INQUIRER THE AUSTRALIAN,SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2015

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There was a funny discussion re-cently on the new ABC televisionshow How Not to Behave. One ofthe hosts, Gretel Killeen, startedcomplaining about “manspread-ing” — men sitting with their legsapart. “Men sitting with their legsso wide apart you’d think they areabout to give birth,” she quipped.

The male host, Matt Okine,suggested men sit that way simplybecause it is more comfortable.“For whom?” asked Killeen. “Formy balls,” Okine responded, with afunny explanation involving agrape ending up in a wine-makingprocess after being squashed at theapex of two adjoining rulers.

Manspreading has attracted at-tention on public transport in NewYork because of men’s spread legssometimes taking up more thantheir allocated seat space. The cityran a campaign: “Dude, Stop thespread, please. It’s a space issue.”Fair enough. It makes sense to pro-mote consideration for others inpublic spaces — but, as always, thepublic discussion descended intotalk about male aggression. It’s allabout patriarchal men claimingtheir territory, sneered the femin-ist commentators.

Hardly a day goes by withoutsome new story appearing thatrubbishes men.

After being criticised non-stopfor about a half-century, it’s prob-ably time men had a right of reply,British journalist Peter Lloydwrites in his recent book, Stand ByYour Manhood. Arguing that menhave spent decades as the target ina long line of public floggings,Lloyd comprehensively but withsurprising good humour outlinesthe “dismissive, patronising andskewed” narrative about hetero-sexual men that has dominatedmainstream media and public pol-icy for so long.

“So why is it that, today, therehas never been a worse time to be aman?” Lloyd writes. “Rubbishingthe male of the species and every-thing he stands for is a disturbing— and growing — 21st-centuryphenomenon. It is the fashionablefascism of millions of women —and many, many men, too. Insteadof feeling proud of our achieve-ments, we men are forced to spendour time apologising for them.When people chide us for notbeing able to multi-task or use awashing machine we join in themocking laughter — even thoughwe invented the damned thing inthe first place.”

Lloyd’s examples of thisskewed public discussion includemany that should make anyrational woman squirm.

Like his comment on the front-running US Democrat candidate:“Hillary Clinton once said —remarkably, with a straight face —that women have ‘always been theprimary victims of war’, not themen who get their legs blown off inthe battlefield in Iraq. Or Libya. OrSudan.”

He mentions that in Nigeria,Boko Haram set fire to a schooldormitory killing 59 sleeping boys— the third tragedy of its kind injust eight months. There wasn’t apeep about this, yet two monthslater when the same terrorist or-ganisation kidnapped a group ofschoolgirls the world mounted aviral campaign in minutes. “Whatgives? Why is boy’s life worth less— or worthless?” questions Lloyd.

Isn’t it odd, he asks, that men’shealth is not given any priority,given that men die five years ear-lier in a life expectancy gap thathas increased 400 per cent since1920? Lloyd’s book includes anAustralian example of the dispar-ity in health funding. Data fromour National Health and MedicalResearch Council shows a “spec-tacular gender gap” with “men’shealth problems being allocated aquarter of the funding women’s re-search gets”. Lloyd quotes a NewsCorp article showing fundingspecifically targeting men’s healthranks 36th in health research pri-orities, just behind sexually trans-missible infections.

Yet where the anti-male biasreaches its zenith is in the witch-hunt over domestic violence. Intheir determination to promotewhat is a very serious social prob-lem — the violence of some mentowards their partners — the zeal-ots controlling public debate onthis issue are absolutely deter-mined to allow no muddying of thewaters. Violence by women is dis-missed as irrelevant, violenceagainst men is routinely ignored orseen as amusing.

A few months ago a promo for a“screwball” comedy, She’s FunnyThat Way, ran in all our major

cinemas. It featured three success-ive scenes showing differentwomen slugging men in the face,followed by a woman sniggering,“Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.”Audiences found that hilariousand there has been not one word ofprotest about the promotion.

Anyone speaking out about thecircumstances that drive men toviolence is reined in. Look at whathas happened to Rosie Batty. Whocould forget this extraordinarywoman speaking with such com-passion about her mentally ill for-mer partner, Greg Anderson,within days of him murderingtheir young son. “No one lovedLuke more than Greg, his father,”she said, explaining Anderson’smental health had deterioratedafter a long period of unemploy-ment and homelessness.

How disappointing, then, tohear her speech at Malcolm Turn-bull’s first major policy announce-ment, the launch of a $100 millionwomen’s safety package. “This is agender issue,” she said firmly,mouthing the party line — not oneword of compassion for men,nothing about men and childrenwho are victims of female violence.

