You make a good point, Roger. I watched only a small part of the program and it was notable for the polarisation of the discussion in line with 2nd wave (70s) feminist principles, which have been largely discredited as a social justice model thanks to the demographic selectivity you pointed out, as well as its failure to properly grasp the fundamental drivers of human behaviours.

The Duluth model of domestic violence policing was the result of the confluence of those principles and a desire to simplify police decision-making, leading to the policy of always removing the man from domestic violence situations rather than seeking to properly investigate culpability. That model is obviously in favour in Victoria, judging from the attitude of the police representative on the Q&A panel. The problem with that model is that it can lead to enormously skewed perceptions of the nature of the problem and become a perverse incentive for violence to be escalated, if men think they will be blamed regardless. The recent case of Jon Stevens/Jodhi Meares saw him being removed and slapped with an AVO despite him being the complainant! There was much media coverage of the event, implying he had been assaulting her, but very little about what really happened when it was revealed.

I'd like to see a much more adult discussion on this topic in particular and on other topics that have become favourite debating grounds for gender warriors of both sexes.

An adult discussion is solution-oriented, blame is not the goal. It is able to encompass more than one idea at a time and to recognise that nuance is important for proper understanding. It eschews rhetoric and pat answers designed to conceal as much as they reveal.

Men and women rely on each other and we need to keep that simple fact at the heart of any of our thinking on matters of gender, which are ultimately all related to domesticity. We are natural allies, not natural enemies.

This is truly a bizarre topic. Is there a real debate? Is there anyone in favour of domestic violence? Violence of all kinds is already against the law. Murder is against the law regardless of the circumstances, except perhaps in war. And what does the writer recommend? "Radical power transfer in society from men to women". What, pray tell me, does that mean? I'm not famous for my intellectual deficiencies but I can't figure it out.

Looking at only the "victims" tells only part of the story about domestic violence. If we also look at the statistics for perpetrators of domestic violence then I suspect we will get a clearer picture of why so many people feel that the terms "domestic/family" violence implies that women represent a significant proportion of perpetrators and potentially hides the fact that this is mostly a male crime. I suspect that many of the male victims are hurt/killed by other male family members. I would like to see figures that show both victims and perpetrators so that the topic can be addressed honestly.

What both the statistics and the screams of "What about teh Menz?" neglect is the context in which family and domestic violence occurs. As mentioned, while there is plenty of information about the victims there is little about the perpetrators. Violence occurs in same sex relationships so it would logically follow that some percentage of male victims would have had male perpetrators. Then there is the actual context of the violence. Where men are killed by female intimates who initiated the violence? Was the woman the aggressor, setting out to injure or kill the male, or were they acting in self-defence? What is the history of violence within the family?

It is often pointed out by the MRAs that men are more frequently the victims of violence in general. It's a shame that they also forget that they are also most often the perpetrators.

The latest figures from the ABS show that 94% of perpetrators of partner and dating violence against males are female. The latest figures from the AIC show that 50% of perpetrators of domestic homicide against males are female. When you factor in violence in gay male relationships, you find that straight males make up some 98.1% of currently violent relationships in NSW, and the figures would be similar in other states (based upon the Fair's Fair and Private Lives studies of domestic violence in gay relationships). The claim that "much domestic violence against men is perpetrated by other men" is a red herring and not backed by data. The majority of perpetrators are female. Yes, some of these females may be using violence in self-defence, but the same can be said of male perpetrators of domestic violence. Even the respected feminist domestic violence scholar Michael P. Johnson agrees that "repeat, severe violence against a non-violent intimate is symmetrical by gender.” And who cares if some men are being attacked and abused by other men - don't they still deserve services and support as victims of violent crime?

Carz, we're talking about domestic violence, not general violence. In the case of domestic violence, there is data on the gender of perpetrators of Dv in this country, with it being found that 94% of all battered men are battered my a female perpetrator (ABS 2012 Personal Safety Survey Table 6).

Furthermore that finding is far from unique. The 2001 National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health in the US for example, found that while roughly half of all domestic violence was bi-directional, more than 35% of all domestic violence was unidirectional and perpetrated by female abusers, against male victims. It should be reiterated that that 35% was non-reciprocal, ie there it was solely "her" abusing "him" [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1854883/].

Meanwhile, an annotated bibliography by Dr Martin S Fiebert of California State University found:

" SUMMARY: This bibliography examines 286 scholarly investigations: 221 empirical studies and 65 reviews and/or analyses, which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners. The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies exceeds 371,600." [http://csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm]

Yet this data and the genderless reality of domestic violence, is disregarded by a twisted and gendered narrative on domestic violence where it is framed as "[male] violence against women", where:

"Women are [exclusively] victims, men are [exclusively] abusers [and any instances to the contrary are to be dismissed as statistical anomalies, lies and arbitrarily trivial and harmless- even when the victim is being attacked with blunt objects, threatened with knives, stabbed or set alight in their sleep]."

According to that narrative, when a man is abused, "he must have done something to provoke it" or "it must have been self-defence”; in other words, "he had it coming to him".

Furthermore, it reinforces the stigma that "real men are never victims [especially of women]" and in doing so, that battered men have 'defiled their masculinity' by 'allowing themselves to be abused [and by a woman of all people]'. This is the same warped psychopathology which underlies the demonisation of female rape victims

Roger Smith draws on a very over simplified use of statistics to make his point. If he were to take a more detailed look at this data by following the convictions etc he may find that the men who died in domestic violence had been the perpetrators of abuse for many years before their partner finally snapped and took drastic action as a self-protection - I would like him to consider that.Also, this single 'one in three'piece of data does not counter all of the other overwhelming statistics that it is a highly gendered occurrence and crime - women are overwhelmingly the victims of domestic abuse and violence - it cannot simply be measured by the extremes - abuse includes all forms of psychological and physical control. Gender inequality is not about transferring abusive power form one gender to another - it is about men not viewing women as a lesser human being that themselves and their male friends, colleagues and leaders. The 'what about the poor men victims' is a tired old counter to the discussion of domestic violence and often shows how threatened men are about public discussion that demonstrates that many men do not view women as equal to them and shows that women's human rights (across the world) are not bestowed equally to those of men. You make a good point about gay relationships and most researchers in this field would agree that this is an experience of violence that is less understood. For someone who would have been aware that women are very often raped by military as part of an invasion from a dominant force, as happened systematically in East Timor as well as many other places of conflict in the world, I would have thought you might have a stronger sense of the existence of gendered violence.

One of my sons, years ago, was in a relationship with a very violent woman. The only time he laid hands on her was to hold her off from attacking him. On one occasion the police were called, and upon arrival at the house, they immediately proceeded to take my son into custody.
It was only when a female friend insisted they check his wounds, and they saw the bite and scratch marks on his body, as opposed his unmarked girlfriend, that they let him go. She was never taken into custody or charged, as they tried to do with him.

It's highly telling that Ruth, like so many radical feminists, operates lock, stock and barrel from what could be described as the feminist playbook for stigmatising battered men. It goes a little something like this:

1. Immediately begin with the tired old trope of "yes men are abused, but" or "I'm sorry you were abused, but". This should never be taken as a genuine recognition of male victims, but rather a tokenistic, insincere one - purely designed to be an act of plausible deniability.

2. Immediately follow this up with the usage of either misleading statements, outdated statistics, findings from studies with questionable methodology (ie only asking women about being victims and only asking men about being perpetrators) and misleading statements to justify the focus being on entirely on female victims and male abusers. Such tactics include using the violence experienced by men at the hands of strangers, to deliberately cover up the existence of battered men.

3. Immediately attempt to cement this by denying the countless evidence out there which proves that domestic violence should be treated as a gender-neutral issue where all victims are supported and all perpetrators are called to be held accountable for their actions, including:

- recent official figures from the AIC demonstrating that battered men and battered women are murdered in this country at similar rates

- recent official figures from the ABS finding that the vast majority of battered men are abused by women

- recent figures by the ABS and the NSW Auditor General's Dept finding that at least a third of all domestic violence victims are male

-several international DV studies such as the 2001 NLSAH, which have found that while half of all domestic violence is reciprocal, of the remaining half which was non-reciprocal, more than 70% of it was found to be women battering men

- recent findings by the ABS that women disclose their abuse 2-3 times more often than men do and report their abuse upto 40% more often than men do.

(continued next post)

If, as all these 'statistics' suggest, there are all these men out there in the community being bashed by their women, then where do these guys go for medical help?
Or do they lie when they get help and say another bloke bashed them?
If this is so, how do we know about these 'statistics'?

I have no doubt there are very violent women in the community, but I think that concentrating on the minority of crimes they perpetrate is being used to take the heat off the very obvious fact that men overwhelmingly perpetrate the most domestic violence in our society.
Why is this fact so hard to handle for some guys?

(continued from last post)

4. In the event of someone bringing up abuse victims being driven to suicide as a direct result of their abuse, claim it's 'different', even though psychologically abusing someone on a daily basis until they commit suicide, is no different to feeding someone low doses of poison on a daily basis until their body finally gives out from the strain and they die from it.

5. Either openly make stigmatising comments towards regarding male victims, or engage in rhetoric which excuses and justifies the standard narrative, which when deconstructed, is quickly shown to stigmatise male victims of domestic violence as urban myths- if not pathological liars- "who had it coming to them" and as quite literally the equivalent of child cheap, filthy worthless sluts.

Gain bonus points for doing so by also stigmatising child abuse victims of female child abusers in the process - especially sexually abused children -through using that narrative.

6. Defend the lack of meaningful support services for battered men, such as no shelters whatsoever, the virtually non-existent amount of support groups in this country and a single phone helpline, with the misleading claim that under-funded and marginalised advocacy groups, anger management groups and even jails provide male victims of abuse with plenty of support. Compound this with economic rationalism in place of arguing for all victims of abuse to be adequately financially supported - regardless of gender.

7. Attack any male victim who refuses to accept either the dehumanisation and stigmatisation we face or the lies which defend it, with the shaming tactic of calling them a "misogynist" - either directly or indirectly.

Given that men are dehumanised as disposable, arbitrary protectors and providers of women by society in the same manner as women are objectified as "baby machines", such a shaming tactic quite literally amounts to the equivalent of a combination of calling them "man-hating lesbians" and telling them "don't dress like a slut and you wont get raped".
________________________________________________________
When feminists stop using this playbook to respond to male abuse victims, they'll actually begin to stand for gender equality.

Suzeonline, you mean where to we go when we go looking for support and are rejected time after time because countless support servfices out there refuse to acknowledge our existence- like when I tried to look for a support group for battered men, desperately feeling alone and isolated - only to be told by countless organisations they had nothing to offer me, with the exception of one organisation who told me that the only thing they had to offer me was an "anger management group" - the equivalent of a female rape victim being offered support and being told the only thing on offer to them was a convent or a reform school.

But of course your response reveals that your depravedly gendered position on domestic violence, is best summed up by the following sentiment "Yes men are abused by women too [but it is much more ideologically convenient for me to operate from a gendered narrative, which stigmatises male victims of abuse as urban myths - if not pathological liars - who 'had it coming to them' and as effeminate scum - the equivalent of cheap, filthy, worthless sluts]." Your gendered response makes that abundantly clear in spades - displaying a gendered empathy gap so great that it dwarfs the Grand Canyon.

If you were genuinely about equality, you would be demanding that society's response to DV and abuse in general was that one victim was one victim too many and that one abuser was one abuser too many - regardless of gender and that the system needs to FIND the money to support all victims.

Yet the fact that you have adopted a position which stimgatised and demonises DV victims and ideologically shields DV perpetrators, based solely on gender, proves that your stance is one which entrenches, rather than rejects sexism on the subject of abuse.

Congratulations to you and other feminists in this thread, demonstrating in spades that feminism is to male abuse victims, what Sharia Law is to female abuse victims.

Suze,
We've had this discussion before, domestic violence is not a gendered issue, according to data from all Western societies there's symmetry in rates of offending and violent women are significantly more likely to initiate a physical fight.
Immigration seems to be causing the upswing in reporting of family violence with overseas born people being the majority of victims, again we've had this discussion many times so I'll just cut and paste:

Partner violence and sexual assault are concentrated in certain demographic "clusters" and there's a pretty simple explanation for the "epidemic" of violence against women, 84% of victims presenting at crisis services appear to be overseas born.
Mail order brides and arranged marriages? Or alternatively allegations of domestic abuse can be used to speed up visa processing and a lot of women appearing at shelters and support services are non residents.
Domestic violence: how taboos veil the truth
http://www.theage.com.au/comment/domestic-violence-how-taboos-veil-the-truth-20150126-12umej.html
"The latest ABS Personal Safety Survey breaks down the figures by gender, age group, state and disability, but not by ethnicity or religion. Of the 27.4 per cent of all Australians who experienced sexual assault in last 12 months, 41.7 per cent were born overseas and were English-speaking, 36.6 per cent were born overseas but spoke other languages, the rest were Australian-born, so ethnicity and cultural factors seem to be significant.

The background of sexual assault victims is also hard to unpack – Australia 16.2 per cent in last 12 months, 3 per cent since age 15; Overseas (English-speaking 41.7 per cent in last 12 months, 7.5 per cent since age 15; other languages 36.6 per cent in last 12 months, 10.9 per cent since age 15)."

@Suseonlin If you live in Victoria you will find that protocols are in place in emergency departments to ask injured women if the injury was caused by DV. No such protocols exist for men. They are not asked and if they say the injury was caused by DV it is up to them to go to a doctor about their injury, take photo's and file a police report. Going to the courts for men again is totally in their hands they will get no help only hindrance. For women all this is done for them. Two studies one by Monash university and another by Curtin university into DV injuries came to very similar conclusions one third of those attending Emergency departments because of DV injuries were men. It was also found that in many cases their injuries were worse because women use weapons (knifes/sharp objects), heavy objects(fry pans etc) or use hot or boiling water or oil.

Why was Rosie Batty made Australian of the Year and why was she on Q and A when as I understand it the coroner has not yet released any findings surrounding the death of her son and his father?

I've attempted to learn as much as I can from what's on the web and media about what took place up until the time of Luke Batty's death. There are some things I'd be interested in knowing:

I understand untested allegations had been made regarding Greg Anderson producing a knife in the presence of his son and another person made allegations of child pornography where according to police there was insufficent evidence to prosecute a case. But did Greg Anderson have any prior convictions for any form of family violence against his name as opposed to AVO's issued on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations or uncorroborated evidence;

I understand the parents had been through the courts(local/family) over many years and it would appear that Anderson had become increasingly dysfunctional over that time. What orders had been made by the courts?;

Just prior to him being murdered Rosie Batty took her son to the UK for a number of weeks(6?), around or over the christmas period/school holiday and not long before Anderson went beserk. That trip would have been a lovely parent/child bonding experience as opposed to being told that you can only see your child at sports training with the other parent hovering around in the background. Was the UK trip in accordance with any existing court orders?; and

Did both parents approve Luke's passport application or did Rosie Batty apply for special circumstances whereby only her approval was required and thereby cutting his father out of the process?

Roscop,
Rosie Batty was selected for political reasons, just like her predecessor Adam Goodes, domestic violence like "racism" is a far bigger political issue than it is a social problem because so called social justice has nothing to do with either justice or society.
The ideals of drawing attention to a particular subject or raising awareness of a social problem and that of actually doing something about it are two different things, Batty and Goodes fall into the former category.
Social justice activism isn't evidence based nor goal oriented and is not carried out on a strategic timeline with the expectation of a result by a certain deadline, it's more about social status signalling and what we might call "crowdism".

Roscoe your writing does pose questions, if the husband was still alive I would like to hear his side, but that is something we will never know now, I felt Natasha did not want to hear anything about male bashing by their wives and seemed to not want to know
Having been a victim from a small child and into middle age of continuous bashing , screaming and having to witness the brutality of my mother with my father has left its mark, not only on me, my brothers as well, he never ever hit back, to the outside world she came across as a fun loving person, the story was completely different when she came home, she ruled, manipulated and cruelty was her forte
Unfortunately because of one sided issues with women being bashed up I find it difficult to reconcile with it, Q&A should now run a story on male bashing,or manipulation by wives who can cause their husbands to retaliate, unfortunately in killing
We do not know what was causing the problem in that household, and can only take her side as to how she was such a model wife, or was she?

You guys have really hit a new low using Rosie Batty's situation for your own purposes.
Her husband murdered her son in front of plenty of witnesses, including other children.

Why Anderson did that, or what else happened to him before that day is hardly the point!
He killed a boy, his own son!

It seems to me that a gendered approach to domestic violence is much more important to some men on this thread than it is to the women, feminists or not.

No one here has suggested women don't perpetrate domestic violence, and as far as I know, if women are convicted of violent crimes, whether it be in or out of their homes, they are punished just the same as men are.
So what are you on about?

If women are bashing you or committing any other violent acts against you, then gather your evidence and go to the police about it, just like battered women have to do.
Or....would you have trouble proving it maybe?
Welcome to the much larger problem of men on women domestic violence then.....

Ojnab,
And how many men are driven to suicide by abuse I wonder? I know of one case from my extended family in which a young husband was literally driven mad by his abusive wife and ended up shooting himself.
We also have to wonder if men who grow up in violent homes are more likely to become victims themselves and whether a similar pattern of abuse occurs in men as in women. What I mean to say is that domestic violence often follows the woman, whether she's an abuser moving from one victim to another or a victim who's an easy target for violent, manipulative men, is the reverse true, does growing up in a violent home make men more susceptible to being abused?
I know of another example from my personal life where a family member was repeatedly assaulted by her partner, they split up and he's been nothing but a gentleman with his new de-facto, even standing by her after she became disabled by a back injury. In the mean time my female relative is winding up her second failed relationship with a man who while egregious and irresponsible in many respects also had no history of violence toward women before meeting her.

