Social Services Minister Christian Porter has recently declared (ABC) that domestic violence in Australia is “almost overwhelmingly, almost exclusively” perpetrated by men against women and girls. The Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence reports (Key Family Violence Data, page 57) that three-quarters of victims in family violence incidents attended by police were female and 77 per cent of perpetrators recorded by police were male. This figure seems to substantiate the prevailing belief that domestic violence is a “gendered” issue, overwhelmingly directed at women and perpetrated by men. The only problem with this view is that the official statistics actually contradict it.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, only 5% of men who experienced violence by their current partner have reported the incident to the police, in comparison to 20% reporting rate for abused women. Considering the difference in the rates of reporting, the victim/perpetrator roles are approximately evenly distributed between the genders on per-incident basis. Comparison of the number of reported incidents to the number of reported offenders, by gender, reveals that half as many women offend as men, but when they do offend they do so at twice the incident-rate.

This result may still over-represent male offenders due to the apparent gender-bias built into the ABS survey’s definition of violence. “Violence is defined as any incident involving the occurrence, attempt or threat of either physical or sexual assault”, where Physical Threat “Is an attempt to inflict physical harm or a threat or suggestion of intent to inflict physical harm, that was made face-to-face where the person believes it was able to and likely to be carried out. Physical threat includes incidents where a person was threatened in their line of work.” A similar definition applies to Sexual Threat. The inclusion of the subjectively assessed threat of violence as actual violence is in itself problematic, but it may also cause significant statistical distortion if women are more likely to feel threatened or take verbal threats and suggestions of sexual nature more seriously than men. I am unable to precisely quantify the effect of this bias on the published results, but the research conducted by Dr Elizabeth Bates at the University of Cumbria reveals that pro-female bias in relation to domestic violence statistics is significant and systemic (see also University of Cumbria and British Psychological Society). A longitudinal study of differences in frequency of intimate partner violence in the United States (American Journal of Public Health) may be a good indicator of actual gender representation among offenders and victims. The study has found that in nonreciprocally violent relationships “women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases” as reported by both women (67.7%) and men (74.9%).

The estimated distribution of victim/perpetrator roles on per-incident basis should not be taken absolutely, as there may still be differences in the severity of abuse. One way to address this question is to consider gender in association with the rates of domestic and family homicide. In this category there is a huge discrepancy between the figures published by the Australian Institute of Criminology and those reported in the news. AIC reports that in the period between 1989–2012 only one in three domestic homicide perpetrators were female. In 2017, Domestic Violence Awareness Australia (DVAA) has reviewed all domestic homicides reported in the national news-media, showing that twice as many females have committed domestic homicide as males. Since it does not seem that 2017 was an exceptional year for domestic homicide, the statistics published by AIC may be grossly inaccurate.

Some discrepancy may be explained by a different way of counting the incidents, with AIC counting homicides committed in the relevant period, and DVAA counting homicides at the time when charges were laid. It is conceivable that in some cases the charges were successfully defended, in which case AIC would not have counted the associated death as a case of domestic homicide. Since conviction rates in cases of homicides are generally high, this is unlikely to be a source of significant error.

A recent analysis of murders by Queensland University of Technology researcher Dr Belinda Parker has shown that “women are more likely to kill when they are motivated by gain” rather than self-defence. In every case examined “the female killers were not the victims of abuse by their husbands.” These findings contradict the claims made by the NSW Coroner’s Court that “In almost every case, even where a man was killed by a woman, the murder involved an abusive male partner.”

In 2017, there were 66 victims of domestic or family violence homicide in Australia (39% of 170). Below are 31 cases of domestic homicide committed by female perpetrators in 2017 that I was able to verify:

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