By Angela Matheson
Barry Williams is feeling good. As head of the 5000-strong national Lone Fathers' Association, he's sure his crusade to publicise the plight of battered husbands — who he believes, are terrorised and beaten by their wives in large numbers and then ignored by domestic violence units — is back on the rails.
"Violence against men is at last being recognised", he says, flipping through recent editions of the Canberra Times. For weeks, the paper's letters pages have been crammed with mail from Lone Fathers and other angry men supporting local man K, one of the men who has charged Australian domestic violence agencies — in this case, the Canberra Domestic Violence Crisis Centre — with sexual discrimination.
K claimed the unit turned him away when his wife allegedly threatened him with violence. His case is now before the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission.
"It's not only K's case, but all of the research suppressed by women's services which show that husband-bashing goes on much more than you would think", Williams says. "I've had men here telling me their wives have thrown saucepans at them and slapped them in the face. It's also happened to me. My ex-wife once threw a frozen chook at me in one of her rages. You just couldn't talk any sense into her."
The Lone Fathers' campaign has been fortified by high profile features run early this year in the Independent and the Age penned by Canberra public servant John Coochey. His articles claim that women give as good as they get in the domestic violence stakes.
In a story which ran under the headline "All Men are Bastards", Coochey attacked domestic violence units, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and the Office of the Status of Women, claiming they "cook the books" in favour of women when compiling domestic violence statistics.
"These days people will accept even the wildest claims, as long as they make women out to be victims", Coochey opined, "particularly if [the claims] also put men in a poor light".
Coochey based his claims on a 1980 US telephone survey which found that women inflict violence on their partners as often as men. The study, Behind Closed Doors, is at odds with all other data collected on domestic violence here and overseas.
Police and court records, women's refuges, domestic violence units and hospital records in Australia and the US, along with the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, the Red Cross and UNICEF, have consistently documented that 95-98% of domestic violence is perpetrated by men against women. The Behind Closed Doors study has also been discredited by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and US statistics agencies, criticised for its shonky methodology.
Nonetheless, mud sticks — particularly if given credibility by the establishment media. Williams says Coochey's articles and K's sex discrimination case have considerably cheered members of the Lone Fathers' Association, whose battle for battered men recently suffered a serious setback.
Last year, Lone Fathers channelled its resources into supporting a 40-year-old Brisbane man, Keith Shew, who took the Brisbane Domestic Violence Resource Centre (DVRC) to the HREOC, alleging the centre had discriminated against him after his wife had beaten him with a vacuum cleaner.
Shew, who arrived at a Brisbane court seeking a restraining order against his wife, was denied access last year to a safe room occupied by women seeking restraining orders — one of whom was Mrs Shew — by DVRC staff suspicious of his motives. "Mr Shew was not allowed into the safe room because his wife was sheltering from him inside", explained the centre's chair, Betty Taylor.
In January, the HREOC dismissed Shew's charges.
Shew and Lone Fathers were incensed. Shew blitzed radio, TV and the newspapers, threatening to take his case to the United Nations. "I feel someone has to make a stand and tell government that men are the silent victims of domestic violence", Shew declared outside the commission in January.
Shew and Lone Fathers' ardour was somewhat dampened when an investigative journalist from Brisbane's Courier-Mail unearthed police records which revealed that Shew had a long criminal record, including eight convictions for assault, receiving stolen goods and weapons offences.
The Lone Fathers' Association pulled out. "We stopped giving our support when we heard everything wasn't as we thought", says Williams. "But there's no doubt women's issues have taken over the political agenda", he says. "All we men are asking for is equality."
What is most telling about the men who push the myth of widespread husband battering", says Michael Flood, Canberra-based founding member of Men Against Sexual Violence and author of the progressive men's magazine, XY, "is the fact that the most serious and common forms of violence committed against men is not on their agenda".
Flood cites a 1995 study from the University of Sydney's Institute of Criminology which shows that the most common form of violence is committed by men against men — on the streets, in pub brawls, gay bashing and school yard bullying. Institute figures also reveal that men commit 91% of homicides, 90% of assaults and nearly all sexual assaults and robberies with violence.
"Male violence against men and women is the real story", says Flood, "not the small number of men hit by their wives."
"As men, we have an obligation and responsibility to look at male violence, not only for the sake of women, but for our own health and well-being. The truth is that men's inability to talk, to admit weakness, to disclose vulnerability, or to feel comfortable in a non-dominant role are successful tactics of power, but they're also our undoing. But the terrible reality of male violence seems a pill too bitter for some men to swallow."
Flood, along with women from the domestic violence units under attack, has drawn the conclusion that the battered husband debate is less a campaign for justice for men than a desire by some men to dismantle women's services which highlight male violence and challenge paternal authority.
For men to be genuine domestic violence victims, muses Dr Patricia Easteal, criminologist at the Australian National University law school, traditional gender inequalities and physical size and strength differences would need to be reversed.
"The man would need to be the less powerful partner in the relationship — both financially and physically. I suppose, if he's a house husband looking after the kids, whose wife is bigger than he is and denies him any income, and who beats him up to press home the point that she's the boss, then we could regard him as a victim of domestic violence."
[A version of this article first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald.]