Where Domestic Violence Research Has Gone Wrong

An Australian pro-feminist professor asked me how I reconciled my “obvious commitment” to ending domestic violence with my refusal to engage in the research toward that effect.

My response to that is that research has gone terribly, tragically wrong.

A woman who is being abused for real is not going to be in a position to take a survey. And if she does, she will be under intense pressure to protect her community's reputation against the “evil liberals” in the government. Which means that such research will fail to account for real wrongs.

A woman who would take such a research would be a woman in a socially liberal community. In socially liberal communities, violence against women is against social norms. Which means that a man who commits domestic violence in such a community is a man who violates social norms – who, by definition, possesses a personality disorder. However that is not where the bulk of violence against women takes place. A most common abuser is not a “sociopath,” a “narcissist” or a “borderline.” He is your average Joe, Igor, Abdul, Praveem or Jamal who thinks that real men dominate women, or that love is for sissies, or that he owes it to God or to his gender to beat women down.

What this means therefore is that this research is wrong. What we see is a completely biased sample. Most feminist-minded women would not go with real misogynists. They would go with liberal-minded men who, for the most part, have a good will toward women. They would decide for one or another reason that the man does not meet their ridiculous expectations. At which point they would decide that the man is – an abuser, a misogynist, whatever – and tell the same thing to an academic who is researching their situation.

This leads us to the present situation. We see women on one side of town howling “misogyny” or “abuse” over nothing. We see women on the other side of town being subjected to real wrongdoings, and the women on the first side of town think that they are losers or wimps. The real abuse cases go completely under the radar. Whereas the people who get detected are for the most part men who are not real abusers at all.

I want to see sanity brought to this matter. In both situations we see a very real wrong. On one side of town, a man goes to jail for “beating up [his] wife's fist with [his] face.” On the other side of town, a man breaks his wife's skull so badly that she needs 40 stitches and walks away with full custody of the child. Neither situation is close to being right.

Now one side accuses me of being a misogynist, and the other side accuses me of being a feminist. What this tells me is that I'm somewhere in the middle, and that indeed I am. I see neither women or men as being better or worse than the other. My stance is a rational one: That anything capable of choice can be good, bad, indifferent or a mix. And in situations of beings who are capable of all sorts of possible outcomes, the solution is not to side with either. It is to support people on either side who are willing to do the right thing and oppose people on either side who are not.

Now one thing that we see claimed by some in feminism is that love is a patriarchial racket or a form of misogyny. Once again, they get that perception from a biased sample. A liberal woman is likely to go for a man who claims to love her. She is less likely to go for a “traditional” man who believes that a woman's place is in the kitchen, or for a “rational” man who thinks that anything with feelings is an inferior form of life. She may discover unpleasantness in her relationship. However she is much less likely to do so from a man who has romantic attitudes than from a man who believes that women belong in the kitchen or from a man who believes that anything with feelings is an inferior form of life.

So yes, I do in fact refuse to engage in that research, and for very good reasons. Once again, that research is wrong. They have not studied women who are being abused for real. And if they attempted to do so, then such women, once again, were under intense pressure to hide from the “evil liberals” in the government what actually went on.

So here it is: A completely reasonable case against what has been wrongful research. And the outcomes of this research, once again, have been completely in the wrong. Your average abuser is not a romantic. Your average abuser is not a “sociopath,” a “narcissist” or a “borderline.” Your average abuser is a man who thinks that violence against women is the right way to go. And until these people confront these real abusers, they will continue rightfully to lose credibility in society.