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The war on terror is closer than we think

Rod Ainsworth from Creative Regions discusses a new work about an important social issue.

May is Domestic and Family Violence Prevention Month. We’re just into the fifth month of the year, around 20 weeks in, and already more than 30 women have been murdered by their partners nationally. This is not only one of the biggest epidemics in our society today, but also one of the biggest threats to our civilisation in my mind.

While this is a very complex issue, the crux of it is simple. Men are terrorising women (around 87% of perpetrators are men). This is a men’s issue – an issue of power and control. Let’s face it, if a politician or public official came to our homes and tortured us and our children in the ways that some men treat their partners, we would say we lived in an oppressive, totalitarian society and we would be justifiably outraged. This kind of terrorism – behaviour that undermines our civil society – is happening every day, all around us.

Before the public campaigning around domestic and family violence became daily news, over three years ago, Creative Regions began interviewing victims and perpetrators to make a piece of verbatim theatre that asked one question… WHY? All this time later, years of discussion and research in my head, with the premiere of the work under our belt and a Queensland tour being planned, I still don’t know. I just don’t understand.

The play is called IT ALL BEGINS WITH LOVE and it shares the stories of five women’s experiences with violence. It is a verbatim work so every word comes from the interview transcripts we collected. Through these characters, we get a glimpse of some of the complexities of intimate partner violence. How does it start? What are the warning signs? Why did they put up with it? Why did they stay? Questions that might seem so simple before the play become incredibly complex over a short 35 minutes. A Q&A session afterwards, facilitated by a professional counsellor, helps to bring together some of the threads that are made bare during the production.

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One of the things we’ve heard during the Q&A is, ”How is a play going to reduce domestic violence?” That’s a pretty big responsibility to place on one small piece of theatre. This is the biggest challenge in making socially-engaged art for me: the expectations that people place on artists and the work. It’s a good question, for sure, and I hope we can reduce violence but one play can’t be lumbered with that task – my answer is that it won’t. Or at least we’d never know if it did.

There are a few things we know the play does do:

  • It shows behaviours that people can recognise from their lives
  • It shows how these characters sought help
  • It enables people to recognise behaviours of friends, neighbours and others around them
  • It helps people to understand what controlling behaviour looks like and how it escalates to violence
  • It helps people to understand how easy it is to normalise or excuse this behaviour
  • It clearly shows the cycle of violence
  • It demonstrates just how damn difficult it is to escape and how hard victims’ lives become.

 

Through these five women, I hope audiences begin to see some of the social costs of this behaviour in our society and the life-long effects on victims. I hope people stop asking questions that blame the victim like, “Why don’t they leave?” and start asking the only questions that matter… “When are men going to stop hitting or killing women?” “When will the terror stop?” and “What can I do about it?”

If that happens, we’ve done our job. For further information see http://www.creativeregions.com.au/

If this post brings up any issues for you, or if you just feel like you need to talk to someone you can call Lifeline 24 hour crisis support line (13 11 14).

Rod is a writer and producer and loves working beyond his comfort zone in new artforms and new collaborations. He wrote the libretto for an opera, The Crushing, which was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Drama Award in 2010 and the APRA/AMC Art Music Award for Excellence in a Regional Community in 2012, as well as a verbatim theatre play called It All Begins with Love about domestic violence which was premiered by Creative Regions in 2014 and will tour in partnership with Arts Queensland and UnitingCare Community in 2015. Rod has worked on numerous film production projects; most recently producing a feature documentary about the AFLOAT Creative Recovery Project in Bundaberg after the 2013 floods and is working on a documentary about Vietnam Veterans. Rod thrives when presented with a blank slate and projects that have the potential to change people’s lives.

Images courtesy Creative Regions. Photo: Paul Beutel Photography.