Against Flood II

Greetings!

This is part II in a series of posts that intends to refute an essay published by Mr. Michael Flood. His writing is in italics, unless otherwise indicated.

The claim that domestic violence is gender-equal received further support with the publication in Melbourne of a study which claimed to show that men and women assault each other at equal rates [Headey et.al, 1999: 58]. This found that 5.7 percent of men and 3.7 percent of women had been physically assaulted by their partners in the last 12 months [ibid: 59]. This study again used the Conflict Tactics Scale, in which men and women are asked whether, in the last year, they or their spouse had ever done any of a series of violent acts: hit with a fist or an object, slapped, shaken, scratched, or kicked, their partner.

There are four problems with the claims about 'husband battering' made by men's rights advocates. Firstly, they only use these authors' work selectively, as the authors themselves disagree that women and men are equally the victims of domestic violence. Secondly, they ignore the serious methodological flaws in the Conflict Tactics Scale. Thirdly, they ignore or dismiss a mountain of other evidence which conflicts with their claims. Finally, their strategies in fact are harmful to men themselves, including to male victims of violence.

The assertion that the CTS is somehow methodologically flawed has already been debunked previously: but for the sake of argument, we will present more evidence and proofs over the duration of this series of posts.

Selective use

The authors of the American CTS studies stress that no matter what the rate of violence or who initiates the violence, women are 7 to 10 times more likely to be injured in acts of intimate violence than are men [Orman, 1998]. Husbands have higher rates of the most dangerous and injurious forms of violence, their violent acts are repeated more often, they are less likely to fear for their own safety, and women are financially and socially locked into marriage to a much greater extent than men.

Husbands?

Extensive research has shown that most violence happens to women who are NOT married or are going through a divorce [a][b][c].

Note the clever use of the word Husband instead of men. Is someone against marriage? Does someone want to demonize and distort husbands? Hasn't Mr. Flood made yet another factual error?

Decide for yourself.

With respect to women being injured, it makes sense that a woman engaged in combat with a man is more likely to be injured. They are, after all, the weaker sex.

While women are the weaker vessel, they are not stupid by any means. This is why, when women decide to attack a man, they are more likely to use weapons against their targets, such as knives and other sharpies [d], which would of course increase the likelyhood of the male victim suffering serious bodily injury or death.

Someone told me once that a 900 pound Gorilla gets...

Anything he wants!

So then, if women are living in such a state of fear of their men in general, why is it that women initiate intimate partner violence more often than men do??


From Psychiatry Online:

Joan Arehart-Treichel

In addressing intimate partner violence, the focus is usually on women who are physically battered by husbands or boyfriends. However, women sometimes hurt their partners as well.

Women are doing virtually everything these days that men are—working as doctors, lawyers, and rocket scientists; flying helicopters in combat; riding horses in the Kentucky Derby. And physically assaulting their spouses or partners.

In fact, when it comes to nonreciprocal violence between intimate partners, women are more often the perpetrators.

These findings on intimate partner violence come from a study conducted by scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The lead investigator was Daniel Whitaker, Ph.D., a behavioral scientist and team leader at the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (which is part of the CDC). Results were published in the May Journal of Public Health…

Furthermore, Whitaker discovered, of the 24 percent of relationships that had been violent, half had been reciprocal and half had not. Although more men than women (53 percent versus 49 percent) had experienced nonreciprocal violent relationships, more women than men (52 percent versus 47 percent) had taken part in ones involving reciprocal violence.

Regarding perpetration of violence, more women than men (25 percent versus 11 percent) were responsible. In fact, 71 percent of the instigators in nonreciprocal partner violence were women. This finding surprised Whitaker and his colleagues, they admitted in their study report.

As for physical injury due to intimate partner violence, it was more likely to occur when the violence was reciprocal than nonreciprocal. 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 percent of the time) than were women (20 percent of the time). "This is important as violence perpetrated by women is often seen as not serious," Whitaker and his group stressed…

There you have it, Mr. Flood. The CDC has officially blown your thesis all to hell.

But wait! There's much more.

Flood continues:

In fact, Straus expresses his concern that "the statistics are likely to be misused by misogynists and apologists for male violence" [cited in Orman, 1998].

