“If the new legislation passes through parliament it will be enough for a woman to simply claim she fears violence may occur in order to be issued with a restraining order.”

This is just another example of the demise of basic principles of justice that have been at the core of our society for centuries. It opens up the way for victims to abuse the law for things like personal revenge. The law should seek justice and not become a plaything of the bitter and resentful.

If you cannot prove harm then you have to accept that reality and find some other way of dealing with your situation. These women are not powerless. They can take control over their situation without resorting to the law but control over their situation is not really what they want. What they so often want is to hurt the person who has turned their fairytale into a nightmare. The real problem is their emotional attachment to their fairytale.

The constant cry of being ‘powerless victim’ has worked a treat in manipulating lawmakers into watering down values such as ‘innocent until proven guilty’. Why stop at domestic violence? Why not just ask every victim of any crime what they would like to see happen to the perpetrator of the harm they have endured. Dispense with evidence, trials, judges and juries and let all victims have what they want.

Some women will be victims of domestic violence but other people are also victims of crimes which they cannot prove. This is not about gender but about principles that apply to everyone. Most of us accept that the system is imperfect but it is the best we can do. What these laws advocate is something a lot more draconian than the best we can do.

Disagree with this risible rubbish and think we could go further with regard to domestic violence and spouses who treat their partners as private property or punching bags, sent to a high security prison for an earned sentence, of in many cases of attempted homicide.

Justifiable on the grounds, a single punch can kill

! A near relative was beaten repeatedly by the animal that professed to love her, was always contrite lovey dovey afterward, and it was always her fault for not being a dutiful wife and opening her legs on demand, minus the usual foreplay, or failing to wait on him hand and foot like his personal slave.

Why she stayed is beyond explanation, save she thought the kids needed a dad? We found her hiding in the chook pen beaten black and blue, with her teeth knocked out or broken off in the gum and requiring surgery.

This animal was all sweetness and light begging on bended knees for forgiveness, giving endless assurances it would never ever happen again! She tolerated more of the same for around half a decade as she earned their living, and paid the mortgage, with a sewing machine.

Eventually she did leave him when he started bouncing a kid off a wall. He died quite early in his forties of cardiac arrest/natural causes. Allegedly, kept seeing a man with a rifle behind every bush? I did have a rifle and did have in my sights on one occasion and let him know!

It's amazing how riveting the damage wrought by a single hydraulic bullet can be?

I mean you can chop down trees or break off a widow-maker limb from one! A surefire and explosive cure for severe constipation!

No loss!

The perps will always say, actually and proactively protecting our women from these assholes is always going to be a step too far, until a few turn up in the morgue dead from Wiltshire stay sharp, knife wounds etc? then they'll be the ones shrilling for protection?
Alan B.

Accepting it is all Men's fault is a given. However most of the men in these disputes have Mothers and Sisters. Those Mothers and Sisters will not look favourably on a system that is so demonstrably unfair Look out pollies when there is another vote coming.

We do have impossible to fool, space age lie detection technology, which could be deployed covertly to catch out even the most convincing compulsive liar/psychopath. Be they wife beating villains or women seeking revenge or payback for betraying trust or whatever?

Why they aren't already deployed to catch out these animals, or intending terrorists or revenge seekers is beyond understanding, save a few high profile politicians could be caught out promulgating porkies? If widely deployed in busy public places?

I mean, who'd have thought an embarrassing or controvertible incident going somewhere to happen, like former Labor leader, Mark Latham, would find a natural home among the liberal democrats?

He and others, may be able to beat a polygraph? But not covert thermal imaging coupled to equally covert C.F.R.T! And able to be recorded on interview room or elsewhere CCTV, for evidence purposes, if criminal perjury is intended or suspected!
Alan B.

Why would a woman fear abuse if there was no grounds for it.

And women are going to wonder why men won't have a bar of them, except for a one night stand.

If I were a young bloke today, it would be first the snip, then never more than one night stands for me. Otherwise there is a 50% chance you will be giving some conniving bitch your seed, money & future.

Too bad odds for me thanks.

Why is it that the left, & womens libbers are so self destructive?

doog, a few possible reasons for you to consider.
- Mental instability (some people live in a world of fear that's divorced from reality).
- As a cover for her their abusive actions. Pretending you were pre-emptively acting in self defence is a great justification for some.
- Leverage in family law. If you can get the man out of the house and keep him away from the kids during a family breakup it puts him firmly on the back foot when it comes to residency arrangements with a follow on that with child residency goes the division of assets along with future income streams from Centerlink and CSA.

