The Cycle of Abuse

A theory on how to break it

Today is (largely) not a deep dive into any numbers or anything, though there will be lots of stats, just a simple statement of what this Substack is trying to achieve, through taking a look at a simple concept from a subtly different perspective.

So what is the cycle of abuse? I’ll use that term, although there are others that mean the same thing: some say ‘cycle of violence’, people at my church use terms like ‘generational curse’. I’m not judging, agreeing or disagreeing, I’m just going to use that particular term for consistency. Some people don’t use the word ‘cycle’ at all, people who doubtless know more about this than I do, and I respect that.

Firstly, what I don’t mean - I am not talking about the cycle of an abuser grooming, then abusing someone, then moving on to the next victim. I am also not talking about the cycle abusive relationships go through, where the abusive partner gives the victim a honeymoon period where everything seems fine, but then tension builds until there is a moment of explosive violence, followed by apparent repentance, and a contrite honeymoon-like phase before it all begins again. Those are legitimate uses of the phrase, but not what I am speaking about.

I am speaking about the generational stuff, abused kids growing up to become abusive parents because that’s how they were raised, similar to how people who grow up around poverty tend to be poor themselves, or people who grow up around substance abuse tend to be at risk of addiction themselves.

I was looking for simple definitions I could work from and I found THIS article in Psychology Today that just nailed it, in my opinion. So I am going to fair-use a whole paragraph to explain what I am looking at, but I recommend reading the whole article, it’s probably shorter than anything I write:

“If you could be a fly on the wall, you might see the cycle of abuse being repeated in the way a husband talks to his wife in the same dismissive, condescending tone in which his father spoke to his mother or in the way his wife passively concedes to her husband’s demands, just as her mother did. You might see it in the way one or both parents has an inordinate need to dominate and control their children. Or, one or both parents may repeat the cycle by neglecting their children in much the same way they were neglected, by constantly putting their own needs before those of their children, not paying attention to or being affectionate toward their children, or being emotionally or physically unavailable to their children because they are abusing alcohol or drugs.”

So it’s this generational cycle I am referring to: a more simplistic way of describing it (and certainly the most popular way) might be this:

• Man abuses woman

• Woman abuses children

• Children grow into men who abuse woman and women who abuse children

Of course this is, as mentioned, very simplistic, there are plenty of men who abuse women and children, or befriend women to abuse their children (particularly sexual predators) and there are plenty of women who abuse men. Also, as that PT article makes the point, the cycle often manifests not just in adults who abuse, but in adults who have low self esteem due to abuse and see experiencing abuse as normal.

Aside - the article predominantly puts women into that category, reflecting the dominant narrative that if we are talking about victims of abuse and violence we are generally talking about women. Although there is a lot of evidence to support this and I don’t want to get into it just now - I will look into a few paragraphs down - I just want to say, think of how many simps there are today: men who are willing to go to extraordinary lengths just to get the slightest acknowledgement or attention from a woman. Do you think they all had healthy upbringings?

Anyway, here we have the cycle of abuse. And the reason I give you that simplistic method of looking at things is not because it is the best way, but because it is the dominant way of looking at the problem - the functional way, if I may put it that way, because it underlies the narrative.

A man who perpetrates violence is just that, a perpetrator. He’s not a victim of anything, even if he, well, absolutely has been a victim in his life.

Case in point - Australia’s most reviled perpetrator, the child sexual abuser Dennis Ferguson. Ferguson was himself a victim of child abuse. THIS very interesting, as well as brave and disturbing article, tackles among other things the issue I had to go through in my previous articles about having to keep certain offenders in indefinite detention - albeit it addresses that issue from the position of shock and distress that such an outcome should engender, as we are forced to act in such a way as a last resort to protect the most vulnerable. Note, if you are paying attention, how this was written in 2009, and we have gone, in 15 years, from discussing indefinite detention in hushed tones as a last resort, to a government mandating it as the norm. 15 years, that’s all it takes.

In Dennis Ferguson’s case, yes, it had to be discussed: the judge at one of his trials apparently said he had no chance to be rehabilitated. But that’s not why I bring it up. The writer says, “It is not clear to me that he is best understood as a victim, despite evidence that he, himself, was the subject of prolonged abuse as a child and young man. As adults we all must take responsibility for our actions to the extent that we have a capacity for comprehension, and must not inflict on others that which was meted out to us. If we do not comply we will be punished and our liberties, in one way or another, will be curtailed.”

This is superbly well said, but I must still add to it. We do not acknowledge Dennis Ferguson as a victim of abuse to excuse, mitigate or displace the responsibility for his actions. He is responsible for his own abhorrent behaviour, and very few people - certainly not me - would have any issue with him facing the full weight of legal consequences for what he did. Rather, we do it to try to understand how he got there and try to make sure, as best we can in our flawed selves and flawed society, that it doesn’t happen again.

Another example - Codey Herrmann. If you don’t know the name, you may have heard of his victim, Aiia Maasarwe, a beautiful 21 year old Arab-Israeli student (and the fact she was a beautiful young woman doesn’t make the crime somehow worse, but I’m not going to diminish her memory by not acknowledge it) who was studying in Melbourne. She was coming home late one night, when Herrmann, in a crime of opportunity, hit her with a pipe, dragged her into bushes, raped her, murdered her and set fire to her body.

