The government has released a new tool as part of its three year and $30 million anti-violence against women campaign: something they’re calling the Excuse Interpreter.
The guide, available as a PDF, is a neat rundown of how seemingly innocuous phrases can have powerful effects on children. It’s designed to get people thinking about the concrete effects that seemingly harmless language can have on people’s attitudes, including tired old bullshit like “boys will be boys”.
For example:
The guide covers categories of excuses including “playing down disrespect to girls” and “accepting aggression as just part of being a boy”.
While it might initially seem to be overstating things a bit to suggest that seemingly harmless phrases like “stop taking things so seriously” will end up causing intimate violence, the point of the guide is to make clear the connection between the attitudes we learn as kids and the actions we take later in life. And realistically, this stuff applies far beyond childhood – how many adults excuse other adults’ behaviour with lines exactly like these?
As the guide says:
“Not all disrespect towards women results in violence. But all violence against women starts with disrespectful behaviour.”
When the campaign was launched in April last year, Social Services Minister Christian Porter explained:
“Our research shows that too often, adults believe that disrespectful or aggressive behaviour by young males towards young females is something that should be understood rather than judged and discouraged. Research shows adults often unwittingly excuse objectively unacceptable behaviour with notions such as ‘boys will be boys’.“It is also clear from our research that too often adults blame the victim by asking what a victim may have done to invite what should simply be recognised as unacceptable, disrespectful behaviour.”
Hopefully this guide becomes required reading, and we can put this whole victim-blaming thing to bed. It’s about bloody time we saw “it’s just a joke” retired for good.
Source: SMH.
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