Aboriginal Culture Today

The Weekend Australian

A CULTURE LEFT BEHIND

JACINTA NAMPIJINPA PRICE

As whites champion the Me Too movement, traditional Aboriginal women continue to live in violence
Like most traditional cultures around the world, Warlpiri culture is deeply patriarchal; men are superior to women and more privileged, and the collective quashes the rights of the individual. These principles, thousands of years old, come together to oppress women now. If I misbehaved as a young girl, some well-intentioned family member might threaten me with forced marriage to a much older “promised husband”. I would obey out of terror.

Aboriginal children are rarely punished physically but are controlled psychologically. I recall when I was a little girl my female kin playing cards at Yuendumu. A Japangardi, one of my potential husbands, walked past. The women pretended he was coming to take me away. They teased me and huddled around, pretending to protect me from his clutches. He played along, pretending to grab for me. I was terrified. Everyone burst into laughter. Japangardi signalled it was all a joke and handed me a $20 note to compensate for the terror he caused me.

Girls are trained to be submissive from birth and their fear is laughed at. My mother was expected to join her middle-aged promised husband as his second wife at 13. She would have gone to her big sister’s household as her co-wife. Mum rebelled. Her father and promised husband relented and told her she could finish school first. They were good and thoughtful men who knew the law but also knew when not to enforce it and that the world was changing. Others of my mother’s age weren’t so lucky and were beaten senseless for daring to rebel.

My parents were determined I would be able to choose my husband. There are still some not granted that right. In customary law, a man is entitled to have sex with his promised wife without her consent. This has been used in court to defend men who had violently and sexually assaulted their teenaged promised wives. In 2002 a 50-year-old Aboriginal man faced court over the abduction and rape of his 15-year-old promised wife. He had already killed one wife. Despite this, his new wife’s family had promised her to him. She was held against her will at his outstation and repeatedly raped. When she attempted to leave with relatives, he fired his shotgun to scare them off. His lawyers argued he was acting within the parameters of his law and fulfilling obligations to the victim’s family.

This was true. The initial charge of rape was reduced. He received 24 hours’ imprisonment for unlawful intercourse with a minor and 14 days’ imprisonment for the firearm offences. When the details were published in a national paper there was outrage and a successful appeal.

I know of many other cases like that: stories of rape, domestic violence and murder; stories belonging to women in my family and many other Aboriginal families. Stories that never reach the ears of the wider public. My close family regularly contributes to the hideous statistics relating to family violence. My Aboriginal sisters, aunts, mothers, nieces and daughters live this crisis every day. There is not a woman in my family who has not experienced some kind of physical or sexual abuse at some time in her life. And none of the perpetrators were white. One of my aunts had her childhood violently stolen from her at the age of 14. Her promised husband, a much older man, held her captive. She was bound with rope “like a kangaroo”, as it was described to me, and repeatedly raped. No one reported the incident. Everyone went about their lives as if nothing had happened. My aunt — one of the most loving, caring and, as I’ve come to learn, resilient women I know — lived on in silence. She lost the ability to bear children. She was left to deal with her scarred womb and tormented psyche while her perpetrator lived on to die as an elder and law man, revered by both the Aboriginal and the wider community.

I was told of another relative who had also been promised to a much older man who, again, had been convicted of killing his first wife. She was terrified she’d suffer the same fate. Her female relatives tried to protect her. I was told her promised husband and other male relatives took her out bush with the connivance of her own father who had also caused the death of his wife. No one has seen her since. That was more than 30 years ago when I was a baby. No complaint was made to the police. These are the kinds of women’s stories I’ve grown up with, told to me in whispers by aunts, grandmothers, mothers. They were also warnings of what can happen when a girl breaks the law.

As an Aboriginal woman I have grown up knowing never to travel on certain roads during “business” time for fear of accidentally coming across a men’s ceremonial party. Like all Aboriginal women, I am at risk of being killed as punishment for making such a simple mistake. This was, and still is, the rule for Aboriginal women in central Australia.

In January 2009 a police car drove on to a ceremonial ground in a remote community. They were pursuing a man who had assaulted his wife. There was a female police officer in the car. That evening the ABC news reported that white police had shown no respect for Aboriginal law. The fact they were pursuing a man who had perpetrated violence against his wife wasn’t mentioned.

Interviewed for the evening news, the late Mr Bookie, former chairman of the Central Land Council, said: “It’s against our law for people like that, breaking the law, they shouldn’t be there. Aboriginal ladies, they’re not allowed to go anywhere near that. If they had been caught — a woman, Aboriginal lady, got caught — she would be killed. Simple as that!” He knew the law and he told the truth.

There was great anger in June this year when Victoria Police issued a statement cautioning women to have “situational awareness” and be “mindful of their surroundings” after the terrible rape and murder of a young Melbourne woman in a Carlton park at night. Aboriginal women in remote Australia must be acutely aware of their situation and surroundings all the time during Aboriginal men’s ceremony. They are taught this from birth. This is the way it is and has always been.

A few years ago I was contacted by a female family member who told me that because of feuding between her family and her inlaws she was wrongly accused of insulting a man in a culturally sensitive way relating to sacred men’s business. As a result she and her daughter were told they had to strip naked publicly in their community to be humiliated. Women know insulting a man with reference to men’s sacred ceremony can result in severe punishment. An accusation is usually believed and supported by the accuser’s female kin. Denial is useless.

A son-in-law can do whatever he likes and his mother-in-law will blame her daughter. In traditional communities in the Northern Territory, the patriarchal and kinbased society is so deeply embedded it’s common for female relatives of even violent offenders to support them against the victim. The obligation to male kin is so strong it can be crippling.

Premature death and lifethreatening illness are blamed on sorcery. Misfortune falling on a family can be blamed on the misbehaviour of women who have attracted the attention of sorcerers. They may be blamed for the death of their children or husbands. Mothers and widows in mourning are sometimes badly beaten after attracting blame. They usually accept punishment because they share the belief system that imposes the penalty. As long as the belief that women can be blamed for the bad behaviour of men, or for accidents and illness, exists in the hearts and minds of Aboriginal people, we will never progress in the fight against physical and sexual violence against women. It is heartbreaking but true.

Ironically, in my experience many of those most horrified by the idea of Aboriginal people questioning the old ways or adapting to the new are people who fully embrace modernity themselves. They are often well-educated and employed, fluent and articulate in English. They live safely in suburbs, have access to the media and the world’s best health services. They don’t die young and they stay out of prison. They have their own culture, don’t live by our customary law, perhaps don’t know what it is. To me, it’s never clear what it is they’re so keen for us to hold on to. Or why we should.

In a small-scale society without prisons and without material wealth, incarceration or fining weren’t available as penalties for law-breaking. Physical punishments such as wounding by spear, beatings or death were the only ones available. Once the punishment had been carried out, conflict could be resolved and everyone could carry on with life. With no defence services or police, everybody, male and female, was trained to fight to defend themselves and their families when called upon. Communities haven’t fully shed these ancient practices.

But they don’t work in a complex, modern society, especially one suffering from high levels of alcohol and drug abuse; a world where we have all of these old traditions plus internet connection to the world, pornography and poker machines — new things that can kill, none of which existed when our culture and laws were formed.

This is the point at which traditional culture and the modern world collide to tear each other apart. My peaceful childhood days in the bush were a stark contrast to town, where members of my family lived in town camps. There, alcohol-fuelled violence took a stranglehold on their lives. I watched as my uncles, whom I loved dearly — men who loved their families — became addicted to grog because they no longer knew where they stood in society. I’ve witnessed alcohol-fuelled rage from men and women towards each other and inflicted on themselves. The principles of traditional and modern economies also clash.

Traditionally we couldn’t preserve or transport food in a harsh climate. Food had to be consumed immediately and shared with those present; and it could be demanded. That was the only way we could survive. But the only things my ancestors possessed that could be shared were food, water and firewood. The principle of demand-share cannot coexist with money, with the need to save, invest and budget. It cannot coexist with addiction. Now, in the cash economy, demand-share and immediate consumption applied to money, clothing, vehicles and houses cause poverty. You can’t say no to kin. They have unrestricted access to your income and all of your assets under the old rules. Some kin will be addicted to alcohol, drugs and gambling.

