"Violence has no gender"

This is the mantra of a popular Australian domestic violence page. Read further and you can see their men's rights agenda. They  claim that feminists are to blame for a "DV industry" that makes money off false allegations against men. Feminists are to blame for using DV as a tool to destroy society. It's really mind blowing to read.

 This same page recently shared some statistics. Here they are:

They're quite acceptable statistics to use, from a reliable source. This group used them to focus on the very high proportion of Aboriginal victims of intimate partner homicide, which is a very worthy cause and I agree that it's a huge problem. But the elephant in the room here is the sex of the majority of victims. Female. 71% in fact. Obviously this is a very small sample and not really representative of the population, so naturally I went digging for stronger data.

The other problem with these statistics, is that it doesn't show sex of the offender. When you look at the sex of offenders, you really see the problem. They're mostly male, regardless of the sex of the victim, with the singular exception of filicide which is roughly 50/50. Many groups will tell you that men are killed more often than women, and that is correct in overall homicide. Here's the latest stats I could find from ABS, and also from the very same publication that the above graph is from, written by the Australian Institute of Criminology.

Men do suffer violence at a higher rate than women, overall. But they also offend at much higher rates. Then of course in domestic violence, intimate partner violence, it is most often a female victim. And men might suffer injury, but women die. Women die at the hands of their partners (or former partners) at rates significantly higher than men. Men are attacked and killed by other men. Women are betrayed by those whom they are supposed to trust. Here are some sobering statistics on intimate partner violence, from BOCSAR (Intimate partner homicides in NSW: 2005 to 2014)

Pretty telling, don't you think? It doesn't take an in-depth analysis to figure those stats out. Quite obvious majority of male offender and female victim. These stats are also just for homicide. They don't tell the full story of domestic and family violence. There isn't much in the way of evidence of coercive control and emotional abuse, the more insidious forms of DV, but there are figures for domestic assault. This graph is also from BOCSAR.

What we can clearly see in this graph is that women are much more likely to experience domestic assault, while males are more likely to experience non-domestic assault. And this correlates with the homicide figures. And again, let's look at the offenders.

Exactly the same trend. Predominantly female victims, male offenders. Another mantra that MRAs use is that men don't report. That is not supported in the report. In fact, there was no significant difference in reporting domestic assaults between male and female victims. Females tend to report non-domestic assault more often though.

The statistics are there. They are easy to find. They are already analysed and graphed out. It's perfectly clear that violence is an issue of biological sex. "Violence has no gender" is a mantra that is easily debunked. While there absolutely are male victims assaulted by females, the fact that they exist doesn't take away from the overall trend. It is quite clear who the majority of victims and perpetrators are.