PROSTITUTED SCIENCE AND SCHOLARSHIP

Ferrel Christensen, Ph.D. Edmonton,

A submission to the Special Senate-Commons Committee on Custody and Access

The present submission to the Committee has been written specifically in response to certain submissions already made. This unusual step has been taken because of serious misbehavior, in their role as social scientists and legal scholars, on the part of those making said prior submissions--misbehavior which could otherwise dangerously mislead this Committee and result in unjust actions on the part of government.

Nor is the behavior in question original to the current enquiry by the Parliament of Canada. It is merely a recent episode in a long history of prejudiced and outright unethical science and scholarship, manifestly motivated by ideology and encouraged by entrenched attitudes in government bureaucracy. This is a serious accusation, but the case is absolutely clear. It requires no special training or specialized knowledge to recognize the improper behavior. It requires only careful attention to the evidence and honesty on one's own part--and the backbone to do something about it.

It must be noted that attempts to mislead can take many forms. Most people fear being caught in a flat falsehood, and falsifying data in science is not common. But equally unethical--because the intent to deceive is the same and the foreseeable likelihood of promoting false belief is the same--are various other kinds of dissimulation. Notable among these is suppression of importantly relevant facts. In the recent scandal over the false conviction of Guy Paul Morin, the chief offence was not the telling of falsehoods; it was the withholding of information which manifestly would influence the outcome of the case. In courts of law, such behavior is labeled "obstruction of justice"--and it is as much a criminal offence as is perjury. But various other techniques of deceit are equally wrong.

As regards the present case, the background consists in a long history of intellectual dishonesty and ordinary dishonesty regarding the subject of violence in the family. For years, social service agencies and organizations have promoted the claim that overwhelmingly, it is men who are violent or abusive toward spouses or children--that there is hardly enough abusive behavior in the home by women to mention. That message has been promulgated in spite of the contrary evidence being massive, and clear to anyone willing to consult it; this dishonesty has been committed for patent reasons of ideology. And even many not sharing the ideology have knuckled under to it, out of fear of the others.

This sad situation in Canada today can be documented to book length. But it is a special tragedy when academics, with their supposed ethical standards, fall into the same behavior. Such behavior by particular academics is the subject of this brief submission.

1. SUPPRESSED SCIENCE in the STATUS OF WOMEN REPORT

The main focus of the present submission is the report commissioned by Status of Women Canada and written by eight academics at three universities: "Spousal violence in custody and access disputes: Recommendations for reform". In what follows, for the sake of brevity and variation, that document will be referred to as "the Bala-Hornick report" (after its two most prominent authors within the relevant areas of law and sociology, respectively), as "the Status of Women report", or simply as "the report".

The report is written in confident language, clearly claiming by implication a good familiarity with the scientific field of family-violence studies. It speaks of the different kinds of research-data available for discovering rates of partner assault, and discusses at some length certain examples of such research. Through all of that, it carefully cultivates the impression that a large majority of such assaults are committed by the man. It does this in numerous ways. The most ubiquitous is that of referring--constantly throughout the report--to the offender as 'he', 'him', 'the husband', etc. and to the victim as 'she', 'her', 'the woman', etc. Certainly, gender-neutral terms are also very much used, such as 'the abusive spouse'. But they are never employed for long without the gender-specific ones being put in again--as if to pay lip service to gender neutrality without letting the reader forget the real message.

In certain places, the report says merely that men commit such assaults "most often" or "more frequently". Though false by the body of scientific evidence, this vague statement would not be seriously in error if it were ever qualified so as to be in the range of 'a little more frequently'; appearing wholly unqualified, it conversationally implies that the statistical difference between the sexes is large. That is certainly what is implied in a context where the offender and victim are constantly being identified by sex--and then almost always referred to as male and female, respectively. For comparison, imagine a treatise on interracial violence in which the offender is nearly always identified as a person of color. Evidently, interracial violence is in fact "most often" by non-whites against whites. But the prejudicial nature and the dangers to justice of that kind of treatment would be obvious to anyone sensitive to the evils of racism.