Methodological flaws

The Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) has three key flaws as a way of measuring violence. Firstly, it leaves out important forms of violence, such as sexual assault, choking, suffocating, scratching, stalking, and marital murder.

Before we answer this charge, I would first like to post what the CTS approach actually measures, as stated in DISABUSING THE DEFINITION OF DOMESTIC ABUSE: HOW WOMEN BATTER MEN AND THE ROLE OF THE FEMINIST STATE (Credit goes to the guys at Don't Get Married.com for finding this helpful report):

Developed in 1971 to measure family violence, CTS breaks physical force and violence into eight categories ranging from (1) throwing things; (2) pushing, shoving or grabbing; (3) hitting or slapping; (4) kicking, biting or hitting with a fist; (5) hitting or trying to hit with something; (6) beating up; (7) threatening with a knife or gun; and finally, (8) using a knife or gun.12

All of these sound like serious acts of violence to me.

Speaking of women's acts of aggression, the report continues:

The comparable use of physical violence by spouses marks only the beginning of the similarities evidenced by these comprehensive first studies of intimate violence.

Arguably, husband abuse can be discounted in comparison to wife abuse if women are found to utilize physical violence against their spouses in a much more sparing fashion than men. However, the various surveys consistently reported that women not only use violence at rates similar to men, but that women match, and often exceed, husbands in the frequency with which they engage in violent behavior.20

Did anyone else hear that? Sounds like someone's neat little argument being smashed all into pieces.

Oh well... let's see what else this report has to say!

3. Severity

While the similarity of rates of physical violence by wives and husbands presented by the various surveys is revealing, such data is not sufficient to make an accurate comparison of the violent nature of wives and husbands. As the definition of “physical violence” used in the various CTS-based studies ranges from “throwing something” to “using a knife or gun,” wives arguably could compare to husbands in use and frequency of violent behavior, but not in the severity of the type of violence employed.

Some differences per type of violence utilized by each sex are certainly evident. Women were found to be twice as likely to throw something at their husbands.24 Wives were also more likely than husbands to kick, bite and punch.25 They were also more likely to hit, or try to hit, their spouses with something and more likely to
threaten their spouses with a knife or gun.26

Husbands, on the other hand, rated higher in the four categories of pushing, grabbing and shoving;27 slapping or hitting;28 beating up;29 and actually using a knife or gun.30 Yet, such per category differences did not evidence that men were unquestionably more prone to acts of severe domestic violence than women. Combining the data collected on the last five categories of physical violence to create a “Severe Violence Index,” wives were found to engage in more severe acts of violence than husbands. 31

Taking the frequency of severely violent behavior into account does not mitigate these findings. Wives show a pattern of severely violent behavior statistically comparable to husbands.32 Consistent with this “over-all similarity” found in the 1975 survey,33 other early reports also found that husbands and wives show “equal potential” for intimate violence and that they “initiate[d] similar acts of violence.”34

And finally:

(a) CTS Challenges

Beyond woozles and scare tactics, a more effective and facially neutral intellectual tactic used to silence the study of female violence has been an attack on the methodology. As an initial criticism, the CTS-based reports, by definition, allow only a focus on violence resulting from conflict situations. While acknowledging the value of CTS in other social studies, sociologists critique their use in the study of family.52

Because the scale’s focus upon “conflict” does not acknowledge the use of violence in a familial setting as a tactic of coercive control, such methodology fails to emphasize the use of violence by men to maintain power or the use of violence without provocation.

53 The CTS reporting methodology is also criticized for its limited focus upon the acts of violence, not the consequences, or more specifically, the severity of the injuries resulting from such acts.54 For example, the ordering of the violence with such acts as “trying to hit with something” regarded as more severe than “slapping” is deemed inappropriate given the potential of severe physical injury which can
result from a slap, while no injury could ever result from throwing something at someone but failing to strike.55

Criticism is also levied at separate groupings of various types of violence which are instead seen as overlapping.56 Recognizing such concerns, the Family Violence Research Laboratory addressed them in their initial studies.57

However, rather than rejecting the methodology and therefore any information it produced outright, the researchers noted that CTS was previously accepted as a methodology in family studies limited to wife abuse. They therefore rationalized that the research methodology remained valuable in a combined study of husband abuse and wife abuse.58 Moreover, despite being collected through CTS methodology, the research of the Family Violence Researchers yields similar results to numerous other studies of husband and wife abuse, including those which rely upon non-CTS methodology.59

And indeed, we shall look at other studies that do not use the CTS method, and yet give us the same outcome:

THAT WOMEN BEAT, BATTER, AND ABUSE ON PAR WITH MEN.

