Against Flood I

Welcome back to Kumogakure School!

Today begins the thorough refuting of an essay written by one Michael Flood, which is posted on the Anti-antifeminist blogspot.

While Mr. Flood's work seems somewhat authoritative at first glace, two things quickly become apparent:

1) Anti-anti feminist, like many feminists before her [a][b], relies heavily on the work of MEN in order to advance her argument that anti-feminism is just, "silly."

You'll have to do a lot better than this Anti-Anti, if you want your assumptions to be taken seriously. Otherwise, expect to be overmatched by superior MRA logic and analysis.

Upon reading feminist works, it becomes clear that these women are like children playing with fire: they can read about and advocate an ideology, but they have no real understanding of the full implications of said philosophy.

Or maybe some of them DO get it and they just don't care about the harm that they cause, and the people they hurt. Either way, it is a unfortunate state of affairs we find ourselves in, that women such as these control our social and political institutions based on such glaringly false, misandric, and flawed ideas.

However, the truth is coming to light, and someday soon, things will be set back to rights. Feminism will eventually be consigned to the waste heap of failed philosophies, never to be resurrected again forever and ever. We will move to an enlightened state where the liberties and rights of all citizens, Man, woman and child, will be protected, and Due Process and Equal Protection of the laws will apply to all.

2) Mr. Flood comes across in his writings as a World Class Mangina and traitor to real men worldwide who are heroically battling against tyrannical feminist doctrine.

His is the sort of flawed, inconsequential writing that brings much sorrow and misery into the world. His insane ramblings about Patriarchy and feminist supremacy are like a fifth of Jack Daniels that the bitter alcoholic consumes morning, noon, and night, a poison that warps the senses and destroys the soul.

He is the kind of man that urges naive and uncritical thinkers onwards to their personal road to feminist hell, a place where even celebrated feminists such as Germaine Greer eventually end up.

As lies and chicanery are intolerable to the Kidd, it becomes my duty to utterly rip into pieces this miserable excuse for an essay.

Let's begin.

Michael Flood

A recent research project claimed to find that men and women are equally likely to be the perpetrators of domestic violence [Headey, Scott and de Vaus, 1999]. Studies such as these have been taken up by anti-feminist men to claim that 'husband battering' is widespread. In the article below, Michael outlines a critique of such claims.

Men in fathers' rights groups and men's rights groups have been claiming very loudly for a while now that domestic violence is a gender-equal or gender-neutral phenomenon - that men and women assault each other at equal rates and with equal effects. They claim that an epidemic of husband-battering is being ignored if not silenced.

Catherine Gilda Bettman, in her work Patriarchy: The Predominant Discourse and Font of Domestic Violence, directly contradicts Flood's insinuation that there is no such thing as a suppression of the fact that women beat, batter, and abuse at rates highly comparable to men:

... Another concerning indication of the gaping questions still to be answered in the area of domestic violence, is the argument by some that women’s violence against men is as much a social problem as men’s violence against women; that victimisation, as well as fear of victimisation, should not be seen as the exclusive domain of women (Hogg & Brown, 1992). Petrachek (1999), for example, asserts that the reality of women who batter cannot continue to be ignored by the media and by researchers. Likewise, McNeely, Cook and Torres (2001) claim that domestic violence is not a gender issue but a human issue and that women are as likely to engage in physically abusive acts as men are. Based upon nationwide sample survey data, Strauss (1993), in the United States, as well as Headey, Scott and de Vaus (1999) in Australia, even suggest that women initiate and carry out physical assaults on their partners as often as men do. In addition, there are suggestions that men are the hidden victims of domestic violence and that women’s violence towards their male partners is either underreported, ignored or covered up (Bagshaw & Chung, 2000; Heady et al., 1999); even that the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Office for the Status of Women have falsified and suppressed statistics that would otherwise have shown the true extent of women’s violence against their male partners (James, 1999). McNeely et al. (2001) also claim that reports in the press and scholarly articles have enshrined a false and inaccurate perspective of the problem in people’s minds and that this has had legal and policy ramifications for men.

