In a recent case involving an Australian woman who murdered her children, there was something particularly notable about public commentary. Almost every commenter expressed sympathy for the murderer, with much sorrowful head-shaking about mental health.
Compare that with the response to, say, the man who threw his young daughter to her death from Melbourne’s Westgate bridge, or the man who murdered his son at a cricket match. Both were diagnosed as suffering from mental illness at the time of their crimes. Yet both were greeted with universal opprobrium. The murderer’s mental state, in one case, was dismissed out of hand by prosecutors.
It seems that, when it comes to crimes of violence, an iron narrative plays out: women are always victims, and men are always, always, at fault. Regardless of the facts.
This is as true of domestic violence as it is of child murder.
While domestic violence against women is constantly highlighted by the mass media, such violence against men is rarely reported. We have a moral obligation to speak out on behalf of male victims of domestic violence, particularly when there are so many barriers deterring them from ever reporting the violence and abuse that are inflicted on them by their female partners.
This is not just a social narrative: it’s official policy. No matter what, women are always the victims.
The Domestic Violence Prevention Centre is funded by the Department of Communities, Child Safety and Disability Services, Queensland Government. This taxpayer-funded organisation claims that violence used by women against their male partners often happens ‘when a woman has to defend herself against an assault in an effort to protect herself from further violence’.
It also attempts to rationalise female domestic violence as a situation when an “oppressed” woman ‘hits back after experiencing a long history of violence and abuse from her partner in the relationship’. ‘Although she may use violence in this incidence she is not the most powerful or most dangerous person in the relationship. She may continue to fear for her safety’, says the Centre on its website.
In other words, this taxpayer-funded organisation is attempting to rationalise female domestic violence. It is doing so by somehow placing the blame on male victims of domestic violence rather than the actual female perpetrators.
Many years ago, I did some consultant work for a service for victims of sexual assault. They explain that they had changed their name from “rape crisis centre” because that title discouraged male victims. An admirable concession. Domestic violence services, however, have no such consideration for male victims.
To test the availability of such support services to male victims in Australia, a Melbourne-based psychiatrist rang the Victorian ‘Men’s Referral Service’. This is how he reported his experience: ‘I rang them one, two occasions in relation to male victims. Both times I was told that if I had dug deeper I would have discovered that the men were the perpetrators.’
[…]The NSW Liberal government has appointed a notorious feminist organisation to “assist” male victims of domestic violence. The organisation’s website informs: ‘The Men’s Referral Service provides free, anonymous, and confidential telephone counselling, information, and referrals to men to assist them to take action to stop using violent and controlling behaviour’.
So a service, funded by taxpayers to provide assistance for male victims of violence, operates from the open assumption that men are in fact always perpetrators.
Imagine a sexual assault service whose mission statement was that it “provides free, anonymous, and confidential telephone counselling, information, and referrals to women to assist them to take action to stop dressing provocatively and asking for it”.
In truth, women can be as violent as men and numerous studies have demonstrated that both genders may commit violent acts in the home in roughly equal numbers has been clearly established in so many studies that it requires no reiteration […]
At least one-third of all the reported cases of domestic violence in Australia involve male victims. And countless more are silently suffering at the hands of their violent female partners. We have a moral obligation to speak out on behalf of all victims of domestic violence.
spectator.com.au/2019/12/the-hidden-male-victims-of-domestic-violence