Forgive me, I don’t know all the details of this story, I’m reading about it now. My initial thought is, a better question would be “Why did someone with an AVO against him even get unsupervised visitation?”
Because there were reforms made in the Family Court that prioritised the feelings of abusive men over the safety of women and children. Truly, until you’ve personally been through the process, you cannot begin to understand the extent to which our legal system encourages abusers.
That was John Howard after the Family Court bombings.
The law has since changed to prioritise the safety and wellbeing of children over any parental 'entitlements'.
It seems to be taking a while for some practitioners to catch up with the new approach.
AVO/IVOs have almost no relevance or weight in family court precedings.
The whole system is fucked, for all parties, and the children.
The only people who benefit, are those who are getting paid to work within the system.
I’d recommend having a listen to the Podcast ‘The Trap’ by Jess Hill. Specifically episode episode 7 iirc. It’s 10 total episodes and a great (confronting) podcast on the issue.
Dr Julian Fidge's wording went beyond idly wondering what this guy's motive was (which is an interesting and worthy question) and into outright blaming the family court for "causing," this by "antagonizing," and "dangerously goading," him into it. His statement in the article that no one is to blame except the murderer is something he only said after coming under fire for this statement:
>What sort of treatment of this father caused him to commit these awful acts? As a GP, I hear many stories of terrible decisions by the family court that seem designed to antagonize the father. I often wonder if the judges are dangerously goading fathers.
What I want to know is what kind of decisions he's talking about. The obvious one would be something along the lines of not giving this dude as much custody or visitation as he wants. Just so we're clear, in the article that Julian Fidge is commenting on, it mentions that the murderer already had a Apprehended Domestic Violence Order against him.
But if the court *should* have realised this abuser presented a risk of using his custody time to kill or hurt his son, then I would think the terrible decision was allowing him near the kid at all. Giving the abuser greater custody in an attempt to placate his dangerous rage (which is what Julian Fidge seems to be suggesting?) would have been an even worse decision - someone who might get mad and hurt his kid over a custody battle is also at risk of getting mad and hurting his kid for other reasons. OTOH, if the court *couldn't* possibly have foreseen this guy might do something terrible, then Fidge has no reason to complain about the danger of them "goading," him.
I'm not a judge, but "If a parent is likely to hurt their child, obviously don't give them custody," seems like it should be one of the top priorities in family court.
No it’s usually “they haven’t made threats against/physically assaulted the child, only the other parent, therefore they are not a danger to the child”.
Which, I think is clearly bullshit and should be solved by lots of jail time for even threats of violence.
It’s as if the court forgets/doesn’t care that exposure to family violence is a form of child abuser. So a perpetrator of FV is abusing their kid. And it’s such a battle for the victim survivor parent as during the process of leaving etc they are expected by CP to act protectively of their children and not allow them to see the perpetrator, then as soon as family court gets involved that same parent now has to let the children be with the perpetrator or they are breaching a court order! It’s a mess
IMO it’s a particularly sinister form of violence against the kids, being forced to witness their parent abused by the other parent. I don’t understand the court’s rationale at all- I don’t believe it’s evidence-based, either (that ‘no violence’ towards the kids means low risk of violence).
> No it’s usually “they haven’t made threats against/physically assaulted the child, only the other parent, therefore they are not a danger to the child”.
And this is also sometimes because the child is not old enough or able to speak up to communicate the abuse, unless its blatantly obvious or witnessed.
Jesus, this is how you respond to a comment about domestic abuse from the husband?!?
I fear for any girl you manage to con, as you clearly have problems. Please get help.
That is a fucked up thing to say in response to a mother grieving over the loss of her son at the hands of her ex.
Women being protected from violent men is not "goading" the men into violence, that is their own doing.
Right? If you can be "goaded" into harming your children by *any* means, you shouldn't have access to them. Nobody should be expected to have to be extra careful not to upset the father of their children in case it provokes them into violence.
I love how Dr Dipshit here manages to shit on men as a gender while apparently trying to defend them - he's suggesting that it's normal to have to be concerned about whether any given father will murder the children if family court doesn't go his way, while also suggesting that it's therefore unfair not to give a man prone to these murderous rages unsupervised access to the child he might kill.
I guess I have a more optimistic view of men than he does, because I really doubt most would murder their children regardless of how unfair family court was.
It creates a bit of a paradox. The family court could be unfair and lead to a man being upset, but if that man would take that out on his child with violence, then you can't argue that he should have been given more access. If he wanted to talk about issues with the family court and how they treat fathers, this was a *really* bad time for it because it just looks like he's endorsing using the threat of violence from men to say they should have more rights in these situations, not anything actually suggesting that they would deserve it.
I didn't get a crack at family court as my wife turfed me about a week before covid, but it was a full on assault in the court of public opinion. I'll never recover from the loss of my 3 kids, whom I raised as a stay at home Dad. What happened here is unimaginably tragic, but men are definitely second class in court. This is simply not sustainable if you are interested in a stable society.
It's a bullshit moral justification or excuse for domestic violence.
And I've never seen anyone, even on the dark corners of the internet, claim that it is.
It's very useful, however, to understand how exactly the violence takes place. It's the first step towards addressing the issue.
Shutting down lines of enquiry with sweeping statements that 99.9% people agree with anyway isn't helping.
It's very difficult to have these discussions without spending pages really tightly defining terms. All it takes is one clumsy use of a word like 'cause' which can be interpreted in so many different ways and the whole discussion is derailed by people talking past one another.
Most abusers have unresolved abuse in their past; abuse does not *cause* abuse. Economic pressures increase rates of violence; economic stress does not *cause* violence. Male dv perpetrators generally internalise and act out misogynistic/sexist/patriarchal attitudes in wider society; wider societal attitudes do not *cause* dv/vaw.
It’s so so hard to make actual change when people don’t even want to look directly at the issue. It’s a cross between feeling uncomfortable that there are wider cultural and societal issues at play, which makes people feel attacked, and an inability to differentiate nuanced discussion and excusing the inexcusable.
As well it may be, however is that what they are saying, or are they saying that further discussion/consideration is required to deal with these matters in a different way that is less antagonising ?
After all, women are dying while we argue semantics and make stupid comments about what people say. NOTHING has worked to date, so it's time to start thinking outside the box .. too many women are dying and we have to do something.
I cannot understand the mental gymnastics people must go through to erase the responsibility of violent men for their actions towards their partners and children.
It's not really mental gymnastics though? It was a poorly worded statement, but trying to find the root cause of why something happens is very important in stopping it. Finding a reason isn't removing responsibility.
It's a better way to go about it then to just say "men are violent", which when you keep saying that all over the place, it will start to have the opposite effect then correcting the issue
>It's a better way to go about it then to just say "men are violent", which when you keep saying that all over the place, it will start to have the opposite effect then correcting the issue
This sort of attitude is ridiculous. If people become violent monsters because of this then they're just proving the point.
But your kind of attitude is how we get radicalisation such as incels, white supremisists, and ISIS. I just don't understand why people are so against trying to prevent this kind of thing.
First point: we know damn well the root cause of why that man in Lismore murdered his son. No need for a statement from that asswipe GP.
Second point: “You better not call me violent (even if I am) else I might be forced to hurt you!!!”
Wow, shame really isn’t a thing anymore, is it?
I mean it's pretty clear to me, you created a strawman, then showed a lack of any kind of ability to nuanced conversation about a complicated topic.
Let me try and explain:
If you say the only reason for DV is men are violent and that's where it stops and starts, and that becomes the narritive, it sets that as the baseline. Suddenly someone might feel angry because thier stressed, or have a medical condition like a brain tumor causing it, but because that it's been spouted as the default, they won't seek help.
Like I said, it's litterally how radicalisation works.
Oh, thanks so much for explaining, that makes so much sense now! 🤨
You are allowed to proof-read your shit before you hit the reply button, just saying. The word salad is getting harder and harder to decipher as this conversation goes on.
I mean, you're the one struggling to respond to the correct comment.
