Quotulatiousness

December 16, 2012

The domestic terror: “I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.”

Filed under: Health, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:39

Anarchist Soccer Mom has a story to tell. It’s neither pleasant nor uplifting, but it needs to be told:

I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.

A few weeks ago, Michael pulled a knife and threatened to kill me and then himself after I asked him to return his overdue library books. His 7 and 9 year old siblings knew the safety plan — they ran to the car and locked the doors before I even asked them to. I managed to get the knife from Michael, then methodically collected all the sharp objects in the house into a single Tupperware container that now travels with me. Through it all, he continued to scream insults at me and threaten to kill or hurt me.

That conflict ended with three burly police officers and a paramedic wrestling my son onto a gurney for an expensive ambulance ride to the local emergency room. The mental hospital didn’t have any beds that day, and Michael calmed down nicely in the ER, so they sent us home with a prescription for Zyprexa and a follow-up visit with a local pediatric psychiatrist.

We still don’t know what’s wrong with Michael. Autism spectrum, ADHD, Oppositional Defiant or Intermittent Explosive Disorder have all been tossed around at various meetings with probation officers and social workers and counselors and teachers and school administrators. He’s been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work.

[. . .]

When I asked my son’s social worker about my options, he said that the only thing I could do was to get Michael charged with a crime. “If he’s back in the system, they’ll create a paper trail,” he said. “That’s the only way you’re ever going to get anything done. No one will pay attention to you unless you’ve got charges.”

[. . .]

No one wants to send a 13-year old genius who loves Harry Potter and his snuggle animal collection to jail. But our society, with its stigma on mental illness and its broken healthcare system, does not provide us with other options. Then another tortured soul shoots up a fast food restaurant. A mall. A kindergarten classroom. And we wring our hands and say, “Something must be done.”

I agree that something must be done. It’s time for a meaningful, nation-wide conversation about mental health. That’s the only way our nation can ever truly heal.

God help me. God help Michael. God help us all.

H/T to Drew M. for the link.

Reactions to the Sandy Hook tragedy

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

In Reason, Nick Gillespie rounds up some of the worst reactions to the terrible event in Sandy Hook:

Horrific events such as the mass shooting at Newtown, Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School are terrible enough in showcasing the evil that men do.

But they also regularly bring out the worst in observers, commentators, and pundits who will never let a lack of knowledge or expertise stand in the way of making grand pronouncements.

Here’s a short tour of four of the least-helpful reactions to an attack that slaughtered more than two dozen Americans — most of them kids 10 years and younger. They come courtesy of a former presidential candidate (Mike Huckabee), an international media mogul (Rupert Murdoch), an Oscar-winning filmmaker (Michael Moore), and a famous crusading journalist (Geraldo Rivera).

Following that is a discussion of the reality of gun violence in America and what might actually address some of the issues in play.

December 8, 2012

The predator who hid in full view of the cameras

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Mark Steyn on the Jimmy Savile investigations:

It’s tempting at this point to offer some musings on the price of fame, the burdens of celebrity. But Savile was cheerfully unburdened. Rather than a celebrity who happens to be a pedophile, he seems to have been a pedophile who became a celebrity in order to facilitate being a pedophile. Robbers rob banks because that’s where the money is. In the Sixties, Savile became a star disc jockey in Britain’s nascent pop biz because that’s where the 14-year-old nymphettes are. In the Seventies, he became a kiddie-TV host because that’s where the nine-year-old moppets are. He became a celebrity volunteer with his own living quarters at children’s hospitals and homes because that’s where the nine-year-olds too infirm to wiggle free or too mentally ill to protest are. He persuaded various institutions to give him keys to the mortuary because that’s where the nine-year-olds unable even to cry out are. (Stoke Mandeville Hospital is now investigating whether he “interacted inappropriately” with corpses.)