He got 36 years, with a non-parole period of 30. Victoria’s DPP appealed the sentence, saying it was “manifestly inadequate” and “too much attention” was given to things like his mental health. You see, in sentencing, “Justice Elizabeth Hollingworth acknowledged Herrmann's life of “extreme physical and emotional deprivation””. (The article linked contains the full 24-page sentencing document, as good journalism should. The appeal, which ultimately asked for life without hope of release, was rejected and his sentence stood).

We are told in multiple articles that, “Herrmann's lawyers told the court he had no explanation for the crime and could not remember the hours before the attack.” He had no previous history of crime (beyond shoplifting, and recording bad hip-hop) or violence, but he did have a history of trauma.

You see, Herrmann was a homeless Aborigine (of a German father, as the name suggests), who had had a life you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. Known to authorities at 6 months, “effectively abandoned by his mother” at 12 months because of substance abuse issues, separated from his culture, in a household with, “drug and alcohol abuse, family violence and neglect”, his toddler years saw him have scabies, rotten teeth and bad skin. By the time he started school - at, what, 5? - he was already in foster care, and already manifesting the behavioural problems that would be diagnosed as a severe personality disorder. Substance abuse followed, leading to drug-induced psychosis, homelessness, hopelessness. Again, multiple articles I read preparing this section comment on the fact that his life has improved by being in gaol, with regular good food and a bed and a chance to access programs.

Does any of this excuse his behaviour? No. There is no excuse. He got 36 years gaol - he deserved 36 years gaol - because he took his trauma out on an innocent person, a 21 year old woman, a happy positive person studying on the far side of the world to try and create a life for herself. No matter what he’d been through, he had no right, no right at all, to brutalise and rape and murder and finally desecrate this innocent person, to snatch her life away and take everything from her.

We do not learn about and dwell on Herrmann’s appalling childhood and life to make excuses - we do it to understand how he came to have this anger that his lawyer described as, “a core of anger… Anger at the world, and especially females.” We do it to consider all the moments in his life where intervention might have set him on a better path, saving at least one and arguably two lives - an intervention that the child he once was deserved.

We look at Codey Herrmann not just as a perpetrator, but as a victim of trauma to prevent other victims of trauma like him, for everybody’s sake. But we still hold him accountable for his actions, because he is an adult and he had no right to do what he did.

That’s how we treat male perpetrators in the cycle of abuse. But when we look at female perpetrators, it’s a different story.

For women, the dominant role in the cycle is understood as victims. And often they are victims only, they do nothing wrong but go from bad relationship to bad relationship because that is all they have ever known and that is how the cycle works.

But as with the men, I am not talking about those who are only victims - I am talking about the perpetrators. Those whose actions continue the cycle and inflict it on others.

Because with women, it is predominantly children who suffer at their hands. Yet when we hear about such instances, the mothers are overwhelmingly identified as victims of abuse themselves, kicking the can down the road as it were. “Yes, these women did terrible things, but they suffered even worse - if only we could have prevented what some man did to them!” But this is a circle, not a hierarchy. It goes around until somehow, someone stops it.

Anyway, let’s go through some examples. Starting with sexual abuse - women are far less likely to be sexual abusers than men, that is most certainly true: maybe 8-11% of sexual abuse is committed by women, depending on the study you use (I have seen studies as low as 2%, and as high as 20% according to the UK Bravehearts website. 8-11% looks right to me).

Anyway, here is a bunch of examples of female child sex abusers. (Every word links to a different case, and there are lots more of them, but it is time-consuming to link like this). What they all have in common is that we are told some variant on, “she had problems” - a bad marriage perhaps, not an abusive one, just an unsatisfying one. She had difficulties at home, she was going through a divorce, her husband didn’t listen, she wasn’t very good socially, she was depressed, so you understand, surely, why she had to seek comfort in the arms of a 12 year old? THIS page has a whole video on the phenomenon.

I wish I was making that garbage up. But people who do the research tell us this is one of the common factors in (one type of) female abusers. Looking again at the excellent Psychology Today, we are told: “these women are less likely to report having experienced severe child maltreatment themselves; instead, their sexual abuse behaviors often result from a dysfunctional adult relationship and attachment deficits. They often do not view their behavior as abusive or recognize its inappropriate nature and they are often driven by a need for intimacy and as a way to compensate for unmet needs.”

So we can see by contrasting the two extremes - a man like Codey Herrmann, who committed an atrocity but whose entire life explains the pain and trauma he acted out, compared to women who have no such backgrounds and yet committed the worst of crimes, child sexual assault - that a man is held accountable for his actions no matter what has led to them, while a woman is excused no matter how ridiculous the excuse. This is not a comment on men or women, it is a comment on the media who maintain these narratives.

(Another example arose as I was researching this piece - a female music teacher who had allegedly sexually abused a child was reported with the tagline that she, “is going to trial to refute allegations that she sexually abused a child”. Men who face allegations are monsters - women who face them are there to “refute the allegations”. There is another whole article in how this framing is done).

Yet, sadly, this is not just the media. Before I go on, though, let me be more clear on the gender divide: I was contrasting two extremes to make a point, not to say, “men only abuse due to trauma, women are just wicked!” Not in the slightest. Just as there are women who commit child sexual assault due to an “unmet need for intimacy” - ie for no good explanation whatever - there are many men who commit terrible acts for no explainable reason. Almost certainly more men than women, at that, but no-one is disputing that, or making excuses for the men.

