Source: NSW Domestic Violence Death Review Team Report 2015/2017, p193 It's bad enough when their spurious or poorly understood claims are used to radicalise disenfranchised men, but even worse when they're straight up wrong about the data and their misinformation becomes accepted fact in public debate. While men are certainly killed in domestic violence situations, their lives are almost never at risk from abusive female partners. But we'll come back to that. The details behind these misleading claims can get a bit technical but they are worth explaining. But investigating and explaining the data is the only way to stop baseless myths about male victims of domestic violence (like they've increased fivefold) settling into public acceptance. The fivefold claim is based on data purportedly from Table 1 of the 2006 PSS that 0.1 per cent of men report being victims of current partner violence and that this figure increased to 0.8 per cent in the 2016 PSS.

The problem is there is no data for this in the 2006 PSS. The figure was probably taken from the 2012 PSS (Table 21), which does give the 0.1 per cent stat, but it's marked as having an error of over 50 per cent and is "considered too unreliable for general use". The 2016 PSS (Table 2.1) shows men reporting partner violence moved from 0.4 per cent in 2005 to 0.8 per cent in 2016. Nothing close to a 553 per cent increase. Women's reports of partner violence increased from 1.9 to 3.2 over the same period. The accurate numbers could be reported a number of ways: Men reporting intimate partner violence increased by less than half a per cent over ten years.

Men's experience of partner violence doubled in ten years. Less than one per cent of men experience partner violence. Women are four times more likely to experience partner violence than men All the above statements are all technically correct. They just present a different picture of the same data. Arndt churned out a few more stats produced by One in Three along the lines of the statements above, technically correct but misleading concentrations on single data points that suit an agenda. "Every third victim of intimate partner violence is a male. Almost half the people being emotionally abused by their partners are male. The biggest leap in sexual harassment over the past five years involves men being harassed by women."

The "every third victim" claim is again based on a single data point and is easily debunked. The PSS needs to be viewed in its entirety and understood for what it is – statistical estimates from a survey of people's perceptions of the violence they have experienced. It is not a list of facts. Violence is a complex issue, particularly when it happens in families and intimate relationships. Victims of violence frequently underestimate the violence or blame themselves. Conversely, perpetrators of violence will often perceive themselves as the victims and overestimate the violence enacted against them. The design of the PSS has changed over time in an effort to eliminate perception bias but it is still dependent on what people remember, how they remember events and what they are willing to disclose to a stranger about the violence they have experienced. It is a good indication of violence in Australia but only if it is viewed in context, not taken as isolated points. Arndt also repeated One in Three's claim based on data from the Australian Institute of Criminology Homicide Report that "domestic homicide results in one man being killed every 10 days". The report says that 75 men were killed between 2012 and 2014, which makes the "every 10 days" claim pretty much true but Arndt followed it with the claim that "women are more likely to use weapons in domestic abuse, hence their violence can also be lethal". The entire paragraph implies all 75 men were killed by their female partners. In fact, only 27 of them were intimate partner homicides and the report has no data on the gender of the offenders.

This AIC report is a summary of all homicide data in Australia for 2012-2014. It doesn't go into much granular detail of any category. The most detailed report on domestic violence homicides in Australia is produced by the NSW Coroner's Court Domestic Violence Review Team. The data is limited to NSW but it covers a much longer period of time, the fourteen years between 2000 and 2014. The report gathers information from police investigations, court proceedings and Coroner's Court inquests, so it is thoroughly investigated and produced with no agenda. NSW is our most populated state and the crime rates in NSW are not significantly different to any other state or territory so it's reasonable to assume this is a fairly good representation of what happens across the entire country. In the entire fourteen years not one man was killed by an abusive female partner. Not one. But 159 women were killed by men who abused them. There are always aberrations in human activities, so it is entirely possible that there have been cases of abusive women killing their male partners in the Australia-wide data. But it would be almost unheard of for fourteen years of data in NSW to show significantly different characteristics to information from the rest of the country.

All violence matters and every victim should be believed and supported, regardless of gender. It would be utterly abhorrent to ignore or dismiss the victim of abuse only because they were male. It is indisputably true that men are subjected to domestic violence and unarguable that services should exist to support them and help them escape an unsafe situation. The reason it becomes important to debunk inflated claims about the prevalence and severity of male victimisation is only to ensure resources are not taken from the crushingly underfunded services required to save women's lives. Particularly when men's lives are not at risk from women. They are in far more danger from other men and resources to protect them should go where they are needed and not be diverted by the MRA's anti-women agenda.