His persona was tailored to his appetites: The child-man shtick meant no one would ever ask him to host grown-up telly shows or move to the easy-listening channel. He motored around the country in a famous silver Rolls with a caravan on hand should he espy a comely schoolgirl at the edge of the road. When opportunity for a quickie struck ten minutes before a recording of Savile’s Travels, it was easier to drop the gold lamé sweatpants than unbuckle a belt and unzip a pair of trousers. And he more or less hid in plain sight. When Fleet Street reporters seeking a quote on something or other called him up and said “Is that Jimmy Savile?” he’d shoot back: “I never touched her!” On the one occasion we met, I remember being struck by the physical strength he projected, even at his then-advanced age. A few years ago, an interviewer asked, “You used to be a wrestler, didn’t you?”

“I still am.”
“Are you?”
“I’m feared in every girls’ school in the country.”

November 27, 2012

Toronto’s once (and future?) mayor

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:01

In Maclean’s, Ivor Tossell recounts the story of Rob Ford’s brief tenure as mayor of Toronto:

At Toronto’s City Hall, surely the most ambiently lunatic building in Canada, a stage was set up to launch the Mayor’s Christmas Toy Drive. Eight small children had been procured to act as “honourary elves,” sitting cross-legged on a carpet at the foot of a Christmas tree, flanked by boxes of mini-trikes and construction cranes. A boxed CFL football sat ominously to one side. The mayor was scheduled to launch the drive at 1 p.m. An enormous crowd of reporters buzzed about. Interest in the mayor’s event had amplified to unusual levels by news that the mayor had just gotten himself fired.

For everyone who’s ever bemoaned the fact that our democracy doesn’t offer a way to recall politicians, witness Rob Ford: the man who couldn’t stay mayor. In a ruling released this morning, a Superior Court justice declared Ford’s seat vacant — a weirdly existential way of putting it — after finding the mayor violated the municipal conflict-of-interest act in a small-stakes, but entirely willful, transgression.

Ford has been in office for two tumultuous years, in which his cost-cutting mandate quickly gave way to a scorched-earth war on the media, a succession of botched policies and a never-ending series of altercations, each more bizarre than the last. Giving the finger to a six-year old; chasing a reporter around a park near his home; helping eject a bus of TTC riders into the rain to get his football team a ride home. Finally, today, the mayor of Toronto was sent back to the voters to ask for his job back. In the end, Rob Ford recalled himself.

Update: Speaking for the defence, here’s Ezra Levant in his trademarked over-the-top style, comparing the Ford case to some other recent political scandals in Canada.

November 26, 2012

New child abuse panic in Britain

Filed under: Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:00

In sp!ked, Neil Davenport talks about the ongoing child abuse panic that is gripping Britain, and contrasts it with the 1987 horror show that was the investigation into systematic child abuse in Middlesbrough:

In retrospect, it is suggested, the move in recent years towards intrusive policing of family life, and in particular working-class family life, was a positive and enlightened development. Incredibly, the re-evaluation of the policing of the family as an enlightened thing has included attempts to rehabilitate the long-discredited Cleveland child-abuse scandal of 1987, when 121 children were removed by social workers in Middlesbrough on the grounds that their parents had abused them. That scandal was closely followed by allegations of child-abuse rings in Rochdale and Orkney in 1990. In each case, the vast majority of the allegations were found to be false. Yet now, in the wake of the Savile scandal, broadsheet journalists claim that the ‘public fury’ against the paediatricians who made the Cleveland allegations was ‘too simplistic’. It created a ‘saga of rogue doctors and wronged parents’, which doesn’t capture the reality of what happened in Cleveland, apparently. In other words, the suggestion is that there was some truth in the Cleveland allegations, and that the state must rediscover its nerve to interfere wholesale into suspicious communities.

[. . .]

As has been previously argued on spiked, it was from the mid-1980s onwards that child abuse took centre stage in the national consciousness. In 1986, the founding of Esther Rantzen’s ChildLine gave credence to the growing belief that children were no longer safe in their own homes or communities. This paedophile panic, largely driven by figures from the political left, reached its devastating pinnacle in Cleveland in 1987. Here, two paediatricians, Dr Marietta Higgs and Dr Geoffrey Wyatt, became convinced that the widespread rape of young children was taking place in this part of Middlesbrough.