Please note that this author is a hardcore feminist who ultimately blames so called stereotypical, patriarchal, misogynistic, and homophobic male attitudes for the existence of all violence in the world. Keeping this in mind, it is all the more amazing that this woman at least has the courage to mention vital studies that disprove Flood's assumptions. It also speaks volumes about Mr. Flood's incredible ignorance, or deliberate deception regarding this sensitive subject area.

Speaking of violence and the Dreaded Patriarchy, we will disprove this hypothesis as false later in the discussion.

Flood continues:

To substantiate their claims, men's rights and fathers' rights groups draw on a body of American studies which use a particular methodology for measuring violence. This is the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS), developed and used by Murray Straus, Richard Gelles, Suzanne Steinmetz and others [Steinmetz, 1977/78; Steinmetz & Lucca, 1988; Straus et.al, 1980, Straus & Gelles, 1986, 1990].

It should be noted that the research of Gells, Straus, and others that use the CTS method, whose studies number in the hundreds, is in no way the only approach to measuring intimate violence in order to prove that domestic violence is a human failing, and not a male only problem, as we shall see shortly.

Since it is critical to Flood's thesis to dismiss the hundreds of studies that use the CTS method as being flawed, I would like to give one of the CTS advocates, specifically Straus himself, the opportunity to defend his research before we go any further.

Thanks to the Wise Counter-Feminist, and the Bold Davout, I found this PDF entitled Processes Explaining the Concealment and Distortion of Evidence on Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence.

Straus notes:

Graham-Kevan’s paper raises the question of how an explanatory theory and treatment modality [The Patriarchal Dominance model] could have persisted for 30 years and still persists, despite hundreds of studies which provide evidence that PV has many causes, not just male-dominance. The answer is that it emerged from a convergence of a number of different historical and social factors. One of these is that gender symmetry in perpetration of partner violence is inconsistent with male predominance in almost all other crimes, especially violent crimes.

Another is the greater injury rate suffered by female victims of PV brings female victimization to public attention much more often. Although there are many causes of the persistence of the patriarchal dominance focus, I believe that the predominant cause has been the efforts of feminists to conceal, deny, and distort the evidence.

Straus continues:

Methods Used to Conceal and Distort Evidence on Symmetry in Partner Violence

Method 1. Suppress Evidence

Researchers who have an ideological commitment to the idea that men are almost always the sole perpetrator often conceal evidence that contradicts this belief. Among researchers not committed to that ideology, many (including some of my own colleagues) have withheld results showing gender symmetry to avoid becoming victims of vitriolic denunciations and ostracism (see Method 7 below).

Thus, many researchers have published only the data on male perpetrators or female victims, deliberately omitting data on female perpetrators and male victims...

... Method 3. Cite Only Studies That Show Male Perpetration

I could list a large number of journal articles showing selective citation, but instead I will illustrate the process with official document examples to show that this method of concealment and distortion is institutionalized in publications of governments, the United Nations, and the World Health Organization. For example, US Dept. of Justice publications almost always cite only the National Crime Victimization study, which shows male predominance (Durose et al. 2005). They ignore the Department of Justice published critiques, which led to a revision of the survey to correct that bias. However, the revision was only partly successful (Straus 1999), yet they continue to cite it and ignore other more accurate studies they have sponsored which show gender symmetry.

And speaking of the CTS model, the author states that:

Another example is the claim that the Conflict Tactics Scales (Straus et al. 1995) does not provide an adequate measure of PV because it measures only conflict related violence.

Although the theoretical basis of the CTS is conflict theory, the introductory explanation to participants specifically asks participants to report expressive and malicious violence. It asks respondents about the times when they and their partner “...disagree, get annoyed with the other person, want different things from each other, or just have spats or fights because they are in a bad mood, are tired or for some other reason.”