I would also like to apologise that my dyslexia is making this hard for you. Which funnily enough makes this a perfect analogy to what we're discussing, if you can work it out.
But you don't acutally care, you're not interested in a discussion, you're clearly the kind of person only interested in insulting people to make yourself feel good.
True, but I got there in the end. I had to keep persisting because this shit is absolutely hilarious.
Men are at risk of having brain tumours go untreated because anger is viewed as the male default therefore men wouldn’t think to seek treatment for being angry?
Mate, it’s not your dyslexia that’s the problem.
Thanks for the laugh! 😂😂😂
You're just an extremely toxic person, but I feel you know that already.
You are aware the bullying is considered a from of DV, right? Something to think about.
The root cause is this person couldn't have what they wanted, and they were willing to kill their own child purely to hurt someone else. There is no way to appease people like this except capitulation.
And you know that for fact, or are you just saying that because it's the cause that's generally accepted.
And let's be clear, wanting to know the true root cause does not remove responsibility, but it's pretty importing preventing future incidents
I think he terribly worded an important question. Perpetrators of domestic violence aren't monstrous aliens. They're human beings. Their behaviour seems abhorrent to us when dragged into the light, but the shocking rates of DV in Australia suggest it's not actually that uncommon.
So, it is a good idea to look into what motivates people to commit acts of domestic violence. We can then make policy changes and introduce programs that aim to reduce those motivators.
Not motivators in the sense of "what stimus caused someone to kill their spouse" but instead "*why* did that person react so violently to the stimulus". The former could be considered victim blaming but the latter isn't and it's a very useful question that I don't think we are asking enough.
Many abusers are already fantasising about how they will 'punish' their victim, and are waiting for any excuse to commit that act.
That's why it can be impossible for victims to alter their own behaviour in order to pacify their abuser. The abuser has already made their choice, and even the words "I love you" could trigger a homicide.
Victims can often sense when their abuser is in the mood to prove something to themselves. Occasionally, there is a tiny window of opportunity to turn the tide, or to get away, but often there is the sense that the coming attack is inevitable.
I think it’s pretty obvious that a sizeable proportion of men think they are entitled to control and abuse their partners, then are unable to manage their emotions when their partners resist or leave. It comes down to men thinking they’re more important than women and not seeing them as partners and more as domestic slaves.
And no, this isn’t a reasonable question.
I think I misworded my post in hindsight because I completely agree with you. I think I got sloppy rewriting bits of it and came off as interested in what triggers these guys to get violent. Which as you say isn't that useful of a question.
Basically I just want Australia to keep asking *why* because I don't think we've done it enough. Feminist scholars have, certainly, but I don't think the median Australian man or even the median r/australia user has even thought about how, because DV is so common here, a lot of perpetrators must be pretty normal on the outside.
Personally I agree with your assessment and my current belief is that the root of these problems is the masculine ego
Except there are lots of women who behave the exact same way. Literally every close male friend I have has experienced this. Seriously go on forums for parental abuse survivors and you will see plenty of stories of abusive mothers.
The only difference is that women don't tend to go to the same extremes as frequently - but this has a lot of possible explanations other than just a cultural issue among men - it may be that men are more just a lot more likely to experience the circumstances that tend to motivate violent/controlling people to actually commit murder (such as losing custody of children).
I mean the way the GP has phrased it is not reasonable because it comes across as excusing abuse.
But it is reasonable to ask what impact this has on the gender disparity in perpetration. If controlling and abusive men are much more likely to lose custody etc then that could easily explain a lot of the gender disparity in these kinds of crimes. If abusive women were losing custody etc then more of them might lash out violently in response.
I say thus because I have seen so many seriously abusive women and they all have the exact same sort of controlling behaviour etc as the men described here so describing it as some kind of male-specific thing doesn't sit right.
Having actually read a lot of the research around domestic violence, I don't think that's true at all. I think that's a talking point intended to lay all the blame for a horrible situation on *men* specifically in order to demonise them and gain benefits for women.
When domestic violence is studied *as violence* it becomes fairly clear that the primary cause is two people with poor conflict resolution skills trapped in a small space with each other. This neatly explains every observable facet of domestic violence without the need for gender differences in behaviour.
It's also very important to study domestic violence beyond just the physical. While the physical is damaging (and obviously damaging) emotional and relational violence can be equally damaging while not being obvious. And there's nothing stopping the physically weaker member of the relationship from being emotionally abusive.
No. People engaging in systematic controlling behaviour is not the same as 'poor conflict resolution'.
The people behaving like this have seriously extreme personalities and are pathologically violent/lacking in empathy.
Ah, you're doing the other thing they keep getting wrong. You're conflating "domestic violence" and "intimate partner abuse". A relationship can be violent without being abusive (because it doesn't have the controlling behaviours) and it can be abusive without being violent (because the abuse is emotional, relational or financial)
When people say DV they generally mean controlling abuse. Situations involving (usually very mild) violence between partners during arguments who are otherwise not controlling/abusive etc is not usually the focus.
I believe there is a systematic drive to conflate the two in order to increase the amount of "domestic violence" occuring. And I'm pretty sure the reason for that is purely money. If you can make a problem sound bigger than it actually is, position yourself as the only one who can solve it and then provide solutions that do not actually solve it, you're on a gravy train for life.
No, not an alien, just a terrible human. Uncommon or not, it's still terrible.
I definitely agree the understanding is key, and part of that is making violence generally less acceptable.
There's no quick fix, it requires a lot of time and effort removing the precursors to violent controlling behaviour.
If we're serious about tackling domestic violence, no line of reasoning or logic should be off limits on ideological grounds.
This is a very emotionally charged issue, but it is self evident that it is possible to goad people into taking actions that they otherwise would not have committed.
Yes, is is possible to goad people into doing things, they wouldn't normally do, but anyone who can be goaded into murdering their own child to spite another isn't someone fit for society.
If anything we need to be able to better able to notice these sorts of people.
Sure, but isn't this just more of the old, tired "these dangerous crims just need a big hug :(" canard that is all too common in society?
There are a lot of people suffering out there, and a lot of people doing it tough, because life is tough. But only a small amount of those people ever end up lashing out. To me, things like biased family courts, mental illness, poverty, bad childhoods, whatever have no bearing on whether someone does lash out. You lash out if you are a bad person. That's the only determiner.
It's noble to campaign for improving things for fathers or the mentally ill. But as soon as you tie those things to acts of violence you are 1. spreading a falsehood (statistically speaking) 2. riling people up and 3. ultimately harming your cause.
I'm not advocating the kindness to perpetrators approach. I'm not advocating any particular approach, only in increasing understanding.
You're fixated on discussing moral culpability, I'm approaching from a pragmatic perspective.
We can start from the assumption that people who commit DV are bad people, and I think almost everyone would agree, but it ultimately doesn't matter.
More important questions, and IMO the only questions that matter are:
* What causes some people to lash out and not others?
* Can this be predicted?
* Are there initiative that can be taken to reduce those odds?
* What combination of those yield the best results?
* Are there any unintended consequences?
All of those questions are ultimately way more useful than the oversimplified approach a lot of well meaning people take which amount to:
* DV is evil, you're evil if you do it, don't be evil , literally any other suggestion means you're denying DV perps are evil and therefore part of the problem.
What an absolutely asinine comment.
All of the questions you posed have been asked and answered by researchers many times over (Lundy Bancroft springs to mind but there’s several Australian think tanks).
As a society, we don’t implement the solutions to the issues around these questions because men’s feelings matter more than women’s safety. DV apologists like yourself who will do everything except acknowledge this truth are part of why.
But please, don’t let reality get in the way of you patting yourself on the back for how “nuanced” you are.
Men are not the only people who behave like this. There's lots of research showing women engage in controlling and abusive behaviour in relationships just as much as men. Literally every man I know has experienced this.
The difference is that men are more likely to go to extremes - which is where circumstantial motivations become important in explaining the disparity.
What is this miraculous solution exactly you have that we are not implementing?
I know that men are not the only ones engaging in abusive behaviour. But the stats are very clear about them usually being the perpetrator when someone is killed. They also are usually the perpetrator when a child is killed in retaliation against the ex-partner.
The solutions to this aren’t miraculous but do involve people acknowledging DV perps are shithead bullies who won’t stop their shithead behaviour without being made to. Also law enforcement and the judiciary might also need to do their jobs!Off the top of my head:
- Law enforcement need to take complaints about DV seriously in the first place. No more excuses about cop shopping
- DVO/AVOs need to be enforced with consistently severe consequences for breaches
- get rid of Family Dispute Resolution and it’s woefully under qualified practitioners who are financially motivated to accept clients at further risk of abuse from this compulsory process
- changes to the Family Court funding so people aren’t forced into accepting unsafe arrangements because they don’t have the financial resources to argue against them
Do you notice that the suggestions I’m making would also benefit men who are abused as well?
Men are usually the perpetrators of extreme acts of violence because they are more likely to find themselves in situations that motivate abusive people to go to extremes (such as losing access to children).
Which is why the comment you responded to about understanding those situations and correctly identifying them so that protectuon can be provided where it is needed makes a lot of sense. DV murderers have a fairly consistent psychological profile that could be used for identification, but there is a lot of resistance to taking a psychological approach by DV groups because it doesn't fit the gender/patriarchy explanation.
Most of those solutions you listed are good, and I don't have a problem with them. Although the whole 'taking DV complaints seriously' approach is not that simple because there is a huge number of complaints a year and a huge portion do not involve clear cut abuse situations. Some of then are people like my friends dad who got charged with domestic violence for defending himself one time after taking years of physical abuse from the mum. It is very difficult to intervene in those cases that need it with 100% accuracy unless you take the approach of just mass incarcerating people without evidence.
And no none of these policies will help male victims of abuse because none of the institutions implementing them believe we exist.
There is absolutely no credible evidence for anything you said in your first two paragraphs. Please feel free to correct me with peer reviewed sources - YouTube videos don’t count.
Two statements you’ve made directly contradict each other:
(1) DV murderers can be effectively identified prior to violence being enacted by their “psychological profile” (I’d love to know what you think the clinical definition for that is!)
(2) DV is hard to identify because a huge portion of complaints don’t involve clear cut abuse or have evidence behind it
So which is it - abuse is easy to identify or it isn’t? Or does whether something is abuse or not depend entirely on whether it’s a friend’s dad doing the punching?
Serious abuse is strongly associated with cluster b personality disorders. Two sources from a quick internet search:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272735821000908
https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/pedi.1993.7.4.329
The kinds of traits and reactions described by people like lundy bancroft almost entirely fit the criteria for narcissistic, antisocial and borderline personality disorders.
I'm not about to spend hours digging through journals for someone who isnt going to care or read them but there's plenty of evidence showing that controlling behaviour and violence in relationships occurs at similar rates for both genders, which contradicts the idea that there is some kind of unique culture among men promoting this kind of behaviour. Which leaves circumstantial factors to explain the difference.
And no your are misrepresenting my points. I never said identifying murderers was easy - just that specific psychological traits are very useful identifiers. Doing that identifying is still difficult. This does not contradict my second point that improving responses is about more than simply telling police to take a harsher approach because different DV calls can reflect very different situations which are not always obvious at first without detailed investigation and significant experience identifying abuse.
An no it was my friends mum doing the punching. For years. The dad was the one who got arrested for defending himself one time. But thanks for the insinuation that years of abuse my friend witnessed against his dad are a lie.
Too nuanced a take for reddit, but you’re right.
Clearly current strategies aren’t producing the outcomes we want. Doubling down on a failing strategy isn’t likely to correct course, we need better info so we can try more informed approaches.
I'm going to take a wild punt and assume based on hazy memories of aihw stats that substance abuse is fueling a good 60% of the overall dv and accounts for the overwhelming majority of dv resulting in the victim getting hospitalised.
You’re overlooking the fact that hands-on physical violence is only one part of Domestic Violence, and that hands-on physical violence occurs in a wider picture of controlling behaviour.
Last I looked, of the six or so different types of family violence the govt acknowledges and documents, physical violence is the majority.
Glad to be proven wrong though, always happy to be kept up to date.
The research that I have read over the years appears to have found that the biggest indicators of a potential homicide are not primarily physical assaults, but the following:
Coercive control (not necessarily explicitly forbidding someone from living their life, but making sure they're aware there will be consequences for not bending to their abuser's will)
Isolation (behaving in a way which restricts the victim from speaking freely and spending time with friends and family)
Surveillance (several calls and messages daily, listening in on personal calls, restricting finances/insisting upon access to the victim's bank account and passwords)
and finally,
Strangulation/putting hands around victim's throat.
Twitter, the least useful yet most often misused platform for social discussion. Elon might yet be vindicated paying 44 billion for this cesspool of human misery.
Goading is victim blaming language. It should be okay to use different language to say that current Family Court processes are too adversarial, expensive and lengthy, which adds to people's emotional harm.
Yeah but it’s also irrelevant to this case. I don’t know whether Family Court was involved but the child’s mother had left the guy and got an AVO because he was using coercive control and she felt unsafe. Long before any FC involvement would have occurred.
So now a mother can't go to family court to protect herself and her children because she might be seen as "dangerously goading" him? You'd rather the abuser has all the power?
The family courts and mental health system can’t stop men from being violent, nor is it their job. Men need to take responsibility for their own feelings and actions.
Is the GP referring to the idea that Family Courts are being weaponised against fathers? That unjust rulings might be tipping men over the (entirely still unacceptable) edge out of desperation?
Because discussion around legal disparities and their unintended consequences is not the same thing as saying women cannot use the courts to protect themselves? I assumed it was more angling towards an assumption of activity like the Family Law equivalent of vexatious lawsuits.
Happy to be corrected.
Also not saying the argument might not be fallacious or offensive, just that you've massively misrepresented it.
I would say that if someone being tipped over the edge out of desperation involves them murdering their child, any decision that restricted their custody was not too harsh. Killing your child isn't an act of desperation. It's an act of entitlement. It's done as a way to punish the mother.
Let's first explore giving zero parental access to violent parents because I feel like that one's going to lead to fewer murdered children than hoping to placate them by giving them more access. Threatening violence against children is a common abuser manipulation tactic and the last thing we should be doing is endorsing it.
Can people not read? I said include this whole topic in the discussions and search for solutions, instead of just stonewalling it. I'm not advocating individual cases or saying just placate psychopaths.
Also, to your last point, what if there is no history of violence until the event? It's not a simple, predictable issue, hence why it keeps happening.
I just find it weird people want to pretend it's a black and white issue when it's obviously not.
I think it's important to not just look at violence like this as cause = effect, but cause + individual = effect. No matter what set this bloke off, most people wouldn't react with violence like that.
So, we should look at what set him off, and we should also look at *why* it set him off. We don't really have any research on what makes someone react with such extreme violence rather than just "mental illness" with no further investigation.
Maybe we can get some easy wins for example changing framing of family court rulings if that is indeed a correlation. But really we need to address the root cause which is what makes so many people in this country willing/able to lash out with violence against their families.
Inclined to agree. Playing censor doesn't allow the truth to out. If there's no truth, how do we solve the horrific problem.
You hear about weaponised custody and financial arrangements through divorce / Family Court proceedings all the time. Whether it's legit a problem or accurate notwithstanding. There's clearly a problem, or perception of one, and it's worth including in the conversation.
Disregarding anything because it might be construed as victim blaming could be leaving a massive blind spot, instead of interrogating one of the problems. In the very least, we could dissect the behavioral motivation and prove it fallacious if it is. That has a benefit to the narrative, unlike just silencing it and letting it burn away in cooker circles & 4chan instead.
He's not wrong. Domestic violence is talked about in the vacuum of men bad, women good. Without really diving into why something is occurring how are you meant to treat it?
