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

Many more men commit homicide, whether of an intimate partner or otherwise, but the gender that is disproportionately targeted is male, not female.

Men kill, and are violent, at greater rates than women, and that's why they are more likely to be the perpetrators of domestic violence, not because of a relationship between the sexes.

And even though they are in the minority, women also kill women, as well as men. If men are driven to kill because of gender, what are women driven by?

That men kill at greater rates than women is not a "bug," it is actually a feature of how we've survived as a species.

Men have for evolutionary reasons acted violent, because violence is necessary to survive in a violent world, and there has been a division of labour where half the species is given to nurture, and the other to protecting the nurturer.

Rather than being designed to be violent towards women, men tend to be protective of them, because ultimately it is women and children-their family grouping's future-that they are protecting. And their violence tends to be directed towards other males who they see as predatory.

A woman shelters from the rain under an umbrella while crossing a street in Sydney, Australia on Oct. 6, 2022. (Muhammad Farooq/AFP via a Getty Images)

And that is what you are seeing evidence of in the statistics.

It is partly this instinct that leads to the gender misdiagnosis being propagated. Because men are protective of women, they instinctively feel more aggrieved when a woman is harmed than a man, and as a result are embarrassed to push back against the narrative because they feel ashamed, even though it had nothing to do with them.

There are further wrinkles the popular analysis ignores that show wealth, education, and ethnicity can be factors with a larger effect than gender.

The murder rate is lowest in the Australian Capital Territory (average of 0.74 per thousand per year), and highest in the Northern Territory (average 6.98 per hundred thousand).

Victoria is the second lowest (1.08), then there is a jump up to Tasmania (1.23), then a further jump to New South Wales (1.29), then South Australia (1.33) followed by Queensland (1.43) and Western Australia (1.49).