Tag Archives: Accountability

Is lenience towards women increasing domestic violence against men?

First of all, let’s see what’s happening with domestic violence rates.

Excerpt:

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.

Similar or slightly larger numbers of men were subjected to severe force in an incident with their partner, according to the same documents. The figure stood at 48.6% in 2006-07, 48.3% the next year and 37.5% in 2008-09, Home Office statistics show.

The 2008-09 bulletin states: “More than one in four women (28%) and around one in six men (16%) had experienced domestic abuse since the age of 16. These figures are equivalent to an estimated 4.5 million female victims of domestic abuse and 2.6 million male victims.”

In addition, “6% of women and 4% of men reported having experienced domestic abuse in the past year, equivalent to an estimated one million female victims of domestic abuse and 600,000 male victims”.

Here’s a typical case: (from the same article)

Ian McNicholl, 47, has painful memories to remind him of the terror he endured when he found himself a male victim of domestic violence.

His then fiancee, Michelle Williamson, punched him in the face several times, stubbed out cigarettes on his body, lashed him with a vacuum cleaner tube, hit him with a metal bar and a hammer and even poured boiling water on to his lap. That at 6ft he was almost a foot taller than her made no difference. He still has burn marks on his left shoulder from when she used steam from an iron on him. Williamson, 35, is now serving a seven-year jail sentence for causing both actual and grievous bodily harm.

During the trial last year McNicholl told the court that, during more than a year of attacks and intimidation, he had lost his job, home and self-respect. He had been too scared to go to the police and had considered suicide. She was only arrested after two neighbours saw her punch him.

Sentencing her at Grimsby crown court last year, judge John Reddihough told Williamson: “Over the period of time you were with him you destroyed him mentally and seriously harmed him physically, leaving him with both physical and mental scars.”

Why is this happening? Well, even women who seem to be nice on the surface can turn violent when they placed under stress (like from work or pregnancy or their periods) that they are not prepared for, and when they perceive that there is no cost to becoming violent with a man. This is especially problematic when the man has no leverage in the relationship to negotiate with because of anti-male bias in social programs, police and courts. How is a man supposed to negotiate with someone who holds all the cards? She can just do whatever she wants, and the whole system is rigged against him.

Look at this news story.

Excerpt:

Judges have been told to treat female criminals more leniently than men when deciding sentences.

New guidelines declare that women suffer disadvantages and courts should ‘bear these matters in mind’.

The rules say women criminals often have poor mental health or are poorly educated, have not committed violence and have children to look after.

‘Women’s experiences as victims, witnesses and offenders are in many respects different to those of men,’ according to the Equal Treatment Bench Book.

‘These differences highlight the importance of the need for sentencers to bear these matters in mind when sentencing.’

The controversial advice comes from the Judicial Studies Board, which is responsible for training the judiciary.

[…]The Bench Book tells judges that the problem ‘consists mainly of violence by men against women’. It adds ‘the reality is that some of the most physically violent incidents are committed by men on female partners’.

The document also suggests that aggression against men by women is rare, saying that ‘men and partners in same-sex relationships might also be victims of domestic violence’.

[…]Updated guidance on how to sentence female criminals was distributed in April in a new section on ‘gender equality’.

It told judges: ‘Women remain disadvantaged in many public and private areas of their life; they are under-represented in the judiciary, Parliament and senior positions
across a range of jobs; and there is still a substantial pay gap between men and women.’

On women accused of crime, the guidance quoted Judge Baroness Hale, the only woman among the 11 at the Supreme Court, who describes herself as a ‘soft-line feminist’.

She said: ‘It is now well recognised that a misplaced conception of equality has resulted in some very unequal treatment for women and girls.’

The rules were prepared by a team headed by High Court judge Dame Laura Cox.

She wrote: ‘It is hardly revolutionary that judges should know of the matters central to the lives of those who attend courts and to aim to provide judges with that knowledge.’

And you can can easily see this in the divorce courts of Western nations where men are regularly taken to the cleaners. (Women get custody 90% of the time, 70% of all divorces are initiated by women, with 80% of them for no other reason than insufficient happiness – despite the fact that they made a vow to love that man forever). When you total up the costs of the marital home and property, alimony and child support, it really is prohibitive. The risks are too high!

And in more extreme cases you get things like this case.

Excerpt:

Three Missouri women convicted of murdering their husbands years ago learned today that they will be released from prison on parole because of claims of spousal abuse.

Vicky Williams, 55, and Roberta Carlene Borden, 65, will be released on Oct. 15, according to their lawyers and relatives. Ruby Jamerson, 57, will be released in 2013. All were serving life sentences from cases that date to the 1970s or 1980s.

[…]Borden was convicted in 1978 of conspiring with her lover to shoot her husband, Delbert, as he lounged in a chair in his Springfield, Mo., home. Jamerson was accused of hiring two teen boys in 1988 to stab her husband, Horace, to death in their north St. Louis County home. Williams was convicted of hiring someone to shoot her husband, Gilbert Lee, as he made his rounds as a security guard in a Chesterfield industrial park in 1979.

Lawyers for the three women later claimed that they had suffered years of mental and physical abuse, including vicious beatings. (See the attached link for more details on the cases.)

Many relatives of the slain spouses have disputed the claims of abuse and argued that the women were only conning their way to freedom.

