V0 - AUSE01Z01MA ALWAYS BEATING UP ON MEN · 2016-08-23 · Partner Abuse State of Knowledge...
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THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN, AUGUST 20-21, 2016 theaustralian.com.au INQUIRER 17 V0 - AUSE01Z01MA ALWAYS BEATING UP ON MEN Eva Solberg is a Swedish politician, a proud feminist who holds an im- portant post as chairwoman of the party Moderate Women. Last year she was presented with her gov- ernment’s latest strategy for com- bating domestic violence. Like similar reports across the world, this strategy assumes the only way to tackle domestic violence is through teaching misogynist men (and boys) to behave themselves. The Swedish politician spat the dummy. Writing on the news site Nyheter24, Solberg took issue with her government’s “tired gen- dered analysis”, which argued that eradicating sexism was the solu- tion to the problem of domestic vi- olence. She explained her reasoning: “We know through ex- tensive practice and experience that attempts to solve the issue through this kind of analysis have failed. And they failed precisely be- cause violence is not and never has been a gender issue.” Solberg challenged the govern- ment report’s assumption that there was a guilty sex and an inno- cent one. “Thanks to extensive re- search in the field, both at the national and international level, we now know with great certainty that this breakdown by sex is sim- ply not true.” She made reference to the world’s largest research database on intimate partner violence, the Partner Abuse State of Knowledge project, which summarises more than 1700 scientific papers on the topic. She concluded that her govern- ment’s report was based on misin- formation about family violence and that, contrary to the report’s one-sided view of men as the only perpetrators, many children were experiencing a very different re- ality: “We must recognise the fact that domestic violence, in at least half of its occurrence, is carried out by female perpetrators.” One of the key patterns that emerged from PASK, Solberg said, was that violence in the family was an inherited problem and children learned from watching the viol- ence of both their parents. “To know this and then continue to ig- nore the damage done to the child- ren who are today subjected to violence is a huge social betrayal,” she concluded. “The road to a solu- tion for this social problem is hard- ly to stubbornly continue to feed the patient with more of the same medicine that has already been tried for decades.” There’s a certain irony that this happened in Sweden, the utopia for gender equality and the last place you would expect misogyny to be blamed for a major social evil. But despite Scandinavian coun- tries being world leaders in gender equality (as shown by the 2014 World Economic Forum’s global gender gap index), Nordic women experience the worst physical or sexual violence in the EU. Given this inconvenient truth it seems extraordinary that for decades the gendered analysis of domestic vi- olence has retained its grip on Sweden — as it has in other West- ern countries, including Australia. No one would deny that it was a great achievement to have men’s violence against women fully ac- knowledged and to take critical steps to protect vulnerable women and ensure their safety. But it has been shocking to watch this morph into a worldwide domestic violence industry deter- mined to ignore evidence showing the complexities of violence in the home and avoid prevention strate- gies that would tackle the real risk factors underpinning this vital so- cial issue. Here, too, we are witnessing Solberg’s “huge social betrayal” by denying the reality of the violence being witnessed by many Austra- lian children. Just look at the bizarre $30 mil- lion television campaign the fed- eral government ran a few months ago, which started with a little boy slamming a door in a little girl’s face. A series of vignettes followed, all about innocent females cower- ing from nasty males. The whole thing is based on the erroneous notion that domestic vi- olence is caused by disrespect for women, precisely the type of “tired gender analysis” that Solberg has so thoroughly discredited. Yet our government spent at least $700,000 in funding for re- search and production of this cam- that domestic violence kills one woman every week. That’s rough- ly true. According to AIC figures, one woman is killed by an intimate partner or ex-partner every nine days. One man is killed by his part- ner about every 30 days. So it is im- portant to acknowledge that male violence is likelier to result in in- jury or death than female violence towards a partner. The fact remains that almost a quarter (23.1 per cent) of victims of intimate partner homicide are male — and we hardly ever hear about these deaths. It is not serving our society well to downplay the fact female viol- ence can also be lethal, towards men and towards children: women account for more than half of all murders of children (52 per cent). These are all still alarming stat- istics but here, too, there is good news. Domestic homicides are de- creasing. The number of victims of intimate partner homicide drop- ped by almost a third (28 per cent) between 1989-90 and 2010-12, ac- cording to data supplied by the AIC (http://bit.ly/2bxn1GO). Chris Lloyd is one of a growing number of Australian academics concerned at the misrepresent- ation of domestic violence stat- istics in this country. An expert in statistics and data management at the Melbourne Business School, Lloyd confirms our best source of data, the ABS’s Personal Safety Survey, clearly demonstrates domestic violence is decreasing. He, too, says it’s wrong to sug- gest there’s an epidemic of dom- estic violence in this country. “Many of the quoted statistics around domestic violence are exaggerated or incorrect,” says Lloyd. “Contrary to popular belief and commentary, rates of intimate partner violence are not increas- ing.” He adds that while he under- stands the emotional reaction people have to this crime, “emo- tion is no basis for public policy”. He’s concerned that Australian media so often publishes misinfor- mation — such as a recent edi- torial in The Age that repeated the falsehood that domestic violence was the leading cause of death or illness for adult women in Victoria. As I explained in my Inquirer article “Silent victims” last year (http://bit.ly/29CV5zD), it doesn’t even make the list of the top 10 such causes. The Age ignored Lloyd’s efforts to correct its mis- take, ditto his concern about er- roneous media reports that inflated domestic violence figures by using police crime