Naming men matters in law. Sex-neutral language lets policy obscure who is harmed and who does the harm.
Family and sexual violence in Australia follows a sexed pattern. Women are disproportionately its victims, men predominate among its perpetrators. This is what the data shows, consistently, across state and national sources, provided that data is properly disaggregated by sex, and it is the starting point for a material-feminist reading of family violence policy: sex is treated as a fixed, material fact with real social consequences, not as an identity that can be dissolved into a symmetrical account of harm. On this view, male violence against women is a structural feature of a hierarchy built on sex, not a problem that affects men and women in similar ways.
A submission from the Women’s Action Alliance Tasmania on the state’s family violence reforms bill, and a national submission from the Affiliation of Australian Women’s Advocacy Alliances to the Second Action Plan consultation, both apply this analysis, at different levels of government, to different instruments. What the analysis itself requires of policy and legislation is worth setting apart from the specific detail either submission addresses.
Naming versus obscuring
Policy and legislative drafting on family violence has increasingly moved toward sex-neutral language. The premise behind this move is that neutral language is more careful, inclusive and precise. Applied to family violence, it does the opposite, however: it replaces a real, asymmetrical, sex-based pattern with an abstraction that assumes symmetry, and the response built on top of that abstraction, whether it is a data collection method, a perpetrator program, or a court’s working assumptions, ends up addressing a different problem to the one actually occurring, treating a man and a woman as equally likely to be the perpetrator when the evidence does not support that.
Sex needs to be named in the instruments themselves, not left to be inferred from context. A bill’s substantive provisions can be drafted in sex-neutral terms and still carry a preamble stating who is harmed and who does the harm, as Victoria’s family violence legislation already does. A national plan can distinguish family and male sexual violence from a single undifferentiated category of sex-based violence, and require that outcomes for women be measured as women’s outcomes rather than folded into aggregate figures that erase the pattern being tracked. Where that naming is absent, the policy built underneath it is working from a failed premise.
Misidentification, female-only spaces and unnamed perpetrators
Three further problems become established once this analysis is taken seriously, and they recur across both the state and national material.
Misidentification of women as perpetrators is one. When police and courts operate without a clear, sex-informed understanding of the pattern of family violence, women who have resisted or retaliated against male violence directed at them are more easily read as co-offenders rather than victims, a predictable consequence of removing sex-based analysis from the analytical frame that frontline officers and courts are meant to apply.
Female-only spaces and services are a second. Refuges, rape crisis centres and recovery services depend on remaining female-only in staffing and delivery for the safety and recovery of the women using them, a dependency that only makes sense once the harm being recovered from is understood as sex-based violence, committed by males. Where policy treats the category of person needing protection as unsexed, the case for keeping such services female-only becomes harder to sustain, even though the underlying structural need has not changed.
The third is a avoidance, in official communication, of naming men as the acting subject. Reporting on male violence against women routinely omits the perpetrator altogether, so that a man’s actions become a woman’s misfortune. Government material on sex-based violence has been written without addressing male perpetrators at all, a consistent pattern of institutions declining to complete the sentence that their own data would otherwise require them to write.
Two instruments, different approaches, one analysis
The submissions differ deliberately on how quickly the definition of family violence should extend beyond partner relationships, to cover, for example, violence against mothers by sons or abuse of older women by family members. AAWAA’s submission on the National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children argues this should be named as a distinct harm now; the Tasmanian submission argues for a time-limited review before Tasmania’s family violence statute is amended to include it.
A bill amending a specific statute has to work within that statute’s existing architecture of relationships and definitions, and a considered review is the responsible way to change that architecture. A national strategy carries no such constraint: its purpose is to name problems and direct funding toward them. The same sex-based analysis, applied to two different instruments, produces two different procedural asks, taken side-by-side, the submissions show that analysis holding steady across different levels of government.
Read both AAWAA’s submission on the National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children and WAAT’s submission on the state’s Family Violence Act Amendment Bill, below.