Domestic abuse law treats men unfairly

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By ROBYN BLUMNER

© St. Petersburg Times, published December 5, 1999

When Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act in 1994, the title said it all. While the body of the law used gender-neutral language, its intended effect was to give legitimacy to the militant feminist notion that men beat women, not vice versa, and that when men hit their wives and girlfriends they are commiting a hate crime.

The act created a civil rights remedy for "gender motivated crimes," casting rape and domestic violence as the manifestation of deep-seated sexism, not personal pathology. Implicitly the law said that fighting in the home is as much a social statement of bias against women as burning a cross on a black family's lawn is against African-Americans.

But this premise falls apart when the sexes act aggressively toward one another and violence is not the exclusive province of men. So when recent studies indicated that the arrest rate of women for domestic violence was creeping up, victim feminists scrambled to figure out how to blame men for the violence that women do.

In California, the percentage of women arrested for domestic violence has spiked to nearly 17 percent, compared with 5 percent in 1987. In Concord, N.H., women account for 35 percent of domestic assault arrests, up from 23 percent in 1993. It's a trend across the country, with women accounting for between a quarter and a third of domestic violence arrests in many states. While women batterers don't tend to do as much physical damage as their male counterparts, a 1997 report by the Justice Department says that men account for 16 percent of domestic assault victims who show up in hospital emergency rooms. And since men refuse to reveal their assailant one-third of the time (it's embarrassing to say you've been injured by your wife), that percentage is probably higher.

With women entering the military, the world of professional boxing (even against male opponents), and other contact sports, the fact that women can be physically aggressive should not surprise anyone. The rise in arrests indicates that stereotypes are falling away; abused men are feeling free to come forward. But militant feminists don't like this emerging equality. While they insist that women be given equal opportunity in the military and sports arenas, they incongruously claim that, due to women's uncombative nature, violence in the home is men's fault. If women do engage in violence, they say, it's merely defensive.

For decades women's advocates rightly demanded that laws against domestic violence be strengthened so that police responding to a domestic dispute couldn't simply "walk the guy around the block." Now those same advocates are crying foul when the mandatory arrest laws they sought to pass are sweeping up women. Rita Smith, executive director of National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, says dual arrests and the arrest of women are unintended consequences of the tougher laws. "We thought the police would do more investigation at the scene," Smith says. She thinks police should not just react to what's before them, where both parties may claim injuries, but determine "who has a pattern of violence and assault and who is most in danger here." In her experience, she says, men are the batterers 95 percent of the time.

To keep women from getting arrested, the domestic violence community is changing its strategy. It's calling for new "primary aggressor" laws and training that tells police to see domestic violence in "context," to look for who holds the power in the relationship and who is fearful. In other words: Arrest the male. The New York Times reported that through this new "contextual" training, Los Angeles was able to reduce the number of women arrested for domestic violence by one-third.

Stacking the deck against men in domestic violence disputes is an unfair, dishonest approach to law enforcement. No one questions statistics on mothers arrested for child abuse. Why is it hard to believe that women abuse their spouses? Politically, of course, the two are quite different. No social movement depends on convincing the public that a mother who beats her children is somehow expressing bias against children as a group, but that's what victim feminists want us to believe about wife beaters. If the reality of the situation is acknowledged -- that domestic violence is not an act of misogyny but an offense against an individual, male or female -- then a law such as the Violence Against Women Act shows itself to be a politically-correct farce.

While VAWA is being challenged this term before the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds that Congress did not have the power to pass it in the first place, the law's faulty premise is its greatest failing. Equality under the law -- the clarion call of the early women's movement -- means you apply the law uniformly irrespective of gender. There should be no presumptions that men's violent acts are more culpable than women's. It may be acceptable in the movies for a woman to slap a man's face when he says something insulting, but on the home-front that will now get you arrested. As well it should.

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