My wife was murdered by a 'monster' – but most perpetrators of violence are normal guys

[ismnotwasm]

So very sad, this epiphany.

Jill had been murdered almost six months earlier, and Adrian Bayley’s defence team were presenting a rather feeble case for a four-week adjournment of his committal hearing. Bayley appeared via video link in the Melbourne court as I sat flanked by two friends and a detective. The screen was to my right, mounted high up and tilted slightly towards the bench. It was uncomfortably silent apart from the occasional paper shuffle or short flurry of keyboard clicks. Bayley’s face appeared on the big-screen TV, looming over my seat. When that moment arrived, a jolt of nausea came and went. But the worst was to come, made all the more horrifying because it was unexpected.

The judge asked Bayley whether he could he see the courtroom. I don’t remember his exact words, but he replied that he was able to see his lawyer and half of the bench. I had come face to face with him before in court, but I'd never heard him manage more than a monosyllabic mumble into his chest. This was different. There was a clarity of communication, sentence structure, and proper articulation. It was chilling.

I had formed an image that this man was not human – he existed as a singular force of pure evil who somehow emerged from the ether. But something about his ability to weave together nouns, verbs and pronouns to form intelligible sentences forced a re-focus – one that required a look at the spectrum of men’s violence against women, and its relation to Bayley and the society from which he came.

By insulating myself with the intellectually evasive dismissal of violent men as psychotic or sociopathic aberrations, I self-comforted by avoiding a more terrifying concept: that violent men are socialised by the ingrained sexism and entrenched masculinity that permeates everything, from our daily interactions all the way up to our highest institutions. Bayley’s appeal was dismissed, but I left court that day in a perpetual trauma-loop, knowing I needed to re-imagine the social, institutional and cultural context in which a man like Bayley exists.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/18/my-wife-was-murdered-by-a-monster-but-most-perpetrators-of-violence-are-normal-guys?CMP=soc_568