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

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.