Sir, - John McGettrick (September 11th), argued that, as his legal practice dealt with very few cases of domestic violence against men, John Waters's assertions that men were frequent victims was unfounded.
The logic of Mr McGettrick's argument was that if men did not seek recourse to the family courts, then they were not the victims of domestic violence. Women go to the family courts in large numbers because even unsubstantiated complaints will often result in the father being immediately excluded from the family home, leaving them with sole custody of the children and de facto ownership of the house. With such rich rewards, it is tempting for a woman to claim her partner is violent.
The stereotyping of men as abusers and women as victims has been so successful that Women's Aid received State funding to monitor the effectiveness of the Domestic Violence Act 1996 in protecting women! Yet when I sought to research the workings of the Act, I discovered that there are no District Court records on the gender of the applicant for protection orders, safety orders or barring orders. I was told that "there was no room on the form" to include such information. The notion of "monitoring" the implementation of the Domestic Violence Act is a joke, since all court hearings under the Act are held in secret and even the decisions of the judge appear to be bound by secrecy!
Perhaps there is another secret committee somewhere to which all the secret judgments are relayed! - Yours, etc.,
Dr Bob McCormack, Iveragh Road, Whitehall, Dublin 9