Dean's World

"What has he done to wear so many scars? Has he changed the course of rivers? Has he polluted the moon and stars?"--Bob Dylan

Background: I've covered the Clara Harris "Murder by Mercedes" case extensively, both in the Houston Chronicle, on the radio, and in this blog. As I've previously noted, Clara Harris repeatedly ran over David Harris as David's daughter sat in the front seat, begging Clara not to kill her father.

In my co-authored column Suppose roles had been reversed in Harris case--Murdered dad deserves sympathy being shown Clara (Houston Chronicle, 1/27/07), I explained:

"Harris, her attorneys and her supporters have been largely successful in concealing the true nature of Clara's crime. Whereas Clara has successfully portrayed herself as the innocent victim of a philandering husband, in reality David Harris was killed while trying to exit a bad and possibly abusive marriage. Clara's defenders also ignore the fact that considerable evidence was presented that Clara--who played the crying, betrayed wife--was also having an affair at the end of their marriage.

"While many see the Clara Harris case as one of love and betrayal, it is in fact a garden-variety domestic homicide. Clara Harris is no better than high-profile wife-killer Scott Peterson. Perhaps Clara is even worse — at least Peterson spared us the crocodile tears."

To learn more about the case, see my columns In Defense of David Harris (LewRockwell.com, 3/4/03) and Convicted Murderess Can Get Custody but Decent Fathers Can't (Houston Chronicle, 9/19/03), or click here.

I've previously noted the way the media has disparaged David Harris despite the fact that he was by all accounts a good father and a decent man. At the time of the civil trial in January 2007, I wrote:

"Of the 354 news stories covering the wrongful death trial that are indexed on Google News, 233 refer to David Harris as Clara Harris’ 'cheating husband.' Not one mentions the phrase 'domestic violence.'"

Were the genders reversed, would we see headlines saying "Man Kills Cheating Wife"? I doubt it.

Now that Harris is back in the news (she's suing her criminal defense attorney--to learn more, see my blog post 'Murder by Mercedes' Killer Clara Harris Whining Again), we once again see the bias on domestic violence. As evidenced by the screen shot above, most news outlets' headlines are again disparaging and dehumanizing David Harris by referring to him simply as "Cheating Spouse."

It seems appropriate to announce this here first. Friends to the End is the book that sent me off on a path I’d never imagined.

When I first started writing it in late 1999, my main intention was to write something a bit unusual; a book that wasn’t appearing in the dozens by different authors under different titles in every bookstore in the country.

I began writing this book about a male victim of domestic violence, under the same misapprehensions that most people held at the time, and still hold today: that there is the same help available for male victims as there is for women. All anyone in this kind of situation need do is pick up a phone and help will surely come.

I don’t know why I didn’t know better. After all, I’d been working with and around the social services in my community for over a decade at the time. Yet, when I began searching the internet for the agencies that provided services for male victims, so I could be sure to have my facts straight, I found that these agencies did not exist. Not only did they not exist, some of the women-only agencies were quite put out with me that I should even ask about such services.

Once I did find a good resource, I had to practically re-write the book from the ground up, as the original manuscript was based on ideas that were simply impossible in the real world.

I have to admit I never tried very hard to find a “traditional” publisher, as I’m a citizen of cyberspace through and through. So it happened that the book was published in e-book format by two different publishers – but not until now in hard copy.

People have been nudging me for some time to do this, not the least of whom is Jan Brown, Executive Editor of the Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men & Women. She’s always felt that Friends is an approachable book on the subject, that needs to be available to the general public. Yes, it is fiction, but I’ve been assured by male victims themselves that everything that happens in the book has happened to one or more of them, too.

You’ll probably think that it’s pricey for a paperback, and I suppose that’s true, but I’ve priced it so that DAHMW can make some cash from the proceeds. You see, every dime above costs is going straight to DAHMW. Not a percentage, not a portion, but the whole thing. If you're not familiar with DAHMW, it is the only agency with a national reach that provides direct client services for male victims of domestic violence.

If you really can’t afford the paperback, it’s available in download form for $5, and DAHMW still gets a nice donation.

BTW, I've got a couple of new websites going, too!

I see today that Darren Mack got lots of jail time. IMHO, that’s the least of what he deserved, but nobody asked me. I think he well may have killed somebody else that got in his way sooner or later, divorce or no, and the particular situation was coincidental. Some of the others that have killed wives, children, and/or others are the same – all they needed was the appropriate trigger to set them off.

I do believe, though, there is a different group of men who may not have gone off the deep end and killed in a rampage had their situations been different. Certainly I do not excuse their actions, but what if something could have been done to prevent these kinds of killings?

As someone who at one time communicated extensively with divorced and divorcing men, I’ve heard a lot of their stories and have seen all kinds of similarities. The divorce stories took on a pattern to the point where I can now just about predict what a guy will say. How he handles his situation takes a different turn, however, when physician-prescribed psychogenic drugs come into the picture.

Of course not every divorce spawns a murder or even domestic violence of any kind; but what I’ve seen are radical changes in behavior by some men taking these drugs. Most often they’re just odd little quirks that seem perfectly ordinary to the guy at the time, but as an outside observer I find disturbing. Some past killers were on these drugs.

This is something I wish someone like Dr. Helen would look into. As someone with no initials behind my name, all I can do is suggest. And hope.

There have been men who phoned or e-mailed that I knew were just idiots, and it was all I could do to keep from saying something like, “Well, if you’d just stop being an asshole, then maybe life wouldn’t be so tough.” If anyone thinks I always take every story at face value, then you need to know I don’t. There is a clear and obvious difference between the assholes and the guys caught off guard; forced into a situation not of their own making.

What I’m sure about is that there are men who can suck it up and go on with their lives. Most of them do, and quite often the children and sometimes even the ex-wives wish it had gone differently. Very few men erupt in radical violence, but there are now enough of those who do they no longer make national news. If you check regional and local news sites every day, you’ll find a sad trend.

This death scenario is happening everywhere, and yet, most of the news stories proclaim nobody can imagine why John Doe picked up the gun that day.

Are we as a society so vengeful and misandric it’s more important for us to see bad men behind bars or executed, and then “put the horror behind us” than it is to examine these incidents objectively to determine why they happened, and perhaps save the lives of some innocent people in the future?

