Legislating
vice and demonising virtue
http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles/archives/000859.html
Daily Mail - 23rd October 2004
The question
‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ is a well known
rhetorical device to illustrate the impossible situation in which
whatever answer someone gives traps them into an admission of guilt.
Now the
government appears to have updated this for the modern era with
the question: ‘When did you stop getting beaten by your husband?’
For from next year, it is to instruct doctors and midwives to ask
all pregnant women if they are being abused by their husbands or
boyfriends.
The implications
of this are breathtaking. What kind of society presumes that all
men are inherently bad? What kind of government seeks to police
pregnancy and turn doctors and midwives into state snoopers into
people’s private lives?
Questioning
women about their menfolk’s behaviour, with not a shred of
evidence that there is any cause for concern, is intrusive and oppressive,
breaching our fundamental right to private life. It overturns the
presumption of innocence on which we all go about our daily business
without state harassment, the very basis of a free society.
But it also
raises deeper questions. How have we slid so quiescently into such
an authoritarian political culture? How has it been so easy to mount
such a direct assault on natural justice and on men and family life?
How have we allowed our values to be turned upside down? And why
are we so silent when lies and distortions are presented as facts?
Just consider
the premise behind this pregnancy abuse directive. The government
seeks to justify it by saying that 30 per cent of domestic violence
is triggered by pregnancy. This may indeed be so; and clearly, violence
against a pregnant woman is an ill earnestly to be avoided.
But in itself,
that statistic is meaningless. For it obviously does not mean there
is a risk of violence to pregnant women overall. Only a small minority
of women ever suffer violence at the hands of their menfolk.
But the
number of cases has been grossly inflated by bogus figures that
the government has chosen to believe, claiming that one in every
four women suffers from domestic violence.
The idea
that a quarter of all women have been assaulted in this way is absurd.
This figure has been drawn from deeply unreliable research which
does not stand up to serious scrutiny. Some of it has been extrapolated
from self-selected samples of individuals in battered women’s
hostels. The rest derives from research of dubious quality, in which
women are interviewed but men are not.
Worse still,
the premise that men are the sole perpetrators and women always
their victims is simply false. Dozens of studies have shown categorically
that in domestic incidents, violence is initiated by men and women
equally. Moreover, much male victimisation is hidden because many
men are too ashamed of being assaulted by a woman to report their
injuries.
Yes, women
tend to come off worst in such encounters because men are stronger.
But that’s not the point. The demonisation of men as violent
aggressors with women merely their passive victims is just not true.
Even the
Home Office’s own respected research unit reported that equal
numbers of men and women said they had been assaulted by a current
or former partner. Yet the same Home Office chooses to ignore or
even deny such findings.
It points
instead to the fact that around 100 women a year are killed by men
in domestic incidents (along with about 50 men killed by women).
But it does not follow that the murder of a woman by her husband
or lover results from sustained domestic violence in that household
— the assumption behind the question that doctors and midwives
must now ask.
Many, if
not most, murders of women in the home are one-off episodes of violence
in which the man suddenly loses control —usually because of
jealousy — and may even kill not just the woman but the children,
and even himself, too.
Moreover,
if one is looking at the main perpetrators of violence within the
home, it is a fact that most child deaths happen to be caused by
women. But if doctors or midwives were accordingly to view all pregnant
women with suspicion, we would rightly regard this as intolerable.
So why is a similar assumption about male violence justified?
Also significant
is the fact that most women victims of domestic violence are assaulted
or killed by men to whom they are not married. This is almost certainly
because of the greater instability in unmarried relationships. So
if the government really wanted to isolate the potential for abuse,
it should surely be requiring doctors and midwives to ask pregnant
woman whether they are married to the father of their child —
and if not, place both woman and child on the ‘at risk’
register.
Just imagine,
though, the outcry if anyone were to propose this. The Home Office
itself has previously acknowledged that marital breakdown is a ‘key
risk factor’ in domestic violence. Yet the government has
nevertheless promoted the false belief that all relationships are
equal in value. By thus encouraging transient relationships, it
has almost certainly helped foster a culture in which domestic violence
is more [ital ‘more’] likely.
So why is
it, on the one hand, apparently encouraging unfettered behaviour
which leads to violence, while on the other taking intrusive measures
to prevent it?
Here, surely,
lies the key paradox at the heart of the government’s broader
social programme. At same time that it wants to police pregnancy
to stamp out the ill of domestic violence, it is licensing a range
of behaviour which is socially destructive and which will cause
increasing chaos, harm and distress —all under the guise of
trying to control it.
