Home » » Abused Husbands » Domestic Violence Research in Australia

Domestic Violence Research in Australia

© Anne Bransdon

Since 1960, worldwide research has confirmed that men are victims of domestic violence but it was the during the 1970s that emperical studies in USA, Canada and England began to reveal the true extent of the violence.

The results challenged the belief that women were the primary victims of spousal abuse. They revealed that women could be violent and that men could be abused by women. However, the results were met with disbelief and regarded by the burgeoning women's lobby as an attempt to undermine their cause.

Similalry in Australia, public debate has been skewed by statistics that have been dominated by a disregard for clinical studies and survey results. While the foundation for Australian research is of feminist ideology, surveys, and in particular those conducted during at hospital emergency departments, reveal that domestic violence is a shared behaviour.

There have also been some intriguing accusations from some of Australia's top researchers that surveys have been advocacy based, that questions were loaded to prove the feminist position and that results that proved that men were abused were ignored.

Sue Price of the Queensland-based Men’s Rights Agency notes on the MRA website* that the evidence has been ignored for too long."Just as our own recent Women’s Safety Survey in 1996 found nearly 27 per cent of violence inflicted on women was committed by other women - again no prominence was accorded this information."

In 1995-96, Dr Robyn Seth-Purdie* produced one the most indepth analyses of violence in Australia, including domestic violence. Her report, collated for the Australian Federal Government, revealed that Australian family violence was comparable to the patterns of family violence in New Zealand, the United States and Canada and although the government has implemented a number of recommendations from the report, it has failed to act on the recomendation that to reveal the true extent of domestic violence there needs to be further investigation.

Seth-Purdie also argued that any existing research on battered men had been influenced by cuturally pre-conceived ideas. "Cultural prejudice has impugned the intellectual respectability of researching the phenomenon of the battered man," she wrote, and she suggested that: "Systematic research is required to assess the frequency and patterns of violence against male partners".

However, while this article may sound as though the message that men are abused too is not being heeded, there are reports, such as Women, Men and Domestic Violence, by Dale Bagshaw and Donna Chung, University of South Australia, 2000,* that are beginning to emerge that recognise male victims of abuse.