Slate.com & Salon.com Criticize the Fatherhood Movement (Part V)
November 9th, 2009 by Glenn Sacks, MA for Fathers & Families
Two major online publications--Salon.com and Slate.com--recently did articles criticizing the men's and fathers movement. Whenever the fatherhood movement and its opponents clash directly, there is an opportunity for all on both sides to listen and learn, so I'm writing several posts on these two articles.
My first two posts dealt largely with a misleading quote attributed to me in both pieces, and the two publications' commendable agreement to clarify it. In Part III, Part IV, this post, and others, we'll deal more with the arguments made by Kathryn Joyce of Double X/Slate.com and Judy Berman of Salon.com.
Both Joyce and Berman are feminist writers who consider themselves opponents of the fatherhood movement. Joyce writes:
MRA groups base their battered men arguments largely on the research of a small group of social scientists who claim that domestic violence between couples is equally divided, just unequally reported. Most notable are the studies conducted by sociologist Murray Straus of the University of New Hampshire, who has written extensively on female violence...Straus’ research is starting to move public opinion. A Los Angeles conference this July dedicated to discussing male victims of domestic violence, “From Ideology to Inclusion 2009: New Directions in Domestic Violence Research and Intervention,” received positive mainstream press for its “inclusive” efforts.
The conference, which took place in June, not July, wasn't simply "inclusive"--it represented a lot of the best research and current researchers in the field of domestic violence. Joyce doesn't mention that Straus was one of the pioneers in the field of domestic violence research, and that he was once hailed by the feminist movement for his efforts on behalf of battered women.
Joyce writes:
Jack Straton, a Portland State University professor and member of Oregon’s Attorney General's Sexual Assault Task Force, argues that Straus critically fails to distinguish between the intent and effect of violence, equating “a woman pushing a man in self-defense to a man pushing a woman down the stairs,” or a single act of female violence with years of male abuse...
These are false and have been leveled for years. Straus distinguishes between serious and minor violence, between self-defense and unprovoked attack, between an aberrant act of domestic violence and a continued pattern of it. And in Straus's work, even by women's own self-reports, female violence against men is a significant problem.
Joyce writes:
All in all, advocates say that cherry-picked studies from researchers like Straus, touted by the MRAs, amount to what Edward Gondolf, director of research for the Mid-Atlantic Addiction Research and Training Institute, calls “bad science.” Statistics suggesting gender parity in abuse are taken out of necessary context, they say, ignoring distinctions between the equally divided “common couple violence” and the sort of escalated, continuing violence known as battery—which is 85 percent male-perpetrated—as well as the disparate injuries inflicted by men and women.
They're hardly cherry-picked--one could not find any randomized survey of domestic violence that did not find that women initiate DV at a significant rate. The only way to arrive at a figure like 85-15 (or the "3 or 4%" figure also used in the Joyce and Berman pieces) is to cite crime statistics or calls to domestic violence service providers. Men don't call the police for a variety of reasons, including that they fear they will be arrested for their female partners' violence. They don't call DV service providers in part because they feel they won't be helped.
Both of these issuers are borne out by research. In The violence we ignore (Baltimore Sun, 7/16/09), Dr. Holstein and I wrote:
Denise Hines of Clark University found that when an abused man calls the police, the police were more likely to arrest him than to arrest his abusive female partner. This is partly the result of primary aggressor laws. Primary aggressor laws encourage police to discount who initiated and committed the violence but instead look at other factors (such as size and strength) that make them more likely to arrest men.
When the men in Ms. Hines' study tried calling domestic violence hot lines, 64 percent were told that they only helped women, and more than half were referred to programs for male DV perpetrators.
Commendably, Emily Toothman, a spokesperson for the National Domestic Violence Hotline, a major, mainstream domestic violence organization, recently called abused men a "relatively unidentified population" and told a reporter:
"Many male victims/survivors do not report or discuss the abuse against them. In light of this, these numbers should not be used as an extensive study of male domestic violence victims in our country."
Two dozen states have primary aggressor type laws. Under the predominant aggressor doctrine, when police officers respond to a domestic disturbance call, they are instructed not to focus on who attacked whom and who inflicted the injuries, but instead consider different factors which will almost always weigh against men. These factors include: comparable size; comparable strength; the person allegedly least likely to be afraid; who has access to or control of family resources (i.e., who makes more money); and others. Given these factors, it is very difficult for officers to arrest female offenders. To learn more, see my co-authored column Maine’s Adoption of Predominant Aggressor Doctrine in DV Arrests Will Ensnare Innocent Men (Lewiston Sun Journal, 8/5/07).
Joyce writes:
MRA critics say the organizational recapitulation of abusive tactics should be no surprise, considering the wealth of movement leaders with records or accusations of violence, abuse, harassment, or failure to pay child support.
