Category: Domestic Violence

Does Study Really Mean Women Approve of Domestic Violence?

A British study recently suggested that a rather large minority of women approve of domestic violence, but unfortunately it’s hard to tell exactly what the study means.

According to a report in the Sunday Times (UK) on the study,

…[500] women taking part were asked to comment on a situation where a man argued with his wife about her long working hours. At the end of the row he slapped her face and locked her in the bathroom.

About 25 percent of the women said they sympathized with the man, and 30 percent said they didn’t believe he should be arrested. Caroline Healy, who conducted the study, interpreted this result as evidence of the failure to communicate the anti-domestic violence message:

Although the Government is spending a lot on publicity to say that violence shouldn’t be dealt with in the home, that message isn’t always getting through. This research shows a clear need for more public awareness and public education work, particularly in primary schools. More needs to be spent on teaching people about it and more research needs to be done.

But the results are ambiguous at best even taking them at their face value. The first result is hardly even interesting — it is possible for men and women to feel sympathy for someone without approving of his or her actions.

Much the same problem occurs with whether or not the husband should be arrested for assaulting his wife. Some studies tend to show that legal intervention in low level acts of violence tends to worsen rather than improve the situation. Those who don’t think the husband should be arrested might think that some form of family counseling might be more likely to change his behavior than arrest.

It’s a shame that studies like this usually only ask the 500 women to react to scenarios where men assault women. It would be interesting to have asked the same people about a situation where a woman slaps her husband after a verbal argument. Would they have felt any sympathy for the woman? Would they have thought the woman should have been arrested?

I know personally my wife and I have never committed acts of violence against each other (and I really can’t imagine this happening), but if my wife should slap me after a heated argument calling the police as the first strategy would be counter-productive over the long term. Does it follow then that, as Healy puts it, I am “implicitly condon[ing] the use of force in intimate relationships”? No, of course not, but neither does every relationship fit into the same cookie cutter mode that requires legal intervention for resolving incidents of low level violence.

Source:

Not all women condemn wife beaters. Gillian Harris, The Sunday Times, July 11, 2000.

Violent Hypocrisy

The Associated Press carried a story the other day on efforts to raise awareness about violence among dating teenagers (Schools struggle to contain dating violence). The story described efforts in Massachusetts, which has one of the most comprehensive programs in the nation to address and prevent such violence.

Addressing the possibilities of interpersonal violence and teaching young men and women to deal with their problems without resorting to violence is certainly an admirable goal and with some studies suggesting up to 1 in 5 students are victims of some form of dating-related violence sometime in their lives, this is certainly a worthy project.

Unfortunately, the Associated Press story included a quote from an alleged expert who argued that in some cases a physical assault or emotional abuse really don’t count as violence. What special cases are these? When the violence involves a young women assaulting a young man.

The surveys of violence among young men and women are pretty clear — both groups report similar levels of victimization, although as with violence between adults, women are far more likely to end up requiring hospital visits or other medical intervention as a result of an assault.

Still violence is violence, but not according to Carole Sousa, a consultant on dating violence to the Massachusetts Department of Education. According to the Associated Press story,

Some studies have suggested that almost as many boys as girls are victims of dating violence, but Sousa contends such figures are misleading. Boys
may be mocked or slapped by a girlfriend, but they often laugh off the
mistreatment, she said. Girls almost exclusively are the victims in cases of
sexual violence or injuries requiring hospitalization, Sousa said.

This is a bizarre claim. The obvious implication is that if a man just slaps a woman a little and calls her names, which she laughs off, that it is misleading to call this serious violence. I thought feminists wanted to call that battered women’s syndrome.

Why is it so hard for these activists to get it through their heads that violence is always an extremely serious matter even if it doesn’t lead to serious injury and regardless of whether it is perpetrated by men or women. Sousa’s claim outrageously minimizes violence committed by women, which is very odd given the general feminist claim that we need to set aside our pre-conceived stereotypes of male and female roles. Instead activists such as Sousa seem to be informed entirely by stereotypes of men as always being the aggressive victimizer and women as always being the passive victim. Which is ironic given that young men are far more likely to be victims of violence than any other group. Reducing violence requires a holistic approach, not the sex-segregated stereotypes being pushed by activists like Sousa.

