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Empowering
Men:
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Sex, Lies &
Feminism by Peter Zohrab
Chapter 4: Domestic Violence
and Men's Catch-22
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1999 Version
Here's an interesting newspaper snippet:1
"Hammer attack backfires
A woman was taken to hospital last night with heavy bleeding
to her head after attacking her husband with a hammer, ... police
said. Her husband held up a rubbish bin and the hammer bounced
off, hitting the woman in the head. No charges would be laid. -
NZPA"
Needless to say, this news item was in very fine print and hidden
in the inside pages of the newspaper. If it had been a man who had
suffered as the result of trying to attack his wife, it would of
course have merited headlines on the front page !
Feminism is now a self-perpetuating industry in the Western world,
and it is trying to use the United Nations and other means, in order
to establish itself equally solidly in the rest of the world. This
Feminist industry requires a constant supply of issues and problems
for its army of researchers, politicians, bureaucrats, journalists
and social workers to work on -- often at taxpayer expense.
These problems and issues usually have the following characteristics:
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They cast women -- and possibly children -- in the role of
victims;
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They cast men in the role of miscreants;
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They can be used to make men feel guilty and put them onto
the defensive;
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Any responsibility on the part of women is downplayed, or
even ignored totally.
Rape, Child Sexual Abuse and Domestic Violence (aka Family
Violence) are three classic instances of this sort of Feminist
issue.
There are five main Domestic Violence lies (which Feminists
typically just imply, rather than actually stating):
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There is a syndrome called "Battered Woman's Syndrome";
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Men commit much more Domestic Violence than women do;
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Men start most or all incidents of Domestic Violence;
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Men can do more damage to women than women can do to men,
and therefore only men should be restrained or punished;
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If a man has been accused of Domestic Violence, this should
be grounds for restricting his access to his children if separation
or divorce takes place.
1 Battered Woman's Syndrome
The book which invented the "Battered Woman Syndrome" is junk
science. This can be seen from the following quotation from a review
of "The Battered Woman" by Lenore Walker (New York: Harper Colophon
Books, 1979). The review is by Robert Sheaffer.2
We have all heard of the 'Battered Woman Syndrome' which
originated with this book.... The Battered Woman is unsatisfactory
as a serious work, and completely unacceptable as a foundation
for family law. First, it is profoundly unscholarly. Without objective
verification of the incidents herein described, they are nothing
more than hearsay. Second, the book does not even pretend to be
objective: the woman's side, and only the woman's side, is presented,
when it is undeniable that in a large percentage of cases, the
woman initiates violence against the man. Third, Prof. Walker's
expanded definition of "battering" that includes verbal abuse
does not even address the issue of female verbal abuse of men.
Fourth, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that Prof. Walker's
sample of 'battered women' is in any way a representative sample,
and even if it were, she presents no statistics to support her
conclusions. In fact, most of her conclusions are utterly unsupported
by any kind of hard data, and are simply pronounced ex cathedra.
Professor Walker (and the wretched quality of her work shows
how deceptive the title "Professor" is) maintained that there was
a "syndrome", whereby a female victim of Domestic Violence was made
psychologically incapable of leaving the relationship. This may
or may not be true, but her unscholarly work certainly does not
prove it.
Karen Horney had previously described what could be called the
"Masochistic Woman Syndrome" -- which might be seen as a less anti-male
way of describing the same phenomenon. It is quite possible for
a person -- male or female -- to be subjected to repeated psychological
or physical abuse in a relationship, but to be prevented by various
other considerations from leaving the relationship. Some of these
considerations might include:
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fear of what their partner might do if they left;
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concern for possible effects on children;
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fear of loneliness;
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concern about the reactions of families and friends;
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reluctance to open up private, sordid details to the scrutiny
of others.
To lump all this into a "syndrome" and give it a name like "Battered
Woman Syndrome" is a useful way of creating a stick to beat men
with, but it has to be seen as the political ploy that it is. For
centuries, men have complained about nagging wives, but men in the
West are practically forbidden to complain about women in public
-- otherwise we would now perhaps also be reading about a "Nagged
Husband Syndrome".
Feminist writers (e.g. Leibrich et al. 1995, Ferraro 1979, and
Walker 1984) often state that women find psychological abuse much
harder to live with than physical abuse. An official leaflet
3
explains the legal prohibition against psychological violence as
meaning that:
"Nobody is allowed to use intimidation, threats, or
mind games to hurt and control another person." (my emphasis)
Despite that fact, Feminists never mention how much better women
generally are at using verbal weapons than men are. Women are probably
much better at carrying out psychological abuse (especially threats
and mind games) than men are. In Feminist accounts of Domestic Violence,
emphasis is always laid on men's presumed greater physical
strength.
In the Feminist propaganda about Domestic Violence, the focus
in on the supposed actions of the men. The reasons
they do what they do (if they do it) are never mentioned. It
is as if domestic violence were the only human activity which occurred
totally without cause. In fact, of course, there are probably
patterns of behaviour in the "victim" which provoked the violence
in the first place. These patterns of behaviour are just as much
a "syndrome" as "battered wife syndrome".
2. Who commits most of the violence ?
Straus and Gelles (1986), for example, showed that men and women
commit just as much physical Domestic Violence as each other. Moffitt,
Caspi and Silva (1996) do likewise. Sewell and Sewell (1997), as
another example, reports statistics showing that women perpetrate
even more domestic violence than men do.4
A lot of the Domestic Violence debate on the Internet, from the
Men's Rights side, has involved exposing false and distorted Feminist
statistics. As this has been so well and thoroughly done by other
people, I will not discuss the details here. However, I do have
evidence of falsification of Domestic Violence statistics by Feminists,
and I want to make people aware that they can't trust the ethics
of Feminist researchers, necessarily. In 1997, I wrote a letter
to my country's Minister of Police -- alleging, amongst other things,
that the Ministry of Women's Affairs had caused domestic violence
questionnaire questions to be doctored:
5
Because of all the counterevidence to their woman-as-victim approach,
Feminists have been rushing around trying to conceal these findings
or explain them away in a manner that fits in with their political
need to reserve victim status for women. Here is an example of that
sort of Feminist reasoning, formerly at the Webpage: http://www.vix.com/pub/men/battery/studies/lkates.html
:
"From: lizkates@delphi.com (Liz Kates)
Subject: Wife Beating
Date: Tue, 4 Oct 94 00:37:09 -0500
WIFE BEATING
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE is a CRIMINAL act of assault, battery,
sexual assault, sexual battery, or other act that injures
or kills a family or household member by another who is
or was residing in the same single dwelling unit. See,
e.g. F.
S. 741.30(1)(a). If there is no outcome, claims of
who did what to whom are irrelevant for all legal purposes.
Hepburn slapping Tracy across the face in one isolated
instance with no particular outcome, regardless of what you think
of the behavior, is not what we mean legally by "domestic
violence." SPOUSAL ABUSE is not isolated acts of "conflict
tactics" in a vacuum.
A battered spouse is one who may be controlled and terrorized
by a combination of abusive tactics, both directly physical
and not. There is a pattern and a dynamic in the relationship
in which one of the parties is the party abused, disadvantaged
and injured--95% of the time, this is the woman. Counting
numbers of slaps without looking at the entire relationship
dynamic, does not tell us who is the abuser and who is
the abused.
The Straus and Gelles Conflicts Tactics Scale is merely that:
it is a research tool that counts certain behaviors that
might be 'conflicts tactics,' but tallying up who moved
how and when does not necessarily comport with the legal
definition of domestic violence, or accurately yield any
picture of what actually happened. And the individual
conflict behaviors arbitrarily listed therein in varying levels
of "severity" neither bear any necessary relationship
to who is injured, nor identify which of the parties is
the party "abused."
