What about the men? White Ribbon, men and violence: a response to Dr Michael Flood by Men’s Health Australia

The White Ribbon Foundation is an organisation that works to prevent male violence towards women – a goal that is extremely worthy and worth supporting. The White Ribbon website states that “all forms of violence are unacceptable,” however in 2009 the organisation issued a document to it’s male Ambassadors which used erroneous ‘facts and statistics’ to downplay, diminish and report incorrectly about male victims of violence. These Ambassadors use federal government funding to take the White Ribbon message into regional, rural and remote communities. These significant errors could have led the Ambassadors, and through them the general public via federal funding, to be misled about the nature and dynamics of interpersonal violence in Australia.

Some of the dangerous myths about violence circulated in the document include claims that men are less likely than women to experience violence within family and other relationships; that we don’t yet know the impact of violence on men’s overall health; and that there is no evidence that male victims are less likely to report domestic violence than are female victims.

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Monash academic retracts erroneous claim that DV is major cause of divorce

The following statement seeks to correct the public record with respect to some minor and inadvertent inaccuracies that were contained in the book  “Child Abuse and Family Law” that was published in 2007 by Allen and Unwin and co-authored with Professor Thea Brown.  The following material statement also seeks to correct the media release that was issued by Monash University's Media and Communications Unit in August 2009.

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AIC report ‘ignores key research on young people and domestic violence’

Attorney-General Robert McClelland and Minister for Justice Brendan O’Connor today released a new Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) report Children’s exposure to domestic violence in Australia.

In this paper, current knowledge about the extent of children’s exposure to domestic violence in Australia is described, along with the documented impacts that this exposure can have on children.

However, a leading men’s health organisation, Men’s Health Australia, says the report completely ignores the largest ever Australian survey of young people and domestic violence.

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Government deception won't reduce family violence

Last week the Federal House of Representatives debated the Family Law Legislation Amendment (Family Violence and Other Measures) Bill 2011. During the debate, the Minister for the Status of Women, Kate Ellis, made a series of false statements to the Parliament and the Australian public. Regretfully, this disregard for the truth follows a pattern of behaviour by state Offices for Women across the country. In August 2009 after a report by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, the NSW Office for Women's Policy issued errata correcting three of fourteen incorrect and misleading statistics contained in its Discussion Paper on NSW Domestic and Family Violence Strategy. In August 2010, the South Australian Ombudsman issued a report finding that the SA Office for Women had published false and/or misleading information on the Don't Cross the Line website, had failed to correct this information, and had failed to act with reasonable diligence and speed once errors were brought to its attention.

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Violence By Women On The Rise (UK)

The number of women in the UK who received court sentences for violence has risen 40% in a decade according to new research on violence by women from the think thank Civitas.