Why Can't Men and Women Cooperate Against Family Violence?

by by John J. Xenakis

A man going through a divorce murders his wife. Another man rapes his eight year old niece. A mother chains her young daughter to the toilet for a week. And in an act of family togetherness, a mother and her boyfriend punish her four-year-old son together: as he holds the boy in the air, she pushes the boy's hands into boiling water.

These are among the many actual stories I came across as I was researching my book.

And yet, if you talk to feminists, only the first two of these four crimes is important, because they were perpetrated by a man; the other two aren't worth mentioning because the perpetrators are women.

That should be surprising because the last two crimes are extremely serious. A lot of children die each year through child battering and neglect, most often by the mother.

The only kind of child abuse that feminists want to talk about is sexual abuse, but as bad as child sexual abuse is, no children have died from sexual abuse, as far as I know.

It's true that fathers sometimes kill their children. When a father kills his children, it most often happens because he shakes them so hard that their heads swing back and forth, and their little spines snap. This is called "shaken baby syndrome," and men must be warned not to allow a moment of rage to kill or paralyze a child.

But most child murderers and batterers are mothers, not fathers. And most child sexual abusers are men other than the child's biological father -- most often the mothers' boyfriends.

With both men and women guilty -- in fact equally guilty -- of family violence, you'd think that men and women could work together to reduce family violence and child abuse. But no, feminists regularly shut men out.

I've been studying family violence for over ten years, and I've come to the conclusion that feminists are not interested in reducing family violence: they prefer policies that INCREASE family violence, so that more public money will flow to feminist organizations.

Feminist policy after feminist policy illustrates this.

For example, feminists have a policy of opposing the mandatory arrest of batterers. Why? I couldn't believe my eyes when I found out: Cities that implement mandatory arrest of batterers need fewer women's shelters, and so feminists get less funding. It's incredible. Feminists would rather have batterers out on the street battering more women, so that feminist organizations will get more funding.

Another example: Lesbian researchers find that lesbians are just as frequently killed, choked, and bruised, have bones broken, and are threatened with guns, knives and clubs -- as women in heterosexual relationships. And yet, when battered lesbians seek help in women's shelters, they're frequently shunned, because the violent perpretrators are women.

In one case I heard of, a battered lesbian took her children to a battered woman's shelter to escape her partner and seek help, and not only was she not helped, but she was raped by the (lesbian) director of the center.

In one policy area after another, feminists and women's activists are simply out for themselves. They ignore battered children and battered lesbians because the perpetrators are women, and being helpful in those situations might reduce their budgets.

Perhaps the worst problem is that most feminist policy is geared towards preventing children from seeing their fathers. I've heard dozens of stories about this over the years, and the stories all seem to have the same pattern.

This is a pattern I've seen followed by both men and women. A child should have plenty of access to both parents. Based on the stories that I've heard over and over, I believe that most parents who try to restrict or eliminate access by their children to the other parent are abusive parents. In story after story, the parent who was shut was shut out because he or she had discovered that the children were being abused by the other parent (or, in the case of mothers, by an abusive boyfriend); the abusive parent shut the other parent out to avoid having the the child abuse discovered or confirmed.

Social workers and judges have almost totally adopted the policy of shutting out the father at the request of the mother, without even considering the facts. These children are then left in the hands of their worst abusers -- the mother and the mother's boyfriend -- cut off from the protection of the only person who might protect them, their father.

The same situation occurs when the father shuts out the mother, but this is extremely rare because social workers and judges rarely side with the father.

Solving all these family violence and abuse problems is going to require the cooperation of men and women. Contrary to the conspirational statements of feminists, no man wants to see a woman or child beaten or abused.

The Center of Hope, headed by the remarkable Rosemarie Greene, is leading the way in getting men and women to cooperate in reducing family violence. She deserves everyone's support.

(John J. Xenakis is author of the new book "Fraternizing with the Enemy: A Book on Gender Issues for Men ... And For Women Who Care About Men." His web site is www.fraternizing.org.)