Higgs and Wyatt based their evidence on a technique called reflex anal dilation, which would supposedly detect signs of sexual assault. After Higgs had experimented on her own children and found a negative result, she concluded that any positive result must mean that other children had been abused. Despite it being too small a control group to give any definitive answers, the dubious test and results were still enough evidence for the state effectively to kidnap and contain over 100 children and arrest their parents.

[. . .]

This resulted in the setting up of a public inquiry, led by Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, which examined instances where sexual abuse was said to have taken place. In these cases, the courts subsequently dismissed the charges against the vast majority of the parents. During the inquiry, it was revealed that social workers were driven by malignant prejudices rather by any sense of duty or professionalism. In video-recorded interviews with the allegedly abused children, social workers were seen threatening and attempting to bribe the children in order to make them confirm social workers’ belief that they had been abused. Leading questions were asked of the children, which would not have been permitted in court.

The impact on the children and the accused parents was devastating. It took some of the innocent parents two years to get their children back home. For years afterwards, the children and parents of Cleveland reported being terrified of any knock on the door. One of the children taken away by the authorities said recently: ‘We were abused by the very people — the doctors and social workers — there to protect children. We were essentially put up for adoption. My father now says he did not dare even put a towel around me at the public swimming pool for years. He was afraid of cuddling us in public. My parents’ lives have been shattered.’

November 20, 2012

50 years later: Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Russia — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:04

It’s being called “one of the most significant books of the 20th Century”, and it was published 50 years ago this month:

The character was fictional. But there were millions like him — innocent citizens who, like Solzhenitsyn himself, had been sent to the Gulag in Joseph Stalin’s wave of terror.

Censorship and fear had prevented the truth about the camps from being published, but this story made it into print. The USSR would never be the same again.

“We were absolutely isolated from information, and he started to open our eyes,” remembers writer and journalist Vitaly Korotich.

[. . .]

It was Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev who had sanctioned publication of Solzhenitsyn’s novel nearly a decade after Stalin’s death. Allowing a book on the Gulag, he thought, would help debunk Stalin’s personality cult. However, one story sparked many more.

“After it was published, it was impossible to stop it,” Korotich recalls. “Immediately we received a lot of illegal publications. A lot of people who were in prison started to remember how it was.

November 12, 2012

The BBC’s nightmare scenario

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

Emily Bell outlines the existential crisis the BBC suddenly finds itself embroiled in:

[BBC director general George] Entwistle’s resignation on Saturday was directly linked to a report broadcast by Newsnight on November 2 that misidentified a public figure allegedly involved in a child abuse scandal. The report, connected to an already broiling scandal, did not make things any worse, theoretically, for Thompson. But the BBC he left is now facing a very serious challenge to its future and independence.

The turmoil at the BBC started with a revelation involving a now-dead TV presenter and public figure, Jimmy Savile, who is accused of molesting possibly hundreds of children. US commentators have tried to explain Savile to the domestic audience, but there really is no parallel here. […] The allegations against Savile were being investigated by Newsnight last year, but its editor, Peter Rippon, decided not to run the investigation on the grounds that the evidence was not sound enough. Subsequently, rival broadcaster ITV pulled together a documentary carrying the allegations against Savile, making the BBC’s decision not to run the original piece seem both flawed and possibly compromised. Just as Entwistle succeeded Thompson as director general, the story of how the BBC had shelved its piece broke.

[. . .]

The most preposterous and fitting denouement to the whole horrible affair happened when, in an attempt to prove itself institutionally robust, Newsnight commissioned a second piece into another child abuse scandal. The show broadcast its investigation on November 2, conducted with the London-based Bureau for Investigative Journalism. Including details about an alleged pedophile, the report led to the misidentification of a former member of a Conservative government as being involved in a North Wales care-home scandal after the central witness interviewed misidentified his abuser. Failing to conduct a sufficiently thorough cross-checking of the victim’s evidence, or even to show him a picture of the former politician, were basic journalistic errors. To make matters worse, the Bureau’s editorial head, Iain Overton, had foreshadowed the “exclusive” by tweeting about it earlier in the day. So in scrambling to address the perception that it was timid in breaking stories about pedophilia, Newsnight’s overcompensation has led to a potentially ruinous situation of the BBC creating false rumors.