Jay of Melbourne, we three brothers because of trauma throughout our lives with a bashing mother towards our father, we have tried to overcome what we may feel should not happen in our relationships with our wives, but unfortunately at times something may be said by your wife which can reflect back to the abuse when young, this may not be intended as such by your wife, but it may sound like your mother to you in one of her rage & bashing fits, we have all suffered from depression in one form or another, if you had mentioned to her that she needed help it would be turned back to you,
that it was you that needed help, likewise with my father, it was a no win situation.
My blood boils when I watch programmes like Q&A with people like Natasha being only interested in women bashing, men are open to abuse the same as women with rape, it is not only a woman's issue.

follow the funding and just like mens health only a pittance is allocated to men who have been the victims of violence.The abc is not only unbalanced but a disgrace. What a mockery they made of that poor guy who had been beaten by a woman. I wonder if we are so keen on highlighting the amount of males committing violence why we avoid the rates among certain races. Well I think a few guys are well on to it already however Susie is stuck in her feminist rhetoric.

runner,
Another question that has to be asked, do violent men who are unhappy at home take out their frustration on other men out in public? What percentage of street bashings and road rage can be attributed to domestic violence?
It's also known that when we're talking about domestic violence we're talking about violent men and violent women in most cases, ie domestic violence is a problem mainly among people who are quarrelsome and violent in the home. Domestic violence doesn't afflict all homes, it's not all men and not all women who possess those traits but a stubborn minority who make up most of the statistics and use up most of the resources.

Susieonline, it is so easy to say why not go to the police, could a child of five do that when a knife was going to be used to kill you, blackmail comes in so well with women, your poor old mother, going to the police, what a disgrace, when I haven't done anything to warrant that, except bashed your husband, bashed all of your husbands wives because you took my boys away from me, Susie I hate to tell you but get in the real world, women are as bad as men with manipulation, smacking faces,screaming etc, you get in a relationship with a man who bashes you then turn that the other way around, then you will know what I am talking about. Killing the child was wrong, but did you live in that household to know what really went on, if so enlighten us all, we would love to know, Runner yours views are correct

Ojnab, the couple in question had never lived together apparently.
He was reported to suffer from an extreme form of mental illness and was homeless.
Are you suggesting there is EVER any good reason why a parent would kill a child?

As usual, these sort of threads have turned into a woman hatefest, and the usual blaming of women for all violence that men perpetrate.
I feel sorry for hate-filled people like many on this thread.
I will leave you all to it...

"Why Anderson did that, or what else happened to him before that day is hardly the point!
He killed a boy, his own son!"

I agree there is never sufficient reason for that kind of violence. The reality is though that many humans have shown a capacity for utterly unreasonable choices when push beyond a breaking point. Context does matter.

I know nothing of the background to that particular situation and won't attempt to read into it specifically.

I do think that one of the problems with the way these issues are played in the media is that because only part of the story is told it can create a very lopsided view. When someone cracks like that there should be a determined attempt to understand why and I've seen little evidence that is the case.

What lead to the residency arrangements that were in place? What involvement did CSA have? What else was going on which might have contributed to pushing someone over an edge that is very foreign to our (and most) cultural values?

We should be speaking out against all non-consensual violence, regardless of the gender or perpetrator, victim, relationship status etc. We should also be doing our best to ensure that the government does not play the part of agent for some of the non-physical forms of that violence. To often it seems that the government is ever so keen to be the agent of abuse with no safeguards to prevent that.

R0bert

Susieonline,

"Why Anderson did that, or what else happened to him before that day is hardly the point!" Right so you're not interested in what caused him to go insane. You can be sure that the coroner will have looked at what happened to him before that day but more than likely I would say only in a way limited by politics.

Murders will continue to occur until policy makers look at the relationship between these events in terms of parents who have no convictions(not just unproven allegations) and who are denied by the courts meaningful access to "their children". Most AVO's do not have proven allegations supporting them because the courts are from what I've gleaned over the years, not all that interested in determining whether a domestic violence offence actually took place but only in separating the parties usually by without prior notice of the process, coaxing the respondent party into agreeing to accepting an AVO on the basis of that party "making no admissions". Usually this means in many instances unjustly separating usually men from their children and shaming one party in the community when members of it like teachers etc are informed that the person has an AVO out on him. I take it Susieonline that you'd have no problem with fathers being unjustly shamed.

Susieonline I have absolutely no qualms about referring to the Batty case. Rosie Batty accepted Australian of the Year(awarded prematurely for the reason given above). She has had a high media profile since the tragic event and has projected herself to the public as a domestic violence expert. I think it is only right that her case should be given a proper and thorough examination...much more than what I fear the coroner's court will give it and certainly a lot more than the media including Q and A has given it.

Susieonline, "No one here has suggested women don't perpetrate domestic violence,..."

May I suggest that you'd be amongst the very last that suggest they do.

Susie, Rosie is being used as the new poster girl to bring attention to Domestic Violence against Women.

Her situation is being used by Domestic Violence against Women advocates to increase awareness of Domestic Violence against Women.

Her case could also be used to bring awareness about the failure of our So called mental health services. Had we still had the type of mental health services that existed 30 years ago Greg Anderson looked like he may have been a candidate to be sectioned.

Who knows what the outcome would have been had Greg Anderson been properly treated to his deteriorating mental state or been incarcerated for his own protection.

Unless steps are taken to assist men like Greg Anderson, the DV rate is unlikely to decrease by much at all.

JOM: “The ideals of drawing attention to a particular subject or raising awareness of a social problem and that of actually doing something about it are two different things, Batty and Goodes fall into the former category.”

I think this is the crux of the issue. It is not what women like Batty say but what they do that should be the focus. They seem to have an inordinate need to keep telling us that domestic violence exists and men are the predominant perpetrators as if it were a new phenomenon.

Why do they need to blame men – there is nothing to be gained by constantly stating the obvious unless of course you are trying deflect attention from yourself.

Many women stay in domestic relationships long after they have become dysfunctional because they are emotionally dependent on those relationships. They feel guilty about that dependence especially when their children are traumatised by having to live with an abusive male that their mother is dependent on. It is much easier for them to shift the blame onto the man than to face their own insecurities. The guiltier they feel the more aggressive they become in their blaming.

This then becomes their narrative and they band together with other insecure women who create a chorus that manipulates public opinion. There would be a lot less domestic violence if women left relationships when they first saw signs of it but they don’t. They do not have the courage to leave and spend their lives blaming men for behaviour over which they have no control.

It is good that help is provided for all victims of all violence but where are the women’s voices warning young women in particular about becoming emotionally dependent on domestic relationships? Why are they not encouraging women to become emotionally independent and to stand up to the constant brain washing that tells them the only valid happiness is domestic happiness?

Little Chloe died in Adelaide at the hands of of a drug addicted mother and her boyfriend, she did not want Chloe from day one, this killing is as bad and if not worse than the Battye case, women are also killers of men and children Susie.

Don't forget the woman in Cairns who murdered 8 children.

@Suseonline You ask why men don't just report what happens to them. First off in increasing numbers they are. ABS 2012 Safety Survey reports over 100,000 in 2012.
In Victoria at least this is quite difficult.
If we refer to:
Victorian Judicial College’s ‘”Family Violence Bench Book”
5.4.5 – Responding to men who claim(1) to be victims of family violence
Police protocols require that men's claims are to be severely questioned and if possible dismissed. If this is not possible then they are to be accused of lying to cover their perpetration of DV. If that fails they are asked what they did to provoke her (blame the victim). If all this fails they are given a referal to an organization which conducts Men's change programs for perpetrators. After that they are on their own. Non of these things happen to women.

Wolly B, you say:

"Don't forget the woman in Cairns who murdered 8 children."

I sure all of the panelists on Q and A were aware of that atrocity and would have been extremely pleased that it wasn't made a point of discussion.

On the tree of family violence that would have to be at the pinnacle.

It is hard enough to comprehend how a person could murder one child but murdering eight takes too much vicarious thought.

One thing I find puzzling is that Feminists have been fighting against discrimination, claiming equality.

Yet when it comes to this issue of family violence, Feminist actively encourage discrimination against men.

Feminist hate being categorised in one group, claiming that there are many types of feminism.

Yet when is comes to the broken record claim of breaking the silence about family violence, the word 'Men' is used to encompass all men, whether they are violent or not.

There is no qualifier that feminists that they are talking about a specific extremely small group of men, who for what ever reason, whether it be drug and alcohol, mental illness, acquired brain injury, sociopath or psychopath behaviours, or just plain evil, will commit violence against another human being.

No the word "men" is meant to apply to all males, including the innocent.

vr041 referenced some material early. Might be worth referenceing some more for those genuinely interested.

http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V75-Straus-09.pdf

A bunch of material at the MediaRadar site
http://www.mediaradar.org/index.php

One of the papers refrenced at the MediaRadar site gives a pretty good summary of key findings of the "Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project"
http://domesticviolenceresearch.org/pdf/FindingsAt-a-Glance.Nov.23.pdf

R0bert

Much of this discussion keeps dropping back to tactics used by ChazP sometime back on OLO - a bit scattered but maybe start with http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=14739#254188.

The "Crime Research Centre and Donovan Research, 2001" had included the following '23% of young people between the ages of 12 and 20 years had witnessed an incident of physical violence against their mother/stepmother' which ChazP quoted without providing a reference.

When asked about the rates involving female initiated violence ChazP had this to say "if you had read and understood my posting you would have seen the highly credible source of the statistics. The reasons it does not include the figures you `suspect' is because they are at best negligible, and more accurately non-existent"

Houellebecq located the report and quite near the stat ChazP was happy to quote was the following "and 22% against their father/stepfather"

When ChazP eventually responded to being caught out the response was "The selective use/misuse of information is part and parcel of any debate".

Those pushing the highly gendered view of DV are not doing so honestly. They quite deliberately hide and suppress information that does not suit their agenda's.

R0bert

“Those pushing the highly gendered view of DV are not doing so honestly. They quite deliberately hide and suppress information that does not suit their agenda's.”

The much touted ‘One in Three’ mantra is an example of this. What does it mean to say that one in three women experience domestic violence in their lifetimes? Does it mean that they once had a slap in the face in a forty year domestic relationship or does it mean that one in three are being beaten senseless on a daily basis? It tells us nothing. The measure of the amount of domestic violence should be measured by the number of acts of violence and the severity of those acts. This is how things are measured in every other form of crime. We don’t say one in three people are likely to experience robbery in their lifetime. We say that there have been x number of crimes of a certain type committed and let the listener draw their own conclusions.

Deliberately trying to mislead people by abusing the way statistics should be delivered is a sign of desperation.

"Don't forget the woman in Cairns who murdered 8 children."

This represents a truism of modern Australia: men's problems are criminalized while women's problem's are medicalized.

As I've often posted on OLO, it comes back to responsibility. Women just aren't expected to take responsibility for their actions like men.

It is absolutely disgusting that Batty was made Australian of the Year; a complete degradation the award. When people like Fred Hollows were made Australian of the Year it mattered. People who dedicated their lives to helping others. Now all you need is a personal tragedy and 'activists' will take advantage of you for their own agenda.

We might as well trash the award.

At least I can say the article itself was excellent. It's so nice to finally see more balance on these issues.

"It is absolutely disgusting that Batty was made Australian of the Year"

Dane I don't think enough is known at this point to support that view. I've not heard a lot of her speaking and what I have heard has mostly centred on the women as victims approach but I have also heard from her more than I've heard from many others in the field in terms of speaking against all violence.

From what I've seen I suspect the choice was tied in somewhat with Abbott chasing the women's vote and some to do with his paternalistic approach to women. Rather than a misogynist I suspect he is more old school paternalist.

There is a list of Australian of the year recipients at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_of_the_Year_Award_recipients and given the high proportion of sports people and entertainers on the list I'm not in a rush to be critical of Rossie Batty without good cause.

R0bert

R0bert,
Paternalist or patriarch I wonder? Paternalist would fit most people's perceptions of Tony Abbott, he's one variation of the White Knight, the other is the male Feminist, the patriarchal view of women boils down to "different but equal", paternalism implies that women are "different but special".

Jay I tend to the view that it's paternalistic. I suspect many of us male and female in our society have elements of that. We were raised that way, women first, protect women etc. I still see parents teaching their children some of those values.

I'm not entirely adverse to some it as courtesies but object when it becomes government policy.

R0bert

R0bert.
Depends on how you were brought up, I didn't encounter any "princesses" until I was an adult, all the women I knew as a young person were practical and hardworking, they didn't need much looking after.
Even my older aunties, some of whom were full time housewives who never had a paying job were experts in their field, they had heads full of recipes and remedies and most of all they were fonts of wisdom and practical advice.

Robert,

I understand sports people are admired by a large part of the population and they have at lease extraordinary physical and mental qualities that make them a role model for young people (and old!) but to me they are not in the same league as a Hollows or Dr Chang AC.

But to lower the bar even further to victims of personal tragedies degrades the award itself. Batty is undoubtedly the victim of a terrible tragedy yet that hardly makes her unique. I had to stop watching Australian Story a few years ago because they just seemed to focus on incredibly tragic stories where half the family died of cancer and the other half died in car accidents. Unfortunately there is no shortage of tragedy in the world.

However, for me the most disgusting thing about Batty getting the award is the way it pushes a partisan anti-male agenda. DV is synonymous in the public mind with men=bad, yet we don't know the exact circumstances that drove her husband to insanity. Many people know men who have gone through bitter divorces where the mother has used the full coercive force of the state to exact revenge for a failed relationship. We will never know if that happened here because of the complete lack of transparency in the Family Court.

But to elevate a victim of a personal tragedy to national prominence solely to further an essentially partisan, political agenda only diminishes the award itself. I wonder who will get it next year: the first married gay couple? Before long you'll have to be disabled, black, female, lesbian asylum seeker to win.

'For instance, during 2010–11 and 2011–12, there were 121 females (62%) and 75 males (38%) killed in domestic homicides according to the latest figures just released by the Australian Institute of Criminology.'

Without clarifying which gender perpetrated the homicide, this is a useless statistic. Anecdotal media accounts of male victims of family homicides indicate that men are being killed by sons, fathers or other male family members, much more so than by female family members.

Also, it's very frustrating to be simply given a statistic without an accompanying link to the table, article or research study, so that the reader can ascertain context.

'The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Personal Safety Survey 2012 also showed that 33.3%, exactly one in three, of the victims of violence by a current partner within the previous 12 months were male.'

Again, no link, no context. Considering this goes against most anecdotal observation, at the very least, a lot more clarification is needed.

This is NOT a kneejerk denial (as I'm sure I'll be told). It's a reasonable expectation that all statistical information within an article that is supposedly overturning and challenging established 'gender myths' be validated and contextualised if it's to be taken at all seriously.

Killarney, unfortunately the AIC doesn't make the gender of the perpetrators of domestic homicides widely available. It's not to be found in their biannual reports - you have to request this data from them.

The 2011-12 data hasn't yet been requested, as far as I am aware. However the data from the previous reporting period 2009-10 found that 50% of perpetrators of domestic homicides of men were female and 50% were male.

MALE PERPETRATORS
Custodial father only: 2
Brother: 3
Other family (male): 13
Son only (includes stepson): 9
Homosexual relationship: 1
Total: 28

FEMALE PERPETRATORS
Other family (female): 1
Daughter: 1
Wife only: 8
Female defacto partner only: 13
Girlfriend: 3
Extramarital lover: 1
Ex-girlfriend only: 1
Total: 28

Source: Australian Institute of Criminology (2013). Custom data request for Greg Andresen from NMHP database. Australian Institute of Criminology: Canberra. http://www.oneinthree.com.au/storage/xls/Family_Violence_Homicides_2008-10_NHMP.xlsx.

You can find the ABS data showing that 33.3% of the victims of violence by a current partner within the previous 12 months were male in Table 3 "EXPERIENCE OF VIOLENCE DURING THE LAST 12 MONTHS, Relationship to perpetrator" available at http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/4906.02012?OpenDocument. 33,100 males and 66,200 females had experienced violence from a current partner during the last 12 months.

You are wrong Men's Health Australia.
I looked up the aic.gov.au site and it does give the genders of both victims and perpetrators for domestic violence homicide statistics.

"Overall, 61 percent of all female homicide victims (n=116) killed throughout 2008–09 and 2009–10 were killed by an offender with whom they shared a domestic relationship, while a greater number of male homicide victims were killed by a friend or an acquaintance (n=173; 86%) than by someone with whom they shared a domestic relationship (n=75; 39%).

Consistent with previous NHMP annual reports, females were overrepresented as victims in intimate partner homicide (n=89; 73% of intimate partner homicides), while males were more highly represented in homicides involving friends or acquaintances (n=173; 86% of acquaintance homicides) or strangers (n=56; 78% of stranger homicides)."

Look it up and see for yourself on aic.gov.au

I fail to see why we can't just say the truth and get on with trying to stop ALL domestic violence.

phanto

'... where are the women’s voices warning young women in particular about becoming emotionally dependent on domestic relationships? Why are they not encouraging women to become emotionally independent and to stand up to the constant brain washing that tells them the only valid happiness is domestic happiness?'

Where on earth have you been for the last 40 years? This is EXACTLY what feminists have been saying over and over and over and over. This is what I'VE been saying on OLO for several years.

Have you read ANYTHING at all that has ever been written or spoken by feminists? Or do you get all your information about feminism from the prolific bigotry and disinformation disseminated by the well-funded and well-connected anti-feminism industry?

'Where are the women's voices?' you ask. Well, they're everywhere. I am one such voice as are all the worlds feminists. And they are saying the very thing that you, and others like you, are telling us that they are NOT saying.

