Domestic Violence and Child Abuse - Part 2

Where-in I look into the numbers behind gendered claims of domestic violence, and we reconsider these through a child-focussed lens.

So, as promised, a look at some of the studies into domestic violence here in Australia and elsewhere.

Why do this, and how is it child-centred? Well, I have now published several articles where I look at ways the media portray domestic violence, and have made the point numerous times, with several example cases, that acts of what should be recognised as domestic violence by women are either downplayed or simply not expressed as such: for instance, the case of Holly Maxwell in my last article, who recorded acts of child abuse to send to the child’s father, and was held accountable for the child abuse, but not the domestic violence that sharing it with the father (and grandmother) clearly was. And, moreover, I assert that these examples constitute, not isolated anecdotes, but the consistent framing of the media for any and all such events: I challenge anyone interested to google similar scenarios where a woman is at fault and see how it is framed. Then, compare to how men are treated when they commit such acts.

Again, the problem is not women: women do bad things, men do bad (and generally worse) things. The problem lies in trying to get a clear understanding of people’s behaviour when the narrative is to treat half the adult population as “always the victim”. And from a child-centred perspective, the problem lies in the fact that this half of the population is more likely to be a perpetrator of child abuse and neglect, or to bring and keep a perpetrator in the child’s life.

But, it can legitimately be said, the plural of anecdote is not data: so, the onus remains on me to provide some hard evidence to demonstrate my assertions that the presence of women in the child abuse statistics is not some outlier or anomaly, but is consistent with women being a smaller, but very real, element of the domestic violence statistics in general, and that this is deliberately downplayed or ignored to maintain the narrative, including by the framing of child abuse substantiations as scenarios where the mother is the real victim.

Where do we start? Well, I have previously discussed the use of the ABS Personal Safety data, as the most comprehensive accumulation of victim data we have. When we turn to the first such analysis in 2005 - there was a prior ‘Women’s Safety Survey’ in 1996, enough said - we find that men in general experience nearly twice as much violence as women: 10.8% of men versus 5.8% of women according to the first table. Well, no-one cares about that, so let’s focus on intimate partner violence.

When we look at the numbers, they have mysteriously changed! You see, I have linked to a reissued version of the 2005 survey - my recollection of it is that the original, apart from being easier to read, had different numbers, numbers that I made note of at the time. Well, I don’t expect you to take my word for it - let’s find a source.

In the 2014 CFCA document Who Abuses Children (itself peculiarly archived despite being less than 10 years old) which I linked to in a previous article, we get reference to the figures I recorded at the time: “The ABS Personal Safety Survey (2005) found that of the women who had experienced physical assault since the age of 15, 31% said they had been assaulted by their current or previous partner compared to 14.3% of men who had been assaulted by their previous or current partner, and almost two-thirds of respondents (61%) said they had children in their care at the time of the relationship.” (This is in the section on “Witnessing Domestic Violence”, par 30 or so - the web form of documents are a lot harder to reference than just ‘pg such-&-such’!) These numbers are different in the linked (reissued) doc which gives us the following numbers: “Since the age of 15, 0.9% (68,100) of men and 2.1% (160,100) of women experienced current partner violence” (yes, this statement is silly - something ‘current’ isn’t what has happened since you were 15) and “4.9% (367,300) of men experienced violence from a previous partner compared to 15% (1,135,500) of women”. So the reissue cuts the numbers in half and changes the proportions. It does the same with the children witnesses, cutting them from 61% to 49% - I don’t know why.

Which is correct? Well, here’s the kicker, lads and ladettes - that original 2005 survey result that 31% of women have experienced violence from a partner is famous. It’s important. Because it is the origin of the oft-touted and much-repeated feminist claim here in Australia that “1 in 3 women will be in an abusive relationship in adult life”.

A claim, for the record, that based on a survey of this size, I am happy to accept. Well, happy is not the word, but you know what I mean. I accept it all the more as it is in line with the UN’s figures on violence against women (the UN is, of course, better informed than the average Australian feminist). The UN says, “Almost one in three women have been subjected to physical and/or sexual violence at least once in their life” - subtly different to being in a violent relationship, but still comparable. Of course, Australia is one of the safest countries in the world, but let’s not tell white feminists they aren’t the world’s most oppressed victims - one problem at a time.

But here’s the thing: if 31% of women experience violence from a partner - intimate partner violence - and 14.3% of men do, 14.3 being nearly half of 31 (closer to half of 31, I might add, than 31 is closer to 33.3) then, we can say, that for any 2 women who have suffered domestic violence, you will get 1 man.

1 in 3 intimate partner violence victims are men.

Is this single survey an outlier, that just needs to be reissued? Not at all: we see this number again and again. In the next ABS Survey in 2012, we see it in the breakdown of violence by known perpetrators: while a man on the street will rarely find himself the victim of assault by a female stranger, if the woman is known to him, the numbers are exact: so turning to the section, Men's experience of violence since the age of 15 by sex of perpetrator, we read, “An estimated 1,816,000 men had experienced violence by a known male (22% of all men ); and an estimated 933,900 men had experienced violence by a known female (11% of all men).” 1 in 3 of the perpetrators were women. If we turn back to the issue at hand, intimate partner violence, we see in table C something truly fascinating:

This is for violence from current or former partners in the last 12 months. Just look at that for a moment: 1 in 3, exactly 1 in 3 - 33.1 thousands of men and 66.2 thousands of women, 0.4% and 0.8%. This is consistent with the earlier stat, on current partner violence in general (not just last 12 months, so even if your current partner has been with you for decades and hasn’t been violent for years, you can still name them), which gives the numbers of 119.6 thousands of men, or 1.4%, compared to 237.1 thousands of women, or 2.7%. 1.4 vs 2.7 - again, over 1 in 3.

The reason I say it’s fascinating is this: when asked about violence from former partners, only 18.7 thousand men respond yes, compared to 66.3 thousands of women, a slightly higher number than for current! This is in accord with what we ‘know’ colloquially about women, that a victim of abuse can go from bad relationship to bad relationship. Why? If you’ve been paying attention to my various posts, you should know - childhood trauma, what I have (very slowly) been working toward talking about, what we ultimately want to prevent. It would appear, though, that once a man has been in an abusive relationship, he is more likely to “learn his lesson” and avoid them in the future - possibly because yes, men will recognise that even a victim can learn and change their behaviour for a better outcome, while women, alas, have feminists endlessly telling them, “don’t tell women to make better choices, tell men to stop abusing!!”

How about we do both? No, no, that’s victim blaming and misogyny, what was I thinking?

Notice one other thing: there is a ‘total’ for Partner Violence / Last 12 months that adds these numbers together to get: Men, 51.8 thousands or 0.6, women 132.5 thousands or 1.5%, which blows out the total past 1 in 3. But you can’t just do that - common sense says that the 66.2 thousand women who have experienced violence from a current partner in the last 12 months and the 66.3 thousand who have experienced it from a former partner are not going to be completely disparate groups: there is going to be overlap, probably massive overlap! And this is not just my opinion: note footnote (a) which I included, and was used earlier in the table: it says, “(a) Components for current partner and previous partner are not able to be added together to produce a total. Where a person has experienced violence by both a current partner and a previous partner they are counted separately for each partner type, but are counted only once in the aggregated total.” This has not happened for this total, and I suspect it is an oversight.

