In a moving and historic address to the National Press Club, Sussan Ley — the first woman to lead the Liberal Party — shared that she has experienced coercive control in a past relationship. That she would choose to speak so candidly about the insidious nature of coercion is a testament to how far public discourse has come in recognising domestic abuse in its less visible forms.

But amid this heartfelt revelation was the following statement: “men’s health policy is women’s safety policy”, echoing a sentiment that is gaining traction across the political spectrum. However, what appears intuitive and self-evident — that if men are mentally, physically, emotionally healthier, then they are less likely to harm the women around them — is becoming an orthodoxy that demands caution and scrutiny.

To be clear, there are overlapping concerns in the policy areas of men’s health and women’s safety. Mental health crises among men, suicide rates, emotional repression, addiction and a lack of engagement with preventative healthcare are real, urgent issues. Simultaneously, domestic and family violence continues to devastate lives, overwhelmingly those of women and children.

But to conflate these two policy areas is to risk obscuring more than we clarify. It is to mistake a correlation for causation, and in doing so, to weaken both responses.

The first danger of this conflation is that it risks a simple pathologising of violence. It frames men’s abuse and violence against women and children as a symptom of male distress rather than a problem of power. In this framing, a man hits, controls or coerces, not because he chooses to exercise domination, but because he is unwell.

In fact, while research shows that untreated trauma, depression or substance abuse can drive an elevated risk of violent behaviour, studies also consistently show that the majority of men who use coercion or violence are not clinically unwell. Rather, these perpetrators are more typically enacting harmful behaviours rooted in social norms and systems.

Women do not suffer from men’s health — they suffer from men’s choices. And what often goes missing in this discourse is the role of gendered power relations and entitlement. Men are often socialised to expect dominance, obedience or control in intimate relationships. These are not issues that can be resolved by more counselling sessions or GP visits alone.

The second issue is that it makes women’s safety contingent upon men’s wellness. This positions women’s rights and freedom as a secondary outcome, a sort of fortunate consequence of fixing another problem. Such logic can depoliticise the feminist struggle for justice, rendering it a by-product rather than a goal in its own right. And as we’ve seen repeatedly, when the urgency of women’s safety is subordinated to broader appeals, policy interventions tend to lose their teeth.

Finally, this conflation risks reinforcing reductive ideas about masculinity. In efforts to “help men” for the sake of their partners, children or society, we can inadvertently perpetuate instrumentalist models of manhood. Men become valuable not for their own flourishing, but for their capacity to protect or refrain from harm. This lens fails to imagine men as fully human beings, deserving of care, introspection and transformation on their own terms.

There is no doubt that we need robust men’s health policies to address loneliness, emotional illiteracy, early intervention in schools, and more. But we need them because men deserve wellness. Similarly, we need urgent, targeted, unapologetic approaches to domestic and family violence — ones that are not diluted or delayed by efforts to universalise the issue.

Sussan Ley’s speech was brave, and her leadership presents an opportunity to shift long-stagnant debates. But as we move forward, we must be careful not to package two complex, overlapping-yet-still-distinct problems into one tidy solution. Women’s safety is not a spin-off benefit of better male health. It is a justice issue, a rights issue and it must be treated with the focus and specificity it deserves.

Professor Steven Roberts is Head of School of Education, Culture and Society at Monash University.