One evening in a low-income rental unit I used to live in, I heard some commotion in the room next door, where a couple had recently moved in. I couldn’t quite make out the words, but it was a female voice, and the tone was confrontational. There was some mild rumbling noises, like tables and chairs being shoved about. I was trying to get some sleep, and was preparing to start banging on the wall, when the noise suddenly ceased. I heard a door open and close, a moment later a knock on my door. Normally, I would have just ignored it, but curiosity got the better of me. I got up, put on some pants and opened the door. Standing in front of me was a scrawny little black man wearing nothing but his shorts, but that wasn’t the strange part: from head-to-toe he was covered with what appeared to be scratch marks and cigarette burns. He wanted to know if he could use my telephone (cell phones didn’t exist then, except in the movies) in order to call 9-1-1. I let him use my phone, then showed him the door, and heard him pitter-patter down the hallway and down the stairs. I heard nothing more that evening, having fallen asleep. But this “comical” episode has remained in memory.
In Henry Fielding’s novel “Tom Jones” (made into a 1964 Oscar-winning film starring a then svelte Albert Finney), Mr. “kick-sand-in-my-face” Partridge was frequently the subject of Mrs. Partridge’s fists, feet and various kitchen wares, for laughs (this part was apparently left on the cutting room floor for the movie). Elsewhere, the verbally-abused Rip Van Winkle did what many men would like to do when married to the likes of Dame Van Winkle: take a long walk, and fall asleep for twenty years. Domestic violence by women, when not considered at all, is viewed as fodder for “humor.”
What has drawn me into stepping into this minefield of mendacity is not the question of what Elin was doing with that nine iron (although there are those who would excuse its use for certain purposes), but two recent events involving domestic violence advocates. One occurred in Georgia, where Arelisha Bridges, a registered lobbyist for a domestic violence advocacy organization for which she was apparently the only member, shot and killed her husband of five days—and 19 years her junior—following a “domestic dispute” that took place on a sidewalk. She was charged with felony murder. The second episode was reported by the Tacoma News-Tribune, concerning the city attorney’s top domestic violence advocate, Gloria China Fortson. Fortson is accused of abusing her position, and aiding and abetting Keisha Jackson who made unfounded claims of domestic violence against her ex-husband, Kelvin Jackson, in a child custody case. Fortson, an apparently over-eager advocate with a chip on her shoulder, loaned the “victim” a vehicle with city money which the “victim” drove to Florida with the couple’s two children. After she was arrested and sent back to Washington, Fortson bailed her out of jail—with city funds.
But that is just the outline of the case; this was clearly “personal” for Fortson. After continued failure to reach a resolution to the custody suitable to herself, Keisha Jackson suddenly began making domestic violence claims against Kelvin Jackson, and eventually these claims reached Fortson, who proceeded to insinuate herself at custody hearings on behalf of Keisha Jackson. “I was very confused,” Kelvin Jackson told a News-Tribune reporter. “Who was this person, and why was she involved?” He soon found out. Since investigators could find no evidence of domestic violence (Keisha Jackson in fact did not claim, at least at first, that physical abuse had occurred), Fortson would level numerous accusations against him that questioned his “integrity” and financial stability. Kelvin Jackson sent several emails of complaint to her supervisors, which they ignored. Fortson complained that if Jackson continued to “harass my supervisors” with complaints about her behavior, “I will be forced to get a anti-harassment order against him.”
Kelvin Jackson’s daughter, Mani, testified that she had been coached by Fortson and her mother on what to say to child protective service counselors about her father, while her brother—perhaps not surprising given the complicated nature of the relationship between mother and son in the African-American community—was apparently brainwashed against his father, and still lives with his mother, currently out of prison awaiting her court date on kidnapping charges. The daughter chose to live with her father; when asked the million-dollar question if her father abused her, as Fortson and her mother claimed, she said he never did. The city’s investigation into Fortson’s actions concluded that her supervisors had wrongly allowed her to run amuck, obviously because it was the “politically correct” thing to do, given the hypersensitivity that domestic violence issue engenders.
