F.A.C.T. Information: Domestic Violence
More great information is available through F.A.C.T. See our home page at www.fact.on.ca

And what is the memory that's valued so highly
that we keep it alive in that flame?
What's the commitment for those who have died,
when we cry out they have not died in vain?
We have come this far always believing that
justice would somehow prevail.
This is the burden, this is the promise,
and THIS is why we will not fail.

Don't let the light go out
It's lasted for so many years
Don't let the light go out
Let it shine through our love and our fears

by Peter Yarrow, from the song Light One Candle performed by Peter, Paul and Marry

The "Progressive Conservative" government of Ontario, as part of its "Common Sense Revolution" has introduced its "Common Sense Revulsion" in the form of Bill 117, "An Act to better protect victims of domestic violence", that will serve to promote gender stereotyping and false allegations in the Province of Ontario, as well as turning the fundamental rights and freedoms in this province into a joke. This bill has been passed and awaits proclamation. There is considerable material available about this Bill in the Ontario Legislature Section of this site.

Media coverage of this bill has been next to non-existant, with the exception of the courageous columnist, David Brown, of the Ottawa Citizen. The news articles are available on this site concerning 117 are:

The References Examining Assaults by Women on their Spouses or Male Partners, produced by Martin S. Fiebert of California State University, this is an annoted bibliograph of articles that deal with the spousal violence of women directed towards men. As the studies do show, violence is an equal gender issue, and that men and women are similarly in a spousal environment. This collection covers "117 scholarly investigations, 94 empirical studies and 23 reviews and/or analyses, which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners. The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies exceeds 72,000." This is also available in PDF format for printing.

Statistics Canada, one of the world leaders in producing one-sided, gender-specific statistics in their 1993 report on Violence Against Women has been largely panned criticised throughout the world for their politics over real analysis. This has carried over into their annual publication, in PDF format, entitled Family Violence in Canada: A Statistical Profile (StatsCan number 85-224) and which is available at no cost from their website. We have, for your convenience (and to make sure there is a real copy out there), the 1998 study and the 1999 study. Then in the 2000 study they did an interesting thing. Rather than simply regurgitating their 1993 study, they redid the study but this time they asked BOTH men and women the same questions! The end result, approximately equal rates of violence between men and women and, in terms of severe violence, some solid differences in the types of violence suffered. Of course, this has those who want bigotted numbers in a flap because they believe you need different standards --- after all a knife stuck in a man by a woman is not really the same things as a knife stuck in a woman by a man. Errr...really?.

Are women violent as well as men? We are told these days that this is not supposed to be possible and that there are no credible studies that indicated this. Pretty delusional, isn't it? Studies of female violence are actively suppressed by certain political groups, and by the governments (especially the Government of Canada) that sponsor them, but they are produced all the time and show amazingly consistent results with some disturbing trends. Martin S. Fiebert of the Department of Psychology, California State University, Long Beach, California has put together a list of 117 of the top references and made this available through http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm.

When you watch the government denial (as below), remember that this type of a co-operative, shared delusional state does count as a psychological disorder in DSM-IV (a foli à many).

Health Canada, under the leadership of an extremely incompetent and father-unfriendly minister named Alan Rock (the man who brought us unfair child support legislation, reintroduced the biases of the family law, and actively campaigned against shared parenting while the Minister of Justice) has received considerable criticism because 100% of their budget for family violence is spent on women exclusively, and much through the most anti-family of the Canadian groups. Stung by criticism, Health Canada put out a literature study, available in PDF format, named Husband Abuse: An Overview of Research and Perspectives which was prepared by Leslie Tutty for the Family Violence Prevention Unit, Health Canada in 1999. I suspect that Ms. Tutty did not choose to ignore the mounds of Canadian and international material, and are often alluded too. However, this report dismisses such material in its conclusions, and instead relied considerably on non-factual material put out by gender-biased groups. The conclusion? Male victims may exist but they are few and far between, especially as compared to the financial needs of the women's groups. As Tutty points out:

In contrast , those who argue that the relative risk of husband abuse is significantly less than that of wife assault tend to come from a feminist perspective . From this view, because men in our society are seen as having more power than women, aggressive behaviours by women against men in couple relationships must be seen differently from men�s violence toward women .
It is quote clear who is pulling the purse strings in this study.

