"Proposals for Consultation on the Mayor’s Domestic Violence Strategy"

Email: Head.Office@mankind.co.uk v1 Fax: 0207-493-4935

 Introduction a - b

Summary i - iii

Response 1 - 16

Appendix 17 - 28

1. SAFE - Biographies page 17
2. Suicide policeman
3. NZ man battered
4. Melanie Oct 24^th1999
5. 67% Alberta survey
6. Donna Aug 1^st 2000
7. Inspector General $1.1m wasted page 23
8. Melanie Feb 20^th 1999 2 pages
9. Donna Rudy Clash 14/5/01 page 26
10. Reena Sommers - female violence
11. Our bodies Uni. of Chicago page 28
12. Melanie Nov 19^th 2000 2 pages
13. war against boys June 18^th 2000 hoff somers
14. Melanie – Men victim so f mythology
15. Linda Slobodian – Nov 6^th 2000statistics Canada

We have grave doubts concerning whether a responses to the above consultation paper is worth serious effort. It recommendations are a forgone conclusions.

Mankind is a men’s and fathers civil rights charity. We are committed to equality and to the full measure of justice to all citizens irrespective of whether they are male or female.

For many years the emphasis of many agencies has been on the perceived victim role and subservient position of women, yet not a moment has been spent looking at the hundreds of instances where men are far more disadvantaged then women.

With regards domestic violence we have built up a considerable expertise in patterns and motivations of the sometimes false or exaggerated allegations made during custody battles. To understand the dynamics of the situation we have had to extend our knowledge base into associated areas including murder – a form of domestic violence not readily associated as such in the public’s mind.

That is why we can confidently conclude that the proposals as they now stand will not work.

That is why we were able to profile the killers of Damilola Taylor within days – certainly long before any other organisation and why we can give you now a profile of why, in the very recent case, the policemen probably killed his family and then himself. The psychiatrist interviewed on Channel 4 News got it nearly right, except for his last few sentences.

We have some experience of dealing with domestic violence forums and of the women (and the few men) who usually staff these reference groups.

At a meeting of the Met Police domestic violence forum we discovered that all the women there (there were no other male delegates) though frantically citing reports in support of doing more had, in reality, never read them. They had no idea that the report they were quoting, "Counting the Cost" by Prof. Stanko, was based on only 43 women’s response in the untypical borough of Hackney.

No doubt this genre of women will again be highly visible in this London-wide proposal to curb domestic violence (aka DV ). Our experience shows that the protagonists inhabit not only the police policy steering committee but also the GLA’s and are driven more by ideology than accuracy.

It concluded that the factors relating to domestic violence were :-

1. lower income groups,
2. persons living in council /social need housing,
3. persons who were divorced and separated who subsequently undertook serial affairs,
4. age and immaturity, ie under 24,
5. casual relationships, ie boy friend/ girl friend, and
6. cohabiting couples, where cohabitation is now shown to last on average less than 18 months.

There is overwhelming evidence from all corners of the world that undercut the very ground upon which the present domestic violence edifice is being built. HOS 191 and every other longitudinal study show women initiating violence more often than men. In addition women far from being traumatised by domestic violence are actually more able to cope with the psychological pressures than men.

This point will result - if the Home Office guidelines are strictly interpreted and enforced - in far more women being convicted of domestic violence than men for physical assault.

And if the guidelines are strictly interpreted and enforced with regard the Home Office’s new definition of domestic violence, ie emotional manipulation financial and psychological intimidation, then 90% of all adult women will be under threat of imprisonment.

We can even predict what the results will be if the GLA buys into the present false mantra.

1. Domestic violence, far from going down, will go up.
2. Domestic violence will be overshadowed by a steady increase in murders.
3. Injuries sustained in domestic violence incidents will become more severe as the punitive nature of GLA policies unfold.
4. Within 5 years scenes reminiscent of the policemen who recently murdered his family and then himself will become far more common place.
5. The European Court will rule that the GLA policy is sexist and discriminatory.
6. A Judicial Review may force the issue of skewed gender treatment by the GLA.
7. Following this more women will be arrested, as Californians painfully found out in 1994, as police enforce the letter of the gender-neutral law.

In the meantime it is more than appropriate to quote extracts from Warren Farrell’s book "Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say", (pages 141 – 156). For it seems that evidence, as we have seen in the Canadian example, has been systematically suppressed and the GLA is therefore now acting on very questionable "evidence". That evidence has been available since the 1970’s. For example, the National Family Violence Survey (US) found that " ….. compared with 1975 … severe violence against wives had in 1992 decreased by 48% but violence against husbands (by wives) had decreased only 2%. Although overall violence (including minor violence like shoving or slapping) against women decreased, overall violence against men increased." [37] ("Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say", page 142). For ease of comprehension the reference numbers [xx] will remain the same as those found in the above book.

This building on shaky foundations leads us to the questions, "Has violence against men been censored out of public life ? And, if so, why ? Is this why we don’t know about it ?"

And at an evermore personal level lets not forget that a portion of government funding to a professor usually goes to the university and lets not also forget that the kudos of being given a multi-million pound budget reflects well on the university attractiveness to students and other sponsors.

If we look at a well known instance of direct censorship we see that the American researcher Suzanne Steinmetz ("The Battered Husband Syndrome" article, 1978, [38] received threats.

This isn't unique, the founder of the first ever women’s refuge in 1971, Erin Pizzey, had the same sort of experience. She was driven out of England by the level of the threats made against her by lesbian / radical feminists. In England she was persecuted to such an extent by these awful women that she had to have a police escort all around England when publicising her book "PRONE TO VIOLENCE". She also had to face placards and jeering women whenever she tried to speak at public events. The bomb squad warned her to have to have all her post delivered to them first. This was in the days of The Angry Brigade (and Moscow gold). Some senior figures have now settled into well paid respectable jobs in public life and can be found at senior levels within our institutions.

Later, when she was working in the US helping battered women there she received threats and to show 'they' meant business her pet dog was shot and then dumped on her front doorstep on Christmas day.

Although the group of women never harmed Steinmetz physically, they did try to damage her career. It wasn't until many years later that she learned that these women had secretly contacted female faculty members at the university where she was employed to urge the women to work against her for promotion and tenure. Similar dysfunctional women, driven by ideology, drove Erin Pizzey out of her Refuge and the movement has remained captured by them ever since (see footnotes 12 and 13).

Richard Gelles, the co-pioneer with Suzanne Steinmetz and Murray Straus of these early studies, reports that Straus was rarely invited to speak at conferences on domestic violence after the three of them published their initial studies.

When he was, he was unable to complete his presentation because of yells and shouts from the audience that stopped only when he was driven from stage. [40]

The indirect form of censorship is not only more numerous but is more insidious and attacks the very vitals of the ethos that is academia and learning.

Knowledge and true progress, as we Europeans have learnt to our cost, can only thrive in a free and liberal environment uncluttered by party dogma of either the tyrannical left or the fascist right.

In Canada, a University of Alberta study found 12% of husbands were victims of violence by their wives and 11% of wives were victims, but only the violence against women was published. [43] This 1987 survey paved the way for the feminist legal academic Catherine MacKinnon to draft legislation that was later accept by the Canadian parliament. The official enquiry leading up to this cost $10 million dollars.

When a Canadian professor found out about this suppression by the Canadian Journal of Sociology, he requested to see the data and was refused. [45] It was only when he exposed the refusal in his next book, combined with another three more years of pressure, that the 46% female violence figure was released and published [46] By that time (1997), Canadian policy giving government support for abused women but not abused men had become entrenched. With the entrenchment came entrenched views petrified into bureaucracies together with the private funding sources such as Canada’s "United Way".

The research director, when asked whether the research to determine need had included abused men and children, answered "No". [47]

The answer leads straight back to where we started. To R. L. McNeely, and the name of the game namely, survival, dilemma, loyalty and kudos. If this seems too incredulous put the same forces into a commercial or industrial setting. The answers then become even more obvious. We all too readily accept the official version. Only recently the truth has emerged about the slaying of the Black Panther group in Chicago. They didn’t provoke the shoot out – it was the police.

If men have learned from an early age never to hit a woman, even when provoked, then why do some men batter their partner ? The same question is also true of women. Why do women batter children and men ? The answer (and causation) is not hard to find. Abuse is, in most cases, the result of ‘power’ and perhaps ironically the sense of powerlessness. More research needs to be undertaken but it looks, according to some commentators, as if the abuse inflicted by a mother is more profound, damaging and lasting than abuse inflicted by fathers.

Think how often you hear about mothers abandoning their babies or putting their infant into as the Americans would say "a dumpster". Isn’t this domestic violence resolving itself as child abuse ? A mother has the power to kill and statistically mother kill far more frequently than fathers. But isn’t it almost always a young single mom with few resources who is more likely to kill ?

Why are women more likely to abuse men who are powerless while curiously, men are more likely to protect women who are powerless?

Or, put another way (just to ensure there is no doubt), why, if he feels powerless, is he more likely to be abusive towards her and she is also more likely to feel inclined to be abusive toward him ?

This also holds true among lesbian women – where the incidence of domestic violence is far higher than in the normal population. The abused woman in a lesbian relationship was more likely to feel that ‘the problem’ of the batterer was dependence, not outright power. [70] With the GLA policy so committed to viewing only women as victims which partner will receive protection in same sex couples ?

