Sex, Lies & Feminism by Peter Zohrab: Chapter 4: Domestic Violence and Men's Catch-22

CHAPTER 7
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE LIES & MEN'S CATCH-22

Introduction
Here's an interesting newspaper snippet:

Hammer attack backfires: A woman was taken to hospital last night with heavy bleeding to her head after attacking her husband with a hammer, ... police said. Her husband held up a rubbish bin and the hammer bounced off, hitting the woman in the head. No charges would be laid. – NZPA1.

This news item was in very fine print and hidden on an inside pages of the newspaper. Had it been a man who suffered as the result of trying to attack his wife, it would have merited headlines on the front page! An equally short article – originating from the Australian Associated Press in Wellington's Dominion newspaper on 29 November 1999 stated:

Scissors in head: A domestic dispute left a New South Wales man with scissors protruding a centimetre into his brain at the weekend. The man, 24, still conscious, was flown from Bathurst to Sydney for surgery.

What is astonishing about this article is that it doesn't mention who the perpetrator was, which made me cynically certain it must have been a woman. It does not mention what action, if any, the police took against the perpetrator. If the perpetrator had been a man and the victim a woman, the article would have been written very differently, with emphasis on the heinousness of the deed and of the perpetrator.

The same approach to the story was taken by Australia's Sydney Morning Herald on the same day. It seems clear that (male and female) Feminists in positions of power (such as journalists) abuse their power, tailoring information, and access to information, in whatever ways suit their political goals. Thus deprived of information that depicts women as perpetrators and men as victims of domestic violence, the public at large is that much more likely to be conned by the one-sided propaganda on this subject that comes from overtly Feminist sources. This includes conning legislators, the police, judges and juries. Only against this background does it make any sense that the USA has a "Violence Against Women Act" on its statute-books !

As I explain elsewhere (in the chapter on the Media University Complex), the mass media is blatantly biased against men. As another example, the world's media (e.g. the Wellington Dominion newspaper on 15 April 1999) reported how music celebrity Whitney Houston publicly announced she was the one who hit her husband, and not vice versa. Reportedly, her husband was arrested for battery against other women, but there were no suggestions from third parties that Whitney Houston should be arrested for battery – she is a woman, after all!

The objective statistics show men and women hit each other about equally. See Fiebert's extensive annotated bibliography at: www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm -- except that women are starting to hit men more often than vice versa, because they now know that the police will almost certainly not arrest them for it !

On page 237 of the Handbook of Family Violence, edited by Vincent B. Van Hasselt (Plenum, 1998), Steinmetz and Lucca report that men were battered by their wives by a 1.47 : 1.0 margin. Similarly, the Guardian Weekly, in February 1999, reported a British Home Office study that showed that "men ... are just as likely as women to be assaulted by a partner." And, in a study in New Zealand (Moffitt, T., A. Caspi, and P. Silva (1996): "Findings about Partner Violence: from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study" (MS)), it was also found men and women assault each other equally frequently in the home.

When journalists talk about bias in the media, they tend to focus on the red herring of the political bias of the owners of the media. Journalists seldom criticise their own bias. Media owners, however, are usually more interested in making money than pushing a particular political line. Editorials and leading articles may, in some cases, be conservative in tone, but it is the selective reporting and highlighting of anti-male news (such as items on domestic violence) and the slanted coverage, using Feminist jargon, by rank-and-file journalists which is the most influential form of media bias. Because it is not as obvious as the bias in an editorial or leading article, the rest of us are hard pressed to guard against it or filter it out.

In a 1999 report about US Congressional hearings on the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) he issued to the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, Stuart Miller writes:

"Afterward, the media only interviewed the battered women's advocates and refused to accept any studies or comment that did not support the 'need' for more VAWA money....One reporter rolled her eyes at the thought that any men have been deprived of their children because of false allegations...and sneered at the men who suggested such 'an absurd proposition.' "

Here we will examine these issues in some detail. Sommers (1994, page 10) states:

"For the past two decades, ... the study of spousal violence has become synonymous with the term 'wife abuse'.... The reason for this misnomer is due to almost exclusive focus of research on husband-to-wife abuse because of the high visibility of females as victims of family violence.... The shelter movement has also made it possible for researchers to have a ready made sampling base comprised of women who were willing to provide testimonies of the abuse they endured."

Domestic Violence is a weapon in the Feminist arsenal. Feminism is now a self-perpetuating industry in the western world, and it is trying to use the United Nations and other organisations, such as World Vision, to establish itself throughout the world. For this purpose, they require a steady supply of issues and problems for its army of researchers, politicians, bureaucrats, journalists and social workers to work on – often at taxpayer expense. These problems and issues usually have the following characteristics:

1. They cast women – and possibly children – in the role of victims;
2. They cast men in the role of miscreants;
3. They can be used to make men feel guilty and put them onto the defensive;
4. Any responsibility on the part of women is downplayed or even ignored.

