Gendered Violence (Read: Men Are Bad)

Gendered Violence is the new term to divide Australians even further. Of course, “gendered violence” is code for “violence against women”, which, if you’re cynical like me, is code for “men are bad”. There’s been a pile-on in the media this week about this topic. The ABC make it perfectly clear that men are the perpetrators here: “Lots of men are feeling uncomfortable about Australia's gendered violence conversation. They should be”. They’re not even trying to hide their bias anymore. In the article, they state: “So far this year 28 women have lost their lives — 28 families who have lost a loved one to gendered violence. In April alone, 11 women died allegedly at the hands of men.”

What I don’t like about this sort of reporting, is that they’re only showing one side. Yes, 28 women being killed is tragic. I’m not disagreeing with that. But there’s no context. In the name of rational and honest debate, they should at least publish how many men were killed over the same time period. But they don’t, so that makes me feel like they’re trying to hide something, or at the very least, they’re focusing on one part of the conversation, and don’t want the reader to see the whole picture. So, in this video, I’m going to show you some statistics. I’m not even trying to take a side here. I just want to know the facts.

But first, just quickly, I’d like to talk about Prime Minister Anthony Albanese showing up at a women’s rally in Canberra on the grass outside Parliament House. He thought it would be a nice photo op to join thousands of people nationally to demand an end to men’s violence, but instead, he got into a bit of a public disagreement with the organiser of the rally.

After making an Indigenous woman cry, the ABC quickly turned on Albanese: “Albanese was so desperate to prove he cares about gendered violence, he forgot one thing: if you’re a proper leader, it’s not about you. The footage of Anthony Albanese at a gendered violence rally outside Parliament House is nearly unwatchable.” It’s both kind of sad, but also admittedly, quite amusing that everybody has kind of turned on Albanese.

Anyway, the statistics! We take a look at the Australian Government’s Institute of Criminology’s latest report on Homicide in Australia released 30 April 2024.

AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTE OF CRIMINOLOGY REPORT – HOMICIDE IN AUSTRALIA 2022–23
https://doi.org/10.52922/sr77420

Homicide in Australia. Celebrating 50 years! Perhaps they shouldn’t have put that on the front cover. The good news is, both the rate of Domestic and Acquaintance homicide has significantly reduced over the last 30 or so years, but they don’t seem to talk about this at the rallies. One would think that the murder rate is increasing.

Victims of homicide by sex. Although both sexes have had significant reductions over the last 30 years, males comprise 69% of homicide victims, more than double that of females at 30%.

It should be noted that most offenders are men, I’m not trying to hide anything, but this rate has been tracking significantly downwards. Whatever we’re doing as a society is somewhat working, noting that the rate of women offenders has stayed approximately the same over the years, or perhaps slightly decreased.

Interestingly, Indigenous offenders, which they didn’t put in a graph for some reason (I think I know why), well, non-Indigenous people have a homicide offence rate of 0.79 – very, very low. Comparatively, Indigenous people have a rate of 10.18! This means that Indigenous people are more than 12 times more likely to commit homicide than a non-Indigenous person. Look, I’m not trying to pick on anybody here, but the facts are the facts. Obviously, this rate is still quite low. The overwhelming majority of Indigenous people are not murderous barbarians, and I’m sure most of them want peace just like the rest of us, but statistically they have committed homicide at a significantly higher rate.

I don’t know if this is relevant, but the Northern Territory has the highest rate of homicide at 2.81.

It should be noted that Indigenous people are more likely to be victims too, 5.36 vs 0.74, meaning Indigenous people are more than 7 times more likely to be killed than their non-Indigenous brothers and sisters.

But of course, you can spin statistics however you please. The ABC recently wrote, “49 per cent of female victims of homicide were killed by a former or current intimate partner”. If you focus entirely on one particular type of homicide, then yes, women are over-represented. It gives the impression that women are under attack more than any other group, which if you look at the overall statistics, is just not factual. Actually, this rate of female intimate partner homicide is the second lowest rate ever recorded in almost 35 years. One might say this is an accomplishment, but no, the PM knows best, “Men are bad! (Unless you’re a woman, then you can just shut up, because I’m the Prime Minister!)”.

MUSIC
Allégro by Emmit Fenn