Riding the Donkey Backwards: Men as the Unacceptable Victims of Marital Violence by Malcolm George from The Journal of Men's Studies, Volume 3, Number 2, November 1994, (p. 137-159). This is also available in PDF format. This is superb survey of the literature and research on domestic violence and lists a huge number of studies that contradict most of the major planks by which domestic violence is distorted a being a man-to-woman problem only. This should be read before things like the Health Canada dismissal of domestic violence with male victims to realise how much of the government position is belief, and how little is really researched.

Gender Differences in Patterns of Relationship Violence in Alberta by Marilyn I. Kwong, Kim Bartholomew and Donald G, Dutton from the Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science (1999), 31:3 (p. 150-160). This is also available in PDF format. This is a reanalysis of the data from the Kennedy and Dutton study (1987) that was used so strenuously in produing "protection of women" laws in Canada. Guess, what? Violence levels are reciprocal and not gender specific. The bidirectionality of violence is seen in the same proportions -- close to equal -- as seen in other studies around the world.

In 1999 the three university professors in Australia released information on domestic violence collected from the International Social Science Survey / Australia 1996/97. A report entitled "Domestic Violence in Australia: Are Women and Men Equally Violent?" written by Bruce Headey, Dorothy Scott and David de Vaus has been obtained and has been made available on this site in HTML format and PDF format. This report indicates that the proportion of men report being victims of domestic assaulted outnumber the proportion of women, although the difference is not supposed to meet the 95% significance criteria to be called "statisically significant". However, it should be noted that men report perpetrating violence against their partner a bit more often than women claim to have been assaulted, but that a (statistically) significant number of men report being assaulted where their female partner does not admit to having perpetrated the violence. The resulting physical injury claimed was approximately equal between the genders. The study confirms that where there is violence in a relationship, the violence tends to be mutual -- mutual violence occurring in about 50% of the relationships where there is violence -- confirming that a neat and tidy definition of a "victim" and a "perpetrator" as being difficult. The amount of intergenerational transfer of violence (i.e. if parents violent, then children will be violent) is shown to be very low.

In 1999 the National Institute of Justice of the U.S. Department of Justice released a report, available in PDF format, entitled Research in Brief: Findings About Partner Violence From the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study by Terrie E. Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi. This deals with a New Zealand study following a group of people throughout part of their lifetimes (a longitudinal study). This study received considerable press, including an article in a left-wing magazine called Mother Jones (available in HTML format) and considerable newpaper controversy documented in out news clipping section. The report indicates that women are more likely to report having committed physical violence against their mate than men, and are less likely to report having been victimised by domestic violence than are men when in a relationship of some permanence (i.e. not just "dating"). The perpetration of domestic violence by males was seen to be highly correlated with mental illness, while female perpetrators were no more inclined to be mentally ill than female victims. One of the strong predictors of being a perpetrator of domestic violence was the lack of both parents (i.e. father generally out) from the household while the perpetrator was a child -- a not surprising result since the elimination of fathers from the lives of their sons is strongly correlated to mental illnesses in the future. The trend is also there for daughters, but not as strongly as for boys.

In 1999 the Home Office of the government of the United Kingdom released the components of their 1996 British Crime Victimisation Study that was related to domestic violence. Two documents are available in PDF format only, a summary known as Research Findings No. 86: Domestic Violence: Findings from the BCS Self-Completion Questionnaire by Catriona Mirrlees-Black and Carole Byron and Domestic Violence: Findings from a new British Crime Survey self-completion questionnaire by Catriona Mirrlees-Black. The links are local links to avoid problems with downloading these documents with an overseas connection. The studies find that men and women are generally subject to equal rates of physical domestic violence. Men are more subject to physical violence in a married or common-law relationship, while women report more incidents of violence after separation. Women report injury in about 47% of cases while men report injury in about 31% of the cases. Approximately equal numbers of men and women report that they were attacked, but women have indicated that they were either more inclined to attack in intermittent violence cases, or to not remember who attacked first. Men were more inclined not to have been violent throughout the incident -- but overall, it indicates that in almost half of all cases both parties participated in the violence. The study does report indicate that women were about twice as likely to report violence against them as being chronic -- so of the chronic victims cases are about 1/3 were men and 2/3 were women, hardly the "vast majority" that the authors allude to. The report does attempt to rationalise significant findings with the mythical political correctness, but the truth of the numbers does show through. The report is very interesting reading.

