Stumbled across this while looking for something else...

[lkanneg]

Anybody on here ever seen this article before?  Know anything about the author?  

http://www.xyonline.net/relate.shtml

[Quasimodo]

Michael Flood is the anti-Fathers' Rights Antichrist from down under.

Here is a link to his "fan club."

[alien]

As soon as I read the man-who-hates-being-a-man's name I stopped. Michael Flood a prisoner of his own gender. Yes - he's well known on another site I visit dadsontheair.com. He plucks DV figures out of his imagination and believes men are to blame for societies' problems.

[Graboid]

I've seen it and the guy is a complete tool. A mangina.  :roll:

[SIAM]

I wrote to Michael Flood way back in March 2004 and got this reply from him (still in my Inbox!):-

--------------

Thank you for your feedback on XYonline. I am disappointed to hear that you see the site as anti-male. I'd describe my own perspective, and that of XYonline, as dedicted to enhancing men's lives. See my document http://www.xyonline.net/misc/pffaq.html, particularly the sections "Does
being pro-feminist mean that you are anti-male?" and "How do pro-feminist men deal with areas of male pain and disadvantage?".

My concern is that a minority of individuals / groups in the men's movement do not want social justice, or at least want a form of 'justice' that in fact would be harmful for women, children, and men themselves. XYonline will continue to critique the inaccurate or women-blaming claims and agendas of some men's groups, while working to build better lives for both men and women.

Best wishes,

michael.
--------------

The e-mail address he used was :- [email protected]

[woof]

Interesting.....he seems concerned about the whole DV issue. Sounds like he has been spending time at Trish Wilsons site, with the whole CST thing.
I fail to see how denying women's violence, helps men.  

[The Biscuit Queen]

To be male-positive is to be affirming of men and optimistic about men; to believe that men can change; to support every man's efforts at positive change.

Manhood and gender are structured by class, race, sexuality, age and region.

It is to be critical of those aspects of men's behaviour, constructions of masculinity, and gender relations which are harmful to women or children (and indeed to men themselves). It recognises sexism and gender injustice and draws on the wealth of feminist insights and efforts.


Men share very unequally in the fruits of male privilege, and some forms of manhood are dominant while others are marginalised.

These are male feminists. They at least give some credence to marginalization of men, but almost as an after thought. I would not consider them part of the men's movement ie.  the movement towards the developement and protection of men's rights.

[dr e]

Interesting link.  I have always been curious about people like Flood and Hugo who seem to be identified with a group that holds them in such low esteem, held solely responsible or even hated.  This morning it dawned on me that at least a partial explanation of this odd behavior could be found in the Stockholm Syndrome.

from Wikipedia The Stockholm syndrome is a psychological response of a hostage, or an individual in a hostage-like situation (e.g. dependent child, battered wife, etc) in which the more powerful person (captor, partner, child molester) (a) has the power to put the individual's life in danger or at least the power to worsen the individual's prospects for the future life, and (b) occasionally exercises this power in order to show that he or she is able to use it, if the victim will not conform to the more powerful person's will. The main symptom of the syndrome is the inidividual's seeming loyalty to the more powerful person in spite of the danger (or at least risk) that this loyalty puts them in.

You can also see this sort of thing in boys who are abused by their mothers.  The mother spouts hatred and viciousness towards the boy and controls his movements and behavior and yet the boy identifies with her to the extreme.  The boy maintains a "love" for the mother as he blindly follows the mother's demands and shows a devotion to her that though shallow will not be exposed as anything but dedication.

The article literally made me laugh out loud.  His condemnation of the CTS is pretty humorous.  If he is going to condemn it for its results that he finds distasteful he will also need to condemn it for all of the stats that the fems love to quote about dv.  How did they get those stats?  Yep, CTS.  For an excellent and scholarly explanation of this just have a look at the John Archer study in Psyc Bulletin in 2000.  The same criticism was leveled against him for his meta-analysis and he responds to the critics pointing out that if they are going to cry foul with his use of the CTS they had better go back and withdraw all of their previous research! Yes indeed, the very critics used the same scale in their own studies.   LOL!  This is so typical.  The fems have a selective condemnation based not on analysis or structure but on whether they find the results to their liking.  Can you say 3rd grade?  Hell, that is even insulting to 3rd graders.  I apologize to all of the 8 year-olds I just insulted.

