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April
Everybody Deserves Better
On International Women’s Day, it is time to
consider the roots of the women’s movement of
the 1960s. Back then, the issues were focused on
equal rights for women. In 2005, most if not all,
the issues have been successfully resolved, in
terms of literal equality in western industrialized
nations. The movement has evolved over time into
something more about female supremacy rather than
equality. While there are those women who will
never be content with their lot in life and always
imagine their perceived lack of prestige, or
success, or whatever to be entirely the fault of
men in general, that simply does not apply to women
today.
Most women accept the challenges presented to
them in their lives, work through them, and move on
to enjoy the benefits provided women which may or
may not have existed before. They wish to live full
and balanced lives, and are free to organize the
varied parts of their lives – marriage,
children, and career in whatever way they
choose.
Generally speaking, the radical elements who
haven’t yet realized their work is done are
easily dismissed, and most often ignored.
Malcontents in society will always be with us. It
is only when we allow these malcontents to dictate
public policy, and our government to fund programs
to further their extremist philosophies that
society puts itself in harm’s way.
Such is the case with the issue of intimate
partner abuse, most popularly recognized as
domestic violence. Today’s programs are still
operated by the same radical feminists, in the same
ways as they were in the 1970s. The only difference
in these programs is that they are now being given
public funding; to the detriment of any community
which supports these programs. They have ceased to
be helpful, if in fact they ever were.
At the root of the problem is the fact that
domestic violence is neither a political issue, nor
a gender issue. To address this social issue in
this fashion, from this standpoint, is a mistake
which sends victims down a dangerously wrong path.
All it does it set the immediate problem on hold
temporarily while creating a new set of problems
for the victim to confront. Offered no other
choice, victims follow the direction of shelter
programs, unaware the actions suggested will have
ramifications that may never be resolved for years,
possibly even causing permanent, irreparable,
damage to themselves, and their children and
families.
The only victims willingly served by existing
programs are women – preferably those with no
male children over the age of 12. Male abusers are
eagerly placed in re-training or incarceration
programs by institutions created to do just that.
There are no effective screening measures in place
in either case to demonstrate evidence of need;
only a verbal request or accusation is ever
required.
The nationwide network of women’s shelter
programs actively and constantly remind the public
that men are to blame for the problem, and
naturally enough, refuse to aid male victims or
female abusers. (While many programs claim to serve
all, in an awkward attempt to address the public
perception they provide assistance without regard
to gender, in practice there are few
equally-accessible services available for anyone
other than female victims and male abusers.) This
same network maintains a stranglehold on public
funding for domestic violence services, and goes to
great lengths to prevent agencies intending to
serve those other populations from doing so.
It is time this project in the cause of feminist
ideology came to an end.
Everything You Thought You Knew about Domestic
Violence is Probably Wrong
There is a morass of confusing dogma surrounding
the subject. It is often lumped together with other
issues of stalking, sexual assault and divorce
which are in fact, entirely separate issues and
should not be considered in the same way, and at
the same time.
However, the establishment in charge of these
programs has found it expedient and profitable to
allow the confusion. In fact, it could be said that
misconstruction and partial truth is the hallmark
of feminist marketing and activism. This has worked
well for them for decades, but in these days of
transparency and accountability, the abilities they
may have had in the past to revise everything from
history to the laws of physics are no longer so
dependable.
Some misconceptions have become part of
conventional wisdom. But, just because
“everybody says so” doesn’t mean
everybody is right. Here are some of the most
widely-repeated tales:
95% of victims of domestic violence are women.
This came to be due to either a misunderstanding or
an outright manipulation of Dept of Justice
figures. While it seems logical to shelter
personnel, that is because shelters are in practice
open to women only. Female victims are the only
victims they see.
There is an epidemic of domestic violence. Since
the actual meaning of the term is something to the
effect of “a greater than usual amount of
cases,” it can’t possibly apply. Nobody
knows what is usual in the first place. From a
marketing perspective, the word sounds good for
emotional effect, but that’s all.
Domestic violence is unknown and unrecognized.
We maintain a running search for articles in media
and online, and even on a slow day there will be
about 50 articles relating to the issue.
Ironically, many of those articles contain a quote
from somebody saying nobody ever talks about
domestic violence. A recent Google search for the
term yielded 5,810,000 results.
Battering always escalates, and the eventual
conclusion is death. This untrue, unsupportable
statement gives some important insight into the
mindset of those running shelter programs. They do
not recognize their clients as individuals, and
there is no provision in shelter programs for
meeting the needs of individuals. Therefore, it is
easy to make blanket statements regarding this
situation, despite a lack of actual evidence.
