Victoria Police fought a legal battle with a transgender woman for more than two years before admitting it incorrectly referred her to men's support services.
She did get support though, just the wrong group. Gendered services aren’t really the issue here, that aspect seems like it worked fine except that she was referred incorrectly.
An aside, but gender division of services is not inherently problematic. Most DV support is done through the same organizations, but male and female DV care has very different needs. The number of men who seek DV support because they are actively at risk of grievous physical harm is vanishingly small, for example; men are generally at risk of losing housing, medical care, are being prevented from accessing their residence or their children are at risk and so male DV support is set up to provide those because that is usually what men most urgently need addressing. This is very counter to womens DV support, which is almost always about removing them from imminent harm ASAP and everything else is secondary. Connecting people to systems designed to provide what they likely most urgently need is critical to providing DV care, and errors can be then corrected once the urgent issues are addressed.
There’s no perfect solution, and unfortunately going with what statistically will improve responses is the best you can hope for. Incredibly rare cases like this, which could have been resolved by simply speaking to the social workers involved, should not be the reason the whole system is slowed down - the solution here is just to make sure people are recorded as their correct genders.
She did get support though, just the wrong group. Gendered services aren’t really the issue here, that aspect seems like it worked fine except that she was referred incorrectly.
You don’t know Australia.
This is the Victorian government support page for Domestic/Family Violence.
You will notice under the men’s referral section it states:
Free, confidential expert support for people at risk of using family violence.
And when you follow the link to the referred service they state:
No to Violence provides a range of services to support men concerned about their behaviour to change what they are doing and keep women, children and communities safer.
Men are only the abusers in the eyes of the government in Australia.
That’s pretty clearly just a badly thought out label for the program though, there’s other similar things under their own separate and similarly poorly named headings. I’m also not sure it’s fair to draw that conclusion about the attitude of the government from that example - there’s a whole bunch of gender-neutral support groups on that same page, including the very first entry:
Safe Steps provides specialised support for individuals facing family and domestic violence, regardless of age, gender, ability, or cultural background. We’re here to listen, understand your situation, and guide you to safety.
That a program exists specifically to help male abusers via therapy isn’t an endorsement of the idea thst female abusers don’t exist, it’s a sign that Australia follows the abuse trends of every other country, where men are orders of magnitude more likely to be violent abusers.
Male access to therapy is fucking terrible across the entire world, so a specific program set up to help remedy that, even in a way with a narrow focus, is not what I would call a problem.
She did get support though, just the wrong group. Gendered services aren’t really the issue here, that aspect seems like it worked fine except that she was referred incorrectly.
An aside, but gender division of services is not inherently problematic. Most DV support is done through the same organizations, but male and female DV care has very different needs. The number of men who seek DV support because they are actively at risk of grievous physical harm is vanishingly small, for example; men are generally at risk of losing housing, medical care, are being prevented from accessing their residence or their children are at risk and so male DV support is set up to provide those because that is usually what men most urgently need addressing. This is very counter to womens DV support, which is almost always about removing them from imminent harm ASAP and everything else is secondary. Connecting people to systems designed to provide what they likely most urgently need is critical to providing DV care, and errors can be then corrected once the urgent issues are addressed.
There’s no perfect solution, and unfortunately going with what statistically will improve responses is the best you can hope for. Incredibly rare cases like this, which could have been resolved by simply speaking to the social workers involved, should not be the reason the whole system is slowed down - the solution here is just to make sure people are recorded as their correct genders.
You don’t know Australia.
This is the Victorian government support page for Domestic/Family Violence.
https://www.vic.gov.au/family-violence-statewide-support-services
You will notice under the men’s referral section it states:
And when you follow the link to the referred service they state:
Men are only the abusers in the eyes of the government in Australia.
That’s pretty clearly just a badly thought out label for the program though, there’s other similar things under their own separate and similarly poorly named headings. I’m also not sure it’s fair to draw that conclusion about the attitude of the government from that example - there’s a whole bunch of gender-neutral support groups on that same page, including the very first entry:
That a program exists specifically to help male abusers via therapy isn’t an endorsement of the idea thst female abusers don’t exist, it’s a sign that Australia follows the abuse trends of every other country, where men are orders of magnitude more likely to be violent abusers.
Male access to therapy is fucking terrible across the entire world, so a specific program set up to help remedy that, even in a way with a narrow focus, is not what I would call a problem.