Quotulatiousness

March 15, 2012

The Omnibus Crime bill is really about only one thing: harsher punishments

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

If anyone thought that the Conservative government had a libertarian streak, the Omnibus Crime bill should be enough to disabuse them of the notion:

The Conservative government’s omnibus crime bill passed the Commons on Monday night. No matter the problem, the solution this unimaginative legislation provides is the same: longer sentences.

[. . .]

An important one that seems to have escaped the government’s thinking is whether, absent any other constructive reforms, it is a good thing to increase the powers of the police and prosecutors, and the effect it will have on the administration of justice. The government prefers to talk about criminals, as if everyone picked up by the police is guilty. Never discussed is the impact increased sentences will have on the accused but not convicted, namely, those presumed innocent.

In the daily operation of the criminal justice system, more severe penalties enhance the power the police and prosecutors have over the accused, or those merely suspected. The Americans have gone to such an extreme that the presumption of innocence is becoming only a notion; so severe are the penalties that police and prosecutors are able to bully even the innocent into pleading guilty. The trial in American criminal justice has been usurped by the plea bargain, in which the prosecutors hold most of the cards.

Canada is not there (yet), but it has happened here. In Ontario, the Goudge inquiry into parents falsely convicted of killing their own children established the pattern. Parents were threatened by prosecutors with such severe consequences that they pleaded guilty to crimes they did not commit, in the meagre hope of salvaging something of their lives.

[. . .]

There really isn’t very much “omni” in the omnibus crime bill. It’s about one thing — harsher punishments. It does nothing to alleviate the disgusting pre-trial (pre-trial!) conditions of remand that prevail in too many jails. It does nothing to mitigate the crisis in legal aid. It does nothing to lessen the likelihood of wrongful convictions. As Chief McFee notes, it does nothing for prevention.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guards themselves? Who watches the watchmen? That’s the ancient maxim. The crime bill shows that those guarding the guards are not on duty.

March 9, 2012

Dalrymple: “British police have … become simultaneously bullying and ineffectual, a disastrous combination”

Filed under: Britain, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:08

Theodore Dalrymple on a recent article by British author China Miéville in the New York Times Magazine decrying the cruel, disproportionate sentences handed out to London rioters:

Some figures: in 2011, there were 12,699 knife attacks in London known to the police (up 13.6 percent from the previous year); 58,160 burglaries (up 8.8 percent); and 68,754 street robberies (up 13 percent). The average national detection rate for burglaries is about one in 12, though even this is an overstatement, due to police manipulation of the figures. Approximately 800,000 domestic burglaries took place in Great Britain in 2009; this means that some 67,000 were detected by the police. In that same year, 6,136 people went to prison in Great Britain for burglary (for an average of 17 months each). Considering the 800,000 burglaries annually, a domestic burglary attracts on average four days’ imprisonment: hardly indicative of judicial ferocity, and not much of a deterrent to burglary.

One cannot say often enough that the victims of crime are, like the perpetrators, more likely to be poor than rich. For example, single-parent households in Britain have a more than one-in-20 chance of being burgled in any given year; and since most burglars are recidivists, indeed multiply so, it follows that the class of victim is much larger than the class of perpetrator. Leniency toward criminals is not therefore a form of sympathy for the poor, but a failure to take either their lives or their property seriously. For Miéville to talk of “panicked reaction” in these circumstances is a form of moral exhibitionism. He is showing off in front of his peers.

The notion that the disorder in London (and elsewhere in the country) is a protest against injustice — a thread that runs through Miéville’s article — is both crude and laughable. It is true that the British police have, after years of liberal-inspired reform, become simultaneously bullying and ineffectual, a disastrous combination.

Number-crunching on the subject of pornography

Filed under: Health, Liberty, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:19

Garth Zietsman does the statistics on pornography. First the objections of various groups:

The sociological objection is that pornography decreased respect for long-term, monogamous relationships, and attenuates a desire for procreation. Pornography can “potentially undermine the traditional values that favor marriage, family, and children”, and that it depicts sexuality in a way which is not connected to “emotional attachment, of kindness, of caring, and especially not of continuance of the relationship, as such continuance would translate into responsibilities”

The religious/conservative objection is similar to the sociological objection. They argue that this industry undermines the family and leads to the moral breakdown of society. They say that it is amoral, weakens family values, and is contrary to the religion’s teachings and human dignity.