Open your eyes, Rosie. The epi-demic of violence you are rightlyso concerned about isn’t just aboutmen. Didn’t you notice Melbournemother Akon Guode, who hasbeen charged with murder afterdriving her car with her four smallchildren into a lake? Or DonnaVasyli, arrested after her Sydneypodiatrist husband was found withseven stab wounds.

Why is it that when a womanwas charged last month with mur-dering her partner in Broken Hill,the story sunk without a trace anddomestic violence was never men-tioned in the media reports?

Around the country there aregovernment departments strug-gling to cope with daily reports ofchild abuse, most often by theirmothers. Yes, it is appalling that somany children grow up in homesterrorised by violent fathers, butabuse by mothers is surely part ofthe story of violence in the home ifwe are really concerned about pro-tection of children and breakingthe cycle of violence.

Bill Shorten’s wife, Chloe, re-cently gave a speech boastingabout her husband’s and hermother’s commitment to theeradication of violence againstwomen. Funnily enough her talkmentioned a book, Scream Quietlyor the Neighbours Will Hear, writ-ten by the woman who set up theworld’s first refuge, Erin Pizzey.Clearly Chloe Shorten’s speechwriter isn’t up on the politics ofdomestic violence. Pizzey is nowworld famous for her strenuouscampaign arguing that domesticviolence is not a gender issue.

“I always knew women can beas vicious and irresponsible asmen,” she wrote, describing herchildhood experience with amother who beat her with the cordfrom an iron. She points out thatmany of the women in her refugewere violent, dangerous to theirchildren and others around them.

Pizzey’s honesty has attractedconstant attacks — she was forcedto flee her native England with herchildren after protests, threats andviolence culminated in the shoot-ing of her family dog.

The 76-year-old started herown “White Ribbon Campaign” tocounter “40 years of lies”, the con-stant male-bashing misinfor-mation that dominates thedomestic violence debate. Thefeminist White Ribbon Campaignthat operates here and overseas isa prime offender.

“We must stop demonisingmen and start healing the rift thatfeminism has created betweenmen and women,” says Pizzey, ar-guing that the “insidious and ma-nipulative philosophy that womenare always victims and men alwaysoppressors can only continue thisunspeakable cycle of violence”.

This brave, outspoken womanis one of a growing number ofdomestic violence experts andscholars struggling to set the re-cord straight about violence in thehome. There’s Murray Straus, pro-fessor of sociology from the Uni-versity of New Hampshire andeditor of several peer-reviewedsociology journals. Back in 1975 hefirst published research showingwomen were just as likely as mento report hitting a spouse. Subse-quent surveys showed womenoften initiated the violence — itwasn’t simply self-defence. Thesefindings have been confirmed bymore than 200 studies of intimateviolence summed up in Straus’s re-cent paper, Thirty Years of Deny-ing the Evidence on GenderSymmetry in Partner Violence.

It’s true that physical violenceby women may cause fewer injur-ies on average because of differ-ences in size and strength, but it isby no means harmless. Women

use weapons, from knives tohousehold objects, to neutralisetheir disadvantage, and men maybe held back by cultural prohibi-tions on using force towards awoman even in self-defence.

Straus’s review concludes thatin the US men sustain about athird of the injuries from partnerviolence, including a third of thedeaths from attacks by a partner.(In Australia, men made up a quar-ter of the 1645 partner deaths be-tween 1989 and 2012.) Andproportions of non-physical abuse(for example, emotional abuse)against men are even higher.Women are about as likely as mento kill their children and accountfor more than half of substantiatedchild maltreatment perpetrators.

(The world’s largest domesticviolence research database pub-lished in the peer-reviewed journalPartner Abuse summarised 1700peer-reviewed studies and foundthat in large population samples,58 per cent of intimate partnerviolence reported involved boththe female and male partner. Seehttp://bit.ly/1GNOjoN.)

Strauss has spent much of hisworking life weathering attacksfor publicising these unwelcometruths about violence, regularlybeing booed from the stage whenhe tried to present his findings. Ontwo occasions the chairwoman ofa Canadian commission into viol-ence against women claimed pub-licly he was a wife-beater — afterrepeated requests she finally wasforced to apologise to him.

Straus has received deaththreats, along with his co-researchers, Richard Gelles andSuzanne Steinmetz, with the latterthe subject of a campaign to denyher tenure and attempts made torescind her grant funding.

“All three of us became ‘nonpersons’ among domestic violenceadvocates. Invitations to confer-ences dwindled and dried up. Li-brarians publicly stated theywould not order or shelve ourbooks,” Gelles says.

It would be nice to report morecivilised debate over this issue inAustralia but, sadly, here too liesand bullying are par for the course.

