What about the men? White Ribbon, men and violence: a response to Dr Michael Flood by Men’s Health Australia

The White Ribbon Foundation is an organisation that works to prevent male violence towards women – a goal that is extremely worthy and worth supporting. The White Ribbon website states that “all forms of violence are unacceptable,” however in 2009 the organisation issued a document to it’s male Ambassadors which used erroneous ‘facts and statistics’ to downplay, diminish and report incorrectly about male victims of violence. These Ambassadors use federal government funding to take the White Ribbon message into regional, rural and remote communities. These significant errors could have led the Ambassadors, and through them the general public via federal funding, to be misled about the nature and dynamics of interpersonal violence in Australia.

Some of the dangerous myths about violence circulated in the document include claims that men are less likely than women to experience violence within family and other relationships; that we don’t yet know the impact of violence on men’s overall health; and that there is no evidence that male victims are less likely to report domestic violence than are female victims.

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The 'wage gap' myth rears its ugly head once again

The Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA) has issued a media release claiming that Australian workplaces discriminate against women because of an average gender wage difference between male and female graduates of $2,000. The source data cited actually found this difference was not due to discrimination but due to the fields of study chosen by males and females, along with other factors such as hours worked and type and location of employer.

Here is a copy of the media release along with our letter to the director of the EOWA in response.

Men's Health Australia Media Watch Report 2011

In November 2007, Greg Andresen was contracted by Men’s Health SA (MHSA – at that time the South Australian Men’s Health Alliance – SAMHA) to conduct a one-day-a-week Media Watch role on behalf of SAMHA and its collaborative partners, the Men’s Health Information & Resource Centre at the University of Western Sydney (MHIRC) and the Australasian Men’s Health Forum (AMHF). In July 2010, a fourth collaborative partner came on board to support the project – The Men’s Advisory Network (MAN) from Western Australia.

The Media Watch role involved the critique, analysis and, when appropriate, challenging of mass media statements and commentary and other forms of institutional, academic and government literature and media that:

• depicted men or boys or masculinity in an unfair, negative or disparaging way
• were misleading, inaccurate, or prejudicial towards men and boys
• detracted from a general positive affirmation of men, boys, and masculinity
• undermined the endeavour to approach men and boy’s health and issues in an intelligent, respectful, positive, equitable and constructive way.

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Monash academic retracts erroneous claim that DV is major cause of divorce

The following statement seeks to correct the public record with respect to some minor and inadvertent inaccuracies that were contained in the book  “Child Abuse and Family Law” that was published in 2007 by Allen and Unwin and co-authored with Professor Thea Brown.  The following material statement also seeks to correct the media release that was issued by Monash University's Media and Communications Unit in August 2009.

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AIC report ‘ignores key research on young people and domestic violence’

Attorney-General Robert McClelland and Minister for Justice Brendan O’Connor today released a new Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) report Children’s exposure to domestic violence in Australia.

In this paper, current knowledge about the extent of children’s exposure to domestic violence in Australia is described, along with the documented impacts that this exposure can have on children.

However, a leading men’s health organisation, Men’s Health Australia, says the report completely ignores the largest ever Australian survey of young people and domestic violence.

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