Video Transcript
Watching people respond on social media to the Johnny Depp lawsuit case against Amber Heard has been interesting. This is the first time I’ve seen so many women not directly attached to a case see through a female accuser’s facade. Depp’s testimony about his experiences got conversations started on twitter and facebook about male victims of female-perpetrated intimate partner violence, with details he disclosed reflected in trending topics like #AmberTurd. When his expert witness stated her diagnosis of Heard’s mental health, that, too, trended on twitter. The response to Heard’s side of the case showed that Depp has the public’s sympathy; her expert witness was criticized as a biased ideologue, and after Heard’s own testimony, the trending topic was #AmberHeardIsALiar. Sounds like an open and shut case, right?
It’s possible that Depp will finally see justice, but I wouldn’t advise holding your breath. Feminists often tell us that there is no bias or discrimination against abused men. They say that female abusers are harshly treated. Meanwhile, they claim that there has been devastating bias and discrimination against abused women throughout history, and that male abusers often get away with their crimes.
History tells a different story.
M. J. George discussed this in his report, Skimmington Revisited, which began by debunking several feminist myths about social attitudes on the topic. He cited multiple sources that noted details of this, including the illegality of “wife beating” in the United States going back to Plymouth Bay Colony of 1655, and in England going back to the first codification of a system of law written by Anglo-Saxon kings, even before the year 1000, with a civil penalty if a man were found guilty of assaulting a woman. This standard didn’t vanish, but was shown in its continued existence and growth by court records from the Elizabethan period on forward.
While feminists might claim that the issue was largely ignored until the early 1970s, the truth is simply that the law focused on punishing men convicted of abusing their wives rather than financing the wife’s choice to leave the marriage. Harsh punishment was intended to act as a deterrent against battery while maintaining the husband’s legal and financial responsibility for his wife, rather than transferring it to the state or the church. The report highlights laws like the 1853 Prevention and Punishment of Aggravated Assaults on Women act and the 1892 Wife Beaters Act, which allowed for harsher prison sentences and public flogging of men found guilty of beating their wives.
Similarly, Robert St. Estephe’s blog, The Unknown History of Misandry, has a catalog of news articles about 19th and early 20th century U.S. court cases in which harsh penalties such as beatings, being restrained and humiliated in public, and even ordered to serve in the military during wartime had been ordered when husbands were found guilty of beating their wives. It includes articles about other community responses, not just to conviction but to mere allegation, including one man who was beaten to death by neighbors, a community legal fund for victims, public flogging and lynchings, and tarring and feathering.
In Skimmington Revisited, M.J. George cited S.K. Steinmetz’s article “The battered husband syndrome” regarding the description of a custom which existed up until the 18th or 19th century in England, called “riding Skimmington,” also known as “riding the stang,” or “charivari.” According to this historically documented custom, husbands accused of beating their wives were subjected by their community to a “noisy demonstration” and paraded through the community in a “mocking procession often involving hostile laughter and derision,” so as to impose public humiliation as a punishment. So, no historical social tolerance for partner abuse, even outside of the court right? No bias against victims?
Oh, wait… we haven’t talked about victims of abusive women yet.
They were not even viewed, in fact, as victims, but instead treated as if the condition of being abused was something they had done wrong. When a husband was accused of permitting himself to be beaten by his wife, he was also subjected to a Skimmington ride for the purpose of publicly humiliating him as a punishment.
That’s right… the social penalty doled out to abusive husbands was also visited upon husbands who had the audacity to be abused. After all, who bore legal and financial responsibility for his wife’s behavior? Who would pay the fine if she was convicted of abuse?
Who could the court punish?
Who else would the community respond to, but the husband?
The 20th century did not see widespread improvement in attitudes toward battered men, even in the last quarter when feminists made many advancements in their advocacy for a federalized response to violence against women. As M. J. George noted,
“Central to this resistance has been an ideology of ubiquitous female victimhood exquisitely founded upon the battered wife. Whilst a begrudging acknowledgement of a very few victimized husbands has occurred, the centrality of the schema of female victimization and male oppression has precluded any more honest exposition least the simplistic representations of gender for lay consumption become inconsistent. Thus, `elite’ culture (ie. that of academia, social commentators such as writers and journalists, politicians, professionals, etc) has sought to manipulate lay consciousness utilizing a presumptive historical framework coupled to the power of modern mass communication systems.”
