The abuse directed at Helen Haines after she was critically injured exposes a culture in which grievance towards women is cultivated. Men have a responsibility to challenge it.

Helen Haines was unloading the boot of her car on Monday afternoon. She was outside her own electorate office on Murphy Street in Wangaratta. It was mid-afternoon and for her, it was just another day. Sadly, for many women like her, it was just another day. A white LandCruiser hit her. Bystanders held the 43-year-old male driver until police arrived. He is in custody. The prime minister has called it a deliberate act. She is in a Melbourne hospital in a critical condition.

By Monday night the wolves were at it again. In the comments sections, under the news articles and across social media, men lined up. Not all of them, but enough of them. A woman in a hospital bed became a target a second time. Mocked, blamed, dehumanised, before police had even finished interviewing the man they arrested.

We do not yet know what the man in the LandCruiser did or what he is accused of doing. We know exactly why the men at the keyboard did what they did. They did it because nobody has ever told them not to. Or because the people who should have told them were busy yet again ignoring it or allowing it to occur, right there, under authorised news articles.

I grew up in a world where the men who shaped boys like me were in the dojo and in the kickboxing and boxing ring. They were not gentle men. They were men who could hurt people with ferocious violence and had decided not to, and who spent their lives teaching boys to make the same decision.

The lesson was simple and it was repeated until it stuck. A man’s strength exists for one purpose. He is a protector, and everything else – the fitness, the discipline, the ability to take a punch and keep standing –........

© Pearls and Irritations