Right now, I just don't know.

Amy Alkon is an obvious voice of sanity.

(Via Glenn.)

State coalitions were and are also lobbying groups for feminist politics, but nobody questioned the legality of the federal government providing funding to what is essentially a political party. Since the advent of VAWA, over 660 laws have been passed at the state level alone due to the efforts of these coalitions.

Meanwhile, any plans for effective services, offered on an egalitarian basis, by small local charities and municipalities were dropped. Services that did not toe the feminist party line were at risk of losing not only government funding, but some private foundation grants as well, since VAWA established the “expertise” of  state coalitions, and membership in a coalition appeared to validate the practices of any agency.

Independent agencies grudgingly signed on, hoping that equal opportunity clauses attached to federal monies would force the feminist programs to make some progress in their approach.

Of course, that never happened; instead, programs say they offer the same services to everyone, and because the federal government appears to believe it, everyone else is supposed to believe it too.

When scrutinized from an objective point of view, VAWA with its anti-male, anti-family tone and inflexible policies, and the advocacy programs it funds with their continuous tirade of division and suspicion, provide a chilling reminder of other social engineering projects of the past. Efforts to deal with “the Negro Problem” suggested it was not only reasonable, but desirable to ship people of color to Africa, no matter how many generations their families had lived in the US. Many Native Americans will recall how children were removed from their homes and placed in boarding schools, to learn the White way of life.

Today, simply being a man carries a risk of arrest and incarceration. Feminists in the early days of the internet sometimes advocated concentration camps for men, but no one took them seriously. Perhaps it is time to reconsider their aim in a different light.

After 13 years of VAWA, and the recognition that all it does is provide for divorce for women, and making it harder to prosecute them for crimes, while at the same time making it easier to criminalize and demonize men, it should be clear that no progress in the approach to domestic violence will ever be made under the feminist regime.

That’s because it was never about helping women to lead violence-free lives or helping families cope with a complex human problem.

Now Joe Biden wants more lawyers, more divorces, more men in jail. More divorced moms working at low-paying, menial jobs means more children for Hillary’s “Village,” and ultimately more tax dollars for women and children dependent on government programs.

Joe Biden expects to come out of this smelling like a rose. Just don’t forget that the roots of roses often sit in manure.

The shelter movement was in deep trouble, and funding sources were drying up. It is a fact of life in the non-profit sector that most private donors prefer to support demonstrably successful agencies with an open relationship with their communities. Since in general, shelter programs were unable to show their services had any effect on the problem, and their relationship in their communities with other agencies and the general public was anything but open, continuing financial support had to come from somewhere else.

By that time, some shelters that had failed under feminist administration had been taken over by other agencies, and in some communities, non-feminist shelter programs had begun to be established. These non-feminist agencies were poised at that time to begin making major changes in the function of their services. To the feminists still in control of the shelter system, probably the most disturbing trend was that these non-feminist programs were intending to provide equal services to all citizens of their communities, which included male victims. There was also consideration of providing aid that did not require relocation and divorce for victims, which is the only “solution” provided by feminist-run shelters.

By the time Senator Joe Biden entered the picture with his “Violence Against Women Act” in the early 1990s, there were feminists in Congress and a feminist First Lady in the White House. All of whom pushed – and pushed hard for this landmark bill that gave the appearance of benefiting women in need. Hearings on the bill were stacked, to include only those who praised VAWA. Enough legislators were either not interested in bucking the trend, or didn’t have time to consider this bill fully, that it simply sailed through Congress to become law. Well, you can’t be against helping women in need, now can you?

If there was any help there, for women or anybody else, it could’ve been a wonderful thing. What it actually did was something else.

In a nutshell, it validated the feminist philosophy of domestic violence, pumped millions of dollars into feminist bank accounts, and created what would become a multi-billion dollar industry out of the misery of American families nationwide.

In practice, VAWA established domestic violence as a crime, one that was always perpetrated by a man against a woman. This would be the first time in US history a law established who would be the victim, and who would be the offender, before any incident ever occurred.

It gave those state coalitions purporting to be “against domestic violence” the power to bully law enforcement and local judiciaries into enforcing feminist doctrine as law. Not only were the cops and judges expected to look the other way while human rights were violated without compunction, they were expected to deny their own experience and established practices. The mindset behind VAWA was stuck in the 1970s, when it was still true that a woman asking for help often had difficulty proving abuse, and police departments were reluctant to get themselves involved in private family matters. Although much had changed in police procedure regarding domestic violence over time, the progress they had made was to be ignored in favor of VAWA’s rigid policy.

Over time, more stories were added to the legend. The “battered woman syndrome” became a legal defense for women charged with a variety of crimes, from petty larceny to 1st degree murder.

They took the concept of client confidentiality, which is applied by most social services agencies, and applied it to not only clients, but to the workings of agencies themselves. Shelters were hidden in secret locations, under the excuse that male abusers would “cause trouble” of some sort. The fact that many women in shelters were using them to hide from arrest warrants of various kinds, and likely still do, is never explained. As mentioned earlier, these programs do not bother to screen applicants for such things as pending criminal charges. Because women “never lie” about domestic violence, all applicants are presumed to be equally in need.

Working under their self-imposed veil of secrecy, shelters began to establish restrictive policies about who would be allowed access to these programs, based on concepts that had nothing to do with expecting clients to demonstrate need, although that is the primary concern for most other social services programs. While they continue to publicly claim equal services for all (including men), in fact their policies exclude far more people than can be accepted. Among the automatically excluded are:

• Women with jobs
• Women with college degrees
• Women with older male children
• Disabled women
• Lesbian women
• Single women
• Men
  

Considering the list of the excluded, one has to wonder if these programs are interested in serving anyone. If asked, shelter workers have a litany of excuses why they cannot serve the above populations, which are largely based on paranoia and strict adherence to dogma. When one recognizes that the intention of the shelter movement is not to benefit the community as a whole, but to benefit feminists and feminism, one can see that the list of the excluded is also a list of those least likely to provide benefit to their programs.

