By Christina Hoff Sommers
Chronicle of Higher Education
Monday, June 29, 2009
“Harder to kill than a vampire.” That is what the sociologist Joel Best calls a bad statistic. But, as I have discovered over the years, among false statistics the hardest of all to slay are those promoted by feminist professors. Consider what happened recently when I sent an e-mail message to the Berkeley law professor Nancy K. D. Lemon pointing out that the highly praised textbook that she edited, Domestic Violence Law (second edition, Thomson/West, 2005), contained errors.
Her reply began:
“I appreciate and share your concern for veracity in all of our scholarship. However, I would expect a colleague who is genuinely concerned about such matters to contact me directly and give me a chance to respond before launching a public attack on me and my work, and then contacting me after the fact.”
The critical work of 21st-century feminism will be to help women in the developing world, especially in Muslim societies, in their struggle for basic rights.
I confess: I had indeed publicly criticized Lemon’s book, in campus lectures and in a post on FeministLawProfessors.com. I had always thought that that was the usual practice of intellectual argument. Disagreement is aired, error corrected, truth affirmed. Indeed, I was moved to write to her because of the deep consternation of law students who had attended my lectures: If authoritative textbooks contain errors, how are students to know whether they are being educated or indoctrinated? Lemon’s book has been in law-school classrooms for years.
One reason that feminist scholarship contains hard-to-kill falsehoods is that reasonable, evidence-backed criticism is regarded as a personal attack.
Lemon’s Domestic Violence Law is organized as a conventional law-school casebook–a collection of judicial opinions, statutes, and articles selected, edited, and commented upon by the author. The first selection, written by Cheryl Ward Smith (no institutional affiliation is given), offers students a historical perspective on domestic-violence law. According to Ward:
“The history of women’s abuse began over 2,700 years ago in the year 753 BC. It was during the reign of Romulus of Rome that wife abuse was accepted and condoned under the Laws of Chastisement. . . . The laws permitted a man to beat his wife with a rod or switch so long as its circumference was no greater than the girth of the base of the man’s right thumb. The law became commonly know as ‘The Rule of Thumb.’ These laws established a tradition which was perpetuated in English Common Law in most of Europe.”
Where to begin? How about with the fact that Romulus of Rome never existed. He is a figure in Roman mythology–the son of Mars, nursed by a wolf. Problem 2: The phrase “rule of thumb” did not originate with any law about wife beating, nor has anyone ever been able to locate any such law. It is now widely regarded as a myth, even among feminist professors. [Read more →]
Tags: DV Industry
Effective abuse-reduction programs need to be grounded in verifiable facts about the nature, extent, and causes of domestic violence. An early incident reveals this may not always be the case:
On January 28, 1993, a press conference was held in Pasadena, California to issue an ominous warning that the upcoming Super Bowl would be the “biggest day of the year for violence against women.” Based on that dire prediction, an article in the Oakland Tribune warned the event could cause men to “explode like mad linemen, leaving girlfriends, wives, and children beaten.” A national advisory was issued with this blunt advice: “Don’t remain at home with him during the game.”
Three days later the Washington Post ran a front-page story revealing there was in fact no evidence to support such claims. A representative of the Massachusetts Coalition of Battered Women’s Services later decried to the Boston Globe how the Super Bowl story “sensationalized and trivialized” the problem of domestic violence.
This episode later came to be known as the Super Bowl hoax. It would not be an isolated event. Indeed, rogue abuse statistics have become sufficiently widespread that researchers have published articles designed to refute such claims.[i],[ii]
These myths have been disseminated by well-known political figures, government agencies, the mass media, and advocacy groups. Respected professional organizations such as the American Bar Association, American Psychological Association, and the American Medical Association have become parties to the disinformation, as well. [Read more →]
Tags: DV Industry
Thanks for the education, Trudy. Well done. You did miss one part, however. The VAST majority of women who habituate these shelters are actually homeless, and not victims of domestic violence. They DO have to go through a “screening” process, which then, in turn, declares them as DV “victims”. Many articles have also been written along these lines as well.
Evidencing the Need
Numbers and statistics play a big part in the programs’ constant fundraising and PR efforts. You may have seen in a newspaper or on TV that shelters in your state or city or county turn away X number of women and children each year, including the statement, “mostly due to lack of space.” There will be a large number in the tens or hundreds of thousands, depending on the population of the area.
That word, “mostly” is important here, because it can obscure the reality. Lack of space is a factor, but not the only factor in operation when they deny services.