There are two separate issues in play with all this that have become toxically intertwined. One is the existence of an endemic culture of child abuse in a number of British institutions, and the other is about the editorial independence and journalistic future of the BBC.

October 27, 2012

An argument against further publicizing the Jimmy Savile victims

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

At the Huffington Post, Brendan O’Neill points out that with Savile dead, the hue-and-cry to round up all the alleged victims and have them pour out their stories will not actually benefit anyone except the “theraputic industry”:

The victims themselves don’t get much out of it, since they are cajoled into reliving unpleasant things that happened decades ago. Worse, they’re publicly branded as damaged, as permanently scarred, despite the fact that many of them will have led full, interesting lives since that one time a dirty old man did something bad to them.

They are immortalised as one of Jimmy’s Victims, and in the process they are dehumanised, turned from rounded, complex individuals into simply sufferers.

Justice doesn’t benefit from these revelations, either, since Savile is dead and cannot be found guilty of anything. It is virtually impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the allegations against him are true, because, in a civilised society at least, the dead cannot be put on trial. Which raises the question of why so many of the police’s resources are being pumped into gathering more and more Savile abuse stories.

And society as a whole doesn’t benefit from the open invitation to every person who had a bad encounter with Savile to reveal all. In fact, society, the big communal space we all inhabit, looks set to be the biggest loser in all this.

The Savile scandal will further dent social solidarity. The promotion of the idea that paedophiles lurk everywhere, that, in the words of the deputy children’s commissioner Sue Berelowitz, “There isn’t a town, village or hamlet in which children are not being sexually exploited”, will exacerbate today’s climate of suspicion and mistrust. The now widely accepted idea that there were “paedophile networks” at the Beeb, in the NHS, even around Parliament, will ratchet up already high levels of public cynicism towards institutions and the political sphere.

October 24, 2012

How to betray your country in one easy walk into a foreign embassy

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 14:58

The story of how a Canadian officer decided to turn traitor and pass secret intelligence to Russia:

When news first broke that the RCMP had arrested a low-ranked Canadian naval officer for providing intelligence to a foreign power, the press was quick to focus on the fact that the officer, Jeffrey Paul Delisle, had previously gone bankrupt. That was exactly the sort of thing a foreign country would look to exploit in a potential recruit. But we know now that Delisle didn’t need to be recruited. Heartbroken and contemplating suicide, he walked into the Russian Embassy in Ottawa and volunteered his services.

[. . .]

Over and over, the RCMP agent returns to one question: Why? He offers friendly comments, assuring Delisle that he knows how much pain, so much pain, he would have been feeling after his divorce. Delisle breaks down. He shares the story of how he found his wife, whom he’d loved since high school, cheating on him. She only married him, Delisle claims she told him, for security. She left him and hooked up with a new man, and was pregnant with the new partner’s child shortly thereafter. Delisle bitterly recalls hosting his ex-wife and her boyfriend at a Christmas Eve party, because his daughter wanted him to. And he wanted to make her happy.

Delisle’s love for his children shines though his statements. He clearly adores them. He says they were the only thing that prevented him from indulging his wish to commit suicide, to steer his car into oncoming traffic. He decided that he’d live for them. Indeed, he was caring for them, his ex-wife apparently being out of the picture — another source of bitterness. Having decided that he was dead inside, but obligated to live, Delisle says he decided to commit “professional suicide.” So he walked into the Russian Embassy and offered to become a spy.

October 22, 2012

Warren Ellis on celebrity license and the price of silence

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

In his weekly Vice column, Warren Ellis explains how celebrities like Jimmy Savile can set things up to get away with awful things:

My drinking companion had, I think, just finished telling me about this — unless that was someone else, some other time, because, hey, drunk — and, after another drink, said, “and then there’s Jimmy Savile.”

