“Violent Men,
Victimized Women”* omits extensive evidence. As a senior Statistics
Canada analyst, Prof. DeKeseredy proclaimed he, "… looked at his
research from a feminist point of view."** Hence, the bigotry inherent
in, “gendered understanding … male violence … abusive men”.
Since the early
1980s, Statistics Canada’s Canadian Center for Justice Statistics
commissioned numerous reports on female ‘victimization’ and a few on
both sexes. But not one CCJS or Statistics Canada report examines male
victims of violence.
Men are victims
of over 80% of assault and battery, 80% of suicides, 97% of work deaths
and over 68% of homicide victims. The magnitude of this preventable
annual male body count remains grim.
“The Canadian
Panel on Violence Against Women,” costing over $10,000,000, although
thoroughly discredited as feminist agitprop, continues to buttress
feminist jurisprudence, poison relations between the sexes, and ignore
male victims of crime.
Interspousal
violence is symmetrical, driven by alcohol, drugs and psychopathology,
and rare. The most secure place for men, women and children remains the
loving refuge of the married family.
Prof. DeKeseredy
and his feminist coven continue to distort official and academic
research. They ignore the maiming and deaths of boys and men. They are
not strangers. The women and children who love them see their suffering,
in despair.
Jeffrey Asher
* NP 7 March
2008, A11
**The Globe and
Mail, 14 April 1992, A4
CCJS: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/datalib/codebooks/cstdli/cj2001.htm
Letter Four
To the Editor,
Re.: "Violent men, victimized women,"
March 7: Walter S. DeKeseredy doth protest too much.
He claims, first, that sexual assault is
primarily committed by men on women. In fact, most men have been
assaulted sexually in their lifetimes -- it just isn't perceived or
characterized that way. Many, many men have been seduced while drunk.
And many have been hit in the groin by their female partners. For
decades, this form of sexual assault has been a standard slapstick gag
on mainstream TV. And if my clients are representative, it is nearly
impossible to have a woman charged with stalking, no matter how
compelling the evidence for it is.
Women's shelters, hostpitals, and police
actively solicit information from women about the possibility of
spousal violence in their lives. Because of the efforts of people like
DeKeseredy, nobody asks men about this. Even so, (automobile and
household) accidents, not male violence, are the number one cause of
injury to women visiting emergency rooms.
Statistics Canada reports that only 2% of
domestic incidents to which police respond require medical attention
for at least one of the participants. Those are the serious cases in
which individual psychopathology might be suspected. For the rest --
the 98% invovling only minor or no injury -- women are as likely to be
the perpetrators as men. They aren't "sick," they just have poor ways
of dealing with conflict and stress.
Sadly, in Canada, the risk of men
committing suicide increases six-fold during the process of
separation, when his children, his home, and most of his income are
taken away from him. Men are afraid to leave abusive and controling
spouses for fear of this predictable consequence of of family
courts.
My own research focuses on the response of the
law-enforcement system to spousal violence. I have shown that men are
treated more harshly than women by the system from the moment the
police arrive at the door to sentencing. For most outcomes, being male
is a better predictor of harshness than any other variable, including
injury level, prior criminal record, substance abuse, or the presence
of children.
It's true that an
"unequal distribution of power between men and women" is often at the
root of spousal abuse; but given how consistently the Courts side with
women in family and criminal cases, the unequal power is decidedly in
the women's favour.
Sincerely,
Grant A. Brown, DPhil (Oxon), LL.B.
9911 87 Aveune
Edmonton, Alberta
T6E 2N8
(780) 435-1742
Violent men, victimized
women
Walter S. De Keseredy, National
Post
Friday, March 07, 2008
In her Feb. 27 article "On domestic
violence, no one wants to hear the truth," National Post columnist
Barbara Kay stated that people claiming women are as violent as men in
intimate, heterosexual relationships are "truth-tellers," while those
who challenge or reject the sexual symmetry of violence are "all
reading from the same myth-riddled hymn book." However, by denouncing
a gendered understanding of intimate partner violence and promoting
the work of Erin Pizzey and Donald Dutton, Ms. Kay has engaged in a
process of activism herself. She is trying to advance a political
agenda instead of telling the whole truth.
One part of the truth Ms. Kay
didn't tell is that sexual assault is violent behaviour committed
primarily by men, especially by male dating partners and acquaintances.
How many men do you know who have been raped by their spouses, ex-spouses
or girlfriends? How often do we read newspaper stories about women
stalking ex-husbands and then killing them and their children?
Sadly, in Canada, the risk of
women being killed increases sixfold during the process of separation,
which partially explains why so many women are afraid to leave abusive
or controlling men. Ms. Kay selectively ignores other serious acts of
male abuse, including strangulation, the destruction of women's prized
possessions, threats to harm or take away children, and the mutilation
of pets. No wonder Canadian battered women's shelters are filled every
day and night.
Another part of the truth
ignored in Ms. Kay's column is that we rarely see men seeking aid in
hospital emergency rooms because they were beaten or raped by their
female partners. On the other hand, male violence against women is the
number-one injury to women treated by emergency room staff. It is
painfully obvious, but worth stating again: The bulk of violence in
intimate, heterosexual relationships is committed by men.
Why do men hit, rape or kill the
women they love? Ms. Kay, psychologist Donald Dutton and many others
claim that they are "sick." Large-scale surveys of the general
population suggest that if violence is a function of mental illness,
then close to a third (if not more) of the men in our society are sick.
Of course, some abusive men have
clinical pathologies, but most do not. If violent husbands, cohabiting
and estranged partners and boyfriends are in fact mentally ill, then
why do they beat, rape or kill only female partners and not their
bosses, friends or neighbours? If we are dealing with men who have
terrible problems with self-control, how do they manage to keep from
hitting people until they are at home alone with their loved ones?