So among women, feelings of power or powerlessness - or some combination - seem in various ways to be the catalyst leading to abuse. Women generally have a support system built up and focused around the home. A man, if he does have a support system, has it centred at his place of work. His would-be mentors are dispersed after work hours while hers always remain close at hand.

For men, it would seem, the picture is somewhat different. In 1997, the American Psychological Association's official journal, the "Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology", found domestic violence by men was more likely to be associated with indicators of powerlessness than it was when women were violent. The researchers found that physical violence among men was more strongly associated with unemployment, low educational attainment, and few social support resources (see HOS 191). It is at this precise point that the fatal flaw in the GLA strategy becomes apparent. All the classical ingredients required for a Warrior Class then emerge, ie a class of males incapable of being influenced by rules or law enforcement agencies and who seek no compromise. A social subset can feel manipulated or targeted when, for instance domestic violence laws effectively brands every man guilty. They may feel it resembles shooting fish in a barrel and the dynamics can suddenly and violently erupt. Civil order may even breakdown completely.

With male unemployment at 300% greater than women’s, a tinderbox situation already exists. Those unemployment ratio levels have existed since the early 1990’s and have never been addressed. The only policies pursued by both Central and Local Gov’t have been to incentivise work for women and single mothers pushing low-achieving men further down the ladder of self improvement and betterment. For this, and other reasons, we predict that the policy will boomerang and London will see greater levels of domestic violence and more ‘no-go areas’. The far higher frequency of domestic violence now seen among lesbian women will begin to be seen in the normal heterosexual population.

As a local authority the GLA will have to overcome the resistance many people feel towards powerlessness. All too many people resist looking at the powerlessness of the batterer because we have all been assuming, in every case, that the batterer was a man. We didn't, and still don’t, want to blame a woman who was battered.

Yes, love can not only make us forgive but it can also blind us. HOS 191 fully shows this aspect when it reported " … half of those who were living with their assailant were still doing so at the time of the BCS interview". Love can make both people feel powerful or make them both feel powerless.

Today’s repertory of politically correct excuses means that if a woman batters a man, it is by definition in self-defence – after all, he has the power. This leads to a "victim-either-way" scenario and the resulting rationalisation leaves men feeling blamed either way. In this no-win situation tensions increase and increases the likelihood of the battering of a spouse or partner, leading to the break-up of the relationship. This leaves millions of children raised without the love of their Dads, and as fathers are the only socialising force children have, the spiral of anti-social behaviour is initiated. In cost-effective terms it is far more attractive to keep the family together and work to iron out problems as a united whole.

Otherwise the only beneficial facet is that it is mightily remunerative for the lawyers and therapists.

A man who once wrote to an "agony aunt" saying that his wife broke his arms and ribs when she threw a heavy chair at him finally filed for divorce. But this was only after she had frequently attacked him with her fingernails, often drawing blood from his face and neck. His training to ‘never hit a woman’ stopped him and countless other men, from retaliating. Ashamed of his wife (and himself to a degree), he made up lies when he visited hospital emergency rooms. He stayed in the marriage for the child’s protection, but when he finally filed for divorce, she then accused him of child molestation. Although he was acquitted, he nonetheless felt violated, devastated. [72]

Paradoxically, a man doesn't have the ability to ‘protect’ until he has the ability to stand up for himself. Sometimes, and this is always very hard for women particularly feminists to accept, the woman may be provoking him to stimulate passion and strength. Erin Pizzey calls this sort of woman prone to violence.

In brief, there is often an intricately woven dance going on, which makes one-sided blame totally inappropriate.

For instance the ‘1 in 4’ figures referring to the number of women who will experience domestic violence clashes with the known facts that only it only affects 4.2% of women. The figures, sometimes given for domestic violence admissions to Emergency Room overlook the simple fact that A & E departments simply couldn’t cope with that level of extra attrition. They are at over-capacity now.

But just how big is the problem of domestic violence that so vexes and absorbs so much time and energy ?

According to Women’s Aid’s own website (funded by the Department of Health) there are over 400 refuges in England and Wales for 'battered women' and their children. Anna Coote and Beatrice Campbell endorse this figure in their book "Sweet Freedom".

But there is not one publicly funded refuge for 'battered men'. Only ManKind is addressing this problem.

With a population in the region of 250 million there are 1,500 shelters for battered women in the United States or one shelter for every 166,666 citizens or one shelter per 83,333 women (by contrast there are 3,800 animal shelters [Schneider, 1990] ).

