Mothers Abusing Fathers
What about the men? White Ribbon, men and violence
What about the men? White Ribbon, men and violence: A response to Dr Michael Flood by Men’s Health Australia
The White Ribbon Foundation is an organisation that works to prevent male violence towards women – a goal that is extremely worthy and worth supporting. The White Ribbon website states that “all forms of violence are unacceptable,” however in 2009 the organisation issued a document to it’s male Ambassadors which used erroneous ‘facts and statistics’ to downplay, diminish and report incorrectly about male victims of violence. These Ambassadors use federal government funding to take the White Ribbon message into regional, rural and remote communities. These significant errors could have led the Ambassadors, and through them the general public via federal funding, to be misled about the nature and dynamics of interpersonal violence in Australia.
Mum’s hate campaign against stepmother in custody battle at Family Court
A MOTHER has lost custody of her two young daughters after she conducted an “obsessive” campaign against their new stepmother.
Family Court judge Justice Peter Young said he suspected it was the mother, 30, who painted “bitch” on the woman’s house and wrote “die dad haters” on her own car in felt-tipped pen and then sought to blame the stepmother, 28.
The judge said the sisters, aged 10 and seven, would be better off living with their father, 29, and his new wife, because their mother “would not likely change”.
He ordered an end to the shared custody which had been going on for more than five years and said the two girls should live full-time with their father.
“I find that he is capable of a greater level of responsive behaviour and conduct than is the mother and that is one of the considerations I have evaluated,” Justice Young said.Caught between warring parents, the sisters had to “tiptoe” around both households for fear of upsetting anyone.
Submissions to Family Law Amendment (Family Violence) Bill 2010 Exposure Draft released under FOI
Subject: Submissions by organisations to Family Law Amendment (Family Violence) Bill 2010 Exposure Draft released under FOI
Dear colleagues,
Under a Freedom of Information Act request, the Federal Attorney General’s Department has finally released the following information to the public:
1. Copies of all public submissions lodged by organisations in response to the public consultation process into the Family Law Amendment (Family Violence) Bill 2010 – Exposure Draft . 122 submissions by organisations supported the proposed amendments; 15 submissions did not support the proposed amendments; and 6 submissions did not indicate whether they supported or did not support the proposed amendments.
2. A tally of the number of submissions by personal individuals that supported the proposed amendments (178); the number of submissions that did not support the proposed amendments (52); and the number of submissions that did not indicate whether they supported or did not support the amendments (36); for all submissions lodged in response to the public consultation process into the Family Law Amendment (Family Violence) Bill 2010 – Exposure Draft.
It is sad that in a democracy such as Australia, we have to rely on Freedom of Information legislation to obtain access to public submissions to a public federal government inquiry, especially when the inquiry’s website clearly states, “unless submissions are marked confidential they may be published.” There is no doubt that the Labor Government is pushing through their Family Law reforms with as little transparency as possible.
When the Attorney General’s Department was originally contacted in February 2011 we were told they “didn’t know if or when the submissions would be published.” When pressed further, we were told they “might be published when the legislation goes through parliament.” This clearly hasn’t happened. The FOI request was made on 18th February 2011, and the documents were finally received on 3rd June 2011 (FOI legislation requires that information be provided within one month, or two months when sensitive information is involved). It has taken a further month to scan them and put them online.
You can read the submissions using the links below. They were sent to us by the Attorney General’s Department in the exact format that you see online. They have been scanned and OCR’d “as-is” into one large PDF document that can be easily searched using Acrobat Reader software. For those of you who might have trouble downloading large documents, the large PDF has also been split into 5 smaller sections.
I have also discovered that a submission lodged on 14th January via email from the One in Three Campaign was not provided under the FOI request. This raises some very serious questions indeed:
1. How many other submissions were sent in to this Inquiry but were not received, and therefore were unable to be considered by the government?
2. How many other submissions were indeed received by this inquiry but were not provided under the FOI request?
Either way, there appear to be serious administrative errors taking place in the Attorney General’s Department. If your organisation’s submission is also not included in the PDFs linked below, could you please let me know as a matter of urgency?
Download links: Full document (142MB) or Part 1 (33.8MB) | Part 2 (16.5MB) | Part 3 (22.9MB) | Part 4 (35.2MB) | Part 5 (34MB)
Kind regards,
Greg Andresen
Research & Media Liaison Men’s Health Australia
Website http://www.menshealthaustralia.net
Post P.O. Box 1292, Bondi Junction NSW 1355, Australia
Attorney General releases compromised ‘Domestic Violence’ research
Attorney-General Robert McClelland and Minister for Justice Brendan O’Connor today released a new Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) report Children’s exposure to domestic violence in Australia.
