In a national conversation rightly focused on domestic violence and the rise of the toxic manosphere, a simple truth gets lost in the noise. The vast majority of Australian men are genuinely good people.
Acknowledging this does not take away from the horror of domestic, family and sexual violence, nor does it excuse the those who commit it. But by almost any measure, Australian men are overwhelmingly raised with solid values and a deep sense of responsibility.
Australia has a bad habit of adopting American political arguments wholesale. We see it in imported debates over issues like abortion, where foreign fights are lazily applied to an Australian reality that is entirely different.
And with the One Nation fold happily regurgitating false arguments and statics about abortion as fact, as well as equally absurd nonsense about family courts and DV, their imported outrage has started wandering to the closely related American rhetoric about the “deadbeat dad”.
It’s started creeping into the Facebook groups and social feeds without any basis whatsoever, and so help me if I hear that phrase out of Barnaby Joyce’s mouth I <insert lots of expletives here>.
In the United States, absent fathers are a real structural problem. Roughly a quarter of all American children grow up in single-parent homes (it’s almost half in African American homes). That issue is tied to America’s specific struggles with safe sex, contraception, abortion, and lack of adequate welfare, as well as deep cultural and social reasons that simply do not exist here.
To bring that narrative to Australia is completely out of touch with reality, and really unfair to Australian men. The statistics show a very clear picture of Australian fatherhood:
- Most kids grow up with both parents. Data from the Australian Institute of Family Studies shows that most children live with both biological parents. Single-parent families remain a minority, making up under 16 percent of households.
- Separation does not mean abandonment. When relationships do end, Australian fathers do not just walk away. Research shows that 18 months after a separation, only 9 percent of children have no contact with their dad. The number of parents that have no contact orders from courts is a fraction of a fraction.
- Kids want their dads around. In major studies of Australian children, nearly three-quarters of eight and nine-year-olds explicitly say they love spending time with both their mother and their father.
Australian dads show up. They stay involved, they provide, and they care.
In fact, many Australian men carry this duty to a fault. In quiet conversations, you hear the same story over and over. I had one of those conversations earlier this week, with both of us telling the stories of men when knew that had been trapped, stayed, and were traumatised for years as a result.
Most of us will know of men who stayed in deeply unhappy relationships solely for the sake of their children. They do the “right” thing, work hard to provide, and put their own happiness last for years, choosing personal misery over leaving their family.
They are good men. They are just not being very good to themselves.
If we want to tackle male suicide, domestic violence, and keep young men away from toxic online spaces, we all need to change how we talk about fatherhood and masculinity. Our good men need to know that being a good father does not mean you have to stay in a bad relationship. A man can be a great dad while accepting that staying with his ‘baby mama’, to use the American vernacular, is a really bad idea for everyone involved.
And that means women letting them go, choosing to have happy and healthy coparenting relationships, rather than fighting to the point that you can’t stand each other, or talking their otherwise good man down because they weren’t good for her.
And neither side turning the children against the other parent. There’s way too much of that too.
(And yes, the same rules apply for same sex couples splitting up and coparenting: you can do this in an adult way.)
Our politicians and commentators really need to stop putting Australian men down, or taking advantage of their misery, for cheap votes. Stop importing American problems, stop feeding Australian voters lies, just stop all of it.
Let’s have real and honest conversations so we can all stop hurting each other, and all be better people.
End Rant.
Dr RK (Kath) Crosby is the CEO of research and strategy company KORE CSR, former strategist for the Australian Democrats, and holds a PhD in political behaviour. She is also a well known migraine and health advocate, and the Publisher of New England Times and North Coast Times.
All opinion and comment on New England Times Engage is the opinion of the writer and not New England Times.
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