Will the vibrant policies adopted in the US (and the billions of dollars earmarked for VAWA and VAWA Mark 2) now set to be embraced by London see our ratio climb to 83,000 too ? And the expense, will that soar into the millions too ? If so, let’s do a numbers check first.

Speaking to former women’s refuge workers it is clear that many of the refuges take just a handful of women and children. "Jobs for the girls" is really how it is spent. "The money designed to give bed space for women and children goes into salaries for refuge workers and outreach workers etc. etc"

‘Women’s Aid’ who are perhaps the most well known organisation in this field, estimate that in 1995 "Around 50,000 women and children spent at least one night in a refuge in England during 1994-5 (WAFE Annual Survey, 1995, not published)".

Although 50,000 women and their children sounds impressive, it is only a measurement of "Bednights" and could be translated to mean only 125 women and children per Refuge. (50,000 / 400).

The population of England and Wales is in the region of 48 million, half of whom are women. Therefore 50,000 overnight stays represents only 0.2% of the female population. Cross-checking, 0.2% of 24 million amounts to 48,000.

The ‘Women’s Aid’ Report continues "Approximately two thirds of the refuge resident population are children (WAFE Annual Survey, Ball 1994). This key phrase means that mothers represented only 1/3 of bed occupancy. In other words, mothers and women constituted only 16,500 of the 50,000. And put another way 50,000 x 1/3 = No. Of women = 16,500 per annum /400 Refuges = 41 women per refuge per year.

Considering the funding, which runs into millions of pounds per annum, to keep these refuges open, by way of Gov’t grants Local Authority funds, private donations and lottery money, one must begin to question whether a 5 star hotel would not be a cheaper alternative.

The above brief calculations, of course, apply only to England and Wales. In Ulster there are currently an additional 400 bed spaces in fourteen hostels (known as refuges). In addition, there are 19 ‘move on’ houses for families who move out of the refuge. In the year 1998–99 1,154 women and 1,831 children were accommodated totalling 2,955. If the population of Ulster is in the region of 1.5m then this represents 0.197% of the whole population but only 0.0769% of the adult only population. In Scotland there are more.

The shortage of published information means that the above can only be conjectures and estimates. The whole matter of funding, misapplication of funds and value-for-money needs to be addressed. In the newly created "DV Industry" there is a need to publish reliable costs and numbers that would meet audit standards. Canadian columnist Donna Laframboise raised the same issue in her article of Saturday, Nov. 14^th 1998 in the National Post .

One shelter worker told us "You are right about there being no properly published information - the government doesn't care what happens to women and children, but just wants Women's Aid silenced."

A conference this November, chaired by Cherie Blair, is all about stopping men who have been convicted of domestic violence seeing their children. While we can certainly agree that there are some men and women who are violent and dangerous (and they should not be given access to their children under any circumstances) they represent but a very small number of cases. Our concern is the political implications behind this conference.

Women’s groups repeatedly depict men as dangerous oppressors at every opportunity never seeming to pause to consider that but for their father, a man, they wouldn’t exist. Even in Preliminary meeting with CAFCASS, to look into ways in which Family Courts and contact could be improved, these Women’s groups activists relentless tried to drive home their point, ad nausea, that in over 50% of divorces domestic violence is experienced. ManKind who requested their source challenged this every time. This which was never forthcoming.

A moments thought shows their assertion cannot be true (see footnote 16). What is more likely is that domestic violence is raised in court as an issue to secure custody.

In common with HOS 191, the latest StatsCan data from Canada indicating the domestic violence can represents a figure as low as 2%.

The fixation that men are always violent reduces Women's Aid and other groups to taking the view that they would like to see a reversal of the apparent presumption that contact is always good for a child. Indeed, their website says this explicitly. They would appear to prefer a regime where all men are presumed violent and only allowed to see their children on licence, once they have proven they are no danger. If this is equality, then we would ask those women’s groups to reverse the genders and see if it feels like equality to them ?

This anti-father approach is the model adopted in New Zealand and the result is that men are increasingly boycotting the system because it’s a No-Win situation for men. It is the innocent men caught up in the regime who find it particularly galling. Few people realise, and apparently this includes Woman’s Aid that the greatest threat to a child in terms of all types of abuse (up to and including that child’s murder) comes from women, ie it’s own mother.

If we truly, and not hypocritically, had the children’s best interests at heart we would not give custody to mothers, and certainly not automatic custody, until they had been psychology tested to ensure they could cope and represented no danger to the child.

Meanwhile the great majority of male victims of DV feel that the police and social agencies are generally unsympathetic to their plight (Study 191), and indeed in some cases antagonistic. A Dispatches programme broadcast on Channel 4 (January 7^th 1999) reported the experiences of 100 male victims of domestic violence by a female partner (10n). They found that:

Comparison of police statistics for male victims of domestic violence with the results of self-report studies suggests that there is gross under-reporting by men of domestic violence against them by women. Such reluctance stems in part from a perception that the police and other social agencies do usually not take their plight seriously.