Get your nose out of all the anti-feminist/mens movement hate-fests they laughingly call 'websites' and 'publications' and 'research studies' and start finding out more about feminist principles and analyses, which (sadly) you seem to have been carefully taught to avoid at all costs.

Craig Minns

'... it was notable for the polarisation of the discussion in line with 2nd wave (70s) feminist principles, which have been largely discredited as a social justice model'

This is the very kind of bigotry and disinformation perpetrated by anti-feminist dogma, which I referred to in my reply to phanto above. It's a manipulative form of false rhetoric that draws the reader into assuming an 'accepted fact' that is neither factual nor accepted. In fact, the feminist 'social justice model' has NOT been discredited. It's remained one of the most important tools for analysing the dynamics of power in our society.

This is the reason why the feminist model remains the cultural benchmark for dealing with domestic violence - the main reason being that DV encompasses all that is fundamentally wrong with the current gender power structure.

Hi Suseonline,

Nowhere in the data you cited does it give the gender of the perpetrator for domestic homicide statistics.

I stand by the data I cited, which came directly from the AIC's National Homicide Monitoring Program.

Mens Health

The statistics you cite do not provide context. Neither do they refute the current model for dealing with domestic violence - which is that women are substantially the victims of domestic homicide and domestic violence and that the major perpetrators of domestic violence on both men and women - are MEN.

Cultural/official acknowledgment and acceptance that men form a minority of domestic homicide/violence victims - and women the perpetrators - has been an essential part of DV policy since the 1980s and police and social workers are fully trained to recognise and address it. Police prejudice towards male DV victims has changed a great deal since the 1980s, thanks to the feminist campaign to have DV taken out of the 'domestic affair' closet and made an important part of public discourse and official policy.

The underlying agenda of these 'what about the men' articles is NOT to raise awareness about a problem that is already well recognised (i.e. that men are also victims of domestic violence). The agenda of this faux 'awareness raising' is to DISCREDIT FEMINISM.

Hi Killarney,

I simply posted the data you requested in order to be courteous and helpful. I'm not citing this data in order to engage in a debate with you. I just think it's important that the correct data is cited whenever discussions like this take place.

The ABS and AIC data does not show that the major perpetrators of domestic violence on men are men. 50% of perpetrators of domestic homicide against men are female. 94% of perpetrators of violence against male partners, boyfriends and dates are female.

Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics (2013), Table 6 EXPERIENCE OF VIOLENCE SINCE THE AGE OF 15, Relationship to perpetrator by sex of perpetrator. 26,500* males experienced violence from a male partner and 427,900 males experienced violence from a female partner since the age of 15. 18,700** males experienced violence from a boyfriend or male date and 295,100 males experienced violence from a girlfriend or female date since the age of 15.

No quantitative data like the ABS and AIC datasets provides context. For this you need to look at qualitative research. I suggest readers look at the Intimate Partner Abuse of Men study at http://web.archive.org/web/20110727183821/http://www.man.org.au/News/IntimatePartnerAbuseofMen/tabid/132/Default.aspx. This provides context for male victims of intimate partner violence (not broader family violence) and shows that they have very similar experiences to female victims.

<This is the very kind of bigotry and disinformation perpetrated by anti-feminist dogma,

<This is the reason why the feminist model remains the cultural benchmark for dealing <with domestic violence - the main reason being that DV encompasses all that is <fundamentally wrong with the current gender power structure.

Posted by Killarney, Wednesday, 4 March 2015 6:27:03 AM

Killarney that is really "The pot calling the Kettle black!"

Killarney:
If what I had to say was so obviously false then why bother arguing with me at all? It is like arguing with someone who believes the earth is flat. The only reason you would argue with them is if you were not completely convinced it was round.

Suzeonline:
I thought you said you were going to leave us to it.

Hi Killarney, the second wave feminist dogmatic model is "important" because there is a large cohort of women in positions of power within social justice and bureaucratic fields who were educated in that dogma and who have benefitted from its existence through preferential treatment ("affirmative action").

However, it has been a dismal failure in actually creating a better set of social justice outcomes, especially in the area of domestic issues, such as DV or division of labour with the family.

It has very little relevance to the next generation of men and women, who have to a very large extent rejected it as merely being a swapping of nameplates on the doors of power.

We need to get past the toxic idea that gender is a field of conflict. Second wave feminism is based entirely on that idea and that is why it is a failure.

@Killarney stated:
"Cultural/official acknowledgment and acceptance
that men form a minority of domestic homicide/violence
victims - and women the perpetrators - has been an
essential part of DV policy since the 1980s and
police and social workers are fully trained to recognize
and address it. Police prejudice towards male DV victims
has changed a great deal since the 1980s"

It has been recognized alright and steps have been taken to minimize and dismiss men's claims of being victims.

If we refer to the Judicial Domestic Violence Bench Book Section 5 (Victoria):
We find the handling of men's claims of being a DV victim are to be dismissed as trivial or the man is to be accused of lying or police are to presume that he provoked it (he deserved whatever she handed out). If he still persists he is to be referred to the men's change program (the one set up for perpetrators). Women on the other hand are always to be believed. In other words your post is totally wrong.

@Suseonline, "I fail to see why we can't ... get on with trying to stop ALL domestic violence". I like the word "ALL" in that statement.

Suseonline as a test of you're sincerity/integrity on this issue tell us all why there is only ever campaigns and taxpayer money thrown at reducing domestic violence against one cohort of victims perpetrated by one of a number of cohorts of perpetrators?

@Killarney

"This is the reason why the feminist model remains the cultural benchmark for dealing with domestic violence - the main reason being that DV encompasses all that is fundamentally wrong with the current gender power structure."

Killarney, so courts should deal with all "alleged" male perpetrators as though they are all tarred with the one male demonizing brush mainly for the purpose of unjustly interfering with the bonding fathers have with their children? That's what this issue is really all about...the easy separation of a father from his children...and for mothers to gain an unjustified advantage in child custody/access cases.

Where are the statistics that show the number of fathers served avo's/dvo's unsupported by substantiated allegations(in other words unproven) and including their chidren as needing protection?

"BILL SHORTEN: One in three women over the age of 15 will face physical violence, 17 in every hundred Australian women will face violence from a current or previous partner, yet only 20 per cent of all those women who face family violence from a partner will actually report it to the police."

http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2015/s4190905.htm

Bill ever the man for gender politics.

The reason why women don't report it to the police is because if you look behind the statics silly Billy mentions you will see in the survey results it is largely very petty non injurious behavior like one incident of a push or shove in the previous 12 months that is captured. Bill and the DV industry mob would like the public to believe it was the other way around where the 1 in 3 implied that it gave insight into the number of women who are being bashed by their husbands with a baseball bat borrowed from the next door neighbor.

<The agenda of this faux 'awareness raising' is to DISCREDIT FEMINISM.
Posted by Killarney, Wednesday, 4 March 2015 6:35:17 AM

Christine Stobla; Lying in a Room of ones own. How women's studies miseducate.
Christina Hoff Sommers; Who Stole Feminism?
Wendy McElroy; Independant womens forum.
Daphne Patai; Heterophobia
Eeva Sodhi; Nojustice.info

Manufacturing Research ; http://web.archive.org/web/20050308115735/http://www.nojustice.info/Research/ManufacturingResearch.htm

Katie Rhopie; The Morning After.
Kathy Young
Susanne Steinmentz

Killarney all the authors above are female in case you haven't noticed. I could add a few more.

Posted by Roscop, Wednesday, 4 March 2015 2:46:32 PM

It would be political suicide for Bill Shorten or any politician, not to regurgitate the 'MESSAGE"!

@killarney, what feminism has done for over the past 40 years is perpetuate a fraudulent message that all abuse is the product of male power over women- a paradigm which systemically enables rapists, batterers, pedophiles and child abusers on the basis of gender and which stigmatises male victims of both abuse and child abuse, as well as female victims of female abusers.

After all under the feminist model, if a little boy is abused by a grown women, then he is arbirarily regarded as being at fault by that dogma - after all the child is the only one in that situation with any form of male power.

Stop pretending that your position is even remotely concerned with ending all abuse when the very narrative it is based in, quite literally stigmatises ME PERSONALLY as a survivor of both child abuse and domestic violence at the hands of female abusers, as nothing but an urban myth, if not a pathological liar, who "had it coming to me" and as effeminate scum - the gendered equivalent of a cheap, filthy, worthless slut.

@suzonline Right, so according to your twisted logic, demanding that male victims of abuse be treated with compassion and that their female perpetrators be held to account is "hating all women", yet according to you, it's acceptable and egalitarian to argue from a gendered narrative which quite literally stigmatises me personally as as survivor of female perpetrated child abuse and domestic violence, as an urban myth, if not a pathological liar, who "had it coming to me" and as effeminate scum.

Oh and before you start with the crap about how you're caring for the vast bulk of male victims of general violence whose perpetrators are male, as one such male survivor, don't try and insult my intelligence.

The fact is that you, like every other feminist out there, EXPLOIT the assault I endured at the hands of a violent male offender, to stigmatise me as a survivor of female-perpetrated domestic violence and child abuse to justify "putting me in my place" - which is as the scum beneath your feet, suffering in shame and silence.

After all my visible existence, as with that of every male survivor of feminist-perpetrated abuse, is a living heresy to feminist dogma, and you and other feminists just can't have that - now can you?

vr041

Don't know if you have seen this.

http://www.responsibleopposing.com/comment/lasttime.html

I will never forget the intensity and range of emotions I experienced the last time that I hit a woman.

I know now, as I knew then, that it doesn't matter:

That she had attacked me first, verbally and emotionally;
That she was the first to begin shouting and intimidating;
That she was much bigger and much stronger that I;
That she hit me first; or,
...
During my apology to my mother, as my father had predicted, she demanded that I acknowledge that I had caused her to hit me, that her violence was my fault. My father had advised me not to argue that point even though, objectively speaking, it is not true.

He explained I could use logic and rationality to devise an acceptable response to her demand without having to lie to her by falsely admitting that I thought her violence was my fault. He advised me to keep my logic to myself, explaining that women do not highly value logic at the best of times and that they detest it when they are emotionally upset. (I told you that much of our discussion was not politically correct.)

Wolly B, I am past reading anecdotes irrespective of the genders of the victim and the perpetrator. Over the years I've read too many of them. In the domestic violence industry literature it is laden with them. It sees them as a substitute for meaningful granular statistics. They are all shaped to portray something like a male perpetrator as an ogre and a meek passive brutalized woman with children cowering with fear in the background with the intended suggestion that they need protection from the former. The ancedotes usually include manufactured photos. Of course there is never ever any suggestion or even the slightest hint that the woman featuring in the anecdote participated in dishing out the violence as the initiator of it or otherwise. The relaters of these anecdotes take literary license to excess. They have absolutely no shame in falsely characterizing what the broad spectrum of domestic violence is. This has been going on for 30 years or more.

If you don't think people in the domestic violence stoop that low here's something to read about those of the ilk that I talk about:

"Khouri's hoax will take its place in a long Australian tradition of literary fraud, from Ern Malley to Helen Darville-Demidenko. But no other fraudulent book has had such wide sales or impact, and in Darville's case the deception only involved her persona, not her book. Khouri has misled the world both on the page and in person."

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/23/1090464854793.html

I’m not going to address every hostile reply made to me over the last few days. Suse and I usually end up the only voices on OLO who try to refute the considerable distortions and disinformation surrounding the treatment of male DV victims – and all we do is get battered around (so to speak) for our efforts.

As with Suse, I do not – and never have – refuted that men make up a minority of domestic violence victims and that facilities and funding to address their situations are woefully inadequate. However, much of the problem lies in the fact that the DV system has been constantly undermined over recent decades through death by a thousand cuts.

In my personal dealings with DV (through friends and acquaintances), I have found the police, social workers and legal system have been completely professional in giving both male and female victims equal support and attention. In fact, a social worker friend of mine, who has had a great deal of experience in DV, gets very annoyed at the constant accusations that the DV system ignores male victims. It's an unfair and unsubstantiated smearing of the professionalism of those people, who are already trying to do their best within very difficult circumstances.

What I am mostly reacting to here is the cheap bigotry and disinformation that blames this situation on feminism – and this is the only issue I am interested in addressing on this thread.

The lack of facilities and support for male DV victims is not the fault of feminism, but of a wider patriarchal culture that assumes men do not need support of any kind and actually promotes and glorifies violence in men.

It’s not feminism, but the patriarchal culture, that has let men down.

The problem is, Killarney, that feminism has merely reiterated patriarchal culture, so if you're right that such a culture is in fact dysfunctional, then where does that leave feminist dialectic?

Craig Minns, it is not the 'fault' of feminists or feminism that many DV male victims apparently aren't coming forward to find the help they need.

This sort of 'I'm a man, therefore I don't need help' mindset has been around since Adam was a boy, long before women strove for the still elusive equal rights as men.

If the male victims of DV don't want to come forward, then maybe the other men in their lives should be more understanding of their situation, because the women already understand how they feel!

Hi Suse, your comment is very defensive of feminism, but having read some of your other comments I suspect that you're not really a typical feminist in the sense of having a strong ideological adherence to the dogmatic model that Killarney, for example, likes to advocate. You are essentially a woman who is proud of her personal achievements and you tend to see criticism of "feminism" as an attack on your own credibility as a professional, causing you to react defensively.

Similarly, a lot of men are becoming very defensive in light of the frequent denigration of the male role that has been a feature of feminist dialectic, which seeks to replace a "patriarchy" with a "matriarchy", simply by putting women into roles that have traditionally been filled by men, without seeking to find other roles that are equally as socially valuable for men as mothering is for women. In other words, men are receiving a message that they are to some extent simply not as valued as women are.

When people feel devalued, they are less likely to seek help when they are in trouble. This is one of the main arguments given by feminists to support the need for outreach and promotion of social campaigns against domestic violence: that women who are in abusive relationships sometimes become convinced that nobody cares enough to help them.

It is exacerbated to some extent perhaps by a male ethic of self-reliance, but if you are suggesting that we should devalue self-reliance, I think you are very much on the wrong track.

Furthermore, as a man, I can tell you that especially for young men, there is very little evidence that women (other than Mum and Nanna) have any sympathy for young men who are anything other than "tough". That may be changing, but if so, very slowly. It is not other men who are holding men back from seeking help, it is women and sadly, most women have no idea they're even doing it.

Gee Craig Minns, you will have me sobbing shortly for the dreadful times men are experiencing in our community!
Are you forgetting that many women have loved male partners, or that they have brothers, fathers and sons? Why would most women not want the best for their men?

The truth is that most women DO want the best for their men, but they also refuse to carry on as lesser humans in society than the men.
The problem is the few men who don't like this new idea of equal rights with women at all!
Which man are you?

What I am mostly reacting to here is the cheap bigotry and disinformation that blames this situation on feminism – and this is the only issue I am interested in addressing on this thread.

It’s not feminism, but the patriarchal culture, that has let men down.
Posted by Killarney, Saturday, 7 March 2015 10:46:38 PM

Christine Stobla wrote how womens studies miseducate women, she had three categories.

Errors of Fact
Errors of interpretation
Sins of Omission .

Eeva Sodhi, Nojustice.info
Perceptions are not Facts

<Justice Canada instructs its research contractors to "make a careful choice about which
<indicators are going to be applied , because you want the indicators to reflect the
<gendered approach you are developing"

This is still applicable today.

Researchers into domestic violence who choose to not support the feminist dogma were threatened, Erin Pizzy had the bomb squad checking her mail.

How Domestic Violence advocates use fear and violence
http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/38333/20051023-0000/www.kittennews.com/cgi-bin/kn_opinion/opinion6c38.html?topic=999927

<· Dr. Steinmetz told me that she received verbal threats and anonymous phone calls
<from radical women's groups threatening to harm her children. And when the ACLU
<invited her to speak on domestic violence, it received a bomb threat

@Craig: '[Suse] I suspect that you're not really a typical feminist in the sense of having a strong ideological adherence to the dogmatic model that Killarney, for example, likes to advocate.'

You got that, Suse? Good feminist; Bad feminist. You're the good feminist and I'm the bad feminist. Divide and conquer. Bully Tactics 101.

Craig

When on earth did calling someone's opinions and observations 'dogma' or 'ideology' ever facilitate a calm, rational discussion? Like many on this board, you are blind to your own anti-feminism triggers, which make you oblivious to your own EXTREME and UNNECESSARILY provocative anti-feminist rhetoric whenever a gender thread occurs on OLO.

The problems in the DV system are overwhelmingly the result of ongoing inadequate funding and cuts to DV spending. The system cannot even adequately address the needs of the majority female victims, let alone the minority male victims. In trying to hijack the issue by claiming that the problems in the system are all the fault of 'dogmatic, ideologically driven, second-wave feminist theory' is pathetic and childish.

And no doubt you wonder why I can't be bothered treating you with respect.

Sheesh, you girls are so defensive it's like trying to have a conversation with a cactus.

Killarney, there is no such thing as a "good feminist" or for that matter a "bad feminist". Feminism was a reasonable response to a pretty lousy situation for some (but by no means all) women. Sadly, it has degraded into just another form of political dogma that allows people to apply labels so they don't have to actually think about things.

In some cases, the labels allow people to devalue those who they have labelled to such an extent that they don't even see them as human any longer.

Fascism 101, Killarney.

Suse, I'm not suggesting that women don;t want what's best for their men, I'm suggesting that what they think is best is often wrong and I'm afraid your first sentence in the response to my comment shows why.

If you don't allow yourself to listen, you will never hear.

WollyB

Look, I ignored your last post, because I can't be bothered arguing with people who bring up all those bigoted, distorted arguments from these ultra-conservative women who have carved careers for themselves by slagging feminism.

Ultimately, the money trail leads all the way back to ultra-conservative US lobby groups such as the Heritage and Olin Foundations, who have been the main financiers of the very lucrative anti-feminism industry and have made their agenda very well known about where women belong.