Jimmy Savile, later Sir Jimmy Savile, was a radio DJ, television personality and tireless charity worker, raising many millions for causes like the storied children’s ward at Stoke Mandeville hospital. He was still best known for his TV show Jim’ll Fix It, where he made dreams come true for kids all over the country.

“Jim’ll fuck it,” said this person I was with. “Jimmy Savile’s a nonce.” If you had the misfortune to grow up outside God’s Own Country, “nonce” is a term for paedophile.

“Bullshit,” I said. “Jimmy Savile’s been around forever. He would have gotten caught. Radio 1 Roadshows? Doing Top Of The Pops on TV since the dawn of fucking time?”

“What do you think the price of silence is?”

“What? How could he not get caught? He looks like a nutter. Dripping in gold chains, long silver hair, shiny tracksuits, gurning at cameras with his ‘now then, now then’ like he’s a fucking glam rock Yorkshire miner? Bollocks.”

Update:

October 15, 2012

A “violence tax” that would only fall on the non-violent

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:40

Steve Chapman on a recent proposal that will penalize the non-violent for violence in their community:

For urban politicians, gun control is like the bar in Cheers — a place of refuge they can seek out whenever things aren’t going well. Things aren’t going well on the crime front in Chicago, with homicides up 25 percent this year. So what else can our elected leaders do but promise action against guns?

Action against the possession and use of guns by violent felons would be a good idea, but the proposal offered by Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle is something else: a penalty on nonviolent citizens who bear no blame for the carnage.

Preckwinkle suggested a tax on sales of firearms and ammunition, with the goal of defraying the costs that gunshots create for the county hospital and jail. Her spokesperson couldn’t say what the tax rate would be or how much revenue it would yield but said the fee would be “consistent with our commitment to pursuing violence reduction in the city and in the county.”

[. . .]

The levy was dubbed a “violence tax,” which is exactly what it isn’t. It would not target criminals who have malice in mind, but would fall entirely on the law-abiding.

Anyone convicted of a felony, after all, is ineligible for an Illinois Firearm Owner’s Card, which is legally required to buy guns or bullets. Under federal law, felons are barred from owning guns. So ex-con gang members would not pay the tax, because they make all their purchases in the illegal market. It would hit only those gun owners who have used their firearms responsibly.

October 10, 2012

Defending the rights of the accused (even when the accused are “clearly guilty”)

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:41

Ken White doesn’t like the way the criminal justice system is criticized on the basis of “feelings”, rather than the facts. In a recent case that the media has reported on as a travesty of justice, he defends the process by which the decision was reached.

Blogger “Gideon” writes at A Public Defender and is, in fact, a public defender. That is to say, Gideon works every day under lousy conditions, inadequate funding, and impossible odds to provide a vigorous defense to people accused of crimes who can’t afford a lawyer — people who, absent vigorous representation, will be ground up by the system, guilty or innocent. God bless Gideon for that. Gideon has been waging a lonely battle to explain what Fourtin v. Connecticut actually means.

As Gideon explains at length […], prosecutors made the strange and probably incompetent tactical decision to charge Fourtin under an infrequently used subsection of the Connecticut rape statute, a subsection that only applies to sexual assault of someone who is “physically helpless.” What the Supreme Court of Connecticut found was not that “if a severely handicapped person could resist but doesn’t, its not rape.” What the Court found was that this victim — who, though severely handicapped, could move and resist — was not “physically helpless” within the meaning of the statute, which is narrowly confined to people who are “unconscious or for some other reason physically unable to communicate lack of consent.” The Court found that the evidence showed that the victim could communicate lack of consent, and thus wasn’t “physically helpless” under the statute. The Court also repeatedly criticized the prosecutor’s decision to charge the case under this particular statute (rather than, for instance, under another subsection that could have applied because the victim was so mentally impaired that she was “unable to consent to such sexual intercourse”), and failure to offer evidence of state’s latecoming theories under this statute.

