Report of Victoria's Royal Commission on Family Violence hardly surprises

When a lefty Labor government commissions a report into a "women's issue" like domestic violence, we have come to expect a regurgitation of the entrenched views of its feminist wing. We also anticipate a list of recommendations requiring expensive government programmes and new laws, along with a goodly dollop of "male-bashing" (pun not intended). In all these respects we can hardly claim to be disappointed with what came out of Victoria.

According to the Victorian Premier, implementing the report's recommendations will cost "many hundreds of millions of dollars". Despite all the money being thrown at this problem,it can be expected to have very little effect in actually reducing domestic violence levels.

The Royal Commission's report came up with no less than 227 recommendations, and Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews (without any detailed consideration) promptly responded by saying that he would implement all of them. Mr Andrews conceded there would be a massive cost, but said funding to stop violence was an "investment". "This will be many hundreds of millions of dollars," he said. "(But) family violence is costing us at least $3.1 billion each year, 40 per cent of police work, and how do you put a price on a life lost?"

The feminist line is embedded right through the report and includes the usual redefining of the English language, starting with the sisterhood's own definition of "violence".

Reference books like the Oxford Dictionary universally define violence along the lines of "behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something". The Royal Commission, however, continues a trend advocated by feminists (now embedded in Victoria's Family Violence Protection Act 2008) by defining violence to also include things like "emotional abuse", "economic abuse" and "controlling behaviour". (Is "nagging" controlling behaviour and therefore violence?) While abusive behaviour of any form is to be condemned, if it does not involve physical force, it is not in itself "violence" according to any accepted form of plain English.

The feminist line continues in the report with core assertions like "the causes of family violence are complex and include gender inequality and community attitudes towards women". The report also contains acts of faith like "there is no doubt that violence against women and children is deeply rooted in power imbalances that are reinforced by gender norms and stereotypes".

One would therefore think that (based on this ideology), if the economic and social status of Australian women could be raised to the level achieved in (say) Sweden (the nirvana of the left), the problem of family violence would be permanently solved. The only problem is that Scandinavian countries in general, and Sweden in particular, suffer some of the highest rates of partner violence against women.

The heavy emphasis on gender inequality being at the heart of family violence is a big exaggeration, though it certainly plays some part. Female violence perpetrated against male partners or violence involving same-sex partners can hardly be rationalised on the basis of "gender inequalities". Inequality in physical strength between the sexes is definitely a factor in cases of male violence against females but I don't think this is quite what the report had in mind.

On a positive note, the report does break from feminist rhetoric by acknowledging that a quarter of victims of domestic violence are male. It, however, does this somewhat cryptically and only indirectly (by saying that "in Victoria three-quarters of victims in family violence incidents attended by police are female"). While acknowledging that "the family violence system needs to respond more supportively to male victims of family violence", the report then goes on to disingenuously also add that "resources should not be diverted from women and children, who constitute the majority of victims". (Surely resources should go to the areas of greatest need irrespective of the victim's sex or age?)

The solutions to Victoria's domestic violence problem, put forward in the report's recommendations (and agreed to by Premier Andrews), are heavily bureaucratic in focus. The first is to implement a Common Risk Assessment Framework in order to deliver minimum standards, roles and responsibilities throughout Victorian agencies. The report also calls for family violence education programmes for police, and for more police resources to be devoted to family violence.

The Commission recommends the creation of seventeen Support and Safety Hubs to act as one-stop-shops for family violence victims. The report also called for specialist Family Violence Courts to be established across the state. It further wants the Victorian Government give priority to supporting victims through the expansion of the Safe-at-Home programme, including rental and mortgage subsidies as well as any benefits offered by advances in safety devices. Suitable case management as well as monitoring of perpetrators by police and the justice system is also recommended. The report also calls for increased emergency accommodation.

Dedicated funding for perpetrator programmes is recommended, along with better monitoring of attendance at men's behaviour change programmes. Employers probably cringed at the recommendation that Family Violence Leave should be introduced and made a paid entitlement for full-time employees.

Overall, the report's "solution" involves throwing large amounts of public money at the family violence problem, including a much enlarged special bureaucracy and a heap of expensive programmes that are unlikely to work. Much more police resources are also to be devoted to dealing with domestic violence, despite hundreds of police in Victoria having already been moved into 32 family violence units over the past three years. This is all at a time when state governments are bitterly complaining that there is insufficient money for public hospitals and schools.

The police are often the first on the scene to deal with incidents of domestic violence. Police officers will tell you that of all the incidents they go to, they most hate attending "domestics". The police see their job as stopping criminal activity, arresting the "bad guy" and being part of a successful prosecution. What they don't like about attending domestic violence incidents is that, after arresting and charging the perpetrator, the victim and the perpetrator commonly make-up later, so that the victim then refuses to testify and resumes cohabitation. The police see their time as having been wasted, and often the cycle of violence continues.

In this vein, much of the Royal Commission's report's emphasis on programmes to help female victims "escape" violent male partners is based on an exaggerated impression of victims' willingness or capacity to leave. Many victims (both female and male) strongly desire to keep their family together or may be desperate for companionship, so they won't readily leave. Lack of refuges or safe houses is not in most cases the main impediment to leaving an abusive partner, though such facilities need to be available (particularly for those without close family to take them in).

Men's behaviour-change programmes of the type being pushed by the Royal Commission are even less likely to be effective. To quote the report itself, "the currently offered Men's Behaviour Change programs are widely regarded as ineffective for high risk men who are treatment-resistant and show high levels of non-compliance. This problem is further complicated by the linkages between high risk family violence [and] drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness or mental disorder, and a personal history of neglect and abuse".

A further problem is that a disproportionate amount of family violence occurs in informal de-facto situations. In such circumstances, if the victim actually walks out, the violent partner may merely end up being recycled in a new relationship. Some female victims of domestic violence also seem attracted to domineering or violent partners, and in many cases will re-partner with another abusive male.

Experience around the world shows that there is no magic solution to domestic violence anywhere. At a personal level, the only solution to domestic violence, that works, is to not to marry or cohabit with a violent partner in the first instance. In this context it should be standard practice to disclose any criminal convictions for violence to prospective spouses before a marriage takes place, and persons with a history of domestic violence should be unable to sponsor an immigrant fiancé or spouse.

In my view the underlying problem with the report is that it is blinded by an ideology that is based on half-truths. Aside from gender inequality, important influences (substance abuse, mental illness, ethnicity, and broad societal attitudes to violence) get very little attention in the report despite being avenues that could usefully have been pursued to reduce violence levels. Rosie Battie gets mention in the report and was overwhelmingly supportive of it. Given that her son's tragic death at the hands of his father was found by the coroner to be due in large measure to her ex's untreated "delusional disorder", I have always felt that, despite her good work, Ms Battie could have done more to highlight mental illness as a cause of family violence.

As a conservative male, I don't think that domestic violence is a matter that either most men should have to apologise for, or that should be a cause for division between the sexes. The reality is that the vast majority of men, as well as women, are opposed to violence in the home, and traditional values apply a particular taboo to incidents where a man assaults a woman.

An EU study suggests that in individual countries "partner and non-partner violence do not take place in isolation and that this indicates the degree to which violence is prevalent both in public and in private life". Consequently domestic violence is part of a broader problem with violence in society, and should not be examined in isolation, as the Royal Commission sought to do.