• Men, of course, are The Enemy, and boys have a nasty tendency to turn into men.
• Single women have no need of a divorce lawyer
• Lesbian women present the uncomfortable reality of female abusers.
• Women with jobs and/or college degrees are apt to reject feminist ideology, either on the grounds of its Marxist roots, or its low opinion of domestic violence victims, who are presumed to be unable to make their own decisions without outside help, and always at the mercy of diabolical men.
• Disabled women are simply too much trouble, and present another uncomfortable fact – that the needs of all women are not identical.

By the early 1990s, shelters were becoming known in the social services field as “revolving door” programs, repeatedly accessed by the same individuals for a variety of reasons, that often had little to do with domestic violence. Few clients completed their programs, and there was a troubling lack of evidence of the effectiveness of these programs.

Shelters nationwide were beset with financial and other administrative difficulties. It is more than likely that the problems stemmed from the fact that many directors and administrators of shelters had little more than a degree in women’s studies on their resumes. Women’s studies programs provide only feminist doctrine and do not include any courses in business or agency administration. At the level of employees who provide direct client services, the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence has always discouraged programs from hiring individuals with too much education, because they presume their clientele to be uneducated, and from low income brackets, and trained, skilled shelter workers would be distrusted, in their opinion.

Had anyone in the field of behavioral science been consulted or allowed to participate in the creation of the “battered woman” mythology, he or she would’ve immediately pointed out the multiple errors of logic and fact encompassed within their so-called theories. This may well be the reason why no individual with any such background appears in the early history of these programs. What you find are former victims on the way to becoming permanent victims (for the purposes of fundraising for their agencies and financial gain for themselves), a few writers, and more feminist lawyers. Some of these women took advantage of affirmative action programs appearing at major universities, and/or styled themselves as “feminist psychologists,” therapists, and various kinds of “experts” in the newly-created field of domestic abuse. Thus, despite the fact that nearly all of the knowledge base on the subject was fabricated for political and economic reasons, these experts gained credence for their speculations.

Any bona fide scientist or researcher daring to question the veracity of the feminist principles regarding the issue has faced much opposition, from simple denial of grants and other funding, to damage to their careers, to outright physical threats to themselves and their families.

Here’s a little bit of the mythology of domestic violence, from the feminist perspective.

• Domestic violence is deliberate; and an escalating pattern of behavior by a man designed to control a woman.
• All men are current or potential abusers, and all women are current or potential victims.
• Women never lie about abuse; men always do.
• Because women can only be victims, they cannot abuse. Thus, any violent behavior on the part of a woman must be excused as self-defense, and no woman should be held accountable for her actions.
• If a woman does not immediately leave her home and divorce her husband at the first sign of abuse, she will ultimately be killed.
• Laws can and should be relied upon to protect women from abuse. It is the government’s responsibility to dictate male behavior in the context of any relationship.
• Women are unable to determine their own possibilities for injury or death at the hands of their husbands, and must be forced out of a relationship determined to be dangerous by any outside party who believes them to be at risk.
• Women who consider themselves safe are in denial and must be protected from their own poor choices.

Although any student of the behavioral sciences learns early on that it is a mistake to make sweeping generalizations and absolute statements about human behavior, the feminist legend relies heavily on both.

Inexplicably, no definition of what specifically constitutes domestic violence has ever been codified into law or universally accepted. It has become an ambiguous crime based on little more than the feelings of a number of individuals, who may or may not have been present at the time of an incident.

How did this happen?

Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the concept of feminism was running out of gas. Nobody wanted to financially support organizations that had served their purpose, and were now little more than coalitions of the perpetually discontented. We already had equal pay for equal work, established in the 1960s. Roe vs. Wade came about in 1973, and no-fault divorce was in effect in most states. The Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution was a non-starter, primarily because states decided it wasn’t necessary to re-invent the wheel by ignoring the 14th Amendment, already in place.

Organizations such as NOW were at risk of going under, due to lack of support. The self-styled feminist gurus left over from the 1960s were faced with the daunting prospect of obsolescence. Since the issue of “women’s rights” had never been anything more than a vehicle for imposing collectivist ideals on an unwilling public for these latter-day Marxists, they decided to latch on to another issue with a lot of emotional impact, and big money possibilities.

Domestic violence was that issue.

Fate had intervened, and in Michigan in 1977, Francine Hughes murdered her husband, though eventually found not guilty of the crime due to a claim of temporary insanity.

Apparently few people ever read the original book on the incident, entitled The Burning Bed by Faith McNulty. If they had, they would’ve recognized that Francine Hughes’ rationalization for the murder was not fear of her life as everyone presumed, but only a desire for “a better life.”

Her story was made into a 1984 TV movie starring Farrah Fawcett, a major TV star of the era, firmly establishing the mythology of the “heroic battered woman” in the public consciousness.

Like barnacles on the hull of a ship, feminists attached themselves to this issue and claimed to have all the answers. The grunt work had already been done – in England, Erin Pizzey had established the first shelter for DV victims, and in the US, groups of lesbian women had established a few programs. The work of the first shelter advocates was co-opted by feminists, who took all the credit, and turned what was intended to be a helpful service to the community into a political cause and cash cow.

I find it ironic that the earliest American programs were for victims of female abusers. Today, lesbian women are among the many groups denied services by today's programs, which refute the existence of violent women.

Erin Pizzey herself was forced out of her own agency by 1984 for the crime of providing equal services for men and women.

Then they developed “theories” of DV, based on thin air and misandry, and peddled them to the public. I’m sure the feminist lawyers were thrilled, because now they had an assured clientele, and could not only live but prosper on the referrals from newly-established “coalitions against domestic violence,” whose purpose was primarily to encourage as many divorces as possible, while serving as lobbying agencies to provide favorable legislation for their newly-created special interest group.

Here's what he's saying in HuffPo:

The [Violence Against Women] Act has transformed the way police, prosecutors, judges and advocates tackle domestic violence in their communities, and infused more than $4 billion dollars to state systems to fight violence against women. In 2007 alone, Iowa received $1.3 million for domestic violence programs with police, prosecutors, judges and advocates. But we are not done.

