Focusing on male violence is a smoke screen that isn't offering any information at all about how people can be less violent.

The men's sites sometimes get it wrong but in the context of government funded campaigns which only mention male violence and the ruthless misrepresentation of family violence and child abuse mothers groups desperate to regain maternal bias in family law a moral stand against the flaws on ''Menz' sites without a corresponding concern over the other does not look all that genuine.

R0bert

Pynchme and Anti

This competition about which gender is worse is getting us nowhere. It achieves nothing for Pynchme to "prove" that men are worse than women. The list she wrote was very good, expecially the second point. Whatever the faults of women, there are people who resolve conflicts with violence and those who choose not to. However, simply pointing out that many men are responsible for the violence is enough to prove her point.

It also achieves nothing for Anti to "prove" that women are worse than women. All us blokes want is to move past this attitude that men must be the villian and women must be seen as the victim. Proving that women are responsible for much DV does that.

BTW: women have much to gain by overturning current gender roles as well. It must be annoying to be expected to be nice all of the time. To be expected to do most of the caring for sick family members. To be seen as pathetic little petals, unable to fix one's own problems. To be demonised for not caring enough. Lets start by ending the female victim/male villian dichotomy.

Cotter: Pardon me for being nosy; I understand if you don't want to answer - but what was/is the wheelchair for?

Antiseptic: <"Most fathers want to be close to their kids, but some are not very good at it, just as some mothers are pretty substandard.">

I agree absolutely. Btw: you might be interested in some recent research about the importance of fathers to their daughters.

Re: the rest of the comment: I can't imagine anyone plotting to shed a partner that they loved and committed to enough to bear children, in order to pick up some lousy money.

<"there are examples of the various grrrl power groups using and advocating violence against men.">

I don't know of any. If you do I'd be most interested in the information - links and articles.

<"What is needed is a means of decoupling the children from the money.">

I don't know much about the mechanisms but this seems to be a good idea. Do you mean that parents would pay towards children's upkeep even if they had no contact with them? I hope so. As a parent I would be glad to pay to fulfil my responsibilities so I'm guessing other parents would feel the same way.

R0bert, the more serious the outcome, the more likely that a male is the perpetrator. A quarter of women who are injured gain their first experience of DV while pregnant. Most revenge killings of women occur after they have left the marriage and premises. I'm sorry but that is fact, no matter how unpalatable you find it. No matter how much you wouldn't do it; other men would/do. If you don't like how OTHER men represent your sex, then stop minimizing their violence. I have no trouble condemning women who are violent because I am not like them.

Benk thanks for taking the time to consider those points and for posting in response to them.

This is a bloke writing about being a man experiencing the cultural crisis of masculinity (I guess one would say):
I'd be interested in your opinions of it:
http://www.zcommunications.org/sexuality-masculinity-and-mens-choices-by-robert-jensen

Nenk:"It also achieves nothing for Anti to "prove" that women are worse"

I agree: I've never tried to "prove" women are worse anything, merely to show that the constant stream of anti-male propaganda is just that - propaganda. It has no basis in any objective reality at all. Some women and some men are unfit parents, but without my input on this site, that would remain unacknowledged, as it was when I first startd posting here.

At that time, any discussion of children or the Family Law consisted of a few man-hating women berating men for everything, with R0bert doing his polite best to point out the odd fact and divorce doctor trying to promote his book.

My posting drove away some of the more rabid man-haters, simply because I did use genuine facts and figures and I wasn't prepared to allow them to bully and abuse me off the site, as was their standard practise. At one stage there must have been about half-a-dozen of them posting a couple of times for every post of mine, doing their girl-gang best to shut me up. I simply abused them back, albeit more effectively, using precisely their own tactics. It worked: the stuff you see posted now is much less vile and the ones that remain are much less virulently misandric, although a few "women with testosterone" still poke their bibs in occasionally.

R0bert:"the ruthless misrepresentation of family violence and child abuse mothers groups desperate to regain maternal bias in family law"

That's the nub. "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" and she will use whatever means she can to express that fury, but only if she thinks she has a "big brother" standing by while she does so. The Family Law as originally written gave her that "big brother" and the fury was truly hellish, with no constraint at all on the nastiness offered to fathers who wanted to be involved with their children after divorce. Paedophilia and violence became standard allegations used against decent men - evidence not required.

Pynchme:"Do you mean that parents would pay towards children's upkeep even if they had no contact with them?"

Yes, but so would every other adult, whether childless or a parent. A previous government was fond of "levies", like the gun buyback levy and the East Timor levy, the Medicare levy, etc. Why not a child support levy? If separating parents had one less thing to argue about, that could only be a good thing.

What's more, abolishing the whole ghastly mess that is the CSA and handing the responsibility back to a competent authority like the Tax office would save billions. At present, according to the DHS budget estimates, the CSA costs our country about $1.2 billion annually increasing to nearly $1.3 billion this year and CSA collect cases (the ones where the parents can't get it together privately) amount to just over a $billion, so it actually costs 20% more to collect the money than is taken in. The CSA try to hide this in their own report, making dishonest and misleading statements, but the DHS estimates budget can't be fudged.

Private collect cases account for a bit more than another billion, but those are happening without the CSA doing anything other than recording that they exist.

Get rid of the CSA and replace it with a cheaper and more efficient direct levy on all personal taxpayers. About $10 a week would do it.

Pynchme, I've never minimised male violence, that's dishonest spin you and others use against those who who object to the utterly one sided representation of family violence which you seem to be OK with. I've disagreed about the representation of violence when really broad definitions of violence are used to maximise "violence" by men but the same definitions are not used for the same actions by women.

I object when I hear carry on's about the increased risk of harm to women after separation by those who dismiss the concerns of men impacted by maternal bias in the family law system telling them to toughen up or dismissing them as bitter men rather than honestly looking at why so many are bitter.

I object when ancient self serving studies with about the same credibility I'd give to a study by the American National Rifle Association "proving" the benefits of widespread gun ownership are used to defend sexist views.

I object when men are attacked for being negative about women by those who so regularly focus on attacking men.

I object when those determined to attack men focus on the extreme end of violence to defend their actions but refuse to honestly address the behaviors and problems which lead up to that other.

R0bert