Stop Honor Killings

The other day I was reading a book by an academic feminist who argued, among other things, that the idea that there is a universal code of morality (i.e. there are just things that are plain wrong) is a white imperialist idea. Maybe, but I still have to say that honor killings are wrong and the relativists be damned.

What’s an honor killing? An honor killing is where a man kills a female relative if he suspects she’s committed a sexual transgression, and in some cultures such violence is not only ignored but actually sanctioned by the legal code.

In Jordan, for example, two women were recently murdered in honor killings. In one case a father killed his adult daughter after she was released from jail after serving time for a sexual relationship her step brother. In the second case, a woman accused of having extramarital sex was murdered by her brothers. Of course both men and women kill each other in the United States and other parts of the world over sexual infidelity, but here’s the kicker — in Jordan the penal code specifically exempts a man from punishment if he kills a female relative to atone for her sexual transgressions.

According to the BBC (Jordanian women killed ‘for honour’), in Jordan about 25 women a year are murdered this way, and their murderers are protected by law from prosecution. That’s a rather large figure in a country of less than 5 million people.

A small group of reformers tried to get the Jordanian parliament to overturn the law protecting honor killings but failed. A protest against the law drew only a few thousand people.

And Jordan isn’t alone in having a problem with honor killings. A report released by Amnesty International last September claimed that hundreds of honor killings take place in Pakistan every year. Although honor killing is murder under Pakistan’s penal code, juries tend to acquit men who kill their female relatives for reasons of honor and judges tend to give light sentences for those men who say they killed to preserve their family’s honor.

Maybe it’s just the Western imperialist in me, but honor killing is downright barbaric and should be outlawed everywhere in the world.

Violence Within Lesbian Couples

One of the recurring claims in much radical feminist literature is that violence is an inherently male problem, as opposed to a general human problem. The radical feminist critique of the family, for example, often simplistically postulates that it is solely the presence of males within the family structure which leads to interpersonal violence in families (in other words, even where a woman assaults a man, it is still the man’s fault).

The idea that women may perpetuate violence on their own is one usually ridiculed as a part of the “backlash” by “right-wing forces.” Studies which show that, in violent relationships, men and women on average participate in acts of violence at similar rates, are dismissed as propaganda and researchers who produce such data often subjected to campaigns of protest.

It is interesting, then to consider a study done a couple years ago at the University of Florida which found domestic violence within lesbian couples to be just as prevalent as domestic violence within married heterosexual couples.

Sociologist Janis Weber interviewed 168 lesbians and found that 14 percent of those in committed relationships experienced some form of domestic violence within the previous month — very close to the number of women in heterosexual relationships who report experiencing some form of domestic violence in surveys.

A press release from the University of Florida summarizing the study noted that:

The study of 84 lesbian couples found that lesbians who beat their
partners fit the profile of heterosexuals who did so because they also abused their authority and tried to control their partners. The victims resembled their heterosexual counterparts in making excuses for the abuse or the abusive partner.

There was one important difference, though — the feminist ideology that men are the root cause of violence makes it difficult for lesbian victims of domestic violence to be taken seriously by authorities.

“The only difference between these women and their heterosexual counterparts is they feel completely ostracized from normal channels of help,” Weber said. “If they call the police, the officer would likely laugh and say ‘Oh right, your girlfriend beat you up.’ And they’re persona non grata at shelters because these are usually battered spouse shelters.”

Elders just as intolerant of women’s rights as groups, people she criticizes

By Elisabeth Carnell

When former U.S. Surgeon General
Jocelyn Elders visited Western Michigan University last week, she demonstrated
that so-called liberals could be just as bigoted, intolerant and misinformed
about the choices women make as any right wing Pat Buchanan-wannabe.

