Usual Suspect, thanks for the last post. It summed up much of what I wanted to write.
The only point of divergance I can think of is that I'd leave Yvonne off the list. I've swapped enough posts with her over a long enough period to have a lot of respect for her.

We don't always agree and I don't always like her phrasing but I think that is genuine disagreement over the evidence not a refusal to try and see the other side or contempt for others.

The other point I'd add is that while we continue to send men mixed messages about violence it will continue to be difficult to stop violence. While we tell men that if they are the victim they have to sort it out for themselves then men will sort it out for themselves. While many women favor "bad boys" over nice guys we will have an abundance of bad boys.

I will note that publicity I've seen about some of the work being done to combat binge drinking does seem to target that last point to some extent.

R0bert

Thanks Robert.

I'm pretty sure I've said on a number of occasions that women can be violent too. Why that should be so revelatory I don't know. We are human beings, just like men, after all.

My understanding of the issue is that there is a call for a wider definition of violence Such as emotional/psychological abuse.

Psychological abuse is not only open to men though. I doubt that a particular gender is more talented in that area than the other.

The DV campaign is focused on physical assault. The kind that end up in physical injuries, the kind that result in the lodging of DVO's.

It really is almost irrelevant who suffers more, the issue is that nothing really ends up being done to resolve existing violence and prevent further violence.

DVO's most certainly are also lodged for leverage sake. Like a counter punch to compensate for a feeling of powerlessness. More often by women, but also by men. This dilutes the seriousness and therefore the protection a DVO should provide for a person. Both parties. The victim and the perpetrator.

There MUST be consequences when a DVO is lodged.

Perhaps we should start addressing DV by legislating that it is not OK to hit children when they are ‘provocative’ of parental authority. Violence is NEVER OK.

Sorry, Runner, I disagree with you. With corporal punishment we teach children that somebody who is bigger, stronger and wishes to exert authority will need to use physical violence, it is acceptable and justifiable.

It is contrary to teaching respect, it is about exerting power.

Just scanning the comments here, few people have actually concentrated on the article itself and its many flaws. There is so much wrong with this essay, it’s impossible to list all the ways within the OLO word-length and posting restrictions. Here are just a few … with further posts to follow.

‘Not only can men accused of domestic violence be expelled from their own houses but domestic violence, in New South Wales, is to be made into a specific crime - presumably, one that carries greater odium and stigma than mere assault.’

Why ‘men’? Exactly the same goes for women who are accused of domestic violence. I know, because I am personally familiar with two cases in which this has happened. The law is clear on procedures for treating DV complaints – regardless of gender.

‘Domestic violence policy and service provision in Australia is overwhelmingly dominated by the “Duluth method” which claims that domestic violence is something that men do to women because of the patriarchal society in which we live and the political, social and cultural control that men exercise over women.’

No, domestic violence policy and service provision in Australia are based on demand. The overwhelming number of serious DV cases in Australia are something that men do to women.

‘… if men were “privileged”, we would expect them to have preferred access to higher education. Yet there are more women enrolled in Australian universities than there are men. In respect of school retention rates, the gap is in double figures - about 69 per cent for boys compared to over 80 per cent for girls at the national level.’

Statistics such as these are often used to portray women as now being the privileged sex and men being the gender underdogs. This is a distorted statistic because the vast majority of trades (many of which are paid more than graduate professions) are dominated by men – and do not require a university degree. Many apprenticeships do not require completion of Grade 12, which greatly explains the lower school retention rates among boys.

‘The changes being introduced to the child support system, in particular, are based on a recognition that Australian society has changed drastically in a period of just two decades since the original scheme was introduced.’

The ‘two decades’ referred to here are typical of the deliberate misinformation spread particularly by men's and father's rights groups that the Family Law reforms of the 1970s were driven by feminism. This is not the case. These reforms merely introduced no-fault divorce and a 1-year separation as grounds for divorce. The child custody laws existent until recently in Australia – which gave priority to mothers – were first designed and implemented in most Western countries during the 1920s and were totally based on the traditional patriarchal assumption of mother as primary carer.

Unless children are in moral or physical danger from their fathers, the new 50-50 child care arrangement is actually quite positive for women (although many women still feel emotionally attached to the traditional view of motherhood). On the contrary one of the main complaints that has always been made by feminism is that social pressure forces women to adopt the greater burden of child care and that men too often shirk their parental responsibilities because they have been traditionally conditioned to concentrate on their careers.

‘While cases reported to police and emergency services do mostly involve female victims at the hands of male perpetrators, the more rigorous population-based studies into the incidence and nature of domestic violence in English-speaking countries tend to present a far more gender-neutral picture of family violence.’

These studies are almost entirely based on the Conflicts Tactics Scale, which is in turn based on extremely unreliable, distorted and biased methodology. Though largely discredited, CTS studies have been considerably amplified by the mens rights movement and by some research institutions who bafflingly continue to conduct studies based on CTS methods. I would very much like to see some research done on why this discredited and misleading research method has been allowed to continue and why it is still viewed as a definitive DV information source.

http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/CTS4.pdf

The Conflict Tactics Scales and Its Critics: An Evaluation and New Data on Validity and Reliability

"The first study reporting data on intrafamily physical violence obtained by means of the Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS) was published in 1973 (Straus, 1973). By January 1989 this instrument 1iad been employed in more than two hundred papers and five books. It is also being used for assessment in clinical work. As might be expected, the largest number of publications are by scholars associated with the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, where the instrument was developed. However, almost 100 empirical studies by other investigators have been located. There is also a substantial literature criticizing the CTS, including at least nine books and articles that devote major sections to the CTS. Feminists have been particilarly critical of the instrument for allegedly understating victimization of women and overslating violence by women. Despite these long-standing criticisms, the CTS continues to be the most widely used instrument for research on intrafamily violence, including use by some feminist critics such as Okun (1986), who employ the CTS for want of a better alternative. Thus, for better or for worse, much of the "knowledge" generated by the large volume of research on "partner violence" is based on (or critics would say, "biased by") use of the CTS.

In view of both the wide use and the criticism of the CTS, it is important to have a comprehensive assessment of this instrument. Researchers need to know how to make the most effective use of the CTS, which is not always obvious, and they need to know the limitations of the data generated by the CTS.'"

R0bert

SJF is critical of the CTS scale, perhaps with reason, yet SJF remains silent on the use of advocacy research which is much more misleading.

I find this sentence interesting, "Feminists have been particilarly critical of the instrument for allegedly understating victimization of women and overslating violence by women."

This may possibly be true, but what also may be true is that feminists are confronted with aspects of female behaviour that they do not like to be confronted with. It is much more comfortable to focus on the negative male behaviour, than it is to look at negative aspects of female behaviour.

The much quoted WSS used a tool which looked very similar to the CTS tool.