A few weeks ago, thousands took to the streets of Madrid to march on behalf of children’s rights, holding banners denouncing false allegations and promoting shared parenting. Please take a quick look at this powerful Spanish video made by a dad recording this exciting protest. It’s thrilling to see so many people, including many women, forcing their government to take notice of what’s happening to dads in their courts.

One of the organisations that orchestrated that Spanish demonstration is a member of DAVIA – The Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance – which now boasts 102 member organisations from 34 countries in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America, and North America. This hugely diverse network consists of all sorts of community-based groups working together to ensure domestic violence policies are ‘science-based, family-affirming, and gender-inclusive’.

Late last month they released a brand-new documentary – ‘MEN TOO – Male Victims of Domestic Violence’ which features many of the key people who have been out there for decades speaking up for male victims.

Meanwhile, in Australia, a country controlled by some of the world’s most powerful feminists, we are preparing for another legal danger facing men. In the next year or so, new coercive control laws will be rolled out in Queensland and New South Wales. A Queensland barrister said recently that lawyers in his state are ‘awaiting the tsunami’ – as the first wave of coercive control allegations hits the courts and lawyers try to stop men being sent to jail on dubious charges.

It’s telling that the new coercive control laws have been kept on ice in these states for years as authorities have difficulty working out who to charge, whether coercive control has taken place, and who the victim is.

This ‘misidentification crisis’ continues to occur with no real solution in sight. Men are far more likely to be prejudiced by current police training practices and so are at greater risk of ending up in the criminal system on a false allegation.

That is why, even though coercive control laws were passed in NSW last year, everything is on hold while authorities work feverishly placing female officers in police stations across the state who face the thankless task of trying to instruct their fellow officers in identifying the problem and the correct perpetrators. Coercive control is a really slippery little blighter, with experts coming up with no fewer than 22 different definitions when trying to pin down what the hell we are talking about.

But when it comes to this new brand of supposedly solely male villainy, it’s hardly surprising that police officers across the country are finding that, as often as not, it is women who exhibit these behaviours – as the Australian Bureau of Statistics has shown. It’s encouraging that many of the men and women in blue seem to be resisting the feminist demand that they only charge men.

An alleged link between coercive control and domestic homicide was used to push through the new laws – despite the fact that this connection was never mentioned in the UK where the laws were introduced in 2015.

‘Let’s not forget that coercive control is the biggest predicting factor in intimate parent homicide,’ said the Minister for Women, Shannon Fentiman, when introducing the bill for the new Queensland laws.

Well, the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOSCAR) has thrown a spanner in the works by announcing coercive control is not a reliable predictor of future violence.

The researchers used a ‘text-mining system’ to capture behaviour associated with coercive control from 526,787 police reports associated with coercive control and used this measure to detect/predict domestic violence over the next 12 months.

The results were unimpressive, stating: ‘Use of our measure in conjunction with existing incident categories significantly expands our ability to identify coercive control behaviours, however it does not improve our ability to predict which events are followed by further domestic violence.’

There’s a further item in the BOSCAR research that exposes yet another flaw in the evidence base supporting the mighty domestic violence industry. The report mentions a comprehensive survey on policing domestic violence which points out that most domestic murders occur without prior police contact with the offender. Only about 3 per cent of cases had a previous domestic violence record.

Think about that. We have this huge number of men having their lives derailed by violence orders, often based on false allegations. Yet the vast majority of men who end up perpetrating domestic homicide have had nothing to do with the police.

As some wise person pointed out, a violence protection order was supposed to be a shield rather than a sword. It was supposed to be about protecting a person, usually a woman, from future violence, not a weapon to be used by an angry or disgruntled woman to destroy a man.

How come we so rarely even talk about whether it is doing a good job protecting vulnerable women?

Well, BOSCAR touched on this issue in a recent publication, which concluded that ‘Although they are an integral part of the criminal justice response, there is limited rigorous evidence on the effectiveness of protection orders in improving DV-related outcomes.’

Too right. The evidence base for our massive violence order system has always been mighty thin on the ground. When most of our DV laws were introduced over a decade ago, overseas research on the subject was dismal, mainly based on phone interviews with victims. The only study with a statistically significant result at that time was research involving phone interviews with 313 people in Seattle!

Not much has changed, even though there’s now a wealth of Australian research looking at reoffending rates for people on violence orders. With so many violence orders now based on false accusations used in family law battles, it’s nonsensical to suggest breaches tell us anything about the deterrent effect of a violence order, given that breaches are often set up as part of the false accuser’s strategy. Plus, there’s the fact that we’re often not talking about physical violence, with violence orders now issued for emotional abuse, psychological abuse, financial abuse, spiritual abuse … the list goes on. The shield is often used to protect a woman’s hurt feelings rather than keeping her safe.

Knowing this, it is very irritating to read research studies that laboriously add up rates of repeat offending and order breaches. These researchers are living in La La Land.

To put the whole thing in perspective, let’s look at just one state – Queensland. The Sunshine State, they call it.

Oh yeh? Queensland has more people locked up for breaches of violence orders than the rest of Australia put together. Not much sunshine for that lot.

Violence orders are already being issued at five times the rate of divorces. And this is a huge growth industry.

The future looks particularly grim for men in our Deep North but rest assured, the move is on everywhere. Violence orders are already scattered like vile confetti across the land. Yet the growth in numbers of men locked up through breaches will pale into insignificance once coercive control’s fast route to prison is fully operational.