James H (14 June) - "I sometimes wonder how many of the abusive people, be they male or female are actually psychopaths or sociopaths?".
The vast majority who use violence in any situation. Some psychopaths are extremely intelligent and rise to positions of power and influence because of their ruthlessness, while those of lower intelligence damage and destroy the lives of those within their family.
This is the area which psychiatrists/psychologists should be concentrating on in FC proceedings, but are often groomed and fooled by the cleverness of such psychopaths, and their ability to manipulate them and the system. Wherever there is an accusation of violence or child abuse, there should be an automatic assessment of psychopathy of the adult involved. Psychopaths are extremely clever at evading the responsibility and consequences for their actions - denial, blaming others, and twisting the evidence are the more simple hallmarks of their personailities. It isn't difficult to pick them out on Blogs and debating forums, mainly by their ability to distort reality, hectoring, and abusive remarks.
Individuals and society need to be protected from these people and that is why it is so important to establish a National Register of Violent Offenders, which is publicly available.

Damn... well I'm exceedingly cross with myself that I missed the pointy end of this debate>;-(

But if there is anyone left reading i'd just like to say that:

Firstly, I think this is a very useful article. While I'm in no position to offer confirmations or denials of statistical details i think it is deeply concerning that the National Plan on domestic violence contains so many presumptions about what men are and are not capable of, and structures processes in such a way that it will be very difficult for individual men to argue against these assumptions. It's heavily biased against men, essentially.

Secondly, any statement to the effect that men are inherently capable of violence, and that domestic violence is in any way associated with masculinity, is both patantly false, and highly damaging. Saying to men that they should self-examine for their own such tendencies positions them as guilty until proven innocent, and runs the risk of teaching young, vulnerable, impressionable men that they should be ashamed of themselves because of the way they were born.

Thirdly, it is pretty obvious from the stark divergence of views between commentators that our understanding of the dynamics and causes of domestic and family violence is still very unsophisticated. We are yet to have anything approaching a proper debate on the reciprocity issue - ie what can the dynamics of a violent relationship tell us about why family violence occurs (incorporating issues of mental illness, levels of education and disadvantage, abuse history, susceptibility to stress, non-violent injustices perpetrated etc). As such, anyone who takes up any kind of unequivocal or universalist position in this debate, like the Michael Floods of this world, is worth saying "goodnight Michael" to, kissing on the forehead and tucking in, turning out the light on, and returning to the adult's table from.

[cont]

And lastly, I would like to register here that I have been subjected to false allegations of intimidation and harrassment in an AVO application, lodged by an ex-girlfriend of mine who was a feminist academic, in an attempt to paint me as a "typical man", and abrogate her responsibility for being the reason why we broke up in the first place. But here again, there's more to it than that, because what actually went on was that she had been badly sexually abused as a child, had subsequently gone on to develop a post-traumatic stress reaction that's normally called Borderline Personality Disorder (that's a medical term, not a descriptor, by the way), miraculously survived her adolescent suicidal urges, discovered the lifeline that is feminism, and as a result of her experiences I think genuinely and legitimately believed that she was under threat from men and from their supposed capacity for violence. May god's love be with her (whoever he is), but educate yourself about BPD and protect yourself from it!

Overall message: All people are different, and there's always more to something than there seems (no mater how closely you look into it); so respect each other, and have the humility to realise that you can't know everything. And fight this bloody legislation!

SamI – You admit to not understanding statistics, but perhaps the following simplified version by Deputy Chief Justice John Faulkes, may help in understanding the scale and nature of the problem.
“In 2005, an estimated 1.3 million women aged 18 years and over had experienced partner violence since the age of 15 years. The most common location where women were physically assaulted by a man was in their home or another person's home (64% or 125,000). In 2005, the majority (87%) of women whose most recent experience of physical assault during the last five years was by a partner said that it took place in their home. A vast majority of women reporting incidents of sexual assault by a partner also said they took place in their home or another person's home. Some women experience partner violence while they are pregnant. In 2005, 37% (83,500) of women who were pregnant during the relationship with a violent partner had experienced violence while pregnant. A small proportion (16%) said that the violence occurred for the first time while they were pregnant. In 2005, 60% of women who had experienced partner violence in the last five years had children in their care. Just over two-thirds of these women (68%) said that the children had witnessed the violence. Violent behaviour is often associated with consumption of alcohol or certain drugs. In 2005, of women whose most recent experience of physical or sexual assault was by a partner, a considerable proportion (50% and 46% respectively) said that their partner's consumption of alcohol or drugs had contributed to the incident."
I hope that this helps you to understand the situation, and the need for children to be better protected from such violence, as is proposed in the legislation. Additionally, in general terms, there are 20 children killed in Australia every year by parent - 12 are killed by their natural fathers, 5 are killed by mothers, and 3 are killed by de facto fathers i.e. 75% are killed by males. Do you not think that children need protection from abuse and death?.

Sam I'm guessing that you are already aware of the principle catch in Chaz's stats - they only refer to part of the stats. It was pleasing to see all the cries of outrage by those who don't like the blame game in response to Chaz's post.

I've never found particularly good material on fatal assaults of children for all of Australia. I have previously posted some detail from the NSW child death review team at
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=11234#189902
and earlier posts. In that case I was looking at trends in fatal assault. Fatal assaults by fathers have dropped significantly in NSW during the period since the changes to family law were introduced, a situation some appear to want to reverse.

What is clear is that generally the risk factors are not primarily about gender, they are about substance abuse, they are about mental illness, they are about the stresses of family breakdown. Those who want to play the gender blame game will continue to focus on violence by men and perpetuate the problem.

R0bert

Robert : Reliable figures can be found at the Australian Institute of Criminology. This is what they have said about child deaths. "There is no mistaking the gross over-representation of fathers as offenders in this period. When the offender was a parent, the offender victim relationship was as follows:
· for 46 victims, fathers were the sole offenders;
· for 11 victims, de facto fathers were the sole offenders (all butone in abuse-type killings);
· for 22 victims, mothers were the sole offenders;
· for seven victims, mothers and fathers or de facto fathers were jointly charged."
No matter how much you may deny or rationalise the issue, there is a gender preponderance in the killing of children.
The major influence on the current reduction in the numbers of child deaths in NSW is due to improved interventions by the police and child protection authorities and the trend was appparent before the 2006 Act. So where and in what way does Shared Parenting come into the equation and what clear and carefully researched evidence do you have to back up such a fanciful speculation.?.