Physical movements and contacts tracked and reported
without reference to outcome are misleading, and nothing
short of fraudulent when used to make the specious claim
that 'women are doing it too.' Women are not battering
their husbands in epidemic proportions. Women are not
regularly beating up their men, and leaving them crouched, huddled,
injured and sobbing (or worse) on the kitchen floor. Men
are not fleeing their homes, children in tow. Men are
not the spouses who live in terror."
I think it's good that Liz Kates refers us to the legal definition
of Domestic Violence, but it is/was only valid in one particular
jurisdiction, and it is an area of the law which is changing fast,
under Feminist pressure. Specifically, Feminist writers on Domestic
Violence, from Lenore Walker onward, have mentioned how many women
find psychological abuse even worse than physical abuse. So a legal
definition of Domestic Violence that ignored psychological abuse
in 1994 (when the quoted passage was apparently written) is unlikely
to be still on the books as I type these words.
For example, here is just the initial part of a legislative definition
of Domestic Violence:
6
SECT. 3. MEANING OF "DOMESTIC VIOLENCE"-
(1) In this Act, "domestic violence", in relation to any
person, means violence against that person by any other person with
whom that person is, or has been, in a domestic relationship.
(2) In this section, "violence" means-
(a) Physical abuse:
(b) Sexual abuse:
(c) Psychological abuse, including, but not limited to,–
(i) Intimidation:
(ii) Harassment:
(iii) Damage to property:
(iv) Threats of physical abuse, sexual abuse, or psychological abuse:
(v) In relation to a child, abuse of the kind set out in subsection
(3) of this section.
Here it is clear that actual physical injury does not need to
occur, so (if this was part of the criminal law, rather than just
of family law) it would be up to the police and the courts to determine
how serious any alleged cases of Domestic Violence are, and whether
prosecution or conviction is warranted.
And in the UK (according to BBC World TV on Sunday, 26 November
1995 ) "Domestic Violence" was (and probably still is) defined
as violence by a man on a woman. So a woman can/could do anything
at all to a man in the UK, and it is absolutely impossible for that
to be considered as "domestic violence". This shows that it is not
particularly useful to focus on legal definitions in force at particular
times in particular places. It also shows how biased the extreme
Feminists are who push this sort of legislation through legislatures
in Western countries.
Liz Kates then goes on to state that the Feminist concept of
"spousal abuse" involves a pattern and dynamic of behaviour where
the victims are 95% female. However, "syndromes" and "patterns"
are theoretical constructs which arise in the minds of researchers
and the like, and bias is absolutely certain to creep in. And Erin
Pizzey (1997) makes it clear that women who are pro-men are
ostracised from the subcultures which these researchers belong to.
Anyone who has studied the Philosophy and History of Science and
takes an interest in scientific matters knows that the creation
of hypotheses and theories is a highly subjective process. It often
takes a lot of time, and much testing and argument to decide the
issue between rival theories. At least the counting of "hits" is
a fairly objective process.
This testing and argument can be acrimonious and descend to the
level of personal attacks, even in scientific circles. Since the
Battered Woman Syndrome is one of Feminism's strategic weapons in
the Sex War, the feminists are no more likely to want to give it
up than the major powers want to give up land mines or nuclear weapons.
Whatever the findings of the researchers may be, the media and the
politicians will, by and large, only take note of the findings that
are promoted by the relevant pressure-groups. And as far as Sex
War pressure-groups are concerned, Masculists are heavily out-gunned
by the Feminists, who often enjoy taxpayer support in ministries
of Women's Affairs, university departments of Women's Studies, and
the like.
So, when Liz Kates says that men are not subject to systematic
abuse perpetrated by their wives, she is talking from belief, not
from knowledge. Feminists have not taken the slightest interest
in the viewpoint of the male in the Domestic Violence (or any other)
scenario. Those who do, such as Gelles,
come to the conclusion that men are indeed the victims of this sort
of abuse -- just as women are.
There is a deep-seated psychological unwillingness in both women
and men to treat women and men equally when they are in violent
confrontation. This is what I call "Machismo's Unholy Alliance with
Dykismo (MUAD)." The machismo of men (e.g. policemen, judges,
and social workers) makes them want to protect women from men, and
the "dykismo" of Lesbian Feminists (who are the powerhouse of the
Feminists' Sex War army) also makes them want to protect women from
men.
The result of the power of Feminist pressure-groups and of the
MUAD is to put men -- all heterosexual men -- into a Catch-22 situation.
If a man's wife or female partner abuses him psychologically or
physically, then he is unable to retaliate. If he retaliates, the
MUAD will arrest him and put him in jail, the Family Court will
impose a court order preventing him from contacting her, give her
custody of the children, severely limit his access to his children,
and give her sole right to live in the family home. So, if third-party
intervention is not possible or is unsuccessful, he just has to
either put up with the abuse or leave the relationship -- to the
detriment of his children's and his own emotional health and (probably)
standard of living. If anything is a "syndrome", then this Catch-22
situation is one.
To give some concrete examples, I know a man whose glasses had
just been broken by his wife, and so he rang the police to ask for
help. The policeman at the other end of the phone line asked if
she had "hit" him or "punched" him. The complainant refused to answer
this question, because he didn't know what the difference was supposed
to be between "punching" and "hitting", but he guessed that the
policeman was just trying to disprove the truth of what he was saying.
The policeman kept insisting on getting an answer to this question,
and, when no answer was forthcoming, he hung up !! In today's political
climate in Western countries, it is inconceivable that the police
would treat a female complainant in that way. But
males have no rights in such situations.
To give another example, an acquaintance told me about an occasion
when, after a domestic dispute, the police were interviewing him
and his wife in their home. His wife said that he had hit her, and
the police duly wrote that down in their notebook. Then he said
that she had hit him -- and the police wrote nothing down !!
Here's a further example:
an advertisement, entitled "Family Violence is a crime,"
and authorised by Brian Hartley, President of the Police Managers'
Guild, appeared in a daily newspaper.7
The advertisement mentioned only women and children victims of this
crime, and omitted any mention of the possibility that men could
also be victims of Family Violence. Not only is this a sexist advertisement
in its own right, but it is also frightening testimony to how little
chance men have of being treated fairly by the Justice system as
far as Domestic/Family Violence is concerned. In addition, I must
emphasise that the Police have no chance of reducing the incidence
of this sort of crime as long as they insist on driving men into
a corner and treating them as guilty until proven innocent. (This
paragraph may have had a positive effect on the Police -- see: Police
See the Light on Family Violence.)
This is why it's not valid to use statistics about police call-outs
as an indication of the level of domestic violence by women on men,
as some Feminists do. Many men know that there's no point calling
the police, because they will automatically take the woman's side.
And this MUAD bias is also a problem in the Third World. India,
for example, has seen the creation of the "All-India Crime Against
Men by Women Front (Akhil Bharatiya Patni Virodhimorcha), which
was founded after the 1988 suicide of Naresh Anand, who had been
unable to bear his wife's physical and mental torture. He
left behind a note pleading with police to form a special cell to
deal with cases of abused husbands, along the lines of the already
extant Crimes Against Women cell.
All that needs to be borne in mind when we read the following
continuation of Liz Kates' email (quoted above):
"'Who is that [on the phone]!' he demands. She ignores
him, hastily whispering 'I gotta go now...' 'GIMME that
phone!!' he shouts. 'Who was that!!' 'It was someone from
work.' He dials call return. It's not. 'You sniveling lying
BITCH,' he shrieks, and yanking the phone out, throws
it into the wall. 'YOU TELL ME WHO THE F--- THAT WAS RIGHT
NOW,' he yells, advancing at her. He picks up a little
glass budvase her grandmother gave her and holds it high.
