At A Voice for Men’s conference yesterday, antifeminist crusader Erin Pizzey was given “a special award for her tireless work with ALL the victims of domestic violence.” Due to the amazing public relations work of AVFM’s spokeswoman for the conference, I don’t know what the award was called, so let’s just assume it was the World’s Greatest Erin Pizzey Award.
Whatever the award was called, the notion that Pizzey works, tirelessly or otherwise, on behalf of “ALL the victims of domestic violence” is demonstrably false. Indeed, she has argued vociferously against extending DV protection to all victims.
In an op-ed she wrote for The Daily Mail in 2011, Pizzey declared herself “horrified” that the British government would consider extending domestic violence protection to those subjected to “emotional bullying and ‘coercive control’” as well as actual physical abuse.
Her “argument” may be triggering for abuse survivors, so I’m putting all of her quotes below the jump.
Pizzey wrote:
In other words, if you stop your wife using the phone, you could be bracketed with a man who has knocked his wife’s teeth out in a rage.
In the future, couples who row, smashing precious belongings in a fit of anger perhaps, could seek to have their other half charged under domestic violence laws. Thus, too, wives who, for whatever reason, destroy their husband’s fine wine collection, or cut the sleeve off his suits in an act of revenge for some betrayal or slight, may find themselves charged with this most serious of crimes.
Domineering, bullying husbands who shout at their wives but never lift a finger to hurt them would find themselves in court.
Let me tell you: this is not domestic violence. It is an absurd idea to define such acts in that way, and worse, it serves to trivialise genuine cases of domestic abuse.
The new definition, which the government did indeed put in place in 2013, extended domestic violence and abuse to include
Any incident or pattern of incidents of controlling, coercive or threatening behaviour, violence or abuse between those aged 16 or over who are or have been intimate partners or family members regardless of gender or sexuality.
The government spelled out clearly what they meant by “controlling” and “coercive” behavior.
Controlling behaviour is: a range of acts designed to make a person subordinate and/or dependent by isolating them from sources of support, exploiting their resources and capacities for personal gain, depriving them of the means needed for independence, resistance and escape and regulating their everyday behaviour.
Coercive behaviour is: an act or a pattern of acts of assault, threats, humiliation and intimidation or other abuse that is used to harm, punish, or frighten their victim.”*
*This definition includes so called ‘honour’ based violence, female genital mutilation (FGM) and forced marriage, and is clear that victims are not confined to one gender or ethnic group.
There is no question, at least not to anyone who is serious about ending domestic violence and abuse, that “controlling, coercive or threatening behaviour” is abuse.
Why shouldn’t “domineering, bullying husbands who shout at their wives” in an attempt to control and coerce them be prosecuted for abuse? Why shouldn’t wives who do the same be prosecuted?
Pizzey not only argued against prosecuting those who bully their partners into submission through emotional, psychological, sexual or financial abuse. She also argued that most victims of domestic violence aren’t really legitimate victims either:
To me, the definition of domestic violence is quite clear: if you are not in fear of your life, you are not suffering it.
That’s right, the woman AVFM just honored as an advocate for “ALL victims of domestic violence” only considers actual physical violence to be domestic violence if the victim is literally afraid that they will be killed.
She continues:
In all other cases, where the aggression takes only an emotional form, or a few coffee cups have been chucked around, women in modern Britain thankfully have the option of finding a lawyer and choosing to separate from their husbands if they wish to do so.
The obvious point is that there is almost always clear evidence in domestic violence cases — bruises, cuts, internal organ damage or scars. Unless you have seen real, shocking abuse as I have, it is difficult to imagine some of the awful violence that people can inflict on each other in the home. And that’s why I’m convinced that bringing other, lesser, wrongs under this same legal umbrella does a great disservice to the women who really suffer.
How does protecting all victims of abuse do a disservice to those suffering the worst abuse? The police arrest people who assault as well as people who murder; this is hardly a “great disservice” to victims of murder.
Pizzey warns that the expanded definition “will turn millions of us into criminals.” She then makes a startling confession:
[A]fter all, I’ve been known in my time to lob the odd glass of wine in the heat of the moment. Indeed, there is something frightfully satisfying about chucking wine at somebody.
Yep. The woman who is A Voice for Men’s guru on domestic violence likes to chuck wine glasses at people. And apparently thinks this is a perfectly fine way to handle domestic disputes.
At this rate, we’ll all end up under arrest, and that is not a situation that’s going to help the police tackle the cases of true physical violence which must be stamped out.
Needless to say, the new definition, in place since April of last year, has not led to mass arrests of everyone in the U.K. If the new definition has put some wine-glass chuckers in jail, I can’t say I think this is a great injustice.
Pizzey declares that
People behave badly in relationships because we have human frailties. This is not an area in which the State should meddle; leave it to relationship counsellors and divorce lawyers.