Rape, Child Sexual Abuse and Domestic Violence are three classic instances of this sort of Feminist issue. The Feminist view of Domestic Violence focuses on the male as perpetrator and the female as victim. This feeds on myths perpetrated by books and films such as "Once Were Warriors," an internationally known New Zealand film based on a novel by a Maori man about violence in a New Zealand Maori family. Maori women in New Zealand have been quick to accept this fiction as a portrayal of the reality of domestic violence in New Zealand families, and this has inspired them with seemingly righteous anger against people like myself who portray a balanced picture of domestic violence. Some of these Maori women have gone so far as to scratch my car and limit my participation in the Wellington (New Zealand) "Fathers, Families, and the Future" event in April 1999. There was even one incident, where a woman seemingly deliberately rammed my car (at the driver's door) at a roundabout – coming at me from another lane in the roundabout, despite my hooting at her, as I saw her coming a couple of seconds beforehand !

Domestic Violence lies
There are five main Domestic Violence lies which Feminists typically imply rather than state:

1. There is a syndrome called "Battered Woman's Syndrome";
2. Men commit much more Domestic Violence than women do;
3. Men start most or all incidents of Domestic Violence;
4. Men can do more damage to women than women can do to men, and therefore only men should be restrained or punished;
5. If a man has been accused/convicted of Domestic Violence, this should be grounds for restricting his access to his children if separation or divorce takes place.

Battered Woman's Syndrome
The "Battered Woman Syndrome" originated in the Jennifer Patri case in 1977. Syndromes are nebulous patterns of symptoms or behaviour which lend themselves to political manipulation. The book (The Battered Woman by Lenore Walker, New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1979), which first popularised and justified the notion, is junk science. This can be seen from the following excerpt from a review by Robert Sheaffer:

We have all heard of the 'Battered Woman Syndrome' which originated with this book.... The Battered Woman is unsatisfactory as a serious work, and completely unacceptable as a foundation for family law. First, it is profoundly unscholarly. Without objective verification of the incidents herein described, they are nothing more than hearsay. Second, the book does not even pretend to be objective: the woman's side, and only the woman's side, is presented, when it is undeniable that in a large percentage of cases, the woman initiates violence against the man. Third, Prof. Walker's expanded definition of "battering" that includes verbal abuse does not even address the issue of female verbal abuse of men. Fourth, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that Prof. Walker's sample of 'battered women' is in any way a representative sample, and even if it were, she presents no statistics to support her conclusions. In fact, most of her conclusions are utterly unsupported by any kind of hard data, and are simply pronounced ex cathedra.2

Professor Walker (and the wretched quality of her work shows how deceptive the title "Professor" can be) maintained there was a "syndrome" whereby a female victim of Domestic Violence was made psychologically incapable of leaving the relationship. This may or may not be true, but her unscholarly work certainly does not prove it. Karen Horney previously described what could be called the "Masochistic Woman Syndrome," which might be seen as a less anti-male way of describing the same phenomenon. And no doubt it is quite possible for a person – male or female – to be subjected to repeated psychological or physical abuse in a relationship yet be constrained by various considerations from leaving the relationship. Some of these might include:

1. fear of what their partner might do if they left;
2. concern for possible effects on children;
3. fear of loneliness;
4. concern about the reactions of families and friends;
5. reluctance to open up private, sordid details to the scrutiny of others.

To lump all this into a "syndrome" and give it a name like "Battered Woman Syndrome" is a useful way of creating a stick with which to beat men, but it has to be seen as the political ploy that it is. For centuries, men have complained about nagging wives, but men in the West are practically forbidden to complain about women in public – otherwise we would now perhaps also be reading about a "Nagged Husband Syndrome."

Feminist writers (e.g., Leibrich et al. 1995, Ferraro 1979, and Walker 1984) often state that women find psychological abuse much harder to live with than physical abuse. An official leaflet explains the legal prohibition against psychological violence as meaning "nobody is allowed to use intimidation, threats, or mind games to hurt and control another person."3

In Feminist accounts of Domestic Violence, emphasis is always laid on men's presumed greater physical strength. Feminists never mention how much better women generally are at using verbal weapons than men. But the book Brain Sex, by Anne Moir and David Jessel, states:

The language skills related to grammar, spelling and writing are all more specifically located in the left-hand side of the brain in a woman. In a man they are spread in the front and back of his brain, and so he will have to work harder than a woman to achieve these skills. (page 45)

Also, Deborah Tannen's 1990 book, You Just Don't Understand, claims women more commonly do their talking in intimate contexts while men do most of their talking in group contexts. This makes women more skilled at manipulating men verbally than vice versa, according to her.

