Statistical Shenanigans

Carey Roberts

Sometimes it seems the Gender Warriors will stop at nothing to get their way.

A number of years ago University of Delaware professor Suzanne Steinmetz published an article called the “The Battered Husband Syndrome.” After culling the findings from five surveys on domestic violence, Steinmetz reached an unexpected conclusion: wives were just as likely as their husbands to kick, punch, stab, and otherwise physically aggress against their spouses.

Steinmetz’s conclusion was so startling that she quickly became a media darling, appearing on the Phil Donahue show and having her work featured in a front-page story in Time magazine.

But the radical feminists were none-too-pleased with Steinmetz’s revisionism, and they knew something had to be done. So they placed Steinmetz on their hit list.

The fem-thugs began by calling University of Delaware faculty members, deriding Steinmetz’s work as “anti-feminist.” Then they leveled threats against Steinmetz and her children. Sponsors of her speaking engagements started to receive threatening phone calls. Finally, a bomb threat was called in to a meeting where Steinmetz was scheduled to speak. [www.law.fsu.edu/journals/lawreview/downloads/304/kelly.pdf]

Bullying tactics like these may be acceptable in totalitarian states, but are an anathema to an open democracy that cherishes tolerance and freedom of speech.

The intimidation campaign succeeded in forcing professor Steinmetz to leave her teaching post. But the feminists’ Mafia-like tactics ultimately backfired when they were exposed for all to see in Phil Cook’s 1997 book, Abused Men: The Hidden Side of Domestic Violence.

So the Sisterhood turned from intimidation to propaganda -- the old-fashioned, in-your-face type. Here are just a few of their neo-Leninist tactics:

-- Definitional deception: Define “violence” so broadly that it includes any unpleasant interaction a woman might have with a male.

-- Ideological idiocy: Claim that men cling to their power by gleefully abusing women. And since women don’t have any power, it’s impossible for them to be violent.

-- Data deluge: Repeat absurd claims like “women represent 95% of DV victims” so often as to drown out the truth.

-- Hypothesis hi-jinks: Don’t consider the possibility of female-initiated violence, and that way you don’t bother to survey the effects of domestic violence on men.

-- Medical mumbo-jumbo: Conjure up a pseudo-scientific diagnosis like “battered woman’s syndrome” to justify the most egregious acts of female violence.

-- Statistical shenanigans: Always present your statistics in nice round numbers like 75%. That way if you are challenged, you can always fall back and say the number is an “estimate.”

-- Shaming and vilification: If all else fails, malign anyone who doesn’t agree with your claims is a “woman-hater” or “sub-consciously sexist.”

No wonder that John Leo, columnist for US News and World Report, once described the feminist DV cover-up this way: “news stories on domestic violence are carefully crafted, consistently unreliable, and often just wrong.”

There’s a good reason for this spate of Ms.-information. The rad-fems want to hoodwink the public and politicians that there’s an epidemic of violence against women out there, and it’s spiraling out of control. Predictably, the cure for that epidemic is a new federal program that carries a hefty price tag.

The name for that federal program is the Violence Against Women Act, first signed into law by President Clinton in 1994. Thanks to VAWA, American taxpayers now cough up $1 billion a year – that’s billion with a “b” -- to help stop family violence.

But the truth is, VAWA is a Trojan Horse. If its goal was to help families, it would promote couple counseling and reconciliation. If its purpose was to assure gender equity, VAWA would also provide services for victimized men. If its aim was to thwart partner aggression, it would feature anger management classes for abusive women.

VAWA is not about helping families. This law is about demonizing men and sowing fear in the hearts of impressionable women. VAWA seeks to escalate the battle of the sexes into a gender war. No wonder so many eligible bachelors are now saying, “Thanks but no thanks.”

History teaches that the family is one of the strongest bulwarks against the centralization of governmental power. The proponents of VAWA seek to weaken and ultimately reconfigure the traditional family. That’s their socialist vision of the future.