Man
beaters behind closed doors
Times
- 19th November 2000
Domestic
violence by women is rising as the balance of power in the home
shifts their way, says Melanie Phillips
Hitting
out: women today have greater economic and sexual freedom, and
are more inclined to use violence in a relationship. At a conference
on women and the law at Dublin Castle last weekend, Cherie Blair
made a stirring appeal for the law to recognise women's rights.
Recent research, she said, suggested there was an in-cident of
domestic violence every six seconds in the UK, with 80% of attackers
being male and their victims female. Women's rights were thus
under assault from men.
The prime
minister's wife was referring to research by Professor Betsy Stanko,
the director of the Economic and Social Research Council's domestic
violence programme, which was unveiled by the Metropolitan police
at a conference last month. Blair regurgitated Stanko's statistics
as fact.
Without
doubt, some women are the victims of serious domestic violence.
Yet the evidence strongly suggests that Stanko's research does
not stand up to scrutiny. It lends support instead to a propaganda
offensive that demonises men and minimises or conceals the fact
that women can be equally if not more violent, a distortion that
has cost many men their homes and their children.
The Met's
"snapshot" research revealed that across the UK, the police received
more than 1,300 distress calls a day about domestic violence,
with 81% being made by women who said they had been assaulted
by men. The Met said this amounted to one victim of domestic violence
calling the police every minute.
Stanko glossed
this further by saying that if the British Crime Survey was used
as a guide, the truer picture was that domestic violence occurred
every six to 20 seconds. This is because the survey says domestic
violence is under-reported by between three and 10 times. The
figures, said Stanko, were a powerful indicator of the inequality
of women.
Yet it is
hard to see how this conclusion can be justified. Statisticians
say the Stanko research makes several elementary howlers. The
same incident may have been the subject of more than one phone
call; the violence concerned may have been directed at property
rather than persons; or the claim made in the call may not have
been true. In addition, this "snapshot" almost certainly grossly
under-represented violence by women against men, who are notoriously
reluctant to acknowledge publicly that a woman has beaten them
up.
Much domestic
violence re-search is flawed because it relies heavily on biased
sampling, asking only women in refuges for their experiences of
violence, for example, or treating allegations of violence as
proof. The fairest and most reliable research asks both men and
women whether they have been both the victims and the perpetrators
of violence on their spouses or companions.
A vast body
of authoritative international research has been done on this
basis. And it reveals a remarkably different picture from the
feminist stereotype of patriarchal bullies and female victims.
Professor
John Archer is a psychologist at the University of Central Lancashire
and president-elect of the International Society for Research
on Aggression. He, too, is critical of the Stanko research. "I
don't see it as a very reliable way of estimating the proportion
of domestic violence in the population," he said.
As Archer
has shown in a recent analysis of data from almost 100 American
and British studies, women are more likely than men to initiate
violence against their spouses or companions and are more likely
to be aggressive more frequently. Most violence is tit-for-tat.
Nor is it the case that women attack men only in self-defence.
Among female college students, for example, 29% admitted initiating
assaults on a male companion.
Men, says
Archer, actually show restraint and put up with a high level of
violence among their wives or lovers. Indeed, he says, women are
encouraged to be violent towards men because they can generally
be relied upon not to hit the women back. True, when men do retaliate,
their greater strength means they are more likely than women to
inflict serious injury. Yet even so, Archer found, no fewer than
one-third of those with visible injuries from domestic violence
were male.
In line
with all this research, the British Crime Survey reported in 1996
that an equal proportion of men and women, 4.2%, had said they
had been physically assaulted by a current or former spouse or
lover in the past year. Only 41% were injured, and although more
women than men were hurt, the difference was not that great: 47%
of women injured compared with 31% of men.
The 1996
report found male victims of domestic violence were particularly
unhappy about the level of support offered by agencies, especially
the police. One police officer conceded how even when the police
were called to a domestic fight and saw the man bleeding and the
woman unscathed, it was the man who was commonly arrested.
One man,
who asked to remain anonymous to protect his children, said his
former wife set fire to his bedspread while he was asleep and
twice attacked him with a kitchen knife, once in the throat. "I
didn't go to the police because it was my home and my family and
I didn't want anyone else involved," he said. "I couldn't walk
out because she was being violent to the children. But in the
end I slept in a locked room with a shotgun."
He defended
himself aggressively and she accused him of violence. After their
divorce, one of her boyfriends told him that she intended to return
and kill her former husband. In fact, she killed another boyfriend
and is now in jail for his murder.
Another
man I spoke to, a former airline worker, married his second wife
when she fell pregnant. But he claims that from the start of the
marriage, she was violent. "She repeatedly punched me in the face
and threw chairs at me, and punched holes in the doors." He never
responded with violence, he said, but he would leave the house
and return when things calmed down.
One night
he left with a bloody face and was stopped by a policeman who
advised him to report the attack. But at the police station the
desk officer said "these things happen" and took no further action.
The husband initiated divorce proceedings, only to find his wife
was accusing him of violence. The courts believed her and promptly
awarded their house to her.
Of course,
such stories may well have another side to them. However, family
lawyers say it is common for women to make false allegations of
domestic violence in divorce cases. Mark Bowman, a lawyer with
London solicitors Alistair Meldrum, said this had got a great
deal worse recently after several court rulings and guidance from
the lord chancellor laid down that if the courts thought domestic
violence had occurred, they may conclude that it was better for
a child not to see its father.
"In the
last few months, the atmosphere has been poisoned by these rulings,"
said Bowman. "They mean that fathers now have to fight every allegation
of domestic violence otherwise they will lose contact with their
children." Yet it's hard to defend themselves as the women don't
have to prove their allegations beyond reasonable doubt, only
on a balance of probabilities. And the courts tend to believe
them.
"Women have
an incentive to exaggerate claims of violence," said Bowman, "as
they can use them to get the man ousted from the family home."
Moreover, he said, the legal aid rules required women who made such allegations to
report them to the police as a condition for assistance.
So on this basis alone, the police figures are likely to be inflated
by these often false claims.
The lord
chancellor's guidance on domestic violence is itself a disturbing
document. Although it says that the definition of domestic violence
must be "gender neutral" and makes passing reference to evidence
that most violence against children is perpetrated by mothers,
it is almost exclusively concerned with domestic violence by fathers.
Cherie
Blair: getting it wrong
Indeed,
domestic violence seems to have turned into an obsession among
family lawyers. A draft "family protocol" from the Law Society
advises lawyers to ask clients leading questions such as "Have
you been arguing a lot recently?" or "Do you generally have a
lot of arguments?" or "Do you and your partner ever lose your
temper?" as a way of sniffing out domestic violence. Even more
sinister is its advice that "many forms of domestic violence are
hidden and not recognised even by the client". So domestic violence,
it seems, occurs even when the victim is unaware of it.
It's not
just Britain that has fallen victim to the notion that endemic
male violence is the symptom of patriarchal power over women.
It's convulsing the legal systems in America, Canada, Ireland
and much of Europe, too.
Yet Archer
stands it on its head. Modern secular values, he says, have combined
with the economic and sexual emancipation of women to enable them
to end relationships with little cost and small risk of male aggression.
The result is the rise in female violence. The balance of power
between men and women has shifted. Why are lawyers and politicians
so determined to ignore the evidence?