I have seen research evidence that women tend to view talking as an end in itself, whereas men tend to talk only if there is a specific reason to. Similarly, females predominate in people-centred occupations and in the study of language-centred academic subjects. There is also evidence that women are much better at reading emotions from people's faces and body-language than men. Which explains why women are more proficient at psychological abuse (especially psychological threats and mind games) than men.

In the Feminist propaganda about Domestic Violence, the focus in on the supposed actions of the men. The reasons they do what they do (if they do it) are never mentioned. It is as if domestic violence were the only human activity which occurred totally without cause. In fact, of course, there are frequently patterns of behaviour in the "victim" which provoked the violence in the first place. These provocative behaviours are just as much a "syndrome" as any "battered wife syndrome." (See the discussion of related issues at www.backlash.com/book/domv.html.)

Who commits most of the violence?
Extreme Feminists claim men commit most domestic violence, but, as noted at the beginning of this chapter the evidence refutes their contentions. Straus and Gelles (1986), for example, showed men and women commit just as much physical Domestic Violence as the other. Moffitt, Caspi and Silva (1996) do likewise. Sewell and Sewell (1997), as another example, report statistics showing that women perpetrate even more domestic violence than men do. 4

Feminists falsify and distort Domestic Violence statistics and everybody needs to know they can't necessarily trust the ethics of Feminist researchers. In 1997, I wrote a letter to my country's Minister of Police – alleging, amongst other things, that the Ministry of Women's Affairs had caused questions in a domestic violence questionnaire to be slanted.5 Because of all the counterevidence to their woman-as-victim approach, Feminists have been rushing around trying to conceal these findings or explain them away in a manner that fits in with their political need to reserve victim status for women. There is an example of that sort of Feminist reasoning at
www.vix.com/pub/men/battery/studies/lkates.html.

Feminist writers on Domestic Violence from Lenore Walker onward have mentioned how many women find psychological abuse even worse than physical abuse. This view has found itself into legislation. Here is the initial part of a legislative definition of Domestic Violence:

SECT. 3. MEANING OF "DOMESTIC VIOLENCE-
(1) In this Act, "domestic violence", in relation to any person, means violence against that person by any other person with whom that person is, or has been, in a domestic relationship.
(2) In this section, "violence" means-
(a) Physical abuse:
(b) Sexual abuse:
(c) Psychological abuse, including, but not limited to,–
(i) Intimidation:
(ii) Harassment:
(iii) Damage to property:
(iv) Threats of physical abuse, sexual abuse, or psychological abuse:
(v) In relation to a child, abuse of the kind set out in subsection (3) of this section.

Here it is clear that actual physical injury does not need to occur, so it is up to the police and the courts to determine how serious any alleged cases of Domestic Violence are, and whether prosecution or conviction are warranted.

And in the UK, according to the BBC's World TV on Sunday, 26 November 1995, "domestic violence" was (and probably still is) defined as violence by a man on a woman.6 So a woman can/could do anything at all to a man in the UK, and legally it is impossible to consider it "domestic violence." This demonstrates why it is not particularly useful to focus on legal definitions in force at particular times in particular places. It also shows how biased the extreme Feminists are who push this sort of legislation through legislatures in western countries.

Liz Kates (www.vix.com/pub/men/battery/studies/lkates.html) states that the Feminist concept of spousal abuse involves a pattern and dynamic of behaviour where the victims are 95% female. The facts do not support this but prove the prejudice of the researchers behind it. Moreover, Erin Pizzey (1997) makes it clear the Feminist community ostracizes women who are pro-fairness.

Subjective science?
Anyone who has studied the Philosophy and History of Science and takes an interest in scientific matters knows that the creation of hypotheses and theories can be a highly subjective process. It often takes a lot of time, much testing and argument to decide the issue between rival theories. Despite the fact that counting blows between domestic partners should be a fairly objective process, such rigour is not practiced by Feminist ideologues.

Since the Battered Woman Syndrome is one of Feminism's strategic weapons in the Sex War, whatever the findings of the researchers may be, the Feminist media and the politicians will, by and large, only take note of the findings promoted by Feminist pressure-groups. Masculists are heavily out-gunned by the Feminists, who often enjoy taxpayer support in ministries of Women's Affairs, university departments of Women's Studies, and the like.

