If you ask me

If you ask me, while any reasonable and sensible plan to stop or reduce domestic violence is to be applauded, the serious shortcomings with how we have dealt with domestic violence, in the past, need to be identified before we can move forward. It also needs to be realised that most of the proposals, now being put forward by the Australian Government and other social welfare groups, are still flawed for a number of important reasons.

The biased domestic violence laws, that we presently have, are not only unfair but often leave children at risk.

I believe that, until these shortcomings are addressed, any new strategy will still be inadequate, in some cases may even increase the danger of domestic violence, will continue to ignore many of the true victims who have been prejudiced by the existing system and, at the same time, erode public confidence and respect for the law.

Let me start by stating, clearly, that domestic violence is wrong and it is wrong regardless of the gender of the perpetrator or perpetrators. Now, in support of that statement, I would like to address this point from my own personal experience with domestic violence and I hope that you, the reader, will follow my story and see the points that I am trying to make in regards to this important issue. I have tried not to get too deep, into my own experiences, for fear of sounding like I am just venting my anger aloud, but I believe that some of my experiences are important in illustrating the points I am trying to make, so I have summarised them here.

Now I ask you to be patient with me while I tell you this abridged version, of my story, so that I can illustrate the points that I am trying to get across. I have, throughout this story, tried to write in such as way as to not identify the perpetrator of the domestic violence, in this case, as my goal is not to seek public vilification of that person but to show how the existing domestic violence laws allowed, and even encouraged, gross misuse of the legal system. Accordingly, some of my writing may seem clumsy and, at times, vague, but my desire to avoid identification of the other person, in this story, is guiding and restricting my writing. Accordingly, I would ask you, the reader, to see this as purely a true story, which it is, and which is intended to illustrate the problems with the law and not as a witch-hunt.

First of all, while the majority of domestic violence perpetrators are male, the fact is that some are female and in those cases it can be the male, the children, or both, who are the victims. This is a fact that has been repeatedly ignored, or trivialized, by the majority of proponents of tougher domestic violence laws, the legal system and the government. Every time domestic violence is discussed, it is almost always assumed that the victim is the woman and the man is the perpetrator, and this bias is dangerous and unjust. Have you ever seen a news report, a newspaper article, or a domestic violence advertisement, on TV, in the newspaper or on a bill-board that shows a man as the victim? The answer, of course, is almost certainly no.

How do I know that women can also be the perpetrators of domestic violence? I know it from first-hand experience, because I am a man and I was a victim of domestic violence. At the same time, and even more importantly, I was also a victim of the bias of the courts and the existing laws and policies towards domestic violence. However, of even greater importance still,  I know that women can be the perpetrators because my child was also a victim of domestic violence and that this abuse was permitted to go on for a long time because of the bias of our legal system. What must be borne in mind, in any discussion of domestic violence, is that the children are also victims and if the true perpetrator is not identified, then they will remain victims of this violence. To allow the bias against men to drive domestic violence laws means that, in those cases where the woman is the perpetrator, children are often left at serious risk at the hands of their violent or abusive mothers. The system to prevent domestic violence, whatever it is, must deal honestly and fairly with both men and women and identify the true perpetrator, or perpetrators, for the safety and good of all.

So, on with my story; I once had the misfortune to be involved with a woman who often turned violent and who also manipulated the current domestic violence laws, and the bias against men imbedded in those laws, to her benefit. When I first met this woman, she used to tell me sad stories about how her previous partner used to beat her up and, in particular, she claimed that he had fractured some of her ribs and her jaw which implied that the beatings were severe. I should also mention that the accused, in this case, was a highly qualified professional who, as far as I can determine, has never before and never since been accused of any violent act.

It didn’t take long before I found out, for myself, that it wasn’t her previous partner who was violent but that it was her. This woman would fly into rages over minor, insignificant and sometimes imagined events, and would often throw items or punches and kicks at me. In addition to the physical violence, the level of verbal abuse had to be heard to be believed and was beyond any of my previous experience with female behaviour. Her behaviour was often made worse by alcohol and prescription pain killer abuse, but even when sober her behaviour could be dreadful.

