The truth about men and murder: new study from Australia

[DancelikeEmmaGoldman]

"A ground-breaking new report on murder in Australia has provided overwhelming proof of the gendered nature of domestic and family violence.

The report shows that men commit more than 80 per cent of murders between couples who have a history of domestic violence. The overwhelming majority of those men had a history of abusing the women they ultimately killed.

In the 20 per cent of murders committed by women, over two-thirds were women killing men who had been abusing them. Of the 152 murders examined by the report only two cases were found where a woman killed a man she had a history of abusing.

Fiona McCormack, CEO of Domestic Violence Victoria, says it is vital to recognise how gender is a factor in family violence.

“The fact that family violence is primarily perpetrated by men and overwhelmingly experienced by women and children can be a deeply uncomfortable truth, but unless we have the courage as a community to look at why it is that some men choose to perpetrate violence, we’ll never be able to fix this,’’ she said."
www.smh.com.au/national/the-truth-about-men-and-murder-20180602-p4zj3g.html

You can read the report here:

Australian Domestic and Family Violence Death Review Network - Data Report 2018

www.coronerscourt.vic.gov.au/find/publications/australian+domestic+and+family+violence+death+review+network

thanks. We need to talk about these statistics. I remember growing up when the teenage boys said girls were mean to them it usually boiled down to "I want to have sex with her but she says no" and when teenage girls complained that boys were mean to them .... well it was an entirely different story. There was a stand up comedian who says that male stand up comedians always tell about their "crazy" girlfriends, but the female stand up comedians don't. "Because if you have a crazy boyfriend you be dead"

The report is admirably clear and depressingly familiar. Interestingly, it doesn't use man/men, some use of women, a few mentions of gender. It mostly contains the unambiguous: male homicide offenders/female homicide offenders. No wriggle room there.

Only Figure 2 (of 24)'s title includes gender: 'IPV Intimate Partner Violence homicide offenders by gender, 2010-2014'. But the labelling of the pie chart in Figure 2 provides absolute clarity:

Males who killed a female intimate partner 79.6%
Females who killed a male intimate partner 18.4%
Males who killed a male intimate partner 2%

That's a really comprehensive report - thanks for linking to it. Shame the Violent Women thread got deleted because it was a really useful refute to some of the more egregious allegations made on that.

Sample size 152.

It's across 4 years, from 2010 to 2014 and represents all the murders that were classified as intimate partner violence. There is no way of getting more data for this location over this timeframe.

It does not, in fact, Assassinated. It was a selected subset of the murders over 4 years, and represents less than half of the IPV murders in that time frame. The linked report itself says that these are case studies are not statistical evidence.

It's not as if I'm against focusing on IPV, as the big thing that this study shows is that in about half of the total cases there's a history of abuse which means that the deaths could potentially be prevented. That's worth any amount of time, money and effort expended. But that's not the headline. I'm against bad stats and bad science reporting in general.

I think the best way to put my concerns about this type of study would be to say: would you really want crime stats for IPV, sexual assault etc. to be gender balanced? Given the power difference between men and women? These are laws intended to protect the (physically) weaker from the strong - they're supposed to be gender imbalanced. If IPV or sexual assault stats were 50:50 I'd be thinking something has gone wrong here.

I can't seem to find where it explains about the IPV murders that they excluded nor where they talk about these as case studies. Perhaps I'm looking at the wrong thing?

The phrase "case studies" isn't used in the linked report.

"The report released last week by the Australian Domestic and Family Violence Death Review Network is not based on statistics. It’s a detailed examination of 152 intimate partner murders between 2010 and 2014 where there was credible information showing a history of violence prior to the murder."

It doesn't say it explicitly Assassinated, and that's what I find troubling. Because it has, unquestionably, excluded 50%+ of IPV cases on the (perfectly reasonable) basis that it was only looking at cases where there was a prior history of violence and it is, of itself, a case study report but it is not reported as such.

That's not good.

How do you know that they have excluded more than half of IPV murders? Is there another source of statistics that you're cross referencing?

And again, perhaps I'm completely wrong, but that paragraph to me doesn't sound like they're treating this as a collection of case studies. The comment about "not based on statistics" seems to me to mean that they're not basing the numbers on some kind of statistical probability of domestic violence being used. They know for definite the history of the domestic violence involved in each case.

Well, yes. I though it'd be a fairly well known stat on this board. But here it is referenced (Sharps, P. W., et al. (2001). Health care providers’ missed opportunities for preventing femicide. Preventive Medicine 33, 373-80.)

There is absolutely nothing wrong with compiling case studies... in itself. But do bear in mind that Andrew Wakefield's paper on the dangers of vaccination was a compilation of case studies. Be wary.

Perhaps I'm looking at the wrong thing, but that reference you've given is for an American study? I don't understand it's relevance to the collection of statistics from Australia.

Do I really have to find the specific stats for Australia? They seem to be fairly similar across Europe, Australia and Canada. This isn't contentious. About 50% of IPV homicides have a prior history of DV. If you need a comprehensive study I refer you to the 2013 Violence Against Women Study (Here: fra.europa.eu/en/publication/2014/violence-against-women-eu-wide-survey-main-results-report).

But, again, this does not cover Aussieland. Sorry.

Ok, so you don't agree that they should have focussed on cases where there was a confirmed history of domestic violence. They're quite clear that's what they've looked at. I don't think that the intention was to discount the other murders, but that wasn't what they were wanting to research.

By the way, I'm not an academic or any kind of expert in this field. I'm just a person chatting online.

The title of the OP is the title of the newspaper article quoted. Australia has a relatively low murder rate (1 in 100,000), which works out to somewhere between 415-450 murders a year. 95% of those murders are perpetrated by men. Men are six times more likely to commit violent crimes than women.

Australia had a Royal Commission into family violence, so there is a lot of current research and statistical data available which you can read here:
www.rcfv.com.au/Report-Recommendations

The references in this article might be useful if you'd like to explore the issue of intimate partner violence.
www.ourwatch.org.au/understanding-violence/facts-and-figures

Whatever set of statistics you interrogate, it's clear that men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of violence. The majority of victims of that violence are other men, but domestic violence is a serious issue for women and children.

Murder rates are the most serious outcome of domestic violence, not the only outcome. It's not only the tragedy of murdered women and children in the present which impacts so heavily, but the long term effects on society.

"The single best predictor of children becoming either perpetrators or victims of domestic violence later in life is whether or not they grow up in a home where there is domestic violence.

Studies from various countries shttpsupport the findings that rates of abuse are higher among women whose husbands were abused as children or who saw their mothers being abused."
www.unicef.org/media/files/BehindClosedDoors.pdf

The question, surely, is not, "Were there murders left out of the analysis because no-one had witnessed previous violence?", but "What are we going to do about male violence?"

Interesting article, thanks for posting.

It's also interesting to note that spree killers and mass shooters in the USA invariably have a history of DV as well.

On average in Australia, one woman a week is killed by her current or ex partner - circa 52 / year

Another horrifying statistic:

3 women are hospitalised each week in Australia with a traumatic brain injury caused by their partner or ex