Pauline Hanson only "makes sense" when you don't know enough about the topic

Here’s an uncomfortable truth that is missing from the current discourse around family and domestic violence.

Abusive men routinely lie about false allegations and claim to be the real victims.

That’s why it’s widely believed that family and domestic violence affects more men than it actually does and that false allegations are a big problem.

We cannot change what we won’t acknowledge and the evidence is clear. Family and domestic violence is a gendered issue, most often perpetrated by men towards women.

Men harm women, they harm each other and they harm themselves in alarming numbers. Surely it’s time to recognise that men’s violence is a national health crisis.

Yet in the midst of grappling with this major issue, we have Senator Pauline Hanson repeatedly demonising women as the cause of men’s suffering.

While that might appease the podcast bros and disgruntled abusers, it doesn’t actually help anyone or save lives.

Many men are clearly struggling and the constant push to make women responsible for men’s actions doesn’t fix anything. It just gets in the way of honest conversation and positive change.

Senator Hanson’s latest comments about domestic violence have been widely condemned as wrong and harmful, but they are also not surprising.

Hanson has a long track record of weaponising misogyny for political gain.

She has always pandered to, protected and employed abusers.

She has always used language like “these women”.

She has always parroted falsehoods about domestic violence, child support and the family law courts.

She has always spewed nonsense and then cried victim when challenged with facts.

Senator Hanson only “makes sense” when you don’t know enough about the topic. The experts don’t agree with her and the evidence doesn’t agree with her.

But for argument’s sake, let’s recap some well documented statistics.

Men’s violence towards each other and themselves:

In 2024, there were 448 victims of homicide in Australia, of which 280 (63%) were men. Most homicide offenders are male with either a known criminal or family violence history.
Men accounted for 3 in 4 suicides. A total of 3307 people died by suicide, of which 2528 were males.

Men’s violence towards women:

Worldwide, a woman or girl is murdered by a man she knows every 10 minutes.
In Australia this year, 38 women have been murdered in suspected FDV incidents so far. Last year it was 79 women and the year before it was 106.
1 in 3 men have used domestic or sexual violence against an intimate partner as an adult.
1 in 4 women have experienced violence by an intimate partner, compared to 1 in 14 men.
In 2024, 79% of domestic violence offenders proceeded against by police were male.
76% of domestic violence hospitalisations were female.
Half of all hospitalisations that involved assaults were due to domestic violence.

(sources: Australian Bureau of Statistics; the Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission; UN Women; Australian Femicide Watch)

As someone who is in these statistics, it’s distressing to hear public figures like Senator Hanson make inflammatory statements that undermine people’s safety.

And the ignorance regurgitated in the comments on any family and domestic violence story – year after year – is both infuriating and devastating.

If Senator Hanson truly cared about this issue, and men’s health more generally, she’d align herself with organisations driving positive change, instead of being the poster politician for misogyny.

We already know her views are wrong.

We already have a mountain of evidence proving that she’s wrong.

We cannot let her derail the conversation and drag us backwards, and we absolutely cannot have someone that ruthless and clueless in power.

Pauline Hanson latest comments on family and domestic violence:

“It is wrong, but it’s also a two-way street. But I’m not saying that it’s just men, women can lose their cool as well. Domestic violence is a scourge, but look, I’ve been through it myself in my life.

“I just feel that if you’re not in a house where you feel safe, you feel you don’t want to be there, then you shouldn’t put up with it. And if these women are getting abused by men out there, then don’t put up with it.”

Why it’s wrong:

Leaving abuse doesn’t reduce the number of abusers. It simultaneously puts the current victim in more danger and creates a vacancy for the next one. One perpetrator = multiple victims.

It minimises abuse as someone losing their cool, rather than a sustained pattern of escalating danger.

It labels abuse as a two-way relationship problem, rather than an abuser problem.

It shifts responsibility for abuse from the perpetrator to the victim. She must leave, rather than he must stop.

It makes abuse something that women put up with, rather than something that men do.

It uses subtle language that distorts reality. “Women can lose their cool … if these women are getting abused … don’t put up with it”.

Some of Hanson’s previous comments:

As bad as Hanson’s latest comments are, she has said and done worse.

In 2019, she used parliamentary privilege to attack her former daughter-in-law, calling her “nasty” and accusing her of making false claims about her son.

Hanson has repeatedly claimed that women lie about family and domestic violence and downplayed the gendered nature of the issue, claims rejected by experts and debunked by evidence.

After a Brisbane father murdered his wife and three children, Hanson pleaded for men not to be “bastardised”. On domestic violence more generally she said that “a lot of people are driven to this, for one reason or another”.

She has said that women use family violence leave for a “holiday” and treat child support as a “cash cow”. And she has said that police spend too much time investigating domestic violence instead of “real crime”.

The insults just keep coming and are an extension of the abuse that so many of us have suffered.

Spreading misinformation might be a vote winner for Hanson in some circles, but I truly hope that fair-minded Australians can see straight through it.

These are some of the major organisations in Australia that are a positive, proactive voice for men: