Domestic Violence Intervention Accountability
An Overview
September 5, 2005
If we appeal to law, we sometimes call upon a Trojan horse; when we invite law in, law re-invites itself time and again, but on its own terms and with its own agenda.
-Renee Romken
The purpose of the National Research Council (NRC) is to advise the federal government concerning science and technology with the purpose that their policy related research will help the federal and in turn state government in developing legislation.
The NRC report Advancing the Federal Research Agenda on Violence Against Women http://books.nap.edu/catalog/10849.htmlnotes on page 6:
As a previous National Research Council committee found, the design of prevention and control strategies – programs and services available to victims and offenders that aim to decrease the number of new cases of assault or abusive behavior, reduce the risk of death or disability from violence, and extend life after a violent event – frequently is driven by ideology [emphasis added] and stakeholders interests rather than by plausible theories and scientific evidence of causes.
Keeping the Promise
Casey Gwinn, is the chair of the California Attorney General Task Force on Local Criminal Justice Response to Domestic Violence. The task force report is “Keeping the Promise” Victim Safety and Batterer Accountability,” http://www.safestate.org/index.cfm?navID=9 .
The task force seems to be a well intentioned and professional group. However, it appears that most members have not have decided to ignore or are unaware of the findings of many recent U.S. Department of Justice sponsored and private studies concerning the issue of domestic violence.
In fact it appears the task force members often are often unaware of or have decided to ignore advice from the majority of scholars and researchers, both public and private, concerning contemporary domestic violence intervention, surveys, reports, data and studies.
Many sociologists and criminologists believe that the reason for the differences between policy relevant research findings and policies in place is that often the policy related research is ignored because it disputes the ideological held beliefs of many domestic violence advocates and the “one-size-fits-all” interventions passed by public policy makers (Fagan, 1998).
Ideological feminist domestic violence advocates claim that domestic violence is a crime of misogyny. They believe that domestic violence is caused by the hatred men have for women. However, data documents that most men do not abuse women. In answer to that ideological feminists claim that while it is true that the majority of men are not violent the non-violent men because of the patriarchal structure of contemporary society, silently condones violence against women (Hendricks, McKean & Hendricks, 2003).
This belief is the foundation of the majority of domestic violence interventions. Hence, when ideology is accepted as fact, it follows that these advocates must believe that men are the offenders and women their victims. There is little to no wiggle room in their theory that women can be offenders and males their victims.
Hence, when men present themselves as victims to domestic violence advocates, those men are often seen first as offenders in sheep’s clothing and when the facts do reveal the truth, some men will be accepted as the rare male victim. This ignorance of male victimization permeates our public policies and drives federal and state intervention.
Permeating the System
The “Keeping the Promise” report is a classic example of “one-size-fits-all” ideological feminism trumping scientific studies and research. This “one-size-fits-all” intervention is not exclusive to California. While this paper concerns itself with the “Keeping the Promise report, this ideological feminist philosophy is at the foundation of most domestic violence interventions in America.
A letter to the California Attorney General for the State is at the front of “Keeping the Promise” and it claims in part that, “This report should be read as a road map for addressing profound problems in the handling of domestic violence incidents in California.”
In reality this report appears to be a roadmap back to many of the failed polices of the 20 th century. While the numbers of all homicide victims have dropped dramatically over the last 22 years the number of white females who are murdered by their intimate partner remains virtually unchanged from 1976 to 2002 http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/ipv.htm.
However, the greatest failing of the road map is that this report is based on criminalizing all acts of “family conflict” as if they were the same as “battering.” It is also predicated on a “one-size-fits-all” ideological paradigm that lacks empirical evidence and hence many of its recommendations are profoundly out of date.
One-Size-Fits-All
In 1995 ago advocates and public policy makers were warned in the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) sponsored report by Jeffery Fagan, The Criminalization of Domestic Violence: Promises and Limits on page 38, that http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles/crimdom.pdf, “
Assuming that the patriarchy and power relations alone cause of domestic violence leads us toward conclusion that do not consider a full array of explanatory variables from other disciplines.
Accepting the patriarchy theory as the single or primary cause of domestic violence has caused many advocates and public policy makers to think that domestic violence is “violence against women” and that the cause of domestic violence is primarily “men abusing women.” This ideological concept clouds the ability of many advocates, public policy makers and interveners to understand the complex and multifaceted issue that is domestic violence.
The 20 th century “one-size-fits-all” ideological feminist paradigm is the belief that every act of “family conflict” must be criminalized and that all “family conflict” offenders must be treated as “batterers.”
Further, viewing domestic violence only or primarily through the lens of the “patriarchy” causes one to believe that men must be the abusers and women their victims. Ideology has caused the task force report to present micro solutions to a macro phenomenon.
Domestic Violence Is Not Treated The Same As Other Crimes
However, California, similar to all the others states, did not pass a “battering” law. What California and all the other states have done is to criminalize almost all acts of “family conflict.” The laws are the same regardless of how minor and infrequent or chronic and serious that conflict is.
The National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAWS) survey documents that the majority of the “violence” that both men and women report are incidents where they are pushed, grabbed shoved, slapped or hit http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/183781.pdf.
In some states only the “fear” that a physical conflict might occur is enough to issue a restraining order. When there is any violation, regardless of context or circumstances, of that restraining order those actions are considered “criminal acts.”
The “any act of family conflict is equal to battering” is the most significant reason for the dramatic leap in the number of males and females being arrested. If the “Keeping the Promise” report were only relevant to “battering behavior” it may have been a very good report.
Domestic violence advocates claim, on one hand, that what they want is for the criminal justice system to treat domestic violence the same as all other crimes. However their “one-size-fits-all” intervention ignores the traditional difference between felonies (serious crimes) and misdemeanors (minor crimes) has created a complex and multifaceted intervention process that mixes civil procedures with the criminal process.
There are now domestic violence policies and procedures that make demands of the criminal justice system that are dramatically different and at times radically at odds with all other criminal justice training and intervention.
What sets the American criminal justice system apart from many other nations is the historic and time honored belief that everyone must be assumed to be innocent until the facts and evidence in the case will produce a verdict of guilt or innocence. Anyone involved in the criminal justice system understands that majority of contemporary domestic violence training is predicated on the belief that women are the victims and men their abusers.
It is a fact that the vast majority of contemporary domestic violence training teaches criminal justice interveners that the “he” the vast majority of the time will be the primary or dominant aggressor and that the “she” the vast majority of the time will be the victim.
In case there is any confusion about the “he” and “she,” the training often notes that the person who is bigger and stronger should be considered the offender and that it really does not matter who assaulted who first. This ideological and prejudicial training creates a implicit biased association of guilt [men] and innocence [women] http://www.caadv.org/materials.html#beyond.
Battering Behavior
Most researchers agree that a “batterer” is a family member or intimate partner who withpremeditation and malice aforethoughtrepeatedly uses coercion, force or violent physical assaults to manipulate and control the behavior of another family member or intimate partner. Research documents that most “batterers” are dangerous and violent people. Many suffer from anti-personality disorders and “batterers” deserve to be arrested.
Family Conflict
Family conflict most often occurs withoutpremeditation or malice aforethought and involves the use of threats and/or minor physical assault in a specific or isolated disagreement. This behavior is often the result of perceived misbehavior, financial matters, jealously, and animated and vocal disagreements.
What “Keeping the Promise” and California law ignores is that while the issuance of restraining orders, mandatory arrest, no-drop-prosecutions, batterer intervention programs, and mandatory health practitioner reports can be positive and productive concerning “battering” behavior and they cam be negative and counter productive concerning “family conflict.”
The Real Domestic Violence Problem
In chapter 1, on page 11, of the introduction under the heading “The Domestic Violence Problem” the task force informs the Attorney General that, “National studies show that 85 percent of reported cases of victimization by intimate partners were against women.” The citation that the task force provides is DOJ sponsored study, “Extent, Nature, and Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence.” This study they cite makes no such claim.
If you are reading the internet version of this paper all you have to do is click on this URL
www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/181867.pdf and then read pages 13 and 14 to find what the national studies the task force cited actually document. The problem appears to be that the ideological feminist “one-size-fits-all” intervention causes the task force to be unable or unwilling to see the truth and the truth does not match the claim by this task force. Paper copies are available from the National Institute of Justice.
Why does the task force ignore the fact that the report it cites, refutes, not supports, the 85% claim. The real problem may be that task force, similar to many other “one-size-fits-all” ideologists, simply can not or choose not to see data they do not agree with.
In fact that citation of “national studies” actually document is that physical assault victimization of intimates range from 9 to 30 percent for women and from 13 to 16 percent for men. This differential is not the 85% to 15% differential that the task force claims that “national studies” document.
After a token mention that men are at risk for all types of violent victimization, the task force does not simply minimize or marginalize male victimization in the rest of the report, the task force similar to most “one-size-fits-all” ideologists, simply ignores male victimization as if it is too rare to matter.
The Gender Differential
The task force ignores the fact that studies, including the NVAWS, document that women are significantly more likely than men to report being victimized. The task force also ignores that the NVAWS documents that the police are significantly more likely to take a report and to arrest or detain an intimate partner perpetrator when the victim is female.
The gender differential of higher reporting for females holds true for same sex victimization. Between 1993 and 1999 13,740 men reported being victimized by their male intimate partner as compared to 16,900 women who were victimized by their female intimate partner
www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/ipva99.pdf.
