An open secret, a closed door

"I am simply inviting you to endeavour to understand their effect on that Irish public which read of them ‘with something of the feeling of helpless rage with which one would watch a stream of blood dripping from under a closed door'."

Journalist Warren B Wells

We have at present an enormous body of evidence which clearly illuminates the fact that domestic violence, violence within relationships and intimate partner violence are not gendered problems, that is to say women and men both suffer and perpetrate these crimes more or less equally. Here for example is an annotated bibliography of 286 scholarly investigations which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners. The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies exceeds 371,600.

Amen.ie, the Irish mens domestic violence charity, reports very similar findings, with 29% of women and 26% of men suffering domestic abuse. A further three Irish gender neutral surveys were carried out by The Marriage and Relationship Counselling Service (MRCS), Accord, and Department of Health and Children

The MRCS study found that domestic violence between couples tends to be mutual in a third of the cases (33%), female-perpetrated in four out ten couples (42%) and male-perpetrated in a quarter of couples (25%). The Accord study found that where domestic Violence occurs, (46%) involved mutual violence; in (30%) of cases it was perpetrated by women only and in (24%) by men only. The Department of Health study found, where domestic violence occurs, (50%) was mutual with the remainder divided equally between women-only and men-only perpetration. Again, all of this supports a non gendered basis for policy and legislation on domestic and intimate partner violence.

So, we may ask, where are the equivalent support networks for men, where are the white ribbon campaigns for men, the mens shelters?

Is it really because society doesn't care?

While a generally unsympathetic environment towards male victims of domestic violence may to a certain extent exist, this ignores the role that feminist groups play in stymying support for innocent victims of abuse simply because they are male.

One recent example of such efforts came ingloriously from the Women's Aid UK branch. Upon learning that the Office of National Statistics had released yet another report inconveniently illustrating the realities of gender symmetry in domestic violence, they had the following to say:

Of course this misrepresentation of plain reality, in particular in terms of "help seeking" where there is rarely if ever any help to be had for men, and "experiencing much more violence", stands in stark contrast to several responses from journalists:

Typically the ratio of male to female serious injuries resulting from domestic violence is 2:3, mostly because men are larger and more powerful, but incidences of violence are nonetheless equally distributed. This is not new or surprising information. Erin Pizzey, the founder of womens shelters (yes you read that correctly, womens) observed early on that the women in her shelters were as likely to be violent as their male counterparts. As a result she was forced to have a police escort with her whenever she travelled, had to have her mail routed through the police to check for bombs, had her dog shot and ultimately was forced to flee the country by feminists. This is why the founder of womens shelters today identifies herself as a mens rights activist.

Locally, male domestic violence victim support group Amen.ie experienced resistance from both government and womens groups (Cleary 2002:42).

Further evidence of the antipathy that womens groups have to the concept of gender symmetry was provided by the CEDAW Shadow Report of the Women's Human Rights Alliance Ireland 2004:

This quite baldly says that womens support suffers from any attention being given to the issues of men, ergo any amount of suffering from men is to be discounted.

The methodologies used by feminist groups to reinforce their anti-male perspective are clearly outlined by Murray Straus, despite the fact that he identifies as a feminist himself, and can be found here. These include

• Suppression of Evidence
• Avoiding Obtaining Data Inconsistent with the Patriarchal Dominance Theory
• Citing Only Studies That Show Male Perpetration
• Concluding That Results Support Feminist Beliefs When They Do Not
• Creating Evidence by Citation
• Obstructing Publication of Articles and Obstruct Funding Research That Might Contradict the Idea that Male Dominance Is the Cause of PV
• Harassing, Threatening, and Penalising Researchers Who Produce Evidence That Contradicts Feminist Beliefs

A good example of suspect statistics can be found in the most recent attempt to claim that one in four women suffer physical and sexual violence by Sharon O'Halloran, director of Safe Ireland. She apparently "has even called for the Government to establish a high-level cabinet sub-committee to address "the prevalence, complexity and poor response" to all forms of violence against women in Ireland".

The report in question is the Violence against women: an EU-wide survey. If we dig a little deeper into the methodologies used to generate this report however we find the following:

Terms such as rape were left out of the questionnaire and it was left to the researchers to decide whether or not rape took place. So if someone answered that they were verbally abused using a sexual slur, it's the researcher who decides if the women was sexually attacked. Essentially the research is predicated on the idea that women don't know what "rape" "violence" or "stalking" mean, and needed a qualified expert to speak for them.

This is a technique that was pioneered by Mary Koss, a feminist researcher who decided that the official unbiased government reports weren't giving her the answers she wanted, so she set up her own surveys in order to adjust the statistics accordingly. Post survey examination of the outcomes however revealed that around three quarters of the women she identified as having been raped did not consider themselves victims of rape, and almost half of them had sex with their supposed attackers after the event identified as a rape had occurred, and continued dating them.

