Category: Domestic Violence

Letting It All Hang Out

A couple weeks ago Wendy McElroy wrote an article about an extremely odd series of events involving the Boulder Public Library in Boulder, Colorado.

The controversy started when library refused to fly a large flag outside its entrance. The library claimed it was for safety reasons, but an official with the library also made comments that the flag might be offensive to some patrons. Eventually the library flew a smaller flag.

And then Colorado resident Robert Rowan became so incensed at the library for an art installation at the exhibit, that he swiped the exhibit, and then called a local radio station to confess and explain why he stole the art.

The art exhibit in question was put up by artist Susanne Walker and was titled “Hanging ‘Em Out to Dry.” It consisted of 21 ceramic penises on a clothesline which was meant to make some statement or another about domestic violence (the installation was part of an exhibit for the Boulder County Safehouse, a domestic violence center).

The display was accompanied by signs which repeated myths about domestic violence such as, “Abuse by husbands and partners was . . . the leading cause of injuries to women” (despite being repeatedly debunked, that myth always seems to turn up on domestic violence literature).

McElroy does an excellent job of summing up the argument that this sort of artwork is simply the latest in a long line of anti-male messages. She recounts a recent incident in Tennessee where the YWCA took out ads featuring a blurred photo of a young boy with the caption, “One day he’ll own his own house . . . drive his own car . . . beat his own wife.” McElroy writes of the ad and the exhibit,

The “Hanging ‘Em Out to Dry” exhibit provides the same sort of “awareness” as done an a priori indictment of all boys as wife beaters. It is hate speech directed at a category of human beings. If you doubt this, imagine a display of black penises strung up. It would be condemned as racist in an instant. Why is it less hate speech to expand the category from “black men” to “all men”?

Which is not to say that Walker shouldn’t have right to make such a piece of art, but that people should not be forced to subsidy such bigoted messages. McElroy notes that Rowan said he wouldn’t have had a problem if this art had been displayed at a private gallery, but didn’t think his tax dollars should go toward supporting its message.

Sources:

Hang male-bashing out to dry. Wendy McElroy, Fox News, November 27, 2001.

Man faces charges for phallic art theft. The Associated Press, November 13, 2001.

Are Men War Mongers?

Even when she temporarily strays away from animal rights ever so slightly, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals chief ignoramus Ingrid Newkirk still manages to spread falsehoods and nonsense wherever she goes. This week, Bruce Friedrich posted an article by Newkirk, “Violence at home,” to an animal rights news list. Within the first three paragraphs, Newkirk manages to make three demonstrably false claims about violence and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the United States.

Newkirk opens her article by writing,

Is it a conicidence that, in the wake of the attacks on Washington and New York, most men speak of retaliation while most women express an urge to return to peace?

No, Ingrid, it is not a coincidence, its a complete falsehood. Zogby International interviewed 1,018 likely voters September 14-16, asking them, “Would you support or oppose an all-out war against countries which harbor or aid terrorists?”

Of those polled, 78.9 percent of men and 71.0 percent of women said they would support such an all-out war. When asked, “Do you agree or disagree that such a war would be worht it even if it involved substnatial American casualties?” 77.0 percent of men said they agree,d while 64.8 percent of women did as well.

The number of men and women who outright oppose such a war on terrorism are almost identical. Only 16.1 percent of men said they opposed an all-out war on terrorism, while 18.7 percent of women said they opposed such a war.

Apparently when Newkirk writes that “most women express an urge to return to peace,” she’s talking about her and her 5 closest friends, rather than the general female population of the United States.

Newkirk then goes on to describe a speech by Colman McCarthy. Newkirk writes,

At the Washington Center for Teach Peace, Professor Colman McCarthy has fretted over the fact that, year after year, his female studnets are always more open than his male students to the concept of peace. A Georgetown law student thought she had the answer. “Women want to know about nonviolence more than men because we are more victimized by violence than men. And, victims always want solutions quicker.”

This is pure nonsense. Aside from rapes that occur outside of prison, the overwhelming victims of violent acts are men. The risk of being the victim of an assault, murder or other act of violence is much higher for men than it is for women.

Finally, Newkirk repeats an oft-repeated but completely fake factoid.

The leading cause of injury to women is being beatne at home. Some women have more fear walking into their homes than walking out of them.

This claim is one of those factoids that appears commonly in domestic violence literature, almost always, as in Newkirk’s case, unattributed. This is because both Justice Department and Centers for Disease Control studies suggest that about 1 percent of women’s injuries are caused by their male partners.

Source:

Violence at home. Ingrid Newkirk, September 21, 2001.

When a Mother Kills

Donna Laframboise wrote a perceptive article about the way violence by women is perceived differently than violence by men.

Laframboise notes that last summer there were two prominent Canadian domestic violence cases. In one instance a man from Pickering, Ontario, murdered his estranged wife and then killed himself, while in the otehr a man from Kitchener, Ontario killed his four children and his wife before killing himself.

This year, however, the Andrea Yates case is of course occupying the media, as is a Toronto case where police recently charged a woman with killing here two kids and then attempting to kill herself. But the public reaction is a bit different from the reaction to the male killers. According to Laframboise,

Radio station phone lines aren’t lighting up with people condemning anti-domestic-violence programs as inadequate. Governments, police and the courts aren’t being accused of doing too little to protect the vulnerable. No one is asking how many more innocent children have to die before these offences receive proper attention. The term “child abuse” is also noticeably absent from the discussion. We aren’t being inundated with statistics telling us how many children are killed by their parents — particularly mothers — each year.