Some feminists argue that it is an industry which exploits women and which is complicit in violence against women, both in its production (where they charge that abuse and exploitation of women performing in pornography is rampant) and in its consumption (where they charge that pornography eroticizes the domination, humiliation, and coercion of women, and reinforces sexual and cultural attitudes that are complicit in rape and sexual harassment). They charge that pornography contributes to the male-centered objectification of women and thus to sexism.

Other objections are that the sex industry is sometimes connected to criminal activities, such as human trafficking, illegal immigration, drug abuse, and exploitation of children (child pornography, child prostitution). However these effects are related not so much to pornography as to prostitution.

Then a small sampling of the findings (it’s a long post):

Firstly (using the General Social Survey) I found no relationship between being pro the legality of porn, or propensity to watch porn, and pro social behaviors e.g. volunteer work, blood donation, etc.

We can dismiss the feminist (and sociological) charges of porn increasing sexual violence and leading to sexism. The USA, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands (2) and Japan were just some of the countries that suddenly went from no legal pornography to quite widespread availability and consumption of it. These studies all found that greater availability of, and exposure to, pornography does not increase the rate of sexual assaults on women, and probably decreases it (3). Japanese porn is quite frequently violent and yet even there rape decreased from an already very low base. It’s interesting that an increase in porn exposure decreases sexual violence only, and has no effect on other crime. Economists would put this down to a substitution effect.

Several countries have sex offender registers — mainly of pedophiles. A wide variety of professions are represented on these registers. Members of professions that supposedly promote morality e.g. clerics or teachers, are quite common on it yet conspicuously absent from such registers are men who have worked in the porn industry.

This study (1) found no relationship between the frequency of x-rated film viewing and attitudes toward women or feminism. From the GSS (controlling for IQ, education, income, age, race and ideology) I found that those who are pro the legality of porn are less likely to support traditional female roles, more likely to be against preferential treatment of either gender, and to find woman’s rights issues more frequently salient. Although I found that women’s rights issues are less salient to male watchers, and female watchers are less likely to think women should work, I also found that watching porn is unrelated to negative attitudes toward women and feminism.

In short exposure to and tolerance of pornography does not cause anti-social behavior (and may even reduce it in relation to sex) and does not get in the way of pro social behavior either.

H/T to Tyler Cowen for the link.

March 4, 2012

“Assuming this account is accurate, this was a war crime”

Filed under: Americas, Britain, History, Law, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:46

Heresy Corner on the story being serialized in the Daily Mail from Tony Banks:

Banks says that “we simply did not have the resources to take prisoners” and “they had started the war and they had not shown much respect for the white flag when they had shot my three mates who went forward to take the surrender at Goose Green.” Neither is an excuse recognised by the Geneva Convention.

To issue an order to take no prisoners is a fundamental violation of the principles of international law and thus a war crime. Section 40 of Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions provides that soldiers who have clearly expressed an intention to surrender (for example by raising their arms or waving a white flag) are considered to be hors de combat and they must be given quarter (i.e. allowed to peacefully surrender). The officer who gave that order is not named but presumably Banks, along with other surviving members of his unit, knows who it was.

[. . .]

Assuming this account is accurate, this was a war crime. The fact that the Paras involved plainly knew that it was a war crime (hence the “brief argument”) exacerbates rather than mitigates their guilt. One soldier killed this boy in cold blood and the others covered up for him. That makes them all guilty, morally and legally. The fact that this took place thirty years ago is no reason why it cannot now be investigated and the perpetrators brought to trial. At the very least Banks should be taken in for questioning.

