This article highlights problems in the way our media and feminist groups approach family violence.

Firstly, the spokespeople from Women’s Refuge and feminist academia bemoaned the claimed reduction in arrests and prosecutions even though the number of family violence ‘investigations’ and ‘offences’ were claimed to have increased. The police explained that they are using more of a ‘whole of whanau’ approach with alternatives to arresting and charging ‘perpetrators’. The feminists seem more interested in punishing men than reducing family violence.

Secondly, one of the key problems in the way feminist groups approach family violence is their simplistic categorization of parties into ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victim’. Much independent (as opposed to feminist advocacy) research has made it clear that the majority of partner violence involves both parties using various forms of violence towards each other during conflicts. The children may be purely victims but the adults are usually both victim and perpetrator. Police choice about which adult party to prosecute or to order out of the house is usually sexist against the man regardless of the actual events and even when he is the only one with injuries.

Thirdly, the claimed increase or at least poor reduction in family violence might suggest that the approaches pushed by male-blaming feminists over many decades are ineffective in reducing the problem. Those feminists don’t acknowledge that but simply continue asking for more money to do more of what they can’t show is working. Good on police for trying another approach. However, police insistence on maintaining the contrived categorization of parties into ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’ will reduce the success of their trial approach.

Fourth, the language used in discussions and by the journalists often amounts to manipulative propaganda. The headline of this article claims “Family violence is up…” and the first sentence claims “New Zealand’s family violence problem is only getting worse…”. These claims are conjecture. All we know is that calls to police regarding family conflict have increased. The article later reports Police Superintendent Tibbott gave two reasons for the apparent statistical increase, one that police now investigate every call-out and two that people appear to phone police more readily (as one would expect given all the encouragement to do so through publicity over recent years).

Professor Janet Fanslow’s reported opinion was that if police were more successful in getting crimes reported, there should be more prosecutions. But the claim that ‘more crimes’ are being reported is propaganda. Calls made to police during family conflict don’t necessarily mean crimes are being reported. Some calls are made by women to win their argument or to punish men (e.g.) for disagreeing with the woman’s wishes or for coming home drunk. Other calls are made because some family member believes a man’s non-violent behaviour (such as verbally expressing anger) amounts to violence or may lead to violence, under our fashionable ideology that sees men’s expression of anger as dangerous and unacceptable but women’s expression of anger as justified and ’empowerment’.

Fifth, Professor Fanslow and no doubt the other feminist interviewees like the idea of forcing ‘perpetrators’ (read ‘men’) into programs to change their behaviour. Many of these programs are feminist indoctrination courses and their ability to change future behaviour is poorly assessed. Forcing people into treatment programs of any kind is known to lack effective outcomes and in New Zealand we consider forced treatment to be unethical when done in other countries or to groups other than men.

Sixth, there was no attempt to interview any men’s movement spokesperson or representative of people (read ‘men”) who have been treated by police as perpetrators, even though the article was about the treatment of the mainly men who are routinely categorized as perpetrators. This lack of balance amounts to anti-male sexism and is business as usual for our biased media.

Finally, the picture accompanying the article is telling. These articles never depict a woman bashing her partner with a frying pan, stabbing him with a knife or stiletto heel, haranguing him incessantly even when he has made a clear request to stop, blocking his exit from a room when he has made it clear he needs to leave to calm down, or any of the other common ways that women commit family violence.