I'm with Alan B's second post (first one is disgusting in my view). We need to apply every tool at our disposal to finding the truth in these matters and I get the impression that lie detection is much more advanced state than our pollies and lawyers want to admit to.

Once we get to the truth we need to use that info to stop any further risk. If that is by way of jail term, financial penalty, impact on access to home, family etc the penalty should apply to whoever is telling the lies (accuser, accused or accomplices).

R0bert

It is pretty telling the way men treat women in countries where
women haven't been able to stand up for any rights.

It was very similar too, 70-100years ago in Australia.
I think history is a daming testiment,to the way
men seek to control women.

There was a reason women abandoned motherhood for
the workplace. It freed them from the control of men, who
never gave them a fair go. Treating them like unpaid slave labour.

There are really loving marriages that last a lifetime,
usually because the man in the marriage is different to the usual male mindset.
But those marriages are the exception rather than the norm.

Hi Alan B, i absolutely agree with your opinion.

It is concerning to find that after the decades of emancipation of women and hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers dollars spent, that some here are unaware of the well proved, significant downsides of positive stereotyping affecting women (and minority groups too). One supposes that it remains prevalent because of the widespread political correctness in the media.

At the same time there is also the endorsement of hostile stereotypes, in this case towards men.

Then there is the manipulation of social policy and individual decisions to suit. Where positive stereotyping in particular is deeply embedded in the psyche of the population, even obvious abuses of human rights can escape detection as too subtle to notice (or even care!).

What the author, Augusto Zimmermann, LLB, LLM, PhD, who is a Lecturer in Law at Murdoch University, Western Australia,.is endeavouring to do is to wave a red flag at the encroachments on the very fundamental principles that underpin our Australian law. We would be very foolish indeed to go along with cynical, cowardly and ignorant politicians who are not earning their money and really must do better. It isn't about 'isms' and the gender war, now is it? It is about legal principles and human rights.

CHERFUL tries to equate the history of western countries with cultures built on very different value systems.

I wasn't around 70-100 years ago but I do have strong impressions from my childhood of the sense of control women of my grandparents generation often displayed around the family.

I recall being taught as a child to stand when a "lady" entered the room, that as a male I'd need to give up my seat if there were not enough seats for all of that ladies present and a variety of other ways of showing respect to ladies, lady being a term used to describe any adult woman from our circles in the same way that gentleman seemed to apply to all of the adult men. Show me any other power based control system where the oppressors were the ones who were taught to show respect to the oppressed.

The women of my grandparents generation often did it tough but from what I saw of it the men often did it a lot tougher, sacrificing pretty much everything for the sake of wives and children.

The term "Women and Children first" pre-dates the 70-100 year span mentioned but does highlight how strongly CHERFUL's view of our cultures treatment of women stands in contrast to at least part of our history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_children_first

CHERFUL cites a self serving and very distorted view of our culture that does not reflect the dominant social norms.

There were practical differences, in many cases hangovers from the biological necessities of an earlier era. There were dysfunctional individuals and social norms that expected differences from the genders (and often from what I've seen most vigorously enforced by the older women of the day). None of that equates to men of our culture systematically seeking to "control" women in the way that CHERFUL claims.

R0bert

Bravo for every word of both of AlanB's posts. All this dancing round the mulberry bush, and defending wife-bashers, is not a defence of men. No normal man would ever give assaulting his wife or anyone else even a passing thought.

Domestic violence will continue until our community turns against all who DO domestic violence (defined as physical assault on a domestic victim) and forcibly removes them, for ever, from where they can get at their victims. Simplest way is to lock them up. They're only scumbags anyway.

Well, females wont be needed much longer. Fairly soon reliable, artificial wombs will replace the need for tantruming hysterics.

Robert

It's easy to give someone your chair and open the door for them, as
opposed to actually paying someone for the hours they put in raising 6 to 10children.

The respect wasn't actually for the woman herself anyway. In a time of no effective
contraception it was always possible a woman could be pregnant. Men were
in fact actually putting their prospective unborn children first rather than their wives and partners. In fact they were protecting any genetic biological offspring in their wives wombs.

The older women were the wisest in society and their authority and wisdom and caring,
was much respected by their large families, but they were still not allowed do to earn a paying wage or have holidays or weekends free like men were.

Women had the young children and babies hanging off their skirts and in their arms
while their husbands considered weekends to be their time off and went off to the pub or playing golf with their mates.

No! Opening a door or giving you a chair because you were old or pregnant, did not
make up for the unpaid slave labour of women. It was the least of what they could have done to help women at the time. But in reality offered no real help in the shape of a fair and equal status, wage wise and labour wise.