When my book,
Domestic Violence: The 12 Things You Aren’t Supposed to Know,
was published eleven years ago, my greatest fear was that it would be
misinterpreted as a defense of violent men — or worse, as a denial that
violence against women is a problem.
As I emphasized and reiterated
numerous times throughout the book, my purpose was not to deny or
minimize violence against women. Rather, it was to take to task those
who have falsified data and concealed information in order to
portray all men as violent and all women as victims. As I explained:
[I]t would be regrettable if anything in this book were
to be used as a basis for eliminating programs and services for abuse
victims…. Calling attention to the untold half of the story about
domestic violence should only serve to increase awareness that
the problem is even more widespread than we may have thought before;
that when the male victims are added in, there are even more victims
than we previously thought. If anything, the information in this book
should therefore impel more, not fewer, programs; more services, not
fewer; more research, not less; and ultimately, it should impel
the development of treatment methods that are more grounded in reality
and therefore more likely to be effective than the current approaches
that are not working.
It appears that these words, for the
most part, have largely been ignored. In a recently published law review
article, for example, my book is cited as an example of a “fathers’
rights” book that claims women lie about being victims in order to
support the “domestic violence industry.” In reality, neither those
words nor that claim is made anywhere at all in my book.
In the never-ending gender wars, it
seems everyone must get classified as either “for” women or “against”
them, and if you challenge any statistic or claim that ostensibly was
created for the purpose of securing special advantages for women, then
you are “against.” Well, in the immortal words of Joe Biden, that’s just
a bunch of malarkey.
In the book, I explain why many of the
things we have been told (that sporting events fuel violence against
women; that 95% of all incidents involve men beating up women; that it’s
the leading cause of death for women; and hundreds of other myths that
people seldom question) are not true. I did not do this because I am
against women. I did it because I am for truth.
The domestic abuse field has been
plagued by misinformation for many years. It seems that a lot of people
have believed that it is necessary to make wildly inflated claims about
violence against women in order to get people to care about the issue.
And apparently a lot of people, at the same time, have also believed
that information about male victims must be suppressed.
From the standpoint of a person who
honestly believes that people only care about fantastic outbreaks of
large-scale epidemics but couldn’t care less about individual people, I
suppose lying about the magnitude of the problem would be very tempting.
The motivation for suppressing or concealing information about male
victims, however, is a bit more difficult to explain.
Some advocates seem to view domestic
violence as a zero-sum game. Any protection afforded to male victims is
viewed as somehow “stealing” such protection away for women. Of course,
this is not true. It is possible to provide legal protections for male
victims without diminishing the legal protections that are available to
women.
The most plausible explanation, I
believe, is that many people in the domestic violence field have wed
themselves, in one way or another, to a feminist theory of domestic
violence. According to Gloria Steinem, domestic violence is the means by
which men, as a class, maintain power and control over women, as a
class. Predominant domestic violence treatment protocols are founded on
this belief. To acknowledge male victims would be to acknowledge that
the feminist theory of domestic violence is invalid. I think it is
likely that the originators of false information and propaganda about
domestic violence simply are not yet prepared to discard the feminist
theory of violence as propounded by Gloria Steinem.
How false claims about domestic violence hurt women
One misgiving I have had about the book
is that I did not explain as fully as I might have how false information
about domestic violence actually does more to harm abused women than to
help them. I did mention this, but my focus in the book was more on the
fact that portraying violence as an exclusively male phenomenon
prevents men and boys who are victims of domestic violence from being
acknowledged, and therefore prevents them from getting the help they
need.
- Misinformation about domestic violence hurts women, too.
To begin with, since most couples
violence is mutual, and is at least as often initiated by the woman as
by the man (according to studies cited in the book), it stands to reason
that women will be put at greater risk of retaliatory violence if there
are no legal, social or moral inhibitions against women’s initiation of
violence against men.
