The Gender Feminist Blame Game - Richard L. Davis - MensNewsDaily.com�

The Gender Feminist Blame Game

January 23, 2005


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by Richard L. Davis

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The male paradigm is peculiarly unsuited to mounting a challenge to men’s predicament. Men have no clearly defined enemy who is oppressing them. -Susan Faludi

To truly understand the dynamics of domestic and dating violence one must recognize that they are complex, multifaceted, and often misunderstood dilemmas that must be viewed through an unbiased lens. Contemporarily domestic and dating violence are often viewed myopically by both print and electronic media as males being the perpetrator and females their victim. Unbiased and impartial academic research documents that domestic and/or dating violence are issues that are misunderstood by most people, laypersons and professionals alike.

In 1995 Jeffrey Fagan wrote in the National Institute of Justice research report, The Criminalization of Domestic Violence: Promises and Limits, online the report is at http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles/crimdom.pdf, “Assuming that patriarchy and power relations alone cause [italics added] domestic violence leads us toward conclusions that do not consider a full array of explanatory variables from other disciplines.” Fagan’s advice seems to have fallen on deaf ears. Fagan’s logic fly’s in the fact of the philosophy behind the Violence Against Women Act and it impedes the ideology that drives the gender feminist agenda.

A gender feminist is an advocate who is more concerned with women’s rights than equal or civil rights. Reason and logic dictate that a gender nuturel advocate is one who should be concerned with human rights rather than the rights of only one gender. As for the bias of the Violence Against Women [italics added] Act, the title speaks for itself.

Concerning the issue of high school domestic and dating violence, one of the most respected national and internationally recognized organizations is the White Ribbon Campaign http://www.whiteribbon.ca/Default.asp?language=English. The White Ribbon Campaign makes no attempt to present the issue in a gender neutral context.

This author has three daughters and two sons. He understands that his daughters, as data document, are at greater risk to experience more serious, injurious and sexual domestic and dating violence assaults than their brothers. However, his daughters know and all data document that his sons are also at risk. A fact that the White Ribbon Campaign ignores.

As a retired police officer this author knows that those who report domestic violence incidents to law enforcement and suffer black eyes, bruises, broken teeth, cracked ribs, busted noses, and fractured jaws at the hands of those who profess to love them, are more often women than men.

However, there are no reasons for this author to view his three daughters as always or primarily being innocent and angelic victims of domestic abuse and their two brothers as being destined to be demonic abusive batterers.

The White Ribbon Campaign proclaims that men, their website excludes all women from any blame, have come to believe that violence against a woman, child or another man is an acceptable way to control the behavior of another person . Do they really believe that women or girls never use violence, abusive or coercive behavior as a dating or familial controlling tactic? They claim female dating violence against males is a rare event. Apparently they spend the vast majority of their time preaching to high school students and little to no time listening to them.

Why is it that the White Ribbon Campaign and other gender feminist organizations that moralize about dating or domestic violence in schools to our children seem to be only or primarily concerned with violence by males against females? Is it possible that not a single person in the White Ribbon Campaign or other gender feminists have ever read an unbiased dating violence study?

How is it possible that not a single person in the White Ribbon Campaign has ever taken the time to read any of the data from the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey http://www.cdc.gov/HealthyYouth/yrbs/index.htm? Is not dating violence supposed to be their area of expertise? Their website documents they do not have a clue about the above survey or that it even exits. Worse still, perhaps they know the truth and simply ignore it.

An article in the August 1, 2001 Journal ofthe American Medical Association, “Dating Violence Against Adolescent Girls and Associated Substance Use, Unhealthy Weight Control, Sexual Risk Behavior, Pregnancy, and Suicidality,” begins by quoting from a National Institute of Justice study that “1.5 million women are physically and/or sexually abused each year in the United States.” Clearly the focus of the article is girls, however, what is the reason they only mention boys as perpetrators and girls as their victims?

In fact, for the above JAMA article to note that 1.5 million women are physically and/or sexually abused each year by an intimate partner the authors had to cut a sentence in half so that they could hide the truth. The sentence purposely cut in half by the authors, documents that 834,732 males also suffer abuse.

For the next seven pages the above article documents only the problems adolescent girls face concerning dating violence. Does it not seem logical to mention or to have a couple of lines about how boys have similar problems? Perhaps the inclusion of male victimization would interfere with their gender feminist agenda.

The same JAMA article was headlined in a Boston Globe article, “One in five teen girls abused.” No mention of boys in the Globe article. Using the same focus as the White Ribbon Campaign, the JAMA article concludes that, “Parents and peers appear to play a role in supporting adolescent males’ [emphasis added] violence toward dating partners…” Why do the authors exclude the fact that females use violence against boys? It appears from this article that girls do not need any parental or peer support concerning their violence. In fact the reader is never informed girls use any violence.

