By Bettina Arndt
The feminists have it all sewn up. All it took was very effective bullying of politicians to have draconian legislation pushed through various state parliaments resulting in unproven domestic violence accusations flooding our criminal law system.
My focus today is on the reluctant enforcers required to do the dirty work for this evil regime – namely our co-opted police officers. I receive regular emails from these long-suffering people, many of whom are appalled at finding themselves having to enforce such unjust laws.
Here’s a letter I received recently from a Queensland police officer:
“I saw something today that sickened me. A man came to the station after receiving a phone call asking him to attend a police station. He genuinely had no idea what it was all about.
His wife had made a private application for a domestic violence protection order (DVO) which had been heard in court and a DVO put in place. He knew nothing about this.
I had to explain the document to him and serve him with a copy.
He was visibly shaken! His eyes filled with tears. He quietly said, “I’m sorry, I am having trouble processing this.” I advised him that he urgently needed to seek professional legal advice. I wanted to speak with him privately to give him some idea what he could do but he said he had to go. He was struggling not to break down and cry.
The order had many conditions. He is not allowed back to his home, even though his office and work equipment is there, he cannot contact his wife nor his two children except through a solicitor.
I read the wife’s application. The short version is that she wants to end the marriage and the man is having trouble accepting this. They had an argument over the fact she is tearing his whole world apart where he is alleged to have behaved badly, pointing his finger in her face and yelling, “I fucking hate you”. He then kicked over a watering can and the water went onto his wife’s legs.
Police attended and suggested that he should go and stay somewhere else, at least for a few days. He left the home, and a few days later told his wife he planned to return to their home. She told him that he couldn’t come back — she was “terrified” of him. She then lodged the DVO application.
This DVO is based solely on what she says happened, no other evidence. I GUARANTEE that this is going to get a lot of mileage in upcoming Family Law Court matters.
Judging by the demeanour of the guy, I think it is unlikely that he is a hot head or violent. This matter STINKS of a setup by the wife’s solicitor. It is a malicious strategic move that was carefully planned and executed.
Sure, I think it is very likely that he did what she said he did — pointed at and yelled at her and kicked over the watering can. I absolutely do not condone his behaviour, but MY GOD the consequences are so out of proportion!
He will probably never get to spend time with his children again because her solicitor is now armed with this DVO with him given no opportunity to provide his side of the story. The Family Law Court will not give a flying you-know-what about the circumstances, and how it came to be. Here is the smoking gun that shows that he is violent and controlling and potentially abusive to the children.
I know that he is absolutely SCREWED! I feel sick to the core.”
Destroying Fathers for Financial Gain
It was very moving reading these heartfelt words from this ordinary copper. After talking to him I reached out to police in regular contact with me, asking them if they’d help record their experiences with these laws.
I’ve made a podcast with the officer who wrote the letter above – I’ve called him “Paul” – and another female constable we’ll call “Lisa” – we disguised their voices to protect them. Others were too nervous to participate but wrote comments about some of the topics we were discussing. It is ominous that even retired police voiced concerns about dire consequences if they were identified talking publicly about these matters.
Please help me this important interview gets the large audience it deserves. People need to know what’s happened to our justice system and here is a brutally honest report from the coalface.
The stories they told me were shocking, even to a seasoned commentator like me.
Take, for example, Paul’s experience at a recent police training course where they were presented with an example of a woman smashing up the windscreen of her partner’s car. Surely this was evidence of a violent, potentially dangerous woman? Oh no. The instructors informed the police officers that they were to assume it was the man who was behind the violence. “He must have done something to drive her to that point.”
At another training course unrelated to domestic violence, it was announced that there would be a further three days’ training at the end of the course, all about DV. A wag at the back of the room called out, “It’s the man!” and the whole room dissolved in hysterics.
Everyone knows the point of all this training is to make sure police go into every investigation with only one focus: it must be the man. It’s become a joke because the ideological spin is so ridiculously heavy-handed.
So ridiculously heavy-handed
Another Queensland police officer – I’ll call him “Joe” – wrote to me explaining that previously it was standard practice for police responding to a domestic violence call to start by separating the couple, then obtain the different versions of events, speak to any witnesses and obtain physical evidence. If both had participated in the violence, then both received a DVO which was called a “cross order”.
The problem was this process meant women were sometimes charged. The feminist overlords found that totally unacceptable so they have now pushed through new legislation that determines it is “the person who is in most need of protection” who should be given the DVO.
The way this is interpreted, says Joe, is that even if a man is bleeding from the head after being hit by the woman, a DVO will still be taken against the man “as he might retaliate or become angry.” Hence, she’s deemed the one in need of protection. It is assumed men simply don’t need protection from women.
This is madness given there’s a solid body of international research which shows that in most violent homes there’s two-way violence, with women participating just as often as men. Yet these new laws require police to ignore that reality and only take DVOs out against men.
Laws in other states are moving in this direction but Queensland now takes the lead as the most anti-male jurisdiction in the country. We have reached the point in Queensland where the maximum penalty for intentionally cutting off a person’s arm is 25 years imprisonment, while the maximum penalty for removing a condom during (otherwise consensual) sex, is life imprisonment.