It also needs to be said that while Mr. Flood criticizes CTS for certain "omissions," the impact that such alleged omissions have on the overall outcome works both ways.

Anyone who’s known enough women (or had little sisters) knows that choking, suffocating, scratching, and the like are female favorites.

Since, according to the High Priestesses of Domestic Violence, there is NO excuse for Domestic Abuse of any kind, if CTS DID include these other measurements that Mr. Flood demands to be added (and, which has already been demonstrated previously and today, criticism of CTS methodology has been duly noted and taken into account,) the number of women who commit DV would be undoubtedly much higher than what researchers indicate now.

In addition, marital murder and sexual assault are not forms of domestic violence. They are felony criminal offenses, a different class of crime, and are usually recorded, tried, and punished in like fashion.

Apples and oranges my dear fellow.

Our author continues:

Most importantly, CTS studies exclude incidents of violence that occur after separation and divorce. Yet Australian data, e.g. from the Women's Safety Survey shows that women are as likely to experience violence by previous partners as by current partners [Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1996: 8]. And that it is the time around and after separation which is most dangerous for women. International data shows similar patterns. For example, the U.S. Department of Justice reports that 75.9 percent of spouse-on-spouse assaults occurred after separation or divorce, with a male perpetrator 93.3 percent of the time [U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Family Violence April 1984, p. 4].

Our author has already made my primary argument for me. What a good fellow!

1) Marriage is the safest and best place for women, children, and men [e][f][g][h][i][j]

2) The feminist inspired family/divorce/child custody/child support/restraining order machine is a significant driver of partner violence.

If we eliminated all of the feminist laws we have passed since feminism came to power, and we adjudicated our divorce, child custody, and support cases according to the Constitution, the Common Law, and the Bill of Rights, and treated all parties to litigation with respect, equal protection for ALL parties, and justice; we would eliminate a great deal of the violence problem that feminism and its politics and policies have managed to create.

I have no argument with women bringing their needs and wants to the public square. I recognize that violence and discord happen in families. I also believe that if anyone, man or woman, has been assaulted or battered, stalked, raped, or violated in some way, then there are very good laws on the books that can be used to hold people accountable for their misdeeds.

However, I DO have a problem with lies, deceit, trickery and chicanery being codified into law. I also have issues with people being denied their full rights and protections that they are absolutely entitled to as free persons. Above all, I despise a tyrannical Matriarchal government that seeks to enslave me and my brothers simply because we are men.

It is clear that the overarching solution to our violence problem is NOT more feminism, but to discredit and discard feminism as an acceptable philosophy, now and forever.

For proofs on how feminist policies are driving force behind domestic violence, please see:

http://www.mediaradar.org/docs/RADARreport-Why-DV-Programs-Fail-to-Stop-Abuse.pdf

http://www.acfc.org/site/DocServer/familyviolence.pdf?docID=641

How the Government Creates Child Abuse

However, it does not take PDFs to reason why some men become violent upon separation and divorce.

If you throw two people in a very stressful situation, and deny one parent his (or her) natural, basic, moral, and constitutional rights over his (or her) own flesh and blood, blatantly and without remorse, AND without so much as any evidence of wrongdoing, without due process or equal protection under the laws, then yes, tempers will flare, and people will get hurt.

It's an uncomfortable truth, but I'm beyond the point of sugarcoating what needs to be said. When people are mistreated, and their babies are involved, and there is no just, moral, and legal way to rectify said injustice, then people are going to get pissed, and sometimes, resort to violence.

This is in no way an endorsement of criminal violence against anyone. However, with the way our family courts are set up, it's a miracle that most men endure the agony of the divorce court system, instead of lashing out at others, and it is a tragedy that so many divorced men commit domestic violence against themselves [k][l][m], simply because of a Matriarchal system of tyranny, created for the feminists and by the feminists, that crushes any dissent or will to fight back.

Try writing a paper on THAT Mr. Flood. You and your ilk utterly disgust me.

Very well!!

We've covered some more ground, but there is much more to talk about.

Kumo X.