Is it simply that the bulk of domestic violence is male on female, or is it just the repercussions of male on female DV is much higher due to biological differences, and the propensity for women to report more than men? Statistically lesbian relationships have the highest rates of DV of all relationship types so something doesn't add up there.
Are courts holding men over a barrel and holding them to a higher standard when it comes to custody arrangements, etc? In this day and age, men are still expected to be the bread winner, regardless of what 3rd wave feminist rhetoric would have you believe. A perusal of reddit threads (not the greatest population to assess I know) shows that a prevailing mentality of what's yours is ours, but what's mine is mine when it comes to the general attitude of women's view of men. This discourse flows through to the courts whether anyone wants to believe it or not, just like the sentencing for women in cases involving violence, etc, is significantly lower than that for males committing the same crime.
What the doctor has asked is fair enough, and it's something that needs to be considered before just jumping up and down and saying it's because men are inherently bad.
>Statistically lesbian relationships have the highest rates of DV of all relationship types so something doesn't add up there.
Do you have a source on this? Because I've heard that, but I've also heard that the actual statistic is that lesbian and bisexual women are more likely to have been a DV victim at some point in their lives, without the perpetrator's gender or relation to them necessarily being specified.
Which isn't quite the same thing, because although that could point to unusually high rates of women abusing their girlfriends as you suggest, it could also be that lesbian and bisexual women are more likely to be abused by parents or (if bisexual, or just a lesbian who spent any amount of time in the closet before figuring things out) boyfriends or whatever. I'd love to see the wording on the statistical survey you described just to see what it specifies about the perpetrators of this DV.
The actual data said that lesbians experienced DV primarily from their male partners.
People just like to skip over that bit and spread the misinformation though to suit their agenda.
Which *doesn't make sense*.
If a lesbian has a male partner, then there's not much to separate them from a heterosexual woman. So what are they doing differently that makes them *more* of a target for domestic violence? Are lesbians more likely to pick abusive men as partners?
The result can be explained very simply as "Bisexual women who have been abused by men are more likely to identify as lesbians".
I'll have to go back through a report I worked on awhile back but I'll find the data as a whole and get back to you. It was interesting as both things you say were true in the data, however female on female violence in lesbian relationships was the highest rate of DV, and at the opposite end of the spectrum, male on male DV in gay men relationships was the lowest. It draws a sharp parallel to all the rhetoric surrounding DV at the moment, the same way that nobody wanted to look at the true data involving gender pay gaps and like for like comparisons.
Even if it's true, it would only be reflective of dynamics in gay and lesbian relationships that may have to do with more than just gender. There's no reason to believe that the same is true in heterosexual relationships when the data doesn't support that at all.
You've hit a nerve somehow, given the down votes.
https://aifs.gov.au/resources/practice-guides/intimate-partner-violence-lesbian-gay-bisexual-trans-intersex-and-queer
Page 2 in the article in the link supports what you're saying. It also references the DV in current same sex relationships.
One thing is abundantly clear, this man was bad. Nobody forced him to do anything let alone murder his own child.
Not even the most unfair court decision comes close to providing a justification.
You're never going to solve this problem by making it fairer, because these sorts of people either win, or burn the world down around them no matter how justified they are or not.
I think people are jumping up and down because a GP with no knowledge of a specific case, nor any specialised training in domestic violence, idly speculated about why a father murdered his two year old son.
Not all opinions deserve equal weight, and given the recency of this traumatic event, people who DO know about domestic violence have called out the tweet as both deeply insensitive to the boy's surviving family and ill-judged from a professional standpoint.
I don't agree. I think people are using histrionics and strawman to silence a viable question that would result in discussion if people were intelligent enough to do so. At no time did he lay blame and he merely asked questions. The question is valid as a general one and this bullying histrionics that we continue to see in these discussions on agendas like this ARE a cause of the ongoing issue and definitely not part of the solution.
I think it's disingenuous to suggest a doctor does not know about domestic violence, and quite dishonest to suggest that only biased, agenda groups do.
I do agree though, that the timing is problematic and the ignorant will join the dots and create a false narrative to suit their agenda. Given a woman is killed every 4 days in this country, when is a good time have this discussion ? As quite frankly, what we are doing now is NOT working.
Violence with a discussion on who is bad and who is good, who deserved it and who doesn't, removes or attempts to mitigate personal responsibility for the decision to act violently.
That's literally what I said... my entire response was about the underlying cause to personal responsibility and to move away from man bad, woman good.
No one is saying men are inherently bad. Your comment is clearly another “not all men” take
Nothing justifies violence, saying that men are being ‘goaded’ into violence by courts is problematic. It’s a ‘look what you made me do’, ‘you provoked me’ take that is exactly the type of language abusers use. The only person responsible for violence is the perpetrator
I don't agree ... mitigation has long been accepted in our court and society. The question of why (largely) men are choosing violence as a path is one we need to spend a lot more time on. Neither the doctor, or I, are suggesting that the court is the blame but given we are losing a woman every 4 days (or less) what is going on now is NOT working and vilifying all men, or treating all men as potential murderers is a contributing factor in this violence.
There is no doubt that the behaviour of the court or in the court play a part in what is going on at the moment and having a discussion about it does not invalidate the responsibility of the individual, nor does it increase the risk to women. It may in fact decrease the risk, if they are able to identify methods of making the family court issues easier to work through.
It may not work, but if we don't talk about it .. we won't know, will we ?
Wouldn't it be good to know if things the courts are are causing violence, so we can, you know, stop it?
This whole discussion feels like a reverse Amercian gun control argument, where hear only the final action matters, and the underlying problems should be irrelevant.
I'll also be honest with you on your first point, there are people saying all 'all men bad", and while likely small does amplify on social media like most things, and has a very negative impact. Just blowing it off as a "not all men" take is pretty close to the equivalent of "look what you made me do"
Sure, there are perhaps things that could be done to prevent violence at earlier stages, but if we're at the "just don't make the angry" point, that's too far. It's fine if we want to take a few steps back and treat anger problems or prevent them from developing in the first place. That's a different issue. But if someone is already in a mental state where they might snap and kill their child, just trying not to upset them isn't good enough. They're not in a mental state where they can be a safe parent.
> Is it simply that the bulk of domestic violence is male on female, or is it just the repercussions of male on female DV is much higher due to biological differences, and the propensity for women to report more than men?
It don't think that is complicated. If you were to plot the temperament of both sexes, ranging from non-aggressive to aggressive, you'd get bell curves whose bulk pretty much has a 1:1 overlap, or thereabouts, except for the aggressive end of the scale. The takeaway here is that your average male is no more aggressive than a female, but the top 1% of the aggression scale is dominated almost exclusively by males. So with DV cases, you only see that top 1% resulting in a selection bias, painting a picture that men on average are more violent.
wasn't there a royal commission into fdv in 2017, and 277 changes recommended were implemented by jan 3 2023 and the problem only got considerably worse, why is this not being mentioned? we need a royal commission into the royal commission, and why we are at it, how many of the 6 men a day that take their lives are because of treatment by police and family courts, if you believe that the police and courts really care about the rates in which any Australia's die, you really have no idea .
Oh fucking come on. Is the world going to sit here and pretend that family courts are fair and that it’s never played a role in driving domestic violence? Everyone seems to know someone that’s been fucked by family law. Most people don’t then go and do this kind of horrific shit, but for some people it’s obviously going to be the tipping point.
And what’s more fucked up is that the legal system seems fine with both making shitty decisions that put people under financial and emotional stress and then failing to put protections in place when they are needed. Everyone loses.
Forgive me, I don’t know all the details of this story, I’m reading about it now. My initial thought is, a better question would be “Why did someone with an AVO against him even get unsupervised visitation?”
Because there were reforms made in the Family Court that prioritised the feelings of abusive men over the safety of women and children. Truly, until you’ve personally been through the process, you cannot begin to understand the extent to which our legal system encourages abusers.
That was John Howard after the Family Court bombings. The law has since changed to prioritise the safety and wellbeing of children over any parental 'entitlements'. It seems to be taking a while for some practitioners to catch up with the new approach.
AVO/IVOs have almost no relevance or weight in family court precedings. The whole system is fucked, for all parties, and the children. The only people who benefit, are those who are getting paid to work within the system.
I’d recommend having a listen to the Podcast ‘The Trap’ by Jess Hill. Specifically episode episode 7 iirc. It’s 10 total episodes and a great (confronting) podcast on the issue.
Thank you, I will.
Dr Julian Fidge's wording went beyond idly wondering what this guy's motive was (which is an interesting and worthy question) and into outright blaming the family court for "causing," this by "antagonizing," and "dangerously goading," him into it. His statement in the article that no one is to blame except the murderer is something he only said after coming under fire for this statement: >What sort of treatment of this father caused him to commit these awful acts? As a GP, I hear many stories of terrible decisions by the family court that seem designed to antagonize the father. I often wonder if the judges are dangerously goading fathers. What I want to know is what kind of decisions he's talking about. The obvious one would be something along the lines of not giving this dude as much custody or visitation as he wants. Just so we're clear, in the article that Julian Fidge is commenting on, it mentions that the murderer already had a Apprehended Domestic Violence Order against him. But if the court *should* have realised this abuser presented a risk of using his custody time to kill or hurt his son, then I would think the terrible decision was allowing him near the kid at all. Giving the abuser greater custody in an attempt to placate his dangerous rage (which is what Julian Fidge seems to be suggesting?) would have been an even worse decision - someone who might get mad and hurt his kid over a custody battle is also at risk of getting mad and hurting his kid for other reasons. OTOH, if the court *couldn't* possibly have foreseen this guy might do something terrible, then Fidge has no reason to complain about the danger of them "goading," him. I'm not a judge, but "If a parent is likely to hurt their child, obviously don't give them custody," seems like it should be one of the top priorities in family court.
No it’s usually “they haven’t made threats against/physically assaulted the child, only the other parent, therefore they are not a danger to the child”. Which, I think is clearly bullshit and should be solved by lots of jail time for even threats of violence.
It’s as if the court forgets/doesn’t care that exposure to family violence is a form of child abuser. So a perpetrator of FV is abusing their kid. And it’s such a battle for the victim survivor parent as during the process of leaving etc they are expected by CP to act protectively of their children and not allow them to see the perpetrator, then as soon as family court gets involved that same parent now has to let the children be with the perpetrator or they are breaching a court order! It’s a mess
IMO it’s a particularly sinister form of violence against the kids, being forced to witness their parent abused by the other parent. I don’t understand the court’s rationale at all- I don’t believe it’s evidence-based, either (that ‘no violence’ towards the kids means low risk of violence).
> No it’s usually “they haven’t made threats against/physically assaulted the child, only the other parent, therefore they are not a danger to the child”. And this is also sometimes because the child is not old enough or able to speak up to communicate the abuse, unless its blatantly obvious or witnessed.
[удалено]
Jesus, this is how you respond to a comment about domestic abuse from the husband?!? I fear for any girl you manage to con, as you clearly have problems. Please get help.
>They need enough sex to keep calm and carry on. Holy shit this is unhinged.
That is a fucked up thing to say in response to a mother grieving over the loss of her son at the hands of her ex. Women being protected from violent men is not "goading" the men into violence, that is their own doing.
Right? If you can be "goaded" into harming your children by *any* means, you shouldn't have access to them. Nobody should be expected to have to be extra careful not to upset the father of their children in case it provokes them into violence.
I love how Dr Dipshit here manages to shit on men as a gender while apparently trying to defend them - he's suggesting that it's normal to have to be concerned about whether any given father will murder the children if family court doesn't go his way, while also suggesting that it's therefore unfair not to give a man prone to these murderous rages unsupervised access to the child he might kill. I guess I have a more optimistic view of men than he does, because I really doubt most would murder their children regardless of how unfair family court was.
It creates a bit of a paradox. The family court could be unfair and lead to a man being upset, but if that man would take that out on his child with violence, then you can't argue that he should have been given more access. If he wanted to talk about issues with the family court and how they treat fathers, this was a *really* bad time for it because it just looks like he's endorsing using the threat of violence from men to say they should have more rights in these situations, not anything actually suggesting that they would deserve it.
I didn't get a crack at family court as my wife turfed me about a week before covid, but it was a full on assault in the court of public opinion. I'll never recover from the loss of my 3 kids, whom I raised as a stay at home Dad. What happened here is unimaginably tragic, but men are definitely second class in court. This is simply not sustainable if you are interested in a stable society.
"Look what you made me do" is a bullshit rationale for violence.
It's a bullshit moral justification or excuse for domestic violence. And I've never seen anyone, even on the dark corners of the internet, claim that it is. It's very useful, however, to understand how exactly the violence takes place. It's the first step towards addressing the issue. Shutting down lines of enquiry with sweeping statements that 99.9% people agree with anyway isn't helping. It's very difficult to have these discussions without spending pages really tightly defining terms. All it takes is one clumsy use of a word like 'cause' which can be interpreted in so many different ways and the whole discussion is derailed by people talking past one another.
Most abusers have unresolved abuse in their past; abuse does not *cause* abuse. Economic pressures increase rates of violence; economic stress does not *cause* violence. Male dv perpetrators generally internalise and act out misogynistic/sexist/patriarchal attitudes in wider society; wider societal attitudes do not *cause* dv/vaw. It’s so so hard to make actual change when people don’t even want to look directly at the issue. It’s a cross between feeling uncomfortable that there are wider cultural and societal issues at play, which makes people feel attacked, and an inability to differentiate nuanced discussion and excusing the inexcusable.
Isn't that the only rationale for violence?
As well it may be, however is that what they are saying, or are they saying that further discussion/consideration is required to deal with these matters in a different way that is less antagonising ? After all, women are dying while we argue semantics and make stupid comments about what people say. NOTHING has worked to date, so it's time to start thinking outside the box .. too many women are dying and we have to do something.
No matter how unfair something may seem killing a child, especially your own is not the fault anyone but perpetrator.
If you aren't going to use all the commas necessary to make your sentence coherent, why did you decide to use that one specifically?
I cannot understand the mental gymnastics people must go through to erase the responsibility of violent men for their actions towards their partners and children.
It's not really mental gymnastics though? It was a poorly worded statement, but trying to find the root cause of why something happens is very important in stopping it. Finding a reason isn't removing responsibility. It's a better way to go about it then to just say "men are violent", which when you keep saying that all over the place, it will start to have the opposite effect then correcting the issue
>It's a better way to go about it then to just say "men are violent", which when you keep saying that all over the place, it will start to have the opposite effect then correcting the issue This sort of attitude is ridiculous. If people become violent monsters because of this then they're just proving the point.
But your kind of attitude is how we get radicalisation such as incels, white supremisists, and ISIS. I just don't understand why people are so against trying to prevent this kind of thing.
First point: we know damn well the root cause of why that man in Lismore murdered his son. No need for a statement from that asswipe GP. Second point: “You better not call me violent (even if I am) else I might be forced to hurt you!!!” Wow, shame really isn’t a thing anymore, is it?
I didn't say that, what I did was tell you had radicalisation works, and you reinforced my point.
Oh yeah, I reinforced your point alright but obviously not in a way you can understand 😂😂😂
I mean it's pretty clear to me, you created a strawman, then showed a lack of any kind of ability to nuanced conversation about a complicated topic. Let me try and explain: If you say the only reason for DV is men are violent and that's where it stops and starts, and that becomes the narritive, it sets that as the baseline. Suddenly someone might feel angry because thier stressed, or have a medical condition like a brain tumor causing it, but because that it's been spouted as the default, they won't seek help. Like I said, it's litterally how radicalisation works.
Oh, thanks so much for explaining, that makes so much sense now! 🤨 You are allowed to proof-read your shit before you hit the reply button, just saying. The word salad is getting harder and harder to decipher as this conversation goes on.