The addicted are allowed, under the rules of traditional culture, to demand their kin fund their addiction. It is the single biggest barrier to beneficial participation in the modern economy. If you are obliged to give, with no questions asked, you can’t budget, you can’t save, you can’t invest. It strips away your incentive to work. I have had to live with this and cope with it all of my life. Sharing reinforces kin relationships and the status of the sharer.

Men have higher status than women and are less obliged than women to share. This system further subjugates women. To avoid the pain of saying no, my mother insists her white husband won’t let her share. My father is happy to take on this role and use the “male privilege” given him by his wife’s culture to protect his Aboriginal loved ones from poverty.

These problematic attitudes and practices I’ve described did not arrive on the Australian continent with white people in 1788. They are millennia old and fundamentally rooted in a deeply patriarchal culture.

James Massing is a senior minister in the Sarawak state government in Malaysia. His people are the indigenous Iban. His greatgrandfather was a headhunter. He has a simple message for other indigenous peoples: “If you don’t adapt, you die.” He knows the traditional culture of his people and speaks their language. He has a PhD in anthropology from the Australian National University. He no longer hunts human heads. He has kept the best of the old ways, and taken the best of what the world has to offer now, to lead his people out of poverty and marginalisation. He knows how his people must adapt to survive.

Recently I was helping my 33-year-old niece to cope with endstage renal failure and her 11-yearold daughter to attend to an ongoing battle with rheumatic fever; we have the highest rates in the world. Their mother and grandmother, my sister-in-law, is in her 40s. She walks with a limp and has permanent damage to her sight and hearing resulting from assaults by Aboriginal male partners and a Warlpiri man who bashed her in the head with a rock because she had no grog or cigarettes to give him. Not long before that I helped ambulance and police officers to place the body of my aunt in a body bag. She had died of a massive heart attack following a drinking binge. She was one of my favourites. Not long before that I identified the body of my young cousin killed in a car crash caused by alcohol abuse. None of these, my female loved ones, had the English skills, confidence or competence to deal with the wider world effectively when crises hit. They all spoke their traditional languages. They were all traditional owners under the Land Rights Act. They knew their Jukurrpa and could name the sacred sites in their country. The old rules of traditional culture simply do not give them, the most marginalised of our communities, the tools they need to deal with contemporary problems and challenges; challenges that the old ones, elders past, couldn’t have imagined.

Massing is correct. We need to adapt to survive and we can do it our way. I have spoken of the need for cultural reform. I have called on Aboriginal people to question long-held beliefs, to challenge that which contributes to violence in our culture and to hold ourselves to account for the part our culture and attitudes play in our communities’ problems. Just as European women have challenged the treatment of women in their cultures to bring about change, I am doing the same in mine.

My message is too much for many people to hear. When I or others relate stories like the ones I’ve told here, we attract labels like “coconut” and “sell out”, and obscene, misogynist, violent abuse. If white people do so, of course, the label is “racist”, “assimilationist” and “white supremacist”. Truth can be threatening and offensive. Truth can be too much for some. Aboriginal women and children are Australian citizens and they must be able to make the same choices as other citizens. Aboriginal activists campaigned for decades for my people to have the full rights of citizens. Now we have them. We also won the responsibilities of citizenship. They can’t be separated. If Australian citizens are in danger of abuse and neglect, they deserve to be protected, not on the basis of their culture but on the basis of their human rights. We cannot sacrifice their lives on the altar of culture.

Thirty per cent of us in the Northern Territory are of indigenous descent. We are determined to hold on to the best of traditional values. We need to let go of the ones that no longer work. My kinsmen, who suffer through these crises, haven’t been taught the best of Western, indeed world, culture to help them cope with the problems whitefellas have brought to us. Many haven’t even been taught to speak, read or write the national language. Our traditional culture simply doesn’t provide all the tools they need for a modern world.

The West has progressed so far because constructive criticism is embraced. Progress cannot be made if long-held beliefs cannot be challenged or if we cannot be honest. My people are intelligent, pragmatic and resilient. We’re not delicate or weak but clever, funny and strong, like our language.

And just as our language has adapted to a new world, I have faith our culture can be adapted and improved. And it will still be our culture.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is a Warlpiri-Celtic woman from central Australia. She is a fierce campaigner for the rights of Aboriginal women and children
against family violence, an elected member on Alice Springs Town
Council and a cross-cultural educator. This is an edited extract from the December issue of Meanjin, out on Monday.
In traditional communities in the Northern Territory, the patriarchal and kin-based society is so deeply embedded it’s common for female relatives of even violent offenders to support them against the victim

Post WW1

Great War’s shockwave resounded through the decades

GEOFFREY BLAINEY

Starvation, poverty and yet further fighting darkened the world despite the hopes of many

They called it the Great War and hoped it had changed the world. But the world was not so easily hammered into a new shape or infused with a new spirit.

On the day when the war officially ended — the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 — the news sped to Australia along the Pacific Ocean cable. Melbourne, then the nation’s capital, received the message that Monday evening at 7.20.

There were no radio stations and most homes lacked a telephone, but the news item — initially pasted on the outside walls of the newspaper offices spread like magic. That night the cheering crowds eventually filled the main streets of every big city. Many other families stayed at home. Having lost a son or father, brother or uncle, they wondered whether it was an occasion for celebrating.

Next day, in the federal parliament, “Willy” Watt as acting prime minister honoured the more than 60,000 men who had died and then turned to the nation’s women. He wished to pay “in feeble words, a special tribute to their courage, fortitude, and self-sacrifice”. There was widespread pride in how the nation had performed.

Most members of the huge Australian army were still overseas, in France and Belgium and Palestine. Ships had to be found to bring them home but the wartime loss of shipping even in neutral nations had been enormous. General Sir John Monash, moving from the quiet battlefields to London, skilfully organised the homewards voyage for 160,000 soldiers He himself did not step ashore in his home city of Melbourne until nearly 14 months after the war had ended. Perhaps nobody in the nation was more respected.

For a time it was called the war to end war. Watt assured his parliament that Australia “for many a generation will remain a safer and a happier place to live in”. In various nations, a host of people joined peace movements or thought of joining them. When the League of Nations (forerunner of the UN) was formed in 1920, with Australia as an inaugural member, the faith was widespread that it would prevent or limit future wars.

Eventually a sobering fact became clear. The peace movement, dynamic in England but pitifully weak in Hitler’s Germany, unwittingly increased the likelihood of a second world war. In the crucial years of the 1930s, it inhibited Britain from rearming quickly at a time when Britain ought to have rearmed to confront a militant Nazi Germany.

Even the armistice of 1918 had no peaceful effects on many lands, especially during the following three years. There was fighting — virtually a civil war — in Ireland. International and civil wars broke out in Russia. Finland and Poland each fought the Russians, and the Bolsheviks and the White Russians fought each other. A small British army was shipped to the shores of the White Sea in northwest Russia. One of its soldiers was Arthur Sullivan, a shy bank clerk who, enlisting in South Australia in 1918, arrived in Europe too late to serve in the war. In the following year, fighting the Russians in a swamp near Archangel, he was awarded the Victoria Cross for an act of remarkable bravery while facing the enemy’s intense firepower.

In eastern Europe the Polish army fought the Czechs, and Romanians fought Hungarians. On the Baltic shores, little Latvia declared war on Germany. Greeks fought Turks in a deadly war in the Mediterranean and Asia Minor, and in 1922 our prime minister Billy Hughes was invited — and was tempted — to send troops from Australia to intervene in that war. One year later, Italian forces, now under Mussolini’s command, bombarded and briefly occupied the Greek Island of Corfu.

In East Asia, violence erupted in the region where the Japanese and the Russian spheres of influence collided. In March 1920 came a Bolshevik campaign of terror and torture along the River Amur. In one small Russian city, more than 700 Japanese residents were killed, the women and children too. Even the Japanese consul and his family were tortured and killed. Japan responded by dispatching troops here and there.

