IWF advertisement is a valuable voice in community

Sacks is a teacher, a carpenter and a graduate of UCLA.

By Glenn Sacks

Neither Chaitra Shenoy’s
“Myths belittle female population, problems relevant to
culture” nor Barrie Levy’s
“Bruin ad misleading (Viewpoint, Letters, May 1) do much
to defend feminist statistics against the evidence presented by the
Independent Women’s Forum in its ad printed in the Daily
Bruin on April 18. The research-based, methodical IWF ad tells us
what serious researchers already know ““ that feminist
statistics and claims are often terrible distortions based on
unprofessional and dishonest methodologies.

Shenoy repeats the discredited feminist factoid that “30
percent of emergency room visits by women each year are the result
of injuries from domestic violence.” The origin of the figure
is a 1984 article “Domestic Violence Victims in the Emergency
Department” in the Journal of the American Medical
Association. It turns out that 38 percent of the 492 patients who
make up the “30 percent” figure were men.

The survey is also flawed because it was a small sample taken at
only one, violence-plagued and poverty-stricken inner-city Detroit
ER. The survey’s authors never claimed that it was
comprehensive or representative of the population as a whole.

When the Family Violence Prevention Fund did a survey of all 397
ERs in California hospitals and asked the (mostly female) nurse
managers how many female patients they believed to be domestic
violence victims were treated in an average month, the total
averaged between two (for small hospitals) and eight (for the
larger ones).

Shenoy attacks the IWF for disputing the feminist claim that
women make only 75 percent of what men do for the same job, but
provides little substantive evidence. As I explained in my recent
Los Angeles Times Op-Ed piece (“Is Pay a Function of Gender
Bias?”, May 12) and in more detail in
“Wage gap reflects sacrifice of men, not
discrimination” (Daily Bruin, Viewpoint, June 2, 1999),
men make more money than women largely because full-time employed
men work, on average, eight hours a week (or over 400 hours a year)
more than full-time employed women.

In addition, full-time employed women have, as a whole, 25
percent less job experience than their male counterparts
(“Why the Gender Gap in Wages Narrowed in the 1980s,”
June O’ Neil and Solomon Polachek, Journal of Labor Economics
11, No. 1, Jan. 1993). Also, men are the victims of over 90 percent
of American workplace deaths and serious injuries and many of these
“male” jobs pay more than other jobs at the same
relative skill level specifically because of the hazards
involved.

  Illustration by ERICA PINTO/Daily Bruin The 75 percent
figure compares apples and oranges by adding up what the average
full-time employed male and average full-time employed female earn.
Both the IWF and the Cato Institute did studies with realistic
comparisons ““ comparing men and women who worked the same
number of hours in the same job and at the same level of experience
““ and found the gender wage gap to be less than 2
percent.

Shenoy also was misled about rape figures and attacks the IWF
used for debunking the infamous “1 in 4 college women victim
of rape or attempted rape” hoax. As I explained in three
Daily Bruin Viewpoint submissions (March 8, 1999; April 13, 1999
and
Nov. 9, 1999), the famous 1 in 4 figure comes from a 1985
survey by Mary Koss which was sponsored by Ms. magazine.

I wrote to Koss on Dec. 3, 1999 and while she still defended her
work, she confirmed for me that her rape/attempted rape figure
include women who were not forced to have sex, but instead had
sexual intercourse when they didn’t want to while
intoxicated.

Many dissident feminists have protested this belittling of women
and asked “How does a guy giving you a drink mean you have to
drink it and keep drinking until you’ve had enough that
you’ll have sex because of the drinks?” To get “1
in 4″ feminists turn a consensual act ““ drinking and
having sex ““ into “rape.”

Researchers have noted that if we use Koss’ definition of
“rape” and apply it to men, a large percentage of
college men are “raped” too. When Tina Oakland,
director of the UCLA Center for Women and Men, defended “1 in
4″ against the IWF (“Women’s
groups demand apology from Bruin for ad,” Daily Bruin,
News, May 17) she cited the American Medical Association and the
FBI, even though the source for both is, in fact, Koss.

Real rape figures are hard to estimate because, as Shenoy
correctly notes, many women understandably do not report rape. The
most methodologically sound and unbiased estimates, as I mentioned
(with sources) in my previous submissions on rape, place the
percentage of women raped at about 4 percent over a lifetime
““ not 25 percent by mid-college career.

If you look at a report by the National Center for Education
Statistics titled, “Campus Crime and Security at
Postsecondary Education Institutions” (1997), the total
number of reported forced sex offenses in one year on all American
campuses combined was 1,310. That comes out to an average of less
than one per campus per year.

Shenoy also believes feminist distortions on domestic violence.
As I explained in my submissions
“Domestic violence is harsh reality for men also”
(Daily Bruin, Viewpoint, May 12, 2000) and “Cancer, violence
major problems for men; research money is needed for both
sexes” (Daily Bruin, Viewpoint, May 17, 1999), most child
abuse and murder of children is committed by women, not men, and
domestic violence against men by women is roughly equal to that of
men against women.

I also presented studies which show that violence in lesbian
couples is at least as high as that in heterosexual couples.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 70 percent of
confirmed cases of child abuse and 65 percent of parental murders
of children are committed by mothers, not fathers (Warren Farrell,
“Father and Child Reunion,” 2001). According to the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, adjusting for the
greater number of single mothers, a custodial mother is five times
as likely to murder her own children as a custodial father.

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

Psychology Professor Martin Fiebert of California State
University, Long Beach compiled 117 studies (http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/)
which found that women were as responsible for initiating and
engaging in domestic violence as men.

Researchers, including Dr. David Fontes, the director of Stop
Abuse for Everyone, have also found that only a small percentage of
female batterers abuse out of self-defense (www.safe4all.org).

Shenoy also overstates the prevalence of domestic violence
against women in our society. What she doesn’t realize is
that feminist domestic violence studies are notoriously inaccurate
because they lump together common acts which men and women do
equally (such as slamming doors, yelling, etc.) with serious abuse
in order to get high figures, which they then present to the public
as strictly serious abuse and as strictly male.

The IWF’s ad isn’t “hurtful to a huge chunk of
our student and faculty population” as Shenoy contends, nor
does it “ferment intolerant, anti-woman … sentiment and
action on campus” and “incite hate” as Levy
believes. Instead, the IWF is a valuable dissident voice which
should be heard not only in the Daily Bruin, but in the
women’s studies classroom as well.

The Daily Bruin was correct in standing by its decision to print
the ad. What are Shenoy, Levy, Oakland and the women’s
studies department so afraid of?