Media
Domestic violence in Australia: some things the statistics say (and the media should report)
Amid Australia’s justified concern over male violence against women, we should remember how much we have been able to achieve so far. Some important indicators of violence against women have more than halved in the past three decades.
Prologue: Violence against women is a bad thing, and it’s still bad even when it used to be worse. We should be trying hard to lower rates of violence, by finding good solutions and implementing them with urgency. We should also understand just what we’re dealing with – which is what this summary tries to do.
The issue of violence against women is in the news right now. Here’s a short summary of what we know about the issue in Australia.
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- Before we say anything else, we need to acknowledge this: an accurate picture of violent crime is hard to get at for several reasons, but mostly because most official crime figures are so very, very unreliable. That goes double for violence against women. Many crimes never get reported, or the police don’t charge anyone, or judges and juries don’t convict – and all of these things change over time as society changes.
- It’s hard to exaggerate what a problem this is. My strong impression is that most of the public and many commentators expect government crime statistics will tell us everything we need to know. They never do.
- How bad is the problem? One typical analysis claims that “about 70% of domestic violence is never reported to the police.” You can probably come up with plenty of reasons why this figure is so high.
- Rates of reporting, charging and convicting thus affect the figures far more than do underlying changes in the actual level of violence in Australia.
- The result of all that is that most experts don’t trust all the official statistics to give them an accurate read on what’s happening. Instead they look for the most reliable figures – which are, necessarily, the figures that will suffer least from under-reporting. That leads them to the figures for homicides. These suffer less from under-reporting, simply because it’s hard to avoid people noticing when someone dies.
- The homicide indicators suggest Australian violence against women continues to fall, at a speed that might surprise many people. Among the most reliable indicators is intimate partner homicide; female victims are down 60+% in the 31 years to 2020-21. (Source: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare)
Intimate partner homicide, 1989-90 to 2020-21
Figure from AIHW
- Before we say anything else, we need to acknowledge this: an accurate picture of violent crime is hard to get at for several reasons, but mostly because most official crime figures are so very, very unreliable. That goes double for violence against women. Many crimes never get reported, or the police don’t charge anyone, or judges and juries don’t convict – and all of these things change over time as society changes.
- When we step back and look at other countries, it’s not clear that Australia has done badly at reducing violence against women. The female victim homicide rate is falling in many places around the world. And countries like Singapore show how much better we should be able to do: their performance, pictured in the graph below, show just how far it is possible to lower the female homicide rate. But not that many places have bettered Australia’s rate of change over the past 15 years. (At the same time, we shouldn’t pat ourselves on the back too hard – because we really just don’t know what causes violent crime numbers to move around over the decades in any country, ours included.)
Female homicide rate, 1990 to 2021, per 100,000 women, for Australia and comparator nations
Figure from Our World In Data
- News reports on the Anzac Day weekend featured a figure of “26 women allegedly killed by men in the first 115 days of the year”. I don’t know how reliable that number is. But on my initial maths, if that rate of homicide continued through 2024, it would mean 83 female victims of homicide for Australia this year – a rate of .59 female homicides per 100,000 women. That is horrific, but not notably out of line with other recent years, such as 202-21’s 69. It would have been a record low just a few years ago.
- As the graph on intimate partner homicide above shows, these homicide figures jump around quite a bit from year to year, largely because the numbers are not bigger. The numbers jump around even more from quarter to quarter. I haven’t yet seen anyone claim that some happened at the start of 2024 to drive the figures notably higher. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to suggest on the basis of events to date that this is happening, unless you have a fairly decent chain of reasoning.
- We do have one more fairly reliable source of domestic violence data – the Personal Safety Survey done every five years by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. This tries to avoid the police crime figures issues by coming at the problem from the other end: it asks members of the general public what crimes they have experienced. As Ben Spivak at the Swinburne Centre for Forensic Behavioural Science notes, the survey numbers suggest at worst that overall domestic violence rates are not rising, and at best that they are falling over time. For instance, the rate of cohabiting partner violence against women fell from 1.7% in 2016 to 0.9% in 2021-22.