In fact Ireland has a mid-range reporting rate of sexual violence in Europe at 8.98 per 100,000 population, considerably lower than the 26.14 in England and Wales and 46.51 in Sweden, with an 8% conviction rate, a far cry from 25% of the population. Even if the reporting numbers are off by a factor of a hundred, they still don't come close to one in four.

So why would feminist groups act in this way? Is it just to secure more funding? While that may be a factor, they don't conduct unseemly and shameful attacks on other charitable causes who could also be very credibly described as partaking of the pool of available funding.

A more complete understanding of the reasons for these behaviours requires that we look a little deeper into the theoretical underpinnings of feminism. Feminism's foundational theory (and this isn't a theory in any scientific sense, being untestable, unfalsifiable, and mostly made up) is that we live in a patriarchy or patriarchal society.

Patriarchy is a social system in which males are the primary authority figures central to social organization, occupying roles of political leadership, moral authority, and control of property, and where fathers hold authority over women and children. It implies the institutions of male rule and privilege, and entails female subordination. In feminist theory the concept of patriarchy often includes all the social mechanisms that reproduce and exert male dominance over women.

Essentially this narrative paints all men as permanent aggressors and all women as permanent victims. Patriarchy theory points to supposed earlier times when women were expected to raise children and stay at home - however even in such relationships, the man was not just expected but required to go out and provide for his family, and often required to give up his life in wars and through dangerous working conditions. A reciprocal relationship existed, which did not favour men in any particular manner. Not to mention that a great many women have worked outside the home throughout history. Patriarchy theory is factually wrong - a far more accurate historical assessment would be to say that the overwhelming majority of men and women were treated equally poorly by a comparitively tiny group of wealthy and powerful men and women.

Feminists point to predominantly male leadership positions, while failing to acknowledge that the men in these positions almost never took actions or enacted policies which favoured men as a class over anyone else. Even in the modern era, women, being in the majority, have the majority of the voting power and hence the majority of the power in society, yet these women for some reason continue to elect politicians based on merit rather than gender, which would be an unusual action to take en masse if there were in fact anything resembling an oppressive patriarchy keeping them subdued.

Despite these facts, patriarchy theory was, is and remains central to feminism.

This is embodied in what is known as the Duluth model of law enforcement, a feminist approach to domestic violence correction. The Duluth Model is based on a "violence is patriarchal" model. The model focuses solely on the men's use of violence in abusive relationships, rather than on the behavior of all parties concerned. This helps the men to focus on changing their personal behavior in order to be nonviolent in any relationship. According to the Duluth Model, "women and children are vulnerable to violence because of their unequal social, economic, and political status in society". It has been highly criticised for being founded on the false premise that men are always the guilty party, which in combination with a mandatory arrest policy, has often led to wrongful arrests of men without due process.

And yet here we can find adoption of the Duluth model (in the face of the enormous body of evidence supporting gender symmetry) among COSC's recommendations to the government, as well as in the policy section of Womens Aid Ireland.

So we can see how gender symmetry in domestic and intimate partner violence strikes right at the heart of feminist theory - if after all women are just as capable of and prone to violence as men, where is the patriarchy? This is the reason for the resistance of feminist groups to acknowledging and deaing with the realities of the suffering of tens of thousands of innocent people in Ireland. This is mentioned by Ruth Cleary in her comprehensive analysis of the recent history of feminism in Ireland.

Also in her research Ms Cleary shows us how feminist groups began in Ireland and the routes they took to accumulate power.

There exists an enormous network of state funded organisations in Ireland which claim to promote the needs of women, crucially as seen through a feminist lens, working according to dubious theoretical and ideological guidelines. According to SafeIreland, over seven thousand women received direct support from their shelters in 2010, and their associated organisations fielded 38,000 helpline calls. As gender symmetry indicates there must therefore also be an equivalent number of men in need of similar services, voices that went unheard, the innocent lives of your sons, grandsons, brothers, fathers, uncles, and friends that not only went without the help of their community but are actively demonised by campaigns such as Man Up and the White Ribbon.

Theirs is the blood flowing under the door.

The Irish public as a whole doesn't appear to have much time for feminism, as Senator Bacik's repeated rejections by the electorate indicate - and rightly so - despite which ideological feminism is alive and well, unelected and without a mandate from the public, in the halls of successive Irish governments.

The time has come to stop ignoring half the problem and highlight the real and deadly consequences of embracing these ideologies. We call on all feminist organisations to discard the harmful elements of feminism and support all victims regardless of gender.