Employment and Income Employment status had a limited impact on attitudes that trivialised domestic violence. Residents in Wagga Wagga that were currently unemployed (5.7%) at the time of the survey were 2.93 times more likely to agree that domestic violence should be handled privately than those who were employed (2.2%). No other differences were found between the employment status groups. No differences were found between income levels in Wagga Wagga residents and trivialising domestic violence attitudes.
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There are conflicting results on age about trivialising DV. Younger people consider it a private matter even when they recognised that women couldn’t leave an abusive relationship if they wanted to. ATSI and other ethnicities had the attitude that women could leave a violent relationship if they wanted to. Other ethnicities also consider it a private matter whilst ATSI held views that women make up DV for custody battles. In general, more educated individuals were less likely to trivialise DV. More efforts are required with younger people, ATSI, other ethnicities and those with lower education in understanding DV as not something to be trivialised. Attitudes towards gender roles and power dynamics
Attitudes towards gender roles Attitudes towards gender roles Stereotypical and narrow constructs about appropriate roles for males and females in private and public spheres, hostility towards women who breach these traditional gender roles, and beliefs of gender inequality all express harmful gender role attitudes (Webster et al., 2018). The levels of agreement in the Wagga Wagga community for the statements that assess attitudes towards gender roles from 2021 to 2016 can be found in the figure below (see Figure 13). Encouragingly in 2021 only a small percentage of the community agree with the statements that reinforce gender roles, with all statements receiving less than 10% of agreement in Wagga Wagga, compared to 2016 when four of the five beliefs receiving agreement levels above 10%. This reduction in the reinforcement of gender roles was significant across all five statements. In 2016, residents in the Wagga Wagga community were 2.1 times more likely to agree that men make better leaders, 2.5 times more likely to agree men have more right to a job, and 2.4 times more likely to agree that women need children to be fulfilled, than residents in 2021. Residents in 2016 were also 3 times more likely to agree university is more important to boys, and 1.4 times more likely to agree discrimination against women is not a problem in the workplace than they do in 2021. Overall, there has been a significant improvement in the Wagga Wagga community on their attitudes towards gender roles. Figure 13. Responses (as percentages of the entire survey population who agree) to statements about gender roles.