The problem is that these charges of abuse are used regularly in divorce courts to tilt the table against the man – the charges of abuse are used to get custody of the children, but they never go to trial. The warrants for restraining orders are sworn out before the charges of abuse can be investigated, and custody rights are granted. Later on, the charges are dropped. But the damage has already been done – the woman has already been granted sole custody. Similarly, there is not history of abuse in many battered wife cases – the lawyers make them up after the fact to get their clients released. Sometimes, after only a few months in jail for murdering their husbands! And they get custody of their children after a few more months. Or sometimes women just take men to court to have their daughters groundings overturned. And the courts do it.

Men understand these things, and it causes them to stay clear of relationships with women that are regulated by the state. So, you may get a lot of men hooking up with women for sex, but men will not marry women and take the chance of coming under the authority of judges who think that women are always victims and should never be blamed or held accountable – even if they make false rape accusations or kill their husbands (that they freely chose to marry!). Some women believe that violence against men is justified because they have been indoctrinated to perceive themselves as victims. The victim attitude allows them to blame men for invented wrongs even when women themselves are the aggressors. And this is why men don’t commit to marriage anymore. It’s not cowardice. It’s that women have priced themselves out of the commitment market.

Related posts

What does universal health care really mean?

I think the point of universal health care (at least the government-run variety) is pretty clear. The goal is to equalize life outcomes so that people who work the hardest pay the most into the system, and people who live in risky/immoral lifestyles withdraw the most. The biggest losers in such a system are the productive people who make responsible, moral decisions about their lifestyle – they pay the most and withdraw the least. The biggest winners are people who don’t work at all but who withdraw a lot.

I think that universal health care makes people irresponsible. The driving force behind universal health care is the idea that people should be able to do anything they want to pursue happiness any way they please, and that the natural limits of reality should be circumvented by spending other people’s money to “equalize life outcomes”.

Socialized medicine proponents are funny people. They think that no one should have to deal with the costs of their own decisions as long as they are sincere in their pursuit of happiness – it’s just not possible to predict what decisions will lead to good outcomes and what decisions will lead to bad outcomes. I once had two Canadian women bragging to me in an airport about how great socialized medicine was until I explained to them that at my salary level I would be paying 50% of my salary to the government and I had not been to the doctor for anything other than a check-up in my entire life. They could not see why I might like to opt out of such a system even after I explained it to them. They apparently thought that at any moment I might develop the urge for an abortion or two and then who would pay for it? Life is so unpredictable for a Canadian woman – it’s better not to have to worry about it and just let someone else pay.

So, let’s see what passes for health care in various universal health care systems around the world.

  • Here’s my previous post on taxpayer-funded in vitro fertilization in Ontario, Canada. It’s a human right! And that means it’s FREEEEEE!
  • But there’s more. Sex-changes are also a human right in Ontario, Canada. It’s FREEEEEE! The taxpayer has loads of money for that.
  • Do you know what else is FREEEEEE! in socialist countries like the UK? Breast enlargements. Yeah, because it’s a human right!

And of course it goes without saying that abortion is a human right everywhere, and should be taxpayer-funded. It really is about playing on people’s fears, and buying votes with other people’s money. The reason that the socialists don’t want health care to be left to private companies instead of government is because private companies would insist that people pay based on their likelihood of filing a claim – as with car insurance. But that is too “judgmental” for the universal health care proponents – they think that no one should feel obligated to behave responsibly just because of petty things like money.

I wonder what my readers think about this.

Is it OK for some citizens to make decisions that are costly and risky as they pursue happiness in non-standard ways, and then assign blame and costs for the inevitable failures and expenses to their neighbors? Is there a right to pursue happiness at the expense of others? Is life predictable enough that people should be able to rationally assess the costs and risks of their own decisions? Would private insurers do a better job of holding people accountable to make good decisions about their own lifestyles? Should people choose how much health care they want based on the coverages they want and the risks they want to incur? Should a person be able to say that they don’t want to be covered for sex changes and have the amount they pay into the system reduced? Should a person be able to opt out of government health care entirely and just buy a medical insurance policy privately, based on their own needs?

A closer look at Obama’s 1-billion dollar “stimulus” earmark

From the Heritage Foundation. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) likes to say that Congressional earmarking has become the gateway drug to federal overspending.  Is there any better evidence of this theory then President Barack Obama’s $1 billion earmark for a special project in Illinois that was slipped into his failed $862 billion stimulus?  According to Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, the Obama Administration awarded $1 billion on August 5th for a Carbon Capture and Storage Network in Illinois:

Today’s announcement will help ensure the US remains competitive in a carbon constrained economy, creating jobs while reducing greenhouse gas pollution.  This investment in the world’s first, commercial-scale, oxy-combustion power plant will help to open up the over $300 billion market for coal unit repowering and position the country as a leader in an important part of the global clean energy economy

This project was an earmark in the stimulus according to a Washington Post story dated March 6, 2009:

Deep inside the economic stimulus package is a $1 billion prize that, in five short words, shows the benefits of being in power in Washington. The funding, for “fossil energy research and development,” is likely to go to a power plant in a small Illinois town, a project whose longtime backers include a group of powerful lawmakers from the state, among them President Obama.

Stimulus seems to be a way of rewarding the people who voted for you with money from the people who didn’t vote for you. At least, that’s the way it is for Obama, apparently.