February 14, 2012

“The Harper crime policy is less than the sum of its parts”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:39

It’s odd to find myself on the same side of a debate as Roy McMurtry, but he and his co-authors Edward Greenspan and Anthony Doob are much more right than the government in this:

The Harper crime policy is less than the sum of its parts because it does not add up to a crime policy that addresses, or even acknowledges, these basic facts. It squanders resources that could be used to reduce crime. Making it more difficult for people to get out from under the shadow of their much earlier offences (through a pardon or “record suspension”) makes it harder for millions of Canadians with criminal records to reintegrate into society. Adding mandatory minimum penalties will do nothing to deter offenders, who, the data demonstrate, do not expect to get caught.

But the Harper crime policy is more than the sum of its parts because it tells us that the government is committed to ignoring evidence about crime, and does not care about whether our criminal-justice system is just and humane.

The student who grows six marijuana plants in her rented apartment to share with friends will soon face a mandatory minimum sentence of nine months in prison. Meanwhile, assaults have no mandatory minimum sentences. The law says that trial judges are required to impose sentences proportional to their seriousness and the offender’s responsibility for the offence. Is someone who grows six marijuana plants much more dangerous than someone who grows five (for which there is no minimum sentence)? Or who commits an assault? The Harper Tories seemingly think so.

Update: Of course, Stephen Harper rhetorically cast the libertarians out of the Conservative party years ago. The current attempts to provide the police with powers even they have said they don’t need merely provide extra proof. Chris Selley summarizes a National Post editorial on the subject:

The National Post‘s editorialists do not understand how a government that considers the long-gun registry (and, we’d add, the mandatory long-form census) an unconscionable invasion of Canadians’ privacy and a waste of their money can possibly get behind legislation that would “give the government unprecedented access to Canadians’ online activities, by allowing police to collect the personal information of Internet users … without having to go through the cumbersome process of obtaining a warrant beforehand.” We share this frustration. But Public Safety Minister Vic Toews made it quite clear what he thinks of such complaints yesterday, when he said Canadians “can either stand with us or with the child pornographers.” In other words: “Attention, libertarian wing of the Conservative Party of Canada. We think you are immoral, and no longer desire your votes.”

February 1, 2012

Arson victim now being dragged through the courts for defending himself with firearms

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:26

Canadian prosecutors have a strong aversion to the idea that people should be allowed to protect themselves, especially if firearms are involved:

Just when was Ian Thomson guilty of unsafe storage of a firearm? Mr. Thomson is the Port Colborne, Ont., man currently standing trial in a Welland, Ont. courtroom after he and his home were attacked by firebombers in August, 2010. (That’s correct, in the topsy-turvy world of Canadian criminal justice, Mr. Thomson and his home were the ones attacked and yet he is the one on trial.)

Having dropped other more serious charges — such as dangerous use of a firearm — because they concluded there was no reasonable chance of winning a conviction, Crown prosecutors have nonetheless bullied ahead with unsafe storage charges against Mr. Thomson.

One can only speculate on the Crown’s motives, but many prosecutors are so opposed to private citizens owning guns and, especially, using guns to defend themselves, their loved ones or property, that it is easy to believe prosecutors are running Mr. Thomson through the ringer in an attempt to discourage other homeowners from following his lead. They have conceded they cannot get a conviction against the retired crane operator and former firearms instructor for shooting at the three men who were trying to burn down his house with him in it, but perhaps they are hopeful their decision to drag Mr. Thomson through months of emotionally draining and expensive court proceedings will cause other homeowners to conclude armed self-defence isn’t worth the hassle.

Update: An already strange case appears to be getting stranger, as the judge needed to adjourn the court to allow time for the lawyers to figure out just what the law actually says:

Canada’s laws on the storage and handling of guns and ammunition are so complicated that a veteran judge needed to adjourn court to allow two experienced lawyers more time for legal arguments and a search of case law to help parse and dissect them.

It was a dud of an ending after two days of trial in the case of Ian Thomson, a 54-year-old Port Colborne man who fired three shots from a legally owned gun to scare off three masked men who were firebombing his secluded farmhouse while one threatened: “Are you ready to die?”

