Nina Funnell perfectly echoes my own thoughts on the murder of a mother and three children by their husband and father.
By NINA FUNNELL
Trigger warning: This post deals with violence against women and children, suicide and other distressing topics. It may be triggering for some readers.
If a man walked into a classroom, pulled out a gun and shot three children and a teacher, before turning the gun on himself, we’d call it a massacre, and we’d call him a vicious murderer.
Yet when a man walks into his own home and shoots his three children and his wife before turning the gun on himself, he’s remembered in the press as a loving family man who was under some strain.
Geoff Hunt, who violently shot and killed his wife and three children this week, has been remembered today in some media as “super, super patient… You couldn’t get a better bloke. The most gentle, considerate bloke… a pillar of society.”
And perhaps he was. But he also murdered his wife and three children and that cannot be airbrushed from this story. Read more
As published on Mama Mia.
4 Responses
Mental illness can do horrific things to a person’s sense of morality and to their volition.
Let’s call out domestic violence without belittling mental illness, hey?
I don’t think anyone is belittling mental illness here. Domestic violence is a major issue in Australia and we need to be able to talk about this. Many people can suffer from a mental illness and yet manage to not murder their family. The media need to have a good long look at how they phrase their articles as these news stories shape our society. I see examples in the news every day particularly of male violence against women being excused away with the blanket of mental illness. People with a mental illness definitely need help and support…..but lets also hold men accountable for their actions and start to take seriously the current epidemic of male violence that is destroying families and taking lives.
Isn’t it interesting how when white men commit mass murder against their families or in their community the first response is to excuse and justify this violence as mental illness? In the US, over the past forty years there have been over sixty mass shootings, all but one committed by men. Imagine if the stats were reversed, and it was women who were murdering. Wouldn’t we rightly say, what is going on with women? Why are we so unwilling to look at these tragic events in a context where one man murders his female partner each week, where it is not uncommon for men to murder their children to punish their wives?
These events are terrible and tragic. Sure, let’s have a conversation on mental illness, giving support to those who struggle and redefining masculinity in such a way that allows men to feel they can seek help. But why do all of these things and the need to excuse the ‘loving father’ who murdered his family have to take precedence over the lives of his wife and three children and the much needed dialogue about why men continue to murder their wives, and sometimes children?
Whether or not Geoff Hunt was a great guy for most of his life can’t be the lens by which his life is summarised, because the good and nice and honourable things he did cannot be allowed to balance out the fact that he chose for the defining act of his life to be the murder of his wife and his children. Regardless of how he saw his actions, any illness he suffered or what ‘strain’ he was under, he stopped being eligible to be called or viewed as a nice guy/good husband/upstanding citizen/loving father the moment he picked up a gun and walked towards the people in his family with the intention of ending their lives.
It’s dangerous to insist on viewing family annihilators, or any man who perpetrates domestic violence, in the ways in which they are good guys, or to focus on the circumstances which may have contributed to their actions, as opposed to naming them as violent men engaged in criminal behaviour and who are expected to take responsibility for that behaviour. Not simply because it excuses male violence against women and children in a way which allows it to continue quietly festering like the canker on our culture which is us. But also because of what it says about all of us. A man murders his family and we summarise him as a good guy? If that’s what the good guys do, what do the *bad* guys do? If killing your children isn’t enough to stop you from being considered a “loving father” then what is the standard of love children and women are meant to accept? And far more chilling – how many of us are even now living in homes with good husbands and loving fathers and nice men?
As for mental illness, the problem does not lie in including the question of mental health in events like this, it’s in allowing the national discussion about male violence against women and children to be sidetracked into one about mental illness, or allowing mental illness to excuse the harm inflicted by those who may or may not be suffering from it. This happens constantly. And it’s hardly unreasonable to expect someone with a mental illness, not to ‘get over it’ but to ‘not murder your family’.
Additionally, why is his prior history of DV relevant? How many times does a man need to harm his wife and children before we are allowed to consider him abusive? One of the things Rosie Batty spoke about at the DV inquiry last week was how the police wait until someone has been seriously hurt or for abuse to emerge as a pattern, to start taking violence seriously. Kim, Phoebe, Mia, and Fletcher Hunt don’t get the opportunity to wait and see if this happens again.