Feminism's cash cow implodes

- Pass the popcorn!

What a week. It’s been just fascinating watching what’s happening in the domestic violence industry which funds much of the feminist enterprise in this country.

Our Watch, the engine room for the mighty $3 billion business, is under attack. Feminists are suddenly eating their own, as key players go public with revelations showing Our Watch’s utterly ruthless suppression of data that challenged their prescribed orthodoxy about gender inequality being the main cause of domestic violence.

Michael Salter, a UNSW feminist criminologist, has launched a major assault on Our Watch in an article in The Saturday Paper, which revealed that, back in 2014, the Victorian government asked him to conduct a review of “drivers” of violence against women. When he produced it, Our Watch wasn’t happy with his conclusions and demanded he delete evidence about the role of alcohol and poverty in family violence. When he refused, his “review” was then rewritten by other researchers.

Our Watch wasn’t going to cop any distraction from their gender transformative project – which, under the guise of tackling domestic violence, was actually intent on “social, cultural and structural and systemic change” – essentially redistributing power between men and women. (Read more about Our Watch’s audacious plan for resetting our society in my blog from three years ago.)

The Saturday Paper quotes Professor Slater saying that he was assured by a representative from the Victorian government that he shouldn’t be too concerned about his evidence being omitted. “We need to imagine this future society that we want to live in. And that vision is not about alcohol. It’s not about class.”  Indeed not. Their vision is about neutered men, kowtowing to women. 

There was no way any pesky researcher could be allowed to state there were other complex drivers for domestic violence. This was just at the time the ideologues behind Our Watch were planning their massive “Stop it at the Start” television campaign, designed to demonize boys and men. By the following year, Malcolm Turnbull, in his first act as Prime Minister, was solemnly pronouncing that domestic violence was all about respect for women.

This was to be the only permitted narrative. Big bucks were at stake, with Michael Salter claiming on Radio National this week that about $300 million was spent on that attitude change campaign, most of it funding the Our Watch bureaucrats. He’s made it clear in his tweets that Our Watch was ruthless in only funding people who ran the party line.  

Around the same time another person who ran into this censorship from domestic violence bodies was Professor Peter Miller, an expert on research on alcohol and violence from Deakin University. Miller was also commissioned by the Victorian government to do research on alcohol’s role in interpersonal violence. Here too, the research was not published because they didn’t like his conclusion that alcohol was a causal factor.

In his evidence to the 2016 Victorian Royal Commission into domestic violence, Miller made it clear that the prescribed approach was wrong: “A sole focus on the gendered nature of family violence which labels men as the perpetrators and women as the victims and which identifies gender inequity as the principal ‘cause’ of family violence is problematic at a number of levels.”  His advice was ignored by the Commission.  

For over a decade, the domestic violence industry has kept a lid on any objective discussion of the complex causes of domestic violence, let alone the fact that half of the perpetrators are female. Controlling the cash cow has proved a very effective means of keeping control of the narrative.

So why has it all blown up now? Well, the trigger was the manufactured crisis following several domestic homicides earlier this year which led to talk from the Albanese government about needing to do more. Under pressure, the government announced a review of  Our Watch’s prevention strategy by a new  “Expert Panel”. Interestingly this excluded the Our Watch CEO but included prominent journalist Jess Hill who has built her career promoting the feminist line on domestic violence.

Intriguingly, just before Hill found herself on this committee, she had broken ranks with the sisterhood, producing a provocative paper, co-authored by Michael Slater, Rethinking Primary Prevention, which showed the strategy of promoting respect for women and attempting to reduce gender inequity wasn’t working. The campaign was failing to produce any change in attitudes they claim were linked to gendered violence.

The Saturday Paper uses as an example of that failure the fact that 41 per cent of Australians believe domestic violence is committed equally by both men and women. Hmm, so almost half of all Australians know the truth about domestic violence but that’s evidence of a failed policy. The lunatics are clearly running the asylum.  

Another feminist hero who found a place on the new Expert Panel is veteran Anne Summers, who obviously also has it in for Our Watch.

Most of the Expert Panel are now openly lined up against Our Watch – promising troubled times ahead for this key body which so long has controlled the domestic violence narrative and funding in Australia.

Yet we mustn’t get carried away thinking any of this means these critics are actually going to come to their senses and look at what the international evidence says about prevention of domestic violence.

