A History of the Domestic Violence Movement

Must-see presentation by Erin Pizzey at the “Ideology to Inclusion” Conference, Sacramento, February 16th, 2008.

Erin begins with the early history of the domestic violence movement, and her efforts to open the first shelter for women and children in 1971. The early history of the feminist movement in England is discussed, and the ensuing battle between advocates who conceptualised domestic violence as a human and family issue rather than a gender issue, and those who used the movement as a means of funding and advancing a radial political ideology based on Marxist teaching. This presentation describes in detail the importance of this ideological split, and how the needs and wishes of women themselves have often been ignored. The presentation ends with a general descriptions of where we are now and suggestions for the future.

TIME Magazine: 5 Feminist Myths That Will Not Die

by Christina Hoff Sommers

If we're genuinely committed to improving the circumstances of women, we need to get the facts straight

Much of what we hear about the plight of American women is false. Some faux facts have been repeated so often they are almost beyond the reach of critical analysis. Though they are baseless, these canards have become the foundation of Congressional debates, the inspiration for new legislation and the focus of college programs. Here are five of the most popular myths that should be rejected by all who are genuinely committed to improving the circumstances of women:

MYTH 1: Women are half the world’s population, working two-thirds of the world’s working hours, receiving 10% of the world’s income, owning less than 1% of the world’s property.

FACTS: This injustice confection is routinely quoted by advocacy groups, the World Bank, Oxfam and the United Nations. It is sheer fabrication. More than 15 years ago, Sussex University experts on gender and development Sally Baden and Anne Marie Goetz, repudiated the claim: “The figure was made up by someone working at the UN because it seemed to her to represent the scale of gender-based inequality at the time.” But there is no evidence that it was ever accurate, and it certainly is not today.

Precise figures do not exist, but no serious economist believes women earn only 10% of the world’s income or own only 1% of property. As one critic noted in an excellent debunking in The Atlantic, “U.S. women alone earn 5.4 percent of world income today.” Moreover, in African countries, where women have made far less progress than their Western and Asian counterparts, Yale economist Cheryl Doss found female land ownership ranged from 11% in Senegal to 54% in Rwanda and Burundi. Doss warns that “using unsubstantiated statistics for advocacy is counterproductive.” Bad data not only undermine credibility, they obstruct progress by making it impossible to measure change.

MYTH 2: Between 100,000 and 300,000 girls are pressed into sexual slavery each year in the United States.

FACTS: This sensational claim is a favorite of politicians, celebrities and journalists. Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore turned it into a cause célèbre. Both conservatives and liberal reformers deploy it. Former President Jimmy Carter recently said that the sexual enslavement of girls in the U.S. today is worse than American slavery in the 19^th century.

The source for the figure is a 2001 report on child sexual exploitation by University of Pennsylvania sociologists Richard Estes and Neil Alan Weiner. But their 100,000–300,000 estimate referred to children at risk for exploitation—not actual victims. When three reporters from the Village Voice questioned Estes on the number of children who are abducted and pressed into sexual slavery each year, he replied, “We’re talking about a few hundred people.” And this number is likely to include a lot of boys: According to a 2008 census of underage prostitutes in New York City, nearly half turned out to be male. A few hundred children is still a few hundred too many, but they will not be helped by thousand-fold inflation of their numbers.

MYTH 3: In the United States, 22%–35% of women who visit hospital emergency rooms do so because of domestic violence.

FACTS: This claim has appeared in countless fact sheets, books and articles—for example, in the leading textbook on family violence, Domestic Violence Law, and in the Penguin Atlas of Women in the World. The Penguin Atlas uses the emergency room figure to justify placing the U.S. on par with Uganda and Haiti for intimate violence.

What is the provenance? The Atlas provides no primary source, but the editor of Domestic Violence Law cites a 1997 Justice Department study, as well as a 2009 post on the Centers for Disease Control website. But the Justice Department and the CDC are not referring to the 40 million women who annually visit emergency rooms, but to women, numbering about 550,000 annually, who come to emergency rooms “for violence-related injuries.” Of these, approximately 37% were attacked by intimates. So, it’s not the case that 22%-35% of women who visit emergency rooms are there for domestic violence. The correct figure is less than half of 1%.

