October has been designated as Tell the Truth about Domestic Violence month by the International Coalition against Domestic Violence. We already announced this in the last article and gave a long list of links to articles which give a true picture of the huge Cover-up which is being perpetrated by those who don’t want to hear the truth; a cover-up which is aided and abetted by the media without whose complicity it would be exposed in short time. The declared policy of the Coalition is that all statements on DV, or IPV as it is known in the US, should be fact-based, supported by rigorous science and should have no truck with ideology which is currently the case.
We alerted readers about a Zoom meeting on September 30 at which Professor Donald Dutton of UBC was to make a presentation and gave the details. We now present the slides here: Global-Initiative-for-Boys-and-Men-Don-Dutton (7). The slides are somewhat cryptic and not easy to interpret in places partly because Dutton gave spoken details to fill in gaps and we don’t have a written copy of his text. Nevertheless they give a most valuable wide-angle view of findings in DV literature over a lengthy period of time.
The gender paradigm is a closed system and takes an anti-science stance consistent with a cult
The Gender Paradigm
In his third slide Dutton outlines the official narrative on DV what he calls the Gender Paradigm. In a powerful article which appeared in Vol 1 of the new journal Partner Abuse in 2010, titled The Gender Paradigm and the Architecture of Anti-science Partner Abuse Vol 1 Issue 1, Dutton gave a savage, scathing account of the lies, untruths and misinformation which underlie this paradigm which is entirely based on ideology not on scientific research. It is worth quoting at length one early paragraph from this article:
Research evidence contradicts every major tenet of this belief system: female DV is more frequent than male DV, even against nonviolent partners, there is no overall relationship of control to DV, and abuse perpetrators who use intimate partner violence (IPV) for coercive instrumental reasons are both male and female. Research supporting the gender paradigm is typically based on self-selected samples (victims from women’s shelters and men from court-mandated groups) and then inappropriately generalized to community populations; or surveys that either ask only women about their victimization (e.g., the 1994 Canadian Violence Against Women Survey) or else discourage male reporting (the U.S. Violence Against Women Survey—see Straus 1999). Advocates adhere to stereotypes of DV generated by extreme or celebrity cases—every case of DV is seen as perpetrated by another O. J. Simpson or Chris Brown.
The gender paradigm is a closed system, unresponsive to major disconfirming data sets, and takes an anti-science stance consistent with a cult. In this article, I compare the responses of this gender cult to other cults and contrast it with a scientific response to contradictory data.
How Google Manipulates the Images
In slide 2 Dutton gives a standard image of DV to be found on Google: the male batterer and the helpless female. We are confronted with this image in every DV article in the press. This is a very powerful image and has a profound effect on policy-makers.
But In slide 16 Dutton uncovers the real truth: this stereotype occurs in about 9 out of 100,000 in the general population.
Slides 4 and 7 contain work of the British researcher John Archer. Even in 2000 Archer had begun to carry out meta studies and to study data from a range of countries. His findings are summarised in sombre terms:
As women’s social-legal power increases in nations
- 1) domestic violence against women decreases
- 2) domestic violence by women increases
Slide 6 Table 13.2 is taken from Reference #2 Stets and Strauss scathingly titled The marriage license as a hitting license: A comparison of dating, cohabiting and married couples.
The percentages refer to who perpetrated the violence, whether M or F. The violence is subdivided into categories under eight headings so we have eight columns: In column four under the heading Males Severe, Females None we find among Dating Couples that Males perpetrated .1%,; whereas in the next column under males none, females severe, we find that females perpetrated 12.5%. In the second last column among cohabiting couples where both commit severe violence, this comes to a whopping 22%.
The work of Capaldi and Desmarais
Deborah Capaldi and Sarah Desmarais have both done trojan work which features in the monumental PASK report. Dr. Capaldi found that the scenario most likely to result in future injury to women was when she initiates violence against her partner and he responds, although both mutually aggressive groups were close in danger levels.
Capaldi also found that physical aggression from men tended to stop when they found a new partner – instead of a man being a batterer or not, quite often his partner’s violence predicted whether or not he would be violent to her.
Slide 11 summarises a number of studies; females commit more violence in all, and in most by a factor of 2 or more. The last column shows how prevalent is bilateral or bi-directional violence.
In slide 13 Desmarais’s conclusions are given. It will be seen that in all but one of the samples males were the more victimised; this includes the large population sample of size 135,000.
Slide 19 describes what happened when men contacted a DV hotline in New Hampshire. Some surveys collect data for women only and ignore men. One notorious example was the EU Fundamental Rights Agency survey in 2013 which interviewed 42,000 women but no men. The survey was clearly politicised and designed to provide support for the Istanbul convention. The EUFRA is one of many shamelessly biased agencies inside the EU which have been captured by ideologues.
Slide 20 takes a close look at a National Violence Against Women survey and draws a very different conclusion. One of the authors Richard Felson is a renowned expert.
The efficacy of treatment models is considered in slides 23, 24.
In accordance with the insistence on rigour, the last slide contains a list of references.
Anybody who wishes to get a comprehensive account of DV research should consult https://domesticviolenceresearch.org/ the PASK report, the world’s largest domestic violence research data base, 2,657 pages, with summaries of 1700 peer-reviewed studies. It was conducted by 42 scholars at 20 universities and research centers, and including information on 17 areas of domestic violence research.
Another article which gives an account of the gendered perspective and contains an exhaustive list of references is one written by Nicola Graham-Kevan who so memorably spoke at our conference in 2019.
Lies, half truths and the Media
The scale of the lies which have been told to advance the gender paradigm is monumental perhaps unprecedented in modern times. It could only have been sustained with the active connivance and complicity of the media. This is as much an indictment of the media as of any state agency or NGO. These are the same people that are now petitioning the State for money to support them into the future, as they are unable to sustain themselves.
When Canadian data on DV included both men and women it was depicted as an anti-feminist backlash
We will finish with a closing quote again from Donald Dutton:
The first-wave gender paradigm researchers continue to think, write, and act as if these contradictory data do not exist. They cite each other as evidence while ignoring data sets that strike at the very core of the gender paradigm ideology. When data refute their theory, they do not abandon the theory but ignore or dismiss the data. They replay at every turn the extreme subjectivity of human judgment, one that has repeatedly been demonstrated in laboratory studies of belief perseverance, that is, self-fulfilling cognitive sets or schema.
It is clear that the gender paradigm cannot see social science as having rules for proper conduct of research apart from political ends, rules arguing against using self-selected samples, unwarranted generalizing, purposely misciting findings, and so on. In fact, when a federal Canadian social science data collection agency finally decided to ask both men and women about abuse victimization, Dekeseredy depicted it as an “antifeminist backlash” and criticized them as abdicating their mandate. (DeKeseredy, 1999).