'Nooo, gimme that!' she whines. 'WHO THE F--- WAS ON THAT PHONE!!!'
She grabs his arm to save the vase, and he holds it out
of her reach. [She has started the violence, according
to who touched who first.] Smash, the vase shatters into
a thousand little shards. 'You pig,' she mutters, nearly
inaudible. 'WHAT'D YOU SAY!!! SAY IT AGAIN, BITCH!!!' he
screams. She crouches at the floor, attempting to scoop
up glass splinters. He grabs her by the upper arm, bringing
her to her feet. She wrenches her arm away, and as he
reaches for her again, pushes his forearm away from her. [Conflict
tactics scale: one grab for each, plus a push for her.]
'I WANNA KNOW WHO WAS ON THAT PHONE!' he yells, down, close into
her face as she backs away. 'No one...' 'YOU
STUPID LYING CUNT!!' he shouts, and shoves her with a force that
flings her into the corner of the wall, hitting her head...
[Conflict Tactics Scale: two for two. Nothing but a fair fight...
so far...]"
Here it is appropriate to use Liz Kates' own words, "misleading,
and nothing short of fraudulent" for her own use of the above (presumably
real) conflict data. What she is trying to do here is show that
physical violence is not the whole picture. I agree with her that
the above example does just that. But if she is trying (as I think
she is) to depict this woman as a helpless, innocent victim of male
abuse, then this shows how one-sided the misandrist (man-hating)
Feminist "experts" on Domestic Violence are.
It is quite clear that this man is being subjected -- probably
over a long period of time -- to severe psychological abuse by this
woman. She is lying to him point blank, which is about as extreme
a form of Psychological abuse as you can perpetrate in a relationship.
She is doing something detrimental to his interests behind his back,
such as having an affair -- or doing her best to give him the impression
that she is doing that.
Over a long period of time, this would be quite sufficient to
drive any man "mad" -- mad/angry, or even mad/insane. Her psychological
abuse is what started the whole incident -- yet it would be the
man who would be arrested if the police were called. This shows
how criticial the issue of interpretation is, and how powerless
men are in the political and legal processes of the West, when it
is the extreme Feminists who are doing most of the interpreting.
3 Who starts the Domestic Violence ?
According to Figure 1 in Straus and Kantor (1994), wives are
reported as committing more minor assaults and major assaults than
are husbands. No doubt this trend will increase. As women become
more and more confident that the legal systems of Western countries
will now allow them to initiate Domestic Violence, get their male
husband/partner arrested for retaliating, get possession of the
family home, sole custody of the children, and a state benefit --
with the father's access to his children severely restricted because
of his history of "Domestic Violence" -- we must logically expect
that more and more women will see the obvious benefits to them in
initiating more and more Domestic Violence, and more and more men
will end up alone, destitute, and desperate. If they then turn violent
towards their ex-partners or themselves, then that is only natural
-- in the face of such legalised oppression.
4 Who should the police concentrate on
restraining ?
The police should investigate Domestic Violence like any other
alleged crime, find out who started it, and then concentrate on
warning or punishing that person. At present, police in some countries
are being trained to automatically punish the man, because they
are being told that only men commit abuse and any violence by women
is only retaliation to abuse by the man, and because men are supposed
to be capable of inflicting more damage than are women.
Men who are beaten by their wives are treated with contempt or
derision, so they know they can only rely on their own strength
in domestic disputes -- the police will always be on the woman's
side.
In New Zealand, for example, there are three kinds of Assault
offences that men can be charged with:
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Common Assault;
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Assault on a Female;
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Aggravated Assault.
A man convicted of "Assault on a Female" is subject to a higher
maximum penalty than one convicted of Common Assault. This quite
clearly sends a signal to all men and women that the legal system
is sexist and operates an anti-male double-standard.
5 What is the relevance of Domestic Violence
to the Family Court ?
A record of Domestic Violence directed against a partner should
not be taken into account when deciding custody and access issues,
because it is not relevant. This would also discriminate against
the father's chances of getting custody and access, because the
police, as we have seen, are biased against men as regards cases
of alleged Domestic Violence. Domestic Violence might even occur
because a father suspects that his partner is not properly looking
after his children -- but he might not have the evidence to prove
it in court. So he would then lose his children and be forced to
leave them to the mother's inadequate care, which caused the problems
in the first place !
6 Conclusion
The specific Feminist Catch-22 on Domestic Violence is that women
are always in the right, whatever they do:
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Men who hit their wives are deemed to do it without provocation
and without reason -- and therefore without excuse. The
issue is never raised by Feminists.
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Women are deemed never to hit their husbands (the issue is
never spontaneously raised by Feminists) -- or, if women do
hit their husbands, Feminists (when Feminists are forced to
agree that women do do this) take the line that they only do
it justifiably.
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When Feminists admit that men are also abused by women, Feminists
claim that only women suffer from a "syndrome" of domestic abuse.
In other words, women are allowed to use the excuse of a "syndrome"
as a defence when they murder their husbands.
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When women murder their husbands, there is usually some excuse
or justification (e.g. domestic violence by the man in their
lives).
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When men murder their womenfolk, they are not allowed to
claim that the woman's behaviour was a justifying factor.
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When women murder their men, the cause is often deemed to
be domestic violence, but when men murder their women, this
murder is deemed to be an *instance* of domestic violence.
Men and fair-minded women must campaign together against women-only
defences and men-only crimes. Feminists have been steadily working
towards the goal of getting all women treated as innocent victims,
no matter what they have done -- and all men treated as criminals,
no matter if they are innocent.
Anti-male bias doesn't just infect the Police -- it is particularly
strong in the media, who pass on this infection to the whole of
Western Society. For example, there was a letter to Time magazine,
published on January 20, 1997, in which Richard M. Riffe, Assistant
Prosecutor of Boone County, Madison, West Virginia, complains about
the biased way in which Time wrote up a case involving a woman who
murdered her husband.8
Time magazine, like most of the Western media, is consistenly
anti-male.
As far as public attitudes are concerned, here are a couple of
examples: a newspaper advertisement 9
for a stage show called "Full Marx" quoted a review of the show
by one Ralph McAllister, which ended with the words:
"So take your family, wallop your husband (my
emphasis), even bring along the great dane, but make sure you see
Full Marx !"
Another example is a student's cartoon (in French) which the
mainly female staff of the Language department of a school 10
thought suitable to post prominently on a wall in the 1990's. This
cartoon told the story of how a woman threw a plate of breakfast
at her husband/partner and then left him -- on the grounds that
he was lazy and had asked for breakfast in bed. (There was no mention
of any background to the incident -- for example, the man involved
might be exhausted from staying up most of the night doing some
dangerous voluntary work, for all we know.) This is Domestic Violence,
but because it was committed by a woman, it was not only considered
innocuous, it was even decorated with written teacher comments such
as, "Very good !", and "Serves him right !" (in French).
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I'd also briefly like to raise the issue of PMT
(Premenstrual Tension). Research needs to take place into the role
of PMT in bringing about Domestic Violence. Of course, research
may already have been carried out into this topic, but I am unaware
of any such studies. It would be ironic, but typical of modern societies,
if PMT were (as is quite possible) a major cause of physical and
psychological abuse of men by women, which then led to men being
arrested because of MUAD bias in the Establishment.
The power angle needs to be looked at, as well. What does it
do for the relative power of men and women in a relationship if
the woman can say and do what she likes, in the sure knowledge that
-- if the worst comes to the worst -- she will get the children,
an income from the taxpayer, and at least half the joint assets,
and he will have restricted or nil access to his children, and a
jail term and child-support bills to pay ? That is the bottom line
in modern western heterosexual relationships.
