Combined with the gendered drivers of violence, general violence acceptance can increase the risk of intimate partner violence.
Types of violence that can be ‘normalised’ are very broad. They can include:
- physical fights; on the football field, on a night out, in the school yard and hazing rituals
- high rates of crime accepted as the norm
- experience of war or living in a conflict zone
- ‘joking’ about violence, or ‘pretending’ to be violent online (trolling, speaking violently in online game channels)
- experiences of institutional abuse, such as in prisons and detention centres
- experiences of discrimination, such as racial abuse or violence against people with disabilities
- exposure to family violence and experience of child abuse.
Of course, these don’t all pose equal risks on their own: a joke that promotes violence does not pose the same immediate danger as a physical fight does. However, normalised forms of violence like these do feed into a culture where violence Is thought of as ‘okay’ or something that ‘can’t be helped.’
Australia’s shared national framework for the prevention of violence against women, Change the story, talks about the ways we can address the impacts of exposure to violence, including:
- taking action to heal from and lessen the impacts of past and ongoing violence
- learning from and supporting people who share their experience of violence
- using policy and strategy decisions to help prevent all forms of violence, and strengthen prosocial behaviour.