Family violence studies document that women are significantly more likely than men to call the police in response to a partner assault. The General Social Survey (GSS) of Canada documents that women are twice as likely as men to report their victimization to the police
http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/85-224-XIE/free.htm.
The NVAWS http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/183781.pdf document that more than half of all physical assaults by intimates are relatively minor and consist of pushing, grabbing, shoving, slapping and hitting and that 1.3% of women and 0.9% of men are physically assaulted by an intimate partner annually.
The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) documents that 50% of women and 32% of men who are assaulted by an intimate partner report suffering an injury. The NVAWS documents that 39.0% of women and 24.8% of men report being injured during their most recent physical assault. This survey includes both violent and minor intimate partner assaults.
The GSS statistics document that an estimated 7% of women and 6% of men in current or previous spousal relationship have been victimized. While the Canadian data does document women are victimized more than men it also documents that domestic violence against men occurs at rates similar to most national Family Violence surveys and studies.
Approximately 23% of women and 15% of men claim they were beaten, choked, or threatened by having a gun or knife used against them. Women are more than twice as likely to be injured, three times more likely to fear for their life and more than 6 times more likely to seek medical attention http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/85-224-XIE/free.htm.
The NVAWS data indicates that if men and women did report their physical assaults at the same rate for crime surveys similar to the NCVS more than one of every three intimate partner victims would be a man. The gender differential in these two surveys clearly documents that men are far more reluctant to view and report their victimization as a crime than are women.
A June 2005 Department of Justice (DOJ) report, Family Violence Statistics, documents that family violence accounts for only 11% of all reported and unreported violence and the majority of family violence is simple assault http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/fvs.htm.
The National Crime Victimization Survey http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/cvict.htm documents that approximately ½ of 1% of people, both men and women, who answered the survey report that they have been a victim of domestic violence.
The NCVS numbers do not represent that domestic violence is a crime of “epidemic proportions” and hence that data is always ignored by the very same domestic violence advocates who then claim that the 85% figure in the very same survey is absolutely true. Why do domestic violence advocates accept the 85% female victimization data presented by the NCVS as fact and then claim the ½ of 1% NCVS data is fiction?
Dating Relationships
Dating relationships are covered by California domestic violence laws. Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) monitors health-risk behaviors among youth and young adults.
Ideological feminists universally ignore data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance (YRBS) unless it suits their agenda. The YRBS on page 30, that documents 8.8% of girls and 8.9% of boys report that they were hit, slapped or physically hurt on purpose by a boyfriend or girlfriend. The same page of the YRBS also documents that 11.9% of girls and 6.1% of boys were physically forced to have sexual intercourse www.cdc.gov/mmwr/PDF/SS/SS5302.pdf.
When ideological feminists do use the data they present the informing concerning the victimization of girls and ignore the victimization of boys.
In California data on the Attorney Generals website notes that there is little difference between males and females who report being victimized by their dating partner. Approximately 60% of students report they were the victims of dating violence http://www.safestate.org/index.cfm?navid=254. Does the Attorney General really think that these similarities evaporate the day boys and girls become men and women?
In Gwinn’s hometown of San Diego, in 2003, less girls 9.9% than boys 12.0% reported that during dating relationships they were hit, slapped or physically hurt on purpose by a girlfriend or boyfriend in the past 12 months. Does Gwinn really think that this differential completely changes they day they become adults?
Also, 10.8% of the girls and 5.9% of the boys in San Diego report there were physically forced to have sexual intercourse. Gwinn must know that under California law all those hits, slaps, and forced sexually behavior are all, by California law, acts of domestic violence.
These California teenagers are not that far removed from the lessons they learn from their parents, regardless of gender. And that lesson is that physical force and economic coercion often works to control the behavior of others.
This is not a lesson taught from the outside patriarchy, it is a lesson taught from inside by the family hierarchy and taught by both parents regardless of gender. In our homes the physically assaults between adults and the physically assaults against children, teach the children three lessons (Straus et al., 1980).
One study documents that a majority of children use physical assaults and coercion to resolve conflicts among siblings. In fact a number of studies reveal that sibling violence is the most common form of family violence in the United States (Wallace, 2002).
Domestic Violence Homicides
The task force notes that homicide is the most serious consequence of violence and it notes the number is unacceptably high for women. In fact it is not equally high for all women. And again, it appears that it is ideologically incorrect for task force to mention male intimate partner victimization.
The DOJ report Family Violence Statisticshttp://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/fvs.htmdocuments that females account for 58% of all family murder victims. Although male victims account for 42% of the deaths “Keeping thePromise” makes no mention of male homicide victimization nor express any concern for the male murder victims.
Another DOJ report, Violence by Intimateshttp://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/vi.htm documents that between 1976 and 1996 of the 20,311 men who were intimate partner murder victims -- 62% were killed by wives, 4% by ex-wives, and 34% by non-marital partners such as girlfriends.
Of the 31,260 women who were intimate partner murder victims – 64% were killed by husbands, 5% by ex-husbands, and 32% by non-marital partners such as boyfriends. Was no one on the task force aware of this data?
While murder is the most serious form of violence it is by far the least common. In 1999 murder accounted for only one-tenth of 1 percent of the total reported crime reported to the Federal Bureau of Justice (Hendricks, McKean, Hendricks, 2003, p. 187-188. The vast majority of people murdered are men.
As noted above data documents that more females than males are the victims of intimae partner homicides. However, the Bureau of Justice Statistics documents that homicides account for less than ½ of 1% (0.3) of all family violence between 1998 and 2002. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/fvs.htm.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation Supplementary homicide report document that in California between 1990 and 2000 the number of acquaintance murders dropped by 53%, the number of stranger murders dropped by 48% and the number of family murders dropped by 28% http://ojjdp.ncjrs.org/ojstatbb/ezashr/asp/profile.asp. Perhaps the task force should have explored what caused the drop in the number of acquaintance and stranger murders.
Limited Understanding and a Lack of Knowledge
At least some of the U.S. Department of Justice sponsored domestic violence studies, most of which are online at http://virlib.ncjrs.org/vict.asp?category=50&subcategory=105 should have been mandatory reading for the task force members before the task force produced a report of its own.
Most troubling of all is that the California Attorney General has two reports that are predominately displayed on his website http://www.safestate.org/index.cfm?navID=9. One is the California Intimate Partner Homicide report. That report is based on the DOJ sponsored study, Analysis of Unexamined Issues in the Intimate Partner Homicide Declinewww.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/grants/196666.pdf.
The latter report on page 21 concludes:
Our findings imply that the net effect of arrests, convictions, and incarceration is not to reduce female victimization, but to ensnare more women in the criminal justice system net.
Again, if we begin with the premise that much of the intended policy and enhancement in criminal justice system response to domestic violence has been designed with the chief goal of protecting women, then a ‘system backlash’ effect may be taking place. Over the study period arrests for domestic violence of male suspects increased a total of 37% but females arrests increased 446%.
The Gwinn report seems unable or unwilling to connect the dots that clearly connect the dragnet of mandatory arrest and no-drop prosecution with these problems. California laws now demand officers can not or must not ignore the difference in the seriousness of the domestic violence incidents. Almost all acts of “family conflict” are defined by legislative laws as “domestic violence.” It appears that this “system backlash” has been mandated by California Assembly members.
Gwinn, in his terms as the City Attorney of the City of San Diego, documents that he believes that the criminal justice system should ignore the differences between felonies and misdemeanors and the dramatic and diverse needs and wants of domestic violence victims and the state should prosecute all cases regardless of the context or circumstances. That is the classic “one-size-fits-all” 20 th century ideology.
The foremost problem with, “Keeping the Promise,” is that it wants to continue with the 20 th century ideological recommendations while ignoring the role of 21 st empirical based research findings in the formulation of criminal justice policy and procedure. And some of the data that warns of this approach is on the website of the California Attorney General.
Research Ignored
Over the last 30 years the criminal justice system has and should continue to play a role concerning criminal domestic violence intervention. There is little question that many lives have been saved and some families have been made safer because of the criminalization of domestic violence. This paper does not want to “push back” changes, it simply wants to “pull” changes into the 21 st century.
However, there are some obvious and painful problems with contemporary criminal justice intervention concerning domestic violence policies and practices that are not being addressed. Too often ideological domestic violence advocates and public policy makers ignore important empirically based policy and relevant findings from Department of Justice sponsored studies. And much too often domestic violence advocates and public policy makers do not know these studies exist.
Mandatory
The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) report, Controlling Violence Against Women: A Research Perspective on the 1994 VAWA’s Criminal Justice Impacts should be read by all domestic violence advocates and public policy makers. It can be found online at http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/197137.pdf.
The above report concludes that:
Above all, they [public policy makers] need to know that their policies and practices will not endanger women [emphasis added]. Unfortunately, there are too few preventive impact evaluations of policies already in place and fewer still that approach methodological standards insuring sound data for shaping policy.
The task force has chosen to ignore the fact that there are no evaluations in place, no methodological standards and no data that can demonstrate that the mandatory domestic violence policies and practices it recommends will not endanger some families. This criminalization of all acts of “family conflict” also ignores the fact that many families seek solutions not sanctions.
Further the above report notes that:
We still have much to learn about differences in offenders and differences in populations of victims to justify advocating one policy over another without qualifications.
