I’ve noticed that young women are quite frightened of men, because they are taught that men are dangerous. I’m concerned that these beliefs will deter women from choosing men wisely, and marrying them. One way to counter these fears about “domestic violence” is to take a look at the studies, and see who is really doing the violence. Is it always men, or is there a balance?

The study was published in the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma.

Here’s the abstract:

Recent debates surrounding intimate partner violence (IPV) have focused on its gender symmetry and gender-oriented nature. These debates center on findings from various data sources, like victimization or self-reported surveys and police-based reports. Data by Statistics Canada, from 1999 to 2014, has shown that the prevalence of IPV is similar for male and female victims, except for sexual assaults. However, there has been a paucity of studies on the severity and risk factors of IPV against men by female partners. Thus, this paper examines the severity of and risk factors for physical IPV against heterosexual men in Canada using the General Social Survey (Victimization) data of 2014. This study revealed that there is a symmetry in the experiences of physical violence between male and female victims. This study also revealed that male victims experience more severe violence than female victims. Using binary logistic regression analysis, years of dwelling together, the victim’s age, childhood victimization, and marijuana use were found to predict physical IPV against heterosexual men. This paper concludes with suggestions about how these predicting factors can be used to identify male victims and the need for a more inclusive approach toward addressing IPV, which should include male victims.

The key points for us:

• scholars typically ignore violence against men committed by women: “However, there has been a paucity of studies on the severity and risk factors of IPV against men by female partners.”
• men and women commit domestic violence at roughly equal rates: “This study revealed that there is a symmetry in the experiences of physical violence between male and female victims.”
• Men are the victims of more severe violence than women: “This study also revealed that male victims experience more severe violence than female victims.”

This confirms data from a blog post I wrote a long time ago (2011) about this issue.

I found that:

Data from Home Office statistical bulletins and the British Crime Survey show that men made up about 40% of domestic violence victims each year between 2004-05 and 2008-09, the last year for which figures are available. In 2006-07 men made up 43.4% of all those who had suffered partner abuse in the previous year, which rose to 45.5% in 2007-08 but fell to 37.7% in 2008-09.

That’s the UK.

And:

An estimated 7% of women and 6% of men in a current or previous spousal relationship encountered spousal violence during the five years up to and including 2004, according to a comprehensive new report on family violence.

That’s Canada.

It’s interesting to note that the police and the courts do not acknowledge that women commit domestic violence. Whenever there is a report of domestic violence, the man is ALWAYS assumed to be the attacker, and ALWAYS arrested and removed from his home. That is the way that domestic violence works, according to the famous “Duluth model”. The Duluth model actually discourages men from getting into relationships that lead to marriage. Men don’t want to be attacked by women, and then treated as the aggressors by police.

Another factor also deters men from relationships and marriage: courts that are biased against men. When there is domestic violence, women are treated far more leniently than men. I blogged about a study about this recently, and found:

The estimated gender disparities are strikingly large, conditional on observables. Most notably, treatment as male is associated with a 63% average increase in sentence length, with substantial unexplained gaps throughout the sentence distribution.

I see stories all the time where women are violent, and get no jail time. Here is one story from January 2024 and here is another from March 2024.

Men do look at these studies, and they decide on their life goals accordingly. Don’t blame men for aligning their goals and decisions with the way that the world really is. If women want men to engage the way that men used to, they should stop being so defensive and fix the problems that are deterring men from relationships.

The Cambrian explosion is the name given to the sudden origin of basically all of the major body plans in nature. It happened in a 3-5 million year period about 540 million years ago. It’s a problem for naturalists, because of the enormous amount of information needed to make these new (and different) body plans. The best explanation they had was that rising oxygen levels did it. Is that right?

Here’s an excellent post by Günter Bechly, writing for Evolution News.

