2500 men’s shoes have been placed in the lawns at the front of Australia’s Parliament House. Each shoe represents a man or boy who has taken their life during this past year. Hopefully the politicians will take notice and realise as Angela Shanahan writes ….. the changes to the Family Law Reform Act do not represent anything positive for fathers and their children, just really an attempt to remove fathers from their children’s lives to satisfy the feminist’s demands.
Regards Sue Price
Men’s Rights Agency
Men’s welfare at the mercy of feminist
ideology
ANGELA SHANAHAN
For two days this week the lawns of Parliament House have been strewn
with 2500 empty shoes, one for each of the men and boys who die in
Australia each year through suicide. According to the Australian Institute
of Health and Welfare our male suicide rate is overall three to four times
higher than the female rate, and mainly involves men in mid-life. These
are the major predictive facts about suicide: being male; being divorced,
widowed or separated; living alone; being unemployed. The suicide rate in
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is twice that of the non-Indigenous population.
Meanwhile, the government is concentrating all preventive efforts on
domestic violence against women, always seen as “gendered” violence; in
other words, men being violent towards women. According to
organisations such as White Ribbon, domestic violence is just a male
problem. It is their fault. What’s more, according to its media releases this
week for White Ribbon Day, most men just can’t see it or know what to do
about it.
White Ribbon demands they “educate” themselves because “violence
against women is at epidemic proportions, and (our research) contrasts
that with the reasons men have given us for not getting involved. We think
men will see that there’s no good reason to not step up this year and either
make a donation or educate themselves.
Because with one in three Australian women being a victim of violence,
it’s not just a women’s issue, it’s everyone’s issue”.
But guess what? According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics there are
47 male deaths from suicide per week. Meanwhile, there are 71 females
who die from fatal domestic violence per year, that equals 1.36 per week.
So male suicides, which are 35 times as numerous as deaths from DV,
should also be everyone’s issue. But where is the advertising campaign?
Where is the support? The ads that are all about “gendered violence” just
blame men, and boys, and the support for men at risk of suicide, except for
veterans of the armed forces, is almost nil.
You might say these two issues, DV and male suicide, are not comparable.
But think about them in the psychosocial terms of the health and social
wellbeing of the community. Most importantly, how well do we value the
health and welfare of each section of the population, male and female?
Domestic violence is, as I know, real and has all sorts of serious
intergenerational effects. My paternal grandfather was a violent man, who
terrorised his family.
But, and this is the big but, where is the nuance in the “domestic violence
is gendered” statements like the ones White Ribbon uses? It is all the fault
of men and apparently the men have to educate themselves.
This is simplistic. It is ideology, plain and simple.
What of the pathologies that plague all of us, and our whole society? Why
is something that involves two people presented as one-dimensional: man
bad perpetrator, woman good victim? The DV lobby does not allow
presentation of this problem in any other way, because allowing any
nuance might question the simplistic assumptions that underlie the
narrow, prismatic feminist ideology that governs all current social
legislation, especially in family law.
One fact of male trauma the feminist trope will not admit is that men’s
mental and psychological welfare is often eroded by the constant blame
and fear of being blamed. No wonder, as even White Ribbon admits, men
are confused.
None of the DV advocates who speak in terms of “gendered violence” and
male “toxic” behaviour look at the root causes of violence.
Importantly, these overlap with the causes of male suicide: substance
abuse, unemployment, isolation, intergenerational dysfunction (especially
in Aboriginal men and young boys), and family breakdown, which affects
all classes and groups of men, but particularly men in the highest age
bracket for suicide.
Since 2008, the highest suicide rates have been observed in middle-aged
males (aged 40-49). But groups such as White Ribbon are not really
interested in the male’s welfare within a marriage or domestic
partnership; furthermore, its view of female welfare is so one-dimensionally seen as victimhood that it never admits the couple dynamic.
However, male suicide, though complex, is often triggered, in the words of
the AIHW research, by “a recent stressful life event”, especially divorce or
final separation from a long-term partner. That has been cited by all
research into Australian male suicide as the overwhelming reason behind
the rise in middle-life suicide, especially where children are involved.
Divorce is not just a single event; it causes a cascading series of problems,
and men in contested divorce cases often find themselves in a maze of
legal and financial dead ends, with a mounting psychological toll of usually
concealed trauma.
An inquiry into the operation of family law earlier this century was one of
the longest in Australian history and found suicide among Australian men
was disproportionately associated with family law disputes, especially over
custody of children. What is more, the level of false accusations was
outrageous.
Consequently, in 2006 family law was redrafted to give fathers more say in
parenting their children after divorce, with a presumption of shared
parenting.
Now, due to the untoward influence of the feminist lobby, for whom all
marriages are potential minefields of domestic violence, that sensible and
humane principle has been abandoned. This is not “reform”. It is a
regression to the past. It is a disastrous change, which will cause more
false accusations of violence and more harm to fathers of children and,
consequently, more male suicides.