Without evaluations in place, lacking methodological standards and without data to document their effectiveness our public policy makers have ignored Department of Justice sponsored studies and have chosen to pass legislation that has created, in many states, mandatory reporting procedures, mandatory arrest, and no drop prosecution policies.
Department of Justice sponsored studies document mandatory intervention policies and practices can produce negative effects for some families. Mandatory legal policies and practices have silenced many domestic violence victims and caused others to lose any and all control over their lives and the lives of their children.
Perhaps, because so many members of this task force remain ideologically stuck in the 20 th century and lack knowledge of any empirically based in the 21 st century research, they have presented old solutions as new changes.
Helpful For Some, Harmful For Others
Few people question the fact that the changes in criminal justice polices and practices can save some lives and can make some families safer. However, many recent DOJ studies document mandatory policies, practices and “one-size-fits-all” criminal justice intervention processes have produced some unintended negative consequences for many families.
The report Forgoing Criminal Justice Assistance: The Non-Reporting of New Incidents of Abuse in a Court Sample of Domestic Violence Victims http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/grants/195667.pdf, documents that rigid mandatory interventions ignore the diversity of the family desires and lack varied programs suited for the diverse characteristics of multi-problem offenders and can cause many victims to ignore the system designed to assist them.
The report above documents that some victims after criminal justice intervention, will not report new victimizations. This demonstrates that aggressive, one-solution-fits-all criminal justice policies are, in some incidences, not only ineffective, they can prove to be more harmful than helpful to some families.
One-Size-Does-Not-Fit-All
Many feminists and now some feminist organizations agree that “one-size-fits-all” intervention is a 20 th century concept that can harm many families. The Ms Foundation for Women (MsFW) has concluded in its report, Safety & Justice for All: Examining the Relationship between the Women’s Anti-Violence Movement and the Criminal Legal System, http://www.ms.foundation.org/user-assets/PDF/Program/safety_justice.pdf that contemporary public policy makers have in fact, put in place policies and practices that do endanger some victims.
The MsFW has concluded that those who are being endangered most by these policies and practices are the very same victims who need help the most. The MsFW believes that our public policy makers should abandon the use of mandatory legal practices such as mandatory reporting, mandatory arrest, and no drop prosecution policies. The MsFW also believes that these policies and practices have eroded the rights of many who have been arrested for minor violations and prosecuted against the wishes of the victim.
Ellen Pence, who pioneered the intervention process of arrest, prosecution and treatment, now believes that today’s one-size-fits-all VAWA funded programs are wrong and are not what she intended. Pence knows that those who commit minor acts of “family conflict” or one violent act are not “batterers” http://denver.rockymountainnews.com/news/justice/.
Esta Soler is the founder and president of the Family Violence Prevention Fund (FVPF). She asserts that certainly all violence is wrong regardless of who is the perpetrator. But, Soler claims domestic violence is not one person pushing another person one time because a couple has gotten into an argument. Soler believes that domestic violence occurs when there is an ongoingpattern of fear, intimidation and violent assault.” California law does not.
However, Soler, similar to so many members of the task force, seems unaware that California law ignores the difference between “battering behavior” and “family conflict.” Regardless of what Soler thinks in California one person pushing another is a domestic violence crime. A push is equal to a pummeling. The Gwinn recommendations also equate a push with a pummeling.
Restraining orders are issued, arrests made, people are prosecuted, people are placed in battering programs, and health practitioners are required by statute law to notify law enforcement without distinguishing the differences between serious and minor incidents because all acts of family conflict have been criminalized. All these interventions ignore the vast diversity of the needs and wishes of family members. The state has become all powerful and righteous.
Why Ignore These NIJ Sponsored Reports
According to the DOJ sponsored report, “Effects of No-Drop Prosecution of Domestic Violence Upon Conviction Rates” http://abstractsdb.ncjrs.org/content/AbstractsDB_Download.asp?page=1:
Finally, we do not know whether no-drop increases victim safety or places the victims in greater jeopardy. . . Before no-drop is embraced as a desirable policy, we owe it to victims to find out whether they are well-served by taking away their right to decide the extent to which they want to pursue a criminal justice solution to their problem.
Another DOJ sponsored report that is important concerning legislation and Gwinn ignores is The Exposure Reduction or Backlash? The Effects of Domestic Violence Resources on Intimate Partner Homicide. http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/grants/186194.pdf.
This above report suggests that:
The results for prosecutor willingness suggest that simply being willing to prosecute cases of protection order violations may aggravate already tumultuous relationships. . . Increases in the willingness of prosecutors’ offices to take cases of protection order violation are associated with increases in the homicide of white married intimates, black unmarried intimates, and white unmarried females.”
Perhaps the above verifies why some victims are hostile to mandatory prosecution.
The National Research Council
At the heart and core of what is wrong with the task force report is that it ignores the following:
The National Research Council (NRC) report notes on page 56 of Advancing the Federal Research Agenda on Violence Against Women http://books.nap.edu/catalog/10849.html notes that researchers and scholars who do not distinguish between violence, abuse, or battering may do more harm than good [emphasis added].
While most scholars and researchers understand it is vital to recognize the difference between “battering” and “family conflict, California criminal and civil laws, laws in the majority of the states and in fact federal laws and the entire criminal justice system, ignore these important distinctions (Hendricks, McKean, Hndricks, 2003).
Justice for All
The Ms. Foundation understands that some contemporary domestic violence policies and practices are having a disproportionate, negative impact on some families. The Ms Foundation for Women’s report suggests that many policies and practices put in place by our public policy makers ignore the fact that many families want, reclamation, rehabilitation, redemption, and restoration, rather than arrest and incarceration. Families want their voices heard not silenced. Families want their needs heeded, not ignored.
Mandatory arrest and no-drop prosecution ignores all of the above. Ironically, while some people proclaim these policies are bringing justice to domestic violence, these policies are stripping both the victims and offenders of the legal rights, that are the very foundation of our justice system, from them. Without a doubt mandatory arrest and no-drop prosecution and the “state knows best” policies have an Orwellian tone to them.
Many mandatory domestic violence policies and practices are eerily similar to mandatory drug policies and practices. In a mystifying and stunning reversal of logic many progressives and liberals who oppose mandatory drug arrests and mandatory sentencing policies and practices do not oppose mandatory domestic violence arrests, policies and practices. Perhaps only they know why.
There are many public policy makers and domestic violence advocates, similar to Gwinn, who are more than willing to take the credit for passing laws that make lives safer for some victims. However, are they willing to take the responsibility for passing legislation that removes due process from both offenders and victims, silences the voices of victims and may endanger the lives of family members? Approximately one in every four domestic violence murders are murder-suicides.
There are many who believe that mandatory domestic violence policies and practices are necessary, because if they save only one life their effort is worthwhile. What these very same people are unwilling or are unable to understand is that this philosophic belief demands that they must also acknowledge that if these same policies and practices take only one life, they may not worth the effort.
Are not the families who may be harmed by mandatory domestic violence policies and practices as worthy of the same compassion and sympathy as those who may be helped? Underserved victims should not have to account for half of the victims to deserve either compassion or services. Underserved victims, at the very least, deserve more than token acknowledgement. Have we decided to cut off the nose of some victims to save the face of the flawed and failing ideological “one-size-fits-all” criminal justice intervention?
Restraining Orders
Family Violence: Legal, Medical, and Social Perspective, one of the most widely read college texts concerning domestic violence, notes that research and positive results concerning the efficacy of restraining orders remains allusive (Wallace, 2002).
In the college text, Domestic Violence: The Criminal Justice Response, on page 245, the authors acknowledge “…for the subpopulation of offenders with an extensive criminal history, it [a restraining order] has little or no positive impact (Buzawa & Buzawa, 2002)
Regardless of that reality, “one-size-fits-all” domestic violence restraining orders are widely used in the civil and criminal courts of the state of California and elsewhere in this nation.
The Facts
The U. S. Department of Justice (DOJ) report, Civil Protection Orders: Victims’ Views on Effectiveness, www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles/fs000191.pdf reports something that most professionals in the criminal justice and social support system are or should be aware of. Violations of these orders increase and their effectiveness decreases, as the criminal record of the offender becomes more serious. Or put more simply many restraining orders are not powerful tools to stop abuse
and yet they are issued.
The above DOJ report documents, as do all studies, that restraining orders’ alone are not effective against offenders who have histories of violent offenses or offenders who have a history of ignoring court orders. In fact the study reports the problems for many plaintiffs will increase not decrease.
Some data documents that plaintiffs from low-income, high unemployment communities who request and receive restraining orders can be placed at increased risk for victimization rather than protection (Mears et al., 2001).
The DOJ report Controlling Violence Against Women documents, contemporary research and empirical evidence suggests that restraining orders are of limited value as a means of preventing violence against many plaintiffs.
There is a valid and growing concern that some plaintiffs in contentious divorce cases may request and are awarded restraining orders after presenting perceived or unsupported allegations of abuse or fear of abuse. In Massachusetts, Barbara Gray, a sponsor of the original restraining order statute stated that, “I think judges grant the restraining orders without even asking too many questions” (Young, 1999, p. 129).
The Premise
The task force report claims that the premise in the issuance of orders from the Family Court, orders is that a period of separation or regulated contact will help prevent a recurrence of abuse. This is a premise with no empirical support and no foundation of fact. It is in fact it is little more than a hunch and a hope. A hypothesis must have some empirical data that can document it validity.
A two year study of a Massachusetts court suggests that restraining orders have little deterrent effect on violent and abusive offenders who have histories of criminal behavior or patterns of chronic domestic abuse (Klein, 1996). Many criminal justice professionals understand the effect of restraining orders is decided by the defendant not the victim nor the state (Wallace, 2002).
Another California study, from Gwinn’s home town of San Diego, documents that almost half of the plaintiffs who received restraining orders reported that things became worse not better (DeBecker, 1997). There seem to be no doubt that the orders do help some people, however, is that sufficient to claim the are a powerful tool to help those being abused?
The truth is that many of the orders are being issued with little to no background information concerning individual socioeconomic, educational, cultural and behavioral variables of either the plaintiff or defendant.
This variables are vital because studies do demonstrate that arrest and restraining can deter some domestic violence for and by some by people, however, it may increase it with people who have histories of criminal behavior, no stake in the community, and are unemployed (Sherman, 1992).
In fact the task force report claims that offenders in the family court are typically more dangerous than those subject to Criminal Protective Orders. This juxtaposition of premise and reality seems to have been lost on many judges in the family courts who continue to issue these orders. Some orders, perhaps rather than protecting plaintiffs are placing some plaintiffs in more, rather than less danger http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/selfhelp/protection/dv/canhelp.htm .
The first paragraph in this section of “Keeping the Promise” notes, “Restraining orders can be a powerful tool to prevent batterers from committing further domestic violence, so long as there is a credible threat that violators will be sanctioned.” However, there are no empirical studies that document that claim is true.
The task then documents that in most California courts restraining orders are being issued without a credible threat that violators will be sanctioned. The task force ignores who is responsible for putting in place this dangerous practice of placing the cart before the horse.
This report needs, some where, some how, to acknowledge that restraining orders may work well for some families, not work well for other families, and actually have negative effects for others. Should not the context of the event, the characteristics of those involved and the possible negative consequences be identified and acknowledged before they are issued?
Deterrence
The NRC report Advancing the Federal Research Agenda on Violence Against Women http://books.nap.edu/catalog/10849.htm notes on page 79 & 80:
The literature on repeat intimate-partner violence demonstrates that legal sanctions do have deterrent effects, although modest in magnitude, but that these effects vary by the characteristics of perpetrators, their relationship with their partners, their stake in social conformity, and factors influencing the decision to impose sanctions.
While research shows that the collective actions of the criminal justice system exert a substantial deterrent effect on crime, this fact is of limited value in formulating policy for specific crime problems.
The two paragraphs above document that the promise made by task force has dramatic limitations concerning the universal efficacy of restraining orders. Among criminal justice professionals it is common knowledge, as studies document, that the most dangerous of offenders are repeat offenders and studies document repeat offenders are rarely deterred by the threat of arrest (Buzawa & Buzawa, 2003. There seems to be little dispute the fact that the majority of repeat offenders, have histories of violence behavior towards both intimates and strangers and they ignore restraining orders.
Connecting the Dots
Diane M. Stuart is the Director of the Office on Violence Against Women in the U.S. Department of Justice. Before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary concerning the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act Stuart claims:
Violence Against Women Act [VAWA] funded National Institute of Justice research reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, has determined the effectiveness of protection orders, concluding that permanent orders are associated with a significant decrease in risk of violence reported to police. Such results can give criminal justice officials greater confidence in granting permanent protection orders, when effectively enforced [emphasis added] www.ojp.usdoj.gov/vawo/docs/testimony07192005.pdf.
Stuart is referring to a Seattle, Washington study that, at least on its surface, seems to document it was the restraining orders that provided the demonstrated protection. This study was systematic, scientific, empirical and extensive and did provide positive results. However, what the study actually documents is that there is now evidence that restraining orders, with a coordinated community wide response and social agency support, can and do provide some protection for some victims.
California has been issuing restraining orders for more than two decades with, as the task force report documents, no coordinated community wide response. Apparently no one want to take responsibility for this miscarriage of justice? Stuart does not tell the Senate Committee that there are only a few similarly sponsored intensive interventions exist anywhere in the United States.
The positive results in Seattle were accomplished through the infusion hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars from the Violence Against Women Act, National Institute of Justice and Community Oriented Policing (COP) grants and also a core of volunteers in the Seattle area. These volunteers and the grants provide support and resources to plaintiffs that are almost unprecedented elsewhere in this country. Stuart makes no mention of those facts.
The Controlling Violence Against Women report notes that, policy makers and practitioners should feel confident that research findings, properly contextualized, [emphasis added] can be used in decision-making on preventing violence.
However, it also notes that above all, policy makers need to know that their policies and practices will not endanger the plaintiff. Hence, it is not the restraining orders themselves that can become powerful tools to provide protection for some people.
The Cart and the Horse
The task force report clearly documents that proper criminal justice safeguards and social support are not available in most California communities. However, the lack of resources and proper supportive safeguards to protect the plaintiffs has not stopped the California courts from issuing thousands upon thousands of these orders. Ready or not, here they are, seems to be the rule of thumb in the California courts.
There seems to be little question, as documented by the task force report, that California has and continues to put the cart (restraining orders) before the horse (coordinated criminal justice and community wide social support).
What is truly dumbfounding is that the Gwinn report itself provides proof positive that many communities and in fact, entire counties in California do not provide coordinated criminal justice intervention and community wide social support. The courts continue to issue restraining orders without understanding what dramatically different effects they can have on different families.
Both Gwinn and Stuart should acknowledge that a restraining order, in and of itself, is only a piece of paper. For offenders who ignore the deterrent effect of arrest and in communities that lack an intensive coordinated community response, the restraining order itself is little more than an empty threat to many offenders and provides little to no protection for the plaintiff (Buzawa & Buzawa, 2002).
In fact the National Research Council study, Violence in Families: Assessing Prevention and Treatment Programshttp://books.nap.edu/catalog/5285.html reports that it is still premature to conclude the actual effectiveness of a coordinated community response on individual members of our very diverse society.
The above report, similar to almost all DOJ sponsored reports note that it is far to early to believe that we have discovered any “one-size-fits-all” intervention process that resembles a ‘powerful tool” or a “silver bullet.” What many restraining orders produce are false promises, broken hearts, and shattered families. As of June 6, 2003 there were 227,941 active restraining orders against adults in California.
A director of the Los Angeles County Domestic Violence Council noted that because they have witnessed the failure of restraining orders to protect many victims and the fact that sometimes restraining orders can actually endanger victims, they are very cautious about recommending these “powerful tools.”
People who profess it is their goal to protect the plaintiffs of these orders and their children need to read the studies, rethink the issue and then tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Half truths may harm as many people as they help.
On page 259 of, Domestic Violence: The Criminal Justice Response, the authors acknowledge, “… the need for rigorous study to determine what works, for whom, under what conditions, and at what cost is clearly recognized” (Buzawa & Buzawa, 2002). The task force report documents not everyone agrees.
It seems that this task force, many professionals in the criminal justice system and many domestic violence advocates in the social support agencies in California are either unaware or ignore many U.S. Department of Justice studies that warn about, “one-size-fits-all” interventions. Perhaps it is time that someone in the California Attorney Generals office read them
Prosecuting Domestic Violence Misdemeanors
Ignoring the Obvious
In the second paragraph of this section the task force report notes, “For example, victims are often hostile to the prosecution, and recant prior damaging statements about the defendant.” Studies document that more than half of the domestic violence victims will recant their testimony (Buzawa & Buzawa, 2003)..
Perhaps part of the problem is that not all family members who seek help are “battered” and many of the defendants are not “batterers.” California’s “one-size-fits-all” domestic violence laws ignore the difference between “battering” and “family conflict” and many in the criminal justice system ignore the fact that domestic violence can be a complex and multifaceted problem.
California courts and social service agencies do not provide individualized attention to identifiable specific problems and mandatory arrest and no-drop policies demand that criminal justice interveners ignore the wishes and needs of the families. Criminal justice intervention is most often just one brush with the same paint for everyone.
The task force report also notes that:
A majority of the prosecutors’ offices in the core counties, however, do not work with community-based victim advocates and agencies that provide such services, preferring instead to work only with their own victim advocates.
The task force report then suggests that the prosecutors’ office should work with community-based victim advocates. That cooperation will not take place until the “one-size-fits-all” practices of the 20 th century are changed to reflect the complexities of domestic violence offenders and victims.
Many advocates understand what this task force ignores. Many of the policies this task force recommends may be right for the “system” however, they may be wrong for many families. Intervention will fail until it is tailored to meet the needs of individual families.
The risk of death or further injury concerning many interventions depends upon the proper understanding the context of the incident, the individual characteristics of the family and the offender and the typology of intervention provided http://ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/jr000250f.pdf .
No-drop prosecution policies place the need of the state/community ahead of families by ignoring the context of specific incidents and the needs of individual families. In no-drop the state actually becomes the victims and the victims is reduced merely to a witness in the case (Wallace, 2002). And then the “system” wonders why many families are hostile to criminal justice prosecution policies that ignore all of the above.
A Really Bad Idea
As the City Attorney for San Diego Gwinn is the architect of the policy of prosecuting misdemeanor domestic violence cases even when the victims are unwilling or unable to participate in the prosecution.
This concept was labeled “No-Drop-Prosecution.” The name is actually a misnomer as there are no jurisdictions that actually prosecute each and every domestic violence incident. However, the philosophy is to ignore the needs and desires of families and to prosecute cases that appear winnable and against the wishes of those who have been abused.