- Some analysts nevertheless cite police crime data to argue that the analysis above goes astray. This argument says that rises over the past decade in rates of male offending in categories like “sexual assault and related offences”, “abduction and harassment” and “acts intended to cause injury” suggest these types of male violence against women are moving up, even as homicide rates move down. That is, they argue that changes in reporting rates don’t explain these numbers. This is possible. But it does not seem all that likely to me that homicide has detached itself so thoroughly from other violence indicators.
- My expectation is that the official levels of these non-homicide offences are rising because our efforts to raise reporting, charging and conviction rates are actually bearing fruit – that is, less crimes are slipping through the cracks. But this is the one point that I most want to explore further, and if necessary revise in this post.
- To the extent that the homicide indicators a) indicate actual crime levels and b) are at odds with people’s perceptions, commentators and the media should work to make both the figures and people’s perceptions more accurate. The stories we tell about crime rates have a real impact on people’s lives. As crime academics Terry Goldsworthy and Gaell Brotto have noted, a person’s fear of current crime levels can be influenced by a number of things, including media exposure. Don Weatherburn, former head of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research has argued: “The female homicide rate is much lower now than it was 20 years ago. The media never report this.’
All of this matters for Australia’s current domestic violence discussion. But it also matters every time some politician or commentator – Left or Right, and historically it has more often been Right – makes a claim about the violent crime rate. We’re in a new era of lower crime, and the debate should recognise that fact.
* The author studied criminal statistics at the University of Adelaide and has dealt with statistics and their presentation in various roles for more than 30 years.
Modi puts religion at centre of campaign – Asian Media Report
In Asian media this week: Hate speech an appeal to ‘bigoted supporters’. Plus: High-tech shake-up for China’s military; EU sings ‘old colonial song’; Bomb plot trial starts in Hong Kong; Recognition urged for Myanmar opposition; West’s chip restrictions ‘will not work’. Religious and communal tension in India have been thrust to the forefront of campaigning Continue reading »
Cruelty of language — the NYT’s leaked Gaza Memo
Ramzy Baroud responds to revelations about The New York Times “guidance” on language about the Israeli mass slaughter in the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7. The New York Times coverage of the Israeli carnage in Gaza, like that of other mainstream U.S. media, is a disgrace to journalism. This assertion should not surprise anyone. U.S. media is Continue reading »
If Avani Dias had been white, would Murdoch media have ignored her India ban?
Strange but true. A reporter from the state-owned broadcaster in Australia was booted out by India, purportedly the biggest democracy in the world, and the Murdoch media in Australia has ignored it in toto. The fact that the ABC’s Avani Dias had been forced to leave the subcontinent was reported in The Age, a newspaper Continue reading »
‘Fire Farage’: Public Wants Ofcom to Ban GB News Politician Presenters
The British public wants politicians to be banned from presenting on channels like GB News, a new poll commissioned by Byline Times suggests.
The opinion poll of UK voters was conducted this week by pollsters We Think and suggests that a majority of voters would back an outright ban on politicians presenting on news and current affairs channels.
However, it comes after broadcasting regulators Ofcom gave the green light to Nigel Farage and other un-elected politicians to continue presenting on channels like GB News, even during the upcoming general election campaign.
Justifying their decision, Ofcom said that they had commissioned research which showed that there was "no clear [public] consensus for an outright ban."
However, the new polling conducted for this paper this week found that across the population as a whole, 63% of those surveyed would support an outright ban on politicians presenting news and current affairs shows, compared to just 37% who disagreed.
There is majority support for a ban among supporters of all major political parties, and among all age groups and regions, the poll suggests.
The findings come after experts questioned Ofcom's claims about their research, which was based on a series of focus groups conducted by pollsters Ipsos.
In a piece republished by this paper, former Ofcom Partner for Content and Standards, Stewart Purvis pointed out that contrary to the regulator's claims, the Ipsos research actually found that “The most prevalent opinion held among participants was feeling uncomfortable with politicians presenting current affairs content".
