This piece in Daily Life yesterday by Jane Gilmore raises some important questions about how we talk about male violence against women.
One of the most startling revelations is the difficulty and the expense of discovering, in Victoria at least, the gender of the majority of perpetrators of violence. While information about the victims of such violence is publicly released, information about the offenders is not, and Gilmore had to pay $700 and wait nine weeks to obtain this information. What Gilmore eventually discovered about the Victorian statistics is this:
In 2013/14
* 87% of homicides were committed by men.
* 98% of sexual assaults were committed by men.
* 83% of non-sexual assaults were committed by men.
* 90% of robberies were committed by men.
* 92% of abductions were committed by men.
I strongly recommend you read the article for a more comprehensive view of these figures.
I don’t want to start a gender war. But these statistics are irrefutable. I can understand that many men, especially those who are not violent towards women and don’t engage in criminal acts, might feel unfairly attacked and defensive when women raise our voices in protest against male violence. However, I would urge you not to waste your energy feeling unfairly attacked (you aren’t nearly as unfairly attacked as we are) and defensive. Most women don’t think all men are violent. But there’s no escaping the reality that most of the violence in our society that comes to the attention of the authorities is perpetrated by men.
If you can get outraged by the king hit and rush in laws overnight to increase penalties for the very few instances of that particular type of male violence, how do you explain the ongoing refusal to be equally and more outraged by the fact that sixty-eight women have been killed in Australia this year, by men? (from Destroy the Joint’s Counting Dead Women project.)
We have a Minister for Women, though you’d never know it. He’s about as useful as the non-existent Science Minister. His name is Tony Abbott. Tell him you want to hear what he intends to do about all the women dead this year and those yet to die, at the hands of violent men.
No Place For Sheep 
Staggeringly high percentages. I wouldn’t have guessed that every single figure would be above 80%.
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No, me either, I had no idea.
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It shouldn’t come as a surprise the percentages and breakdown of the gender. In fact, I’m surprised that its not higher.
In each state, the prison population by gender is between 91% to 96% Male. (ABS stats online)
This is sexual dimorphism. There is no outrage for what on the surface appears sexist because people understand what sexual dimorphism is and that no social engineering is going to overcome that. The RAW FIGURES are what is important with victims of violence. The number of deaths in domestic violence is ghastly.
A great tool for tracking crime rates in NSW is this http://crimetool.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/bocsar/
Awesome website.
Interesting stats….. while Sexual offenses have remained unchanged in the last 18 years 148.1 per 100,000 people to 154.9, Domestic Assault has gone up 2.7% per year, 254.1 to 397.
Domestic assault is one of the few crimes on the rise. Just about everything else is trending down per capita, Theft, Robbery, Homicide, Malicious Damage even the road toll is down.
Domestic assault though is that crime where because it occurs in the home, away from other people (adults), the early signs are not treated before it escalates. It makes it very hard to police and very hard to influence easily.
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Thanks very much for that information, link & additional stats.
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Reporting of domestic assaults is on the rise. Actual incidence is probably little different; human beings haven’t come a long way from the cave dwellers of 100,000 years ago.
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You’re probably right.
Its to the credit to the females of the species that they are less inclined to put up with the crap that they have in the past. That manifesting in domestic abuse shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, the cro-magnons of our herd still have a long way to go.
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Shocking. My attitude towards perpetrators of sexual and domestic violence is to think it a great pity that I ever gave away my riding crop. What is completely shameful is that in domestic violence situations, as the article points out, it is very difficult under existing laws on admissibility of evidence to charge and successfully prosecute an offender.
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Just goes to show how evil those Victorians are.
Mind you, the stats are probably only for convictions. Women may just be better at getting away with it.
100% of all births are committed by women; that has to be evil.
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Your mother won’t like that
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Bless her, it might have been the most evil thing she ever did!
She told me that she was on guard duty in WWII and challenged an American airman who said he had fought the Japanese but he’d never been so scared in his life as when a woman pointed a rifle at him. (Little did he know, the bullets were in her pocket 🙂 )
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I was outraged at the outrage over king hits. The results are devastating, sure, and the perp should be punished, but it’s usually a ‘momentary lapse of reason’, usually under the influence and usually without intent to kill or put someone in hospital, as opposed to domestic violence, which is usually ongoing and deliberate and not necessarily as often under the influence (not that that’s an excuse).
The whole one-punch thing is great for ‘tough on law and order’ pollies because a lot of it is captured on the now ubiquitous security cameras and people respond with outrage to what they can see, which is that that is plastered all over our sensationalist MSM. The vast majority of incidents of men committing violence against women take place, I imagine, in the home, away from prying eyes, and away from the potential for winning ‘law and order’ votes. Unfortunately and obviously, we can’t be promoting the use of security cameras within private residences.
It’s not the whole picture but it’s my take on a part of it. Another aspect, arising from the dominant narrative of a male-controlled society, is that the ‘coward punch’ scenarios largely involve males attacking males, and pollies and the MSM can play the concerned parent while totally ignoring violence perped against women.
(I might be repeating the obvious of the two articles but sometimes I find clarity by explaining things to people who already get it 🙂
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Yes Gruffbutt, and as usual bad law is the result. One drunken fool takes a single hit at an (innocent?) victim and the result is one dead and another in prison for the next 20 years.
I would have thought that the perpetrator would suffer the consequences of killing a person in those circumstances in his own head, and more than a few years in prison would be absurd.
But when politicians are urged to do something, ‘something’ is what they do. For good or ill.
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Exactly.
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