Kicking a Man Whilst He’s Down

Last Christmas, one of Australia’s major suicide prevention groups had a call from a very distressed suicidal man. The counsellor did his best to support him and arranged to keep in touch. But there was no answer to the counsellor’s follow up calls. Following the organisation’s duty of care rules, the counsellor made a call to NSW police, fearing the man was at imminent risk of harm. 

The police reaction was shocking. “Is there a female partner who could be at risk? Is he likely to hurt her,” asked the police officer, whose immediate concern was not checking on the man in crisis but rather assessing the risk that the suicidal man could be violent.

Welcome to the latest triumph of feminist policy innovation.

A system that looks at the man standing on the edge of the abyss — the group dying by suicide at three times the rate of women — and decides the most urgent question to ask is not ‘How do we save you?’ but ‘Have you been hurting women?’

It is a policy of breathtaking intellectual dishonesty and moral inversion.

It all started in Victoria but could become official policy across the country The 2021 Victorian Government MARAM Framework Document is prescribed for over 6,000 organisations and approximately 392,000 professionals in Victoria, including those involved in mental health, drugs and alcohol support, homelessness, family and health services.

The framework is based on the premise that significant numbers of men who commit suicide each year have a history of using family violence. Responding to suicide risk “should consider the risk of the person using violence to themselves, their family and community”, explains the document.

The Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) has pushed a similar line, recommending screening male clients for domestic violence perpetration in mental health, alcohol and drug and crisis services – precisely the settings where suicidal men often present.

And what happens if they identify a suicidal perpetrator? When a suicidal man reaches out for help and is identified (or merely suspected) as a potential perpetrator, MARAM recommends “keeping perpetrators in view”.

Here’s what that actually means in practice:

• “Ongoing monitoring and oversight” — Once flagged, you are now officially “in view”. Your mental health crisis is logged, tracked and monitored across the system.
• “Contributing to accountability” — Formal risk assessment and mandatory documentation of behaviours are designed to make it much harder to minimise, deny or continue any alleged violence.
• “System-wide responsibility” — Every relevant organisation, including mental health services, alcohol and drug services and crisis lines, now has a duty to keep you “in view”.
• “Information Sharing” — Your confidential discussions about suicide, depression or relationship breakdown can be legally shared, without your consent, with other authorised services.
• “Protecting victims and children” — The overriding priority becomes ensuring any current or former partner and children are protected from you, the man at risk of ending his own life.

This draconian system has been proudly in place in Victoria for five years now and received zero scrutiny – such is public interest in the fate of men, even suicidal men.

Zealots in our health services have proved all too keen to follow this advice and presume that suicidal men are perpetrators of violence.

I talked last week to a man who sought help from a mental health service in Dandenong Victoria. The suicidal man had lost contact with his children despite the Victorian police having charged his partner with two counts of assault against him.

I’ve seen the desperate text messages he wrote to the service, complaining about his treatment.

One of the health workers kept pushing me asking if I’d ever hit a woman, saying ‘You must have done something, you must have hit her.’ She went on and on, informing me that this was the first step to getting better by acknowledging the truth, even after I had shown them the mother’s charge sheet from Victorian Police.

The health worker pushed so hard it turned into a loud verbal argument lasting over 15 minutes. “I ended up walking away in tears. This left me more suicidal than when I had started using their services almost a year earlier,” the shattered man explained.   

The policies are in place and already adding to the burden of men in crisis. But what data support this mighty feminist edifice?

That’s where the plot thickens.

Almost a year ago, I exposed misleading research from the Australian Institute of Family Studies which claimed one in three men reported being violent towards their partners. Somehow the institute forgot to mention in its report on this ‘Ten to Men‘ study that almost a third (30.9%) of the men surveyed were victims of similar violence, which included both physical and emotional abuse.  

It turns out that this ‘Ten to Men’ study is also responsible for one of the key statistics underpinning the claimed association between suicide and perpetration of domestic violence – namely the finding that suicidal men are 47% more likely than other men to become violent towards their partners.

Lots of suicidal men later become wife-beaters, this research suggests. Note we are not really talking about any sort of physical abuse at all. Most of the domestic violence perpetrated by these men is emotional abuse. Nearly a third (32%) of men in the ‘Ten to Men’ research reported they had made a partner feel “frightened or anxious”, while 9% reported “hitting, slapping, kicking or otherwise physically hurting a partner when angry”.

Get your head around that. This key statistic being used to introduce these draconian measures is based on the claim that suicidal men pose a risk – but that risk could be simply a partner feeling anxious or nervous.

But getting back to the AIFS researchers and their ‘Ten to Men’ research. We now discover these zealots have done it again. Whilst producing that magical 47% figure, it turns out they left out inconvenient results which blur the ideological goal of targeting men for their violence. They forgot to mention that many of these suicidal men end up as victims of violent women rather than perpetrators.

You see, the study questioned all men about both perpetration and victimisation and found almost a third (30.9%) reported being victims and 25% reported both – bidirectional violence. Those data were never published, nor did the researchers choose to publish the likelihood of suicidal men experiencing abuse from a woman, nor to release the figures to allow other to make this calculation.

More bizarre still, this 47% claim is about suicidal men potentially becoming violent in the future when they weren’t in the past. And yet the researchers use this cooked-up statistic to target suicidal men about their current and previous relationships. Asking the poor vulnerable blokes about beating up wives and partners, past and present. The whole thing is from Cloud Cuckoo Land.

This entire policy edifice, resting on remarkably shonky research foundations, actively denies the most vulnerable men in Australia the simple human compassion they cry out for — and pushes some of them closer to the edge.

As one of Australia’s first sex therapists, Bettina Arndt began her career discussing sex on television and training doctors and other professionals in sexual counselling at a time when such topics were largely taboo. Her current – and even more socially unacceptable – passion is exposing Australia’s unfair treatment of men through the relentless weaponisation of laws and policies that portray women solely as victims. Her decades of advocacy for fair treatment of men in the Family Court included serving on key government inquiries. Bettina makes YouTube videos and blogs on Substack.