In May, I introduced the National Domestic Violence Volunteer Attorney Network Act, legislation that, for the first time, creates a streamlined national system to recruit and train volunteer lawyers and match them with domestic violence victims. Using the power of the Internet, this nationwide network of attorneys will be coordinated by American Bar Association; statewide legal coordinators would manage legal services in their individual states, and the National Domestic Violence Hotline and Internet-based services would provide legal referrals to victims. The historic partnership forged in my bill will mean that enthusiastic potential advocates quickly and seamlessly will get linked to training and new clients. And at the same time, desperate victims will be referred to a statewide coordinator and quickly connected to a lawyer.

Here's what I have to say to Joe Biden:

Snake Oil Salesgirls and the Politics of Domestic Violence
by Trudy W. Schuett

I don’t think any human problem has been so distorted, misaddressed and politicized as the problem of domestic violence. 

Today we are forced, through our tax dollars to support 2000+ services nationwide that only aid an elite group of agency-defined women, with services it is becoming clear even these “special” women do not want. Today’s woman doesn’t want to run away and hide, then divorce and get revenge on her former spouse by wrecking his career or even putting him in jail and costing him a lot of money he well may not have. Neither does she want to permanently damage her children by destroying their relationship with their father, possibly even their grandparents, and submitting them to “education” programs in feminist philosophy. She’s smarter and more mature than that.

She may well have paid for that house she’s expected to leave, and have a career she will be unwilling to drop in favor of relocating to a “women’s shelter.”

All she wants is for the abuse to stop. That’s all any abuse victim wants.

Why should she be expected to leave behind everything she’s worked for and enter a residential program designed for women without education, marketable skills or any other support? Why should she be expected to enter a communal living situation where she knows that none of the other residents have been screened for arrests, drug abuse and/or violent behavior? Why should she expose her kids to the professional poor, who only use women’s shelters because they can, and live on manipulation of government and private programs?

For many women, the prospect of going to a shelter is worse than their abusive situation, and so they either deal with it on their own in some way or put up with it, and stay where they are. In seven years of activism for unserved victims of domestic violence, these are the women who contact me. They wish there were services that would give them the tools they need to deal with their problem without throwing away everything they’ve worked for in their adult life.

We have to face the reality: the programs and services now available treat women as if they are incompetent, and the solutions they offer do not address the problem.

Note: this is a very long piece, almost 3000 words, so I'll be posting it in chunks until it's done.

Give a men’s issues program a little money and a place to work in, and what do you get?

Equal services for all comers. Of the first two people helped by SDMC’s new domestic violence program, one was a man, the other a woman. See, they don’t mess around with apportioning their services based on gender. A person in need – military or civilian – is a person in need, period. They don’t care about your chromosomes.

Here’s what Harry Crouch, the mover and shaker behind this program had to say in his recent newsletter:

“Friday, October 13, We provided our first emergency shelter for an abused man who was chased out of Los Angeles by members of a gang [with] which his abusive and threatening wife was somehow affiliated. On Monday, October 15 a residential women's facility psychologist referred to us a homeless young woman who recently lost her children through a divorce. As the story goes apparently both she and her Marine ex-husband were abusive. The abuse escalated after the husband was caught screwing around with another Marine -- a female. Even in DV-Central San Diego there is a dearth of facilities for single women who are abused. But, we now had a place for her to stay too, plus she'll get help with job search and basic life skill training. So will the man if he chooses, though his situation is very different.”

If you’re a federal employee who donates to United Way through the Combined Federal Campaign, please consider designating your donation for the San Diego Men’s Center. As you’re probably aware, San Diego is a big military town, and SDMC understands the needs of military people. Not just men, but all the human beings who protect our country.

On the other side of the country, the home office in Maine of the Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men & Women, also provides equal services for everybody. They have provided aid for both men and women who were unable to get the help they need in their communities.

If we can fund and support these agencies, perhaps their egalitarian approach can provide some real answers and practical solutions to domestic violence. If you take away the politics and gender bias, what you have is a human problem that is quite simply, not addressed by the majority of the 2000+ services nationwide.

I wouldn't ordinarily give this deeply disturbed individual so much as a passing mention, but some of the content in this post seems to me like it may even be actionable. If it is, I hope to God that Glenn Reynolds is on top of it.

Hate speech is not limited to the far right -- this is the kind of thing I've been putting up with for seven years. It's also the kind of mindset that has kept domestic violence services and aid firmly planted in the past, and no longer of any help to today's women, men, or families.

Kelly at A Woman Against Feminism was wondering aloud what can be done to work for men’s rights, and since it is DVA month, it’s a good time to get started. Here are a few  things you can do offline:

All over the country there are events scheduled this month to support women’s shelters, and local media are recycling the same old myths and fabrications. Why not attend one or more of these and hand out some flyers with better information?  There are some ready for printing here and here. Even better if you can get a few other people to go with you. Don’t be shy about approaching any media people you may encounter, if you’re confident you’ve done your homework.

The DAHMW flyer is also suitable for placing anywhere there is a rack for distributing this kind of community information, such as hospitals, doctor’s offices and even some supermarkets and/or shopping malls. DAHMW is the only nationwide org that will help anyone, regardless of gender.

While you’re at it, pick up on some of the flyers provided by your local DV orgs and city or county Victims Services. Take a highlighter and use it to point out the information that is bogus or meaningless. Then write a letter explaining (respectfully, please ;>) why their factoids are incorrect, point by point. Send copies to the administration of the offending agency, their Board of Directors, and any major donors you can locate. In the case of city or county services, mail copies to each member of the City Council or County Supervisors. Don’t forget the editor of your local paper.

When your local media quotes any of the aforementioned myths and fabrications, phone, write, or e-mail and let them know where they went wrong.

Most Often Quoted Bogus info on DV:

“95% of victims are women” – this is a misinterpretation of an old DOJ study that looked at convictions for domestic violence in one year. In those cases, yes, 95% of those victims were women. But the study did not claim to apply to everyone, all the time.

“Every (X number) seconds, a woman is battered.” – The simple fact that the number varies widely from report to report should  be a clue as to the veracity of this factoid. Nobody really knows where it came from. The best guess is a 1977(!) study done by Murray Straus, which also mentioned an equal number of men. Certainly the FBI never said it.

The fact that almost no national agency uses these numbers anymore, since they have been so widely debunked doesn’t stop small, local agencies from using them anyway. My own county’s victim services dept has a flyer out right now that says: “The number one cause of emergency room visits for women is domestic violence.” Christina Hoff Summers debunked this in Who Stole Feminism? in 1994.

Every year has a prevailing factoid used by almost everybody in the biz. This year it’s “One in four women will experience domestic violence in their lifetime.”

There is no study anywhere that validates that claim.

The closest I’ve been able to come is this one, (from 2000) which says:

“Nearly 25 percent of surveyed women and 7.5 percent of surveyed men said they were raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, or date at some time in their lifetime…”

Were is not the same as will. Yet it makes for a good sound bite.

The same study goes on to say:

"According to these estimates, approximately 1.5 million women and 834,732 men are raped and/or physically assaulted by an intimate partner annually in the United States. Because many victims are victimized more than once, the number of intimate partner victimizations exceeds the number of intimate partner victims annually. Thus, approximately 4.9 million intimate partner rapes and physical assaults are perpetrated against U.S. women annually, and approximately 2.9 million intimate partner physical assaults are committed against U.S. men annually."

There is plenty more information, some of questionable validity here.

I know this is going on long, but I do want to make two more important points.

A frequent factoid is one that claims a certain percentage equaling a majority of women murdered are killed by somebody they know. This is a pulsating, dripping red herring. The same applies to men and children, but they leave that part out. People who are going to kill somebody usually kill somebody they know – for all kinds of reasons.

Finally, behind all of this is the undeniable fact that there is no universally accepted definition of domestic violence. Every group that deals with this issue has its own definition, based on their own agenda. These range from outright physical assault to “feeling uncomfortable” to a woman’s prediction of her significant other’s future behavior.

…and that’s probably enough to get started!

She’s probably not the first, nor will she be the last. Tanya Rider suffered needlessly due to the skewed—and potentially deadly—teachings of the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

As my dear and trusted friend Harry Crouch, pointed out in the Seattle Times today:

For a variety of excuses from the King County Sheriff's Office, Tanya Rider may have died while incapacitated in her vehicle for more than a week. The most galling excuse is clearly suspecting her husband of foul play before initiating a search.

Tom Rider was required to pass a polygraph test to eliminate suspicions about his role in her disappearance before a search was launched, which leaves me incredulous for at least two reasons. First, it presupposes that Mr. Rider might have been involved in her disappearance, and second, had roles been reversed, it's questionable whether a polygraph would have been required of Mrs. Rider.

Most galling is that Mrs. Rider's suffering was prolonged until the King County Sheriff's Office could determine that her husband was not some sort of abuser, which is gender-profiling and otherwise just plain stupid.

These demonstrably dangerous agencies, which operate in every state, and in any case under questionable legal circumstances, need to be shut down as soon as possible.

If nothing else, they are bigotry in motion. Forcing law enforcement agencies who, left to their own devices, operate on the basis of facts and evidence, to skew their procedures to satisfy the needs of a political cause, is nothing short of insane.

Does anyone really think that some self-involved, over-educated girl who has never held a real job in her life is qualified to advise your local cops on how to do their work?

Hey, people, this stuff happens every single day. All over the country.

By law, (VAWA 1994) law enforcement professionals at every level are now expected to add misandry to their SOP folio. It is such horse hockey, such nonsense that now women are at risk because a handful of bigoted, vengeful girls decided 20 years ago they could make a few bucks off the misery of their claimed “sisters.”

Look at the history of the issue of so-called “battered women” and you will find lots of divorce lawyers, highly-paid directors of services which do little or nothing, and plenty of professional victims.

The result has been that while thousands of women are handed your tax dollars every day under false pretenses, the actual women in need go without any help at all because their dear benefactors – those feminists who somebody is always insisting I thank – didn’t consider their problem.

They couldn’t get their heads far enough out of their asses to do that.

There is almost nothing in this House Resolution that is objective, supportable, or egalitarian. It’s simply more of the formulaic “men are pigs, women are idiots” nonsense propagated by the radical feminist lobby.

Richard Davis has more detail here.

Dean alerted me to a pretty good discussion on domestic violence going on at Dr. Helen’s blog. Seems there’s a new study conducted by the CDC that suggests men shouldn’t be overlooked as victims of DV.

There have been more of these as time goes by, and I do get a little bit of hope from them. Of course, as Alaysia, a commenter at Doc Helen’s pointed out, the DV industry is made up of many true believers who will do anything; twist any situation, to make it the fault of the man in the relationship.

At the upper echelons of the industry are many self-styled “women’s advocates” who’ve crafted lucrative careers for themselves out of the misery of families everywhere. When I’ve pointed this out in the past, I’ve often been chided by shelter workers and others who claim “nobody’s ever gotten rich off domestic violence.”

While it’s true that at the lower levels of the industry you find people working long hours for little or no pay, those same people never seem to recognize the disconnect. Nor do they ask why it is an organization such as the National Domestic Violence Hotline, which provides relatively little service, has a yearly budget in the multiple millions of dollars and can afford to pay people $37K a year to answer the phone. (This is as of 2005 – the budget has certainly increased by now.)

I’ve said much of this here before, so I won’t belabor the point.

However, what my experience in social services has taught me is that in agencies large and small, there are those who live off the power they hold over other people, and the awesome control they can exert over not only families, but entire communities. When you’re dealing with people teetering on the edge of ruin, the actions of a single individual can determine whether a family emerges from their crisis, or is destroyed. It doesn’t take long working in this field to realize how that works, and it can be seductive as any drug for those who can’t (or won’t) detach.

The scary thing for me is that so many of these people have convinced themselves they’re working for some kind of warped concept of goodness. They honestly believe the bizarre, irrational doctrine that accompanies so much of what constitutes the “conventional wisdom” regarding domestic violence.

Had the agencies providing their questionable “help” for battered women been left in the private sector, the worst of them would have closed down by now, leaving the more-egalitarian agencies to progress, and seek better solutions. In fact, what I hear is that immediately prior to the 1994 passage of the Violence Against Women Act, many agencies were poised to open their doors to male victims, and figure out what to do about the issue as a whole. But VAWA prevented them from doing that, and so what we have now are stagnated services that do little or nothing, while costing the public amazing amounts of money.

The ironic thing is that properly-run services with a balanced, and focused  perspective would cost a fraction of what’s being spent now.