Domestic violence is a deliberate pattern of
power and control. While this is true in some
cases, it cannot possibly be true all the time.
Again, this relates to the inability of current
programs to treat victims as individuals. It also
reflects on the viewpoint of feminist-run shelters
that domestic violence is political in nature. In
this ideology, men are the cause, and women are the
hapless victims, unable to deal with their problems
without outside intervention.
We can have an end to domestic violence, if only
_________. This purely human problem has been with
us long before it was given a name, and will be
with us as long as we continue to be human.
Certainly, we can have an end to the parts of it
engineered by the feminists as soon as control of
these programs is given to apolitical professionals
with an understanding of family problems. It is
unreasonable to even consider there will be a day
when there is no domestic violence whatsoever, just
as it is unreasonable to consider there will ever
be an end to crime, greed, or any other human
failing.
How Did Things Get This Way?
People in general, and Americans in particular,
have a deep well of compassion and concern for
other individuals. Yet, in the 20th Century there
was a new reliance on the word of
“experts” in dealing with personal
issues, as the population became increasingly
mobile and separated from the extended family
situations of earlier times. The 20th Century was
also a time when socialist ideals became attractive
to a people faced with issues such as unemployment
and alcoholism. Welfare programs, such as those
established in the Great Depression of the 1930s
appeared to succeed, even though Prohibition on
alcohol did not.
Still, there was an acceptance of the idea that
politicizing and criminalizing dysfunctional human
behaviors was an appropriate means of dealing with
those kinds of issues. By the 1960s, socialist
activists and various groups seeking improved
levels of social acceptance for specific groups of
people appeared all over the country.
Among these groups were the feminists, who
claimed to want “equal rights” for women.
This term was, and still is defined differently,
depending on who is using it. What the most radical
and militant feminists considered equal rights
included dominance over men, and the dissolution of
marriage and traditional family structure. This
would be replaced with government control,
including placement of children in public childcare
facilities from birth to adulthood.
By the 1970s, most of the more-realistic goals
of equality for women were achieved, leaving the
radical elements with few issues to confront. Here
and there, shelters and services were beginning to
be established to help battered women, which were
prime targets for the radical feminists. These were
usually small grassroots efforts run by people with
little or no experience in political activism. The
only thing the early shelter volunteers had in
common with the radical feminists was sometimes a
shared hatred of men and everything they did. This
happened often enough that the feminists were given
free rein in their activism. What had once been
agencies providing simple aid on a volunteer basis
became massive concerns, with infrastructure,
staffing, and funding to match.
The well-publicized goal of these programs was
“an end to domestic violence.” Advocates
for these programs were constantly lobbying
legislatures at all levels for favorable laws
fostering divorce, and criminalization of perceived
abusive behaviors by men, as well as
ever-increasing levels of funding. No law, no
amount of funding, was ever enough.
Any legislator, researcher or public figure of
any kind who attempted to object to this level of
government control of private lives, who suggested
seeking solutions other than divorce or that men
and women were equally responsible for the problem
was labeled a misogynist, an abuser, or worse. Many
careers have been ruined by shelter advocates
resisting change or accountability for their
programs. Some questioning these programs have even
suffered threats of physical harm or specious
lawsuits. This kind of behavior on the part of
anti-male, anti-family factions of the radical
feminist movement continues today.
In 1994, the initial Violence Against Women Act
was passed, and a new social problem was recognized
by Congress. “Gender violence” was
claimed by advocates to be the #1 issue facing
women everywhere. Despite the fact the term has no
meaning on its own, the law passed, and $3.5
billion dollars in public funding was earmarked for
these women-only shelter programs.
Meanwhile the general public, believing the
problem was under the control of well-meaning
experts, not only supported this act, but
encouraged the programs to expand and the laws to
become more restrictive and inequitable.
Legislation suggested by shelter advocates moved
farther and farther away from the core issue as
time went on. Today it is almost impossible to have
a discussion of either divorce or domestic violence
without mentioning the other, or bringing in the
blame issue.
We are no closer to finding practical solutions
to the problem, for either victim or abuser, than
we were when the first shelter was established in
1971 by Erin Pizzey. Her early attempts at
providing equitable services were promptly
eradicated by the feminist takeover of shelter
services everywhere.
What Can We Do to Change Things?
First, the public needs to recognize the
difference between the fictions promoted by those
implementing an ideology, and the reality of the
situation. Those who have been able to avoid
intervention by the established domestic violence
industry, and study the problem using accepted
scientific methodology and objectivity have found a
quite different problem than is generally claimed.
