely everything to instill change. But the real change has to come from other good men speaking out. And he does this whole piece on how he blames himself for raping

he knows, like his friend, raping a woman. He completely owns the fact and says, I didn't know he was a rapist, but I saw the signs over the years, all those deadly S's that you spoke about. He's like, as a friend, there were things that were said that weren't right. There were signs that I saw that I ignored because I was a man that didn't want to speak up. And,

And his message is men are the ones that need, like the good men are the ones that need to be having these conversations in their male circles. And sometimes I think as much as we have these reforms and these changes and these programs, which we absolutely need, we need to be encouraging our husbands to be having these conversations with their friends and our sons to be having these conversations with their friends because they're the people that are going to actually instill the change. It's not the women that are saying, please don't rape me. That's not what's going to change anything. Yeah.

Absolutely right. You know, the number of men who are abusive, who have access or get access to an intervention program is a drop in the ocean. I'll just cite some figures here. They're ballpark figures. In Queensland last year, I believe that we had something like 65,000 domestic violence orders issued. We had something like 45,000 breaches of domestic violence orders issued.

And when an order is breached in Queensland, it becomes a criminal offence. So it moves from the civil code into the criminal code. So breaching a DV order is a criminal offence. $45,000.

Now, I can't accurately ascertain how many men start a domestic violence intervention group. Start, not finish, because we know there's an attrition rate to those groups. But I would estimate maybe 1,500 men. But you can see the disparity between the 45,000 breaches.

And we know who these breaches are because that's the criminal offense. And then the number who actually get an intervention for transformation, for rehabilitation, for change. So we can't rely just on a small men's intervention program to solve the whole problem. That's not going to happen, not at this point in time. So you're right. I think good, respectful men who've done their own work, who won't collude, who

who won't exonerate, who won't turn a blind eye to the disrespect and abusive ways of other men. We really need to call on that resource. And it's not easy because, you know, often men find it difficult to stand up to other men because men tend to police each other, you know, about what you can do and what you can't do. You know, the man box, of course.

So it takes a man who's not willing to be contained in that man box, who's not willing

who's not willing to put his head in the sand or turn a blind eye or turn his back on disrespectful behavior from another man and to stand up and be who he should be as a good, respectful man and call it. We need to really focus on that. And I think, as you say, that's got to come from the male community. That's got to come from men's groups and not men's rights groups, but from men who understand that this is unjust. This should not be happening.

Brian, what you just mentioned, you said that domestic violence case can turn from being a civil case to a criminal case. What would constitute a breach to change it to a criminal case? Any breach, any breach should mean officially, and it is officially, a criminal act. So case in point.

A man I worked with texted his partner and phoned his partner multiple times over one weekend when there was a no contact order. So let's say he did it 200 times. Theoretically, that's 200 breaches. Action should have been taken, but it was a no contact order. Oh, he just breached by contacting her when he shouldn't. That's technically a breach. You know, I've heard that term used, a technical breach. No such thing as a technical breach. It's a breach. It's a breach.

No action was taken. Next breach this man committed, he turned up drunk on her doorstep, bashing on the door. She was hiding in fear inside. Eventually, he left. She reported that breach, no action taken. Third breach, very hot evening in Queensland, security door locked, the doggy door left open. He was a small guy. He squeezed through the doggy door,

And he was at the end of her bed at 2 a.m. in the morning, third breach. So you can see an escalation there. When we don't react, when we don't respond to the initial breach, he's going to see how far he can go. Each of those breaches was an escalation to the previous breach. So, you know, we need to have swift and certain consequences for breaches of behavior, for any noncompliance.

But my question to that is, why is it that we see domestic violence as a civil case, whereas if someone was to do this to someone who they weren't in a romantic relationship with, like if I was to harass someone with 200 phone calls after physically abusing them,

That wouldn't ever be a civil case. That would be a criminal case to start with. If I broke into someone's house, if I showed up on their door drunk smashing on the door, like we treat domestic violence cases as though they are not as violent or that they are more acceptable than what we would if it was a stranger and it wasn't an intimate partner relationship. Yeah, we do. That is true. I agree with you completely, Laura. But having said that, we have other laws. We have stalking legislation.

We have torture legislation. We have deprivation of liberty legislation. We have non-lethal strangulation legislation here in Queensland. We've got other legislative acts that we could respond to his behaviour with other than just the domestic violence legislation. So my question is, with all this legislation, why aren't we able to contain these men better?

And my only concern with the making DV legislation criminal behaviour, as you so rightly say, when we have misidentification of women and she's identified as an offender, does she get criminalised because of that behaviour? Yeah. So I think we need to be very, very cautious and careful about that. I agree with you. I agree that it is criminal behaviour.

And I agree that we need to respond better than we're doing to contain his abusiveness. But it's part of that unintended consequences sometimes conversation that we need to have around how this may impact on her. I agree totally with you, though. I think if it's criminal behavior initially and if it's done right, an investigation clearly identifies him as the abuser, then maybe her safety is assured completely.

more quickly, more urgently, more comprehensively than if we leave it under the civil code. I would really love to know as well, how is it that perpetrators weaponise children in these sorts of situations? When a woman leaves and they take their kids with them and they try to protect their kids, which is

is usually the main priority for mums. What is it and how is it that men are able to use the children in order to gain access and to further terrorise the women who have left? Men will weaponise anything and everything. They weaponise courts.