The reasons not to aggressively prosecute many domestic violence misdemeanors should be obvious. However, the foremost reason is that a DOJ sponsored study of homicide data in 48 states documents that increased prosecution rates increased the death rate for many intimates in those jurisdictions www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/grants/186194.pdf.
The above report, Exposure Resources on Intimate Partner Homicide, Final Report, documents that increasing prosecution was associated with increasing the number of deaths of white married couples, black unmarried intimates and white unmarried women. To not address this issue after the fact and not before putting in place no-drop prosecution is inexcusable.
A study of the Quincy District Court in Massachusetts found that aggressive prosecution policies in that court increased by 2.5 times the likelihood that victims, when abused again, would not report that incident to law enforcement (Buzawa & Buzawa, 2002). Perhaps the fact that their needs are minimized or ignored plays a part in their decision making process.
Advocates for Who?
What is truly strange about mandatory arrest and no-drop prosecution is that many domestic violence advocates, particularly those who work in conjunction with the prosecutor’s office, continue to approve of these “one-size-fits-all” policies.
At the heart and core of the domestic violence advocate movement and the belief that connects choice with the empowerment of women. How or why is it that many of these advocates can not see that mandatory arrest and no-drop prosecution is all about no choice and disempowering women?
Choice is at the heart and core of all domestic violence advocacy agencies. Those who train the many volunteers who answer domestic violence hotlines and provide advocacy in the courts, train those advocates to always remind the victims that the decision to leave their abuser, file criminal charges, etc. must be theirs and no one else’s.
Volunteer advocates are reminded, consistently and constantly, to never advise the victim/survivor’s as to what course of action they should take. Empowerment derives from allowing the victim/survivors to make independent decisions. Removing choice is disempowering!
How or why is it then that so many prosecutors, domestic violence advocates and members of the “Keeping the Promise” task force are actively involved in the disempowerment of victims by removing their right of choice by forcing mandatory arrest and no-drop prosecutions on victim/survivors? What can possibly cause that juxtaposition?
What Not To Do
It is often reported that law enforcement officers have been reluctant to make arrests in domestic violence incidents. That law enforcement reluctance is based on anecdotal stories not empirical facts. The fact is that many empirical studies document that there is often little difference in the arrests of intimates or strangers. Similar factors influence the decision to arrest for both intimates and strangers (Hendricks, McKean & Hendricks, 2003).
What is not written is that many officers made that decision to help not harm the families. The officers understood that many families are seeking assistance and solutions not arrest and sanctions.
The officers also believed that some people they arrested, with the consent of the person who was abused, would return home shortly after the arrest. Officers believed, rightly or wrongly, that many people after being arrested might take out their anger on the person who caused their arrest.
Officers also understood that the offender was sometimes involved in “family conflict” and was not a “batterer.” It is not always family members who call law enforcement. When some “family conflicts” rise to the level of physical assaults, a neighbor or someone who witnesses the conflict will call the police.
Many domestic violence advocates and responding officers know full well that often the “system” places itself first and families second. In fact many families who find themselves ensnared in the arrest dragnet think that some arrests are made to ensure that the law enforcement agency will not be sued.
In the case of “no-drop” policies there appears that the many people in the hierarchal “system” believes it is intellectually superior and more important than the “family” or an individual family member. If that was not true the prosecutors would listen to the families desires not to prosecute.
The few DOJ sponsored studies that claim to document that families do approve of “no-drop” policies have such small interview samples that it is unlikely that those results are representative of the general population (Buzawa & Buzawa, 2002).
And again, it is simply illogical to treat victims and offenders as if they are some monolithic group. Anyone who has had face to face interactions with families and offenders, not after the fact research reviews of data sets, understands full well the diverse problems and even more distinct and dissimilar needs families have.
Study the Studies
After reviewing the growing number of DOJ sponsored studies that report “no-drop” policies are not a good idea, one must conclude that the task force members are not aware of these studies or have made the choice to ignore them. Most empirical studies conclude that dragging each and every family into court and prosecuting family members against the will of other family members is not always a good idea.
Our research findings suggest that prosecutors should re-assess whether coercing victims to assist in the prosecution of their abusive partners is worth the costs. Use of coercive actions has the effect of lowering victims’ empowerment, and this should not be an acceptable outcome for prosecutors www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/grants/202983.pdf.
Another study documents that:
What is troublesome is that this research has found that despite the victim’s experience with a “model” intervention program reporting was still a major concern as the majority of victims did not report subsequent offenses to the police. In fact this research adds credence to earlier expressed fears that a too aggressive criminal justice response that did not reflect diversity of victim desires might have had the unintended effect of deterring future reporting www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/grants/195667.pdf.
It is difficult to understand why the state of California, this task force or many other criminal justice professionals have made the decision to continue to ignore the following warning.
Finally, we do not know whether no-drop increases victims safety or place the victims in greater jeopardy. . .Before no-drop is embraced as a desirable policy, we owe it to victims to find out whether they are well-served by taking away their right to decide the extent to which they want to pursue a criminal justice solution to their problem.
http://www.ocjc.state.or.us/march2002.pdf
In this section of the “Keeping the Promise” the task force reports, “Domestic violence victims who receive support and services are more likely to be and feel safe and thus more likely to cooperate with prosecutors.” There is little to disagree with here.
However, California laws that include mandatory arrest and no-drop prosecution policies for domestic violence can have just the opposite effect. Refusing to understand the proper context of the incident and ignoring their wishes is not seen by many victims as being “supportive” of their needs.
Perhaps the task force members should have read the “Mandatory Arrest and Prosecution Policies for Domestic Violence” report that can be found at the National Violence Against Women Prevention Research Center website www.nvaw.org/policy/mandarrest. This report notes:
Recent data suggest that arrest may actually increase abuse for some women [emphasis added]. The number of jurisdictions implementing mandatory prosecution has increased, even though data on the benefits and drawbacks of the policy are scarce.
When batterers were arrested, victims experienced repeat abuse in 26 percent of the cases. When batterers were arrested and the victim perceived the police as concerned and willing to listen [emphasis added,] the repeat abuse rated dropped to nine percent.
There seems to be little doubt among scholars and researchers, and this includes many feminists, that mandatory arrest and no-drop policies are not good ideas. In fact, recommending that the state of California should enforce the mandatory arrest dragnet and no-drop prosecution persecution may very well have the effect of victimizing once again many of the families the criminal justice, because of those policies, engulfs.
Holding Batterers Accountable: Batterer Intervention Programs, Probation Departments, and the Courts
The Nexus Of The Problem
It appears that the majority of the members of this task force, perhaps because of ideology or lack of knowledge concerning recent studies, have had difficulty in connecting the empirical dots. On page 5, of the Executive Summary the task force reports:
Batterer intervention programs are at the center [emphasis added] of California’s criminal justice response to domestic violence.
In the same paragraph the task force notes that a DOJ sponsored study reports:
Even after 15 years of national evaluations, it is impossible to say how effective these programs are [emphasis added].
The DOJ sponsored report that the task force refers to above is, Batterer Intervention Programs: Where Do We Go From Here, www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/195079.pdf. On page 26 it notes:
More troubling still on page 63, of the task force report the Program Executive Director of a batterer intervention program in Oakland notes that after their [batterer intervention programs] used for almost 25 years in California that:
“. . . one of my interests is to make sure that we actually study programs, batterers’ programs, because the reality is that we do not know if programs work.
Perhaps because these two concepts (1) batterer programs are at the core of California’s criminal justice response to domestic violence and (2) no one really knows they work, are so diametrical opposed, that dichotomy has escaped the task force.
What is even more troubling is that after all the years of having a treatment program that no one knows works the task force seems intent on placing more and more people in that program? Is this California’s metaphor for the Major-Major sequence in Catch 22?
Despite the fact that scholars and researchers have failed for decades to document that batterer programs actually work, they remain central to the California response to domestic violence. Millions upon millions of dollars have been spent with little to no documentation of positive outcomes. How can the task force expect “accountability from batterers” if the programs themselves have none?
It Gets Worse
The DOJ sponsored report, Batter Programs: What Criminal Justice Agencies Need To Know,
http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles/171683.pdf warns against any “cookie cutter” approach to intervention because research documents the need for diverse approaches. California has in place programmatic and administrative standards for its batterer intervention programs that severely lack diversity.
The California standards demand that all batterer programs adhere to the feminist perspective. The above DOJ report documents that:
Central to the [ideological feminist] perspective is a gender analysis of power, which holds that domestic violence mirrors the patriarchal organization of society. In this view, violence is one means of maintaining male power in the family.
Further the California standards insist that Group Treatment is the intervention of choice for domestic violence perpetrators. Treatment programs may be open to accept new members as the program continues or closed in structure. The groups may range from a minimum of 4 to a maximum of 12.
What goes unstated, however, is that the advocates have been trained to expect that these groups are groups of men who are so intent on oppressing women because of the patriarchy that they beat them. Diversity in this style of training is severely lacking.
The National Research Council report, Understanding Violence Against Women,
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/5127.html documents quite clearly what the majority of scholars and researchers believe. Diversity is most important in batterer intervention programs. They all agree that batterer intervention should be tailored, within reason, to the individual and diverse behaviors of those placed in the program.
The criminal justice system is responding to battering behavior as if it is one and the same as family conflict incidents. The majority of researchers and professionals agree that multifaceted causes require different and distinct interventions. Research into the cause and consequences of domestic violence should not and cannot be limited by any “single ideological theory” or any “one-solution-fits all” intervention.
