With the National Network of Stopping Violence Services Annual Conference under way at Auckland’s Waipuna Lodge, the feminist propaganda machine has kicked into high gear.

The Herald warns that: ‘Faith in protection orders wanes‘. The story by Simon Collins begins with an impressive graph with prominent red arrows pointing upwards under the heading “Male Assaults Female”. There are no reported figures for violence by females to balance this picture.

The second section: “Protection Orders” is not separated by gender, but it shows a dramatic drop in the numbers of Protection Orders both sought and granted since 1999.

The article says that the drop in applications for orders, despite Women’s Refuge efforts to encourage women to seek them, is because they are loosing faith with the justice system:

The services manager of Auckland agency Preventing Violence in the Home, Holly Carrington, said the courts were failing to enforce protection orders when men breached them by contacting their former partners or failing to attend anti-violence programmes.

“Here in Auckland the courts are a major problem in the response to family violence; a major barrier to the safety of victims,” she said.

“Sentencing for family violence offenders is so inconsistent, and much more often than not they are way too lenient. They [offenders] have to practically kill someone to get a prison sentence.”

This is a rather extraordinary claim, and it is given a prominent position in the article. Many reasonable people would be rightly alarmed if this were the case. Unfortunately there is no attempt to check out the facts, or present an alternative viewpoint.

It is indisputable that men’s groups are having an impact, and the domestic violence industry is in damage-control mode, pushing their dishonest spin that it is all about “mens rights”:

A joint submission to MPs by refuges and nine other agencies, quoted in a report last week by the Parliamentarians’ Group on Population and Development, said the Family Court was “increasingly seen to be overriding the safety of women and children in favour of ‘men’s rights’.”

Women’s Refuge chief executive Heather Henare said there had been enormous pressure on judges from the fathers’ rights movement, reflected in comments by Waitakere Judge Philip Recordon last week that men up for their first offence “at the lower end of the scale” should sometimes be discharged without conviction.

Justice Ministry analyst Elizabeth Bartlett suggests that the “underlying incidence of family violence has remained unchanged” which would surely suggest that all the money being poured into Feminist social-engineering schemes is a total waste. But when you are a government and one of your pet projects, run by your sisters, isn’t working what do you do? Yep, you do it more, with increased resources and funding!

The Ministry of Women’s Affairs has commissioned two Waikato University academics, lawyer Ruth Busch and psychologist Neville Robertson, to conduct a year-long study of protection orders, including the barriers preventing women from seeking them.