If you ever wonder about the effectiveness of this extensive, long-running academic propaganda campaign, ask yourself… in all of the years that you’ve known of the the term “wife beater” being used to describe male perpetrators of domestic violence, have you ever heard anyone use the term “husband beater” in the same way, with the same seriousness? How many times have you seen a wife’s angry violence against her husband used as comic relief in entertainment media? How many times have you seen the gender-reverse?
Murray Straus did extensive research on gender symmetry in partner violence, and in his report, “Gender symmetry in partner violence: The evidence, the denial, and the implications for primary prevention and treatment,“ he revealed biases within the research community focused on this topic. He described these more specifically in his report, “Processes Explaining the Concealment and Distortion of Evidence on Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence.” In an article about these biases, “Straus Exposes the Academic Veils Placed on Domestic Violence Research,” Tom Golden summaries the seven ways Straus described feminist academics useing to filter out evidence that did not support their narratives.
According to the article, these are:
1) Suppress Evidence, a method wherein researchers would use surveys that asked questions about both sexes, but only report on the answers from women.
2) Avoid obtaining data inconsistent with the patriarchal dominance theory.
Patriarchal dominance “theory” is based on feminism’s patriarchy conjecture, which has never been verified with empirical evidence, but feminist academics have simply persisted in referring to it as “theory” throughout their history as if it has.
Patriarchy “theory” holds that all of western civilization is made up of societies that consist of male-dominated legal, social, and economic structures by which men hold power, while women are largely excluded from it. Patriarchal dominance “theory” is a population-wide allegation of abuse that is usually described by feminist academics in terms of male society using power, authority, and violence to manifest and maintain institutionalized and social dominance over women. Feminists apply this theory specifically to intimate partner and sexual violence as a means of justifying their choice to largely disregard evidence of female perpetration in favor of a focus on male perpetration and female victimization.
Thus, feminist avoidance of contradictory data is achieved by not asking questions that would elicit answers the researchers did not want to receive. The example given was surveys that would ask women about their victimhood and men about their perpetration, but fail to inquire about women’s violence or men’s victimhood. This tells only half of the story, and creates an intentionally misleading impression that victims are only female, and perpetrators are only male.
3) Cite only studies that show male perpetration. This would be done while omitting existing data that shows female perpetration, again creating the false impression that it does not exist.
4) Conclude that results support feminist beliefs when they do not. The example described was a 2005 study by Kernsmith where the author claimed that women’s violence was more likely to be in self-defense, when there was no existing data to support that claim.
5) Create “evidence” by citation, also known as the “woozle” effect. Using this method, an unsupported claim becomes treated as a known fact as a result of repeated reference to it in research reports. Kernsmith’s claim is an example of that, having been cited in multiple sources until it has become a common belief that is now wrongly treated as established fact.
6) Obstruct publication of articles and obstruct funding for research that might contradict the idea that male dominance is the cause of personal violence. Examples of this were a call from the National Institute of Justice for papers on the topic of partner violence with the stipulation that “proposals to investigate male victimization would not be eligible” and a reviewer objecting to one of Straus’s proposals because it said that “violence in relationships was a human problem.”
7) Harass, threaten, and penalize researchers who produce evidence that contradicts feminist beliefs. Examples range from disruption of oral presentation with shouts and stomping to being defamed as a wife-beater, to bomb scares at personal events, and being denied tenure and promotions. Straus is quoted as concluding that a “climate of fear has inhibited research and publication on gender symmetry in personal violence.”
Feminist academics rely on doctrinal conjecture supported by a shell game of academic fraud which is achieved by concealing biases within substandard methodolgy, and false conclusions within fabricated jargon, then ensuring their spread and suppressing counterevidence via ideological nepotism in academic publication and abuse of researchers whose work is not similarly biased.
