Category: Domestic Violence

Imam Sentenced in Spain for Book with Wife Beating Advice

The BBC reports that Muslim cleric Mohamed Kamal Mustafa was sentenced to 15 months in jail by a Spanish court for writing a book that included advice on the proper way to beat one’s wife. Under Spanish law, however, the sentence will be suspended and Mustafa will not serve any time in jail provided he doesn’t commit another similar offense.

The book in question, Women in Islam, was published in Spain in 2000 and offered advice for men on how to assault their wives without landing in trouble with Spanish legal authorities. For example, Mustafa advised that when men physically discipline their wives,

The blows should be concentrated on the hands and feet using a rod that is thin and light so that it does not leave scars or bruises on the body.

Women’s groups in Spain were outraged by the publication of the book, and the state agreed, charging Mustafa with inciting violence against women. This was the first successful prosecution of inciting violence against women in Spain.

Muslim groups in Spain were quick to distance themselves from Mustafa’s claims that he was simply interpreting the Koran. Mohamed Halhoul, director of the Islamic Council of Catalonia, told the New York Times,

We respect the sentence. In Islam, there does not exist any type of call for aggression, either towards men or women.

Sources:

Imam rapped for wife-beating book. The BBC, January 14, 2004.

Spain Sentences Imam for Book Offering Advice on Wife-Beating. Dale Fuchs, The New York Times, January 15, 2004.

Great Britain Opens First Shelter for Male Victims of Domestic Violence

The Observer reported in December that the first shelter for male victims of domestic violence in Great Britain would open in early 2004, with another shelter planned for later in the year.

The Observer noted that the most recent British Crime Survey found that about 4 percent of both men and women said they had been victims of violence by intimates, and that in those incidents 50 percent of women and 31 percent of men said they sustained an injury.

Those sort of findings lead men’s groups to question the lack of resources for male victim’s of domestic violence. The Observer quoted David Hughes, editor of Male View magazine, as saying,

At the last count there were 426 shelters for women in Britain. That means there should be at least 70 refuges for men [assuming 1 in 6 acts of domestic violence are committed by women against men based on another survey]. Yet up until now there was none.

Ian Hancock, a National Health System director of psychological services, told The Observer that along with the lack of facilities, men also face social pressure not to report acts of domestic violence. According to Hancock,

It’s difficult for anybody if they’re being battered but with men their problem is compounded by the fact that they feel they shouldn’t allow themselves to be battered by a woman. The idea that it makes you some kind of weakling means it’s a double whammy for men. It affects their self esteem. . . . People have this image of muscular women and weedy men but size has got nothing to do with it. A man can be twice the size of his female partner and still be battered by her.

Source:

Battered men get their own refuge. Jamie Doward, The Observer, December 21, 2003.

Are Russian Mail-Order Brides Placed at Too High of a Risk?

There’s an interesting article at LegalAffairs.Org about mail-order brides from Eastern Europe. There have been a couple of high profile instances of violence against women who came to the United States as mail-order brides, leading to calls for tighter regulation of matchmaking services that arrange such marriages.

But in her article on the topic, Nadya Labi notes that a) no one knows if mail order brides from Eastern Europe are really subject to more violence than any other group, and b) the few limited studies that have been done suggest that, in fact, there isn’t a problem with these marriages. Labi writes,

So far, no definitive studies have confirmed the industry’s bad rap. In the 1996 Mail-Order Bride Act, Congress directed the Department of Justice to investigate fraud and domestic violence in mail-order marriages. But immigration officials don’t collect data on these relationships, so after three years of fact-gathering the DOJ could offer only preliminary and suspect statistics. Based on 266 immigration cases, a small sample, DOJ reported that matchmaking agencies did not play a significant role in marriage fraud. Investigators also found that mail-order brides suffer abuse less frequently than homegrown wives. On the strength of anecdotal evidence that some mail-order brides are abused, however, the 1996 law required international marriage brokers to tell foreign brides about their rights to claim certain immigration benefits if they become victims of domestic violence.