Other barriers that appear to be unique to male victims is the shame or humiliation felt in admitting to being assaulted by a woman (particularly if she is physically smaller), the fear of being ridiculed or not believed, and an almost institutionalised presumption of guilt against them.

Additionally, for those with children, there is the sure and certain realisation that, regardless of who is at fault, if they complain, it is they who are likely to lose their homes and their children under a family law system hostile (or perceived to be hostile) to men and fathers.

The studies by Prof. Archer (10j) indicated that men actually show restraint and put up with a high level of violence by their wives or lovers. Indeed, Archer considered that women are encouraged to be violent towards men because women realise that men can generally be relied on not to hit back. A point hinted at in a recent report of one of Ms. Terri Moffitt’s more studies into DV.

Women's Aid throughout the yearlong meeting of the CAFCAS Advisory Board (2000-2001) insisted that domestic violence occurred in over half of all divorces. This is absurd simply because there are 150,000 divorces every year and 50% would mean that 75,000 domestic violence cases involving around 120,000 children would be heard in court, with Court Welfare Officers reports. This just doesn’t happen. Gov’t statistics don’t support the proposition. It doesn’t happen because Court Welfare Officers (CWO) file on average only 33,000 welfare reports per annum.

A moments thought shows the proposition cannot be true. What is more likely is that domestic violence is raised in court as an issue in order to secure custody – the silver bullet ploy.

Women's groups such as Women's Aid and Rape Crisis have outrageous 'factoids' (ie, fictitious facts) on their websites. One instance, from Rape Crisis, states that over 90% of all disabled women have been raped. How can anyone take that seriously ? Does this mean every time we see a woman in a wheelchair we will know for certain, because Rape Crisis has told us, that she has definitely been raped ? This is not only discourteous but also offensive to all disabled women.

Despite the huge body of international research showing a substantial level of female perpetrated domestic violence or abuse against men in couple relationships, the assumption that women are always the victims and men their victimiser. This belief and version of reality still largely underpins government and public policy. Indeed it provides the very rationale for giving ever larger sums of public money to women's groups and refuges, and virtually none for male victims.

The cumulative effect of this one-sidedness, certainly in the UK, has been to marginalise male victims of domestic violence and their children, in both public policies and support; this despite the probable existence of significant numbers of injured male victims and chronic male victims.

The cumulative effect of this one-sidedness, certainly in the UK, has been to marginalise male victims of domestic violence and their children, in both public policies and support; this despite the probable existence of significant numbers of injured male victims and chronic male victims.

There are few helplines specifically for them and a dearth of support or advisory literature (10m). What little money was available was withdrawn in 1999 and 2000 (sae Mall below). Despite the authoritative results of its own Study 191, the Home Office continues the polarisation of domestic violence issues. This petrified view persists in Government thinking and is endemic in most Whitehall deepest but especially the Home Office and the former Scottish Office. Principally this is fuelled by the Women's Unit, although it is now apparently focussing on outcome rather than culpability. Such a strategy of looking to blame and assign the burden the liability still focuses essentially on women as victims. By focusing more on outcomes The emphasis has moved from the previous grounds that (officially, at least) there were To few male victims to worry about, to the new premise of who is perceived to be the most harmed by domestic violence.

The consequent failure to treat victims of both sexes equitably has resulted in the only national helplines in England and Wales for male victims of domestic violence (Merton M.A.L.E.) being forced to close down
in spring 2001 due to lack of funding. This helplines was launched in 1991 and had since received about 8,000 calls a year as well as numerous letters. A similar helplines in Scotland for male victims has also been forced to close due to a refusal to fund it by the new Scottish Parliament following protests from women's groups! Such apparent official indifference to male victims of domestic violence is surely unacceptable in a society now so sensitive to equal rights and 'inclusiveness'.

In Scotland, 'zero tolerance' campaigns, including Behind Closed Doors and TV advertising, are being aimed essentially at women. A Women’s Aid group manages the national helplines for all domestic abuse. Such an arrangement is hardly likely to encourage calls from male victims, since Women's Aid is an organisation well known for its hostility to men generally and which has persistently denied the existence of any significant number of male victims or of female aggressors. In the Christmas TV advertisements, Scottish children were urged, if parents were violent or abusive, to inform on their fathers but not their mothers.

In February 2001, however, after representations by men's groups, the Social Justice Minister, Jackie Baillee, grudgingly announced that new research would be commissioned in 2001 into male victims of domestic abuse in Scotland. Sadly, she heavily qualified it by asserting the usual radical feminist polemic that domestic abuse is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men against women.

