Tasmanian police resist feminist weaponisation of DV laws

- Police elsewhere have succumbed to pressure from the ideologues.

“I’m 8 and I came here today because I want men to stop killing women.”

Here’s a little girl who took part in a women’s domestic violence rally last weekend, as shown in the ABC’s Tiktok video covering the nation-wide protests. It’s hard to beat this as an example of the wicked anti-male propaganda pouring out from our public broadcaster every week.

Naturally, their concern about stopping people killing each other only works one way. Have a look at some of the violent acts by women reported in Australia this week:

• Ellouisa Brighton Gibson, a 36-year-old Toowoomba mother has been charged with murder after allegedly dousing her children in petrol as they slept and then setting them alight. The Queensland house fire on May 7 killed all three children and severely burnt her partner.

• A grandmother in Central West NSW was arrested after two children were found dead during a welfare check. On May 5 the bodies of two boys, aged six and seven, were found in their Coonabarabran home.

• Corbie Jean Walpole, 24, doused Jake Loader, a 'lifelong friend', in petrol and set him alight having been angered by a sexist comment, Albury District Court was told on May 8. Fifty-five per cent of Mr Loader's body was burned, he spent 74 days in a Melbourne burn unit and underwent 10 surgeries.

• On May 9 a Gold Coast mother-of-four pleaded guilty to 22 offences, most seriously chasing her partner down the street at Ashmore and trying to stab him in the head with a boning knife.

• 60-year-old Anna Maria Di Pinto, who allegedly chased and stabbed her husband, saying “you’ll bleed out soon” and “he needs to die”, pleaded guilty to attempted murder in the Adelaide Magistrates Court on May 7.

• A 34-year-old social media influencer was accused with her partner of torturing her baby daughter and taking photos of her in "immense distress and pain" to elicit donations. On May 7 charges were dropped against her partner but the child's mother now faces 72 charges.

• Annette Louise Ruth Hancock, 56-year-old Tasmanian woman was found guilty on May 13 of stabbing her partner to death during a drunken argument inside his Hobart flat three years ago.

And then, of course, we saw the second week of the triple-murder trial of Erin Patterson who was accused of poisoning her relatives with a beef wellington laced with deadly mushrooms – in Morwell, Victoria, July 2023.

How’s that for a toll of violence against men – all in the news in the same week as women march in the streets claiming women are the only victims? Well, the truth is that most of these cases involving violent women only get mentioned in brief news items, if at all. Our disgraceful, wimpish media is too cowered by the feminist lobby to give any proper coverage to these stories, let alone draw any conclusions about this clear evidence of the two-way nature of domestic violence.

And when journalists do mention female violence, it’s always presented as the result of mental illness or a history of abuse, invariably by a male. Hardly ever is the behaviour characterized as domestic violence, and reporters happily promote the perpetrator’s virtues as good parents, kind neighbours, etc - descriptions now utterly taboo when discussing male offenders.

The most shameful of this week’s stories is Ellouisa Brighton Gibson’s alleged murder of her three children which has echoes of the 2020 Hannah Clarke tragedy, where a Brisbane mother and her three children were killed in a car fire lit by her estranged partner. The Clarke murder caused instant media outrage across the country, leading to press conferences, public inquiries, new charities and, changes in the law. Hannah Clarke is now a feminist tragic heroine, part of our social history. That year she was named one of Marie Claire magazine's 'Women of the Year.'

Meanwhile Ellouisa Brighton Gibson’s story is sinking without a trace, with barely any reporting beyond the first minimal news stories, and the subsequent court decision to charge her with murder. Only The Australian has reported that an older child told police he saw her lighting the fire and that she also attempted to burn her partner. The contrast with the Hannah Clarke homicide is most revealing.

This all set the stage for a very timely video I made this week with a woman who has a good deal to say about the way feminism is distorting our approach to domestic violence, particularly when it comes to policing and the justice system.

Dr Fiona Girkin works with the Tasmanian Institute of Law Enforcement Studies teaching police about domestic violence. When she first wrote to me nine months ago to tell me about her work, she thanked me for “being willing to protect men from women who seek to destroy their lives.”

Fiona Girkin is no longer prepared to call herself a feminist. Before her present teaching job, she worked for 20 years in the community services sector alongside many feminists, “It was the most toxic workplace I have ever worked in,” she said, explaining that she had “experienced many women who claimed to be empathic but instead wielded power of a different kind. They would bully and manipulate staff to gain power over in the resources they held including large sums of Government funding for service provision.”

Fascinating stuff, eh? Particularly as it led her to do a PhD on female psychopathic behaviour in community services! That’s a story for another day – I plan a second video with Fiona about that intriguing topic.

Fiona’s experience with this feminist culture left her shocked at the manhating narrative where “only women can be the good ones and men are always bad.” When she applied for the teaching job with the police service, she explained that she refused to misrepresent the truth about domestic violence – namely that men and women are equally likely to be perpetrators.

Amazingly it turned out that was exactly what police management were seeking – someone who would give police proper information about how two-way violence plays out in relationships, teaching police to properly analyse the presenting situation, evaluate evidence and make careful decisions about whom to arrest.

It's nearly a year since she started the job and she’s been delighted to discover Tasmania police seem to be doing their job in just the fair, unbiased manner she has been promoting. The result is, she believes, just as many women are being arrested as men. “Women are certainly being arrested, taken to the station to be assessed as perpetrators. I think that is happening 50% of the time.”

How about that? Here’s little Tasmania, in our Deep South, holding out against the feminist push to weaponise domestic violence laws against men. This stands in stark contrast with Queensland’s relentless campaign to weaponise domestic violence against men – see my video with two police whistleblowers. My interview with a former NSW police prosecutor showed police and prosecutors in this state are coming under similar pressure, as is true now in most other states and territories.

Fiona reports Tassie police are actually encouraged to talk to both parties, look at the evidence on both sides and figure out what seems to be going on, and arrest the person who seems responsible. Then the case ends up being examined by an experienced senior officer who, with the help of a specialist family violence unit, determines whether to charge.

Proof they are doing the right thing came in an ABC article 18 months ago, which complained bitterly about Tasmanian women being “misidentified as perpetrators” of domestic violence. “Domestic violence workers in Tasmania have been warning of a simmering misidentification crisis: mounting cases where police have mistaken the victim for the perpetrator and taken out a protection order against them or charged them with criminal offences — with devastating consequences.” The article claimed many of these women are able to have these orders revoked by magistrates (no doubt nervous of attracting feminist wrath) – but it’s pretty clear evidence that police are doing their job in applying the law in an unbiased fashion.

Fiona is most frustrated by the billions of dollars being poured into domestic violence funding and used to support the huge DV industry intent on shaming men while the families most at risk get absolutely no attention. “We have certain addresses that police actually know quite well. They’ve attended multiple times over the last 20 to 30 years. They might have initially seen the parents and now they are seeing the kids of the kids who are being violent.”

She explains these multi-generational violence problems are often related to drug and alcohol issues which are being totally ignored by the domestic violence industry. “That’s what bothers me. I think: why aren’t we putting money into these families that have become generationally abusive, to try to break the cycle?”

Here’s a Tasmanian government graph showing that although there’s been a significant increase in reports of domestic violence in her state, high risk cases involving physical abuse have declined.

All the increase is in the low-risk categories which include emotional abuse and coercive control. “I’d be confident to say the physical side of the violence is probably actually decreasing,” Fiona says, but the expanded definition means valuable police resources are being spent on policing people who raise their voices or are mean to their partner’s cat.

“If you throw a bigger net, you catch more fish, don’t you? I think if we keep expanding the definition everyone’s relationship is going to come under the definition of family violence. That bothers me because what happens then is that spreads the resources so thin that if police are out attending low-risk homes they could potentially miss a call for a high-risk home where someone could potentially die,” Fiona explains.

So much good sense from this impressive woman who finds herself in this pivotal role, training police to deal effectively and fairly with this important social problem. Do help me circulate my video conversation with her - it deserves a large audience.

Fiona Girkin’s story is such a contrast with the scene at the other end of our country – where the Queensland police union is doing the feminists bidding, lobbying the government for police to be able to hand out violence orders like parking tickets, setting up more men to end up in prison. But, who knows, maybe Tasmania’s idea of an impartial police force will catch on?

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