Currently Congress is considering the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act which would, according to Labi, “force agencies to ask each male client about his marital history and criminal background.” Do we want the government getting that directly involved in how people decide who they marry? As Labi writes,

But is it a broker’s job to run a background check on a man simply because he wants to meet a foreign mate? The legislation before Congress exempts matchmaking services like Match.Com and Yahoo! Personals because these companies charge the same rates to men and women and to natives and foreigners. In light of the financial incentive that mail order brokers have to side with their male clients, it makes sense to treat brokers differently by requiring them to tell foreign brides about their immigration rights. However, it seems premature to impose background checks without more proof that the men who go to brokers to meet foreign women . . . are more dangerous than men at any singles party. Mail-order brides are adults who can only hope for the best and guard against the worst. They should proceed, as others do, at their own risk.

Source:

Mrs. America: The business of mail-order marriage. Nadya Labi, Legal Affairs, January/February 2004.

Jon Holbrook on Domestic Violence in Great Britain

Jon Holbrook recently wrote an interesting analysis (The law and the ‘one in four’) about British government claims that 1 in 4 women in Great Britain have been the victims of domestic violence. According to Holbrook, the government figures intentionally exaggerate domestic violence incidence in order to recast how domestic violence is perceived in that country.

Holbrook writes,

It is interesting that [Home Secretary, David] Blunkett has not relied on the Home Office’s own research of 1999, which dealt in detail with victims’ perceptions of domestic violence. What this showed was not that people thought domestic violence was acceptable, but that only 17 percent of most recent domestic violence incidents were considered by their victims to have been crimes.

Probably part of the reason for victims being reluctant to criminalize their partner’s violent behavior is the fact that, as the researchers say, many of the incidents were perceived ‘as too trivial in intent or action to warrant the attention of the criminal justice system.’

Holbrook notes, for example, that the overwhelming majority of incidents used to support the 1 in 4 claim did not result in any sort of injury, but was instead characterized as either a push, shove or grab.

Such actions are not appropriate, but do they rise to the level of criminal behavior? Clearly most of the “victims” of such acts did not think so. As Holbrook puts it,

But another related factor is that victims of domestic violence, and no doubt other members of the public as well, are able to distinguish between something that is wrong and something that is criminal. Or to put it another way, they are able to distinguish between something that is a private matter to be sorted out by those affected and something that warrants criminal justice intervention.

But, of course, such ideas presumes the sort of autonomy on the part of women which domestic violence rhetoric tends to diminish and deny. Can a woman really decide on her own whether or not to prosecute when her husband or boyfriend grabs her during a heated argument? The answer, of course, is no if you buy into current domestic violence ideology (ironically, when men are the victims of such behavior, the feminist line is that this isn’t really domestic violence at all).

Sources:

The law and the ‘one in four’. Jon Holbrook, Spiked-Online, July 23, 2003.
Thursday, September 4, 2003.

Man Files Lawsuit Over Access to Domestic Violence Shelters

Eldon Ray Blumhorst, 42, has filed a civil rights lawsuit against 10 battered women’s shelters in Los Angeles that denied him a place to stay. Blumhorst called the 10 shelters in December saying that he needed shelter from domestic violence, but none of the shelters would accept him on the grounds that they only serve women.

Blumhorst maintains that is a violation of California laws that prohibit sexual discrimination by programs receiving state funding, as the domestic violence shelters do. Writing on the case for Women’s Enews, however, Elizabeth Zwerling quotes a lawyer representing 9 of the 10 shelters as saying that,

Women’s shelters receive funding from the state pursuant to a gender-specific funding statute. . . . Our argument is that these are lawful programs. The case has no legal merit.

