Wooing the female constituency

This is an excerpt from a column by Chris Trotter in the Financial Independent Review (The entire piece is at here at Kiwiblog);

Keys speech to the Salvation Army's "JustAction" conference on April 17 illustrated just how ambitious this re-branding exercise has become:

"There are those whose life stories would read very much like Louise Nicholas's but who will never have their day in court and whose experiences were not confined to the provinces, or to the 1980s, and the perpetrators were not policemen. There remains a dark side to the experiences of too many New Zealand women and children at the hands of too many New Zealand men."

There is truth in this. But it could also be said that there are too many New Zealand men and children suffering at the hands of New Zealand women. Of course that wouldn't play well with the female constituency Key is trying to woo and frankly, too many men just seem to put up broad condemnatory statements like Key's.

My own experience is that when it comes to domestic dysfunction the blame can be fairly evenly divided between the genders - acknowledging of course that men usually cause more physical harm.