On August 27, 1997, the American Medical Association in The Journal of The American Medical Association, reported a study that showed Men Are Victims of Domestic Violence as Much as Women. This was a study of the emergency department of a large urban hospital. This study "Domestic Violence in an Inner-City ED" by Amy A Amy, Todd G. Nick, Steven J Weiss, Debra Houry and Trevor Mills was pubished in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, the Journal of the American College of Emergency Physicians, August 1997, Volume 30, Number 2, p. 190-197. A gender-neutral test was conducted to determine if the patient in emergency was a victim of domestic violence. This study found that, of those who sought assistance for their injuries in the emergency department of the hospital were approximately equal in numbers of men and women. Furthermore, due to the pressure received by these researchers, they also note: "There is an expressed fear among some that recognition of DV by women directed against men will deemphasize the importance of providing services to women. Recognition of the global nature of violence may be more realistic than assuming that only women are victims." Such is the nature of goals of this section of the FACT website.

Intimate Violence in Canada and the United States: A Cross-National Comparison by Elaine Grandin and Eugen Lupri as published in the Journal of Domestic Violence, Volume 12, Number 4, 1997, p. 417-443. This article compares self-reported violence in the United States and Canada [different studies used] and compares the values between the two countries. Amongst the results is that Canadian men and women indicated that they were more inclined not to have committed a single act of domestic violence than the corresponding Americans. In addition, almost 1 in 5 Canadian men admitted to at least one act of violence while about 1 in 4 Canadian women reported being violent. This compares to about 1 in 10 American men and 1 in 8 American women. This document is also available in PDF format.

Police sensitivity training takes a hit
Wednesday, October 28, 1998 by Donna Laframboise, National Post

New Justice Department Findings Show Domestic Violence Advocates have Exaggerated Statistics, Women's Group Says
August 26, 1997, by Cathy Young - from Men's Rights (NB. US article, in PDF format)

American Medical Association - Men Are Victims of Domestic Violence as Much as Women
August 27, 1997, The Journal of The American Medical Association

The War Against Boys, October 24, 1996, Boston Globe newspaper

Abuse, Indeed! by Ron Montgomery, Balance Magazine, spring 1998 edition

An Update on the Progress of Alberta, Canada's Bill 214

(Victims of Domestic Violence Act) by Garth Wood, Associate Editor, Balance Magazine, December 29, 1996

Women's Shelter Movement Blamed for Denying Husband-Battering

The Research on Husband Battering

Studies on Spousal Abuse

The following statistics were provided by The Easton Alliance For the Prevention of Family Violence, a centre to help abused men, Toronto, Ontario, Canada (416) 691-1113,

Henton, Cate, Koval, Lloyd, and Christopher (1983) discovered that 78 out of 644 high school students had experienced courtship violence. A closer examination of 70 students revealed that 50 students (71.4%) reported that at some time, each partner had assumed the role of both victim and aggressor. Of the remaining 28.6%, the relationships were described as follows: 1.4% - male abuser only; 5.7% - female abuser only; 8.6% - abused male only; and 12.9% - abused female only.

Henton, Cate, Koval, Lloyd, and Christopher (1982) found that their sample of 355 college students yielded 79 who had experienced premaritalviolence. Once again, nearly 70% (53 of 79) were involved in relationships in which the abuse was mutual. Of the remaining students, 10% were inrelationships where the male was the only abuser, while 22% said that the female was the sole abuser. These studies indicate that much of courtship violence is mutual, but when it is not, the female is just as likely to be the sole abuser as the male.

