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October 17, 2001

Agenda Over Fact

By Paul Craig Roberts

Three years ago I concluded a sixteen-year stint as a Business Week columnist with the observation: “As the growing emphasis on feelings crowds out reason, facts will play a smaller role in public discourse.”

That was the safest prediction any economist ever made. Respect for facts has a tenuous hold on the allegiance of public policymakers, journalists, academics, and many others with agendas unsupported by the facts.

Recently, a history professor wrote a book citing sources that don’t exist. What was important to the professor was not truth, but making a case against gun ownership.

To further their agendas, other professors have fabricated life stories for themselves. A professor in Maryland passed himself off as a Vietnam veteran and told stories about events that never happened. Another at Columbia created a history of himself as a Palestinian refugee. One woman won a Nobel Prize in Literature for a fabricated biography. Even some scientists have made up global warming scenarios in order to achieve their environmental objectives.

In a civilization in which so much depends on adherence to fact, it is a scary thing to experience fact playing second fiddle to emotions. If fact becomes dispensable, what becomes of law, crime and punishment, trials, contracts, insurance, finance, technology, science, and identity?

Almost anywhere we look, we can find examples of propaganda crowding out truth. Consider the issue of domestic violence.

October is Domestic Violence Awareness month. The premise of domestic violence is that it is something men do to women. A current issue of National Review, for example, has a two-page add sponsored by the tobacco company Philip Morris. One page has the face of an attractive young woman. The other page is text designed to arouse anger at men:

“He said he beat me because I deserved it. Now I know I deserve better.” “‘He tried to strangle me last night.’ Melissa cried as she wrote these words, eight months pregnant and seeking an order of protection from her husband. Their high school romance had seemed like a fairy tale, but when the honeymoon ended the beatings began.”

There are shelters for battered women, domestic violence coordinating councils, and magazine and newspaper articles and advertisements that encourage women to report their husbands to the police just as they would report any other criminal.

Seminars warn women that a raised male voice constitutes abuse and is a prelude to a beating.

Feminists believe that the percentage of men who are abusers is far higher than arrest records indicate. From this belief they conclude that hoards of abused women are sufering in silence.

How many times have you read: “In the U.S. a man beats a woman every 12 seconds”? Have you ever wondered where these statistics come from or how often women batter men?

In his book, “The Revolt of the Primitive,” Howard S. Schwartz shows that the one-sided portrait of men as abusers of women is constructed out of fabrications and selective reporting of real studies.

The most extensive data base on domestic violence is the National Family Violence Survey, funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health and supervised by Murray A. Straus and Richard J. Gelles. Their conclusion that women are as likely to be violent and to initiate violence as men is one of the best replicated findings in all of social science.

The feminist claim that 12%-!5% of men are abusers comes from a survey, which reported that10.8 percent of the men committed minor acts of violence and 2.5% committed more severe acts. The same survey found that 12.4% of women committed minor acts and 4.7% committed major acts of violence. Moreover, 67% of the women said they had initiated the violence. Only 26% of the women blamed the male.

Ironically, it is mainly uninformed males, such as Dan Rather and Philips Morris executives, who spread the feminist propaganda. When Dan Rather termed Super Bowl Sunday “a day of dread for American women,” he was giving credibility to the feminist claim that wife beatings shot up 40% on the day of the big game. This feminist hoax was finally exposed by Ken Ringle in the Washington Post.

When confronted with their false reporting, feminists say that they trust their feelings about men more than “gender-biased statistics.” Like others, they are not interested in information that gets in the way of an agenda.

Paul Craig Roberts is the author (with Lawrence M. Stratton) of The New Color Line : How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy

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Ultra-successful brainwashing of the public by the media

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If you want to find an example of ultra-successful brainwashing of the public by the media, you need look no further than the subject of domestic violence; though I have to admit that child abuse runs it a close second. If you ask the man-in-the-street what he thinks domestic violence is, he will probably tell you that it is men attacking women within the family. If you further ask him why he thinks this, he will tell you that he has heard it many times in TV news broadcasts, read about it in newspapers and magazines and has seen adverts about it on television.

Exactly! In a word he has been brainwashed and, sadly, he is by no means alone; he is in the company of his wife, his neighbours, his children's teachers, his bank manager and countless politicians. They are all totally ignorant of the true facts about domestic violence. So where can these poor beleaguered souls discover the truth about this important problem which constantly batters their ears and eyeballs? The sad answer is, it's all around them if only they use their eyes and their ears.

In January 1999 the UK Government's Home Office published the results of a survey into domestic violence. It was the biggest ever carried out anywhere in the world and involved more than 10,000 men and women. It was called Study 191 and it stated, quite categorically, that 4.2% of men and 4.2% of women perpetrate the crime of domestic violence. In other words they had discovered that men and women are equally violent.

Surprised? Don't be. It's nothing new and to my knowledge (and to anyone else's who has researched the matter) it has been known for at least 30 years.

The persistent claim that the overwhelming majority of victims of domestic violence are women is not supported by any impartial research, either in the UK or elsewhere. The results of all reputable gender-neutral studies of domestic violence in couple relationships, published to date, indicate that there is an almost equal numerical culpability between men and women.

