There is a major and unspoken issue within the domestic violence industry. A pervasive, stubborn and factually unsound political ideology is dictating funding, meddling in intervention strategies and warping how we view and help abusers and victims. It’s not scientific. It’s not evidence based. And it is deeply divisive. Yes, it’s the big P, yet again, ‘patriarchy’. A theory that for fifty years has been a spectre hovering over the domestic abuse industry to exclude male victims from receiving help. A theory that claims that all abuse is fundamentally men enacting ‘patriarchal control’ onto women. A theory that Professor Don Dutton, arguably the greatest living researcher of family violence in the world, has called ‘the ecological fallacy’. ‘These people are fanatics’, says the very founder of family violence research itself, Professor Murray Straus. ‘The big lie’ says Erin Pizzey, the woman who founded the oldest and largest abuse refuge for women in the modern world. But these expertise seemingly do not matter. So forget the factors of low self esteem, of young age, youth delinquency, of alcohol and drug use. Ignore the formative experiences of childhood abuse, of spanking, of bullying, of trauma. Do not ask about the influences of economic stress, low education, poor healthcare, relationship breakup and of poverty. Erase the more than thirty associated risk factors as given to us by the CDC. Don’t look at the data that again, and again, and again, shows that men and women perpetrate domestic violence at *equal* rates. And ignore the fact that whilst 'power and control’ is a characteristic of male perpetrated abuse, it is just as much a characteristic within female abusers too. So forget the data and forget the science, because the cause of abuse is one thing and only one thing, it’s the patriarchy. But is it? Well let’s take a broader and evidenced based look at what really causes domestic abuse. ~ Images by Gradienta, Carlo Alberto, John Towner, and Sophie from Unsplash. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

2023-01-09