To many citizens of the world, these were disturbing events. But they were thought to be minor compared with the ultimate fate of the defeated Germany. If Germany could be permanently tamed, perhaps Great Wars would be no more.

It was impossible to foresee in 1918 that the armistice would be followed, 21 years later, by an even longer and deadlier war. Initially the victors, especially France and Britain, were determined to keep Germany in a state of military weakness. They soon disarmed Germany, disbanded nearly all its army, sunk its submarines and confiscated its mightiest war ships.

They took away all its colonies, including German New Guinea, which Australia claimed. They redrew Germany’s home boundaries so that its area was smaller, its population and its resources fewer. Such a series of penalties, such punishments, surely would keep Germany from ever again becoming a military threat.

How then did Germany rearm? It is now widely contended that the peace treaty imposed on Germany at the Versailles peace conference in 1919 was too harsh, thus provoking it to seize the chance to rearm and eventually retaliate.

In fact, the Treaty of Versailles had punished Germany no more harshly than the Germans had punished the defeated Russia in 1917-18. And the Allies’ punishment of Germany at the end of World War II was even harsher than that imposed after the previous war. The humiliation imposed by the Allies in 1945, after the death of Hitler, actually kept the peace decade after decade.

The immediate aftermath of war was spiced with reassuring sights that daily life in Australia would soon become normal.

But there were occasional shocks. The economy still suffered from inflation. Between 1914 and 1919 prices doubled, but people’s wages and salaries lagged far behind. Even while the great battles had raged in France, economic unrest stoked industrial troubles on the Australian coalfields, railways and wharves. In 1919, yet again, more days were lost through strikes than in any previous year. In 1920 in Western Australia a teachers’ strike disrupted family life. In Broken Hill, the miners were already engaged in a strike that lasted for a year and a half: they were called “the spuds and onion days”.

The far outback suffered heavily, because many of its biggest employers — the goldmines — had to close. The price of gold did not change during the war but the cost of mining soared. Nearly all gold towns erected a war memorial but most families whose surnames were inscribed had left the district. In the typical city, the unemployment rate was as high in the 10 years after the war than in the 10 years before.

Meanwhile, an epidemic arrived by sea. Called the Spanish flu, though perhaps a product of US military camps and deplorable conditions on the European battlefields, it created near-panic as it spread across the globe. In February 1919 the premier of NSW issued an order closing churches. He banned race meetings and shut down cinemas, libraries, auction rooms and other places where crowds might assemble.

The malady infected the ablebodied more than the old. In all, 12,000 Australians died: that was more lives than Gallipoli had snatched away.

Many of the illnesses of wartime were not initially acknowledged. Tens of thousands of returned Australians suffered from trauma. Only in the past 20 years have historians detected how numerous were those who suffered from what was called “shell shock”. When the most popular of generals, “Pompey” Elliott, died in 1931, the news that he had committed suicide was at first hidden from a public that so respected or admired him. Mental illnesses, caused by the stress of war, were not yet socially acceptable. Few doctors were capable of handling them.

It seems likely that far more soldiers were wounded physically rather than mentally. Of the 333,000 Australians who served overseas in the war, half were wounded in action or gassed. Caring for the wounded, the widows, and the orphans called for a massive increase in the postwar federal budgets.

Another uncountable loss was in talent, wasted talent. So many of those Australians who were killed in action or died prematurely in the following decade showed qualities of leadership. They would have been prime ministers, premiers, judges, leaders of the trade unions and churches, university professors and the principals of schools, poets and musicians, goahead farmers and pastoralists, surgeons and scientists, and the pacesetters in many professions and trades.

For more than a century, Australia had been a man’s land; within the adult population the women were far out-numbered. Then came World War I and the departure of an army of men for overseas war zones. For the first time since the arrival of the First Fleet, this country held more females than males. Even after the war, the scarcity of young men prevailed. In the 20s, the unmarried young woman became a reminder of the war.

After the armistice came a collision of ideas and political movements. Russia’s victorious Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 — itself one effect of the war — preached radical ideas in Australian workplaces. In 1920, the newborn local Communist Party called for the overthrow of parliaments, the police forces, army and navy.

In the following 20 years, farleft ideas gained a toehold in universities and creative writers’ groups and in some Protestant pulpits. They won a strong foothold in the trade union movement. They created divisions in the Labor Party, already divided.

The traditional tensions between Catholics and Protestants were temporarily heightened by World War I and the accompanying insurrection in Ireland.

In 1916, the thorny question of whether Australia should compel young men to fight a war in Europe began to split the Labor Party. The articulate Catholic orator, Bishop Daniel Mannix, fresh from Ireland, became the most ardent opponent of conscription. Not perhaps since the 1850s had an Australian political figure — one holding no seat in parliament — so shaped and sharpened a major public debate.

The Australian people, by a narrow majority, twice voted against their government’s proposal to conscript and compel fit men to join their fellow countrymen at the battlefields. So enormous were the number of casualties on the Western Front that Britain and New Zealand were already conscripting soldiers, but Australia refused. The refusal became part of the long-term policy of the Labor Party.

The prime minister who declared war on Mannix was Hughes, a Sydney Protestant of Welsh ancestry. As Labor’s leader he became prime minister in 1915, ardently supported the war against Germany, and believed that Australia should — come what may — send more soldiers to France in the dark days of the following year. He aroused such fierce opposition that he had to leave the Labor Party.

A wily politician, Hughes remained prime minister, thanks to the support he now received from his former non-Labor opponents. At the peace conferences in France in 1919 he made his international name, appearing as the outspoken leader from Australia and the scorner of US president Woodrow Wilson.

He, more than any other leader within the British Empire, predicted Japan would become a first-rate military power and a special danger to Australia.

An astonishing episode in 1920 was the expulsion from the federal parliament of Irish-born Hugh Mahon. An ally of Mannix, Mahon was a longstanding Labor politician from the West Australian goldfields.

Addressing a Melbourne outdoors rally in favour of independence for Ireland, he expressed the fervent wish that “the foundations of this bloody and accursed British Empire would be rocked — if God dispensed true justice”.

As a result of his rather wild and anti-British outburst he was not simply suspended from parliament but expelled, by 34 votes to

17. His seat in parliament was declared to be vacant.

The Mahon episode — ironically it was debated on Armistice Day, 1920 — was a sign of a troubled nation. Surely parliament justifies its existence partly because it serves as a vital channel for discontent. To block that channel worried many loyal citizens. After the Hughes Split, the Labor Party became more a Catholic party. In the following half-century, Labor did not often win office. In that period it produced only three prime ministers — James Scullin, John Curtin and Ben Chifley — each of whom was reared in Catholic families of Irish descent.

Perhaps we now have a tendency to exaggerate religious rivalries and tensions in old-time Australia. There it was much easier than in modern Britain and in the US for a Catholic to attain high office. While it has long been the custom to view the wartime debates and divisions that centred on conscription as primarily Protestant versus Catholic, these debates also reflected clashing viewpoints that existed inside every church.

A large and influential minority of Australians of that era acquired a distaste for war. In the next war they hoped their nation would be neutral, not taking into account that it could be neutral only if the potential enemy gave its consent. Japan in 1941 was to give no such consent.

In some ways World War I seriously hurt Australia. But that war would have been more devastating if we, like France and Belgium, Russia and Turkey and Romania, had been invaded by a foreign army. We were saved partly by our isolation, a factor that was to work against us in World War II.

We would have suffered even more severely if our sea lanes had been endangered often by enemy cruisers and submarines. Most of the European nations suffered from a shortage of food as the war went on. Even bread was rationed in many European countries. On Armistice Day in 1918, millions of Germans were close to starvation. Indeed, their nation surrendered partly because civilian morale was collapsing. Here, in contrast, there was no shortage of food.

Australia gained enormously because it was on the winning side. It is curious that the word armistice, with its peaceful connotations, can dominate our memory of the war. As a nation, we too often forget that we were victorious. Anzac Day is the nation’s abiding and commanding memory of World War I, and because Gallipoli is widely but mistakenly viewed as a disastrous defeat, we forget that the war as whole ended in a decisive victory. Most people who had a part in that victory were proud of their country, vowing it was the best in a turbulent world.

