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Thanks for posting this, and sorry I misspelled "inappropriately" in the heading.
Anyway, here is what I sent to Jan Laitos and KUSA:
To Jan Laitos,
I must take issue with your article on 9news.com “Domestic Violence Arrests – Part 1.” Perhaps the major reason for the increasing number of arrests of women in domestic violence cases is that men are becoming less reluctant to report domestic violence against them.
I agree that domestic violence is a serious issue that affects both men and women. However — for reasons of funding — public policy has traditionally concentrated on those cases where women are victims and men are abusers. Many people are concerned about the lack of attention given to male victims. Here are some facts to consider:
-According to a recent CDC survey, 1.5 million American women are severely assaulted by their "intimate partners" each year. It is less known that 835,000 men are also assaulted annually by intimate partners, representing some 36% of the total. (Note: the methodology of this survey has been criticized by men’s advocates as flawed, however this is still a significant finding).
-Women and men assault each other with roughly equal frequency. This would make the difference in the above figures even closer to parity. However, women are much more likely to report domestic violence to police.
-Women often compensate for their smaller size by using weapons such as knives, guns, baseball bats, and fireplace pokers. One study found that 86% of female-on-male violence involved weapons, contrasted with 25% in cases of male-on-female violence.
-Men are usually reluctant to call the police in a domestic dispute for fear of ridicule. Also, police will often arrest the man even when it is the woman who committed the assault.
-Many women's shelters exist in the United States and other Western nations, but there are very few shelters for men.
Child abuse, a related issue, is committed by women more often than men (and even less often by a biological father).
Also consider that false allegations of domestic violence have been used against men for years. I have seen few if any coverage of this area on 9 news.
You may be interested in the Fiebert bibliography, which “demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners.”
http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
Until domestic violence is treated as a human problem (rather than from the feminist “male batterer/female victim” perspective) real progress in this area will be limited. I would challenge you and 9 news to take a more balanced approach to covering domestic violence in the future.
Steven G. Van Valkenburg
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by Anonymous User on 11:41 PM November 28th, 2004 EST (#2)
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Steven,
I too felt compelled to respond to this, as it's something that I've been on the receiving end of. My response:
I have just read your article for 9 News (posted at http://www.9news.com/acm_news.aspx?OSGNAME=KUSA&IK OBJECTID=6c61325a-0abe-421a-01a1-89b4dc0306cf&TEMP LATEID=0c76dce6-ac1f-02d8-0047-c589c01ca7bf) and feel driven to comment, as this is an issue that has touched me personally.
I cannot speak for statistics, except to say that I've seen many that seem to prove that women are almost always the victim, men almost always the aggressor. This was something I grew up and took completely for granted. I distinctly remember my father drilling into me how you never hit girls, no matter what they did to you. It was a lesson I never forgot, and my brother who once did regretted it for weeks afterwards complements of my father.
However, more recently I've seen a different side of this issue, from a very personal perspective. My wife has problems with addiction, and when under the influence can become very combative. This has been a growing problem for me over the past eight years, and has included many events I will not bother to list here. She has endangered herself and our children many times, and some years ago became aggressive when challenged. I took both sets of car keys and hid them, as she was drunk and planning to take the children out in the car, and it ended in a verbal fight in which she threw books, plates, cups and anything else that came to hand. I was bruised, but otherwise unhurt. I will stress that at no time during this or any other incident have I ever hurt my wife in any way.
Since then this has happened several times, and I eventually sought help from al-anon, having nowhere else to go. I had personal experience of contacting the police, only to be laughed off (or as good as). My family contacted social services against my wishes, who visited and did nothing except command me to be 'more supportive'. Only al-anon offered any respite, as at least I could meet people in similar situations, people who understood the pain I was suffering and my inability to cure it. I thought of leaving my wife many times, but knew from legal advice and friends that I'd stand very little chance of taking the children with me - and I could never stand to leave them there alone. I tried all I could to find some help for her or for us, but she would have none of it.
Al-anon was where I first discovered that my view of voilence was perhaps wrong. Almost half of the local group were men, and though one was attending as a parent of an alcoholic son, the others were all driven there by their spouses addiction and the problems it caused.
Of those men, three others suffered voilence to some degree or other. All suffered with situations that I would classify as 'concerning enough to call the police' - screaming, slamming doors, items thrown, broken glass, fear of violence, etc. One had a black eye on the day I arrived there. Having heard their stories and seen them during the telling, I would swear on oath that these men did nothing to provoke the attacks they suffered.
My own situation has improved to a small degree, for which I'm thankful. I personally stopped attending al-anon not long after I started, as it offered me little more than the company - but I have never forgotten the lesson it taught me. Men do suffer with voilence from women, just as women suffer with voilence from men.
I felt compelled to write because the tone of your article seems to be one of disbelief in this concept. It seems to suggest that women only hurt men (if they do at all) because men first hurt women. That may the case some of the time, but I can attest personally that it is not so all of the time.
Perhaps those women are being arrested because in that situation, at that time, they are the aggressor. If women are being arrested more frequently, then perhaps this is part of a balancing of what has been, for far too long, an unjust imbalance...
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Sent Dan Werner (the Reporter) a copy of the previous Reuters article, regarding the Texas woman charged with murdering her child, and warned the very idea of women being violent was too absurd and that such articles must be some sort of printing error ! ! !
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Jan Laitos is actually a man. I checked this out in Google. Sorry for the confusion.
Who knew?
Steve
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