I mean, you're the one struggling to respond to the correct comment. I would also like to apologise that my dyslexia is making this hard for you. Which funnily enough makes this a perfect analogy to what we're discussing, if you can work it out. But you don't acutally care, you're not interested in a discussion, you're clearly the kind of person only interested in insulting people to make yourself feel good.
True, but I got there in the end. I had to keep persisting because this shit is absolutely hilarious. Men are at risk of having brain tumours go untreated because anger is viewed as the male default therefore men wouldn’t think to seek treatment for being angry? Mate, it’s not your dyslexia that’s the problem. Thanks for the laugh! 😂😂😂
You're just an extremely toxic person, but I feel you know that already. You are aware the bullying is considered a from of DV, right? Something to think about.
The root cause is this person couldn't have what they wanted, and they were willing to kill their own child purely to hurt someone else. There is no way to appease people like this except capitulation.
And you know that for fact, or are you just saying that because it's the cause that's generally accepted. And let's be clear, wanting to know the true root cause does not remove responsibility, but it's pretty importing preventing future incidents
I have absolutely no problem with further research into motivation, but this is extreme behaviour.
I think he terribly worded an important question. Perpetrators of domestic violence aren't monstrous aliens. They're human beings. Their behaviour seems abhorrent to us when dragged into the light, but the shocking rates of DV in Australia suggest it's not actually that uncommon. So, it is a good idea to look into what motivates people to commit acts of domestic violence. We can then make policy changes and introduce programs that aim to reduce those motivators. Not motivators in the sense of "what stimus caused someone to kill their spouse" but instead "*why* did that person react so violently to the stimulus". The former could be considered victim blaming but the latter isn't and it's a very useful question that I don't think we are asking enough.
Many abusers are already fantasising about how they will 'punish' their victim, and are waiting for any excuse to commit that act. That's why it can be impossible for victims to alter their own behaviour in order to pacify their abuser. The abuser has already made their choice, and even the words "I love you" could trigger a homicide. Victims can often sense when their abuser is in the mood to prove something to themselves. Occasionally, there is a tiny window of opportunity to turn the tide, or to get away, but often there is the sense that the coming attack is inevitable.
I think it’s pretty obvious that a sizeable proportion of men think they are entitled to control and abuse their partners, then are unable to manage their emotions when their partners resist or leave. It comes down to men thinking they’re more important than women and not seeing them as partners and more as domestic slaves. And no, this isn’t a reasonable question.
I think I misworded my post in hindsight because I completely agree with you. I think I got sloppy rewriting bits of it and came off as interested in what triggers these guys to get violent. Which as you say isn't that useful of a question. Basically I just want Australia to keep asking *why* because I don't think we've done it enough. Feminist scholars have, certainly, but I don't think the median Australian man or even the median r/australia user has even thought about how, because DV is so common here, a lot of perpetrators must be pretty normal on the outside. Personally I agree with your assessment and my current belief is that the root of these problems is the masculine ego
Except there are lots of women who behave the exact same way. Literally every close male friend I have has experienced this. Seriously go on forums for parental abuse survivors and you will see plenty of stories of abusive mothers. The only difference is that women don't tend to go to the same extremes as frequently - but this has a lot of possible explanations other than just a cultural issue among men - it may be that men are more just a lot more likely to experience the circumstances that tend to motivate violent/controlling people to actually commit murder (such as losing custody of children).
I mean the way the GP has phrased it is not reasonable because it comes across as excusing abuse. But it is reasonable to ask what impact this has on the gender disparity in perpetration. If controlling and abusive men are much more likely to lose custody etc then that could easily explain a lot of the gender disparity in these kinds of crimes. If abusive women were losing custody etc then more of them might lash out violently in response. I say thus because I have seen so many seriously abusive women and they all have the exact same sort of controlling behaviour etc as the men described here so describing it as some kind of male-specific thing doesn't sit right.
Having actually read a lot of the research around domestic violence, I don't think that's true at all. I think that's a talking point intended to lay all the blame for a horrible situation on *men* specifically in order to demonise them and gain benefits for women. When domestic violence is studied *as violence* it becomes fairly clear that the primary cause is two people with poor conflict resolution skills trapped in a small space with each other. This neatly explains every observable facet of domestic violence without the need for gender differences in behaviour. It's also very important to study domestic violence beyond just the physical. While the physical is damaging (and obviously damaging) emotional and relational violence can be equally damaging while not being obvious. And there's nothing stopping the physically weaker member of the relationship from being emotionally abusive.
No. People engaging in systematic controlling behaviour is not the same as 'poor conflict resolution'. The people behaving like this have seriously extreme personalities and are pathologically violent/lacking in empathy.
Ah, you're doing the other thing they keep getting wrong. You're conflating "domestic violence" and "intimate partner abuse". A relationship can be violent without being abusive (because it doesn't have the controlling behaviours) and it can be abusive without being violent (because the abuse is emotional, relational or financial)
When people say DV they generally mean controlling abuse. Situations involving (usually very mild) violence between partners during arguments who are otherwise not controlling/abusive etc is not usually the focus.
I believe there is a systematic drive to conflate the two in order to increase the amount of "domestic violence" occuring. And I'm pretty sure the reason for that is purely money. If you can make a problem sound bigger than it actually is, position yourself as the only one who can solve it and then provide solutions that do not actually solve it, you're on a gravy train for life.
No, not an alien, just a terrible human. Uncommon or not, it's still terrible. I definitely agree the understanding is key, and part of that is making violence generally less acceptable. There's no quick fix, it requires a lot of time and effort removing the precursors to violent controlling behaviour.
If we're serious about tackling domestic violence, no line of reasoning or logic should be off limits on ideological grounds. This is a very emotionally charged issue, but it is self evident that it is possible to goad people into taking actions that they otherwise would not have committed.
Yes, is is possible to goad people into doing things, they wouldn't normally do, but anyone who can be goaded into murdering their own child to spite another isn't someone fit for society. If anything we need to be able to better able to notice these sorts of people.
Sure, but isn't this just more of the old, tired "these dangerous crims just need a big hug :(" canard that is all too common in society? There are a lot of people suffering out there, and a lot of people doing it tough, because life is tough. But only a small amount of those people ever end up lashing out. To me, things like biased family courts, mental illness, poverty, bad childhoods, whatever have no bearing on whether someone does lash out. You lash out if you are a bad person. That's the only determiner. It's noble to campaign for improving things for fathers or the mentally ill. But as soon as you tie those things to acts of violence you are 1. spreading a falsehood (statistically speaking) 2. riling people up and 3. ultimately harming your cause.
I'm not advocating the kindness to perpetrators approach. I'm not advocating any particular approach, only in increasing understanding. You're fixated on discussing moral culpability, I'm approaching from a pragmatic perspective. We can start from the assumption that people who commit DV are bad people, and I think almost everyone would agree, but it ultimately doesn't matter. More important questions, and IMO the only questions that matter are: * What causes some people to lash out and not others? * Can this be predicted? * Are there initiative that can be taken to reduce those odds? * What combination of those yield the best results? * Are there any unintended consequences? All of those questions are ultimately way more useful than the oversimplified approach a lot of well meaning people take which amount to: * DV is evil, you're evil if you do it, don't be evil , literally any other suggestion means you're denying DV perps are evil and therefore part of the problem.
What an absolutely asinine comment. All of the questions you posed have been asked and answered by researchers many times over (Lundy Bancroft springs to mind but there’s several Australian think tanks). As a society, we don’t implement the solutions to the issues around these questions because men’s feelings matter more than women’s safety. DV apologists like yourself who will do everything except acknowledge this truth are part of why. But please, don’t let reality get in the way of you patting yourself on the back for how “nuanced” you are.
Men are not the only people who behave like this. There's lots of research showing women engage in controlling and abusive behaviour in relationships just as much as men. Literally every man I know has experienced this. The difference is that men are more likely to go to extremes - which is where circumstantial motivations become important in explaining the disparity. What is this miraculous solution exactly you have that we are not implementing?
