“The reporting of the Australian Institute of Family Studies report has done us all a disservice. However, that flows from a misconceived question. The result is a widely reported perception which is unreliable, dangerously so.” Columnist HUGH SELBY worries about sustaining the myth of endemic male badness on flawed evidence. 

I’m afraid now. First time in my long life that the fear has started when I open my eyes and it lasts all day, especially when I’m out and about, mixing with others.

I’m not a parent in Gaza wondering whether my children will make it home from school, or in the Ukraine wondering whether my children will come back from the front, or in the Emperor Donnie’s domain where so far 514 children (under age 20) have been killed by guns in 2025. In the last year of a democratic presidency, 1400 of them went out with a bang.

The statistics for that gun violence in the MAGA land of milk and honey and Elon are stark, collected over more than a decade, and broken up into the sorts of categories that one would expect and understand, such as: deaths – wilful, malicious, accidental; injuries – same grouping; children under 11; teens; police deaths, police injuries, suspects – same grouping; defensive gun use; unintentional; murder-suicide; and suicides.

I’m a Canberra parent and grandparent and I’ve seen the latest statistical report from the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS), a national, government-funded body, about the increasing proclivity of Australian men to perpetrate family violence.

Here is how the ABC reported it online. The headline is “One in three Australian men report using intimate partner violence”. Yikes. I have two sons and one grandson: is one of them a past, present or future DV perpetrator?

Making it worse is that the rate of violence has increased. In less than a decade the rate increased from one in four to the current one in three.

We’ve had more than a decade of incessant media, political and special interest campaigns about treating others respectfully, the availability of refuges for DV victims, increasing police resources and criminal sanctions, education programs to eradicate violence, and marches. What has this led to? More, not less violence. At least, that’s the spin.

Among the men that I see going to work on the red tram, standing on the sidelines on a wintry morning, shivering, watching their children or grandchildren playing a ball game, picking up an item from an aisle in Bunnings, going on a bike ride with their primary school aged daughters to get some take-away dinner, one third of them are abusers, criminals hiding in plain sight.

Little wonder I’m frightened. It’s like the domino theory of my youth that explained the inexorable Communist advance, and the notion that smoking pot leads inevitably to ice, meth, etcetera: any abuse of one’s partner and children will lead to a tsunami of elder abuse. Guaranteed. I am a victim in waiting.

Let’s have a little look, shall we?

The AIFS report can be found here. 

It’s well set out and easy to follow. And the relevant chapter is just 16 pages, not a big ask for a paid journalist to read. Just for fun I typed in to Google, “one third of aussie men are abusers”. Do it and look at the long list of reputable media outlets that reported the outcome in the same way as ABC Online.

“Emotional abuse” is the most common form of violence reported in the AIFS study, with one third of those men between 18 and 65 owning up to making an intimate partner feel “frightened or anxious”. Physical violence is less than 10 per cent and violence in sex around 2 per cent.

One quarter of men reported two-way traffic; that is, they both gave to, and received from, their partner “violence” of one sort or another. 

The study defines “intimate partner violence” as, “Any behaviour within an intimate relationship (including current or past marriages, domestic partnerships or dates) that causes physical, sexual or psychological harm” .

The report explains that, respondents (all male) were presented with a series of questions following the prompt, “As an adult, how have you behaved towards a past or present partner?”, and asked to respond either “yes” or “no”. Respondents were also able to skip answering these questions. The questions included:

• Have you ever behaved in a manner that has made a partner feel frightened or anxious? (emotional type abuse)

• Have you ever hit, slapped, kicked or otherwise physically hurt a partner when you were angry? (physical violence)

• Have you ever forced a partner to have sex or made them engage in any sexual activity they did not want? (sexual abuse)”. 