In addition, and just like the fable
about the boy who cried wolf, repeatedly making false claims about
domestic abuse victimization ultimately weakens the credibility of the
movement.
Most importantly, though, adhering to a
false theory about the nature and cause of domestic violence obstructs
the development of treatment modalities that may actually be effective
in addressing the problem. If domestic violence is simply viewed as the
means by which men as a class maintain power over women — that is to
say, simply the means by which “the patriarchy” sustains itself — then
there will be very little chance of the real causes and correlates
being discovered. As I expressed it in the book,
Those involved in the treatment of offenders need to
honestly and openly acknowledge that not all batterers are alike; that
“patriarchy” and “male privilege” usually have very little to do with
it; and that things like low self-esteem, dependence,
poverty, unemployment, lack of education, alcoholism, drug abuse, mental
illness, stress, biological and neurological factors, cohabitation at
an early age, parentage at an early age, parental rejection, abusive
childhood, weak parent-child attachment, tolerance of corporal
punishment (a.k.a. child abuse), marital dissatisfaction, and yes,
sometimes even female violence, do in fact have a lot to do with male
violence. Unless these issues are addressed honestly and objectively,
the real causes of violence will never be treated.
(Citations omitted here for the sake of brevity.)
Another way that false propaganda
embracing the Steinem model harms women is by perpetuating sexist
stereotypes. The double standard that a man should not hit a woman but
it does not matter if a woman hits is a man is founded, in large part,
on a belief that men are – or should be – capable of taking care of
themselves, and women are not. It reflects a belief that women need
protection because they are weaker than men, but men should not need
anything because they are stronger. Sexists have no problem telling an
abused man to “man up” and “take it like a man,” but would never suggest
to an abused woman that she “woman up” or “take it like a woman.”
Female violence is minimized, or even laughed about, because women are
regarded as ineffectual. Of course, this is not true. Some women do, in
fact, have sufficient physical strength to inflict considerable damage
on another person. Nor is women’s supposed deficit in physical strength
particularly significant, given that any woman can make up for with a
knife or a gun what she might lack in physical strength.
The double standard reflected in the
propaganda reinforces a belief that a man should be strong enough to
control a woman: If he is so weak as to “let” a woman or a girl beat him
up, then he is not “a real man.”
It should not be necessary to explain
that it is not really in women’s best interests to teach boys and men
that their defining characteristic — what makes them “real” and
therefore worthy of the title of “man” — is their capacity and
willingness to use physical force to control women.
The double standard also reinforces a
stereotype of all men as being stronger than all women. It is exactly
this stereotype that has been responsible for the denial of equal
opportunities to women in law enforcement, firefighting, and certain
types of military service.
Progress
In the eleven years since the
publication of my book, I am pleased to report that many service
providers and workers in the field of domestic violence either have come
to expressly acknowledge that male abuse victims exist, or have made at
least some effort to start using gender-neutral language. A few, like
the Mayo Clinic, have even developed information and resource listings
explicitly for male victims analogous to the ones they have developed
for female victims. It has also been reported that even though they
legally may only be required to provide free screening of female
children for child abuse, some health care providers screen all children
for it regardless of sex. These are the kinds of positive changes I had
hoped my book would help bring about. So far, none of these things
appears to have diminished anyone’s level of concern for women.
The truth is really very simple: The
pain of domestic abuse does not discriminate on the basis of sex. It is
not something that anyone, male or female, should have to endure.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Proud National
Coordinator of the Family Survey Program
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the same type"), general terms
at the end of specific lists include only things of the same type as those
specifically mentioned in the list. If a provision lists "oranges,
grapefruit, lemons, and
other fruit", the doctrine of ejusdem generis limits the
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GranPa Chuck
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Law with family law questions. And the first
thing you have to do is recognize the emotions and stay calm. You must
exude serenity. Don’t make any sudden movements; keep a state of
calmness around you. You do not want to absorb the emotions radiating
off this person.