What would have happened if Australia was on the losing side?

If Germany had won the war decisively, it would have imposed a harsh peace treaty on Britain, France, Australia and other defeated nations. Germany would have demanded a huge sum in reparations, and Australia would have been a payer. Germany if victorious would have sunk or taken over the British navy and, of course, the small Australian navy. It probably would have confiscated most of the British cargo fleet, which was still the largest in the world.

Berlin, if victorious, certainly would have reclaimed German New Guinea, which had been captured by Australia in 1914. It might have annexed Papua, too, and occupied Thursday Island, thus giving it control of Torres Strait. It is likely that German banks, shipping lines and manufacturers would have acquired a leading role in our commerce.

In May 1917, when Germany’s leaders were still confident of winning the war, Kaiser Wilhelm II set down his own wish list. He would demand the vital British island of Malta in the Mediterranean; he sought Madeira and other islands in the North Atlantic as German naval bases; and he resolved that the Belgian Congo and French West Africa would become German possessions. And many strategic resources, he insisted, should be under Germany’s direct or indirect control, including Australia’s wool and Russia’s manganese.

Armistice Day is certainly a celebration of peace. It is also a celebration of victory and of all those Australians, who through bravery and determination, gave us that victory.

Geoffrey Blainey’s latest work is

The Story of Australia’s People, in two volumes

.

Demise of the conservatives

Conservatives world over lose winning culture

GREG SHERIDAN
FOREIGN EDITOR

Trump’s mid-term success obscures right-wing losses
What do the US mid-term elections tell us about the future of conservative politics, and the conservative cultural movement, in the US, in Britain, in Australia and in the West generally? They actually tell us a great deal, and mostly it’s pretty bad news.

But first, make no mistake. These results were a good outcome for Donald Trump. Elected by the mechanics of the electoral college with three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016, and relentlessly attacked and vilified by everyone but conservatives ever since, Trump proved that he is neither an aberration nor an illegitimate president.

This election definitively disproves the idea that an overwhelming majority of Americans bitterly oppose Trump and all his works, and that those who did vote for him are suffering grave buyer’s remorse. Trump nationalised the elections as far as possible, made himself the centre of the debate and held Republican losses in the House of Representatives to well within the normal mid-term setback for the party in office.

Much more spectacularly, he gained several Senate seats. When there is a big anti-incumbency vote the party in power typically loses Senate seats. All of this reflects Trump’s tactical agility and effective aggression. It also reflects the fact the Republicans, much more than the Liberals in Australia or the Conservatives in Britain, are very good at the technical side of electoral politics. They get out their votes, they raise money, they leave as little as possible to chance.

But let’s try to take a couple of steps back. Trump’s tactical effectiveness and the Republicans’ technical virtuosity together tend to conceal the fact that, overall, the conservatives are losing in America and across the West.

Here is a central reality. Politics is downstream of culture. The West’s political crisis of today reflects and is caused by the antecedent cultural crisis. Whether you call them the culture wars or something else, conservatives are broadly losing the arguments about the meaning of life, the purpose of society, the manner of politics and the nature of the good life. As they lose the culture, they will surely in time lose the politics.

That doesn’t mean the Left will be forever triumphant. I have often quoted the insight of Ross Douthat: if you don’t like the religious Right, wait until you meet the non-religious Right. The sterility of the contemporary Left’s view of the human condition will lead to reaction. But that reaction may not come in the civilised tones of a Robert Menzies or a John Howard. It may have about it the tone of voice of an angry mob. It will be anger untempered by grace. It is most likely to be ultranationalist.

It is a grave mistake to demonise Trump, but there are traces of all this in Trump.

The old and previously enduring consensus of modern liberalism has broken down. On the Left it has been replaced by the febrile and insane, and ultimately destructive, doctrines of postmodernism. On the Right it is challenged by a pre-modern outlook, some of which is a retreat to tradition, some of which is an ugly indulgence of anger and an answer of minority identity politics with white identity politics.

How, specifically, do the US mid-term elections bear on this? The turnout was unusually high at 47 per cent, or about 110 million voters. In the Senate, perhaps 12 million more people voted for Democrats than for Republicans. Each state has an equal number of senators — two. So Wyoming, with fewer than 600,000, people has two senators — just like California, with 40 million people.

Rural people are more conservative than city people, so the Republicans get a lot more senators. Similarly, Democrats were defending many more “safe” Senate seats than were Republicans, so naturally their vote was higher.

However, in the House of Representatives, all 435 districts were up for election. Democrats won the popular vote by more than 7 per cent, or nearly eight million votes. Although a direct comparison is not strictly possible, to put it in its nearest Australian terms, that would mean a two-party-preferred vote for the Democrats of 53.5 per cent against 46.5 per cent for the Republicans. In Australia, this would produce a landslide for the Democrats.

The reason it doesn’t in the US is because state legislatures control federal congressional districts and fiercely gerrymander them. But in time this gerrymander will work its way out of the system.

Politics is downstream of culture. The West’s political crisis of today reflects and is caused by the antecedent cultural crisis

Australia, like the US and many Western societies, used to have a pro-rural gerrymander in its electoral system. This meant that conservatives were falsely reassured that they still had strong majority support while they had in fact lost it. In 1972 Gough Whitlam’s Labor Party won only eight seats from the Liberal-National coalition of Billy McMahon to secure a majority of 67 to 58, even though Whitlam’s Labor won 52.7 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote, a result that today would give a government a landslide.

Once British Conservatives enjoyed a similar advantage. Modern politics is wiping those old pro-rural and pro-conservative gerrymanders out of the system everywhere. Although the US Senate, like the Australian Senate, will always have a bias for small states, in time the Democratic voter majority will yield Democratic election victories.

Trump remains entirely competitive for the next presidential election in 2020, especially if the Democrats choose a left-wing candidate, but three critical midwest states that Trump won narrowly in 2016, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all went decisively Democrat. He could not possibly win re-election without those states.

Moreover, culturally as well as politically, the Republicans dominate only one big state, Texas. They narrowly won Florida but it’s always lineball. California and New York are profoundly and pervasively Democrat. So is Illinois mostly. These long-term trends are very difficult for Republicans.

In Australia, the conservative government of Scott Morrison is by no means defeated and will certainly fight hard, but in truth it probably has a 15 to 20 per cent chance of re-election. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn, the most leftwing Labour leader in modern British history, with a long record of supporting communists and terrorists, stands on the brink of government, supported by an even more left-wing party in the Scottish Nationalists, whose chief mission is to tear apart the United Kingdom.

A decent, conservative woman, Theresa May, daughter of the manse, devoutly Anglo-Catholic, the picture of modest personal behaviour and irreproachable decency in her own life, is a dead woman walking, who at last year’s election transformed a safe majority government into a minority government forever teetering on the edge of the abyss.

Why are conservatives losing the big arguments in the West?

There are structural and strategic reasons, and tactical reasons. Consider a few.

All over the West, the Left is dedicated and systematic in capturing institutions. This is especially evident in big universities. Conservative academics have been all but cleaned out of humanities departments in mainstream universities. In Australia we have a Monty Python satire situation in which the Ramsay Foundation cannot give away tens of millions of dollars to a public university to teach a degree in Western civilisation, because Western civilisation in the Western academy is considered to be a synonym for genocide, rape, torture, sexism, colonialism, imperialism and all the rest.

At Oxford University last year, the student body at Balliol College banned the Christian Union from participating in “freshers’ fair” because this might threaten, intimidate or “harm” students, because Christianity is associated with Western civilisation, and Western civilisation is synonymous with genocide, rape, torture, etc.

The madness of the modern Left is truly breathtaking and completely beyond parody. For may years it has been left-wing dogma that children are not harmed by divorce, that pornography does not lead to sexual crime, that violence on film and television and social media does not lead to imitative violence in the real world. And yet at the same time the Left holds that a Christian Union stall would be intimidating to freshers and that the study of Shakespeare’s Othello needs trigger warnings because of the treatment of characters of colour.

But while it is easy to lampoon this madness, conservatives have found it impossible to counter it effectively.