There’s some basic information that my search of the report and “supplementary material” on the same online page did not reveal. This includes:

• What proportion of survey respondents chose not to answer those questions (both in this latest survey and the earlier one some years ago)? Further, we know nothing about their reasons for not answering. “Guilt” is only one reason. Other reasons include regarding the question as poorly phrased, and refusal to speculate as to what was in a partner’s mind.
• By what means were respondents assessing the partner’s fright or anxiety? Is this based on the partner saying, “You are making me anxious”, or the partner bursting into tears, or some assumption by the respondent? Survey questions seeking to gather hard evidence should avoid speculation.
• Why is “emotional abuse” being used as a synonym for “psychological abuse” (the term used in the definition quoted above)? Emotions and psychological conditions are not the same. For example, a person can be emotionally upset by one remark, but it can take many such remarks to cause a psychological injury.
• Why is the term “emotional abuse” being placed at the end of the question? A person of any gender may behave in a manner that might cause one partner, but not another, to be uncomfortable, to become emotionally upset. Such behaviour is not necessarily abuse. It may be better characterised as insensitive, inappropriate, rude, untimely. It might even, in the circumstances, be well deserved, apt, and appropriate.

Sadly, the question on “emotional abuse” is a right proper mess. So much so that the reporting of its responses does much harm and no good. Where the truth lies as to the prevalence of “male on partner psychological violence” will require a recasting of the question such that its ambit is much clearer.

Let’s try to better define the problem

It’s usually a problem when anyone sets out to cause injury to another, be that by physical or psychological means. It’s a special problem, one that defies the intent of “intimacy”, when this conduct occurs between two people who are supposed to be supporting each other.

“Abuse” means to act improperly, to be cruel and/or violent, to misuse, to have a bad purpose. It is a term that is much wider than applies in the current “domestic violence” context that limits it to physical (eg striking, choking, kicking, throwing, crushing), psychological (eg coercive mental control, frequent belittling, threats of physical injury), and sexual (eg unwanted, be that as to when, where, what and how).

“Abuse” extends to bullying, intimidation, treachery, and control over property. Many people who have gone through the pain of a relationship breakdown will grasp the notion of “abuse” in the context of disputes about property and child upbringing. 

On the other hand, humans being a complex mix of ever changing physical capabilities, personality and sex drive, there is the certainty of frustrations, anger, disbelief, inadequacies etcetera, being vented by and at partners. After all, he or she is the one “closest” to us.

Sharing bad news, venting, blowing off steam, cussing and accusations are often regretted, but they are not the equivalent of an intent to inflict an injury. 

Referring to the survey question, “Have you ever behaved in a manner that has made a partner feel frightened or anxious? (emotional type abuse)” consider when a breadwinner comes home and says to their partner: “I was sacked today. How are we going to pay the mortgage?” If this is a typical two-income family unit, then the partner will “feel frightened or anxious”. But it is not “emotional abuse”.

The categories in the gun violence statistics above are simple and easy to understand. By contrast, the issue of what constitutes psychological abuse and what doesn’t is much harder to define. 

I suspect that future surveys will need to give the respondents more guidance as to what activities might be such abuse and what indicia will turn something from an outburst to abuse.

To be afraid or not depends on the question

The reporting of the AIFS report has done us all a disservice. However, that reporting flows from a misconceived question in the survey. The result is a widely reported perception which is unreliable, dangerously so.

The AIFS team is to be applauded for taking a long-term approach to measuring our health and welfare. They should continue that work.

But, it is essential that they rethink and then rephrase the questions that they are asking. There is that trite saying that to get the right answer one must first ask the right question.

I’m still afraid, but the reason has changed. My initial fear was that among my male bloodline, not one in four, but one in three would be an abuser.

That fear has gone. There is no good evidence to support it. There is, so it seems, no good evidence of the prevalence within relationships of one partner seeking to psychologically injure the other.

Now I have another fear: that those who need to ponder these issues and resolve them will instead dig in, desperate to sustain the empowering myth of endemic male badness and the river of funding to them that flows from its acceptance.

Author Hugh Selby is a CityNews columnist, principally focused on legal affairs. His free podcasts on “Witness Essentials” and “Advocacy in court: preparation and performance” can be heard on the best known podcast sites.