VIOLENCE OF MEN NOT FULL STORY

THE murder of Eurydice Dixon two weeks ago was frightening enough — a young woman killed as she simply walked through a park on her way home.

Yet activists are now misusing that death to make women fear more than some monster in the bushes. They must fear their husbands, too.

This was best illustrated by Emma Alberici, the ABC’s chief economics correspondent, in a speech at Deakin University.

She linked Dixon’s murder to domestic violence, though the man accused was a total stranger, saying: “Every week two women will die at the hands of a man who has told them he loves them. Already 30 women have been murdered this year by an intimate partner.”

And Alberici, like many activists, suggested such violence was endemic in men: “Why aren’t we asking why men are so violent?”

In fact, those 30 murders — 31, actually — work out at closer to one each week.

Moreover, I have checked many of the cases and found a picture far more complicated than the one being portrayed, of a supposed culture of male violence that leaves no wife safe.

For a start, that list includes at least two women killed by other women. Others, including Dixon herself, were not killed by an intimate partner.

One was murdered during an aggravated burglary, and another when a thief tried to steal her car.

Sons or grandsons have been accused of the killings of some of the women: one was a schizophrenic and another a drug addict who also killed his father. These don’t seem to have been killings driven by men’s attitude to women.

Then there were at least two killings of Aboriginal women, one in a pack attack said to have involved other women. Aboriginal women are in fact more than 30 times more likely to end up in hospital from domestic violence, which suggests we should worry more about Aboriginal culture.

At least two of the women were killed by men who also killed a male — and that should remind us that two-thirds of murder victims are, in fact, men.

Then there’s Nancy Barclay, who was 83 when she was killed, allegedly by her terminally ill husband. Police say he told them she had Alzheimer’s disease and that he strangled her to put her out of her misery.

So, no, this list of 31 murders suggests many more factors than a culture of male violence.

Let’s not blind ourselves to so much else that we should confront.