One of the biggest changes in the legal infrastructure over the last fifty years has been the increased empowerment of women in the legislative, and more importantly, the judicial and prosecutorial systems. Along with this has come an increased focus on women's issues, as well as a growing influence of organizations dedicated to turning the legal spotlight on crimes against women. This is mostly to the good. As women have begun to attain their proper and equal place in the discussion and implementation of policy, significant gains have been made. A woman's sexual history can no longer be used in court in rape cases, and it is understood that "no means no", no matter her sexual past. It is no longer acceptable to beat a woman because she was a "nag, or common scold", a legitimate mitigating factor as recently as 1950. It is now legitimate to claim self-defense in the killing of an abusive or battering husband, even if the woman's life was not in "immediate or proximate" jeopardy, indeed the stigma of assaulting a woman has evolved into that of a cowardly weak man: such a man is looked upon with justifiable derision, whereas in the past, it was considered a mans prerogative. And police are no longer inclined to respond with a nod and a wink to domestic violence calls, or to simply "mediate" between the parties, which often condemns the woman to future battering.
However, an undesirable side-effect has appeared along with these gains.. Strident activist groups, with the co-operation of women in positions of power and politicians catering to the women's vote have advanced an agenda that, beyond correcting historical and patriarchal injustices, have distorted the true picture of gender relationships when it comes to legal advocacy and prosecution. The goal seems to have evolved into tactical victory in the name of a perceived gender war, rather than a fair and equitable evaluation during the development of criminal policy. This has had the consequence of demonizing men, unnecessarily increasing the male prison population (and it's attendant breakdown of families), and the portrayal of women as perpetual victims, certainly antithetical to the stated goal of empowerment and equality.
Of course, victimhood is one of the most powerful tools in the political arsenal whenever a group wishes to advance it's agenda, one that will not be ceded easily, because to do so dilutes the power and momentum that has been achieved. As in all warfare, reasonableness is a weakness. In reality, gender warfare is a manufactured conflict. We all have an interest in combating domestic, as well as general violence. It is disingenuous and counter- productive to inflict damage inaccurately and unnecessarily on those who should be our partners and allies. At the very least, policy should be based on an accurate reporting of facts, and a clear picture of the true state of domestic violence situations. With the heated rhetoric of domestic violence, this is demonstrably not the case.
Men are incarcerated at a rate of 20:1 for domestic violence compared to women. Yet study after study show that women are equally, if not more guilty of violent assaults on their partners. What studies? Here are just a few. Morse, BJ, -"Beyond the Conflict Tactics Scale: Assessing Gender Diferences in Partner Violence". Edalati, Ali and Redzuan, Ma'rof, "Female Physical Aggression ( A Review of the Data)",
Arias, I., Seimos, M, and O'Leary, KD, "Prevalence and Correlates of Physical Aggression During Courtship"-Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Hamel, 2005, Brown,. 2004, George, 2003, Cercone, Beach and Arias, 2005, Katz, Kuffel and Coblentz, 2002,...the list is endless. (I have included more studies at the end of this paper.). Not enough? In a roundup of seventy empirical studies, fifteen scholarly reviews and eighty-five carefully controlled investigations by Martin Friebert, Ph D., of the University of California, Long Beach, the cumulative consensus is that men are morelikely to be assaulted by their spouse than woman, (though the difference is statistically insignificant). And finally there is the gold standard: Murray Strauss' seminal series of reports, surveys, and studies over a period of thirty-five years, the best researched, most carefully controlled work on the subject, corrected and reevaluated over time, and the work referred to in every discussion of the subject, as well as the one under the most virulent attack. I will refer to his findings more later on.
Of course, the devil is in the detail: surveys are conducted in different ways. For example, it is presumed that men will under-report their own assaults. To correct for this, the National Family Violence Survey questioned 2,994 women. The result? According to women themselves, there were 124 assaults per 1000 couples instigated by women, and 122 per 1000 instigated by men. Separate results were obtained for severe assaults, as opposed to minor assaults. Woman committed 50 severe assaults per 1000, compared to men committing 46. I will stress once again: this is according to women.