MYTH 4: One in five in college women will be sexually assaulted.

FACTS: This incendiary figure is everywhere in the media today. Journalists, senators and even President Obama cite it routinely. Can it be true that the American college campus is one of the most dangerous places on earth for women?

The one-in-five figure is based on the Campus Sexual Assault Study, commissioned by the National Institute of Justice and conducted from 2005 to 2007. Two prominent criminologists, Northeastern University’s James Alan Fox and Mount Holyoke College’s Richard Moran, have noted its weaknesses:

“The estimated 19% sexual assault rate among college women is based on a survey at two large four-year universities, which might not accurately reflect our nation’s colleges overall. In addition, the survey had a large non-response rate, with the clear possibility that those who had been victimized were more apt to have completed the questionnaire, resulting in an inflated prevalence figure.”

Fox and Moran also point out that the study used an overly broad definition of sexual assault. Respondents were counted as sexual assault victims if they had been subject to “attempted forced kissing” or engaged in intimate encounters while intoxicated.

Defenders of the one-in-five figure will reply that the finding has been replicated by other studies. But these studies suffer from some or all of the same flaws. Campus sexual assault is a serious problem and will not be solved by statistical hijinks.

MYTH 5: Women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns—for doing the same work.

FACTS: No matter how many times this wage gap claim is decisively refuted by economists, it always comes back. The bottom line: the 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure or hours worked per week. When such relevant factors are considered, the wage gap narrows to the point of vanishing.

Wage gap activists say women with identical backgrounds and jobs as men still earn less. But they always fail to take into account critical variables. Activist groups like the National Organization for Women have a fallback position: that women’s education and career choices are not truly free—they are driven by powerful sexist stereotypes. In this view, women’s tendency to retreat from the workplace to raise children or to enter fields like early childhood education and psychology, rather than better paying professions like petroleum engineering, is evidence of continued social coercion. Here is the problem: American women are among the best informed and most self-determining human beings in the world. To say that they are manipulated into their life choices by forces beyond their control is divorced from reality and demeaning, to boot.

Why do these reckless claims have so much appeal and staying power? For one thing, there is a lot of statistical illiteracy among journalists, feminist academics and political leaders. There is also an admirable human tendency to be protective of women—stories of female exploitation are readily believed, and vocal skeptics risk appearing indifferent to women’s suffering. Finally, armies of advocates depend on “killer stats” to galvanize their cause. But killer stats obliterate distinctions between more and less serious problems and send scarce resources in the wrong directions. They also promote bigotry. The idea that American men are annually enslaving more than 100,000 girls, sending millions of women to emergency rooms, sustaining a rape culture and cheating women out of their rightful salary creates rancor in true believers and disdain in those who would otherwise be sympathetic allies.

My advice to women’s advocates: Take back the truth.

Christina Hoff Sommers, a former philosophy professor, is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She is the author of several books, including Who Stole Feminism and The War Against Boys, and is the host of a weekly video blog, The Factual Feminist. Follow her @CHSommers.

Feminist Death Threats: The Anti-Equality Revolution - A Conversation With Erin Pizzey

The Independent Covers Male Victims Of Domestic Violence

by Oratosaurus

For once, the news media is telling the truth about domestic violence, so when it happens it’s cause for celebration. This article from The Independent actually takes on the topic of men as victims of intimate partner violence and does so in a way that encourages both belief in their stories and empathy for their plight.  These are men, not women.  As such, they have their own uniquely masculine problems in trying to deal with the violence directed at them by their female partners.  In the vast majority of articles in the mainstream media, men are ignored altogether as victims or slighted by the claim that, in some way, they embellish or even misrepresent what happens to them.  In the most typical of sexist ways, because they’re men, they’re expected to either not be hurt at all or to deal with it without complaining. excellent article does no such thing, instead talking with actual men and their actual responses to being assaulted by their wives/girlfriends.

An inch under six foot tall, Dave, a gardener with a deep, gravelly voice is not most people’s idea of a domestic violence victim. But he suffered two years of abuse at the hands of his girlfriend and was too embarrassed and loyal to report her to the police. He slept in his car for weeks before speaking to his local council, who found him a place at a men’s refuge.

