Over recent weeks, Pauline Hanson made headlines for her comments on domestic violence. She declared domestic violence is “a two-way street”.
Media outlets then unearthed a 2025 podcast episode in which Hanson called paid domestic and family violence leave a “holiday”, and alleged domestic violence diverts police attention away from “real crime”.
While Hanson says her comments were taken out of context, her stance on domestic violence is not new.
In fact, as I chart in a forthcoming piece in Australian Historical Studies, her identification with male grievance has been core to her politics since day one. She’s been dubbed “queen of the Australian men’s rights movement”.
Yet this aspect has been largely overlooked by journalists and scholars alike, overshadowed by her attitudes toward racial diversity and immigration.
In 1996, Hanson told a journalist:
I think the most downtrodden person in this country is the white Anglo-Saxon male.
In 2023, she said in parliament:
[…] but, no doubt, I will be the only woman today speaking for the most oppressed and neglected minority in Australia: men.
As evidenced by these two quotes, almost 30 years apart, Hanson has consistently cast herself as an unwavering champion of men’s rights.
Though the manosphere has been trending in recent years, it’s just the latest manifestation of the men’s rights movement, which took off in the 1960s.
A subset of this movement is the fathers’ rights movement. Its followers believe the push for women’s rights has gone “too far”, that the Family Court is under feminist rule, and that the “feminist domestic violence industry” weaponises family law against men.
At the core of both movements is a simultaneous belief in male supremacy and male victimhood, with women as the primary villain in both cases.
Hanson championed the men’s rights agenda long before the rise of the manosphere. Hanson 1.0 (1996-98) and Hanson 2.0 (2016–) alike adopted many of the movement’s demands as core policy. This was most evident in attacks on family law for its supposed anti-male bias, a victim-blaming rhetoric of domestic violence and general anti-feminist sentiments.
Since the 1990s, Hanson has been an ardent believer in the myth that men are victimised by the Family Court system.
In her 1996 maiden speech, she attacked both the Family Law Act and child support scheme for being biased against “non-custodial” (male) parents, arguing the former “brought death, misery and heartache to countless of Australians” while the latter “has become unworkable, very unfair and one sided. Custodial parents can often profit handsomely at the expense of a parent paying child support”.
After successful lobbying by men’s rights groups, in 2019 Hanson moved for a parliamentary inquiry into the family law system and was appointed as its deputy chair.
Throughout the inquiry, Hanson endorsed evidence from the men’s rights groups invited to give testimony, while disparaging bodies representing single mothers and women’s legal services.
Hanson has long advanced men’s rights movement myths about domestic violence.
Demonstrating the increasing radicalisation of Hanson 2.0, in her 2016 maiden speech she warned the murder of women by their former partners out of “sheer frustration” would increase unless men are treated with more respect in “this unworkable system”.
Lastly, Hanson has been staunchly anti-feminist since her early days in parliament, appealing to men who feel directly threatened by feminism.
In a 2019 parliamentary speech, she stated she had had a “gutful of hearing from man-hating feminists […] I’m sick and tired of this constant criticism of men in Australia, especially if they’re white”.
Source: Pauline Hanson was once dubbed ‘queen of the men’s rights movement’. Her 30-year career shows why
Families are still grieving, and many Australians remain saddened and shocked, after the killing of four women and girls in four days earlier this month. And according to Australian Femicide Watch, 37 women have been killed this year.
Many of us have been asking: what more do we need to do to stop men’s violence against women?
There are many evidence-backed answers to this important question. But calling this violence a “two-way street” and misplacing the responsibility for violence back onto victims, as One Nation leader Pauline Hanson did this week, is not one of them.
According to our national Personal Safety Survey, one in four women have experienced violence by an intimate partner or family member since the age of 15, compared with one in eight men.
One in five women have experienced sexual violence since the age of 15, compared with one in 16 men.
And one in five women have experienced stalking since the age of 15, compared with one in 15 men.
The overwhelming majority of this violence is perpetrated by men. We cannot ignore the gendered patterns.
The research has long shown us that planning to leave, and leaving, are among the most dangerous times for women and children.
Not only can leaving be associated with an escalated risk of physical and lethal violence, but often post-separation abuse by former intimate partners continues, with detrimental impacts on women’s and children’s mental health, economic security, and long-term recovery.
And for many victim-survivors, coercive control, including financial abuse, stalking and social isolation, can leave them with little freedom or material resources to leave safely.
The stark reality is for many victim-survivors, there is nowhere safe and affordable for them to go. Domestic violence is the leading cause of homelessness for Australian women and children.
Source: Domestic violence isn’t a ‘two-way street’. The evidence shows it’s gendered and often deadly
The proposed changes would encourage child support to be collected directly from wages more often. About half of child support payment arrangements are made privately, which can be hard to enforce.
The government is also planning to release an online tool to help parents select the most suitable collection method.
The proposed laws would also be more flexible, allowing either parent to switch from private to government collection to recover child support debts.
There’s also funding to crack down on people who repeatedly don’t lodge tax returns to reduce the amount of child support they owe.
When child support is unpaid, delayed, or underpaid, payees (mostly mothers) can lose access to higher government payments or face unexpected debts because government payments are linked to expected child support. Single mothers with young children almost always carry the greatest financial burden of non-payment because they are less likely to be employed than other mothers.
Under the changes, late or unpaid child support is increasingly being framed as financial abuse.
Source: The government is reforming child support. Here’s what’s changing – and what’s been missed
The world watched on in horror in 2024 as Dominque Pelicot and 50 other men were tried in a French court for repeatedly drugging and raping Gisele Pelicot over almost a decade. All of them were found guilty.
A recent investigation by CNN revealed there are thousands-strong groups on messaging app Telegram who share tactics and videos assaulting and raping their girlfriends and wives.
While the CNN report and Pelicot’s case shocked the world, these cases are not unique, with private pages and group chats being uncovered in Australia, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain, China, and Poland.
While research on perpetrators of online violence is still emerging, those who study the cultures of these online groups observe that a kind of homosocial bonding is created when share their abuse with one another.
While the men in these groups are sharing images and videos of women, commenting on women’s bodies, degrading women and objectifying women, it is men who are at the centre of the exchange. They seek the validation and praise of other men. One way this is achieved is by getting comments and likes on their videos.
In these groups, the practices and the language are meant to degrade women, to reduce them to raw material, objects to be consumed to satiate men’s desire, and to reinforce the bonds between men. Misogyny is the “social glue” that holds these communities together.
In 2024, Telegram’s founder was arrested and charged in France for allowing illicit behaviour on the platform, including the distribution of child sexual abuse material. The case is still before the courts.
Source: Men film themselves sexually abusing sedated women and share it with other men online. Why?
