Reforms & Initiatives

As The Guardian says, "If royal commissions worked, children and families would be safe by now", and I predict that whatever the politicians promise, few of the misguided recommendations will be fully implemented (many are unaffordable) and there will be little if any resulting reduction in family violence.  Indeed, the report's calls for more (uncosted) funding for everything show a complete disregard for financial constraints or the need for greater efficiency and prioritisation (reflected also in the report's 1900 pages and 227 recommendations!).  It's reliance on false feminist ideology means it will do nothing but worsen current problems of justice denied to men/Dads and their children (whose legal & human rights are being routinely and increasingly trampled on), and if anything, the band-aid measures proposed for women's refuges and IT monitoring & tracking will only serve to increase fear, which is often the underlying driver of emotionally abusive & aggressive behaviour ("Fear is the path to the dark side.  Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering").  This critique of women's refuges considers they have become part of the problem – comprising "hotbeds of misandry", with many of the women taking refuge being abusive themselves (with 67% of the women admitting severe violence toward their partner in the past year) – and should be replaced with family counselling (except in extreme cases that are beyond this and need court intervention) — but couples counselling is opposed by feminist-dominated DV organisations.

The Royal Commission (chapter 16 and recommendations 62 & 63) did at least recognise the need to move some other minor cases like traffic offences out of the inefficient courts (to free up court capacity for family violence) and to "move away from inefficient manual and paper-based processes towards electronic and online processes".  But not surprisingly for a judge's report, it fails to appreciate the need for drastic reform of court systems.  Most alarmingly:

• Recommendation 22 seeks to curtail the presumption of innocence, making the system even more biased against men and harder for them to see their children (by worsening the existing problem of false allegations & unwarranted AVOs discussed here).

• Recommendation 75 reinforces court inefficiency and injustice by allowing the court to immediately strike out an appeal if the alleged offender fails to attend a "mention" in court.
  (The vast majority of "mentions" are grossly inefficient procedural matters that involve the judge and entire court of officers scheduling a date for when the actual issues of a case will be considered in a "hearing".  They should be replaced by simple automated processes handled by IT and low-grade clerks.)

• Recommendation 78 actually proposes to repeal imminent legislative changes that aim to move some cases out of the courts.

The justice system is failing in all respects and needs drastic reform.  It overly penalises a huge number of Dads seeking fair access to their children (or more importantly, trying to ensure their children can see their Dad), whilst failing to properly protect women (or men) from the genuinely serious perpetrators of abuse, not least due to the gross inefficiency and poor allocation of justice system resources.  Note though that it's make-work court processes more than DV & family laws themselves that most need reforming, as the cost and delays they create hand all power to a controlling abuser (whether male or female).  There is, however, scope for legal changes that could apply to the "Sexual Complaint Investigation Tribunals" I propose here.

Also, even though psychological abuse such as gaslighting or controlling & coercive behaviour can be deeply damaging (and is more commonly perpetrated by women), we should be cautious about explicitly criminalising it because it can be difficult to prove (as found in the UK since they passed such laws in 2015) and could simply overwhelm the police and courts with long-winded & expensive but unproductive cases that police & judges don't fully understand or appreciate (especially when it's perpetrated by women).  Before acting on this in Australia (like NSW already has), governments should gain a better understanding of the objective DV research and develop a prioritised set of comprehensive evidence-based reforms that will tackle the true causes of domestic abuse perpetrated by both genders.  Rather than criminalising psychological & emotional abuse or coercive control, limited resources may be better spent on community support services that can help people identify and stop or escape it.

Educating children

Nevertheless, the underlying problem of lack of compassion and empathy seems to be extremely widespread, in men and women.  The ideal and most influential place for learning empathy is by example as children in the family home, but since that doesn't always happen,  I think our schools need to help teach kids how to be more aware of and look after their emotional health and – like in Denmark – to develop empathy and care for & not judge others, with the help of methods such as mindfulness / meditation (like Goldie Hawn has promoted with Mindup) or relaxation/self-hypnosis recordings and (I highly recommend) the Landmark Forum.  That, I thought, was at least one other good recommendation (#189) in the Victorian Royal Commission report, for: "the introduction of respectful relationships education into every government school in Victoria from prep to year 12", which I would make a top priority, along with recommendations 62 & 63 on court reform.