In fact I can basically prove it: if we go back to the numbers that table C is based on, which includes table 3, "EXPERIENCE OF VIOLENCE IN THE LAST TWELVE MONTHS, Relationship to perpetrator” we see the following:

Note that when you add up the numbers you get more than 100% for the percentages - so yes, while the 91.3% of men and 94.7% of women who didn’t experience violence in the previous 12 months are just stand-alone figures, the figures of those who did experience violence had some overlap in the different categories, as some experienced more than one type of violence.

Let’s move on. When we turn to the 2016 Personal Safety Survey report, we learn this: 1.6 million women report (physical) violence from current or former partner, and 2.2 million report emotional abuse: 547,600 men report violence and 1.4 million report emotional abuse. 

Adding these together we get a total view of abuse suffered by 2 million men, 3.8 million women. More than 1 in 3. Now again, there is likely to be overlap, but if we assume everyone who commits violence also commits emotional abuse, which seems very likely (imagine a physically abusive partner who hits but doesn’t also belittle / control / isolate a partner? Very hard to picture) - then we get numbers of just those 2.2 million women who reported emotional abuse (1.6 million of whom also experienced physical violence), and 1.4 million men who were emotionally abused (547,600 who are also physically abused): so again, it would be more than 1 in 3. Far more, actually.

So no matter how we look at it, lifetime experience, current partner or last 12 months, we keep coming back to that number. 1 in 3, sometimes slightly less, sometimes clearly more, 1 in 3 victims of domestic violence are men.

And we see it again in the numbers for stalking, which has a lot of overlap with the DV numbers: “Since the age of 15, 9.1% (681,700) of men have been stalked… compared to 19% (1,472,300) of women”. (This is from the stalking section of the 2005 ABS Personal Safety Survey reissue - I am going to have to rely on the reissue for much of my evidence, as I don’t have a full copy of the original text).

It also casually pops up on the front page of the NSW DOMESTIC VIOLENCE DEATH REVIEW TEAM REPORT 2017-2019 which said, “The silhouettes on the cover of this report represent the 272 women, 155 men and 103 children who lost their lives to domestic violence in NSW between 2000 and 2019.” So there is, unfortunately, a body count to back all this up, it’s not just numbers on a page or opinions in a survey.

Hey, look, there’s a whole website devoted to this! One in Three dot Com dot Au (Full disclosure - I only skimmed it. I do try to focus on child-centred things, no matter how often I get distracted or have to make detours to make a point).

When we look at the US, which is not directly comparable but, as with the UN, gives us a bigger set of figures to work from for a more comprehensive view, I find that bodies such as the NDACV and the national Hotline quote a CDC paper to the effect that, “More than 1 in 3 women (35.6%) and more than 1 in 4 men (28.5%) in the United States have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime.” So in the US it is worse for women - 31.x% up to 35.x% - but the number for men has doubled, from 14.x % to 28.x%.

Finally, let’s look at the UK figures: the Home Office, which defines domestic violence as “Violence Against Women and Girls” - I’m not kidding - says, “The year ending March 2020 CSEW data shows that 13.8% of men and 27.6% of women aged 16 to 74 have experienced domestic abuse behaviours since the age of 16, equivalent to an estimated 2.9 million male victims and 5.9 million female victims.” One in three. The UK government take it seriously because they have an, “ambition to reduce the prevalence of all VAWG crimes, regardless of who they affect, and to support all victims/survivors, including men and boys.” (Once again, not making it up).

So, 1 in 3 victims of domestic violence are men, the numbers are very clear, and doubtless you have already heard that number before. What you may not know is the savagery with which this simple number is denied by feminists. An example was seen in an infamous moment on Australian television which, admittedly, did not get savage, but was a one-sided moment where a panel of “experts” on DV were asked about the 1 in 3 number - and I put it in inverted commas because if the feminists want Christian Porter, the first respondent, as their expert spokesperson, boy howdy they can have him - and very little attempt was made to understand or defend the number, which will speak volumes about the make-up of the debaters. The very fact that only the white people spoke, and the one Aboriginal on the panel, Nova Peris, had to stay silent, speaks volumes. Anyway, the clip is only 4:10, so by all means watch it: Christian Porter, a conservative politician whom I cannot speak about because “If you can’t say anything nice…” and I seriously can’t, is unsurprisingly dismissive of the claim - just casually rejects it, smirking. (Seriously, watch the video - he smirks as he says this, probably because he gets applause from a left-leaning crowd for it). A police officer then speaks and talks about men being 25% of DV victims in NSW, but says, “more than half, the offender is still male”: that doesn’t actually address the number, which was 1 in 3 men as victims (I have demonstrated from the figures above that you can show 1 in 3 men as victims of women, but technically that is not being discussed here) but I think he is getting a few of his stats mixed up here, what with the various different ways DV, intimate partner violence, family violence and just violence in society can get recorded. I will move on to the issue of LGBT violence, as there is a belief - wrongly - that most men who experience DV suffer it in gay relationships from other men, and I will debunk that shortly.

The third person on the panel was a woman who chips in with, “perpetrators get really really smart at playing the victim”, as though men reporting as victims were just “playing the system” in her words - I have no response to that, but by all means think about the mentality of someone who would say that - and finally there is a woman who knew the Personal Safety Survey stats that I believe were quoted earlier in the episode (it’s been many years since I saw the full episode) and she starts by actually repeating a variant of the “one in three women will be in an abusive relationship as an adult” (she says it as, one in three women over 15 will suffer physical or sexual abuse from a known male) and she bases this, as I said earlier, on the Personal Safety Survey. She then says this is, “very different” to one in three men saying they are victims - note with men a survey response is only a man “saying” he has suffered, whereas a survey response from a woman is data. Hmmm. She says this is a distortion, and then claims there is actually 450,000 male victims out of 2,000,000, and for some reason calls this 30% men, 70% women: I just can’t work that out. Well, she was put on the spot, let’s give her a pass.

Bottom line? She read the data differently. She’s allowed to do that, and I will respond shortly.

She then goes on to point to British crime figures that catalogue the frequency and severity of crime, and says abuse of men reported is more likely to be one-off, where-as repeated abuse and more violent abuse tends to be targeted at women. From a women’s perspective, this is absolutely a valid and indeed central issue. From a children’s perspective, not so much - but I will explain that and get into the child-centred reading of all this at the end.

For the moment, I’m going to turn to a second, and far more savage, attack on the one-in-three figure, posted in the Sydney Morning Herald earlier that year (it refers to a Q and A episode but it was not the one I linked to, I can’t find it). This was by a reporter who often addresses domestic violence - almost exclusively as a women’s and indeed feminist issue - and she goes deep into the figures to make her point, so we can really address a strong objection and not some straw-man nonsense.

