If you or someone you know is impacted by domestic violence, call 1800RESPECTon 1800 737 732. In an emergency, call 000.
What happened at Camp Hill this week was inexcusable. A mother and her three children murdered by the man who claimed to love them. (I won’t be speaking his name in the rest of this article.)
Yet the deaths of Hannah Clarke, 31, Lainah, six, Aaliyah, 4 four and Trey, three, have been followed by all-too-familiar rhetoric…
The man who chose to ambush his own family on their Wednesday-morning school run, ignite their car and leave them to burn, must have been somehow ‘driven to it’.
Watch: Violence against women… the hidden numbers. (Post continues below.)
It’s right there in news stories about his custody battle and “loving” Facebook posts about his family.
It’s in social media comments about him finding ‘the only way to be with his kids forever’.
It’s in stigmatising presumptions that he was mentally ill, or that his limited football career may have caused brain damage.
It’s in language like ‘tortured’ and ‘he snapped’.
On Thursday night, it was even explicit in speculation by a member of the Queensland Police. Speaking at a press conference, Detective Inspector Mark Thompson pondered: “Is it an instance of a husband being driven too far by issues that he’s suffered..?” (The force has since issued an apology and Thompson has been stood down from the investigation.)
With each phrase, each headline, each comment, the responsibility for this crime is leveraged a little further off the shoulders of this man.
‘Driven to it’… as if he was merely a passenger, as if he had little choice.
This was a man who subjected Hannah to repeated violence and abuse throughout their relationship.
Queensland Police have confirmed they’d dealt with him on a number of occasions and that he was under a Domestic Violence Order and the force’s Vulnerable Persons Unit had also been involved, offering counselling to Hannah and the children.
In December, with assistance from her parents, she was able to take her little ones and leave. Unlike so many people in an abusive relationship, she had a place to land, means to survive, a support network. It still couldn’t keep her safe.
This was a man who was controlling, manipulative and violent until the end.
He didn’t become dangerous because Hannah left. Hannah left because he was dangerous.
Of course, it's only human for us to scramble for an explanation for this crime, to ask 'how could this happen?' It's shocking and unnerving and difficult to understand, even though it's happened before — now eight times this year alone, according to Destroy the Joint's Counting Dead Women initiative.
We want to say 'this happened due to X', because it gives context to the horror, because we want to think it can be prevented, and because then we can search our own lives for that thing. We look for an explanation because we want to feel that we are safe. As individuals and a community.
And so, people say, X = the broken family court system. X = disempowerment of men. X = a heartbroken father who snapped.
But would any of that actually satisfy the question? Does any of that make sense of what he did?
To suggest the murders of people like Hannah, Lainah, Aaliyah and Trey can be somehow explained is to suggest that they are inevitable or — worse — justified, even in some small way. Look at their faces above as you consider that.
In reality, the domestic violence equation is anything but simple. Police and governments and researchers and criminologists and welfare organisations have been working to unpick it for years, knowing it's bigger than any of them alone. They have pointed to certain elements that factor into the issue as a whole (a few among them: misogyny, gender, prior exposure to abuse).
But none that excuses it in the individual.
There was no heartbroken Brisbane parent 'driven too far'. There was no 'mentally ill monster' in Raven Street.
There was only a man who plotted and perpetrated the deaths of his family, who told bystanders not to save them from the flames, who took his own life and died on the footpath unable to live with what he'd done.
There was only a murderer.
If this post brings up any issues for you, or if you just feel like you need to speak to someone, please call 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – the national sexual assault, domestic and family violence counselling service. It doesn’t matter where you live, they will take your call and, if need be, refer you to a service closer to home.
Feature image: Facebook.
Top Comments
What he did to those poor little souls and their beautiful mother is absolutely haunting. You would have to be evil to the very core to kill your children, in particular, burning them to death. To die in such a horrendously painful way, well, you wouldn't even wish that on your worst enemy.
And he was a coward right to the very end. Running from the car, stabbing himself so he wouldn't have to face any accountability for his awful crimes. What a POS.
It was probably for the best that Hannah didn't survive. Nothing she ever did would have brought her any joy after what happened to her children. Now at least she gets to be with her baby angels in heaven. May they all rest in peace.
Nothing will change and heinous acts like this
will continue so long as the media and talking heads (like a psychologist
talking about this case on Radio National) keep talking about this in terms of
logic and reason. Steve Chase, the ABC presenter was asking said psychologist
things like, "Oh but was his situation enough to make him do this" -
all as if there were a rational point in a person's life whereby they can
consider it justified to burn his whole family to death. This cool weighing up
of the perceived 'sufficiency' of the triggering event is just adding fuel to
the fire - because any potentially murderous fathers listening to this can
consider that justification exists for these homicidal acts. The main problem
with respect to commentary on these issues is an evident lack of understanding
of the sort of mental states that precipitate these events. Necessarily -
independent of how much of an arsehole the perpetrator is - a complete
breakdown of the mind has to occur for someone to even consider such barbarity.
