Liz45:"If you put Domestic Violence into your search engine, you'll come up with millions of articles - some are surveys."

If you put Fairies into your search engine, ditto. do you suggest that we base DV policy on the fairies at the bottom of the garden's advice?

All the reputable surveys conducted by non-advocacy "researchers" show that DV is not a gendered issue except insofar as if it escalates to physical violence the greater strength of men means that women may ebd up worse off.

Liz45:"The stats I gave were part of a speech by Nicola Roxon a couple of yrs ago"

Nicola Roxon is a politician and a professional Feminist. Her rise to the Ministry is due entirely to her gender, not her capacity. Her utterances on gender issues are designed as advocacy, not as a considered view of the data.

Citing Roxon on gender issues is like citing George Bush on the Iraq war - it means you have no case and not many brain cells.

Liz45:"We recently had a case,where due to the young woman wearing skinny jeans,and the Judge admitting that he couldn't have removed them without assistance, showed her consent. "

And we have had lots of examples of men being released after being falsely accused. The girl in your example brought no evidence that she had been physically assaulted. She claimed she felt scared, but she didin't claim he made any threats. She claimed he "ripped her jeans off", which is absurd on the face of it. He claimed it was consensual and the judge found that her evidence was not credible.

Why should her word be taken willy-nilly with no judgement applied?

Take your time, it's not going to be an easy one for you.

Liz next time you put Domestic Violence into the search engine try looking for some that actually test their assumptions rather than start out with the usual statement of faith and work from there.

Look for the ones which have explored not only about women's experience of DV but also the ones which have looked at men's experience and at the mutuality of a significant proportion of DV. Try looking for any which explore those factors for the non-physical types of DV, who nags who, who checks messages on their partners mobiles, who find's their social life controlled by a partner etc?

The kind of research you seem to be used to and I suspect which Roxon would favor does not tend to ask those questions. It starts with the assumption that DV is about men controlling women and works from there. Once they have done that then any of the nominated behaviors by men are decreed to be controlling and when done by women get excused as women fighting back.

There appears to have been very little serious work on exploring the prevalence on non-physical controlling behaviors and a consistent pattern for many years that when actual experience of physical assault by a partner is investigated the numbers come up very similar for men and women. The only real difference is at the severe end of the injury range and there is some evidence that mutual assault is a very significant factor at that extreme end.

R0bert

Obviously, for Liz45 it would "have been easier just
to have his still hot dinner on the table when he got
home from work". That way she might have avoided the
violence that evidently was the hallmark of her marriage.

Roscop wasn't joking, apparently. While it's heartening
that some others found his comment as appalling as I did,
the exculpatory comments by some men here are indicative
that White Ribbon Day is still needed. No doubt most
men who act violently towards women are "merely expressing
[their] own frustration", but it seems that it's still not
accepted by a recalcitrant minority that such behaviour
is completely unacceptable, even as a "joke".

What is also quite appalling is the tenor of the snide
comments directed towards a woman whose revelations of
her own experience indicate that criminal violence toward
women in the home still occurs in our society.

"What is also quite appalling is the tenor of the snide comments directed towards a woman whose revelations of her own experience indicate that criminal violence toward women in the home still occurs in our society."

This statement is wonderful as it captures very well the prevailing social attitude to violence across the Western world. The attitude goes something like this:

1. Some women tell true stories about their experience of horrendous criminal violence by men in the home

2. We as a society feel sympathy for these women and want to help them and protect them from further violence

3. These women and their sympathisers, because their only experience has been of male violence towards women, naturally - it's only human nature - look for and provide statistics that show the level of violence against women, but ignore statistics showing the levels of violence against men, thus providing a one-sided and misleading view of the entire picture of violence in society

4. People don't want to challenge these misleading statistics because to do so is (incorrectly) to be seen as somehow attacking those women who have experienced horrendous criminal violence by men in the home (like talisman just claimed)

It should be clear to any rational person, that challenging misleading statistics is not attacking women, or attacking female victims of violence in any way, or denying that male violence towards women exists and should always be challenged. It is merely saying "there is another side to the story that your one-sided statistics aren't showing us".

You can read more about this issue at http://www.oneinthree.com.au/misinformation/

Any discussion on domestic violence would be incomplete without reference to an ideology which specifically advocates it:

"Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and SCOURGE them. Then if they obey you, seek not a way against them. Lo! Allah is ever High, Exalted, Great."
Koran 4:34
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO0UaBG1Bsg&feature=related

This is of course just a minor aspect of an ideology which promotes violence toward all those who do not adhere to its worldview:

"Kill the disbelievers wherever you find them."
Koran 2:191

Eliminating Islamic calls to violence would reduce many forms of violence to a fraction of their current level.

Proxy you forgot mention how appallingly homophobic some Muslim's are when you introducing your pet bias to this topic. Go on attack them for homophobes, you know you want to.

On the other hand I've not seen anything to suggest that muslim violence is of itself a significant factor in Australian violence stats.

talisman, if you read Liz's comments at least one of her posts suggests that she may have been the physical aggressor. I don't know if that's what she is saying but Liz has not clarified the comment about her doing the assaulting. When I saw her piece on her experiences I did rethink my response to her somewhat but her own bad experiences with one man don't excuse a determination to believe the worst of men, to use the most loaded phrases to describe male behavior.

R0bert