Laframboise thinks the reason is that people are so used to hearing about violence against women that they immediately “slot” stories where women are the victims into that category, while the corresponding lack of publicity about violence where women are the perpetrators makes people see it as the exception to the rule (which perhaps explains why commentators often say they cannot imagine why a woman would kill her children, but rarely do such questions arrise when fathers kill their offspring).

Source:

Domestic violence isn’t a gender issue. Donna Laframboise, National Post, July 18, 2001.

United Nations Highlights Problems of Child Marriage

In March the United Nations Children’s Fund released a report highlighting the continuing worldwide problem of childhood marriage of girls. Childhood marriage is an especially acute problem in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

An extreme case is a country such as Nepal where 7 percent of girls are married before age ten and 40 percent by age 15. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, and other countries, very large percentages of girls are married before their 18th birthdays.

Attendant with child marriage are other abuses such as domestic violence and honor killings. As UNICEF executive director Carol Bellamy put it, “Forcing children, especially girls into early marriages, can be physically and emotionally harmful.”

Aside from the domestic violence problems, there are also numerous risks from pregnancy-related complications for these young brides. Pregnancy-related death is the single leading cause of mortality worldwide for girls aged 15 to 19.

Source:

Child marriage ‘violates rights’. The BBC, March 7, 2001.

New York City to Allow Civil Suits for Gender-Biased Crimes

Feminist Daily News Wire recently reported that the New York City Council approved a new law on November 30, 2000, that will “allow victims of rape, domestic violence, and other crimes motivated by gender bias to sue the perpetrators in civil cases.” According to The New York Times, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is expected to sign the bill.

This is basically a rehash of the federal Violence Against Women Act provisions that were thrown out as unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court a few months ago. The goal here is to codify into law the radical feminist construct that there men as a class oppress women as a class.

As an example, the Feminist Daily News wire notes that for a civil suit to be allowed under this law, it must be accompanied by evidence of gender bias such as the act “perpetuated stereotypes of women’s submissive role.” Under this law, then, a rapist who rapes and sodomizes a woman could find himself in civil court, while a rapist who rapes and sodomizes a man would not have to worry about a suit under this statute because the criminal act couldn’t be construed as an example of “gender bias.”

The ultimate message such laws send is that crimes of violence committed by men against women are much more serious than crimes of violence committed by women against men or by men against men, since only the crimes in the first category are part of a society-wide conspiracy against women.

At one time, feminists might have saw such unequal protection before the law for men and women as a sign of overarching paternalism, but today it’s just business as usual.

Source:

NYC Establishes Civil Rights Remedy for Victims of Gender-Biased Crime. Feminist Daily News Wire, December 1, 2000.

Is Domestic Violence Political Persecution?

Last year the national Board of Immigration Appeals reversed a judge’s decision to grant a Guatemalan woman asylum in the United States because it decided she wasn’t fleeing persecution for her political opinions or membership in a social group. Rather the board said that since the woman was fleeing domestic violence by an abusive husband, this was an internal criminal law matter for Guatemala to decide.

Feminists, on the other hand, argue that in fact domestic violence is an act of political oppression that targets women because of their gender. As Karen Musalo, director of UC Hastings’ Center for Gender and Refugee Studies told the San Francisco Weekly,

Everyone agrees that [domestic violence] is persecution. The board is saying that [the circumstances] are a shame but they are bound by the statutes of the law. We, the people that disagree, say that you can interpret the statutes differently. But the effect is that right now, we might not be able to offer protection to women persecuted because of their gender.

Should women who are victims of domestic violence be allowed to seek asylum in the United States?

As a libertarian I favor simply opening up the borders and letting anyone who wants to come to the United States, so I certainly hope this Guatemalan woman is able to stay in this country. On the other hand Musalo and others don’t seem to have thought through their position very well.

While domestic violence is deplorable, all of the evidence indicates that it is far from a gender-specific crime in which men target women. Not only do studies of domestic violence in the United States repeatedly show that women are as likely to engage in acts of domestic violence as men (a recent study even found higher incidence rates by women) but we also know domestic violence incidence among lesbian couples is comparable to that which occurs in heterosexual couples.

Radical feminists like to resist the notion, but violence is a human condition rather than a specifically male characteristic.

In addition, one of the obvious problems the immigration courts are concerned with is that if gender is created as a special category that men might well form the largest class of individuals targeted based on their gender. University of California Berkeley law professor Patty Blum told the San Francisco that, “The paradigm of refugee law is about the concerns for men. THey are about the public sphere activities that men participate in, the political organizations they participate in, the speeches they make. But women are impacted in this society in this more private sphere.”

Huh? If you had visited Guatemala during the height of its civil war you would have found many men forced into military service by one side or another who were targeted by the government or rebels specifically because they were men. Men who would have much preferred to grow old farming their small plots of land were forced to join government or rebel militias, fight and often die simply because they were men.

Immigration courts clearly want to avoid those kinds of claims. Again, I think pretty much anyone should be allowed to cross the border, but if there are going to be laws, feminists shouldn’t pretend that women are the only ones targeted for special repression based on their sex.

Source:

Shelter from the Storm. Bernice Yeung, San Francisco Weekly, October 25, 2000.