Domestic Violence and Child Abuse - Part 3

The final part, where-in I finally dive into the literature, and explain why I am focusing on this from a child-centred perspective.

So, part three of this long look into domestic violence statistics.

A quick recap: I am doing this for the following reason - I have asserted that the majority of violence and neglect of children is committed by their mothers. This is not by a huge margin, and it does not excuse or ignore male violence against children (particularly sexual abuse of girls, which occurs in horrific numbers and explains the trauma that many women are expressing when they are abusive). However, the narrative around violence is that only men are perpetrators, only women are victims, and therefore if children are victims they should be understood through the “women-and-children” lens as victims of men.

This does not help children. We need to hold women accountable, the same way we hold men accountable - no more, no less. Equality.

But we can’t, while the dominant narrative convinces people of the opposite. So, I am looking at the validity of that narrative, not simply from a children’s perspective, but on its own terms.

In the first article, I looked at some examples of how child abuse is recorded, and how it is not reported as an act of abuse against the father - even when it patently is - compared to when men commit child abuse, whereat the mother is considered the ‘real victim’ almost (or in some cases, actually) to the exclusion of the actual child. These are not ‘anecdotes’, but examples for the reader to keep in mind while looking at any similar case: you can judge for yourself whether I am accurate or distorting things, and I encourage readers to check my sources and to do that research, just look up any infamous case of child abuse and consider how it is framed.

In the second article I looked at the violence numbers in Australia and saw that for domestic violence, they were much the same as for the UK or the US - one in three domestic violence victims is men. I did this to establish that yes, women are quite capable of being abusers. I then looked at how the ‘feminist’ side of the media just want to absolutely deny this number despite its consistency, apparently for no other reason than to maintain the narrative - men are the perpetrators, women are the victims, any anomalies should be explained away, ignored and where necessary, denied and even ridiculed. Having deconstructed the objections and finding them wanting we saw two interesting things.

Firstly, we saw that one of the main arguments, that male domestic violence only occurs in gay relationships, is less able to explain intimate partner violence than the far higher levels of lesbian violence. Moreover, there is a recognition in the literature that the dominant narrative - their words - of men as perpetrators and women as victims completely fails the LGBT community, and I ask why this is not recognised in child protection literature where the “women and children” approach likewise fails but is only getting worse.

Secondly, I then looked briefly at all areas of violence other than domestic. While in the past I have used crime statistics to explain that men are the predominant victims of violence outside the home, I here used reports from women themselves that when they experience violence outside the home, it is predominantly and in some cases overwhelmingly at the hands of other women, in every other site surveyed.

I therefore concluded that all of this not only shows that the current domestic violence narrative, which is deliberately and unequivocally women-centred, is inadequate for developing any sort of understanding of violence outside of the intimate partner violence sphere that is the dominant focus, and that women as perpetrators is a consistent finding in all areas of violence and abuse data collection, not just regarding children.

If you still doubt such a finding, please feel free to check out that last substack HERE and check my sources.

For this (our final) look at domestic violence, I want to look at the academic literature and theories around domestic violence, and see if they support such a finding and what we can learn from them.

I will be working heavily from a 2007 AIFS research report titled, Allegations of family violence and child abuse in family law children’s proceedings. If this seems a strange or tangential place to start looking at DV research, I can only say that of the many such reports I went through, this has the best basic overview of the DV research in section 1. I will include later research, of course (2007 is a while back now) but I wanted an official document to work from, so no-one would think I was just cherry-picking research - there is, obviously, a lot, and smaller studies can be found that say practically anything. Also, this was a work that was written for the sake of reform in the family court, not from an MRA or father’s perspective as some might suspect but just due to the delays, uncertainty regarding accusations and suspicion from all sides that the family court system could be doing a lot lot better. As such, it received a response from the Federal Magistrates Court HERE as to the implications of implementation of the findings, and is therefore not some dry academic text but a genuine contribution to a difficult subject.

Let’s jump in!