What is the goal of this systematic, institutionalized, discriminatory feminist dominance of intimate partner and sexual violence research?
We could ask Erin Pizzey, the founder of the first shelters for abused women and men in Chiswick, UK, whose mission involved actual remedy. As she explained in a speech titled, “How feminists tried to destroy the family, “Our group in Chiswick worked with as many refuges as we could. Good, caring women still work in refuges across the country, but many women working in the feminist refuges, about 350, admit they are failing women who most need them.
With the first donation we received in 1972, we employed a male playgroup leader because we felt our children needed the experience of good, gentle men. We devised a treatment programme for women who recognised that they, too, were violent and dysfunctional. And we concentrated on children hurt by violence and sexual abuse. Yet the feminist refuges continued to create training programmes that described only male violence against women. Slowly, the police and other organisations were brainwashed into ignoring the research that was proving men could also be victims.”
Soon after it began, Erin’s work was taken over by feminists bent on using it to make money. They evicted her from her own refuges, ended support for abused men, hijacked the domestic violence advocacy movement internationally, and made it about female victimhood, and hating and blaming the male population as directed by the tenets of the feminism’s patriarchy conjecture.
In the United States, this manifested in the invention of a new standard practice for community response to intimate partner violence in Duluth, Minnesota. From there, it was quickly spread around the world. Like that of the feminists who hijacked Erin Pizzey’s work, the Duluth Model is an ideological practice based on feminism’s patriarchy and patriarchal dominance conjectures, and it has been imposed by its creators on a problem which by design, it cannot solve.
In the chapter “Some Thoughts on Philosophy” from the book, “Coordinating Community Responses to Domestic Violence,” Duluth model co-creator Ellen Pence wrote, “By determining that the need or desire for power was the motivating force behind battering, we created a conceptual framework that, in fact, did not fit the lived experience of many of the men and women we were working with.” She rephrased this confession at the end of the paragraph, “We all engaged in ideological practices and claimed them to be neutral observations.” She then went on to say, “Speaking for myself, I found that many of the men I interviewed did not seem to articulate a desire for power over their partner. Although I relentlessly took every opportunity to point out to men in the groups that they were so motivated and merely in denial, the fact that few men ever articulated such a desire went unnoticed by me and many of my coworkers. Eventually, we realized that we were finding what we had already predetermined to find.”
Despite Pence’s short burst of self-awareness, she and the other workers at the Duluth Abuse Intervention Project went on to create a model of community response that categorizes domestic violence as a male-perpetrated crime against mostly female victims that is rooted in patriarchal dominance and is used “to intentionally control or dominate and intimidate” the victim. These beliefs provide ideologues with a convenient excuse to ignore any details related to partner violence that contradict their gendered narrative.
It is in this environment that feminists pushed for federal family violence law in the United States during the mid-to-late 20th century. Their goal was to supercede state laws that recognize this type of violence as a problem regardless of the sex of the perpetrator with a federal law that would mandate that all community response to it nationwide must take the gendered approach mandated by the feminist standards of the Duluth model. To this end, activists testified in 1978 before the house of representatives subcommittee on select education and submitted feminist philosophical writing as evidence in order to persuade congress to treat violence in general as a male perpetrated, female suffered behavior, attributable to masculine characteristics, the pressure of traditional gender roles, and a male-dominated social structure. Originally, feminists did not get the law they wanted, and they would continue to fight for it until 1994.
In 1984, congress passed the Family Violence Prevention and Services act. This law authorized the Secretary of Health and Human Services to make grants to st ates to assist in supporting “the establishment, maintenance, and expansion of programs and projects to: (1) prevent incidents of family violence; and (2) provide shelter a nd related assistance for victims and dependents of victims of family violence in order to prevent future violent incidents.“
The law did not mention gender except to bar states from gender discrimination in the application of policy and procedures by police a nd victim’s serivces organizations if they took advantage of the federal funding it made available. In other words, under the Family Violence Prevention and Services act, mandatory arrest policies and the service and housing availability provided by these agencies and organizations were required to be gender-neutral.
