Washington DV Press

Don Dutton is an expert on Domestic Violence. His methods of collecting data are scientific as opposed to empirical. He recently notes in a report Concerning the ABA entitled :

The gender paradigm in domestic violence research and practice part II: The information website of the American Bar Association

that:

The Website of the American Bar Association (ABA) sets out to correct ten purported myths about domestic
or intimate partner violence (IPV). The critique of these myths appears to be empirically based. However, a
close reading of the studies used to debunk these “myths” shows that they are either: 1) government
publications with no empirical data, or 2) empirical studies that do not refute the targeted myth. The problems with the false conclusions on the website are varied, but three main ones are: 1) confusion of
allegations of abuse with real incidence of abuse; 2) interpretations of unsubstantiated claims of child abuse that are based on varied sources for corroboration that use vague decision criteria in studies not designed to assess malingered claims; and 3) over simplification of the complex causality of psychological phenomena, such as Parental Alienation Syndrome. In many of these studies, social science methodology may be poorly suited to answer questions best left to an unbiased weighting of facts in an individual case.
© 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

These are the ten myths:

MYTH 1: domestic violence is rare among custody litigants
MYTH 2: any ill effects of domestic violence on children are minimal and short-term
MYTH 3: mothers frequently invent allegations of child sexual abuse to win custody
MYTH 4: domestic violence has nothing to do with child abuse
MYTH 5: abusive fathers don’t get custody
MYTH 6: fit mothers don’t lose custody
MYTH 7: Parental Alienation Syndrome (“PAS”) is a scientifically sound phenomenon
MYTH 8: children are in less danger from a batterer/parent once the parents separate
MYTH 9: parents who batter are mentally ill, OR parents with no evidence of mental illness cannot be batterers
MYTH 10: if a child demonstrates no fear or aversion to a parent, then there is no reason not to award unsupervised contact or custody

He lays out the case scientifically here. I’ll let you decide who is full of what here. One clue. He does not stand to lose as much as the ABA should he be correct here.

My thanks to my friends at the California Men’s Center for pointing this out to me. Don Dutton has always been right on the money and is undefeated in court against the ABA, who continues to forward these lies.