– Kicking a man when he is down.
Last Christmas, one of our major suicide prevention groups had a call from a very distressed, suicidal man. The counsellor did his best to support him and arranged to keep in touch. But there was no answer to the counsellor’s follow up calls. Following their organisation’s duty of care rules, the counsellor made a call to NSW police, fearing the man was at imminent risk of harm.
The police reaction was shocking. “Is there a female partner who could be at risk? Is he likely to hurt her,” asked the police officer, whose immediate concern was not checking on the man in crisis but rather assessing the risk that the suicidal man could be violent.
Welcome to the latest triumph of feminist policy innovation:
A system that looks at the man standing on the edge of the abyss — the group dying by suicide at three times the rate of women — and decides the most urgent question to ask is not ‘How do we save you?’ but ‘Have you been hurting women?’
It is a policy of breathtaking intellectual dishonesty and moral inversion.
It all started in Victoria but could well become official policy across the country. The 2021 Victorian Government MARAM Framework document is prescribed for over 6,000 organisations and approximately 392,000 professionals in Victoria, including mental health, drug/alcohol, homelessness, family and health services.
The Framework is based on the premise that significant numbers of men who commit suicide each year have a history of using family violence. Their official practice document guides practitioners “to screen for suicide threat in the context of perpetration (and vice versa).” Professionals are advised to explore violence history and controlling behaviours when assessing suicidal men, especially in separation/distress contexts.
“Responding to suicide risk should consider the risk of the person using violence to themselves, their family and community,” explains the document.
The Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) has pushed a similar line, recommending screening male clients for DV perpetration in mental health, alcohol/drug and crisis services – precisely the settings where suicidal men often present. “We are missing opportunities to identify domestic violence perpetrators,” proclaims an article in The Conversation from Silke Meyer, Nicola Helps and Kate Fitz-Gibbon, authors of the AIC policy article.
And what happens if they identify a suicidal perpetrator? The Orwellian list of consequences will leave you reeling…
When a suicidal man reaches out for help and is identified (or merely suspected) as a potential perpetrator, MARAM recommends “keeping perpetrators in view.”
Here’s what that actually means in practice:
- Ongoing monitoring and oversight — Once flagged, you are now officially “in view.” Your mental health crisis is logged, tracked, and monitored across the system.
- Contributing to accountability — Formal risk assessment, mandatory documentation of your behaviours, and coordinated responses are designed to make it much harder for you to minimise, deny, or continue any alleged violence.
- System-wide responsibility — Every relevant organisation, including mental health services, alcohol/drug services, and crisis lines, now have a duty to keep you “in view.”
- Information Sharing — Your confidential discussions about suicide, depression, or relationship breakdown can be legally shared, without your consent, with other authorised services, including specialist Men’s Behaviour Change Programs.
- Accountability-focused referrals — You’ll likely be referred to a perpetrator intervention program, even while you’re still in acute suicidal crisis.
- Protecting victims and children — The overriding priority becomes ensuring any current or former partner and children are protected from you, the man at risk of ending his own life.
Isn’t that just extraordinary? This draconian system has been proudly in place in Victoria for five years now and received zero scrutiny – such is public interest in the fate of men, even suicidal men.
Zealots in our health services have proved all too keen to follow this advice and presume that suicidal men are perpetrators of violence.
I talked last week to a man who sought help from a mental health service in Dandenong, Victoria. The suicidal man had lost contact with his children despite the Victorian police having charged his partner with two counts of assault against him.
I’ve seen the desperate text messages he wrote to the service, complaining about his treatment. “One of the health workers kept pushing me asking if I’d ever hit a woman, saying, ‘You must have done something, you must have hit her.’ She went on and on, informing me that this was the first step to getting better by acknowledging the truth, even after I had shown them the mother’s charge sheet from Victorian Police.”
The health worker pushed so hard it turned into a loud verbal argument lasting over 15 minutes. “I ended up walking away in tears. This left me more suicidal than when I had started using their services almost a year earlier,” the shattered man explained.
Massaging the statistics.
The policies are in place and already adding to the burden of men in crisis. But what data supports this mighty feminist edifice? Surely, we must question this assumed link between suicide and domestic violence and seek out the research basis for that vital connection.
That’s where the plot thickens…..
