Dean's World

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.