Dob in the brutes who bash women

If there is a god among all this evil, then the human race "is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity".

So wrote philosopher Cardinal John Newman in 1865.

The quote haunts me as much now as when I first read it as an epigraph in Graham Greene's The Lawless Roads, many years ago.

I often think of the phrase while working on domestic violence stories as court reporter; day after day, listening to details of the many and various ways men punch their partners' teeth in.

Occasionally the tedium is interrupted by an outrageously violent case, or more recently in Hastings District Court, the dressing down of a recidivist woman-beater by a judge.

After denying the man bail, Judge Tony Adeane sent him packing with the following: "As far as you are concerned women are there to be thrashed into shape ... you are a man with an ugly character and attitude, and you are charged with further ugly offending, domestic violence, beating up a woman. You are a gang member - and you live the dream".

The judge's allusion to a false utopia is right on the money. These men live the dream while their partners live the nightmare.

I've seen hundreds of them standing in the dock. They're ordinary, nondescript men. Nothing about them betrays their rage.

In stark contrast their partners are easy to spot. As the brutal facts are read out in court there's a lost set of eyes in the public gallery reliving the ordeal. They have the look of a beaten farm-dog, bewildered but blindly loyal. Many yell "love you babe" as their attackers are led away.

I've heard their men's excuses - situational explanations, inter-generational violence, booze, meth, mental issues, crimes of passion, cultural differences, self defence and infidelity.

But I've given up on them. I'm with the cardinal. These chaps are beyond human solution. They're inveterate, calamitous bullies. The excuses mitigate the violence, but never explain it.

The answer surely lies with their victims, many of whom perjure themselves by lying in court to protect their men, their children and themselves.

To you beautiful, enduring, strong women, who walk the lawless roads every day - dob him in.

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