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In a post titled “Let’s Play ‘What’s Wrong With This Headline’” Historiann says (all emphasis hers.)

OK, kids–here’s today’s challenge:  “Couple, their 3 kids found dead in Maryland home.“

Who or what might have killed an entire family?  Was it carbon monoxide?  Botulism?  World War II ordinance discovered in the sandbox too late?  (I’m humming the Jeopardy theme while you click and read.)

Time’s up!

If I were the grandparent who discovered my daughter and grandchildren murdered by my son-in-law, I sure as heck wouldn’t like the news dubbing the murderer and my daughter a “couple,” and the senseless slaughter of my grandchildren as being “found dead” instead of “murdered by their father.”

Read the quote in context here.

Yeah, while not everyone’s as thrilled about the 50th anniversary of Strunk and White, this particular form of passive construction is getting a little stale.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that (statistically speaking) is that in less than a week they’ll have another chance to practice headlining the next such story using active construction.

Seriously! If the mainstream can’t even accurately describe what’s happening how on the big blue marble are they going to be able to address it? As Historiann put it in her piece

Why isn’t this considered a national public health emergency? Where are the ad campaigns encouraging people not to keep guns in their homes, and urging men to seek counseling if they take their anger out on their family members? (Hey–it’s worked so far with drunk driving and smoking–maybe not so much with the anti-drug campaigns.)

The irony is that the murderers almost invariably believe owning firearms protects “their” wives and children from… strangers!

%@*$#!

[Note: This started out as a note at the bottom of this post about sex work and domestic violence but realized it could probably stand on its own. —fl]

While looking up exact numbers of domestic/intimate homicides (assault rates are often barkingly ambiguous but a body’s pretty unambiguously, and un-ignorably, a body) I noticed two fairly persistent mismatches of statistics.

One set, comparing the number of women victims to men victims compares overall rates. This leaves the misleading impression that women overwhelmingly victims compared to men. Another set implies that women are overwhelmingly domestically homicidal compared to men. This leaves the impression that women are more sangunary when it comes to domestic violence.

Care to guess which camp (DV activists vs MRAs) prefer to emphasize which statistics?

Bottom line, though, is that men are overwhelmingly likely to be murder victims, period, meaning the relative percent of DV victims out of all types of homicide is pretty low. Meanwhile women commit a very small number of murders overall, so their DV homicide rates are statistically high but numerically low.

It took a little digging but it looks as though in the U.S. approximately two women are murdered by their women partners for every one man murdered by their woman partner. Still disproportionate but it also suggests domesticity isn’t a completely safe bet for men either. One wonders if relying on less partisan hyperbole might result in a) more common ground, b) less unproductively ginned-up gendered outrage, and especially c) fewer domestic homicides.

Update: I didn’t say it before but in case it’s not completely obvious, realistic ratios of domestic violence or domestic homicides justify nothing, mitigate nothing, explain nothing. And confuses nothing. It’s meaningless to say “only” two women die for every man instead of three or ten or fifty, just as it’s meaningless to try and spin something like “almost half the victims are men.” If the ratio is “only” two to one it’s as much a gendered problem as if it was a million to one. And if more men are victims says only that the problem is bigger than our gender narratives would have it, not that anything is somehow more “fair.” I’m pretty sure nobody would have misunderstood but it never hurts to be clear.

Photos via Womanist Musings blog.

A Texas organization called The Family Place that provides court-ordered treatment for domestic-violence offenders and victims recently initiated an awareness-building ad campaign about the risks faced by children in households when they grow up.

Various Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) object on the grounds that it’s male bashing. A prominent MRA, Glenn Sacks, says the the ads should be withdrawn.

Renee of doesn’t agree that the ads should be taken down.

Society needs to be shocked out of its complacency when it comes to domestic violence. We have normalized images in the mainstream media of women being beaten and brutalized. We have justified male aggression by asserting that in some way that women are asking to be treated this way. Enough is enough. If even one person is shocked into realizing that they need help, or a woman is empowered to leave an abusive relationship then these ads will have served their purpose.

Read the quote in context here.

For the record, while Beck and, to a certain degree Renee, feel the ads are male-bashing The Family Place (TFP) itself seems to be more neutral. Two data points from their website, however, are in order:

- This year, we have provided court-ordered batterer’s treatment to 449 male, 106 female and 98 adolescent offenders.

- To date we have counseled 9 male and 1,335 female victims in our outreach programs.

Source: The Family Place Awareness Campaign page

I’m… pretty sure I’m as aware that men are victims of DV as anybody, and just as aware that women can be abusers. The numbers of perpetrators TFP has treated bears that out.

I’m also aware that standard gender stereotypes hinder even male victim’s recognition of domestic violence as well as female perpetrator’s. The ratio of men and women victims TFP has treated really bears that out.