But we have to somehow get past the ideologues and the profiteers first, and I’m not really sure how to do that.

UPDATE: Some interesting commentary from female abusers & feminists, etc...

From the Hindustan Times

Hundreds of “harassed” husbands, including IIT and IIM grads, engineers, doctors, lawyers and NRIs, will gather at Jantar Mantar on Sunday as part of the countrywide protest against dowry harassment and the more recent domestic violence laws. "We are all victims of these biased laws,” says Swarup Sarkar of Save Indian Family Foundation, the organiser.

Plenty happened while I was in L.A., fighting traffic and working. At least the weather cooperated this time. Everybody was complaining about the heat – 100° at times –  but I was right at home in it!

Just before I hit the road, an article in a British paper caught my eye. Check it out:

"For those who think Indonesia is a world away a recent study showed that a third of men in the UK think domestic violence is acceptable.

"Staggeringly and more than half polled said it was a domestic issue and shouldn't involve the law."

Well, those answering the poll did not say DV was “acceptable,” they just said it shouldn’t involve the law. That is something else entirely.

In fact, this piece in the NY Times suggests DV laws are beginning to have negative consequences. (Not like I didn’t know that already, but it’s good to see the light going on in other places)

While I was away, Margo Moore AKA Kirkham was sentenced here in Yuma for the death of Bill Kirkham a year ago. She got three years jail time and three years intensive probation for a drug charge. Comments on the news article in the Yuma Sun are not quite what you’d expect, BTW. Also of note is the fact the defendant’s own brother was happy to see this girl behind bars.

I was fairly pleased with the sentence, because it is the longest in recent memory for one of these cases. For example, Mary Winkler only served 67 days, and that was not even in a jail.

In the WSJ, Jeff Zaslow wonders if we’re teaching our kids to be fearful of men. (Hat tip: Instapundit) Well, duh…

The piece includes this quote:

Virginia's campaign was designed to encourage people to trust their instincts about possible abuse, says Rebecca Odor, director of sexual and domestic violence prevention for the state health department. She stands by the ads, pointing out that 89% of child sex-abuse perpetrators in Virginia are male.

What Ms. Odor doesn’t say is where her figure of 89% comes from. Most likely, it’s the number of convictions or arrests for child sex abuse crimes, which is not the same as the number of actual perpetrators of child abuse in the general population. Nobody really knows that number, but all indications are that when it comes to child abuse in general, women tend to be in the majority.

Just as “battered women’s advocates” once attempted to prove that 95% of all victims of domestic violence were female, by misrepresenting a simple reporting of the number of convictions, numbers are again being used to confuse and obscure the reality.

All of the above require more attention, but I just wanted to ease back in and note some of these things I’ve been thinking about. A teaser, as it were, for future postings.

Got a bunch of e-mails this morning about a radio program today (9am Eastern) on male victims of domestic violence. This is the Al Roney program on 810 WGY out of Albany New York. They have streaming audio here

Their call-in number is 1-800-825-5949

Here's the backstory:
Last year during the elections Congressman John Sweeney's wife, Gayle called the police on John claiming domestic violence. He lost the election, and this year John filed for a divorce stating that he is the victim of DV and obtained a restraining order against his wife. His wife has now been moved in with "friends" along with body guards, even though there is evidence (including photos of bruises and bite marks and a police report) shows that John was the victim of DV.

More from the Albany Times-Union here.

I suspect the truth of the matter, as it usually does, lies somewhere in between. We talk about male victims, we talk about female victims, but if there was ever an apolitical, objective study done, I'm sure what they'd find is that situations of mutual abuse, with couples resorting to violence against each other, would far outnumber the obvious, clear-cut cases where there is a definite victim, and an abuser.

Women commit, by far, the majority of violent child abuse.

They also commit, by far, the majority of elderly abuse (i.e. kicking, punching, and beating up helpless old people).

Isn't it amazing how many people become enraged or snotty when you point out this unassailable fact?

I guess the stereotype of "woman as perpetual victim" is embedded permanently in the culture.

Men must be ultimately to blame, I suppose.

New Study from the University of Washington. UPI story here. That's the real story, IMHO.

Over at Dr. Helen’s blog, there’s a discussion of the Mary Winkler case, which is the best known of the many recent cases where a woman killed her husband or intimate partner.

There’s an alarming trend in this country today. Men are being murdered, and the perpetrators –  their wives, girlfriends, or mothers – are getting away with light sentences, or even probation. In one case, an accused murderer was even allowed to change her name and serve her probation in another state.

In each of these cases, it would appear that those prosecuting were driven by political concerns and a disingenuous belief  that their cases would prove to be anomalous, a one-time incident that was unlikely to ever happen again on their watch. Unfortunately, there have been four recent cases in the Desert Southwest alone, and more in other parts of the country. That would seem to disprove any notion of exclusivity, when it comes to women committing murder.

Yet prosecutors continue to bend over backwards, often to the point of blaming the victim, his family, and everyone but the accused, to see that these crimes are not fully prosecuted. The only anomaly here is that in these cases, the defense and the prosecution cooperate to ensure the lightest sentence possible. There would be no sentence at all in most of these cases, but for the propensity of these women to confess to their crimes.

Even the most politically paranoid officers of the court cannot pretend no crime has been committed, when there is an incident, duly reported by local media, of a death by other than natural causes.

Ever since Francine Hughes killed her husband while he slept in 1977, there has been a growing reluctance to prosecute women who claim abuse. In those days, abused women had little or no help available to them, and in the case of Francine Hughes, her action was considered justifiable. That is no longer the case. Today there are as many as 4000 shelters and programs nationwide, and help is only a phone call away. Yet women accused of murder, who use the abuse excuse, are rarely, if ever, asked why they did not access these services and chose to kill instead.

Because of the reluctance of prosecutors to pursue justice in favor of political expediency, we now have a situation where violent women are encouraged  to continue their behavior, knowing the authorities will turn a blind eye to any crime of violence they commit against a man. Amy Dugas, who killed her husband in Maine and was allowed to serve her probation in Tennessee, has subsequently been arrested for assault no fewer than three times. Here in Yuma, relatives of Bill Kirkham, killed last August, are concerned for their own safety once his killer is released from jail in about two years. (One of those years to be served for an unrelated charge.)

In both of these cases, the women had long histories of violence and drug abuse, with multiple prior arrests, yet when their behavior had progressed to killing, prosecutors refused to do their jobs of protecting the public. Had these habitual criminals been male, then they would have been put behind bars for many years, perhaps life. There is in fact, no record of any man being acquitted of murder because of a claim of spousal abuse.

There is a clear double standard here that we can no longer ignore.  Prosecuting crimes based on the sex of victim and accused is nothing more than bias, and has nothing to do with justice. Court officials who choose this path may be saving or advancing their careers, but meanwhile they leave the community at risk from violent predators who are no less dangerous because they are women.

There was a conference on male victims of domestic violence this week. In West Virginia, no less.

Mea culpa, this is very late, but a DAHMW volunteer is on Volunteer Matches Spotlight for the month of April! Conga-rats!

It was business as usual in Tennessee, as Mary Winkler got what amounted to a slap on the wrist for the murder of her husband. Convicted of manslaughter, she could conceivably be paroled after serving a third of the 3-to-6-year sentence. Matthew Winkler's parent's have filed a wrongful death suit, but that's kind of an exercise in futility, methinks.

Just a couple of quick observations:

What I wonder now is if she will face other charges for that check-kiting scheme the murder was designed to cover up. Will we find that passing bad checks is a greater crime than the murder of a man?

One thing I notice in these cases is that not even the prosecution ever asks: Did you ever approach your local women's shelter for help, and if not, why not?

There’s jury selection for the Mary Winkler trial going on right now, and this trial is going to be extremely interesting to watch. When the news broke initially last year, I had slim hopes that justice would be served, as in the recent past female murderers have been treated quite differently than their male counterparts.

In 1991, Carol Harriman from Camp Verde, AZ murdered her husband, after going around town for two weeks quite openly trying to find someone who would do the job for her. Although the woman was convicted, Governor Jane Dee Hull commuted the sentence in April of 2001, on the grounds that murdering an abuser should be considered to be self-defense.

We are always hearing about "domestic violence awareness." Maybe it's time we start hearing about the truth of these programs, and how they simply provide aid and promotion for female abusers.

There's been another murder of a man by his wife here in Arizona. My thought is that it's an unusual state of affairs.

Once this kind of crime becomes no longer newsworthy, then you really need to worry.

What I wonder about is the rest of the country. Maybe Minnesota or Oregon or Kentucky is also experiencing a rash of spousal murders and I just don't know about it. I've tried doing searches on Google News and Topix, and end up with a gazillion irrelevant results.

If anybody has a suggestion for a productive string of search terms, I'd be grateful.

In other news, my good buddy and Executive Director of the Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men and Women, Jan Brown, made the NY Daily News on Saturday. This was on the Jason Kidd divorce, which is apparently fodder for many jokes and high hilarity in sports circles. I know my local sports guy at the Yuma Sun needed some education awhile back. (You need to scroll down, sorry.)

Have we learned nothing from the Duke rape case, I wonder? Maybe we just haven't reached the tipping point yet. I do know we had to put off publication of DAHMW's resource guide of agencies that provide actual services for male victims, as some previously women-only services are changing their names and their programs. This rendered a lot of the information we had incorrect, and so we have to go back and re-check what we have. Volunteers are needed, BTW.

So some of the news is good, some not so much.

On a more practical level, the effect of VAWA is that it is almost impossible these days for anyone to get help for a domestic abuse problem without resorting to an arrest/shelter/divorce scenario. The VAWA-established rule of revenge applies, the minute anyone phones 911 for aid in a household violence case. The man is arrested, the local women’s shelter is called by the police and responds, and from that moment, the entire concept of domestic violence as a crime by a man against a woman prevails.

After that point, there is nothing either party can do about it. The facts of any specific case are now immaterial.

VAWA takes precedence. Any domestic violence is now a crime against a woman, perpetrated by a man.

In my five years of activism for unserved victims, I’ve heard not only from male victims, but from female victims as well. Women are quite often bullied and threatened into entering the shelter/divorce system against their will. What women want are the tools to deal with their issue. They do not see the shelter scenario as practical, and for them it is a cure worse than the disease. Yet the system has the power to take away their children if they do not comply.

Even victims who are killed cannot escape the revenge scenario of VAWA. If the victim is male, he must have been an abuser, is the feminist philosophy. Because of 12 years of VAWA-sponsored “education,” the families of men who are killed by their abusers are now subjected to the same kind of treatment by government officials and others involved in the death process as if they are also automatically abusers.

In a recent e-mail, the daughter of Bill Kirkham, who was killed by his girlfriend in August ’06, (here in Yuma Arizona) after much abuse and many arrests, told me everyone from City or County government treated Bill and them as if they were all nasty abusers. Nevermind his brother, Duane, was once on the Board of Directors of our local Safe House women-only shelter. During his tenure, in the early 1990s, they were making plans to expand services for male victims. Guess VAWA got in the way.

Today at Safe House in Yuma, we have Sarah Seneker as Executive Director, who was previously in charge of the victim services program for Yuma County. She told United Way Allocations Panel members in 2005 she’d “never seen a male victim in 29 years.”

Over in Imperial County, California, a CHP officer was killed by his wife in December. The local newspaper responded with an article that suggested domestic abuse was a part of every male cop’s life. Nevermind Kym Cano had been arrested more than once before on DV charges. Once she killed him, it was then his fault, apparently, for being stupid enough to die. He asked for it, by being a man, and by being a cop.

Francisco Cano never had a chance. Not only Kym, but VAWA, sealed his death warrant.

Bill Kirkham never had a chance, either. His stalker and eventual murderer was allowed to take his name legally and eventually kill him. Just because she is a woman.

Both cases are of course, still pending, but it seems nobody wants to look into the real reasons for these senseless deaths.

How many more men have to die?

Do we really think it’s OK for women to kill men they have issues with?

VAWA leaves the door open for women to take the law into their own hands. Yes, there is precedent. In April of 2001 Gov. Jane Dee Hull of Arizona commuted the sentence of Carol Herriman, who had been convicted of murder, simply on the grounds the woman claimed abuse. While there was no doubt the abuse occurred, there is plenty of doubt that the woman made any attempt to deal with the issue in any other way.