The opening of this report (the first 5 paragraphs) is a heck of a read, flat out stating that family court issues are basically argued ideologically between feminists and MRAs (the author herself uses the term “feminists” to describe one side) and was written back during that hateful period when denial of parental alienation was the prevailing view: HERE is a surprisingly balanced view on the topic from Huffington Post. Read that opening section by all means, we are going to focus on the DV scholarship in sections 2 and 3, but first this comment comes up, which effectively frames much of the ‘problem’, or the different foci that researchers take. It is from near the end of section 1.1:

There is a tension, for example, between a general recognition that all violence and abuse is unacceptable, and an acknowledgement that not all violence and abuse is the same. There is also a tension between those who see all violence and abuse as motivated by a desire to control, and those who see evidence of multiple motivations. Thus, an Australian discussion paper published in the late nineties by the Domestic Violence and Incest Resources Centre (DVIRC) made the following observation about research in the area of domestic violence at the time:

Usually researchers go into the field armed with a preferred definition of domestic violence, then ask research participants for their view on, or experience of, that form of violence. They do not generally seek from participants their own understanding of violence. (MacDonald, 1998, p. 7)

.

I have focussed on writing this as I have long promised to provide a review of scholarship to back up some of my previous claims about the dominant DV narrative of “men bad, women victims”, that it is wholly inadequate for describing violence in general, and completely misleading when it comes to child protection. However, I was tempted to be diverted to discussing issues of coercive control, which has been in the media a lot lately as governments seek to introduce legislation that criminalises it as a “standalone offence”: just this week, THIS article came out, with links to several others. These articles do not gender the idea of coercive control, but do frame it entirely according to the narrative, only giving examples of female victims and male perpetrators. This, despite the fact that women are more likely to be the sufferers of the sort of cluster B disorders whose symptoms are like a catalogue of relationship manipulation, control and abuse, as discussed in my article HERE, and which men report as the victims of as discussed in my last post HERE.

But I don’t want to get distracted by this - I am not here to argue men’s issues, I am here to consider how our understanding of domestic and family violence shapes child protection thinking and policy. Just be aware of what is happening even as I write this.

Where do I stand in those earlier ‘sides’? Well, it is precisely because I recognise that controlling behaviours does not gender the issue but can be employed by both men and women that I can have a foot in both camps. Yes, there are controlling, abusive people, and they are a big part of the problem. But I also believe firmly that there are frequently a multiplicity of factors - childhood trauma, adult trauma, alcohol and substance abuse, mental health issues and poverty - that are significant drivers of domestic violence, and some of which can overlap (I wrote intersect but changed my mind, let’s not use that term) with or underpin manipulative or controlling behaviours.

That being said, we have seen two different views - DV as an expression of (overwhelmingly male) control, focussing on intimate partner violence, and DV as a complex problem. The latter does not focus solely on intimate partner violence but include family violence and child abuse, and also recognises that violence or abuse does not by any means have to go one way, but can be a feature of a volatile relationship. Recognising DV as a complex problem or, to again quote our researcher, that it “has multiple motivations”, gels with later research such as THIS paper a few years later which states (then explores) the fact that, “domestic violence, substance misuse and mental illness are complex and frequently inter-related problems”.

I am going to categorise these two approaches thusly: the “blame (male) control” we’ll call the “feminist approach”, and the “recognise the complexity” we’ll call the “holistic approach”.

Our AIFS researchers acknowledges the importance of recognising DV as a complex problem presenting in a variety of ways at the start of section 1.3 as she quotes Ver Steegh (2005), who points out it is a “fiction that families with a history of domestic violence are all alike”, that “all cases of domestic violence are serious and important; saying that they are not all the same does not diminish this fact” and finally echoes Ver Steegh’s conclusions that, “the confusing and contradictory research findings in the area of “domestic violence” strongly suggest the existence of different types of violence”. This is exacerbated by tendencies for different studies to find different sorts of violence due to different foci / methodologies and then to appear to contradict each other, when in fact they are simply reporting different things. Consider my previously reference to studies of ‘battered women’ (if that is still an acceptable term) found in shelters - a common image of adult abuse - who constitute a valuable and important group to study and listen to, but whose experiences of violence will be a far cry from children who have experienced abuse in a single-parent-female household, the most common place for children to be abused. They are very different, but they are not contradictory - they are simply each describing a different locus of violence.

Our AIFS scholars summarise thusly:

At the heart of such analyses of family violence are well-reported differences in findings from two types of studies. Those generally known as “family conflict studies” appear to paint a picture of violence that is largely situational and initiated by men and women in roughly equal proportions. By contrast, those generally known as “crime victimisation studies” paint a picture of escalating violence perpetrated overwhelmingly by men, primarily motivated by an obsessive need to control the partner and, usually, the children as well.

