Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick wrote an excellent debunking of a widely publicized study published in the British Medical Journal claiming that extremely large percentages of women in Great Britain were victims of domestic violence. It turns out that is true only if you push the definition of domestic violence to the breaking point.
Specifically, Fitzpatrick points out that the study looked at three separate categories of domestic violence — controlling behaviors, violent incidents and consequent injuries.
Under controlling behaviors, for example, researches asked women if their partners had ever “shouted, screamed at you,” “criticized you,” “put you down in front of others,” “restricted your social life,” “checked your movements,” “threatened you,” “shouted at, threatened the kids,” and “kept you short of money.”
It is probably no surprise that 69 percent of the 1,700 women interviewed by a mailed questionnaire reported experiencing some form of controlling behavior. But who has been in a relationship and not experienced any of these? I find it hard to believe that only 69 percent of women in this survey have been in shouting matches or been criticized by their partners.
I suspect if you gave this survey to men, you would find very similar levels as well. Which is not to suggest that there would be any point in doing so, because it’s not quite clear what the point is in measuring the number of people who have partners who have “criticized you” or “restricted your social life.”
As Fitzpatrick writes,
This ‘reframing’ of diverse forms of interpersonal conflict as manifestations of violence reveals a simplistic and misanthropic view of human relationships. From this jaundiced perspective, all men are bastards, all women are victims; all human beings are vicious or pathetic, degraded creatures, and the only hope for humanity lies through expert professional intervention.
In fact, it seems to go further — the survey items here clearly imply that interpersonal conflict in and of itself must be eliminated for there to be a healthy relationship between men and women, which is downright absurd. In fact, interpersonal conflict can be health — certainly no one is benefited by a childlike “your partner should never criticize you,” which sounds a lot like a feminist version of that Surrendered Wife nonsense.
Source:
Doctoring domestic violence. Michael Fitzpatrick, Spiked-Central.Com, February 7, 2002.