Given that significant barriers exist to prevent perpetrators from talking
about their ideas of doing immoral and illegal acts (society at large will
censure such talk) and given that male ego is undoubtedly at work in the form
of “I can’t be wrong” ‘Male Pattern Recalcitrance,’ there are few impeding
factors that can be brought to bear on such situations. It seems everyone is
‘talking past’ the most salient issues. The main barrier to the propagation of
more useful commentary is the continuation of framing life-destroying phenomena
in terms of ‘weighing’ the apparent sufficiency of the ‘triggering’ events as
experienced by the man – as if all this can be explained by logic, and as if
such savagery can EVER be justified under any circumstances. It cannot. The
only messages that may help prevent these tragedies in the future are messages
directed at men, so as firstly to get their attention and then to tell them
that THEIR THINKING IS WRONG. In the same way that a depressed person
contemplating suicide has lost rational perspective, and feels they must die in
order to feel relief (when you’re dead you can’t feel anything, and certainly
not relief) … well the reality of this situation is typically that the person
does not really want to die. Suicidal ideation itself is a trauma that
accelerates and ‘snowballs’ irrationality, often leading to tragedy. The same
sort of erroneous thinking applies to murder/suicides. Rational thinking has
broken down, and society at large is not conversant with the counter-intuitive
nature of homicidal/suicidal thinking. The person does not want to die, or to
kill his family, yet is under the delusion that this is 'the only way out.'
Really, as I say the thinking is wrong, on every level. Nothing can ever be
solved by entering into such madness. But men especially need to know to be
aware of the very first inklings of such poisonous thinking, again in the same
way that a suicidal person needs to recognise when thought patterns are veering
into dangerous territory. Given that it’s currently not societally acceptable
to talk about having family-murdering urges; such thoughts will remain
underground. The opportunity, then is surely for the mass media to talk
directly to men, in the form of “If you have had, have now, or may in the
future have homi/suicidal urges; know that these are not only bad and wrong
thoughts, but they are a sign of a broken mind. A mind that has gone beyond
rationality, and in its despair has submitted to base urges and deterministic
end-of-the-world conclusions. In the same way that so many emotionally-charged
media stories carry a prefacing ‘trigger warning’, and at the end of the story
a suggestion to call Lifeline, Beyond Blue etc. if the story raises any issues
– we must have some sort of a ‘blow-off valve’ setup for men to access. For
without any such intervention, there is little hope of preventing the
deterioration of relationships into spite, hatred and ultimately a total
breakdown of rational thought, reason, humanity. In summary, I believe what is
needed is the widespread dissemination of messages to men directly; urging them
to examine their thinking, and to consider this is not just about them, and
that they are – surprise surprise – not always right because they are male and
strong. The absence of such messaging leaves wide open the path for men to
think that their situation is that they ‘have been pushed too far’ when in fact
resorting to murderous urges is not at all based on reason or a measuring of
the sufficiency of the perceived provocation. The message needs to be broadcast
that such thinking is always wrong. It is wrong and morally corrupting for the
man – and potentially catastrophic to the other family members who, after all,
were forged in love and tenderness. There needs to be a teasing apart of the
beauty of romantic and familial attachment, and notions of possession of same.
There needs to be an awareness that sometimes love ends in painful and
unthinkable loss – but that such agony is not at all commensurate with visiting
greater pain and suffering on those you are supposed to love. All of this can
only begin when men get the message that they can STOP further destructive
thinking, and to realise that their thinking has gone haywire, and they can
challenge distortions of thinking that lead them to believe the only way out is
Armageddon. These messages, communicated directly to men via radio, TV,
Internet, can sow enough of a seed of reflection to at least make the
perpetrators reconsider; to realise that the murderous and suicidal thoughts
they have are not even of their own authorship. They are the result of an
unstable mind; a mind that has lost perspective. These are ‘Trojan Horse’
thoughts that compete for headspace with valid, rational thoughts. After a
time, the warped thoughts – because they come from the same mind, after all –
are given equal weight, leaving the way open for the thoughts to be acted on.
There must be a widespread realisation of this mechanism whereby thinking can
go wrong. It goes way beyond ‘normal’ murderous urges (say, in the case of a
hot-blooded fight) and perverts the mind to thoughts of destroying loved ones.
Everybody abhors massacres like this one. Such acts are unthinkable. But, if we
cordon off such acts as unthinkable and thereby fail to think about the
circumstances that lead to these tragedies, we deprive ourselves of the
possibility of preventing them.
This is all very well if it applies to a man who "snaps" under the pressure of his marriage breakdown, but this was a man who was deeply misogynistic and had a long history of abusing and controlling his wife. This heinous act was a culmination of that. He didn't get "pushed too far." In my opinion we should be looking at why he had such a deep hatred of women (as confirmed by his cousin today) and whether our society does enough to stamp out misogyny.
To compare this mans actions to suicide by someone who is depressed is abhorrent. Murdering your family is about control and then murdering yourself following that act is about the avoidance of consequence.
A depressed person who attempts suicide or completes suicide is genuinely trying to end their unimaginable pain. Pain few Linking or comparing these two things is extremely ignorant and stigmatising to innocent people battling mental illness.
There is definitely an issue with males with mental health problems refusing to admit their issue or self-medicating with drugs or alcohol.
Whilst I completely disagree with some of the comments I’ve seen about the family courts being the “cause”, surely to have such a warped thinking or be so murderous as to burn your own kids alive something pretty serious has gone wrong somewhere, most probably in the way he was raised or childhood. There are many people dealing with terrible issues and parental alienation who would never consider doing something so horrendous. I definitely do not feel it is an issue to investigate this, however I think any suggestions that he was “driven” to commit this act by the family court or AVO is just looking at the symptoms not the actual cause.
There’s no family breakup in the world stressful enough to ‘snap’ someone into a homicidal rage. Actually there’s no situation on earth that stressful. Violence only comes from hatred and anger, never from stress. Stress puts people in the hospital, makes them ill, makes them walk away, makes them self harm, causes them to drink or self medicate. It never makes someone kill.