Domestic violence comments to Bettina Arndt puts UTAS lecturer in spotlight

Australia Broadcast Center

22-05-2025

A university lecturer who teaches Tasmanian police recruits about domestic violence will not be involved in police training courses while comments she made in an interview with controversial men's right's commentator Bettina Arndt are reviewed.
In the video published online last week, Fiona Girkin says police are seeing "just as many women as they are men in domestic violence situations as the perpetrator ".
Dr Girkin is an associate lecturer in Policing and Emergency Management at the University of Tasmania and a former service manager of Launceston sexual assault support service Laurel House.
She teaches Tasmania Police recruits about family and domestic violence.
In the video, titled Tasmanian police resist feminist weaponisation of DV laws, she nods along as Ms Arndt explains that Dr Girkin originally approached her saying she'd be interested in talking about her teaching role.
"You thanked me for being willing to protect men from women who seek to destroy their lives," Ms Arndt says.
"Yeah," Dr Girkin says.
Bettina Arndt was condemned for her comments following the murder of Hannah Clarke and her three children in 2020, and has also been criticised for her sympathetic interview with a twice-convicted paedophile on YouTube.
In the interview with Dr Girkin, Ms Arndt says "you do teach them [police] about the international research showing in most violent homes, most males and females are violent and women often instigate violence?.
Ms Arndt continues "the data's well and truly out there", to which Dr Girkin nods and says "mmm".
"What I'm hearing from police that have been around for a long time … is that they're seeing just as many women as they are men in domestic violence situations as the perpetrator," Dr Girkin replies.
Alina Thomas from family violence support service Engender Equality said she was concerned about that messaging.
"[It] is a misrepresentation of what we know from evidence, from data and research about the causes and the impacts of family and sexual violence in the community.
"When people are entering into that conversation who have a very alternative perspective to what the evidence is demonstrating, it detracts from the severity of the reality and the impacts of that.
"That undermines the services who are working in that space, it undermines the change that we are trying to create… and the absolutely worst thing that happens is that victim survivors who have experienced this insidious form of violence find themselves being disbelieved, discredited."
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 1,582 offenders were proceeded against for a family or domestic violence-related offence in Tasmania last financial year, and 81 per cent of those were male.
The ABS states the male family and domestic violence offender rate was about four times higher than the female offender rate, with 505 male offenders per 100,000 males, compared with 117 female offenders per 100,000 females.
Chief executive of the Women's Legal Service Tasmania, Yvette Cehtel, said the interview was "disappointing on a number of fronts".
"So it's inconsistent with police reporting, it's also inconsistent with the Chief Justice of the Federal and Family Court of Australia's Lighthouse Project which identifies men as perpetrators of most family violence matters, and it just doesn't accord with what we see in our work either," Ms Cehtel said.
In the interview with Ms Arndt, Dr Girkin also says "stats do show that there's a gender imbalance when it comes to domestic violence", but she urges police to go into homes and look at behaviour, not gender.
She also tells Ms Arndt "we refuse to see women as perpetrators" and "we make a lot excuses for women, when women can be extremely manipulative and extremely harmful both in their own social groups but also to men in relationships".
Dr Girkin also expresses her views on laws around coercion and emotional abuse.
Dr Girkin told Ms Arndt "women are extremely manipulative and do use coercive control on a regular basis" and she believed that women were "probably more manipulative than men in many ways".
Yvette Cehtel said she was concerned a view like that may create a hierarchy of family violence offences, when Tasmania's Family Violence Act was clear that emotional and financial abuse could be standalone offences.
"It really normalises a whole raft of behaviours that constitute family and sexual violence. And there is absolutely a live conversation that we need to be having about barriers that exist for men reporting family and sexual violence.
In a statement, Tasmania Police said it did not have any input or awareness of Dr Girkin's interview.
"The opinions stated by Dr Girkin are not in line with the principles Tasmania Police supports in dealing with family violence," the statement said.
The University of Tasmania, Dr Girkin's employer, confirmed it was "aware of the interview and reviewing the issue", but would not comment further on matters concerning an individual staff member while that process was underway.
The University's Chief People Officer, Kristen Derbyshire, said UTAS was committed to fostering a community where respect, safety and inclusion were paramount and its values were set out in a Gender-Based Violence Action Plan in March this year.
Bree Klerck from the Tasmanian Family and Sexual Violence Alliance said the university should have a broader review of its academic and educational standards.
"To ensure that any adversarial narratives are looked at and not incorporated into UTAS lectures or coursework as well," she said.
Alina Thomas from Engender Equality said while Dr Girkin was still on staff at UTAS, the university was effectively endorsing her.
Dr Girkin did not respond to the ABC's attempts to contact her.