Contrary to what we are told by feminists today, the Violence Against Women act did not establish these programs or the shelters that were funded by them. FVPSA did. Feminists were not satisfied with it because it was not gender discriminatory, so they continued their activism, this time focusing on sexual violence prevalence research and ramping up their gendered narrative and its emphasis on their patriarchal dominance allegation.
An article in the October 10, 1993 edition of the Toledo Blade titled “Rape: The making of an epidemic,” detailed a significant part of this process: The race among feminist university professors to create sexual violence prevalence research that would obtain a data set showing that rape was a common experience among wom en. Yes, you heard that right: They were not trying to find out how common the experience was, but actively trying to prove their allegation that it was common.
Remember the pattern of academic fraud I described earlier? In this article is explained the origin of the study that became the source for the oft-cited 1 in 4 statistic that was originally used to allege an epidemic of male-perpetrated sex crimes against female victims, especially on the campuses of post-secondary educational institutions, which was in turn used to fuel nation-wide pressure for legislative action.
According to the article, in 1987, Ms. Magazine publisher Gloria Steinem publicized a very flawed study by Kent State professor Mary P. Koss. Koss was able to inflate her rape statistics by declining to ask her subjects whether they had ever been raped or sexually assaulted. Instead, she asked them a series of questions about their sexual experiences and then interpreted their responses based on her beliefs about rape. Criticisms of the study included the fact that she used a broader definition for rape than the legal term and vague wording in her questions to increase the likelihood of resposnes she could interpret as rape experiences. It was noted that about ¾ of Koss’s survey respondents disagreed with her assessment of their experiences, and nearly half went on to have sex with their alleged attackers again. In response to these criticisms, Koss revised her survey to avoid asking if respondents agreed or learning whether they’d had further involvement with their alleged attackers.
In 1993, then-senator Joe Biden cited Koss’s statistics on the senate floor in his advocacy for congress to enact the Violence Against Women act, which he authored, and which passed, and went into effect in 1994. That law, though it has been revised with expansions, is still in effect today with all of its gender-discriminatory language intact. VAWA gave feminists exactly what they wanted: It codified the Patriarchy-conjecture-based Duluth model of community response and the patriarchal dominance allegation into United States federal law. And by the way, if you think Koss’s flawed research has gone away, think again. Her writing on sexual violence prevelance research is used by the researchers for the US Centers for Disease Control’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence survey, as well as by the United Nations in its sexual violence research. The definition of rape used by these institutions was written by Koss for the specific purpose of maximizing the types of sexual violence perpetration that could be defined as rape without garnering statistics on female perpetration of the crime against male victims. It includes every possible method of sexually violating a person except that of forcing the victim to sexually penetrate the perpetrator. How’s that for systematic, institutionalized discrimination?
From the beginning, the stipulations of the Violence Against Women Act included funding to contract research done with the express goal of justifying the continued application of enforcement aimed at benefiting only women, as described in section 40291, research agenda, which specifies violence against women in every statement about what type of projects will receive funding. This directly financially supports the institutionalized system of academic fraud I described earlier.
Section 40121 of the act also created grants, again, worded to specifically focus only on violence against women, which funded training for personnel at every level and section of the criminal justice system. Yes, this training will necessarily be guided and themed based on the Duluth model. What does that mean?
Think about how many gender studies graduates are employed in the process of creating the materials and lectures for that training, then distributing those materials and offering those lectures. This is in addition to the profits to feminist ideologues in the domestic violence victim’s advocacy industry, which receives funding for shelters, therapy programs for victims and perpetrators as described in the Duluth Model and the personnel who run and power those programs, and advocates to assist accusers in their interactions within the criminal justice system, including accompanying them to court. While profit is spread across many individuals, this funding makes female-only domestic violence victim’s advocacy a multi-billion dollar industry.Unlike the gender-neutral FVPSA, VAWA is a legislative Rube Goldberg device designed to funnel men through the criminal justice system for the alleged benefit of women and the financial benefit of state-run agencies and feminist-run organizations; a gender-specific law with problems deliberately written into its design, so that no part of the legal system has any choice but to apply it in an entirely discriminatory fashion.
Why would feminists want to create such a sexist system? After all, if they believe that this type of violence is a mostly male-perpetrated crime against mostly female victims, a law like the FVPSA should be perfect. It directed law enforcement to not ignore violence just because it is in the home, and funded shelters so abuse victims had a means of escape. That would result in protection of the supposedly mostly female population of abuse victims without discriminating against the supposedly few victims who are male, or exempting from accountability the supposedly few perpetrators who are female.
A report by William Wells and William DeLeon-Granados titled, “Analysis of unexamined issues in the intimate partner homicide decline: Race, quality of victim services, offender accountability, and system accountability,” provides some insight. Examining the time frame between 1987 and 2000, researchers found that in California, enhanced arrest policies designed to increase law enforcement response to intimate partner violence caused the number of arrests of men to increase by 37%, but the number of women arrested increased by 446%. Convictions for an offense following a domestic violence-related arrest grew by 131% for males, but by 1207% for females, and post-DV-arrest incarceration rates increased by 156% for males, but 1683% for females.
The researchers referred to this change as a “system backlash.” However, during that same time, they reported that the state’s intimate partner homicide victimization rates for female victims dropped 49%, but for male victims, the rates dropped 61%. The researchers also noted that shelter availability and the number of counties with at least one shelter more than doubled during that time period, and they seem to have hypothesized based on the woozle that women’s perpetration of domestic violence is mostly in defense against male batterers that the increase in shelters is responsible for causing the rate of intimate partner homicide victimization of both sexes to drop.
Of course it was really the shelters, because why would arresting the female partner in a domestic violence incident reduce any incidence of partner homicide, even when the victim is male?
To understand this, you have to understand the actual dynamics of intimate partner violence, rather than rely on feminists’ gendered narrative. According to the study “Rates of Bi-directional vs Uni-directional Intimate Partner Violence Across Samples, Sexual Orientations, and Race/Ethnicities: A Comprehensive Review,” by Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling and her group, who evaluated 50 studies that reported rates of these categories of violence, 57.9% of intimate partner violence was bi-directional, meaning both partners used violence against each other. In about ⅔ of the 42.1% of partner violence that was uni-directional, meaning only one partner was violent, the perpetrator was female. In other words, solely male-perpetrated intimate partner violence only represented about C% of the violence measured in the study. The remaining 86.2% involved at least some female violence, including 28.3% that was solely female perpetrated.
Another study, “Differences in Frequency of Violence and Reported Injury Between Relationships With Reciprocal and Nonreciprocal Intimate Partner Violence,” by Daniel J. Whitaker and his group, “analyzed data on young US adults aged 18 to 28 years from the 2001 National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which contained information about partner violence and injury reported by 11,370 respondents on 18,761 heterosexual relationships.” That study involved a survey in which the respondents self-reported both their experiences and their own behavior. In the report, reciprocal vs nonreciprocal were the terms used to describe two-way vs one-way violence.
The results showed that, like the results found by the Langhinrichsen-Rohling group, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of non-reciprocal cases. They found that “reciprocity was associated with more frequent violence among women, but not men.” They also noted that a meta-analysis from 2004, “Intimate partner physical abuse perpetration and victimization risk factors: a meta-analytic review,” by Sandra M Stith and her group, which analyzed evidence from 85 studies, had found that a woman’s perpetration of violence was the strongest predictor of her being a victim of partner violence. However, as they also noted, men were more likely to inflict injury, and reciprocal IPV was associated with greater injury than nonreciprocal IPV regardless of the gender of the perpetrator. This means that pattern of higher female perpetration of IPV may be the underlying cause of a significant incidence of female injury, likely often sustained in the ensuing conflicts after the females initiate by engaging in violence first.
So, how did activists in the domestic violence victim’s services industry respond to the arrest data resulting from mandatory arrest policies, and the data from these studies?
Advocacy organization Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE) answers that in their report, “Talking Back to Restraining Order Abuse,” which explains that “in response to the expanding number of arrests, jurisdictions came under pressure to implement strategies to expedite the caseload, such as to:
- Establish sentencing diversion programs such as batterer intervention programs
- Create fast-track prosecution procedures
- Implement “predominant aggressor” policies to reduce the number of dual arrests”
Wait.. what is a “predominant aggressor” policy?