statistics — a notoriously unreliable source. As Weatherburn points out, it’s very difficult to determine wheth- er swelling numbers of incidents reported to police reflects an in- crease in actual crime. “It may sim- ply be a tribute to the excellent job that has been done to raise aware- became an ambassador for Our Watch, she was welcomed by its chief executive, Mary Barry, who thanked the ambassadors for “en- gaging Australians to call out dis- respect and violence towards women and advocating for gender equality”, which was “exactly what the evidence says is needed to end the epidemic”. Our Watch staff spend their time writing policy documents and running conferences all firmly locked into the gender equity framework. The site’s facts-and- figures pages include lists of cher- ry-picked statistics about violence against women but male victims are dismissed by simply stating that the “overwhelming majority of acts of domestic violence are perpetrated by men against women”. There’s an interesting parallel here. As it happens, this one-in- three ratio is similar to the propor- tions of suicides among men and women. Among males, 2.8 per cent of all deaths in 2014 were attribut- ed to suicide, while the rate for fe- males was 0.9 per cent. Imagine the public outcry if the smaller number of female suicides were used to justify committing the en- tire suicide prevention budget to men. So why is it that all our gov- ernment organisations are getting away with doing just that with the hundreds of millions being spent on domestic violence? According to one of Australia’s leading experts on couple relation- ships, Kim Halford, a professor of clinical psychology at the Univer- sity of Queensland, most family vi- olence does not fit the picture most of us have when we imagine dom- estic violence — a violent man se- verely beating up his partner to control her. Such violence makes up less than 1 per cent of family violence. Most family violence is two- way aggression, with international research showing about a third of couples have a go at each other — pushing, slapping, shoving or worse. Given the shame and stig- ma associated with being a male victim of family violence it is not surprising that men downplay these experiences in victim sur- veys such as Australia’s Personal Safety Survey. It’s only when men and women are asked about per- petrating violence that the two- way violence emerges, with women readily admitting to re- searchers that they are very ac- tively involved and often instigate this type of “couple violence”. “Thirty years of international research consistently shows that women and men are violent to- wards each other at about the same rate,” Halford tells Inquirer. As one example, two major meta-analysis studies conducted by psychology professor John Archer from Britain’s University of Central Lancashire in 2000 and 2002 found that women were like- lier than men to report acts such as pushing, slapping or throwing something at their partner. Archer pointed out that women were like- lier to be injured as a result of the couple violence, although there was still a substantial minority of injured male victims. This two-way violence wasn’t what most researchers expected to find, admits a leading researcher in this area, Terrie Moffitt from Duke University in the US. “We asked the girls questions like, ‘Have you hit your partner?’ ‘Have you thrown your partner across the room?’ ‘Have you used a knife on your partner?’ I thought we were wasting our time asking these questions but they said yes, and they said yes in just the same num- bers as the boys did.” Moffitt’s work with young people was part of the world-renowned Dunedin longitudinal study back in the 1990s that recently featured on the SBS series Predict My Future (http://bit.ly/29NEDwQ). It is telling that Australia has not conducted any of the large- scale surveys focusing on perpe- trating violence likely to reveal the two-way pattern shown else- where. But gender symmetry did emerge in violence studies pub- lished in 2010-11 by Halford that focused on couples at the start of their relationships, newlywed cou- ples and couples expecting a child together. Even with these early re- lationships, about a quarter of the women admit they have been viol- ent towards their partners — just as many as the men. Halford suggests that perhaps three-quarters of a million child- ren every year in Australia are wit- nessing both parents engaged in domestic violence. Only small numbers see the severe violence we hear so much about, what the feminists call “intimate terrorism”, where a perpetrator uses violence in combination with a variety of other coercive tactics to take con- trol over their partner, but as Hal- ford points out, even less severe couple violence is not trivial. “Children witnessing any form of family violence, including cou- ple violence, suffer high rates of mental health problems and the children are more likely to be viol- ent themselves. Couple violence is also a very strong predictor of rela- tionship break-up, which has pro- found effects on adults and their children,” he says. The 2001 Young People and Domestic Violence study men- tioned earlier was based on na- tional research involving 5000 young Australians aged 12 to 20. This found ample evidence that children were witnessing this two- way parental couple violence, with 14.4 per cent witnessing “couple vi- olence”, 9 per cent witnessing male to female violence only and 7.8 per cent witnessing female to male vi- olence only — which means about one in four young Australians have this detrimental start to their lives. The report found the most damage to children occurred when they witnessed both parents involved in violence. It is often claimed that women hit only in self-defence, but Hal- ford points out the evidence shows this is not true. “In fact, one of the strongest risk factors for a woman being hit by a male partner is her hitting that male partner. It’s ab- solutely critical that we tackle cou- ple violence if we really want to stop this escalation into levels of violence which cause women seri- ous injury,” he says. Of course, the impact on children is the other im- portant reason to make couple vi- olence a significant focus. Naturally, none of this rates a mention in the section on “what drives violence against women” in the official government frame- work (http://bit.ly/2a3sVOQ) pro- moted by all our key domestic violence bodies. Nor is there any proper attention paid to other proven, evidence-based risk fac- tors such as alcohol and drug abuse, poverty and mental illness. The only officially sanctioned risk factor for domestic violence in