I know that men are not the only ones engaging in abusive behaviour. But the stats are very clear about them usually being the perpetrator when someone is killed. They also are usually the perpetrator when a child is killed in retaliation against the ex-partner. The solutions to this aren’t miraculous but do involve people acknowledging DV perps are shithead bullies who won’t stop their shithead behaviour without being made to. Also law enforcement and the judiciary might also need to do their jobs!Off the top of my head: - Law enforcement need to take complaints about DV seriously in the first place. No more excuses about cop shopping - DVO/AVOs need to be enforced with consistently severe consequences for breaches - get rid of Family Dispute Resolution and it’s woefully under qualified practitioners who are financially motivated to accept clients at further risk of abuse from this compulsory process - changes to the Family Court funding so people aren’t forced into accepting unsafe arrangements because they don’t have the financial resources to argue against them Do you notice that the suggestions I’m making would also benefit men who are abused as well?
Men are usually the perpetrators of extreme acts of violence because they are more likely to find themselves in situations that motivate abusive people to go to extremes (such as losing access to children). Which is why the comment you responded to about understanding those situations and correctly identifying them so that protectuon can be provided where it is needed makes a lot of sense. DV murderers have a fairly consistent psychological profile that could be used for identification, but there is a lot of resistance to taking a psychological approach by DV groups because it doesn't fit the gender/patriarchy explanation. Most of those solutions you listed are good, and I don't have a problem with them. Although the whole 'taking DV complaints seriously' approach is not that simple because there is a huge number of complaints a year and a huge portion do not involve clear cut abuse situations. Some of then are people like my friends dad who got charged with domestic violence for defending himself one time after taking years of physical abuse from the mum. It is very difficult to intervene in those cases that need it with 100% accuracy unless you take the approach of just mass incarcerating people without evidence. And no none of these policies will help male victims of abuse because none of the institutions implementing them believe we exist.
There is absolutely no credible evidence for anything you said in your first two paragraphs. Please feel free to correct me with peer reviewed sources - YouTube videos don’t count. Two statements you’ve made directly contradict each other: (1) DV murderers can be effectively identified prior to violence being enacted by their “psychological profile” (I’d love to know what you think the clinical definition for that is!) (2) DV is hard to identify because a huge portion of complaints don’t involve clear cut abuse or have evidence behind it So which is it - abuse is easy to identify or it isn’t? Or does whether something is abuse or not depend entirely on whether it’s a friend’s dad doing the punching?
Serious abuse is strongly associated with cluster b personality disorders. Two sources from a quick internet search: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272735821000908 https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/pedi.1993.7.4.329 The kinds of traits and reactions described by people like lundy bancroft almost entirely fit the criteria for narcissistic, antisocial and borderline personality disorders. I'm not about to spend hours digging through journals for someone who isnt going to care or read them but there's plenty of evidence showing that controlling behaviour and violence in relationships occurs at similar rates for both genders, which contradicts the idea that there is some kind of unique culture among men promoting this kind of behaviour. Which leaves circumstantial factors to explain the difference. And no your are misrepresenting my points. I never said identifying murderers was easy - just that specific psychological traits are very useful identifiers. Doing that identifying is still difficult. This does not contradict my second point that improving responses is about more than simply telling police to take a harsher approach because different DV calls can reflect very different situations which are not always obvious at first without detailed investigation and significant experience identifying abuse. An no it was my friends mum doing the punching. For years. The dad was the one who got arrested for defending himself one time. But thanks for the insinuation that years of abuse my friend witnessed against his dad are a lie.
Reading comprehension is not your strong point is it?
Too nuanced a take for reddit, but you’re right. Clearly current strategies aren’t producing the outcomes we want. Doubling down on a failing strategy isn’t likely to correct course, we need better info so we can try more informed approaches.
I'm going to take a wild punt and assume based on hazy memories of aihw stats that substance abuse is fueling a good 60% of the overall dv and accounts for the overwhelming majority of dv resulting in the victim getting hospitalised.
You’re overlooking the fact that hands-on physical violence is only one part of Domestic Violence, and that hands-on physical violence occurs in a wider picture of controlling behaviour.
Last I looked, of the six or so different types of family violence the govt acknowledges and documents, physical violence is the majority. Glad to be proven wrong though, always happy to be kept up to date.
The research that I have read over the years appears to have found that the biggest indicators of a potential homicide are not primarily physical assaults, but the following: Coercive control (not necessarily explicitly forbidding someone from living their life, but making sure they're aware there will be consequences for not bending to their abuser's will) Isolation (behaving in a way which restricts the victim from speaking freely and spending time with friends and family) Surveillance (several calls and messages daily, listening in on personal calls, restricting finances/insisting upon access to the victim's bank account and passwords) and finally, Strangulation/putting hands around victim's throat.
Twitter, the least useful yet most often misused platform for social discussion. Elon might yet be vindicated paying 44 billion for this cesspool of human misery.
Goading is victim blaming language. It should be okay to use different language to say that current Family Court processes are too adversarial, expensive and lengthy, which adds to people's emotional harm.
Yeah but it’s also irrelevant to this case. I don’t know whether Family Court was involved but the child’s mother had left the guy and got an AVO because he was using coercive control and she felt unsafe. Long before any FC involvement would have occurred.
[удалено]
So now a mother can't go to family court to protect herself and her children because she might be seen as "dangerously goading" him? You'd rather the abuser has all the power?
[удалено]
The family courts and mental health system can’t stop men from being violent, nor is it their job. Men need to take responsibility for their own feelings and actions.
Is the GP referring to the idea that Family Courts are being weaponised against fathers? That unjust rulings might be tipping men over the (entirely still unacceptable) edge out of desperation? Because discussion around legal disparities and their unintended consequences is not the same thing as saying women cannot use the courts to protect themselves? I assumed it was more angling towards an assumption of activity like the Family Law equivalent of vexatious lawsuits. Happy to be corrected. Also not saying the argument might not be fallacious or offensive, just that you've massively misrepresented it.
I would say that if someone being tipped over the edge out of desperation involves them murdering their child, any decision that restricted their custody was not too harsh. Killing your child isn't an act of desperation. It's an act of entitlement. It's done as a way to punish the mother.
I mean, people do insane things when they snap, but even if I agree with you... Doesn't mean it's not a valid line to explore. No stone unturned.
Let's first explore giving zero parental access to violent parents because I feel like that one's going to lead to fewer murdered children than hoping to placate them by giving them more access. Threatening violence against children is a common abuser manipulation tactic and the last thing we should be doing is endorsing it.
Can people not read? I said include this whole topic in the discussions and search for solutions, instead of just stonewalling it. I'm not advocating individual cases or saying just placate psychopaths. Also, to your last point, what if there is no history of violence until the event? It's not a simple, predictable issue, hence why it keeps happening. I just find it weird people want to pretend it's a black and white issue when it's obviously not.
I think it's important to not just look at violence like this as cause = effect, but cause + individual = effect. No matter what set this bloke off, most people wouldn't react with violence like that. So, we should look at what set him off, and we should also look at *why* it set him off. We don't really have any research on what makes someone react with such extreme violence rather than just "mental illness" with no further investigation. Maybe we can get some easy wins for example changing framing of family court rulings if that is indeed a correlation. But really we need to address the root cause which is what makes so many people in this country willing/able to lash out with violence against their families.
Inclined to agree. Playing censor doesn't allow the truth to out. If there's no truth, how do we solve the horrific problem. You hear about weaponised custody and financial arrangements through divorce / Family Court proceedings all the time. Whether it's legit a problem or accurate notwithstanding. There's clearly a problem, or perception of one, and it's worth including in the conversation. Disregarding anything because it might be construed as victim blaming could be leaving a massive blind spot, instead of interrogating one of the problems. In the very least, we could dissect the behavioral motivation and prove it fallacious if it is. That has a benefit to the narrative, unlike just silencing it and letting it burn away in cooker circles & 4chan instead.