He tries to paint a picture of  Strauss, Gelles and Steinmetz as being unfairly used by the men's rights advocates to promote their viewpoint.  This could not be farther from the truth.  I know from my own personal experience that Richard Gelles feels stongly that male victims of dv are not getting a fair deal and that VAWA is in urgent need of being amended to help them.  Why else would he be an endorser of the www.vawa4all.org site?  From what I have heard Struass feels similarly and I bet Steinmetz also.  Flood's cherry picking quotes is misleading and not a good representation of the truth.  Funny he didn't give links for those, eh?

http://www.vawa4all.org/endorsements.asp :wink:  

Similar to the Stockholm syndrome idea, male feminists remind me of little boys about 8 or 10 who will blindly defend mommy no matter what.  At this point in their development these boys have yet to develop a strong sense of self and solid boundaries that mark their own adulthood.  This can foster an automatic response to perceived insults to mom with a reaction that appears as if they have just been attacked themselves.  The solution is of course to allow the self to grow.

What is really curious is that most of us agree with having a marked distaste for the sort of straight jacket through which societie's roles have collared men.   That much we can agree on.  The biggest disagreement that I can see here is that the men's rights side of things is upset with the misandry of feminism and the pro-feminist men like Flood and Hugo simply respond to this as if it were an unpardonable sin.  How dare anyone say anything about mom!

[fezzik]

To be male-positive is to be affirming of men and optimistic about men; to believe that men can change; to support every man's efforts at positive change.

Any guesses what he wants to change men into? That's a damning word. He doesn't want to educate men, he doesn't want men to grow, to gain perspective, to gain wisdom. He doesn't want anyone to be a better man,  he wants us to change into not-men. He's not male-positive for the length of a sentence!

Men's rights and fathers' rights men share with men's liberationists the idea that men's roles are harmful, damaging and in fact lethal for men.

I'm sorry, but this is just dead wrong. Where does he get the idea that father's rights activists think that fatherhood is harmful, damaging and lethal? Or does he think that fatherhood isn't a man's role?

[Tigerman]

Micheal Flood is a ******* ******* and that's all I've got to say about that ******* ***on!

[woof]

This is pretty long, but for those who are interested, this is the argument that is used to de-bunk the CTS using the CTS....LOL :shock:

First, let me provide a little background. The primary argument made by men's rights activists is that men are as likely, or more likely, to be abused by a wife or girlfriend than the reverse. They base this opinion on various family violence studies. Typical is Warren Farrell's statement that "the great majority of two-sex studies that have been done (more than a dozen) find women and men to be equally as likely to initiate domestic violence at every level of severity." (Farrell's quote is a bit dated - there are now dozens such studies.)

Farrell's claim is based on influential research conducted by family violence researchers Murray Straus and Richard Gelles, and by other researchers who have followed up on Straus and Gelles' work. (It's worth mentioning - I'll get into this later - that both Straus and Gelles have objected to the misuse of their work by men's rights activists). This research, based on interviews with both men and women, has found that wives are as likely to assault husbands as husbands are to assault wives. Other researchers have replicated Straus and Gelles' results, most often using the same survey instrument, resulting in a intimidating list of studies showing equivalent rates of male and female-perpetrated spousal violence.

An article by men's advocate Philip Cook summarizes the Straus/Gelles findings:

Men's rights activists acknowledge that government records such as police reports have found that vastly more women than men are victims of spousal assault. But they dismiss this by saying men would never admit to being abused. As Warren Farrell explains, "male socialization to 'take it like a man' makes men the sex more fearful of reporting their abusers."

Men's rights activists conclude, therefore, that data showing that men are greater abusers is invalid due to male underreporting: fairer studies, in their view, find that men are equal victims, and women are equal abusers. I'm here to examine where that data comes from.

The empirical claims made by men's rights activists about domestic violence are based on studies using Straus and Gelles' Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) (and also from a few studies using methodology very similar to the CTS). When I examined a bibliography of "references examining assaults by women on their spouses or male partners" on a men's rights website, for example, I found that of 86 prevalence studies cited, 59 (about 70%) used the CTS as a research tool! In order to evaluate men's rights activists claims of equal male victimization, it is therefore necessary to examine the CTS.

A review of the social science literature indicates that the CTS is, even according to its creators, seriously flawed when used as a comparative measure of male and female domestic victimization (i.e., the way men's righters and anti-feminists use it).

2. How do we define "abuse" and "violence?" What's left out?.

Many critics have questioned whether the CTS's definition of violence can fairly capture the range of marital violence. For example, none of the original CTS's questions ask respondents about rape or sexual assault - an area in which male abusers predominate. Not asking about rape could lead to undercounting of severe male-on-female violence. (In response to this criticism, a later version of the CTS - the "CTS2
- pasted on some questions about sexual assault. However, of the 59 CTS studies I found listed on a men's rights website, only 3 used the CTS2).