Look at what happened to Tan-veer Ahmed. This Sydney psy-chiatrist has long written abouttaboo topics, such as reverse ra-cism or denial in the Muslim com-munity, which got up the nose ofthe Fairfax Media audience. Twoyears ago he ended up losing hiscolumn over plagiarism charges.

Ahmed had spent six years as aWhite Ribbon ambassador butthis all came unstuck this yearwhen he wrote an article for TheAustralian that pointed to the per-nicious influence of radical femi-nists on public debate overdomestic violence and suggestedthe “growing social and economicdisempowerment of men is in-creasingly the driver of family-based violence”.

Boy, did that bring them out inforce. Fairfax columnist Clement-ine Ford condemned his danger-ous message, which “prioritisesmen’s power over women’ssafety”, adding that she didn’t havetime for “men’s woe-betide-mefeelings”. After a tirade of attackson social media, White Ribbonasked him to step down, informinghim that to be reinstated he wouldneed to undergo a recommitmentprogram. Shades of Stasiland, eh?There’s a fascinating twist to thiswhole saga. Heading up WhiteRibbon Australia’s research andpolicy group is Michael Flood,who is on the technical advisorygroup for the UN’s Partners forPrevention, which has producedresearch papers supporting the es-

sential points Ahmed makes aboutthe links between men’s social dis-empowerment and violence to-wards their partners.

Flood has spent his career fo-cusing on men’s violence, from hisearly years teaching boys in Can-berra schools about date rapethrough to alarmist papers sug-gesting pornography promotesmale aggression, to his latest roleas pro-feminist sociologist at theUniversity of Wollongong. Des-pite his years in academe he’shappy to play fast and loose withstatistics when it comes to demo-nising men.

“Boys think it’s OK to hit girls.”Back in 2008 this shocking newsabout teenager attitudes to viol-ence led to headlines across thecountry. The source was a press re-lease by White Ribbon Australiareporting on a publication byFlood and Lara Fergus that madethe extraordinary claim: “Close toone in three (31 per cent) boys be-lieve ‘it’s not a big deal to hit agirl’ .” Politicians jumped on thebandwagon, and everywherethere were calls for the re-edu-cation of these horrible, violentyoung men.

Flood and his colleagues had ittotally wrong. The research actu-ally found males hitting femaleswas seen by virtually all youngpeople surveyed to be unaccept-able. Yet it was quite OK for a girlto hit a boy — 25 per cent of youngpeople agreed with the statement“When a girl hits a guy, it’s really

not a big deal”. When the error wasbrought to their attention, WhiteRibbon finally issued a correctionand sent letters to newspapers, butof course none of these had the im-pact of the incorrect, misleadingmedia headlines splashed rightacross the country.

A simple mistake? Well, per-haps, but there actually has been asteady stream of misleading stat-istics about domestic violence andit’s a full-time job trying to getthem corrected. The person whohas taken on that daunting task isGreg Andresen, the key re-searcher for the One in ThreeCampaign, which seeks to presentan accurate picture of violence inthe home. The Sydney man some-how manages to challenge muchof the deluge of misinformationabout domestic violence while alsoworking a day job and rearing ayoung family.

The campaign’s reference to“one in three” refers to the pro-portion of family violence victimswho are male. Our best data onthis comes from the AustralianBureau of Statistics’ Personal Safe-ty Survey in 2012 that found 33 percent of people who had experi-enced violence by a current part-ner were male.

Confusingly, there’s another“one in three” figure constantlybandied about in domestic viol-ence discussions, referring to theproportion of women who haveexperienced violence during theirlifetime. This figure actually refers

to all victims of incidents of physi-cal violence, not just violence bypartners, and about one in twomen experience similar violence— as explained in an excellent re-port just released by Australia’sNational Research Organisationfor Women’s Safety.

The One in Three website(oneinthree.com.au) opens with astartling image of a man with bat-tered nose and a shocking shinerplus the slogan, “It’s amazing whatmy wife can do with a frypan.”That certainly makes the point butthe strength of this site is the solidstatistical analysis — more than 20pages dissecting misleading stat-istics aired over Australia’s media.

Here’s one example fromABC’s Radio National: “A recentsurvey in Victoria found family vi-olence is the leading cause of deathand ill health in women of child-bearing age.” Andresen draws onAustralian Institute of Health andWelfare data to show the top fivecauses of death, disability and ill-ness combined for Australianwomen aged 15 to 44 are anxietyand depression, migraine, type 2diabetes, asthma and schizo-phrenia. “Violence doesn’t makethe list,” he concludes.

The same nonsense aboutdomestic violence being the lead-ing cause of death in youngwomen also appeared on SkyNews last year, spurring psychol-ogist Claire Lehmann to do herown analysis, which she publishedin her blog (http://bit.ly/1Km1xEg)on White Ribbon Day. Lehmannmade it clear she supports the im-portant work of the campaign but,she writes, “what I do not support,however, are dodgy statistics andfalse claims which belittle thisgood cause”.