So again, we come back to the complex, family-focussed ‘holistic’ approach, and the simplistic, female-centred ‘feminist’ approach. (The scholarship also uses the terms “gender symmetrical” for a recognition that both genders are initiators and perpetrators of most domestic violence, and “non-gender symmetrical” for focussing on this as a male problem).

Now… this does not make the feminist perspective wrong (or completely wrong), it simply makes it inadequate. The feminist approach covers a very real form of DV, specifically a form of intimate partner violence, which has been called “intimate terrorism” (and since I have been using terms like ‘simplistic feminist approach’, I won’t be so hypocritical as to complain about this emotive label). Intimate terrorism is the behaviour of your classic controlling male abuser, where a terrified woman is isolated, restricted and controlled, if not through actual physical and sexual violence - though these may certainly be features of the abuse - but through emotional abuse, threats, domineering behaviour, financial abuse, gaslighting and manipulation, and moreover there is a tendency for escalation over time to physical violence even if not initially present. This sort of abuse may also involve threats or actual abuse toward the children, and to describe the victims as “women and children”, and recognise the need to rescue and protect these women and children from the abuser is absolutely legitimate.

That being said, I do not intend to spend much time on this, because it is the dominant narrative. This is what we generally mean when we speak about “domestic violence”, this is the primary focus of the violence discourse, and this is the primary focus of the various government strategies, policies, research initiatives and 10-year-plans to reduce domestic violence. And this may well be the worst form of domestic violence, with the highest body-count and one we absolutely should focus on, including keeping children away from such violent men.

The problem lies in thinking this is the totality of domestic violence, or even the most prevalent form of domestic violence, or the form of domestic violence that should primarily inform the discussion around children. None of these things is correct.

The AIFS paper looks more at ‘intimate terrorism’ in section 1.4.1, then in 1.4.2, it looks at its counterpoint, ‘situational violence’. This is, in my understanding, referring to situations of abuse that would include your classic ‘volatile relationships’ - Matthew Mcconaughey’s introduction to his parents’ relationship in Greenlights is a staggering real-life example - relationships marked by shouting, possibly throwing things or other physical altercations, one or the other partners threatening to or actually leaving, yet not relationships where you can clearly delineate this or that person as ‘victim’ or ‘perpetrator’, as these roles may change from situation to situation.

To do it justice, I will just quote the next section verbatim:

Johnson (2005) cited Archer’s (2000) meta-analysis of intimate partner violence in the United States, in which Archer found that intimate partner violence in agency samples was heavily male perpetrated, whereas in general samples it was largely gender-symmetric. Johnson suggested that much of the violence seen within agencies (such as women’s shelters or refuges) falls into the category of “intimate terrorism”, a largely gendered phenomenon, and that it is the observations by practitioners and researchers associated with such agencies that have fuelled more general gender-based theories of violence.

On the basis of his analysis of a 1970s Pittsburg sample, Johnson (2000) concluded that 97% of “intimate terrorism” was perpetrated by male partners. In contrast, 56% of “situational couple violence” was initiated by men. In a British sample, Graham-Kevan and Archer (2003) found figures of 87% and 45% respectively for these same dimensions.

Johnson’s (2005) conclusion, therefore, is that broad statements about the gendered nature of violence are fundamentally misinformed. In his view, it is essential first to define the type of violence being considered. Johnson claimed support for his discontinuous model—in which gender plays a critical role in one form of violence but considerably less so in the other—from researchers such as Graham-Kevan and Archer (2003); Holtzworth-Munroe (2000); Holtzworth-Munroe and Stuart (1994); Jacobson and Gottman (1998); and Swan and Snow (2002).

I hope that is self-evident, but let me explain just in case - whereas the ‘intimate terrorism’ model mainly comes from speaking to ‘battered women’ and other female victims of controlling and domineering violence, and is predominantly perpetrated, over 90%, by men (a finding I would dispute in detail, but not in substance - I think women perpetrate far more of this than recognised, but it is still a predominantly male behaviour), the ‘situational’ model is more 50-50 as to who ‘initiates’, or there is no clear initial perpetrator. Moreover Leone, Johnson, Cohan, and Lloyd (2004) identify this as the predominant form of DV, while Holtzworth-Munroe and Stuart (1994) also recognise that some men commit violence not from being domineering or controlling abusers, but due to “stress, anger and poor relationship skills; these men generally have positive attitudes towards women.” I’ll mention here, for my US readers, that the CDC uses the terms “reciprocal” and “non-reciprocal”, where “intimate terrorism” is non-reciprocal, while situational violence or (generally female) acts of self-defence in the face of intimate terrorism are reciprocal. And since I’m bringing in foreign scholarship, I’ll also throw in this passage from the abstract of a European study, also from 2007, in the Journal of Family Violence:

Feminists typically argue that IPV is committed only by men against women. Others argue that violence is a human problem and women also commit much IPV. To resolve these debates, IPV has been classified into two categories: common couple violence captured by population-based studies, and patriarchal terrorism, captured by studies of battered women. 