More subtly, the CTS's method of measurement may be overly literal, measuring narrowly-defined actions while failing to consider their context and meaning. As Straton points out, results of violence are ignored: the CTS "equates a woman pushing a man in self-defense to a man pushing a woman down the stairs." Similarly, the context of violence is ignored: playful kicking in bed, considered aggressive by neither partner, is counted as more severe violence than a bone-jarring push against a wall.

The CTS ignores not only different physical impacts of violence, but also different mental impacts of violence. A recent study indicated that violence, "even when both the man and woman participate," leads to significantly worse outcomes for women; women are more frightened by the violence, with a greater sense of loss of personal control and well-being.

As a matter of common sense, there's an enormous difference in mass and physical strength between most women and men, and that can make a big difference in how abuse "feels." An ex-girlfirend of mine - who weighed 100 pounds less than I do - once punched me, as hard as she could, on my chest. It left a bruise and hurt my feelings, but I certainly didn't feel frightened or helpless. Why not? Because I could walk out the room whenever I pleased, and she couldn't stop me.

Now, what if I had hit her? Although the action would have been the same, the dynamic would have been totally different - because she would have been effectively trapped with me unless I chose to let her go.

Researcher James Nazroo conducted a survey of domestic violence, which was designed to consider the kind of contextual information the CTS leaves out. As Nazroo wrote:

Don't get me wrong - I know what my ex-girlfriend did was reprehensible. I'm not saying it's okay to hit men. I'm not denying that some individual men are badly abused, sometimes by girlfriends or wives who are much smaller than their victims. But for most male-female relationships, there's a big difference in physical power that benefits the male, and it's pointless to pretend it doesn't exist.

It's no coincidence that, even according to the Straus/Gelles study, women are nearly seven times as likely to report being injured as "equally abused" men are.

3. Sampling bias.

According to Michael Johnson, the CTS's dependence on voluntary interviews with a representative sample population could create a strong bias against measuring the worse cases of domestic violence: "men who systematically terrorize their wives would hardly be likely to agree to participate in such a survey, and the women whom they beat would probably be terrified at the possibility that their husband might find out that they had answered such questions." Straus himself seems to agree with this criticism.

Sampling error is always a concern, of course, but there are reasons to think it's a bigger problem with the Straus/Gelles work than in most. For one thing, according to Michael Johnson, Straus and Gelles people who refused to answer screening questions were not included when Straus and Gelles calculated their 84% response rate; taking this discrepancy into account, the actual response rate may be closer to 60%, low enough to create a severe danger of sampling bias. More importantly, Straus and Gelles compiled information only about abuse within current, ongoing relationships; but fear of a current abusive partner would obviously make a victim hesitate to be frank with interviewers. It's much safer for a victim of severe battery to refuse to be interviewed altogether, in such circumstances.

In contrast, when the US Bureau of Justice statistics did a similar study (see part 5, below), they designed the interview process to enourage current victims to report honestly (they put protections in place to assure that the person interviewed could respond safely while alone in the house, without the spouse's knowledge), and did not ask only about current relationships. They also had a higher response rate, which means a much lower chance of serious sampling error.

Jack Stranton points out another important sampling bias: the CTS, as used in the original Straus/Gelles research and most of the research that follows it, excludes violence that occurs after a divorce or separation. However, such violence accounts for 76% of spousal assaults, and is overwhelmingly committed by men; excluding this violence disproportionately omits most spousal violence against women.

4. Contrary Social Science Data.

CTS studies leave thousands of abused women uncounted. According to a CTS study, a typical woman in a battered woman's shelter reports having been assaulted by a spouse 65 times in the year previous to admission. Straus and Gelles' national study found that there are about 80,000 women in the United States who are abused at that level. In contrast, data from battered women's shelters show that up to 490,000 women use shelters each year - and that figure doesn't even include thousands of severely battered women who don't make it to a shelter.. This huge discrepancy shows that instances of severe woman-battering, far from being fairly measured by the men's rights activists favorite studies, are in fact badly undercounted.

When combined with Michael Johnson and Jack Stranton's observations about sampling bias, it seems clear that the CTS simply isn't measuring the worse cases of violence against women.

