Progress. At last, the Scottish Parliament has debated domestic violence with the express intention of focusing on violence done by women to men. I don’t think I’m out of line saying that that wouldn’t happen in this country in a million years.
But of course just last December, the Scottish government published its survey of domestic violence in that country and, like so many such studies that are done in an effort to find out the facts as opposed to further propagandizing the matter, it showed that men and women equally are DV victims. I wrote a piece here shortly after the survey came out.
The survey showed, for example, that 5% of men and 5% of women said they’d been a victim of DV in the previous year. It also showed that, of those victims, 80% had suffered either no injury at all or only a slight bruise or cut in the incident. That is, only 1% of the roughly 16,000 people surveyed said they’d been victimized and suffered a significant injury. Interesting too was the fact that only a tiny percent of the victims said they’d been victimized repeatedly. In short, the Scottish study gives a very good idea of who does DV, how serious it is, who needs intervention and who doesn’t.
So perhaps that study provided the backdrop for the debate in Parliament. Whatever the case, though, this report by our good friend John Kimble tells us that much good was said in the debate, even if there seems to be little in the way of results coming from it (The Rights of Man, 6/19/10).
It appears that men’s and fathers’ best friends both in the Scottish and the British Parliaments come from the Liberal Democrats and, to an extent the Conservatives. Labour is still stuck in the old misandric paradigm they learned from gender feminists years ago. But Lib Dems and Conservatives more and more seem to be starting to get it. More and more they seem willing to reject the astonishing hypocrisy and outright falsehoods DV advocates have trafficked in lo these many years.
Listen to Lib Dem member Mike Rumbles and ask yourself when you expect to hear a similar statement in the U.S. Congress.
“I hope that we will all see the evil of domestic abuse for what it is–an evil that is perpetrated on the weaker member of a relationship. It is not a gender issue. If we treat it as such, no progress will be made in tackling its true evil. Members should not continue with the mistake of saying that it is simply a gender issue. It is about the abuse of one person in a relationship by their partner. Once we recognise that, we might at last get on the right track and have a chance of helping all those victims who really do need our help.”
He’s spot on. It’s what so many people have been saying for decades now. If we’re serious about reducing DV, we need to first admit what it is and who does it. That means consigning to the dustbin of history the radical feminist claims that only men commit DV and that it arises solely from a man’s desire for control. In fact, we know the truth – that DV is a family dynamic, that it’s a psychological phenomenon that can be treated, that men and women do it, and men and women are victims.
We’ve been taking the gender feminist approach to dealing with DV for almost 40 years. And yet almost daily we hear about our “epidemic” of domestic violence. It’s past time to demand a change to what works and away from what doesn’t. If the gender feminist way of dealing with the problem worked, we should have seen some results by now. But we haven’t because their analysis of the problem has little to do with DV and much to do with separating men from their homes, their children and their freedom.
The debate in the Scottish Parliament won’t change much of that. But it is one of those wonderful moments of clarity in which we see the bad old days passing, and the promise of better to come.
Thanks to John for the heads-up.