this country is gender inequality. “Other factors interact with or re- inforce gender inequality to con- tribute to increased frequency and severity of violence against women, but do not drive violence in and of themselves” is the only grudging acknowledgment in the framework that other factors may be at play. At the recent hearings of Vic- toria’s Royal Commission into Family Violence, experts in al- cohol abuse and mental illness spoke out about this blatant disre- gard of the 40 years of research that addresses these complexities. “It is simplistic and misleading to say that domestic violence is caused by patriarchal attitudes,” said James Ogloff, a world-re- nowned mental health expert. “A sole focus on the gendered nature of family violence, which labels men as the perpetrators and women as the victims and which identifies gender inequity as the principal cause of family violence, is problematic on a number of lev- els,” said Peter Miller, principal re- search fellow and co-director of the violence prevention group at Deakin University. Miller was involved in a com- prehensive recent review of longi- tudinal studies involving pre- dictors of family violence that identified childhood experiences with abuse and violence, particu- larly in families with problem alcohol use, as key predictors of adult involvement in domestic violence. He has encountered ob- struction in conducting and pub- lishing research into the role of drugs and alcohol in family violence. The evidence is there about the complexities of domestic violence, but on an official level no one is lis- tening. The reason is simple. The deliberate distortion of this im- portant social issue is all about feminists refusing to give up hard- won turf. Ogloff spelled this out to the royal commission when he ex- plained that the Victorian family violence sector feared that “recog- nising other potential causes of vi- olence could cause a shift in funding away from programs di- rected at gender inequity”. Forty years ago an important feminist figure was invited to Aus- tralia to visit our newly established women’s refuges. Erin Pizzey was the founder of Britain’s first refuge, a woman praised around the world for her pioneering work helping women escape from violence. On the way to Australia Pizzey trav- elled to New Zealand, where she spoke out about her changing views. She had learned through dealing with violent women in her refuge that violence was not a gen- der issue and that it was important to tackle the complexities of viol- ence to properly address the issue. Pizzey quickly attracted the wrath of the women’s movement in Britain, attracting death threats that forced her for a time to leave the country. She tells Inquirer from London: “The feminists seized upon domestic violence as the cause they needed to attract more money and supporters at a time when the first flush of en- thusiasm for their movement was starting to wane. Domestic viol- ence was perfect for them — the just cause that no one dared chal- lenge. It led to a worldwide mil- lion-dollar industry, a huge cash cow supporting legions of bureau- crats and policymakers.” In Pizzey’s New Zealand press interviews she challenged the gen- der inequality view of violence, suggesting tackling violence in the home required dealing with the real roots of violence, such as in- tergenerational exposure to male and female aggression. News travelled fast. By the time Pizzey was set to leave for the Aus- tralian leg of the trip she was per- sona non grata with the feminists running our refuges. Her visit to this country was cancelled. That was 1976. Since then the gendered view of domestic viol- ence has held sway, dissenters are silenced and evidence about the true issues underlying this com- plex issue is ignored. And the huge cash cow supporting our blinkered domestic violence industry be- comes ever more bloated. Bettina Arndt is a Sydney-based social commentator. bettinaarndt.com.au The domestic violence industry has a vested interest in a gendered analysis BETTINA ARNDT GETTY IMAGES The University of Queensland’s Kim Halford suggests that perhaps three-quarters of a million children witness both parents engaged in domestic violence ness of DV, encouraging women to report, and efforts to get the police to respond properly,” he points out. Weatherburn believes that the slight (5.7 per cent) increase in re- ports of domestic assault in NSW during the past 10 years could be due to an increase in victims’ will- ingness to report domestic assault; he points to the 11 per cent drop across that time in serious forms of domestic assault, such as assault inflicting grievous bodily harm, as a more reliable picture of the trend in domestic violence. Weatherburn adds that valid comparisons of state police figures on assault are impossible because each police force has a different approach to recording assault. But in many states the goalposts have also shifted. The explosion in police records is due in part to recent expansions in the definition of family violence to include not just physical abuse but also threats of violence, psychological, emotional, econ- omic and social abuse. Look at Western Australia, where this changed definition was intro- duced in 2004. That year West Australian police recorded 17,000 incidents of violence, but by 2012 this had almost tripled to 45,000. Other states report similar trends because of these expanded definitions. “If a woman turns up to a police station claiming her man has yelled at her, the chances are that she’ll end up with a police report and well on her way to obtaining an apprehended violence order, which puts her in a very powerful position,” says Augusto Zimmer- mann, a commissioner with the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia, who explains that AVOs can be used to force men to leave their homes and deny them contact with their children. Often men are caught in police proceedings and evicted from their homes by orders that are is- sued without any evidence of legal wrongdoing. “It is a frightening re- ality that here in Australia a per- fectly innocent citizen stands to lose his home, his family, his repu- tation, as a result of unfounded al- legations. This is happening to men every day (as a consequence) of domestic violence laws which fail to require the normal stan- dards of proof and presumptions of innocence,” Zimmermann says, adding that he’s not talking about genuine cases of violent men who seriously abuse their wives and children but “law-abiding people who have lost their parental and property rights without the most basic requirements of the rule of law”. The growing trend for AVOs to be used for