Elders demonstrated the problem
with current pro-choice politics – abortion rights advocates believe in
choice for women only as long as women go along with a prescribed political
platform. Some women choose, for example, to be pro-life. Not all women
agree with the position that abortion is always morally defensible.

Yet Elders, despite her pro-choice
rhetoric, believes dissent from her abortion position cannot be tolerated.
She told her audience at WMU that anyone wanting to be an obstetrician-gynecologist
should be trained to perform abortions and, “those who choose not
to perform abortions should not be OB/GYNs.”

Is this what women struggled
for in this nation for more than 250 years? To have the former surgeon
general argue to exclude women from a profession if they don’t toe the
ideological line on abortion?

Do we really need to reduce
women’s health care choices by excluding pro-life individuals from being
OB/GYNs?

Elders accuses Congress of
being too busy with “vaginal politics” to consider real health
care reform, but she is also guilty of using gender as a political smokescreen
to advance ideas harmful to women.

Elders also engages in the
radical feminist fetish for false statistical measures.

Many women’s activists apparently
don’t believe problems like domestic violence are serious or stark enough
in themselves so they insist on exaggerating their extent.

So Elders makes the ludicrous
claim that 30 percent of emergency room visits by women are the result
of domestic violence ­ five times the reported level. While emergency
room statistics do clearly underestimate the level of domestic violence
incidents they see, Elders loses all credibility with her absurdly large
figure.

The problem with using this
and other inflated figures thrown around about domestic violence, aside
from being intellectually dishonest, is the danger that when people learn
the figures are exaggerated they may discount the true severity and extent
of domestic violence.

Similarly Elders perpetuates
the myth that women make only 75 percent of what men make, leaving people
to draw the conclusion that sexual discrimination explains the difference.

In fact when educational level,
years of experience and type of work are held constant, women make almost
as much as men. For example, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth
demonstrates that of people aged 27-33 who have never had children, women’s
earnings are almost 98 percent of men’s.

Elders’ sleight of hand is
like comparing a male engineer with a decade of on the job experience
to a female high school dropout staring her first job.

Yes, a pronounced difference
in income is likely to exist between the two, but blaming that difference
on sexual discrimination is absurd.

The irony of such statistics
is that women have made incredible economic gains in large part due to
the pressure and attention feminists gave sexual discrimination in the
1960s. Today women outnumber men in graduate schools, and the percentage
of women in the labor force has increased from 26 percent in 1940 to 59
percent in 1995.

Rather than take credit for
the improvement and perhaps engage in a well-deserved round of self-congratulation,
the most vocal elements of the mainstream feminists movements must pretend
women’s positions in the economy have gotten dramatically worse. Those
who disagree with this analysis are relegated to being part of a backlash
which exists largely in the imaginations of a few prominent feminist authors.

Elders is an excellent example
of this doom and gloom feminism. In her term as surgeon general and her
public appearances since her forced resignation, Elders comes across as
a mirror image of the paternalistic right-wing forces she rails against.

Like them she has little use
for the choices women actually make for themselves. Instead she prefers
to substitute her own revealed truth about how society should be ordered,
accompanied with an irrational faith in big government to accomplish her
goals.

It would be nice if people
like Elders would actually listen to and trust the women they claim to
represent rather than constantly talking past them.

Men are from Earth, Women are from Earth?: A Review of Cathy Young’s Ceasefire

Ceasefire:
Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality
By Cathy Young
Amazon.Com price: $17.50 (click on link above to buy)

At the end of the 20th century two versions of the same ages-old idea still dominate most public
discussion of the sexes — namely that men and women are radically different.
On the one side are conservative activists reacting against feminism’s
inroads who claim children are harmed if their mothers work outside the
home or that women are harmed by a lack of “modesty” in sexual
relations. On the other side are many feminists and their sympathizers
who have simply reversed antiquated sexual stereotypes about women and
applied them to men.