SAVE explains this in their special report, “Predominant Aggressor Policies: Leaving the Abuser Unaccountable.” After describing the dynamics of domestic violence and noting the challenges officers face in determining who to arrest, the report states, “Legal definitions provide a basis for unraveling the intricacies of such situations. According to Black’s Legal Dictionary, the aggressor was traditionally defined as: One who first employs hostile force. The party who first offers violence or offense. He who begins a quarrel or dispute, either by threatening or striking another.“
The report goes on to describe how this common sense standard changed beginning in the mid-1980s when states began to enact mandatory arrest laws, likely in response to the Family Violence Prevention and Services act of 1984. “Advocates began to complain that the law was being enforced too aggressively, arguing arrested women were being “re-victimized” by the system. In response, the DoJ Office of Violence Against Women modified its grant requirements. Beginning in 2001, application kits for funding under the Violence Against Women Act asserted that dual arrests ‘trivialize the seriousness of domestic violence and potentially increase danger to victims.’ Thereafter, grant recipients would need to ‘demonstrate that their laws, policies, or practice and their training programs discourage dual arrest of the offender and the victim.’ This requirement spurred the adoption of the “predominant aggressor” concept in states around the country.”
These polices use different criteria than that laid out by Black’s Legal dictionary to determine who police should treat as the predominant aggressor, and therefore arrest. These criteria commonly include things like prior complaints or history of domestic violence between the parties, meaning that if a woman frequently calls police to complain that her partner is abusing her, then assaults him, her history of reporting him as an abuser will influence the officer’s decision to arrest. If a woman falsely accuses her husband many times and then assaults him, an officer responding to this complaint would have to consider those previous accusations evidence that the man, who is the victim, should be arrested.
Another common criteria is relative severity and extent of injury inflicted on each person.
SAVE’s report provides an example of why this criteria can be unreliable, citing the case of a California couple: “A knife-wielding woman raised her hand, preparing to stab her husband. The man quickly raised his arms in self-defense. The woman then struck the man with such force that her forearm sustained a fracture. The man only experienced minor contusions and abrasions.”
Using severity and extent of injury as a criteria to judge the predominant aggressor, an officer would be compelled to arrest the victim in this case, as well.
Somewhat less common criteria include whether one of the parties acted in self-defense, the intent of the law being to protect victims from continuing abuse, risk or potential of future injury, person’s fear of physical harm, and witness statements. Some states require officers to consider the reasonable force standard, the power and control dynamics of the couple, and their relative size and strength. As the report points out, some of these criteria are subjective and vague, some difficult to implement because they rely on complainants’ statements, and four of the criteria overtly predispose the officer to arrest the male.
Using relative size and apparent strength will almost always flag the male as an aggressor. Requiring the officer to judge risk of future injury will, as well, because of his Duluth Model training and his likely assumption that the bigger, stronger person can cause more injury. I’ve already noted the issues with using a history of prior complaints and the relative severity or extent of injury as criteria. Given that research shows that women are more likely to engage in violence, but men are more likely to inflict injury, this criteria is likely to result in frequent obfuscation and wrongful arrest.
Under predominant aggressor policies, if an officer evaluating an incident of intimate partner violence engages with a big, sturdy-looking, calm, uninjured husband who is the financial support of the household, and a smaller, more frail-looking, upset and injured wife who is a homemaker, the policy will predispose the officer to arrest the husband whether there is any evidence that he assaulted his wife, or whether she injured herself attempting and failing to kill him, then responded by becoming hysterical with rage.
As a result of these ideological policies, there has been a pattern of callousness and neglect toward male victims of female perpetrators. Emily M. Douglas and Denise A. Hines described this in their 2011 report, “The Helpseeking Experiences of Men Who Sustain Intimate Partner Violence: An Overlooked Population and Implications for Practice. In relating the experiences that helpseekers had with police, they stated that among the cases where the partner was determined to be the primary aggressor, 21% reported the police refused to arrest the partner, and 38.7 indicated the police said there was nothing they could do and left. Even when police didn’t respond to this identification with nonaction, arrest did not automatically follow as it normally does with male perpetrators. Instead, 41.5% of respondents said police had asked the helpseeker if he wanted his partner arrested.