We hear much today about the need for women's refuges where all those women who are `regularly' beaten up by men can flee with their children. The first such refuge in this country (indeed in the world) was opened by Erin Pizzey in London, back in 1971. She was a feminist and thought that women needed to be helped. But in her book Prone to Violence, published in 1982, she stated that, of the first 100 women who entered that refuge, 64 of them were as violent, or more violent, than the men they were allegedly running away from. So with this evidence available for over 20 years, why are the public and the politicians so ignorant of it? The simple answer is: the book was censored. Erin Pizzey received death threats from feminists in the UK who, at that time, were riding on the crest of a powerful wave, and Erin had to leave the country.

I first heard about the book eight years ago so I decided to buy a copy. I was told that it was out of print. I decided to try the massive Internet booksellers Amazon who boasted that they could supply any book. When I visited their site I asked for the titles of all the books written by Erin Pizzey (she's written about 12). Down scrolled a list of all her books - all except Prone to Violence. Strange! Are you now thinking the unthinkable, that book censorship is alive and well in the UK? You are so right!

Having failed to buy a copy, I decided to borrow one. I tried my local library but they told me that they did not have a copy. I therefore filled in the necessary card, and paid the fee, for them to borrow a copy from another library in the UK. I was eventually informed that there was not a single copy of the book in any library in the country. Fortunately, having had experience in the publishing business, I knew that a copy of every book published in the UK has to be sent, free, to the National Library, by the publisher. I told my library this and asked them to borrow a copy from them. They did, and I was eventually able to read the book. A year or so later, Prone to Violence was published on the Internet. The cenosrship had eventually failed and now anyone can download the entire book free.

Now that governments and other agencies can no longer censor books which appear on the internet, does it surprise you that we constantly hear of how much "damage" merely being on the Internet does to children? Increasingly politicians and other censorship angents are trying to take some sort of control of the Internet no matter how feeble the reason. Freedom to think is a constant threat to politicians. This complete censorship of domestic violence has now been replaced by a one-sided presentation of the "facts" of domestic violence with the feminist spin machine presenting carefully selected "facts" to present to the public in an effort to suggest that domestic violence is a sex issue, and not showing it in its true colours as a social issue. Violence in couple relationships has always existed. Some examples of male victims include Abraham Lincoln, and more recently, Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne, to name but a few. But do you think any of these gentlemen would want it noised abroad that they were attacked by their wives? I hardly think so. Just imagine what such publicity would have done to their macho images. And here we have a genuine problem but one which is slowly being solved. Men don't like to admit that they are attacked by their wives or girlfriends; hence they are loathe to admit it. In the UK the men's civil rights charity, ManKind, has over the past year, set up helplines for male victims all over the country. How many calls do they get? One of the men who mans one of the lines recently told me that he gets on average 15 every day; and that's only in one area of the south of England.

I know four men who have suffered domestic violence at the hands of their wives. The first woke up one morning to find his wife sitting on the side of his bed, striking matches and throwing them on the sheets in an effort to set him alight, another told me of the time he was left lying injured and bleeding on the floor of his kitchen, after being attacked by his wife, and when the police arrived, they stepped over him to go to his wife to ask if she was all right. A third man had his skull and several ribs fractured by his wife using an iron bar, but still stayed with her until the day she put crushed glass in his dinner. When blood started pouring out of his mouth, he realised it was time to move out. A fourth stands at six feet four, is a black belt in karate and his wife constantly bombards him with verbal abuse. He will not hit her because he knows very well that if he does the police will immediately arrest him and make him leave his home.

If you wish to delve further into the truth about domestic violence, I suggest you obtain a copy of The A to Z of D.V. complied by Martin S Fiebert, Ph.D. of the Department of Psychology, California State University. This is a collection of 95 scholarly investigations, 79 empirical studies and 16 reviews and analyses, covering over 60,000 case studies. Together, this massive volume of evidence proves beyond doubt that women are as physically aggressive, if not more so, in relationships with their spouses than men. All this is freely available on the Internet.

The majority of male victims feel that the police and social agencies are generally unsympathetic to their plight and in some cases antagonistic. A Dispatches programme, broadcast in the UK on 7th January 1999 reported on the experiences of 100 male victims of domestic violence and found that: 30% had been attacked while asleep; 25% had been kicked in the genitals; 25% of the male victims had themselves been arrested after seeking police help, and 89% felt that the police had not taken their complaints seriously. Only 7% of the female assailants had been arrested and none was subsequently charged.

Despite the huge body of research I have referred to above, the assumption that women are always the victims and men the victimisers still largely underpins government and public policy and is the reason for giving many millioins of pounds of public money to women's groups and refuges every year, and none to help male victims. There are over 445 refuges for "battered" women in England and Wales where women can flee and take their children. At the moment, in the UK there are just two refuges for men, one opened in December 2003 and the other, which is the only one exclusively for men, in January 2004.

Given the foregoing, it is not surprising that men do not report instances of domestic violence against them, and it is this problem that the UK men's rights charity ManKind is now busy addressing. Their DV posters are being increasingly seen in police stations, libraries and on notice-boards as more and more people are becoming aware of the truth of the situation and are willing to help. One of the posters shows a man with an injured face bearing the caption, "The `garage door' he bumped into last night was female." This is an attempt to urge men to report domestic violence as readily as women do. The latest surveys show that women are five times more likely than men to report domestic violence against them.

Domestic violence is not a sex issue, it is a social issue, and until both sides of the problem are acknowledged and addressed by those who claim to be concerned about the matter, no cure will be found.