The Domestic Violence Debate Australia Is Forbidden to Have

Pauline Hanson has spent the past week being denounced for describing domestic violence as "a two-way street".

The reaction was as swift as it was predictable. Read the headlines, and you would think she had excused wife-beating, blamed women for being assaulted, or suggested genuine victims somehow deserved it.

She said none of those things.

What she did was challenge the approved story surrounding domestic and family violence, along with the legal, bureaucratic, and advocacy machine that has grown around it. That is a far more serious offence in modern Australia.

There should be no argument about the basics. Violence against a spouse or partner is wrong. Men who assault women should be prosecuted. Women who assault men should be prosecuted. Children must be protected, and genuine victims deserve safety, justice, and proper support.

The trouble starts when someone asks whether the system built around domestic violence is always fair, proportionate, or even honest about the evidence.

Australians should be able to ask how family violence laws are being used, whether fathers are treated fairly in the Family Court, whether false allegations occur, whether male victims are ignored, and whether the definition of violence has been stretched too far. Instead, anyone raising those questions risks being labelled a misogynist, an extremist, or an apologist for abuse.

That is what happened to Hanson.

During an appearance on the Broken Fathers podcast late last year, she argued that family violence laws had gone too far and that protections created for genuine victims could be weaponised in bitter separation and custody disputes. She spoke about fathers being disadvantaged in the family law system and questioned whether domestic matters were swallowing up police time that could be spent dealing with serious crime.

She also criticised paid domestic violence leave, saying it could be exploited through false allegations, and made the apparently scandalous observation that women can also "lose their cool" and become violent.

When she was asked this week to condemn men who commit domestic violence, she did. She said it was wrong. Then she added that women can be perpetrators and men can be victims.

That was enough to set off the pile-on.

The issue was never really whether violent men should be punished. Hanson did not argue otherwise. What enraged her critics was the suggestion that the category itself may have become distorted.

That concern is not something dreamed up by an angry politician or a few aggrieved fathers on a podcast.

A scholarly paper published in The Family Journal in March 2025 examined what happens when domestic and family violence expands beyond physical assault to include emotional, psychological, financial, and other loosely defined behaviour.

The paper, The Expanding Definitions and Impact of Domestic and Family Violence on Family Dynamics and Legal Frameworks, noted that domestic violence was once understood mainly as physical abuse. That is no longer the case.

The term now covers emotional abuse, psychological abuse, financial control, coercive control, and a growing list of behaviours whose boundaries are nowhere near as clear as a punch, a threat, or a sexual assault.

The author warned that these broader definitions could lead to legal overreach. Minor disputes or ordinary bad behaviour could be swept into the category of abuse. Reciprocal conflict can be mistaken for coercive control. Complicated family relationships could be forced into rigid legal categories that do not reflect what actually happened. Arguments once handled between couples, relatives, counsellors or churches could become matters for police, lawyers, and courts.

The paper argued that authorities must distinguish between coercive violence and reciprocal conflict.

There are relationships in which one person systematically terrorises, controls, and isolates the other. Nobody should minimise that. The perpetrator deserves the full force of the law.

There are also relationships full of mutual hostility, screaming, threats, retaliation, manipulation, and aggression from both sides. They may be toxic. They may be dangerous. They may need outside intervention.

They are still not necessarily the same as a one-sided campaign of coercive abuse.

Treating every ugly relationship as though it follows the same pattern leads to bad decisions and, at times, to terrible injustice.

Most Australians understand what physical violence means. A punch is a punch. A death threat is a death threat. Sexual assault, stalking, and calculated financial imprisonment are not hard to recognise.

The line becomes much murkier once family violence is said to include monitoring spending, repeated criticism, checking a partner's phone, objecting to their friends, controlling household decisions, or causing emotional distress.

Any of those things can form part of serious abuse. Context is everything.

A husband checking a joint bank account after discovering that his wife has secretly spent thousands of dollars is not necessarily financially abusing her.

A wife who objects to her husband going out drinking every night is not necessarily isolating him from his friends.

A couple demanding access to each other's phones after infidelity is not automatically engaged in technological abuse.

And an argument in which both people behave appallingly is not always a simple story of one abuser and one passive victim.

Once definitions become elastic enough, nearly any failed relationship can be reconstructed as abusive after the event. A lawyer can go back through years of rows, text messages, spending disputes, jealous remarks, and hurt feelings, then arrange them into a legal narrative.

The case may no longer turn on whether anyone was assaulted. It can turn on tone, money, household rules, social contact, and conflicting memories about who made whom feel afraid.

That is a gift to lawyers. It is far less obviously a gift to justice.

The word "violence" carries serious moral and legal weight. Stretching it across an ever-growing range of non-violent conduct risks weakening the distinction between genuine terror and the ordinary cruelty, selfishness, and dysfunction found in many broken relationships.

