F&F: Obama Misstates Facts on Domestic Violence in New DV Awareness Month Proclamation

Article here. Excerpt:

'In President Obama’s new proclamation “National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, 2011” he misstates several key facts on men, women, and domestic violence. Harvard-trained public health specialist Ned Holstein, MD, MS explains:

“Obama tells us that ‘One in four women and one in thirteen men will experience domestic violence in their lifetime.’ In reality, over 200 studies have found that women initiate at least as much violence against their male partners as vice versa. Obama’s 3.25 ratio is actually 1-1. And men comprise about a third of domestic violence injuries and deaths.”

The most recent large scale study of DV, published in the American Journal of Public Health, surveyed 11,000 men and women and found that, according to both men’s and women’s accounts, 50% of the violence in their relationships was reciprocal (involving both parties). In those cases, the women were more likely to have been the first to strike. Moreover, when the violence was one-sided, both women and men said that women were the perpetrators about 70% of the time.

Dr. Holstein, Board Chairman of the national family court reform organization Fathers and Families, says, “Obama’s distortion is no mere quibble over statistics—the myth that ‘only men do it’ has crept into family courts, leading judges to put children into the custody of dangerous mothers whose violence is ignored because of the pervasive myth that women do not injure or kill.”'