tactical purposes in family law disputes is also pushing up police records of domestic viol- ence. “Rather than being motivat- ed by legitimate concerns about feeling safe, a woman can make an application to AVO simply be- cause she was advised by lawyers to look for any reason to apply for such an order when facing a family law dispute,” says Zimmermann, who served on a recent govern- ment inquiry into legal issues and domestic violence. A survey of NSW magistrates found 90 per cent agreed that AVOs were being used as a divorce tactic. Research by family law pro- fessor Patrick Parkinson and col- leagues from the University of Sydney revealed that lawyers were suggesting that clients obtain AVOs, explaining to them that verbal and emotional abuse were enough to do the trick The bottom line is that police reports tell us little and the ABS Personal Safety Survey remains our best source of data, showing the true picture of domestic viol- ence. But there’s one more vital fact revealed by that survey that rarely surfaces: men account for one in three victims of partner vi- olence. You’ll never find this figure mentioned on Our Watch, one of our leading domestic violence or- ganisations, annually attracting government grants of up to $2 mil- lion. In May, when Lucy Turnbull Victims of domestic homicide 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 2002-03 03-04 04-05 05-06 06-07 07-08 08-09 09-10 10-11 Intimate partner Other family member Sibling Child Parent 11-12 Number Source: AIC How often have we been told we face an epidemic of domestic violence? It’s simply not true paign — just one example of the shocking misuse of the hundreds of millions of dollars that Malcolm Turnbull boasts our government is spending on domestic violence. Our key organisations all sing from the same songbook, regu- larly distorting statistics to present only one part of this complex story. There is a history of this in Aus- tralia. “Up to one quarter of young people in Australia have witnessed an incident of physical or domestic violence against their mother or stepmother,” Adam Graycar, a former director of the Australian Institute of Criminology, wrote in an introduction to a 2001 paper, Young Australians and Domestic Violence, a brief overview of the much larger Young People and Domestic Violence study. Somehow Graycar failed to mention that while 23 per cent of young people were aware of dom- estic violence against their moth- ers or stepmothers, an almost identical proportion (22 per cent) of young people were aware of domestic violence against their fa- thers or stepfathers by their moth- ers or stepmothers — as shown in the same study. This type of omission is every- where today, with most of our bu- reaucracies downplaying statistics that demonstrate the role of women in family violence and beating up evidence of male ag- gression. How often have we been told we face an epidemic of domestic violence? It’s simply not true. Most Australian women are lucky enough to live in a peaceful society where the men in their lives treat them well. The official data from the Aus- tralian Bureau of Statistics shows violence against women has de- creased across the 20-year period it has been studied, with the pro- portion of adult women experi- encing physical violence from their male partner in the preceding year down from 2.6 per cent in 1996 to 0.8 per cent in 2012. (Viol- ence from ex-partners dropped from 3.3 per cent to 0.7 per cent.) “There’s no evidence that we’re in the middle of an epidemic of domestic violence,” says Don Weatherburn, the respected direc- tor of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, confirm- ing that these figures from nation- al surveys carried out by the ABS provide the best data on domestic violence in the country. He adds that in NSW “serious forms of domestic assault, such as assault inflicting grievous bodily harm, have actually come down by 11 per cent over the last 10 years”. The most recent statistics from the ABS Personal Safety Survey show 1.06 per cent of women are physically assaulted by their part- ner or ex-partner each year in Australia. This figure is derived from the 2012 PSS and published in its Horizons report by Austra- lia’s National Research Organis- ation for Women’s Safety, available at http://bit.ly/1ZYSyEj. The rate is obtained by dividing cell B9 in Table 19 (93,400) by the total female residential population aged 18 and older (8,735,400). One in 100 women experienc- ing this physical violence from their partners is obviously a matter of great concern. But this percent- age is very different from the usual figures being trotted out. You’ll never find the figure of 1.06 per cent mentioned by any of the dom- estic violence organisations in this country. Their goal is to fuel the flames, to promote an alarmist re- action with the hope of attracting ever greater funding for the cause. What we hear from them is that one in three women are victims of violence. But that’s utterly mis- leading because it doesn’t just refer to domestic violence. These stat- istics are also taken from the Per- sonal Safety Survey but refer to the proportion of adult women who have experienced any type of physical violence at all (or threat of violence.) So we’re not just talking about violence by a partner or viol- ence in the home but any aggress- ive incident, even involving a perfect stranger — such as an al- tercation with an aggressive shop- ping trolley driver or an incident of road rage. That’s partly how the figure in- flates to one in three, but it also doesn’t even refer to what’s hap- pening now because these figures include lifetime incidents for adult women — so with our 70-year- olds the violence could have taken place more than 50 years ago. And the equivalent figure for men is worse — one in two. As for the most horrific crimes, where domestic violence ends in homicide, we are constantly told The ‘Stop it at the start’ campaign was based on the notion that domestic violence is caused by disrespect for women
Transcript of V0 - AUSE01Z01MA ALWAYS BEATING UP ON MEN · 2016-08-23 · Partner Abuse State of Knowledge...
THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN, AUGUST 20-21, 2016theaustralian.com.au INQUIRER 17
V0 - AUSE01Z01MA
ALWAYS BEATING UP ON MEN
Eva Solberg is a Swedish politician,a proud feminist who holds an im-portant post as chairwoman of theparty Moderate Women. Last yearshe was presented with her gov-ernment’s latest strategy for com-bating domestic violence. Likesimilar reports across the world,this strategy assumes the only wayto tackle domestic violence isthrough teaching misogynist men(and boys) to behave themselves.
The Swedish politician spat thedummy. Writing on the news siteNyheter24, Solberg took issuewith her government’s “tired gen-dered analysis”, which argued thateradicating sexism was the solu-tion to the problem of domestic vi-olence. She explained herreasoning: “We know through ex-tensive practice and experiencethat attempts to solve the issuethrough this kind of analysis havefailed. And they failed precisely be-cause violence is not and never hasbeen a gender issue.”
Solberg challenged the govern-ment report’s assumption thatthere was a guilty sex and an inno-cent one. “Thanks to extensive re-search in the field, both at thenational and international level,we now know with great certaintythat this breakdown by sex is sim-ply not true.”
She made reference to theworld’s largest research databaseon intimate partner violence, thePartner Abuse State of Knowledgeproject, which summarises morethan 1700 scientific papers on thetopic.
She concluded that her govern-ment’s report was based on misin-formation about family violenceand that, contrary to the report’sone-sided view of men as the onlyperpetrators, many children wereexperiencing a very different re-ality: “We must recognise the factthat domestic violence, in at leasthalf of its occurrence, is carried outby female perpetrators.”
One of the key patterns thatemerged from PASK, Solberg said,was that violence in the family wasan inherited problem and childrenlearned from watching the viol-ence of both their parents. “Toknow this and then continue to ig-nore the damage done to the child-ren who are today subjected toviolence is a huge social betrayal,”she concluded. “The road to a solu-tion for this social problem is hard-ly to stubbornly continue to feedthe patient with more of the samemedicine that has already beentried for decades.”
There’s a certain irony that thishappened in Sweden, the utopiafor gender equality and the lastplace you would expect misogynyto be blamed for a major social evil.But despite Scandinavian coun-tries being world leaders in genderequality (as shown by the 2014World Economic Forum’s globalgender gap index), Nordic womenexperience the worst physical orsexual violence in the EU. Giventhis inconvenient truth it seemsextraordinary that for decades thegendered analysis of domestic vi-olence has retained its grip onSweden — as it has in other West-ern countries, including Australia.
No one would deny that it was agreat achievement to have men’sviolence against women fully ac-knowledged and to take criticalsteps to protect vulnerable womenand ensure their safety.
But it has been shocking towatch this morph into a worldwidedomestic violence industry deter-mined to ignore evidence showingthe complexities of violence in thehome and avoid prevention strate-gies that would tackle the real riskfactors underpinning this vital so-cial issue.
Here, too, we are witnessingSolberg’s “huge social betrayal” bydenying the reality of the violencebeing witnessed by many Austra-lian children.
Just look at the bizarre $30 mil-lion television campaign the fed-eral government ran a few monthsago, which started with a little boyslamming a door in a little girl’sface. A series of vignettes followed,all about innocent females cower-ing from nasty males.
The whole thing is based on theerroneous notion that domestic vi-olence is caused by disrespect forwomen, precisely the type of “tiredgender analysis” that Solberg hasso thoroughly discredited.
Yet our government spent atleast $700,000 in funding for re-search and production of this cam-
that domestic violence kills onewoman every week. That’s rough-ly true.
According to AIC figures, onewoman is killed by an intimatepartner or ex-partner every ninedays. One man is killed by his part-ner about every 30 days. So it is im-portant to acknowledge that maleviolence is likelier to result in in-jury or death than female violencetowards a partner.
The fact remains that almost aquarter (23.1 per cent) of victims ofintimate partner homicide aremale — and we hardly ever hearabout these deaths.
It is not serving our society wellto downplay the fact female viol-ence can also be lethal, towardsmen and towards children: womenaccount for more than half of allmurders of children (52 per cent).
These are all still alarming stat-istics but here, too, there is goodnews. Domestic homicides are de-creasing. The number of victims ofintimate partner homicide drop-ped by almost a third (28 per cent)between 1989-90 and 2010-12, ac-cording to data supplied by theAIC (http://bit.ly/2bxn1GO).
Chris Lloyd is one of a growingnumber of Australian academicsconcerned at the misrepresent-ation of domestic violence stat-istics in this country. An expert instatistics and data management atthe Melbourne Business School,Lloyd confirms our best source ofdata, the ABS’s Personal SafetySurvey, clearly demonstratesdomestic violence is decreasing.
He, too, says it’s wrong to sug-gest there’s an epidemic of dom-estic violence in this country.“Many of the quoted statisticsaround domestic violence areexaggerated or incorrect,” saysLloyd. “Contrary to popular beliefand commentary, rates of intimatepartner violence are not increas-ing.” He adds that while he under-stands the emotional reactionpeople have to this crime, “emo-tion is no basis for public policy”.
He’s concerned that Australianmedia so often publishes misinfor-mation — such as a recent edi-torial in The Age that repeated thefalsehood that domestic violencewas the leading cause of death orillness for adult women in Victoria.
As I explained in my Inquirerarticle “Silent victims” last year(http://bit.ly/29CV5zD), it doesn’teven make the list of the top 10such causes. The Age ignoredLloyd’s efforts to correct its mis-take, ditto his concern about er-roneous media reports thatinflated domestic violence figuresby using police crime statistics — anotoriously unreliable source.
As Weatherburn points out, it’svery difficult to determine wheth-er swelling numbers of incidentsreported to police reflects an in-crease in actual crime. “It may sim-ply be a tribute to the excellent jobthat has been done to raise aware-
became an ambassador for OurWatch, she was welcomed by itschief executive, Mary Barry, whothanked the ambassadors for “en-gaging Australians to call out dis-respect and violence towardswomen and advocating for genderequality”, which was “exactly whatthe evidence says is needed to endthe epidemic”.
Our Watch staff spend theirtime writing policy documentsand running conferences all firmlylocked into the gender equityframework. The site’s facts-and-figures pages include lists of cher-ry-picked statistics about violenceagainst women but male victimsare dismissed by simply statingthat the “overwhelming majorityof acts of domestic violence areperpetrated by men againstwomen”.
There’s an interesting parallelhere. As it happens, this one-in-three ratio is similar to the propor-tions of suicides among men andwomen. Among males, 2.8 per centof all deaths in 2014 were attribut-ed to suicide, while the rate for fe-males was 0.9 per cent. Imaginethe public outcry if the smallernumber of female suicides wereused to justify committing the en-tire suicide prevention budget tomen. So why is it that all our gov-ernment organisations are gettingaway with doing just that with thehundreds of millions being spenton domestic violence?
According to one of Australia’sleading experts on couple relation-ships, Kim Halford, a professor ofclinical psychology at the Univer-sity of Queensland, most family vi-olence does not fit the picture mostof us have when we imagine dom-estic violence — a violent man se-verely beating up his partner tocontrol her. Such violence makesup less than 1 per cent of familyviolence.
Most family violence is two-way aggression, with internationalresearch showing about a third ofcouples have a go at each other —pushing, slapping, shoving orworse. Given the shame and stig-ma associated with being a malevictim of family violence it is notsurprising that men downplaythese experiences in victim sur-veys such as Australia’s PersonalSafety Survey. It’s only when menand women are asked about per-petrating violence that the two-way violence emerges, withwomen readily admitting to re-searchers that they are very ac-tively involved and often instigatethis type of “couple violence”.
“Thirty years of internationalresearch consistently shows thatwomen and men are violent to-wards each other at about thesame rate,” Halford tells Inquirer.
As one example, two majormeta-analysis studies conductedby psychology professor JohnArcher from Britain’s Universityof Central Lancashire in 2000 and
2002 found that women were like-lier than men to report acts such aspushing, slapping or throwingsomething at their partner. Archerpointed out that women were like-lier to be injured as a result of thecouple violence, although therewas still a substantial minority ofinjured male victims.
This two-way violence wasn’twhat most researchers expected tofind, admits a leading researcher inthis area, Terrie Moffitt from DukeUniversity in the US. “We askedthe girls questions like, ‘Have youhit your partner?’ ‘Have youthrown your partner across theroom?’ ‘Have you used a knife onyour partner?’ I thought we werewasting our time asking thesequestions but they said yes, andthey said yes in just the same num-bers as the boys did.” Moffitt’swork with young people was partof the world-renowned Dunedinlongitudinal study back in the1990s that recently featured on theSBS series Predict My Future(http://bit.ly/29NEDwQ).
It is telling that Australia hasnot conducted any of the large-scale surveys focusing on perpe-trating violence likely to reveal thetwo-way pattern shown else-where. But gender symmetry didemerge in violence studies pub-lished in 2010-11 by Halford thatfocused on couples at the start oftheir relationships, newlywed cou-ples and couples expecting a childtogether. Even with these early re-lationships, about a quarter of thewomen admit they have been viol-ent towards their partners — justas many as the men.
Halford suggests that perhapsthree-quarters of a million child-ren every year in Australia are wit-nessing both parents engaged indomestic violence. Only smallnumbers see the severe violencewe hear so much about, what thefeminists call “intimate terrorism”,where a perpetrator uses violencein combination with a variety ofother coercive tactics to take con-trol over their partner, but as Hal-ford points out, even less severecouple violence is not trivial.
“Children witnessing any formof family violence, including cou-ple violence, suffer high rates ofmental health problems and thechildren are more likely to be viol-ent themselves. Couple violence isalso a very strong predictor of rela-tionship break-up, which has pro-found effects on adults and theirchildren,” he says.
The 2001 Young People andDomestic Violence study men-tioned earlier was based on na-tional research involving 5000young Australians aged 12 to 20.This found ample evidence thatchildren were witnessing this two-way parental couple violence, with14.4 per cent witnessing “couple vi-olence”, 9 per cent witnessing maleto female violence only and 7.8 percent witnessing female to male vi-olence only — which means aboutone in four young Australianshave this detrimental start to theirlives. The report found the mostdamage to children occurredwhen they witnessed both parentsinvolved in violence.
It is often claimed that womenhit only in self-defence, but Hal-ford points out the evidence showsthis is not true. “In fact, one of thestrongest risk factors for a womanbeing hit by a male partner is herhitting that male partner. It’s ab-solutely critical that we tackle cou-ple violence if we really want tostop this escalation into levels ofviolence which cause women seri-
ous injury,” he says. Of course, theimpact on children is the other im-portant reason to make couple vi-olence a significant focus.
Naturally, none of this rates amention in the section on “whatdrives violence against women” inthe official government frame-work (http://bit.ly/2a3sVOQ) pro-moted by all our key domesticviolence bodies. Nor is there anyproper attention paid to otherproven, evidence-based risk fac-tors such as alcohol and drugabuse, poverty and mental illness.
The only officially sanctionedrisk factor for domestic violence inthis country is gender inequality.“Other factors interact with or re-inforce gender inequality to con-tribute to increased frequency andseverity of violence againstwomen, but do not drive violencein and of themselves” is the onlygrudging acknowledgment in theframework that other factors maybe at play.
At the recent hearings of Vic-toria’s Royal Commission intoFamily Violence, experts in al-cohol abuse and mental illnessspoke out about this blatant disre-gard of the 40 years of researchthat addresses these complexities.“It is simplistic and misleading tosay that domestic violence iscaused by patriarchal attitudes,”said James Ogloff, a world-re-nowned mental health expert.
“A sole focus on the genderednature of family violence, whichlabels men as the perpetrators andwomen as the victims and whichidentifies gender inequity as theprincipal cause of family violence,is problematic on a number of lev-els,” said Peter Miller, principal re-search fellow and co-director ofthe violence prevention group atDeakin University.
Miller was involved in a com-prehensive recent review of longi-tudinal studies involving pre-dictors of family violence thatidentified childhood experienceswith abuse and violence, particu-larly in families with problemalcohol use, as key predictors ofadult involvement in domesticviolence. He has encountered ob-struction in conducting and pub-lishing research into the role ofdrugs and alcohol in familyviolence.
The evidence is there about thecomplexities of domestic violence,but on an official level no one is lis-tening. The reason is simple. Thedeliberate distortion of this im-portant social issue is all aboutfeminists refusing to give up hard-won turf. Ogloff spelled this out tothe royal commission when he ex-plained that the Victorian familyviolence sector feared that “recog-nising other potential causes of vi-olence could cause a shift infunding away from programs di-rected at gender inequity”.
Forty years ago an importantfeminist figure was invited to Aus-tralia to visit our newly establishedwomen’s refuges. Erin Pizzey wasthe founder of Britain’s first refuge,a woman praised around the worldfor her pioneering work helpingwomen escape from violence. Onthe way to Australia Pizzey trav-elled to New Zealand, where shespoke out about her changingviews. She had learned throughdealing with violent women in herrefuge that violence was not a gen-der issue and that it was importantto tackle the complexities of viol-ence to properly address the issue.
Pizzey quickly attracted thewrath of the women’s movementin Britain, attracting death threatsthat forced her for a time to leavethe country. She tells Inquirerfrom London: “The feministsseized upon domestic violence asthe cause they needed to attractmore money and supporters at atime when the first flush of en-thusiasm for their movement wasstarting to wane. Domestic viol-ence was perfect for them — thejust cause that no one dared chal-lenge. It led to a worldwide mil-lion-dollar industry, a huge cashcow supporting legions of bureau-crats and policymakers.”
In Pizzey’s New Zealand pressinterviews she challenged the gen-der inequality view of violence,suggesting tackling violence in thehome required dealing with thereal roots of violence, such as in-tergenerational exposure to maleand female aggression.
News travelled fast. By the timePizzey was set to leave for the Aus-tralian leg of the trip she was per-sona non grata with the feministsrunning our refuges. Her visit tothis country was cancelled.
That was 1976. Since then thegendered view of domestic viol-ence has held sway, dissenters aresilenced and evidence about thetrue issues underlying this com-plex issue is ignored. And the hugecash cow supporting our blinkereddomestic violence industry be-comes ever more bloated.
Bettina Arndt is a Sydney-based social commentator. bettinaarndt.com.au
The domestic violence industry has a vested interest in a gendered analysis
BETTINA ARNDT
GETTY IMAGES
The University of Queensland’s Kim Halford suggests that perhaps three-quarters of a million children witness both parents engaged in domestic violence
ness of DV, encouraging womento report, and efforts to get thepolice to respond properly,” hepoints out.
Weatherburn believes that theslight (5.7 per cent) increase in re-ports of domestic assault in NSWduring the past 10 years could bedue to an increase in victims’ will-ingness to report domestic assault;he points to the 11 per cent dropacross that time in serious forms ofdomestic assault, such as assaultinflicting grievous bodily harm, asa more reliable picture of the trendin domestic violence.
Weatherburn adds that validcomparisons of state police figureson assault are impossible becauseeach police force has a differentapproach to recording assault. Butin many states the goalposts havealso shifted.
The explosion in police recordsis due in part to recent expansionsin the definition of family violenceto include not just physical abusebut also threats of violence,psychological, emotional, econ-omic and social abuse. Look atWestern Australia, where thischanged definition was intro-duced in 2004. That year WestAustralian police recorded 17,000incidents of violence, but by 2012this had almost tripled to 45,000.
Other states report similartrends because of these expandeddefinitions.
“If a woman turns up to a policestation claiming her man hasyelled at her, the chances are thatshe’ll end up with a police reportand well on her way to obtainingan apprehended violence order,which puts her in a very powerfulposition,” says Augusto Zimmer-mann, a commissioner with theLaw Reform Commission ofWestern Australia, who explainsthat AVOs can be used to forcemen to leave their homes and denythem contact with their children.
Often men are caught in policeproceedings and evicted fromtheir homes by orders that are is-sued without any evidence of legalwrongdoing. “It is a frightening re-ality that here in Australia a per-fectly innocent citizen stands tolose his home, his family, his repu-tation, as a result of unfounded al-legations. This is happening tomen every day (as a consequence)
of domestic violence laws whichfail to require the normal stan-dards of proof and presumptionsof innocence,” Zimmermann says,adding that he’s not talking aboutgenuine cases of violent men whoseriously abuse their wives andchildren but “law-abiding peoplewho have lost their parental andproperty rights without the mostbasic requirements of the rule oflaw”.