Its proposals
to deregulate gambling, for example, will turn our cities into tawdry
sleaze-pits: magnets for crime and corruption which will increase
gambling addiction and in particular the misery of the poor in rising
rates of poverty, debt, ill-health and family breakdown. It almost
defies belief to hear ministers breezily condoning the fact that
casino operators intend to bribe local authorities to grant planning
permission for their expanding gambling empires.
The deregulation
of gambling is all of a piece with its proposals for all-night drinking,
which will merely exacerbate our already rising rates of drunken
disorder, violence and crime. Even more extraordinary is the government’s
relaxation of controls over soft drugs, despite overwhelming evidence
of the harm they do not just to individuals but to society.
In addition,
the government is flirting with the idea of ‘zones of tolerance’
for prostitution, despite the fact that these would become magnets
for sex tourism and trafficking, creating seedy centres for drug-taking
and other associated crimes.
Moreover,
all-night drinking, gambling and clubbing — with its attendant
culture of drug-taking — are heavily promoted as the basis
for the regeneration of our cities. Economic prosperity is thus
being pursued through the active and official marketing of vice.
In all this,
ministers are systematically unstitching the outstanding social
reforms of the late Victorians, who were driven by liberal and religious
motives to improve society and thus elevate the human condition.
This great movement of conscience to attack moral and social degradation
was rooted in the Methodism which gave rise to the Labour party,
and which it is now so comprehensively betraying.
For it is
licensing, legitimising and promoting behaviour considered socially
harmful while actively attacking married family life, the premier
institution of social order. This onslaught on the family is far
broader than the obsession with domestic violence, or the rigging
of rape trials by weighting the burden of proof against the defendant
to get more convictions.
It has used
the welfare system to redefine the family as woman and child with
a man as an optional extra. It undermines parental authority by
providing contraceptives and abortions to under-age girls without
their parents’ knowledge. And it is using the gay rights agenda
to spearhead the movement to give equal rights and recognition to
sexual relationships outside marriage and destroy altogether the
very idea of norms of behaviour.
This is
no accident. It is because ministers — many of whom have never
grown out of their sixties attitudes — have absorbed the revolutionary
philosophy of that decade first promoted by the Italian communist
thinker Antonio Gramsci. He said that the liberal-democratic societies
of the west could be overturned through the subversion of their
morality and culture, in which the moral beliefs of the majority
would be replaced by the free-for-all practised by all those who
transgressed those norms.
These would
form a ‘coalition of oppositional groups’ which would
capture all society’s institutions
—
schools, universities, churches, the media, the legal profession,
the police, voluntary groups —and make sure that this intellectual
élite all sang from the same subversive hymn-sheet.
These ideas
penetrated intellectual life and shaped a generation of thinkers.
The outcome
was an assault on morality through a coalition of minorities promoting
‘victim culture’ in which minority demands trump majority
values; an assault on the nation through multiculturalism and the
wrecking of education; an assault on men and marriage through extreme
feminism.
It was a
process once memorably dubbed by the American senator Daniel Patrick
Moynihan as ‘defining deviancy down’. Whereas previously
there was intolerance of unmarried mothers or homosexuality and
stigma over divorce, there is now ruthless enforcement of the doctrine
that all lifestyles are morally equivalent and intolerance instead
of anyone who objects.
The obsession
in government with ‘equal opportunities’ —which
radiates outwards to other establishment institutions like the police
or judiciary — is in reality an agenda to enforce minority
values over those of the majority and pillory anyone who dissents.
And dissent
is stamped upon — not least because, when deviant behaviour
becomes viewed as normal, normal behaviour inevitably becomes treated
as deviant. So, for example, sexual encounters where a woman may
have second thoughts afterwards is suddenly defined as ‘date
rape’. And the traditional family, that bastion of security
and safety, becomes stigmatised instead as a fetid stew of child
abuse, marital rape and violence against women.
As a result
of decades of propaganda, intimidation and spinelessness, the ‘long
march through the institutions’ urged by revolutionary thinkers
has been achieved. The evidence is on display all around us: academics
producing bent research projects, zealot feminist civil servants
in the Home Office, or judges whose hearts bleed for burglars rather
than their victims and permit the demands of gypsies to ride roughshod
over the planning laws that bind the rest of us.
Wittingly
or unwittingly, such people are helping promote an agenda for legislating
against virtue and in favour of vice; against self-restraint and
for irregularity; against domestic order and for disorder. It is
a corruption of our liberal values. The demonising of men as potential
rapists, child abusers and woman-beaters is a crucial part of that
agenda, and the lamentable questioning of pregnant women but its
latest manifestation.