Purvis also points out that those questioned for Ofcom's research do not appear to have been "asked what they thought of the fact that the politicians who present on GB News all come from the same side of the political divide."
Ofcom have been heavily criticised within the industry for their apparent reluctance to impose sanctions on GB News, despite repeatedly finding them in breach of their impartiality rules.
The channel, which employs multiple Conservative and right-wing politicians including Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg, is soon to be joined by former Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Since going on air, the channel has been found to have breached impartiality rules a record number of times, but has so far avoided any significant sanction.
In an interview last month Ofcom's CEO Melanie Dawes suggested that regulators should hold GB News to "different" standards to other broadcasters like BBC News due to their relatively small audience.
However, following threatened legal challenge by the Good Law Project, the regulator issued a statement implying that Dawes had misspoken and that "the same rules and assessment process apply to all broadcasters”.
GB News has continued to build a growing but niche audience for its brand of right-wing news and opinion content, despite losing tens of millions of pounds each year.
However, an investigation by this paper found that the UK Government is now the biggest advertising funder of the channel.
Despite GB News often platforming racists and conspiracy theorists, and facing record numbers of Ofcom investigations, more than £1 million of UK taxpayer money has been spent on almost 10,500 ads since the channel launched in summer 2021.
Think-tanked
As a China-watching think tank winds up after Morrison-era cuts, a respected analyst reviews government funding for security-related research and education. One Sunday morning nearly four years ago Kevin McCann was surprised to learn that an organisation he chaired was being hounded in the News Corp tabloids for being in “China’s grip” and “lobbying against Continue reading »
Rishi to the Rescue: How the Prime Minister ‘Moved Heaven and Earth to Help the Conservative Press’
An Abu Dhabi-backed consortium wants to buy the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, News International titles, and some journalists from the Telegraph itself, go mad. Conservative politicians also declare their opposition. Rishi Sunak rushes through legislation to prevent such a takeover from occurring. Deal over.
If ever there was proof of the power of the press to get what they want, this is it. That needs rephrasing: the power of the Conservative press to get what they want, when there is a Conservative Prime Minister only too happy to please, in this, General Election year.
It’s remarkable how Sunak moved heaven and earth to appease the proprietors of the Daily Mail and The Times and Sun titles.
Other interest groups can campaign for years for perfectly sound, bona fide, necessary, reform to reach the statute books. Often, to no avail – reasonable as the new measure is, vital as it is, they are kept waiting.
Yet, along come the big beasts of Lord Rothermere and Rupert Murdoch, aided and abetted by some noisy Conservatives (some of them, anxious to curry favour with the influential newspapers), and the Government crumbles. Appallingly, senior figures in the Government were said to be in favour of the Abu Dhabi bid, believing it would cement relations and lead to further investment from that super-rich country. No, the Conservative media titans are against, so against the government shall be.
Rupert Murdoch, seen above in London in June 2023, was against the deal and wants the Spectator. Photo: PA Images / Alamy
No matter that Rothermere and Murdoch had their reasons for kiboshing the Abu Dhabi purchase. Rothermere harbours a desire to own the Telegraph, while Murdoch wants the Spectator, also part of the Telegraph stable. They did declare their interest to their readers, usually towards the end of news reports regarding the progress of the campaign.
They devoted plenty of space to the importance of upholding free speech and defending human rights. The giveaway as to their true motive was, surely, that claims by the consortium that Abu Dhabi was only a ‘passive’ investor were largely ignored. Likewise, the suggestion that this marriage could see the resurrection of a device implemented when another foreign newspaper takeover occurred was similarly brushed aside.
That was when Murdoch bought Times Newspapers and a separate, independent board was installed to act as an objective cut-off on key matters. This time around, with his eyes set on owning the Spectator, Murdoch was seemingly not prepared to countenance a repetition.
