Category: Australia

http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2015/march/1425128400/jess-hill/home-truths
“Where women are the perpetrators, the violence is different: studies have repeatedly shown that it’s not as prolonged, and that men are far less likely to be living in fear. They’re also far less likely to be murdered: men kill women in four out of five intimate partner homicides. In the vast majority of cases where women kill their partners, the death follows a history of being subjected to domestic violence.”
“Despite fashionable debates about whether we’re living in post-feminist times, the uncomfortable truth is that our not-so-distant history still feeds into our beliefs. A late-19^th-century married woman was literally a man’s property, and it was his duty to protect her. The common law doctrine of coverture vanquished a woman’s legal rights on her wedding day, and assigned them to her husband. From that day on, she and her husband were considered to be the same person – and that person was the husband. Coverture was abolished in 1882, but its legacy endured; until the 1990s, a marriage certificate conveyed permanent sexual consent, and Australian men were permitted by law to rape their wives.
Domestic violence is the modern legacy of this history.”