Domestic violence - a statistical 'shock and awe' campaign?

Yet some domestic violence literature, when citing the survey finding, now (again oddly) characterise the one in four statistic as referring to only physical violence. The leaflets handed out over the past 12 months by the socially conscious commercial retail chain, "The Body Shop", being a case in point.

Domestic violence literature thus not only blurs the past with the present but blends quite different, (and sometimes relatively innocuous) behaviours with the abjectly violent, in order to incite a widespread impression that physical domestic violence against women is currently running rampant and unchecked in our community.

The ever confluent nature of the now ubiquitous term domestic (or family) violence which brings under its one heading a range of non-physical behaviours is of primary concern. The nuances of context and intensity are increasingly lost in a determined reinterpretation of any kind of marital disagreement or discord, into a paradigm of male "perpetrator" and a female "victim". We see a lot of street behaviour that we might regard as offensive or verbally aggressive but in the absence of a physical assault (whether major or minor) we don’t classify it as violence per se. Yet domestic violence researchers seem to almost salivate over a positive response to,"Has your partner (husband) ever yelled at you?" Tick! Another (female) domestic violence victim. (Although, "Did you yell back?", is conveniently never asked.)

Some literature cites the number of "finalised" intervention orders issued by the lower courts as another source of "statistical evidence" of the "magnitude" of domestic (family) violence. The wrong statistic is again being deployed, with an apparent intention to deliberately mislead.

Most "finalised" intervention orders are finalised simply because they are uncontested. That is, the male "respondent" is persuaded (often bullied) by court officials, such as deputy court registrars, into signing up for a "final" or "permanent" - actually usually a one-year - order rather than contest the allegations in court. The lower courts don’t want any more congestion if it can be avoided.

Convincing a bewildered "respondent" to sign up for the permanent order on the basis of a "By Consent, Without Admissions", is not particularly difficult, especially if a solicitor (assuming he can afford one) has already advised him that it could cost up to $10,000 if he goes to court.

And further, that he will most likely lose, because the legal test is not "beyond reasonable doubt" but merely the "balance of probabilities". This is a very weak civil law test in the context of penalties that could ultimately imprison a respondent, and where magistrates are increasingly fearful of bad publicity if a violent act should subsequently occur. The catalyst for which, ironically, is often the possibly faked restraining order allegations and the trauma of being hauled into court often for the first time in life. The entire lower court system is thus motivated to push for a so-called “final” or “permanent” order.

Why is the language of “forever” (i.e. a “permanent order”) deployed in the context of an order that expires after 12 months, if not to create a misleading wider impression of life long fearfulness?

So much for "justice" and the fading jurisprudential notion of the "presumption of innocence". Too often intervention orders have become a "merry-go-round" of loose allegations and lower court bureaucratic pragmatism, without anyone delving into the true factual merit of the original application. Whether a female complainant was ever genuinely fearful or merely a (civil law) perjurer and liar is often never explored. And if it is explored, the diluted "balance of probabilities" test still renders such findings questionable. Domestic violence literature increasingly proclaims that domestic violence is a crime. Quite so. Therefore, in any legal action, the criminal law test of "beyond reasonable doubt" should be applied.

Given the growing recognition - by the public, but typically not the judiciary - that intervention orders are regularly used as a tactical weapon in achieving favourable custody and property outcomes in subsequent Family Court proceedings, a count of intervention orders as a measure of "violence against women" is virtually meaningless. The only useful measure might be the number of intervention orders that were "finalised" (aka made permanent) and thus issued, following an actual finding of fact by the court. For the reasons already cited however, such a statistical measure needs to be very qualified.

Another statistic commonly cited by an increasingly frenzied domestic violence industry (investigate the amount of public funding to any organisation that puts itself under the "domestic violence umbrella" and you will instantly understand why this had become a publicly funded "industry") is the number of police call outs to domestic or family violence incidents. Whether the "incident" involved verbal disagreement between husband and wife or an act of actual violence, we would never know. It is merely noted as an "incident".

In fact, if the protagonists were two brothers arguing in the front yard that too, would be noted on the official records as a domestic or family violence incident. These records of "incidents" are then inevitably fed into the ever-swelling "conduit" that ultimately produces headlines that purport, "alarming new data shows domestic violence against women running out of control". The end result is then ever-increasing public funding to combat the ever burgeoning horror of violence against women. Nobody ever delves deep enough to examine how many of these police reported "incidents" actually involved a physical violence or threat of violence or indeed whether a woman was even present at the time.