The man has to either defer to the woman, walk out of the relationship,
or run the risk of the worst-case scenario becoming a reality. The
United States divorce rate in 1988 was the fourth-highest in the
world, according to the UN Demographic yearbook. And there has been
research in that country, which has found that the marriages that
last the longest are those where the husband always gives way to
the wife! So the extreme Feminist Domestic Violence campaign has
also got to be seen as a tool for bringing about Matriarchy in the
family and for increasing the number of solo mothers and fatherless
children, in order to replace a social system based on the nuclear
family with one based on no particular structured unit between the
individual and local government.
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2002 Version
CHAPTER 7
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE LIES & MEN'S CATCH-22
Introduction
Here's an interesting newspaper snippet:
Hammer attack backfires: A woman was taken to hospital
last night with heavy bleeding to her head after attacking her
husband with a hammer, ... police said. Her husband held up
a rubbish bin and the hammer bounced off, hitting the woman
in the head. No charges would be laid. – NZPA 1.
This news item was in very fine print and hidden on an inside
pages of the newspaper. Had it been a man who suffered as the result
of trying to attack his wife, it would have merited headlines on
the front page! An equally short article – originating from
the Australian Associated Press in Wellington's Dominion newspaper
on 29 November 1999 stated:
Scissors in head: A domestic dispute left a New South
Wales man with scissors protruding a centimetre into his brain
at the weekend. The man, 24, still conscious, was flown from
Bathurst to Sydney for surgery.
What is astonishing about this article is that it doesn't mention
who the perpetrator was, which made me cynically certain it must
have been a woman. It does not mention what action, if any, the
police took against the perpetrator. If the perpetrator had been
a man and the victim a woman, the article would have been written
very differently, with emphasis on the heinousness of the deed and
of the perpetrator.
The same approach to the story was taken by Australia's Sydney
Morning Herald on the same day. It seems clear that (male and female)
Feminists in positions of power (such as journalists) abuse their
power, tailoring information, and access to information, in whatever
ways suit their political goals. Thus deprived of information that
depicts women as perpetrators and men as victims of domestic violence,
the public at large is that much more likely to be conned by the
one-sided propaganda on this subject that comes from overtly Feminist
sources. This includes conning legislators, the police, judges and
juries. Only against this background does it make any sense that
the USA has a "Violence Against Women Act" on its statute-books
!
As I explain elsewhere (in the chapter on the Media University
Complex), the mass media is blatantly biased against men. As another
example, the world's media (e.g. the Wellington Dominion newspaper
on 15 April 1999) reported how music celebrity Whitney Houston publicly
announced she was the one who hit her husband, and not vice versa.
Reportedly, her husband was arrested for battery against other women,
but there were no suggestions from third parties that Whitney Houston
should be arrested for battery – she is a woman, after all!
The objective statistics show men and women hit each other about
equally. See Fiebert's extensive annotated bibliography at: www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
-- except that women are starting to hit men more often than vice
versa, because they now know that the police will almost certainly
not arrest them for it !
On page 237 of the Handbook of Family Violence, edited by Vincent
B. Van Hasselt (Plenum, 1998), Steinmetz and Lucca report that men
were battered by their wives by a 1.47 : 1.0 margin. Similarly,
the Guardian Weekly, in February 1999, reported a British Home Office
study that showed that "men ... are just as likely as women
to be assaulted by a partner." And, in a study in New Zealand
(Moffitt, T., A. Caspi, and P. Silva (1996): "Findings about
Partner Violence: from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and
Development Study" (MS)), it was also found men and women assault
each other equally frequently in the home.
When journalists talk about bias in the media, they tend to focus
on the red herring of the political bias of the owners of the media.
Journalists seldom criticise their own bias. Media owners, however,
are usually more interested in making money than pushing a particular
political line. Editorials and leading articles may, in some cases,
be conservative in tone, but it is the selective reporting and highlighting
of anti-male news (such as items on domestic violence) and the slanted
coverage, using Feminist jargon, by rank-and-file journalists which
is the most influential form of media bias. Because it is not as
obvious as the bias in an editorial or leading article, the rest
of us are hard pressed to guard against it or filter it out.
In a 1999 report about US Congressional hearings on the Violence
Against Women Act (VAWA) he issued to the American Coalition for
Fathers and Children, Stuart Miller writes:
"Afterward, the media only interviewed the battered women's
advocates and refused to accept any studies or comment that
did not support the 'need' for more VAWA money....One reporter
rolled her eyes at the thought that any men have been deprived
of their children because of false allegations...and sneered
at the men who suggested such 'an absurd proposition.' "
Here we will examine these issues in some detail. Sommers (1994,
page 10) states:
"For the past two decades, ... the study of spousal violence
has become synonymous with the term 'wife abuse'.... The reason
for this misnomer is due to almost exclusive focus of research on
husband-to-wife abuse because of the high visibility of females
as victims of family violence.... The shelter movement has also
made it possible for researchers to have a ready made sampling base
comprised of women who were willing to provide testimonies of the
abuse they endured."
Domestic Violence is a weapon in the Feminist arsenal. Feminism
is now a self-perpetuating industry in the western world, and it
is trying to use the United Nations and other organisations, such
as World Vision, to establish itself throughout the world. For this
purpose, they require a steady supply of issues and problems for
its army of researchers, politicians, bureaucrats, journalists and
social workers to work on – often at taxpayer expense. These
problems and issues usually have the following characteristics:
They cast women – and possibly children – in the role
of victims;
They cast men in the role of miscreants;
They can be used to make men feel guilty and put them onto the
defensive;
Any responsibility on the part of women is downplayed or even
ignored.
Rape, Child Sexual Abuse and Domestic Violence are three classic
instances of this sort of Feminist issue. The Feminist view of Domestic
Violence focuses on the male as perpetrator and the female as victim.
This feeds on myths perpetrated by books and films such as "Once
Were Warriors," an internationally known New Zealand film based
on a novel by a Maori man about violence in a New Zealand Maori
family. Maori women in New Zealand have been quick to accept this
fiction as a portrayal of the reality of domestic violence in New
Zealand families, and this has inspired them with seemingly righteous
anger against people like myself who portray a balanced picture
of domestic violence. Some of these Maori women have gone so far
as to scratch my car and limit my participation in the Wellington
(New Zealand) "Fathers, Families, and the Future" event
in April 1999. There was even one incident, where a woman seemingly
deliberately rammed my car (at the driver's door) at a roundabout
– coming at me from another lane in the roundabout, despite
my hooting at her, as I saw her coming a couple of seconds beforehand
!
Domestic Violence lies
There are five main Domestic Violence lies which Feminists typically
imply rather than state:
-
There is a syndrome called "Battered Woman's Syndrome";
-
Men commit much more Domestic Violence than women do;
-
Men start most or all incidents of Domestic Violence;
-
Men can do more damage to women than women can do to men,
and therefore only men should be restrained or punished;
-
If a man has been accused/convicted of Domestic Violence,
this should be grounds for restricting his access to his children
if separation or divorce takes place.
Battered Woman's Syndrome
The "Battered Woman Syndrome" originated in the Jennifer
Patri case in 1977. Syndromes are nebulous patterns of symptoms
or behaviour which lend themselves to political manipulation. The
book (The Battered Woman by Lenore Walker, New York: Harper Colophon
Books, 1979), which first popularised and justified the notion,
is junk science. This can be seen from the following excerpt from
a review by Robert Sheaffer:
We have all heard of the 'Battered Woman Syndrome' which originated
with this book.... The Battered Woman is unsatisfactory as a serious
work, and completely unacceptable as a foundation for family law.
First, it is profoundly unscholarly. Without objective verification
of the incidents herein described, they are nothing more than hearsay.