The US is better at the creation of conservative culture than Britain or Australia, partly because it is much more dynamic about creating new institutions. So there are many liberal arts colleges in the US that focus on the great books of Western civilisation. There is just one in Australia, Campion College, although there are a number of Protestant Bible colleges and the like in the process of transforming themselves into general higher education institutions. They don’t have the scale to challenge the Left’s cultural hegemony but they will keep the torch burning. Only in the US do such initiatives operate at scale.

Then there is the sheer technical and political incompetence of much of conservative politics. Conservatives don’t believe in identity politics and they don’t believe in quotas. This is because they have a profound, doctrinal and sound belief in the universalist principles of citizenship and indeed of humanity. Conservatives do, however, believe in diversity. But they are not very good — in fact they’re bloody awful — at practising diversity.

It was perhaps the worst mistake of the Abbott government to begin its first cabinet with one female minister. Those forces who tried valiantly to reform the offensive provisions of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act were incompetent fools not to find, recruit and prioritise champions of this reform of Chinese and Indian and other minority backgrounds. This is the merest common sense.

Throughout Britain, the US and Australia conservatives are riven over immigration. In truth, immigration is a wholly conservative policy. Run properly, it builds up the nation, it develops the economy, it lifts living standards, it enhances national security and it gives life and meaning to the universalism at the heart of all decent conservatism.

But all conservatives are rightly opposed to illegal immigration. That is a popular position, even with most immigrants. But conservatives are often so clumsy in their arguments, and sometimes tacitly want the support of the genuinely prejudiced, that they seem often to be arguing against people on the basis of their ethnicity. Trump is particularly prone to this, even though opposing illegal immigration is sound in principle and an electoral winner.

However, this issue can provide false hope. A Republican governor of California in the 1990s, Pete Wilson, won one election by opposing Hispanic immigration. He mobilised white voters against Hispanic immigration. But he also convinced Hispanics that the Republican Party was their enemy and after he left office Republicans have never recovered in California.

Good political leadership, of course, can affect culture, both by encouraging institutions and by shaping debate.

The frightening lure of white nationalism that remains only a small minority of Trump’s support is inherently wrong in principle, against conservatism and extremely dangerous for conservatives. Because older folks are much more conservative than younger folks, winning tactical victories by appealing to mass wisdom against popular foolishness may work for a time but does not build a long-term movement.

But the real elephant in the room of conservative defeat is the decline of religious belief. Britain is already a majority atheist nation. Only 15 per cent of Brits identify as Anglicans. Only 3 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds identify as Anglicans.

In the US, religious belief is stronger but in similar decline. In 2007, 78 per cent of Americans described themselves as Christians, while 16 per cent said they had no religious belief. Seven years later, 23 per cent had no religious belief and 70 per cent said they were Christians, a radical decline off a large base.

In Australia, in 2006, 64 per cent were Christian and 19 per cent had no belief. A decade later, only 52 per cent were Christian and 30 per cent had no religious belief.

In all three societies, it is the older cohorts who believe. Younger cohorts have a majority of nonbelievers and they are not acquiring belief as they age.

Here is a bitter truth. In the end you cannot sustain a conservative culture in the face of the collapse of transcendent belief.

Nonetheless, there are plenty of signs of hope. The best strategic approach is the Irish one: situation desperate, advance on all fronts.

Conservatives believe in diversity. But they are not very good at practising diversity

The demise of Men

THEY ARE OUT TO SHEAR AWAY MASCULINITY

DIMITRI GONIS

Years ago they used a knife, now they neuter boys with language
The castrati were boys deprived of their masculinity in the name of a sublime, sonic effeminacy so that others could celebrate the higher registers of culture. Eunuchs also were castrated before they reached puberty so that they became more submissive and servile to their masters. In both cases, the mutilation of manhood drastically reduced their testosterone levels, with boys developing highpitched voices and more effeminate characteristics.

The literal castration of boys may be a practice of bygone eras, but psycho-cultural castration is very real and happening throughout the Western world.

Today’s boys are being psychologically and culturally neutered in the early stages of their cognitive and affective development through a subliminal conditioning aimed at the gradual rejection of their masculinity to ensure their development along the lines of fluid identities.

Gone are the days of “man” and “woman”, “strong” and “weak”. Introducing our children to this fluidity is a crime against their humanity, in that it is deliberately engineering their personalities, sense of gender, even sex. A sinister agenda driven by political correctness and rabid misandry.

Throughout the Western world children are being inoculated against the inherent “toxicity” of masculinity. They are taught that it is an evil social construct, and part of a trans-historical male despotism; that it has long been the source of injustice for billions of society’s more vulnerable.

The unspoken aim of this “humanism” is to reduce masculinity to an ailment that must be cured via collective psycho-cultural emasculation. This involves nipping it in the bud before boys discover the advantages of their testosterone, and by altering their reality. This means changing the cultural grammar required to articulate their existential predicaments — thus transforming them into passive acolytes of the new, effeminised vision of humankind; a place where the primal brutishness of males has been subdued and everyone is judged on their merit, on a level playing field.

The truth is that nothing in the entire history of the world has ever been fought on a level playing field due to our inherent differences. Of course, there will always be those who are offended by such premises. Their offence, however, cannot erase the manner in which nature selects to distribute its gifts, and the fact it does so without caring about who may be offended.

What we have is a movement intent on resetting the natural laws/odds in the name of a utopian level playing field, where the unfair advantages of testosterone have been eliminated. To achieve this bizarre societal equilibrium half the players must be “castrated” so that there is no unfairness coming from those who have been endowed with much higher levels of androgen. One would never expect a rugby coach to select his players on the basis of human emotions rather than physical capacity. Yet men, today, are expected to reject their masculinity to avoid offending those who are always offended.

And since one cannot contend or reason with nature, then it must be circumvented by creating political, linguistic and psychological categories that rationalise its randomness and “unfairness” — which explain differences between male and female as misconceptions rather than a fact of nature. They claim there is no such thing as difference; each person is what he or she wants to be. For those men insulted, there is a solution — get used to it. Society must be refashioned so that it more equitably represents our modern needs and those whom toxic masculinity has marginalised and oppressed for so long.

Hence, we are all suddenly being ordered to accept that men and women are exactly the same when they are not. They are intrinsically different beings with different qualities, needs and perceptions of the world. Societies throughout history have been driven by the virility of masculinity and nurturing femininity.

Women are innately more nurturing. They are also, generally, better with children, the elderly and the infirm. Most do not aspire to become generals, CEOs or heads of state. They are also not interested in the man-hating mantra of those who have recently infected society with a venomous contempt that far exceeds the misogyny and chauvinism they have supposedly sought to combat. Yet their misandry somehow seems acceptable because of its “humanism”, which purports to dignify the vulnerable while reducing the domineering male to a state of helplessness, a pathetic groveller finally getting a taste of his own medicine.

Medicine is indeed needed for a being relegated to the margins of modern society, forced into roles that are not congruent with his essential nature. The diminution of masculinity and the skyrocketing suicide rates among men are directly related. That is not to say that men should remain on the couch and women in the kitchen. There is, however, an elephant in the room that everyone is ignoring: the blatant emasculation of 21st-century men.