But back to the point I want to make. Is the fact that men are “stronger” than women (at least in certain contexts) and potentially can inflict greater physical harm, sufficient reason to ignore the female equation in domestic violence? Apparently so. A brave few researchers, who recognize that most domestic violence does not occur in a vacuum, or accept the aggressive male/passive female stereotype that solely condemns men, have chosen to use “family conflict” over “domestic violence” as base point. Women’s advocates often use the terms of “family conflict” to inflate domestic violence numbers while omitting actions by women that fit under those terms.
The aggressive behavior of women is "the third rail of the domestic violence field" according to Richard Gelles, dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work. “Touch it and you get electrocuted." Not surprisingly, studies on the subject by Gelles and others have caused an avalanche of denials and self-rationalizations in the domestic violence industry.
According to Gelles, the “ lifetime risk” of a woman being hit in some fashion (however minor) by a male partner is about 28 percent, although he admits that those researchers with political agendas might come-up with higher numbers. Many such studies might claim that verbal abuse and creating an “intimidating” environment constitutes domestic violence; other studies simply focus on reports from women’s shelters, or cite crime statistics that obscure the fact that in many localities where police are required to make an arrest, males are more likely to be arrested even if the female is equally or more at fault. Gelles points out that such studies (unlike his) ignore the fact that a man's “lifetime risk” of being hit by a female partner is also about equal. Frankly, in most cases, this “violence” is of a minor degree, but in a heated situation, it could easily escalate into something more.
A recent USA Today story mentioned a study by some “courageous women” who expressed shock that “The number of women who hit first or hit back is much greater than has been generally assumed.” One researcher was “surprised by the frequency of aggressive acts by women and by the number of men who are afraid of partners who assault them.” Naturally, in order not to upset women’s advocates unduly, it was nevertheless pointed out that men are bigger and stronger, and that what they do was much worse.
Since such studies do upset some people with a permanent victim complex, it is to be expected there are “studies” coming out of the woodwork excusing women who commit domestic violence. A Georgia State University (yeah, I never heard of it either) study minimized domestic violence perpetrated by women by giving their violent actions “context,” with the aid of pioneering work “exploring women’s uses of violence by bringing together feminist sociopolitical analysis and bell hooks’s concept of patriarchal violence in the home.” Now don’t give the fact of your lack of objectivity away so easily.
A study entitled “A Working Analysis of Women’s Use of Violence in the Context of Learning, Opportunity, and Choice” determined that using “a community sample of couples” shows that “although women may hit their partners more often than men do, if context and meaning is included in the assessment of violence, male violence is considerably more likely than female violence to be dangerous and threatening. The data presented also demonstrate that male-perpetrated marital violence is likely to lead to serious injury and greatly increases women's risk of anxiety, whereas female-perpetrated marital violence has neither of these consequences for men.”
That kind of mendacity really gets my craw. What do these women know what it is like to be a man living with a woman with a personality disorder that requires her to constantly whine, yell and scream? Especially when you cannot reason out an issue with such a person? What kind of atmosphere does that create? This does not justify violence, but it does bring into the equation female culpability in creating an atmosphere in which domestic violence can occur. After all, women are more “verbal” than men.
I am not going to make the claim that domestic violence perpetrated by men and women are the same, even if they do occur in equal amounts. We have seen and heard all the horror stories and anecdotes. But I won’t be cowed into denying reality. We shouldn’t be excusing domestic violence whoever commits it. Talk about how to stop domestic violence that always focusing on what the male needs to do needs to go. The “studies” that suggest that women are “justified” in using domestic violence, even against a male who is not physically aggressive, by “shouting over” male complaints, are useful merely for exposing the hypocrisy of them. I have listened to too many women whose verbal activity constitutes abusive behavior. Given the recent incident in the King County Metro bus tunnel, where one female beat and robbed another female right in front of security guards who did nothing, it is obvious that today, women are clearly no longer afraid not only to claim violence, but to engage in it as well.
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