Concluding outcomes before research is complete can limit focus and establish a bias against evidence to the contrary. Age specific and/or single gender research ignores or minimizes the vast array of many exploratory and explanatory variables concerning domestic violence.
Most researchers and professionals agree there are three principal models, each containing many sub groupings, that attempt to explain the reason why many who profess to love and care for each other often choose to neglect, abuse and batter their spouse, partner, or child.
The Feminist or Cognitive-Behavioral model
This approach explains that domestic violence mirrors the patriarchal organization of society and because of misogyny (the hatred of women by men) it is men who primarily use violence in order to maintain their traditional dominate role in the family. It is proffered that the behavior of the male batterer is a result of sexism and culturally learned masculine mores and norms.
This training prepares law enforcement officers and others in the criminal justice system for battering behavior at the expense of ignoring or not understanding all other forms of family violence. The message of the majority of contemporary criminal justice domestic violence training and education is that “domestic violence is battering behavior.”
The Family Conflict model
The abuse is the result of family stresses or the acceptance of conflict to resolve disputes both in the family and the neighborhood. Abusers strive for an important or predominant role in the family. In this view any family member may contribute to the escalation of violence.
The Psychotherapeutic model
This model proffers that personality disorders, early traumatic life experiences, or other individual dysfunctions predispose some people to use violence in family relationships.
Even those with little to no expertise concerning batterer treatment understand that group treatment programs do not provide for individual, diverse and specific needs. And the structure of these programs clearly document they are designed around the premise that men, because of the patriarchy, are the offenders and women their victims.
In fact there are no state guidelines for any form of structured interventions for violent women in California. This despite the fact that the National Violence Against Women survey clearly documents that domestic violence victimization is a problem for both men and women
http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/183781.pdf.
And Worse Still
There is little to no empirical data that can document why batterer intervention programs, should be the center of California’s criminal justice response. Perhaps in an effort to provide some empirical justification for making battering programs central to California’s criminal justice response, on page 63 of the task force report:
More to the point, batterers who do not complete their programs are more likely to re-abuse their victims.
Studies document that this appears to be true. However, rather than justifying the task force’s premise, this citation presents yet again another reason why batterer intervention programs should not be central to California’s criminal justice response domestic violence.
Current research documents that the most chronic and violent abusers are people with long histories of criminally violent behavior towards friends and family and they are not representative of the general population. These offenders are the most dangerous people who will wreak the most havoc and they, as data documents, are not deterred by threats of incarceration, let alone batterer programs.
What the task force does not reveal to the Attorney General may be more important that what it does. Studies do document that batterers who successfully complete or attend the majority of the programs classes are less likely to recidivate than batterers who do not.
Studies also document that most batterers who are not assigned to treatment programs also do not re-abuse the same victim. Studies also indicate that placing offenders in batterer programs may cause some victims to remain with these dangerous offenders who can not be deterred and hence place them in more rather than less danger for further victimization (Klein, 2004).
If there is no empirical evidence that batterer programs actually work, how is it possible that they remain the pillar, the very foundation of California’s criminal justice response!
Law Enforcement’s Response To Health Practitioner
Reports of Domestic Violence
Empirical Data Not Hunches and Hopes
A 1998 National Research Council study funded by the Carnegie Corporation, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and U.S. Department of Justice clearly documents that to avoid unintended negative consequences scientific research must precede intervention programs concerning mandatory health practitioner intervention and domestic violence. The California assembly has done just the opposite and worse still, this task force and the assembly seems intent on ignoring the negative consequences of that legislation.
The studies report, Violence in Familieshttp://www.nap.edu/openbook/0309054966/html/ provides a clear warning to states about the implementation of mandatory reporting laws:
The committee recommends that states initiate evaluations of their current reporting laws addressing family violence to examine whether and how early case detection leads to improved outcomes for the victims or families and promote changes based on sound research. In particular, the committee recommends that states refrain from enacting mandatory reporting laws [emphasis added] for domestic violence until such systems have been tested and evaluated by research.
In dealing with family violence that involves adults, federal and state government agencies should reconsider the nature and role of compulsory reporting policies [emphasis added}.
For reasons not articulated in “Keeping the Promise” the task force seems to have concluded that California legislators apparently know what is best for health care practitioners, law enforcement officials, and the victims of domestic violence.
Look Before You Leap
One of the most widely read college texts concerning domestic violence is, Family Violence: Legal, Medical, and Social Perspectives by Harvey Wallace. One of the reasons it is so popular with colleges is that it recognizes something that the advocates in California, perhaps because of their ideological philosophy ignore. The issue actually is “family violence” and not primarily “violence against women.” In the first paragraph of the preface Wallace warns:
The study of family violence is a complex, multifaceted experience. By its very nature, family violence involves physicians, nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists, family counselors, educators, social workers, attorneys, judges, and law enforcement officials. All professionals have expertise in their own area of specialization. However, they may not understand or appreciate the difficulties experienced by others in their area of interest [emphasis added]. For example, a member of the medical profession may be able to diagnose physical injuries but not understand the complexities of the courtroom.
As the task force notes this section is the most controversial. Perhaps it is the most controversial because it is not a good idea and the recommendations of health care practitioners are ignored. The California assembly seems not to appreciate the difficulties faced by many of the health care practitioners and more importantly their patients.
Leaping Without Looking
Concerning law enforcement’s response to health practitioner reports of domestic violence, the task force reports on page 7, of the executive summary:
California’s domestic violence reporting requirement for health practitioners has proven controversial. We did not attempt, however, to decide whether the requirement is a good one [emphasis added].Our focus, instead, was to find out how health practitioners are complying with their reporting obligations, and how law enforcement responds to these reports.
Not exploring that the problem might be with the law and not the professionals attempting to implement the law is the real problem with this task force and California criminal justice system domestic violence intervention. No one knows if the law is good or not and apparently no one is going to take the time and effort to document it efficacy. The first and foremost mission of the task force seems to be, “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”
The fact that the task force members do not understand nor appreciate the difficulties faced by others could not be expressed any more clearly than above. One would expect that the California assembly member who wrote this law would understand, more clearly than others, the dangers involved in leaping before looking.
The authors of this paper do not question that most people involved with California’s domestic violence intervention are well intentioned. However, good intentions do not always produce good results. Wallace helps us understand why there is so much confusion on page 3:
How does one accurately study or research a phenomenon if a definition cannot be agreed on because the definition of any act both sets limits and focuses research within certain boundaries? The lack of agreement in defining family violence has led to confusion and disarray in attempts to determine factors that cause or contribute to family violence.
Family violence morphed into domestic violence and then into “battering.” Any member of any family, including the majority of the California assembly, should acknowledge that there is a distinct difference between “family violence” and “battering.” The problem is that ideology causes too many people to ignore that reality.
Further, this legislation mandates that the health care practitioners must ignore their medical and ethical obligations of meeting the desires, needs and confidentiality of their patients at the expense of conforming to “the law.”
Autonomy and Confidentiality
In a bit of Orwellian logic and a lack of morality it is suggested that health care practitioners inform the “battered patient” that this report is to be kept confidential by the clinic and cannot be accessed by friends, family, or other third parties without the patient’s consent.
First, while it is technically true that the specific “report” may be kept confidential, the patient is not informed that confidentiality and their autonomy will be ignored by everyone else. The truth is that patient confidentially and personal autonomy will become subservient to “the system.”
Second, while the patient may very well have been injured in an altercation with another family member, that fact standing by itself, does not automatically and absolutely cause that specific family member to be a “battered patient.”
California Mandatory Reporting Law: A Summary
http://endabuse.org/health/mandatoryreporting/california.pdf
Health care practitioners are “mandated” to report to law enforcement any patient who is “suffering from any wound or other physical injury inflicted upon the person where the injury is the result of assaultive or abusive conduct.”
A fact that seems lost on the assembly members is that most families, do at times push, shove, slap or hit one another. This behavior, while not acceptable, is not considered “battering” anywhere except under mandatory legislation that wittingly or unwittingly, transforms all acts of “family conflict to “battering.”
If a wife slaps a husband, the husband losing his balance, falls and injuries himself, he is now, under California law, a “battered” patient and his wife a “batterer.” To deny that some men and women do hit each other out of jealously, anger or rage is to deny reality and reams of empirical evidence to the contrary.
And Confusion Reigns
Esta Soler is the founder and president of the California non-profit Family Violence Prevention Fund (FVPF) http://endabuse.org/. A visit to the FVPF website documents that the FVPF is not really concerned with “family violence” it is concerned with “violence against women.”
One example, of many, is that the FVPF presents advice on how we should respect women and girls. FVPF consistently presents men and boys as the abusers and women and girls only as their victims.
It seems to the authors of this paper that figuratively throwing our sons under the bus to protect our daughters is a rather radical ideological position to present. Oddly, few people in the media question the ideological philosophy of the FVPF.
It is the FVPF website above that links the reader to a summary of this section California law. Soler has claimed, more than once, that while all violence is wrong regardless of who is the perpetrator, all physically assaultive acts are not acts of domestic violence.
Soler contends, domestic violence is not one person pushing another person one time because of jealously or anger. Soler believes that domestic violence occurs when there is an ongoingpattern of fear, intimidation and violent assault.” The authors of this paper agree with Soler, however, California law ignores all three of us.