Second, the book does not even pretend to be objective: the woman's
side, and only the woman's side, is presented, when it is undeniable
that in a large percentage of cases, the woman initiates violence
against the man. Third, Prof. Walker's expanded definition of "battering"
that includes verbal abuse does not even address the issue of female
verbal abuse of men. Fourth, there is no reason whatsoever to believe
that Prof. Walker's sample of 'battered women' is in any way a representative
sample, and even if it were, she presents no statistics to support
her conclusions. In fact, most of her conclusions are utterly unsupported
by any kind of hard data, and are simply pronounced ex cathedra.2
Professor Walker (and the wretched quality of her work shows how
deceptive the title "Professor" can be) maintained there
was a "syndrome" whereby a female victim of Domestic Violence
was made psychologically incapable of leaving the relationship.
This may or may not be true, but her unscholarly work certainly
does not prove it. Karen Horney previously described what could
be called the "Masochistic Woman Syndrome," which might
be seen as a less anti-male way of describing the same phenomenon.
And no doubt it is quite possible for a person – male or female
– to be subjected to repeated psychological or physical abuse
in a relationship yet be constrained by various considerations from
leaving the relationship. Some of these might include:
-
fear of what their partner might do if they left;
-
concern for possible effects on children;
-
fear of loneliness;
-
concern about the reactions of families and friends;
-
reluctance to open up private, sordid details to the scrutiny
of others.
To lump all this into a "syndrome" and give it a name
like "Battered Woman Syndrome" is a useful way of creating
a stick with which to beat men, but it has to be seen as the political
ploy that it is. For centuries, men have complained about nagging
wives, but men in the West are practically forbidden to complain
about women in public – otherwise we would now perhaps also
be reading about a "Nagged Husband Syndrome."
Feminist writers (e.g., Leibrich et al. 1995, Ferraro 1979, and
Walker 1984) often state that women find psychological abuse much
harder to live with than physical abuse. An official leaflet explains
the legal prohibition against psychological violence as meaning
"nobody is allowed to use intimidation, threats, or mind games
to hurt and control another person."3
In Feminist accounts of Domestic Violence, emphasis is always
laid on men's presumed greater physical strength. Feminists never
mention how much better women generally are at using verbal weapons
than men. But the book Brain Sex, by Anne Moir and David Jessel,
states:
The language skills related to grammar, spelling and writing are
all more specifically located in the left-hand side of the brain
in a woman. In a man they are spread in the front and back of his
brain, and so he will have to work harder than a woman to achieve
these skills. (page 45)
Also, Deborah Tannen's 1990 book, You Just Don't Understand, claims
women more commonly do their talking in intimate contexts while
men do most of their talking in group contexts. This makes women
more skilled at manipulating men verbally than vice versa, according
to her.
I have seen research evidence that women tend to view talking
as an end in itself, whereas men tend to talk only if there is a
specific reason to. Similarly, females predominate in people-centred
occupations and in the study of language-centred academic subjects.
There is also evidence that women are much better at reading emotions
from people's faces and body-language than men. Which explains why
women are more proficient at psychological abuse (especially psychological
threats and mind games) than men.
In the Feminist propaganda about Domestic Violence, the focus
in on the supposed actions of the men. The reasons they do what
they do (if they do it) are never mentioned. It is as if domestic
violence were the only human activity which occurred totally without
cause. In fact, of course, there are frequently patterns of behaviour
in the "victim" which provoked the violence in the first
place. These provocative behaviours are just as much a "syndrome"
as any "battered wife syndrome."
Who commits most of the violence?
Extreme Feminists claim men commit most domestic violence, but,
as noted at the beginning of this chapter the evidence refutes their
contentions. Straus and Gelles (1986), for example, showed men and
women commit just as much physical Domestic Violence as the other.
Moffitt, Caspi and Silva (1996) do likewise. Sewell and Sewell (1997),
as another example, report statistics showing that women perpetrate
even more domestic violence than men do. 4
Feminists falsify and distort Domestic Violence statistics and
everybody needs to know they can't necessarily trust the ethics
of Feminist researchers. In 1997, I wrote a letter to my country's
Minister of Police – alleging, amongst other things, that
the Ministry of Women's Affairs had caused questions in a domestic
violence questionnaire to be slanted.5 Because of all the counterevidence
to their woman-as-victim approach, Feminists have been rushing around
trying to conceal these findings or explain them away in a manner
that fits in with their political need to reserve victim status
for women. There is an example of that sort of Feminist reasoning
at
Feminist writers on Domestic Violence from Lenore Walker onward
have mentioned how many women find psychological abuse even worse
than physical abuse. This view has found itself into legislation.
Here is the initial part of a legislative definition of Domestic
Violence:
SECT. 3. MEANING OF "DOMESTIC VIOLENCE-
(1) In this Act, "domestic violence", in relation to any
person, means violence against that person by any other person with
whom that person is, or has been, in a domestic relationship.
(2) In this section, "violence" means-
(a) Physical abuse:
(b) Sexual abuse:
(c) Psychological abuse, including, but not limited to,–
(i) Intimidation:
(ii) Harassment:
(iii) Damage to property:
(iv) Threats of physical abuse, sexual abuse, or psychological abuse:
(v) In relation to a child, abuse of the kind set out in subsection
(3) of this section.
Here it is clear that actual physical injury does not need to
occur, so (if this was part of the criminal law, rather than just
of family law) it would be up to the police and the courts to determine
how serious any alleged cases of Domestic Violence are, and whether
prosecution or conviction is warranted.
And in the UK, according to the BBC's World TV on Sunday, 26 November
1995, "domestic violence" was (and probably still is)
defined as violence by a man on a woman.6 So a woman can/could do
anything at all to a man in the UK, and legally it is impossible
to consider it "domestic violence." This demonstrates
why it is not particularly useful to focus on legal definitions
in force at particular times in particular places. It also shows
how biased the extreme Feminists are who push this sort of legislation
through legislatures in western countries.
Liz Kates (www.vix.com/pub/men/battery/studies/lkates.html)
states that the Feminist concept of spousal abuse involves a pattern
and dynamic of behaviour where the victims are 95% female. The facts
do not support this but prove the prejudice of the researchers behind
it. Moreover, Erin Pizzey (1997) makes it clear the Feminist community
ostracizes women who are pro-fairness.
Subjective science?
Anyone who has studied the Philosophy and History of Science
and takes an interest in scientific matters knows that the creation
of hypotheses and theories can be a highly subjective process. It
often takes a lot of time, much testing and argument to decide the
issue between rival theories. Despite the fact that counting blows
between domestic partners should be a fairly objective process,
such rigour is not practiced by Feminist ideologues.
Since the Battered Woman Syndrome is one of Feminism's strategic
weapons in the Sex War, whatever the findings of the researchers
may be, the Feminist media and the politicians will, by and large,
only take note of the findings promoted by Feminist pressure-groups.
Masculists are heavily out-gunned by the Feminists, who often enjoy
taxpayer support in ministries of Women's Affairs, university departments
of Women's Studies, and the like.
So, when Feminists such as Liz Kates say men are not subject to
systematic abuse perpetrated by their wives, they are talking from
belief rather than knowledge. Feminists have not taken the slightest
interest in men's experiences of Domestic Violence (or anything
else), so they have no data on which to base their assertions. Those
who do examine domestic violence objectively, such as Gelles, come
to the conclusion men are indeed the victims of this sort of abuse
– just as women are. The "syndrome" will include
as many – if not more – men, when gender is ignored
and only other factors are considered. Hence, it's better for everybody
if we deal with these issues rationally rather than turning everything
into a gender war. Then we can focus on solving problems where now
the system tears families apart.
Does anybody give a DUAM about men?
There is a deep-seated psychological unwillingness in both sexes
to treat women and men equally when they are in violent confrontation.
Part of this is what I call "Dykismo's Unholy Alliance with
Machismo (DUAM)." The machismo of men (e.g., policemen, psychologists,
lawyers, judges, etc.) makes them want to protect women from men,
and the “dykismo” of Lesbian Feminists (who are the
powerhouse of the Feminists’ Sex War army) also makes them
want to protect women from men.
I am not attacking Lesbianism as such, here. The sexual habits
of Lesbians are one issue, and their political power in the Sex
War is another. It has been a struggle for many people in the West
to be reprogrammed into realising that people of other races and
sexual orientations are not inferior or evil. However, having made
that transition in their thought-patterns, many people over-correct,
and find themselves unable to criticise anyone of a different race
or sexual orientation. This is what gives Lesbian Feminists their
power.
I'd like to give some examples of what I mean here, because this
is a very serious problem. My examples come from the Machismo side
of the DUAM, but the same sort of remarks apply equally well to
the Dykismo side of the phenomenon. On November 19th 1999, I went
to see Mr. J. J. Taylor, Family Violence Prevention
Coordinator at Police national headquarters, Wellington, New Zealand.
I asked to see the Police Commissioner himself, but was put on to
Mr. Taylor as the most appropriate person for the topic that I wanted
to discuss.
The reason I decided to talk to the police about this issue (I
had been working in the same building that housed the police national
headquarters for 12 years) was that I had just come across the Fiebert
Bibliography. That bibliography's summary states:
This bibliography examines 95 scholarly investigations, 79 empirical
studies and 16 reviews and/or analyses, which demonstrate that women
are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their
relationships with their spouses or male partners. The aggregate
sample size in the reviewed studies exceeds 60,000. (www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm)
Armed with this ironclad evidence the Feminists were lying about
Domestic Violence, I arranged a meeting. On the telephone, he agreed
there was a disparity between what academic research said about
the roles of males and females in Domestic Violence, and what the
media said. But he changed his tune when we met.
At the meeting itself, which was held in the (apparently empty)
cafeteria rather than in a meeting-room, it turned out he believed
the standard Feminist explanation for the above-mentioned discrepancy,
and handed me some police statistics and other information on Domestic
Violence arrests. I handed him a copy of the Fiebert bibliography,
then spoke about the six (minor) workplace assaults I had been the
victim of over the past 12 years at the hands of three females –
just four floors above where we were sitting (I didn't mention the
sexual harassment or intimidation I had suffered in addition to
those straightforward assaults). He covered his mouth with his hand
as if he was covering an itch to smile. Certainly, the expression
in his eyes suggested he was smiling! And I must admit my own instinctive
reaction is also to smile when hearing about female assaults on
males (the DUAM, again!), but it was significant to see this reaction
from someone in his position in the field of domestic violence.
Then he asked me if all the research I had read showed that women
and men hit each other equally frequently, and I said not every
single one. I recalled, in particular, the 1996 New Zealand National
Survey of Crime Victims, commissioned by
the Victimisation Survey Committee, comprising representatives from
the Police, Ministry of Women's Affairs, and other government agencies.
However, I pointed out that the relevant questionnaire had been
slanted – possibly on the initiative of the Ministry of Women's
Affairs – to make it appear men hit women more frequently
than the other way around. Moreover, Mr. Taylor could not explain
the questions' slant.
The questionnaire (from Table 2.13) did not ask men and women
simply whether:
-
Any partner ever actually used force or violence on you,
such as deliberately kicked, pushed, grabbed, shoved you or
hit you with something; or
-
Any partner ever threatened to use force or violence on
you such as threatened to kick, push, grab, or shove you; or
-
Any partner ever deliberately destroyed or threatened to
destroy your belongings.
Instead of those straightforward question, the questionnaire
asked whether:
-
Any partner ever actually used force or violence on you,
such as deliberately kicked, pushed, grabbed, shoved you or
hit you with something in a way that could hurt you;
and
-
Any partner ever threatened to use force or violence on
you such as threatened to kick, push, grab, or shove you in
a way that actually frightened you; and
-
Any partner ever deliberately destroyed or threatened to
destroy your belongings in a way that frightened you.
The bias against men responding positively is immediately obvious,
since men are socialised to downplay fear and to be relatively insensitive
to pain. This was confirmed by data from another table (page 81)
in the very same survey, which showed that 50.5 percent of women,
as compared to only 31.4 percent of men, reported experiencing fear
when on the receiving end of a violent offence. So the results of
this survey are useless as evidence of the comparative incidence
of domestic violence committed by women, as compared to men. I cannot
think of any reason for the questions being framed in that way,
except in order to make women appear to be more frequent victims
of family violence than men are. The focus is women's subjective
experience of events, rather than the events themselves.
Then Mr. Taylor mentioned the other relevant New Zealand survey
on this topic – "Findings About Partner Violence"
by Moffitt, Caspi and Silva (1996), which showed the same thing
as the overseas studies – that women hit men at least as often
as men hit women.
However, Feminists are not to be outdone by mere facts, and this
is where Mr. Taylor came out with his most telling statement. I
can't quote him verbatim, but what he said was more or less that
you can't just count "hits" in that way, and that, in
one case referred to by Moffitt (et al), the woman had kicked the
man because he was holding her by the throat. The implication was,
of course, that she was acting in self-defence.
So I asked Mr. Taylor why the man had held the woman by the throat,
but he just replied, "Because he was assaulting her !"
This is exactly what I mean by the DUAM - Feminists and police
officers like Mr. Taylor follow the chain of causation only just
far enough back to establish (to their satisfaction) that the woman
is the innocent party in such circumstances.
So I repeated this little dialogue between Mr. Taylor and myself
back to Mr. Taylor, and I accused him of being biased against men,
and said I would quote him. He then accused me of quoting him out
of context (which is absurd, since we were still in the same context)
! Then I offered to retrace the conversation, in order to give him
a chance to clarify what he had meant, but he refused. He just added
- implausibly to me - that this sort of bias would never stand up
in a real courtroom to the detriment of any man. But this is exactly
what I am sure does happen again and again to countless men all
over the western world. Only an unusual combination of client and
lawyer would uncover such bias in a courtroom. In fact, exactly
this sort of bias was shown by a Judge Adams in a programme on the
Family Court that was broadcast on Television New Zealand in 2001
– to the detriment of a Polynesian man's access to his child
(See the chapter on the Justice System)..
I was absolutely aghast and yet felt triumphant - here were the
exact allegations of police and Feminist bias which I had discussed
and read about in theory, coming to live in the flesh and blood
of the head of domestic violence policy in the country where I live
! A few months later, after publicising that incident, I heard from
a judge (Judge Carruthers, who was meeting with men's groups about
Family Court issues) that Mr. Taylor had left the position he was
holding when I interviewed him.
Lesbians as Activists
There is no denying many Feminists are not lesbians, particularly
now that Feminism is so mainstream in western societies. But Lesbian
Feminists are still at the cutting edge of man-hatred (misandry),
and they frequently work behind the scenes, letting the photogenic
heterosexual Feminists pose in the limelight. It is important not
to be naïve about this, because there are a lot of Feminists
who are intelligent enough to see how having obviously butch spokeswomen
creates poor Public Relations. Anyone who has taken an interest
in the Women's Refuge and Rape Crisis movements, for example, will
have seen how they have largely replaced their Lesbian spokeswomen
with apparently heterosexual women. But it would be naïve to
assume the Lesbians have somehow disappeared or been overthrown
in some sort of coup d'etat.
It is not my intention to attack Lesbianism as a lifestyle, as
I have stated previously. Too many men in the international Men's/Fathers'
movement are homophobic, already. However, my point here is to lay
bare part of what I see as the Psychohistory of Feminism. Lesbians
are of course subject to oppression, but they also use this to garner
sympathy from politically correct communities, such as western bureaucracies,
while they get on with the business of drafting anti-male legislation.