It may help to get a bit of understanding on the way non-profits determine their numbers, so we’ll provide a little primer here. Non-profits generally calculate their amounts of service provided based on what is called a service unit. In the case of a shelter, this would be one night, in one bed. A year then would be 365 service units. A shelter at full capacity with ten beds would provide 3650 service units per year.
This may not equal 3650 people, however. A woman staying multiple nights will use multiple service units. She will be represented in the total multiple times, according to the length of her stay.
When they want to get an accurate count of the number of people they’ve served in a given length of time, regardless of the number of nights, they call it a number of unduplicated individuals. Still, for fundraising/publicity purposes, non-profits will often use their number of service units, and call it people, even though that’s not strictly true. [Read more →]
Tags: DV Industry
In this section, she discusses the veil of secrecy that involves the movement and the over protective way in which shelters are not studied, nor can they be verifiable that they are actually helping as this White House report mentions.
By 2000, what is sometimes known as “the women’s shelter movement’ already had 30 years to establish itself in communities all over the country. Those who’d spent much of their lifetimes, and often entire careers in this field were regarded as experts that knew the subject better than anyone. The thinking of the day was that surely they knew what they were doing, and had the absolute best of intentions. If they didn’t have the answers to this unpopular and uncomfortable issue, then nobody did. Doing something was certainly better than doing nothing at all, so governments at all levels, private charities, and later, corporations gave these respected experts free rein to manage the issue as they wished. Governments enacted laws and provided funding, private charities used their expertise in other matters to establish centers and shelters, and corporations helped with promotion and even more funding.
After nearly four decades, it has become not only politically incorrect, but sacrilegious to question the methods or motives of any agency or program in the vast network of women’s shelters and batterer programs. Anyone who questions must either hate women or not understand the severity of the problem. Anyone who questions must not want equality for women, and to set society back hundreds of years. [Read more →]
Tags: DV Industry
Trudy Schuett, god bless her soul, has taken a woman’s point of view on available DV programs and the problems that exist within them. She started with an open mind and was both surprised and shocked at what she found. You decide for yourself what is right or wrong here.
Lifting the veil of secrecy on shelters and services for families affected by intimate partner abuse
Yuma County in far southwest Arizona has a population of about 200,000 year-round residents. In the winters this population can double, due to an influx of agricultural workers and snowbirds from northern states. It is roughly halfway between Phoenix and San Diego, with very little in between Yuma and the major metropolitan areas. Perhaps it is this isolation or the fact that those who live there do so because they’ve chosen to be there. Either way, this area is uncommon in the way its various charities and helping agencies relate to each other.
There is a dynamic and high-functioning network between the agencies, that benefits all. The people who work for the variety of non-profits in the area know each other, and it’s not long before a new arrival will know the rest of the people too. There is always something being shared, be it information or resources. It’s not hard to get know the agencies and what they do.
The only exception in this, and in most other locales, is in domestic violence services. [Read more →]
Tags: DV Industry
Tags: DV Industry
Fathers are needed. Fathers are important. Single Mother households are bad. Here it is:
Florida International University did the unthinkable. They did a study on what Fathers men to the nuclear family, and the devastation that results when good men are alienated (PAS) using legal false allegations. Here is what they found:
The statistics are alarming: children from fatherless homes account for 63 percent of youth suicides, 85 percent of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders and 71 percent of all high school dropouts. And 37 percent of fathers have no access or visitation rights to their children.
Finley’s research indicates that fathers are more effective at attenuating high-risk behaviors such as sex, drugs and other criminal activities. These behaviors also involve high social costs.
Read the full article here:
A girl needs her dad
Finley’s findings also suggest that parent-children relationships are not as much about identification or imitation, as once thought, but about transaction. The way a girl learns to become a woman is through her interaction with her father. That will determine how she will relate to men in her adult life.
His study concluded that girls experience a greater impact by divorce than boys.
“The real cost is actually to the daughters of divorce. They don’t have relationships with their fathers. So when they enter adolescence and start questioning whether to have sex, they don’t have a realistic idea of what men are like.”
When evaluating the consequences of divorce for children, balance is critical, says Finley. Society has a vested interest in balance.
Informing social policy
The take-home message, according to Finley, is simple: “Fathers matter. Children need their fathers and, as it turns out, fathers need their children,” he says.
Divorced fathers are eight to 10 times more likely to commit suicide than divorced mothers. They also are higher on most indices of personal and social distress than divorced mothers.
