Red Headed Femme

This is a great article and link via Richie at Crimitism. Richie's comments are insightful as usual, but the scholarly work done by Michael Flood re: "husband battering" impressed me. Some quotes:

There are four problems with the claims about 'husband battering' made by men's rights advocates. Firstly, they only use these authors' work selectively, as the authors themselves disagree that women and men are equally the victims of domestic violence. Secondly, they ignore the serious methodological flaws in the Conflict Tactics Scale. Thirdly, they ignore or dismiss a mountain of other evidence which conflicts with their claims. Finally, their strategies in fact are harmful to men themselves, including to male victims of violence. To make the fifty/fifty claim about husband battering, men's rights and fathers' rights advocates must also ignore or dismiss a mountain of conflicting evidence, from crime victimisation surveys of the population, numerous studies using methodologies other than the Conflict Tactics Scale, calls made to domestic violence centres and services, hospital statistics on how people were injured, and applications for intervention orders.

This massive body of evidence continues to show that men are more often the perpetrators of domestic violence than are women, that women are more often the victims of domestic violence than are men, and that when boys and men are the victims of violence this is usually violence by other boys and men.

However, surveys such as the one by Headey et.al are likely to miss a second important form of domestic violence, what Johnson calls "patriarchal terrorism". This represents some husbands' practice of a terroristic control of their wives. It involves the systematic use of not only violence, but economic subordination, threats, isolation and other control tactics [Johnson, 1995: 284]. This violence is patriarchal because it is based in patriarchal ideas of male ownership and control of their female partners. This second form of domestic violence involves much more frequent violence (although the men using this can also control their wives using other tactics), the violence is more severe, and it is very likely to escalate over time.

Patriarchal terrorism. How scary--and how apt.