The Little Man Who Wasn't There

By JOHN T. SMITH, Editor in Chief, World Fathers Union News Page

One of the most unjust of accusations commonly leveled against men by radical women's organisations is that we are dangerous and violent to women simply because of our greater size and physical strength. The implication is that we beat women just because we can. However, what such anti-male organisations very carefully neglect to mention is that men themselves are nearly twice as likely to be victims of violent crime as are women. They also conveniently overlook all the cases of female-on-male domestic violence, which number almost as high as the other sort but are rarely prosecuted.

A recent spate of legislative efforts to control the dangerous beasts we are supposed to be has led me to consider this subject in some detail. I'll refrain from talking about the U.S.'s contribution, the Violence Against Women Act, partly because the U.S. is a bit of a sociological anomaly when viewed through a global perspective, but mainly because Glenn Sacks has covered the issues relating to the VAWA so well already. Instead, let us look at the U.K., and see if we can learn something from the experience of domestic violence researchers working for the Home Office.

In England and Wales, for instance, National Statistical Office figures for 2004/5 show that 5% of men--but only 3% of women--were victims of some type of violent crime. The combined population of England and Wales being approximately 52 million, that means 2,600,000 men were attacked, whilst 1,560,000 women suffered some sort of violence. These figures are for all sorts of violent crime, not just domestic violence.

The British Crime Survey reports that only 14% of all violent crime was domestic. We can be pleased to note that this is not a very large number at the same time as we can regret that it is as large as it is. Whilst there are still far more drunks piloting tons of metal down the roads each year--all too frequently with consequences much more deadly and random--no one wishes to see spouses settle their differences with rolling pins or cricket bats.

But this crime survey is unusual in that it does not rely on police statistics--which it claims are not representative because many crimes are never reported to the police for a variety of reasons (most, according to the notes in the BCS, because the victim did not consider what happened a crime). Instead, they interviewed some 22,000 randomly selected people to ask about their personal experiences as victims of crime.

Once they had these data in hand (and calling them data is generous: No verification of the allegations was attempted; the researchers simply took the subjects at their word), they then extrapolated to arrive at incidence figures and estimated totals for the entire population, for each of the categories defined by the study.

Given that domestic violence is a 'hot' political topic these days--and having read the list of very suggestive questions posed by the survey--I would not be surprised to learn that the figures are somewhat inflated. But even if they are not, they tell a story of much smaller dimensions than anti-male activists would have one believe.

We return to the 14% mentioned earlier, the percentage of all violent crime that is designated as 'domestic violence.' 14% of 1,560,000 should give us the number of women who were victims of all sorts of domestic violence in England and Wales, according to the BCS. That works out to 218,000 women in a population of over 52 million: an incidence of 42 women in ten thousand, or 0.0042%. This is not, in any reasonable view, the national crisis anti-male advocates would have one believe.

But strangely, the BCS does not reconcile its own figures very well. In a separate BCS report on "Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault, and Stalking," the authors place domestic violence--including the sub-categories of sexual assaults and stalking--at something akin to 21% for both men and women: 9% of men were victims of domestic violence, and 13% of women. That is a total of 11,440,000 victims. This is hard to understand, since the other BCS figures show that all violent crime only comprises 4,160,000 victims, an incidence of only eight percent for the entire population of England and Wales.

In fact, it is likely the definition of domestic violence itself which is at fault. This is now so elastic as to have become statistically meaningless. Each succeeding year, under pressure from the prevailing anti-male attitudes in society, the definition of domestic violence is stretched further downwards, so that by now it covers acts which no reasonable person would consider serious enough to merit the label 'violence.'

It is no surprise therefore to read in the BCS that '64 per cent of women and 94 per cent of men subject to domestic violence in the last year did not think that what had happened to them was a crime.' The BCS authors discuss (on page 39 of the report) the problem of expanding the definition, yet, incredibly for supposedly neutral researchers, they take the position that expanding the definition of domestic violence is a good thing, because 'naming the incident as domestic violence is associated with the greater likelihood of survivors of violence seeking help.'

The crowning touch of irony is perhaps the authors' use of that word 'survivors'--for as the definition of domestic violence is stretched downwards, it gathers under its lengthening shadow all those minor incidents heretofore excluded...many of which do not involve the use of force at all. Thus the authors argue for a definition of 'violence' which encourages victims of the least serious forms of domestic disagreement--acts that even the victims themselves didn't consider a crime (until they were told to do so)--to 'seek help'...presumably from the police or a women's shelter.

In other words, the researchers went looking for 'the little man who wasn't there,' and they re-defined him until they found him.

"Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away...."

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that sort of thinking is an insult and disservice to those much less numerous women and men who have suffered true violence from their partners. It denigrates their pain, and will, in the long run, cause victims of serious physical violence to be lumped together in the public mind with the 'survivors' of shouting matches. In fact, that is already happening.

In reality, the very small percentage of men who actually use their superior physical strength against women to commit real violence can be regarded as abberant--both statistically and in the descriptive sense. In addition to being few in number, the BCS states that these men (and the women they abuse) are also heavily concentrated in the lower socio-economic stata: the great majority are uneducated, permanently poor, and part of a marginalised and disconnected sub-culture which is not representative of anything but itself. Using these men's behaviour to portray domestic violence as a catastrophic social pandemic is absurd.

The claim that men beat women 'because they can' is extreme, radicalist hyperbole. Yes, I suppose we could beat women into submission and 'take back the power' we've willingly given them over the last century or so. But the simple fact is, we don't. And no one remembers--or even dares suggest--that women today remain powerful in society only because men allow them to. Yet we continue to do so, and not because we must: but because it's the right thing to do.

Where's the recognition for that?