In my native Australia there are two women who are men's rights activists and they are truly despicable. The first one, Bettina Arndt, interviewed the man sent to prison for grooming and sexually assaulting the current Australian of the Year, Grace Tame. The second, is the font of all ignorance, pauline hanson. After a man, last year, doused his estranged wife and kids with petrol as she was reversing their car out of the driveway, and later set them alight, and they all died, hanson appeared on television and suggested that he may have been pushed too far! Then, when there was talk of criminalising coercive control and taskforces on domestic violence, hanson came out saying that we had to stop demonising men!

This claptrap came from a woman who thought nothing about demonising Muslims after the Lindt Cafe Siege and the shooting murder of Curtis Cheng by a radicalised young Muslim man! Yet, apparently, according to hanson, John Howard's gun buy back scheme was a kneejerk reaction to the Port Arthur Massacre but a call to ban Muslim immigration because a Muslim man who came on a business visa, in 2001, and claimed that he faced persecution, but had a history of violence and mental health concerns, and had no connection to ISIS, is not!

If a woman dies at the hands of a violent man, then the spotlight should rightly be focused upon all men, and here's why. I knew a man, whose ex-wife has an important role in my life (no, she's not my lover) and if you saw him, you would assume he was just a regular guy, but behind closed doors, or when he thought people weren't paying attention, he was abusive. The onus is on men who, if they have a friend, whom they think is a regular guy but who lets the visage slip and has a nasty side, to call him out on it.

I remember the cases of two men, one was Peter May, who, 25 years ago, murdered his estranged wife, his kids, and his in-laws before turning the gun on himself. His friends sometimes said that he abused his wife, verbally. Another man, whose name was Rodney Falls, was shot by his wife, but she was acquitted of his murder on these grounds. Rodney Falls was a calculatingly brutal man, who, in public and around his friends, was attentive, caring and gentle, but behind closed doors, violently assaulted his wife. So, she, one time, mixed sleeping pills into his mashed potato and then using a gun supplied by a friend, shot him twice in the temple. Men such as him attempt to create the image that they are kind, decent men, but in reality, they are brutal.

I become angry with my mother, sometimes, because she's a lot like my maternal grandfather, who was controlling towards my grandmother and used to drink quite a bit. My father told me that my grandfather asked him if he had started smacking me when I was about one and if he didn't, my grandfather would. And my father said that if he laid a finger on me, he'd flatten him. My mother is a demanding person, who, if you tried to explain why something couldn't be done, would yell at you, and when it went wrong, would say she didn't tell you to do it.