In this paper, current knowledge about the extent of children’s exposure to domestic violence in Australia is described, along with the documented impacts that this exposure can have on children.
However, a leading men’s health organisation, Men’s Health Australia, says the report completely ignores the largest ever Australian survey of young people and domestic violence.
Published in 2001 by the National Crime Prevention division of the Commonwealth Attorney General’s Department and the Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs, the national research involved a survey of 5000 young Australians aged between 12 and 20, and in-depth discussions with special groups, namely homeless youth, victims of domestic violence, and youth from different ethnic backgrounds.
This was the largest sample of young people ever surveyed on their experiences of parental domestic violence in Australia or, most likely, the world.
The main findings relate to young people’s understanding of and attitudes to domestic violence, their experiences of witnessing parental or carer’s domestic violence and of violence in their dating relationships, and how they deal with these experiences.
Key findings of this national research ignored by the new AIC report, include:
- Considering physical violence only, nearly a third (31.2%) of young people had witnessed one of the following: a male carer being violent towards his female partner; a female carer being violent to her male partner; or both carers being violent.
- 14.4% of young people reported that this violence was perpetrated both by the male against the female and the female against the male. 9.0% reported that violence was perpetrated against their mother by her male partner but that she was not violent towards him. 7.8% reported that violence was perpetrated against their father by his female partner but that he was not violent towards her.
- Most reported parental violence seemed to be minor, in that no effects were reported by the majority of child witnesses. Where outcomes were reported, the most likely outcome was the separation of the parents. The most severe disruptions on all indicators occurred in those households where both male to female and female to male violence was reported (ie two-way couple violence).
- Witnessing parental domestic violence had a significant effect on young people’s attitudes and experiences. Witnessing was also the strongest predictor of subsequent perpetration by young people. The best predictor of perpetration was witnessing certain types of female to male violence, whilst the best predictor of victimisation in personal relationships was having witnessed male to female violence.
- Where young people had, or were experiencing parental domestic violence, a third of them had not told anyone about it. This rate was higher amongst boys than girls and higher amongst the 12 and 13 year olds than the mid or older teens.
- Young people were more likely to say a woman is right to, or has good reason to, respond to a situation by hitting, than a man in the same situation. And while males hitting females was seen, by virtually all young people surveyed, to be unacceptable, it appeared to be quite acceptable for a girl to hit a boy.
Men’s Health Australia spokesperson Greg Andresen, said, “It is regrettable that these important findings were omitted from the new AIC report. If the government is serious about protecting children and young people from the effects of domestic violence, the National Plan to Reduce Violence Against Women and Their Children must be expanded to include male victims and their children.”
Media contact: Greg Andresen | media@menshealthaustralia.net | 0403 813 925
The invisible domestic violence – against men
That women accounted for 7% of all convictions for domestic violence last year will come as a surprise to many. But what is not clear is whether the growing numbers of women convicted – a 150% increase in five years – represents a rise in actual cases of female-perpetrated domestic violence.
Domestic violence has traditionally been understood as a crime perpetrated by domineering men against defenceless women. Research spanning over 40 years has, however, consistently found that men and women self-report perpetrating domestic violence at similar rates. Professor John Archer from the University of Central Lancashire has conducted a number of meta-analytic reviews of these studies and found that women are as likely to use domestic violence as men, but women are twice as likely as men to be injured or killed during a domestic assault. Men still represent a substantial proportion of people who are assaulted, injured or killed by an intimate partner (50%, 30% and 25% respectively).
If the empirical research is correct in suggesting that between a quarter and half of all domestic violence victims are men, a question follows: why has women’s domestic violence towards men been unreported for so long, and what has changed in the last five years to make it more visible?
One reason may be the feminist movement. Feminism took up the cause of domestic abuse of women in the 1970s, with the world’s first women’s refuge being opened by Erin Pizzey in 1971. Feminism understood domestic violence as the natural extension of men’s patriarchal attitudes towards women, leading men to feel they had the right to control their partners, using violence if necessary. Feminists campaigned successfully to bring the issue into the public arena, thereby securing resources to establish services to help victims. This activism and advocacy led to governmental and public acceptance that “domestic violence” was synonymous with violence against women.
Paradoxically, feminist concerns for female victims may also have led to the recent increase in arrests of female perpetrators. The disparity between prevalence study statistics and criminal conviction data of male domestic violence perpetration led US feminists to successfully campaign for mandatory arrest policies for domestic violence call-outs. Mandatory arrest policies coincided with a three-fold increase in the number of women arrested. In the UK, a pro-arrest policy was also introduced, requiring police forces to always consider an arrest in domestic violence cases. Although not eliminating police discretion, the policy undoubtedly diminished individual police officers’ discretionary powers. The increase in female arrests for domestic violence suggests that when police officers were freer to exercise discretion, it was exercised more frequently in favour of female perpetrators.
