In this essay, I will address 5 falsehoods of feminism which I will then seek to correct with accurate information. These falsehoods are as follows: 1) men commit more domestic violence against women than women against men, 2) men commit more psychological aggression against women than women against men, 3) men abuse their children more than women do, 4) men rape women more than women rape men and 5) men kill their intimate partners more than women kill their intimate partners.
Addressing each of these falsehoods, I make my case with supporting evidence that 1) women commit more domestic violence against men than the other way around, 2) women commit more psychological aggression against men than the other way around, 3) women abuse their children more than men do, 4) men are as likely to be victims of rape as women are and almost as many women as men are perpetrators of rape and 5) women kill their intimate partners as often as men kill theirs.
After I have made my case for each one of them, I will then offer my explanation for why it is so.
1) Domestic Violence.
Regarding domestic violence, the Partner Abuse State of Knowledge project resulted in 5 reports being published in 2012 and 2013. It was a project that spanned over 2 years in which 42 family violence scholars and 70 research assistants at 20 universities and research institutions participated. Approximately 12,000 studies were considered and more than 1,700 were summarized.
http://www.domesticviolenceresearch.org/
It found “rates of female-perpetrated violence higher than male-perpetrated (28.3% vs. 21.6%)”
and that “Among large population samples, 57.9% of [intimate partner violence] reported was bi-directional, 42% unidirectional; 13.8% of the unidirectional violence was male to female (MFPV), 28.3% was female to male (FMPV)”
http://www.domesticviolenceresearch.org/domestic-violence-facts-and-statistics-at-a-glance/
Moreover, the 2017 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey Report, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States, shows that on average for the years 2010, 2011 and 2012, an estimated 4.430 million women were victims of physical violence by an intimate partner compared to an estimated 5.389 million men. (Tables 5.1 and 5.4).
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/NISVS-StateReportBook.pdf
Don Dutton is a tenured emeritus professor at the University of British Columbia at the Department of Psychology and is one of the world’s leading authorities on the causes of domestic violence.
He, and a number of others, such as the late Murray Straus, have challenged the feminist ideological paradigm that domestic violence is predominantly perpetrated by men on women.
In a couple of lectures, I link to above, he deconstructs some of the myths surrounding domestic violence. He has found, for example, that even in cases of domestic violence where one partner uses severe violence (as opposed to minor violence) and the other uses no violence, women perpetrators were found to be in the majority. There was nearly twice as many as male perpetrators. This was revealed in the 1992 report by Jan Stets and Murray Straus that analysed data from the 1985 US national survey on domestic violence. Sample size of married couples was 5005 as well as 526 dating couples and 237 cohabiting couples.
Amongst domestic violence incidents that result in injury, domestic violence researcher, Murray Straus, has estimated their prevalence at about 0.5% of all domestic violence cases. John Archer did a meta-analytical study for the Psychological Bulletin in the year 2000. It combined a number of studies to create a sample size of over 64,000. It found that women were injured slightly more often than men in domestic violence. The effect size or d’ (d prime) was found to be one sixth of a standard deviation. This is not a significant difference.
Whitaker et al did a survey for the Centers for Disease Control in 2007. Sample size was 11,370. Age range was 18 to 28. It found that half of the domestic violence was reciprocal. Of the other half, the unilateral violence where only one partner is violence, 70% of the perpetrators were female.
All of these reports use representative community samples. The Conflict Tactics Scale of measuring violence is used and it doesn’t matter if a male or female is reporting. You get the same results.
Dr Don Dutton points to other surveys that undermine the feminist ideological position such as a study by Simon et al (2001) that found that only 2% of North American men agree with the statement “It’s okay to hit your wife to keep her in line”. It surveyed more than 5238 people. This is therefore not a normative belief and thus conflicts with the feminist paradigm of patriarchy. He points out, to audience laughter, that 6% of Americans believe that they were abducted by aliens. Another study (Coleman and Straus 1986) found that most marriages are not patriarchal. It found only 9.4% of North American marriages are “male dominant”.