Likewise, there are many women whose abusive behaviour can clearly be explained - though not excused - due to abusive and traumatic pasts. In fact, considering the high levels of abuse, specifically sexual abuse, against girls (I’ll give all the numbers shortly, this is one of those moments that you might not want to read the whole thing if you are a survivor of abuse yourself) I’ll certainly suggest that the majority of women who commit abuse later in life do so because of their childhoods. Look, for instance, at THIS earlier post where (in the final section on Don Dale) I looked at a small group of girls in detention in NSW - only 40-odd, but 91% had backgrounds of abuse. HERE is one example of a woman who ended up an abuser after the most horrific experiences at the hands of her mother and step-father - this is almost certainly the very pattern that sees many (male) paedophiles pursue the life they do.

My problem is not that women commit abuse due to their own trauma - that is the cycle of abuse, that is what we must stop - but the way they are not held accountable as adults in the same way men are. And when we follow the cycle -  women then commit abuse against children - we find it being described with terms like this:

“Evidence (also) suggests that mothers are more likely than fathers to be held responsible for child neglect” (my emphasis added) “...This finding is consistent with the fact that mothers tend to be the primary caregiver and are usually held accountable for ensuring the safety of children even in two-parent families. In light of societal views on gender roles, it has been argued that this may constitute unreasonable “mother blaming” (Allan, 2004; Jackson & Mannix, 2004).” - Source, Who Abuses Children? ‘Neglect’, par 3

“Single parent—female and two parent intact families had the highest proportions of substantiations across all jurisdictions (Figure 2.2). There is likely to be a number of reasons for the over-representation of single parent—female families in substantiations. For instance, lone parents are more likely to have low incomes and be financially stressed (Saunders & Adelman 2006) and suffer from social isolation (Loman 2006; Saunders & Adelman 2006) —all factors that have been associated with child abuse and neglect (Coohey 1996).” - Source, CPA 2008-9 pg 17

And note that in these cases, I am not talking about media shills pushing a narrative - these are government studies I am citing, that still can only speak of women as victims or make excuses even when they are discussing the child abuse those women committed. Yes, those women are doubtless damaged and traumatised themselves - victims of childhood sexual abuse like Dennis Ferguson - but that should not be any excuse. Yet it is consistently the way both the media, and in too many cases academia, speak of female behaviour.

One of the most egregious examples of this was a deliberate series in the Australian ABC. Manosphere-types who worry about the underlying causes of damaging female behaviour, whether it be abusive intimate relationships, ex-partners who are now abusing their children or even toxic siblings, often speak about Borderline Personality Disorder, a name that “traditionally refers to the mix of symptoms located on the border between psychosis and neurosis” [SOURCE] and men within the manosphere share stories of surviving a relationship with such a person, or red flags to look out for in a potential partner. Women, of course, have a huge variety of media of their own - Facebook groups, blogs, sites, books and podcasts - that similarly talk about experiences or warnings of abusive partners, and my wife regularly bemoans that she can’t scroll for 5 minutes without someone complaining about how, “my ex was a narcissist!”

There are a variety of psychological issues that are seen as underpinning male abuse - narcissism, antisocial personality disorder, impulse control problems, conduct disorders, and yes, Borderline Personality Disorder, while the more sensible will include substance abuse disorders, childhood trauma (of course!) and PTSD. None are as dominant in being linked to abuse and domestic violence in the way that BPD dominates discussions about female abusive behaviours among the manosphere (very few of which, one would imagine, are actually trained to perform a clinical diagnosis).

I thus find it very suspicious that the ABC ran an entire series of articles (I’ll be linking many below) on why people with BPD don’t get the care they need, and are demonised as ‘bad’ rather than ‘ill’.

Of course, there is also no reason to think the ABC takes any notice of what goes on in the Manosphere. The need to do these articles may have been triggered by nothing more than the details around the disease they mention: “BPD is the most common personality disorder in Australia, with government data showing one to four of every 100 Australians experience BPD at some stage in their life. It's common in young women — its symptoms usually appear in teenage years and early adulthood, and more women are diagnosed with BPD than men.” An earlier article says women are three to one more likely to be diagnosed.

Ahhh, it’s a women’s issue! So rather than exploring how this most frequent of personality disorders explains much of the abusive behaviour that men regularly detail being on the receiving end of - from emotionally abusive mood swings and outbursts, to paranoid accusations, to threat of suicide and self-harm to prevent a man leaving the obviously toxic relationship, and other similar manipulative behaviours - instead this women’s issue is simply used to explain once again that women are victims.

Listen to a few of the “symptoms” of this disorder:

• strong, overwhelming emotions and feelings

• intense mood swings including outbursts of anxiety, anger and depression

• a pattern of tumultuous relationships with friends, family and loved ones

• alternating between idealising and devaluing other people

• fear of being alone and frantic attempts to avoid abandonment

• unstable and distorted self-image or sense of self

• feeling neglected, alone, misunderstood, chronically empty or bored

• suicidal thoughts or suicide attempts

• impulsive and risk-taking behaviour, such as unsafe sex, illegal drug use, gambling, over eating, reckless driving or over spending

• black and white thinking, or difficulty compromising

• paranoid thoughts in response to stress

• feeling cut off and out of touch with reality

Imagine dating such a person. More to the point, imagine being a woman and dating a man like this. Now imagine describing the problems of this relationship to a female friend.

