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?