So, when Feminists such as Liz Kates say men are not subject to systematic abuse perpetrated by their wives, they are talking from belief rather than knowledge. Feminists have not taken the slightest interest in men's experiences of Domestic Violence (or anything else), so they have no data on which to base their assertions. Those who do examine domestic violence objectively, such as Gelles, come to the conclusion men are indeed the victims of this sort of abuse – just as women are. The "syndrome" will include as many – if not more – men, when gender is ignored and only other factors are considered. Hence, it's better for everybody if we deal with these issues rationally rather than turning everything into a gender war. Then we can focus on solving problems where now the system tears families apart.

Does anybody give a DUAM about men?
There is a deep-seated psychological unwillingness in both sexes to treat women and men equally when they are in violent confrontation. Part of this is what I call " Dykismo's Unholy Alliance with Machismo (DUAM)." The machismo of men (e.g., policemen, psychologists, lawyers, judges, etc.) makes them want to protect women from men, and the “dykismo” of Lesbian Feminists (who are the powerhouse of the Feminists’ Sex War army) also makes them want to protect women from men.

I am not attacking Lesbianism as such, here. The sexual habits of Lesbians are one issue, and their political power in the Sex War is another. It has been a struggle for many people in the West to be reprogrammed into realising that people of other races and sexual orientations are not inferior or evil. However, having made that transition in their thought-patterns, many people over-correct, and find themselves unable to criticise anyone of a different race or sexual orientation. This is what gives Lesbian Feminists their power.

I'd like to give some examples of what I mean here, because this is a very serious problem. My examples come from the Machismo side of the DUAM, but the same sort of remarks apply equally well to the Dykismo side of the phenomenon. On November 19th 1999, I went to see Mr. J. J. Taylor, Family Violence Prevention Coordinator at Police national headquarters, Wellington, New Zealand. I asked to see the Police Commissioner himself, but was put on to Mr. Taylor as the most appropriate person for the topic that I wanted to discuss.

The reason I decided to talk to the police about this issue (I had been working in the same building that housed the police national headquarters for 12 years) was that I had just come across the Fiebert Bibliography. That bibliography's summary states:

This bibliography examines 95 scholarly investigations, 79 empirical studies and 16 reviews and/or analyses, which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners. The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies exceeds 60,000. (www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm)

Armed with this ironclad evidence the Feminists were lying about Domestic Violence, I arranged a meeting. On the telephone, he agreed there was a disparity between what academic research said about the roles of males and females in Domestic Violence, and what the media said. But he changed his tune when we met.

At the meeting itself, which was held in the (apparently empty) cafeteria rather than in a meeting-room, it turned out he believed the standard Feminist explanation for the above-mentioned discrepancy, and handed me some police statistics and other information on Domestic Violence arrests. I handed him a copy of the Fiebert bibliography, then spoke about the six (minor) workplace assaults I had been the victim of over the past 12 years at the hands of three females – just four floors above where we were sitting (I didn't mention the sexual harassment or intimidation I had suffered in addition to those straightforward assaults). He covered his mouth with his hand as if he was covering an itch to smile. Certainly, the expression in his eyes suggested he was smiling! And I must admit my own instinctive reaction is also to smile when hearing about female assaults on males (the DUAM, again!), but it was significant to see this reaction from someone in his position in the field of domestic violence.

Then he asked me if all the research I had read showed that women and men hit each other equally frequently, and I said not every single one. I recalled, in particular, the 1996 New Zealand National Survey of Crime Victims, commissioned by the Victimisation Survey Committee, comprising representatives from the Police, Ministry of Women's Affairs, and other government agencies. However, I pointed out that the relevant questionnaire had been slanted – possibly on the initiative of the Ministry of Women's Affairs – to make it appear men hit women more frequently than the other way around. Moreover, Mr. Taylor could not explain the questions' slant. The questionnaire (from Table 2.13) did not ask men and women simply whether:

1. Any partner ever actually used force or violence on you, such as deliberately kicked, pushed, grabbed, shoved you or hit you with something; or
2. Any partner ever threatened to use force or violence on you such as threatened to kick, push, grab, or shove you; or
3. Any partner ever deliberately destroyed or threatened to destroy your belongings.

Instead of those straightforward question, the questionnaire asked whether:

1. Any partner ever actually used force or violence on you, such as deliberately kicked, pushed, grabbed, shoved you or hit you with something in a way that could hurt you; and
2. Any partner ever threatened to use force or violence on you such as threatened to kick, push, grab, or shove you in a way that actually frightened you; and
3. Any partner ever deliberately destroyed or threatened to destroy your belongings in a way that frightened you.

The bias against men responding positively is immediately obvious, since men are socialised to downplay fear and to be relatively insensitive to pain. This was confirmed by data from another table (page 81) in the very same survey, which showed that 50.5 percent of women, as compared to only 31.4 percent of men, reported experiencing fear when on the receiving end of a violent offence. So the results of this survey are useless as evidence of the comparative incidence of domestic violence committed by women, as compared to men. I cannot think of any reason for the questions being framed in that way, except in order to make women appear to be more frequent victims of family violence than men are. The focus is women's subjective experience of events, rather than the events themselves.

Then Mr. Taylor mentioned the other relevant New Zealand survey on this topic – "Findings About Partner Violence" by Moffitt, Caspi and Silva (1996), which showed the same thing as the overseas studies – that women hit men at least as often as men hit women.

However, Feminists are not to be outdone by mere facts, and this is where Mr. Taylor came out with his most telling statement. I can't quote him verbatim, but what he said was more or less that you can't just count "hits" in that way, and that, in one case referred to by Moffitt (et al), the woman had kicked the man because he was holding her by the throat. The implication was, of course, that she was acting in self-defence.

So I asked Mr. Taylor why the man had held the woman by the throat, but he just replied, "Because he was assaulting her !"

This is exactly what I mean by the DUAM - Feminists and police officers like Mr. Taylor follow the chain of causation only just far enough back to establish (to their satisfaction) that the woman is the innocent party in such circumstances.

So I repeated this little dialogue between Mr. Taylor and myself back to Mr. Taylor, and I accused him of being biased against men, and said I would quote him. He then accused me of quoting him out of context (which is absurd, since we were still in the same context) ! Then I offered to retrace the conversation, in order to give him a chance to clarify what he had meant, but he refused. He just added - implausibly to me - that this sort of bias would never stand up in a real courtroom to the detriment of any man. But this is exactly what I am sure does happen again and again to countless men all over the western world. Only an unusual combination of client and lawyer would uncover such bias in a courtroom. In fact, exactly this sort of bias was shown by a Judge Adams in a programme on the Family Court that was broadcast on Television New Zealand in 2001 – to the detriment of a Polynesian man's access to his child (See the chapter on the Justice System)..

I was absolutely aghast and yet felt triumphant - here were the exact allegations of police and Feminist bias which I had discussed and read about in theory, coming to live in the flesh and blood of the head of domestic violence policy in the country where I live ! A few months later, after publicising that incident, I heard from a judge (Judge Carruthers, who was meeting with men's groups about Family Court issues) that Mr. Taylor had left the position he was holding when I interviewed him.

Lesbians as Activists
There is no denying many Feminists are not lesbians, particularly now that Feminism is so mainstream in western societies. But Lesbian Feminists are still at the cutting edge of man-hatred (misandry), and they frequently work behind the scenes, letting the photogenic heterosexual Feminists pose in the limelight. It is important not to be naïve about this, because there are a lot of Feminists who are intelligent enough to see how having obviously butch spokeswomen creates poor Public Relations. Anyone who has taken an interest in the Women's Refuge and Rape Crisis movements, for example, will have seen how they have largely replaced their Lesbian spokeswomen with apparently heterosexual women. But it would be naïve to assume the Lesbians have somehow disappeared or been overthrown in some sort of coup d'etat.

It is not my intention to attack Lesbianism as a lifestyle, as I have stated previously. Too many men in the international Men's/Fathers' movement are homophobic, already. However, my point here is to lay bare part of what I see as the Psychohistory of Feminism. Lesbians are of course subject to oppression, but they also use this to garner sympathy from politically correct communities, such as western bureaucracies, while they get on with the business of drafting anti-male legislation. There is a difference between attacking what Lesbians do in their private life and attacking what they do politically.

It certainly fits with the self-interest of Lesbians to be Feminist. And it is from Lesbians I have experienced some of the most marked physical intimidation, discrimination against pro-men views, and the most extreme reactions against anti-Feminist statements. If you know that a TV news producer is a Lesbian, for example, it is a cast-iron guarantee she will be biased against men's issues. If she is merely a heterosexual Feminist, the likelihood she is biased against men is somewhat reduced.

Catch-22
The result of the power of Feminist pressure-groups and the DUAM is to put men – all heterosexual men – into a Catch-22 (i.e. No-Win) situation. If a man's wife or female partner abuses him psychologically or physically, he is unable to retaliate. If he retaliates, the DUAM will arrest him and put him in jail, the Family Court will impose a court order preventing him from contacting her, give her custody of the children, severely limit his access to his children and give her sole right to live in the family home. So if third-party intervention is not possible or is unsuccessful, he just has to either put up with the abuse or leave the relationship – to the detriment of his children's and his own emotional health and (probably) standard of living. If anything is a "syndrome," this Catch-22 is one.