Meanwhile, Australians are constantly told domestic violence is reaching epidemic levels.

New research from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR) has made that claim harder to repeat without qualification.

Self-reported domestic and family violence victimisation in NSW fell from 0.91 per cent during 2016 to 2019 to 0.65 per cent during 2022 to 2025.

Self-reported violent victimisation among women also dropped, from 4.1 per cent in 2017-18 to 3.0 per cent in 2024-25.

Similar downward trends were observed in Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia. The number of women and children killed in domestic homicides in NSW remained broadly stable between 2017 and 2025, ranging from 19 to 26 a year.

Domestic violence has not disappeared. Nobody sensible would claim it has. But those figures do not fit neatly with the endless claim that Australia is facing a crisis that only ever worsens.

The BOCSAR research matters because it relies on people reporting their experiences through population surveys, rather than simply counting incidents recorded by police or service providers.

Police reports can rise even when the underlying level of violence does not.

Greater public awareness can encourage more victims to come forward. Broader definitions can capture behaviour that was not previously recorded as domestic violence. Police recording practices can change. Mandatory reporting can expand. People may simply become more willing to call the police.

So when official reports go up, what exactly has increased? The violence itself? The willingness to report it? Or the range of conduct now being counted? Those are not the same thing, although governments and campaign groups often speak as though they are.

The public is entitled to ask what the numbers actually show before more money, legal power, and bureaucracy are piled onto the system.

Male victims are another part of the discussion that makes many people uncomfortable. Men can be abused. Women can be violent. That does not deny the fact that women are more represented among victims of domestic violence. It simply recognises that statistics do not make an individual man's suffering disappear.

Male victims are often ignored, disbelieved, or laughed at. Some are ashamed to report what is happening. Others know there may be nowhere obvious for them to go. Recognising them does not take anything away from female victims. Justice is not a fixed pie.

Violence is still violence when the offender is a woman. A victim is still a victim when he is a man.

Then there is the family law system, where allegations can determine whether a parent sees a child again.

In 2013, retiring Family Court judge Justice David Collier spoke publicly after 14 years on the bench. He warned that false allegations of child sexual abuse were being used as weapons in bitter custody disputes. He called them "a horrible weapon".

Once an allegation is made, the court cannot simply shrug it off. It has to be investigated. Even when the claim cannot be proved, suspicion can cling to the accused parent for years and wreck the relationship with the child.

Collier said some litigants were so determined to win that they would say anything, including making allegations designed to shut fathers out of their children's lives.

Some allegations are malicious. Victims need protection, but people who are falsely accused need justice. Any legal system worthy of the name must be able to recognise that. Yet even mentioning false allegations is now treated in some quarters as an attack on all victims. It is a childish way to discuss a serious problem.

Around domestic violence there is now a large network of departments, police units, legal centres, commissions, consultants, researchers, charities, advocates, and specialist service providers. It's basically become an industry or an institution in itself.

And institutions have their own interests, whether the people inside them admit it or not. An organisation created to deal with a crisis is unlikely to announce that the crisis may be easing and its powers should be cut back. A bureaucracy rarely volunteers to shrink. Lawyers do not make money by making disputes simpler. Advocacy groups built around public alarm have little incentive to emphasise data suggesting the situation may be improving.

Broader definitions create more cases. More cases create more demand for staff, training, legal services, programs and funding.

That means the pressure is always towards expansion. More behaviours are captured. More relationships come under scrutiny. More money is demanded. Anyone who questions the process is warned that lives will be put at risk.

There is no obvious point at which the system says: enough.

If self-reported violence is falling while the institutional response keeps growing, someone should ask why. If the definitions are becoming broader and more dependent on interpretation, someone should ask who gains from that. And when every criticism is recast as sympathy for abusers, it is reasonable to wonder whether the language of victim protection is also shielding the system from scrutiny.

Hanson asked those questions in her usual blunt fashion. She is not known for delicate phrasing.

That does not make the questions illegitimate.

She questioned whether the definition of family violence had become too broad. She acknowledged female violence and male victims. She raised the problem of false allegations and a family law system capable of destroying the bond between a parent and child.

She did all this as new official research suggested that self-reported domestic violence may be falling rather than endlessly climbing.

Violence is wrong. Genuine victims must be protected. Serious abusers should be punished.

Australians can believe all of that and still question the way the system operates. They can recognise male victims, acknowledge female aggression, demand evidence before accepting allegations, and ask whether every unhappy relationship belongs in the same legal category as genuine coercive terror.

Pauline Hanson did not create these problems.

She spoke about them.

The furious reaction says more about the state of the debate than it does about her.

“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”
― John Stuart Mill