Policy statement made by ministers and or their Whitehall depts ought to indicate an open mind or willingness to explore the subject.

But such closed mind thinking is also reflected in the ongoing Europe-wide campaigns sponsored by the European Commission and the Council of Europe. They focus only on violence against women, but not by them. The Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly's Committee on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men adopted in Paris on 5 March 1999 the following declaration:-

Men, possibly numbering many millions across Europe, have effectively sat patiently by while this onslaught has been unleashed.

They have suffered in silence and for the most part without any prospect of redress. Male victims of female violence in couple relationships, and fathers who have suffered unfairly or cruelly under family law, perhaps losing their children in the process, as well as their homes, savings, and income on family breakdown - might be excused a wince at the hypocrisy of this one-sided declaration.

In the same manner the falsification of domestic violence statistics is endemic. It has become the curse of proper academic enquiry and even feminist writers are being to debunk whole swathes of mythology.

Figures from feminist sources aren’t out by the odd 20% but often by 2,000%. Take, for instance, the present GLA document itself.

Refuge activists and feminists are none to clever when it comes to numbers. In her respectfully reviewed book, The Rites of Man, (1991), Rosalind Miles wrote: "In the London area alone, more than 100,000 women a year need hospital treatment after violence in the home."

This represents 1 in 17 woman living with a man in London needs hospital treatment for injuries inflicted by her man. If, as we know, only 2% of domestic violence incidents are serious enough to require hospital treatment the true figure for incidents of domestic violence, including those unreported to the police and untreated by hospitals, must be gigantic

The 100,000 figure given by Miles for women receiving treatment in London hospitals after domestic violence, were queried by Sunday Times reporters at the time. When they telephoned to ask her source she said she ‘could not remember’ and when asked to comment on the discrepancy between her figure and the Home Office's (11,240) she terminated the interview.

Next day, however, she remembered "reading it" (the figure of 100,000) in the Evening Standard - a year before her book was published". She could give no date, author, context or origin for this item of scholarly research.

Explaining the discrepancy between its previous estimate (11,240) and the published facts, (25,000) a spokesman for the Metropolitan police said: "I can't explain that at all, but 25,000 is a wrong figure." Hence we see the birth of a 'factoid'.

But Mankind, backtracking through t archives can shed some light on the matter. Dr Susan Edwards has now admitted, in the last few years, that she knowingly falsified the figures.

In 1990, a spokesman on domestic violence for the Metropolitan police told the press that it received "about 25,000 calls a year" reporting incidents of domestic violence, That figure was "an extrapolation for London as a whole drawn from research in specific areas". For some reason, Edwards doubled them again. The figure published by Edwards in ‘The London Policing Study’, was more than double the number the Met had supplied her with.

She had simply doubled it from 11,420 to 25,000. But this figure wasn’t high enough for Sandra Horley, who was then, and remains today, the director of the Chiswick Family Refuge (founded by Erin Pizzey).

It then re-appeared as 58,000.

According to Horley, even that terrible number of 58,000 was an immense understatement. In a letter to The Independent in 1990, she wrote: "The Metropolitan police receives approximately 100,000 calls a year from women who are trying to escape male violence."

Are we to believe that Sandra Horley simply doubled again the 58,000 and came out with a nice round number – 100,000 ? If so, then another factoid was thus born and the mythology continued

A parliamentary reply of Oct 1994 produced the only reliable figure, ie, 11,420 domestic violence incidents recorded by the Metropolitan police in 1993. That figure is less than half the figure of 25,000 reported incidents previously given to the Sunday Times by the London Met. and less than a quarter of Edwards’s 58,000 figure.

Without that statement, by Mr Maclean, we would still be planing for 100,000 victims.

But of the 11,420 domestic violence incidents in the Metropolitan police area in 1993, how many would you guess involved the same individuals more than once? How many complaints were of the threat, rather than the reality, of violence? How many of those incidents were reported by men who were living with men? How many incidents of domestic violence were reported by men living with women ?

Imagine that Susan Edwards was in charge of preparing figures for Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary or for supplying the junior minister, Mr Maclean, with her version of the figures. It would be the end of his career, Parliament would force the minister to resign. A point GLA members may like to absorb.

The value of stopping to do a statistical analysis is to make the fear appropriate to the reality. When it isn't, it's called paranoia. This advert is causing paranoia and women are beginning to fear 'fear' itself rather than reality.

In the year the advertisement was conceived 900 women were murdered by the man they married. [74]

That’s 900 out of population of 54 million married women in the United States, or 0.0016%. [75]

Which is more frightening, 42% or 0.0016% ?