Recognising the differences in these models of violence is called the ‘discontinuous’ approach or model: discontinuous because there is a discontinuity, again if I am understanding correctly, between the majority of domestic violence, which can involve conflict initiated or escalated by one or the other party depending on the day, or initiated by one party but escalated by the other, or where both parties are clearly to blame - relationships where there is no clear ‘perpetrator’ or ‘victim’, just a lot of conflict - and that small amount of serious, male-perpetrated severe abuse that dominates crime statistics, hospital admissions and headlines. 

It is also discontinuous in that the one does not escalate into the other, although it is worth recognising that the “situational” form can still lead to escalation unto death. The 2016 DVDRT report into DV deaths for the previous 15 years in NSW proclaimed loudly on pg 9 that, “There were no cases where a woman was a primary domestic violence aggressor who killed a male primary domestic violence victim”, but then mentions in the footnotes that 3 of the killings (or about 10% of men killed in Intimate Partner Violence) were exactly these sort of volatile relationships where “there had been domestic violence in the relationship perpetrated by both parties” (n. 23) and another where a woman had “killed a man she was having a covert intimate relationship with - accordingly, the male homicide victim was neither a domestic violence abuser nor domestic violence victim”. He wasn’t a DV victim, because he wasn’t living in her home when she murdered him - fantastic. Similarly, male perpetrators and female victims of homicide often fit the “situational” pattern, where a very much two-way fight or antagonistic relationship one day ends with the escalation of violence where the larger, stronger man kills the woman. The probability, based on biology, that things will escalate in this direction rather than the other still leads to a higher number of women killed and thus, understandably, greater calls for protecting women, such that some in the scholarship still want to identify this as a male problem (eg at 1.4.2.1 we see this as what “Johnston and Campbell (1993) referred to as "male controlling interactive violence"”). Again, this is an understandable, but undeniably women-centred approach.

The discontinuous model is preferred by many researchers because by recognising the different forms that abuse can take or be understood as, it does not downplay the more serious forms but, on the contrary, reminds us, in Johnson and Ferraro’s (2000) oft-repeated words:

The modelling of the causes and consequences of partner violence will never be powerful as long as we aggregate behaviours as disparate as a “feminine” slap in the face, a terrorizing pattern of beatings accompanied by humiliating psychological abuse, an argument that escalates into a mutual shoving match, or a homicide committed by a person who feels there is no other way to save her own life.

That is, both the ‘symmetrical’ nature of most domestic violence, and the reality that the most severe abuse does indeed fit the ‘male perpetrator / female victim’ narrative, can be acknowledged under this model without contradiction. This is called, in the field, the “gender paradox”, albeit all these years later that is a term that can have several meanings and is now generally applied to something else - go check Wikipedia by all means to learn what.

Anyways, what I have said so far you can get from the AIFS report (which includes a section from scholars such as Kimmel who disputes some of the core methodologies such as the use of the Conflict Tactics Scale, but not always the core idea that violence can be divided between deliberate controlling tactics, and that which is more “situationally induced”). Let me add some more current research and, importantly, some numbers to put all this in perspective.

Looking at a worldwide study from 2013 (8 pages of analysis, 141 pages listing the studies they looked at), although they tell us on page 1 that, “Most of the studies [they analysed] reported on female victimization only”, they were able to identify 73 studies from around the world that gave numbers for both, and concluded:

• In 62% of the studies, female-on-male physical violence was higher, or equal, to male-on-female

• In 67%, female-on-male psychological abuse (and control) was reported in higher numbers than male-on-female

• Unsurprisingly, male-on-female sexual abuse was still much greater than that going the other way.

When larger (community-wide) sample sizes were separated out and focussed on rather than smaller sample sizes, the results were 50-50 for physical violence and emotional abuse being equal or greater for female perpetrators: in the former case, exactly 50-50 (22 studies out of 44). They therefore concluded (pg 3), “the overall percentage of adult IPV that is symmetrical – comparable across gender, or higher in the direction of male victimization/female perpetration – constitutes the majority of IPV throughout the world.”

