Sarah Kanowski

When the reality is that even though I never thought, like in my head I'm like I'm not going to do any of those things.

Like if we think about it like this,

We have rigid gendered norms at the very beginning of the line.

What I believe men and women should be, not what they can be, but what they should be, based on a rigid idea of identity that moves through sexist language and misogynistic language that polices people to stay in that space of what they're supposed... ..what, according to these rules, they're supposed to be.

Then we move into other things like objectification and victim-blaming and sexual harassment, then eventually sexual assault, then eventually domestic violence, then eventually murder.

I could never see myself at that other end of the continuum when we saw sexual harassment, assault, murder, rape, any of those types of things.

But in the other space where I remember myself sitting at a table telling sexist jokes or even laughing at sexist jokes or objectifying women with a guy who took every one of those steps, I remember standing in the gym and watching him yell at hand for the kids being disruptive and me sitting back and being like, well, why does she put up with that?

rather than saying, why is he so abusive?

Like, why is he being so cruel right now?

Why is he making this her fault?

Why is he not being a caring and nurturing father?

I never asked any of those questions.

I just asked questions of what she was doing and how she was reacting to the abuse that he was choosing.

And so at the beginning it was like, there's no way this is a real thing.

I was never part of that.

I'm not the problem.

I never did any of those things.

And then the more I got into the work, the more I had these conversations and the luck I had to be able to do this work alongside two people, one who, she was a woman who'd worked on the front lines of domestic violence...

..services for women escaping at the pointy end of violence, and another who was a man who had worked in behaviour change... ..in men's behaviour change programs for more than 10 years, who'd lived a similar life to me inside the world of rugby, and I played rugby league, and growing up as a man, I was so lucky to have these two people, Dean and Hannah...

by my side as I did this work who would after a conversation say to me hey you phrased this this way could you think about phrasing it differently because it sounds like you're putting a lot of pressure on the victims or they would say hey man I noticed that you were we had that conversation now you seemed a bit off what's going on for you can we talk about that they would just open that space for a conversation where I could say I think I'm the problem