Support for a feminist conceptualisation of domestic violence has been afforded by men’s generally more visible violent behaviour. Men make up the majority of perpetrators of violence in public places, such as football matches and nightclubs. As men appear to be more ready, willing and able to use violence outside the home, the logical extension is that men are more violent than women per se. This argument has frequently been cited by researchers such as Professors Russell and Emerson Dobash as evidence against the veracity of figures showing large numbers of male victims of domestic violence, while ignoring the fact that men’s aggression in public places is almost always directed towards other men.
In recent years, female violence has become a more public affair, with changes in drinking patterns being a likely contributing factor to more women being arrested for violent offences outside of the home. In addition, the widespread use of CCTV may have provided sufficient evidence for the police and CPS to override stereotypes of women as nonviolent. The erosion of the passive female stereotype is likely to result in more women being charged and convicted of offences generally, which might also result in increases in the conviction rates for women’s domestic violence.
The dual stereotypes of the violent man and passive woman have undoubtedly obscured the existence of male victims of domestic violence in the past. Men were also unlikely to view their own victimisation as either domestic violence or a criminal assault , and so were unlikely to seek help.
Large sums of money have been spent on educational campaigns to encourage female victims to seek help. Until there are similar campaigns for men, it is unlikely that the true number of male victims needing help will be known. If the current trends continue however, women may find themselves increasingly likely to be charged with domestic assault, and men more likely to be offered help and protection.
Nicola Graham-Kevan | guardian.co.uk
Men Shouldn’t Be Overlooked as Victims of Partner Violence
In addressing intimate partner violence, the focus is usually on women who are physically battered by husbands or boyfriends. However, women sometimes hurt their partners as well.
Women are doing virtually everything these days that men are—working as doctors, lawyers, and rocket scientists; flying helicopters in combat; riding horses in the Kentucky Derby. And physically assaulting their spouses or partners.
In fact, when it comes to nonreciprocal violence between intimate partners, women are more often the perpetrators.
These findings on intimate partner violence come from a study conducted by scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The lead investigator was Daniel Whitaker, Ph.D., a behavioral scientist and team leader at the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (which is part of the CDC). Results were published in the May Journal of Public Health.
In 2001, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health attempted to amass data about the health of a nationally representative sample of 14,322 individuals between the ages of 18 and 28. The study also asked subjects to answer questions about romantic or sexual relationships in which they had engaged during the previous five years and whether those relationships had involved violence.
Of those subjects, 11,370 reported having had heterosexual relationships and also provided answers to the violence-related questions. So Whitaker and his colleagues decided to use the responses from these 11,370 subjects for a study into how much violence is experienced in intimate heterosexual partner relationships, who the instigators are, and whether physical harm accrues from the violence.
The 11,370 subjects, Whitaker and his colleagues found, reported on 18,761 relationships, of which 76 percent had been nonviolent and 24 percent violent. That almost a quarter of the subjects had engaged in violent relationships may seem high to some people, but “the rates we found are similar to those of other studies of late adolescents and young adults, a time period when interpersonal-violence rates are at their highest,†Whitaker told Psychiatric News. Also, he added, “these rates demonstrate the magnitude of interpersonal violence as a health and social problem.â€
Furthermore, Whitaker discovered, of the 24 percent of relationships that had been violent, half had been reciprocal and half had not. Although more men than women (53 percent versus 49 percent) had experienced nonreciprocal violent relationships, more women than men (52 percent versus 47 percent) had taken part in ones involving reciprocal violence.
Regarding perpetration of violence, more women than men (25 percent versus 11 percent) were responsible. In fact, 71 percent of the instigators in nonreciprocal partner violence were women. This finding surprised Whitaker and his colleagues, they admitted in their study report.
As for physical injury due to intimate partner violence, it was more likely to occur when the violence was reciprocal than nonreciprocal. And while injury was more likely when violence was perpetrated by men, in relationships with reciprocal violence it was the men who were injured more often (25 percent of the time) than were women (20 percent of the time). “This is important as violence perpetrated by women is often seen as not serious,†Whitaker and his group stressed.
Of the study’s numerous findings, Whitaker said, “I think the most important is that a great deal of interpersonal violence is reciprocally perpetrated and that when it is reciprocally perpetrated, it is much more likely to result in injury than when perpetrated by only one partner.â€
The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, upon which this investigation was based, was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development with co-funding from 17 other federal agencies.
http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/42/15/31.2.full
