From Augusto Zimmermann posted to Men’s Rights Agency Facebook page on 22/5/22
While domestic against women is constantly mentioned by Australian politicians and duly highlighted by the national media, violence against men in this country is rarely reported and largely ignored by everyone. There is a constant pressure to phrase this issue only as a “male problem,” thus placing all the blame for such violence on Australian men as a collective group.
If the Labor Party wins the federal election on Saturday, it will appoint a domestic violence commissioner to help “women and girls.” In addition, Labor has committed $152 million (US$110 million) over four years to combat this form of violence and to fund 500 new community sector workers to support women.
Anthony Albanese, the opposition leader, wrote this on his Twitter account: “We need tangible action. Children have lost mothers, families have lost daughters.”
Prime Minister Scott Morrison doesn’t want to be left behind, and he has also promised to establish a commission to end domestic violence against women and girls.
Delivering an open address for the National Summit on Women’s Safety in September 2021, he stated: “I want all women, every girl, in this nation to live
But what about also protecting everyone, regardless of gender, against domestic violence?
Perhaps I was too naïve to believe that our politicians were against all forms of domestic violence.
Despite the abundance of research available that domestic violence can also be perpetrated by women against their male partners and children, the Australian political class continues to frame the problem entirely as violence against women.
However, since the 1980s, studies have indicated that men (and boys) are just as likely as women (and girls) to endure domestic violence.
About 15 years ago, for example, the Harvard Medical School released an important document to explain that domestic violence “involve both women and men as perpetrators.”
Based on its own critical analysis of 11,000 American men and women ages 18 to 28, it concluded:
“When the violence is one-sided, women were the perpetrators about 70 percent of the time. Men were more likely to be injured in reciprocally violent relationships (25 percent) than were women when the violence was one-sided (20 percent). That means both men and women agreed that men were not more responsible than women for intimate partner violence.”
These researchers confessed to be surprised to find that “among relationships with nonreciprocal violence, women were the perpetrators in a majority of cases, regardless of participant gender.”
According to them, “One possible explanation for this, assuming that men and women are equally likely to initiate physical violence, is that men, who are typically larger and stronger, are less likely to retaliate if struck first by their partner. Thus, some men may be following the norm that ‘men shouldn’t hit women’ when struck first by their partner.”
But these findings would certainly not surprise Linda Mills, who is the Ellen Goldberg Professor of Law at New York University. She is a leading authority on the subject of domestic violence, and according to her,
“Years of research, which mainstream feminism has glossed over or ignored, shows that when it comes to intimate abuse women are capable of being as violent as men in intimate relationships. And women can be physically violent as well as emotionally abusive.”
Compared to abused women, male victims often experience a countless number of external barriers, especially when contacting the police and social services. Whereas women will find many safety nets to turn to, abused men have virtually none.
And since their complaints often are not even taken seriously, there is almost no shelter for battered men and their children escaping from domestic violence.
Of course, it shouldn’t even be necessary to categorically state that I have no intention of minimising the serious problem of domestic violence against women. Certainly, there are men who grossly mistreat their partners and children. One must speak out loud and clear about violence against women— we must speak out loud and clear about violence against anyone.
And this is precisely why recognising that men can also be the victims of domestic violence is so important.
Arguably, if the likes of Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese were really interested in combating all forms of domestic violence, they wouldn’t be ignoring the plight of men who silently endure such violence due to the lack of support from these politicians.
Prof Augusto Zimmermann PhD
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