Blink and you might have missed it but our new Prime Minister said something deeply shocking this week.
“Women must be respected,” Malcolm Turnbull proclaimed, while announcing $100 million in funding to tackle violence against women. “Disrespecting women is unacceptable.”
I know, right…? How embarrassing.
We live in a country where the Prime Minister blatantly demonises men and wastes public money on policy gimmicks for the girls. A country where there is bipartisan support from the Opposition, who have also quenched their thirst on the feminist koolaid.
Or so says Miranda Devine and The Daily Telegraph.
In her column today, Devine slammed the Government’s family violence initiatives and laid blame for violence against women squarely at the feet of women themselves. It’s only ‘unsuitable women’ (AKA poor ones) who get abused by their partners, she argues. Unsuitable women who have kids with “a string of feckless men” because they want to get their grubby, broken hands on more welfare money.
Think that’s an exaggeration of Devine’s argument? I sincerely wish that were the case.
You can read her column in full, here.
Now, indignant cries of ‘not all men are violent!’ and ‘what about violence against men?’ are commonplace on the pages of our daily tabloid newspapers. Any feminist who has ever opened their mouth or put finger to keyboard on the issue of violence against women, does so in full knowledge that this sort of vitriol will come back at them.
Of course not all men are violent, feminists respond in exasperation. And of course all victims of violence deserve support, treatment and care, we calmly explain. But eliminating gender from our analysis of family violence would leave us with zero hope of ever actually addressing the problem. Because prevention requires us to understand why the perpetrators of family violence are almost always male and why so many women are at risk of becoming — or already are — victims.