The Victim is often the Abuser

Maybe you should work on not being violent, ma'am?

The caption reads:
Why should I leave with my kids, and let him stay, when he’s committed the crime?
I’m the victim, it would be a lot easier for him to go.


Based on Australian statistics, 8 out of 9 men are abusive. For the rest of the world, the abuser is as likely to be male or female. The only thing the Australian statistics prove is the prejudice of those who generate the statistics, unless Australia has more problems with the water than anyone is telling us.

I can't help wanting to tell this woman that the new laws have defined 'abuse' more broadly, and perhaps she should stop playing the victim for the entertainment of her friends and family, and take a good look at her own behaviour. It may be that she is damaging her children.

Although it is implied that the drunken brute (see page 9) is breaking things in the house, the reality is that this "victim" is as likely to have done it.

Ob is the only person in our house who ever broke anything in anger, and the only person who ever threw a punch. Her abusive behaviour increased as my disability worsened.
I've often wondered how she could have convinced her family that she was the victim. I found part of the answer in her first attempt to concoct evidence for the courts, from over a year before she filed Intervention Orders.

She did it by only telling them part of the story.
When you put her words in the context of reality, the meaning becomes much different. Her pained comments become self-serving distortions -- excuses for abuse more than anything else. She showed me what she had written as a threat. In a few minutes, she had to admit they were exaggerations and she had no legitimate grounds. (She told me it didn't matter. In the end, she was right.)

What we have in these publicly funded cartoons is the same thing. In Australia, only the woman can legally abuse. In fact, she is encouraged by the law and the structures that surround the courts to be abusive.
Ob came to feel so confident that she would always be the victim, she was willing to try to provoke violence, even to the point of baiting me by putting words in my mouth. At the time, I thought she was simply being childish.

What I didn't realize was how childish the courts were...

To the woman in the cartoon: No, ma'am, there is no proof you are the victim. And perhaps justice would be best served if you left the house, and let the guy raise the kids away from your abuse.