The claim that the offenders are overwhelmingly male is also made quite explicitly by the Bala-Hornick report in a few places. In Section 5.1, instances in which "a primary caregiver mother is the primary aggressor spouse" are labeled "relatively rare". In his oral presentation to the Committee (not speaking for his co-authors), Professor Bala said, "The incidence of women in the spousal violence situation is far less than it is for men as far as being the perpetrators of violence" (Bala 1998, p. 26). In Section 1.3.2, following citations from a clearly nonrepresentative US clinical study reporting that "female initiated violence" was 10-15% of its cases, the report urges that this "probably understates the proportion of serious abuse by males". (Clinical studies are well known for being statistically non-representative, hence indeed highly unreliable; but see this submission's Section 2 below for what the representative ones have found on the matter of initiation of violence.) A further quote from the source of that 10-15% figure says "both men and women...are perpetrating a considerable amount of physical and verbal aggression in... separating/divorcing families". But the report itself immediately adds that "There are reported Canadian family law cases where the woman has clearly been the aggressor, but these are relatively rare." Now, the proportions of men and women officially reported in court cases as committing physical spouse abuse could be (and in fact are--more on this later) very different from the actual proportions; hence by giving no warning--as it does repeatedly elsewhere--that these statistics may be seriously in error, the report yet again promotes belief that partner violence is nearly always committed by men.

As indicated already, this claim that wives are rarely the aggressor flies in the face of the scientific evidence. And so it is hardly surprising that that large body of data is nowhere mentioned in the Status of Women report. Over a hundred sociological surveys, conducted with mathematical randomness or with reasonable assurance that the samples are fairly representative of a large population, have gathered data on partner assault by both sexes. Now, even "representative" studies are subject to various possible kinds of error, but they are by far, when done correctly, the most trustworthy sources of statistical information. And these have all gotten the same result: that women assault their partners about as often as, or more often than, men do. (See Attachment A of the present submission.)

The report takes up considerable space (Sec. 1.2 through 1.3, mostly) discussing sources of information-- police reports and especially clinical samples--which scientists would agree, and which it admits for its own purposes, are statistically unreliable. It does discuss at length the male-to-female partner-violence statistics from one random general-population survey, one which does have a good promise of being statistically representative--and which deliberately refrained from collecting any female-to-male abuse reports. But the unanimous verdict of the multitude of studies which have some hope of providing accurate statistics for male-female comparisons is left unmentioned in the report, omitted in favor of unsupported claims and insinuations that such assaults are overwhelmingly by men.

Social science is far from yielding highly reliable exact statistics on complex human problems; this submission is not claiming that the collective verdict of the partner-abuse surveys is certainly correct. Its point is instead an ethical and moral one: that the Status of Women report is dishonest, and that such dishonesty both derives from and results in serious prejudice. Anyone with the credentials of the sociologists signing this report, and claiming any sort of background in the subject of partner abuse, has to be aware of the multitude of general-population studies looking at the behavior of both sexes. Indeed, those whose specialty is law but claim some study of the area can hardly have missed anything so obvious in the research literature. In contrast, since this crucial information has generally been kept from the public, it is reasonable for such persons to suppose that legislators will be unaware of all that evidence, and hence easily misled.

1a. Persistent suppression of facts

There is much more to reveal on the subject of this dishonesty. To begin, the report does fleetingly admit the existence of two of the equal-violent-acts studies. But it does so in a manner which seriously obscures their content--and also reveals that hiding the existence of the rest of the massive corpus of data is deliberate. Consider the following maneuvers.

