Violence against women: The toxic culture of weaponised victimhood

From Andrew Tate to Bruce Lehrmann, male frustration and weaponised victimhood allow violence against women to persist in Australia, Dr Victoria Fielding writes.

* CONTENT WARNING: This article discusses domestic violence and rape

AUSTRALIA IS HAVING a much-needed conversation about the root causes of violence against women.

Amongst this conversation, Australia needs to recognise that the movement of powerful people supporting rapist Bruce Lehrmann was a symptom of a toxic culture where men weaponise women’s fights for justice and equality against women.

When men place themselves in the role of victims of women’s progress – victims of women’s liberation, feminism and fights for equality – they are either consciously or perhaps unconsciously punishing women for daring to be equal to them.

This manipulative reversal of the roles of victim and aggressor in abusive and violent situations has at its heart the phenomenon of weaponised victimhood. Weaponised victimhood stems from the age-old reaction of people with power – in this case, men, lashing out at challengers of power: women – simultaneously claiming they are the true victims of women’s struggle for equality.

Bruce Lehrmann weaponised his own apparent victimhood throughout the painful years Brittany Higgins fought for justice after Lehrmann raped her. While maintaining his innocence, Lehrmann and his powerful supporters consistently characterised him as the hapless victim of a false rape allegation.

This accusation, linked to Higgins’ apparent desire to further the cause of the #MeToo movement against sexual violence, was the central theme of Channel 7’s scandalous Spotlight interviews with Lehrmann and his supporters.

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Before being found guilty of rape on the balance of probabilities in his own defamation trial, Lehrmann was booked in to be a speaker at men’s rights activist Bettina Arndt’s "presumption of innocence" conference.

One of Lehrmann’s supporters, apparently and concerningly an ex-policeman, encapsulated Lehrmann’s victimhood narrative by being tattooed with Lehrmann’s face alongside the words: 'Real Victim Survivor'.

Lehrmann weaponised his supposed victimhood to characterise himself as the innocent party smeared by a fake rape allegation, placing Higgins in the villain frame. In doing so, he and his supporters were not only villainising women for making allegations of sexual and gendered violence and assault but were also opposing movements like #MeToo, which aim to hold men accountable for violence against women by building women’s power alongside feminist fights for equality in society.

These attacks on Higgins’ credibility by Lehrmann and his powerful supporters were akin to men who use abuse and violence against women when women dare to suggest they should be equal to men — men who prefer inequality, who prefer a feeling of superiority over women in the social pecking order, lash out when women demand a more equal status.

The fact is that Australia does not have a problem with men being falsely accused of sexual assault and violence. We have an epidemic of violence where too many men do not meet consequences, and too many women end up assaulted and/or murdered.

Statistics demonstrate how difficult it is for women to get justice when they are sexually assaulted by men. Of the women who've experienced a sexual assault, 87% did not report the matter to police.

Australia no place for violence against women

While Australia boasts of being a progressive nation, the problem of violence against women continues to shame us.

Figures on the successful prosecution of rape are hard to access, but Victorian courts were reported to have 23,000 rapes reported to police between 2009 to 2019, with only 1,003 sentences for rape — a measly 4% of the approximately 13% who report in the first place.

Despite women’s clear victimhood as both sufferers of sexual assault and victims of a justice system where their perpetrators regularly go unpunished, men are the ones weaponising their faux-victimhood to oppose gender equality.

For instance, the men’s rights movement frames men as victims of feminism and alleges female privilege creates sexism against men. This weaponised faux-victimhood is also the ideological thread of the related "Incel" (involuntarily-celibate) movement, where men blame women for “reverse rape” — for not having sex with them.

Scarily influential misogynist Andrew Tate also provokes male resentment towards women by claiming – amongst many other dangerous misogynistic tropes – that women 'bear responsibility' for being sexually assaulted.

I believe that weaponised victimhood is not only used by men collectively in movements against feminism but also plays an important role in abuse and violence perpetrated by individual men against women, whether the women are known to them or strangers.

Take, for example, the father of the Bondi Junction killer saying that his son"wanted a girlfriend… he was frustrated out of his brain”.

Although it is clear his father did not mean to infer that his son was a victim by calling him ‘frustrated’ at not having a girlfriend, the implication is that this mass-murderer was a victim of women not dating him — the same complaint of the Incel movement, which experts say exhibits a violent, extremist ideology.

Another way of describing such ‘frustration’ is 'humiliated fury', a phrase coined by Jess Hill in her book See What You Made Me Do. Hill argues that men’s humiliated fury is a key precursor to domestic violence.

Such ideas can be brought together to argue that women advancing gender equality make men feel humiliated because men perceive women’s slow but steady gains toward gender equality as akin to them losing their privilege, advantage, power and control over women.

Statistics backing up this notion are included in a discussion paper by Jess Hill and Michael Salter about preventing domestic violence.

They cite an ANU study which found that women who have seemingly achieved income-gender-equity in the home by earning more than their male partners are:

'35% more likely to be subjected to physical violence, and 20% more likely to be subjected to emotional abuse'.

Domestic violence is also known to escalate when women try to leave their abuser, with between 50% to 75% of domestic violence homicides occurring during or after a woman has left her abuser — after a woman has literally tried to gain liberation from a coercively controlling man.

It follows that some men feel vulnerability, shame and humiliation when women are not inferior to them and when women are not under their control. These emotions culminate in humiliated-fury-fuelled violence.

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The key point is that this humiliation and violence comes from men believing they are the victims because they have "lost" their power and control over women. This loss is used to, in their own minds, make them feel they are the victim and are thus justified in lashing out. They are literally weaponising their victimhood.

Co-host of Network Ten's The Project, Waleed Aly came close to saying something similar but ultimately missed the point when he argued efforts to prevent violence against women should not solely focus on improving gender equality but should instead address known risk factors amongst a minority of men.

In his words, these include:

'... alcohol, gambling, pornography and abusive and neglectful childhood environments.'

Aly argued this because he says the current orthodoxy of ending violence against women by progressing gender equality is not working.

He described this gender equality approach as seemingly logical; that by removing hierarchical gender norms which see women as inferior, men would not feel 'humiliation, shame and disrespect' when women do not 'behave like their supplicants', with violence in this theory a way for men to 'restore their self-esteem', but claims in practice was not having the desired impact.

What Aly fails to recognise in this argument is that it is the progression towards gender equality itself which may be a major cause of men’s violence. Men’s violence, figuratively and sometimes literally, represents humiliated men putting women back in their place below men on the societal hierarchy — below men in their individual relationships.

Lehrmann’s weaponised victimhood against his rape victim Brittany Higgins demonstrates how men play the victim when women fight for justice and equality.

If Australia is to truly understand – and then prevent – male violence against women, we need to recognise how much-needed progress towards gender equality is being weaponised by men to play the victim, culminating in more abuse and violence and less justice for women.

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