And don't get me started on the truly awful Erin Pizzey. She was brutally beaten by both her mother and father, but for reasons best known to her, decided to blame it all on Mum. A lot of her anecdotes about being hounded and violently persecuted by feminist banshees are more a product of her Mummy-rage and febrile fantasies than anything resembling reality. I used to read her Cosmopolitan articles as a teenager back in the 1980s and she was so embarrassingly earth-motherish, I even remember her criticising women for wearing tampons.

<let alone the minority male victims.
<Posted by Killarney, Sunday, 8 March 2015 8:24:08 PM

When it comes to being killed or severely injured by domestic violence of course males will make up the minority.

However domestic violence definitions, are expand far from the purely physical injuries, to include activity such as emotional abuse and manipulation. Financial abuse, to controlling some one with sex.

An intriguing conversation I had tonight with one individual was about what happened with Russian brides, and the scam that they ran on unsuspecting men.

Demands by these women included things like mobiles phones not only for themselves but their children as well, a computer and internet, credit cards and a few other luxuries, failure to comply resulted in sexual withdrawal.

The usual trend was after a 18 months and usually a child (possibly sired by the male) and then allegations of domestic violence, resulting in the male being moved out of the house he once owned.

One bloke I know, had 60k in the bank and owned his own house, so he lost the lot and has to pay child support.

Craig

'Sheesh, you girls are so defensive it's like trying to have a conversation with a cactus.'

I am a grown woman, not a girl. How would you feel if I referred to you as a 'boy'?

And you are not having a 'conversation'. You are having a political discussion - which inevitably involves strong opinions and viewpoints. By degrading those opinions and viewpoints by using terms such as 'dogma' and 'ideology', you are derailing reasonable discussion.

The 'prickly' discomfort you feel is because I am throwing back at you the same tactics you use to create discomfort in anyone who puts up a comment with a feminist leaning.

'Feminism was a reasonable response to a pretty lousy situation ...'

Yes, and that 'reasonable response' was met back then with all the same bigoted rage and disinformation that is applied to third-wave feminist issues today. So too, was this same bigoted rage and disinformation applied to the suffragettes.

It's the same old divide-and-conquer shaming rhetoric, repackaged for each successive generation to control and manipulate women's behaviour.

But keep on doing it if you believe it gives you a rhetorical advantage over us mere 'girls'.

@ Killarney

"In my personal dealings with DV (through friends and acquaintances), I have found the police, social workers and legal system have been completely professional in giving both male and female victims equal support and attention."

Oh what absolute rubbish!

In the jurisdiction that I live in the Domestic Violence Crisis Service(DVCS) has an office in the court building. I'm sure its not there for helping male alleged perpetrators or male alleged victims. It's there to assist females who are there to take out AVO's against their male partners and to assist them every step of the way. Most of them get that in addition to free legal aid. The alleged perpetrator gets no assistance. The aim of the court is to handicap the alleged perpetrator in the process to the max.

Most AVO's are issued "ex parte" the alleged perpetrator. Whilst he'll receive a copy of the application with the AVO and an order for him to show up at the court on set date, are served. He'll not be told that he is entitled to a transcript of the "ex parte" hearing to see what the alleged victim said in court and that he can look at the case file at the court to see how the matter was dealt with by judicial officer at the "ex parte" hearing.

I've gone to the court expecting to be able to sit in on domestic violence case/s. The receptionist will not tell you in which court the cases are being heard. On the court list the court no's are not shown against cases with the name of parties like other cases concerning other matters and in the family court. So I walked into some of the courts until I came across one where a domestic violence matter was being heard. The magistrate stopped proceedings and asked what I was doing in his court. I said I was there to observed the law being applied and he then carried on with the case looking rather unhappy with my presence.

Make no mistake about it, these courts are "star chamber" courts.

Roscoe, with all this 'injustice' being heaped on all these supposedly innocent men being issued with the useless AVO's in court, we still have the continuing problem of the death of women by their intimate partners every week of the year in Australia.
And the unknown number of severely injured women who were bashed in their own homes, but survived.

It seems that every day in the media we hear about women being injured or killed by their loving male partners, or of men being bashed, or worse, by other men.

So forgive me if I have trouble feeling sorry for these men you seem to want to save in the court system.....

Having been through abuse by a mother who certainly new how to abuse, always right, never wrong, if you disagree with me I will slap your face or I will start screaming, you sons are there for me, look after me, why have pups and bark yourself, a great saying of hers, So we kids did the cooking for her, remember I am a lady I don't do that, Yes! After years of abuse even when we married it still did not stop and after my father died after years of cruelty, there was now another problem, I am your mother, remember, so divorces became the order of the day, it's me or your wives, always remember I am your mother.
Looking back over those manipulate years of our family, to be quite honest if my father had killed her, we would of had to agree with what he did.
Females have a skill of being manipulative with males, I see it so often with friends where the female will become bossy to the male normally he doesn't respond, and I most certainly think that males can stand so much until they break and resort to violence or killing.
Even to this day I am very wary of any female attending my needs, and tend to avoid, example, security at an airport by mainly aggressive females, look for a male instead
The only time we will be free of the continuous torment of the past, will be after we have passed on, it is always there and never leaves you.
I have posted earlier on this tragedy which I will say again females can be twice as bad as males in the cruelty stakes, been there for nearly a lifetime of misery while she lived, it most certainly was, nobody can tell me otherwise

@ Suse

>So forgive me if I have trouble feeling sorry for these men you seem to want to save in the court system.....

What have I said that makes you think I want to save guilty men?

Has it not occurred to you that some of "these men" might in fact be innocent in regard to the allegations made against them and have unjustly been separated from their children. I fully understand your "trouble in feeling sorry for these men". I guess such callousness from you is only to be expected.

Is it not supposed to be that both that the accused and the accuser should be subject to fair and due process in the courts? Or do you think where women are the alleged victim there should be exceptions to that?

As to "... we still have the continuing problem of the death of women by their intimate partners every week of the year in Australia." You may be correct in saying that but have you ever noticed that the common denominator in most of these cases is a father separated from his children whether justified or otherwise?

Yes there are women being killed by their partners and this will continue without much doubt and I don't think rough justice helps in anyway to change that situation. Nevertheless one woman can help to balance the domestic violence murder score by murdering eight children. That tops the previous Australian record for domestic violence where a women murdered six children and killed herself in WA some years ago. How's that?...a woman holds the Australian domestic violence record...stick that one under your bonnet Suse.

Roscop, charming as ever.
I am upset at anyone being murdered, male or female.
I see no point in arguing with such an angry man as yourself.

Killarney, the "prickly discomfort" I feel is in trying to hold a sensible conversation with someone who is determined to choose to take offence at everything said to her.

You've become so determined to attack everything said to you, that even when someone makes a positive comment about feminism you manage to find a way to be offended by it.

Seriously mate, I really think you're doing yourself more harm than good in posting here the way you do

Yes Suse...Angry! There are untold number of fathers in Australia who are angry...very very angry. Fortunately for the mothers involved except for a relative few, the vast majority of fathers have contained that anger.

I suggest everyone should read "Kangaroo Court:Family Law in Australia by John Hirst" and it will be understood why if you haven't experienced the application of that law first-hand as a father. It should be a prescribed text for all high school legal studies students.

Following is a link to a book review:

https://www.cis.org.au/images/stories/policy-magazine/2005-winter/2005-21-2-barry-maley.pdf

Excerpts:

xxxxxxxxx

"You need to be a good scholar, a good writer, as well as brave, to launch a long-overdue critique of the Family Court. La Trobe University historian John Hirst fills the bill with this curial J’accuse probing the Court’s injustices."

xxxxxxxx

"As Hirst notes, an allegation is not investigated by the Court but passed over to the state welfare departments who report either that it has been substantiated or not substantiated—not that it has not occurred. The victim of the ‘unsubstantiated’ allegation has not been declared innocent and continues to wear a stigma that cannot be removed unless a criminal charge is brought and shown to be false. In the meantime, so far as the Family Court is concerned, accused fathers have to prove their innocence. The burden of proof and the costs of doing so have shifted to them."

xxxxxxxx

Craig

No. What I am describing is a very common pattern in online forums such as this. Women who use any kind of feminist-type argument are routinely belittled and provoked by extremely hostile anti-feminist posters, who often attack in packs of 4 or 5 at a time and keep treating these women's opinions and viewpoints as empty 'dogma' and 'ideology', or alternatively, as irrational man-hating.

Whenever I make a feminist argument, I almost NEVER receive a mature response that addresses my actual argument. Almost always, I am personally belittled and provoked simply because I am a feminist.

And than, of course, after being belittled, provoked, ignored, dismissed and smeared, I am then told by my oh-so-innocent, ever-so-'courteous' attackers that I am angry (!!) and that my anger is not doing my 'cause' any good.

I suggest, Craig, that you go back over your comments to me on this and other threads. Almost never have you treated me as anything other than a misguided fool enslaved to a dogma.

You could also take a look at the general responses to Suse, who has to ride much the same gauntlet on every gender thread.

And remember, you (along with one or two others) were the one who brought up the feminism angle. So take some responsibility for the responses you got.

If you're not prepared to start treating feminist-oriented women as mature, intellectual equals or to use mature, non-provocative language when dealing with them, then don't have the audacity to expect a calm, respectful response.

No, Roscop, my comments re the Family Court are not rubbish.

In the last seven years, I’ve had dealings with two sets of divorcing couples who found themselves among the 6% of cases that end up in the Family Court, and one other couple who came close but managed to settle out of court.

In all three cases, the men acted like complete pigs. They alienated all the legal teams, judges and family counsellors. Despite many witness accounts of their abusive and violent behaviour towards their wives and children and their uncooperative contempt for all the professionals involved with their cases, the final outcome in each case re marital assets and child residency, was split down the middle, as are virtually all Family Court decisions.

Despite the professional teams bending over backwards to help these men, they remained bitter and angry that they had received a ‘bum deal’ by a ‘female-biased’ court system.

I know another man who, after 17 years, is still irrationally bitter that his wife received a $90,000 divorce settlement – which represented exactly half the value of the marital home. To this day, he still rants and raves to anyone foolish enough to listen about how unfair it all was. To some men, ‘half’ the marital assets is way too much to give to an ex-wife and shows ‘unfair bias’ towards women.

Until my dealings with these cases, even I believed a lot of the prevailing hype that the Family Court favours women. Not anymore. In fact, I go on record as saying that if the Family Court stands accused of gender bias, it actually favours MEN. And it does so by excusing their atrocious behaviour and pandering to their self-pity.

Ojnab

Your tale is harrowing. I can't begin to imagine what you went through and still go through.

My own mother was wonderful (as was my father), but I've seen many examples of toxic mothers (and fathers) such as yours. They may have been abused as children or they may have some kind of sociopathic personality disorder, but their behaviour is ultimately inexcusable.

Killarney, I reject your assertion that I have treated you as a misguided fool at any point. You have taken a dislike to the term dogma, which you have taken to imply some irrational aspects, but that is not at all the implication. A dogma is a set of heuristic rules that have become entrenched within a particular model of thinking about a topic. It is based on some axioms which are rarely challenged.

In the case of the feminist model you tend to espouse, those axioms include that violence in the home is a problem mostly experienced by women and perpetrated by men; that there is a cultural structure that is called patriarchal, which is hierarchical and subordinates people along gender lines; that women are no different to men in any way other than reproductively and that this difference is not a significant one. Of course there are others, but you get the point, I'm sure.

Most of the basis for this "second wave" feminist model is derived from Marxian ideas of class struggle, which is not surprising given that Friedan and Abzug, two of the most influential figures in the formation of the dialectic were both strongly Marxist both by inclination and education. It was supplemented by Fabianism as middle-class women sought a political dialectic they felt comfortable with and by the colour political ideal of communitarianism. The mishmash of these somewhat different ideas has then mixed with elitist New Left intellectualism to produce the "progressive" feminist model we see today.

That model is mostly concerned with personal advantage in individual outcomes, not with 'lifting all boats' through a 'rising tide' of a better cultural paradigm and because there is no coherent philosophical basis, it has become an amorphous idea that can mean anything and hence means nothing very much. It is reactionary, not proactive and it cannot admit real progress, because it is cast as a struggle.

We boys and you girls are all in this together, you know. Try to think beyond the dogma, on both sides.

Craig Minns- re feminism : "Sadly, it has degraded into just another form of political dogma that allows people to apply labels so they don't have to actually think about things."

So you ''...think about things.', but feminists don't?
Do you not think that is belittling women like Killarney and myself for daring to have different views on the treatment of women in our society than you?

As for the 'axiom' "violence in the home is a problem mostly experienced by women and perpetrated by men; ...", this fact is shown in all the police statistics, and we can add that the violence in all other ares of society are overwhelmingly perpetrated by men.

These statements are facts, and not made up by feminists or anyone else.

@Suseonline

"As for the 'axiom' "violence in the home is a problem mostly experienced by women and perpetrated by men..."

Your statement with regard to police statistics is erroneous.

The police role in domestic violence matters is, inter alia, to collect evidence and so that it can be presented to the court...whether there has been domestic violence and perpetrated by whom, is determined by the courts and then when it comes to issuing AVO's the minimum standard of proof is applied ie "on the balance of probabilities". So the statistics you talk about do not show anything as fact...at best they are only indicators.

Suseonline, you say that police statistics show that "violence in the home is a problem mostly experienced by women and perpetrated by men". This is true but not overwhelmingly so. The NSW Auditor General found that 34% of domestic and family violence incidents recorded by Police in 2010 involved male victims and 30% involved female perpetrators. More recent NSW Police stats back up this data.

Source: Audit Office of New South Wales (2011). New South Wales Auditor-General's Report: Responding to Domestic and Family Violence, Performance Audit. Retrieved May 17, 2013, from http://www.audit.nsw.gov.au/ArticleDocuments/143/Responding_to_Domestic_Family_Violence_Full_Report.pdf.aspx.

@MHA. Thanks for posting that link. I found it a very interesting to read:

"In 2010, NSW Police recorded 126,325 domestic and family violence incidents involving 92,215 victims and 81,772 perpetrators. There were twice as many female victims as male and twice as many male perpetrators as female."

That is without doubt wrong as to purporting to show facts. The important thing that is missing here is the word "ALLEGED". The numbers show alleged victims and alleged perpetrators. In terms of actual facts, if you were to look into each of the incidents you would find an untold number of alleged victims are in fact perpetrators of violence and untold number of alleged perpetrators are in fact victims of domestic violence and\or "false allegations"

Apart from defining family violence as what men do to women, what I find interesting is that it is said in the document that " On average, domestic and family violence kills 36 people each year,..". What the gender breakdown of that is, isn't stated. But then it says in relation to 2010 that there were 92,215 victims. So it looks like for every 2-3,000 alleged victims(not including the very high number of victims they say don't report violence) there is one death. Does that suggest to you that there is a lot of battering of female partners going on with baseball bats borrowed from the man in the apartment on the other side of the very thin wall?

In fact if you look closely at the document it doesn't make much sense. On page 8 it gives separate pie charts victims and perpetrators by gender. Then in the following text is says:

"These domestic and family violence incidents included 26,006 assaults, 33,000 other offences including stalking and property damage and 66,000 verbal arguments where Police detected no offence." There you have it folks "66,000 verbal arguments where Police detected no offence. Well that blows Suseonline's argument out of the water ie that a domestic violence incident recorded by the police shows as fact that a domestic violence occurred.

Oh come on you guys get your heads out of the sand!

Do you think the police, courts and statisticians colluded to falsify these statistics just to hide the 'real' truth that there are all these women out there bashing all the poor defenseless men to death in their homes?

As MHA showed us above, 66% of domestic violence victims were women, and 70% of perpetrators were men. Doesn't it look different noted down that way?

How do you disregard murder statistics among domestic violence victims......overwhelmingly female.....but hey, I bet you guys know the real story don't you?
Those murdered women must have asked for it, and their deaths are only to be expected.
Yeah right.

Roscop/MHA

The men involved in the three anecdotal cases I mentioned in a previous comment were all violent, abusive husbands - and they were each on their second or third divorces.

All had been through the DV system in their past divorces, so they knew how to get around it. Their typical tactic was to bring frivolous DV complaints against their wives in order to neutralise any attempt the wives might make to bring DV orders against them. They also belonged to MRM groups, who routinely advise their members to use these tactics, i.e. 'If you don't do it, she will.'

So there is a strong anecdotal case to be argued that some of the statistics are reflecting this increasing tendency for men to take out frivolous DV orders simply as a 'legal protection' device and/or to give them a perceived legal advantage during divorce proceedings.

After all, we are constantly hearing that women are supposed to be abusing the DV system for their own advantage. So, why should we assume men are NOT?

Craig

Ah, yes, of course! The feminist ‘dialectic’ was laid down by a bunch of dead middle-class white men. And then a bunch of living middle-class white women dutifully turned that dialectic into a dogma to feather their own already very comfortable middle class nests.

Yeah. Yeah. Heard it all before. That’s the main ‘dialectic’ pushed by anti-feminist ‘dogma’. It portrays feminism as a mainly white American middle-class phenomenon – not a global struggle by one half of humanity to overcome the entrenched socio-political inferiority inflicted on them by the other half.

‘We boys and you girls are all in this together, you know.’

No, we are not. We occupy the same geographical space, but in a socio-political sense, women and men occupy separate universes.

No matter what class, culture, nationality, religion, minority or majority women belong to, they live their entire lives within a male-centric culture. Men do not live their lives within a female-centric culture. (Although, if you take any of this anti-feminism, MRM rhetoric seriously, you'd be forgiven for thinking that feminists control the whole world!)

Dear Killarney you make me laugh...