He pointed to a survey done in Arizona by Gwat-Yong Lie in 1991 that surveyed 350 lesbians, 78% of whom had prior heterosexual and prior lesbian relationships. They were asked to report on abuse victimization in each and they report consistently more abuse from the female partner compared to the male partner, whether that be physical, sexual or verbal abuse. This discredits the idea that there is a patriarchy that is repressing women. Why are women repressing each other then?
Also, the Advocate reports:
“The National Violence Against Women survey found that 21.5 percent of men and 35.4 percent of women living with a same-sex partner experienced intimate-partner physical violence in their lifetimes, compared with 7.1 percent and 20.4 percent for men and women, respectively, with a history of only opposite-sex cohabitation. Transgender respondents had an incidence of 34.6 percent over a lifetime according to a Massachusetts survey.
The CDC’s 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, released again in 2013 with new analysis, reports in its first-ever study focusing on victimization by sexual orientation that the lifetime prevalence of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner was 43.8 percent for lesbians, 61.1 percent for bisexual women, and 35 percent for heterosexual women, while it was 26 percent for gay men, 37.3 percent for bisexual men, and 29 percent for heterosexual men (this study did not include gender identity or expression).”
https://www.advocate.com/crime/2014/09/04/2-studies-prove-domestic-violence-lgbt-issue
Dr Don Dutton also referred to a study written by Feld & Straus in 1993 which analysed US survey data in 1985. They re-interviewed people in 1986 and found that of the men who used severe violence in 1985, only 6% used severe violence in 1986 if the woman did not use violence against them. However, 23% of the men who used severe violence in 1985 used severe violence in 1986 if his partner used minor violence against them and 42% of the men who used severe violence in 1985 used severe violence in 1986 if his partner used severe violence, same as they do, against him. According to the feminist paradigm of domestic violence this important information on predicting the risk of future domestic violence, and thus taking steps to prevent it, is ignored because it conflicts with the politically mandated ideology that men are the only perpetrators of domestic violence and women are the only victims.
2) Psychological Aggression.
Shoring up the finding that women perpetrate more domestic violence on men than the other way around is the finding that men in intimate partner relationships experience more psychological aggression than women do. See, for example, Tables 4.9 and 4.10 of the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence survey report, published in 2011, and Tables 5.2 and 5.5 of the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence survey report, published in 2017.
https://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_Report2010-a.pdf
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/NISVS-StateReportBook.pdf
The 2011 NIPSVS report found that, in the previous year (2010), an estimated 16,578,000 women in an intimate relationship had experienced psychological aggression, compared to an estimated 20,548,000 men. Moreover, men report a markedly higher proportion of coercive control, as opposed to expressive aggression. From the report, psychological aggression includes expressive aggression (such as name calling, insulting or humiliating an intimate partner) and coercive control, which includes behaviours that are intended to monitor and control or threaten an intimate partner.
The 2017 NIPSVS report found that on average for the years 2010, 2011 and 2012, an estimated 17,022,000 women in an intimate relationship had experienced psychological aggression compared to 20,831,000 men. Moreover, men report a markedly higher proportion of coercive control, as opposed to expressive aggression. From the report, psychological aggression includes expressive aggression (such as name calling, insulting or humiliating an intimate partner) and coercive control, which includes behaviours that are intended to monitor and control or threaten an intimate partner.
3) Child Abuse.
According to the 2017 Child Maltreatment Report, published by the Children’s Bureau which is part of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, nearly twice as many mothers as fathers perpetrate child abuse, e.g neglect, physical, psychological and sexual abuse, on their children, 270,409 mothers compared to 142,801 fathers. Table 3.17. It’s over twice when father is combined with “father and nonparent(s)” and mother is combined with “mother and nonparents(s). This is based on data from 51 states.
Also, according to the 2017 Child Maltreatment Report, nearly twice as many children were killed by their mothers than by their fathers, 410 versus 208. When father is combined with “father and nonparent(s)” and mother is combined with “mother and nonparent(s)”, total numbers are 222 for former versus 555 for latter. See Table 4.4. This is based on data from 43 states.
https://www.acf.hhs.gov/cb/report/child-maltreatment-2017
4) Sexual Abuse and Rape.