And the crown displays a remarkable lack of firearms knowledge:

Mr. Mahler said Mr. Thomson was “less than forthcoming” and “secretive” when police arrived. He suggested Mr. Thomson even picked up the spent shell casings from his porch and hid them in his bedside table.

Seeming confused, Mr. Thomson said he didn’t understand.

“Didn’t they fall to the ground?” Mr. Mahler asked, apparently thinking shell casings from a .38-calibre revolver were ejected from the gun with each shot.

“No,” said Mr. Thomson as the crowd of gun advocates watching from the public gallery chuckled and guffawed at Mr. Mahler’s mistake.

Spent shells from a .38 remain in the gun’s cylinder until it is opened and they are removed. Mr. Thomson took the casings out at the same time he opened the gun to reload it, which was at the bedside table, where the casings were when police arrived, he said.

Of course, if he’d had enough time to collect expended brass — in the dark — before police arrived, it doesn’t support the idea that the police were going to be timely in arriving after he first called 911, does it?

January 25, 2012

A unanimous Supreme Court decision against GPS tracking that still leaves wiggle room for the police

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:08

Jacob Sullum on the very narrow grounds used by the majority to decide US v. Jones:

“If you win this case,” Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben during oral argument in U.S. v. Jones last fall, “there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen of the United States.” That prospect, Breyer said, “sounds like 1984.”

Fortunately, the government did not win the case. But the Court’s unanimous decision, announced on Monday, may not delay Breyer’s 1984 scenario for long. Unless the Court moves more boldly to restrain government use of new surveillance technologies, the Framers’ notion of a private sphere protected from “unreasonable searches and seizures” will become increasingly quaint.

[. . .]

The majority therefore concluded that it was unnecessary to resolve the question of whether Jones had a “reasonable expectation of privacy” regarding his travels on public roads. By contrast, the four other justices, in an opinion by Samuel Alito, said he did, given that investigators tracked all his movements for a month — a kind of surveillance that can reveal a great deal of information about sensitive subjects such as medical appointments, psychiatric treatment, and political, religious, or sexual activities.

While Scalia’s approach draws a clear line that cops may not cross without a warrant, it does not address surveillance technologies that involve no physical intrusion, such as camera networks, satellites, drone aircraft, and GPS features in cars and smart phones. If police had tracked Jones by activating an anti-theft beacon or following his cell phone signal, they could have obtained the same evidence without touching his property.

Lorne Gunter: The long-gun registry was broken from the start

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:55

Writing in the National Post, Lorne Gunter points out that the long-gun registry was even less useful than we thought:

Last month, the RCMP and Statistics Canada were forced to admit that they don’t keep statistics relating to the number of violent gun crimes in Canada that are committed by licensed gun owners using registered guns.

“Please note,” Statistics Canada wrote in response to an access to information request filed by the National Firearms Association, “that the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) survey does not collect information on licensing of either guns or gun owners related to the incidents of violent crime reported by police.” Nor does StatsCan’s annual homicide survey “collect information on the registration status of the firearm used to commit a homicide.”

This raises the question: Why did it take so long for the government to begin ridding Canada of the horribly expensive, unjustifiably intrusive federal gun registry? If no one in Ottawa had any systematic way of tracking whether or not Canadians suspected of committing a violent gun crime were licensed to own a gun and had registered the gun being used, then they had no way of knowing whether registration and licensing were having a positive impact on crime.

There are around 340,000 violent crimes reported to police in Canada each year. Just over 2% of those (around 8,000) involve firearms. (There’s another reason to question the initial wisdom of the gun registry: Why was Ottawa expending so much time, effort and taxpayer money on such a tiny percentage of violent crimes, while doing comparatively little to prevent the 98% of murders, robberies, kidnappings, rapes and beatings not committed with a gun?)

Even if you grant the original notion that the government had an overriding need to track gun ownership (over and above the user licensing scheme that pre-dated the registry by decades), this can only count as a waste of time, money, and effort.