Her article is titled, The ‘One in Three’ Claim About Male Domestic Violence Victims is a Myth.

Let’s dig in!

Firstly, she puts her case on the table similar to the headline: “The claim made by many men's rights advocates that one in three victims of domestic violence are men is false. Utterly false.”

She acknowledges that the source of this claim is the Personal Safety Survey, and links to the ‘latest’ version (that’s what the linked site says, not her claim). The latest version, when she wrote this, I believe would have been the 2012 version.

And she then says that the number, from table 3, has a warning, “"Estimate has a relative standard error of 25 per cent to 50 per cent and should be used with caution."

You’ll notice I used both table 3 and table C (which is an amalgam of several of the tables), but I did not base my argument solely on this one number. One number could be an outlier. And yes, very small figures are liable to misrepresentation, I have made that point myself re the homelessness figures: it is relevant here with regard to the very small number of men who report sexual abuse within relationships (and yes, they are probably LGBT relationships).

But ONE IN THREE is not a small number. Not a tiny percentage that can be misrepresented.

And it is not an outlier. As I demonstrated at length above, it is a consistent figure that was already there in the 2005 survey (though not in the ‘reissue’??), is consistent whether you look at lifetime after 15, last 12 months or current partner, consistent when you looked at subsets like emotional abuse or stalking, and occurred again in the 2016 survey linked above (which she didn’t have at TOR), and when I finally got my hands on the 2021-22 figures, it is there again in the Cohabiting Partner Violence section, which gives us the figures of 2.7 million women and 1.5 million men suffered abuse of one type or another from a partner, with the breakdown showing a lot of overlaps.

But let’s stay with the 2012 survey the author was working from. If 0.4% of men responding, a fraction of a percent, has, “a relative standard of error of 25 to 50%”, then the figure of 0.8% of women responding - still a fraction of one percent - can hardly be treated as suddenly reliable: slightly more reliable, perhaps, but still surely containing a significant margin of error. (If any of you are actuaries, you can go HERE and calculate the exact margin of error, probably around 15%). Should we throw out the female numbers?

I say no, because I have never denied the ABS figures were a ‘survey’, not hard data - I said that the first time I responded to reliance on ABS figures! But as I said then, it’s our best source of numbers, so you don’t casually dismiss it. I didn’t when previous people used it, I simply engaged with and challenged the readings of these figures. And here, in the first example where I am actually relying on the ABS figures to make my point, I will do the same.

And I will, moreover, point out that using such figures to estimate the prevalence of DV is standard practise in the literature: for instance, THIS study into domestic violence during Covid says, “Victimisation surveys have, under normal circumstances, become an accepted way of estimating prevalence rates for domestic violence.” So, accepting the numbers without denying their limitations, let’s move on.

The author continues, “Domestic violence is extremely complex and it's not unusual for victims to be confused about whether their relationship is actually abusive. Nor can it always be defined by simply identifying "an act of violence".” She then brings in an anecdote, of an abused woman who did not think of what was happening to her as domestic violence. She continues on to explain that only 57% of respondents actually go through the 30 minute process, and the interviewers are trained not to continue if it puts the person in danger (from an abusive partner who does not want their victim talking about it).

So she moves, in a couple of paragraphs, from “these numbers are estimates with a high rate of inaccuracy” to “domestic violence is underreported, because victims can be prevented from speaking out or even realising their victimhood”. Her thinking, as she explains a few paragraphs later, is that because women may be underreporting, then ‘current partner’ numbers are unreliable, and the problem is doubtless bigger for women. The problem? She can only perceive this problem of female victims! The fact that men have the entirety of the domestic violence discourse telling them they’re not really victims, even if their partner ticks one or most or all of the boxes of an abusive partner, doesn’t occur to her as a reason for men underreporting. No, if the numbers show as high as 1 in 3, then men are being overreported, not the opposite.

So let’s explore that. Where did the ABS Personal Safety Survey come from, and is it likely to overreport, or underreport, violence against one gender or the other? The 2016 survey says on every single page the disclaimer, “The 2016 PSS was funded by the Department of Social Services under the National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children 2010–2022”, so it was female-focussed: it is, as we saw, the successor to 1996’s “Woman’s Safety Survey”. In fact, if we look at the original press release for the 2005 survey, it gets worse: at the end, we are told, “Funding for the women's component of the 2005 Personal Safety Survey was provided through the National Initiative to Combat Sexual Assault and Partnerships Against Domestic Violence - Australian Government initiatives administered by the Office for Women (OfW). The male component was funded by the ABS.” So this is still not a genuine attempt at equality of reporting, or equality at collecting data, or understanding the statistics - it is simply a section for men tacked on to something that is still female focussed.

THAT is extremely important: these surveys are designed to get, not the best and most accurate results in general, but the best and most accurate understanding of violence against women. I don’t bring this up to complain or howl about men being disadvantaged, but so you can understand how and why such surveys are undertaken at all. We already saw that there is a massive under-reporting of children - many of the questions in these surveys are only interested in 15 years and older - because children are not the focus, ‘people’ are not the focus. This is all part of an attempt to reduce violence against women in society, a perfectly laudable endeavour but one that can hardly be expected to produce accurate statistics for non-women, and certainly not a scenario where we can say, “the women are probably underreported, but the men are over-reported”. The women are far more likely to be reported as accurately as we can, whereas the male numbers are more likely to be underreported than otherwise if the aim of the exercise is to get to the heart of female victims, not male.

This female-focussed method of collecting data is spelled out in the methodology employed. The author of the Herald article mentions how the interviewers were trained not to put people in danger, with the sub-text that women (but not men) are underreporting. In the Explanatory Notes of the 2012 survey, we are told (par 17): 

To help ensure respondent comfort and well-being, as well as encouraging participation, the ABS used female interviewers for the PSS. It was considered that men and women would be more likely to feel comfortable revealing sensitive information about their possible experiences of violence to a women [sic]. This was based on collective advice from experts in the field during the survey development, was in line with the successful procedures followed for the 2005 PSS and was also supported by the 2012 PSS Survey Advisory Group. To cater for instances where this might not be the case, the ABS also trained a small number of male interviewers, in case a respondent preferred that their interview be conducted by a male. No requests for a male interviewer were made.

Ok, so they had men on hand just in case, that’s good, and I don’t want to malign these female interviewers whom I am sure were well trained, but again, which is more likely - that they failed to pick up on cues that a fellow woman was being abused and asked follow-up questions or made sure they were at ease, or that they failed to pick up on cues from the man? These interviews went for 30 minutes - since women generally use twice the rate of words as men when communicating, it is far more likely that a woman in that time will pick up on female cues than male, however you look at it. In fact, the more I think about this - that having men interviewed by other men to get the best results wasn’t the go, but having them interviewed by women was - what are the assumptions there? That people will open up more to women because they are non-threatening? That men will not open up about being victims of violence to other men because of the social stigma - a stigma that, again, this Herald author doesn’t acknowledge as being a factor in underreporting by men - but he won’t feel that stigma in reporting to someone of the same gender as his abuser? None of this makes a great deal of sense, albeit I absolutely recognise they have made a lot of effort to come up with the best system, as detailed in these explanatory notes. My suggestion would just be, when setting up the interview, ask if the person wants to be interviewed by a man or a woman, and assign that gender. To phrase it as, “we’re assigning a woman, but you can change that if you need to make a fuss” is to create an unnecessary bias in one direction.