According to the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence survey, published in November 2011, in the previous year (2010), almost as many men in the US were “made to penetrate” (an estimated 1.267 million victims) as women are raped (an estimated 1.27 million victims) See tables 2.1 and 2.2. No estimate of the number of men raped is given because the total number is too small.
“Made to penetrate” has the same meaning as rape as the definitions on Page 17 make clear.
Click to access NISVS_Report2010-a.pdf
Also, according to the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence survey, published in November 2011, in the previous year (2010), an estimated 686,000 women in the US were victims of rape by an intimate partner (Table 4.5) compared to an estimated 586,000 men who were “made to penetrate” by an intimate partner. (Table 4.6) No estimate of the number of men raped is given because the total number is too small.
“Made to penetrate” has the same meaning as rape as the definitions on Page 17 make clear.
Click to access NISVS_Report2010-a.pdf
According to the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey Report, published in April 2017, for the years 2010, 2011 and 2012, an estimated average of 1.473 million women in the US were raped (Table 3.1) and an average of 1.715 million men were “made to penetrate”. (Table 3.5).
“Made to penetrate” has the same meaning as rape as the definitions on Page 17 of this report make clear.
Click to access NISVS-StateReportBook.pdf
Also, according to the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey Report, published in April 2017, for the years 2010, 2011 and 2012, an estimated average of 2.542 million women in the US were victims of contact sexual violence by an intimate partner (Table 5.1) compared to an estimated average of 2.108 million men who were victims of contact sexual violence by an intimate partner (Table 5.4).
Click to access NISVS-StateReportBook.pdf
All the above statistics are based on self reports for the previous year. Feminists, and others invested in the narrative of women as permanent victims and men as permanent oppressors, counter that one should look at the lifetime figures which show considerable disparity between male and female victimization levels. Karen Straughan and Alison Tiernan do an excellent job examining this interpretation of the hard data of the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence survey, published in November 2011.
https://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/feminist-lies-feminism/papering-over-inconvenient-crime/
http://archive.is/9muqX
Aside from the disingenuous statistical tactic of re-categorizing the vast majority of the rape of males as “made to penetrate”, placing it under the separate category of “other sexual violence”, there is the cultural pressure on men who self-report previous rape and sexual abuse victimization to 1) reframe it as consensual or 2) view it as a rite of passage or 3) view it as less violent than it was or 4) “forget” it completely. This amnesia or reframing becomes more apparent as more time transpires after the adverse event, especially if the sexual abuse was by a woman.
Widom and Morris (1997) found that “16% of men with documented cases of sexual abuse considered their early childhood experiences sexual abuse, compared with 64% of women with documented cases of sexual abuse.” Ahola et al. (2009) found that eyewitnesses rated female perpetrators less violent than male when reporting after an interval of one to three weeks as opposed to ten minutes.
As more time passes since the traumatic event, there is a greater tendency, especially for men, to report false negatives, for example, when they do not report they were raped in their lifetime when, in fact, they were. The result is that the reported lifetime victimization rate given for rape and “made to penetrate” combined, in the 2011 NIPSVS report is 18.3% of women and only 6.2% for men. The entire disparity could well be an outcome of the greater willingness of men to reframe or “forget” sexual abuse or rape perpetrated on them by a woman.
The previous year figures are therefore more reliable. Moreover, the 2011 NIPSVS report found that 80% of men report a female rapist and 98% of women report a male rapist. These are lifetime figures (previous year figures are not given) and the 80% number for men is likely an underestimate of the percentage of female rapists for the reasons already given.
Alison Tiernan concludes, “The cautious and least sensationalistic position to take based on the NIPSVS’s findings is that men and women are most likely at an equal risk of rape and that the proportion of male to female rapists is not significantly gendered.”
5) Domestic Murder and Domestic Homicide.
