Rising violence blamed on sex revolution

Anthony Daniels

Rising rates of domestic violence should be blamed on the "sexual revolution", says a visiting British expert.

Psychiatrist Anthony Daniels, who writes under the name Theodore Dalrymple, says his hospital in Birmingham saw a "huge" increase in injuries to women in the past 20 years, paralleling a doubling of arrests for family violence in New Zealand in the past decade.

His ward saw more than 1200 patients a year for attempted suicide by drug overdose, initially mostly young women but now slightly over half men.

Seventy per cent of the women were victims of domestic violence, and 70 per cent of the men had attacked their partners and then overdosed to try to prove to themselves, their partners and the courts that they had mental problems.

One in five of the women aged 16 to 50 living in the hospital's catchment area went to its emergency department each year with injuries inflicted by their partners.

"Most of that was caused by sexual jealousy," Dr Daniels said.

"There has been a tremendous increase in both the quantity and quality of jealousy, and the reason for this is because there is no structure in the relations between men and women."

Dr Daniels arrived in New Zealand at the weekend for a two-week tour sponsored by the Sensible Sentencing Trust, Family First and Christine Rankin's For the Sake of our Children Trust.

He quoted textbooks stating that psychiatrists should expect to see cases of "obsessive jealousy" once or twice a year.

"I was meeting it once or twice a day. Unless the previous observers were missing something at the time, this is a change," he said.

He put it down to stable, lifelong marriages being replaced, particularly in poorer communities, by the freedom to form serial short-term relationships.

"In the area in which I worked, regular [stable] relationships were almost unknown except among people of Indian subcontinent origin. The illegitimacy rate was almost 100 per cent," he said.

"The men who took overdoses had been violent to their women, and they were using violence actually as a means of controlling and enforcing their exclusive sexual possession, and they were assuming that other men were as predatory as they were.

"Although of course there has always been violence within marriage, and I don't think you are ever going to get rid of that, we know that violence is much more common amongst people who are not married than it is among people who are married."

He advocates marriage incentives such as a tax-free allowance of "say $20,000 a year" for married couples living together, but only $5000 a year for people living singly. He thinks divorce should be allowed only for violence, infidelity or "failure to keep one's responsibilities".

He would also scrap the domestic purposes benefit except in cases where men could not be forced to support their former partners and children.

He said people would still be free to form relationships outside marriage - they would just be discouraged.

"It depends what your expectations are in life," he said. "If your expectation is that life should be a continual Romeo and Juliet experience, then quite obviously it's not practical to suggest that people are going to stay together. But if you actually feel that your own inclinations are not the only thing that ought to be considered in any given situation, but the overall effect on other people, the effect on society, ought to be considered, then that will change how you behave."

Dr Daniels will address a National Party youth conference in Wellington today, speak in a debate with Green MP Sue Bradford on Wednesday and hold public meetings in Napier, Tauranga and Auckland.