Domestic violence - a statistical 'shock and awe' campaign?

A recent Canberra Times article, lamenting the lack of affordable low cost public housing for poor families, featured a couple with young children who were forced to live in a caravan. A "housing worker" was quoted as suggesting to the mother, "If there was family violence, you could get a house straight away": i.e. claim you are a (female) victim and (within the context of your immediate needs) the "world is your oyster".

Male victims (of anything) need not apply - if Schapelle Corby was Steve Corby, would Australia care less?

The Supported Accommodation Assistance Program (SAAP) is yet another key source of statistics on so-called "family violence". What the SAAP data does not show however, is how many women were encouraged to falsely claim they were fleeing family violence, or indeed what the nature of the "violence" was, so that they could receive priority treatment. Using SAAP data as a measure of violence against women is badly flawed because it can be misconstrued (again with an apparent deliberate intent) to reflect a statistic illustrating the number of women and children fleeing family violence. Often SAAP data, in fact, reflects the large number of homeless men seeking emergency accommodation. In this context, the real "SAP" is Australian society.

By both omission and commission, Australia is being sold a very gross and socially dangerous statistical lie - offered up a "poisoned chalice" - that is serving only the interests of its creators, and those legions, who have so readily signed up to the fictional notion that every fourth female face we see each day is secretly living in stark terror and fear of "family violence". Some women unfortunately are. So are some men. What must be untangled so that effective measures can be put into place is the real incidence of such violence from the fictional statistical misrepresentations that are serving an entirely different purpose.

The mantle of mass victimhood casts a long and very dark shadow that too often conceals the very location of the murder of truth and where propaganda is granted the breath of life. Almost all political tyrannies have their origin in segregating societies into the conceptual equivalent of "good and evil", "angels and demons", "victims and perpetrators", “four legs good, two legs bad”. There is never a middle ground. Nowadays, "Muslim and terrorist" become increasingly synonymous and dangerously interchangeable notions. So too, do the notions of "male and perpetrator", "female and victim".

When liars are afoot in society, their first weapon of choice is statistical "proof".

Yep - no doubt about it - Colin must be Chinese. After all, statistics never lie.