Why shouldn’t the state “meddle” in cases of domestic abuse? The law doesn’t end at your door.
Pizzey winds up her op-ed by accusing those working against domestic violence – presumably she excludes herself – of being in it for money and power.
Over the past ten years, domestic violence has become a huge feminist industry. …
This is girls-only empire building, and it is highly lucrative at that. Men are not allowed to be employed at these organisations. Boys over the age of 12 are not allowed into safe houses where their mothers are staying, which I think is scandalous. …
Who benefits from this industry? Refuge has an annual income of more than £10 million from both public and private donations. Cherie Booth is a patron. The heads of these organisations are on very generous salaries.
And they are on a feminist mission to demonise men — even those who never have and never will hit a woman.
It’s appalling that this woman has gotten any kind of award.
Opps, I suddenly realized that some people might think I was nagged into doing all the chores, that isn’t the case. I wanted to do them, I’m not a career person I’m a homemaker by nature
Necrotroll! Don’t dig up dead threads dude, it just makes you look desperate for a fight.
And for the record the commenters here are plenty upset about emotional abuse, and you’d have to be either ignoring 90% of the threads or wilfully ignorant to not realise it. In fact, in a recent thread that wasn’t zombified like this one, we did a lot of discussion about the fact that a prominent AVfM member doesn’t think any pattern of non-physical psychological abuse should be regarded as abuse. So kindly STFU trying to tag us as insensitive – there’s a difference between the moving goalposts of psychological abuse and the irritation of feeling like someone’s not prioritising something you’ve asked them to act on before. If you’re choosing to pretend those two things are equal you’re not here for a discussion, you’re trolling.
@richardinnorway
I’m sure that no one here denies that the experiences described above are emotionally abusive. Any kind of emotional attack that makes you feel suicidal and extremely self-loathing is undoubtedly abusive. But you’re also stretching the definition of nagging. Nagging isn’t abusive behavior, and is often instead a feature of non-abusive interpersonal conflict.
And yes, I have been nagged before as well. Just one example: my older siblings nag me about getting a job all the time, and I hate it. But there is a difference between being nagged and being constantly criticized for every little thing in such a way as to eat away at my self-esteem and make me feel like I’m worthless and unlovable. Feel free to label your emotionally abusive experiences as nagging, but don’t tell other people how to use the word, especially not other survivors of emotional abuse.
Gosh, it’s almost like the trolls don’t bother to read the points made in the OP that starts the thread.
Can someone tell me the source of the false statistic that women “initiate” the majority of domestic violence? It’s something MRAs regurgitate constantly, but I have not been able to find one official, trustworthy source that claims this. I’m guessing the source is their own, collective asshole?
I don’t know where the stats come from, but I do know that there’s been a big jump in women arrested for DV in recent years and that’s probably where the talking point comes from.
Of course, they ignore the context as usual. The laws in many states have changed so that the police have to make an arrest when there’s a DV call whether the victim wants to press charges or not. This was enacted to protect victims, who are often too afraid of the consequences of pressing charges. But there’s been a side effect. Victims get arrested too if they hit back in self defense and victims get arrested if their abuser turns it around and claims the victim is the real abuser.
As a result, women are being arrested more (often both are arrested at once), but they’re actually the victims, not the abusers and in those cases, charges are dropped pretty much right away.
I might be wrong, but I suspect that this is where MRAs get their “facts.” Being the abusers lobby, they naturally twist facts to make the victim look bad and the abuser look like the victim. It’s what they do. They also like to equate minor acts of violence like a slap or a kick with severe acts of violence resulting in hospitalization, permanent injury or even death. The latter, unlike the former is much , much more likely to be male on female violence.
Note to any trolls planning on pooping in this thread: No, I’m not saying a woman can never genuinely abuse a man. Just stop pretending it happens equally.
There are some statistics relevant to this, but not really supporting it. The big problem is the Conflict Tactics Scale which researchers can use to come up with some numbers to crunch. Unfortunately, too many people overlook that it relates to conflict. If the subjects were initially sorted into non-violent, conflict affected and abuse/control affected, the statistics for the conflict group might be relevant. But when you come to controlling, abusive partners the violence is much more serious and much more one-sided and much, much more dominated by men. And the CTS falls down badly here, even the guys who came up with it in the first place say this. (Can’t find a bookmark at the moment. I’ll have a look tomorrow.)
When people obliviously apply the CTS to abusive relationships, they’ll “count” a man choking a woman as Tick One Box and they’ll also count the woman screaming, kicking, slapping responding or defending herself against that assault as Tick Three Boxes. Looking at the numbers it’s obvious that she’s more violent than he is even though she was the only one in any serious danger during that exchange.