He struggles to keep it together when he recalls the day his girlfriend smashed a bottle of Jack Daniels across his head, leaving him bleeding on the pavement: a deep scar is still clearly visible on his forehead. But when the 45-year-old from Essex describes the relief of being believed by the authorities, he breaks down, his broad shoulders heaving beneath his rugby shirt.
“When help finally comes it’s an emotional thing,” he says, sitting on the sofa at a safe house in Berkshire where he is being helped to rebuild his life. “As a man, it’s very difficult to say you’ve been beaten up. It seems like you’re the big brute and she’s the daffodil, but sometimes it’s not like that.”

Then there’s Kieron Bell.

Kieron Bell very nearly became one of those grim statistics. He is also one of a handful of men who has successfully prosecuted a partner for violence. The 37-year-old bouncer from Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, had to have emergency heart surgery after he was stabbed in the chest by his wife, Sarah, in 2009. She had been violent since the start of their marriage in 2006 but he did not want to turn to the police at first, initially because he still loved her and later because he thought they would never believe that a 5ft 2in woman would be subjecting a bulky 5ft 10in bouncer to a reign of terror.
After the stabbing, his wife tried to claim that Mr Bell fell on a knife but, while recovering in hospital, he decided to report her to the police. In 2010 she was charged with grievous bodily harm and was released from prison only in May last year. “I was scared to call the police. I’m a big bloke and I thought I’d get laughed at,” he said. “I think there needs to be more information out there for blokes. If I’d known what the signs to look out for were before, I could’ve done something sooner. But I loved her and because of my child I stayed with her.”

Dave and Kieron give us two reasons why men don’t go to the police when their partners turn violent.  First, they’re afraid they’ll be laughed at and not given any help by the police and social services workers who are supposedly there for them.  Second, there are the kids.  If a couple has children the man will often see himself as their first and last line of defense against their abusive mother.  And he knows to a virtual certainty that, if he walks out,
(a) his wife will get custody and he’ll barely ever see his children again, if then,
(b) the children will be at the mercy of their mother, and
(c) she’ll likely charge him with abuse which will get him banned from access to the kids and maybe put in jail.
Is it any wonder men don’t seek help?
Then there’s the fact that, if they do reach out, there probably won’t be a hand to grab.

One in three victims of domestic abuse in Britain is male but refuge beds for men are critically scarce. There are 78 spaces which can be used by men in refuges around Britain, of which only 33 are dedicated rooms for males: the rest can be taken by victims of either gender. This compares with around 4,000 spaces for women. In Northern Ireland and Scotland there are no male refuges at all.
Alan Gibson, an independent domestic violence adviser for Women’s Aid which runs the men’s refuge in Berkshire that is helping Dave, said: “Four organisations phoned us today looking for places for four different men. They’ve been attacked and abused, but there is only one room available in the country and someone will have to decide which of those four men is most in need.”

Unsurprisingly, this almost complete absence of services for male victims of domestic violence stems directly from government policy that assumes male victims don’t exist.

Mark Brooks, chairman of the men’s domestic abuse charity, the Mankind Initiative, said: “Support services for male victims remain decades behind those for women. This is not helped by the Government and others having a violence against women and girls strategy without having an equivalent for men. Everybody sees domestic violence victims as being female rather than male. This is one of Britain’s last great taboos.”
The Mankind Initiative helpline receives 1,200 calls a year from men or friends and family calling on behalf of men. Stigma and fear of being disbelieved, among other factors, make men much less likely than women to report abuse to the police. The British Crime Survey found that only 10 per cent of male victims of domestic violence had told the police, compared with 29 per cent of women. More than a quarter of male victims tell no one what has happened to them, compared with 13 per cent of women.
The human cost of ignoring the problem is stark: 21 men were murdered by a partner or former partner in 2010/11.

That unwillingness of the government and service providers to assist male victims only perpetuates a societal conception of DV that’s not only at odds with the truth but lays down a red carpet for false allegations by women.

Nicola Graham-Kevan, an expert in partner violence at Central Lancashire University, said: “Society is blind to women’s aggression. The biggest disparity is women’s ability to seek help which makes men very vulnerable to false allegations. People often won’t believe that men are victims. Men have to be seen as passive, obvious victims with clear injuries, whereas, if a woman makes allegations, they are believed much more easily.”