Despite repeating this criticism for 25 years in perhaps a hundred publications, none of those publications has provided empirical evidence showing that only conflict-related violence is reported. In fact, where there are both CTS data and qualitative data, as in Giles-Sims (1983), it shows that the CTS elicits malicious violence as well as conflict-related violence. Nevertheless, because there are at least a hundred articles with this statement in peer reviewed journals, it seems to establish as a scientific fact what is only an attempt to blame the messenger for the bad news about gender symmetry in PV.

Mr. Straus concludes:

Finally, it was painful for me as feminist to write this commentary. I have done so for two reasons. First, I am also a scientist and, for this issue, my scientific commitments overrode my feminist commitments. Perhaps even more important, I believe that the safety and well being of women requires efforts to end violence by women and the option to treat partner violence in some cases as a problem of psychopathology, or in the great majority of cases, as a family system problem (Hamel and Nicholls 2006).

Now that we have heard from one of the leading proponents of the CTS model, which has been used in hundreds of studies to prove that women beat, batter, and abuse at rates equal to, or slightly less than men do, let us continue with our analysis of the Flood essay.

Let us assume for a moment, that Flood is correct (which he is not) when he says that CTS studies should be excluded from discussing intimate partner violence.

If we were to do such a thing, we can still find HUNDREDS more examples of studies that confirm the findings of the CTS research that have different authorship and methodologies.

For example, if we look to Mediaradar's Analysis of House Resolution 590 source list, we find that the (American) Centers for Disease Control has posted findings that support the general outcomes of the CTS reports:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Physical Dating Violence Among High School Students

--- United States, 2003. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, May 19, 2006. Table 1.www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5519a3.htm

If we look on the Battered Men website we have several reports from:

Statistics Canada
The British Government
The Rev Sam and Bunny Sewell

and others not cited by Mr. Flood as researchers who are using an allegedly "flawed" methodology as he believes the CTS method is.

The Impeccable Baskerville, in his impressive book Taken into Custody [c][d][e], cites (P.338, citation 548) the following authors when he states without hesitation that women batter, beat, and abuse on par with men:


Farrell, Warren, Women Can’t Hear What Men Don't Say

Young, Cathy, Ceasefire: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality

Dutton, Donald G, Rethinking Domestic Violence

Archer, John, Sex Differences in Aggression Between Hetrosexual Partners: A Meta-Analytic Review.

(Be sure to read another of his papers, Cross-Cultural Differences in Physical Aggression Between Partners: A Social-Role Analysis here.)

X.B Arriaga and S. Oskamp, Violence in Intimate Relationships

Moving onwards, we find that even the USA TODAY, that Bastian of political correctness, has acknowledged the truth about partner violence (albeit imperfectly, but it's a start!):

Studies shatter myth about abuse

By Karen S. Peterson, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — It is not just men who hit women. Women hit men, too. And the latest research shows that ignoring the role women play in domestic violence does both women and men a disservice.

There is little doubt that women get hurt more than men. She may slap him. But then he may hit her harder or more often.

By not understanding the mutual role they often play, women are at great risk for injury, new studies show.

Still, the newest findings challenge the feminist belief that "it is men only who cause violence," says psychologist Deborah Capaldi of the Oregon Social Learning Center. "That is a myth."

The number of women who hit first or hit back is "much greater than has been generally assumed," Capaldi says. She says she is surprised by the frequency of aggressive acts by women and by the number of men who are afraid of partners who assault them.

Capaldi and two other female researchers call for a re-evaluation of treatment programs nationwide. Such programs focus on men and ignore women. Men are court-ordered into some type of rehabilitation, and their women are told in support groups or shelters that they had nothing to do with the violence, Capaldi says.

"Prevention and treatment should focus on managing conflict and aggression for both young men and women," Capaldi says. Each needs to understand the role both play while still putting a "special responsibility" on the man, who can inflict greater injury.

But wait!

There's MORE.

I have so much data to utterly refute Mr. Flood and the feminists who love him, that I need to save the rest for another day so ya'll can take in today's information. But don't sleep, as there is much more to come.

Kumo out.