I am not a coward and, in my long life, I have only been forced to defend myself on two of occasions when attacked by other males. However, at the same time, I am not a violent person and, as soon as those attacks had been thwarted, I retired from the ‘field of battle’. In truth, I abhor violence and have a very low opinion of those individuals who resort to their fists, unnecessarily. I have only ever used sufficient force or actions as was required to protect myself yet, at the same time, I do strongly believe in the right of an individual to defend and protect themselves and their families.

However, in the case of this woman, I never offered any violence, never even tried to defend myself because it was blatantly obvious, from the very start, that her purpose was to force me to respond so that she could then take legal action against me, destroy my life and, at the same time, seek sympathy for the injuries that she would then claim I caused her. Both she and I knew that the system was slanted against me and this made it virtually impossible for me to defend myself against someone who, I knew all too well, had no qualms about inventing whatever story suited her designs and that she wouldn’t hesitate to do so.

This woman seemed to have some sort of pathological, would-be-victim syndrome and always sought the pity and attention of any government department, legal entity, group of people or individual who would listen to her and she had no hesitation about inventing any story to secure their pity. To try and get me to satisfy her desire to be a victim, she would often push me up against a wall, keep pushing, punching and kicking me, and daring me to hit her back and, when I failed to respond, she would call me a coward. She then started telling people that the injuries, that she had previously attributed to her ex-partner, where now of my doing and, I am sure, that the partners she has had since me, have received similar treatment.

Throughout my time with this woman, I must admit that it was extremely difficult to restrain myself and not respond with violence, because her attacks and antagonism would go on for very long periods and would occur without warning and without reason. However, I knew that to respond with any form of violence, even with a simple push to get her away from me, would have given her the excuse she wanted, would have landed me in a huge amount of legal trouble, would have destroyed my life and, at the same time, made me into something that I wasn’t. Nevertheless, it took an enormous amount of self restraint not to fall into her trap.

Why did I stay with her, you might ask? I stayed because I genuinely feared for the safety of my child if left totally in this woman’s’ care, and the system, that is the Family Court and DOCs, had completely failed to respond to my requests for help. The bias against men is strongly present in those organisations, too, to the point where they just won’t listen to any story unless it comes from a woman. When I thought that my child was old enough to be reasonably safe, I then moved to separate accommodation but remained, close by in the local area, to be available to my child at all times of the day or night.

The downside of my resolve, not to respond to this woman’s violence, was that I was often left with bruises and scrapes and, on one occasion I had to attend the casualty department of my local hospital to have a substantial gash in my forehead stitched up. Regrettably, and because of the embarrassment I felt in relation to this event, I lied to the hospital staff and stated that I had tripped and fallen and that was how I had suffered the injury. I think that would be a very common response for any man who has just been physically attacked by his wife or girlfriend! How I wish that I had told the truth because, as I now realise, such reports are needed to correct the bias against men that clearly exists in our legal system.

To go on with my story, when this woman realised that I wouldn’t respond with violence, she just went and created stories about my alleged violence towards her anyway and, after we separated, took out Apprehended Domestic Violence Orders (ADVO) against me. The truly disgusting thing, about ADVOs, is that a woman can make up any story she wants and you are assumed guilty until proven innocent. I always thought that the cornerstone of Australian law is the presumption of innocence; but not in the case of domestic violence.

Significantly, this woman also invented more serious allegations that I was sexually abusing our child, and spread those stories widely throughout the community, but never once took the matter before the police, DOCS or the courts because such an accusation would have been investigated properly and the lie exposed. The bias of the domestic violence laws, and the willingness of the courts to attribute guilt without evidence, encouraged her to go to the courts with false accusations of domestic violence, while the handling of child sexual abuse, which still includes a presumption of innocence and requires thorough investigation by the police and by social workers, discouraged her from pushing her luck in that arena.