According to Warren Farrell, American educator, activist and the author of seven books on men’s and women’s issues, FBI statistics on their face show that 1.5 times as many men as women kill their intimate partners. See video below. However, he argues that FBI statistics do not account for the female style of killing men which is to get a boyfriend (if she’s poor) or a hitman (if she’s rich) to carry out the killing as well as a motivation to not get caught in order to benefit from the deceased’s will. She’ll only benefit from that if her partner’s death looks like an accident. Men, on the other hand, tend to kill spontaneously out of emotion and it’s more obvious to the police that a man has killed a woman. As for female planned murder, even if the scheme is rumbled and the hitman/boyfriend is caught and she is caught, the FBI records it as an “multiple offender killing” rather than as a woman killing a man. When domestic murder statistics are re-evaluated to take into account the female style of killing then there will be a significant increase in the total number of women who kill their intimate partners compared to the number of men who kill their intimate partners.
Indeed, a review of FBI recorded statistics on intimate partner violence from 1976 to 2017, carried out by Northeastern University, Boston, Professor of Criminology, James Alan Fox, shows that, until the mid 1970s, almost as many men were killed in intimate partner violence as women. Then, the number of male victims declined significantly in subsequent years.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/domestic-violence-murders-rising_n_5cae0d92e4b03ab9f24f2e6d
Perhaps the reason for this lies in the increasingly successful use by females accused of intimate partner homicide of what Warren Farrell terms the 12 “female only” defenses that women can use, but not men, in a court of law to avoid or reduce a conviction or reduce a sentence as a result of a murder conviction. Warren Farrell lays all of these defenses out in his book, “The Myth of Male Power”, published in 1993, Chapter 12.
http://warrenfarrell.org/TheBook/
He writes, “There is no male-only defense for killing a woman. Nor should there be. But if there were, the male equivalent of the female PMS Defense would be the Testosterone Defense; the equivalent of the Innocent Woman Defense would be the Rational Man Defense – the equally sexist assumption that a man would not commit a crime unless he had a rational reason to do it; there would be Father Defenses, Battered Man Syndromes, and special defenses tailored for the burdens of the male role… such as a Bodyguard Defense.”
In his book, “Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say”, published in 2000, Warren Farrell states that the sexes kill their spouses about equally.
http://www.mediaradar.org/WCHWMDS_excerpt.php?segment=23
In “The Myth of Male Power”, he states that: “In brief, it is impossible to know the degree to which the sexes kill each other. The only thing we know for certain is that both sexes kill men more than they kill women.”
Perhaps, it is the case that women actually kill their intimate partners more than men do. According to the afore-mentioned Partner Abuse State of Knowledge project, women are 56.7% of all intimate partner violence perpetrators. According to the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence survey, in each of the years 2010, 2011 and 2012, men, on average, accounted for 54.9% of all victims of intimate partner violence. It may not be unreasonable to extrapolate from that data that, domestic murder or domestic homicide, as an unfortunate subset of intimate domestic violence, would be perpetrated by more women than men. It is true that men have, on average, more than 40% greater upper body strength than women; are, on average, 15% heavier and are, on average, 6 inches taller, however, in this age of readily available weapons, such as knives and guns, that physical advantage a man has often counts for naught.
Furthermore, the Partner Abuse State of Knowledge project found that among large population samples, 57.9% of [intimate partner violence] reported was bi-directional, 42% unidirectional; 13.8% of the unidirectional violence was male to female (MFPV), 28.3% was female to male (FMPV)”.
https://domesticviolenceresearch.org/domestic-violence-facts-and-statistics-at-a-glance/
In other words, of the 42% of intimate partner violence that was unidirectional, there were over twice as many women perpetrators as men. This represents a particularly dysfunctional type of relationship where the other partner does not even physically fight back to defend him or herself. It would not be unreasonable to conclude that a higher proportion of domestic murders and domestic homicides arise in this type of dysfunctional relationship. Taking that into account, the ratio of female domestic murderers to male domestic murderers could well be as high as 6 to 4, if not higher still.
