Part 2 of 2 - more of the summary

The first two results run counter to conventional wisdom and to the hypotheses with which we began the paper. However, some degree of confirmation or at least plausibility derives from the fact that men’s and women’s reports on rates of domestic violence more or less agree. If the women are to be believed (as they have been by previous investigators), then so are the men. Further, the results relating to women being as violent as men are in line with some recent American research.

Of course it takes more than one survey to overturn received wisdom. It is fair to ask researchers how much confidence they have in their own findings. We are reasonably confident about the first and third results; that female and male partners assault each other about equally often and that violence runs in couples. Nor do we have reason to doubt that the offspring of violent parents are unlikely to be violent themselves, albeit at greater risk of being violent than are the children of non-violent parents. We have much less confidence in the second result, finding it hard to credit that women injure men as seriously as men injure women. We hope that our measures of the severity of injury and pain were a reasonable first attempt. Nevertheless, in future work it will be important to compare subjective assessments of severity to more reliable and objective measures.

R0bert

Part 1 -

The Australian Bureau of Statistics Personal Safety Survey, 2005, revealed overwhelmingly that men were the greatest victims of social violence in Australia (estimated 1,007,500 men and 740,000 women over a 12 month period - they didn't count the kids). In fact men are over 36% more likely to be the victims of any kind of violence in their daily lives.

So much for your "myths" Mr Moodie.

The ABS survey presents the true picture of what's going on in Australia today, it begs the question, it seriously does, why is Mr Moodie grandstanding on a platform which only represents women as the victims of violence?

Why does he not call for an end to all violence, mythical or otherwise?

Why does he not call for an end to all violence, ACTUAL?

Why does he not propose policies to investigate and solve problems of violence that besets all Victorians? Especially that of men as victims, they being overwhelmingly underrepresented by Vic government policies it would seem, either myth or factual.

These are reasonable questions.

Continued...

Part 2 -

Mr Moodie writes an article that says that "Male myths are hard to kill". Well perhaps they are Mr Moodie. Especially when you try to substitute truth with myths of your own. Cooking numbers is nothing new in the domain of "persuasive" politics, but that aside, I am heartened by the contributions of upstanding and regular contributors to this page in their reasoned, and in some case, personally painful anecdotes appearing above, who share their stories to enlighten us.

I am not heartened by the contributors whose identities have appeared in support of Mr Moodie - identities I've never seen before, and as such, I wonder why they're posting on this topic, not being regular contributors.

I'll leave that matter to each to evaluate that assertion. The ABS data are extremely enlightening. Mr Moodie's claims, not supported by data here, are open to conjecture at best, and probable dismissal at worst. If this is the best that Mr Moodie can muster, then good luck Victoria.

Here is a man who purports to be Victoria's Health Minister, yet he appears to care only about the health of one half of his constituents. More men die from prostate cancer than women of breast cancer, but what is his prostate cancer policy? More men than women are the physical and emotional victims of violence, but what are his health policies for this?

He doesn't have any.

It's a good thing I don't live in Victoria Mr Moodie, because I certainly wouldn't be voting for you or anyone else in your party who appears to value one half of the population over and above the other half.

A personal opinion of mine, you understand.

I'm writing to address the claim that the ABS survey gives us much idea of domestic violence against women versus against men.

(Part 1)

From the PSS data, a total of 73,800 females and 21,200 males experienced at least one incident of physical assault by a current or previous other-sex partner in the last 12 months (ABS 2005: 30).

(…) Because of the narrow way in which the PSS measures violence, these figures do not tell us whether this violence was part of a systematic pattern of physical abuse or an isolated incident, whether it was initiated or in self-defence, whether it was instrumental or reactive, whether it was accompanied by (other) strategies of power and control, or whether it involved fear. (In addition, we only know the relationship to the perpetrator for the most recent incident.) In this regard, the PSS is similar to many other quantitative studies using measurement instruments focused on violent acts. Instruments such as the Conflict Tactics Scale focus on ‘counting the blows’, although most CTS-based studies provide more information than the PSS on the severity of the physical acts involved.

Violence prevention advocates typically use the term ‘domestic violence’ to refer to a systematic pattern of power and control exerted by one person (usually a man) against another (often a woman), involving a variety of physical and non-physical tactics of abuse and coercion, in the context of a current or former intimate relationship. It is simply not the case that every one of the 73,800 women noted above is necessarily living with this. All experienced at least one violent act by a partner in the last year: for some this was part of a regular pattern of violent physical abuse, but for others it was a rare or even reciprocated event. The PSS itself gives us some sense of this. Among women who had experienced violence by a current or previous partner since the age of 15, for a little over half (54.2 per cent) there had been more than one incident (ABS 2006a: 37)

(Part 2)
Related to this issue, noting how many women or men were subject to at least one physical assault by a partner does not necessarily tell us much about the impact of domestic violence on the victim. Women may see the emotional impact of physical aggression as more significant than the physical impact, and the emotional impact is influenced as much by judgements of threat and intent to harm and their own self-blame as by the degree of force used or injury caused (Gordon 2000: 759). In addition, women may experience the impact of non-physical tactics of control and abuse – controlling their movements, destroying property, verbal abuse, mind games, and so on – as more damaging than physical aggression. (…)

To the extent that we use the term ‘domestic violence’ to refer to the experience of chronic abuse and subjection by a partner or ex-partner to strategies of power and control, we cannot claim that every woman or man here is a ‘victim of domestic violence’. (…)

For these same reasons, there are also real limits on the extent to which we can use PSS data to adjudicate the debate regarding women’s and men’s experiences of domestic violence. In acts-based approaches such as that used in the PSS, ‘acts’ “are stripped of theoretical and social meanings and, as such, provide an inadequate basis for describing or explaining the violent acts of men and women.” In particular, these approaches are unable to distinguish between distinct patterns of violence in heterosexual couples. Some heterosexual relationships suffer from occasional outbursts of violence by either husbands or wives during conflicts, what Johnson (2000) calls “situational couple violence”. Here, the violence is relatively minor, both partners practise it, it is expressive in meaning, it tends not to escalate over time, and injuries are rare. In situations of “intimate terrorism” on the other hand, one partner (usually the man) uses violence and other controlling tactics to assert or restore power and authority. The violence is more severe, it is asymmetrical, it is instrumental in meaning, it tends to escalate, and injuries are more likely.

Murray Straus conducted "Dominanca and Symmetry in Partner Violence by Male and Female University Students"
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/ID41E2.pdf

Women are as violent as their male companions - and sometimes more so, according to a controversial study presented yesterday at a domestic violence conference in Manhattan.
The survey of 13,600 college students came to the surprising conclusion that in the majority of abusive relationships, women are the perpetrators at least as often as they are the victims of violence.

About one-third of students in 32 countries said they assaulted their partner in a survey conducted by the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire.

Donald Dutton 'Domestic Violence isn't one sided'
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=2e012098-a2f8-44a6-ad48-90756f74f64a

TV3 New Zealand "Domestic Violence research shatters sterotypes"
http://www.tv3.co.nz/default.aspx?tabid=112&articleID=3672

Nuance journal no longer available online.

Australian researcher Ann Lewis & Dr Sotirios Sarantakos, Nuance, 3, December 2001, pp 1-15.

'Domestic Violence and the Male Victim'