January 14, 2012

Making the War on Drugs even more dangerous

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:25

Colby Cosh points out that the recent spate of deaths from ecstasy overdoses in western Canada is at least as much a result of the way the so-called War on Drugs is being prosecuted:

In recent weeks, it seems, adulterated ecstasy (MDMA) has left Alberta and B.C. with a sizable heap of young corpses. A tragedy has thus come home to roost in the West: namely, the tragedy of policy that incentivizes adulteration of drugs that, if manufactured in the open and checked for purity, would kill hardly anybody. Pure MDMA has a larger “therapeutic index” — a wider safety margin for overdose — than alcohol. It would probably make a pretty reasonable substitute for alcohol in many settings if we were to sit down and rebuild a drug culture from scratch. But over the past ten years or so, both Liberal and Conservative governments have worked to increase penalties for and monitoring of the flow of “precursor chemicals” used in the manufacture of MDMA.

It has been their goal to make pure MDMA more difficult to manufacture; when precursors are seized it is hailed as a triumph. But illicit drug factories never do put out the follow-up press release announcing that they’re putting less MDMA in their “ecstasy” and replacing it with other party drugs that have much smaller safety margins, or with drugs that interact dangerously with MDMA. And when rave kids die as a result, the RCMP chooses not to pose imperiously alongside the body bags giving a big thumbs-up. They are eager to take credit only for the immediately visible results of their work.

[. . .]

The debate over “harm reduction” in Canada has, for the past year or so, revolved around the Insite clinic in East Vancouver. That debate has been fraught with as much confusion and misinformation as drug moralizers could possibly create, but the core message, I think, has gotten through to Canadians, and certainly to the gatekeepers of their media. The message is this: we have only meagre power to stop people from abusing heroin if they are determined to do that. We do have, however, significant ability to protect people from the problems of a poorly-titrated or actively adulterated supply of heroin. The morbidity and mortality burden from the actual addiction itself, compared to the burden resulting from the drug’s illegality, is both modest and intractable. Insite is basically designed to yield the benefits that allowing heroin to be issued by prescription would bring.

Canada is apparently too under-equipped with libertarians to see that the logic extends to ecstasy, which about a million adult Canadians have used at least once. Yet rave-scene users have already been implementing “harm reduction” philosophy on the dance floor for decades. They react as best they can to adulteration risks by sharing information about dealer reliability, and they mitigate the most important medical peril of MDMA — the possibility of hyperthermia, i.e., internal overheating — by making sure ravers have access to cool rooms and plenty of fluids.

No government of any ideological stripe has ever successfully kept intoxicants away from eager customers: not the US government in Prohibition, not the Soviet government (on-the-job drunkenness was endemic), not even modern day prison authorities (drugs are plentiful behind bars). The “War on Drugs” has — predictably — failed. The question should be how to minimize the harm to drug users and society at large, because drug prohibition is a massive failure.

January 6, 2012

Weird local story gets a bit weirder

Filed under: Cancon, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:33

In Pickering, about 20 kilometres west of here, the regional police found that an abandoned home had been modified to add a “confinement room”. It’s in a fairly secluded area, so there were no immediate leads to who had made the modifications or who (if anyone) had been confined in it. Today, the National Post reported that the “dungeon house” has burned to the ground:

An abandoned Pickering farmhouse that was found to have padlocked dungeon in its basement burned to the ground early Friday morning, adding an unexpected twist to an already bizarre police investigation.

A fire broke out at 140 Concession Rd. 7 outside of Pickering shortly after midnight and soon consumed the desolate building where police had been carrying out an investigation.

[. . .]

Before the blaze, police were trying to determine who built the “confinement-style” room with padlocks affixed to the very thick door, discovered in late November when crews went in to assess the building that had been scheduled for demolition.

Police said the house was last occupied in 2006, but the room was new — believed to have been built within the last year or two.

“I can’t get into what was in the room, but the way it was constructed — the time and effort put into it and the materials used — clearly indicated it was a room designed to hold somebody in,” Durham Regional Police Detective Darren Short said last month.

