Ideology in the Guise of Empirical Research
November 16, 2005
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. - John Adams
The National Institute of Justice
The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) is in the U.S. Department of Justice and is the lead agency in fostering research and direction for the criminal justice system. Many people believe that the NIJ is the unofficial think tank for the criminal justice system. In many ways it remains so.
The college text, Crisis Intervention, 3 rd Edition (Hendricks, McKean, Hendricks, 2003) note on page 178:
Currently, intimate partner violence is studied from a family violence perspective, a feminist perspective, and a social psychological perspective. If one reviews the research, commentaries, and debates between adherents of the three perspectives, it sometimes seems as if they are talking about different phenomenon.
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 (Kruttschnitt, McLaughlin & Petrie, 2004) notes 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.
The NIJ and our public policy makers have, for reasons that are difficult if not impossible to understand, decided to ignore the professional advice from scholars and the NRC. There is a Violence Against Women Act, because our public policy makers have accepted the feminist perspective, which is only one theory of three, as the exclusive or primary theory.
The Feminist Perspective
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 alone or primarily who use violence 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 all other forms of family violence. The message is quite clear, domestic violence is battering.
The Family Violence Perspective
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 Social Psychological
This model proffers that personality disorders, early traumatic life experiences, or other individual dysfunctions predispose some people to use violence in family relationships.
One Perspective Does Not Fit All
All professionals, at least those who are not ideological feminists, agree that the feminist, family violence, and the social psychological perspectives are all theories and not one of them is a single stand alone fact. Until one is substantiated, all three must continue to be used to meet the individual and diverse needs of both offenders and victims.
In an insult to the intelligence of advocates who are concerned about the victims of domestic violence, regardless of gender, the majority of our public policy makers continue to believe that the Violence Against Women Act is also concerned about male victimization.
Some public policy maker actually present this specious claim as fact while the majority if not most NIJ research and studies minimize, marginalize and ignore male victimization. In fact, some NIJ grant applications actually forbid any mention of male victimization.
http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/sl000734.pdf.
A fact that can not be altered by our public policy makers, regardless of how hard they try to spin the truth is that to date, not one thin dime has been spent on a single heterosexual male victimization program or research study. Not a single penny. And that is a fact no one can spin or alter!
The National Violence Against Women Survey
The National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAWS) was supported by a grant to the Center for Policy Research from the National Institute of Justice and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Is it not logical to believe that researchers should have presented to the NIJ and the CDC a survey that is bias free, empirical based and not ideologically driven?
However, it should have been obvious to the NIJ and the CDC that the authors of the survey, Patricia Tjaden and Nancy Thoennes, are not unbiased researchers. They both are ideological feminists. There is nothing wrong with being an ideological feminist. However, there is something wrong when ideological feminists pose as unbiased researchers. The NIJ and the CDC should expect researchers to produce an unbiased presentation of the issue of domestic violence.
It is generally agreed that ideologicalfeminist research, by its very nature can not be value-free. In fact ideological feminist research is overtly political. Ideological feminist research favors a less structured approach to gathering information so that ideological feminist researchers can offer their own theories on their own terms. This is precisely what Tjaden and Thoennes did with the NVAWS and what other ideological feminists continue to do with NIJ funding.
One only has to Goggle Tjaden and Thoennes to discover that they identify themselves with the belief that the abuse of power in society (by men) fosters the battering of women (by men) perpetuates conditions that condone violence against women and children (by men). Tjaden and Thoennes believe that women, most often, are passive victims at the hands of violent men. How is it possible that the NIJ and the CDC could not understand that the ideology of these authors would skewer the research?
If there is any doubt about the fact that Tjaden and Thoennes are not concerned with male victimization, it was the original intent of Tjaden and Thoennes to exclude males from the NVAWS. How did the NIJ and the CDC expect an unbiased survey from researchers who displayed little to no interest in interviewing male victims?
Other studies and articles by the authors document that they have little to no interest in the family violence perspective nor the social psychological perspective. They are concerned with violence against women first and foremost. Violence against men is not one of their priorities.
It should have been obvious to the NIJ and the CDC that the conclusion Tjaden and Thoennes reach, that strategies for preventing intimate partner violence should focus on the risks of abuse posed by men against women, was already fully developed and deeply held by Tjaden and Thoennes before the survey was administered.
Because they are ideological feminists and not feminist Tjaden and Thoennes do not care about the fact that feminists support the equality of the genders. Ideology permeates both the manner in which the survey was administered and the results of the NVAWS are skewed to match the ideological beliefs of the Tjaden and Thoennes.
In fact the survey was actually administered differently for females and males. Only female interviewers interviewed female respondents while half of the male respondents were interviewed by male interviewers and half by female interviewers.
The NVAWS did not require that a “physical assault” actually be a physical assault, nor the act of stalking to “actually be stalking.” The “physical assault” and “stalking” reported only had to be acts that would cause a victim to feel a “high level of fear” that those events might occur.
The majority of scholars, researchers and criminologists acknowledge that women report crime at a higher rate than men and that women “fear” crime or violent acts at a much higher rate than men. In fact the NVAWS documents that women are approximately twice as likely as men to report their being abused as men are.
Barlow and Kauzlarich note in, Introduction to Criminology, that a number of studies document women are three times more likely than men to feel unsafe in their own neighborhood at night. They also note that while elderly women report being the most fearful they are the least victimized.