These questions cannot be
answered by psychological theories, primarily because these theories
ignore the unequal distribution of power between men and women in
Canadian society and in domestic contexts.
Ms. Kay incorrectly assumes that
feminists have more influence over police officers, politicians,
judges and other practitioners than people who claim that intimate
violence is a gender-neutral problem. She also ignores the fact that
-- despite federal and provincial directives to police to lay charges
for all cases of domestic violence where reasonable and probable
grounds exist -- charges are uncommon. The same can be said about
sexual assault and stalking.
Ms. Kay quotes Erin Pizzey, who
stated that for gender politics "Canada is the scariest country on the
planet." Indeed, many Canadian women live in fear on a daily basis --
but not for the reason Ms. Pizzey suggests. As my friend and colleague
Dr. Meda Chesney-Lind once stated, given the alarming amount of
violence women suffer at male hands, the incredible story is that the
number of female murderers is so low.
Dr. Walter S.
DeKeseredy is a professor of Criminology, Justice and Policy Studies
at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.
Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a
division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.
Notes from JS
From Rethinking
Domestic Violence D Dutton 2006, chapter 2
Coney and Mackey (1999) applied the **Woozle
to the “feminization of domestic violence,” the argument that
all perpetrators were men and victims were women. DeKeseredy ( 1988:
Woman abuse in darting relationships ) contains numerous instances of
presenting data and misinterpreting it. For example,
(DeKeseredy, 1988) examined ”social support theory” that posits
“male peer group processes conducive to sexual, psychological and
physical assaults on female dating partners may be the micro-level
(sic) expressions of a dominant social structure and ideology that is
based on the male hierarchical ordering of society” (p. 3).
DeKeseredy’s data indicated that only 4% of his male college sample
endorsed acts of serious violence (from the CTS) (pp. 55-56), and that
1.3-2.3% of his sample (a maximum of 7 men) reported having engaged in
sexual abuse (p. 56). In spite of these low rates of abuse
perpetration, DeKeseredy concluded that “woman abuse in the context of
dating is a serious social problem” (p. 54).
Moreover, he did not report female violence rates nor consider whether
relationship violence was bilateral.
Perceptions of male peer support
for abuse against dating partners were also generally low. For
instance, only 3.9% of participants reported that their male friends
had “told them to use physical force” against a dating partner and
3.2% said “use force for sexual rejection.” Therefore, it is difficult
to understand how DeKeseredy could conclude that “male social networks
may reinforce wider patriarchal social relations by perpetuating and
legitimating woman abuse” (p. 79). Though these data do indicate an
association between perceptions of peer support for dating abuse and
reports of abusive behaviour, DeKeseredy fails to consider that
correlational findings cannot be interpreted in causal terms oncludes
As described later, DeKeseredy and Schwartz (
1998:Woman abuse on campus)
DeKeseredy and Schwartz (1998)
asked college women who reported having perpetrated dating violence
whether their own use of violence was in self-defence.
DeKeseredy and
Schwartz report levels of severity of violence used by women
(according to their self report) and the women’s own reports of the
extent to which their violence was motivated by three reasons,
including self-defense. Only 6.9% of women reporting
non-severe violence and 8.5% of women reporting severe violence
reported that they “always” used violence in self defense (p. 77). By
comparison 62.3% and 56.5% of the non-severe and severe groups
respectively reported that they “never” used violence in self defense.
In fact, women were as likely to report that they had initiated the
attack as to report that their violence was self-defensive. Moreover,
though women were asked to report on both perpetration and receipt of
partner violence, these reports were never directly
compared. Nevertheless, Dekersedy conclided "our overall
conclusion is that much of the violence by Candian undergraduate women
is in self-defense"( p91) see RDV page 119.
In spite of the well-documented, high
prevalence rates of women’s violence towards men in young adults, the
college men who were sampled (n = 1300) were asked about their own abuse
perpetration, but not their victimization. Needless to say, men were not
asked whether their violence was self-defensive in nature. This study
was apparently designed so as to minimize women’s violence and to avoid
the possibility of discovering and reporting men’s victimization, or
even the extent to which male violence is self-defensive. Nevertheless,
the data which have been published indicate that more college women are
violent than college men, and that most of women’s violence is not
self-defensive.
**Woozles are usually not simply a
matter of authentic misreporting. They also reveal a desire to read into
the data an a priori position that is really not there. All the data
reporting mistakes I found in the literature were, without exception,
made in the direction of supporting feminist dogma.
**Woozle
Gelles and Straus (1988))p.
39 – 40 described the
“Woozle effect” as based on a children’s story by A.A. Milne, where
Winnie the Pooh and Piglet hunt a “woozle” whose existence they know
only from tracks on the ground – tracks they themselves have made.
Gelles and Straus used the term to describe certain myths that developed
in the domestic violence field without solid evidence. This typically
happens when crucial qualifiers from an original article are dropped to
make the statements more certain than the original author intended.
Gelles and Straus supply several examples, including Kempe et al. on
“battered child syndrome,” from which speculations about child abuse’s
lethality potential were exaggerated in subsequent articles by other
writers. Another example was a statistic that Gelles and Straus reported
themselves, that 55 percent of a selected experimental group of families
reported conjugal violence. This sample came from the police department
domestic disturbance files and a private social service agency, so the
members were not representative but selected because of prior problems.
A subsequent book (Langley and Levy, Wife Beating: the Silent Crisis)
reported that half the women in the United States were abused, citing
the Gelles and Straus study as the basis for their inappropriately
extrapolated statistic. ( from RDV
chapter 2)
