suzeonline:"I'm losing the argument, so I'm going to leave the thread"

Yeah, Suze, standard for you.

cHAZp:"they frequently give instructions to mothers that they have substantiated the children’s allegations of abuse during contact "

No, they don't. DOCS is bound by strict privacy controls and will not discuss a matter with a complainant or anyone else.

You'd do better not posting Chaz, since every time you do you make it abundantly clear you have not the slightest idea what you're talking about.

The sort of rubbish you post might play well at a gathering of the coven, but it doesn't have any basis in reality.

Suze

I am sorry, you didn't actually say that some men here actually bash their wives, just that we want to. For example;
"I suspect that if he had said all women deserved a good belting at times, you would have agreed with him.
Are you agreeing with him then, that a woman screaming abuse or throwing things at her male relative deserves a good belting?"
and
"You can carry on and beat your chests and wish you still lived back in the 'good-old-days' when women did as they were told, or they rightly got a 'clip over the ear', or a 'good swift kick' if they didn't."

The main change that we are agitating for is for people to stop seeing DV as a series of incidents where men attack women in our lives and start seeing DV as arguments that spiral out of control. Despite this understanding being supported by a large body of research, people are reluctant to discuss DV in this way, because of the sort of personal attacks that you engage in.

We just want domestic violence to be properly understood, so that it can be fixed.

@Douglas It's a tough question to answer because when you're looking at what is "worse", there are the immediate effects of the abuse and the secondary effects (ie what happens when people disclose abuse, etc).

In terms of the immediate effects, both forms of abuse are equally damaging and in both cases the judge should have been prosecuted for what amounts to an illegal ruling on their part. This is why I have been arguing in here from the word go, and on Fathers4Equality along with others there, that there needs to be greater accountability on the part of judges- which won’t happen while judges themselves are the driving force behind law reform, any more than changes to malpractice laws would happen while doctors drove changes to medical law reform.

However the secondary effects are and have proven consistently to be far worse for male victims or victims of female abusers. A boy being groomed and sexually abused by a female teacher and having it be reported on prime time news as "an affair" by the media creates indifference compared to outrage if the genders were reversed.

Likewise, or that a 15 year old boy can be raped by a friend's mother at a friend's slumber party then forced to pay child support from the ensuing pregnancy locally, yet Tony Abbott was lambasted on Q&A for disagreeing with an 11 year old rape victim in South America having an abortion. This shows how much worse the secondary effects are for male victims of female abusers (and similarly for female victims of female abusers). In both these cases, we're talking about child abuse where society doesn't seem to have a problem with it, simply because the victim is male and the abuser is female.

That ties back to the message of the article. What makes those secondary effects worse, are the social stereotypes which lead society to refuse to believe that abuse is equally damaging for male and female victims. A gendered approach to abuse, doesn't simply not help "unpopular" victims; it actually abuses them all over again.

> a 15 year old boy can be raped by a friend's mother at a friend's slumber party then forced to pay child support from the ensuing pregnancy locally.

This didn't actually happen, did it?!? A rape victim forced to pay for the consequences of the rape? That can't be the whole story, surely.

> A boy being groomed and sexually abused by a female teacher and having it be reported on prime time news as "an affair" by the media creates indifference compared to outrage if the genders were reversed.

I appreciate how much worse the SOCIAL situation is for a male. In my impression, whether he's being raped, beaten, or even burgled, a man is often treated worse than a woman victim would be and more likely to be accused of the crime of which he is a victim. Admittedly, some reports and a few women say the opposite: that it is women who get rough treatment and I think in some ways (suspicion of poor driving, for example) there are stereotypes that work against them.

However, I believe that the LAW should always be applied in a gender-neutral fashion, even if the perceived problem being addressed is almost all one gender. If not, it open up abuses on the other gender, who then does not have equal protection under the law.

For example, I do not believe that a law should be introduced that "newspapers must report abuses on men in a realistic manner that does not minimise the nature of the crime." Putting aside whether such a law can really make society better, it would invite newspapers to start picking on women and minimising their crimes, instead. Such a law should be worded "newspapers must report abuses on people in a realistic manner that does not minimise the nature of the crime." That addresses the issue that men suffer from, and covers any issues now or future than women might suffer from.

I come back to my message that "laws should not be introduced to be gender-biased, nor should they be enacted in a gender-biased manner."

@Suzeonline- You've been accused of blatant misandry because that's what you've promoted. You went on record as saying that if a woman attacks her male partner physically, he should just run away and not bother calling the police, and of saying that if a woman attacks her partner with a weapon, that it must be self-defense. Furthermore you have directly defended a battered woman's yet villified any man that does so.

You said it yourself- you're a nurse, not a psychologist. You have had numerous cases of injuries consistent with abuse presented to you, but you are in no way qualified to say how many of those cases were reciprocal ipv, how many might have been self-inflicted by non-reciprocal abusers for the purpose of making fraudulent claims and how many men you might also have seen who might have been abused but lied about their abuse to protect themselves from further abuse by the system.

Yet from your unqualified role you have perpetuated the same sick myths which protect female abusers while vilifying male victims.

To then refer to your "wonderful male family members" after doing so is like a racist counting out the number of friends they have of the race they're accused of being reacist against.

You ask why we don't talk about our wonderful female partners. First off this thread is about domestic violence, not our wonderful partners of life after domestic violence.

I'm currently with a wonderful woman and on Valentiners Day it'll be 18 months we've been together, but that doesn't change the horrors I endured or the fact that I can't turn my back on the other men who are part of the silent epidemic of abuse victims out there.

Secondly though, I'm not about to stand by and have her called a blow-up doll, as she deserves far better than those kinds of insults, which is generally what happens with you and your ilk. Oh and she completely agrees with my fight. Then again that's the difference between a woman and a woman who is also a feminist.