The issue of self-defense is clear. You really can’t just kill somebody if you believe they may at some time in the future cause your death.

In the cases of Francisco Cano and Bill Kirkham, I believe they were in terrible situations and had no idea what to do next. They knew there was nothing they could do, and no one they could ask for help. These educated men had no illusions about the state of help as it is.

Their killers didn’t, either.

On September 13, 1994, the Violence Against Women Act was quietly signed into law, changing forever the way we approach the issue of intimate partner abuse.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the so-called "battered women's" programs in place all over the country were in trouble. They were being criticized as nothing more than "revolving door" programs, which were frequently abused by women who used them as places to chill out for awhile before returning to an abusive relationship, or simply as transient housing for homeless women. Their programs did little or nothing to address the actual issue, but in general provided only a temporary escape, and divorce assistance.

To add to their problems, many shelters faced closure due to poor administration and badly-managed finances. Many programs were founded and run by former victims, or friends and families of victims, most of whom had little experience in the operations of non-profit agencies.

Had this situation been allowed to develop naturally, we would have quite different approaches and programs than are in place today. As early as 1991, there was a movement to establish programs for abused men, not to mention the fact that the earliest programs in the US were actually established by lesbian women in violent relationships.

VAWA had the immediate effect of freezing existing programs in time. By providing 1.5 billion dollars in funding, agencies that had already begun to demonstrate the weaknesses and poor concepts of their programs were allowed, even encouraged, to continue in business as usual.

VAWA now defined in practice that all domestic violence, rape, and intimate partner abuse was a crime by a man against a woman. To make matters worse, it was structured in a way that not only allowed but promoted revenge-seeking for victims rather than simple justice for offenders under due process of law. Laws against assault and rape were already in place, but the crafters of VAWA chose to ignore that reality in favor of something that would oppress men in the same way they imagined themselves to be oppressed. Then and now, it is all about the revenge.

You may also find, if you can access media from the time, that many people were under the impression that VAWA was about rape counseling, and not about spouse abuse.

Those who were against the legislation in its proposed form on grounds of gender bias were diverted by the proponents' claim that "the language is gender-neutral."  Sure, most of the language, even with subsequent changes, is what could be called, "gender-neutral." What cannot be denied is the fact that it is entitled the Violence Against Women Act. Not Violence Against People, or Violence Against Intimate Partners. So again, in practice, VAWA rejected any approach that included male victims or female abusers, and prevented any program recognizing these individuals from accessing the massive funding available to other programs.

That claim of "the language is gender-neutral" continued to be used by proponents of this bad law for many years, and maybe even continues today. It is undeniable, however, that any programs hoping to serve the rejected population have routinely been denied government funding on the grounds of the title of the law - not the language of the body of the law.

The first version of VAWA included provisions that allowed women to sue their targeted man in civil court, as well. Fortunately, that provision was ruled unconstitutional in 2000, but unfortunately, the media coverage of the time suggested the entirety of VAWA had been so discarded. This led some people to believe that this terrible mistake had been corrected, but the framework of VAWA remains. It was reauthorized in 2000, even more quietly than its initial passage in 1994, and then again in 2005. The 2005 reauthorization allowed the word, "men," to be inserted at some point, but that does not mean it has become an instrument of equality, by any means.

What we have now is an established network of  VAWA-funded coalitions in each of the 50 US states that oversee not only the operations of the domestic violence shelters, programs, etc., but also the "education" of law enforcement entities - from the judiciary down to the cop on the street - in feminist concepts of domestic violence. These coalitions tend to be run by what I call "professional victims" - women who were once abused, but were able to remove themselves from that situation and go on to build currency or a career from their experience. That they have refused to heal and move on is something we should not notice or mention.

Once such woman is Barbara Hart, who 30 years after her short-tem abusive relationship, still calls herself "a battered woman." Her lucrative legal practice was built on her professional victimhood, and the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence, which she was instrumental in establishing, advertised her law firm on early incarnations of the website.

Others you will find in state coalitions are radical and extremist feminists, with nothing more to recommend them to the world of employment than a women's studies degree. Many of these girls have had no training for any job, have never held a job, and so that's where they go. You will find an inordinate number of women with high degrees in women's studies in domestic violence programs, and social services of all kinds.

I once spoke with a woman who was disappointed no one had ever told her that her PhD in women's studies would only get her a job at a women's shelter. I could not commiserate. You'd think that at some point a person with that level of education should be able to catch on...

I guess not, though. She later e-mailed me to ask for assistance in promoting her program of using performance art and poetry for male victims as a way to express their grief. Yeah, right...

Look for Part Two tomorrow

The inventor of the well-known noodle product has died in Japan at the age of 96. More on ramen noodles and their inventor at the Elementary Chef.

Don't forget -- your visits to the Elementary Chef are helping to fund Desertlight Center, a support group for male victims of abuse! So far, $124.11 has been raised thru the cash-less fundraiser. Thanks, everybody!

Yep, it’s getting down to the wire, Xmas looms, and your cards are maxed out. Still, you’d like to support a deserving charity.

Well, there’s a way I can help you with this. I get paid for writing at the Elementary Chef. I’ve decided that all proceeds from that will be going to DesertLight Center. That’s what I’m calling my nascent support group for male victims. It is, by the way, a chapter of The Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men and Women, the only nationwide organization to provide crisis help for male victims and female abusers. It is a registered 501 (C) (3) non-profit, in case anybody’s wondering.

I get paid by the number of visits to the site, so go on over and see what's up over there!
 
You'll be supporting a good cause, and it won't cost you a dime. If you're interested in cooking, you might find the site helpful, as well! ;>) It's geared toward basic information for those who may just be getting started, so you'll find information on things like reading a recipe, how to use a stove, etc. Yes, it’s that basic!
 
Please tell your friends! I know there are a lot of people who'd like to support this kind of an organization, but just don't have the cash to spare, so this is a way anyone can help without actually having to write a check.

This will be an ongoing effort – no time limit, what I make from Elementary Chef will always go to DesertLight Center. I’ll have the total raised on the website when that’s up. The first check arrives about the 11th, so everybody will know how much we’ve raised!