One other big problem is researchers looking into “relationships” and only counting those who are currently living together. What we know about Intimate Partner Violence is that some of the worst, and most likely to be lethal, violence occurs after people have separated. Excluding circumstances like this means that the worst instances of male initiated, serious violence are automatically ignored in the data collection.
The other thing we do know is that men are much more likely (not less as many men tend to argue) to press charges against a woman partner once the police are involved.
I don’t have any statistics, but looking at the discussions that the MRA have had around male-on-female DV, they seem to think that (1) “provocation” into physical violence is an acceptable reaction, let alone legal defence and (2) that male-on-female DV is caused by the woman purposefully goading the man into assault/battery. Because it’s never the fault of the male batterers.
The MRA argument also runs on false equivalency – they seem to think that, for example, punching a mouthy woman means that she started it and deserved what she got. This type of framing means that battery is seen as equivalent to verbal harranging (which is required for believing that provocation is any type of reason), and it’s “unfair” that the woman “gets off” when she “instigated” the “abuse”. Remembering that any type of repeated request by a woman to a man is “nagging” which is “abuse”.
So they don’t need a statistics source because of they way they impute causality. It’s an article of faith for them – one of many.
What they are using is the findings on the Conflict Tactics Scale in some studies. The CTS asks people to report instances of “aggression” but completely fails to measure context.
For instance, let’s say a man starts to beat the shit out of his girlfriend, and says that he’s going to kill her this time. She tries to escape, but winds up in the kitchen so she grabs a knife and slashes at him, and as a result he ends up in the ER for some stitches. This would be rated as her being more domestically-violent than he is, since he was verbally violent and she had some bruises, but he was severely physically injured. The context, in which he was issuing a death threat and giving every indication that he was going to make good on it immediately is not recorded.
Let’s just be succint and say that MRAs pick any statistic that will make women look bad. That always works.
And even make one up when fudging data analysis doesn’t help them. Ass facts FTL.
Probably this: http://www.saveservices.org/2012/02/cdc-study-more-men-than-women-victims-of-partner-abuse/
They did a self report study in England as well and found that while men reported being victims of violence far more often than women until they were told that the questions would be repeated with a lie detector and then they acknowledged that their partner telling them no might not rise to the level of violence.
By law on a DV call if both peeps report violence by the other then both peeps go to jail. The way the abuser uses this to advantage is no surprise.
[TW: Abuse, rape, paedophilia.]
So… In Pizzey’s eyes, was my teenage “Boyfriend” (ugh) abusive or not? Sure, he completely isolated from my friends and tried his best to isolate me from my family; sure, I wasn’t even allowed to take a leak without his express permission; sure, he told me that he’d kill himself if I ever contacted my friends, refused sex or left him; sure, he forced me into phonesex and cybersex and/or raped me damn near every day for the three months we were “Together” (ugh); sure, I was 15 and he was 25; sure, abstinence-only education meant that the only thing I knew about sex was “It makes babies” before it all began; sure, I later found out that he was also raping one of my 14-year-old friends at the same time… But hey, he never hit me! *rolls eyes*
(Don’t worry, the sick bastard’s in prison for the rest of his life.)
I personally know Erin and you should show her some respect for the pioneering work she did back then. Because she dislikes the new brand of man hating feminists who want to blame all the ills of the world on men doesn’t negate her good work. Some of the man hating feminists weren’t even around at the time Erin was doing her campaigning work and most likely wouldn’t want to put their heads above the parapet, given that everything in the seventies and early eighties along those lines was twice as difficult as it today. Shame on you! I any of you want to send me hatemail – BRING IT ON!!!
LOL weaksauce necro trolling. 1/10
If you want a domme, pay for one.
Maureen,
You’re full of shit. No one is going to send you hate mail. Find another way to get attention.
Awww. WHTM got a necro troll for Christmas this year. God bless us, every one!
Funny, that would be the first person I’ve heard of who’s met Pizzey who doesn’t dislike her. On that basis alone I decree that trolly is telling Xmas fibs.
Boring troll is boring. Erin Pizzey is irrelevant.
I do not subscribe to the philosophy that if a person did something good once they should be respected by everyone forever and nothing bad they have done should be considered.
Many of us were there and did our share but we don’t effing go round demanding gratitude like these authoritarian asshats do. Criminy!
That’s ridiculous, Wonder Woman doesn’t hate men. That’s what you were referring to, right? It’s the only context in which the phrase “the world of man” isn’t absurd, so I’m assuming you were refering to fictional Amazons.
I wonder why it’s Teh Ebil for these straw feminists to hate men, but perfectly okay for Pissy and her MRA mates to hate women?
And perfectly okay for Pissy & Co. to send battered wives back to abusive husbands if they think the women haven’t been “abused enough” to merit a stay in a shelter. If that’s not hateful, I don’t know what is.