Control language and you control everything. It is only a matter of time before punitive legislation

— aimed at facilitating the wholesale emasculation of our societies through the mandatory application of specific vocabulary and concepts — is introduced. Our social justice warriors may be celebrating their nomenclatorial victories, but they are relinquishing more than they know. The barbarism once inflicted on the castrati and on eunuchs continues in the name of an effeminised vision of humanity. It’s no surprise that male testosterone levels are diving at an unprecedented rate
— everything is against them. Most of what maleness once found expression in is slowly vanishing. The one-time hunter has lost his hunting ground, the warrior his battleground, the lover his virility, the husband his purpose.
Dimitri Gonis is a Melbournebased writer.
The truth is that nothing in the entire history of the world has ever been fought on a level playing field

Domestic Violence

AUGUSTO ZIMMERMANN

Women Can Be as Violent as Men

You may have heard of a Perth-based family counsellor who was forced to resign from Relationships Australia WA (RAWA) after posting on his private Facebook page an article social commentator Bettina Arndt wrote a few years ago for the Weekend Australian.[1]The article summarised the latest official statistics and research on domestic violence, providing evidence that most domestic violence is two-way, involving women as well as men.[2] This was regarded as a breach of policy, because, on its own website, RAWA says its domestic violence policy “is historically framed by a feminist analysis of gendered power relations” which, contrary to the international evidence, denies women’s role in domestic violence.[3]

By endorsing a feminist policy that is so morally bankrupt (and punishing a well-respected counsellor for refusing to do so)[4], this government-funded institution displays a disturbing lack of compassion for the wellbeing of all the male victims of domestic violence. RAWA’s policy is based on a discredited approach that perpetuates the false assumption that domestic violence is always perpetrated by men against women. And yet, data keeps mounting which indicate that domestic violence may be perpetrated by both men and women against their partners. A decade ago an official letter by the Harvard Medical School declared that “the problem is often more complicated, and may involve both women and men as perpetrators”. Based on the findings of an analysis of more than 11,000 American men and women aged eighteen to twenty-eight, the letter concluded:

When the violence is one-sided … women were the perpetrators about 70% of the time. Men were more likely to be injured in reciprocally violent relationships (25%) than were women when the violence was one-sided (20%). That means both men and women agreed that men were not more responsible than women for intimate partner violence. The findings cannot be explained by men’s being ashamed to admit hitting women, because women agreed with men on this point.[5]

The Harvard Medical School’s letter was based on a seminal work published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2007. Written by four experts in the field (Daniel J. Whitaker, Tadesses Laileyesus, Monica Swahn and Linda S. Saltman), it seeks to examine the prevalence of reciprocal (that is, two-way) and non-reciprocal domestic violence, and to determine whether reciprocity is related to violence and injury.[6] After analysing the data, which contained information about domestic violence reported by 11,370 respondents on 18,761 heterosexual relationships, the following conclusions were reached:

● A woman’s perpetration of domestic violence is the strongest predictor of her being a victim of partner violence;[7]

● Among relationships with non-reciprocal violence, women were reported to be the perpetrator in a majority of cases; [8]

● Women reported greater perpetration of violence than men did (34.8 per cent against 11.4  per cent, respectively).[9]

One explanation for these significant findings is that men are simply less willing than women to report hitting their partner. “This explanation cannot account for the data, however, as both men and women reported a larger proportion on nonreciprocal violence perpetrated by women than by men.”[10] In fact, the authors explain that women’s greater perpetration of violence was reported by both women (female perpetrators = 24.8 per cent, male perpetrators = 19.2 per cent) and by men (female perpetrators = 16.4 per cent, male perpetrators = 11.2 per cent).[11] Based on the information available, the authors concluded:

Our findings that half of relationships with violence could be characterised as reciprocally violent are consistent with prior studies. We are surprised to find, however, that among relationships with nonreciprocal violence, women were the perpetrators in a majority of cases, regardless of participant gender. One possible explanation for this, assuming that men and women are equally likely to initiate physical violence, is that men, who are typically larger and stronger, are less likely to retaliate if struck first by their partner. Thus, some men may be following the norm that “men shouldn’t hit women” when struck first by their partner.[12] 

Unfortunately, violence by women against men is a phenomenon that has received little attention in the media and in government. Yet for nearly four decades the best research reveals that men are also frequently the targets of violence by female partners. Since the 1980s more than 200 academic studies have demonstrated that, despite the common assertion, most partner violence is mutual, and that a woman’s perpetration of violence is the strongest predictor of her being a victim of partner violence.[13] Across several countries the best research available shows that the percentage of men who are physically assaulted by their female partners tends to be remarkably similar to the percentage of women physically assaulted by their male partners.[14]However, those who deny the empirical evidence often resort to unacceptable tactics, which includes “concealing those results, selective citation of research, stating conclusions that are the opposite of the data in the results section and intimidating researchers who produced results showing gender symmetry”.^[15] One of the leading researchers in the field, Dr Murray A. Straus, has received numerous death threats, as have his co-researchers, Dr Richard Gelles and Dr Suzanne Steinmetz, with the latter the subject of a vicious campaign to deny her academic tenure and rescind her grant funding.[16]

Australian media and government reports often frame domestic violence merely as “violence against women”. This generates a totally false assumption that males are always the aggressors; that men are the only ones capable of harming their partners. For instance, you may recall the federal campaign on television two years ago. These ads were part of a $30 million campaign designed “to help break the cycle of violence against women and their children”.[17] It seemed to suggest that all of the perpetrators of domestic violence are Caucasian males.[18] The Prime Minister even assured us that his domestic violence campaign was all about creating “a new culture of respect for women”.[19] Malcolm Turnbull, a self-described feminist, concomitantly launched a $100 million “women’s safety package”, apparently because violence against women in the home is on the rise. In his words: “All disrespect for women does not end up with violence against women, but let’s be clear, all violence against women begins with disrespecting women.”[20]

More recently we have seen further calls to action from Mr Turnbull to “change the hearts of men”, and from the Opposition leader, Bill Shorten, to “change the attitudes of men”, as if there were some kind of unspoken bond between these politicians and the men who commit violence against women. “Not all disrespect of women ends up in violence against women but that’s where all violence against women begins … but what we must do … is ensure that we change the hearts and minds of men to respect women”, Turnbull says.[21] Shorten says, “All this violence is ultimately preventable and … we need to change the attitudes of men.”[22] While these political leaders see no problem in offending the Australian people by assuming that violence against women is an “accepted part” of our society, Claire Lehmann, the editor of Quillette, reminds them that in our society “crimes against women are stigmatised and punished harshly. Sexual offenders generally are given lengthy prison sentences and are secluded from other prisoners precisely because the crime is so reviled—even in ­prison”.[23] And yet, in the distorted world of identity politics:

individuality is subsumed into the collective. When one man holds power, he doesn’t do so on behalf of himself, he does so on behalf of the male collective. Likewise, when one man commits a murder, collectivists will portray it as being done in the service of all men. This regressive worldview has no qualms about ascribing collective guilt to entire groups of people. But ascribing collective guilt strikes at the very heart of our understanding of justice and liberty.[24]

Clearly these two federal leaders believe their statements on this matter will have popular support, particularly from women voters. But judging from the letters received by journalist and sexologist Bettina Arndt, who wrote an article in the Australian in 2016 about research showing the prominent role women played in violence in the home, there are many in our community, including many women, who are extremely uncomfortable with gender politics. She received an avalanche of supportive letters, not only from professionals working with families at risk from violent mothers, but also from many women who had grown up in such homes, or had witnessed their brothers, fathers and male friends experiencing violence at the hands of a woman. As she points out, “many women commented how surprised they were that Turnbull made such an offensive, one-sided policy announcement”.[25]

Women can be as abusive as men

Professor Linda Mills, the Ellen Goldberg Professor at New York University, is the principal investigator of studies funded by the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Justice, which focus on treatment programs for domestic violence offenders. Her studies in the field are published by Harvard Law Review, Journal of Experimental Criminology and Cornell Law Review. As she points out:

Years of research, which mainstream feminism has glossed over or ignored, shows that when it comes to intimate abuse, women are far from powerless and seldom, if ever, just victims. Women are not merely passive prisoners of violent intimate dynamics. Like men, women are frequently aggressive in intimate settings and therefore may be more accurately referred to as “women in abusive relationships” (a term I prefer to the more common usages “battered women,” “victim,” or “survivor”) … The studies show not only that women stay in abusive relationships but also that they are intimately engaged in and part of the dynamic of abuse. As the studies of lesbian violence demonstrate, women are capable of being as violent as men in intimate relationships. And women can be physically violent as well as emotionally abusive. That violence comes out in their intimate relationships both as resistance and as aggression. We need to put aside our preconceptions of gender socialization and roles.[26]