The article does contain important information concerning the plight of this authors three daughters, however, what about his sons? Why does not the JAMA article address boys as victims? Why do the authors of the article choose to ignore the plight of boys? Is it because the Violence Against Women Act is more concerned with males as perpetrators than as victims?

The National Center for Victims of Crime http://www.ncvc.org/stats/teen.htm at one time was unbiased and noted that 45% of females and 43% of males reported being the victim from a dating partner. Now their home page notes that, “Twenty percent of teenage girls and young women have experienced some form of dating violence.” The National Center for Victims of Crime has chosen to ignore the victimization of boys. They are now political correct.

Another similar, yet unbiased, report, “Date Violence and Date Rape Among Adolescents: Associations With Disordered Eating Behaviors and Psychological Health, http://www.apa.org/releases/dateviolence.html concerning the same type of adolescent abuse was administered in the Minnesota public schools and this report notes that nearly 9 percent of girls and 6 percent of boys report some type of abusive date-related experience.

The data in the JAMA article was from the 1999 Massachusetts Youth Risk Behavior Survey http://www.doe.mass.edu/hssss/yrbs99/letter.html . The survey documents that 18 percent of females and 7 percent of males report they were hurt physically or sexually by a date or someone they were going out with. Also 16 percent of females and 6 percent of males report that someone had sexual contact with them against their will.

The following is on the Massachusetts Jane Doe Inc. website http://www.janedoe.org/about.htm

Jane Doe Inc. is a catalyst for change. Through our network of direct service providers, business partners, health professionals, law enforcement and government officials, school teachers and concerned individuals, we amplify the voices of those committed to breaking the silence and ending domestic violence and sexual assault.

We raise awareness, engage people to take action, increase access to and improve the delivery of services, act as a clearinghouse of information, promote efforts to address the needs of underserved communities, and advocate for public and private funding and improved policies and practices in the public and private sectors.

Jane Doe Inc. places a high priority on building bridges with and among our members as well as with allied organizations, government agencies and the private sector. We engage with our allies to address issues of health care, affordable housing, homelessness, economic development, civil rights including those for the disabled and immigrants. By drawing the connections between these concerns and the needs of sexual assault and domestic violence survivors, we share in the task of reaching solutions that integrate rather than divide our efforts [italics added].

On the Jane Doe website you will find that it proclaims that 1 in 5 female high school students report being physically and/or sexually abused by a dating partner http://www.janedoe.org/know.htm. Jane Doe makes no mention of boys being physically and/or sexually abused by a dating partner. This is appears to be divisive rather than an integrative.

National data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey paints a very different picture than the one being proffered by the White Ribbon Campaign, Jane Doe and other gender feminists.





The Gender Agenda

Why do the White Ribbon Campaign, Jane Doe and other gender feminists hide or attempt to erase the abuse of boys and men? How does Jane Doe plan on building bridges or providing solutions when they hide and ignore the abuse boys suffer? Should not all of us regardless of age, gender or sexual orientation deserve to be free from abuse? What is the real agenda of gender feminists?

The findings from the National Violence Against Women (NVAW) survey in the report, “Full Report of the Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women,http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/183781.pdf documents that 40.0 percent of surveyed women and 53.8 percent of surveyed men report being physically assaulted by a parent, stepparent, or other adult caretaker as a child. Does this not document more male than female victimization?

Another National Institute of Justice sponsored study, Extent, Nature, and Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/181867.pdf, from the same NVAW survey estimates that annually, 4.8 million women and 2.9 million men will suffer from intimate partner assaults. Is 2.9 million male victims so small a number as to be inconsequential to gender feminists?

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Children’s Bureau report, Child Maltreatment 1996: Reports From the States to the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, http://www.calib.com/nccanch/pubs/factsheets/ncands.cfm documents that 17,590 children were physically abused by men and 21,757 children were physically abused by women. And using an irony they fail to recognize or understand, gender feminists claim that women abuse children more often than men because more children are being raised by women than men.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics special report, Intimate Partner Violence and Age of Victim, 1993-99, document that concerning violence between persons of the same gender, that on an annual basis 13,740 males report being victims of same sex abuse and 16,900 females report they are victims of same sex abuse. Should we use this data to document that female same sex perpetrators are more violent than male same sex perpetrators?

The Bureau of Justice Statistics special report, Murder in Families, documents that “in murders of their offspring, women predominated, accounting for 55 percent of the killers.” These murders do not appear to be in self defense. In spousal murders, women account for 41 percent of the killers.