Intimate partner abuse is something that can often
be addressed in other ways than the overly
simplistic intervention/divorce/relocation scenario
provided by existing programs.
There are also different people involved. While
the male abuser/female victim is part of the
picture, there are also female abusers, male
victims, mutual victim/abuser situations, serial
victims, and a small group of those who appear to
have an addiction to violence.
There is a nascent, but emerging pattern of
individuals and groups seeking alternatives to the
ideological approach, which could be encouraged to
come forward. In some locales, human services
programs have deliberately removed themselves from
the national network of services in order to serve
their communities without interference. Some
agencies, that depend on the funding and networking
opportunities provided by the national network,
have an unspoken, but functioning “open door
policy” that provides those limited services
allowed by the network to a greater population than
only the female victims mentioned earlier. Others,
such as the Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men,
function independently of the network, as it has
repeatedly been refused admission.
While the issue is nowhere near as cut and dried
as is publicized today, an opening up of inquiry,
allowing honesty and objectivity to prevail will go
a long way itself to provide otherwise-unknown
solutions for some cases. Here and there, in
isolated shelters and counseling programs, are the
seeds of these new, and unidentified
approaches.
Federal, state, and municipal government needs
to stop funding organizations that are using public
monies for ideological purposes and divert those
funds to those who are operating on equitable
terms, and providing practical assistance to
members of their communities without regard to
gender.
A serious investigation of organizations such as
the Violence Against Women Office, National
Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the National
Domestic Violence Hotline, and the individual state
DV coalitions needs to be undertaken, and criminal
charges filed where necessary, if misappropriation
of government funds or other wrongdoing is found.
Civil litigation needs to be pursued in those cases
where these agencies and coalitions have caused
economic or other actionable damage to communities
and individuals.
Legislators and public officials at all levels
of government who have opposed the feminist-based
programs and been hesitant to speak out due to fear
of political repercussion should be encouraged to
make their positions clear, by taking the lead in
restoring their communities to the sanity of equal
treatment for all.
In addition, they can withdraw and/or oppose any
legislation that is related to increasing criminal
penalties for domestic violence. Past laws have
been proven to be of little value, and only serve
to add to the burden of already overcrowded prison
populations. They are only reflections of the
politicization of human relationships, which is
part of the feminist ideology, and has no place in
addressing domestic violence from a humanitarian
point of view.
Screening procedures must be developed to ensure
that applicants can demonstrate a need for services
of any kind. There is no screening procedure in
place today, and many cases of abuse of the system
itself go unrecognized. Current services have
resisted any suggestion that they either screen
applicants or network with other agencies to avoid
duplicating efforts.
Finally, since there is no procedure in place to
determine whether shelters actually aid women in
becoming free of abuse in their lives, there should
be some way to establish independently whether
these shelters provide the community with any
service at all.
Some have said to me that this idea of scrapping
VAWA entirely is the wrong approach, that we should
simply correct the problems and give this system
credit for the good it has done. If I knew of any
actual good to anyone, I would give credit where
credit is due. I’ve been writing about this
issue since 1999 and not once have I ever had a
single positive e-mail about women’s shelter
services from a recipient of same. I don’t
believe they come away from these programs any
better off than before.
Allowing these prejudicial, deeply biased and
regressive programs to continue unchecked will only
serve to add to the numbers on the welfare rolls,
in the jails and under the care of
government-sponsored child protective agencies.
In the United States of America, in the 21st
Century, our families deserve better.
©2010, Trudy W.
Schuett
* * *
Trudy W.
Schuett is an Arizona-based online veteran with 10
years in cyberspace; an author and multiblogger.
She has held workshops on blogging, writing, and
promo for writers at the New Communications Forum
and Arizona Western College, and has participated
in world blogging events such as Global PR Blog
Week. She is also an advocate for unserved victims
of domestic violence. She is is the author of three
novels, two how-to books and eight blogs. Note:
Books are currently out of print, but two appear in
blog form. She currently publishes New Perspectives
on Partner Abuse at partnerabuse.com.
She has a video at her site that provides a look
into the circumstance of a few men. Entitled,
Husband
Beaters
It is in five parts and was part of the Secret
Lives of Women series on the WE network. She
publishes the AZ
Rural Times 
and New
Perspectives on Partner
Abuse ,
she is on Twitter
and Facebook
She lives in Yuma AZ, with her husband, Paul.
desertlightjournal.blog-city.com/
or E-Mail.
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