The "42%" of all murdered women are killed by the same man, uses an old trick. Home and marriage are the two safest places for a women. Even HOS 191 recognises this.

The extraordinarily high figure of 42% is arrived at because so few married women are murdered to begin with (0.0016%) but when they are, husbands or ex-husbands account for 42% or about 0.0008%.

If we were to look only at husbands who murder while still married then the figure of 0.0008 would be considerable less. So it is not a matter of interpretation, or accidental conclusions, but of deliberate falsification (mis-information) that we have to contend with. More "negative externalities".

It is the same deceitfulness on the part of those who should know better that has given rise to the wholly phoney figures for rape – which incidentally, have been falling for over a decade in regards stranger rapes not only in this country but in many overseas countries. Yet more of those "negative externalities".

However, to return to domestic violence, it is an unspoken belief that husbands are more likely to kill their wives than vice versa. This is a common misconception.

So feminists inspired polices can lead to an increased murder rate.

It is men who are the people who cannot find a supportive ‘retreat’ even a temporary one, which could lead them towards a relationship language permanently.

No one knows ‘for sure’ which sex kills the other more. At first sight it might be reasonable to presume that more men kill women than vice versa. However, from various sources it seems likely that more wives kill husbands. But until the government is willing to collect data about the three female methods of killing, we can only make an educated guess. Our statistical gathering system has several major structural shortcomings. One implication of this relates to prison suicides. The Home Office and Prison Service's experts were unaware until alerted by ManKind, that the risk of young male suicides in prison (within the first 2 weeks) is directly related to fatherlessness. Equally, the Race and Violent Crimes Task Force (RVCTF) unit of the Met Police is set to gather data on murders associated with domestic violence. This connection it appears has not occurred to them before. A ‘RVCTF’ delegate will work with a detective on murders for any domestic violence correlation. But without two vital parameters that they have overlooked the whole expensive exercise will be futile.

We only know, according to FBI information, that in multiple-offender killings there are four times as many husbands as victims than wives. [78] That is, the 41% figure does not include either of the last two female methods of killing. The number of the first, ie undetected poisonings, is even harder to determine.

In the UK the first and the third methods are the most common but the second is by no means uncommon.

Most importantly, of the hundred or so contract killings, only a small percentage were originally recognised as such. The very purpose in hiring a professional as with poisoning was to have the husband's death appear as an accident so the wife can collect insurance money.

A husband is much more likely to kill in an emotional fit of rage (so much for the rational sex!). Or he kills his wife and children, and then turns the gun on himself. Which is where we came in.

WEDNESDAY AUGUST 29 2001 PA NEWS

Man beaters behind closed doors

Hitting out: women today have greater economic and sexual freedom, and are more inclined to use violence in a relationship.