To give some concrete examples, I know a man whose glasses had just been broken by his wife, so he rang the police to ask for help. The policeman asked if she had "hit" him or "punched" him. The complainant refused to answer this question because he didn't know what the difference was between "punching" and "hitting", and he suspected that the policeman was just trying to disprove him: If he said "punched", he expected that the policeman would says something stupid like, "Women can't punch." The officer insisted, however, on getting an answer to this question and when no answer was forthcoming he hung up! In today's political climate in western countries, it is inconceivable that the police would treat a female complainant that way. But males have no rights in such situations.

An acquaintance told me about another incident when, after a domestic dispute, the police interviewed him and his wife in their home. His wife said he had hit her and the police duly wrote that down in their notebook, but when he said she had hit him the police wrote nothing down.

Here's a further example: an advertisement, entitled "Family Violence is a crime," and authorised by the President of the Police Managers' Guild, appeared in a daily newspaper.7 It portrayed only women and children as victims of this crime, omitting any mention of the possibility men could also be victims of Family Violence. Not only is it a sexist advertisement in its own right, but also frightening testimony to how little chance men have of being treated fairly by the Justice system. The police have no chance of reducing the incidence of domestic violence so long as they insist in driving men into a corner and treating them as guilty until proven innocent.

For example, in New Zealand there is an organisation called "Victim Support" which, as its name implies, supports crime victims. A woman there attacked a man for repeatedly doing noisy "wheelies" with his car on the street in front of her house. She threw things at him and menaced him with a stick. Yet, despite that it was the woman who assaulted the man, the police intervened on her side and Victim Support called to offer psychological support to her family. Moreover, when I was assaulted outside a supermarket in the same city, my glasses were broken and I received cuts that required stitches, but did Victim Support call? No. Evidently, such organisations (or the police who refer people to them) work according to the unwritten rule that only women are victims and men can look after themselves.

Many men know there's no point calling the police, because they will automatically take the woman's side. This is why it is not valid to use statistics about police call-outs as an indication of the level of domestic violence by women on men, as the former Minister of Justice, Doug (now Sir Douglas) Graham did when a deputation from the New Zealand Men for Equal Rights Association went to see him in 1998.

Doug Graham was proud of his Feminist-inspired domestic violence legislation and maintained he was not stupid (evidently I have a reputation for thinking Feminists are stupid). So I pointed out he was contradicting himself – showing himself to be stupid, by basing his notions of the relative culpability of men and women in domestic violence on the arrest figures! When I explained, he agreed with me. I am certain, however, that his Feminist advisers would have made sure he did not actually do anything based on the fleeting insight he gained that day.

My impression as to how Feminist his ministry is relates to incidents such as the publication of Hitting Home. His Ministry of Justice had been planning to produce a series of studies on domestic violence:

1. Men talking about violence against their female partners;
2. Women talking about violence against their male partners;
3. People talking about violence against their same-sex partners.

But they only produced the first one, Hitting Home. The official reason was they ran out of money. This seems suspicious given the sheer volume of programmes addressing that same issue. Why not focus on female violence for a change? Because Feminist journalists latch onto Feminist-compatible research and turn it into headlines and documentaries, which Feminist politicians then use to push Feminist legislation into Law, I am certain the Feminists in the Ministry of Justice stopped the second and third studies because they did not want the political impact of the first, anti-male report to be at all blunted by publicity about the fact that women (including lesbians) commit domestic violence. See, for example, the webpage: "Gay and Lesbian Same-Sex Domestic Violence Bibliography" (www.xq.com/cuav/dvbibl.htm)

And this DUAM bias is also a problem in the Third World. India, for example, has seen the creation of the "All-India Crime Against Men by Women Front" (Akhil Bharatiya Patni Virodhimorcha), which was founded after the 1988 suicide of Naresh Anand, who had been unable to bear his wife's physical and mental torture. He left behind a note pleading with police to form a special cell to deal with cases of abused husbands, along the lines of the already extant Crimes Against Women cell.