January 5, 2012

Double-jeopardy falls to political correctness

Filed under: Britain, History, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

Brendan O’Neill on the terrible precedent of a recent British government decision and it’s most recent mis-use:

On Nick Ferrari’s breakfast show on London’s LBC radio this morning, I argued that all the people describing this case as a victory for justice are overlooking the fact that it is a victory built upon the wreckage of some pretty important legal principles. One longstanding legal protection in particular — the double jeopardy rule, the idea that no one should be tried twice for the same crime — had to be dismantled in order to get Dobson back in the dock. Having been acquitted of the murder of Lawrence in 1996, Dobson was what we used to call ‘autrefois acquit‘, previously acquitted, which in the past would have meant that he could not have been tried for the murder a second time. That all changed in 2003, when New Labour ditched the double-jeopardy rule.

[. . .]

Double jeopardy is the elephant in the room of the Dobson and Norris conviction. Sure, journalists are mentioning it, usually in fluffy factboxes titled ‘How this case came to court’, but no one wants to discuss it in detail. No one wants to discuss the extraordinary amount of history and progressive tradition that had to be consigned to the dustbin of ‘bad ideas’ in order to secure one conviction against two nasty blokes.

The double-jeopardy rule had existed in some form or other for centuries. There was a Roman maxim which said ‘nemo bis in idem debet vexari‘ — no man shall be punished twice for the same. It’s there in early Christianity, too, in St Jerome’s insistence in the fourth century that ‘there shall not rise up a double affliction’. It’s also in the sixth-century Digest of Justinian, the seed of much of modern jurisprudence, which insisted that, ‘The governor should not permit the same person to be accused of a crime of which he has been acquitted’. An academic study of the double jeopardy rule in history points out that it is one of the ‘few legal rights recognised by the Christian fathers throughout the Dark and Middle Ages’.

In twelfth-century England, a form of double jeopardy was codified in the Constitutions of Clarendon, which, in an attempt to rein in the authoritarian instincts of Henry II, stipulated that no man could be tried for the same offence in both the ecclesiastical courts and the king’s courts. It had to be one or the other. From England it spread to the US, where the eighteenth-century revolutionaries and their successors made a bar against double jeopardy a key plank of their new republic’s constitutional guarantee of liberty against state power. In each historic period, the purpose of the rule against ‘double afflictions’ was strikingly similar: to protect individuals from potentially being hounded and interminably retried by governors, crown forces or cops determined to stick them in jail. That’s because being permanently at risk of prosecution is itself a kind of life sentence.

December 23, 2011

What is justice?

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:19

We may not be able to fully answer that question, but I think Scott Greenfield has a good case for what isn’t justice:

Whenever a motion is made for a bill of particulars in the Southern District of New York, the government’s response is the same: It would unduly prejudice the government to be required to disclose allegations of fact that would enable the defendant to know the specific conduct that forms the basis of the charge against him. And the court agrees.

You know, telling the defense what exactly it says the defendant did that was criminal would indeed prejudice the government. It would give the defense half a chance to prepare its defense. Well, maybe only a third of a chance, but at least a chance. Level the playing field, if only a bit? Prejudice.

But when it comes to prosecuting “enemy combatants,” the ante is upped. Way upped. Not only is the risk of individual failure at stake, but the reputation of a government that’s come to depend on a population who believes, with their every breath, that it can be trusted to ignore every safeguard around which are concept of a legal system is based, and still be fair. The integrity of the outcome must be trusted, and yet the conviction of those denied their rights must be assured.

What to do? It’s not enough to deny the defense access to the evidence against the defendant. No, not the puny refusal to provide a bill of particulars, but wholesale denial of “state secrets.” Still, a criminal defense lawyer gets used to thinking fast, working on the fly. We don’t enjoy the luxury of depositions, document demands, the absolute necessities of civil practice where lawyers whine about not being allowed to use a proctoscope at least five years in advance of trial. We prepare for surprises because we have no choice. We deal with the unknowns, because that’s our job.

Bad enough? Nope, read the rest of the post to find out just what little similarity to actual justice is in operation for those accused of being “enemy combatants”.