In Section 1.3.2 it is acknowledged very briefly that "A study carried out by researchers at the University of Calgary reported that 18% of men admitted to physically assaulting their female partners, compared to 23% of women". The report quickly discounts the finding, however, adding "...though it is very probable that men are more likely to deny [abuse which they have actually committed] than women". Given the large difference between the level of social acceptability of wife abuse and that of husband abuse, it is indeed very probable that such denial by a man is more likely; but to know whether this makes a large difference in the reported figures, we would have to know just how much more likely such denial is. Though the report veils a factual matter in vaguery, there is good information on the question of how much statistical difference this factor makes: when women's own reports of what abuse they have committed and suffered are compared, they still come out as assaulting and being assaulted about equally often. This fact is well known in the scientific literature, having been reported for years by Murray Straus, the world's most prominent family-violence survey researcher. (See Straus 1993 in the References section of this document.) Though this possible objection to equal-rates-of-abusive-acts data was answered years ago, the Bala-Hornick report speaks as if it were still viable.

What is especially revealing about this reference, however, is that care is taken to conceal so much. In fact, the researchers at the University of Calgary, led by Eugen Lupri, have conducted not one but multiple general-population surveys on partner abuse, beginning in the mid-1980's and continuing through the present. Lupri's random-sample studies of behavior by both partners (like all others, again) have always found equal or higher partner-abuse rates by women. Yet not only is this not mentioned in the report; the Calgary researchers are not even named, nor are any of their numerous papers and publications listed--not in the text, nor in the footnotes, nor in the bibliography. Though careful and detailed citations to publications on the report's own ideological "side" abound, the only reference to this large body of work is through mention of that one study as made in a newspaper column! Nor is this all that's revealing: the sociologists among the authors of the Status of Women report are themselves at the University of Calgary, in the same department as the Lupri researchers. (Where, if memory serves, a few years back their Canadian Research Institute for Law and the Family was located a few steps down the hall from Lupri's office.)

Other Canadian research (see References) finding equal assault rates is likewise kept from the Committee in this report, notably the long-known work of Reena Sommer at the University of Manitoba, Bland and Orn at the University of Alberta (Psychiatry), and Kennedy and Dutton at the University of Alberta (Sociology). Instead, the Bala-Hornick report juxtaposes the Calgary result with another one--one from an unpublished study whose statistics are so far out of line with the representative-sample surveys and with selective-sample research in general that no one both knowledgeable and responsible would regard it as an unbiased result. (Though it is quite in line with the very low rates of misbehavior by women standardly claimed by its primary author, Peter Jaffe.) And yet, even though this other study is prima facie from a non-representative sample, the Status of Women report--in sharp contrast to its challenging of the Calgary data--does not say a word of caution against it.

As regards non-Canadian research, the report's single other hasty reference to the standard statistical results involves data from a survey done in Kentucky: "One large scale American study revealed that for 38% of couples where there was spousal violence, the woman initiated the physical attack." Now, in its ordinary meaning and in the standard research literature, 'initiation' refers to an act of violence unprovoked by a prior physical attack on the occasion in question. What the report says in the next sentence, then, would be puzzling to the reader not well familiar with the literature: "While some scholars dismiss all female initiated violence in relationships as self defence...." Though it fails to explain how starting the violence could be in self defence, what the authors evidently had in mind--to judge from certain discussions in the literature on this subject--is pre-emptive strikes, based on physical attacks by the man on previous occasions. But the text of the Status of Women report provides no evidence regarding the percentage of female violence that is in self defence. And there is good reason for the silence: it is uniformly indicated by the representative-sample surveys that most female partner violence is not committed for this reason.

Instead of providing evidence on the matter, then, the report suppresses the existing data. Instead of evidence, it relies on insinuation to mislead the reader. Indeed, the form the insinuation takes is a cheap sophistical trick, a case of praising with faint damns. Consider now the entire sentence: "While some scholars dismiss all female initiated violence in relationships as self defence, there is substantial Canadian and American data that calls such blanket assertions into serious question." In fact, the 'some scholars'claim is quite evidently false; even the most extreme academic proponents of the self-defence thesis hold only that the great bulk of violence by women, initiatory and otherwise, falls in this category. Yet by presenting as probably-wrong-but-respectable even the extreme view, the report creates the false appearance that the great bulk of such violence is just self defence--together with the false appearance of making an honest scholarly concession. (Compare: "There is substantial data questioning the view of some scholars that all interethnic fraud is committed by Jews.") Such behavior from academics is inexcusable.