Read more: ‘Telegraph Takeover Bid Backed by UAE Doesn’t Matter – Because there’s an Agenda at Every Newspaper’
What’s also telling is that plenty of British assets have fallen into foreign hands, many of them to sovereign wealth funds, down the years without the raising of barely a squeak by the same media or MPs. It’s as if the much-touted phrase, Britain is ‘open for business’ has been taken literally to also mean ‘Britain is for sale’.
Assets to have gone overseas include:
There are numerous examples of all sorts of assets tracing their ultimate ownership abroad. Grocery, retail, hospitality, and fashion brands, many of them historically and iconically ‘British’, have been targeted by foreigners and their money men.
Occasionally there have been protests but they have usually died down. Cadbury’s going to the Americans was an especially emotive one. Royal Mail, no less, may soon join the National Lottery with Czech owners. The newspaper that reports at length on these deals, the Financial Times, is owned by the Japanese. The only sale that attracted a similar amount of column inches, was arguably that of Newcastle United by Saudi Arabia, but, like the rest, it went through.
The pattern is familiar: there’s a bid, there is some disquiet expressed by the employees, unions and stakeholders, then the offer is raised again and perhaps again until the owner’s expectations are met and it’s accepted and the fury, such as it is, falls away.
Fears about Chinese and Russian influence, together with uncertainty surrounding treatments for Covid, saw the government pass the National Security and Investment Act, or NSIA, of 2021, giving the Cabinet Office the ability to intervene and block a transaction on national security grounds. It covers 17 sectors, most of them to do with defence, tech, medicine, bioscience, data and AI.
The idea was to stop the asset and/or its intellectual property, the know-how, falling into enemy hands. At first sight, the figures are impressive – the Act is wheeled out regularly. There were more than 1,000 ‘mandatory notifications’ – the bidders in these sectors must inform the Government – in 2022, the latest and first year to be reported. But 95% of these were cleared unconditionally at the initial screening phase.
Only 5% were subject to in-depth scrutiny and most of these received conditional approval. However, five deals were stymied completely, of which four involved companies with Chinese ownership and one a Russian oligarch.
Another 14 were approved subject to conditions, and these mostly involved Chinese owners. The restrictions were imposed to safeguard national security, including a UK Government attendee at board meetings, external monitoring, commitments for the IP to remain in the UK, and guarantees to continue to supply specified UK contractors such as the Ministry of Defence or an emergency service.
The NSIA might well have been deployed in the Telegraph case. The sectors where it applies are broadly defined and doubtless, a skilled lawyer could have made a case for the paper’s inclusion.
It never reached that stage. Sunak leapt into action and brought forward a new piece of legislation, just to make sure the Abu Dhabi bid perished. Rothermere and Murdoch got their way. The irony is that they may only have made the path easier for another bidder, Sir Paul Marshall owner of Unherd and GB News. Marshall, born in Ealing, is definably British. How the media barons stop him remains to be seen.
‘Ofcom is Fine With Political Parties Interviewing Themselves on GB News During the General Election’
Ofcom has published more than 100 pages of research and new guidance about their rules on "due impartiality" which will probably affect GB News the most, Stewart Purvis writes on his blog in a post titled, 'Imagine a General Election campaign where a political party can interview itself on TV every day. It’s coming soon courtesy of Ofcom'.
Are we any wiser about the impact on the forthcoming General Election campaign?
1. What’s the Bottom Line?
Last month I wrote an article for the Guardian with a former colleague at Ofcom, Chris Banatvala. We asked three questions, now we know the answers.
Q: Is Ofcom going to allow senior party officials to present election programmes as long as they are not actual candidates?
A: Yes. Under Ofcom’s current interpretation of their rules the Honorary President of the Reform UK Party, Nigel Farage, who is also a director and co-owner of the party, will be able to present his weeknight prime-time programme on GB News unless he stands as a candidate. He will be able to do this throughout the election campaign – even though Reform UK says it will stand around 600 candidates
Q: Could a channel host party loyalists from only one side, delivering nightly unchallenged polemics on each day’s campaign news?
