Peter’s personal story

Firstly, I have to say how deeply insulted I am, when I see these Australia Says No to Violence Against Women, advertisements on TV.  And the ads where a boy locks himself in a room with a male coming down the hallway to yet again sexually assault him.

When I see these ads, I literally feel sick in the stomach and if my boys are in the room, they get angry and verbally run these ads down as utter lies and rubbish, because they have all been hurt by an abusive woman, who has so many women supporting her in her attempts to control our children. Even my daughter questions the sincerity of other women, but worst of all, she does not trust her own mother.

These ads all state that men are the perpetrators of ‘ALL’ domestic violence and child abuse and that women are innocent just like the children are innocent.

Well, I'm sorry to say that the women I have known are nothing like innocent and it is anathema to state they are innocent like children.

In my abusive marriage that ended early 2006, for the 15 years of that marriage, I suffered some very serious abuse from my wife who was almost as tall as me and weighed roughly the same too.  Her behaviour left me feeling that at anytime she was going to start belting me, because she was so verbally violent, when she would lean over me with her knuckles clenched while I sat at the kitchen table and she would be screaming abuses at me because I dared to raise the issue with her of the fact she forgot to pay a bill yet again and they are now threatening to send out the debt collectors.

This was from a woman who wanted control of the money, but then complain that her load was too much. When I offered to her that we do it together, she would then fly at me for not trusting her.

That scenario happened again some months later! 

The above abuse only escalated as the years went by, but in the second year of our marriage our first child was born, a boy. This boy would then go on to suffer horrendous physical, emotional and psychological abuse for the whole of the 13.5 years he lived with his mother. She would bash him and bash him till he was on the floor in a foetal position. She would be standing above him and swinging hits at him, like a flailing machine registering hits of anywhere between 10 and 20 times.

Whenever I was around to witness this, I always intervened by screaming at her to stop. She warned me that if I ever told anyone outside of our home, anything that I believed she was like, that that would be the instant end of our marriage and I would never see our son or any of our children ever again.

So, being totally defeated and too frightened to leave my son alone with this monster, I remained and capitulated. We ended up with 3 more kids. These children did not suffer as much as the first one, but they did (and still do) suffer serious neglect and manipulation.

Later in the marriage when I ended up off work chronically ill, she became physically violent. She would hit and shove me, when I tried to escape her tirades. She would barricade me in our bedroom by standing in the doorway with her arms crossed and refuse to move. She would be screaming at me demanding answers to questions, but she wouldn't shut up to let me answer. She would call me all sorts of names and I would end up feeling like I was having a heart attack and was going to die. On three occasions I exploded and hit the wall next to my side of the bed, which was on the opposite side of the room to her and because it was made of old plaster board, the wall got a hole in it. She would then leave me alone after berating me for damaging the wall. But on two occasions, I thought I was truly going to die and had to escape. So I mustered up all my strength, which was not much due to my illness, and I pushed past her. All I achieved was to push her back on her heels, which made it much easier for her to come back at me with all her body weight and shove me very hard then slap me. This shove further hurt my already badly damaged spine and I saw stars and nearly collapsed. I had to go back to my bed and I just collapsed on the bed and hardly moved for 3 whole days. During the 3 days she hardly spoke to me or came near me. I thought I was going to die!

When she decided to get rid of me, I was in hospital in the city and just before I was due to come home, she gleefully informed me that if I did, I would be arrested because she got a violence restraining order out on me. This order effectively kept me in exile from my home town and away from my kids for 8 months. She lied to the police and the courts to get this order and I was treated like a criminal from then on by everyone.

We have one daughter who is the second youngest. This poor child, along with the boys, loves her mother a lot, but finds she must have a week on and week off with me and her mother, so she can have some respite. Their mother is a very expensive and draining woman to live with. She is a 100% taker and gives little to nothing of herself back.

Now I have the eldest living with me 100%, the second eldest at 80% and the two youngest at 50%.  Every week the youngest has to go back to his mother, he begs me to let him stay. But he is too immature to make that decision and because he cannot fight the authorities, then he has to remain with his mother until he is strong enough to demand to stay with me.

You see, the authorities, being the family court, the police and the Dept of Child Protection, all manipulate children when they interview them. They twist what the children say and then lie in court. These departments are completely against fathers and will openly and deliberately and knowingly keep children with an abusive mother, just so they can stop them going to the father.

It is their policy to openly discriminate against fathers. I would challenge anyone to prove me wrong! If this is not the case then why is it that all men are aware of the hatred and abuse they will receive when being involved with these most horried govt depts, and why is it that even in 2009 they still send the vast majority of children back with the mother and in most cases the mother is the abuser of the children.

I am confident of that claim too, because in Western Australia, the dept of child protection's own stats for the last 4 years show that mothers are responsible for 3 times more of the child abuse to their own children than the natural fathers are.

When I was kicked out of my family and forcibly kept in exile by an unlawful restraining order, I made numerous phone calls and looked all through the internet to find any help or support for me as an abused husband/father and to also get help for my abused children.

What I found was that there was ZERO help out there for me. Even the men's helpline was totally useless. They actually told me they were there to help men who were abusers not victims.

And I made the mistake of phoning the dept of child protection. The woman I spoke to attacked me and told me to stop telling lies about the mother of my children and warned me that I could get into trouble for doing so. She claimed that according to statistics, women are all victims and that the men are the abusers of women and children.

So, because of this woman, my children had to endure many more months of abuse at the hands of their mother and also their mother's own abuser - her mother.

You see, the abuse in this family has come down through the women. My ex wife's grandmother abused her husband and her children but one child in particular. That child was my wife's mother. My wife's mother abused her husband and also my wife as well. Then my wife abused me and all our children but most of all the eldest.

The only abuse she hasn't perpetrated, to my knowledge that is, is sexual abuse.  She has done everything else!!

I can only hope and pray that this country will get rid of its discrimination against men and boys and start bringing the pendulum back to centre. We all know men and women should be treated equally, so why on earth are we discriminating against men.