Concerning the Suppression of Rights

If domestic violence is caused by the suppression of women’s rights and gender inequity, please answer the following questions.

If domestic violence is caused by the suppression of women and gender inequity, why does perpetration and victimization rise and fall with the level of the socioeconomic and educational status of the participants while there is no change in gender differential percentages?
What is the cause of same sex violence?
What is the cause of elder abuse by both males and females against both male and female elders?
What is the cause of the high number of assaults on males as adults and/or as children by adult females?
Why should adult heterosexual women’s rights be our primary concern or more important than everyone else’s rights?
When will domestic violence advocates who insist on reducing the exploration of domestic and dating violence to a gender blame game between men and women understand that they are performing a disservice to all victims of abuse, regardless of age, gender or sexual orientation?
Why do so many domestic violence advocates continue to argue that women are abused while they argue about what “abuse” is or is not?
Why do so many domestic violence advocates continue to rail against the use of the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) as a measuring tool when it document equal victimization of men and women? Is it moral and just that these very same gender feminists use the CTS when they attempt to inflate the number of women they claim are being abused by men?
Why do gender feminists think the needs of women are more important than the needs of domestic violence victims regardless of age, gender or sexual orientation?
Why do so many domestic violence advocates want to continue arguing about victim percentage differentials?
Do domestic violence advocates really think that pitting one victim against another is a fair, just and compassionate solution to the problem?
Why does the White Ribbon Campaign proclaim that we should ask only male students to take a pledge not to hit female students?
Does the White Ribbon Campaign really expect anyone to believe that female students only hit male students in self defense?
Has no one in the White Ribbon Campaign ever spoken to a female student who hit her boyfriend because she was angry or jealous? Perhaps it is time they listen rather than lecture.
Equal Access for All Victims

After 4,000 years of recorded human history, that more often than not, ignored the issue of domestic violence, why not present, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Should notthe message be that no one, regardless of age, gender, or sexual orientation deserves to be hit and everyone regardless of age, gender or sexual orientation can be a perpetrator, victim or both? If so, why exclude male victimization?

The National Conference on Family Violence: Health and Justice met in March of 1994, 10 years after the first Attorney Generals Task Force on Family Violence demanded that the criminal justice system take the issue of family violence, not only or primarily violence against women, seriously www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles/redfam.pdf.

The 1994 conference notes that the problem of “family” violence in the United States is epidemic. The conference report estimates that the annual incidence of abuse of family members is at 2 to 4 million for children, nearly 4 million for women, and 1-2 million for elder adults. Not a single incident of male victimization. Are not men members of the family? At this conference there were 400 professionals and 80 national experts.

The National Violence Against Women Survey estimates that as many as 830,000 men may be victims of some type of domestic abuse each year. This would mean that every 37.8 seconds a man is abused by an intimate partner. How or why is it possible that these 480 professionals or national “experts” could not bring themselves, at least once, to mentionmale victimization? The report itself would not once note a single male victimization.

The majority of contemporary gender feminists and domestic violence advocates can not see male victims because they believe that domestic violence “is” violence against women. They believe that domestic violence is singularly or primarilycaused by patriarchal sexism and the power and control men want to exhibit over women.

If gender feminists were to admit male victimization does occur in large numbers their “patriarchal sexism” theory would fall by the wayside. Hence, their theory has become more important to them than recognizing male victimization as anything other than a “rare” event. As this conference documents, gender feminists are determined not to let the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth be heard.

In fact, for those law enforcement officers who might respond to a domestic violence incident and think that the female may have initiated the abuse and might be the primary aggressor, the report notes on page 7 that the officers must enforce “the primary physical aggressor” concept. The primary physical aggressor concept dictates that the larger and stronger of the people involved in the incident should be the person arrested. This is a sad, painful and shameful code concept for dictating the arrest the male not the female.

What gender feminists are unable or unwilling to understand is that their gender number blame game is driving people many people away from the issue of domestic and dating violence. This is harmful not helpful. Unbiased data document that being a domestic and/or a dating violence abuser or victim, can be problematic for anyone regardless of percentage of victimization, age, gender or sexual orientation.

Gender feminists need to learn how to exhibit equal concern and compassion for our daughters and our sons. Each and every time gender feminists ignore or minimize male victimization they perform a disservice to all victims of abuse.

All victims regardless of severity, frequency or percentage of victimization deserve our compassion and sympathy. No victim, regardless of age, gender or sexual orientation needs to equal half of the total number of victims in order to deserve equal access to services and funding. Perhaps once the gender feminists decide to end their righteousness of cause and their percentage participation gender blame game, more people, both male and female, will become more concerned about and more involved in seeking solutions and providing resolution.

Richard L. Davis