Imagine yourself as those kids

Van Badham on twitter wrote

 

"This is a really interesting way of phrasing “listened to the screams of the tiny, powerless children he had trapped in the car as they succumbed to the flames he himself had lit”. Imagine yourself as those kids, their last seconds of life in that car. Then reread the headline."

 

When I do that, I can only cry. It's an existential grief, haven't we all been children once?

 

I was. A child, terrified by a drunken lout who kicked in the front door of our public housing to abuse my mother and us kids while we were having a bath. It was the price you paid for being poor and fatherless. He didn't set fire but he could have. He was big, powerfully built and on another blinder. Somehow mum pacified him enough, we survived.

 

All around me, good dads took their boys to footy, rewarded their daughters with princess presents and generally played the role expected of them. Some of them were alcoholics like the succession of men who occupied the step father role for me and domestic abuse seemed to be just something you had to endure. Sure some kids acted out, they bullied those around them or hid in their self made sanctuaries, and as we became teenagers, more than a few fell victim to the plague of hard drugs that scoured the 70s. It was just what you grew up with.

 

As a boy you also grew up with TV images of heroic cowboys, gallant soldiers defying death, astronauts leaving the world to step foot on the moon...football on the weekends, boozy parties, panel vans. The gender roles were pretty simple and the rules very liberal for men. But things change and having kids yourself probably changes you more than you expect.

 

So I come back to Van. I can imagine myself as one of those kids, the terror, the absolute mortal fear as the one who is supposed to care for you burns you alive. Trapped in a car. Another man made hell here on earth. But I can't imagine myself as the man who did that thing. 

 

Later in life I was lucky enough to do a course in gender studies. It gave me an appreciation of the way gender works to order society, but it also revealed the costs. 

 

For women and children the cost is far too disproportionate and frankly, little reward. There is a burden for men too, but also a far greater reward. And for all of us, for society at large I think the traditional gender roles impoverish us and restrict us in thinking and being what we could be.

But while gender enabled this lowlife piece of shit to breach his AVO, kidnap his children and ultimately murder them and their mother in the most horrific way I am at a total loss to understand how any parent could actually do that. Could actually douse your kids in petrol in a car and set them alight and go to your death with their screams. How?

There is no "two sides" to this. There is a senseless loss of life, perpetrated by very disturbed man who grew up enabled by patriarchal gender norms that bestowed a mindset which said you can destroy that which you cannot own. It is a grotesque inhumane act and heart-wrenching to imagine those final moments.

We must do better, for our children, and their children. For all of us. This is not ok.