Those allegations are often used as tools to wrest custody from fathers in divorce cases.  And effective tools they are.

Dr Graham-Kevan believes the system needs to adjust to make it safer for male victims and their children, who can end up with an abusive mother. “The biggest thing for me as a parent is that children are being placed in significant positions of harm. It sounds anti-feminist, but I think we’re allowing women too many rights in the family court, because courts assume that the women are the best parent as a starting position, rather than looking at it equally.”

So in a nutshell, mothers get the vast majority of custody.  Some of that custody is given them courtesy of their own false claims of domestic violence.  Mothers commit much more of the child abuse than do fathers (in the U.S., mothers acting alone do twice as much child abuse than do fathers acting alone).  And to top it all off, children who are abused by their parents are far more likely to grow up to be abusers as adults.  If you’re the devil, it’s an ideal system.  It’s a system that perpetuates domestic violence instead of decreasing it as researchers in the U.S. have noted.

If the system offered male victims and their children some sort of help, obviously the incidence of domestic violence could decrease at the outset.  But more importantly, if the system didn’t hand over children to abusive mothers, we’d find ourselves training fewer abusers.  Of course we do none of that because the system of DV response is too committed to its own narrative of female innocence and male corruption to do the obvious.  Until that narrative changes, domestic violence will continue to be the scourge it is.

Gender Symmetry In Partner Violence

Please check out this paper by Murray A. Strauss, which examines both the undeniably reciprocal nature of intimate partner violence & the reasons that information is continually suppressed:
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V75-Straus-09.pdf

There is also an excellent, up-to-date bibliography of 268 studies showing that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships here: 

http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm

Both are good resources to bookmark for research & debate.

The Domestic Violence Advert I'd Like To See

Interview With Erin Pizzey

Great interview with the one & only Erin Pizzey - the founder of the world's first shelters for battered women back in the 1970s - with Dean Esmay from AVFM:

