Re: On domestic violence, no one wants to hear the truth


"MCP" <gf010w5035@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:tRwxj.206809$3m6.192323@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=a41532d6-d4df-46a2-a784-f6499938f3b0&k=49786

In a just world, Englishwoman Erin Pizzey, who founded the world's first
shelter for battered wives in 1971, would be a sought-after speaker on the
subject of domestic violence. In the real world, however, Pizzey's name is
a
byword for politically incorrect apostasy.

There is more money gained by challenging Pizzey. Pizzey represents a loss
of economic activity. Pizzey will not be rewarded by an economic environment
that favors any activity at any cost. Pizzey will die poor unless Pizzey
changes her behavior.


Pizzey's crime? A humanist, she challenged the belief system dictated by
radical feminists, who colonized her shelter and made her presence
untenable.
Their ideological mantra, still alive and kicking, insists that men are
the
default perpetrators in domestic violence (also known as "intimate partner
violence," or IPV, in the jargon) while women are invariably innocent
victims
who inflict violence only in self-defence. But Pizzey knew from her own
experience (her wealthy, socially elite parents were mutually abusive, and
her
mother violent to Erin), and from what the women in her shelter told her,
that
most partner violence is reciprocal.

Holding women responsible for their violence was so at odds with the
received
wisdom of the movement's activists that, for her whistle-blowing pains,
Pizzey's dog was killed and her entire family received death threats.
Undaunted, she pursued her equal-responsibility crusade in the United
States
for many years in a fusillade of articles and books.

While dramatically extreme, Pizzey's story is nevertheless emblematic of
the
hostility truth-tellers confront in the domestic violence industry.

Another outlier, University of British Columbia psychology professor Don
Dutton, is acknowledged by his peers as a world expert on IPV. He has
proven,
over and over again -- most recently in his definitive 2006 book,
Rethinking
Domestic Violence -- that the tendency to violence in intimate
relationships
is bilateral and rooted in individual dysfunction: Men and women with
personality disorders and/or family histories of violence are equally
likely
to be violent themselves, or seek violent partners.

But Dutton's scientific credentials and extensive 25-year archive of
peer-reviewed research cut no ice with Canadian policymakers, none of whom
has
ever solicited his advice.

Instead, pseudo-science absolving women of violent impulses, delivered on
demand to interest groups by the same tiny, incestuous coterie of
ideologically sympathetic professionals, is routinely applied in training
police, family law judges, social workers and women's shelter personnel.

A lazy, politically correct media dutifully spreads the party line by
reporting uncritically on bogus selection-biased "studies" by
non-accredited
stakeholders, who extrapolate to the general population data that are
based on
testimonials from men in court-mandated therapy programs or women in
shelters.

Ah, women's shelters! Southern Ontario resident Mariel Davison offers up a
rather damning story of what happens when naively impartial volunteerism
collides with women's shelter groupthink.

Davison has an honours degree in psychology. A few years ago, considering
herself an "equal opportunity feminist," she volunteered to serve at a
local
women's shelter. During eight weeks' "training," Davison was subjected to
relentless male-bashing and junk science. That, and the puzzling
incongruity
of the female-as-victim message with the battered lesbians who also sought
refuge -- lesbian violence was a taboo subject amongst trainees -- led to
further intellectual inquiry.

Davison thought her trove of cutting-edge findings would prove welcome,
but
instead they got her turfed by her peers: "I was told I had too much
education
to volunteer at the shelter."

Incredulous, Davison dogged the shelter's supervising and financing
government
ministries with demands that they review objective literature, but was
stonewalled at every turn. Nothing came of her campaign.

And nothing will for the foreseeable future, because the domestic-violence
industry is a closed shop, from Women's Studies courses (don't look for
Pizzey's or Dutton's research there, or in Men's Studies, since there are
none), to women-only shelters, to Status of Women, to the National
Judicial
Council, to the Supreme Court of Canada. They're all reading from the same
myth-riddled hymnbook.

Erin Pizzey and Don Dutton were both keynote speakers at a recent
Sacramento,
Calif. conference sponsored by an independent body, the National Family
Violence Legislative Resource Center (Motto: "Advocating for
nondiscriminatory
and evidence-based policies"). Pizzey accepted a lifetime achievement
award to
a prolonged ovation.

Pizzey told her standing-room-only audience that for gender politics
"Canada
is the scariest country on the planet." Scary to men who suffer because of
it,
certainly, but apparently not to most other Canadians, who remain
curiously
indifferent to the demonstrable misandry permeating the institutions that
define and shape our culture.

bkay@xxxxxxxxxxxx





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