"All had been through the DV system in their past divorces, so they knew how to get around it. Their typical tactic was to bring frivolous DV complaints against their wives in order to neutralise any attempt the wives might make to bring DV orders against them. They also belonged to MRM groups, who routinely advise their members to use these tactics, i.e. 'If you don't do it, she will.'

Haha..very funny..the men got in first the next time. So its only men, thanks to advice received from the evil MRM groups,who know how to manipulate and unfairly exploit the legal system. That just tells us the system is wide open to abuse. Thanks for adding support to my argument. Oh and of course women would never unfairly exploit the system...they are all innocent little petals and besides as the domestic violence industry mantra goes you should always believe the self-described victim (only if the person is female I understand).

Please carry on.

sheesh...

so much for mature discussion.

You really do just hate blokes. How weird.

Oh, by the way, Friedan and Abzug were women, Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique and they both started the National Organisation of Women. I believe Abzug is still alive.

Never mind, I'm sure your mental hygiene is far too good to allow silly things like information get into that thick head of yours.

You've finally convinced me you're genuinely mentally deficient. Congratulations.

Suseonline, looks like you want to cherrypick statistics from the document MHA put up.

How about where it says there were 66,000 incidents that fell into the category of verbal arguments where "no offence was detected" by the police. The people in the domestic violence industry people use police domestic violence incident attendance figures to suggest to the public that in each incident attended that there is a female victim and a male perpetrator.

Of course I have no confidence in statistics on this issue. I know how the results driven 1996 Womens Safety Survey commissioned by the OSW was conducted. As reported in the media senior officials within the ABS had serious concerns about how the OSW was allowed to shape the questions. Advocates for women made great mileage out of that survey. What it showed in the main was that survey participants experienced what can only be described as very petty stuff like one instance of a push, a bite like, a kick in the previous 12 months. It was waved in the face of the public at every opportunity as very serious violence leading to women being frightened for their lives.

Sure there are women being killed. After all it is they who are in the main the ones who are nicking off with the kids with the assistance of the courts and controlling the father's access to his own children. Even Rosie Batty agreed to allow the son's father to have access to him at cricket practice. She must have been feeling generous after she and the boy went on a 6 week trip to the UK for when the boy asked her if he could stay a little longer playing with his father she agreed. I don't know that the father had ever been "convicted" of any offence. Did the father give consent for his son's passport to be issued, I don't know. From what I've read I think I do know he was just one hell of an angry man and had been for some time.

Roscoe we do not know what Rosie Batty was like when she was at home, she could have been as the case with my mother, the darling to the outside world, although this always changed when they also had a" lashing of her tongue" and quickly changed their mind and never spoke to her again, Rosie Batty could have been a complete bitch at home, but the darling to the outside world, nobody knows except Rosie Batty, personally I do not like the woman, she comes across to me as fake, Is relishing in her role as the Fairy godmother to all those hurt women with vile husbands, she should also be looking at what have caused those men to be like they are, was I part of the problem, but no, wouldn't raise a voice in any circumstances., I was the gentle loving housewife, and pigs might fly as well.

Roscop

'So its only men, thanks to advice received from the evil MRM groups,who know how to manipulate and unfairly exploit the legal system.'

You didn't read my comment. You probably got a few words into it and then the hostile anti-feminism/anti-women triggers took over and you decided to 'write' my post for me in terms of your own (considerable) gender prejudices.

For what it's worth, my post referred to both genders using the system for their own ends. It made the reasonable argument that the rise in the numbers of male DV victims could partly reflect the push by men's groups to get more men applying for DV orders against their wives. I certainly saw this trend in the cases I observed. I've also heard Family Law solicitors and barristers of both genders say they have observed this trend. In fact, very few Family Law lawyers take the DV system seriously.

Only 6% of divorces end up in the courts - the rest settle through mediation or the parties' own initiative. So those couples who end up in court have reached a point of such extreme dysfunction and hostility that no matter what the Family Court does or rules, the parties feel ripped off by a system that 'favours' the gender opposite to theirs.

The books and articles being written - often through conservative, anti-feminist think-tanks like the CIS - to frame an argument that men are being continually abused by a DV system that overwhelmingly favours women, are taking opportunistic advantage of the tiny number of dysfunctional Family Law cases that will never produce a desirable outcome for either party.

Also, the 'dispossessed male' genre has emanated from the US, which has the most draconian divorce legislation in the Western world. The genre has tried to transplant the US-divorce system onto the Australian Family Law system - and it fools almost no one, except those with a personal axe to grind.

Craig

The 'dead white men' I referred to was Marx and other leftist gurus such as Engels, who coined the statement: 'the world-historic defeat of the female sex'.

Much feminist thinking predates Marx and Engels - Mary Wollstencraft, Elisabeth Cady-Stanton and Susan B Anthony, for starters. Also, plenty of feminist writing predates Friedan and Abzug. There are also various feminist writings dating from the Middle Ages.

As for feminism being a left-wing (Marxist) movement, I have found that leftist men are every bit as hostile to the women's struggle as are right-wing men. A lot of radical leftist men hate feminism for diluting the 'purity' of the class struggle (although they mysteriously fail to apply this logic to the race struggle).

And finally, as for your considerable abuse towards me in your last two comments, this is par for the course when feminists have to deal with anti-feminist men (and women), who have trouble controlling their 'triggers' when reading feminist-oriented comments.

You seem to be suffering a bad case of CAFD (Cognitive Anti-Feminism Dissonance). This is a common psychological syndrome whereby the more condescendingly and aggressively an anti-feminist behaves towards a feminist, the more polite and rational he thinks he is being. Conversely, the more politely and rationally a feminist behaves towards an anti-feminist, the more emasculating and aggressive he thinks she is being.

So ... because, by now, he has convinced himself that she is aggressive, emasculating and irrational, he then believes himself justified in letting rip with lots of personal abuse about her mental faculties and, of course, the piece de resistance, she just hates all men.

Whatever floats your boat, but don't kid yourself that you ever wanted a 'rational discussion' with me.

Perhaps someone can please explain why women seem to have this hatred of family violence by men towards them, they tend to leave the first perpetrator and then cannot wait to jump into bed with the next male who could be exactly the same as the first, and so on, so why bother if men are such loathsome creatures, are they looking for security and hope to find it in their next conquest, if men are such violent creatures for goodness sake stop the hunt when divorced or whatever, I am completely puzzled by it all.

Killarney, you say "Only 6% of divorces end up in the courts.." Ergo, everything is hunky-dory with the way in the court has been operating.

That's the tired old argument that the old defenders of the court put up ad nauseam.

This is what historian John Hirst had to say about it in the Quarter Essay titled "Kangaroo Court" FAMILY LAW IN AUSTRALIA, P12:

"Sometimes defenders of the Court cite the low 5% percent trial figure to show that most people are satisfied with how their cases are settled. This is far from the truth. People settle because they run out of money to pay lawyers (and haven't got the time and energy to conduct their own case) or they face an allegation that is too hard to fight or they are told they have no hope of winning what they might want."

I'd say in regard to Hirst's statement the smarter fathers have as little to do with the court as possible. After reading a few appeal judgments they get an excellent understanding in regard to how the court operates and decide not to go pizzn good money up against the wall. Besides the court doesn't enforce its own orders because of its timid attitude towards mothers who breach them. (That's why I'm curious to know whether Rosie Batty was in compliance with court orders if they existed when she took her son to the UK for 6 wks or whatever it was. Because the murder happened soon after their return.)

The historian was unfortunately correct in saying many acrimonious divorces never make it to the court system Roscop.

My female relative was so frightened of her husband that she ended up agreeing to his financial terms just to be rid of him. She earned more than him over their 20 year marriage (no children thank goodness) and had a larger superannuation balance, but walked (ran) away from the argument because he threatened her physically.
Their assets were split 40/60% in his favour.

I wonder how many other situations like this one happen out there?

This thread has been about speaking out for all victims of violence, yet most posters on this thread continue to blame women for the violence inflicted on them even though they are predominantly the victims.

Trying to blame Rosie Batty for her ex-partner bashing their son to death in public because she must have been a 'bitch' at home, or because she took her son back to her native land for six weeks, is a new low, even for you guys.

I am now asking why the men who have been supposedly bashed, or had other DV issues forced on them at home, didn't ask for it themselves?
Maybe they upset the violent women in their lives?

That being the case, then maybe those men 'asked' for trouble from their violent partners then?
Oh, well then, they deserved it....

Ojnab

I understand what you say. A woman close to me, a family member and close friend, has this 'pattern' of hooking up with violent men. Each time, when she was in the first bloom of love and introduced me and my husband to this latest love of her life, we immediately saw she was heading for disaster, but nothing we could say or do made any difference.

Her own father was a violent, abusive man. His own father was not - he was quite a gentle man. But his mother was a woman who fawned all over men and pandered to their every need. She basically despised women - I don't know enough about her background to understand why she was like this.

After three divorces, in which she went though hell, my friend has been alone now for seven years. At least she has come to realise that she can't be trusted to find a mature relationship with a man who doesn't have lots of baggage about women. So she is doing her best to make a life for herself as an independent person.

To this day, she is constantly abused by her last husband - via nasty text messages on an almost daily basis and lots of slander about her to any and all of her friends and acquaintances. He still tries to recruit various professionals to 'prove' that she is a violent, unstable person and unfit mother and he repeatedly tries to turn her children against her. Again, this man had a mother who pandered to his every need and basically despised women.

This is just one case and does not speak for all women. But I do believe that the wider socio-political climate that assumes women to be the inferiors of men has a lot to do with it.

Make of this what you will.

Roscop

Everything you say about the divorce system applies equally to both men and women. The heightened tensions surrounding divorce make it almost impossible to achieve an outcome that both parties are satisfied with. More often than not, people have to forgo what they perceive to be their 'just cause' in order to move on with their lives.

It's unhelpful, indeed dangerous, to continue viewing the system as biased towards either gender.

Another amazing anecdote...the story of a kept man:

>>>My female relative was so frightened of her husband that she ended up agreeing to his financial terms just to be rid of him. She earned more than him over their 20 year marriage (no children thank goodness) and had a larger superannuation balance, but walked (ran) away from the argument because he threatened her physically.
Their assets were split 40/60% in his favour.

"No children thank goodness" so Suseonline considering the average marriage only lasts about 11 years or thereabout, would you like to tell us what kept such a horrid loveless relationship together for twenty years? She must have been a hell of a lady in bed or were her housekeeping, gardening and motor mechanic skills perfecto? Like with the Batty case I'm intrigued.

Killarney tells us "Everything you say about the divorce system applies equally to both men and women. " Well that's good... all is equal...all is square...therefore no matter how fundamentally flawed family law is and the application of it is, there is definitely no need for reform. Gotcha message.

I never said it was a loveless relationship did I Roscop?

The last 2 years were difficult for both of them due to his mental illness, although the rest of her family, especially the male relatives , had been urging her to leave him beforehand due to his increasingly controlling, bullying behavior.

He only turned really nasty when she left him, and felt he 'lost control' of her.
It was extremely traumatic for the whole family, and I must say that in the end we all urged her to just settle for what she could get, divorce him and get him out of all our lives.

Of course, we could have all been wrong about him....

<Perhaps someone can please explain why women seem to have this hatred of family
<violence by men towards them, they tend to leave the first perpetrator and then cannot
<wait to jump into bed with the next male who could be exactly the same as the first,
Posted by Ojnab, Wednesday, 11 March 2015 11:01:29 PM

As much aa Killarney, despises Erin Pizzey, Erin did write about this, I think it was addressed in her book "Prone to Violence." which is available on the internet.

Maybe on one of those sites that causes Killarney to have an hissy fit.

I understand, WollyB. Women have 'hissy fits'. Men have justifiable outrage.

Men are driven by logic and reason. Women are driven by pure emotion.

Killarney, You know Jodhi Meares?...she's the one who has a collection of driving offences as long as ones arm and seems to get off very lightly whenever one is committed.

But with respect to domestic violence, going by newspaper articles Jodhi Meares when she discovered an email, on her then partner's laptop, from his ex I understand she got more than a little emotional. It seems ok for her to make contact with her ex. But guess what Killarney?...her partner was the one who scored the AVO.

Suseonline said that told us that men and women are treated the same before the law...which is utter rubbish. Not many men have cleavage like Jodhi Meares which can mesmerise the beak to extent that he/she loses track of who the offender is.

Roscop

No, I'm not aware of Jodhie Meares or her history of driving offences. On checking her background on Wikipedia, I remain ignorant, as it didn't tell me much.

All I can gather from your post is that she is one of the vast army of women who have used the DV system for their own ends.

I've incurred the occasional parking fine and speeding offence in my time. Does that mean that I could use this as a legal offence against my lovely husband, should I ever choose to divorce him?

@Killarney, It doesn't matter whether its a vast army or just a few who use the DV system for their own ends. The simple fact of the matter is the system is not concerned about the impact an AVO has on the respondent's relationship with his children and the court accepts "unsubstantiated allegations" It is therefore axiomatic that the system is wide open to abuse. So Killarney don't tell me that women are possessed of too much integrity for them not to use them as weapons against partners.

You should read the 1999 Survey of NSW Magistrates:

"The one-third that did agree with the statement pointed to such things as the lack of assistance to men and the often harsh consequences of the orders made, particularly when they involved children."

We don't know how many involve fathers and their children because the courts don't publish insightful statistics. It is all part of keeping facts about the way the court operates hidden from the public.

To

Killarney, because your research skills are not top grade the following link should help you to find out about Jodhi Meare's driving record:
http://tinyurl.com/nouw6v4

<I understand, WollyB. Women have 'hissy fits'. Men have justifiable outrage.

<Men are driven by logic and reason. Women are driven by pure emotion.
Posted by Killarney, Saturday, 14 March 2015 11:42:17 PM

I could have said "made you choke with anger" or maybe "boil with anger", explode like a volcano or maybe "righteous indignation".

I understand that you have an extreme 'hatred','dislike' of MRM's. and they make your blood boil.

This makes me wonder what is the real reason that these groups upset you so much?

i have just had a revelation about this subject.

Regarding AVO's, the women who take them out against their 'intimate' partners who end up getting bashed by them anyway, should get a commendation from the police for telling the truth about their partner.

Those who take out AVO's who don't end up bashed or dead, would need to pay a penalty for having lied.
Isn't that a great idea?

Wolly, Killarney's animus towards MRM groups is because she fears they might be successful in lobbying for changes to be made to the laws which would result in women losing their privileged treatment in the courts. She's afraid courts might be told to publish meaningful insightful statistics that have more substance to them than those peddled in feminist propaganda.

@Suseonline,

If a person lies or grossly misrepresents the facts in order to take out an AVO against their partner, he/she should incur a penalty - not a commendation, irrespective of whether he/she is subsequently bashed (FULL STOP).

Because the law does not work that way ie follow natural justice principles, some men become so enraged that they take the law into their own hands.

I would suggest Roscop, that if a man/woman has the ability to become so 'enraged' as to take the law into his/her own hands, then the woman/man who took out the AVO had very good reason to do so.

The problem with the current AVO system is that the poor victim has to actually wait until they are physically harmed by the violent offender before anyone will believe them.
Of course, only a few victims and perpetrators of domestic violence are also embroiled in family court issues.
Financial issues and loss of control over partners after marriage breakdowns also cause violence.

I don't know what the answer is.

Suse, I think you may be on the right track in some ways.

The answer is to get totally away from the genderised view to allow resources to be pooled and directed at the study of violence per se in Australia.

There should be an independent national study conducted on the causes of violence and following that report, consideration of the treatments.

It is very poor indeed that an ex-federal senator, who incidentally has her income guaranteed to life by the exasperated taxpayer, has the front to declare on national television (again paid for by the taxpayer) that domestic violence is a gender crime. All, she is doing is riding the same wagon that won her a Senate seat as a career politician.

It should be obvious to all that the contributors to the violence are not anywhere near as simple as that intellectually-narrow, conceited, self-promoting and pretentious woman imagines.

A national study of the general theme of violence please, by a prestigious university, and side-step the blocks and log-jams like that foolish woman.

For once I agree with you Onthebeach.
We DO need a serious study on the causes of all the violence we see in our homes and on the street.

I was reading an article on alcohol-fueled violence which was interesting.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-27/macho-culture-to-blame-for-alcohol-fuelled-violence-dr-anne-fox/6270072

Obviously, all we have been doing to try and stop the violence has not worked so far, so maybe we should not keep looking at just the old 'causes' of violence amongst humans, such as alcohol or drugs.

Maybe there are other underlying factors or causes that fuel the violence in some people... such as encouraging violent sports such as boxing or shooting.
Are we as a society encouraging violence in our young (and not so young) people in some way... ,?

Susie,

Early research into DV, distanced the issue of drug and alcohol abuse from DV, even though there is evidence that this issue is linked.

When the drug addict or alcoholic receive treatment and dry out, the issues of behaviour that is associated with their drug taking or alcohol drinking behaviour, usually disappear, except in cases when they are self medicating for a mental illness.

We do not need another inquiry, because the evidence that is needed is already there, however what is needed is a monumental shift in the attitude and beliefs of society and DV advocates.

It is no good punishing the perpetrators after the fact, it is much better to teach people the skills to deal with situations before they escalate to violence.

However there will always be a group that not a single method will make any difference, the really evil people, the sociopath and psychopaths.

Or people with personality disorders.

I don't agree totally with your views WollyB.
If alcohol and/or drugs were the only precursor to violence, then wouldn't all people who over-indulged in these substances be more aggressive and violent than usual?
But they don't do they?

There must be something else involved that leads to some intoxicated people displaying extreme violence, while others don't.
And then there are those who don't need alcohol or drugs on board at all to become violent.