Working like a well-oiled machine
Everywhere we find a veritable industry of lawyers and women’s groups coaching women to use violence accusations, often false or utterly trivial, to game the family law system – a system now primed to give these alleged “victims” every possible advantage, including shutting dad out of the children’s lives or making him pay for supervised contact, and gifting them a greater slice of the assets – Albanese has a bill before parliament designed to consolidate that final perk.
How’s that for an evil system? And it’s working like a well-oiled machine, churning through thousands of men across the country, with police as the enforcers. Nearly 10% of men in New South Wales have had police take some form of legal action against them for domestic and family violence, according to research from the Australian Institute of Criminology. All men are at risk.
Often reluctant enforcers, all the police I spoke to report widespread disquiet about the bias against men, but they know they’ll be disciplined if they object or fail to implement these policies in the field. It is all set in cement… in legislation passed by parliament, and policies developed to interpret that legislation against men.
A Human Travesty
These Queensland coppers know they can’t get into trouble for making a DV application but if they don’t and something happens in the future, they end up in the firing line with the dreaded Ethical Standards Command.
Joe: “Whenever there is a serious DV incident, the first thing that occurs is the checking of any previous DV applications, DVO’s, calls to the police. Ethical Standards will go after any officer who hasn’t done everything possible to obtain a DVO.”
Joe mentions a case where a female was determined to be the DV offender and was charged by police. The offender then complained to Ethical Standards that the police had charged her and not the male. Even though the evidence clearly showed that the female was the offender, Ethical Standards tried to discipline the officers for daring to charge her.
Coaching women to make false allegations
It’s maddening for police knowing they can do longer do their job properly. They aren’t allowed to fully investigate these matters, they can’t question a woman’s complaint, however much she appears to have been coached.
“Everyone knows some women are being ‘worded up,’” says Lisa. This means learning to include the “facts” which will get the DVO over the line. It’s no coincidence that new strangulation legislation passed in Queensland in 2012 led to a huge increase in the numbers of reported strangulations.
“One police officer had an ex-wife who took to yelling, ‘Stop strangling me!’ over the back patio when she didn’t get what she wanted – like $10K in cash over and above the usual child support,” reports Joe.
What, a false allegation? Never happens, according to police chiefs. Police who have spoken out publicly about false allegations have been suspended. There’s an unwritten rule that women face no consequences for making false allegations – ostensibly because the authorities don’t want to discourage them from making complaints!
BETTINA ARNDT
Everybody Knows
Lisa herself was a victim of DV in her previous marriage — to a man with mental health problems. “I was fearful I would be stabbed in my sleep.” Yet, she’s no man-hater, but rather simply keen on offering protection to all people who need it.
“I joined to keep my community safe, take down the bad guys… not be a social worker. We have so many non-urgent matters being sent to us. These people are adults and the vast majority of these matters could be dealt with by the people themselves, with the help of social work and support agencies. They don’t need to involve the police. We are supposed to be an emergency service.”
The feminists have conned politicians and legislators into believing that handling all this trivial nonsense has something to do with keeping women safe but the reality is these laws are simply about empowering women to punish men. Kicking them out of their homes, denying them contact with children – because they yelled at their partners. That’s just abhorrent.
Breaches the easy route to jail
Lisa spells out her frustration at the way the system has been distorted. She mentions one man who was in the rare situation of having been given a DVO to protect him from his violent de facto partner. “He’d left the family home with his children and gone to a place of safety. When he returned to collect things for the children, he was locked out of the home and verbally abused. He recorded the woman’s behaviour and contacted police. But even though the female respondent’s behaviour was a clear breach of the DVO she wasn’t arrested nor charged. Nothing happened to her.”
A man would have been in hot water. “I warn men that breaching a protection order is the fastest way to get sent to gaol,” says Lisa, spelling out the numerous ways women set up breaches to make this happen. “Like the female who continually messages the male respondent, knowing full well he is not allowed to contact her. But as soon as he responds, she contacts police and has him charged. How is this just or fair? How is this a good use of police or court time and resources?”
She speaks for many police when she vents about having lost her discretion to make decisions in these matters: “As a female I am highly offended by our system at the moment. Where’s the consistency? How come I can keep a man in custody for sending a text message, or breaching a DVO but I have to heavily justify keeping in custody a person who has committed a break and enter?”
And it is only going to get worse – with the new coercive control laws now in place that she fears will end up with even more men unnecessarily in jail or committing suicide.
It all makes her really angry. “I’m just a lowly front-line copper. I came here to do my job,” she says. But it’s a job she is no longer permitted to do properly and that’s why she’s speaking out. “If nobody stands up to these injustices, nothing is going to change. It’s never going to be all right. I need to be able to sleep at night.”
We all need to speak up, and to highlight the actual experiences of these front-line officers. They have been co-opted as very reluctant enforcers for the new order, and many don’t like it one bit.
This is another example of our politicians and senior public servants bowing to feminist ideology. And to hell with the injustice.
About the Author
Bettina Arndt is a leading Australian journalist and social commentator who has been writing across a broad range of topics since the 1970s. She has been the only mainstream journalist in Australia to consistently speak out about the rampant abuses in the country’s massively destructive domestic violence industry.
Bettina Arndt recently hosted a major conference in Sydney titled The Presumption of Innocence. You can read more about it HERE.
You can read more about her colourful career at her Wikipedia entry HERE. You can follow her most recent work on her Substack page HERE.
MORE STORIES FROM BETTINA ARNDT IN A SENSE OF PLACE MAGAZINE
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