For his book, “Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say”, Warren Farrell draws upon a Bureau of Justice Statistics special report called “Murder in Families”, published in 1994.
https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=791
It draws on a survey of murder cases disposed or completed in 1988 in the courts of large urban counties in the United States, specifically, murder cases disposed in the 75 largest counties in 1988, involving an estimated 9,576 defendants. It found that, overall, husbands comprised 59.3% of the assailants in spouse killings. It also found that “in black murders, wives were about as likely as husbands to be charged with the murder of their spouse. Of the 283 black-on-black spouse killings, 53% of the assailants were husbands, compared to 62% of the 218 white-on-white spouse killings. In the 11 Asian, Native American, Pacific Islander, or Alaska Native spouse murders, the husband killed the wife”.
This apparently is the source for Warren Farrell’s claim in the video I linked to previously that official statistics show that men kill their spouses at a rate one and a half times higher than women kill their spouses. He then argues that this still under-estimates the female total for domestic murders. He details 6 blinders in his book, “The Myth of Male Power” that he believes results in underreporting the final female number: 1) the greater likelihood of female murderers to poison their partners 2) their greater tendency to use contract killers 3) their greater tendency to come from a more middle class background and, therefore, in a position to hire better defense lawyers 4) the chivalry factor, 5) the innocent woman factor and 6) the plea bargain factor which sometimes leads to the dismissal of charges. Read more below.
Conclusion.
All of the information I have presented runs counter to the counterfactual feminist narrative that overwhelmingly men are the perpetrators of domestic violence and women are the victims. Among their abundance of emotion laden catchphrases is the one sided statistic that 2 women a week in the UK die from domestic violence at the hands of her intimate partner, ignoring the likelihood that 2 men a week also die from domestic violence at the hands of his intimate partner or at the instigation of his intimate partner (he’s killed by her boyfriend or a hitman she has hired). Similarly, feminists say that 3 women a day in the US are killed in domestic violence at the hands of her intimate partner, ignoring the likelihood that 3 men a day in the US also die from domestic violence at the hands of his intimate partner or at the instigation of his intimate partner (he’s killed by her boyfriend or a hitman she has hired). Another one-sided statistic, propagated by feminists, is that one in five or, more recently, one in four college women will be sexually assaulted, ignoring the fact that one in five or one in four college men will also be sexually assaulted as the hard data from the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence survey clearly bears out.
Since the 1970s, we have been looking at the issue of domestic violence through an emotion laden (uni)gendered distorting lens which has only served to obscure, obstruct and undermine debate on this important issue rather than promote discussion and find working solutions. Basing solutions on the mistaken belief that one sex is violent and the other is not has not worked and never will work. The toxic feminist narrative of “men bad, women good” needs to be abandoned in favour of taking cognizance of what the epidemiological studies actually say. They say that when it comes to domestic relationships, women are somewhat more violent and psychologically manipulative than men.
Is this unfair to women? No. Since the 1970s, the nonsense word “gender” has been introduced into public discourse. It put forth the idea in the minds of the public that even though men and women are physically different, we are the same in our minds; we’ve only been socially engineered to be different. Hence, the gender ideologues believed we can be socialized back to behave like one gender, regardless of our sex. This one sex gender ideology began to come unstuck in the 1980s with the emergence of fMRI scans that showed that there were structural differences between the male and female brain. Over 100 differences have now been identified. If there are structural differences in our brains, it seems no stretch to conclude that there are subsequently differences in our minds, in how we think.
Ideological feminists believe in the one sex gender to this day. The duality of our species is denied even though for most other species of closely related animal such a duality in behaviour as well as appearance would not be controversial in the least. Moreover, chromosomes alone determine which of 2 sexes all mammals and birds are. No reptile, after hatching, has been observed to change sex. Of all vertebrates, only one species of fish, the mangrove killfish, has been observed to have functioning male and female sexual organs at the same time. Even this species of fish has been observed to have only two sexes: male and hermaphrodite. If we substitute a dualistic view or sexual dimorphic view of our species for the monistic view presently preferred by feminists I believe we can accept the hard behaviourial data about the two sexes without cognitive dissonance.