The majority of scholars, researchers, criminologists and laypersons understand that males are acculturated not to admit to being fearful, be tough, and to ignore pain. This gender “fear differential” is ignored by Tjaden and Thoennes and its absence increases the differential of the percentage of “abuse” between men and women. All social surveys will continue to document that men are less affected by intimate partner assault because of acculturation.
And many women will continue to suffer greater sexual and injurious assaults until it is recognized that many minor assaults initiated by women can quickly escalate into dangerous and violent assaults with the smaller and weaker person suffering the most. This is particularly true with men who have histories of violent behavior inside and outside the home and have histories of chronic substance abuse.
Tjaden and Thoennes could have used NVAWS to resolve the disputed question of how many assaults by women against men are actually defensive in nature and how many assaults are actually initiated by women. As noted above, this could be important to the welfare of many women. It was a question Tjaden and Thoennes avoided asking.
In the criminal justice filed who initiates an assault is still an important legal element. It is not necessarily true, as many ideological feminist continue to believe, that who loses the fight is the victim.
The following is a list of some of the publications from the National Violence Women Survey by Tjaden and Thoennes:
To obtain copies of these publications, visit NIJ's Web site at: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij or contact the National Criminal Justice Reference Service, P.O. Box 6000, Rockville, MD 20849-6000; 800-851-3420 or 301-519-5500; or send an e-mail message to
askncjrs@ncjrs.org.
An Open Question to the NIJ and CDC
As most of the publications above note, Tjaden and Thoennes, have used funds from the NIJ and the CDC to produce publications that result in sweeping ideological claims that play an integral role in minimizing, marginalizing, and ignoring male victimization by the criminal justice system. Attempts to always dismiss the high number of incidents that are initiated by women continues to pose an increased danger to some women.
It is important to the criminal justice system and other crisis interveners that they understand that some women can be just as coercive and assaultive as some men. This is important for the safety of both women and men and that reality needs to be becomes more important than ideology.
On page 60 of the Full Report of the Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women, Tjaden and Thoennes write that “intimate partner violence should be considered first and foremost a crime against women.” On page 55 of the, Extent, Nature, and Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence, Tjaden and Thoennes write that “intimate partner violence should be considered first and foremost a crime against women and prevention strategies should reflect that fact.” Again, while true feminist believe in equal rights, ideological feminists believe first and foremost in women’s rights.
The behavior of Tjaden and Thoennes clearly documents that they may actually think that the findings from the NVAWS document their belief that violence perpetrated against women by intimates is often part of a systematic pattern of dominance and control. Tjaden and Thoennes claim that data from the NVAWS documents their belief to be a fact on page iv of the Extent, Nature, and Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence.
Absolutely no where in the NVAWS can the data document that a systematic pattern of dominance and control is the single or a primary causal factor for violence against women. The data is not there.
The absence of empirical evidence did not prevent Tjaden and Thoennes from making that false claim. They are ideological feminists and their claim is neither factual nor ethical. However, while I do not condone what they claim, I can understand that their political agenda of ideological feminism is why they make that claim. They want others to believe what they believe.
What I can not understand is why that false claim is not evident to either the NIJ or the CDC. If the NVAWS findings provide no data that the violence perpetrated against women by male intimates is often part of a systematic pattern of dominance and control, why did the NIJ and the CDC allow Tjaden and Thoennes to make the claim that it does?
Scholars and researchers understand that the NVAWS used a mortified version of the Conflict Tactics Sale (CTS) to measure the violence. Scholars, researchers and in fact ideological feminists acknowledge that the CTS can not and does not measure what actually caused the act or document the intent of the actor. There are no questions added to this modified version of the CTS used in the NVAWS that is designed to calculate or measure the casual factor or the intent of the perpetrator, regardless of gender. The ideology of Tjaden and Thoennes has caused them to see what is not there.
Tjaden and Thoennes believed before the survey that violence against women is caused by a systematic pattern of dominance and control and hence they claim that the feminist “theory” to be an actual fact without providing any empirical evidence. Is it that no one at the NIJ or CDC noticed or that no one cares?
No where in any of the reports listed above, that are sponsored by the NIJ and CDC, do Tjaden and Thoennes present a single shred of empirical evidence that documents that dominance and control systematically causes men to use violence against women. Tjaden and Thoennes do document that women experience more chronic and injurious physical assaults at the hands of intimate partner than men, however, no where do they document the cause of the assaults or the intent of the perpetrators.
And hence, because neither the NIJ nor the CDC appear to be aware of the false claims of Tjaden and Thoennes in the NVAWS, the feminist perspective continues to drive criminal justice interventions and batter programs at the expense of ignoring the family violence and the social psychological perspectives.
The question to the NIJ and the CDC is simple. Why are contemporary criminal justice interventions based only or primarily on the feminist perspective? If there is anyone at the NIJ or the CDC that doubts the feminist perspective is now the predominate criminal justice perspective they need only to look at the California Attorney General Task Force on Local Criminal Justice Response to Domestic Violence. The California intervention process is reflective of the intervention policies in the majority of the states.
The task force report is “Keeping the Promise” Victim Safety and Batterer Accountability.” This report is available from the Attorney General’s Office and it is available online at http://www.safestate.org/index.cfm?navID=9 .
