A door that wouldn’t open
When I first approached DVNSW, I wasn’t looking to start a dispute. I reached out professionally, sharing evidence and lived experience as a male victim-survivor of DV. There was no reply. When I later left a measured, factual comment on their public page, it was removed and I was blocked. This reinforced what their website implied – DVNSW actively denies the survivor experiences of male victims.
That one moment captured something much larger: a system that listens only to those who already speak its language, and quietly sidelines anyone who brings evidence outside the culturally approved ideological framework. It is a system built around a single, approved story – and victims who fall outside that story are excluded.
Excluded from help.
Excluded from recognition.
Excluded from visibility.
I am one of those victims. And I’m certain I’m not alone.
NSW isn’t funding a domestic‑violence system – it’s funding a worldview
A government‑funded peak body must by definition represent all victim‑survivors. Yet DVNSW explicitly requires its members to operate “within an intersectional feminist framework.” It is written plainly on their website, and their Good Practice Guidelines embed the same theoretical foundation. They are not trying to hide their gender or ideological bias.
Their “About” page reinforces this lineage, tracing the organisation’s identity to the Women’s Refuge Movement and listing intersectional feminism as a core organisational value.
None of this is hidden; it is stated proudly. And while feminist analysis has contributed enormously to understanding certain forms of harm, the issue here is not feminism – it is monoculture.
A publicly funded peak body that enforces an ideological entry requirement cannot, by definition, represent the full diversity of victims. A real system must begin with identifying behaviours, not beliefs. With harm, not theory. With victims, not ideology.
And when a system pre‑believes one narrative, it also becomes an amplifier – the exact environment in which indirect, third‑party‑dependent aggression does the most damage.
How a single story shapes every decision
1. The first minute of contact decides the next twelve months
Frontline responders often make quick judgments. If the “dominant narrative” in training materials is that men perpetrate and women are harmed, those judgments tend to follow the ideologically approved script.
ANROWS has repeatedly warned that misidentification – especially in cases where both partners allege harm – is a known, documented problem. Their national research emphasises the need for pattern‑based assessment, not gut instinct.
NSW’s own Safety Action Meeting Manual outlines how early decisions shape everything that follows. Once a case is funnelled into the wrong pathway, it is remarkably difficult to correct.
2. The risk tools only look for one pattern of abuse
NSW’s tools were built to spot direct aggression – the kind that leaves marks. Yet the psychology is clear: female offenders are more likely to use indirect, reputation‑based, third‑party‑dependent tactics – “concern‑framed” allegations, reputational attacks, triangulation, and administrative misuse. These strategies work only when others believe them, and when institutions pre‑believe one narrative, indirect aggression is amplified, not filtered.
If we don’t ask about these patterns explicitly, they remain invisible on paper – and victims remain invisible in practice.
Not only that – our current ideologically framed system risks amplifying harm by giving institutional support and resources to one mode of abuse – the type psychology tells us is preferred by female abusers.
3. Male victims and the quiet problem of non‑recognition
Male victim‑survivors approaching peak‑body‑aligned services are confronted by referral pathways that assume they are perpetrators, not victims. This is retraumatising, and compounds the institutional amplification of the abuse they’ve suffered at the hands of their intimate partner.
NSW Communities and Justice now acknowledges publicly that male victim‑survivors face credibility barriers, social stigma, and service gaps. But this belated recognition only underscores how deeply the existing system design is shaped by a single ideological frame.
Male victims are retraumatised by institutions, who effectively fund amplification of their abusers’ tactics, and back it with the State legitimised violence.
My own case – and why the system’s design matters
When I reported the violence I had endured, police refused to take a statement, review evidence, or speak to witnesses. They never retrieved CCTV footage of an assault I reported before it was overwritten. They defaulted instantly to the assumption that I was the aggressor.
This wasn’t an isolated error; it was the predictable outcome of a system that had already decided what a “real victim” looks like.
For months, I lived with escalating fear, reputational damage, and the psychological toll of being disbelieved by the very institutions that should have been protecting me. I ended up in hospital multiple times. I became suicidal – not only because of what I endured at the hands of my Ex, but because of the institutional rejection that turned private abuse into systems abuse – the same story, now armed with official power.