Erin Pizzey, the woman who set up the first refuge for battered women in 1971, knew from the very beginning that women can be as violent as men in domestic relations. She herself was raised by a violent mother who used to beat her with an ironing cord until the blood ran down her legs. Pizzey strove in vain for her mother’s love. She was left badly damaged by her regular beatings and verbal abuse. She was called “lazy, useless and ugly” by her mother, who often called her father “an oaf and an idiot” and depicted his mother as a “prostitute” and his father as a “common Irish drunk”.[27] In Pizzey’s own experience, women are just as capable of domestic abuse in both the physical and emotional sense. When she opened a refuge for battered women in England, sixty-two of the first 100 women to come through the door had been as abusive as the men they had left.[28] So when the feminists started demonising fathers in the early 1970s, her own memories were a sober reminder that:

Women and men are both capable of extraordinary cruelty … We must stop demonising men and start healing the rift that feminism has created between men and women. This insidious and manipulative philosophy that women are always victims and men always oppressors can only continue this unspeakable cycle of violence. And it’s our children who will suffer.[29]

Erin Pizzey is part of a growing number of brave experts and scholars trying to set the record straight.[30] As early as the 1980s academic researchers such as Dr Murray A. Straus, a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire, have developed research demonstrating that women are just as likely as men to report physical and emotional abuse of a spouse. These findings have been confirmed by more than 200 studies of intimate violence and they are summed up in Dr Straus’s article “Thirty Years of Denying the Evidence on Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence”.[31] This article indicates that most partner violence is mutual and self-defence explains only a small percentage of partner violence by either men or women.[32] Rather than self-defence, “the most usual motivations for violence by women, like the motivations of men, are coercion, anger, and punishing misbehavior by their partner”.[33] As Dr Straus points out:

Pearson (1997) reports that 90% of the women she studied assaulted their partner because they were furious, jealous, or frustrated and not because they tried to defend themselves. These motives are parallel to the motivations of male perpetrators. Research on homicides by women shows similar results. For example, Jurik and Gregware (1989) studied 24 women-perpetrated homicides and found that 60% had a previous criminal record, 60% had initiated use of physical force, and 21% of the homicides were in response to “prior abuse” or “threat of abuse/death.” A larger study by Felson and Messner (1998), drawing upon 2,058 partner homicide cases, determined that 46% of the women perpetrators had previously been abused, but less than 10% had acted in self-defense.[34]

In the United States, estimates from national family violence surveys show that within a given year, at least 12 per cent of men are the targets of some sort of physical aggression from their female partners, with 4 per cent (or over 2.5 million) of these men suffering severe violence.[35]In another pioneering study in America, the clinical sample found “the eruption of conjugal violence occurs with equal frequency among both husbands and wives”.[36] This study included several statements by women who often abuse their husbands. “I probably had no reason to get angry with him … but it was such a bore. I was trying to wake him up, you know. He was such a rotten lover anyway. So I’d yell at him and hit him to stir him up,” said one woman.[37]

In Britain, female domestic violence against men is clearly on the rise. Data from Home Office statistical bulletins and the British Crime Survey reveal that men made up about 40 per cent of domestic violence victims each year.[38] Seventeen men were killed by their female partners in England in 2012 alone. [39] Furthermore, British men are twice as likely as women to keep their abuse undisclosed, primarily because of cultural barriers and a legal system that does not protect them.

“They feel emasculated. Their pride is undermined and they are reluctant to see themselves as victims,” says Mark Brooks, the chairman of Mankind, a charity for male victims of domestic violence.[40] Even so, “every year our helpline is seeing at least a 25 per cent increase in the number of men seeking help”.[41]

Of course, the percentage of reported male victims would be considerably higher were it not for the sexist biases of the system. As noted by a journalist in the Guardian, men assaulted by their wives and girlfriends are often completely ignored by police. They are often treated as “second-class victims” and many police forces and councils do not take them seriously. “Male victims are almost invisible to the authorities such as the police, who rarely can be prevailed upon to take the man’s side,” says John Mays of Parity, an organisation that advocates equal treatment of domestic violence victims, both male and female, and their children. Their plight is largely overlooked by the media, in official reports and in government policy, for example in the provision of refuge places—7500 for females in England and Wales but only sixty for men.[42]

The official UK figures notoriously underestimate the true number of male victims of domestic violence. This is so because men in Britain are extremely reluctant to disclose that they have been abused by women. Culturally it is still enormously difficult for men to bring these incidents to the attention of the British authorities. It certainly does not fit the false narrative that women are supposed to be always weak and never the perpetrators of domestic violence. But it is patently clear that both men and women can be victims of such violence, and that “men feel under immense pressure to keep up the pretence that everything is OK”, said Alex Neil, a Scottish politician who was Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing at the Scottish Parliament between 2012 and 2014.[43]

As for Australia, the Australian Bureau of Statistics Personal Safety Survey reveals that proportions of non-physical abuse (for example, emotional abuse) against men have risen dramatically over the last decade, with 33 per cent of all people who reported violence by a domestic partner being male.[44] And yet, one of the tactics used by domestic violence campaigners is to highlight only men’s violence and leave out any statistics relating to women. There is constant pressure to present domestic violence as a “male problem”, and place all the blame for such violence on men as a collective group. As a result, and based on a theory that addresses the problem essentially as a male problem, male victims are often met with disbelief, even suspicion, when they seek protection from a violent partner.

Consequences of the denial of female domestic violence

Domestic violence against male partners is grossly under-reported. Frequently men do not conceptualise the physical violence they sustain from their female partners as a crime. Indeed, studies in the field indicate that men are reluctant to report assaults by women, “even when severe injuries result”.^[45] This reluctance is prevalent among male domestic partners, perhaps because they are expected to be physically dominant. Admitting to sustaining violence from a female partner may be viewed as “emasculating”.^[46] Further, when domestic violence is conceptualised as a crime in these surveys, women are significantly less likely to report their own use of violence. Some research reveals that women fail to report as much as 75 per cent of their own use of violence.^[47] According to Professor Donald G. Dutton and Dr Katherine R. White:

One reason that intimate partner violence toward men is underestimated is that men are less likely to view [domestic violence] as a crime or to report it to police. Men have been asked in survey if they had been assaulted and if so, had they reported it to police. In a 1985 survey, less than 1% of men who had been assaulted by their wife had called police (Stets & Straus, 1992). In that same survey men assaulted by their wife were less likely to hit back than were wives assaulted by their husband. Men were also far less likely to call a friend or relative for help (only 2%) … Historically, men who were victims of assault by their wives were made into objects of social derision. … Men are socialised to bury problems under a private veil, including being the object of abuse from female partners … Either the women are bragging or the men are in denial, or both.^[48]

This under-reporting of female domestic violence is partly explained also by the fact that men who sustain this form of violence are unlikely to seek help for these issues out of a reasonable fear “they will be ridiculed and experience shame and embarrassment”.^[49] If they do overcome internal psychological barriers, they still face unfair external institutional barriers in seeking help from social services and the criminal justice system. For instance, male help seekers often report that when they call the police during an incident in which their female partners have been violent, the police sometimes “fail to respond or take a report”.^[50] Indeed, male victims of domestic violence encounter greater animosity when contacting the police. This can be contrasted to the “positive and supportive attitude” of the police to women who accuse their husbands of violence. According to Sotirios Sarantakos, an adjunct professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Charles Sturt University:

Most interesting is the finding regarding the practice of women running to the police after hitting the husband, although they hit him without a reason. Even threatening to go to the police was often taken very seriously by the husbands—not without reason. The positive and supportive attitude of the police and authorities to women’s position was reported to have encouraged many wives to take advantage of this and to become even more aggressive at home. Even when they had severely assaulted the husband, their statement that they had been assaulted and abused by him at that time or previously was sufficient for the police to treat them as innocent victims.^[51]

Men are far more likely to be arrested for domestic violence than their female partners, even when other factors including previous arrests are taken into account. A study in the United States reveals that men face harsher legal ramifications post-arrest: 85 per cent of violent men were arrested and prosecuted by the police, compared to only 53.5 per cent of violent women.^[52]Some of these men are actually innocent and report “being ridiculed by the police or being incorrectly arrested and convicted as the violent perpetrator, even when there is no evidence of injury to the female partner”.^[53]

