The Domestic Violence
Industry’s War on Men
By painting all males as brutes, feminists hope to reduce half
the population to a state of dhimmitude.
January 21, 2010 - by Barbara Kay
The industry that has grown up around domestic violence (DV), or, as it is more
precisely situated these days in research circles, intimate partner violence
(IPV), began in good faith decades ago as a legitimate campaign to help women
trapped in abusive relationships.
Over the years, as the triumphalist feminist
revolution’s long march through the institutions of the West proceeded with
eerily unchallenged vigor, DV emerged as a highly politicized touchstone
justifying women’s entitlements — legal, economic, familial — at the expense of
boys’ and men’s human rights.
A tipping point in the DV chronology, when the focus amongst militant feminists
shifted from helping individual women to the more totalitarian ambition of
reducing the male population to cultural dhimmitude, can be traced back in
time to December 6, 1989, and in space to a school two miles north of my front
door.
December 6, 2009, marked the 20th anniversary of a unique tragedy in Western
history, the systematic massacre of 14 women
engineering students, with injury to 13 others, at Montreal’s École
Polytechnique by a lone young gunman, Marc Lepine, who killed himself at the
end of his shooting spree.
As an act of violence against women, the Montreal Massacre had no prequel or
sequel. Lepine — his real name was Gamil Gharbi, but Lepine chose to identify
with his québécois mother rather than his brutal, misogynistic, Algerian-born
father — was a sociopath, unaligned with any faith, political movement, or
identity grievance group. He was no jihadi. Although one could argue that the
massacre presented elements of an honor killing, Lepine’s crime was essentially
sui generis.
Ironically enough, if he were a jihadi, feminists would have been stymied in
their rush to collective judgment, for the standard reflex following
jihadist incidents is to repudiate any linkage of the act with Islam and to
warn against expressions of Islamophobia.
But in the case of the Montreal Massacre, a diametrically opposed instinct
prevailed. Because Lepine’s only distinguishing feature was his
maleness, the tragedy sanctioned unbridled
hostility toward all heterosexual men.
Indeed, for elite feminist
apparatchiks, then in their most muscular and misandric phase, bliss it
was in that bloody Montreal dawn to be alive.
Brazenly, without bothering to adduce any substantiating chain of evidence,
there being none, feminist
spokeswomen linked the horrific crime of a lone sociopath to the general
phenomenon of domestic violence against women. Marc Lepine “became” all men who
want to control women — eventually all heterosexual men — and December 6
achieved instant sacralised status as a day of national mourning that, for
fevered rhetoric and solemnity, eclipsed even 9/11 memorials.
As I wrote in a December 2007 National Post column:
By contrast [to Americans’ lessening interest in 9/11 memorials], the Canadian
public never seems to weary of the annual December 6 tribute to the 1989
Montreal Polytechnique shooting massacre of 14 women. Indeed, 12/6’s branding
power burgeons with every anniversary: The theme of violence against women
dominates the media; new physical memorials are constructed; additional
programs decrying domestic violence against women are entrenched in school
curricula; masses of white ribbons are distributed; more stringent gun control
is more strenuously urged.
Their cumulative effect is to link all Canadian men to a global conspiracy
against women of jihadist proportions.
Feminists everywhere in the West appropriated its emotive themes to lend
greater credence to an already widespread pernicious tripartite myth:
namely, that all men — the “patriarchy” — are inherently prone to violence
against women, that all women are potential victims of male aggression, and
that female violence against men is never unprovoked, but always an act of
self-defense against overt or covert male aggression.
The unspoken corollary to these falsehoods is that violence perpetrated
against males, whether by other males or by females, is deemed unworthy of
official recognition or more than minimal legal redress, and that while female
suffering must be acknowledged as socially intolerable, male suffering may not
make a parallel moral claim.
In fact, as any number of peer-reviewed research and government statistics make
clear, although women are far more likely to report domestic abuse, equal
numbers of men and women experience some form of DV during their lifetimes; men
and women initiate abuse in equal measure; and far from any inherent
“patriarchal” instinct to control women, DV — in Judeo-Christian culture at any
rate — is almost always attributable to individual psychological dysfunction
(see citation for Abusegate RADAR report below).
For the overwhelming majority of boys and men who harbor no ill
feelings toward women and no wish to control them — indeed, whose impulses are
largely chivalric; feminists have never
explained why all those “patriarchal” and “controlling” men on the Titanic
died after voluntarily ceding the lifeboats to women and children — the social
and cultural fallout from feminist
misdirection about DV beggars any honest observer’s descriptive
powers to summarize.
The unjust loss
of children in biased family courts under judges trained by feminist DV “experts,” lives
ruined by unchallenged false allegations of abuse, men’s ineligibility for
psychological and logistical services lavishly provided for women — these are
just a few of the human rights abuses men routinely
endure because of DV industry myths.
At the heart of the myth-propagation problem is the 1991-initiated White Ribbon
Campaign, impulsively organized by leftist male
Canadian politicians eager to ingratiate themselves with politically
influential feminists in the hysterical wake of the tragedy.
The “educational” and commemorative campaign, which rapidly spread to 57
countries, is based on scaremongering falsehoods perpetrated by feminists
pulling the communications levers of the DV industry, such as the
canard that one in three (in some accounts, four) women will be a victim of
male aggression in her lifetime, or that spousal homicide is the leading cause
of death for women (in fact, it is not even on the list of leading causes).
Credible information on DV is easily accessed, but the largely liberal media
compliantly channel the disingenuous “findings” and “reports” churned out by
hopelessly biased advocacy groups, whose methodology does not, to
put it kindly, meet the gold standard of community-based, peer-reviewed
research, or who use definitional ruses, or who collect only male-on-female
violence information, or who withhold data on female violence — and I could go
on.
The controversial and irrefragably anti-male Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is coming up for renewal in Congress this year. VAWA
partakes of exactly the same philosophy as the White Ribbon Campaign and
doubtless owes its provenance in large part to the Montreal Massacre
juggernaut.
Is there hope for a breakthrough in correcting the public’s perception on
DV, the necessary precursor to a gender-neutral approach to support for
DV victims by policymakers?
One encouraging indicator has surfaced this month in the form of a high-profile
Abusegate
campaign, organized by a coalition of groups and individuals working to reform
domestic violence laws. The campaign will include a concentrated lobbying
effort on Capitol Hill explaining how flawed information leads to flawed
public policy. It will also feature a series of radio interviews with
internationally respected domestic violence expert Dr. Donald Dutton of the
University of British Columbia, author of Rethinking Domestic Violence.
But Abusegate’s most tangible contribution to public exposure of the DV
industry’s willful deception of policymakers and the public is encapsulated in
a scrupulously referenced special report drawn up by a reliable research group,
RADAR (Respecting Accuracy in
Domestic Abuse Reporting): Fifty Domestic Violence Myths.
The report deserves widespread distribution in the media, as well
as in political, educational, and legal circles. It completely debunks the
received wisdom on many aspects of DV. For example, it tells us that: women are
as likely as men to be controlling; fewer than 1% of hospital visits by women —
not 22% as often touted — are attributable to DV; the actual annual number of
rapes reported by the FBI is 90,427, a tenth the number claimed by
feminists; 71% of children killed by one parent were killed by their mothers;
and 46 other little-known facts the DV industry would prefer you didn’t know.
This report will not have relevance for everyone: it is only for men and for
those women who have, or have had, or may have in the future kind thoughts for
a father or male partner or brother or son or son-in-law or male friend or,
indeed, any man who has, or may someday, contribute something positive to their
lives or to the lives of those they love.
So as I say, this report may not be relevant to you, in which case you should
not feel obligated to pass it along to anyone else. For those to whom it is
relevant, you owe it to the men in your life to share it with others.
Barbara Kay is a weekly columnist in the comment pages of Canada’s National
Post newspaper.
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