The difference between the authors of this paper and Soler is that when it comes to implementing legislation Soler’s ideology causes her to ignore what she knows to be wrong. Apparently, ideology triumphs over logic and common sense.
Soler also seems oblivious to the fact that “laws” define domestic violence for the criminal justice system. In the world of the California criminal justice system, domestic violencedoes notrequire an ongoing pattern of fear, intimidation and violent assault. Any and all physical assaults regardless of the context of the act must be reported by practitioners.
In fact there is not a single domestic violence law in this nation that matches Soler’s definition of domestic violence. Not a single state has a law that requires an ongoing pattern of fear, intimidation and violent assault. Hence, the confusion and disarray in California and elsewhere in this nation continues.
The Letter of the Law
In the executive summary of the task force report is a letter to the California attorney general that seems to enforce the belief that the law is more important than research, logic or common sense.
Our report includes disturbing examples of agencies that have failed: to respond to domestic violence victims, to enforce the law, to comply with the law, and to work in necessary collaboration.
Perhaps what is most disturbing is the fact that this task force seems to have little to no interest in understanding any of the reason “why” some people are not complying. Perhaps the controversy among so many health care practitioners is that they understand it is a “bad law.” The task for seem unable or unwilling to accept the fact that the reason there may be so much non-compliance is that often the law defies logic and common sense.
Perhaps many medical field practitioners, as do many other scholars and researchers, understand that attempting to “arrest” their way out of the problem is not going to work in California or elsewhere.
Rather than simply strengthening and enforcing the law on the books, perhaps someone, apparently not many members of this task force, need to question what sections of the law seem to be working well, what sections of the law seem not to be working as well, and discover the “whys” concerning those differences.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Why do the members of the task force avoid recognizing that doing the wrong thing over and over again is not going to make it right.
In their infinite wisdom the California assembly has made it a crime for practitioners not to comply with this law. Lost on these Assembly members is the fact that they are using force and power to control the behavior of a group of people who disagree with them rather than persuasion, reason and common sense. Many domestic violence advocates recognize that style of behavior.
One crystal clear example of the California Assembly members not understanding they have passed a fundamentally flawed law is the fact that it appears that no one in the criminal justice system has yet to arrest a medical practitioner for noncompliance. Perhaps that is a message to the Assembly members that the law is not a good one?
And, thankfully in California many health care practitioners continue to understand the importance of placing patient autonomy and confidentiality before their blind compliance with the letter of this very flawed law.
This particular section of mandated domestic violence intervention, more clearly than the others, documents how the law places itself above reason. In California the law has become triumphant in creating confusion and disarray involving both the victims it intends to serve as well as those who truly want to help victims regardless of age, gender or sexual orientation.
A conclusion that seems to have escaped many members of this task force is that many health care practitioners have failed to enforce or comply with the law because they can clearly recognize that this law can harm some of those it intends to help.
Again, it is a fundamental educational concept to recognize that the only dumb question is the question not asked. The fact that this task force did not think it was necessary to ask the health care practitioners why they were not complying documents that patient consent, confidentiality or autonomy are not a part of the task force agenda.
Recommendations For Change
The Red Herring
There continues a seemingly endless, negative and fruitless argument between many domestic violence advocates, women’s and men’s rights organizations, and individuals concerning domestic violence that:
When data is collected from battered women’s shelters or self reporting criminal justice surveys women do appear to be the primary victim. However, data collected from family violence surveys document the men and women report victimization at approximately the same rate.
From this disparate data the fine line that often separates science from politics becomes blurred by those who think that if you do not believe 100% that sexism, the oppression of women and the patriarchy is the root cause for most domestic violence, you must be 100% against them. Far too often ideological feminist scholars and researchers predetermine which position their research will support before their research actually begins.
In general sociologists agree that the “subjectivity of personal values” is a form of “bias” and hence should be avoided in favor of objectivity. Objectivity is a scholar’s personal neutrality in conducting research (Macionis, 1997). In the first paragraph on page one of the, Full Report of the Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Womenhttp://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/183781.pdf the authors write:
In unprecedented numbers, scholars trained in such diverse disciplines as philosophy, literature, law, and sociology examined violence against women in the context of feminist ideology.
Hence, the two above ideological feminist authors, similar to many others providing research have made the decision to change traditional “objective” research to “subjective” ideological feminist biased research that presents data in a manner that fosters the ideological feminist preconceived idea of domestic violence victimization.
These above authors are ideological feminists. They did not want men included in the National Violence Against Women (NVAW) survey and they had only women interview women while only half of the male’s were interviewed by men.
The NVAW survey documents that more males 53.8% than females 40% experienced some type of physical assault by an adult caretaker as a child. The survey also documents that 1.3% of women and 0.9% of men were physically assaulted by any type of intimate partner annually.
The latter, at face value, appears to document women are the primary victim’s until you read that the survey also documents that women report their victimization more than twice as often as men. The victimizations in the NVAW survey include all physical assaults and not only the most violent.
One does not need to be a scientist or a scholar to recognize the relevance of the above paragraph. Despite their own results the authors declared that women should be considered the primary or more important victim. Their ideological feminism caused them to present data and reach conclusions that are not synonymous with the truth that they actually report on page 29, 30 and 31 of their report. The authors are unwilling or unable to acknowledge truth in their conclusions. Perhaps their ideology may have clouded their both vision and version of the truth.
Criminal Justice Data
Criminal justice data does documents that women suffer from greater physical injuries and exhibit more fear of their intimate partner than men. Criminal justice data also documents that more men than women are violent criminals. It is undeniable that physical strength and contemporary gender and cultural mores play important roles in those differences.
When domestic violence occurs between men and women the coercion and physical assaults, more often than not, have the same intent yet their results often appear to be very dissimilar in their harmfulness (Hendricks, McKean & Hendricks, 2003). However, regardless or not if more harm is suffered by one gender, are not each equally guilty of the same intent? Do not each share equal responsibility when initiating the incident?
A Central Premise
Although many domestic violence advocates frame the issue of intimate partner homicide as a gender issue (women are killed simply because they are women) criminal justice data documents otherwise http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/factsheets/suifacts.htm. Data clearly documents, given the context of the violence, that some women can be as violent as some men.
Men commit more homicides than women. However, the patriarchy has little to do with homicides as data documents that men are far more violent against other men than they are against women http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/homtrnd.htm#contents. Men also kill themselves far more frequently than they kill women http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/factsheets/suifacts.htm.
Homicide data documents that more females than males are the victims of intimae partner homicides. However, homicides account for less than ½ of 1% (0.3) of all family violence between 1998 and 2002.
It is generally accepted by scholars and researchers that the behavior of a populace in general cannot be predetermined from the aggregate data of the behavior of an extremely small subgroup of that population (Macionis, 1997).
Intimate partner homicides are extremely rare vents. In fact the above less than one percent (0.3) includes all victims of family violence, not only intimate partners. Excluding homicides, females account for 58% of victims of family violence and males 42% www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/fvs.htm .
The time has come for public policy makes to question the wisdom of pitting the victimization reported by women against the victimization reported by men? All public policy makers need to question why ideological feminists, who often know little to nothing about the complexities of the criminal justice system, pit women and men who are domestic violence victims against each other?
Why is it expected by criminal justice interveners, domestic violence advocates and public policy makers that men need to be the victims of physical injuries as often as women or men need to be as fearful as women in order to receive equal empathy and support? Why is male victimization so often minimized, marginalized, and ignored? If domestic violence is unacceptable, regardless of severity, then why is it not equally intolerable for either gender to perpetrate abuse?
While some domestic violence advocates and a few public policy makers claim they are equally concerned about male victimization the fact is that billions of public and private funds are being spent on female victimization and little to nothing is being spent concerning male victimization. Almost all ideological feminist domestic violence websites that document dating violence note the number of females victims while ignoring male victimization Are not our sons as worthy as our daughters?
A New Awareness
When there are suggestions for change from advocates who are equally concerned about all victims of domestic violence they are often accused by feminist ideologists of being part of the backlash against the victimization of women and of women’s rights. Nothing could be further from the truth.
It is also common for those who resist change to attack the bearer of the message and not the message itself. Not everyone who suggests that contemporary interventions are biased and that change is needed can be painted as a misogynist by ideological feminism.
Advocates for Change
Ellen Pence pioneered the Duluth model for domestic violence intervention. Pence, believes that “one-size-fits-all” policies similar to those in California are wrong. She believes, as do the authors of this paper, that too often offenders are placed in programs that do not suit their needs. She also believes many people that are charged with “domestic violence” are not batterers.
Pence designed her community wide intervention to address the most violent of the predators and those who are chronic batterers. Pence claims that if her partner cheated on her and she, in a fit of anger, slapped her partner that does not make Pence a “batterer” http://denver.rockymountainnews.com/news/justice/. Pence is not a misogynist.
The Ms. Foundation for Women (MsFW) http://www.ms.foundation.org/ is concerned first and foremost with women’s rights. This organization has concluded in its report, Safety & Justice for All: Examining the Relationship between the Women’s Anti-Violence Movement and the Criminal Legal System, http://www.ms.foundation.org/user-assets/PDF/Program/safety_justice.pdf that our public policy makers have in fact, put in place policies and practices that do endanger many victims.
In fact the MsFW has concluded that those who are being endangered most by these mandatory policies and practices are the very same victims who need help the most. The MsFW believes that contemporary public policy makers should abandon the use of mandatory legal practices such as mandatory reporting, mandatory arrest, and no drop prosecution policies.
The MsFW believes that many policies and practices that were intended to help families have instead harmed many families. The MsFW also believes that these policies and practices have eroded the rights of both men and women who are being arrested and prosecuted. No one is going to acuse the MsFW of being a misogynist organization.
Ellen Goodman in an article for the Boston Globe acknowledges that women initiate violence nearly as often – though not as lethally – as men. Goodman writes that men and women are approximately equally caring and empathetic. Some men are more so than women and some women more so than men.
Goodman writes, “When the social constraints are off – surely when women are rewarded for violence – they can mimic the worst behavior of men.” Goodman is not a misogynist. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/09/23/tender_terrorists/
Linda G. Mills, who is a domestic violence survivor and not a misogynist, is the author of, Insult to Injury. Mills believes that mandatory intervention assumes a false omnipotence. Mills notes that in California this false omnipotence grew from the paradoxical claim of Gwinn and former police sergeant Anne O’Dell that the way to help women is to remove their right of choice. This seems chillingly similar to the fallacious and potentially harmful claim that one must burn the village in order to save it.
Recommendation One
Read and heed the research. Over the last decade there have been numerous important findings in the many scientific empirical studies. If you are working in or with the criminal justice system and you continue to ignore the two U. S. Department of Justice sponsored reports below, you very well may be instrumental in harming as many victims as you are helping.
The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) report, Controlling Violence Against Women: A Research Perspective on the 1994 VAWA’s Criminal Justice Impacts must be read by those concerned about domestic violence www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/grants/197137.pdf . The recommendations from the California task force may very well have been quite different if just a few of the members had read this report.
This above report notes that:
Above all, they [public policy makers] need to know that their policies and practices will not endanger women [emphasis added]. Unfortunately, there are too few preventive impact evaluations of policies already in place and fewer still that approach methodological standards insuring sound data for shaping policy.
The single prosecution policy found to protect victims in Indianapolis was to permit victims who initiated their complaints at the prosecutor’s office to drop charges, a finding that has been interpreted as evidence of victims empowerment [emphasis added] or self-protection (Ford, 1993)
An analysis of offender interviews in the Milwaukee (SARP) experiment similarly found that when police were seen as having treated the suspect fairly, he was less likely to again batter the same victim within 12 months of his arrest (Paternoster, Barme, Bachman, and Sherman, 1997).
The second study that must be read is The National Research Council (NRC) report http://books.nap.edu/catalog/10849.htmlAdvancing the Federal Research Agenda on Violence Against Women notes that researchers and scholars who do not distinguish between violence, abuse, or battering may do more harm than good. California, or in fact most federal or state legislators ignore that important distinction.
The above report note:
Without consistency in the use of terms across studies, research in this field will remain fragmented; new measurement instruments that have been developed may not receive adequate testing or experimental use in studies that can demonstrate their power, and accurate prevalence and incidence estimates, especially of severe violence, will remain elusive.
The research shows that legal sanctions do have a deterrent effect, although modest in magnitude, but that these effects vary by characteristics of perpetrators, their relationships with their partners, their stake in social conformity, and factors influencing the decision to impose sanctions.
Finally, there is emerging and credible evidence that the general origins and behavioral patterns of various forms of violence, such as male violence against women and men and female violence against men and women, may be similar.
A growing body of empirical evidence reveals that perpetrators of violence against women commonly have histories of violence and conduct problems outside of intimate relationships; the same is also true for women who perpetrate violence behavior. However, there is no longitudinal sample of the U.S. population currently examining causes of violence against or by women.
As previous National Research Council committee found, the design of prevention and control strategies – programs and services available to victims and offenders that aim to decrease the number of new cases of assault or abusive behavior, reduce the risk of death or disability from violence, and extend life after a violent event – frequently is driven by ideology and stakeholder interests rather than by plausible theories and scientific evidence of cause [emphasis added].
Without evaluations in place, lacking methodological standards and without data to document they would not be harmful to some domestic violence victims the California Assembly members have ignored most unbiased contemporary scientific empirical studies and passed legislation that created, “one-size-fits-all” mandatory policies and procedures that are based on little to no research that documents their effectiveness. Worse still, the California Assembly members have ignored studies that document that the policies they passed may be more harmful than helpful to many families.
Recommendation Two
Do away with all mandatory policies. Mandatory legal policies and practices have silenced many domestic violence victims, driven others away from seeking help and caused others to lose any and all control over their lives and the lives of their children.
In fact, many of our mandatory domestic violence policies and practices are eerily similar to the mandatory drug policies and practices. It is mystifying why progressives and liberals who so often oppose mandatory arrest and sentencing policies for drug abuse do notoppose mandatory domestic violence arrests, policies and practices.
Recommendation Three
Do not have in place any “one-size-fits-all” interventions. All feminist researchers argue against any “one-size-fits-all” interventions for women who are arrested for domestic violence because of the many negative consequences presented by that policy. If these ideological feminist researchers could look at the issue “objectively” they would then understand that the same is true for men.
Recommendation Four
Treat our sons the same way we treat our daughters. All domestic violence organizations must be bias free. The president of the Family Violence Prevention Fund http://endabuse.org/ , Esta Soler claims that:
Until now, there has been little help and support for those who want to teach their sons to reject abuse and help their daughters avoid becoming victims of dating, domestic or sexual violence.
Because of her feminist ideology it can not occur to Soler, and many other domestic violence advocates that they have become the very same people that feminism rightly railed against at the end of the 20 th century.
The majority of domestic violence organizations, similar to the National Domestic Violence Hotline http://www.ndvh.org/educate/abuse_in_america.html, perhaps because of their ideological feminism, note that one in five female high school students (a daughter) reports being physically and/or sexually abused by a dating partner.
The above agency, similar to most ideological feminist domestic violence agencies that receive millions of dollars from the federal government have willingly, because that truth refutes their philosophic belief, have chosen to ignore the plight of our sons.
These ideological feminist organizations universally ignore the fact that the same survey, that they use to present their gender specific data, also reports that 8.8% of females (a daughter) and 8.9% of males (a son) reports being physically assaulted and 11.9% of females (a daughter) and 6.1% of males (a son) reports being sexually assaulted. What ever happened to the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Is their ideology more important to them then the safety of our sons?
The American Sociologist Association (ASA) has formal guidelines for conducting and presenting research. Very simply put the ASA believes that research must be both technically competent and unbiased. Researchers must release all their findings without omitting specific data that upholds only their position on an issue.
Conclusion
The authors of this paper have attempted to place online URL’s, when ever and where ever possible, that link the reader to the information presented. Perhaps if task force or the California Attorney General would review at least some of the above studies they might revise their recommendations, many of which seem to be based on ideological feminist beliefs and not empirical data.
There is hardly a more contentious issue in the criminal justice system than the issue of domestic violence. This task force has decided to repackage the policies of the 20 th century that have failed many victims and present them once again as answers to the dilemmas we face early in the 21 st.
It appears that the task force, far too often, accepts ideological assumptions as fact and ignores empirical data and research to the contrary. It appears that members of this task force all too frequently did not attempt to connect the empirical research dots. Instead, they have presented their report in an ideological manner that separates the issue of male and female violence that is not supported by data and they ignored the opportunity to take an unbiased scientific analysis of the issue.
The NRC reports that evidence now documents that the patterns and forms of violence, male violence against women and men and female violence against men and women, may be similar. The NRC believes that we, both men and women, must end the fragmented gender separate approach concerning cause and consequences of violence if we intend to minimize it effects on both men and women (Kruttschnitt, McLauglin, & Petrie, 2004).
Given the importance of the issue and the continued controversy that surrounds this debate, one that far too often drowns out the needs, desires and the voice of the families involved, it is time for an unbiased assessment of the data and research.
Finally this report brings to mind the questions that are only infrequently asked and less frequently answered. It is understandable why ideological feminist agencies would want to ignore the issue of male victimization, it is their agenda. However, why is male victimization so often ignored by our public policy makers and both the electronic and print media?
Why does the federal government spend billions on female victimization and at the same time take the absurd position of claiming the neutrality of the Violence Against Women Act? Many females and most males also wonder why so many domestic violence advocates, as their websites document, minimize, marginalize, and ignore male victimization.
Stranger still, why is the safety of our daughters in dating relationships a major concern for these agencies while they ignore our sons? Most domestic violence agencies, on their websites, document the abuse noted by the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System suffered by our daughters and ignore the abuse suffered of our sons.
Does the federal government, domestic violence advocates or these domestic violence agencies think that parents grieve more when their daughters rather than their sons are killed, physically assaulted or sexually abused by a family member rather than by an acquaintance or stranger?
And why do the California Assembly members and this task force place feminist ideology before the relevance and importance of reading and understanding information provided to them, information that is often only a mouse click away, in scientific empirical studies by scholars and researchers?
Richard L. Davis & Jan E. Brown
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Richard L. Davis (Lt.ret) is the author of Domestic Violence: Fact and Fallacies, an adjunct instructor of criminal justice courses for Quincy College at Plymouth and the VP of www.Familynonviolence.org. He may be reached at rldavis@post.harvard.edu
Jan E. Brown is the Founder and Executive Director of the Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men and Women, a national crisis line that offers support and services to victims of domestic violence. www.noexcuse4abuse.org She may be reached at: help@noexcuse4abuse.org
