Before we call it a ‘crisis,’ what is the true situation behind domestic violence?

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese would have been better off not attending the Violence Against Women Rally in Canberra.

Not just because he got some avoidable bad press, but because the whole idea of the rally was flawed from the start. He should not have given it tacit support.

First, the bad press. If you missed it, he reduced the organiser, Sarah Williams, to tears accusing her of refusing to let him or Senator Katy Gallagher speak.

"That's a lie, that's a full-out lie," she said.

Then Mr. Albanese tried to press on while she was being comforted by fellow protestors. Not a good look for a man when you are making claims about "gendered" violence.

Second, to the bad policy and philosophy behind the protest.

The claim that domestic violence is all about toxic masculinity and misogyny is wrong, and taking that idea seriously stops us from confronting the real reasons for domestic violence and lures politicians into making all sorts of ludicrously unrealistic promises.

Stopping "men's violence against women" is in the same category as the promise by a previous Australian Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke that "no child would live in poverty?"

So, while hopelessly utopian, that is the demand inevitably made at these protests.

But it's not only Albo who has bowed to the power of the gendered crowd. Both sides of politics have made promises and launched enquiries based on the presupposition that for some reason men kill women because they are women.

Maybe some do, but it is likely to be in very rare cases. Behaving as though this is a universal truth, and targeting your resources at an imaginary threat is a waste of those resources, and ignores the real problems.

Gender is not a major motivator for violence

According to the National Homicide Monitoring Program over the period since 1989, on average twice as many men were killed as women. Over the same period, on average, 86 percent of killers were male.