Really? Who? Please provide the names of the "wealth of movement leaders" who have been found by a court to be violent.
Joyce writes:
Some advocates call MRA groups “the abuser’s lobby,” because of members like Jason Hutch, the Buckingham Palace fathers’ rights “Batman,” who has been estranged from three mothers of his children and was taken to court for threatening one of his ex-wives.
Another Joyce misspelt name--that's "Hatch," not "Hutch." According to Hatch, there were no "threats," but instead a long-running and emotional dispute over his access to his children, which he claimed his ex-wife refused to allow. I don't know which one of them was telling the truth--ask Joyce, I'm sure she'll tell you all about it.
Joyce writes:
Within the ranks of the men’s rights movement, vigilante “resisters” are regularly nominated and lionized for acts of violence perceived to be in opposition to a feminist status quo
A handful of internet lunatics say something stupid--this is hardly the "ranks" of the men's/fathers' movement.
I'm writing several posts about the issues raised in the Slate.com and Salon.com articles--to read the others, click here. The two articles are Kathryn Joyce's "Men's Rights" Groups Have Become Frighteningly Effective (Slate.com, 11/5/09) and Judy Berman's "Men's rights" groups go mainstream--Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability (Salon.com, 11/5/09).
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November 9th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
These are false and have been leveled for years. Straus distinguishes between serious and minor violence, between self-defense and unprovoked attack, between an aberrant act of domestic violence and a continued pattern of it. And in Straus's work, even by women's own self-reports, female violence against men is a significant problem.
wow very well written
November 9th, 2009 at 10:51 pm
Kathryn Joyce and Judy Berman have no idea what they're talking about or are lying when they say the 50/50 research comes from a "small number of researchers." It's the overwhelming research out there, now well over 200 studies and growing. http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
And of course Kathryn Joyce and Judy Berman ignore the recent well-controlled study funded by the Centers for Disease Control that examined heterosexual relationships throughout the U.S. and found: "Almost 24% of all relationships had some violence, and half (49.7%) of those were reciprocally violent. In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases." http://www.ajph.org/cgi/content/abstract/97/5/941
It also found:
"More women than men (25% versus 11%) were responsible. In fact, 71 percent of the instigators in nonreciprocal partner violence were women" and "while injury was more likely when violence was perpetrated by men, in relationships with reciprocal violence it was the men who were injured more often (25% of the time) than were women (20% of the time)," as reported by the American Psychiatric Association at http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/42/15/31-a
November 9th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
Wow, this woman has no shame whatsoever. Plays very dirty and is intentionally misleading and fast and loose with the facts as she knows them. I love these vague "considering the number of them that are abusive, blah blah" statements. Clear enough to villify but vague enough to avoid libel suits. Man, she's dirty. Why not just start saying things like "considering the number of feminists leaders that abuse their children" or "taking into account how many leaders of the feminist movement have tried to poison their husbands". Why not fight fire with fire? They outfund and outgun us. They are freakin' nuts.
November 9th, 2009 at 11:29 pm
Yeah men's rights groups are nuts, only it just so happens they're forming literally all over the world on every continent, and that International Men's Day (IMD), first proposed by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1999 at a UN Conference in Vienna, was inaugurated in 1999 in Trinidad and Tobago and received principal support from men's groups in USA, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. And, speaking on behalf of UNESCO, Director of Women and Culture of Peace Ingeborg Breines said: “This is an excellent idea and would give some gender balance.” The objectives of IMD include focusing on men's and boy's health, improving gender relations, promoting gender equality, and highlighting positive male role models. "It is an occasion for men to highlight discrimination against them and to celebrate their achievements and contributions, in particular for their contributions to community, family, marriage, and child care." IMD is celebrated in Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Australia, India, United States, Singapore, United Kingdom, Malta, and South Africa on November 19, and global support for the celebration is broad.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Men's_Day
http://www.zimbio.com/IN+SEARCH+OF+FATHERHOOD/articles/16/MEN+INTERNATIONAL+MEN+DAY+IMPORTANT+SEARS
November 9th, 2009 at 11:40 pm
"Wow, this woman has no shame whatsoever. Plays very dirty and is intentionally misleading and fast and loose with the facts as she knows them."
Since this is Slate (Washington Post) and Salon, my question is, where are their editors? Where are their ombudsman?
I don't think the editor or ombudsman would correct anything, but I think it would be very useful to go to them, document the conversation, including their rejection of the criticism.
NPR has a pretty useless ombudsman too, and it is helpful, even in liberal circles, to document the conversations with the ombudsman and the reporter and show their willing malfeasance and craptacularity.
November 10th, 2009 at 12:33 am
It seems rather weak on Joyce's part that her refutation of Murray Straus relies largely on this source:
"Jack Straton, a Portland State University professor and member of Oregon’s Attorney General's Sexual Assault Task Force, argues that Straus critically fails to distinguish between the intent and effect of violence..."