Dean: Good morning Erin, how are you?
Erin: Good morning, It’s very cold.
Dean: It’s very cold is it? Well, it’s early December, I guess it is cold; you’re living in London these days, yes?
Erin: Yes I am.
Dean: So, you have recently, in the last year or so, published a book called “This Way to the Revolution – a Memoir” from Peter Owen Publishers. What can you tell me about that book, Erin?
Erin: I’ve always tried to tell the truth about the beginnings. I was one of the first people in England to get involved with the Women’s Movement and what I saw there, I knew perfectly well was going to be extremely destructive. And, when I began to stand up at these great big Collective meetings – and interestingly enough there were a lot of women from America who came over with initial instruction to show the British women how to be radical feminists. They’re a pretty frightening crowd and I got screamed at a lot partly because I said many women like myself, who are married, with or without children are perfectly happy to have the choice to be able to stay home. So, in the end last year actually… it took me ten years to get this book published, it was turned down by every major publisher in this country. And, finally, Peter Owen, who is a fine very small publishing company, agreed that they would publish. And they’ve done a wonderful job of it. And it is, it’s the whole truth about what went on behind the movement… the feminist movement.
I’m sorry, were you saying something?
Dean: So you say the feminist movement, the women’s movement… I confess I haven’t read the entire book yet, but I’ve at least read part of it and it’s certainly very interesting. Would you say that you considered yourself a feminist in the very early days?
Erin: I considered myself like many women across the world, I considered myself an equity feminist. I believed in equality for everyone. Now there were issues that needed discussing, but as soon as I saw, because you have to remember my background, my parents were caught by the Communists when I was nine and I didn’t see them for three years – they were under house arrest…
Dean: Your parents were caught by the Communists?
Erin: Yes in 1949, my father was in Tientsin in the Foreign Office…
Dean: In China?
Erin: Yes, China and they had marched up the driveway and they were arrested. They were very lucky, my parents, because they were just under house arrest. Most of the others were put into prisons. And I had one very close family member who came out completely insane from what happened to him. So, I had no love of Communism from the very beginning. From what I saw when I was in these great big collectives was really Marxism. We were all organized into groups in our own homes and told that we must have consciousness-raising sessions. And I remember the woman who came to our consciousness-raising and when she finished, I said this has nothing to do with women, this is actually Marxist. I said so we’re supposed to go to work full time and put our children into care provided by the state – like the Communist government – and why are we calling this liberation? And so very quickly I was booted out and went off to open a community center for mothers and children. And then I knew, once the donations came in, once the press picked it up–because the local paper–because my refuge by that point was full—I knew very well the sound of the feminist boots coming down to actually hijack the entire domestic violence industry and turn it into a billion dollar industry. Which they’ve done.
Dean: Well those are very powerful words and statements. I understand you were born in China, yes?
Erin: Yes.
Dean: So you and your family were there when they turned communist.
Erin: No, I was born in China, but then my parents were re-posted to China when I was about eleven years old. They were reposted to Tientsin and that’s where they were incarcerated.
Dean: Oh I see. Yet, I can already hear some people objecting. I’ve met a lot of women who consider themselves feminists in some form or other and they look at you like you’re from Mars if you say this business about it being Marxist in origin or…
Erin: Yes, but most of them don’t even know anything about the beginning of this movement. And the thing I have to point out, very simply, the beginnings of the women’s movement happened way back when a lot of women were fighting for the rights of people, of Americans, to end the apartheid that was going on at that time. When they had finished marching for the civil rights movement—There’s a whole storied history that you can read it. They came back and decided that the leftist women wanted their own movement. So instead of it being Capitalism, which everyone was against in the left wing movements, they simply changed the goal posts and said it was Patriarchy. Everything was because of men, because of the power that men have over women. And then the second part of their argument was that all women are victims of men’s violence because it’s The Patriarchy. And that is such a lot of rubbish. Because, we know, and everybody in the business knows, that both men and women in interpersonal relationships can be violent. And that’s in every single study all across the Western world. All this time – 40 years – we’ve been living a big lie led by these Feminist women who essentially have created a huge billion dollar industry all across the world and they have shut the doors on men. No men can work in refuges; no men can sit on Boards; boys under the age of twelve often can’t go into the refuges. A mother has to make a difficult choice of what she should do.
Dean: Here in the U.S. I’ve at least come across a few shelters which employ men in some fashion…to act as guards at the doors or…
Erin: That’s not working in refuges; that’s standing outside.
Dean: Standing outside or picking women up and driving them places…yes.
Erin: Not as staff though; not working in the refuge. In my refuge, half the staff are always men because they’re so important for children who haven’t known good, kind men…and some of their mothers.
Dean: I understand. That makes good sense. I see from your memoir for example, that in the early 60’s you had to show proof that you intended to get married just to get contraception from your doctor.
Erin: Yes.
Dean: Women couldn’t apply for mortgages… and so I presume it’s that sort of thing that made you interested in the Women’s movement in the first place.
Erin: Yes, absolutely. And I had such a vision, and partly the refuge because–I know all about violence. Both my parents were violent. My mother was particularly violent to me because I looked like my father. And the other two; my twin sister and my brother were much more like her. And my whole concern is, it is generational violence, and if we don’t save this generation of children we simply have more and more violent people. Because, until we understand we cannot blame men for everything. Women have to look at themselves and be honest about their own violence. And also, to understand what you do to a child’s brain when you actually fight each other, scream, yell and hit children, it causes brain damage. And we know that now from MRI scans. They can see what it does, particularly to the frontal lobe, the right frontal lobe, which is the seat of all our emotions.
Dean: There was a psychologist in Canada who recently published a piece asserting that the stereotype that we seem to all accept now of the helpless, innocent woman who is beaten on by a brutish, thuggish man and needs to run away represents perhaps only 4 or 5 percent of all domestic violence cases and that almost all other cases are more complicated than that. Would you agree that that sounds about reasonable?
Erin: Yes, of the first hundred women who came into my refuge, sixty percent were as violent as the men they left. Or, they were violent and the men weren’t.
Dean: They were violent and the men weren’t?
Erin: Yeah! And that’s why I tried to open a house for men almost immediately after I opened the refuge for women and my problem was – and this was a great shock to me – I was given a house at a Peppercorn Rent by the Council; and then I asked men who had actually given money for my refuge for women and children (they were millionaires) to give me some money for the men’s house, and none of them would give a penny!

The Invisible Man On The Donkey

GirlWritesWhat taking apart patriarchal theory & the feminist historical narrative of domestic violence. It doesn't get much better than this:

Domestic Violence Hoaxes

The living, breathing miracle that is Christina Hoff Sommers on Lies That Will Not Die:

Domestic Violence Myths Help No One

by Christina Hoff Sommers

"The facts are clear," said Attorney General Eric Holder. "Intimate partner homicide is the leading cause of death for African-American women ages 15 to 45."

That's a horrifying statistic, and it would be a shocking reflection of the state of the black family, and American society generally, if it were true. But it isn't true.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Justice Department's own Bureau of Justice Statistics, the leading causes of death for African-American women between the ages 15-45 are cancer, heart disease, unintentional injuries such as car accidents, and HIV disease. Homicide comes in fifth--and includes murders by strangers. In 2006 (the latest year for which full statistics are available), several hundred African-American women died from intimate partner homicide--each one a tragedy and an outrage, but far fewer than the approximately 6,800 women who died of the other leading causes.

Yet Holder's patently false assertion has remained on the Justice Department website for more than a year.
How is that possible? It is possible because false claims about male domestic violence are ubiquitous and immune to refutation. During the era of the infamous Super Bowl Hoax, it was widely believed that on Super Bowl Sundays, violence against women increases 40%. Journalists began to refer to the game as the "abuse bowl" and quoted experts who explained how male viewers, intoxicated and pumped up with testosterone, could "explode like mad linemen." During the 1993 Super Bowl, NBC ran a public service announcement warning men they would go to jail for attacking their wives.

In this roiling sea of media credulity, one lone journalist, Washington Post  reporter Ken Ringle, checked the facts. As it turned out, there was no source: An activist had misunderstood something she read, jumped to her sensational conclusion, announced it at a news conference and an urban myth was born. Despite occasional efforts to prove the story true, no one has ever managed to link the Super Bowl to domestic battery.

World Cup abuse?
Yet the story has proved too politically convenient to kill off altogether. Last summer, it came back to life on a different continent and with a new accent. During the 2010 World Cup, British newspapers carried stories with headlines such as "Women's World Cup Abuse Nightmare" and informed women that the games could uncover "for the first time, a darker side to their partner." Fortunately, a BBC program called Law in Action took the unusual route pioneered by Ringle: The news people actually checked the facts. Their conclusion: a stunt based on cherry-picked figures.

But when the BBC journalists presented the deputy chief constable, Carmel Napier, from the town of Gwent with evidence that the World Cup abuse campaign was based on twisted statistics, she replied: "If it has saved lives, then it is worth it."

It is not worth it. Misinformation leads to misdirected policies that fail to target the true causes of violence. Worse, those who promulgate false statistics about domestic violence, however well-meaning, promote prejudice. Most of the exaggerated claims implicate the average male in a social atrocity. Why do that? Anti-male misandry, like anti-female misogyny, is unjust and dangerous. Recall what happened at Duke University a few years ago when many seemingly fair-minded students and faculty stood by and said nothing while three innocent young men on the Duke Lacrosse team were subjected to the horrors of a modern-day witch hunt.

And then there's Iran
Worst of all, misinformation about violence against women suggests a false moral equivalence between societies where women are protected by law and those where they are not. American and British societies are not perfect, but we have long ago decided that violence against women is barbaric. By contrast, the Islamic Republic of Iran--where it is legal to bury an adulterous woman up to her neck and stone her--was last year granted a seat on the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defended the decision by noting Iranian women are far better off than women in the West. "What is left of women's dignity in the West?" he asked. He then came up with a statistic to drive home his point: "In Europe almost 70% of housewives are beaten by their husbands."

That was a self-serving lie. Western women, with few exceptions, are safe and free. Iranian women are neither. Officials like Attorney General Holder, the deputy constable of Gwent, and the activists and journalists who promoted the Super Bowl and World Cup hoaxes, unwittingly contribute to such twisted deceptions.

Victims of intimate violence are best served by the truth. Eric Holder should correct his department's website immediately.

Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at AEI. This article originally appeared here.