Roy Baumeister, a social psychologist and Social Psychology Professor at the University of Queensland, contends that men tend to care more about or they are better than women at wider transactional social networking whereas women care more about or they are better than men at intimate one-to-one relationships. They, therefore, help or aggress more than men do in their preferred sphere of social interaction.
In a 2007 address to the American Psychological Association, link to transcript below, he claims that, “Aggression and helping are in some ways opposites, so the converging pattern is quite meaningful. Women both help and aggress in the intimate sphere of close relationships, because that’s what they care about. In contrast, men care (also) about the broader network of shallower relationships, and so they are plenty helpful and aggressive there.”
So, applying Roy Baumeister’s thinking to the domestic violence data, women care more about the intimate nurturing relationships to be found in the domestic sphere resulting in them being somewhat more violent and helpful there whereas men care more about the broader network of shallower transactional relationships and men subsequently are more violent and helpful when operating in that network.
Murder statistics would seem to bear this out: Nearly half of all women who are murdered die at the hands of their intimate partners. Only 5 percent of men suffer the same fate. Statistics from the United States Department of Justice show that between 1980 and 2008, of those convicted of homicide in the United States, the vast majority, 89.5%, were men.
This would suggest that, in men’s preferred sphere of interaction, beyond the domestic sphere, “on the streets” and other domains beyond the domestic sphere, he is more aggressive (and helpful) towards other men than women are.
As Roy Baumeister puts it, “Women don’t hit strangers. The chances that a woman will, say, go to the mall and end up in a knife fight with another woman are vanishingly small, but there is more such risk for men. The gender difference in aggression is mainly found there, in the broader network of relationships. Because men care more about that network.”
However, under the feminist monistic “one gender” viewpoint, you’re forced to come down on one side or the other rather than recognize that violence can be on either side depending on what kind of relationship is focused on, the female preferred intimate relationship dynamic or the male preferred transactional relationship dynamic. It’s always preferable for governments to come down on the side of women because men are more difficult to control. It remains the grim reality that governments want to control people rather than allow people to think for themselves.
George Carlin put it best.
The purpose of this article is not to argue that women are worse than men or to say that women are more violent than men. I’d say that overall women are about as violent as men are. Similarly, for rape and sexual assault, which are subsets of violence, a reasonable interpretation of both the 2011 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey Report and the 2017 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey Report is that both men and women have an equal tendency to commit rape and sexual assault. As a subset of violence, homicide, US Department of Justice statistics show that overall men kill a lot more than women do. I am not countering the feminist argument of a corrupt conspiratorial patriarchy keeping women down with the argument that there is a corrupt conspiratorial matriarchy keeping men down.
The purpose of this article is to point out that once we examine our species through a dualistic lens or a sexual dimorphic lens, something that we do without batting an eyelid in relation to all other closely related species, rather than an ideological monistic lens, then the surveys that I have linked to and that report on a greater propensity for female instigated violence in domestic relations make more sense. It’s better to examine the science rather than pretend it doesn’t exist.
It is for this reason that I started this article with links to direct reports on what official domestic violence statistics from the United States and other places around the world say about domestic violence and who’s responsible for most of it. For example, I referred to the 2017 Child Maltreatment report which compiles statistics from most US States and which show that “mother” and “mother and nonparent(s)” are responsible for over half of both reported child abuse and reported child fatalities by parents; I referred to the 2017 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Report, for which 22,590 women and 18,584 men were surveyed, and which shows that nearly 1 million more men than women were victims of violence by an intimate partner in each year between 2010 and 2012 and I referred to the Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project reports, published in 2012 and 2013, which summarized over 1,700 studies and which show that women are 56.7% of all intimate partner violence perpetrators.
Facts don’t care about your feelings. The facts make for uncomfortable reading for those of a certain ideological bent and it is surely tempting for some of them to run away from them, sweep them under the carpet or otherwise ignore them. But, there they are. As Winston Churchill put it, “The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.”
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