Social policy, Finley argues, needs to catch up to the research: “Family law should be based on social science research - not ideology.”
Finley is a frequent contributor to journals that influence public policy. His study, “Father Involvement and Long Term Young Adult Outcomes: The Differential Contributions of Divorce and Gender,” was published by Family Court Review, an interdisciplinary communication forum for judges, attorney, mediators and professionals in the mental health and human services.
Tags: DV Industry
I have had many responses to my call out for those having difficulties with self-proclaimed, and narcissistic actor, Doug Bartholomew. He’s very careful with his language these days, having referred to me (he claims indirectly) as being a stalker and a repeat DV offender, which I’m not. He has also claimed that the day in which he called me, somebody created another ID on his computer as his reason for concern. I simply pointed out that local computer logs and IP tracking could easily discover who that was, albeit himself who “created” this or somebody else, or maybe this is a fabrication altogether. Either way, he stumbled when offering specifics and could not relate this problem to me (or anyone) being a stalker and/or repeat DV offender.
At one point he mentioned that one party was not going to like his findings, which backs up my claims of quackery and hackery against this man and his “practice”. That reveals that he doesn’t think it’s possible for two to be responsible for an altercation. That’s funny because that age-old saying that is wise beyond its years, doesn’t state: “It only takes one to fight”. I’d like for him to explain that one further.
As for stalking, he has now returned two of my messages as I have NOT repeatedly called his office, which is what a real stalker would do. So, please keep up these actions and keep up the big mouth in your classes Doug, as it’s helpful to everyone!
Currently, we are working with well over 5 complaints against this man, which includes tapes of his sessions and the biased line of questioning that he uses under the “guise” of being an expert showing that he enables the continues the bad behavior of others as “victims”, while looking for anything that he can use against those not labeled as victims, then charges ridiculous charges for these practices.
If one, in turn asks him to do further ivestigation, as does often happen because of the biased line of questioning that he uses in the first place he simply threatens them with more exhorbitant charges for what really should have happened in the first place.
As a result, we also have members of his staff involved as they are concerned about what is happening. Complaints are soon to be filed with the Department of Health as this man ans his practices need to be stopped. There is verry little, if anything, that is CLINICALLY involved here.
Stay tuned for developments.
WADVPress
Tags: DV Industry
June 9, 2009
SPRINGFIELD, MO (KTVI-FOX2now.com)
In Missouri and some other states there’s real, biological dad and there’s legal, non-biological dad. Missouri lawmakers acknowledge the two aren’t always the same. A law is now headed to the governor’s desk. He paints houses. But a night out with the boys painted a messy future for Tony Galvin - a married father of three, “She got my number from a friend of mine at the bar.” Galvin says he never met her again, or saw her again. He adds he never had sex with her, “Nooo, never touched her.”
Perhaps, but two years later the woman had a baby boy, naming Tony the dad. Tony says he never knew about a paternity hearing, so when he didn’t show, he defaulted.
After his 30 days to appeal ran out, in the state’s eyes, he “was” dad. Legal dad. Period.
Tony says, frustrated, “They got nothing. And they’re just ‘you’re the dad!’”
But Tony got child support orders - $674 a month.
Prosecutors charged him with criminal non-support and the state took his driver’s license.
His life? “It ruined it, ruined it. [Read more →]
Tags: DV Industry
People. This is what to expect until we take back and learn how to control our government.
(June 4) - He called himself the Lion King, the emperor of Galveston, and more simply, “the government.”
At 6-foot-4 and more than 250 pounds, he was impossible to escape in the close quarters of an office. And his alcohol-laden lunches could foreshadow vulgar, racist language and sexual assault.
That was the description of U.S. District Judge Samuel Kent at a hearing Wednesday before a House Judiciary Committee task force considering his possible impeachment. The stunned hearing room was silent as two victims of Kent’s sexual misconduct detailed their personal ordeals that lasted years.
The Texas judge pleaded guilty in February to one count of obstruction of justice for lying to investigators about the sexual misconduct in his Galveston, Texas, courthouse. It was the first case of sexual abuse against a sitting federal judge.
Though he acknowledged in his plea that the events had occurred, the charges covering the sexual misconduct itself were dropped as part of the plea agreement. He had previously insisted the sexual events were consensual.
Kent, who turns 60 this month, was sentenced in May to 33 months in prison and ordered to surrender on June 15. He also was ordered to undergo treatment for alcoholism while in prison. [Read more →]
Tags: DV Industry