And I know that my experience is not unique.
The numbers we pay attention to – and the ones we ignore
We speak often, and rightly, about the number of women killed by intimate partners. In 2023–24, approximately 46 women and 9 men were victims of intimate‑partner homicide. But the system treats homicide as the whole picture. It isn’t.
Suicide: the uncounted mortality channel
The ABS recorded 2,419 male suicides and 795 female suicides in 2023. Until coroners code DFSV antecedents, Australia effectively assumes 0% of suicides are driven by domestic violence – an assumption no one would tolerate if these deaths were homicides.
Australia simply doesn’t collect the data on suicide linked to DV, so we are forced to make an assumption regarding attribution of causation.
A conservative 2–3% attribution for men aged 25–64 already implies ~40–60 DV‑linked male suicides a year; at ~5%, the toll rises to ~100. This does not diminish the horror of female homicide. It widens the lens so all DV‑related deaths are counted – and we can develop policies, tools, and institutional responses aimed at preventing all forms of harm.
The figures
The argument that deserves a clear answer
“Domestic violence is gendered.”
Intimate‑partner homicide is indeed gendered. Women carry the heaviest burden there. That reality must never be minimised.
But the existence of one gendered pattern does not justify a gender‑exclusive system. When ideology becomes the filter for who qualifies as a victim, the system starts protecting a narrative – not people.
An hypothesis entirely consistent with the data, the psychological research, and all domestic violence research, as well as lived experience testimony, is:
- women suffer IPV at the hands of male perpetrators, and in the worst case it escalates to homicide (approximately 46 p.a.)
- men suffer IPV in the form of coercive control, reputational attacks, false allegations and legal peril, and in the worst case it leads to suicide. Our system doesn’t measure this directly, but it could be conservatively estimated at 60 p.a., plus 9 homicides p.a. So a conservative estimate is that we lose 69 men p.a. to domestic violence, but we don’t measure female modes of aggression, so these deaths remain uncounted and invisible.
What a real domestic‑violence system would look like
1. Behaviour over belief
Funding should be tied to demonstrable capability: the ability to recognise coercive control in all its forms – physical, emotional, indirect, and administrative. No ideological declaration should be required.
The practical rule is simple: Investigate all allegations – a standard that recognises both aggression modes and relies on evidence, not gender.
2. Make misidentification measurable
Agencies must record and report misidentification events, including time‑to‑correction and the consequences for victims. Without data, accountability is impossible.
3. Update the tools
A short DVSAT Part‑B should be triggered whenever the client is male or when cross‑allegations exist. It must include:
- Systems abuse / false narrative: Have complaints, orders or reports been used against you to control or punish you?
- Reputational sabotage: Has your partner contacted your employer, friends, or services to damage your reputation?
- Help‑seeking reception: When you first sought help, were you treated as a victim, a perpetrator, or neither?
- Evidence decay: Have messages/photos/witnesses been lost or blocked after incidents that would show context?
- Acute psychological risk: Since misidentification or service refusal, have you had thoughts that life isn’t worth living?
These items capture patterns our current tools are blind to and operationalise ANROWS’s guidance on identifying the person most in need of protection.
4. End the monopoly
NSW should fund at least two additional peaks – one specialising in male victim‑survivors and systems‑abuse patterns, and another focusing on behavioural science and coercive control. A single peak cannot credibly define the entire problem space. And plural peaks reduce the risk that one story becomes the only filter.
5. Count what’s currently invisible
Introduce a coronial/ABS DFSV antecedent flag with minimal fields: relationship context; recent separation; cross‑allegation/misidentification; systems‑abuse indicators. This aligns with Parliament’s inquiry into DFSV and suicide.
Until we have reliable measures of suicide attribution, publish an annual estimate of DV‑linked suicides at 2%, 3%, and 5% sensitivity levels to reflect conservative estimates.
this is about victims, not narratives
DVNSW helped build the sector. That history matters. But no organisation – and no ideology – should be allowed to dominate the entire definition of domestic violence in a state as diverse as NSW.
A real system is plural. It listens to multiple voices. It detects multiple patterns. It recognises victims based on what happened, not who they are assumed to be.
NSW must stop funding an ideology and start funding a system designed to see – and help – all victims of domestic violence.