We of course cannot leave the abuse of children out of the equation, though I plan to deal with that as a separate issue in a later chapter. In general, studies and statistic show that women are the most prevalent abusers of their children, and not by a small margin. Of every 100 children victimized by violence, 62 are victimized by their mothers. (Steinmetz, 1980, and Texas Dept. Of Human Services)
Many of the misleading figures quoted by advocacy groups result from surveys conducted at shelters for battered women. Results here are predictable. Many others come from arrest and crime statistics. These are skewed against men for the same reasons that domestic violence incarceration rates are skewed against men, reasons which we will examine as we go. Results are further distorted by the phrasing of the questions. For example, in one survey, a question seeking "factors responsible for the battering" do not include as an option an initial attack by the woman.
During the buildup to the 1994 passage of the Violence Against Women Act, it was common for advocates to claim that a "woman is assaulted by a domestic partner every eighteen seconds", or that 20-30% of injuries that send a woman to the emergency room stem from abuse by their partners. These figures, quoted by President Clinton, the ABA, and the AMA, come from a single source: research duo Evan Stark and Anne Flitcraft. Yet thevery same study shows that a man was assaulted by his partner everyfifteen seconds. And the ER stats classified any injury whatsoever caused by another person against a woman as domestic violence , including muggings, and car accidents. Stark himself retracted most of his claim. The act eventually allotted five billion dollars to fight violence against women (none for men!) and increased criminal penalties for domestic violence, as well as adding over 700 new crimes, thresholds, and mandates, including the near universal legislation that requires police to make an arrest on every domestic violence call. This automatically translated into increased incarceration rates for men, and all that entails: family breakdown, increased impoverishment and unemployability, single parenthood and overcrowded prisons.
There are several dissonances at work here. It is, correctly, perceived that of course a man is inherently capable of inflicting much more damage than a woman. Yet beyond that truth is the fact that a woman is statistically more likely to use a dangerous weapon, by a three to one margin. When serious injuries are tallied, woman far outpace men. An analysis of 6,200 police reports and hospital records show that 74% of men experienced serious injury while women averaged 51%. When a weapon was used, 63% of men were injured and only 15% of women. Studies show that while men were more likely to strangle,, choke or beat up their partners, women were more likely to slap, kick, bite, punch or hit with an object. (Archer, 2002). Apologists claim that these are natural responses: women are reacting in self-defense against a more powerful foe. This is belied both by statistics that show women equally initiate aggressive behavior, and the common sense correlate that by initiating physical aggression, a woman is inviting retaliation, which often can lead to an increase in the severity of the injuries.
This response carries the implication that when a man is attacked, hedeserved it. Polls suggest that society supports this contention. It is considered acceptable for a woman to slap a man who has been "fresh". A woman assaulting a cheating husband is acceptable, but when the woman is the cheater, the attack becomes an incarceratable offense. Both society and the legal system operates on the presumption that a man should just take it, so many men are reluctant to report incidences of violence perpetrated by their female partners.
Because of the heightened awareness of the problem, politicians, the law, and the courts , as always, rush to overcompensate. The result is that the threshold of what constitutes domestic violence has been lowered. Any laying on of hands- grabbing, holding is now considered an assault. In one definition, for the purpose of reporting assault figures (and increasing budgets), assault was described as "insulting, swearing at, sulking (sulking!), refusing to talk, stomping out of a room, saying things out of spite(!) As we've noted previously, most states require an arrest on a domestic violence call, so police need to scramble to find a way to turn a minor disagreement into a prosecutable crime. The go-to position, the one that will be most believable in court, and cause the least grief from advocacy groups in the current social climate is to charge the man.Research shows that 15% of all couples experience at least one incident that could be considered domestic violence a year. The incidence of actual serious battering is more in the line of 1%. This does not minimize the enormous cost and damage experienced by the victims of that 1%. It just says that arresting and incarcerating the rest has a cost too.