Regarding whether men or women report issues, the 2005 press release says: “In the 12 months prior to the 2005 survey 35% of men and 36% of women who experienced physical assault by a male perpetrator reported these incidents to the police.” So, as a general rule of thumb, we would assume that the numbers are accurate proportionally, since both genders report equally that they are, well, not reporting their violence, or only reporting it a little over a third of the time. BUT, in both these cases the reporting is consistent with the narrative, that men are perpetrators of violence, so I don’t believe it is unreasonable to suspect that where it goes against the narrative, such as men reporting that they experience violence from women, that established hesitance to report increases, and men are under-reporting violence at the hands of women.

And best of all - if you want to believe that women are also under-reporting violence at the hands of women, violence that also goes against the narrative, go right ahead! (and yes, where this is intimate partner violence - in queer relationships - there is absolutely evidence to support that this is underreported.)

Do I have anything other than these reading of the numbers? Well, yes. I could also respond with anecdotes - the Herald author got to use one - but as above, that’s not data. No, for clear, substantiated examples of the problem, I point to the Holly Maxwell case in the previous article [] I wrote, where a woman abused her child and sent photos and videos of the abuse to the father. Clear, obvious abuse, as defined under Emotional Abuse in the 2012 ABS Survey (see Endnote 1):

• Threatened to take their child/ren away from them

• Threatened to harm their child/ren

And as I said in my previous article, all the charges brought against Holly Maxwell were about the child, nothing about this act of domestic violence against her former partner, no offer of a victim’s impact statement that I can find.

And this is consistent. You better believe I have plenty of examples of this. Think how many times I point out that an action against a child did not elicit a victim’s impact statement from the father.

Not just he said / she said anecdotes, but substantiated cases where the authorities have gotten involved, and decided the woman’s behaviour just doesn’t bear acting on, even though it fits the definition of abuse. Nothing in the court system, nothing in the DV stats.

And compare that to a scenario like (most famously) Rosie Batty, where, through no fault of hers, the death of her son became the exemplar of violence against women.

So yes, we have absolute proof that male figures get underreported - because even when abuse is clearly present, the authorities can simply ignore it, if it is aimed at a male.

We have one other interesting demonstration that men underreport: this one is from the 2021-22 figures. In the new section on Witnessing parental violence during childhood, it says this:

Of women, 16% (1.6 million) witnessed parental violence during childhood, including:

14% (1.4 million) who witnessed violence towards their mother

5.0% (498,300) who witnessed violence towards their father

Of men, 11% (1.0 million) witnessed parental violence during childhood, including:

8.9% (853,800) who witnessed violence towards their mother

3.7% (350,000) who witnessed violence towards their father

Think about that. There is no reason these numbers should be different - men and women, when they were children, would have been witnessing the same domestic violence. Do men commit less violence in front of their sons than their daughters? Do women? 

Either the men are less likely to report, or they are less likely to view certain behaviours as domestic violence.

Either way, men are underreporting. And if I may throw in a US perspective, the US peak body for domestic violence puts it like this:

…men seem not to report abuse in the same way women do. In fact, many men remain silent because they think there’s no point in reporting the abuse. They think no one will ever believe them.

Let’s move on to sample size. The author claims that only 57% of respondents were included: that is, a lot of people who were approached did not respond or could not be included. She hypothesised that some of the non-respondents were women in abusive relationships where the man would not let her speak freely or be alone, or she was just afraid (this overlaps with her claims that the ‘current partner’ numbers are unreliable).

That is reasonable - this is a genuine concern. Just like surveys that are conducted in a battered women’s shelter - yes such things happen, they give a good understanding of victims of abuse, and of the nature of abuse, but a very bad understanding of abuse across the population - so too a survey into victims of violence that doesn’t include women whose partners won’t let them respond is going to have some obviously skewed results. But there are two things to take into account here. Firstly, once again, the author only considers how this affects women - the fact that men, who declined to respond at an almost identical rate (56% against 57%), might likewise be wanting to avoid the backlash of an abusive partner, does not even occur to her. And the backlash for a man might not be as bad as for a woman, might not be a risk of death or hospitalisation, but then most scenarios of abuse for women don’t risk such things either. For a man it might be a muttered, “happy wife, happy life”, by which he means if he doesn’t make sure his wife is happy, by refusing things like this survey, she will make it a priority that he is not happy, through nagging and belittling and emasculating and various other forms of emotional abuse, or flat out slapping or kicking or throwing or the other forms of physical violence that women use more than men (men favour punching).

Secondly, although there is a genuine concern here that some of the most at-risk women have been missed, the sample size of the women is more than three and a half times that of the men. Here is the explanation from pars 27-29:

There were 41,350 private dwellings approached for the survey, comprising 31,650 females and 9,700 males. The design catered for a higher than normal sample loss rate for instances where the household did not contain a resident of the assigned gender. Where the household did not contain an in scope resident of the assigned gender, no interview was required from that dwelling. For further information about how this procedure was implemented refer to Data Collection.

After removing households where residents were out of scope of the survey, where the household did not contain a resident of the assigned gender, and where dwellings proved to be vacant, under construction or derelict, a final sample of around 30,200 eligible dwellings were identified.

Given the voluntary nature of the survey a final response rate of 57% was achieved for the survey with 17,050 persons completing the survey questionnaire nationally. The response comprised 13,307 fully responding females and 3,743 fully responding males, achieving gendered response rates of 57% for females and 56% for males.

So again, the problem cannot simply be argued an ‘under-reporting of women’, since they made sure to speak to 3.5 times more women than men to make sure they were getting accurate results for the women.

That, after all, was the point.

And one last thing needs to be said about dismissing the current partner figures for men, but claiming the women’s are somehow significantly underreported - in table 3a of the 2012 report, line 11 we are given the relative standard error for women who claim they have not experienced violence in the last 12 months.

It’s 0.3%. Not some massive hidden number of frightened women who didn’t dare report their abuse. Yes, I accept the common-sense arguments such a group may exist, I absolutely accept that, but I also accept the same common-sense suggestion that a similar group of underreported men may also exist. But if we just go by this incredibly low rate of error, then any claim that these statistics support the author’s argument are, in her own words, “a myth. Utterly false”.

