Victoria’s female-led government seeks to reprogram men

Australia’s Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan announced last week the creation of a new office in her government called the “Parliamentary Secretary for Men’s Behaviour Change.”

‘Building respectful relationships’

Allan tapped fellow Labor Party member MP Tim Richardson for the role, which will explore how to reprogram men so that they are more “respectful” towards women.

“Tim Richardson will become Parliamentary Secretary for Men’s Behaviour Change, continuing the Allan Labor Government’s priority to make Victoria a safer place for women and children and work to end the tragedy of deaths of Victorian women at the hands of men,” the premier stated. “This is the first position of its kind in Australia – and will focus largely on the influence the internet and social media have on boys’ and men’s attitudes towards women and building respectful relationships.”

For his part, Richardson slammed those who he said had “pretty hectic reactions'' to the announcement. He said his office will be “modelling positive role models for boys and men and ensuring we break away from gendered based stereotypes and building respectful relationships.”

Victoria: A mostly female government

Allan assumed office in September last year following the resignation of Daniel Andrews. She selected a cabinet of 12 women and six men, making the Allan administration a mostly female government. Mainstream media were also soon crowing that the Victorian Parliament achieved “gender parity” with 64 male and 64 female MPs.

Are women more violent than men in relationships?

Allan’s initiative to change men’s behavior drew criticism and mockery. Some pointed out that the Allan administration has no stated plans to change women’s behaviors despite female violence in relationships.

An Australian study in 2017 found that men in relationships experience higher rates of emotional and physical abuse than women.

The research is joined by 270 empirical studies and 73 reviews that have found women are at least as physically aggressive as men in relationships. In teenage intimate relationships, girls have been found to be nearly twice as physically violent toward boys than vice-versa. 

Women do, however, sustain more physical injuries resulting from spousal violence than men.

Expert: 'Women beat men'

University of Haifa Prof. Zeev Weinstock, considered one of the world’s foremost experts on violence between men and women, reported these controversial findings before the Israeli Knesset in 2017:

For almost 50 years we have known that men's violence towards women takes place in similar proportions to the violence that women use against men in intimate relationships, in almost every culture and society that we know from traditional societies to liberal Western societies.

In addition, we know that in the motivations for violence, there is no difference between men and women. For the same reasons that men beat women, women beat men. The results are different, because of the differences between men and women, and men's physical endurance - they are injured less and therefore arrive less to the emergency rooms. So the visibility of the problem is very high in the case of women, but the motivations and the violent behavior are not a peculiarity of either particular gender.

Weinstock added that the same is true even in Arab societies, despite popular perception, but that "[t]he system today is structured to deal with the violence of men against women, and it does not intervene in cases where women are violent towards men.”

“Even in cases where women are violent toward men, the women are always treated as if they are the victim, and the victim is treated as if he were the aggressor,” he stated.

Indeed, social experiments have found that bystanders who witness a man being physically violent against a woman are more likely to intervene but will stand back and even express amusement if the roles are reversed.

Is research on female aggression being censored?

But publishing such findings has become taboo. In 1980, when evidence of equality in intimate violence began to surface and threatened the feminist narrative of an “oppressive patriarchy,” researchers “faced not only criticism but also a barrage of abuse, falsehoods and threats from women's advocates that is now well documented.”

Researcher Kate Fillion wrote in her 1997 book Lip Service: The Myth of Female Virtue in Love, Sex, and Friendship of a COVID-era suppression of scientific evidence:

Currently, findings on all types of female physical and sexual aggression are being suppressed; academics who do publish their research are subjected to bitter attacks and outright vilification from some colleagues and activists, and others note the hostile climate and carefully omit all data on female perpetrators from their published reports.