Many non-CTS studies have found, contrary to CTS results, that men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of domestic violence, while women are overwhelmingly the victims. Since most (but not all) of these studies are designed to measure criminal violence, Farrell dismisses them, saying men are socialized to "take it like a man" and not report their victimization. However, Russell Dobash pointed out "that women have their own reasons to be reticent, fearing both the loss of a jailed or alienated husband's economic support and his vengeance." Moreover, surveys of domestic violence victims in the US and Canada have found that men are more likely to call the police after being assaulted by their partner. So while it's true that both men and women have motivation not to report their abuse, it's just not true that men are actually less likely to report abuse than women.

Finally, studies using variants of the CTS have found some apparent contradictions. A CTS study of violence by stepparents (conducted by Gelles himself) found no difference in rates of stepparent and natural-parent violence - but as Jack Stanton points out, other studies, including homicide reports, show that "a stepparent is up to 100 times more likely to assault a small child than is a birth parent." Like the unaccounted-for abused women, this finding suggests that the CTS is deficient at measuring the most severe instances of family violence.

5. Putting the CTS to the test.

A 1998 study conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) used a modified form of the CTS to survey a representative sample of 8,000 Americans. Unlike most previous CTS studies, the BJS study asked about rape and sexual assault, and did not limit respondents to describing only violence taking place within marriages or relationships; these changes addressed many (but not all) of the criticisms previously made of the CTS. And responding to the claims of men's rights activists, the survey was designed to be about "personal safety" issues, rather than being presented as a survey about crime. (In this case, by the way, men's rights activists are right: it's better not to use hot-button words like "crime" in surveys.)

This study was an important test for people on both sides of the CTS debate. If CTS critics were correct, such a study would find different results from previous CTS studies, and specifically would find that women are more frequent victims of spousal violence. If, on the other hand, men's rights activists were right, then this study would have found equal abuse, since it asked men and women the same questions (mostly the same questions as the CTS).

Critics' expectations were fulfilled. The results of the government's study strongly contradicted previous CTS studies: the BJS study found that overall women were more likely to be abused by an intimate partner than men, particularly for the more severe kinds of violence. For example, women were seven times as likely to have been threatened with a gun; 14 times as likely to report having been "beat up" by a partner; and twenty-six times as likely to have been raped.

6. Straus and Gelles on the men's rights movement's use of their work.

The evidence against using the CTS to show equal victimization on the part of men is strong and persuasive; not even the creators of the CTS endorse the men's rights activist interpretation any longer. Straus has recently written that the female victims of severe battery are the cases which are "the most serious problems and which need to have priority in respect to interventions." Gelles has put it even more strongly, arguing that "it is misogynistic to paint the entire issue of domestic violence with a broad brush and make it appear as though men are victimized by their partners as much as women."

To be fair, Straus and Gelles have also been critical of feminists - although Straus (who considers himself a feminist) has described some feminist work as serious and deserving of respect, a concession that few men's rights activists are willing to make.

7. Summing up what the stats can tell us.

Overall, the evidence supports a commonsense conclusion: there isn't sex equality in serious violence. Women are battered by their intimate partners much more often than the reverse. Given the many reasons to doubt the CTS's accuracy for measuring severe violence in families, the most reasonable conclusion is that the Straus/Gelles studies - at least, as they're used by men's rights activists - are inaccurate.

So should the Straus and Gelles studies be rejected entirely? I say no. The evidence weighs strongly against the "equal victimization" hypothesis, but that doesn't mean the results of CTS-based studies should be thrown out entirely. Although it's clear the Straus/Gelles work doesn't accurately measure the most severe instances of intimate violence, the validity of the CTS in measuring what Michael Johnson calls "common couple violence" - minor, sporadic, non-escalating and mutual violence between spouses - has not been disproved. Some researchers, including CTS co-creater Straus, have suggested that the seemingly contrary data actually indicates two different aspects of domestic assault, the relatively sex-neutral "common couple violence" and the more severe violence that lands some women in shelters. The results from the CTS may, in the end, significantly deepen understandings of the dynamics of violence within families.

It is unlikely, however, that this possibility will provide much comfort to men's rights activists committed to the equal victimization hypothesis. While CTS studies corroborate a key men's rights belief - the capacity of women to commit spousal assault - the possibility of equal victimization is key to the CTS's appeal to men's rights activists. And the facts just won't support that belief.

And to those men's rights activists who say that we need more services for male victims of domestic violence - I agree completely! It's only the men's rights claim that women and men are equal victims of intimate violence that I'm disagreeing with. I don't think anyone can look at the facts and deny that women are sometimes violent, or that male victims of intimate violence need more support services.