That said, I think the ads are fine for at least two reasons: first because even though they don’t serve every victim they absolutely serve the 80-85% of DV victims who are abused by men… and for any ad strategy that’s pretty good coverage.

Second because the phenomenon of female-partner and child abuse are well recognized these ads point at changing a known context. To the extent that violence against male partners in heterosexual relationships and violence against same-sex partners are less recognized an awareness-building ad campaign would need to have completely different objectives and thus falls outside the scope of… the shelter program of the agency that placed the ads in question.

Again, this isn’t to say it’s not appropriate to call attention to female-on-male, female-on-child, the very common female-on-frail-or-elderly, and same-sex domestic violence. In fact it’s necessary and, I think, by raising awareness that it’s not something just for “women and children” to watch out for such a campaign could even generate synergy with campaigns such as The Family Places.

But!

It’s nonsense, even counterproductive to say their ads should be taken down.

Frankly I’m disappointed with Sacks who, as one of the other commenters at Rene’s place mentioned, seems to be personally far more moderate than the average member of the constituency he’s chosen to represent**. I mean, it’s not as though he’s without resources of his own. And, considering the size of his audience if he or his constituency was serious… if they seriously considered violence against men an issue instead of a diversion… then he could certainly marshal considerable support for a separate campaign. Again, that he’s not — nor as far as I know has any significant MRA group — suggests the MRA movement really isn’t serious… really does see domestic violence against men as a dodge against responsibility. Which, again, is disappointing because, y’know, it really does happen. (Based on their client breakdowns it’s very likely TFP would welcome backing for such an initiative if they believed it was offered in good faith.)

The good news? There’s strong evidence that a great deal of DV against men happens under two circumstances: defensively, as when an abused partner cracks and assaults a sleeping, drunk, or otherwise temporarily incapacitated partner***; and, more frequently, later in life when the formerly abusive partner becomes infirm before his erstwhile victim. Consequently campaigns to end the more common domestic violence against women and children will reap collateral benefits to male victims in those two categories.

So again, no matter how you look at it it’s at best counterproductive and at worst selfish and blame-avoiding for MRAs to object to traditional DV-reduction campaigns. My vote would be “counterproductive” though — by fretting about feminism instead of making common cause, we men stay vulnerable to the much greater problems anti-feminism imposes on us… including greater vulnerability to our (proportionately small) share of the receiving end of domestic violence. If MRAs were serious they’d neither object to nor compete with but contribute to and supplement traditional DV-awareness programs.

[** In this regard Sacks is a bit like Heart, a counterpart who hosts an equally galvanized constituency at Womens Space. —fl]

[*** Remember that most abuse victims who assault their abusers, a la Lorena Bobbett aren’t feminists — people who are aware of feminism are also aware that there are many less violent ways out of an abusive relationships. —fl]

Here’s something I’ve been meaning to blog about since last fall.

In a post titled “Authority (not in the sense you think…)” Trinity of Let Them Eat Pro-Feminist Safe Spaces said

On a mailing list I’m on, someone mentioned old school radical feminism and brought up Ti-Grace Atkinson on BDSM. I haven’t read much of her on it, just whatever was in Against Sadomasochism, and eve there I don’t remember what exactly she said as opposed to the others. But what the person brought up was her idea that BDSM exposes, lays bare, shows up in stark contrast the power dynamics under patriarchy.

And I was just thinking about that, about how at least among anti-BDSM feminists, statements and theories like those are assumed to be authoritative. They’re assumed to tell the real truth about us and what we do and its meaning.

Read the rest here, plus an early version of this post as a comment.

I’ve been reading a ton of old-school radical feminists lately (Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, Andrea Dworkin, Germaine Greer) and… This could be a possible total brain fart here but I think one of the problems with trying to match theory of 40 years ago with BDSM as practiced today is that when they were writing there was no legal or philosophical basis for sexual consent. When those authors were writing their classics there was, for the most part, no such thing as dominance or submission. There was just “the way it is in heterosexual relationships.”

Now I happen to think that the work those early writers did, particularly the extraordinarily brusque (and possibly sexually submissive) Dworkin, to make “no means no” real (against resistance that still, unbelievably, has life in it) created the safe spaces for the total explosion of conscious BDSM and other forms of kink we’re able to practice today. (Consent lies at the basis of almost[**] all BDSM today.)

But! Because their work launched our contemporary understanding of the meaning of consent then by definition the classics can’t really address the post-consent environment.

To understand the new order we have to look at newer, not-yet-classic radicals.

[** Note: Most BDSM information sites have sections on identifying abusers so there certainly are some. But for the most part most domestic abusers aren’t savvy enough to bother pretending what they’re doing is D/s or S&M.]