I’m outraged that the prosecution made a lousy and seemingly inexplicable call. I’m outraged that someone who sexually assaulted a profoundly handicapped woman goes free because of incompetence. But I’m not outraged that the state has to prove that you’re guilty of the specific crime you’re charged with to put you in prison. That’s fundamental to due process. “Well, hell, he didn’t do what he’s charged with, but he did something else awful” is tyrannical. I’m more afraid of the state’s ability to make it up as they go along in a criminal case than I am of criminals going free. As a criminal defense attorney, I know that it would be impossible to defend clients if the government could throw on their case and then ask the judge to find a statute that fits, instead of charging defendants with a specific crime and then proving that crime. As Gideon points out, the Sixth Amendment gives you the right “to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation” against you. “You’re a criminal, we’ll figure out what statute you violated after we see how the evidence turns out at trial” is not due process.

October 5, 2012

Apparently only Christians go to prison in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:29

At least, that’s the most charitable interpretation of this move by the federal government:

The federal government is cancelling the contracts of non-Christian chaplains at federal prisons, CBC News has learned.

Inmates of other faiths, such as Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jews, will be expected to turn to Christian prison chaplains for religious counsel and guidance, according to the office of Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, who is also responsible for Canada’s penitentiaries.

Toews made headlines in September when he ordered the cancellation of a tender issued for a Wiccan priest for federal prisons in B.C.

Toews said he wasn’t convinced part-time chaplains from other religions were an appropriate use of taxpayer money and that he would review the policy.

In an email to CBC News, Toews’ office says that as a result of the review, the part-time non-Christian chaplains will be let go and the remaining full-time chaplains in prisons will now provide interfaith services and counselling to all inmates.

According to the report, 57% of inmates are Christian. I smell a charter challenge to this ruling.

October 4, 2012

Claim: more women die of domestic violence than cancer

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:43

A friend of mine posted this claim on Twitter earlier today and it struck me as being incredibly unlikely. A quick Google search turns up the following numbers for causes of death in the United States in 2009 (total 2,437,163):

  • Heart disease: 599,413
  • Cancer: 567,628
  • Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 137,353
  • Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 128,842
  • Accidents (unintentional injuries): 118,021
  • Alzheimer’s disease: 79,003
  • Diabetes: 68,705
  • Influenza and Pneumonia: 53,692
  • Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 48,935
  • Intentional self-harm (suicide): 36,909

If we assume that exactly half the reported deaths from cancer are women, that says 283,814 women died of various forms of cancer in 2009. How does that stack up against the murder statistics (which would include domestic violence along with all other killings)?

13,636

One of these numbers is not like the other (and of the reported 13,636 homicides, 77% of the victims were male).

This is not to diminish the dangers of domestic violence, but throwing out numbers as my friend did doesn’t actually help the situation.

October 3, 2012

“The stereotype is so strong, that when you look at the actual data, you’re shocked”

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:26

In the National Post, Tom Blackwell finds the common stereotype on domestic violence at variance with the facts:

Conventional wisdom suggests that women usually kill their spouses in self defence or as a final, desperate reaction to chronic battery, the burning-bed syndrome that is sometimes cited as a defence in murder trials. A new Canadian study, however, suggests that barely a quarter of husband-killers are victims of domestic abuse, less than half suffer from any identified psychological problem, and fewer still have had trouble with police.

[. . .]

To Don Dutton, a UBC psychology professor who has examined domestic violence for decades, the results of the new study are no surprise, despite what he called an erroneous understanding of “intimate-partner” assault that continues to prevail in society.

“We’ve got a stereoptye about domestic violence … that the oppressor or perpetrator is the male and when female violence happens, it’s a reaction against male violence,” he said. “The stereotype is so strong, that when you look at the actual data, you’re shocked.”

Prof. Dutton, author of the book Rethinking Domestic Violence, suggested that such assumptions evolved from the feminist view that family violence was a socio-political act of “patriarchal men suppressing women.” He argues instead that personality disorders in both male and female offenders better explain family violence than do social norms.

Prof. Dutton, not involved in the Quebec research, cited a number of studies in the United States that concluded the most common type of domestic violence was not abuse of women by men, but “bilateral” violence where both spouses hurt each other with similar severity.

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