Let’s be clear - this is not, of course, the full story of domestic violence, and we must again, and always, stress that women consistently suffer more severe and indeed horrific outcomes than men, such as perpetually living in fear, homelessness with children when fleeing violence, hospitalisation and death. The authors acknowledge this on pg 4. The asymmetrical nature of the extremes of violence is found in later research, such as THIS article from a 2011 edition of the journal Aggression and Violent Behaviour, which concludes after studying 13 empirical studies and two meta-analyses (with a focus on self-reporting) that, “they generally support the claim that men and women may exhibit similar rates of IPV when no contexts, motivations, and consequences are considered”, but once, “severity, motives, and impacts” are taken into account, it becomes asymmetrical in favour of men brutalising women. (This is the famous article that showed that while men tend to beat, punch and strangle more, women are more likely to throw things at their partner, slap, kick, bite, or hit with an object).

Why does this asymmetry appear? Here I am going to throw in my $0.02. Other than the common-sense reason we saw earlier that men are bigger, stronger and generally more likely to use physical aggression when threatened, which increases the chances that in any given conflict, a woman is likely to finish on the losing end of a confrontation with a man, we have the question of why men are not found to be victims of the ‘controlling’ or dominating form ‘intimate terrorism’, which you may have noticed was also called things like ‘patriarchal terrorism’. We saw, both in studies just quoted and in my previous Substack, that male victims of controlling or manipulative female behaviours are even higher than victims of physical abuse, and this is consistent with the high rates of certain cluster B personality disorders reported among women that can be a major driver of such behaviours. Why, then, do men not show up in the statistics as intimate terrorism victims?

One reason is found in something I referenced earlier: the Journal of Family Violence article from 2007. (Full disclosure, I am only referencing the abstract as the article is behind a paywall). Speaking of what we were calling the ‘discontinuous model’, the author flat-out states, “This typology ignores male victims of extreme IPV”: unsurprising when it is practically defined as a male-on-female behaviour driven by patriarchal control. The article explored the reports of 190 callers to a men’s helpline for DV, most reporting the sort of classic controlling and even fear-inducing behaviours that constitute classic intimate terrorism. Such a small number may still fit within the single-digit percentages acknowledged as female-on-male intimate terrorism, but the additional information - that the callers experienced frustration with trying to get people to listen to them, help them or take them seriously - is consistent with the idea that there may be significant under-reporting of male victims of IPV.

My personal theory on all this comes down to the ‘targets’ that perpetrators of intimate terrorism choose or focus on. Male perpetrators will often target women whom they believe will be less likely to report them, or to leave them despite the abuse - women with self-esteem issues, less attractive or less popular women, women with disabilities etc. Male abusers, whom you may remember from my last article are more likely to use belittling, domineering and humiliating language as a form of abuse, may abuse the woman in a number of ways, (physical, financial, isolating etc) all while telling her she is worthless, doesn’t deserve any better, will never get another man and other hateful controlling comments designed, again, to convince her that she has to remain in the abusive relationship. The statistics tell us that such women, unfortunately, even if they manage to escape such a relationship, may end up in another just like it because such men target them: and while I have mentioned this in the past and some may have inferred I was somehow blaming the woman for ending up in these relationships, let me stress again, abusive men target these women. The blame lies with the men - but the agency to change this cycle lies with the women, and I will go on saying that no matter how many feminists it upsets.

Again, the statistics for this were covered in my last Substack where women reporting current abuse were as likely to be reporting problems with men from previous relationships as they were current ones. Likewise, current partner numbers for experiences of abuse were much closer (between the genders) for various types of abuse than lifetime numbers, where numbers for women blew out to the classic 2-to-1 ratio.

I theorised that men may have a single experience of a violent relationship - indeed, as per our situational violence finding, they were as likely to - but may have then, to be blunt, “made better choices” or started dating someone completely different to the sort of abusive person they found themselves with. But why should this be the case? In the era of incels, OnlyFans, simps, and other indicators of large numbers of men who are starved of female attention and companionship, why aren’t such men going from one controlling, manipulative relationship to another, as sadly too many women are? (Again, let’s remember that the victimisation data showed that, at any given moment, only about 1% of relationships are abusive).

