CDC - 71% of instigators of DV are women
Trudy W. Schuett
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...
That wasn't the only bald-faced lie, but come on! Who the Hell paid this guy?
The bad thing is we no longer seem to be able to say anything about thet.
This is true in every field--government, corporate, doesn't matter. That it's often a noble endeavor, or starts as one, does not change that one whit. That there are many true believers at the lower echelons who do not profit much is also nothing new at all.
This is far from the first study of its kind, but the fact that it's from the CDC may be useful in getting people to wake up a little more, and to get legislatures and courts a little more motivated to do something.
But I dunno. Is it possible to overcome people's prejudices on this? I often seriously wonder.
I've been meaning to ask, why do you spend so much time writing about domestic violence? I see so little people in general writing about how men get the short end of the stick and I'm wondering why you decided to pick up this particular baton?
Excerpt:
In California, male victims are excluded by definition. Section 124250 of the state’s Health and Safety Code defines domestic violence as follows:
The infliction or threat of physical harm against past or present adult or adolescent female intimate partners, and shall include physical, sexual and psychological abuse against the woman, and is part of a pattern of assaultive, coercive, and controlling behaviors, directed at achieving compliance from or control over, that woman. [emphasis added]
How does this stuff constitutional? Doesn't it violate equal protection?
Some genders are more equal than others.
The 1994 law states that men and women will not be protected equally under the law, and as of yet, no man has been able to take it to the supreme court to challenge the constitutionality of the law.
both genders are equally protected from violence against women ;p.
I first got interested in this issue while doing research for a novel in late 1999. By then I already had 10 years' experience working with small private charities in my area. I'd known about abusive women since 1st or 2nd grade, when one of my classmates' mothers went off on her dad one day, and there were other women I knew since. So I was really shocked to find that shelters of the day pretended those women didn't exist.
As one thing leads to another online, I eventually encountered some other crusaders and joined in. I'm an old leftover hippie who believes in equality, and I can't just let this one slide.
Dishman:
IMHO, most programs are operating illegally. If they were held to the same standards other programs must follow, they'd be shut down immediately if not sooner.
But as "everybody knows," men are pigs, and women are idiots who must be protected by laws for their own good. So TPTB look the other way and allow these quite real violations of human rights to occur. They tell themselves their intentions are good, and that's the end of it.
That was one hell of a display of dysfunctionality. I was honestly shocked.
I haven't wrestled the recent boyfriend yet, but I did learn that yelling and arguing really loudly and scarily like I do (thanks, dad!) scares him enough to win any argument.:)
They can just consider it payback for binding our feet, shoving our chunklet asses into corsets, leaving chick babies on mountaintops, droolin over size o asses and generally making us miserable for centuries.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.