This might explain why so many men who sustain violence are deeply reluctant to report on their partners. Compared to abused women, there are few social programs or non-profit organisations providing useful assistance to men who are the victims of domestic violence.^[54] Instead, male victims often experience external barriers when contacting these social services. When they locate the few resources that are specifically designed to accommodate the needs of these male victims, hotline workers often infer that they must be the actual abusers and refer them to batterers’ programs.^[55]

In the judicial system, male victims of domestic violence are often treated unfairly solely because of their gender. Indeed, men who make claims of domestic violence face a deeply hostile system, which is far less sympathetic in its treatment of abused men. This is an area in which the “gender paradigm” has caused gross instances of injustice. In the United States, even with apparent corroborating evidence that their female partners were violent to them, male help-seekers often report that they lost child custody as a result of false accusations.^[56] As noted by Professor Denise A. Hines (Psychology) and Dr Emily M. Douglas (Social Policy):

Male help-seekers have reported that their complaints concerning their female partners’ violence have not always been taken seriously, yet their partner’s false accusations have reportedly been given serious weight during the judicial process (Cook 1997). Other men have reported similar experiences in which their female partners misused the legal or social service systems to inappropriately block access between them and their children or to file false allegations with child welfare services (Hines et al 2007). According to some experts, the burden of proof for IPV [intimate partner violence] victimization is high for men because it falls outside of our common understanding of gender roles (Cook, 1997); this can make leaving a violent female partner that much more difficult. For example, many men who sustained IPV report that they stayed with their violent female partners in order to protect the children from their partner’s violence. The men worried that if they left their violent wives, the legal system could still grant custody of the children to their wives and that perhaps even their custody rights would be blocked by their wives as a continuation of the controlling behaviors of their wives used during the marriage (McNeely et al, 2001).^[57]

In the United States, an emergency clinic study in Ohio found that burns obtained in domestic relations were as frequent for male victims as for female victims, and that 72 per cent of men admitted with injuries from spousal violence had been stabbed.^[58] Likewise, at an emergency clinic in Philadelphia male patients reported being kicked, bitten, punched or choked by female intimate partners in 47 per cent of cases. Unfortunately, such emergency clinics tend to ask only women, but never men, about potential domestic violence origins for injuries.^[59]

This may be a natural consequence of the cornerstone of mainstream feminist theory that domestic violence is primarily motivated by “patriarchal control”. According to Adam Blanch, a clinical psychologist and family counsellor working in Melbourne, “only a very small percentage of domestic violence is found to be motivated by control”.^[60] As he points out, “control” is a motive for both men and women in equal proportions. “An extraordinarily large body of evidence consistently shows that most domestic violence is committed by both women and men and is motivated by feelings of revenge, frustration and anger,” he says.^[61] His conclusion is that women are no less violent than men, although female violence against male partners is under-reported.

As Hines and Douglas comment in their seminal study on women’s use of domestic violence against men, “the conceptualisation of domestic violence from a strict feminist viewpoint has hampered the ability of women who abuse their male partners to seek and get help from social service and criminal justice systems”.^[62] Women who resort to such violence face considerable barriers when seeking help within the current social service system. The following quote exemplifies the experience of one of these abusive women:

He tries to understand my side of the argument. He talks to me rather than hits me. I still hit him, however. I would like to enrol in a class in anger management, but the shelter for battered women does not help women with this problem.^[63]

Male victims struggle to locate anti-domestic violence services to assist them, since help lines or shelters are generally targeted towards female victims. They often report that their complaints concerning their female partners’ violence have not been taken seriously.^[64] Instead, male victims who have reached out to domestic violence organisations in the past have found themselves further abused by feminist services that refuse to believe that any man can be a victim of domestic violence. Some have even been put at risk of further violence not only against themselves but also against their children by these services contacting the abusing spouse and letting her know the man has sought help. There is even the assumption that the victim himself could actually be the perpetrator.

A psychiatrist who lives in Melbourne and once rang the Victorian “Men’s Referral Service”, commented: “I rang them on two occasions in relation to male victims. Both times I was told that if I had dug deeper I would have discovered that the men were the perpetrators.” This shows that a supposedly public service provider is pushing the anti-male agenda of radical feminists. With so many Australian men taking their own lives, our governments have the moral duty to provide these abused men the help they so desperately need, particularly when family violence is concerned.

However, the New South Wales government has just gone the opposite direction. It has appointed a feminist organisation to assist male victims of domestic violence. This organisation’s website says: “The Men’s Referral Service (MRS) provides free, anonymous, and confidential telephone counselling, information, and referrals to men to assist them to take action to stop using violent and controlling behaviour.”^[65] It is unacceptable that information given “for men” is entirely predicated on men being the sole perpetrators of violence. The MRS is on the public record as saying services “need to be cautious in automatically assuming that a man assessed by police or another referring agent as a victim of domestic violence truly is the victim”.^[66]According to Greg Andresen, a spokesman for “One in Three Campaign”, which advocates for male family violence victims:

A male victim seeking support who reads on a website that he needs to take responsibility for his “violent and controlling behaviour” is probably not going to have a lot of confidence in ringing that service and asking for help. And if he does call and is assumed responsible for the violence, he may not reach out for help again.^[67]

Female domestic violence against children

The distortion of the truth is found also in discussions about domestic violence against children. “A quarter of Australian children had witnessed violence against their mother,” South Australia’s Victims of Crime Commissioner Michael O’Connell stated in August 2010. This statistic comes from “Young People and Domestic Violence”, a study that reveals almost an identical proportion of young people being aware of female violence against their fathers or stepfathers.[68] The study found that, although 23 per cent of young Australians were aware of violence against their mothers or stepmothers, 22 per cent witnessed the same sort of violence against their fathers or stepfathers.[69] According to Bettina Arndt:

Whenever statistics are mentioned publicly that reveal the true picture of women’s participation in family violence, they are dismissed with the domestic violence lobby claiming they are based on flawed methodology or are taken out of context. However, [according to] the best available quantitative data—ABS surveys, AIC (Australian Institute of Criminology) and homicide statistics—police crime data show that a third of victims of violence are males. These data sources are cited by the main domestic violence organisations, [although] they deliberately minimise any data relating to male victims.[70]

Many young Australians grow up afraid of their mothers. Australian children in violent families are more likely to be killed by their mothers than by their fathers. Although men made up a quarter of the 1645 partner deaths between 1989 and 2012, women accounted for 52 per cent of all child homicides. [71] Women not only are more likely to kill their children, but also account for more than half of all the substantial maltreatment perpetrators. In May 2015, the Australian Institute of Criminology released a research paper which states: “Where females were involved in a homicide, they were more likely to be the offender in a domestic/family homicide.”[72]Although the majority of victims of domestic homicides overall were female (60 per cent), women were the sole offenders in more than half of the filicides (52 per cent) and offenders in 23 per cent of intimate partner homicides.[73] Also, men were more likely than their female partners to become the victims of filicide (56 per cent), parricide (54 per cent), and homicides involving other domestic relationships (70 per cent).[74]

Final Comments

Domestic violence used by women against men is a phenomenon that has received little attention from the Australian media and government. From the nation’s media reports, public inquiries and official campaigns, one would believe that men are the sole perpetrators of domestic violence—and that all men are equally likely to carry out such acts of violence. Yet for nearly four decades research has shown that men are frequently the targets of violence by their female partners. Those who deny this evidence may resort to scientifically unacceptable tactics. This includes “concealing these results, selective citation of research, stating conclusions that are the opposite of the data, and even intimidating researchers who have produced results showing gender symmetry”.[75]

I have no intention of minimising the real problem of serious domestic violence against women. One must speak out loud and clear about violence against women. In fact, we must speak out loud and clear about violence against anyone. This is why recognising that men are also victims of domestic violence is so important. Enough of pretending domestic violence is simply about dangerous men terrorising their families. It is time to abandon this sexist and harmful paradigm, and correct all the injustices caused by the politicisation of such a tragic reality that affects countless adults and children, male and female alike.

Dr Augusto Zimmermann is Professor of Law at Sheridan College in Perth, and Professor of Law (Adjunct) at the University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney campus. He is also President of the Western Australian Legal Theory Association, and a former Commissioner with the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia.