“I am pleased that we are now paving the way to ensure that men exposed to violence have the same rights as women exposed to violence. For far too long we have not taken it seriously enough that men can also be victims of intimate partner violence and need help. The time has come to ensure that abused men and their children receive the same help as when a woman reaches out for help.”
With these words on April 24 Marie Bjerre, the Danish Equality Minister announced the first radical U-turn by an EU government on the hitherto untouchable, taboo subject of Intimate Partner Violence and has set a headline which other European governments will have to come to terms with however unwelcome and distasteful they find it.
For far too long we have not taken it seriously enough that men can also be victims.
It will cause deep underground rumblings across Europe, within the EU, and most certainly within the “progressive” circles where policy makers and much of the media dwell. This cosy, corrupt cartel has up to now seemed immune to doctrinal shift, secure from the appeals of IPV experts, the pleas of male advocacy groups that policy in the field take account of the evidence, which has now reached overwhelming proportions. Most of all it will alarm the feminist groups who have dictated the terms of debate for decades and have laid down the unchallengeable precepts on which current policies of the EU and its member states are built.
That this should come from a “progressive” social democrat government is even more extraordinary.
The Danish Press Release
The Press release by the Danish Ministry of Digitalization and Gender Equality, 4/24/2023, goes on:
The government, the Socialist People’s Party, the Liberal Alliance, the Radical Left and the Danish People’s Party agree that men exposed to violence in close relationships must have help and support, and that we as a society must take men exposed to violence seriously. Therefore, the parties to the agreement for the Finance Act 2023 are allocating money to the action plan against partner violence and partner murder, with a view to equalizing offers for abused men and women.
The money must go to ensure that abused men can get the same offers of help that women in crisis centers get today. This applies, for example, to the right to psychological help for themselves and their possible children when they stay in a crisis centre. In the future, men affected by violence must also be allowed to be accompanied by their children when they stay at a crisis centre.
In the eyes of Minister for Equality Marie Bjerre, it is an important victory for equality between men and women, which she has been very keen to get in place.
Because as the law stands today, men exposed to violence can only stay in hostels according to Section 110 of the Service Act. They do not have the right to the same help and the same offers as women have according to Section 109 of the Service Act.
With the Finance Act for 2023, 36 million DKK is set aside permanently for an action plan against partner violence and partner murder.
The Danish press release also gives a figure for IPV: “The University of Southern Denmark estimates that 5.5 per cent of women (in terms of numbers approx. 118,000) and 4.0 per cent of men (approx. 83,000) over the age of 16 have been exposed to physical and/or psychological partner violence in 2021 (SDU 2022).”
Separately, a 2018 study of Danish adolescents found that 13.1% of males and 9.3% of females report being a victim of dating violence.
Consequences
The first consequence is that the Danish Government recognises that intimate partner violence is not gendered, is NOT gender-based as has been a cardinal principle of radical feminists for decades and tenaciously and slavishly adhered to by the Irish government. We have a state agency which deals with Domestic Sexual and Gender-Based Violence, DSGBV.
During times of universal deceit telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
Striking is the frank admission that men have been badly treated and even more striking are the promises to equalise funding for men and women, and to provide refuge for men and their children in crisis centres just as for women. The present position for abused men is to place them in hostels. In Ireland even this does not apply; there are no refuges for battered men either.
This is a critical, fundamental development— the recognition by an EU member government that men and women suffer equally from domestic abuse and ought to receive equal support services. It flies in the face of adamant and arrogant current demands from the EU, enshrined in an EU Directive no less, that all member states implement the Istanbul Convention whether they ratified it or not; a Convention which is so utterly contemptuous of the suffering of male victims of domestic abuse that it imperiously demands that the overwhelming disparity in support services for victims be even further aggravated as set out in Art. 9 and which further demands that the resources of schools and media be deployed to ram home the message of gender-based violence as in Art. 14.
It further stipulates that such measures as these and others which reinforce discrimination be NOT considered discrimination as Art 4.4 sets out, an Orwellian inversion of logic which defies belief in a so-called democracy.
As Orwell once put it: The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
But now there is another EU state which simply ignores the Istanbul Convention. Where does this leave the Convention?
Radical Feminism’s Version of History
The radical feminist version of domestic abuse is that it arises from patriarchal tyranny whereby men subjugate women by violence.
In 1993, the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (DEVAW), in which the UN offered the first official definition of gender-based violence which incidentally is laid down in the Preamble of the Istanbul Convention. As we have noted before, the group UN Women wields enormous power within the UN and its influence can be found in many UN documents. Of course there is no counterpart for men.
This approach is symbolised by the Power and Control wheel (Duluth model ). But as Linda Kelly opines in Disabusing the Definition of Domestic Violence: How Women Batter Men and the Role of the Feminist State, Florida State University Law Review 30(4), a successful challenge to the theory of patriarchal dominance would fatally undermine feminist theory. This is why it is so ferociously resisted and why the Danish decision is so significant.
A book published in 2019 we have just learned about is William Collins: The Empathy Gap: Male Disadvantages and the Mechanisms of Their Neglect.
This is an extraordinarily detailed book written from a UK perspective, which over 21 chapters covers every conceivable problem afflicting men and boys in the social policy field which require but are not getting proper state intervention, largely because of the absence of recognised male advocacy groups and the hostility of other powerful lobby groups.