Domestic violence is harsh reality for men also

By Glenn Sacks

The Clothesline Project will come to UCLA May 16-18 and will
focus on domestic violence against women. The project, however,
will only tell half the story. Why? Because the evidence is
overwhelming that battering is committed by both men and women
equally. By using weapons and the element of surprise, women are
wounding and killing their male partners as often as vice versa.
For example:

Dr. Martin Fiebert of the department of psychology at California
State University, Long Beach compiled and summarized 117 scholarly
investigations with more than 72,000 respondents and found that
women were every bit as responsible for initiating and engaging in
domestic violence as men. The 117 studies are listed in
alphabetical order at http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/.

Longtime domestic violence researchers Richard Gelles and Murray
Straus, who were once hailed by the feminist movement for their
pioneering work on bringing domestic violence against women to
national prominence, have repeatedly found that violence is as much
a female problem as a male problem, in both minor and serious
assaults.

Studies conducted by the Family Research Laboratory at the
University of New Hampshire found in 1975, 1985 and again in 1992
that abuse rates were equal between husbands and wives and that, in
fact, abuse of wives by husbands was decreasing while abuse of
husbands by wives was increasing (“A Man’s World: How
Real is Male Privilege and How High is the Price?” by Ellis
Cose).

A recent study by University of Wisconsin psychology professor
Terrie Moffitt shows that violence in the home is usually initiated
by the woman, not by the man. In an article “Hitting The
Wall: After 20 years of Domestic Violence Research, Scientists
Can’t Avoid Hard Facts” feminist Nancy Updike cites the
new study and writes, “The study supports data published in
1980 indicating that wives hit their husbands at least as often as
husbands hit their wives” (Mother Jones, May/June, 1999).

In “The Truth about Domestic Violence: A Falsely Framed
Issue” R.L. McNeeley, a professor of social welfare at the
University of Wisconsin, testified to equal rates of abuse by men
and women, and Susan Steinmetz, director of the Family Research
Institute at Indiana University and Purdue University, reached the
same conclusions in 1978 in “The Battered Husband
Syndrome.”

Nor can female domestic violence be dismissed as
“self-defense.” According to Straus, for example,
“10 percent of women and 15 percent of men perpetuated
partner abuse in self-defense.”

Crime statistics do in fact indicate that women are more likely
to suffer serious injury in domestic violence than men are. But
such statistics are misleading because surveys show that an abused
woman is nine times as likely to report abuse as an abused man
is.

The furor and fallout from the O.J. Simpson trial of 1994 left
the American public with the false impression that husbands murder
wives significantly more than wives murder husbands. For example, a
1994 Department of Justice study on “murder in
families” analyzed 10,000 cases and found that women made up
more than 40 percent of those charged in familial murders.

The survey also shattered the feminist myth that men who murder
wives are treated leniently by the “male” criminal
justice system. In fact, exactly the opposite is true ““ men
convicted of murdering a spouse are sentenced to three times as
many years in jail as women so convicted. In addition, women were
10 times as likely to get probation for their crime as men.

As a whole, the Justice Department survey reports that of all
familial murders (of spouses or of children), males were the
victims in 56 percent of all cases and that females were more
likely to have killed males than males to have killed females.

Feminist academics often pretend that domestic violence is a
crime committed uniquely by men against women, which they blame on
“patriarchy.” In reality, domestic violence is as
common in lesbian relationships as it is in heterosexual ones. One
survey of bisexual women showed that they were 40 percent more
likely to have been abused by their most recent female partner than
all of the their past male partners combined.

According to St. Joseph’s University sociology professor
Claire Renzetti: “It appears that violence in lesbian
relationships occurs at about the same frequency as violence in
heterosexual relationships… (lesbian) batterers display a
terrifying ingenuity in their selection of abuse tactics,
frequently tailoring the abuse to the specific vulnerabilities of
their partners” (“Violent Betrayal: Partner Abuse in
Lesbian Relationships”).

As well as being responsible for their share of spousal abuse,
women are responsible for more than their share of abuse against
children. A recent study of confirmed child abuse found mothers
committed the abuse at nearly four times the rate of fathers.
Another showed that well over half of parental murders of children
are committed by mothers, not fathers (“Ceasefire: Why Women
and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve Equality” by Cathy
Young).

A USC survey cited by radio doctor Dean O’Dell showed that
incidence of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is actually not as common
as once believed, because many of the dead infants had, in fact,
been suffocated under a pillow by their mothers, who then claimed
“SIDS.” Child endangerment and child neglect are also
overwhelmingly female.

While many prominent feminists such as Gloria Steinem have been
instrumental in distorting the truth about men, women and domestic
violence, some dissident feminists are speaking out against these
misandrist lies.

For example, feminist activist Erin Pizzey, a pioneer from the
early 1970s in advocating for battered women and the author of
“Scream Silently or the Neighbors Will Hear,” says that
domestic violence against men is now ridiculed and ignored in the
same way that domestic violence against women was ignored 30 years
ago. She says “there are as many violent women as men, but
there’s a lot of money (now) in hating men. The activists…
(are) there to fund their budgets, their conferences and their
statements against men.”

Even Susan Faludi, author of the feminist classic
“Backlash,” has appeared on talk shows speaking with,
and advocating for, battered men.

And several organizations, such as SAFE (Stop Abuse for
Everyone) have united men and women in the cause of bringing to the
public the obvious truth that domestic violence is a two-way street
(http://www.dgp.utoronto.ca/~jade/safe/).

Familial violence ““ by and against both men and women
““ is a serious problem in a violence-wracked America, but it
is a problem for which both men and women share equal
responsibility. Over the past 30 years, feminist activists have
justly called abusive men to account for their despicable actions.
It’s now time to do the same for abusive women.