The answer seems to be, because even abusive women don’t want these men! Whereas men will target women as described, choosing women who may feel they have to put up with abuse because they have no other option, (allowing the abusive male to indulge his pathetic controlling or domineering needs), women who are controlling, domineering or manipulative show no such tendency in mate selection that I can see, and I say this based on both looking at the numbers, and also based on the behaviours of the (admittedly few) abusive women I have personally known. Women are hypergamous, and will attempt to enter relationship with the ‘best’ man they can find, not the weakest, even if she has a need to manipulate or control the relationship. Such a man, though, may well refuse to simply roll over in the face of such treatment, leading not to a one-sided ‘intimate terrorism’ relationship, but the sort that outsiders will view as ‘symmetrical’, since when she starts yelling at him, he will yell back. Worst of all, this will give the female narcissist a chance to play the victim - and again, this is something very one-sided in the literature, as male abusers who play the victim are well recognised (I remember quoting something about this from Q and A, and I saw a reference to the recently deceased O. J. Simpson referring to himself as a battered husband, despite murdering his wife) but the “believe all women” narrative means the presence of women doing the same is never acknowledged, despite it being a regular complaint of male victims and a recognised behaviour of, say, women who suffer Borderline Personality Disorder.

Do I have specific evidence to back up my theory? Well, other than the reports of men who have been in relationships with manipulative and controlling women, it lies in the ‘emotional abuse’ stats that I mentioned above, and that I showed in the last Substack. Here is the graph again:

I mentioned above that women are more likely to report abusive language - belittling, degrading or humiliating language designed to allow the abusive man to control the woman by destroying her self-esteem and making her think she has to stay in the relationship. But when we look at the other forms of emotional abuse, men experience them in higher percentages: these are the classic controlling, manipulating behaviours such as controlling their movements, isolating the man from his family and friends, monitoring their whereabouts and that pesky type of abuse that men keep reporting in larger numbers but feminists think only women experience - threatening to take the children.

Since men report this in equal or greater numbers for ‘current relationship’ but far less for ‘lifetime’, I commented when I last referenced this that men seem to ‘learn the lesson’ and engage in healthier relationships in the future, doubtless remembering that time they dated a ‘crazy bitch’ (and how many feminists recognise this is a term men use to describe abusive partners? Any?) and dodged a bullet. But such men probably don’t take such abuse lying down - they probably fight back, at least verbally, and will show up in the statistics, therefore, as symmetrical DV. In reality, this could be an ‘intimate terrorist’ in all her splendour at work.

That’s my theory, anyway.

Where does all this get us? Well, we’ve looked at the “holistic approach” as I called it, that DV is complex and often two-sided or based on situations of fighting and anger that may not be instigated as part of a wider scenario of control, but simply triggered by the moment, although the woman is more likely to bear the brunt of the outcomes in terms of injuries and other consequences. What about the other perspective, which I called the ‘feminist’? I’ll quickly speak about that, before tying it together from a child-centred view.

A recent articulation of the ‘feminist’ perspective can be found HERE - yes, I have mentioned this before, and each time we come back to it we see something more.

Let’s have a quick look - and again, I am looking at the article, not going through the study it is reporting on since it deserves a deep dive. Having done this preliminary work on DV I am now ready to do that, but after this article wrapping up looking at DV I want to get back to clearly child-centred content for a while and yes, even a positive article about how to combat some of this stuff.

The ABC article starts with what we can now see is a howler, and a deliberate one at that:

41 per cent of respondents mistakenly believe domestic violence is equally committed by men and women, an increase from 23 per cent in 2009. 

"There are community attitudes that have this idea of what we call sex symmetry; this idea women and men perpetrate domestic, family and sexual violence at similar or equal rates," says Chay Brown, research and partnerships manager at The Equality Institute.

It’s a deliberate falsehood because they use the technical term ‘symmetry’ to describe this theory - one which is not simply held by ignorant respondents to a survey, but by researchers. They know the terminology, therefore they know they are being untruthful in saying that it is a ‘mistake’ to believ ite - on the contrary, it is the dominant view. That the numbers of ordinary people who know this is increasing is a positive thing, but not one that proponents of the feminist perspective are going to be happy about.

They go on to mix truth - “It shows the "most significant and consistent finding in scholarship on violence perpetration" is that most violence is perpetrated by men”, (which is definitely true aggregated across all forms of violence) - with fiction: “"We know that most of women's violence is in the context of self-defence," for example, Dr Brown says, while with men it's about "entitlement, power and control".” Neither of these statements is true, not even close, as we saw above: most violence is situational.