Some respondents gave statements about their experiences. “They determined she was the aggressor but said since I was a man it was silly to arrest her.” “Told me to get her help. Told me to spend the night in a hotel.” “They saw me as a large male and…took her side. I was at the hospital with bruising and burned eyes from hot coffee thrown in them. They didn’t believe that she did this…and refused to arrest her… The next incident…the police…saw me bleeding… they charged her with felony DV but later dropped it to misdemeanor assault because we are not married and do not live together.”
The report noted similarly dismissive responses from DV hotlines, agencies, and online resources for abuse victims when male helpseekers contact their services. The researchers stated, “A large proportion of those who sought help were told, “We only help women.”
They went on to describe that a majority of helpseekers reported being referred to batterers programs or given a number which turned out to be for a batterer’s program. They also stated, “The results from the open-ended questions showed that 16.4% of the men who contacted a hotline reported that the staff made fun them, as did 15.2% of the men who contacted local DV agencies.”
These agencies and programs, as well as the training programs for criminal justice system personnel to operate under the policies that cause these outcomes, collectively receive billions in annual public funding. That funding is intended to support a community response to protect domestic violence victims against further victimization, break the cycle of abuse, and reduce future incidence. Instead, it is going to fund a system that excuses violence if the perpetrator is female, resulting in a failure to rehabilitate perpetrators who are of the demographic most likely to initiate violence. It discriminates against their male victims on the basis of gender, resulting in a failure to protect victims who are of the demographic most likely to be targeted.
This combination can actually empower a female perpetrator and trap a male victim in an abusive relationship with her, as she can use threat of false allegation and aggressive community involvement to prevent him from leaving her… and doesn’t that just sound a little bit familiar?In a legal environment dominated by feminist-informed, patriarchy-theory-based Duluth-model-mandated predominant aggressor policies and the overall presumption of male guilt, can we really expect Johnny Depp’s case to conclude with an unbiased outcome? Our society has a long history of not just discriminating against abused men, but disparaging, dehumanizing, and ridiculing them.
It will be a true miracle if the jury in this case sees through the institutional biases influencing the defense’s expert witness, even though her testimony was viewed as a failure by the public. It will be an even bigger one if they are not swayed by Amber Heard’s tears, even though much of the public was able to see through those, as well. We must not forget that the judge must have been subject to federally mandated Duluth model training and that will influence the instructions she will be giving to the jury. It will be a miracle if that does not influence their decision. And as Depp explained in his own testimony, it is very probable that even winning this case will do little or nothing to end the damage Heard’s allegations did to his career.
That doesn’t mean his supporters should admit defeat. It means we should view this case as a test of the system. As a beloved media figure with a wide support network and a huge arsenal of evidence that he was the one who was abused, can this man break through the gender biases in the system? If this was a criminal case against Depp before a judge making a unilateral decision, my answer would be absolutely not. In that kind of trial he’d be up against VAWA-mandated and funded systemic biases which would require the judge to view everything Heard did as self-defense against abuse committed by Depp. Instead, he’s relying on laymen from the community to decide whether to adopt those biases, or whether to reject them and award him a judgment against his physically and emotionally abusive false accuser. That is still a steep uphill battle. Although, after all of the evidence we have seen, this should be the open and shut case that it looks like, we really cannot expect a Depp win.
We can only hope.
