Demonising Men While Ignoring Female Filicide Data

If you’re a man in Australia, you’d be fully aware of the anti-male rhetoric currently occurring in the Australian Government and the media regarding violence against women. One would think there are only male criminals in Australia, which is obviously, and rationally, not true. Obviously, the vast majority of men are not criminals, so to make us all feel guilty over this is insulting. For example, MPs Amanda Rishworth, Minister for Social Services, and Justine Elliot, Assistant Minister for the Prevention of Family Violence, just yesterday released a statement titled, “Investing to help keep women and children safe”. They promise to “lead the development of national, evidence-based standards for men’s behaviour change programs.” They will fund “services designed to break the intergenerational transmission of violence and programs that work with men – including men’s behaviour change”, and will develop “evidence-based standards for men’s behaviour change”. As I said, rationally, we all know that it’s not just men committing crimes, but for some reason, only the behaviour of men needs to be changed. This is bordering on dystopian. I’m sure you’ve heard by now about the Premier of Victoria Jacinta Allan’s new Parliamentary Secretary for Men’s Behaviour Change – Dystopian and Orwellian.

But I’m not here for that. Specifically, I’m here to talk about filicide, the killing of one’s own child, an absolute abhorrent crime. I would classify it as one of the worst crime’s imaginable, as you are killing a person who you are supposed to be protecting, one that is completely dependent on you. Unsurprisingly, the media are blaming men. In this ABC article a couple of months ago, “Filicide overwhelmingly linked to male perpetrators who ‘deeply believe their actions are justified’”. In the article, they state that 68% of offenders are men. I have previously stated this statistic myself, expecting the data to be accurate. But this data is probably very much cherry-picked. If you click on “Get the data”, it literally just shows the two numbers. According to their citation, the data is from 2010–2018.

I decided to go hunt down the numbers myself. If you go to the original source, the Australian Government’s Institute of Criminology who collect data on homicides and so on, search for filicide, their latest report is from 2019 titled:

FILICIDE OFFENDERS
https://www.aic.gov.au/publications/tandi/tandi568

You can download the PDF. In the document, it clearly states in Table 1: Filicide offenders by gender, at the National level, 52% of offenders were male, and 48% were female. To be fair, this data is from the years 2000 to 2012, so it’s a little bit old. But one thing that is clear, is that these figures are a lot different from the ABC article blaming male perpetrators at 68%. Interestingly, the publishers of these figures make it look like the latest data by having 2024 in brackets, which is when they released their findings, but their findings are based on 2010 to 2018 data. It’s all very mischievous, if you ask me.

So in the name of honesty and openness, let’s try to hunt down the most recent figures. This is the Institute of Criminology’s National Homicide Monitoring Program. This is where all the data that is being published is coming from anyway. I’ve linked to this below, so you can double check all my figures if you want to. But obviously, I’ve got no interest in making any of this up. I just want to know, and to show you, the truth, which seems to be in short supply in recent years.

AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTE OF CRIMINOLOGY: NATIONAL HOMICIDE MONITORING PROGRAM
https://www.aic.gov.au/taxonomy/term/239

You can see all the published reports on homicide for the last 30 years or whatever. For example, clicking on the latest one, we can see they provide the Homicide Incident data since 1989. Table A8 is the one we’re interested in. For this presentation, we’re only interested in filicide. Also, because the media are only showing data up until 2018, we’ll only look at the data from 2018 onwards. Okay, so in the last five years of data, there were 61 cases of reported filicide. They don’t show us the gender breakdown in this file, but we can get that from each individual report.

In the last five years of data, 30 children were killed by their fathers, and 35 killed by their mothers. In percentage terms, that’s 46% to approximately 54%. That wasn’t hard, was it? One would think that using the latest data would be more relevant to society that using older data, don’t you think? Then why didn’t they include it in their 2024 research paper?

Look, as I said, I’m not here to demonise females, but instead of the Government and the media demonising males, why can’t they just say, “Killing your children is wrong no matter who you are.” Wouldn’t that be a fairer and less divisive way to put it?

MUSIC
Allégro by Emmit Fenn