It is a good start that Hill and Slater admit that shaming males isn’t working as primary prevention: “Telling men and boys that if they make sexist jokes, or fail to challenge the attitudes of their mates, they are personally responsible for the physical and sexual violence, or homicides committed by other males has not proven a compelling or successful argument.” 

But the fact remains that none of these players recommend tossing out efforts to change male attitudes. Michael Slater is on the Advisory Group of the White Ribbon Australia, which is responsible for shaming boys in schools and running male-bashing workshops in endless organisations and workplaces. With the new push against toxic masculinity, efforts to reform men are actually on the rise.

Note also that Slater, Hill and colleagues are still maintaining that tackling gender inequality is critical – they only concede that other approaches are necessary as well. Listen to Anne Summers speaking at the Elsie Conference earlier this year:

“I hope we can understand more about the monster we are confronting, and I hope this will lead us to rethink our approach. While gender equality is essential, it is not enough.”

And this mob only ever talks about violence against women. They never mention female violence.  Women’s violence against men and against their own children never makes it onto the agenda.

The CEO of Our Watch, Patty Kinnersly has been very busy this week appearing on Radio National and The Project, pretending she is not aware of her organisation ever suppressing data, and sticking to her guns claiming the key factors in predicting violence against women are sexism, gender stereotypes and disrespect for women. (See my article refuting her claims here.) The one concession she has made is to acknowledge that alcohol and poverty are amongst various “reinforcing factors” that underpin the key driver of gender inequity.

The latest twist in this week’s excitement came with the release by Our Watch of a report card claiming that they have been successful in driving down domestic violence:

The national tracker from Our Watch, the national organisation for preventing violence against women and their children, found a significant 66% decline in women killed by men’s violence over the past three decades, and a decline in the harmful attitudes that drive violence over the past 20 years. 

Hmm, talk about a desperate strategy. The claim that Our Watch’s primary prevention strategy has been successful in driving down incidents of domestic violence was obviously designed to ward off the critics. But it will really piss off the rest of the  industry which relies on claims of an ever-growing epidemic of violence to keep raking in the government funding.

Plus, it was destined to get up the nose of the media who supports this feminist industry. It was most amusing hearing an interview with Patty Kinnersly on Radio National this week when the host, Patricia Karvelas, grilled Kinnersly through gritted teeth about how she could possibly claim decreased violence given the current epidemic of domestic homicides. Karvelas’ irritation was very telling.   

It’s all hogwash, of course. The domestic violence industry is constantly manipulating the rates of domestic violence by moving the goal posts – expanding the definition of violence to include coercive control, for instance. Or making changes to family law which further incentivise false allegations. None of this does anything to protect genuine victims of violence, and certainly increases the risk of suicide for falsely accused men. Current policies are killing people, men and women.

As for Michael Salter…. when he’s not throwing grenades into the domestic violence industry, he’s recently been busy trying to clean up after another feminist meltdown. His good friend Grace Tame, sexual abuse victim and former Australian of the Year, has been forced to step down as CEO of her charitable foundation. The Australian cites “a donor backlash over its questionable governance and a half-hearted leadership style that left a scattered strategy and produced few tangible results for sexual abuse survivors.”

Amazingly, Salter is the Grace Tame Foundation director, clearly someone who should have known that this charity was running off the rails. He has apparently been making it known around town that Tame will soon cease in the position and recruitment efforts will begin to identify a successor.

Our captive media is, as expected, ignoring this important story about the fall of this feminist icon. I remember years ago asking a well-known journalist why no one bothered to properly investigate Grace Tame’s story. He laughed and said that to expose Tame would be like “killing Bambi.” A career-ending move for any journalist.

But the good Professor Michael Salter certainly gets around. It turns out he is also on the Expert Advisory Group of the eSafety Commissioner where we find another prominent feminist, Julie Inman Grant, totally running amok.

The man seems to have a talent for getting involved with women who mean trouble. I’m tempted to suggest he might consider a new project - on toxic femininity.

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Finally, I hope you’ve seen some of the publicity we have managed to attract for our upcoming conference on Restoring the Presumption of Innocence.

This is having the desired effect of getting taboo topics – like false allegations and the constant attacks on men – into the public eye. Have a look at this great interview with Damian Coory whose show, The Other Side, features on ADH TV. (Damien is speaking at our conference.)

It’s pretty exciting that in the last few days 70,000 people have watched this rare expose of the dangerous new coercive control laws – a challenge to the feminist propaganda on this topic being regurgitated by our media.