November 20, 2016 by Robert Franklin, Esq, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization
No sooner had I completed a couple of pieces on the almost thoroughly misleading Greeley Tribune piece on domestic violence than I’m greeted by this (Relating to Men, 11/16/16). The blog is that of the excellent Jasmin Newman and the piece is by the even more excellent Bettina Arndt. It was originally published by Spectator Australia.
It’s about male victims of domestic violence in Australia and their shoddy treatment by the DV industry there backed up by public money. I say “shoddy treatment,” but the better word would be “non-treatment.” That’s because for years men’s organizations like “1 in 3” have been raising awareness of male victims only to be shouted down by the gender-feminist DV industry.
But, 40 years after the first authoritative study was published demonstrating that men and women perpetrate DV equally, male victims in New South Wales were finally granted some public money for a pilot program that would aid them. Arndt explains:
What a welcome surprise. In June this year the NSW government announced a pilot programme for male victims of domestic violence. Finally politicians were acknowledging that women aren’t the only victims of family violence. A third of victims are male, said Pru Goward as she promised $13 million over four years for the pilot.
That’s chickenfeed compared to the hundreds of millions that Malcolm Turnbull boasts are being spent on domestic violence across the country, all promoting an ideologically-driven agenda which pretends the problem is all about men and ignores 40 years of international research showing most family violence is two-way, involving women as well as men.
So as she says, $13 million isn’t the same as winning the Powerball Lottery, but it’s something. At last NSW was putting a bit of money where it should have been all along. It’s not much, but it’s a start. Cause for celebration, right?
Not so fast. Put a cork in that champagne bottle.
What a blow to discover last week that the government has awarded the contract for this vital new service to Men’s Referral Service, an organization driven by feminist ideology and long known for shunning male victims. In the past MRS was on the record for refusing to acknowledge the existence of male victims. More recently the organisation’s position shifted to arguing male victims don’t experience abuse in the same way as women and hence don’t deserve support.
MRS has only ever worked with male perpetrators and is notorious for “red flagging” men who claim to be victims, attempting to prove they are in fact perpetrators.
Yes, the very people who’ve gotten DV wrong from the very beginning, who’ve pretended that men aren’t victims even when they clearly are, who’ve spurned the science on DV and harvested huge sums paid by taxpayers to perpetrate their fraud now get to run this pilot program on male victims. Gee, I wonder how they might treat those male victims. Wait, I don’t have to.
What is really astonishing is that the NSW government boasts that this was the reason MRS was chosen for the job. In response to my questions the Attorney General’s department proudly proclaimed MRS was selected because of the organization’s expertise in “how to identify a genuine victim.”
“Victims will be referred to local support services in NSW while aggressors will be encouraged to take part in Men’s Behaviour Change programmes.”
Frankly, that pretty much spells it out. Men’s Referral Service, that’s never met a male victim of DV will receive NSW largess to ferret out who is and who isn’t a “genuine victim.” It’s fair to predict that next to no male victims will be found. Men who seek help will be told, in keeping with the gender-feminist narrative long purveyed by MRS, that they’re not victims at all, but perpetrators. That’ll happen by the strange alchemy of the DV industry that (a) calls all DV an attempt at “power and control” and (b) every action by a male as an attempt at “power and control.”
Don’t believe me? Years ago I was astonished to read the materials for a training course for New Hampshire police officers dealing with cases of alleged DV. Sure enough, all were riveted on the concept of power and control and nowhere was the concept that sometimes women assert power and control in their relationships to be found.
The materials consisted in part of eight hypothetical scenarios in which an officer was called to the scene of alleged DV and had to figure out who, if anyone, to arrest. Truth to tell, the course wasn’t that difficult. Any officer who answered that the correct thing to do in every case was to arrest the man was correct in every case.
That included hypothetical number eight in which the officer knocks on the door which is opened by the man. He has a lump on his forehead and a trickle of blood down his face. He says his wife hit him with a heavy glass ashtray that the officer sees lying on the floor. The man says he did not assault his wife, but she assaulted him. The officer then asks the wife, who’s in the bedroom, and she affirms her husband’s story in every detail.
Conclusion: arrest the man. Why? You’ll never guess. The course said that it was appropriate to arrest the man because he was the one who came to the door when the officer knocked and that indicated a bid on his part for “power and control.” Really.
Passing over minor matters like (a) the man had committed no crime, (b) there was no probable cause to arrest him, (c) the woman had committed a crime and (d) there was probable cause to arrest her, my point is the gender-feminist version of power and control, who commits it, who doesn’t and how we know. If answering the door constitutes “power and control,” what doesn’t? I said above that putting MRS in charge of determining who is a “genuine victim” absolutely guarantees that Australian men will receive the same treatment described by the police training materials. Every effort will be made to spin male behavior as exerting power and control and whether they’ve been beaten black and blue will be of no consequence.
The NSW pilot program is not an attempt to help male victims of DV or their abusive partners. It’s an attempt by the NSW government to appear to do something for male victims while actually just doing more of the same.
Of course if more of the same worked to reduce incidents of DV, I wouldn’t complain, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t because it can’t. It can’t because it gets DV wrong from the start and never looks back.
More about this tomorrow.
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#domesticviolence, #misandry, #Australia