But unfortunately, respectful relationships education seems to have been captured by extreme feminist ideology, with dishonest propaganda from the likes of White Ribbon that emphasises "toxic masculinity" as if it were an inherent trait — coaching girls to expect to be victims & fearful of boys (and encouraging/enabling girls to make false rape accusations), and boys to be ashamed of being male (as they are lectured about their supposed privilege & misogyny) — in both the UK and in Australia where boys are labelled as predators & oppressors and all boys (not just offenders) are made to apologise to girls and only boys are made to pledge an oath against violence towards women.  Far from reducing abuse, this indoctrination & shaming borders on abuse itself (especially if combined with other questionable gender theories), and with divisive, negative messages like this damaging the self-esteem & confidence of both boys & girls, I can't think of a better way of encouraging future gender conflict and domestic violence! (Even this feminist journalist admits the 'stock feminist answer' that 'men do it for power and control' falls short and that shame within men – along with mental illness, childhood trauma & substance abuse – are major contributing factors to DV.)  Read and hear Bettina Arndt's reaction to this appalling program (& a similar South Australian school program that also misrepresents DV — practically ignoring violence & abuse by girls against boys & other girls), which incredibly, the Victorian government then got Our Watch to review, which was never going to produce a robust, independent critique of the gendered narrative it uses, given they promote the same one-sided story, as you can see in this dishonest propaganda video that they foist on teachers & kids!

It's hardly surprising that in response to the feminist "war on Dads" and "toxic masculinity", some boys and young men (especially those who are Dad-deprived) have turned to misogynists like Andrew Tate or the few others echoing him that offer them a rare, supposedly-positive view of masculinity — but one that only reinforces divisive & disrespectful views on gender.

Flexible, evidence-based human services & community parenting support

More generally, because so much insidious abuse occurs behind the closed doors of a "nuclear family", society needs to rediscover the collective/community approach to parenting & child-care (of our historic cave-living & hunter-gather days), of which schools may be just one part.  Such assistance may be provided with proactive support services for struggling families who are identified as "at risk", or those already affected by DV, delivered through broader reforms for more flexible and integrated person or family-centred "human services" (i.e. providing the best combination of services to address individual person & family needs through a contracting & purchasing framework that encourages improved social and economic outcomes).

It was, initially, pleasing to see that after I started writing this page in 2015-16, the NSW Government recognised the existence of DV against men and provided initial funding to support them (unlike other States like Victoria & WA), as did the UK in March 2019, but unfortunately Australian feminists once again took control, as the "support" provided – such as "Men's Referral Service" – remains based on the presumption that men are the perpetrator.  Clearly there's still a long way to go before we have truly equitable and supportive attitudes & services for men (with the same even or appropriately-sceptical approach that's planned for male victims also applied to women reporting abuse, since the very narcissistic nature of abusers is such that a significant proportion of perpetrators deny their guilt and blame the victim, especially if there is no proof of physical violence, as is the case for the emotional abuse that is most commonly inflicted on men).

We need to dramatically improve the objectivity, quantity and quality of research devoted to DV & suicide, to better inform supporting services that are evidence-based, innovative and responsive to individual & local circumstances.  This is why the highly data-driven "public health" approach to tackling violent crime (recognising the influence of localised cultural, economic & other factors, rather than any inherent characteristics of certain groups of people) has been so much more successful than traditional punishment approaches or simplistic lecturing of whole groups of society (like all men).

There is also the opportunity for assistance from Artificial Intelligence (AI) "companions" (I was told of one being developed called "MEKA", which uses "Machine Empathy" (M.E.), but it doesn't seem to have materialised), which could act as a "trusted, confidential friend" for advice (e.g. to help people identify and deal with abuse) but won't report the issues to others without the user's permission — which is a problem with current mandatory reporting laws that can discourage children from seeking help from professionals.  However, there is also the potential for harm through bad algorithms that could actually trigger suicide.

NEXT: Protective vs toxic masculinity