Hi there PAUL1405...

The rapidly rising levels of alcohol and drug fuelled domestic violence is a real worry. Not only violence occasioned against spouse on spouse, but violence perpetrated against parents, by their useless siblings !

A very timely Topic I believe.

Sometimes Paul, I'm thoroughly ashamed of being male ?

The problem with domestic violence is that it is normally perpetrated behind closed doors, with the woman being too afraid to report the violence. Sadly, often the first that people know of it is when the spouse is seriously injured. Without information the police are powerless.

Using numbers to compare it with terrorism is somewhat nonsensical, as other things such as Flu kill up to 3000 p.a. Traffic kills about 2000 etc. But terrorism has a much more pernicious effect way out of proportion to its scale.

Terrorists and domestic violence,

http://tinyurl.com/nhmujhy

Might as well conflate the two, since that was the intent of the OP.

-To conflate the two in typical *bleep*-stirring, Greens 'Protest Party' style.

To muddy the waters to discredit the very separate and essential policy to inhibit terrorism, the great bulk of which has consensus between the major parties.

Any relationship between terrorism and domestic violence is manifestly preposterous.

Some offenders who perpetuate domestic violence, outside their home environment, behave like model citizens. It's only until they return to the private confines of their home environment, their personalities mysteriously alter, and the hapless spouse cops a battering, often because of some vague 'negative' event, that's occurred at the offenders work ?

Who better to take out your irritation and frustrations upon, especially if you've got a belly full of booze, or high on Ice ? After all the 'little wife' won't alert police, will she ? She better not, otherwise she'll really cop it next time ?

And domestic violence rates among the ' gays' and indigeneous communities. Oh that's right more funding will fix it.

o sung wu, you have seen the stats on rates of perpetration when both parties are asked (or chosen to ignore them when they have been made available during previous discussions) so why continue with the sexist stereotypes?

The lead in the rate of initiation of physical violence against an intimate partner currently lies more with women than men (hardly surprising given the mono vision focus on male initiated DV thats being going on for a long time) and it would be an interesting argument to try and justify the idea that men perpetrate more of the verbal abuse against intimate partners.

Unfortunately many of those supposedly most concerned by DV show little interest in actually resolving it, either I assume because current gender based myths suit their gender wars or out of paternalistic views about the genders.

While DV is used as a means to attack men and gender remains the focus rather than the more significant factors (substance abuse, mental illness etc) are ignored it will be very difficult to progress the issue much further. While more than half of perpetrated DV is completely missing from public policy and anti-DV messages because of sexist stereotypes and an unwillingness to accept women has fully human capable of both great goodness and some pretty vile behaviour further progress is hindered.

DV is a real problem, the size of the problem is though very hard to determine though because of the sick gender games some are determined to play with the issue rather than a principled stance against all of it.

R0bert