At a conference on women and the law at Dublin Castle last weekend, Cherie Blair made a stirring appeal for the law to recognise women's rights. Recent research, she said, suggested there was an incident of domestic violence every six seconds in the UK, with 80% of attackers being male and their victims female. Women's rights were thus under assault from men.
The prime minister's wife was referring to research by Professor Betsy Stanko, the director of the Economic and Social Research Council's domestic violence programme, which was unveiled by the Metropolitan police at a conference last month. Blair regurgitated Stanko's statistics as fact.
Without doubt, some women are the victims of serious domestic violence. Yet the evidence strongly suggests that Stanko's research does not stand up to scrutiny. It lends support instead to a propaganda offensive that demonises men and minimises or conceals the fact that women can be equally if not more violent, a distortion that has cost many men their homes and their children. The Met's "snapshot" research revealed that across the UK, the police received more than 1,300 distress calls a day about domestic violence, with 81% being made by women who said they had been assaulted by men. The Met said this amounted to one victim of domestic violence calling the police every minute.
Stanko glossed this further by saying that if the British Crime Survey was used as a guide, the truer picture was that domestic violence occurred every six to 20 seconds. This is because the survey says domestic violence is under-reported by between three and 10 times. The figures, said Stanko, were a powerful indicator of the inequality of women.
Yet it is hard to see how this conclusion can be justified. Statisticians say the Stanko research makes several elementary howlers. The same incident may have been the subject of more than one phone call; the violence
concerned may have been directed at property rather than persons; or the claim made in the call may not have been true. In addition, this "snapshot" almost certainly grossly under-represented violence by women against men, who are notoriously reluctant to acknowledge publicly that a woman has beaten them up.
Much domestic violence re-search is flawed because it relies heavily on biased sampling, asking only women in refuges for their experiences of violence, for example, or treating allegations of violence as proof. The fairest and most reliable research asks both men and women whether they have been both the victims and the perpetrators of violence on their spouses or companions.
A vast body of authoritative international research has been done on this basis. And it reveals a remarkably different picture from the feminist stereotype of patriarchal bullies and female victims.
Professor John Archer is a psychologist at the University of Central Lancashire and president-elect of the International Society for Research on Aggression. He, too, is critical of the Stanko research. "I don't see it as
a very reliable way of estimating the proportion of domestic violence in the population," he said.
As Archer has shown in a recent analysis of data from almost 100 American and British studies, women are more likely than men to initiate violence against their spouses or companions and are more likely to be aggressive more frequently. Most violence is tit-for-tat. Nor is it the case that women attack men only in self-defence. Among female college students, for example, 29% admitted initiating assaults on a male companion.
Men, says Archer, actually show restraint and put up with a high level of violence among their wives or lovers. Indeed, he says, women are encouraged to be violent towards men because they can generally be relied upon not to hit the women back. True, when men do retaliate, their greater strength means they are more likely than women to inflict serious injury. Yet even so, Archer found, no fewer than one-third of those with visible injuries from domestic violence were male. In line with all this research, the British Crime Survey reported in 1996 that an equal proportion of men and women, 4.2%, had said they had been physically assaulted by a current or former spouse or lover in the past year. Only 41% were injured, and although more women than men were hurt, the difference was not that great: 47% of women injured compared with 31% of men.
The 1996 report found male victims of domestic violence were particularly unhappy about the level of support offered by agencies, especially the police. One police officer conceded how even when the police were called to
a domestic fight and saw the man bleeding and the woman unscathed, it was the man who was commonly arrested.
One man, who asked to remain anonymous to protect his children, said his former wife set fire to his bedspread while he was asleep and twice attacked him with a kitchen knife, once in the throat. "I didn't go to the police because it was my home and my family and I didn't want anyone else involved," he said. "I couldn't walk out because she was being violent to the children. But in the end I slept in a locked room with a shotgun." He defended himself aggressively and she accused him of violence. After their divorce, one of her boyfriends told him that she intended to return and kill her former husband. In fact, she killed another boyfriend and is now in jail for his murder.
Another man I spoke to, a former airline worker, married his second wife when she fell pregnant. But he claims that from the start of the marriage, she was violent. "She repeatedly punched me in the face and threw chairs at me, and punched holes in the doors." He never responded with violence, he said, but he would leave the house and return when things calmed down.
One night he left with a bloody face and was stopped by a policeman who advised him to report the attack. But at the police station the desk officer said "these things happen" and took no further action. The husband initiated divorce proceedings, only to find his wife was accusing him of violence. The courts believed her and promptly awarded their house to her.

By JONATHAN MILNE, Nations News, 13 OCTOBER 2000 (New Zealand)

WASHINGTON (AP) - The government wasted $1.1 million on a program that told public housing tenants which gemstones, types of incense and clothing colors would best improve their self-esteem, an internal audit found.
The Creative Wellness Program was funded through a federal anti-drugs and crime program at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) starting in 1998. But in a report released Wednesday, the HUD inspector general
found scant evidence the money had resulted in less substance abuse or violent crime in the public housing projects.
``This represents an excessive and ineffective use of public housing drug elimination funds with no measurable benefits,'' the report said.
The inspector general also said that HUD employee Gloria Cousar, then deputy assistant secretary for public and assisted housing delivery, likely misused her position by awarding the contract for the program to Michelle Lusson, with whom she had a long-standing relationship through their joint leadership of the Virginia-based Community Center for Holistic Healing and other capacities. The inspector general said Cousar did not make enough of an effort to look for alternative contractors.

HUD spokeswoman Nancy Segerdahl said the department agreed wholeheartedly with the inspector general's conclusions about the wellness program.

The creative wellness program has been suspended and the contract with Lusson's Washington-based nonprofit, National Institute for Medical Options, was not renewed.
``The bottom line is, gemstones, mood rings, don't mean much to a family going without a roof over their heads,'' Segerdahl said. ``It's pretty clear the program did little to further the mission of HUD.''

Cousar has been removed from the position and no longer has authority to sign off on grant awards, although she still works in the agency's public housing division, Segerdahl said. Additional disciplinary action will be considered.

The wellness program, begun under then-Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo but canceled this year with his support, aimed to make public housing residents feel better about themselves and thus be less likely to be involved with drugs, domestic violence or crime.
The wellness effort was funded through HUD's $310 million drug-elimination program, which the Bush administration has proposed killing.

The wellness program provided ample ammunition to Republican critics of the drug-elimination program, which provides grants to municipal housing authorities for a variety of crime- and drug-fighting efforts. Congress is considering competing spending bills that would either cut the anti-drug program as Bush wants or restore full funding for it.