The growing trend for AVOs tobe used for tactical purposes infamily law disputes is also pushingup police records of domestic viol-ence. “Rather than being motivat-ed by legitimate concerns aboutfeeling safe, a woman can make anapplication to AVO simply be-cause she was advised by lawyersto look for any reason to apply forsuch an order when facing a familylaw dispute,” says Zimmermann,who served on a recent govern-ment inquiry into legal issues anddomestic violence.
A survey of NSW magistratesfound 90 per cent agreed thatAVOs were being used as a divorcetactic. Research by family law pro-fessor Patrick Parkinson and col-leagues from the University ofSydney revealed that lawyers weresuggesting that clients obtainAVOs, explaining to them thatverbal and emotional abuse wereenough to do the trick
The bottom line is that policereports tell us little and the ABSPersonal Safety Survey remainsour best source of data, showingthe true picture of domestic viol-ence. But there’s one more vitalfact revealed by that survey thatrarely surfaces: men account forone in three victims of partner vi-olence.
You’ll never find this figurementioned on Our Watch, one ofour leading domestic violence or-ganisations, annually attractinggovernment grants of up to $2 mil-lion. In May, when Lucy Turnbull
Victims of domestic homicide1009080706050403020100
2002-03 03-04 04-05 05-06 06-07 07-08 08-09 09-10 10-11
Intimate partner
Other family memberSibling
ChildParent
11-12
Number
Source: AIC
How often have webeen told we face an epidemic of domestic violence?It’s simply not true
paign — just one example of theshocking misuse of the hundredsof millions of dollars that MalcolmTurnbull boasts our government isspending on domestic violence.
Our key organisations all singfrom the same songbook, regu-larly distorting statistics to presentonly one part of this complex story.
There is a history of this in Aus-tralia. “Up to one quarter of youngpeople in Australia have witnessedan incident of physical or domesticviolence against their mother orstepmother,” Adam Graycar, aformer director of the AustralianInstitute of Criminology, wrote inan introduction to a 2001 paper,Young Australians and DomesticViolence, a brief overview of themuch larger Young People andDomestic Violence study.
Somehow Graycar failed tomention that while 23 per cent ofyoung people were aware of dom-estic violence against their moth-ers or stepmothers, an almostidentical proportion (22 per cent)of young people were aware ofdomestic violence against their fa-thers or stepfathers by their moth-ers or stepmothers — as shown inthe same study.
This type of omission is every-where today, with most of our bu-reaucracies downplaying statisticsthat demonstrate the role ofwomen in family violence andbeating up evidence of male ag-gression.
How often have we been toldwe face an epidemic of domesticviolence? It’s simply not true. MostAustralian women are luckyenough to live in a peaceful societywhere the men in their lives treatthem well.
The official data from the Aus-tralian Bureau of Statistics showsviolence against women has de-creased across the 20-year periodit has been studied, with the pro-portion of adult women experi-encing physical violence fromtheir male partner in the precedingyear down from 2.6 per cent in1996 to 0.8 per cent in 2012. (Viol-ence from ex-partners droppedfrom 3.3 per cent to 0.7 per cent.)
“There’s no evidence that we’rein the middle of an epidemic ofdomestic violence,” says DonWeatherburn, the respected direc-tor of the NSW Bureau of CrimeStatistics and Research, confirm-ing that these figures from nation-al surveys carried out by the ABSprovide the best data on domesticviolence in the country.
He adds that in NSW “seriousforms of domestic assault, such asassault inflicting grievous bodilyharm, have actually come down by11 per cent over the last 10 years”.
The most recent statistics fromthe ABS Personal Safety Surveyshow 1.06 per cent of women arephysically assaulted by their part-ner or ex-partner each year inAustralia. This figure is derivedfrom the 2012 PSS and publishedin its Horizons report by Austra-lia’s National Research Organis-ation for Women’s Safety,available at http://bit.ly/1ZYSyEj.The rate is obtained by dividingcell B9 in Table 19 (93,400) by thetotal female residential populationaged 18 and older (8,735,400).
One in 100 women experienc-ing this physical violence fromtheir partners is obviously a matterof great concern. But this percent-age is very different from the usualfigures being trotted out. You’llnever find the figure of 1.06 percent mentioned by any of the dom-estic violence organisations in thiscountry. Their goal is to fuel theflames, to promote an alarmist re-action with the hope of attractingever greater funding for the cause.
What we hear from them is thatone in three women are victims ofviolence. But that’s utterly mis-leading because it doesn’t just referto domestic violence. These stat-istics are also taken from the Per-sonal Safety Survey but refer to theproportion of adult women whohave experienced any type ofphysical violence at all (or threat ofviolence.) So we’re not just talkingabout violence by a partner or viol-ence in the home but any aggress-ive incident, even involving aperfect stranger — such as an al-tercation with an aggressive shop-ping trolley driver or an incident ofroad rage.
That’s partly how the figure in-flates to one in three, but it alsodoesn’t even refer to what’s hap-pening now because these figuresinclude lifetime incidents for adultwomen — so with our 70-year-olds the violence could have takenplace more than 50 years ago. Andthe equivalent figure for men isworse — one in two.
As for the most horrific crimes,where domestic violence ends inhomicide, we are constantly told The ‘Stop it at the start’ campaign was based on the notion that domestic violence is caused by disrespect for women
