The abuse directed at Helen Haines after she was critically injured exposes a culture in which grievance towards women is cultivated. Men have a responsibility to challenge it.
Helen Haines was unloading the boot of her car on Monday afternoon. She was outside her own electorate office on Murphy Street in Wangaratta. It was mid-afternoon and for her, it was just another day. Sadly, for many women like her, it was just another day. A white LandCruiser hit her. Bystanders held the 43-year-old male driver until police arrived. He is in custody. The prime minister has called it a deliberate act. She is in a Melbourne hospital in a critical condition.
By Monday night the wolves were at it again. In the comments sections, under the news articles and across social media, men lined up. Not all of them, but enough of them. A woman in a hospital bed became a target a second time. Mocked, blamed, dehumanised, before police had even finished interviewing the man they arrested.
We do not yet know what the man in the LandCruiser did or what he is accused of doing. We know exactly why the men at the keyboard did what they did. They did it because nobody has ever told them not to. Or because the people who should have told them were busy yet again ignoring it or allowing it to occur, right there, under authorised news articles.
I grew up in a world where the men who shaped boys like me were in the dojo and in the kickboxing and boxing ring. They were not gentle men. They were men who could hurt people with ferocious violence and had decided not to, and who spent their lives teaching boys to make the same decision.
The lesson was simple and it was repeated until it stuck. A man’s strength exists for one purpose. He is a protector, and everything else – the fitness, the discipline, the ability to take a punch and keep standing – was in service of that.
They were also honest about the second half of the lesson, the part that gets left out today. Who are you protecting people from? Not storms, not against some freak event, but other men. The husband. The ex. The bloke who follows a woman to her car. The men in the ring knew this because they had seen it, in their own families and in their own suburbs. As did I. They did not dress it up. A protector who does not know what he is protecting against is useless.
That is the grim reality those men handed down. The threat to women is male. If you are going to teach a young man one thing, teach him that. Teach him that the wolf is not somewhere out there. The wolf looks like him, and no amount of ‘education’ or nurturing will remove every single wolf from society. Some men just like being wolves.
Compare that to what seeps out of the manosphere. Its central message to boys is that they need to be understood. They are lost, blamed and misunderstood by a culture that has turned on them because of women. Nobody listens to them; nobody is on their side.
There is a half-truth in that, which is why it sells. Boys do need guidance from the types of men who were my role models. But plenty of them are not getting it. The manosphere has found the gap and filled it.
But look at what it fills the gap with. It takes a real need and answers it with grievance. Its role models tell boys that the problem is women. The men I learned from told boys that the problem is men, and that the job of a good man is to stand against the bad ones, and that the bad ones will always be around, hunting for people you love. One message demands sympathy. The other demands responsibility. One builds an audience, followers, vacuous empathy. The other builds a man.
The manosphere never asks a boy to protect anyone. It asks him to feel wronged. A boy who has been taught to feel wronged will, sooner or later, find someone to blame. The comments under Monday night’s news stories show you who he picks.
The numbers do not leave much room for argument. Approximately 226 men per day are proceeded against by Australian police for domestic and family violence or sexual assault offences. That is one every 6.4 minutes. By the time you finish reading this, another woman would have been preyed on by a wolf.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics counted 97,800 family and domestic violence offenders in 2024–25, up 8 per cent on the year before and the highest rate recorded since national figures began, and the vast majority are men. The median age was 35. These are not boys; these are not strangers in a car park. They are husbands, partners, fathers and exes, which is to say the men a woman is supposed to be able to trust and, tellingly, someone she knew.
There is no reading of these figures in which women are the problem. There is no reading in which men are the misunderstood party. The threat is male, it is domestic, and it is growing. Anyone telling young men otherwise is either lying to them or is a wolf.
So what does protection mean now? In Wangaratta on Monday it meant exactly what it meant in the ring. People ran towards a car, not away from it. They held a man until police arrived. A witness called them heroes, and there is the old lesson, repeated to me when I was growing up, intact, in a country town.
But the wolves are not only on Murphy Street. They are in the comments. They are in the group chat. They are the mate who says something about a woman that makes everyone go quiet and nobody says a word. The actions we take to protect women in 2026 have to extend to them, and they have to extend to the men of the manosphere who dehumanise women for a living.
Men listen to men. That is not fair to women, who have been saying all of this for decades. It is also true. The manosphere understands it perfectly, which is why it works. It speaks to boys in a male voice and it tells them what it wants them to hear. The answer is not to ask women to speak louder. The answer is other men, in the same rooms and on the same platforms, saying the opposite and meaning it.
Not here. Not in front of me. Not under this post. That is what the men who were my mentors would have said. It is what very few men say now.
Society needs to stop kidding itself. There are wolves. There will always be wolves. No program, no campaign and no amount of understanding will change that. What can change is whether the men standing next to them do anything about it.
The men I learned from did not pretend the wolves could be reasoned with. They did not tell boys the world had failed to understand them. They told boys the truth, that the most dangerous thing a woman will ever face is a man, and then they taught those boys to be the other kind but show no mercy or tolerance towards the wolf.
If you want to teach a young man one thing, teach him that. He is a protector. Tell him honestly who he is protecting people from and make it clear that the job does not stop at the car park. It follows him into every comments section, every group chat and every pub, and it applies most of all when the wolf is someone he knows.
Helen Haines is in a hospital bed; our heart and thoughts are with her and her family. The men who went after her a second time on Monday night did it with their phones. Somewhere, another man watched them and did nothing. The opposite of the men who ran towards her on that night, to protect and help.
Kos Samaras
Kos Samaras is a director at RedBridge Group, a research and strategy firm specialising in public opinion, social trends, and behavioural insights. He works across industry, government, and media to help organisations understand community attitudes and navigate complex social and political environments.