Having made these (unconvincing) arguments in favour of dismissing the current partner stats - well the stats for men, don’t dismiss the stats for women, those are underreported don’t you know… - the Herald author then moves on to her great gotcha moment. Having quoted one of the ABS staff who explained that the current partner question “doesn't consider the complexities and nuances of domestic violence” - but only for women, the additional complexity and nuance of recognising abuse of men in a discourse designed for women never occurs to them -  she says, (and I’ll quote her in full so as not to misrepresent her):

A question from the PSS that takes a longer view, which may be both statistically and slightly inherently more reliable, asks about the respondent's experience of violence from a previous partner since they were 15 years old (Table 4). 21 per cent of the people who answered yes to that question were men, so already we've gone from 1 in 3 to 1 in 5.

So let’s look at table 4.

Notice line 19 gives another current partner figure, I think I mentioned it above - its 119.6 thousands men vs 237.1 thousands women, or just over 1 in 3. Heh.

But, when you look at previous partner stats it is 336.3 thousands men vs 1262.2 thousand women, so the men are, indeed, only 21%.

Except… this is the table for violence, which is specifically defined as “physical or sexual violence or threat”. And that is NOT the totality of intimate partner abuse, it's not even the majority. Because - and I shouldn’t have to tell a feminist writer for the Herald’s Daily Life section this - the largest sort of intimate partner abuse is emotional abuse (I believe my American readers may tend to use the term “psychological abuse” for this, but then this is all several years old and we have so many new terms now it’s not funny).

We find the emotional abuse stats HERE:

Women were more likely than men to have experienced emotional abuse by their current partner since the age of 15. (Refer Table 32)

Current partner

An estimated 392,100 women (4.5% of all women) had experienced emotional abuse by their current partner since the age of 15.

An estimated 248,000 men (2.9% of all men) had experienced emotional abuse by their current partner since the age of 15.

Women were also more likely than men to have experienced emotional abuse by a previous partner since the age of 15.

Previous partner

An estimated 1,840,600 women (21% of all women) had experienced emotional abuse by a previous partner since the age of 15.

An estimated 1,024,500 men (12% of all men) had experienced emotional abuse by a previous partner since the age of 15.

Are we seeing a pattern here, folks? Compare any two bad relationships and for a man it is way more than 1 in 3 likely to be the abusive one, but across a lifetime, the numbers drop - men learn and don’t go from bad relationship to bad relationship. For men, that’s just common sense. For women - well, don’t blame her, we are told.

It’s not about blame, it’s about choices. It’s about agency.

Anyways, that’s a separate issue. To see all the numbers, check out table 32.

What matter is when we add those numbers to the violence ones:

• Men, 1,024,500 + 336,300  = 1,360,800

• Women, 1,840,600 + 1,262,200 = 3,102,800

That’s 30.5%. Is that where the lady on the TV got her 30% figure from? Clever girl! (Don’t you feel better, by the way, when you make the effort to find the origin of a figure, and don’t just dismiss it out of hand because you don’t agree with it?)

I need hardly say, 30.5% is a lot closer to 33.3% or ‘one in three” than to 21%...

BUT… as previously, there would have to be overlap. If you go back and check table 4, you can again see that when you add the numbers up, you get way over 100%. So, reasonably, there would have to be overlap between physical and sexual abuse on one hand, and emotional abuse on the other - especially when the most prominent form of emotional abuse women report is constant bad langauge (denigrating names and things said to belittle, shame or humiliate the person). Men report higher levels of, well, everything else [SOURCE]

So once again, either we believe that the violent and sexually abusive men were mysteriously silent while brutalising their partners, or we recognise overlap.

Therefore we either do as I did above and suspect that the numbers pretty much overlap completely - 1,840,600 women were emotionally abused, 1,262,200 of whom were also physically abused etc, or we theorise an amalgam of some sorts. The national US body that runs the National DV Hotline I mentioned above puts the number at 84%.

Thus it’s either 21% of women and 12% of men - men are more than 1 in 3, in fact they are 36.3% - or we take a back-of-the-envelope figure somewhere between 30.5 and 36.3 (perhaps 84% of the way toward 36.3), which would be somewhere in the vicinity of…

One in three.

There is a reason this number is so consistent, and so well defended. It keeps popping up.

Turning back to our Herald author (who, let’s remember, was last seen forgetting to include emotional abuse figures in her domestic violence assessment - and yes, we’re almost finished with her) she then says, 

Table 22 of the PSS gives some information about the frequency of partner violence. As above, current partner violence is unreliable, so we need to look at the more robust data on previous partners. 84 per cent of the people who reported more than one violent incident from a previous partner were women.

Actually, as we saw current partner violence is not at all unreliable - the fact that only 0.4% of men and 0.8% of women are in violent relationships at any given moment is simply reality, and it’s good to know that less than 1% of either gender is in an abusive relationship at any given time - but let’s keep her honest and look at table 22.

O dear. We see exactly why she doesn’t want you relying on the current partner figures, because - line 13 - the percentages are identical.

And even when we get down to the previous partner totals, it is 50% men versus 73% women. Not the huge gap you may have expected.

Now, certainly, there are more women claiming men are physically or sexually violent or threatening “most or all of the time”, more than a quarter of those saying they suffered abuse. I just don’t know what to say to that - I can’t even fathom what that looks like. A male partner who can’t be in the same room, can’t communicate at all without being physically or sexually threatening or actually violent? Of course, part of that is my privilege of never being in such a relationship, I absolutely get that, and I am not saying it’s utterly inconceivable, but as a man, I would use the term “all / most of the time” differently. Perhaps the respondents did too. (We can, apparently, ignore the women who say their current partners are violent “all / most of the time” because they have the 25-50% error rate ‘unreliable” asterisk. Apparently such things don’t happen in current relationships, only in the past. Best to keep away from the past, then).

Since these are percentages of what were uneven figures to start with, the author is able to legitimately claim the 84% figure she says, though I don’t feel this paints an accurate picture at all. But we’ll give it to her. She then rounds out her arguments by pointing out that:

• The PSS does not address the effect of the violence on the victim.

• It doesn't ask if the victim was physically injured by the violence.

• It doesn't ask if they felt frightened or helpless or controlled.

• It doesn't ask if the violent act was committed in self-defence.

• It doesn't ask if respondents wanted to leave the relationship because of the violence, or if they were able to do so.

• It doesn't ask if they needed help to leave, or if that help was available and effective.

I’ll just point out two things here:

Firstly, yet again, the assumption that all these only happen to women.

Secondly (a nit pick) - yes, it does take into account if the person “wanted to leave”, and also if they “felt frightened or helpless or controlled.” The definition of “emotional abuse” found at Endnote 1 says it is behaviours “that were repeated with the intent to prevent or control their behaviour and were intended to cause them emotional harm or fear” - so every man who reported emotional abuse felt frightened, helpless or controlled - and includes situations where the abuser:

• Stopped or tried to stop them from contacting family, friends or community

• Stopped or tried to stop them from using the telephone, Internet or family car

• Monitored their whereabouts (e.g.. constant phone calls)

• Controlled or tried to control where they went or who they saw

So yes, whether the responder was able to leave was indeed taken into account.

It also makes two important caveats: it says:

Emotional abuse excludes:

Nagging - a respondent whose spouse nagged them was not defined as being emotionally abused unless the respondent perceived this behaviour caused them emotional harm or fear.

A respondent who has a substance abuse, gambling or compulsive shopping issue (etc), whose spouse restricted their access to money, the car, or the internet, are not defined as being emotionally abused unless the respondent perceived that these restrictions caused them emotional harm or fear.

This last bit is fantastic, no you can’t just say you’re emotionally abused because you are nagged (though I must admit, someone who has been nagged daily for 30 or 40 years might say otherwise…) and likewise, you can’t cry, “financial abuse!” or “controlling behaviour” if your partner is doing things in response to your own addictive behaviours. These are sensible caveats.

And the final comment by our author? Ooo, it's a doozy. After a handwave to the ‘reality’ of male victims of domestic violence - o sure, they exist, just not in numbers large enough to care about (ok, that’s a bit mean) - she says in the last sentence:

…the facts are that women and children are overwhelmingly the victims of domestic violence, and men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of violence, both against women and against each other.

Do you see that? Please tell me I haven’t been wasting my time, and I’ve at least educated you enough to pick that up.

After throwing in children for no reason - everything discussed so far has been about experiences of those 15 years and over, so she apparently just wants the emotional impact of the “women and children” line - she then drops it again immediately.

She knows she can’t honestly accuse men of being the overwhelming perpetrators of violence against children! She’s been doing this long enough to know the numbers go the other way!

This is common, folks - it is very common among feminist authors in the media, that they will rail about domestic violence, drop in the phrase “women and children” at every opportunity to co-opt the legitimate concerns all adultst have about child abuse, but then mysteriously don’t mention the actual figures because they know. I will probably do an entire article about this someday, and will try not to get diverted by it now.

So there we go, one in three victims of intimate partner violence are men, despite claims to the contrary.

Perhaps you are wondering why I am worrying about an 8 year old article about 12 year old data. Well, re the data, I addressed the 2005, 2012 and 2016 and 2021-22 ABS personal safety surveys, and showed the results were consistent, and they are the most recent (the 2021-2 figures were released in 2023, Covid delayed). So they are the most recent Australian numbers.

As for the article, as I said, this was meant to address a steel-man objection, and the author from the Herald I was referring to, other than having done her homework by going through the actual tables of the data and interviewing the people behind the survey, is not just a good journalist but is also the Herald’s go-to person for domestic violence issues. (I mean that, by the way - there is (mostly) nothing wrong with this person as a journalist, her problem is not dishonesty or lack of journalistic ability, it’s that she literally cannot conceive of all this abuse also applying to men - not even a third of it. All she had to do was believe the numbers that were right there, not tie herself in knots trying to get around them). I have seen this article linked to authoritatively as though it ‘demolishes’ the one-in-three claim, so I thought it worth correcting.

And as I read this journalist’s other material, I came to realise something fascinating. At first I was inclined to believe she was deliberately covering up when she “overlooked” children in railing about male violence. But I saw something far sadder.

She knows all the evidence, and the problem is not that she is covering it up - it's that she can’t put it together because there is an ideological pillar already in its place.

So she writes one article about how women are 140 times more like to die on the roads than be murdered on the streets - yes, NSW is really that safe for women, while I can rattle off a handful of names of women killed by strangers on the streets of Victoria in the last decade, I can’t name a single woman here in Sydney - and does she conclude that women are being frightened pointlessly by a feminist media narrative with no basis in reality? No, but I wouldn’t expect that much of a red-pill moment for her. What bothers me, as she then examines male stranger violence as though it is a thing for women to fear, is this comment:

In one of the most comprehensive studies of men who kill, criminology professors Rebecca and Russell Dobash spent 10 years interviewing hundreds of murderers incarcerated in British prisons. Their findings are profoundly disturbing. They found it was common, but not consistent, that men who committed murder come from troubled backgrounds, with histories of child abuse and growing up with domestic violence. As adults, many (but not all) of the men who killed women had problems with alcohol and unemployment.

So she knows that men who commit violence are not just ‘evil’, but, like women who commit violence, have backgrounds of childhood abuse and violence themselves, backgrounds that continue into adulthood with dysfunction such as unemployment, and self-medicating through alcohol.

And when she revisits the one-on-three numbers after the 2016 census to “debunk” it again (she doesn’t, she instead engages with some nonsense that the eponymous MRA website claims) she makes this stunning admission:

Intimate partner violence is the only life-threatening social issue where women are the overwhelming majority of victims. Suicide, murder, road deaths, cancer deaths, drug overdose, substance abuse, gambling addiction and incarceration all disproportionately affect men but none of those issues get a fraction of the attention Men's Rights Activists give to domestic violence.

The main focus of MRAs - highlighting men getting destroyed in court and seeing children lose access to their fathers - is not something she mentions here. What I find fascinating about this sentence is, you can substitute the word ‘feminists’ for MRAs and the sentence only becomes more accurate.

She knows that although the narrative always has to be “women are the real victims”, intimate partner violence is the only major area (“life threatening social issue”) where this is actually true: as I have said many times, it’s also the only form of violence, domestic or otherwise, where women are the predominant victims. She knows this. But she can never question why it is we talk about intimate partner violence more than all those other areas, because she is one of the people who makes it so.

And finally, while talking about an (in)famous coroner‘s report that looked at a decade of domestic violence deaths and concluded that, basically women never kill men while perpetrating domestic violence against a victim (you’ll forgive me if I don’t go into that claim, that is once again an article in itself) she asserts the following:

[During the decade being examined,] 53 children were killed by a parent.

• Nearly 60% of them were boys.

• Half of them were under 2 years old.

• 75% occurred in a domestic violence context, but in just over half those cases, the child was not the direct victim of the abuse.

• 80% of the fathers who killed their children were perpetrators of domestic violence.

• 94% of the mothers who killed their children were victims of domestic violence.

She then goes on, 

But what about prevention directed at the source of the problem? We need strong services for children living with domestic violence. Boys growing up with violence need help to understand the damage done to them and to ensure they do not carry that violence on in their adult lives.

What, do I not say this constantly? She knows, once again, that today’s abuser is yesterday’s victim, that today’s man - or woman - committing the most horrendous acts, is acting out the trauma of childhood.

So who commits the trauma? Well, let’s revisit those figures quickly. She knows boys are targetted in child abuse - not just for death, which she mentioned here first, but she has surely seen the stats I have quoted so many times, that every form of abuse mostly affects boys except household sexual abuse, which girls suffer more. But let’s not assume what she knows (and of course I only do so because I can see she is someone informed who does her homework - go and read that whole article where she attacks MRAs above, she does a very good job demolishing one of their claims even as she unintentionally puts all her biases on display), let’s stick to the coroner’s report in front of her.