To discuss briefly what the surveys have in fact found: In the first big US random national study on family violence (involving abuse of spouses, children and siblings) clear back in the mid-1970's, the result of equal rates of violent acts between spouses made many ask whether much of the violence by women might be acts of self defence, or else revenge against original physical assault by the man. Even then it was clear, however, that far from all female violence was any kind of fighting back, any kind of retaliation or self defence. For in roughly a fourth of cases of violence in the preceding year, the woman reported that only she had been violent. (And in roughly a fourth of cases only the man had been violent, so that both had been violent in about half of all couples where any violence had occurred that year.) This means the man did not respond to her act with violence of his own, on that occasion or any other during the year--and that any possible violence by him on earlier occasions was long past. Then, since there were bound to be cases in which the man did respond in self defence or retaliation to a woman's initial violence, in well over a fourth of cases of couple violence the woman would have committed the first or only assaultive act.

In 1985, in the second big national US survey, an explicit question was added to determine who started it on occasions where both partners were violent. The responses indicated that about half of the time, the woman was the initiator. (That 38% cited above is thus low compared to the large US study.) Other surveys, including some in Canada (e.g., Bland and Orn, 1986), have found no significant difference between male and female initiation rates. Yet other couple-violence surveys have taken a different approach, asking respondents whether, on any occasions when they were violent, they were acting in self defence, or perhaps getting even for a preceding violent act by the partner. In all such surveys to date, the proportion of their acts listed by women as being in self defence has been well below half--and the men's reported rates of self defence have been quite similar to those of women. Even with retaliation added in, the totals do not add up high enough to avoid the result of women committing assaults--i.e., violent acts unprovoked by prior violence or threat of violence by the man--in half or more of all cases of partner violence. (For a good survey of the evidence on the relative rates of couple violence by males and females, see Straus 1993.) None of this is reported in the Status of Women document.

Tucked away in a footnote (23 in Sec. 1), the report does mention the result on self defence from the Manitoba survey. Suspiciously, it sets the level at 19% rather than the 10% stated in its cited source--though it does mention the 15% rate of self defence reported by males. Much more importantly, it then immediately changes the subject, instead of facing the implication (even for the 19% figure) of high rates of unjustified violence by women. The report's source itself is a secondary one, a book by John Fekete which details a great deal of the dishonesty in Canada over family violence research. This latter fact is not mentioned, of course, but the citing of that book erases any possible remaining doubt that the writers of the report were aware of the standard statistical results on partner abuse: on the same page, Fekete lists various Canadian studies getting the result of equal numbers of violent acts by the two sexes, and he mentions that there have been at least thirty investigations in this category. (The Fekete book is also the source of the report's Kentucky reference. Ironically, he mentions there that the female-to-male violence data from that survey were originally suppressed.) In a further footnote (24) of the Status of Women report is a reference to the book which reported the results of the big US national survey from 1976, together with a journal article by the same researchers (Straus and his associates) about an aspect of their second big survey in 1985. But what is clearly implied by the footnote's placement is that those sources merely provide evidence that not all of women's first-strike violence is in self defence. The systematic hiding of contrary facts does not get much more persistent than it does in this report.

1b. The endemic dishonesty

How could academics engage in such behavior? Are there not codes of ethics for social scientists? Do they not forbid such things as suppressing evidence which conflicts with personal views? There are, and they do. In part, the reason these academics could commit such acts was the near certainty that they would get away with it. "Politically correct" misbehavior--i.e., that which supports the regnant party line in a given sociopolitical milieu--is generally rewarded, not punished. And these particular academics are very politically correct just now. If we know anything from behavioral science--or from daily observation--about personal behavior, it is the power of ideology and perceived self interest to distort the reasoning and moral principles of individuals. If we know anything from social psychology--or from history--about group behavior, it is the power of received dogma and sociopolitical rewards or punishments to dominate the thought and actions of various communities and entire cultures.