What also has a cost, apparently, is daring to speak out against the direction we are headed in. As stated before, victimization is a powerful weapon and the demagogues that benefit from it's use will not give up the moral high ground they are holding easily. Researchers who have pointed out the problems, inconsistencies, and factual errors that have been taken as gospel have come under fierce attack by advocacy groups, including violence and harrassment. Even the "founder" of the domestic violence movement has been vilified for speaking the truth. Erin Pizzi, author of "Scream Quietly or the Neighbors Will Hear" and the founder of the first shelters and crises lines for battered women: "There is now an established domestic violence industry which fears any acknowledgment of the well established scientific fact that women can be as violent as men with their intimate partners, and are not always victims reacting only in self-defense." The truth is that domestic violence is a human problem, not a gender problem.
Okay, let's take a breath here. None of this is meant to encourage the increased incarceration of female domestic offenders. (We are after all, trying to reduce the prison population!) Nor is it a call to turn back the gains that women have earned in the workplace and society in general. It is a call to turn down the heated rhetoric that results in a frenzy of laws and prosecutions based on faulty data that results in damage to thousands of men and their families, and the significant societal damage that results. The true fight against violence (of any kind) is being sacrificed to a overarching political agenda. The loss of a father or spouse damages women too: single parent homes, kids raised without a father figure, loss of income and impoverishment, as well as increased societal dependence.
Why does domestic violence occur? The overwhelming consensus is that it is learned behavior. If a child is raised in a home where violence is the norm, he will develop into an adult that believes the same thing. It becomes self perpetuating and normalized. That is why it is so important to focus on eradicating home violence in all it's forms, regardless of gender. To hear the slogan "My parents beat me, and I turned out all right", is bad enough in the world, but to hear it uttered in prison defies credulity.
Theories as to the roots of violent behavior generally fall into three categories. The instinct perspective, advanced by Freud and Lorenz, postulates that aggression stems from thanatos, the death wish, initially aimed at self-destruction but eventually externalized, or from an inherited fighting instinct that is common to all species.
Drive Theory suggests that frustration, disappointment and interference with goal oriented behavior can cause an individual to lash out at those who are seen as standing in the way of those goals, or at least those who he/she has transferred the blame for frustration to.
The General Affective Aggression Model poses a list of input variables such as exposure to people behaving aggressively, exposure to cues related to aggression, such as guns or other weapons, values about aggression such as that it is acceptable, or even desirable and expected,having prejudices about the character of specific groups, or having specific skills such as knowing how to fight or use weapons. These input lead through a progression: first, a physiological arousal or exitement, then to hostile feelings, which then encourage hostile cognitions. Individual appraisal then determines whether aggressive action can be effected without penalty. Anyone reading through the above list will no doubt come to the conclusion that the answer is "all or most of the above". Most individuals rarely get to the stage where risk analysis affects the decision making.
These are the factors that must be addressed, the grounds on which the battle against violence must be fought. It does no good to single out half the human population as at fault for having an alleged "inherent characteristic" as a cause when those characteristics are endemic to all humans. The solutions lie in education, counseling, the proper training of health care providers, law enforcement and legal proffesionals that teaches, to both sexes that the tolerance of violence is passed down from generation to generation, and with time it can be eliminated.
As those who hold onto patriarchal, misogynistic, and retrograde attitudes die out and are replaced by those to whom normalized violence is considered unacceptable, we will see a continued dramatic drop in the incidence of domestic violence. (Male battering of women has already undergone a significant drop as societal awareness is raised. Female rates, curiously, have risen slightly.) In the meantime, we need to stop throwing stones, concentrate on ending the generational cycle, stop the gender politics and work together at eradicating this serious problem by addressing the issues at their very human core.
Next: Gender Politics and The Law: Sex Crimes.
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