Straus et al. (1980) reported that out of a nationally representative sample of 2,143 couples in 1975, 28% had experienced violence at some point in their marriage, and 16% had experienced violence within the past year. In nearly half of those families, the abuse was mutual (i.e., both spouses had committed a violent act). Of the remaining couples, the husband alone was violent in 27.7% of the cases, while the wife alone was violent in 22.7%. Only slight differences between husbands and wives were found in the annual incidence rates of overall violence - 12.1 per 100 husbands compared to 11.6 per 100 wives. The mean frequency of violent acts in 1975 for men was 8.8 and 10.3 for women. When examining severe violence, women were more violent than men. Severe wife-to-husband violence occurred in 4.6 out of 100 families, while the rate for severe husband-to-wife violence was 3.8 out of 100 families

Ten years later, the overall rate of violence by husbands had declined slightly, but violence by wives showed a small increase. Straus and Gelles (1986) in a telephone survey of 3,520 households, discovered that the rate of overall violence by husbands dropped to 11.3 (from 12.1), while wife-to-husband violence rose to 12.1 (from 11.6). The rate of severe violence by men in 1985 was 3.0, down from 3.8, and the rate of women was 4.4, down from 4.6.

An unquestioned belief about human behaviour is that men are more aggressive than women. Yet when Frodi, Ropert-Thome, and Macauley (1977)surveyed the empirical literature on aggression, they found that 61 percent of all studies reviewed did not show men to be more aggressive than women,and that "....women [did not show] consistently lower tendencies than men to be physically aggressive. "

The inter-generational transmission of violence by abusive wives to their children has been demonstrated by Walker (1984). In her study of over 400 battered wives, 29% of the wives and 35% of the battering husbands had witnessed their mother inflicting violence upon their father during childhood.

Reena Sommer, Gordon E. Barnes and Robert P. Murray (1991), in a study of 1257 (615 male and 642 females) Winnipeg residents, found that approximately 39 percent (39.1%) of married or cohabiting females participated in at least one form of spouse abuse with their current partner.

The following stats were provided by The Men`s Television Network, (905) 898-1107

M. McLeod, researcher, found violence against men is more destructive than violence against women. Her study revealed that women utilized weapons in 80% of cases. M. McLeod, "Women Against Men", Justice Quarterly, 1, 1984

A study of 150 Quaker families found the incidence of severe wife-to-husband violence to be three times that of husband-to-wife violence. Brutz and Ingoldsby, 1984

Research confirms that male victims of severe violence by female partners encounter widespread bias if they try to get the authorities involved. AnsonShupe, Indiana University/Purdue University, 1994

In a 1986 study, Professor Eugen Lupri found the overall violence index was 17.8% for men and 23.3% for women. Eugen Lupri, University of Calgary, 1986

Under Attack:The lonely cry of battered husbands.
by Karen Woodstra, feature article, The Toronto Sun, Fathers Day, 1994

New Book
Tragic Tolerance .... of Domestic Violence
by Paul Szabo, Member of Parliament of Canada

This is a consolidation of surfing the net and doing a lot of research. He plageurizes from Christina Hoff Somers, Gelles, Straus, Children's Rights Council video tape on the Illinois Visitation Interference law, Richard Gardner, The Journal of the American Medical Association article "Battered Men" and just about everything you've read concerning domestic violence of men. It has stats on the fact that 25% of women going to battered women's shelters are not battered but are using them as a hostel and that the gender feminists want to build up the stats on abused women. It has some interesting testimony from the Special Joint Committee on Custody and Access. Paul Szabo was on the panel for some of the Toronto, Ontario hearings. It's great!!! We have the complete book on this website, click here. The book was paid for by the taxpayors of Canada and is free!!!!

Paul Szabo
Member of Parliament, Mississauga South
Room 175
Confederation Building
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1A 0A6
(613) 992-4848 or fax: (613) 996-3267
In Canada, you can mail the above address without any postage
or
1684 Lakeshore Rd. W., Unit 20
Mississauga, Ontario L5J 1J5
(905) 822-2111 fax: (905) 822-2115


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