As stated at the outset of this submission, in fact, suppression and distortion of data on this and related subjects have become common in Canada, even by scientists; the pattern is long since established. One particular tactic is of special interest, though to explain it fully requires further important information about spouse abuse itself.

Although the report never presents any data on what percentages of violent acts result in serious injury, its claim in a couple of places that women are more often seriously harmed by spousal violence is certainly true. Only a very small percentage of men and women are brutally abusive. And among them, given men's appreciably greater physical strength and certain other average differences between the sexes, even strict equality in malevolence would result in much greater levels of injury to the women. (Though equally abusive women do often compensate for the strength disadvantage through a much greater use of weapons and through attacking at vulnerable times.) There is less certainty about the results among attempts to compare extreme violence by husbands and wives; but a benchmark is the fact that about a fourth of spousal homicides in Canada involve the woman killing the man. As Attachment B reveals, close to this same proportion is found in a variety of measures of severe injury from physical assault by spouses in the U.S. In particular, it seems that crime-victimization surveys--which ask members of the general population about criminal acts which they have suffered--get around this result for injurious spousal assaults. The overall rates of spousal assault reported on these crime surveys are very much smaller--on the order of 1/10 or 1/20--than the rates found by the surveys asking questions specifically directed at spouse abuse. The reason for the big difference, evidently, is that the effects of most acts of spouse abuse are not serious enough for the respondents to the survey to label them as crimes. Hence, it further seems, the higher proportion of women victims when the acts are severely injurious results in the crime surveys reporting a higher percentage of female victims than the spouse-abuse surveys do.

It is general public awareness of the extremely serious cases which has, altogether rightly, fueled public concern over battered women. And it is that same general concern which has helped to prepare the way for the stereotyping. But this very grave case is very far from being the typical case of partner abuse. The great bulk of assaults between partners are the actions of fairly ordinary people, with fairly ordinary levels of conflict and emotional dysfunction and substance abuse. And in general, those ordinary assaults cause little or no physical harm to either sex--hence, in the large majority of cases, the injury levels are about equal for the two sexes. This fact too has been discovered by general-population representative surveys of the type discussed above. (As for emotional harm resulting from these ordinary levels of physical abuse, at least two studies have found that the level of emotional harm for abused men was about as far above the baseline for others of their sex as was the case for abused women--though the author of this submission has not searched the literature on that particular subject. See Grandin et al. 1997.)

But this symmetry between the genders in the general case has not been welcome news to the ideologues who have been controlling most of what the public gets to hear on this delicate subject. These people have wanted dearly to promote the idea that there is a "war against women" in society and in the home. (In the minds of the more extreme, all this one-way aggression is fueled by the woman-hating and woman-dominating views of "the patriarchy".) And the sociologists' surveys, seeking data on all assaults in the home, have provided high numbers of abusive acts between spouses. The bad news for these people is that, to repeat, the typical males and females in this general case are about equally harmed--i.e., neither seriously harmed--and about equally assaultive. But publicising these facts would not send the message these people want to send. So they employ what has become a very common tactic: they announce the half of the data on violence by men and suppress the rest. And, by carefully associating all of these relatively minor assaults with the small numbers of cases of real battering, they get their "war against women"--and a vicious stereotype of males in general.

This distortion of researchers' data has often been committed even, as in the Bala-Hornick report, by scholars and scientists. And some of the researchers themselves--especially in Canada--have obliged by withholding half of their own data to begin with. In the case of Statistics Canada's large survey on violence against women by men--which was cited at some length in the Bala-Hornick report--the researchers used a variation on the tactic. Knowing full well, from all the prior research, that asking about all abusive and assaultive acts would reveal large numbers of such by women, they refrained from asking about women's acts. If you know you won't like the answers, you just don't ask the questions.

Related areas of dishonesty One of the types of unethical behavior alleged against police in the Guy Paul Morin investigation was failure to gather evidence which they knew might well disprove their prejudiced beliefs about him. Many seem to have the idea that as long as they can say, "Hey, I didn't outright lie", using tactics which they know will mislead is not dishonest. But as noted at the outset here, one can as easily deceive with half-truths as with falsehoods. Scientists and scholars have a special obligation--a duty of care, if you will--not to abuse their power over what the public gets to know. They certainly have an obligation not to create or reinforce bigoted stereotypes. When they do abuse that power, they must be held accountable.