All of this needs to be borne in mind when we read the following excerpt from Liz Kate's email (on the website mentioned above):

'"Who is that [on the phone]!" he demands.
She ignores him, hastily whispering "I gotta go now..."
"GIMME that phone!" he shouts. "Who was that!!"
"It was someone from work."
He dials call return. It's not. "You sniveling lying BITCH," he shrieks, and yanking the phone out, throws it into the wall. "YOU TELL ME WHO THE F- THAT WAS RIGHT NOW," he yells, advancing at her. He picks up a little glass budvase her grandmother gave her and holds it high.
"Nooo, gimme that!" she whines.
"WHO THE F- WAS ON THAT PHONE!!!"
She grabs his arm to save the vase, and he holds it out of her reach.
[She has started the violence, according who touched who first.]
Smash, the vase shatters into a thousand little shards. "You pig," she mutters, nearly inaudible.
"WHAT'D YOU SAY!!! SAY IT AGAIN, BITCH!!!" he screams.
She crouches at the floor, attempting to scoop up glass splinters. He grabs her by the upper arm, bringing her to her feet. She wrenches her arm away, and as he reaches for her again, pushes his forearm away from her.
[Conflict tactics scale: one grab for each, plus a push for her.]
"I WANNA KNOW WHO WAS ON THAT PHONE!" he yells, down, close into her face as she backs away.
"No one..."

[Conflict Tactics Scale: two for two. Nothing but a fair fight... so far...]'

Here it is appropriate to use Liz Kates' own words: "misleading, and nothing short of fraudulent" for her use of the above (presumably real) conflict data. Part of what she is trying to do here is show that counting hits is not the whole picture. I agree. But if she is also trying (as I think she is) to depict this woman as a helpless, innocent victim of male abuse, then this shows how one-sided the misandrist (man-hating) Feminist "experts" on Domestic Violence are.

It is quite clear this man is being subjected – probably over a long period of time – to severe psychological abuse by this woman. She is blatantly lying to him point blank, which is about as extreme a form of Psychological abuse as you can perpetrate in a relationship. She is doing something detrimental to his interests behind his back, such as having an affair or doing her best to give him the impression she is.

Over a long period of time, this would be quite sufficient to drive any man "mad" – mad/angry, or even mad/insane, but the DUAM has no concept of male pyschological suffering. Her psychological abuse precipitated the confrontation yet if they call the police he will be the one they arrest. Indeed, I have ample anecdotal evidence of cases in which men who complained their female partners had attacked them were investigated as cases of domestic violence by the man against the woman! This shows how critical the issue of interpretation is, and how powerless men are in the political and legal processes of the West, when it is the extreme Feminists who are doing most of the interpreting – and teaching their interpretations to the Establishment as fact !.

Murray A. Straus (1997), responding to Feminist criticism of the Conflict Tactics Scale, approvingly quotes Gelles as stating:

"(W)hile the statement is true that men and women hit one other in roughly equal numbers, it cannot be made in a vacuum without the qualifiers that: 1) women are seriously injured at seven times the rate of men; and 2) that women are killed by partners at more than two times the rate of men."

First we should note he is obviously reiterating the Feminist-unfriendly fact that men and women do indeed hit one other in roughly equal numbers. Only if we expect abused men to shrug off their abuse, however – "take it like a man" and not defend themselves – are his other two points truly relevant. But can we reasonably expect men to let an abusive woman rage simply because she may (in many cases) be physically weaker? Don't men have a right to defend themselves, too? Whatever happened to the notion of equality?

The fact that women are more likely than men to be killed in acts of domestic violence needs to be investigated in detail and addressed with grave concern, not as a gender issue, but a social problem. Moreover, our investigation should ignore the age of the victim lest we overlook the many male infants murdered by their mothers. (It is a sad truth that when age is excluded as a factor there are nearly as many male as female perpetrators of domestic homicide in the U.S. -- A grim equality.)8

The actual numbers and proportions will of course vary from country to country, but it is interesting to read the "Most Recent US Spousal Murder Statistics" web-page
. (www.kidpower.org/stats/stats2.html).

Although more husbands were convicted of murdering their wives than the converse (156 wives, but 275 husbands), this might well be a feature of anti-male judicial bias, since:

1. the average sentence for spousal murder (excluding the death penalty and life sentences) for men was 16.5 years, whereas it was only 6 years for women;
2. 94 percent of husbands, but only 81% of wives, received a prison sentence on conviction for spousal murder;
3. "Victim Provocation" was given as a defense in 44% of the wives' trials, but only in 10% of the husbands' trials. This does not mean the husbands were not provoked – it just means that the DUAM makes it much harder for men to make a claim of provocation with judges and juries.

Who starts the Domestic Violence?
The police should investigate Domestic Violence like any other alleged crime, find out who started it and then concentrate on warning or punishing that person. At present, police in some countries are trained to automatically punish the man, because they are told only men commit abuse and any violence by women is simply retaliation to abuse by the man, and men are supposed to be capable of inflicting more damage than women.

Men who are beaten by their wives are treated with contempt or derision, so they know they can only rely on their own strength in domestic disputes – the police will always be on the woman's side. In New Zealand, for example, there are three kinds of Assault offences that men can be charged with:

1. Common Assault;
2. Assault on a Female;
3. Aggravated Assault.

A man convicted of "Assault on a Female" is subject to a higher maximum penalty than one convicted of Common Assault. This sends a clear signal to all men and women that the legal system is sexist and operates an anti-male double-standard.

