"Other OLO commenters who have accused me many times of man-hating, simply because I'm a feminist, take note. I am defending men here, because in this instance, they deserve defending"

Hey Killarney,
Yes, I saw... you eaned yourself a brownie point.
Keep it up and I might be forced to ease off my feminist criticisms... but only a little.
- But you can't blame others for being judgemental; feminists are typically very judgemental too, typically known for man-hating and acting irrational and you make the choice to identify as one.

But yes, credit where its due, nice job.

Yours and Phanto's discussion does put a focus not only the importance of accurate data, but the need to convey the statistics in a way that does not misrepresent the truth.
I myself would not assume that one in three women purportedly being victims of DV in their lifetimes equates to one in three men being perpetrators, but I accept the point phanto made.

I think that playing 'the blame game' won't help us prevent DV..
When playing 'the blame game' we tend to employ a 'cure' mentality rather than a 'preventative' one and if the real aim is prevention then we must look at how the relationship unravelled.
There's always 3 sides to the story; His, Hers AND THE TRUTH.
I think that if we're going to entertain the blame game, we need to play it fairly.
Both sides need to have an opportunity to blame the other if we're going to get down to the truth.
Both parties need to understand and accept the others point of view, and know when they have themselves acted unfairly and contributed to the breakdown.
And we need to know whats really going wrong in order to develop the right strategies to prevent it happening.
[Cont..]

[Cont..]

It's only through this process that both parties will understand and acknowledge theirs and their partners mistakes, to understand how and why things broke down and start to behave in a way where they're 'mindful' and make changes to their relationships so that the chances of DV occurring are truly reduced.

Only by hearing the perpetrator defend themselves and lay their own blame, can we sort out which excuses were reasonable and which ones weren't; in regard to understanding how the relationship breakdown; and therefore getting a 'bigger picture' of how the DV came to occur.
(And don't take that the wrong way; I already said earlier I'm not actually defending violent behavior)

The police officer in the earlier article changed her own behaivior in order to prevent it ever happening again.
I don't know the truth of how her earlier DV relationship unravelled but she (the victim) took active steps to now prevent it from happening again none the less.
And this tells you that there are things women can do to prevent putting themselves in bad situations.

I came across another article this morning that puts a different light on this problem.
Anyone hear about the woman from Deniliquin who apparently drowned one of her kids while another looked on?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-04/mother-to-face-court-charged-with-sons-attempted-murder-moama/8324598?

We need accurate data on the perpetrators in regards to also understanding how they were raised.
I know this is a touchy subject, but I want to know how many perpetrators of DV were raised by single mums; or violent fathers.

I could probably come up with some strategies that might work towards a reduction of DV, if anyone is interested.

Here are some back-of-the envelope figures.

1. ABS (2014):

Total DV homicide victims (rounded) = 1,140
Total road fatalities (rounded) = 1,150

Average annual government spending on road safety (including infrastructure improvement) from 1970 to 2010 = $4.5 billion

Average annual government spending on road safety awareness (excluding infrastructure improvement) from 1970 to 2010 = $600 million

Average annual (and allocated) government DV spending, from 2014 to 2018 = $23 million

2. Re statistics on the number/percentage of violent marriages (ABS 2014)

Percentage of population married = 49%
Percentage of population cohabiting =10%

Therefore: 59% of the total population of 22 million = 12 million that are married or cohabiting. So, there are approximately 6 million married/de facto relationships in Australia.

ABS (2014)
Total DV homicide victims = 1,140
Total reported DV assault victims = 54,000

Therefore:
DV homicide as a percentage of all marriage/de-facto relationships = 0.019%
Reported DV assault as a percentage of all marriage/de-facto relationships = 0.9%

This means that, based on police records, approximately 1-2% of all marriages/de facto relationships are violent. This, of course, does not take into account the number of unreported assaults or the fact that the same perpetrator/victim may account for several reported cases. But it would be safe to assume that the number of violent marriages/de facto relationships is still in the low single-digit percentile.

3. Translated into actual numbers, approximately 60,000 to 200,000 Australians are violently assaulted by their intimate partners in any given year. Though the percentage is small, that is still a significant number of violent assaults. While this does not constitute an ‘epidemic’, it DOES constitute a major social, criminal and legal problem.

4. Re feminist ‘exaggeration’ of DV violence:

The problem with the ‘feminist exaggeration’ argument is that it deliberately conflates FOCUS with EXAGGERATION. Feminists FOCUS on DV because women are PROVEN to form the substantial majority of victims in all countries studied. This feminist focus is also based on lingering historical-cultural attitudes and legal precedent (i.e. laws that ‘allowed’ a man to physically ‘discipline’ his wife).

Thank you, Killarney. Those stats put everything into perspective.

As I understand it, the purpose of DV is not so much to kill a partner as to keep 'the little woman' in line. A violent partner wants things their way, only their way, and will terrorise their victim to keep getting it. It makes them feel like a big man. They get off by domination, so why would they go to the extreme of killing off their major source of satisfaction ?

Thanks again.

Regards,

Joe

Whoops! Very red-faced. Got one of my statistics catastrophically wrong!

The Australian DV homicide number for 2014 was 150, not 1,140. Not sure what I did. I was looking at several websites and may have inadvertently grabbed a US or UK statistic. Don't know.

Should have realised the figure I gave was way too high. Sorry.

Hi Killarney,

I made the same mistake :) I didn't really look carefully at the homicide figures and ask, 'Hang on, that doesn't seem right.' But 150 is still three every week, one every couple of days or so. That is truly appalling.

Of course, there are many cases of non-physical assault, harassment, hectoring, badgering, brow-beating. The point surely is that usually the female partner is in a far more vulnerable position, less likely to be the bread-winner (and controller of the Household Purse), and more likely to be saddled with all of the tasks looking after the kids.

Cheers,

Joe