A: Yes unless they are candidates. And party officials, assembly members and political activists will all be allowed to interview representatives of their own party every day of the campaign.
Q: Will channels with poor compliance records and fewer viewers than the public service broadcasters be given greater flexibility in achieving “due impartiality” on the basis of what Ofcom calls “audience expectations”?
A: The suggestion that Ofcom was operating this two-tier system came from none other than the CEO of Ofcom, Dame Melanie Dawes, when she told an event in Oxford "the standard for someone like the BBC, which reaches still 70% of the TV viewing audience, [for] the news is a different one from that of a channel that has an audience of maybe four or five per cent of the viewing public. We expect different things. And I think that’s appropriate.”
When challenged before a potential legal action by Professor Julian Petley and the Good Law Practice, Ofcom now say that these were "two brief remarks made in the context of a live Q&A interview" and that the comments "were clearly not intended to be, and should not be taken as, an unpublished policy position of Ofcom". I think that’s Ofcom code for "the CEO mis-spoke".
2. What Does the Audience Research Show ?
Ofcom says: "The report captures a wide range of views but, overall, the audience feedback supports the broad design of existing due impartiality rules under the Broadcasting Code." Cynics would suggest that’s exactly what the research was designed to do so let’s examine one issue in detail.
Under Ofcom’s current interpretation of the rules, politicians cannot present news programmes but they can present 'current affairs’. As I have pointed out before the distinction between these two genres was not set out in the law that created Ofcom, the regulations Ofcom enforce or the guidance it has provided to broadcasters. It only existed in a blog by an executive. Now Ofcom is taking the opportunity provided by the research to change the guidance to codify the blog. But is that what the audience research really shows?
When the research project was first commissioned, the Ofcom Chairman, Lord Grade, took the unusual step of predicting what it would discover, telling a Voice of the Listener and Viewer conference that he was sure the audience would know the difference between news and current affairs.
The evidence from "29 focus groups with 157 participants from range of backgrounds, reflecting different political leanings and media consumption habits from all across the UK" tells a different story. This being ‘qualitative’ not ‘quantitative’ the research company Ipsos does not provide numbers of who thinks what, but instead attempts to summarise what the groups said.
Two of Ipsos’s headline points are:
"Participants thought they could easily distinguish between news and current affairs content and name common features of both in principle. However, in practice, the presentation and style of these types of content blurred the line between news and current affairs which confused participants particularly when a programme contained both."
Dig deeper and you find the audience was even more confused. Four of the key characteristics they associated with news programmes but not current affairs: Studio backdrop/presenter sitting behind a desk / rolling banner /ticker are all prominent parts of Farage’s programme which he is only allowed to present because Ofcom deems it "current affairs".
A further irony is that two of the characteristics they associate with news, rolling banners and tickers, don’t actually appear in news programmes such as the BBC’s Six O’Clock News and ITV’s News at Ten.
This was an especially disappointing result for Ofcom when you consider that the "stimulus materials", the video clips shown to the focus groups, did not include any ‘hybrid’ programmes such as BBC Radio Four ‘Today’, Channel Four News, BBC Newsnight and rolling news sections of Sky News which all have elements of both genres. Such clips would have left the focus groups even more confused since most of the people who make them are not sure themselves if they are news or current affairs or both. Ofcom itself also seems confused. Under its definition, these hybrid programmes are probably both news and current affairs. But it always seems to investigate them as news.
So if the evidence is that viewers think they know the difference but actually don’t, what do they think of the principle of politicians presenting ‘current affairs’ programmes?
Ipsos is absolutely clear;
"The most prevalent opinion held among participants was feeling uncomfortable with politicians presenting current affairs content."
The raw material includes quotes such as:
"I just don’t think politicians should be doing all these current affairs programmes, or not as many." Female, South England, 55+
"It undermines the topic they’re presenting or discussing. To be on the safe side, stick with presenters who aren’t associated with politics in any way.” Female, Midlands, 35-54.