Whereas throughout much of
human history women were often viewed as less than human and relegated
to demeaning stereotypes, so much radical feminism and even mainstream
feminism has simply replaced those old stereotypes of women with new and
equally pernicious stereotypes about men. Some go so far as to reject
important advances such as the scientific method simply because men originally
created them and maintain that men and women even think differently. Whereas
once men used women’s alleged irrationality to pigeonhole and debase women,
today some feminists agree that women’s thinking is less rational than
men’s but instead view this as a positive thing.

Into this fray steps Cathy
Young whose book Ceasefire argues that men and women aren’t all
that different after all and that many of the problems often described
in the media as men’s or women’s problems are, in fact, problems common
to all humanity regardless of sex. As Young aptly puts it in the title
of her first chapter, “Men are from Earth, Women are from Earth.”
That in many circles this is still a fundamentally radical idea is testament
to how pervasive sexual stereotyping in all its varieties remains.

As Young points out, although
early feminism was committed to a more egalitarian view of the sexes,
radical feminism has come to “reject the principle of equal treatment,
either because legal standards are inherently ‘male’ or because one cannot
treat oppressor and oppressed as equals. All divide humanity along gender
lines.” Her book does an excellent job of illustrating just how widespread
this division along gender lines has become.

Violence, for example, is
an area where media and feminist treatment tends to differ radically depending
on the sex of the victim. Although data from the National Crime Victim
Study show men are the victims in about 15 percent of all assaults by
current or former partners (and men make up 25 percent of the victims
of aggravated assaults), rarely is violence by women against men described
in terms of domestic violence. Young points to the coverage of the murder
of actor and comedian Phil Hartman by his wife. Unlike the coverage of
OJ Simpson’s assaults and alleged murder of his wife, Nicole, nobody described
Hartman’s murder or evidence of earlier abusive incidents as “domestic
violence.” Much of the media coverage focused on how despondent and
depressed Hartman’s wife was and focused on her problems with drugs and
alcohol.

Of course to support this
sort of gender bias, both the media and feminists try to claim there are
fundamental differences between men and women, and in the process often
end up producing a series of bogus statistics. Ceasefire excels
at debunking more feminist fictoids that you can shake a stick at. Young’s
analysis of Susan Faludi’s Backlash is simply devastating. Young
shows Faludi’s book to rely almost from top to bottom on extremely poor
scholarly standards, egregious misquoting of primary sources and a whole
host of other questionable procedures. She even catches Faludi making
a claim in Backlash that Faludi herself had debunked in an earlier
newspaper profile! Ceasefire takes the process of demythologizing
feminist claims that Christina Hoff Sommers began in Who Stole Feminism? and carries it to the next level. The level of detail is enormous here
– I have no idea how Young keeps track the huge amount information that
she brings to bear to cut through so much nonsense. Ceasefire would
be worth reading if this was all it did.

But Young aims higher and
doesn’t pick solely on feminists for their many miscues – she also picks
apart many of the claims made by some in the Men’s Movement and outright
conservatives such as Wendy Shallitt and F. Carolyn Graglia whose rejection
of feminism leads them to adopt views every bit as noxious as the radical
feminists (in fact Graglia approvingly cites radical feminist Andrea Dworkin’s
critique of heterosexuality).

At the very end of her book,
Young offers 12 suggestions to get past the gender wars, but her first
suggestion should be the only guiding principle anyone needs – “when making
judgments that involve gender, try a mental exercise reversing the sexes.” The beauty of this standard is that it asks people to treat others not
as stereotypical representatives of their respective gender but as individual
human beings. It is a call for a world where, except for a few exceptions,
gender is treated as a neutral matter that has no place in influencing
moral or legal judgments.

It is strange that today this
simple idea (really just a restatement of the liberal idea of the rule
of law) is despised by many of the intellectual leaders of both conservative
and feminist camps. Ceasefire is a plea to rescue humanity from
the narrow box of gender that both camps want to force it into. Young’s
book an impassioned and illuminating appeal for a true equality of the
sexes.