8. Epilog: Why It Matters

Men's righters disagree with feminists - and with conventional social science - about how often husbands beat up wives, and vice versa. They argue that men are equal or greater victims of intimate violence. Feminists disagree. Is this just squabbling over numbers? It can sure look that way. But there's a deeper argument going on here.

In the face of strong counter-evidence, and contrary to the opinions of the researchers whose work they rely on, men's rights activists passionately insist that men are equally victims of spousal violence. What compels them to this belief? Men's rights activists are at least partly driven by a fear of guilt and shame. Men's rights activists are attracted to the equal-victimization hypothesis because, to them, it suggests that men are not to blame for violence against women.

It is common for feminists to be perceived as anti-male; bell hooks (herself a feminist) argues that anti-male sentiments have been a significant part of bourgeois white feminism, and that such anti-male discourse is a barrier to male support of feminism. A similar analysis is made by R.W. Connell, who describes the "public face" of feminism as "hostile to men." Shame for being male is a common first reaction among men encountering feminism, and doubtless that first impression drives some men away from feminism.

A fear of shame is also a common theme in the men's rights critique of feminism. From David Shakleton's essay in Everyman Journal, a men's rights magazine: "The deepest, most deadly power given to women by tribal evolution is the power to shame... Today feminism is using that deep power to shame the souls of men." A men's rights activist on an online discussion board expressed similar themes of blame and shame, quite plaintively (capitalization, punctuation and line breaks as in the original):

Allen Johnson's The Gender Knot analyzed seminal men's rights writer Warren Farrell and found a similar subtext: "Farrell seems so worried and angry about guilt and blame that he goes off the deep end to argue that men aren't powerful at all." Farrell's desire to deny the idea of male privilege - and thus deny that any blame can fall on men - leads him to argue that men are equally or more victimized in almost every instance, including spousal abuse.

What the men's rights movement offers men is a defense mechanism - a lens for viewing sex roles which obscures an "ocean of guilt and shame" (in Johnson's words). As Michael Messner describes in his analysis of men's rights discourse, "a few highly questionable studies [provide] an emotionally charged basis for the development of an ideology of male victimization." By describing men as equal (or, often, greater) victims, the men's right lens shields men from shame or guilt; it is this lack of blame that appeals to men's rights activists.

The purpose of claims of equal male victimization isn't to deny the reality of wife-battering (to the contrary, many men's rights activists fervently claim sympathy with individual battered women), but to deny the existence of patriarchy and male privilege altogether. In this way, men's rights activists hope to avoid shame.

(Of course, many feminists - including me - have argued that there is no need for men to feel shame in feminism; wallowing in guilt is not only unnecessary, it's counterproductive.)

What's sad is, men's righters are right about some things. Patriarchy hurts men, too. It's harmful to have only men register for the draft. It's harmful to men to be set on career paths that estrange them from their families. It's harmful to men who face violence from other men. Its harmful to men that some male-dominated jobs are unsafe. And for those men who genuinely are victims of severe intimate violence, it's harmful that there are almost no services available to help victimized men. (Etc, etc.)

Which makes it ironic that the men's rights movement is primarily a movement about preventing change; about rolling back the years to bring back "Father Knows Best"; about denying that patriarchy even exists; and about attacking feminism, the only movement that's made any progress in challenging how sexism and patriarchy hurt us all.

However much they say they want change, by denying male privilege, the men's rights movement has become fundamentally reactionary. It isn't possible to undo patriarchy if you won't even admit it exists.

And that - not just statistics - is what the debate over "husband-battering" is about.

9. References

Connell, R.W. "Disruptions: Improper Masculinities and Schooling." Men's Lives. Eds. Michael S. Kimmell and Michael A. Messner. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998. 141-154.

Dobash, Russell P., R. Emerson Dobash, Margo Wilson and Martin Daly. "The Myth of Sexual Symmetry in Marital Violence." Social Problems 39:1 (1992). 71-91.

Farrell, Warren. The Myth of Male Power. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

Fiebert, Martin S. References Examining Assaults by Women on Their Spouses or Male Partners: An Annotated Bibliography. 1998. 26 May 2000

Gelles, Richard J. "Domestic Violence: Not an Even Playing Field." 27 May 2000

Gelles, Richard J. and Murray A. Straus. Intimate Violence: The Causes and Consequences of Abuse in the American Family. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.