The alleged violence, which she used in her ADVO applications, was completely imaginary and had no basis in fact what-so-ever.  You might have noticed that I mentioned a single fictitious event as the excuse for her applications, but that there was more than one ADVO. Even though there was a gap of several years between her applications for ADVOs, she used exactly the same story, with exactly the same wording, in each application and couldn’t even be bothered inventing a new story because she knew that the court would take her side regardless. The registrar of the court confided to me that, while the court had serious doubts about her story and he clearly did not believe her himself, I should just ‘take it on the chin’ because the court would always rule in the woman’s favour, just to be on the safe side.

When a woman applies for an ADVO, the court will immediately issue an interim ADVO, and this is served on the defendant, named in the ADVO, by the police. To obtain an interim ADVO, a woman only has to say that she is in fear of her life, with no evidence to support that claim, and the man is immediately assumed to be virtually a criminal. At a later date, there will be a court hearing to determine if the interim order should be replaced with a permanent order and, at this hearing, evidence can be submitted to justify the issue, or removal, of the ADVO. This may seem fair, at a glance, but there are several serious problems with this system.

First of all, the hearing to determine if the order should become permanent is normally many months, and even as much as a year or more, after the initial application and, throughout that time a man, who may be innocent, has been added to a police data base and, for all intents and purposes, is being treated as a criminal. At the same time, any children, living with the woman, may remain at risk if she is the perpetrator of the violence. Secondly, when the case is heard in court and unless there is clear evidence to support the defence, the man has no chance of defeating the order. This is especially true if the reasons given for the application are fictitious and vaguely written; how do you prove that fallacious events, that are alleged to have occurred in the privacy of a home, are untrue?  If an alleged event was said to have occurred where there are no witnesses for either the defendant or the applicant, how can justice be done when the court will always take the woman’s word, even when her story is flimsy and suspect? The courts do have the option of refusing an application, if they doubt the veracity of the claims, but if the applicant is a woman and the defendant a man, then this almost never happens, if at all.

True, it can be very hard to determine the facts, and we do need to protect those women who genuinely need protection, but it is grossly wrong to sacrifice the rights of men simply to avoid the complexities of determining the truth and attributing blame where it rightly belongs.

Some of you may know that the issue of an ADVO against a man is not an actual conviction for the crime of domestic violence, and that is true, but try being the subject of such an order, when you are innocent, and see how it makes you feel. A man who beats on a woman is one of the lowest forms of scum imaginable and to be told, by our legal system, that they believe you might be that sort of person, is a huge assault on one’s self image, a mammoth hit to one’s self esteem and to leave that accusation, hanging over your head for the rest of your life, is grossly unfair.

This is the dilemma I faced, and proving my innocence when the reasons stated for the ADVO were false and, to which, there were no witnesses for either her case or mine, was an impossibility. Nevertheless, I continued to fight those ADVOs, because I refused to be labelled as a pseudo-criminal when I was not guilty and, in fact, when I was the victim of the only domestic violence that had actually occurred. In each of my ADVO cases, this woman eventually volunteered to revoke the orders but only after she had caused me years of anguish, significant erosion of my self-worth, employment difficulties, general embarrassment and social discomfort, after she had cost me considerable sums in legal fees and when she had secured additional financial concessions from me.

It should be noted that the court staff, my lawyer, and many other people from various legal professions have told me that many ADVOs are taken out simply to put leverage on the ex-partners in the matters of money, property and custody of children. The system is so wide open, and so biased, that it allows this blatant, obvious and, all too frequent, misuse of ADVOs.  The scary thing is that our legal system knows this but just accepts it!