As with the term “symmetry”, I suspect they know this from the excuses that are made: ““Women are also more likely than men to self-report their use of violence, inflating the stats, as well as studies using "clumsy methodology" such as "simply counting the blows", says Dr Brown.”” Both of these assertions contain fact - the ‘counting the blows’ is a criticism of the Conflict Tactics Scale mentioned above, which, much like the ABS Personal Safety Data, is something feminists decry when it suits them, and rely on when it suits them (my understanding is its use was essential in firsting bringing ‘battered woman syndrome’ to light). As for women being more likely to self-report, this is also true, but does not therefore mean women are inflating the numbers. (Interestingly, they refer to the same Aggression and Violent Behaviour article I did for that claim, although I came across it through other means, which shows they know its conclusion that the evidence supports the gender symmetry model in most cases, and on this specific reporting issue, the highlights state at the very beginning, “Both men and women tend to underreport IPV”, undercutting another claim the ABC article makes - “most victim-survivors underreport!” they say, with neither the acknowledgement nor even the awareness that this is true for men as well.)

After this are some sections on Aboriginal women having their children taken away, which is a children’s issue I will deal with at a proper time, followed by more excuses: we are told, “close to half of all female domestic and family violence related deaths in Queensland from 2015 to 2017 were of women who had previously been identified as a respondent to a domestic violence order.” ‘Respondent’ means the woman was being treated as the perpetrator or an instigator, and the feminist author is implying, “but she was killed, she’s the victim!”, completely ignoring the scholarship we just spent some 10 pages looking at: mutual or symmetrical violence can begin with either party, but if it escalates to killing, it will probably be the woman who is the victim. This doesn’t change the fact that the woman may well have been a DV perpetrator or mutual perpetrator. Nor would such a sympathetic reading of the events be given to men, as any woman who kills a man who was previously a respondent of a DV order will be hailed as acting in self-defence, but the idea that any of these “female domestic and family violence deaths” may have been killed by someone in the family acting in self-defence does not occur to them, nor does the possibility that this is not necessarily by an intimate partner (our NSW coroner’s investigation into DV deaths, south of the border from Queensland, shows a solid half of female adult homicide victims in the ‘Adult relative / kin’ subset were killed by their son/step-son (pg 15), reminding us that (adult) sons kill a lot of mothers, something that only makes sense when we really start to dig into the violence targeted at boys that occurs in single mother households).

The complexity around Intimate Partner Violence is tragically lost even when discussing Indigenous violence, despite the fact that (as mentioned in a previous Substack) the concept of Family Violence (distinct from DV or IPV) is focussed on in Australian figures as a way of describing the wider familial relationships in indigenous households in contrast to the western ‘nuclear family’. Regarding domestic violence deaths of Aborigines, the ABC article tells us, “"The deceased person had been recorded as both a respondent and an aggrieved party in domestic violence orders in nearly all of the domestic and family violence related deaths of Aboriginal people," The State of Knowledge Report on Violence Perpetration shows, again with both an implication that women are being wrongly identified as perpetrators, and a failure to recognise the complexity of either the nature of most (symmetrical) domestic violence, or the nature of violence within the Indigenous community. They start by saying, “Misidentification — when a domestic violence victim is incorrectly named as the respondent (person reported to be the perpetrator) on an intervention order, or charged with criminal offences — is alarmingly common”, while in the sidebar we are told, “Police are mistaking domestic violence victims as perpetrators at staggering rates, derailing the lives of potentially thousands of women around the country every year. Why are they still getting it so wrong?” The reality, of course — borne out by both the police numbers and the research — is that while police are far from perfect, they are both highly trained and, alas, highly experienced at dealing with DV on a daily basis, and if they say, “both parties are to blame” — consistent with the scholarship, the victimisation numbers and the anecdotal evidence from men — then we should listen.

Something the feminists simply refuse to do.

How are they getting it so wrong? The answer is found in the ideological language that sprinkles this article — “we live in a male-dominated society in terms of leadership and power structures”, “with men it's about "entitlement, power and control"”, etc. They are ideologically captured, to the terrifying extent that even though nobody is denying that most perpetrators of violence are male, the merest hint of a woman being held accountable for her actions, or called out for poor behaviour, sets a whole industry into motion to deflect and deny.