Hood, Jane C. "'Let's Get a Girl: Male Bonding Rituals in America." Men's Lives. Eds. Michael S. Kimmel and Michael A. Messner. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998. 431-436.

hooks, bell. "Men: Comrades in Struggle." Men's Lives. Eds. Michael S. Kimmell and Michael A. Messner. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998. 578-587.

Johnson, Allen G. The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997.

Johnson, Michael P. "Patriarchal Terrorism and Common Couple Violence." Journal of Marriage and the Family 57 (1995). 283-294.

Margolin, Gayla. "The Multiple Forms of Aggressiveness Between Marital Partners: How Do We Identify Them?" Journal of Marital and Family Therapy 13 (1987). 77-84.

Messner, Michael A. "The Limits of the Male Sex Roel: An analysis of the men's liberation and men's rights movements' discourse," Gender and Society 12:3 (1998), 255-276.

Nazroo, James. "Uncovering Gender Differences in the Use of Marital Violence: the effect of methodology." Sociology 29:3 (1995), 475-494.

Shackleton, David. "The War Against Men: looking behind gender politics." Everyman Journal November-December 1997.

Straton, Jack C. "The Myth of the 'Battered Husband Syndrome.'" Masculinities 2.4 (1994). 79-82. (Online summary here).

Straus, Murray A. "Physical Assaults by Wives: A Major Social Problem." Current Controversies in Family Violence. Eds. Richard J. Gelles and D. R. Loseke. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993. 67-87.

Straus, Murray A. "The Controversy over Domestic Violence by Women: A Methodological, Theoretical, and Sociology of Science Analysis." To appear in Violence in Intimate Relationships. Eds. X.B. Arriaga and S. Oskamp. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. 26 May 2000

Tjaden, Patricia and Nancy Thoennes. Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women: Findings from the National Violence Against Women Survey. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, November 1998. NCJ 172837. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/pubs-sum/172837.htm

Umberson, Debra, Kristin Anderson, Jennifer Glick and Adam Shapiro. "Domestic Violence, Personal Control, and Gender." Journal of Marriage and the Family 60 (1998). 442-452.

[dr e]

Woof do you have a link for this article?

[dr e]

Interesting article.  The most important aspect in my opinion is that he is arguing that rates of spousal violence are not equal.  This is light years from  the arguments just a few years back that denied more than a handful of women were actually abusive in relationship.  Hey, the guy is moving in the right direction.  

Frankly, who cares if it is 50/50, 60/40, 70/30 or whatever.  It doesn't really matter.  The important thing is that there is a significant percentage of male victims and they have no services.  The response from the DV industry has been frightfully uncaring and slothlike.  We have, and I have personally contacted legislators, clinical agencies, directors of agencies etc etc and they all remind me of the lady on mad tv who puts her fingers in her ears and says lalalalalala.  That is the real injustice and the obvious sign of true hatred.  They just don't care.  In fact it seems to go farther than not caring, they seem to care that men don't get services.  It seems personal.  They want to make sure that men are not acknowledged and not cared for.  I find it truly disgusting.

All his yak yak yaking about the CTS is pretty funny.  Just read Archers explanation about the CTS in the psyc bul 2000 meta-analysis.  The bottom line is that I trust peer reviewed researchers and a bonafide meta-analysis a whole lot more than I trust this guy or some survey monger who takes the admissions to an emergency shelter and tries to extrapolate data.  

It is interesting to note that during his piece he doesn't give statistics or numbers supporting his point of view.  He doesn't give links to the quotes he offers of Strauss and Gelles.  He doesn't give you any way to check out what he has said other than a list of articles at the end.  Perhaps they were footnoted.  I didn't see any.

Men's rights activists are attracted to the equal-victimization hypothesis because, to them, it suggests that men are not to blame for violence against women.

Now this is really interesting.  I don't know any man who feels that men who are perps of dv are not to blame.  He is completely incorrect on this count but the interesting side of this is that I think he gives us a glimpse into his own (and feminisms) way of looking at things.  My guess is that this is simply projection and the reality is that the feminists are very frightened of the equal-victimization idea since it would end their own comfort in their self-satisfying blaming of men for dv.

Who wrote this Woof?

E

[woof]

Woof do you have a link for this article?

Not right off the top Dr E, I'll have to go look for it, it's somewhere on this site if it's still active. http://www.amptoons.com/blog/ This isn't Trish"s site like I said in my earlier post but rather Amanda's. I think I can find it later, but I don't have the time to look for it now though.

[dr e]

I think it is Amp and I think it is here.