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

By Michael Gray - posted Wednesday, 8 June 2005


An old statistical joke goes like this:

Apparently, one in five people in the world are Chinese. There are five people in my family. Mum isn’t Chinese and I’m sure dad isn’t. It could be my older brother Colin. Or it could be my younger brother Chang Fu Yat. Frankly, I think it must be Colin.

Pick up almost any newspaper on any given day and you will most likely find a by-line claiming: "Statistics show …"; "new survey finds …"; or, "new study proves …". Often accompanied by embellishments such as "shocking”, “appalling”, and so on.

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Nowhere is this more prevalent than on the subject of gender relations and in particular the emotionally charged subject of domestic violence. (The new euphemism is "family violence" - but only lip service is paid to even the concept of male victims.)

The widely cited statistic on the subject is the Women’s Safety Survey (WSS), published in 1996 that claims, "One in four Australian women (25 per cent) experience domestic violence within their lifetime". This survey finding underpins government policy and legislation in every Australian state jurisdiction (with the exception of Victoria, which now evidently claims that "one in five women are victims of domestic violence", apparently suggesting that women would be much safer if they domicile in Victoria).

No "study" is of much value until it has been subjected to peer review. This has never occurred in relation to the Women’s Safety Survey. For a number of reasons, there is an urgent need to now do so.

The WSS study was released under the imprimatur of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) but was in fact a creature of the then bureaucratically powerful Office of Status of Women (OSW), which commissioned the survey. There was significant consternation reported at that time in relation to complaints by ABS officers that they were being "bullied" into undertaking unprofessional, and methodologically flawed "advocacy research"- research which is designed to prove the existence of something, whether it exists or not.

For example, the notion that one in four women are suffering from domestic violence is an alarming figure and conjures images, at the very least, of black eyes and bruises occurring on an appalling scale. How many Australian’s would know that the survey findings included such largely irrelevant questions as “Have you ever received an obscene phone call?” Or that the survey report obfuscated the fact that some 27 per cent of respondents were actually reporting violence caused by other women?

There were many other seriously disturbing aspects to this survey. Again, for example, it also involved only voluntary participation, which is a key source of survey bias as it attracts participants who may have an untoward fascination with the subject matter, a factor that can dramatically skew the results.

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Similarly, the survey was a "life incidence" survey, thus inviting the recitation of some event far off in both time and in memory. The failings of human memory and perception with the passage of time are well recognised by our legal system, which, with very few exceptions, refuses to admit evidence that has been expired by time. Twenty years and a bitter divorce can change a memory from someone merely "pushing away" into "he threw me down the stairs".

The law recognises the frailty of old memories but our ever -increasing victim culture does not. Society would not entertain the concept that someone is currently a "road accident victim" based on a minor and non-permanent injury they had incurred from a vehicle accident 20 years previously. Nor would we necessarily put much faith in a 20-year-old version of how the accident occurred. Yet this is precisely what such surveys on domestic violence increasingly attempt to encourage society to accept as reality.

When citing the "one in four" statistic, some domestic violence literature oddly leaves out the phrase "within their lifetime", giving a false impression of immediacy (that one in four women are victims - right now, on this very day). Moreover, the Women’s Safety Survey did not actually purport to say that one in four women were victims of "physical" domestic violence, but included a range of other non-physical (and potentially uneventful) behaviours that were then (re)-classified as "domestic violence".

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.

A recent Canberra Times article, lamenting the lack of affordable low cost public housing for poor families, featured a couple with young children who were forced to live in a caravan. A "housing worker" was quoted as suggesting to the mother, "If there was family violence, you could get a house straight away": i.e. claim you are a (female) victim and (within the context of your immediate needs) the "world is your oyster".

Male victims (of anything) need not apply - if Schapelle Corby was Steve Corby, would Australia care less?

The Supported Accommodation Assistance Program (SAAP) is yet another key source of statistics on so-called "family violence". What the SAAP data does not show however, is how many women were encouraged to falsely claim they were fleeing family violence, or indeed what the nature of the "violence" was, so that they could receive priority treatment. Using SAAP data as a measure of violence against women is badly flawed because it can be misconstrued (again with an apparent deliberate intent) to reflect a statistic illustrating the number of women and children fleeing family violence. Often SAAP data, in fact, reflects the large number of homeless men seeking emergency accommodation. In this context, the real "SAP" is Australian society.

By both omission and commission, Australia is being sold a very gross and socially dangerous statistical lie - offered up a "poisoned chalice" - that is serving only the interests of its creators, and those legions, who have so readily signed up to the fictional notion that every fourth female face we see each day is secretly living in stark terror and fear of "family violence". Some women unfortunately are. So are some men. What must be untangled so that effective measures can be put into place is the real incidence of such violence from the fictional statistical misrepresentations that are serving an entirely different purpose.

The mantle of mass victimhood casts a long and very dark shadow that too often conceals the very location of the murder of truth and where propaganda is granted the breath of life. Almost all political tyrannies have their origin in segregating societies into the conceptual equivalent of "good and evil", "angels and demons", "victims and perpetrators", “four legs good, two legs bad”. There is never a middle ground. Nowadays, "Muslim and terrorist" become increasingly synonymous and dangerously interchangeable notions. So too, do the notions of "male and perpetrator", "female and victim".

When liars are afoot in society, their first weapon of choice is statistical "proof".

Yep - no doubt about it - Colin must be Chinese. After all, statistics never lie.

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Article edited by Patrick O'Neill.
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About the Author

Michael Gray has a BA in Australian Studies, Literary Studies and Psychology from Deakin University. He is currently employed as a statistical officer within the Commonwealth Government.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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