There is a difference between attacking what Lesbians do in their
private life and attacking what they do politically.
It certainly fits with the self-interest of Lesbians to be Feminist.
And it is from Lesbians I have experienced some of the most marked
physical intimidation, discrimination against pro-men views, and
the most extreme reactions against anti-Feminist statements. If
you know that a TV news producer is a Lesbian, for example, it is
a cast-iron guarantee she will be biased against men's issues. If
she is merely a heterosexual Feminist, the likelihood she is biased
against men is somewhat reduced.
Catch-22
The result of the power of Feminist pressure-groups and the DUAM
is to put men – all heterosexual men – into a Catch-22
(i.e. No-Win) situation. If a man's wife or female partner abuses
him psychologically or physically, he is unable to retaliate. If
he retaliates, the DUAM will arrest him and put him in jail, the
Family Court will impose a court order preventing him from contacting
her, give her custody of the children, severely limit his access
to his children and give her sole right to live in the family home.
So if third-party intervention is not possible or is unsuccessful,
he just has to either put up with the abuse or leave the relationship
– to the detriment of his children's and his own emotional
health and (probably) standard of living. If anything is a "syndrome,"
this Catch-22 is one.
To give some concrete examples, I know a man whose glasses had
just been broken by his wife, so he rang the police to ask for help.
The policeman asked if she had "hit" him or "punched"
him. The complainant refused to answer this question because he
didn't know what the difference was between "punching"
and "hitting", and he suspected that the policeman was
just trying to disprove him: If he said "punched", he
expected that the policeman would says something stupid like, "Women
can't punch." The officer insisted, however, on getting an
answer to this question and when no answer was forthcoming he hung
up! In today's political climate in western countries, it is inconceivable
that the police would treat a female complainant that way. But males
have no rights in such situations.
An acquaintance told me about another incident when, after a domestic
dispute, the police interviewed him and his wife in their home.
His wife said he had hit her and the police duly wrote that down
in their notebook, but when he said she had hit him the police wrote
nothing down.
Here's a further example: an advertisement, entitled "Family
Violence is a crime," and authorised by the President of the
Police Managers' Guild, appeared in a daily newspaper.7 It portrayed
only women and children as victims of this crime, omitting any mention
of the possibility men could also be victims of Family Violence.
Not only is it a sexist advertisement in its own right, but also
frightening testimony to how little chance men have of being treated
fairly by the Justice system. The police have no chance of reducing
the incidence of domestic violence so long as they insist in driving
men into a corner and treating them as guilty until proven innocent.
For example, in New Zealand there is an organisation called "Victim
Support" which, as its name implies, supports crime victims.
A woman there attacked a man for repeatedly doing noisy "wheelies"
with his car on the street in front of her house. She threw things
at him and menaced him with a stick. Yet, despite that it was the
woman who assaulted the man, the police intervened on her side and
Victim Support called to offer psychological support to her family.
Moreover, when I was assaulted outside a supermarket in the same
city, my glasses were broken and I received cuts that required stitches,
but did Victim Support call? No. Evidently, such organisations (or
the police who refer people to them) work according to the unwritten
rule that only women are victims and men can look after themselves.
Many men know there's no point calling the police, because they
will automatically take the woman's side. This is why it is not
valid to use statistics about police call-outs as an indication
of the level of domestic violence by women on men, as the former
Minister of Justice, Doug (now Sir Douglas) Graham did when a deputation
from the New Zealand Men for Equal Rights Association went to see
him in 1998.
Doug Graham was proud of his Feminist-inspired domestic violence
legislation and maintained he was not stupid (evidently I have a
reputation for thinking Feminists are stupid). So I pointed out
he was contradicting himself – showing himself to be stupid,
by basing his notions of the relative culpability of men and women
in domestic violence on the arrest figures! When I explained, he
agreed with me. I am certain, however, that his Feminist advisers
would have made sure he did not actually do anything based on the
fleeting insight he gained that day.
My impression as to how Feminist his ministry is relates to incidents
such as the publication of Hitting Home. His Ministry of Justice
had been planning to produce a series of studies on domestic violence:
-
Men talking about violence against their female partners;
-
Women talking about violence against their male partners;
-
People talking about violence against their same-sex partners.
But they only produced the first one, Hitting Home. The official
reason was they ran out of money. This seems suspicious given the
sheer volume of programmes addressing that same issue. Why not focus
on female violence for a change? Because Feminist journalists latch
onto Feminist-compatible research and turn it into headlines and
documentaries, which Feminist politicians then use to push Feminist
legislation into Law, I am certain the Feminists in the Ministry
of Justice stopped the second and third studies because they did
not want the political impact of the first, anti-male report to
be at all blunted by publicity about the fact that women (including
lesbians) commit domestic violence. See, for example, the webpage:
"Gay and Lesbian Same-Sex Domestic Violence Bibliography"
(www.xq.com/cuav/dvbibl.htm)
And this DUAM bias is also a problem in the Third World. India,
for example, has seen the creation of the "All-India Crime
Against Men by Women Front" (Akhil Bharatiya Patni Virodhimorcha),
which was founded after the 1988 suicide of Naresh Anand, who had
been unable to bear his wife's physical and mental torture. He left
behind a note pleading with police to form a special cell to deal
with cases of abused husbands, along the lines of the already extant
Crimes Against Women cell.
All of this needs to be borne in mind when we read the following
excerpt from Liz Kate's email (on the website mentioned above):
'"Who is that [on the phone]!" he demands.
She ignores him, hastily whispering "I gotta go now..."
"GIMME that phone!" he shouts. "Who was that!!"
"It was someone from work."
He dials call return. It's not. "You sniveling lying
BITCH," he shrieks, and yanking the phone out, throws it into
the wall. "YOU TELL ME WHO THE F- THAT WAS RIGHT NOW,"
he yells, advancing at her. He picks up a little glass budvase her
grandmother gave her and holds it high.
"Nooo, gimme that!" she whines.
"WHO THE F- WAS ON THAT PHONE!!!"
She grabs his arm to save the vase, and he holds it out of
her reach.
[She has started the violence, according who touched who
first.]
Smash, the vase shatters into a thousand little shards. "You
pig," she mutters, nearly inaudible.
"WHAT'D YOU SAY!!! SAY IT AGAIN, BITCH!!!" he screams.
She crouches at the floor, attempting to scoop up glass splinters.
He grabs her by the upper arm, bringing her to her feet. She wrenches
her arm away, and as he reaches for her again, pushes his forearm
away from her.
[Conflict tactics scale: one grab for each, plus a push for
her.]
"I WANNA KNOW WHO WAS ON THAT PHONE!" he yells,
down, close into her face as she backs away.
"No one..."
[Conflict Tactics Scale: two for two. Nothing but a fair fight...
so far...]'
Here it is appropriate to use Liz Kates' own words: "misleading,
and nothing short of fraudulent" for her use of the above (presumably
real) conflict data. Part of what she is trying to do here is show
that counting hits is not the whole picture. I agree. But if she
is also trying (as I think she is) to depict this woman as a helpless,
innocent victim of male abuse, then this shows how one-sided the
misandrist (man-hating) Feminist "experts" on Domestic
Violence are.
It is quite clear this man is being subjected – probably
over a long period of time – to severe psychological abuse
by this woman. She is blatantly lying to him point blank, which
is about as extreme a form of Psychological abuse as you can perpetrate
in a relationship. She is doing something detrimental to his interests
behind his back, such as having an affair or doing her best to give
him the impression she is.
