LETTER REGARDING VAWA FAXED TO SENATE AND HOUSE JUDICIARY

To: The Honorable Members of the Judiciary Sub-committee on Crime

Subject: Violence Against Women Act

Dear Honorable Senator:

Supporters of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) no doubt see gender violence the way battered-women's advocate Phyllis Chesler sees it. Says she, without citing sources, “According to contemporary studies, 90 percent of all violent crimes are still committed by men. ... When those women who commit 10 percent of all violent crimes do kill, nearly haflf kill male intimates who have abused them or their children, and they invariably do so in self-defense.” (Source: “Battered Women's Syndrome: Science or Sham?” Independent Institute, October 28, 2002, Wendy McElroy)

VAWA supporters, as well as much of the mainstream media, agree with Chesler that female aggression against men is minimal and nearly always provoked. 

Some of them begin to waiver, however, when they are presented with statistics revealing women's rather extensive violence against children:

Women are more likely to commit major physical abuse of their children than are men: 56.8 percent to 43.2 percent. [Source: Fire With Fire, by feminist Naomi Wolf, p. 221, hardcover]

Women are more likely to kill their children than are men: 55 percent to 45 percent. [Source: “Women and Violent Crime,” a paper by Prof. Rita J. Simon, Department of Justice, Law and Society and Washington College of Law, American University, Washington, D.C]

Women commit almost all of the murders of newborns. In Dade County, Fla., between 1956 and 1986, according to the June 1990 Journal of Interpersonal Violence 5:2, mothers accounted for 86 percent of newborn deaths. [Source: When She Was Bad, by Patricia Pearson, p. 255, note 71.]
(According to the Dept. of Health and Human Services, in 2003, nearly 60 percent of child abusers and neglect perpetrators were female.)

The idea of women assaulting children is finally becoming admissible in the minds of many Americans. Much credit for that may have to go to the use of hidden cameras. Increasingly, these cameras are catching mothers and female baby sitters in the act of brutalizing toddlers and even babies. “Prime Time Live” was among the first to serve up examples of these acts. On November 19, 1997, it revealed nightmarish scenes of mothers clamping their hand over the nose and mouth of their desperately struggling infants. In Great Britain, researchers using covert video cameras in just two hospitals filmed parents suspected of child abuse, predominantly mothers, in the act of deliberately attempting to smother their infants.

Battered-women's advocates excuse this maternal domestic violence against children -- while vociferously condemning the paternal type -- by claiming it stems from such "syndromes" as postpartum depression and "the oppressive patriarchy," the latter of which the advocates always blame for women's criminal behavior but never credit for women's good behavior. The advocates cite these syndromes in order to generate sympathy for the mothers (while generating anger toward the men who assault far less defenseless adult women). However, they can't seem to explain the fact that at least as many female baby sitters have been video-taped violently abusing toddlers and babies. Hidden cameras are doing what battered-women's advocates and most mainstream media outlets won't do: expose female violence.

Women's brutality against small, defenseless children -– a common form of violence that takes place in the home but which VAWA supporters do not call domestic violence -– suggests what ought to be painfully obvious:

If women, without provocation, batter and kill children, whom they've supposedly been socialized to love, they can, without provocation, batter and kill men, whom they've been socialized -- by the media, feminist literature, and VAWA-type legislation -- to distrust, fear, and hate.

Understanding this, one becomes more receptive to evidence that women dispense about as much unprovoked domestic violence as men do. Consider data in the July 2000 National Violence Against Women Survey. According to the National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS), which is administered by the U.S. Department of Justice, "data from the National Family Violence Survey consistently show men and women are equally likely to be physically assaulted by an intimate partner." (See government file.) Thus, an equality in domestic violence is established even though "Males appear to report their own victimization less than females do and to not view female violence against them as a crime." (See pdf file, "The gender paradigm in domestic violence research and theory: Part 1—The conflict of theory and data.")

If we don't take women's violence seriously, why should we take women's opinions seriously? After all, violence is merely an opinion acted out, a view transformed into behavior.

To objective, unbiased researchers, VAWA was not born of clear-cut data substantiating a climate of systemic abuse of women. Rather, it was given life by a blending of feminist and chivalrous myths about men being violent and predatory, and about women being weak, vulnerable, morally superior, and requiring special protections. It is also nourished by an ignored gender gap that I call the gender compassion gap: we are socialized to feel more compassion and sympathy toward female victims than toward male. The effect is that one story and picture of an abused woman is worth a thousand stories of abused men. “...[I]t’s a fact," says Cathy Young, author of Ceasefire! "that violence against women shocks us far more than violence against men.”

Plainly VAWA is the product of an ideology. That ideology -– that women suffer more violence than men and need more protections -- is nurtured by the ever-increasing number of advocates who have developed incomes and careers in the battered-women industry which they have built and invested much time and energy in. The ideology is fueled also, I believe, by those who see VAWA as validating their belief about “the systemic patriarchal violence against women.”

As an ideology-driven law, VAWA is destined to further alienate the sexes, just as a Violence Against Whites Act would further alienate the races. Moreover, by practically federalizing and institutionalizing the idea that men are bad and women are good, VAWA can only fuel the anger between the sexes and hence may increase the potential for the very violence VAWA seeks to eliminate. (This may explain why many supporters urge that VAWA be reauthorized on the basis that “violence against women is increasing.”) And it may produce another unintended, truly tragic consequence. Currently, far more men rescue women from danger than the other way around – an important factor that is missing in the theories about misogyny and violence against women. In reaction to VAWA's dichotomizing, women-good/men-bad messages, could some men grow so cynical that, rather than try to rescue a woman from danger as they normally would, they simply glance away and walk on by? [Nov. 23, 2006, update: This is already happening. See "Segregating Children From men."]

VAWA should be renamed along the line of the Family Violence Prevention Act, so that male victims receive the equal protection that the 14th Amendment entitles them to. Or perhaps it ought to be discarded altogether.

~~~~~

Violence Statistics At a Glance:

Post-script notes:

Men are victims of more violence even when rape and sexual assault are factored in.

The safest group is white women, who also happen to be the most vocal about being victimized and demanding protection.

In 2000, 1,247 women were victims of intimate partner homicide.

In 2003, 1,500 children died from abuse or neglect. (From the book When She Was Bad.)

Even though more children than adult women die from domestic violence (committed in the form of abuse and neglect mostly by females), feminists and the mainstream media direct our attention almost exclusively to the domestic violence against grown women. And Congress passed a Violence Against Women Act. Which sex has the power?

*For the truth on rape statistics, see "Tide turns against rape -- but why?"

tags: gender violence  biden  

links: digg this    del.icio.us    technorati    reddit