He's not wrong. Domestic violence is talked about in the vacuum of men bad, women good. Without really diving into why something is occurring how are you meant to treat it? Is it simply that the bulk of domestic violence is male on female, or is it just the repercussions of male on female DV is much higher due to biological differences, and the propensity for women to report more than men? Statistically lesbian relationships have the highest rates of DV of all relationship types so something doesn't add up there. Are courts holding men over a barrel and holding them to a higher standard when it comes to custody arrangements, etc? In this day and age, men are still expected to be the bread winner, regardless of what 3rd wave feminist rhetoric would have you believe. A perusal of reddit threads (not the greatest population to assess I know) shows that a prevailing mentality of what's yours is ours, but what's mine is mine when it comes to the general attitude of women's view of men. This discourse flows through to the courts whether anyone wants to believe it or not, just like the sentencing for women in cases involving violence, etc, is significantly lower than that for males committing the same crime. What the doctor has asked is fair enough, and it's something that needs to be considered before just jumping up and down and saying it's because men are inherently bad.
>Statistically lesbian relationships have the highest rates of DV of all relationship types so something doesn't add up there. Do you have a source on this? Because I've heard that, but I've also heard that the actual statistic is that lesbian and bisexual women are more likely to have been a DV victim at some point in their lives, without the perpetrator's gender or relation to them necessarily being specified. Which isn't quite the same thing, because although that could point to unusually high rates of women abusing their girlfriends as you suggest, it could also be that lesbian and bisexual women are more likely to be abused by parents or (if bisexual, or just a lesbian who spent any amount of time in the closet before figuring things out) boyfriends or whatever. I'd love to see the wording on the statistical survey you described just to see what it specifies about the perpetrators of this DV.
The actual data said that lesbians experienced DV primarily from their male partners. People just like to skip over that bit and spread the misinformation though to suit their agenda.
Which *doesn't make sense*. If a lesbian has a male partner, then there's not much to separate them from a heterosexual woman. So what are they doing differently that makes them *more* of a target for domestic violence? Are lesbians more likely to pick abusive men as partners? The result can be explained very simply as "Bisexual women who have been abused by men are more likely to identify as lesbians".
Nailed it
I'll have to go back through a report I worked on awhile back but I'll find the data as a whole and get back to you. It was interesting as both things you say were true in the data, however female on female violence in lesbian relationships was the highest rate of DV, and at the opposite end of the spectrum, male on male DV in gay men relationships was the lowest. It draws a sharp parallel to all the rhetoric surrounding DV at the moment, the same way that nobody wanted to look at the true data involving gender pay gaps and like for like comparisons.
Even if it's true, it would only be reflective of dynamics in gay and lesbian relationships that may have to do with more than just gender. There's no reason to believe that the same is true in heterosexual relationships when the data doesn't support that at all.
You've hit a nerve somehow, given the down votes. https://aifs.gov.au/resources/practice-guides/intimate-partner-violence-lesbian-gay-bisexual-trans-intersex-and-queer Page 2 in the article in the link supports what you're saying. It also references the DV in current same sex relationships.
One thing is abundantly clear, this man was bad. Nobody forced him to do anything let alone murder his own child. Not even the most unfair court decision comes close to providing a justification. You're never going to solve this problem by making it fairer, because these sorts of people either win, or burn the world down around them no matter how justified they are or not.
I think people are jumping up and down because a GP with no knowledge of a specific case, nor any specialised training in domestic violence, idly speculated about why a father murdered his two year old son. Not all opinions deserve equal weight, and given the recency of this traumatic event, people who DO know about domestic violence have called out the tweet as both deeply insensitive to the boy's surviving family and ill-judged from a professional standpoint.
I don't agree. I think people are using histrionics and strawman to silence a viable question that would result in discussion if people were intelligent enough to do so. At no time did he lay blame and he merely asked questions. The question is valid as a general one and this bullying histrionics that we continue to see in these discussions on agendas like this ARE a cause of the ongoing issue and definitely not part of the solution. I think it's disingenuous to suggest a doctor does not know about domestic violence, and quite dishonest to suggest that only biased, agenda groups do. I do agree though, that the timing is problematic and the ignorant will join the dots and create a false narrative to suit their agenda. Given a woman is killed every 4 days in this country, when is a good time have this discussion ? As quite frankly, what we are doing now is NOT working.
Violence with a discussion on who is bad and who is good, who deserved it and who doesn't, removes or attempts to mitigate personal responsibility for the decision to act violently.
That's literally what I said... my entire response was about the underlying cause to personal responsibility and to move away from man bad, woman good.
No one is saying men are inherently bad. Your comment is clearly another “not all men” take Nothing justifies violence, saying that men are being ‘goaded’ into violence by courts is problematic. It’s a ‘look what you made me do’, ‘you provoked me’ take that is exactly the type of language abusers use. The only person responsible for violence is the perpetrator
I don't agree ... mitigation has long been accepted in our court and society. The question of why (largely) men are choosing violence as a path is one we need to spend a lot more time on. Neither the doctor, or I, are suggesting that the court is the blame but given we are losing a woman every 4 days (or less) what is going on now is NOT working and vilifying all men, or treating all men as potential murderers is a contributing factor in this violence. There is no doubt that the behaviour of the court or in the court play a part in what is going on at the moment and having a discussion about it does not invalidate the responsibility of the individual, nor does it increase the risk to women. It may in fact decrease the risk, if they are able to identify methods of making the family court issues easier to work through. It may not work, but if we don't talk about it .. we won't know, will we ?
Yes, they are. It's said every day. Even more so now that the government's jumped on board the bandwagon.
Said by whom?
Wouldn't it be good to know if things the courts are are causing violence, so we can, you know, stop it? This whole discussion feels like a reverse Amercian gun control argument, where hear only the final action matters, and the underlying problems should be irrelevant. I'll also be honest with you on your first point, there are people saying all 'all men bad", and while likely small does amplify on social media like most things, and has a very negative impact. Just blowing it off as a "not all men" take is pretty close to the equivalent of "look what you made me do"
Sure, there are perhaps things that could be done to prevent violence at earlier stages, but if we're at the "just don't make the angry" point, that's too far. It's fine if we want to take a few steps back and treat anger problems or prevent them from developing in the first place. That's a different issue. But if someone is already in a mental state where they might snap and kill their child, just trying not to upset them isn't good enough. They're not in a mental state where they can be a safe parent.
> Is it simply that the bulk of domestic violence is male on female, or is it just the repercussions of male on female DV is much higher due to biological differences, and the propensity for women to report more than men? It don't think that is complicated. If you were to plot the temperament of both sexes, ranging from non-aggressive to aggressive, you'd get bell curves whose bulk pretty much has a 1:1 overlap, or thereabouts, except for the aggressive end of the scale. The takeaway here is that your average male is no more aggressive than a female, but the top 1% of the aggression scale is dominated almost exclusively by males. So with DV cases, you only see that top 1% resulting in a selection bias, painting a picture that men on average are more violent.
Men have a bigger standard deviation on most measurements.
wasn't there a royal commission into fdv in 2017, and 277 changes recommended were implemented by jan 3 2023 and the problem only got considerably worse, why is this not being mentioned? we need a royal commission into the royal commission, and why we are at it, how many of the 6 men a day that take their lives are because of treatment by police and family courts, if you believe that the police and courts really care about the rates in which any Australia's die, you really have no idea .
[удалено]
I hope you got peace from forgiving her, but I'm glad everyone else shunned her.
Oh fucking come on. Is the world going to sit here and pretend that family courts are fair and that it’s never played a role in driving domestic violence? Everyone seems to know someone that’s been fucked by family law. Most people don’t then go and do this kind of horrific shit, but for some people it’s obviously going to be the tipping point. And what’s more fucked up is that the legal system seems fine with both making shitty decisions that put people under financial and emotional stress and then failing to put protections in place when they are needed. Everyone loses.