Speaking of misuse of AVOs and ADVOs, I have been told by a serving member of the police force that AVOs are so easy to obtain that criminals have even used them to inhibit police investigations of criminal activity. It has transpired that criminals have applied to the courts and been granted AVOs against individual members of the police force. Then, with an AVO against them, that member of the police force can no longer approach the suspect to investigate them nor can they continue with their regular duties as they are then denied access to firearms, including police issue firearms. I realise that this is not a common occurrence but the fact that it has happened, even if only once, is a sad statement on the tardy nature of the laws we have had forced upon us. The problem of being denied access to firearms, when the subject of an AVO, is a huge problem for members of any police force, members of the ADF, anyone working in the armed security sector or competition shooters including Olympians, if they are, in fact, not guilty of domestic violence and have simply been falsely accused.

Now let me chat about the impact of an ADVO when it is served on an accused perpetrator. We have all heard the news reports and read the news articles where someone has been murdered by someone else who was subject to an ADVO. Basically, a piece of paper, even if endorsed with the court’s letterhead and lots of legal words and phrases, has very little effect in stopping someone who is prone to violence and who is determined to do someone harm.

However, there is another aspect to the issue of an ADVO that I have never heard anyone else talk about, but I am sure is a real factor in some of these tragic events. As I said before, I was falsely accused of domestic violence on several occasions, but the first time was a huge shock to me. It was completely unexpected and, as I said, completely without foundation or fact. With no actual event to justify the issue of an ADVO, the first I knew that I was going to be the subject of an ADVO was when two policemen knocked on my door, at 6am one morning, to serve me with one. I was stunned, hurt and felt gutted by this event. I felt defiled, humiliated and denigrated by that document and betrayed by my own country; and this is not an exaggeration of my feelings.

However, after a couple of hours, my hurt started to turn to anger and then a foreign and unnatural thought came into my mind, and this is something that I am not proud to admit but, briefly, I considered going to this woman’s house to give her a good beating. In that fleeting moment I thought that, if I was going to be labelled as a perpetrator of domestic violence, without any evidence, then I might as well actually do it; I might as well get my monies worth, so to speak. If the system could so flagrantly ignore my rights and so easily decide that I was a pseudo-criminal based solely on my gender, when I had actually been the victim, then I might as well become what I was falsely accused of being. This is something like a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’; if you treat someone like you expect certain behaviour from them, even if that behaviour is foreign to them, then there is a danger that they will exhibit that behaviour. This is something that law-makers should bear in mind before writing such biased and unfair laws.

As I said, I am not proud of that thought and I have been, till now, reluctant to admit to it, but fortunately it was a passing thought that I never acted upon and, indeed, something that I would never act upon it. However, I now believe that this experience leads us to an important point that needs to be considered in any debate on domestic violence laws. Following on from that fleeting feeling, I have often wondered how a person, who did have a real predisposition towards violence, would react in a similar situation. Someone who was capable of violence against their partner might, in fact, be spurred on to commit violence against the person in revenge for having had an ADVO taken out against them. An ADVO could, in fact, initiate the very act that it is designed to prevent.  I believe that this raises the question of whether an ADVO achieves any form of real protection for the endangered party at all.

If you ask me, the ADVO system is just a toothless tiger designed more to give the police and the courts protection from any legal, or public opinion, backlash should violence be inflicted on any woman who had sought protection from the system. The fact that the courts will always err on the side of the woman, just as the registrar of the court had told me, only further reinforces this notion. In addition, the concept that a piece of paper can prevent violence, in the case of a violent and determined individual, is just nonsense.

Now before any of you start quoting domestic violence statistics, let me raise some questions about the veracity of those statistics. Recently I read an article entitled “Let’s end domestic violence”, written by Julia Angrisano who is the NSW/ACT Secretary of the Finance Sector Union, and, to her credit, Julia Angrisano makes some reference to the fact that, while the majority of domestic violence abusers are men, some are also women. However, where her article is flawed, in my view, is where she states that, in the past 10 years, there have been 238 domestic violence killings and 80% were women and children, she then goes on to claim that there were “no cases where a woman was a domestic violence abuser and had killed a male victim.” What I see wrong with this statement is that, with the blatant bias against men imbedded in the domestic violence laws, how can we know that this is true?

