On January 25th, Fairfax blog Daily Life published an article by Jane Gilmore titled "Fact or fiction: Every third victim of intimate partner violence is a male". The article was the latest in a series of attacks upon male victims of domestic violence by the publication.

The article contains two serious errors.

Firstly Gilmore claimed that “women's reports of partner violence increased from 1.9 to 3.2 [between 2005 and 2016]”. Actually, the 2016 ABS PSS found that women’s reports of partner violence increased from 1.5% to 1.7% (Table 2.1) - a 13% increase that the ABS says is not statistically significant.

Secondly, the author claims that “women are four times more likely to experience partner violence than men”. The 2016 PSS found that 211,700 women and 113,900 men (Table 1.1) experienced violence by an intimate partner in the last 12 months. That’s not even twice as many - nowhere near four times.

Our Watch (who should have immediately picked up these obvious errors) re-published Gilmore’s article on their Facebook page with the note “Journalist Jane Gilmore discusses the data surrounding male victims of domestic violence and the importance of reporting the facts.”

Here are the facts. Over the past decade, partner violence against women has remained relatively stable. By contrast, partner violence against men has doubled (and current partner violence has increased five-fold).

The One in Three Campaign has written an in-depth analysis of the claims made in Gilmore's article. It is available here.