As I sat down to write this article the Veitch-Dunne-Powell drama was unfolding on the radio. Months of media and public speculation came to a kind of halt. At least that’s what I initially thought. But no. There’s more to come. The whole affair has become both media entertainment and a serious foundation for discussion about family violence. Yet despite the seriousness I’m not sure I really need to know the details of this case. Why would I? As one police office commented, “This is nothing new”.
Yet I do want to know. There is something voyeuristic that keeps me clicking on the latest tantilising headline. What keeps me going there?
I have decided the reasons are multilayered. There’s the obvious public swing from abhorrence to concern for Veitch. The involvement of the media in a case where few facts were ever available. The ongoing rhetoric used by blog sites and social institutions to use the case as a frame for their particular social slant. Women’s Refuge have offered up quite significant remorse assessments; a few Men’s Rights groups have taken up the cause in the opposite direction to show how mono dimensional family violence has become. Physical always trumps emotional, though the latter may lead to the former. One is unacceptable, the other hard to prove - both are devastating.
This whole affair is about much more than them, it’s about us and what we are really like: hate, ongoing tension among the sexes, justice, fairness, grace, forgiveness, the blessing and curse of the public media and our insatiable need to pry into someone else's tragedy. Maybe we feel better about ourselves.
Moreover, we manage all this over an issue about which we still know so little and probably always will. Yes, the stories will come out, but neither will be entirely true. None of us will have the capacity to test for veracity with cross examination. Yet we’ll read just the same, gorging ourselves on whatever new angle can be found. It reminds me that there is a spring of angst below the surface of civil society. It doesn’t take much to see it erupt to a level of unwarranted ugliness.
I guess I am struck by just how punitive and cynical our public discussions have become. There must always be a victim and there must always be a perpetrator. The problem is, we soon become confused about who is who and what to do next.
I have yet to read an article or hear a panel of experts mention reconciliation and how we might help that process. That would be too much to hope for. I might be wrong, but I wonder if that’s what the couple wanted all along? Who got in the way? We all did!
Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God”. The UN send them around the world. I think we might need some - here at home.
Digby Wilkinson 2009