{"id":12696,"date":"2011-12-21T10:18:54","date_gmt":"2011-12-21T15:18:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=12696"},"modified":"2014-07-22T10:14:22","modified_gmt":"2014-07-22T15:14:22","slug":"barbara-kay-spousal-abuse-is-remarkably-gender-balanced","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/12\/21\/barbara-kay-spousal-abuse-is-remarkably-gender-balanced\/","title":{"rendered":"Barbara Kay: Spousal abuse is remarkably gender-balanced"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> reveals the awkward truth that nearly half of all spousal abuse is by female partners:<\/p>\n

\n

One of first-wave feminism\u2019s great achievements in the 1970s was to end the denial surrounding wife abuse in even the \u201cbest\u201d homes. Resources for abused women proliferated. Traditional social, judicial and political attitudes toward violence against women were cleansed and reconstructed along feminist-designed lines.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 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 \u201cdisappeared\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

(While the CDC survey does not reference Canadian data, our IPV statistics vary significantly from the U.S.\u2019s in certain respects. \u201cMinor\u201d wife assault rates as measured on the commonly employed Conflict Tactics Scale are identical, but \u201csevere violence\u201d rates in Canada fall as the violence ratchets up. For \u201ckicking\u201d and \u201chitting,\u201d Canadian rates were 80% of the American rate; for \u201cbeat up,\u201d they were 25%; and for \u201cthreatened with or used a gun\/knife,\u201d they were only 17%.)<\/p>\n

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 \u201cDomestic Violence Prevention and Reduction,\u201d and sure enough, it defines domestic violence as \u201cintimate partner violence against women,\u201d recommending only that government work \u201cto bridge gaps in the services and systems designed to protect women and children.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

One area where the majority of abusers are female is child abuse: women are much more likely to batter their children than men.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s great achievements in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,9,28],"tags":[374,343,968,290,43],"class_list":["post-12696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-law","category-media","tag-children","tag-crimeandpunishment","tag-family","tag-statistics","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3iM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12696"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12698,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12696\/revisions\/12698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}