“Well, he is so moody, he’s all over the place. One minute he idolises me, the next he’s screaming in anger, then he’s depressed and muttering about suicide. When we fight he doesn’t even listen to my side, and he’s just plain paranoid afterwards. One time we were arguing in the car and he drove so fast I thought he would kill us there and then! But when I say I’m not happy, he clings to me and threatens to harm himself if I leave”.

Is there a woman in the western world who, on hearing this, would not respond by telling her friend she’s in an abusive relationship?

But as a female illness - well, she’s the victim, isn't she? And if that sounds brutal or harsh or unfair, let me stress, nowhere in these articles is the word ‘abuse’ used. The articles constantly speak about the stigma, but nowhere is it flat out stated that there is a stigma because BPD can manifest as abusive behaviour, violence, manipulation. Rather, excuses are made - ““The idea that they're actually manipulating is actually quite incorrect if you look at it cognitively speaking," [the expert] said. "What they're trying to do is get their needs met and also unburden themselves of this emotional distress which gets locked inside them. So if it's a significant other, they'll do anything, they'll try anything, to try and relieve this distress.”” That’s an extended way of saying they can be manipulative, but, you know, for really good reasons. Also, the focus is on self-harm and suicide, which are certainly genuine problems with this issue but also, in a country where one man a week kills a partner or ex-partner but six men a day kill themselves, we can legitimately say that men’s issues, even those leading to abuse, can better be examined as issues leading to self harm.

That is, if we wanted to make excuses for abusive men. We don’t, nor should we. (Needless to say, the smaller number of men with BPD are often completely dismissed in some of these articles, such as THIS one, though they do make the occasional appearance). On the contrary, when men display exactly the same behaviours, for exactly the same reason - BPD - it's not called, “mental illness”.

It’s called “coercive control”.

If you think I’m exaggerating, read THIS about Michael Slater, a well-known former Australian cricketer and commentator. His behaviour fits all the manipulative elements of BPD, because he was diagnosed with BPD. But he is not the victim, to this journo or any other - too many men act that way.

Yes, many men have mental health issues. Its why they commit suicide and harm themselves far more than they harm anyone else, as I just said. But when a mentally ill man hurts himself, it's ignored, and when a mentally ill man hurts those close to him, as mental health sufferers invariably do, it's “toxic masculinity” or some such rubbish.

Anyway, the ABC article first cited speaks about getting first responders better training so they can help victims of this illness. Another article speaks about the discrimination BPD sufferers face, with people thinking they might be manipulative and irrational, while another speaks about how a diagnosis can be masked by the patients’ own ‘pain’. Every few months the ABC publishes an article that is some variation on “what it's like to live with BPD”, HERE and HERE and HERE, focussing almost exclusively on women, of course. Over and over we hear that governments need to do better, health care services need to do better, these people deserve so much better.

And this is fine, in fact, this is the correct way to do things! We need to help those who will potentially end up as abusers, to themselves or others, if we don’t!

(It reminds me of when I first heard about the ‘defund the police’ movement in the US, my initial response was, “so they will send social workers to DV call outs, rather than police with guns? Wow, that will literally reduce the number of black men getting killed by police, what a great idea.”

I don’t agree with all the ‘defund the police’ ideas, of course - shoplifting is a crime, not an ‘act of reparation’, and defunding border police or ICE leads to child trafficking. I try to be open minded, but I’m still sane).

Anyway, please, for God’s sake, don’t misunderstand the point I am making in discussing things like BPD! I am not saying, “look at all the crazy women out there, let’s punish them!” or anything remotely like that. I am bringing this up for two reasons: firstly, to point out the different way we treat male and female abuse - can anyone imagine the ABC writing a series of articles portraying male abusers as ‘victims’ because of what drove their behaviour? But in at least some cases, that’s exactly what we need to do.

And secondly, I am bothered that the dark side of this disease, abusive behaviour, is so casually dismissed. We don’t need to be doing any more of that. We need to hold adults accountable for their actions, not make excuses: this is why I started with Dennis Ferguson and Codey Herrmann. They both had backgrounds of abuse that explained their behaviour, to labour the point, but could never excuse it.

We need more holding women accountable, because of what they do to children - again, that's the cycle of abuse. To stop it, we need to both understand how they got to that point, and not all BPD sufferers, or Munchausen-by-proxy sufferers, or narcissists, or whatever else leads a woman to abuse, necessarily comes from a history of abuse themselves: that government factsheet on BPD mentioned above explains, “As with most mental health disorders, the causes of borderline personality disorder are not completely understood. It is probably caused by a combination of genes and life experiences. Having another mental health condition, being very sensitive, or suffering abuse or neglect during childhood may make some people more likely to develop borderline personality disorder. But not everyone with these factors will experience borderline personality disorder and not everyone with these experiences will develop borderline personality disorder traits.” (An earlier article tries to associate BPD with “emotional trauma and abuse” without explaining that this is by no means the norm, and for ‘proof’ links to another article that makes no such claim, and finally admits that “research over the past 15 years shows the disorder had ''organic components to it'', with BPD sufferers often showing abnormalities in their frontal cortex — the area of the brain that helps regulate rationality, fear and other emotional responses”). People who develop this or that behaviour, condition or syndrome do not somehow get a free pass to act out, and while we may do everything we can to support them, if they take out their anger, pain or confusion on others, we must hold them accountable.

Yet this is the opposite of what we see happen, at least for women. Another example of this is found HERE, which is coverage of an extensive study that I want to go through thoroughly before I comment on it in depth. The crux of the argument is that men commit the majority of domestic violence, which is no doubt true. The problem is, this article consistently makes excuses even for those smaller numbers of violent acts that are recognised as perpetrated by women - “We know that most of women's violence is in the context of self-defence", “Women are also more likely than men to self-report their use of violence, inflating the stats”, “It's not to say women don’t use violence… But in terms of rates, impact, severity and motivation, that violence is different.” The article also uses misleading language or conflates issues to distort the results. For instance, the author quotes an advocate as pointing out that, “it's an "uncomfortable truth" that men are "overwhelmingly responsible" for most intimate partner violence”. This is true (though perhaps not “overwhelmingly”), but it does not give the context that we focus on “intimate partner violence” precisely because it is the one form of family violence most likely to lead to a dead woman - in every other form of family violence, it is men who are more likely to lose their lives. Maybe not by a huge proportion, but still demonstrably so - if a parent is killed, it's more likely to be a father or grandfather, if a sibling is killed, it's more likely to be a brother.

If a child is killed, it’s more likely to be a boy.

So we focus on intimate partner violence to continue the myth that women are the predominant victims of any violence, and as is often the case, “intimate partner violence” is used interchangeably with “domestic” or “family” violence to continue that myth, whereas in fact they are quite different terms used to cover not just violence against women but violence against all members of a family or household. To maintain the idea that it is “only women” who are victims, the massive under-reporting of men as victims of abuse is not acknowledged directly, but rather we hear: “As most victim-survivors don't report to authorities – or anyone at all – police and legal data are limited sources of information on perpetration”, with no discussion of which sex is less likely to report their abuse. And as for the areas where women start to dominate as perpetrators, this is dismissed in a single line: “Data gaps exist in other key areas including for at-risk groups such as children, people with disability and queer people.” These are all areas where women are over-represented as perpetrators. I have mentioned elsewhere [SOURCE] about the rates of violence in lesbian and bi relationships being higher than hetero - relationships without men are more violent, not less - and as a disability and aged care support worker for nearly 30 years I am aware of the stats regarding abuse of people with disabilities and the elderly, and the high rates of this that are perpetrated by women. It can legitimately be argued that this is because women are more likely to work with or be carers of the elderly and people with disabilities (but again, this is not an excuse!!!) but I am not thinking just of what happens in the ‘industry’ - I have literally spoken to too many men in wheelchairs who have been assaulted by women on a bus, or in a pub, or on the street. I suspect, based on years of studying these figures, that this has more to do with the nature of female violence. Women, I believe, target the helpless when they commit violence - they will, for instance, target a person in a wheelchair, or a small child, in a way that a male, even an abusive and aggressive one, simply tends not to. An angry man who comes home will target his wife, then the teenage kids, and ‘work his way down’ as it were - an abusive woman will target the smallest and most helpless children and work her way up (apologies if this is triggering, for instance if you experienced abuse of a radically different nature to this, I am obviously generalising to make a point I believe is valid and I use that language because I believe it best conveys my point, not to be flippant).

Anyways, I am getting off topic. As I said, I want to really look into that study in depth before I respond, it certainly deserves to be taken seriously and the overall conclusion, that most abuse across the board is ultimately committed by men, is something I agree with. My problems lies in the reporting on it, the almost complete disregard for the abuse of children, and the fact that the sweeping statements that are made, when viewed through the lens of focussing on preventing child abuse, can be simply wrong. For instance, the claim, “Violence towards male victim-survivors is also overwhelmingly perpetrated by other men” falls apart when you focus on boys.

Let’s look at the numbers.

The report was not wrong in saying that “data gaps exist” when we try to look at child abuse perpetrators. A search of the available studies in Australia will probably bring you to THIS 2018 article from the Australian Institute of Criminology, Who Is Responsible For Child Maltreatment? It immediately informs us (on pg 1) that, “Knowledge about who is responsible for child maltreatment in Australia is limited. Australian data about persons responsible for maltreatment are rarely available, with most research focusing instead on the victim (Child Family Community Australia 2011; McDonald et al. 2011).” A focus on the victim can’t be faulted, but doesn’t help our cause. Pressing on, we learn on page 2 that, “Females are typically found to account for just over one-half of those responsible for maltreatment, and are more likely to be responsible for neglect (Department of Communities 2009; Sedlak et al. 2010; USHHS 2016).” It is immediately followed by the inevitable excuse: “this is not surprising given that females spend more time than males caring for children and are therefore more likely to be considered responsible for harms that occur.” (I bring this up, not to deny that this is a reasonable thing to consider, but just to point out that abusive female behaviour is always excused - male behaviour, pretty much never. This does not help our kids.) On pg 5 we get a clearer number - women are responsible for 55.5% of child maltreatment. Men are certainly more responsible for much of the most serious sort of abuse like sexual assault: an earlier report (2014) from the Australian Institute of Family Studies, Who Abuses Children? (quoted above) which also starts by acknowledging, “Data on those who abuse children is limited in Australia”, gave figures of physical violence against children as 55% perpetrated by fathers / stepfathers vs nearly 26%, or half that, by mothers / stepmothers, based not on substantiations or prosecutions but on ABS Recorded Crime data of residential assaults reported to the police, which is certainly better than nothing. Frankly, as someone who has been looking at this for years, I believe women are responsible for way more physical and emotional violence than the limited Australian data admits, and I say that because of the overseas numbers. This report itself acknowledges that “a British retrospective prevalence study of 2,869 young adults aged 18-24 (May-Chahal & Cawson, 2005) found that mothers were more likely than fathers to be responsible for physical abuse (49% of incidents compared to 40%)”. This is, again, immediately excused with, “part of the difference may be explained by the greater time children spend with their mothers than fathers.” If we have a quick look at US data, the most recent report, Child Maltreatment 2022, has the breakdown on physical violence roughly equal (51-49 to male perpetrators, pg 106). These DHHS Child Maltreatment reports each year dedicate table 5.3 (yes, that table every year going back to at least 2012) to a gender breakdown of child abuse perpetrators, and consistently show women as more likely to be perpetrators in the overwhelming majority of states (usually 35 to 40 of the 52 states and regions covered). Finally, the most serious abuse of all, murder, is also around 52% female (AHRC report pg 105.)

A word on that last report, it is an annual report of the National Children’s Commissioner and this one specifically addresses family and domestic violence, the cycle of abuse we are interested in (the Commissioner’s functions are wider, dealing with all human rights issues that are child related, not just the basic human right to be free of abuse - other annual reports reflect this.) I am not a fan of this Commissioner - too much ‘cut-&-paste’ reporting, just page after page of, “well this NGO said this, and this government department said that”, not enough in-depth analysis and research for someone with her resources - but she does have the power to compel information, and she used it to get customised reports on child abuse from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which is fantastic when we are struggling to “get datasets” as above, but only covers physical and sexual violence, not the greater threat of emotional abuse. Some of the data is proportional - for instance, “here is a percentage of childhood victims who experienced violence at the hands of a parent” - which is useful for considering early intervention responses (or other best-intervention policy) but less useful for us in considering the best way to break the cycle of abuse.

To get victim data we need to look at the Child Protection Australia reports, which are the collated reports of all the various state child protection / community services departments for each year, similar (for any US readers) to the above-mentioned DHHS Child Maltreatment reports that are released annually. For anyone seriously interested in learning about child protection, these sort of reports are required reading.

So… by gender breakdown (we’ll get to the reason for this again in a moment, if it isn’t clear) figure 3.5 of each of the years -2021 (and consistently going back to 2010-11 across the reports I looked at) is as below: boys suffer more in terms of physical abuse, emotional (called ‘psychological’ in the US data) and neglect, while girls suffer more sexual abuse. Here is a sample from 2019:

By all means look up those reports HERE. Full disclosure, the very latest report, Child Protection Australia 2021-22, shows girls have now edged out boys in emotional abuse, but shows a jump for boys as victims of physical assault, albeit this is based on primary type of abuse, where often there is more than one present (eg a physically abused child is often emotionally abused also).

As I earlier promised, let's quickly tackle the issue of sexual abuse: although sexual abuse is the smallest form of abuse (other than murder), the discrepancy between girls and boys as victims of sexual abuse is so great that it tips the numbers on their head, and means girls over all suffer the highest level of child abuse, even though boys suffer higher levels in all the more prevalent forms, albeit not by huge margins. It also turns the child abuse numbers on their head, interestingly enough, because Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse showed boys suffered about two-thirds of institutional child abuse, based on thousands of respondants detailing abuse going back generations, but as the New Matilda article on Dennis Ferguson quoted above argues, in-home sexual abuse of children, which mostly targets girls, dwarfs what goes on in institutional abuse - a horrifying though that as a society, we are simply not yet capable of dealing with - and this mostly effects girls, enough that overall figures for both sexual abuse and abuse in general skew toward girls.

So we have a lot of girls who grow up from childhoods that feature sexual abuse and other forms into traumatised survivors, and some of those become poor mothers, or seek out or perpetrate dysfunctional relationships. This is completely understandable, and we try as a society to provide some sort of support for those women. We need to try harder.

But we also have, in every other category of abuse, boys - the majority of all the other categories - who likewise grow up traumatised, and broken, and angry, and some of who, become perpetrators themselves. Instead of understanding this - not excusing, just understanding - we blame them, or we blame men in general (most of whom would put themselves in danger to protect women and children before they would ever hurt them), and we ignore that most of the harm such broken men do is not to others, but to themselves, through drug abuse and self-destructive behaviours and suicide.

We need to try a damn sight harder for those boys and men.

So where are they?

The final question to ask is, where is this child abuse happening, that we can identify and prevent or provide support as needed?

I have previously referenced an Australian study, Family Structure and Child

Maltreatment from 2012 that makes the point that single mother families represented 17% of society but twice that, 33%, of places where substantiations happen. This is not just proportionally higher - it is literally higher than any other family type. The article of course made some excuses, such as pointing out (based on a Canadian study) that, “Sole-mothers tended to experience a greater number of parental personal and social problems—including substance abuse, mental health issues, low levels of education, and unemployment—than other parents. Much of the variation in risk by family structure in this study was explained by these differences.” Again, this is not unreasonable - the point is to understand why the abuse happens, not to demonise the minority of single mothers (let alone the majority) who are in the statistics, and all of these risk factors play a part. But they do not excuse the behaviour, nor even sufficiently explain it. The great economist and historian Thomas Sowell has made the point that two-parent families in African American neighbourhoods have the lowest levels of child abuse, crime etc, while single mother families have the highest - and these are obviously problems magnified by far higher prevalence in some African American communities - despite being in the same neighbourhoods and facing the same problems of poverty, crime and discrimination that everyone else in the neighbourhood does.

The report does show some research overseas that has found no discernable difference between two parent families and single mother (as well as reports in the UK and Canada that show the same), so is this 2012 report an outlier? When we go through the Child Protection Australia reports, it is pretty consistent that no, it is not: single mother households fairly consistently produce the highest levels of child abuse in real numbers and certainly as a proportion of family types across society.

CPA 2008-9 pg 17

CPA 2010-11 pg 9

CPA 2012-13 pg 25 - this year, two-parent families were 36% of substantiations, single female second with 28%

And that’s it. The numbers for 2014-15 were REMOVED - we can tell, because all the relevant terminology, “single parent - female”, “family type”, “family of residence” all appear in the glossary but do not appear in the text of the report. Nor any report going forward.

Why is this? Because apparently we don’t need to know that most child abuse in the country, again not just proportionally but in real terms, is happening in single mother households, at the hands of mothers, step-fathers or some combination of the two (or more rarely, unsupervised siblings).

That doesn’t suit the narrative.

I haven’t found much evidence for how this all happened, other than one throw-away line in that ABC article I looked at. I mentioned how the article reported on a study into domestic violence, and, not content with saying that men commit most violence, insisted on excusing or downplaying such female violence as we acknowledge, often to the extent of distorting or hiding the facts - eg, the abuse of boys that I have since demonstrated in some categories occurs mostly at the hands of mothers. That article includes the comment, from the CEO of a Tasmanian NGO: “data we have fails to look at patterns of violence, and is more focused on categorising sites of abuse.”

And what is wrong with that? The CEO then says:

“"What we really need to be able to see is where there is a power imbalance, and one person is using that power imbalance to meet their needs at the expense of other person.”

That is precisely what happens to too many boys living in single mother households. They are targeted by the mother, to meet that mother’s need, to get back at her ex, or at men in general, or whatever else drives her to abuse her child, or to bring a step-father into the child’s life who abuses them.

But the sort of people who write these articles have a very clear narrative they are trying to push, which is again spelled out in that article:

"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".

And what happens when the statistics clearly show this drive for “entitlement, power and control” but there is no man there? It demolishes the narrative. So you just don’t report such things. In fact, even acknowledging that there is a problem in single mother households in Australia is regarded, officially, as a form of misogyny.

What happens to those boys - the survivors, that is? Well, those numbers are tragically plain.

So, chances of youth from fatherless homes going to gaol goes up 50%, and by 34, the chances have doubled.

Those numbers are from the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 (NLSY97). If you’re wondering why I am using data from the last century, from the other side of the world, its because, surprise! We’ve found another situation where “data gaps exist” because it is mysteriously under-researched.

Think about that for the moment. With the majority of focus in preventing violence (one of our biggest social issues) being on preventing violence against women, and national action plans to prevent women, and large NGOs like OurWatch sucking up funding to prevent violence against women, why is there no proper data about the men who end up in gaol for things like domestic violence and rape? Does nobody want to know who these men are, where they come from, why they act like this?

I guess it's like who perpetrates violence against children, or violence in lesbian and bi relationships, or violence against people with disabilities. We don’t need the data, because we already have a perfectly good narrative to explain it. It’s all toxic masculinity, abusive men, always and only, has to be, don’t need data.

As I said before, this doesn’t help children. This doesn’t help anyone.

Gaol data are the tip of the iceberg for how disadvantaged fatherless boys are - suicides are up, academic performance down, poverty up, I’m sure you have heard many of the horror stories. Of course, fatherless girls also suffer, although from a gaol perspective, I saw that whether mum goes to gaol is the bigger indicator for whether girls end up there. But, single mums certainly have single mums, if you take my meaning, and it is this cycle we are talking about trying to break.

When we go looking for evidence, we find constant assertions about this - 70% of men in prisons are from fatherless homes! 85% of youth in custody are from fatherless homes! - and I don’t doubt there is a reason for these assertions, but what’s good for the gander is good for the goose, so let’s work only off actual data, not angry non-custodial dads or third-hand claims from foreign sites.

Attempts to find anything relevant at the Australian Institute of Criminology site were fruitless (though admittedly there are a lot of reports on that site, many hundreds, and maybe I just didn’t put the right terms in). But I did find this: Child maltreatment and criminal justice system involvement in Australia: Findings from a national survey. So this looks specifically at the issue of whether there is a link between child abuse and adults committing crime - whether the cycle of abuse exists - and yes, there unsurprisingly seems to be: pg 1 tells us, “international research has consistently found associations between child maltreatment and criminal offending, both in adolescence (multiple sources given) and in adulthood (multiple sources given).  In the United States, a longitudinal study found individuals identified by the courts as victims in substantiated cases of child maltreatment were more likely than matched controls without substantiated maltreatment to be arrested in adolescence or adulthood (source given)”. These sources are all from the last 20 years, and quite consistent. Violent behaviour is 1.8 times higher in one meta-analysis (pg 2). We are then told, “a small body of Australian research has demonstrated connections between maltreatment and offending”, and the research seems to be focussed on sexual abuse, the smallest format and the one most perpetrated by men, as well as the one most likely to have female victims.  The final conclusion of the report (pg 16) is that both men and women who face any maltreatment as children double their chances of going to prison at least once.

But turning to those areas with more female perpetrators and where boys are targeted, we hear, “An Australian birth cohort study linking substantiated child maltreatment data to delinquency measured at age 21 found that any maltreatment—and particularly physical abuse, emotional abuse and neglect—was associated with a threefold increase in the odds of delinquency for males, but not for females (Abajobir et al. 2017). In sum, although the Australian evidence base is relatively small, it is generally consistent in finding associations between childhood maltreatment and offending.”

So this tells us - not from a perspective of blaming women, but purely from a perspective of “what sort of man grows up to be an offender?” - we are, unsurprisingly, looking at men who have been abused have a 3-fold increase in delinquency by 21 and are on the path to serious crime, if not already perpetrating it. Our figures above on single parent female homes being the places where most abuse happens, tells us there is a connection - again, unsurprisingly - between raising a boy fatherless, and him becoming a criminal. More research needed, of course.

This demonstrates a few other important things.

Firstly, it demolishes the ‘toxic masculinity’ myth. If ‘toxic masculinity’ was the reason some men commit violence against women, or other crimes, then obviously we should see a fall in such behaviours when boys are raised by women in fatherless households, away from men who could model, pass on or transmit the dreadful scourge of toxic masculinity. Instead we see the opposite - a rise.

Secondly, it likewise demolishes the excuse that women only commit violence against children because they are forced, by social convention or by the patriarchy or whatever, to do the bulk of child-rearing, and if men spent more time around kids they would commit more abuse. Although we’ve seen this multiple times, and from researchers not just media shills, it was always a dreadfully specious argument - try to think of any other form of violence that is excused like this! Imagine someone saying, “o well priests only abuse altar boys because they spend all their time around altar boys”. But this shows it is not just bad logic, it is factually wrong. If this argument were true, then once again we would see, if only proportionally,  the bulk of abuse happening in pretty much any other sort of dwelling - married and de facto if you think there is going to be some sort of 50-50 split in violence between men and women, or in single father dwellings (or the other dwellings) if you think the male predilection for violence we see in other relationships is going to assert itself against children. But we don’t see this - we see the opposite. Once again, we see that when fathers are removed from the equation, violence against children does not go down, it goes up.

So where does all this leave us? Actually, all these depressing numbers and cover-ups and false narratives, when uncovered, give us hope: because they leave us with a very clear picture of the cycle of abuse, and steps to take to break it.

And even those steps can, from a certain perspective, be seen as positive. And their outcome would certainly be positive.

From everything we have seen, we know that abusive men are not just evil, they are often abused, traumatised little boys grown up and expressing their pain and trauma. The same as we are often told - with good reason - about little girls, who experience that abuse, specifically sexual abuse, at even higher rates.

And those boys grow up to be men who hurt women and children, and the girls grow up to be women who seek out bad relationships, or (in lesser numbers) hurt men, or (in greater numbers) hurt children.

And the dominant thinking is, “if we just stop the men, we stop the cycle”. And we do hold the men accountable, and treat them as monsters, and lock them up, in some cases indefinitely. We hold men responsible for their actions, despite their traumatic backgrounds, because they are adults.

But that does not break the cycle, because as mentioned before, it is a circle not a hierarchy. To break the circle, who have to interrupt it at the point that it transmits into the next generation.

That means, we have to protect children. And that means, in many cases, we have to protect children from their own mothers. That is something we do not do consistently enough. We often give women with children additional support, and we should, we need to do more. The area we are failing is in holding women accountable. If there is one thing I suspect I have shown more than any other in this article it is that we make excuses for mothers who abuse, and for women in general when it comes to poor behaviour.

We need to hold women responsible for their actions, because they are adults.

This is the positive thing. We need to exercise - not just advocate, but actually practise - equality. We need to treat women as adults and stop infantilizing them. Pursue them equally when they break the law. Punish them equally.

Treat them as adults. That is, ultimately, a good thing.

Because the outcome, if we can raise a generation of boys free of abuse, is we decimate the next generation of rapists, wife-beaters and other terrible people some of those boys would have grown up to become.

Isn’t that worth it? If people don’t want to stop violence against boys for its own sake - because they believe only women are victims, or they just hate men, or whatever - wouldn’t it still be worth it to prevent so much of that violence against women, violence against everyone, happening to the next generation?

I believe so. And that’s the mission of this Substack.

So as I call out the so-called journalists who perpetuate nonsense narratives of how only women are victims and only men are perpetrators, I’ll doubtless be called a misogynist and every other name under the sun. (The current favourite is “far right!”, and I’ll laugh if they throw that at a life-long Labor voter like me - but I won’t be surprised). I don’t care. Because hopefully I’ll be doing my little part to make this a world with less rape, less violence against women, and yes, more support for single mothers.

A better world for my daughters.

I’ll leave you with that comment I quoted earlier about Dennis Ferguson: “It is not clear to me that he is best understood as a victim, despite evidence that he, himself, was the subject of prolonged abuse as a child and young man. As adults we all must take responsibility for our actions to the extent that we have a capacity for comprehension, and must not inflict on others that which was meted out to us. If we do not comply we will be punished and our liberties, in one way or another, will be curtailed.”

All I ask, is that entirely reasonable way of thinking about child abusers, be applied with equality.