Australia’s DV system is gaslighting male victims

Australia counts female DV deaths but not male DV-related suicides, writes Doctor Alex Vickery-Howe.

AUSTRALIA’S DOMESTIC VIOLENCE system is built on ideological assumptions, outdated behavioral patterns and blind spots in national data collection that make male victims effectively invisible. When institutions fail to detect the types of DV harms (misuse of reputation, abuse of systems, and misidentification) to which men disproportionately suffer, the result is structural injustice, not impartiality.

Damage to the national system

The entire architecture of domestic violence across Australia is built around one dominant narrative: that DV is predominantly male violence against women. This narrative is real and must remain central. But that’s not the whole picture.

Male victims, whose experiences include loss of reputation, abuse of systems, administrative misconduct or misidentification, remain completely outside the national policy imagination. They are not named, they are not measured, they are not represented in policy discourse, and they are not believed by law enforcement.

The Commonwealth’s key frameworks – the ANROWS survey, the AIHW briefs, the ABS Personal Safety Surveys – reflect and reproduce a worldview in which male-pattern victimization is not seen as a meaningful class of harm. The result is a system that fails to see, count and support male victims across the country.

How national data architecture is blinding Australia

At the national level, Australia does not collect any data on:

• mistaken identity by police;
• role reversal (i.e., victims are falsely blamed and recorded as perpetrators);
• abuse of systems, including weaponization of institutions under false pretenses;
• indirect aggression and reputation sabotage;
• DV-related suicide; And
• administrative abuse (AVOs, DVOs, DFFH interventions, court reports).

The ABS Personal Safety Survey does not measure these patterns.

AIHW cannot report on these because they are not collected.

ANROWS’s evidence base does not analyze these because they fall outside its ideological framework.

When your national data collections exclude variables that would reveal male-pattern victimization, the resulting picture is guaranteed to be incomplete. Australia finds “little evidence” of certain patterns because it doesn’t measure them.

A nation that fails to take into account a victim class will inevitably find little evidence of the harm suffered by that class.

In this case, this class constitutes 50 percent of the population.

The behavioral science the Commonwealth ignored

The international psychology literature consistently shows that:

• men disproportionately resort to direct aggression; And
• Women disproportionately use indirect aggression (reputation-based, third-party dependent, and institutionally mediated).

Australia’s national DV risk frameworks, including the ANROWS guidance and the state-based risk tools derived from it, detect male-pattern aggression only.

They don’t measure indirect aggression at all.

But indirect aggression is exactly the behavior pattern that maps to:

• false claims;
• loss of reputation;
• misuse of systems;
• arming the police, courts and child protection agencies; And
• coercive control exercised through institutions.

Taking these wider harms into account, NSW and Queensland have criminalized coercive control but still fail to measure patterns of oppression that disproportionately harm men.

A national system that measures the aggression pattern of only one gender will always “discover” the victimization of only one gender.

When ideology replaces evidence at the national level

State level domestic violence peak bodies, such as the DVNSW, are openly and unabashedly gender biased in their framing of domestic violence. DVNSW is not an outlier; It is a state-level mirror of a broader national problem.

Australia’s publicly funded family violence policy ecosystem is largely shaped by:

• ANROWS gender ideological research frameworks;
• women-centered peak bodies;
• feminist-focused academic institutions; And
• Commonwealth funding was tied to gender-specific definitions of services.

This creates portfolio-level capture when:

• national policy conversations begin with a gendered assumption;
• alternative forms of harm are treated as deviations or impossibilities;
• research funding reinforces rather than tests the narrative; And
• and male victims become the “blind spot” that everyone can safely ignore.

The impact is national: Australia’s domestic violence machine is gaslighting male victims.

Not by deliberate deception, but by structural design: Their experiences fall outside the permitted narrative, so survivors’ stories are ignored, distrusted or accused of lying, front-line cops assume they are trying to create a false alibi when they report abuse, they are told the abuse does not exist.

Institutional disbelief and misidentification in Australian jurisdictions

I have first-hand experience of this mischaracterization in NSW, but the pattern is the same in every state and territory:

• Police treat male first reporters as possible perpetrators.
• Counterclaims from women are encouraged, facilitated and instantly legitimized.
• The men’s evidence is brushed aside or ignored and the evidence is not collected or examined.
• For male victims, orders of protection against female abusers become a shortcut to “mission completion,” not the beginning of an investigation.
• Corrections and oversight institutions protect the system, not the truth.

The same failure is being repeated in Australia, as no jurisdictions measure misidentification and no national framework instructs them to do so.

Male victims in Queensland, Victoria, WA and the ACT report the same experiences; The moment a male victim reports harassment, he is treated as a criminal. There is no investigation. Just an assumption based on gender.

Because Australia has created a national system that recognizes only one gender victim profile, it has created an interlocking system of institutionalized misidentification.

In the bad old days, a woman reporting sexual assault would be asked critically: “What did you do to encourage her?” or “What were you wearing?” We are all now ashamed of such historically shameful victim blaming.

But the equivalent of a man reporting domestic violence by his partner is no longer facing ridicule and critical questions – a man reporting DV runs the risk of reflexively not being believed, his abuser being encouraged and given the opportunity to make false and retaliatory accusations, and then the actual victim being accused of a crime and prosecuted.

Even in the worst-case scenario, victim blaming against female victims rarely rises to the level of victim prosecution; however, this is commonplace for male victims in Australia today.

Deaths Australia refuses to count

Australia publishes detailed annual counts of female intimate partner homicides. We lose approximately 50 women a year (almost 1 woman a week) due to domestic violence. Each of these is a tragedy and we must do everything we can to prevent these terrible deaths. Those who commit these crimes must be punished in the most severe way by law.

Australia also loses more than 2,400 men to suicide each year. We don’t know how much of this is due to domestic violence because we don’t measure, count or report these statistics. The women responsible cannot be punished or prevented from reoffending because our DV system completely fails these victims.

Australia:

• Does not count DV-related suicides;
• does not collect DV precursors in national coronal coding;
• does not map coercive control trajectories to suicide outcomes; And
• DV death statistics do not include DV-related male suicides.

As a result, the Commonwealth acts as if 0 per cent of suicides are due to domestic violence; this is a statistically implausible assumption and is unacceptable for other large categories of harm.

Even a conservative reference of three per cent suggests that Australia loses as many men to DV-related suicide as we lose women to intimate partner homicide.

Suicide is the national way of death for male DV victims; but because Australia refuses to measure it, male deaths are quietly administratively erased.

A country that counts only one way of dying will always conclude that only one gender dies.

Genderless justice on a national scale

A national justice system cannot apportion protection by gender and still claim legitimacy.

Australia cannot continue to:

• funding gender-specific peak bodies;
• produce gender-filtered data;
• equipping police with gender-specific tools;
• ignore male-pattern victimization;
• erasing DV-related suicides from the death register;

and then declares himself dedicated to “all victim survivors.”

A national reform principle is needed:

Investigate all claims.

All genders. All patterns. All situations.

Australia must replace ideology with evidence and narrative with investigation.

National reforms Australia should implement

To align with best practice evidence and restore legitimacy, the Commonwealth should:

Add DFSV precursor flag to national coronal data

AIHW and ABS should jointly code key DV indicators in suicide cases.

Fund male victim services and a national male victim advocacy summit

Plural summits protect against ideological capture.

Reform national DV research funding through ANROWS

It requires the inclusion of misidentification, role reversal, abuse of systems, and indirect aggression.

Create a national DVSAT‑B for cross-claims

Each police jurisdiction needs to assess misuse of systems and damage to reputation.

Train all Australian police forces on patterns of indirect aggression and misidentification

A national curriculum is needed.

Publish national misidentification measurements

Without measurement nothing changes.

A justice system that sees every Australian victim

Australia’s story on domestic violence was shaped by good intentions but has become incomplete, exclusionary and empirically unsustainable.

Women must be protected from suffering and death at the hands of abusive male partners.

But men also suffer, are misidentified, silenced through institutional disbelief, and some die when the system refuses to recognize them — and then add insult to fatal injury when the system refuses to count them as DV victims.

Australia can continue to tell a gender-specific story or build a domestic violence system that sees every victim.

He cannot do both.

Dr Alex Vickery-Howe is an award-winning playwright and social commentator. He teaches creative writing, screen and drama classes. Flinders University.

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