Thursday, March 15, 2012

DV Myths help no one.



The big lie against men just keeps stacking lie on lie. A fellow father rights activist sums the situation up in a far better way than I can by saying;

"This article points out how gullible politicians are, among others, in their efforts to appear to be chivalrous. They will buy propaganda as truth,resell it on their web sites and denigrate men, In the overall statistics DV
Injuries of all women are not in the top 10."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2011-02-03-sommers04_st_N.htm

USA Today: Domestic Violence Myths help no one: Christina Hoff Sommers

By Christina Hoff Sommers

Friday, February 4, 2011

"The facts are clear," said Attorney General Eric Holder. "Intimate partner
homicide is the leading cause of death for African-American women ages 15 to
45."

That's a horrifying statistic, and it would be a shocking reflection of the
state of the black family, and American society generally, if it were true.
But it isn't true.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Justice
Department's own Bureau of Justice Statistics, the leading causes of death
for African-American women between the ages 15–45 are cancer, heart disease,
unintentional injuries such as car accidents, and HIV disease. Homicide
comes in fifth—and includes murders by strangers. In 2006 (the latest year
for which full statistics are available), several hundred African-American
women died from intimate partner homicide—each one a tragedy and an outrage,
but far fewer than the approximately 6,800 women who died of the other
leading causes.

Yet Holder's patently false assertion has remained on the Justice Department
website for more than a year.

How is that possible? It is possible because false claims about male
domestic violence are ubiquitous and immune to refutation. During the era of
the infamous Super Bowl Hoax, it was widely believed that on Super Bowl
Sundays, violence against women increases 40%. Journalists began to refer to
the game as the "abuse bowl" and quoted experts who explained how male
viewers, intoxicated and pumped up with testosterone, could "explode like
mad linemen." During the 1993 Super Bowl, NBC ran a public service
announcement warning men they would go to jail for attacking their wives.

In this roiling sea of media credulity, one lone journalist, Washington Post
reporter Ken Ringle, checked the facts. As it turned out, there was no
source: An activist had misunderstood something she read, jumped to her
sensational conclusion, announced it at a news conference and an urban myth
was born. Despite occasional efforts to prove the story true, no one has
ever managed to link the Super Bowl to domestic battery.

World Cup abuse?

Yet the story has proved too politically convenient to kill off altogether.
Last summer, it came back to life on a different continent and with a new
accent. During the 2010 World Cup, British newspapers carried stories with
headlines such as "Women's World Cup Abuse Nightmare" and informed women
that the games could uncover "for the first time, a darker side to their
partner." Fortunately, a BBC program called Law in Action took the unusual
route pioneered by Ringle: The news people actually checked the facts. Their
conclusion: a stunt based on cherry-picked figures.

But when the BBC journalists presented the deputy chief constable, Carmel
Napier, from the town of Gwent with evidence that the World Cup abuse
campaign was based on twisted statistics, she replied: "If it has saved
lives, then it is worth it."

It is not worth it. Misinformation leads to misdirected policies that fail
to target the true causes of violence. Worse, those who promulgate false
statistics about domestic violence, however well-meaning, promote prejudice.
Most of the exaggerated claims implicate the average male in a social
atrocity. Why do that? Anti-male misandry, like anti-female misogyny, is
unjust and dangerous. Recall what happened at Duke University a few years
ago when many seemingly fair-minded students and faculty stood by and said
nothing while three innocent young men on the Duke Lacrosse team were
subjected to the horrors of a modern-day witch hunt.

And then there's Iran

Worst of all, misinformation about violence against women suggests a false
moral equivalence between societies where women are protected by law and
those where they are not. American and British societies are not perfect,
but we have long ago decided that violence against women is barbaric. By
contrast, the Islamic Republic of Iran— where it is legal to bury an
adulterous woman up to her neck and stone her—was last year granted a seat
on the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defended the decision by noting Iranian women are far
better off than women in the West. "What is left of women's dignity in the
West?" he asked. He then came up with a statistic to drive home his point:
"In Europe almost 70% of housewives are beaten by their husbands."

That was a self-serving lie. Western women, with few exceptions, are safe
and free. Iranian women are neither. Officials like Attorney General Holder,
the deputy constable of Gwent, and the activists and journalists who
promoted the Super Bowl and World Cup hoaxes, unwittingly contribute to such
twisted deceptions.

Victims of intimate violence are best served by the truth. Eric Holder
should correct his department's website immediately.

Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute. She is the author of Who Stole Feminism and The War Against Boys,
co-author of One Nation Under Therapy, and editor of The Science on Women
and Science.





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