Let’s not dwell on it. I will still give them the final comment: before the section on indigenous women, they say something that is reasonably correct: regarding the use of violence by women, they say, “But in terms of rates, impact, severity and motivation, that violence is different." This is a reminder, yet again, (probably for the last time in this article), that women do indeed suffer higher rates by many metrics, higher impact and more severe violence, and often for different motives.

And if you are looking at this from a female-centred perspective, it is reasonable to focus on calling out and ending this more severe form of violence which does so much damage. And remember, this is not just the dominant narrative: ending violence against women is the stated focus and goal of governments, researchers, NGOs and pretty much everybody - I certainly want to see an end to violence against women, who doesn’t?

Therefore, feminists push narratives and research that promotes this goal, and downplay anything that disagrees - which in this case is the bulk of both data and research - claiming the methodology is wrong, or it’s an anti-feminist backlash, or it’s not taking into account the man’s power and privilege, or the woman must have been acting in self-defence.

This latter is a classic example. Consider this: a woman and a man engage in mutual yelling which escalates to shoving, or throwing things, or some sort of (less serious) physical altercation, and not for the first time police are called.

The researcher looks at this and correctly identifies it as mutual, or symmetrical, or situational violence, triggered by the situation and not by either party’s desire to control or dominate.

But the police have been called before, so the woman is already on the books as known to the police in a DV context. Therefore, to the feminist, she is a victim of DV, and the man is a perpetrator.

Therefore, her behaviour MUST, to the feminist, be understood as self-defence! It’s open-and-shut!

This is the feminist approach to this complex problem. The same is seen as to whom the perpetrator is with regard to essentially any mutual scenario: and pesky things like police charging the woman or researchers concluding the abuse was mutual, are ignored.

If the man instigates, then obviously, the man is the problem.

If the woman instigates, but the man escalates - the man is the problem, because escalation leads to women getting hurt more, or hurt worse.

If the woman instigates, escalates to blows and injures the man, but previously the police were called and both parties were identified as to blame - then the woman must have acted in self defence, and the man is the problem.

If the woman instigates and escalates to blows, but the man injures her defending himself, you better believe the man is the problem.

The answer? Remove the man! Put him in gaol, or on the street, or whatever it takes. Problem solved.

From a female-centred perspective, this makes perfect sense. The ‘perpetrator’ has been removed, the woman and children are safe, justice is done.

Except… from the children’s perspective, it looks very different.

From the children’s perspective, their main defender, their father, has been removed. And they are now alone with a woman who (in this case of mutual or symmetric DV), for all the feminist attempts to identify her purely and solely as a victim, is in reality a perpetrator of abuse.

And her target for those behaviours or urges, the man, has now been removed.

She will instinctively seek a new target, either the children, or a new man, who will (experience clearly shows) more likely be an even more volatile man than the father, and create a worse outcome.

And the father, whose mere presence as a witness may have been enough to restrain her worst urges, will be gone.

And she will now be living as a single mother, with all the additional social and financial pressures, stresses and complications that this brings, and again with no-one to take it out on except the children.

And where she was likely to come off second-best in a confrontation with the father due to simple biology, now it is the children who are more likely to suffer, particularly the smaller children that women have a tendency to target. The strength, or size, or bone-density gap between the average grown woman and a small child is far greater than between the average grown woman and the average grown man.

So whereas from a female-centred perspective it makes sense to remove the man and to treat the ‘woman-and-children’ as some sort of peculiar combined victim-class - because the child will not be a threat to the woman - from a child-centred perspective, it is ESSENTIAL to recognise what the numbers around child abuse substantiations and the standout reality of abuse predominantly happening in single mother households is telling us: in simply removing the man to make the woman feel safer (or to assuage our consciences about violence against women) and ignoring a woman’s previous abusive behaviour because we are determined to portray her only as a victim, we run the very real chance we are putting children at risk.

This is why I have gone through all this domestic violence data and research - once again, not to defend men or ignore female victims, but so people can understand that yes, women can be violent and abusive, yes, ALL the DV data and research supports the fact that this happens in far larger amounts than we want to talk about (just like abuse of children in general), and as previously mentioned - let me put it in big letters so no one can fail to understand:

The ‘men are perpetrators / women are victims’ narrative of domestic violence, which only holds true for a minority of intimate partner violence, is inadequate for domestic violence in general, and absolutely detrimental for understanding child abuse and neglect.

I truly hope I have finally made my point.

Next time, something child centred.