The Perils of Ideology

Erin Pizzey

With special guests:

• Erin Pizzey
• Mark Sutton and
• Susan E. Block.

In May 2007 Dads on the Air interviewed the founder of the world’s first refuge for battered women, Erin Pizzey. This interview was circulated far and wide, making it one of the most publicised broadcasts in DOTA’s history. As the Australian Government has recently been raising the issue of domestic violence from a one-sided ideological perspective, including the establishment of the National Council to Prevent Violence Against Women and Children, we thought it would be timely to re-broadcast the Erin Pizzey interview to try and bring some balance and rationality to the domestic violence debate. Here is a copy of our media release from May 2007:

Domestic violence is not a gender issue, says the founder of the world’s first refuge for battered women. Back in the UK from Bahrain where she recently opened the first purpose-built shelter for women and children in the Arab world, Erin Pizzey spoke today with the Dads on the Air radio program on radio 2GLF, Liverpool.

Ms Pizzey said that domestic violence treatment has to move out of the courts into the mental health arena, “because most domestic violence is [mutual] - both parties are violent. One party may not be physically violent to the other but in those relationship addiction situations they don’t leave each other. The violence is perpetual. It’s quite simple: if children are born into violent families, both boys and girls will be infected.” She believes eventually we will have to concentrate on an alternative strategy of love and hope for these problem families. We will have to abandon the model of idealising the “victim”, demonising the “perpetrator” and politicising the issues.

Asked what she thinks of current domestic violence treatment programs, Ms Pizzey replied, “They basically miss because they’re politically based. The programs are there to punish men better. Well, you can’t do that. There’s no recognition that women can be equally complicit in the violence. All women going into refuges, which are largely feminist, are told they’re victims. It doesn’t matter what happens: if she murders a man she’s a victim, if she batters and abuses him, she’s still a victim. And that is getting us nowhere.”

Ms Pizzey also talked about the “Violence Against Women – Australia Says No” campaign that portrays perpetrators as male and victims as female. Asked whether the campaign does more harm than good, she said, “Absolutely, because it’s a lie apart from anything else.” She went on to talk about the problems male victims face in society. “You can wake up one morning and find out you’re involved with a nightmare, and then there’s the nightmare of trying to get out of it. A woman waking up with a nightmare next to her has all sorts of avenues for escape, and immediate sympathy and protection. But just as likely it’s going to be a man, and he is going to get ridiculed and laughed at. Just like my father [who] was six-foot-four and my mother was a traditional four-footnine. No one would ever believe what my mother got up to behind the front door.”

A complete transcript of the interview with Erin Pizzey can be found at http://dadsontheair.net/shows/pizzey.htm.

Also on today’s program we feature another wonderful contribution by Mark Sutton from Liberal Arts Radio in the US. Alec Baldwin took a lot of heat after an angry voicemail to his daughter was leaked back in 2007. In his recently released book about Parental Alienation, A Promise to Ourselves, he confides that he was suicidal after the voicemail incident. Susan E. Block, a family law attorney and the former Administrative Judge of the Family Court of St. Louis County, looks at the problems facing non-custodial parents within the family law system, such as excessive child support payments and unenforced visitation, that lead to depression, debt, imprisonment, and even suicide. On a more positive note, she also discusses new solutions that are being implemented in the US state of Missouri. More at http://www.liberalartsradio.com.

We also discuss the recent release of statistics by the Australian Institute of Criminology, correcting an error in its National Homicide Monitoring Program 2006-07 Annual Report. The original report stated that 7 homicides involved a mother and 15 involved male family members. The corrected report states that 11 homicides involved a mother and 11 homicides involved a male family member. When the category of ‘male family member’ is broken down, we see that only 5 perpetrators were fathers, while another 5 five were de-facto partners of the mother who lived with the child (one father murdered two children). Importantly, no child victims were killed by a complete stranger in 2006–07. This means that only 24% of child homicide perpetrators in Australia are fathers, contrary to what we read regularly in the media.

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