What is the relevance of Domestic Violence to the Family Court?
A record of domestic violence against a partner (i.e., violence between adults) should not be taken into account when deciding custody and access issues, because it is not relevant. It also discriminates against fathers' chances of getting custody and access because the police, as we have seen, are biased against men. Indeed, domestic violence might even occur when a father suspects his partner is neglecting or abusing his children but he lacks the evidence to prove it in court. He might notice they are looking unwell, listless, etc., but the children might be too afraid of the consequences to say what their mother has been doing. If he defends them from her, he risks losing his children to the mother's inadequate care, which is what caused the problems in the first place!

Conclusion
The Feminist line on domestic violence is official policy in many countries. As one Women's Refuge worker put it in Contact newspaper (July 22, 1999), talking about the changes she noticed during the past 15 years:

"One of the main things that struck me is that the police attitude has got much better. Our work is known and the various agencies are working together."

The specific Feminist Catch-22 on domestic violence is that women are always in the right, no matter what they do:

1. Men who hit their wives are deemed to do it without provocation and without reason – and therefore without excuse. This issue is never raised by Feminists.
2. Women are deemed never to hit their husbands (the issue is never spontaneously raised by Feminists) – or, if women do hit their husbands, Feminists (when Feminists are forced to agree that women do do this) take the line that they only do it justifiably.
3. When Feminists admit men are also abused by women, they claim only women suffer from a "syndrome" of domestic abuse. In other words, women are allowed to use the excuse of a "syndrome" as a defence when they murder their husbands.
4. When women murder their menfolk, there is usually some excuse or justification (e.g., domestic violence by the man in their lives).
5. When men murder their womenfolk, they are not allowed to claim the woman's behaviour was a justifying factor.
6. When women murder their men, the cause is often deemed to be domestic violence, but when men murder their women, this murder is deemed to be an instance of domestic violence.

Men and fair-minded women must campaign together against women-only defences and men-only crimes. Feminists have been steadily working toward the goal of getting all women treated as innocent victims, no matter what they have done – and all men treated as criminals, no matter if they are innocent.

Anti-male bias doesn't just infect the police – it is particularly strong in the media, who pass it on to the whole of western society. For example, there was a letter to TIME magazine, published on January 20, 1997, in which Richard M. Riffe, Assistant Prosecutor of Boone County, Madison, West Virginia, complains about the biased way in which TIME wrote up a case involving a woman who murdered her husband.9

As far as public attitudes are concerned, here are two examples:

1. A newspaper advertisement for a stage show called "Full Marx" quoted a review of the show by one Ralph McAllister, which ended with the words, "So take your family, wallop your husband (my emphasis), even bring along the great dane, but make sure you see Full Marx!10

2. A cartoon (in French) which the mainly female staff of the Language department of a school thought suitable to post prominently on a wall in the 1990's. This cartoon told the story of a woman who threw a plate of breakfast at her husband and then left him on the grounds he was lazy and had asked for breakfast in bed. This is Domestic Violence, but because it was committed by a woman, it was not only considered innocuous, but some of the teachers even decorated it with comments such as, "Very good!" and "Serves him right!" (in French).11

I'd also like to briefly raise the issue of PMT (Premenstrual Tension), or PMS (Premenstrual Syndrome). The role of PMT in domestic violence needs research. It would be ironic, but typical of modern societies, if PMT were (as is quite possible) a major cause of physical and psychological abuse of men by women, which then led to men being arrested because of DUAM bias in the Establishment.

We need to investigate the power relationship, as well. What does it do for the relative power of men and women in a relationship if the woman can say and do what she likes, in the sure knowledge that if the worst comes to the worst she will get the children, an income from the taxpayer, and at least half the joint assets, while he will have restricted or no access to his children, a jail term and child-support bills? That is the bottom line in modern western heterosexual relationships.

The man has to either defer to the woman, walk out of the relationship or run the risk of the worst-case becoming a reality. The United States divorce rate in 1988 was the fourth-highest in the world, according to the UN Demographic yearbook. And there has been research in that country which found that the marriages that last the longest are those in which the husband always gives way to the wife! So the extreme Feminist domestic violence campaign has also got to be seen as a tool for replacing a social system based on the nuclear family with a Matriarchal society comprised of single mothers and fatherless children.

For more on this topic, see "Femi-Fascism Flourishes," by Cassandra Hewitt-Reid, at the free radical website. (www.freeradical.co.nz/content/37/37hewittreid.html).