I mean, if Jack Straton is a member of the Attorney General's squad of advisers, and so much of current law and practice owes its origin to precisely these people, one would hardly expect them to be enthusiastically critical of themselves. The most credible sources are the independents with no clear conflicting interests, and the establishment figures who do admit to the shortcomings of the systems they are answerable for.
Guys fighting their own corner are not credible in debate with those of opposing views - I can imagine what sort of reception I would get if I quoted Glenn Sacks as a cornerstone source in an argument presented to a group of feminists (unless he was conceding in their favor, of course).
That Joyce doesn't seem to care about this suggests she's not really interested in debate, but in reassuring the faithful.
November 10th, 2009 at 9:17 am
Feminists have always played fast and loose with the truth -- that's because their ideology is based on partially-understood precepts from a variety of political philosophers, co-opted to obscure the reality of the hate/supremacist concepts feminism is actually about.
Since they've successfully managed to hide their motives for decades - now we have a situation where thousands of people who are untrained, uneducated, and generally unemployable are about to lose their lucrative positions with the many VAWA- created government agencies where they work, and will do literally *anything* to keep their jobs.
The tide is turning against them, and they know it.
The only strategy left to them is their feeble attempts to discredit the growing number of people who disagree with their mainly-bogus ideas. We can expect to see more nonsense from Kathy and Judy and their grrlfriends as the re-authorization of VAWA draws closer.
Men and women both are disgusted with not only the disrespect heaped on them by feminists, but also that huge price tag for the many useless programs that are claimed to be so vital.
November 10th, 2009 at 10:50 am
As I said on my own blog about Joyce's article, it appears she did not bother to look up any of the statistics she cited. It is hardly likely that she was incapable of doing so because she went out of her way to link to Angry Harry's blog in order to make a loose connection between the men's movement and George Sodini. I do not think Joyce was intentionally lying (although it is entirely possible), but I do think she intentionally ignored any information that disproved her claims. Her article reads like a set of feminist talking points about the men's movement, and just like making talking points, nothing is backed up with a shred of evidence.
November 10th, 2009 at 11:36 am
I often find it both sad and humorous that feminists, perhaps providing the largest dissemination of false and/or completely unsupportable "statistics and research" in the world - would have the unmitigated gall to question how anyone else uses and discusses research on any topic.
November 10th, 2009 at 11:54 am
Yes, you can find violent, abusive people that have attached themselves to the "Men's Rights" movement, just as you can find violent pro-lifers, violent environmentalists, violent PETA people, violent marxists, violent muslims, and yes, even violent feminists.
I don't consider David Duke, Louis Farakhan, Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolf to be representative leaders of white men, black men, people frustrated with the size or intrusive nature of government, or those appalled at abortion. I don't condone their actions, even where their viewpoint happens to overlap my own.
As someone who's a "member of the men's rights movement", I resent the implication that I'm violent or condone violence, or that I'm somehow interested in denying anyone their day in court, or the opportunities afforded to anyone in this country. Far from it - I propose that most hated idea of feminists - that men and women should be treated equally before the law, and that no one in this country deserves a handout collected at gunpoint, that we're presumed to be competent adults, and responsible for our own lives.
It's sad that my complaints about how I'm treated by the court system, the presumption of guilt that I'm saddle with given ANY allegation by my ex, the tightrope of behavior and accountability I walk, and the extreme contrast where my ex's activities are concerned, are all brushed aside by another baseless, groundless, unsubstantiated, morally bankrupt, and poorly peer-reviewed pile of spoiled tripe that these two articles represent.
What's even more striking is the contrast - Joyce and Berman pull out the extreme lunatic fringe as representative of the whole spectrum, and yet people like NOW's Pappas get a pass on their own radical views and intolerant positions.
It's amazing what passes for investigative journalism.
November 10th, 2009 at 11:59 am
Glenn:
"They're hardly cherry-picked--one could not find any randomized survey of domestic violence that did not find that women initiate DV at a significant rate. The only way to arrive at a figure like 85-15 (or the "3 or 4%" figure also used in the Joyce and Berman pieces) is to cite crime statistics or calls to domestic violence service providers."
----
This is the standard tactic of feminists. In the 70's they fought tooth & nail to get government subsidies for anonymous phone surveys (and then later DV shelters & funds based on the results of those surveys) to record levels of female victim DV (as opposed to crime stats), stating that many women were too shamed to file a charge.
Now, however they want to reverse course and use (the earlier discredited) crime stats---but for MALE VICTIM'S ONLY.
They want to use the more honest anon phone survey's for female victims, but the less honest hospital records & crime stats for male victims.
They wear their big0try plainly for all to see. The depth of their hate is truly astonishing.