Is it their upbringing and environment?
Is it something they are born with?
Is it based on their mental health issues?
Is it cultural?
Is it worse in men or women?
Is it age related, maybe hormones?

I don't believe enough has been done to determine these issues, and to show us all once for all, what can be done to stop the rage In our society, or at least lessen it.

However, I wonder whether everyone would agree with the findings of such studies anyway, given the suspicion many people feel about 'academics' , or about the gender of those conducting the studies, or about 'special interests' groups?
Somehow, I don't think so....

WollyB and Roscop

'This makes me wonder what is the real reason that these groups upset you so much?'

Shouldn't you be asking yourselves why feminists and feminism upset YOU so much? The fear, loathing and hatred of feminism that manifests itself on this and many other public forums is way, WAY out of proportion to anything that feminists do, say or write.

I have always believed that the reason for this grossly disproportionate hatred of feminism is that men and male-identified women fear the possibility of women getting too much power. This kind of fear is often directed at any group that challenges the status quo - but feminism gets much more than its fair share.

I also have the theory that there is a great deal of sexual guilt in men, which in turn drives so much extreme anti-feminism. Men are conditioned by the culture to feel that they are sexually predatory and that their sexual lust is always bubbling away under the surface. This makes men fearful that their sexuality could easily get out of control.

When feminists talk of male sexism, rape and the sexualisation of women by the culture, this triggers powerful sexual guilt in men - which drives their anti-feminist hostility.

As for MRM groups, I am highly critical of these groups as they have manifested over the last 20 years. Their entire focus is on spreading bigotry and disinformation regarding feminism and fictitious female bias in the Family Court and AVO systems, as well as phoney research regarding female domestic violence.

The MRM groups that started in the 1980s were very different. Their focus was on consciousness-raising about the negative effects of the patriarchy on men's lives. I knew several men who ran these groups and/or participated in them. They had my utmost respect. However, these groups were superseded by the anti-feminist backlash and gradually morphed into the misogynist, anger-filled supremacist MRM industry we have today.

Suse

All those questions have been answered in many studies over several decades.

The reasons lie within the kind of society we have - one that is based largely on social injustice, and held in place by a system of structurally embedded violence.

The more social injustice there is in a society - between classes, genders, races, countries, minorities and majorities, and also between humans and nature - the more violence there is.

Susieonline, do not need alcohol or drugs to become violent, you then outlined what could be violence within a lot of people both male and female, I do agree with you on those points, mental conditions can make people violent, they do not mean to become violent but owing to an alteration of thoughts in the brain this can happen, depression can trigger violence. in a lot of cases this is the main problem, I really do not think the feminist angle comes into what makes men violent, most men couldn't care less about that, including myself, but mental problems a definate yes.

@Killarney While I can't speak for all MRAs, I can honestly say that the reason why male survivors of female perpetrated abuse (and some female survivors of female-perpetrated abuse for that matter) despise feminism is because it's entire narrative on abuse unashamedly enables and ideologically shields every single batterer, rapist and child abuser who is female.

Furthemore, it simultaneously, unashamedly stigmatises every single male victim - as well as female victims of female perpetrators - as nothing but a pack of urban myths - if not pathological liars who "had it coming to us" and essentially as cheap filthy worthless sluts. That is precisely what the feminist narrative does, regardless of how inconvenient or uncomfortable that truth is for you.

According to feminist dogma, all abuse is the product of "patriarchy" -"male power"- where "women are [exclusively] victims" and "men are [exclusively] perpetrators [and when they are victims, they're "doing it to each other" anyway]".

Of course, when confronted on this by male victims, the standard feminists response is "I'm sorry you were abused, but" or "Yes men are abused too, but", yet what feminists consider "being sorry", most people regard as condescension. Furthermore it very quickly reveals itself to be a shallow act of plausible deniability, when it is immediately followed by a response which attempts to justify the very stigmatisation of those of us who are male victims of abuse.

Under those circumstances, why shouldn't male victims of abuse hold feminism in the same regard as female victims of abuse hold Sharia Law?

If feminists don't like that cold, hard, uncomfortable truth, then here's a suggestion: embrace the whole of equality - including accountability - and challenge each other to be a part of the solution - demanding an inclusive narrative on domestic violence which demands compassion and support for all victims and demands that all perpetrators be held accountable and rehabilitated... irrespective of their gender.

Or is applying the phrase "one it too many" to male victims of female perpetrators, as well as female victims of male perpetrators, a little too close to egalitarianism for feminism's liking?

Furthermore from a transnational perspective, the Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project (P.A.S.K.) has completely debunked the standard feminist narrative on domestic violence [http://domesticviolenceresearch.org/]. The project involved 112 academics at 20 universities, considering 12,000 studies and summarising 1,700+ of them.

It found, regarding perpetration: "Rates of female-perpetrated violence higher than male-perpetrated (28.3% vs. 21.6%)"

It found regarding a gender breakdown: "Among large population samples, 57.9% of IPV reported was bi-directional, 42% unidirectional; 13.8% of the unidirectional violence was male to female (MFPV), 28.3% was female to male (FMPV)"

In other words it found that, 71.7% of all domestic violence involves a female victim and male perpetrator, 86.2% of it involves a male victim and female perpetrator and that 67.2% of all unidirectional domestic violence is perpetrated against men, by women.

It found regarding perpetrator motivation: "Male and female IPV perpetrated from similar motives – primarily to get back at a partner for emotionally hurting them, because of stress or jealousy, to express anger and other feelings that they could not put into words or communicate, and to get their partner’s attention."

Furthermore, regarding self-defence-based perpetration, it found: "Self-defense was endorsed in most samples by only a minority of respondents, male and female. For non-perpetrator samples, the rates of self-defense reported by men ranged from 0% to 21%, and for women the range was 5% to 35%. The highest rates of reported self-defense motives (50% for men, 65.4% for women) came from samples of perpetrators, who may have reasons to overestimate this motive."

Interestingly, it found regarding anger and retaliation:
"None of the studies reported that anger/retaliation was significantly more of a motive for men than women’s violence; instead, two papers indicated that anger was more likely to be a motive for women’s violence as compared to men."

Why do we insist on treating domestic violence as a gender issue when arguably the largest academic review into DV research has completely debunked every single argument for doing so?

Arguably because it goes against the interests of powerful vested interest groups like feminism and the Domestic Violence Industry of "Women's [only] Services".

I tell you what vr041, I will agree to be more concerned about the apparently hidden problem of adult male victims of female perpetrated domestic violence, if you agree to be equally concerned by the much higher murder rate of women by their 'intimate male partners' than the opposite way around?

There is no hiding murder statistics....

@Suzonline Congratulations for demonstrating the very reason why feminism is to male abuse victims, what Sharia Law is to female abuse victims.

Firstly, your argument amounts to an assertion that if as a male survivor of child abuse and domestic violence, I object to being stigmatised as an urban myth - if not a pathological liar - who "had it coming to me" and essentially as a cheap, filthy, worthless slut, then I must have absolutely no sympathy nor empathy with female victims of domestic violence. Such an argument is utterly chauvinistic, victim demonising, domestic violence apologist, and reeks of veiled shaming tactics.

Secondly, your claims about "vastly more battered women are murdered" are blatantly false. The domestic homicide figures for 2008-2010 were 75 men and 116 women and their just released figures for 2011-2012 were 75 men and 121 women - in both cases, battered men accounted for more than 38% of all domestic homicide victims - or roughly 2 in 5 domestic homicide victims. Or are you going to claim that the Australian Institute of Criminology are a pack of liars now too?

Thirdly, in setting the bar for domestic violence being treated seriously at homicide, you are trivialising less serious instances of domestic violence- effectively treating them as "just shoving" - unworthy of attention. That very type of argument is the reason that noone intervenes in domestic violence until it's too late and harms not only bettered men, but battered women as well.

In short, thankyou - whether it was intentional or unintentional, you have just proven my point about the sexist and abuse apologist stance of feminism on the issue of domestic violence (and by the nature of DV, child abuse and rape also) in spades.

vr041 "
In short, thankyou - whether it was intentional or unintentional, you have just proven my point about the sexist and abuse apologist stance of feminism on the issue of domestic violence (and by the nature of DV, child abuse and rape also) in spades."

Aren't you doing the exact same thing in reverse vr041?
And I have not mentioned child abuse or rape at all, so that is your own comment.

As for your statistics, we have been over all that on these pages ad nauseum
The question to ask is, why are you so upset that more women are killed by their intimate partners than the other way around?

The men killed by domestic violence weren't all murdered by their female partner either, were they? But that is not mentioned at all, why is that?

Far more men are killed by other men out on the streets, so why aren't you out there campaigning about that fact?

All murders are awful.
But denying the truth is no help at all.

vr041

You cite a link that doesn’t work. Authoritative websites usually look after their links.

I did some digging to find out who this Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project was and all I found was what I’ve come to call ‘black, blue and red’ sites. These are shoddy, badly constructed websites that create a sense of sensationalism by using lots of big red headings and lists of links to supposedly authoritative studies, many of which do not work.

They do not disclose who they are or how they are funded – except the usual vague references to dubious ‘empirical research’.

If their research is as stringent and objective as they claim to be, why can’t they put a bit more effort into their website design? Or are they just small ‘cottage’ activists with little funds and virtually no credibility other than with those who share their own worldview?

You throw lots of percentages and statistics around but fail to indicate how those percentages and statistics were obtained.

As for the AIC figures you cite, you are making a rebuttal to an argument that does not exist. What you refer to as the ‘feminist stance’ is nothing of the sort. The so-called feminist stance is that women comprise the MAJORITY of victims of domestic homicide – not the anti-feminist furphy that women are the ONLY victims of domestic homicide. So the rest of your argument falls apart.

Also, just look back at your last two posts. You are full vaguely intense rage that you have chosen to channel into a hate-filled post about what you want feminism to be, not what it actually is.

Feminism is not the enemy of male victims of violence. If you want to blame anyone, look to governments who shirk their responsibility to fund programs that support all victims of domestic violence – male and female. And, for that matter, look to the macho patriarchal values and attitudes that prefer to shame men ‘being victims’ rather than support them

@suzonline "Aren't you doing the exact same thing in reverse vr041?

Far from it. I am arguing from a position that one victim is too many, regardless of gender - end of story. In contrast, your position is to advance the plight of battered women by throwing those of us who are, or have been battered men under a bus.

"And I have not mentioned child abuse or rape at all, so that is your own comment."

Domestic violence, by its very nature, also includes rape and child abuse.

"As for your statistics, we have been over all that on these pages ad nauseum"

Which you choose to remain willfully blind to becauise it is heresy to your feminist dogma.

"The question to ask is, why are you so upset that more women are killed by their intimate partners than the other way around? "

No what I'm appalled and offended by is that you would use domestic homicides to try and trivialise domestic violence on the basis of gender.

" The men killed by domestic violence weren't all murdered by their female partner either, were they? But that is not mentioned at all, why is that?"

In other words, the same old tired narrative of "part of it is 'men doing it to each other' so that makes it ok to trivialise it".

" Far more men are killed by other men out on the streets, so why aren't you out there campaigning about that fact?"

Which you prove here by trying to use my experience of being the victim of such violence a few years ago, to justify stigmatising me as a DV and child abuse survivor.

" All murders are awful."

Translation - when domestic violence doesn't involve homicide, it's arbitrarily trivialised.

" But denying the truth is no help at all."

Do yourself a favor and take your own advice.

Because more women than men are killed in domestic violence it does not automatically follow that men are more violent than women in domestic situations. If you want to present an argument based on statistics then the statistics must back up your argument. In this case they only back up the argument that more men murder in domestic situations. In no way can they support an argument that men are more violent in general. Murder is not the only type of behaviour that can be defined as violence.

The latter argument can only be supported by statistics which show that men commit more acts of violence than women do and there are no reliable statistics which show this. Any statistics can only be based on reported acts of violence. Anecdotal evidence is not enough to create statistics. It is true to say that reported acts of violence against women outnumber those against men but that does not prove that men are more violent. Men may choose not to report acts of violence against them for a number of reasons. Until you can be assured that all acts against either gender are reported comprehensively then you cannot substantiate an argument that men are more violent than women in domestic situations.

It may well be true that men perpetrate more acts of violence but we cannot really tell that from the statistics presented. It is not a valid argument.

Phanto, I would call murder the ultimate act of violence really, wouldn't you?

We need to speak out for all victims of family violence of course, but surely we should be concentrating firstly on the largest group of perpetrators of domestic violence?

Men are the largest group of men on men, and men on women violence, so there is no point denying it. Let's just get on with trying to stop it.

Suzeonline:
Of course murder is the ultimate act of violence but the fact that some men murder their domestic partner does not mean that men are more violent than women. Some women also murder their male partners so you could also use the same argument to suggest that women are more violent than men.

If you are trying to argue who is the more murderous then you would have to have to look at the statistics. Nearly all murders are reported one way or another and so the statistics are a valuable basis for an argument. You could say with fair certainty that more men murder their domestic partner than do women but that is not the same thing as saying men are more violent than women. Violence includes a whole range of physical harm and not just murder so if you are trying to determine which gender is the more violent then you have to look at all forms of violence.

The statistics do not prove which gender is the more violent – they only show which gender has reported violence more. If we are trying to get to the bottom of the problem we have to be honest about what can be proven and what cannot be. If you cannot prove the statistical background of an argument then it is unfair to present it as an argument. You may well be right about men being more violent than women but you do not have an argument to support your case. You simply do not know who are the largest group of perpetrators of domestic violence you only know which group has reported the most and that cannot be a measure. How many five-year-olds report domestic violence at the hands of their mothers? Does that mean it does not exist even in ‘epidemic' proportions?

<Men are the largest group of men on men, and men on women violence, so there is no <point denying it. Let's just get on with trying to stop it.
Posted by Suseonline, Tuesday, 17 March 2015 9:38:37 AM

Phanto has raised some good and valid points.

http://www.franks.org/fr01060.htm

At risk of getting abused by our resident feminists, There are cases where women get men to do the dirty work for them.

Recent examples, a man who was accused of child abuse, was killed, another male who was gay was accused of rape and he was killed by so called good samaritans.

I am not sure how many fights are started in night clubs or pubs, by a girl friend saying to her boy friend that some guy had tried to 'chat her up'.

"but surely we should be concentrating firstly on the largest group of perpetrators of domestic violence"

and current stat's that actually ask both genders about DV indicate that women initiate more DV than men (hardly surprising after decades of DV messages focussed solely on DV initiated by men).

Which ever way you look at it there have been decades of one sided messages about DV, if it's concentrate on the largest group of perpetrators then the message is currently targeting the wrong gender, if it's an issue of "firstly" then it's well past time to broaden the scope.

The trouble is that the gender warriors don't want any acknowledgement that it's not a simple gender paradigm with the occasional ever so rare exception (which is just her striking back against his emotional bullying). They have too much riding on their precious myth of patriarchy to be willing to accept that's not the way most western homes work. To many advantages to be gained for women through the family law system by misuse of the concept of battered wives to deal with the issue with any kind of honesty.

So the diversions, the lies, the spin will continue regardless of how much evidence is put before them.

R0bert

Robert, I once saw an article but don't quote me, that said something like;

"The strongest indicator of physical violence, is to be in an emotional abusive relationship."

Phanto you are correct with child abuse starting about the age of five, that is the time when you begin to know what is going on within the family, with myself, brothers and father, wives and grandchildren, we were constantly under physical and mental violence for the next fifty six years by our mother, it was of no use going to the police because she would have said, as mentioned earlier, fancy doing this to your own mother and wife, dramas with marriages, meant she was losing control of her boys, manipulation was rampant, mother was first, wives second, divorces happened.
There are many people who do not realise what goes on in families, one other family I know the mother by her cruelty caused the children to have facial tremors until they left home, Susie women are violent, men prefer not to go to the police, always keep in mind you do not know what goes on behind closed doors, in the end of her life we hated visiting her in a nursing home, but we did because she after all "was our mother" but the damage to her family was well and truly entrenched in their minds.

RObert, I know you and others have had problems with the Family Law system, but what of all the domestic violence amongst those families that aren't in that system?
Where do we find the causes of the violence there?

I doubt we will ever find the 'causes' or perpetrators/victims of most non-physical DV, unless we bug all homes of suspects, so the only measure that will assist in lessening this type of DV (financial, emotional, control etc) is advertising campaigns that constantly asks ALL victims to speak up and ask for help.
They need to know they don't have to put up with someone else trying to control their lives with fear.

As a nurse, I have always been more involved with the physical aggression side of DV, and the resulting wounds, broken bones, broken homes and relationships that this causes.
It is mainly this side of DV that is most obvious to others and to society in general.
That is not to say it is the only element of DV we should concentrate on, but that it is the part that has to be dealt with the fastest, for obvious reasons.

As far as I have seen, all anti-DV campaigns DO discuss the less physical DV issues and suggest that victims get help, and none of the adverts I have seen say
'Women Only.'
So the male victims need to come out and be heard.....it took a long time for women to come out and ask for help.
Maybe they could have their own DV helpline, if they don't want to ring the present available helpline?

Suseonline, so just which anti-DV adds have you seen that have portrayed a male victim and female aggressor?

I've yet to see a single one. That in itself becomes a pretty clear message of "Women only" especially when combined with all of the other messages which portray DV in terms of violence against women.

R0bert

@killarney Firstly the "]" in the link was a formatting glitch; removing it fixes the link. Secondly if you had researched it, you'd have learned that Ingentaconnect are hosting both their peer reviewed journal articles and summarising tables - hardly the work of "small ‘cottage’ activists" as you put it - which debunks the entire feminist DV narrative.

As for the AIC, it's a rebuttal to an argument which you're pretending doesn't exist. If feminism truly cared about all abuse, it would be arguing that when more than a third of all DV victims are male, roughly 2/5 of all DV homicide victims are male and 94% of all battered men are abused by women, we need a focus which demands that society holds both male and female perpetrators equally accountable, and that battered men are given the same support and services as battered women. Yet instead the argument which feminists always use is that a female majority justifies a female only focus on DV, just as you are now.

Furthermore if you think that I'm misjudging feminism then you're in denial. Feminism has done nothing but frame abuse as a product of "the patriarchy" - a product of "male power". It was feminism which gave us the Duluth model and to raise just one example, it was feminism which drove Erin Pizzey out of the world's first battered women's refuge which she established - before causing her to flee the country through acts of both violence and terrorism against her - just one example of many. These are unassailable facts.

You bring up the failings of government, yet it has been the concerted lobbying by feminists to frame policies combating abuse around an exclusive male-perpetrator, female-victim duality which is entirely responsible for the current state of play.

My disdain for feminism and my anger at the way it manipulates traditionalist stereotypes about masculinity, to stigmatise those of us who are male victims of abusers, is entirely justifiable. If your dogma hadn't so utterly blinded you through double ignorance, you would actually recognise that.

@suzonline Again you prove my point. Firstly, your response to Phanto, effectively sets the bar for taking domestic violence seriously at homicide, drawing on the slim-moderate majority of DV homicide victims being female (a roughly 60/40 split is anything but one sided) and then using that premise to argue for a pantomime narrative on domestic violence- framed exclusively around a male-perpetrator/female-victim dichotomy - with the tokenistic mention of male victims "as a tiny minority" as an act of plausible deniability.

Then there's this:

"Men are the largest group of men on men, and men on women violence, so there is no point denying it."

Firstly we're talking specifically about domestic violence here, which the ABS has revealed is perpetrated by women in 94% of the at least 1/3 of all cases where the victim is male, debunking this claim.

Secondly, feminism has never been genuinely concerned for male victims of any kind. If it did, it would demand that male victims of including male perpetrators are treated more sympathetically and compassionately as female victims; instead it dogmatically focuses on the male perpetrator like a dog with a bone, while exploiting said victims as a means to an end to justify stigmatising male victims of female abusers. You say that we need to speak out, yet look at what happens to those of us who do, like the appalling way the male survivor who recently identified himself on Q&A was treated. Your response is divorced from reality.

Then you draw on the experiences as a nurse, while ignoring the fact that last I checked, your industry has mandatory DV screening for battered women, but not for battered men - how do you know that you haven't encountered numerous battered men who simply covered up the nature of their injuries? You don't.

Secondly what about all the men who never go to the hospital for fear of being ridiculed? After all, battered men disclose their abuse 3 times less often that battered women and are half as likely to seek help for it. But of course, that's "different", isn't it?

<Then you draw on the experiences as a nurse, while ignoring the fact that last I
<checked, your industry has mandatory DV screening for battered women, but not for
<battered men
Posted by vr041, Tuesday, 17 March 2015 11:24:39 PM

The types of questioned asked are;

"When was the last time he hit you?"

"When was the last time you hit her?"

Oh come on you guys, you are getting hysterical now.
If all these battered men are keeping it all to themselves out there in the community, then how on earth do you know of the scale of the problem?
Do you have ESP?

I would suggest that the scale of the DV against women is also understated because women don't report it all either, due to being frightened of repercussions from their partner. At the end of the day, men can physically block violence against them a lot easier than most women, so don't tell me there are lots of scared men out there because no one will ever believe that.

Trying to deflect the huge problem of DV out in the community by saying there is more of a female perpetrated problem is just sexist hysteria from men who don't like losing control of women.
Get over yourselves.

@suzonline In calling me personally "hystrical" because I am speaking out as a battered men against injustices and stigmatisation I face, due almost entirely to feminists like you these days, you have simply deomnstrated my point that when you scrape away the denials, you clearly view me personally and every other battered man out there as both the scum beneath your feet and living heresies to your fanatical feminist dogma.

Firstly, nationally, ABS and AIC for example, have explicitly stated the extent of the problem; internationally, it has been large-scale undertakings like the P.A.S.K. ESP has never been a pre-requirement for literacy or research.

Secondly, certainly women under-report, however it is matter of public record that battered men under-report and under-disclose far more. This is hardly surprising when we have to fear not only reprisals, like battered women, but stigmatisation due to bigoted, gendered ideologies like yours.

"At the end of the day, men can physically block violence against them a lot easier than most women, so don't tell me there are lots of scared men out there because no one will ever believe that."

Translation: "battered men should just 'man up and take it' and they're not 'real men' if they can't"; that's precisely what you've argued here. Your response here is no different to blaming women for being raped, for "dressing like a slut". Never mind the fact that your delusional view of masculinity ignores the fact that the moment a weapon is used or the victim is drugged, physical strength differences become irrelevant.

"Trying to deflect the huge problem of DV out in the community by saying there is more of a female perpetrated problem is just sexist hysteria from men who don't like losing control of women."

Firstly, I seem to recall arguing for a gender neutral approach which was inclusive of all perpetrators and victims; feminism's gendered narrative on abuse is what stigmatises victims and enabled perpetrators. Secondly, you talking about control is the height of hypocrisy, given your desperate and fanatical desire to control the victim narrative along gendered lines.

Wolly B, the strongest indicators from what I've seen are the usual culprits. Substance abuse, mental illness, "disadvantage" etc.

Suseonline
"then how on earth do you know of the scale of the problem" - bt looking that the research that's not bound to feminist dogma or the natural consequences of the one sided portrayal of DV. Research that asks the same questions of both genders rather than starting with feminist narratives about power and finding the results that fit.

I and others have posted links and excerpts from it here over many years. There is a lot of it available and the conclusions are very clear if you are not blinded by gendered blinkers. You might ask yourself why you still don't know the answer to your question.

R0bert

Suzeonline : At the end of the day, men can physically block violence against them a lot easier than most women, so don't tell me there are lots of scared men out there because no one will ever believe that.

So it is only violence if you connect with your target? If you swing a baseball bat at someone it is ok until you actually hit them. So you shouldn’t be scared if someone fires a gun at you. Only be scared if they actually hit you. So a woman should not feel fear because there is a possibility of being hurt – she should only feel fear after she gets hurt. This is a bizarre understanding of one of human nature’s fundamental instincts.

By your logic women could block violence if they took self-defence courses so ultimately it is their own fault if they get hurt.

When all else fails just tell men to ‘get over it’.

RObert, (to Suseonline), "You might ask yourself why you still don't know the answer to your question"

Admittedly though it would be difficult for the public to sort the facts from the political rhetoric, where the taxpayer is forking out large grants to bodies headed by CEOs who declare emphatically that DV is gendered violence affecting women and children with men are the offenders, full stop!

-Just remembering Stott-Despoya's repetitive rants (doesn't she have anything else?) on Q&A. Stott-Despoya has been on continuous loop for years and that is just more of the same. I haven't bothered to look for the annual report and financial statement for that body Stott-Despoya heads but I'd guess it is swinging from the taxpayer's teat for up to $10m pa. That allows a heck of a lot of networking, lobbying and marketing.

Add to that the cross marketing of other victim industry lobbyists who also suck mightily from the guvvy teats.

Goodness knows what the total annual spend pa on feminist promotion is out of that bucket of tax dollars, but it has been leaking like a colander since Whitlam.

Of course one still wonders what it might take for women like Suseonline to wake up to reality. -That she has been taken for a ride for years by clever, manipulative, educated middle class women who always were advantaged and have enjoyed a jolly good ride on the gravy train.

Suse

'Trying to deflect the huge problem of DV out in the community by saying there is more of a female perpetrated problem is just sexist hysteria from men who don't like losing control of women.'

I know you are only exaggerating the point out of exasperation - but that's not entirely what most of the men here are saying. Only one or two irrational extremists here are trying to make us believe the poppycock that women are the greater perpetrators of DV.

However, they virtually ALL destroy their own argument by blaming this lack of acknowledgment of male DV victims on feminism, instead of where the blame really lies - the lack of political will to fund and support the DV system and macho patriarchal bigotry that views male victims of female violence - indeed most violence - as 'failed men'.

This thread has long since descended into farce. Most OLO gender threads really just become another excuse to bait, bully and blame feminists for men's problems. That's always the lazy option.

So that's it for me. See you on another thread.

Natasha Stott Despoya is too busy mixing with the "right" people like the Downer's etc to mixing with battered women, she has the gift of the gab, that's about all.

@killarney Stop insulting my intelligence and the intelligence of every single battered man here who is reading this thread. You claim that feminism isn't the enemy of battered men, yet if it looks, walks, quacks and swims like a duck, then it's a duck.

Firstly according to your response, it is perfectly acceptable for feminists to stigmatise me personally, along with every single other battered man out there as virtually non-existent, lying, effeminate scum who "had it coming to us", if they're "exasperated". If Sheik Hilaly was "exasperated" when he compared female rape victims to "unconvered meat", would that make it ok, or is that "different"?

Secondly, you made deliberately misleading statements about the P.A.S.K. starting with it's link: http://www.domesticviolenceresearch.org/

You then made baseless accusations about the academics who worked on the project, while making baseless and unfounded accusations against a peer reviewed academic journal that was thew product of collaboration between 20 universities and over 100 academics, as well as misleading claims about its methodology in reviewing and collating over 1,700 studies. Of course, you have gone out of your way in previous posts here to attempt to minimise the prevalence of female abusers and male victims of DV.

Furthermore, rather than acknowledge the pain and revictimisation which your hateful and sexist ideology has inflicted upon DV victims/survivors and child abusers when confronted with one, you instead resort to the shaming tactics like "you need help" ind indirectly, "misogynist" (feminists always baselessly equate criticism of feminism to hatred of women) - which actually amounts to calling me a "woman hating homosexual" and telling me "be a real man and you wont be abused".

Finally when confronted both the gendered, stigmatisation-based narrative on abuse of both the Duluth Model and Patriarchal theory, as well as the violence and terrorism against men and women used by feminism to maintain that narrative, you simply dismiss it by pretending it hasn't been made.

But then I guess members of organisations like the KKK also try to downplay the hatred of their movements by calling them things like "white pride movements" too.

Ah well now, we can all cherry pick our websites can't we?

At least mine is Australian statistics.
"Domestic and sexual violence is overwhelmingly committed by men against women.
89 women were killed by their current or former partner between 2008-10. This equates to nearly one woman every week."

http://www.anrows.org.au/sites/default/files/Violence-Against-Australian-Women-Key-Statistics.pdf

You are right though Killarney, best to leave them to it now.

Suse,

Is it not a shame that Australian law does not allow women who are/were the victims of domestic violence (or any other violence) to possess any legal items for the purpose of self defence?

If they were then some of those 89 deaths may have been avoided.

Why do so many people commenting seem so full of bile and anger?

All the article is doing is asking for a rethink.
If he's wrong, then calm reason should set him right. Any article asking for a rethink often arouses anger. Even Peter West's this week on the aged, though it seems a bit bitty and scattered at times.

If we reflect on people speaking about feminism, why do so many of them seem to be so white-hot in anger? What is it about gender issues that makes them so wild? This was something that used to be reserved for religion!

The ultimate test for Killarney, Suzeonline and all other women is whether they are prepared to renounce any domestic relationships with men that they have. Are they also prepared to declare that they will never enter into any relationship until it can be proven beyond all doubt that all men have stopped behaving violently?

This is the only logical way for them to act. Any woman who enters into such a relationship knowing full well that there is a one in three chance of being beaten up by their partner is either a complete fool or totally lacking in self respect. Why would you take such an enormous risk to your well being? They know for certain that the statistics are trustworthy and that women can be killed in domestic relationships and yet they enter or remain in such relationships.

You cannot say that women who are victims of domestic violence did not expect it would happen to them. They have known ever since the statistics have been available that there is a one in three chance that they will come to harm. Even the Australian of the Year is telling them and yet they remain in relationships with men. Why isn’t she telling them to get the hell out of those relationships while there is still a chance?

In what other circumstances would you take on such odds against your own health and well being unless you had no choice? Women have a choice. If they find themselves in a situation where they do not have a choice for financial reasons then they should appeal to women like Killarney, Suzeonline, Rosie Batty and all those other concerned advocates against domestic violence for help. It is not the government’s problem if you freely choose to enter into a situation with such ridiculous expectations of a positive outcome when all the statistics and research are telling you not to. .... cont.

Why are men always put down, mainly by women? Evidently a TV ad depicts a married man too tired to have sex with his oversexed wife so she wants to jump into bed with someone she does not know to satisfy her lust.
Ladies get this straight, just where are these oversexed women, it is more likely the woman who is too tired to perform fellatio on their husbands,or whatever sex position he may want, if she wants to have sex swinging from the chandelier for goodness sake tell him, she may be surprised at his lust then.
When are we going to see women in bed half asleep while there oversexed husbands resort to masturbation or go out to find an oversexed woman and leave her in bed asleep, of course we won't, ladies must not be depicted as zombies but men can
Men are definately on the hit list with women whether it be violence, killing, zombies in bed, zombies at work, but ladies take a long and hard look at yourselves.
How often do you see women out digging holes in the ground, chopping trees down, etc never, men can do everything a woman can in the house, perhaps we do not need them

Women who genuinely care about the safety and welfare of other women should be doing everything in their power to encourage them to leave and should help them in practical ways to leave where they need it. Or is it that they safety of women is not their primary concern?

It is time for these women to either put up or shut up. The problem is not about domestic violence it is about procuring the safety of women. Women have all they need to protect themselves from the violence of men that they tell us is so epidemic. They have choice and can have independence from domestic relationships. It is time they began exercising that independence. Nothing is more important than their own personal safety and when they choose to enter situations where it is severely threatened then they show a total lack of self-respect. This is why any arguments they put forward about domestic violence are so hollow. There is no need to argue there is simply a need to act. To get out of all domestic relationships and to spend their energy helping their gender to see that such relationships are very dangerous.

Suzeonline says she has seen firsthand the damage that can be inflicted by domestic violence. Why is she not spending her time doing everything she can to help women see the danger of entering into any domestic relationship with men? Why isn’t she helping them get out before it is too late? Why does she waste her time arguing when action is the only logical course?

Killarney thinks it is a lot to do with the ‘system’. A patriarchal system can only be dismantled by women taking affirmative action not by futile argument. If women refused to enter into domestic relationships they could not become victims of a patriarchal attitude to domestic violence. There would be no domestic violence without domestic relationships. Women can take control but they do not have enough self-respect to do so. The problem is not what men do to women but what women do to themselves by having domestic relationships.

@suzonline Firstly, that ANROWS source has already been debunked, on the following grounds:

"“The statistics presented by ANROWS have been designed to over-inflate female victimisation by using lifetime experience of violence instead of current rates, while downplaying male victimisation by taking only the female perspective,”

http://www.oneinthree.com.au/news/2014/9/15/one-third-of-domestic-violence-victims-denied-services.html

But of course, that's perfectly acceptable to sexist, abuse apologist perspectives like yours. After all, your argument - the standard feminist argument - amounts to:

"Here's something I found to suggest a majority of DV victims are women. Therefore I can justify claiming that the overwhelming majority of DV is perpetrated by men against women. Therefore I can justify treating DV as a 'women's issue' and a 'men's problem and perpetrating the myth that only women are victims and only men are perpetrators. Oh but here's an acknowledgement of male victims - but understand that it's entirely tokenistic, there solely as an act of plausible deniability and if push comes to shove, I'll be forced to reveal that I think men should just 'man up' and take it from a woman [after all he probably deserved it anyway] and if he can't, then he's not a 'real man' anyway - not that I think men are human beings to begin with."

Not that the above should surprise anyone who is informed. Whenever you scrape away the veneer of the what feminism pretends to be in a PR exercise, you very quickly find that while when it comes to female victims "one is too many", when it comes to male victims, suddenly it's "a numbers game" - where "winning the game" happens when you can make those number appear to resemble "0". But then that's hardly surprising when feminism at its heart has always viewed men as a pack of brainless, knuckle-dragging neanderthals who are to blame for any and all violence - even when they are the victim and the abuser is female.

@Bronte Why shouldn't those of us who are battered men be filled with pain and anger over how feminism has treated us. For over 40 years, feminism has created a narrative whereby we are quite literally stigmatised as virtually non-existent, lying, effeminate scum - after all, according to feminism, all violence and abuse is the product of "male power" and all female-perpetrated abuse is justifiable as a reaction to it - ergo men are to blame for all abuse, even when they are the victim and the abuser is female.

Furthermore whenever anyone has gotten too close to challenging that narrative, they have even been met with not only violence, but terrorism, by the feminist movement: http://www.foxnews.com/story/2006/05/30/feminists-deny-truth-on-domestic-violence/

Erin Pizzey, the founder of one of thew world's first battered women's shelter and the author of "Scream quietly or the neighbours will hear" has herself gone on record as stating that this has been to exploit DV as a cashcow and as a means of perpetuating their radical, hateful dogma: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix5-jqQYU1M

Now as a survivor of DV and child abuse, living in a world where I am stigmatised as a virtually non-existent, lying, piece of effeminate scum, who "had it coming to me" - where turning for help is more likely to result in mockery, minimisation, being treated like a perpetrator or dismissal, based purely on my gender and the gender of my abusers, why shouldn't I feel the same level of scorn and condemnation for the primary source of that bigotry - feminism - that for example, African Americans feel towards the KKK?

ur041 ."@suzonline Firstly, that ANROWS source has already been debunked,"

Really?
Who are we to believe....official Government statistics taken from police and court reports.....or dodgywebsite.com brought to us by who knows who in America?

I can certainly see how one in three domestic violence victims can be males, as I have seen reports on men killing their fathers, sons, nephews only recently, and it is all very sad, as all domestic violence is in all forms.