But do the viewers think the rules should allow politicians to present these programmes?
Ipsos says, "Not everyone in this group thought they should be prevented from doing so."
Should we be surprised by that when we read that 11 of the 29 groups "were conducted with audiences of channels where politicians have been presenting current affairs programmes more regularly". You might well expect that 'not everyone’ in these groups would like to stop the programmes they watch. The real question is was there an overall majority of people who thought that politicians shouldn’t present current affairs programmes. Ipsos would know this but we aren’t told.
Instead, Ipsos concludes:
"Across groups, there was common concern about politicians presenting current affairs content, but this did not equate to a consensus on preventing them from presenting such content."
Ofcom goes one step further in its press release:
"People expressed a range of views about politicians presenting current affairs programmes, but although there were concerns, there’s no clear consensus for an outright ban."
So "a prevalent view" among viewers that they are "feeling uncomfortable" has been diluted to "a range of views".
The final twist comes when an Ofcom executive, Cristina Nicolotti Squires, a former ITN colleague, appears on Radio 4’s Media Show and announces :
"When it came to current affairs they didn’t particularly like politicians presenting it but they didn’t want it banned."
Now "not everybody" agreed to a ban has been strengthened to "they didn’t want it banned".
Some evidence base.
3. What subjects weren’t the focus groups asked about?
I can’t find any mention of any groups being asked what they thought of the fact that the politicians who present on GB News all come from the same side of the political divide.
Nor, it seems, were they asked what they would consider to be a reasonable proportion of a programme that should be given to views which are an alternative to those of the politicians who gave the opening monologue.
Perhaps Ofcom didn’t want to know the answer.
My colleague, Chris Banatvala adds this important final point: "When all is said and done, this qualitative research shows ‘across groups there was common concern about politicians presenting current affairs content'. Surely that is the beginning of the debate and not, as Ofcom seems to imply, the end."
Reprinted with kind permission by Stewart Purvis. More of his writing here.
Israeli captive in Gaza says IDF has killed 70 captives and shames Netanyahu
Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a US-born Israeli, wishes his parents a good Passover – and says Netanyahu and his far-right government should be ‘ashamed’
A US-born Israeli held captive in Gaza has said on video that Israel’s military has killed seventy of his fellow captives and that Israeli PM Netanyahu and his far-right government ‘should be ashamed of yourselves’.
Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a 24-year-old Californian-born Israeli taken captive on 7 October, went on to tell his parents that he loves them and hopes they somehow manage to have a happy Passover:
Goldberg-Polin, who at 24 years old will have served in the Israeli military, has lost part of his left arm, presumably under fire on 7 October last year, although it is unclear from what he says whether he was wounded by Palestinian fighters or by Israeli forces. It is now well known – admitted by the IDF and freely discussed by Israeli newspapers, though still ignored by UK media and politicians – that Israeli helicopters and tanks killed ‘immense’ numbers of Israeli citizens under the IDF’s ‘Hannibal doctrine’ of killing potential hostages. His performance is passionate, but it is, of course, unknown whether he was speaking under duress.
Relatives of Israeli captives killed in Gaza have also accused the Israeli military of killing them; the IDF is known for sure to have killed three hostages who had escaped, stripped to show they were no threat, and were calling out in Hebrew, while waving a white flag, for soldiers not to shoot. Israel is holding around nine thousand Palestinian hostages, who have been arbitrarily detained and imprisoned without trial. The EU is calling for an independent investigation of the hundreds of executed Palestinian captives currently being unearthed behind Al Shifa hospital after Israel’s raid there. Israel has murdered more than 40,000 civilians, mostly women and children.
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ANZAC Day 2024: Better balanced assimilation or war reports fatigue?
Perhaps it is my imagination, but in the days immediately preceding Anzac Day 2024, there seems to be less media exhortation to observance than has been usual in recent years. I think that we can take it as given that those who march and attend at dawn will participate again this year with undiminished spirit Continue reading »