They weaponize children. They weaponize their own sons who are radicalized very often to committing horrendous behavior against the mother. So the use of children is particularly horrific, I think, because

It just continues and lengthens the time of abuse that children have to experience. You know, there's awful cases of fathers giving access to children when the clear indications were that this was a sexual predator. This was a dangerous, dangerous man. And yet

All that was overlooked because men have a right, their right to fatherhood because they fathered this child. Men will get access to kids through courts and then they've won the battle. And so she hasn't been able to protect these children as she wants to. The court has dismissed her.

their right to safety virtually in cases. And children become just another means to get back, to punish, to have revenge against the partner for having the temerity to want to live in safety from his violence. You know, I remember I was talking about weapons and what weapons men had at home in a group one night.

Some of these men were living on properties where they had access to guns, of course, and used guns as part of their lifestyle, their livelihood. You know, the discussion became around men who use crossbows for hunting on these properties and hunting knives. And then one man just very clearly and very calmly cut across the conversation and said, Brian, you know what? I'm

I can use anything I want as a weapon. And I thought, you are being very honest and very truthful. And the truth he was talking about was kitchen knives or chairs or tools at home. But the reality is that he's not only talking about implements in the home.

He's talking about courts. He's talking about police. He's talking about school. He can use anything as a weapon in his strategy of coercive control to create misery and to increase his tyranny over this woman's life. Absolutely petrifying is what it is. It's petrifying. Absolutely. But it also, like, I mean...

it's such a almost depressing conversation to have because everything that we've spoken about comes back to this idea that the systems in place, they're not protecting victims. The systems in place are broken. They don't work. And there needs to be a radical overhaul of how we manage and take care of

victims, survivors, but also how we punish, rehabilitate, what it is that we do for perpetrators as well. It seems like the system itself is fundamentally broken and there isn't a way out of this yet. And how is it going to be fixed? Well, I think that's a conversation we need to have nationally with

with politicians, with academics, with practitioners, with people with lived experience, with children. And it's not about having another report or another investigation. It's got to actually lead to what you're calling a systemic overhaul. When we know the risks of fatalities that high risk, high harm perpetrators have, we need to have some kind of task force within the police that

that deals specifically with high-risk, high-harm domestic violence offenders. And I know there are certain areas which are moving potentially towards that. I think we need to have what's called focus deterrence in our police force, where we focus on the highest-risk harm guys, and then we have other levels of intervention for men who may not be at that stage yet.

As imminent a risk as the high risk, I harm. I think we've got to really focus on the early intervention that we were talking about before in terms of young boys, young girls, access to social media. What are we doing in our schools in terms of respectful relationships? And let's also remember that schools are there to educate and to socialise our children, but they can't do it all. I think we need to have parental programs which are teaching parents

how to be maybe more engaged, more involved in their children's lives and not to shrug their shoulders and give up parenting for mobile phones or for social media. I think courts, as I said previously, need to be far more nuanced in their understanding and be far more trauma informed about the effect of trauma on women and children.

Far more nuanced in understanding the tactics and how perpetrators manipulate courts too and weaponize courts and call that and see through that. So it's got to be a multi-leveled approach. It's going to take a lot of personnel, a lot of resources. You know, people sort of at governmental levels cry poor often that there's not enough money to do this. Well, if we prioritize and value the lives of women and children,

And let's remember, it's not only women we want to keep safe.

It's the next generation. It's the potential perpetrators who are growing up now, the potential victims who are growing up now, that we want to block or disrupt that pathway to being a perpetrator or that pathway that may lead to being a victim survivor. We want to interrupt that in ways that are going to keep people healthy and safe. It's a wicked problem, and wicked problems have to be addressed at multiple levels, and

I don't believe, you know, as some people do, that this can be defeated within a generation. I'm sorry, I just don't see that happening. I don't think that understands the nature of the problem we're dealing with, really. I don't want to be a pessimist or appear to be negative.

But I think when we deal with this wicked problem, we have to be realistic and we have to throw the resources that are needed at it, but understand that this is going to take time. Brian, thank you for coming and for being a part of the podcast and having what is such an important conversation and for all the work that you do in trying to rehabilitate, trying to enact reform. Yeah, it really is such...

It's such a hard conversation to have because it does, as we just kind of landed on, it does feel as though change is not happening fast enough. But we so deeply appreciate you being a part of the podcast and everything that you're doing to try and make that happen. Well, thanks to your work too, Laura and Britt, because I think podcasts are a

a way of hopefully, you know, people may learn something. I'm only one voice. I realize that. But when people listen to podcasts that talk about this awful reality, the impossible lives that some women are living, hopefully it deepens their awareness, their understanding. And who knows, it may actually instill a motivation to be able to do something about it in their neck of the woods, in their family, in their area. They may be able to speak up and shine a light on where it needs to be shone.

So you're part of the community response too. So the work you do is valuable and valued. So thank you very much. And for the invitation to be here today. These are definitely the conversations. You say you're only one voice and we're only one podcast, but they are the conversations that could potentially save a life. And if they do save one life, then that's what matters. So thank you so much, Brian. Absolutely. Thank you.