Bettina Arndt on Apprehended Violence Orders
Bettina Arndt's October 1 essay is not an argument that domestic violence is imaginary. It is an argument that the order meant to restrain it has been detached from violence, issued at industrial scale, and then used to cut fathers off from their children before any allegation is proved. She calls the result state-sanctioned parental alienation. And as any bloke knows, who has been through this meat grinder, she is spot on.
Personal example. My nephew was living with a somewhat feral woman. They went to a night club she got drunk. She made advances to some other drunk guy. Nephew saw it, said we are breaking up, and left. He went back to the unit to eat, but was confronted by eight armed police who arrested him for assault. Seems said girlfriend rang police when he left, claimed he bashed her up in the nightclub. Nephew was handcuffed taken to holding cell, kept there all night, was not given a lawyer or allowed to make a call. Witnesses at the club did not see any violence. Faced with this the girl friend withdrew the complaint, but police continued. The case got thrown out. But the girl friend never got any punishment for making a fabricated complaint. The AVO prevented the nephew from getting his tools and even clothes from the unit. It too was dropped. Action against police? The lawyer did not recommend it, as things like this are common.
Indeed, the scale is the first claim. In 1987, New South Wales local courts issued 1,462 apprehended violence orders, then available only between people in a domestic relationship. In 2025, BOCSAR recorded 52,757 domestic AVOs commenced and 107,830 in force at year's end, more than double the stock of seven years earlier. About 85 percent of final orders run two years or more. Queensland applications rose 44.4 percent in the decade to 2017–18, and 22.6 percent after population growth. No agency publishes a national count. On the NSW rate, Arndt puts the country at well over 300,000 orders in force. Mothers are usually the protected person. Because children's arrangements run through her, the order stops contact with the children as well. A father is cut off with no trial, no tested evidence, and no finding.
She sets that expansion against the Australian Bureau of Statistics Personal Safety Survey. Since 2005 the rate of physical violence fell from 10 percent to 6.1 percent for men and from 4.7 percent to 2.9 percent for women, violence from anyone, not only partners. The male decline, she notes, came mostly from fewer assaults by other men, often strangers, which a domestic order does not touch. Between 2016 and 2021–22 the ABS found no significant change for either sex, while the orders kept climbing. Defenders can say the orders helped. Her point is that a system growing this fast while measured violence falls is tracking policy, definitions, and a bureaucracy, not a matching rise in danger.
Almost none of it is tested. Of 44,537 AVO applications in NSW in 2023, 609 were dismissed after a defended hearing, about one in seventy. The courts do not publish how many matters were defended at all, or how many of the 35,621 final orders were by consent. An Australian Law Reform Commission report, citing Victorian practice, put the median protection-order hearing at three minutes. Interim orders in NSW can be made whether or not the defendant is present or has been told. In Western Australia, if a respondent does not return the form within 21 days, the interim family-violence restraining order becomes final. He is never heard. In Victoria, even among respondents who turned up, 69 percent of final intervention orders were made by consent rather than contested. NSW and Queensland allow consent without admissions: he does not accept the allegations, often on legal advice that a fight costs money and will probably be lost.
Arndt's sharpest point is that "without admissions" is not the small thing lawyers tell men it is. In NSW a person subject to an AVO in the past ten years cannot hold a firearms licence. In Western Australia disqualification runs for the life of the order plus five years. A Working with Children Check can be refused or cancelled. The family court must consider the order when deciding where a child lives. And a breach is a crime. Contact the order forbids, including, because children are routinely named, a birthday text to his own child, and he can be arrested. She cites Australian Institute of Health and Welfare figures, drawn from ABS criminal-court data, of about 39,600 defendants in 2023–24 whose principal offence was breaching a violence order: more than a hundred people a day in a criminal court because of a document no criminal court issued. The design, as the podcast source she relies on puts it, is civil to obtain and criminal to break. A determined applicant can engineer the breach by appearing with the children at his work or in a shop. If he waves, he has breached.
The label, she argues, does work the public thinks is done by fists. Nobody publishes the conduct behind the civil orders. The nearest window is the criminal list. In 2024 BOCSAR counted 37,916 domestic-violence court finalisations in NSW: 54 percent involved an assault charge, 35 percent intimidation or stalking, a category BOCSAR's own research says is typically threats and verbal abuse, not stalking in the ordinary sense, and 40 percent a breach of an existing order. Categories overlap. Of the assault finalisations, about one in three ended with nothing proved. In the Family Law Act the definition widens again, to behaviour that coerces or controls, or that causes a family member to be fearful, with no express requirement that the fear be reasonable. Repeated derogatory taunts sit under the same label as assault. The Law Reform Commission said this in 2010: an interim order "may be made for a number of reasons that do not reflect the level of risk, or evidence, of family violence." Arndt's charge is that fifteen years on, the system still answers the label, not the act.
The administration follows from that design. Orders are fast, ex parte, and sticky. Contesting them is slow, expensive, and often advised against. Consent is counted as agreement. The children are swept in without a separate finding about them. The government that runs the system does not count how many children lose a parent to an untested order. Real victims exist, and some orders protect them. Her claim is that the machine no longer distinguishes those cases from a fight about money, a fear that has not been shown to be reasonable, or a tactical filing in a custody dispute, and that once the paper is issued, a father's contact with his children is a criminal risk, not a parenting question.
This is but one more example of the feminist system's cultural war against men.
https://bettinaarndt.substack.com/p/weaponised-domestic-violence-orders
