MCP wrote:
> http://www.menweb.org/throop/battery/daveclass.html
>
> Instead of doing the regular reports on our readings this week, I
have
> decided to do a brief report on husband battering. I hope this is
okay. If
> not, please let me know, and I'll stick to the readings in the
future.
[...]

> The idea of women being violent is a hard thing for many people to
believe.
> It goes against the stereotype of the passive and helpless female.
This, in
> spite of the fact that women are known to be more likely than men to
commit
> child abuse and child murder (Daly & Wilson 1988 report 54% of
parent-child
> murders where the child is under 17 were committed by the mother in
Canada
> between 1974 and 1983, for instance. The Statistical Abstract of the
United
> States 1987 reports that of reported child maltreatment cases between
1980
> and 1984 between 57.0% and 61.4% of these were perpetrated by the
mother.
> Nagi 1977 found 53.1% of perpetrators were female, 21% male and 22.6%
both.
> Note that because mothers tend to have more access to children than
do
> fathers that these results should not be interpreted to mean that
were
> things equal, women would still commit more abuse).

[...]

> Results like these are greeted with great suspicion by those who see
> domestic violence as a political issue to be exploited rather than a
social
> problem to be solved.

And those who exploit the issue do so at the great peril of "the
children," whom they pretend to care about.  Consider the case of a
family with children where the husband is battered.  In that house, he
is the anger sink for his wife.  Her anger and hatred are directed at
him.  If he doesn't fight back, he's still his wife's preferred target,
so he spares his children the abuse they would probably suffer if he
were not there.  If he does fight back, he may be protecting his
children from an abusive mother, which would hardly be surprising given
the father's natural protective instinct.

So, the political forces leave this man with no options.  He must
protect the kids, because God only knows what she'll do if he leaves.
He can't take the kids anywhere, because the shelters are for women,
and he might also go down for kidnapping.  So he just takes it.
Eventually, the situation ruptures.  Either he loses it and smacks her
up big time, or she kills him, or she leaves him.  In either case, the
kids wind up exposed to an abusive mother.

It is shown above that most child abuse is perpetrated by the mother.
The police have unpaid people who do the job of protecting children
with abusive mothers.  They're called fathers.  Instead of using that
resource and working with it, the cops, and their paymasters, treat
this free work like a crime and cart the man off, leaving themselves
with the job that the man once did.  But the cops can't really do it.

It's wrong that the politicos don't give a rat's ass about fathers, and
it's even worse that they spout this for-the-children nonsense when
they routinely take away the primary protectors of children, which are
fathers.  If they can't care about men, can't they at least care about
kids?  Apprently not.  Hence, instead of saying "for the children" when
they want something, they should really be saying, "for the women."
[...]



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