In the domestic violence cases that I was dragged into, I tried very hard to prove my innocence but throughout the court proceedings, and despite reservations expressed by individual court members and legal workers as to the veracity of my accuser’s claims, I was never once cleared of the accusations. In time, the ADVOs were revoked in return for financial concessions but this does not mean that the accusations were proven to be false. To this day, the court records would still reflect the original assumption that I was guilty because, the way domestic violence is handled in court, it is almost impossible to prove innocence in these cases. In addition, everyone who was involved, or made aware, of those ADVOs will always wonder, to some degree, if the accusations against me were true; the stigma stays with an innocent man for the rest of his life.

Then, with the question of my guilt raised but unanswered, and if my ex-partner had then killed me, then I would have been added to the statistics that Julia Angrisano quotes. Let me tell you that this is not such an unlikely situation, because there were many nights when I barricaded myself into the spare bedroom, where I slept, for genuine concern of being knifed while I slept. I could have gone to my grave with false accusations blighting my name and reputation and my killer would have simply pointed to the false, yet never proven and never disproven, claims that I was the perpetrator of the violence and she would simply claim that she was defending herself. The bias against males, in domestic violence cases, makes the statistics, as stated in Julia Angrisano’s article, and indeed, stated in many other articles and reports, suspect.

In my case the ADVOs, against me, were revoked, which means that, legally, they never existed but I am certain that records of those orders are still in the system. Despite the revocations, I am convinced that my name still appears in police databases as a possible perpetrator of domestic violence, that the question of what sort of man, I really am, will always be lurking in the shadows of official records. In addition, there are people living in my community who have heard the stories of domestic violence that were spread against me and, because there was never a definitive court ruling on guilt or innocence will always believe the stories or, at best, always wonder if they were true. I have been slandered and denigrated with, what would seem to these people, the concurrence of the courts and this adds to their perception that I was guilty. Try living with that hanging over your head for the rest of your life!

Throughout this story, I have talked about the impact upon men of the bias of the existing laws from my own personal experiences and the impact it had on me. I also have briefly mentioned the impact upon children but, in fact, this is a vastly more important point that, I hope, will be addressed by some of the children who have been affected by female instigated domestic violence. I could talk about the effect on my child, from my own viewpoint, but only the victims can really talk about what has happened and how it has affected them. I know that my child still suffers from the domestic violence and abuse committed by the mother, in this case, but remains mostly silent about what transpired. This child has chosen to have nothing further to do with the mother, and is clearly still very angry about what she did, but remains tight lipped about most of the events of those formative years. Nevertheless, a great deal of damage is evident there, and I would urge everyone, even those who are openly biased against men in the case of domestic violence, that they need to stop and think about the rights, the welfare and the future of all children caught in such cases. The safety of children, caught in domestic violence cases, relies heavily upon the correct identification of the perpetrator irrespective of the gender of that perpetrator. We owe it to the children to positively identify the person who truly represents a danger to them.

In conclusion, I don’t have an answer for what would be the best system to reduce domestic violence, to ensure the safety of both women and men, to ensure that all parties are given a fair and just hearing and that people, regardless of their gender or age, can live without fear of violence from someone else and fear of persecution by an unjust legal system. However, I do know that the present system is a fraud, incapable of applying justice to all, can leave children at risk, attributes blame based upon gender and not evidence, is easily manipulated by the unscrupulous and, in some cases, contributes to the violence. At the same time, the current system does not provide any real protection for those who genuinely need it.