Firstly, notice how she reports the numbers so we go from “children are being murdered” to “the women who kill are the real victims!” <sigh>

Secondly - and again, I don’t want to get bogged down on this, now we are back to something child-focussed I could go on indefinitely but I will try to keep it short - the coroner’s report needs a quick bit of background. It is, as the name suggests, looking into domestic violence deaths - and it is a REAL problem that a woman killing her child (or her husband) isn’t by definition regarded as committing domestic violence, but only if there is a history or reported DV incidents. So the report gives us this caveat:

Having reviewed every case from the 10 year review period, it was determined that of the 56 cases where a parent killed a child/ren (resulting in 69 deaths) there were 40 cases (52 deaths) where a child was killed in a domestic violence context. 

So immediately we learn that a quarter (17/69) of the children murdered by a parent don’t fit the definition of domestic violence.

Do you see why I keep saying there are problems in how we record DV numbers? How can a parent who kills their child not get recorded as committing domestic violence? Well, when the definition is that flawed!

Does anyone think we are talking about men here? No, any man who did such a thing would be committing domestic violence against his (ex-)partner, he would always be included. I will bet dollars to donuts that what we have here are women with mental illness killing their children.

Which is the most common scenario of child murder.

Next, let’s quickly look at the 94% number. This is completely misleading (though probably not deliberately). What the report actually says is:

Almost all of the 17 female parents who killed their child/ren in domestic violence context were victims of domestic violence from a current or former intimate partner (N=16, 94%). 

So the important part is ‘current or former’. This is not simply abused women taking out their current problems on a child - a woman could be in an abusive relationship as a teen, then have a stable marriage for 20 years and when it all falls apart and she drowns the children to get back at her husband, she will still appear in the stats as “victim of intimate partner violence”.

Is this a fair reading? Well, if we look at the Monash Filicide research folks I have referenced in the past, they say in a report from Cambridge (in the section Perpetrator Factors): 

Mothers were characterised as being mentally ill (52%), separated from or with no current partner (45%), having a history of crime (30%), being a victim of domestic violence (23%), and having drug (22%) and alcohol (11%) abuse issues.

So while the woman might have a 94% chance of being a DV victim at some time in her life, it is down to 23% in the situation where she kills, and indeed women who kill are more likely to be known criminals than current victims of domestic violence. Kinda reframes things a bit, doesn’t it. Reminds you the victim is the child, not the mother.

Ok, so again, our Herald author probably hasn’t read that study. But she has the data in front of her on who is doing the killing. (Remember, we have removed the ‘non-DV’ killings, which, other than one case of euthanasia by both parents, I suspect are basically all female perpetrators: again, a father or step-father murdering his child will never not be considered domestic violence). This is on page ix - 25 males, 15 dads and 10 step-fathers. 17 women, 16 mums and 1 step-mother. 

Mums, or the step-dads she has brought into the child’s life, kill most kids. Kids are safer with their dad. Once again, removing the allegedly abusive dad from the scene makes things less safe, not more safe.

But that requires a bit of thought. Ok, lets turn to the penultimate thing we learn (also pag ix):

Over half of the male parents who killed their child/ren in a domestic violence context reported being a victim of violence and abuse during their childhood (N=14, 56%). Over half of the female parents who killed their child/ren in a domestic violence context reported being a victim of violence and abuse during their childhood (N=10, 59%).

So for all the attempts to position mum as the real victim, what we actually see is it is practically the same in both cases - whether a man or a woman, it is childhood trauma that drives more than half of these situations, as much for men as for women.

So a quick recap:

• The author knows men are the victims of basically all the serious horrors in society except intimate partner violence

• She knows boys suffer the majority of abuse, and women are actively involved in that abuse

• She knows there is a cycle, and that we need to prevent those boys growing up to becoming abusive men

But she never puts it all together. No, tell her something as simple as one in three men are victims of intimate partner violence (not every case of which will involve a female perpetrator) and she will immediately start blindly defending the women, ignoring the numbers and attacking the (MRA) messengers.

It's sad. She’s a smart and talented journalist who is trying to do the right thing and fight the scourge of domestic violence, but she can only think within the narrative, and even when she is presented with the evidence needed to break that cycle - by holding women accountable for their treatment of children so those children don’t grow up to be men with a real problem with women, and understanding the trauma that men are acting out - she can’t see it.

Oy…

Now, you might at this point be asking, “well, so what. All you have done is prove maybe men are a third of DV victims, women are still two thirds. So women have it worse, they still suffer twice as badly as men, and they suffer worse outcomes such as murder, being forced into shelters etc”.

Correct. I will say, yet again, that my point in bringing all this up is not to claim that somehow men have it worse, or they are the real victims. No, no, no. I am not saying that. I am simply demonstrating that women can be perpetrators as well as victims, something that is often lost. Yes, men are the predominant perpetrators, but women are only the predominant victims when it comes to intimate partner violence. And beyond intimate partner violence, the numbers tell a very different story.

Trust me, I’ll get us there. Let’s keep going.

For starters, let’s look at the sites where violence happens (long-time readers will remember, we are never meant to do that!)

Looking at this figure from the 2005 ABS Personal Safety Survey, which shows where victims of violence predominantly experience it.

Look at that! We didn’t just bust one myth, I think we busted all of them!

First, look at male-on-male violence in the home (or ‘domestic violence’). It’s there, but it is not the ‘majority’ men are reporting. Now, there are a variety of scenarios this would cover - adult siblings getting into a fight, a father getting into a fight with his adult son - so even what we have is not clear cut.

What we do not have, is the claim, made above by that police officer on Q and A, that most domestic violence is men on men. And certainly, keeping in mind there is a lot more than just gay male violence going on there, we also don’t have the idea that most male victims of domestic violence are victims of gay intimate partner violence.

No, most male victims in the home are victims of female behaviour. Female violence, even leaving aside emotional abuse.

Why are the statistics so different (between victims’ accounts and what the police think is happening)? Because most men who experience violence at the hand of a woman will never have her charged, never get the police involved. It’s that simple.

Now, moving on to female victims (and note, these numbers are comparing percentages, so the fact that the male and female bars might be similar heights doesn’t mean men and women suffer the same, women still suffer more domestic violence than men) and the women are telling us they suffer a lot of violence in the home at the hands of men - we knew that - but also that there are proportionally a lot of female perpetrators there, too! In fact, we have much higher female perpetration against women than male against men - so rather than dismissing male victimhood as “just gay men”, we need to actually consider the high levels of violence in lesbian relationships. So, turning to the government’s AIFS website, their study of LGBT intimate partner violence HERE (pg 2) makes the point, “lesbian women were more likely than gay men to report having been in an abusive same-sex relationship (41% and 28% respectively)”. Later studies I have seen (by the same government organisations) that take into account the wider understanding of the ‘rainbow’ than just ‘gay men and lesbian women’, show that women report violence the least in hetero relationships, then more-so if they are bi, and finally the highest number (41% here being higher than anything reported for women in general in the ABS stats) among exclusively lesbian women. 

As I said so many times - take men out of the scenario, and violence goes up, not down. And, rather than ignoring violence against men as “just gay males”, we could legitimately point out that more violence against women is caused by other women.

Finally, I want to throw in this section from pg 4:

Calton and colleague’s review of the literature (2015) found that gender roles and assumptions about LGBTIQ relationships affect the way domestic violence service providers view intimate partner violence. As described above, the dominant view of men as perpetrators and women as victims may inhibit the ability of both victims and service providers to recognise intimate partner violence in LGBTIQ relationships. In lesbian relationships involving physical violence, for instance, there may be the assumption that women are incapable of exerting physical power over other women. Similarly, stereotypes about gay men not being “masculine” might result in views that they are not capable of violence (Calton et al., 2015; Kay & Jefferies, 2010). Trans victims may be especially affected by a heteronormative lens: “without the stereotypically masculine aggressor and stereotypically female victim easily identifiable, both survivor and potential helpers may not recognise abuse” (though some victims may be in relationships with heterosexual men) (Calton et al., 2015, p. 5). 

Leave out the queer focus here for a second - this is an admission not only that our understanding of domestic violence is distorted because of the “dominant view of men as perpetrators and women as victims”, but that service providers and even researchers approach the subject through this lens (even if only instinctively) and have to actively combat those prejudices: something they do for the LGBT community, but DON’T DO when studying violence against children because they persist with the “women and children” narrative!!!

Don’t start me. Getting back to the ABS figures, let’s move on to “in the open” - out on the street - unsurprisingly, that is where men face more threats from other men, we know that from crime statistics, and they face very little threat from women. But look at the women’s numbers - just because Australia is very safe, women still experience some violence from men on the streets, but they actually report experiencing slightly more, maybe 1%, from women!

And when we look at violence in the workplace, yup, moreso from women.

And in licensed premises? Lot’s of male-on-male violence there, but the women? Surely it is drunken men grabbing women from all directions, right…? No, it's not even close, several times more violence from other women than from men!

And finally, in the catch-all “other place”, women still think of other women as the perpetrators more than men.

Tell me, have you ever heard any of this before? I hadn’t!

Do you see why I keep hammering how false, how deceitful, how useless the narrative of “men violent, women victims” is? Not only does it fail victims outside the Intimate Partner narrative (particularly children), it fails to identify perpetrators just as much!

Perhaps you are wondering if this is all an outlier - what do the other ABS surveys say?

Surprise! This is all covered up again - it’s completely lacking from both the 2012 and 2016 reports! Who saw that coming?

Hey, we’re close to the end. One last thing to address, and it’s important - the undeniable fact that men do far more damage to women when they commit domestic violence. A punch, as they say, does more damage than a slap - and men certainly kill more women than vice versa by absolutely any metric.

Again, I am not going to dispute this, or suggest somehow men have it worse. That’s not the problem with the question.

The problem is this (and this, indeed, is why I have gone through all this data at all) - the argument that men are more violent because they physically do more damage, which is relevant in men vs women scenarios, is not an issue in women vs children issues - the woman can do far more damage than a child.

This argument only comes up because we place women at the centre of the discourse. Since men do so much violence - kill more, drive women and children into shelters etc - it is natural that a hefty focus of the domestic violence discussion is on male violence against women. But it is not the totality of the situation. Were we to focus on men, the nature of the problem becomes utterly different - we end up with, not so much less violence, but a different locus of violence: where men use their fists or, far less often, a weapon, women use the violence of the state. The Australian Institute of Criminology’s 2020 statistical bulletin into police shootings, which have only been increasing, reminds us that when police use lethal violence, 98% of the time it is against men, and 39% of the time it is related to an alleged domestic violence situation (pg 5). The violence of the state also occurs in scenarios such as locking men away on the uncorroborated word of an angry (ex)-partner, even if it is only overnight. This is one of the main complaints and foci of MRAs, yet in the mainstream, this is just utterly disregarded or casually denied with the assertion, “believe women”. The manosphere’s other big complaint, that men are denied access to their children (and, more importantly, that children are denied access to their father and paternal grandparents), is tipped on its head, and the threat of taking children away or denying access, is literally discussed as something men do to women as part of coercive control, but is denied as something women do to men, despite being present in the ABS data as something men report more (the Australian Social Trends 2014 issue I linked to above tells us, “Men who had experienced emotional abuse by their current partner were more likely than women to report that their partner had threatened to take their children away (16% compared with 7%)” and the staggering phrase, “Women who had experienced emotional abuse from a previous partner were less likely than men to report that their previous partner had lied to their children with the intent of turning their children against them (29% compared with 38%).”). We can only say that if men are threatening to do this, they are really bad at it, because the custody outcomes are very clear - one legal team give us the following:

Based on information collected for the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS), data from 2014 showed that 83% of child custody arrangements ordered a majority of (or complete) custody to the mother. In just 9% of cases, custody is split evenly between a mother and father. And just 8% of all sampled child custody arrangements saw the father take a majority of custody, or complete custody.

The most common arrangement is that the mother takes 66-84% custody of the child or children, while the father takes 14-34%. This roughly equates to fathers caring for the children involved for 2-5 days each fortnight.

What does all this mean? It means as a way of dealing with domestic violence as a whole, the narrative of “men perpetrators, women victims”, and the system that supports it, fails miserably to address the different ways men and women can be both victims and perpetrators of abuse and simply follows a female-centric understanding. Again, there is a reasonable reason for this, as men commit more and greater violence. But in doing so, it hides or dismisses the reality of female abusive behaviour as somehow “lesser” and not worth worrying about, in part because men are physically stronger than women and also more likely to use physical force, so they should be the focus as perpetrators.

However, when we take a child-centred approach, this narrative collapses, as both women and men are physically much larger than a child and a serious physical threat. Nor can we dismiss women as users of physical violence, as I must again point you to the stats that show outside the home, away from the intimate partner violence that is the focus of violence discussions, women are more likely to be physically assaulted by other women than by a man. Likewise, again, women are more likely to be assaulted by a female intimate partner than a male one, proportionally, though not in real numbers as obviously hetero relationships dominate statistically as they do in reality.

And similarly, women pose a greater threat to children. That is what I have said all along, and we now have more than enough evidence to see that this claim doesn’t just stand on its own merits, but is:

• Consistent with women committing one third of domestic violence against male partners, even though such partners may be larger and this may not be a safe thing to do

• Consistent with women committing even higher rates of violence against other vulnerable groups, such as people with disabilities and the elderly

• Consistent with women committing higher rates of violence in LGBT relationships where they are able to exercise forms of dominance, such as physical or financial, they they may not typically be able to do in relationships with men

• Consistent with women suffering higher rates of some mental illnesses that can lead to abusive behaviour (particularly cluster B disorders), such as Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Parental Abuse and Histrionic Personality Disorder.

• And finally, the horrific levels of sexual abuse that girls experience, that explains so much of the behaviour that these abusive women later exhibit.

This is why we need to view women not simply as victims, but as perpetrators where appropriate, and as both where necessary.

Next time I will delve into the academic research to see if it supports this conclusion.