Poor mental health is not an excuse for misogyny and violence
Not only are mental health issues are not an excuse, they’re barely an explanation for men’s violence.
Evidence says there’s a link between men’s poor mental health and the physical, sexual, psychological, emotional, financial and political violence they choose to commit against women and children. The Australian Man Box survey found men who hold to rigid ideals of masculinity are both more likely to experience poor mental health and more likely to commit violence against intimate partners. Another study found 1 in 3 Australian men have been violent to their intimate parters and that it is more common in men with mental health issues.
As I wrote in my last piece, Men are the problem, this does not mean anyone should be tempted to excuse sad, mad men for the violence they choose to enact. Violence is always a choice and men should be accountable for the choices they make.
Mental illness does not cause violence and it does not excuse it. It doesn’t even really explain it. Women suffer more mental health issues than men and are far less violent, so the determining factor is not mental health, it’s gender.
I shouldn’t have to say this, (but I know I do): I am not arguing against mental health care for men and boys. That would be a ludicrous misinterpretation of my point. Obviously, men and boys with mental health problems should receive all the support and care they need. The chronic underfunding of mental health care is one of the structural failings of Australia’s medical system and more people will die as governments continue to ignore their responsibility to provide adequate health care services to their constituents.
I’m not even arguing against more work to get a better understanding of the role mental health might play in increasing the risk of men committing violence. The more we know about how men benefit from sexual and intimate violence, the better we are armed to fight it. If some men are choosing to use rape and abuse of women and children to medicate the symptoms of their illness, we need to know about it and we need to train medical, legal, educational and political institutions to respond appropriately.
But the risk of too much concentration on mental health in prevention or understanding of violence is that it (once again) becomes a means of removing men’s accountability for violence.
Partly, this is due to the recent concurrent surges in masculinity research, weaponised online misogyny and concern about men’s mental health, which are so tangled that it’s almost impossible to separate them. It’s also because these issues are painted over a backdrop soaked in millenniums of viciously sanctimonious voices blaming women for the violence men choose to do to them: What were you wearing? Did you say no? How often did you say no? Did you said no in a way he could understand? If he didn’t understand that you said no, then weren’t you asking for it? What if I show the court a picture of the undies you were wearing when you said no, doesn’t that prove you’re a liar?
The long historical context is crucial to the essential work of understanding the link between men’s mental health and they violence they choose to do to women and children. The slate is not clean, it’s covered in ancient writing that blames women and absolves men of their responsibility for rape, abuse and murder.
It’s also important to recognise that these myths are not only a historical problem. They’re still prevalent and still permeating our lives and beliefs. In the more than ten years I’ve been doing the Fixed It project, I’ve documented hundreds of cases of media reporting on men’s violence against women. The most common themes I’ve recorded are erasing men’s responsibility for the violence they commit (variations on the too mad, bad or sad to be accountable), rendering violent men completely invisible (let’s not even acknowledge the man was there), blaming women (duplicitous, malicious, faithless women are all out to ruin men’s lives) or erasing women (women’s pain and injuries are a regrettable but irrelevant side effect of men’s important experiences).
When we follow the manosphere down the rabbit hole to reposition men and boys as disadvantaged, we can fall into the trap of reinterpreting any mention of the injuries they inflict on women, girls, non-binary people and “unmanly” men as a contribution to that disadvantage. The facts about violence do not demonise men. They simply recognise the reality of men’s violence.
For most of the twentieth century rape was viewed as the inevitable result of psychiatric illness (what we now call mental health issues). Men who committed rape were seen as sick and incapable of controlling their deviant sexual impulses. Their disease was believed to be born of childhood disturbance, latent homosexual tendencies or an antagonistic relationships with a mother figure (because if you can’t find any other woman to blame, there’s always his mother). This separated men who raped and killed women from the dominant group of “normal” men who were performing strong heterosexuality along with stoic endurance of childhood experiences and therefore did not fit the cultural depiction of the sexual psychopath (aka: the rapist). As Dr Nicholas Groth wrote in his highly influential 1979 book, Men Who Rape, “rape is always a symptom of some psychological dysfunction”.
This model took a deeply sympathetic view of men who raped women. As respected psychotherapist Benjamin Karpman wrote in 1951, sexual psychopaths (aka men who rape women) “are victims of a disease from which many of them suffer more than their victims”.
By the 1970s, this concept had entwined itself into the American legal system and thirty states had enacted “sexual psychopath” laws that defined rape and rapists in terms of diseased sexual urges.
While the psychiatric dominance of the legal response to rape has diminished in recent decades, the disease model has not disappeared from modern attitudes to violence. In the 2017 Australian National Community Attitudes Survey (NCAS), 33% of Australians agreed that “rape results from men not being able to control their need for sex” (NCAS removed this question from the latest iteration of the survey).
While modern language is less explicit in erasing responsibility for the choice to rape someone than the “sexual psychopath” labelling of the twentieth century, “poor mental health” is still the common narrative for offenders.
Recent analysis of sentencing remarks in sexual offence cases in Victoria shows the most commonly cited mitigating factor (reasons to reduce prison time) was that the offender was of “good character”(!!!). The second most common was “difficult/deprived background” and the third most common was “mental disorder/disability”. Another study in 2025 found that trauma experiences of offenders were noted in 96% of sentencing hearings for sexual offences, although there were variations in how much effect this had on sentencing.
To be clear, I’m not table thumping about lock-‘em-all-up-and-let-the-prison-guards-sort-‘em-out. I think prisons are dangerous, often counterproductive and demonstrably racist - I’m just not sure what the alternative might be. That aside, the prevalence of mental health and past trauma in the mitigating factors mentioned in sentencing remarks exist because defence lawyers think this will work to get a sympathetic outcome for their clients. It’s only in the evidence because they crafted the narrative and submitted it to the court. The essential context that’s missing from all these narratives is that most people with mental illness do not rape or sexually assault people, and women (who have far more mental health issues than men) rarely commie violent crimes.
In fact, where mental health problems are used to remove men’s responsibility for violence, they have they opposite effect for women. Women with mental illnesses are viewed as less credible when they report violence and even seen as more likely to have provoked or precipitated men’s violence.
Mental health is not always a choice we get to make for ourselves. Violence, however, is always a choice and not one that can be explained away by poor mental health excuses.
AI declaration: I do not use AI in any of my work. Not for writing, structure or research. Mostly because the few times I tried it the results were so incomplete and unreliable that it ended up being faster and better to do it myself. I’m told AI has improved significantly since then, but I’ve chosen to not explore this because I don’t want to be tempted away from the complex imperfection of my own thoughts, voice and analysis.
I have sometimes used AI to create images, and they are all labelled as such. Graphs and data are all my own work from spreadsheets I create myself and data I download from reliable sources such as the ABS.
Thanks Jane. Brilliant analysis as always and as always, infuriating!