Cotter, there is one problem with your insistence that "victims of crime" services are available to both men and women. In order to receive any compensation or services, you firstly must be a "legal", victim. That is the woman who abused you and your children must be investigated by the relevant authorities, tried in a court of law and found guilty of assaulting you and/or your children.

Sadly, this almost never happens, because almost all, of the bureaucrats concerned are corrupt, femanazis, in the protect, female criminals and paedophiles, at all costs, business. Not only do they protect the real criminals, abusing Australia's children but a man who contacts a social worker to report abuse more than 3 times may find himself on a stalking charge. I kid you not, i have seen this happen. Corrupt bureaucrats & politicians will go to any lengths to protect themselves and their fellow travellers in the paedophile ring.

It would be nice to get gender out of this but conservative governments have tried to "Mainstream" social services before in order to make them available to everybody, regardless of gender, race, etc, but the same corrupt bureaucrats i mentioned earlier wanted to "fight for their turf" and create more "Jobs for the Girls".

Daviy, i here what your saying about alcohol &/or drugs, having also seen it first hand. But it is another, chicken & egg argument. Almost all of the male addicts i met were self medicating their pain as a response to female abuse. I have even, met females, who started drinking half way through a marriage, using it as one of the control mechanisms on her hapless husband/victim.

Suzeonline, why traumatise your daughter with fake stats on DV, rape, etc, when children and adolescents, living most of their lives in "flight or fight mode" end up psychotic, with nasty mental illnesses like "Borderline Personality Disorder", which is infinitely more common in women than men & has been increasing more alarmingly than depression. All 3 of my partners were crazy & violent as a direct result of being abused by their mothers.

pynchme,

'THERE ARE SERVICES AVAILABLE FOR ANY AUSTRALIAN MALE OR FEMALE; VICTIM OR PERPETRATOR.'

Yes there are and that's an excellent point and important message! You're being quite nice lately.

But in this generous mood you're in, do you at least accept a few caveats....

A lot of domestic violence type services were set up by women for women, often by women who had experienced first hand violence at the hands of a man. Now if a man turned up to such a facility telling stories of a violent relationship where he wasn't the primary aggressor but had to admit his own involvement in these violent domestic disputes, do you think all woman from the organisation would be able to accept his version of events and attempt to help him in a non-judgemental way and look to properly accept his partners abuse?

I think from your attitude to domestic violence, from the general stereotypes and community assumptions about domestic violence, it would be harder for a man to believe he is going to be believed than it is for a woman.

WHICH IS WHY YOUR POINT IS A REALLY GOOD ONE to encourage men to seek help even if they perceive (perhaps correctly) that they might encounter some resistance. Keep trying, as I'm sure soon enough they'll get that open-minded social worker.

Most importantly, given your very important point, can you see the damage the Australia Says No campaign does to the expectations of men in violent abusive relationships of being believed and helped by these services? Regardless of the reality, and regardless how open-minded you say you are, what kind of reception do you think the average man will be expecting when domestic violence is advertised by the government in this absolutist male=abuser female=victim dichotomy.

And what effect do you think this fiercely guarded representation of gender stereotypes in domestic violence by WRD type organisations has on men in need of help and their confidence of finding it without ridicule, judgement or suspicion?

Cotter, Susie and Pynchme,
you sound like you work, or worked, in the welfare field, so you must be aware that the stance in welfare education is that DV is actually 'men beating up on women' as told to me by a male social work educator.

I know when I was a child, despite the broken futniture, bruises, blood splattered like confetti on the Christmas tree, because of my extremely violent step-mother, there was no help. The police just took her away to cool down. i remember injuries caused by knifes, furniture saucepans, and even an episode with a gun (my brother kept the bolt and bullets at his mate's house because of this possibility - he was only a kid himself). When i was beaten and choked to a point of losing consciousness (rescued by my brother) the police said they couldn't do anything unless someone was murdered. That freaked me out just a lot. There was no help. My father was ridiculed by the cops but he was a sickly man at the time and no match for my stepmother.

Gender did not concern me, I just wanted the violence to stop.

It is terrible to see, otherwise good people (men and women), descend into violence.

I suggest that there is enough of the blame game on this forum. I for one would like to see us all working towards ending the violence, regardless of the gender of the perpetrator.

If you have ever experienced the sheer terror, mind altering, sound bending, time distorting TERROR that children can experience when adults fight, I think you would drop the he/she bulldust.

Well said aka, you are right of course. Children are terrified of violence wherever it comes from. Some then go on to commit violence later in life, and the cycle goes on.

It certainly shouldn't be a gender issue when discussing domestic violence. Boys are affected just as much as girls.
I for one am finished bashing my head against a brick wall with some posters on this thread.

I was so sick of the violence-induced trauma I had to deal with in casualty over the years, that I got out of there and now work in a calmer environment!

Maybe what I saw (and patched up) in those hospitals has coloured my views on domestic violence, however, I am against violence, no matter who does it.

Suzeonline:"I am against violence, no matter who does it."

Excellent, Suzie, well said. I didn't think you were one of the real manhaters, but they do make it hard for you women to express a contrary view, don't they? It's all "you're either with us or against us", "telling lies for women", "the end justifies the means", no chance of arriving at a genuine meeting of minds. I wondered how long you'd put up with it.

You realise the pynchme, et al now consider you a "traitor to your gender" don't you?

Aka, the issue of violence against children has been deliberately confused with the issue of violence against women. The original UN discussion papers were all about protecting kids. some bright spark decided that the best way to protect kids was to empower women, on the theory that mothers would protect their kids. What's happened, of course, is that when some mothers are placed under pressure and there's no man around to take it out on, the kids suffer, just as they do when some men are placed under similar pressures.

The lesson is that both genders are capable of violence. Our ancestry is uniformly violent so it should be no surprise that we possess the genes to be the same way.

Suzeonline
"Maybe what I saw (and patched up) in those hospitals has coloured my views on domestic violence, however, I am against violence, no matter who does it."

Right, Now can we all start to stop violence at all levels and continue to leave gender out of it?

We have got to start to do something very soon for the children that are coming after us.

At the moment the male violence is remaining static and the female is increasing, we have got to find what is the cause here and the only common denominator that I can find is alcohol, because the male consumption of alcohol has remained near static and it is no doubt that alcohol was/is a big issue in the male violence, female use of alcohol has increased, does anyone think that alcohol could then be the common denominator in this WHOLE VIOLENCE issue?

Further we have all these video games that have the portrayal of violence in them that both genders are watching and playing this has got to be taking affect on young minds, get the young out in the bush and let them see, feel and observe nature and see if we can bring some interest of our surrounds into the lifes of the young

Thanks All
From Dave