December 21, 2011

Barbara Kay: Spousal abuse is remarkably gender-balanced

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:18

Everyone knows the old myth about a spike in wife-beating after major sporting events (most frequently referenced is the Superbowl, but the same factoid is trotted out about every “big game”). Barbara Kay reveals the awkward truth that nearly half of all spousal abuse is by female partners:

One of first-wave feminism’s great achievements in the 1970s was to end the denial surrounding wife abuse in even the “best” homes. Resources for abused women proliferated. Traditional social, judicial and political attitudes toward violence against women were cleansed and reconstructed along feminist-designed lines.

But then a funny thing happened. The closet from which abuse victims were emerging had, everyone assumed, been filled with women. But honest researchers were surprised by the results of their own objective inquiries. They were all finding, independently, that intimate partner violence (IPV) is mostly bidirectional.

But by then the IPV domain was awash in heavily politicized stakeholders. Even peer-reviewed community-based studies providing politically incorrect conclusions were cut off at the pass, their researchers’ names passed over for task force appointments and the writing of training manuals for the judiciary. Neither were internal whistle-blowers suffered gladly. Erin Pizzey, who opened the first refuge for battered women in England in 1971, was “disappeared” from the feminist movement when she revealed what she learned in her own shelter: She committed a heresy by asking women about their own violence, and they told her.

[. . .]

(While the CDC survey does not reference Canadian data, our IPV statistics vary significantly from the U.S.’s in certain respects. “Minor” wife assault rates as measured on the commonly employed Conflict Tactics Scale are identical, but “severe violence” rates in Canada fall as the violence ratchets up. For “kicking” and “hitting,” Canadian rates were 80% of the American rate; for “beat up,” they were 25%; and for “threatened with or used a gun/knife,” they were only 17%.)

By now there is no excuse for the failure of governments at all levels to follow through on — or at least acknowledge — the settled science of bilateral violence. Yet just last week the Justice Institute of British Columbia issued a lengthy report on “Domestic Violence Prevention and Reduction,” and sure enough, it defines domestic violence as “intimate partner violence against women,” recommending only that government work “to bridge gaps in the services and systems designed to protect women and children.”

One area where the majority of abusers are female is child abuse: women are much more likely to batter their children than men.

December 15, 2011

Grim, crime-wracked, post-apocalyptic Toronto ranks … 52nd most dangerous in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:29

Everyone in Canada knows that Toronto is a cess-pit of crime where the oppressed citizenry huddle in fear, while idyllic Victoria is a benign, peaceful enclave of happiness. But what we know just ain’t so:

Toronto ranks 52nd among cities and towns in the country for the label “most dangerous” according to Maclean’s. Victoria, BC? Far from being a peaceful place, ranks second in the country after Prince George, BC. In fact, BC has four of the top ten dangerous cities, while Ontario’s most dangerous place, Belleville, clocks in at number 11.

December 14, 2011

“‘They’ve been very draconian,’ Gingrich said, meaning it as a compliment”

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:54

Jacob Sullum on the GOP’s current front-runner for the 2012 presidential nomination:

The first time Newt Gingrich disgusted me was in 1995, when the freshly installed speaker of the House proposed the death penalty for drug smugglers. Fifteen years later, I had a similar response when Gingrich demanded government action to stop Muslims from building a mosque near the site of the World Trade Center.

From the perspective of someone who wants to minimize the role of government in every aspect of our lives, Gingrich is bad in the ways conservatives tend to be bad—and then some. At the same time, he is generally not good in the ways conservatives tend to be good, which makes me wonder why anyone would prefer him to Mitt Romney as a presidential candidate.

Gingrich’s bloodthirsty enthusiasm for the never-ending, always-failing war on drugs is especially appalling because he casually dismissed his own pot smoking as “a sign that we were alive and in graduate school in that era.” Last month he expressed admiration for Singapore’s drug policy, which includes forcible testing of suspected drug users, long prison sentences for possession, and mandatory execution of anyone caught with more than a specified amount. “They’ve been very draconian,” Gingrich said, meaning it as a compliment.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress