It is only misogyny that determines this government's resistance to what is obvious. The government is wrong to think, as it does, that domestic violence is about women's experience of harm and humiliation and that doing something means being nicer to women. The Home Office should treat domestic violence not as the exception but as the paradigm. That would focus minds on the inescapable correlation between gender and violence - whoever the victims are, the perpetrators are overwhelmingly men. And it would address the inertia and indifference which meets not only domestic violence, but all violence, whether the victims are women, or other men.
Violence is about conquest.
And as the Australian academic Robert Connell insists, violence, like crime and war, is a context for making masculinity. Violence happens because someone wants to hurt someone else - because of their gender, their generation or their race. We have thought of it as a short-circuit of someone's individual mind. But when you look at domestic violence you see that it is more about gender than it is about individuals, it is a social problem with deep rooted meanings. A project involving domestic violence researchers and the police in West Yorkshire revealed an unpredictable response.