Almost a year ago, I exposed misleading research from the Australian Institute of Family Studies which claimed one in three men reported being violent towards their partners. Somehow the Institute forgot to mention in their report on this Ten to Men study that almost a third (30.9%) of the men surveyed were victims of similar violence, which included both physical and emotional abuse. AIFS’s reported data excluded all the men who were victims but not perpetrators of violence – a total of 355 forgotten survivors.
Almost 100K viewers enjoyed our video of Senator Malcolm Roberts grilling the squirming AIFS researchers about this oversight.
Funnily enough, it turns out that this notorious Ten to Men study is also responsible for one of the key statistics being used to underpin the claimed association between suicide and perpetration of domestic violence – namely the finding that suicidal men are 47% more likely than other men to become violent towards their partners.
So, lots of suicidal men later become wife-beaters, this research suggests. Note we are not usually talking about any sort of physical abuse at all. Most of the DV perpetrated by these men is emotional abuse. Nearly a third (32%) of men in the Ten to Men research reported they had made a partner feel “frightened or anxious”, while 9% reported “hitting, slapping, kicking or otherwise physically hurting a partner when angry.”
Get your head around that. Here’s this key statistic being used to introduce draconian measures which could push a vulnerable man over the edge. All based on the claim that suicidal men pose a risk – and it turns out that risk could simply be feeling anxious or nervous. Who of us could honestly say we have never made our partners anxious?
My partner plays double bass in a community orchestra and has suffered considerable anxiety wondering if I would explode during the endless Welcome to Country ceremonies that for years introduced their concerts. Anxiety comes with the territory of knowing a loved one all too well.
But getting back to the AIFS researchers and their Ten to Men research. Amazingly we now discover these zealots have done it again. Whilst producing that magical 47% figure, it turns out they left out inconvenient results which blur the ideological goal of targeting men for their violence. They forgot to mention that many of these suicidal men end up as victims of violent women rather than perpetrators.
You see, the study questioned all men about both perpetration and victimisation and found almost a third (30.9%) reported being victims, and 25% reported both – bidirectional violence. That data was not published, nor did the researchers choose to publish the likelihood of suicidal men experiencing abuse from a woman, nor to release the figures to allow others to make this calculation.
More bizarre still, this 47% claim is about suicidal men potentially becoming violent in the future when they weren’t in the past. AND YET… they use this cooked-up statistic to target suicidal men about their current and previous relationships. Asking the poor vulnerable blokes about beating up wives and partners, past and present. The whole thing is from Cloud Cuckoo Land.
At least there is one Australian professional who is brave enough to call this rubbish out. Stan Korosi is a Melbourne clinical sociologist who specialises in parental alienation and family conflict. His decades of supporting men alienated from their children makes him very sensitive to malicious intent of research he describes as “deeply flawed, best described as misleading, and gender-discriminatory for ignoring the roles women may play in perpetrating Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) and coercive control.”
Writing on his parental alienation platform, Dialogue in Growth, Korosi asks: “How does the AIFS justify demonising suicidal men as IPV perpetrators using research bias to demonstrate its preconceived conclusion?” He concludes that AIFS researchers had already decided that men are violent because of their gender. “They were already addicted to the extremist gendered violence cult’s dogma, and their research program was designed to confirm their adherence to it.”
And it’s not just the AIFS’s research. That’s simply the latest data being used to justify this targeting of suicidal men. The 2021 MARAM Framework was based on research based on incomplete, often inaccurate coronial records, death reviews and police reports which include, of course, the current tsunami of apprehended violence orders, many based on false or trivial allegations. A rough estimate suggests that between 150,000 – 250,000 men each year are acquiring this stain on their record, with a cumulative total of almost 2 million men since these laws were introduced in the 1980s.
This entire policy edifice rests on remarkably shonky foundations: dubious and incomplete coronial and police records riddled with false allegations and misidentification, combined with the deliberately deceptive Ten to Men research.
The result is both tragic and grotesque. What was sold to the public as “protecting women from dangerous men” has been weaponised into a system that treats suicidal and distressed men not as patients who desperately need help, but as presumptive perpetrators who must be screened, monitored, and “kept in view”.
In the name of women’s safety, we are actively denying the most vulnerable men in Australia the simple human compassion they cry out for — and pushing some of them closer to the edge.