References and further information:
Skimmington Revisited
Establishes long history in US & UK of penalizing husbands found guilty of battering wives, but humiliating husbands found guilty of being dominated/battered by their wives.
https://web.archive.org/web/20061006055315/http://www.dewar4research.org/docs/skim-revisited.pdf
Examples of handling of DV in US before federal law – many cases of community response that back up what is said in the skimmington Revisited file.
https://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/search/label/Domestic%20Violence
Tom Golden explains the process of suppression of evidence of male victims of female perps in DV research
https://menaregood.com/straus-exposes-the-academic-veils-placed-on-domestic-violence-research/
Strauss’s research which Tom Golden referenced:
Gender symmetry in partner violence: The evidence, the denial, and the implications for primary prevention and treatment
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228350210_Gender_symmetry_in_partner_violence_The_evidence_the_denial_and_the_implications_for_primary_prevention_and_treatment
Processes Explaining the Concealment and Distortion of Evidence on Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/processes-explaining-concealment-and-distortion-evidence-gender Erin Pizzey describes how her work began, what she was doing to help families affected by partner violence, and how feminists hijacked her work and used it to destroy the family
https://honest-ribbon.org/mega-featured/how-feminists-tried-to-destroy-the-family/
Ellen Pence admits Duluth Model is based on ideology and not unbiased research
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Coordinating_Community_Responses_to_Dome/Vk_qT-apdT4C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22Coordinating+Community+Responses+to+Domestic+Violence%22%22some+thoughts+on+philosophy%22+%22By+determining+that+the+need+or+desire+for+power+was+the+motivating+force+behind+battering,+we+created+a+conceptual+framework+that,+in+fact,+did+not+fit+the+lived+experience+of+many+of+the+men+and+women+we+were+working+with%22&pg=PA29&printsec=frontcover
My research on the history of VAWA up to 1994 passage
https://breakingtheglasses.blogspot.com/2013/01/vawa-is-not-like-that.html
3 Rates of Bi-directional versus Uni-directional Intimate Partner Violence Across Samples, Sexual Orientations, and Race/Ethnicities: A Comprehensive Review
http://domesticviolenceresearch.org/pdf/PASK.Tables3.Revised.pdf
Differences in Frequency of Violence and Reported Injury Between Relationships With Reciprocal and Nonreciprocal Intimate Partner Violence
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1854883/#r12
Koss & VAWA
https://www.honeybadgerbrigade.com/2020/07/06/the-duplicity-of-feminist-researcher-mary-koss/
Rape: The making of an epidemic
https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=w2NPAAAAIBAJ&sjid=XgMEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5854%2C2479318
An Analysis of Unexamined Issues in the Intimate Partner Homicide Decline: Race, Quality of Victim Services, Offender Accountability, and System Accountability
https://web.archive.org/web/20081026044407/http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/grants/196666.pdf
Arrest Policies for Domestic Violence https://talkingback2restrainingorders.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/save-justice-denied-dv-arrest-policies.pdf
Predominant Aggressor Policies: Leaving the Abuser Unaccountable?
https://web.archive.org/web/20200108005251/http://www.saveservices.org:80/downloads/Predominant-Aggressor-Policies
Justice Denied: Arrest Policies for Domestic Violence https://web.archive.org/web/20080516075625/http://www.mediaradar.org/docs/RADARreport-Justice-Denied-DV-Arrest-Policies.pdf
The Helpseeking Experiences of Men Who Sustain Intimate Partner Violence: An Overlooked Population and Implications for Practice
http://wordpress.clarku.edu/dhines/files/2012/01/Douglas-Hines-2011-helpseeking-experiences-of-male-victims.pdf
The Missing Persons of Domestic Violence: Battered Men
http://breakingthescience.org/RichardGelles_MissingPersonsOfDV.php
My article Abused Boys and Men, Feminism’s Acceptable Losses, with references described in video
https://archive.ph/wi8K4
Talking Back to Restraining Orders (https://protectiveordervictims.com/)
SPECIAL REPORT: Arrest Policies for Domestic Violence, www.saveservices.org
https://talkingback2restrainingorders.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/save-justice-denied-dv-arrest-policies.pdf
Patriarchy “theory”
https://www.academia.edu/5488906/Patriarchy_Feminist_Theory_encyclopedia_essay_on_concept_of_patriarchy_
Patriarchal Dominance “theory”
https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/jgbv/6/1/article-p9.xml
- Who invented gynocentric culture | HBR Talk 306 - April 25, 2024
- How did gynocentric culture come about? | HBR Talk 305 - April 18, 2024
- Are women the weaker link? | HBR Talk 304 - April 11, 2024
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