Over a long period of time, this would be quite sufficient to
drive any man "mad" – mad/angry, or even mad/insane,
but the DUAM has no concept of male pyschological suffering. Her
psychological abuse precipitated the confrontation yet if they call
the police he will be the one they arrest. Indeed, I have ample
anecdotal evidence of cases in which men who complained their female
partners had attacked them were investigated as cases of domestic
violence by the man against the woman! This shows how critical the
issue of interpretation is, and how powerless men are in the political
and legal processes of the West, when it is the extreme Feminists
who are doing most of the interpreting – and teaching their
interpretations to the Establishment as fact !.
Murray A. Straus (1997), responding to Feminist criticism of the
Conflict Tactics Scale, approvingly quotes Gelles as stating:
"(W)hile the statement is true that men and women hit
one other in roughly equal numbers, it cannot be made in a vacuum
without the qualifiers that: 1) women are seriously injured at seven
times the rate of men; and 2) that women are killed by partners
at more than two times the rate of men."
First we should note he is obviously reiterating the Feminist-unfriendly
fact that men and women do indeed hit one other in roughly equal
numbers. Only if we expect abused men to shrug off their abuse,
however – "take it like a man" and not defend themselves
– are his other two points truly relevant. But can we reasonably
expect men to let an abusive woman rage simply because she may (in
many cases) be physically weaker? Don't men have a right to defend
themselves, too? Whatever happened to the notion of equality?
The fact that women are more likely than men to be killed in acts
of domestic violence needs to be investigated in detail and addressed
with grave concern, not as a gender issue, but a social problem.
Moreover, our investigation should ignore the age of the victim
lest we overlook the many male infants murdered by their mothers.
(It is a sad truth that when age is excluded as a factor there are
nearly as many male as female perpetrators of domestic homicide
in the U.S. -- A grim equality.)8
The actual numbers and proportions will of course vary from country
to country, but it is interesting to read the "Most Recent
US Spousal Murder Statistics" web-page.
Although more husbands were convicted of murdering their wives
than the converse (156 wives, but 275 husbands), this might well
be a feature of anti-male judicial bias, since:
-
the average sentence for spousal murder (excluding the death
penalty and life sentences) for men was 16.5 years, whereas
it was only 6 years for women;
-
94 percent of husbands, but only 81% of wives, received a
prison sentence on conviction for spousal murder;
-
"Victim Provocation" was given as a defense in 44%
of the wives' trials, but only in 10% of the husbands' trials.
This does not mean the husbands were not provoked – it
just means that the DUAM makes it much harder for men to make
a claim of provocation with judges and juries.
Who starts the Domestic Violence?
The police should investigate Domestic Violence like any other
alleged crime, find out who started it and then concentrate on warning
or punishing that person. At present, police in some countries are
trained to automatically punish the man, because they are told only
men commit abuse and any violence by women is simply retaliation
to abuse by the man, and men are supposed to be capable of inflicting
more damage than women.
Men who are beaten by their wives are treated with contempt or
derision, so they know they can only rely on their own strength
in domestic disputes – the police will always be on the woman's
side. In New Zealand, for example, there are three kinds of Assault
offences that men can be charged with:
-
Common Assault;
-
Assault on a Female;
-
Aggravated Assault.
A man convicted of "Assault on a Female" is subject
to a higher maximum penalty than one convicted of Common Assault.
This sends a clear signal to all men and women that the legal system
is sexist and operates an anti-male double-standard.
What is the relevance of Domestic Violence
to the Family Court?
A record of domestic violence against a partner (i.e., violence
between adults) should not be taken into account when deciding custody
and access issues, because it is not relevant. It also discriminates
against fathers' chances of getting custody and access because the
police, as we have seen, are biased against men. Indeed, domestic
violence might even occur when a father suspects his partner is
neglecting or abusing his children but he lacks the evidence to
prove it in court. He might notice they are looking unwell, listless,
etc., but the children might be too afraid of the consequences to
say what their mother has been doing. If he defends them from her,
he risks losing his children to the mother's inadequate care, which
is what caused the problems in the first place!
Conclusion
The Feminist line on domestic violence is official policy in
many countries. As one Women's Refuge worker put it in Contact newspaper
(July 22, 1999), talking about the changes she noticed during the
past 15 years:
"One of the main things that struck me is that the police
attitude has got much better. Our work is known and the various
agencies are working together."
The specific Feminist Catch-22 on domestic violence is that women
are always in the right, no matter what they do:
Men who hit their wives are deemed to do it without provocation
and without reason – and therefore without excuse. This issue
is never raised by Feminists.
Women are deemed never to hit their husbands (the issue is never
spontaneously raised by Feminists) – or, if women do hit their
husbands, Feminists (when Feminists are forced to agree that women
do do this) take the line that they only do it justifiably.
When Feminists admit men are also abused by women, they claim
only women suffer from a "syndrome" of domestic abuse.
In other words, women are allowed to use the excuse of a "syndrome"
as a defence when they murder their husbands.
When women murder their menfolk, there is usually some excuse
or justification (e.g., domestic violence by the man in their lives).
When men murder their womenfolk, they are not allowed to claim
the woman's behaviour was a justifying factor.
When women murder their men, the cause is often deemed to be
domestic violence, but when men murder their women, this murder
is deemed to be an instance of domestic violence.
Men and fair-minded women must campaign together against women-only
defences and men-only crimes. Feminists have been steadily working
toward the goal of getting all women treated as innocent victims,
no matter what they have done – and all men treated as criminals,
no matter if they are innocent.
Anti-male bias doesn't just infect the police – it is particularly
strong in the media, who pass it on to the whole of western society.
For example, there was a letter to TIME magazine, published on January
20, 1997, in which Richard M. Riffe, Assistant Prosecutor of Boone
County, Madison, West Virginia, complains about the biased way in
which TIME wrote up a case involving a woman who murdered her husband.9
As far as public attitudes are concerned, here are two examples:
A newspaper advertisement for a stage show called "Full Marx"
quoted a review of the show by one Ralph McAllister, which ended
with the words, "So take your family, wallop your husband (my
emphasis), even bring along the great dane, but make sure you see
Full Marx!10
A cartoon (in French) which the mainly female staff of the Language
department of a school thought suitable to post prominently on a
wall in the 1990's. This cartoon told the story of a woman who threw
a plate of breakfast at her husband and then left him on the grounds
he was lazy and had asked for breakfast in bed. This is Domestic
Violence, but because it was committed by a woman, it was not only
considered innocuous, but some of the teachers even decorated it
with comments such as, "Very good!" and "Serves him
right!" (in French).11
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I'd also like to briefly raise the issue of PMT (Premenstrual
Tension), or PMS (Premenstrual Syndrome). The role of PMT in domestic
violence needs research. It would be ironic, but typical of modern
societies, if PMT were (as is quite possible) a major cause of physical
and psychological abuse of men by women, which then led to men being
arrested because of DUAM bias in the Establishment.
We need to investigate the power relationship, as well. What does
it do for the relative power of men and women in a relationship
if the woman can say and do what she likes, in the sure knowledge
that if the worst comes to the worst she will get the children,
an income from the taxpayer, and at least half the joint assets,
while he will have restricted or no access to his children, a jail
term and child-support bills? That is the bottom line in modern
western heterosexual relationships.
The man has to either defer to the woman, walk out of the relationship
or run the risk of the worst-case becoming a reality. The United
States divorce rate in 1988 was the fourth-highest in the world,
according to the UN Demographic yearbook. And there has been research
in that country which found that the marriages that last the longest
are those in which the husband always gives way to the wife! So
the extreme Feminist domestic violence campaign has also got to
be seen as a tool for replacing a social system based on the nuclear
family with a Matriarchal society comprised of single mothers and
fatherless children.
For more on this topic, see "Femi-Fascism Flourishes,"
by Cassandra Hewitt-Reid, at the free radical website.
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