To summarize, I would like to emphasis the following points from my experiences and hope that people, when debating domestic violence, might keep these in mind:

• It needs to be realised, and clearly recognised in law, that domestic violence is not solely committed by men but that women can also be guilty of domestic violence. Just because a small number of men are responsible for the majority of the domestic violence in our community, doesn’t mean we can sacrifice the legal rights of all men and denigrate the male gender so blatantly,
•  The present system for dealing with domestic violence is biased against men and this needs to change to a system that is just and fair for all involved otherwise those men who are actually victims, and not perpetrators, will be denied justice as has sometimes been the case in the past. It also means that those women, who are violent or abusive, will get away with their crimes and go on to repeat their abuse against future partners,
• Further, the bias against men, imbedded in the system, puts the children of violent women at continued risk. This point, alone, should cause even the most biased proponents of the existing laws to stop and think. Do we really wish to continue to put children at risk because it is easier to attribute the blame, for domestic violence, based upon gender?
• From my own experience, with a woman who quickly resorts to violence, who craves being a victim and who knows that the bias of the system allows her to do these things with impunity, I wonder how many men have resorted to domestic violence because they have been pushed to it. This does not excuse the actions of such men, domestic violence is wrong regardless of who is the perpetrator or the circumstances that lead to it, but the women who have contributed to this crime, should also be held to account. It is likely that such cases are not common, but when they do occur, the women are just as guilty as the men and is a further reason for removing the bias against men so the courts are obliged to get to the truth,
• The presumption of innocence until proven guilty needs to be preserved in all legal matters including domestic violence matters. To sacrifice such a basic right for the sake of political expediency, is grossly improper, totally wrong and is an attack upon the very freedoms that we value. Any country that allows its’ citizens to be categorised as criminals, or even just pseudo-criminals, on the mere say-so of another person, without the presumption of innocence, without real evidence, without a proper right of defence and without a complete and fair legal process – which is how the system currently works – is not truly a free country. Such flawed legal processes are more usually associated with pariah nations like North Korea and extremist organisations like the Taliban or ISIS, and certainly not with a developed country that claims to be free, like Australia,
•  The system of issuing ADVOs is too easily misused for financial, property, custodial and other reasons and some dishonest lawyers will actually recommend an ADVO to their female clients in order to put leverage on their ex-partners during divorce proceedings even when there has been no domestic violence. If the process of obtaining an ADVO was more just with more accountability, then people would not be able to so easily obtain ADVOs for reasons other than to prevent violence. This would reduce the burden on the police and the courts and allow more time and effort to go into investigating, and preventing, real cases of domestic violence,
• ADVOs are of little value in protecting people who are in real danger from a partner or ex-partner who is determined to do them harm. A legal document or court ruling is only effective if the people who are subject to that order are willing to submit to it. A person who intends harm to another person is usually not the type of person who will be influenced by the threat of legal repercussions especially when, in many cases, the subsequent legal repercussions are watered down and insipid, and
•  There is a danger that ADVOs can, in some instances, actually initiate the violence that they are meant to prevent and so they are not a solution to the problem, of domestic violence, and that they promise protection without being able to deliver on that promise.

A further comment, that I would like to make, is that the personal events that I mentioned above are true and accurate and while they took place quite some time ago, I am still very, very angry and extremely hurt with what transpired. However, let me make it clear that my anger is not towards the woman at the centre of this story, as I have put that behind me, but my anger still burns strongly against the Australian Government and the Australian legal system for the unjust, unfair and biased way in which they trod all over my rights, denigrated my name and my reputation, and willingly allowed someone else to turn my life upside down for her own twisted reasons and financial gain. Even worse, domestic violence laws, through the bias against me, exposed my child to abuse and neglect that has never been addressed and the perpetrator, of that abuse, has never been held to account.

As a law-abiding Australian citizen I had an entitlement to a fair and just hearing, to reasonable treatment, to a presumption of innocence until proven otherwise, and I was denied that. I was betrayed by my own government for their own political expediency and because they have failed to create a just and workable system. My anger still burns and continues to grow and it is time that our politicians actually came up with a workable and FAIR way of dealing with the problem of domestic violence when perpetrated by either men OR women. If our politicians and law-makers cannot find a workable and fair way to deal with the problem, then they should resign and allow someone else to do the job.

If I was to compress all that I have stated above, into a single succinct statement, it would be:

“For the people to respect the law, the law must first respect the people.”

 It is the absence of this respect, for both men and women equally, that is the root cause as to why our domestic violence laws have failed dismally.