What I rarely see reported is women killing their intimate male partners, thank goodness.

Mind you, if we see any changes in our gun laws in Australia, and it is made easier for all people to get their hands on guns, like it is in the shooting-mad country of the US, then we could very well see increases in all kinds of domestic violence fatality statistics.
I hope we never see this happen.

Suzeonline why is it so important to you to win the argument about which gender is the more violent? You keep saying that it is futile to try and convince the men on this forum and you have said that you are no longer going to participate in the argument but you keep coming back like you are addicted to trying to prove that men are worse than women in this regard.

Sure, men argue with you as they try and prove that you are wrong but why do you let yourself become embroiled in such arguments? Why is it so important to you to prove this point?

Ultimately it does not matter which gender is the more violent – the only thing that matters is that people remain safe but you seem to have no interest at all doing what is necessary to help anyone be safe. Why are you not doing everything in your power to discourage women from entering into such dangerous circumstances? Where is the practical assistance to help women out of such relationships where they cannot help themselves?

It seems by your behaviour that you do not care about women but only about painting men as villains. What drives you to want to do this so much? What is it that such behaviour is really trying to achieve? Why do you have to do it? If you spent half as much time helping women avoid relationships as you do trying to win such a pointless argument then you would have done something really special for women.

You don't know me at all Phanto, so no point spreading lies about my motives.
As a woman, I am always likely to change my mind, especially when I see lies on this forum.

As I have said before, I have cared for many female DV victims in both hospitals and homes over the years as a nurse. I have seen and heard some truly horrific things that none of you could even imagine.....unless you were involved in DV in some way yourselves.

I will always speak out for people of either sex who have been bashed, burned, slashed, beaten, kicked or shot by other people, especially those bashed in their own homes by people who are supposed to love them. It makes my blood boil.

The vast majority of those I have seen bashed like this have been women, and that is not a statistic, it is personal knowledge after 30 years of nursing.....

@suzonline Firstly, weren't you 'done' here? I guess that's just one more misleading statement by you.

Secondly, considering that your message to me personally and every other battered man out there was the equivalent of "don't dress like a slut and you wont get raped", you have no credibility here - unless you exist under the misconception that making DV apologist (and therefore rape apologist and child abuse apologist), slut-shaming, perpetrator shielding, and utterly chauvinistic statements passes for credibility.

After all, to hell with the fact that the ABS found that a third of all DV victims are male and that 94% of our abusers are female- after all, those facts are nothing but grand heresies to your feminist dogma, aren't they?

Like all feminists, you clearly believe it's our fault we're abused - because either in your mind, we're liars, or "your 'male power' made her do it". Your entire response has done nothing but prove that feminists are no better in their regard and treatment of those of us who are abused men, than radical Islamic clerics with abused women.

Thirdly, that ANROWS source you cited has has been debunked by the One In Three Campaign, through drawing on the actual data by official government bodies like the ABS - caught out in your exact same crime, raising the plight of battered women, by demonising, stigmatising and diswmissing those of us who are battered men out there, as your own comments here have caught you out in.

Fourthly, the "dodgy website you refer to" is actually the work of over 100 academics, at least 49 of them with PhDs and experts in their fields, and is nothing more that a web portal to every single article from their peer reviewed journal, hosted on Intagenta Connect (http://www.ingentaconnect.com/) which describes itself as "ingentaconnect from Publishing Technology is the world's largest resource for scholarly publications ". Calling anything any part of the P.A.S.K. as "dodgy" is nothing more than character-suicide on your part.

Stop pretending you have any credibility left here the toothpaste is out of the tube concerning your bigotry.

ur041, all those comments you think I made about you and other male DV victims, I couldn't actually find them in my posts. Were you dreaming?

I don't think you were ever a victim of DV.
I think you are just an angry man trying to blame women for all your problems, like so many others.
You don't want to think of all victims of family violence at all, just the male victims.

It's time for you to move on with your life.

@suzonline " I will always speak out for people of either sex who have been bashed, burned, slashed, beaten, kicked or shot by other people, especially those bashed in their own homes by people who are supposed to love them. It makes my blood boil."

Yet you previously said:

" At the end of the day, men can physically block violence against them a lot easier than most women, so don't tell me there are lots of scared men out there because no one will ever believe that."

In other words: "battered men should just 'man up and take it' and they're not 'real men' if they can't" - the equivalent of 'caring' for a rape victim by saying to them "if you weren't dressed like such a slut, then you wouldn't have been raped".

The truth, which the sum of your posts have betrayed, is that you only care about the abused when they are female and abused by a male. When it's a male victim of a female abuser, you clearly hold us in nothing but condescension, callousness and contempt - viewing us as nothing but liars and scum beneath your feet and entirely to blame for being abused because we "didn't just 'man up' and take it". You clearly oppose a gender-neutral, inclusive, social narrative on abuse.

Furthermore your attitudes towards abused men and boys are best summed up by the following: "To abuse against men, feminism says 'who cares?' After all it's almost all just 'men doing it to each other' and in the 5-10 cases of a woman abusing a man worldwide, it must have been self-defence or he must have provoked it: you go girl!"

You've even just gone on record implying I'm lying about being a survivor of DV and child abuse, when people such as my mother would say otherwise, and of using the "misogynist" shaming tactic - effectively implying I'm a "woman hating homosexual" while shaming me with "if you'd manned up, you wouldn't have been abused".

Congratulations on demonstrating that feminism is the new "male chauvinism".

In a NSW AG's report it say that "In 2010, NSW Police recorded 126,325 domestic and family violence incidents involving
92,215 victims and 81,772 perpetrators. " Once again the word "alleged" is missing. One can only assume that the figures are based on the domestic incidents the police attended.

http://tinyurl.com/mpgc7x4

The government document says:

"According to Police statistics, Aboriginal women are six times more likely to suffer domestic and family violence than non-Aboriginal women."

Have a look at the graph taken from the report:

http://tinypic.com/r/fuzxv/8

In terms of incidents per 100,000 population you'll see a huge disparity between Walgett in NSW and other place included in the graph. Have you ever seen a domestic violence ad with Aborigines in it? Of course not because this whole issue has been greatly politicized.

Suzeonline: Well I do know enough about you to express certain opinions about your motives. I am not telling lies I am just expressing opinions – if they are wrong then there is no need to be defensive.

As a woman you are always likely to change your mind – you don’t need an excuse such as that to change your mind. Everyone has a right to change their mind but my question was why do you change your mind. What is it that keeps driving you to try and win a pointless argument?

It is very patronising to assume that you have seen horrors that no one except those involved in domestic violence could imagine. Have you ever been to war?

There is no need to speak out for people who have been bashed etc. It is too late then. Why are you not speaking about the dangers of entering into domestic relationships in the first place or remaining in them now so that you do not have to wait until it is too late? How many women have to suffer and be killed before those who claim they care begin to agitate for the dismantling of domestic relationships? One in three are in danger – that is several million Australian women and women like you will not lift a finger to help them to safety until it is too late.

I don’t need to know you I just need to observe the hypocrisy between the care you claim you have for women and your complete lack of action in protecting them until the damage is done.

“The vast majority of those I have seen bashed like this have been women, and that is not a statistic, it is personal knowledge after 30 years of nursing.....” And still you go on trying to prove a point which does not matter. You do not care about the safety of women you only really care about your own selfish agenda.

@Roscop It should be noted there that the breakdown was 60,887 female victims (66%), 31,328 male victims (34%), 57.542 male perpetrators (70%) and 24,230 female perpetrators (30%). No figure in there is under 25%, meaning that where minorities do exist, they are significant minorities, therefore they cannot justifiable be dismissed or ignored.

The other thing to note is the under-reporting rates found by the ABS 2012 Personal Safety Survey [http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/4906.02012 ] which found in Table 25, in terms of then current victims, that 80.2% of battered women and 94.7% of battered men who were currently the victims of domestic violence had never reported it to police. In terms of previous abuse, Table 26 notes that 57.6% of battered women and 80% of battered men had never reported it to police.

Those rates of under-reporting suggest that, if anything, those figures need to be adjusted by a factor 2.36 to 5.05 for battered women. In the case of battered men, those figures need to be adjusted by a factor of 5-18.87. I would also remind everyong here that Table 6 reveals that 94% of male victims of intimate partner abuse are abused by a female partner

The ABS data makes it abundantly clear that certainly what the police are seeing firsthand in terms of the ordeals of battered women, is the tip of the iceberg. However the data also reveals that it even more the case with battered men.

What this goes to prove is that if we really want to end domestic violence, then the first step has to be removing barriers to disclosure. That can only truly happen when sexism has no place in the issue of domestic violence - whether that sexism is peddled by masculinists or feminists.

That includes vile, stigmatising sexism like "At the end of the day, men can physically block violence against them a lot easier than most women, so don't tell me there are lots of scared men out there because no one will ever believe that."

Those of us who are, or have been battered men and battered women, deserve far better.

Vr041: “What this goes to prove is that if we really want to end domestic violence, then the first step has to be removing barriers to disclosure.”

What happens in the mean time? Thousands of people are going to get hurt when they do not need to be. Why would you place your safety in the hands of politicians, legislators, police and public sympathy when you can take control of it yourself?

You can end domestic violence by not having domestic relationships. This is totally within the control of every individual adult in the country. Changing attitudes and policies toward the outcomes of domestic violence could take decades.

There are enough dangers in life without deliberately putting yourself in harm’s way. Either the proliferation of domestic violence is not as bad as indicated or people in domestic situations do not really care about their own well being. It is time we stopped looking for governments and the legal system to protect us from situations that are under our own control.

You have quoted the figures and these are only the tip of the ice berg so domestic relationships seem a very dangerous proposition. It seems to me that you are trying to draw attention to these figures for no apparent reason other than to refute the arguments of feminists. Let them have their delusions but they cannot have then without exposing themselves as hypocrites. Men who are battered have the same power of control that women do. Often they may not feel like they have that control but they do and if they do not feel like they have control then that is a personal problem which only they can work on.

Phanto, I fail to see how I can be out there 'protecting' the women (and men) when all the police, courts and Governments fail to do so miserably now?
And if I was out there marching in the streets, you and others here would label me a feminist activist who hates men anyway, so nothing would change, right?

At least I am involved in caring for them after they are hurt.
What do you do for them?

Ur041, why aren't you out there ranting and raving about all the men hurt and killed by other men in their homes and out on the streets?
There are far more men hurt this way than by DV, so you should be out there advocating for all the 'one-punch' victims etc.
You won't do this though, because that wouldn't suit your mysoginistic views....

@phanto "What happens in the mean time?"

In the meantime people should be mindful of the situations their friends are in- both male and female and do what they can as soon as warning signs present themselves.

"Men who are battered have the same power of control that women do."

That can only happen when battered men are told that what they're goibg through is wrong and that they deserve better, instead of "just man up".

@suzonline Let's review your feminist contempt for male victims of abuse.

"your mysoginistic views"

Translation: "you're a man hating homosexual and if you were more of a man you wouldn't have been abused".

This is clearly the case as evidenced by the following:

" At the end of the day, men can physically block violence against them a lot easier than most women, so don't tell me there are lots of scared men out there because no one will ever believe that."

In other words, battered men are clearly effeminate scum in your mind.
"I don't think you were ever a victim of DV."

Translation: "You're a liar who hates women."

You bring up "men hurt and killed by other men", yet even then our perpetrators become the focus rather than us- due almost entirely to feminism exploiting our ordeals to advance it's agenda.

"There are far more men hurt this way than by DV"

Which is your justification for treating us like nonexistent, lying, effeminate scum who "had it coming to us".

"You won't do this though"

And yet as someone who has been both, what I am doing is helping victims of male violence far more than the feminist exploitation of us is. The fact is that feminism's 'concern' for us does nothing but shift the focus entirely onto the perpetrator meaning we're still treated with chauvinism and indifference. Conversely, what I am doing helps all male victims by breaking down the stigmatisation of male victims at its most culturally inconvenient.

Stop hiding behind your gender and face up to your own sexist contempt for male abuse victims.

We are not going to stop family violence, Stott Despoya and Batty think they can, they can rave and rant all they want to but it will be to no avail, human nature being what it is we all, men, women and children tend to become arguementire very quickly, this being our nature, this is obvious with the people writing on this subject here, arguments can lead to violence then to killing, no matter where, perhaps marriage or living together is not the answer to continued hate of one another, but the way society is structured all sorts of issues come forth with money and children etc, so killing will continue.
Writing here on our manipulative and violent mother we do feel she had a mental problem, we do not know the cause of her being like she was all her life, was it hereditary, was there other undisclosed problems as a child, we will never know, but it did leave a scar with us mentally

@Ojnab, you are right. There will always be domestic violence, more so whilst fundamentally flawed family law, domestic violence laws and court processes remain in the place.

Suseonline et al like to rabbit on about how 2 or whatever women are killed each week by their partners. But they would be amongst the last to mention the common thread in many if not the majority of these killings is a father separated from his child/ren. They like to construe these cases as the man having lost control over his ex-partner not the ex-partner having gained near full control over the child/ren as in the Batty case. Eg the kid had to get agreement from his mother to stay a bit longer playing with his father.

There was another case in Canberra just recently where a mother of 3 got murdered by a person who I understand through the grapevine was the father of her youngest a 2 week old baby. The mother had taken out an "easy as pie" to get "ex parte" interim AVO (or whatever they call them in the ACT) a few days before against the man who murdered her. It must have been served on him because it is reported in the press that he has been charged with breaching an AVO as well as the murder, but apparently nowhere in the press has it been reported that he is the father of the newborn, only as him having been in a relationship with the murdered woman. Well if all this is true what do you think made the man so angry?

Roscop, if a man kills his ex-partner because she has custody of their children and took out an AVO against him, then surely the courts were right all along to grant these to her?
You are disgusting if you suggest that it is her fault he killed her.

Surely he should have gone after those police or court officials who gave her custody of the kids and the AVO?
But no, those sort of controlling, violent men are cowards who deserve everything they got.
The children are the real victims of these domestic violence murders, because they have now lost both their parents.

Suseonline, No I don't agree with your proposition that because the murder occurred after the issue of the AVO it necessarily proves what the situation was before the AVO was issued.

I dare say the woman would be still be alive today if she hadn't gotten an "easy as pie" "ex parte" AVO taken out on the father of her newborn child. It would seem hardly unlikely that the mother would have had the time to be given custody of their neonate.

Do you know what the term "ex parte" means? If the father was such a serious threat to the mother, the father should have been ordered to court so he could respond to mother's allegations. In the interim the mother and their children could have taken themselves off to a battered woman's refuge. But as person who I understand works with "alleged" victims, you would know the court is only interested on separating the parties in the conflict in the absence of one of them, and in most cases that means putting distance between the absent one and his child/ren, not in determining facts.

Its disgusting that AVO's can be taken out so easily purely on the basis of unsubstantiated allegation/s. Men don't have a monopoly on lying and exaggerating and behaving with malice when it comes to legal actions. I take it from what you say that its inconsequential if a father is separated from his child/ren on that basis.

No Roscop, I think it is a tragedy and disgusting that a frightened woman can take an AVO out on a man and STILL get murdered!

I have seen the cops come round to a house where the ex-partner has turned up with a machete, only to talk him into leaving quietly. He should have been jailed for breaching the order. No kids involved in that one, he was just upset that she dared to leave him, like most of them are....and you know it.

AVOs are not worth the paper they are written on.

I believe there are new laws being put forward at present re AVO's, so the penalties are more severe if they are breached.
You should be happy about this because all those battered men out there will be able to take out AVOs against their rough women and be a little more safe....

Suseonline, "I believe there are new laws being put forward at present re AVO's, so the penalties are more severe if they are breached."

Well that isn't going to help women who are seriously at risk of being murdered. I don't think a person intent on murdering his ex-partner is going to be thinking too much about the stiffer penalties for breaching AVO conditions if he is not too bothered about the consequences for murder. Then again some women seem to have strange and illogical way of thinking about these things as you've shown.

As to your story "I have seen the cops come round to a house where the ex-partner has turned up with a machete, only to talk him into leaving quietly. He should have been jailed for breaching the order."...seems like a crock of the proverbial to me.

I would have thought threatening with a machete was in itself a criminal offence irrespective of whether an AVO was being breached...what were the cops affirmative action recruits?

Not crock at all unfortunately.
I could tell you many more stories, but no point as I know you won't believe me anyway.
I don't know what the answer is to protect these women.
Have a nice day.

@Roscop and yet if it was a female ex-partner, turning up to a battered man's house with a machete, Suz would be blaming and mocking the victim. After all, her response to all female perpetrated domestic violence against men is:

"At the end of the day, men can physically block violence against them a lot easier than most women, so don't tell me there are lots of scared men out there because no one will ever believe that."

But vr041, Suse is right when she says "...men can physically block violence against them a lot easier than most women...".

Like when a man has a frozen chook thrown at his head all he has to do is just palm it off if he is quick enough. Women can't block nutting much at all at least not having things put inside them at least 300 times over a year or so...just read about the case of the heavy sleeper:

http://tinyurl.com/prcp7k2

@Roscop "Like when a man has a frozen chook thrown at his head all he has to do is just palm it off if he is quick enough."

Oh you mean that magical, mystical barrier which only men have and where a man need only extend his hands and his skin becomes invulnerable to being stabbed or shot, where blunt objects bounce off him as though he were made of rubber and where a magical force-field deflects any and all boiling and flammable liquids poured on him? Is that what you're referring to?

Congratulations to Roger Smith and to the Three in One campaign run by Greg Andresen which have exposed the deliberate distortion of the family violence facts. In the two year period between 2010 - 2012 there were 121 women killed and 75 men killed in the area of family violence. Lets all rise up and speak up against family violence for both men and women and not buy into the ideological man hating narcissism that is peddled as the truth.