Another to add to the impressive list of excellent articles from this author.

We have had many discussions around this topic here on OLO and we have arrived at a very similar consensus view: violence is violence and if it is bad that women suffer it, it is equally as bad when men do. Also, if a law encourages its own abuse, it's a bad law.

I do have one small quibble though, which is that I think we need LESS advocacy, not more, based on the do-no-harm principle.

The evidence to date is that a proliferation of groups devoted to advocating for a pet cause does not improve the outcomes, but instead muddies the waters and leads to misinformed decision-makers.

Take the profit centres out of the picture and it becomes much easier to see a possible path.

Well blow me down. I must be dreaming, just a moment and I'll pinch myself to make sure I am awake. Yep I'm awake.

Now is this onlineopinion or maybe another website?

This cant be Australian media, after all according to the experts, men dont experience DV, I heard Koshy and all those media type personalities getting on the White Ribbon band wagon.

To be honest I fully expected another male bashing article to be published today, after all white ribbon day is a day to bash all men over the head about violence against women.

One only needs to look at the debacle over the feminist urban myth about grand final domestic violence to realise that a heck of a lot of people are being led up the garden path.

In another forum ChapZ who said she hates gendered biased research is going really hate this article.

She wrote "What you are all so expert at is trying to trash any research which does not support your particular point of view. Can any of you point to any research which you have completed and which has been peer reviewed.?."

Many of the socalled research about DV has been published in peer reviewed journals, that only problem with peer review is that a huge bias can emerge, if it does not support a particular dogma it does not get published or funded.

Yet at the same time ChapZ is critical of articles and criticism put forward, she herself posts research articles that support her own point of view.

Perhaps it was Lenore Weiztman who started the trend
http://www.acbr.com/biglie.htm

Weitzmans research was accepted because it appealed to female bias.

A former feminist friend of mine, would accept any feminist research without question, yet challange extremely severely any research which showed men in a positive light.

Afterall any research that appeals to your beliefs is much easier to accept, than research that is confrontational in challanging beliefs or feminist urban myths.

Anti well said. A good piece.

There is no good reason to run gender specific campaigns and plenty of reasons not to.

It's also interesting in light of the proposal to have DV allegations given greater weight in Family Law.

Having wording such as '"domestic violence is predominantly perpetrated by men against women and children" (eg. s.9 (3) of the NSW Crimes (Domestic and Personal Violence) Act 2007). ' in the legislation at the same time as giving greater weight to allegations of DV, broader definitions and an unwillingness to put any protections against abuse of the system through false claims makes those proposals all the more horrifying.

R0bert

<Now, as I’ve said before, Scotland did a study last year that showed that men are about one-sixth as likely as women to view a particular DV incident as a crime and about six times as likely as women to say that an incident is “just something that happens.” My guess is that those figures correlate pretty closely with men’s tendency (or lack thereof) to report DV incidents to the police.>

http://www.fathersandfamilies.org/?p=11213

Battered Men toll trebled
http://www.thesun.co.uk/scotsol/homepage/news/3231822/Battered-men-toll-trebled-in-decade.html

We shouldn't condemn violence against women!

No...we should condemn VIOLENCE!

Violence knows no Gender.

This issue has been EXPLOITED by the 'Critical Theorists' such as Marcuse and his Fabian/Socialist mates from the Frankfurt school as a means of bringing in the 'Revolution' without blood and gore on the streets.

Wiki(Frankfurt School)
//Following Marx, they were concerned by the conditions which allowed for social change and the establishment of rational institutions.[5] Their emphasis on the "critical" component of theory was derived significantly from their attempt to overcome the limits of positivism, materialism and determinism by returning to Kant's critical philosophy and its successors in German idealism, principally Hegel's philosophy, with its emphasis on dialectic and contradiction as inherent properties of reality.//

Feminism and Gender politics is but one of many 'contradictions' that fitted this script.

Rationality tells you that both male and females commit violence. It is thus IRRATIONAL that a pamphlet be offered at local police stations with the title "If there is violence it is always HIS fault"

Equally 'ideology' based is:

Gloria Steinem's assertion that "the patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself."

AAah..but it fits the 'script' of the critical social theorists eh!

So... in summary a 'Gender' based approach to family violence is irrational, insulting and discriminatory.

"Rationality tells you that both male and females commit violence. It is thus IRRATIONAL that a pamphlet be offered at local police stations with the title "If there is violence it is always HIS fault""

I know of at least one Police station that has several domestic violence posters stuck on walls, (for both public viewing and for police staff veiwing).

Every poster depicts domestic violence carried out by males with women as the victim.

The White Ribbon Day campaign has very little to do with domestic violence. It is a feminist campaign designed to denigrate and criminialize the male gender.

Not surprisingly it is well supported by university academics.