Zwerling interviewed people at Los Angeles shelters who said since they have limited resources, they have no choice but to focus on women and children. Ben Schirmer of Rainbow Services told Zwerling that,

The fact that we limit ourselves to women and children is not to say that it is not a problem with men. It’s that we have limited resources and it’s all we can do to try and keep up with the demand for services for women and children.

It’s not clinically appropriate to house men and women in the same facility.

Another shelter director, Kathie Mathis of the Domestic Violence Center of Santa Clarita, tells Zwerling that she doesn’t simply turn away men, but rather refers them to shelters that do take men. “We’re all in a network,” Mathis said. “No one is turned away; they’re just referred.”

But according to an article about the case by Glenn Sacks, the nearest shelter to Los Angeles that accepts men is 80 miles from downtown Los Angeles. Moreover, that shelter does house bot men and women and, according to Sacks, does so apparently without the sort of clinical problems that Schirmer seems to think are inherent to the practice.

Zwerling cites California State University, Long Beach professor Martin Fiebert’s research that reviewed more than 100 international studies of domestic violence and found that women are “as physically aggressive or more aggressive than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners.”

She follows this up, though with a quote from Linda Berger, director of the Statewide California Coalition for battered Women, who maintains that most violent acts by women are defensive.

But as Sacks notes, two large studies of domestic violence funded by the National Institute of Mental Health found that women were just as likely to initiate violence in domestic settings as were men.

Blumhorst’s lawsuit is a long shot at best, but it’s interesting that Schirmer attacks the lawsuit with largely the same language that targets of lawsuits by feminists have used,

It’s hard to run a nonprofit in today’s economy. It’s easier to sue than to start a new shelter. But lawsuits like this that take us away from our mission do not help anybody.

If only those pesky men would take their lawsuits over gender equality and go home!

Sources:

Suit presses for ‘gender symmetry’ in shelters. Elizabeth Zwerling, Women’s eNews, July 21, 2003.

Battered husbands’ injuries no jokes. Glenn Sacks, Ifeminists.Net, June 17, 2003.

Domestic Violence Advocate Convicted of Second-Degree Murder

Oregon domestic violence advocate Lorraine Netherton was convicted in July of second degree murder in the death of 22-year-old Desiere Rants. Rants was literally caught in the middle of a custody battle that Netherton was trying to resolve.

Until last year, Netherton was chair of the Federal Way Domestic Violence Task Force. She was forced out in a vote of the members of the task force, however, who were concerned about “her violent temper and her penchant for carrying handguns.”

Netherton, 40, had agreed to help a neighbor with her child custody battle. Netherton was trying to serve the father of the child, William Rants, with court papers. According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Netherton spotted William Rants in a car with his daughter, and engaged in a car chase of William Rants.

At the end of that car chase, William Rants and his daughter exited the driver’s side door of the car and Desiere Rants, his sister, exited from the passenger side. Desiere got between William and Netherton apparently to try to keep them apart. Netherton claimed that Desiere hit her, and so she fired two shots into the woman’s upper body, killing her.

Both witnesses and physical evidence contradicted her claims, however. Although Netherton testified that Desiere Rants had hit her 6-8 times in the head and face, there was no evidence of any injury and even Netherton’s makeup remained undisturbed. Moreover, witnesses testified that Netherton fired without provocation at Desiere and then stood over her and fired at her again as she lay on the ground.

The jury settled on a conviction for second degree murder after spending two days debating and ultimately rejecting a conviction for first degree (premeditated) murder. Netherton plans to appeal, and could face 16-25 years for the murder if her conviction is not overturned.

Sources:

Domestic-violence foe guilty of second-degree murder. Tracy Johnson, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 19, 2003.

Woman charged in fatal custody-case shooting. Hector Castro, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, November 28, 2002.

Domestic violence worker guilty of murder. Kathleen R. Merrill, King County Journal, July 19, 2003.

Ex-advocate for violence victims is charged in slaying Maureen O’Hagan, Seattle Times, November 28, 2002.