Here’s the naturalistic scenario:

For more than seventy years it was the scientific consensus and undisputed textbook wisdom that the origin of multicellular life in the late Precambrian was triggered by increased oxygen levels (Fike et al. 2006, Sahoo et al. 2012, Lyons et al. 2014, Reinhard et al. 2016, Anonymous 2023, Harrison 2023, Ralls 2023, UCPH 2023). For example, McFadden et al. (2008) identified two pulses of oxidation in the Precambrian and found that “following this second oxidation event, between 550 and 542 million years ago, there was a worldwide increase of Ediacaran organisms, complex macroscopic life forms, an event recently dubbed the Avalon Explosion” (Virginia Tech 2008). Similarily, the study by Pogge von Strandmann et al. (2015) was promoted in a press release as demonstrating that “oxygen provided breath of life that allowed animals to evolve” (Hickey et al. 2015).

This was all a lot of theorizing in order to save naturalism from scientific evidence. But science makes progress, and the smoke gets cleared:

Now a new study (Ostrander et al. 2023) by group of researchers from Denmark has overturned decades of evolutionary dogma and claims the exact opposite: “oxygen didn’t trigger multicellular organisms” (Anonymous 2023, UCPH 2023). What this study found was instead clear evidence of a lower oxygen content correlated with the Avalon Explosion of the Ediacaran biota. The authors summarize their surprising findings as: “Contrary to a classical hypothesis, our interpretations place the Shuram excursion, and any coeval animal evolutionary events, in a predominantly anoxic global ocean.” Co-author Christian Bjerrum commented “Specifically, it means that we need to rethink a lot of the things that we believed to be true from our childhood learning. And textbooks need to be revised and rewritten. So, if not extra oxygen, what triggered the era’s explosion of life? Perhaps the exact opposite” (Anonymous 2023, UCPH 2023). Some even went further and suggested to “forget everything you thought you knew about how life evolved on Earth” (Ralls 2023) because it “turns out we might be very wrong about how life arose on Earth” (Harrison 2023).

Prior to the “increase in oxygen” hypothesis, naturalists used to explain away the Cambrian explosion by saying that we had not studied the fossil record for long enough. “Eventually, we will have a better picture of the fossil record, and that will show that we started with a few simple life forms, and then branched out into more and more complex life forms, over an hundreds of millions of years”.

But that’s not what they are saying now, because the evidence is in:

Here is what Professor Derek Briggs, a world-renowned expert on Cambrian fossils, has to say on this issue: “We now know that the sudden appearance of fossils in the Cambrian (541–485 million years ago) is real and not an artefact of an imperfect fossil record” (Briggs 2015). Likewise, Zhang & Shu (2021) admitted that “multiple sources of evidence are strongly suggestive of a real evolutionary event being recorded rather than an artifact of an imperfect fossil record.” Cabej (2020) put it even more clearly: “Nevertheless, now, 150 years after The Origin, when an incomparably larger stock of animal fossils has been collected, Darwin’s gap remains, the abrupt appearance of Cambrian fossils is a reality, and we are still wondering about the forces and mechanisms that drove it.

How many times does this have to happen, before naturalists admit that they are committing the “atheism-of-the-gaps” fallacy?

Before science, atheists told us that the universe was eternal. Then science progressed, and we now know that the universe – space, time, matter and energy – all came into being out of nothing about 14 billion years ago. What could cause that? Well, the cause of all of nature must be supernatural. 

Before science, atheists told us that any old universe would support life. If gravity was a little different, then people would just have pointy ears, like you see on Star Trek. But then science progressed, and we now have a long list of dozens of constants and quantities in nature that must be finely-tuned to an incredibly high degree in order for complex life of any kind to exist. Fine-tuning requires an intelligent agent – that’s the only explanation that we have experience with.

Before science, atheists told us that the origin of life was easy. Life is just a clump of jello, very boring and simple. No need for a cosmic engineer. But then science progressed, and we discovered biological information, such as DNA, inside the cell. Naturalists tried to say that most (or all) of that information was “junk DNA”, but more science happened proving them wrong again.

I could go on and on with example after example. Naturalism is about faith. They start with the desire for personal autonomy. Autonomy from the moral law. They speculate about how nature can be explained without a Creator and Designer. They take refuge in gaps in our scientific understanding. But then science progresses, the gaps close, and everyone knows for certain.