In great detail she demon-strates how the dodgy statisticsstem from misleading analysis of aVicHealth report and presents allthe Australian data from the ABSand AIHW showing the claim istotally absurd. Yet the ABC, pre-sented with all the data, still con-cluded the claim was accurate.

One of the tactics used by dom-estic violence campaigners is tohighlight only men’s violence and

leave out any statistics relating towomen.

“A quarter of Australian child-ren had witnessed violence againsttheir mother,” South Australia’sVictims of Crime commissionerMichael O’Connell thundered inAugust 2010.

This statistic came from aYoung People and Domestic Viol-ence study that showed almost anidentical proportion of young peo-ple was aware of domestic violenceagainst their fathers or stepfathers.Yet this barely got any mention inthe media coverage.

Whenever statistics are men-tioned publicly that reveal the truepicture of women’s participationin family violence, they are dis-missed with the domestic violencelobby claiming they are based onflawed methodology or are takenout of context.

But as Andresen says: “We usethe best available quantitative data— ABS surveys, AIC (AustralianInstitute of Criminology) homi-cide stats, police crime data, hospi-tal injury databases — all of whichshow that a third of victims of fam-ily violence are male. The samedata sources are cited by the maindomestic violence organisationsbut they deliberately minimise anydata relating to male victims.”

A recent episode of the ABC’ssatirical comedy Utopia showedpublic servants who ran the Na-tion Building Authority all in a twitworking out how to knock back aFreedom of Information request.It made for great comedy watch-ing the twists and turns of the bu-reaucrats seeking to refuse therequest, assuming it was better toblock it “just to be on the safe side”.Pretty funny considering this fic-tional FoI request turned out to re-late to a harmless, long-finishedmulti-storey carpark. The bureau-crats must run around like head-less chooks when they receive theregular FoI requests sent to allgovernment bodies regarding thelong-term cover-up of the genderof child abuse perpetrators.

Imagine the scene at theAIHW when they received FOIrequests relating to a long-termcover up regarding the gender ofchild abuse perpetrators.

The one time this body pub-lished this data was in 1996 andshowed 968 male perpetrators to1138 women. Since then FoI re-quests have produced data onlyfrom Western Australia, namelystate Department for Child Pro-tection figures that showed thenumber of mothers responsible for“substantiated maltreatment’’ be-tween 2007 and 2008 rose from312 to 427. In the same period thenumber of fathers reported forchild abuse dropped from 165 to155. Easy to see why bureaucratswould be nervous of figures likethat.

Queensland Premier Annasta-cia Palaszczuk recently madeheadlines by calling for campaignsagainst domestic violence to in-clude male victims.

Her comment was met by abarrage of complaints from dom-estic violence services warning hernot to recognise male victims atthe expense of women.

According to Pizzey, that’s thereal issue. It is all about funding. Ina 2011 article for The Daily Mail sheargued domestic violence had be-come a huge feminist industry,“This is girls-only empire building,and it is highly lucrative at that.”

Pizzey has spent most of her lifespeaking out about the lies beingpromoted by this industry to pro-tect their funding base and beg-ging audiences not to create adomestic violence movement hos-tile to men and boys.

“I failed,” she concludes sadly,but she hasn’t given up. Her mess-age is clear: “The roots of domesticviolence lie in our parenting. Bothmothers and fathers can be viol-ent; we need to acknowledge this.If we educate parents about thedangers of behaving violently, toeach other and to their children,we will change the course of thosechildren’s lives.”

As Lloyd so eloquently pointsout, domestic violence is only oneof many issues where men arebeing demonised, where the ex-clusive promotion of women’s pri-orities leaves men with a dud deal.His book explores issues such aspaternity fraud, schools failingboys, circumcision, becoming aweekend dad, men’s sex drive, por-nography and the early death rate.

Ironic, considering how oftenwe are told men still hold all thepower.

It’s about time those malenewspaper editors, politicians, bu-reaucrats and other powerful menstarted asking hard questionsabout the one-sided conversationthat leaves so many men missingout. And maybe women who careabout their brothers, sons, fathers,partners and male friends maycare to join in.

‘Both mothers andfathers can be violent; weneed to acknowledgethis’

ERIN PIZZEYBRITISH FOUNDER OFTHE FIRST WOMEN’SREFUGE

SILENTVICTIMS

Our culture assumes domestic violence is almost invariably committed against women. But the data reveals a surprisingly high number of men are also abused

BETTINA ARNDT

Jennifer Aniston delivers a slap to her onscreen boyfriend, Will Forte