Sadly, deception in this manner appears to infect other scientific work in Canada under the sway of the same widespread sexist ideology. In one recent incident, certain social scientists researching child abuse through a public survey announced to the country that it is mostly committed by fathers. Since this is not the result other general-population studies get, other academics and scientists queried them for details: How much more--a little, a lot? But though willing to publicise that vague and prejudicial claim, they have so far refused to release any actual statistics. More revealingly, it turns out they have reached that conclusion by doing something highly peculiar: counting grabbing and shoving but not slapping as abusive actions by parents. (Peculiar not only because all three are standardly included on such surveys, but also because the omitted category is seen by most as physically and emotionally more harmful, in general, than the other two.) Now, since slapping, grabbing and shoving make up a huge proportion of abusive acts on standard child-abuse surveys, leaving one of those categories out and keeping the others must have a large impact on the statistics overall. And since slapping is found to be overwhelmingly a female activity by those surveys, leaving it out must heavily impact the comparative statistics for the two sexes. But all the public is given to know, again, is the politically charged conclusion. And a political motive for the omission is not far to seek.

Another recent major survey, this one meant to gauge the effect of various causal influences on children's wellbeing, found the result that children in two-parent homes fare much better than those in single-mother homes--the standard result in such studies. But it also evidently found that children in single-father homes do the best of all. Such a surprising result cries out for further exploration. Might the reasons be economic (though standardly, attempts are made to factor out this influence before conclusions are drawn)? Might it be that there is so much anti-father prejudice in the system that on average, the fathers who do get custody of children are superior parents? Might it be because of some unknown factor whose discovery would be of great importance to children? But this tantalizing piece of evidence will be ignored, for the researcher involved illegitimately manipulated the subpopulation size to the point where this result could be falsely dismissed as not statistically significant. (These last two studies are not on the specific topic of spousal violence; but if the Committee is willing to investigate or call for investigation on such matters, documentation on them will be provided.)

Returning to the subject of partner abuse, most dishonest of all is the notorious ten-million-dollar Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women--itself quoted as authoritative in the Bala-Hornick report. Others have analyzed many of the extreme tactics and conclusions in its Final Report, and no attempt will be made to discuss that huge tome in this sumission. But in light of the recent raising of public awareness regarding one particular topic, certain pages from it have been reproduced here (Attachment C) as an example of its ideology-dominated thinking. Years of investigation by law enforcement agencies across the continent, and a number of heartbreaking court trials, have by now revealed to the public what was obvious to honest observers all along: that there has never been an ounce of real evidence for the existence of large numbers of ritual-abuse cults. Whether there have in fact been any such cultic groups (in contrast to plain, and extremely small, pedophile rings) is very much in doubt. What is not in doubt is that there has been a huge amount of hysteria-fed confabulation and suggestion-created "memory" of utterly fantastical events. Notice well, then, the total lack of objectivity and concern for evidence in what the Panel says on this subject. Its pronouncements are the fervent dogma of true believers, not the words of cautious scientists. (And consider that a certain researcher on whose veracity the Status of Women report relies heavily, Peter Jaffe, was a key member of the Panel.)

To repeat: none of this blatant intellectual dishonesty and regular dishonesty would be attempted in the first place, much less gotten away with, were it not for the fact that in the present milieu in Canada, distortion of the truth about men as victimizers and women as victims is considered acceptable if not downright chivalrous. This in a land where much lip service is given to integrity and where prejudiced stereotypes--at least when directed against the "designated groups"--are reviled and punished under law. Consciousness-raising being the difficult thing it is, a concrete example of this hypocrisy has been enclosed (Attachment D) in the form of a racial paraphrase of a fairly typical flyer on family violence distributed by a social-service agency. It is all too painfully plain that the paraphrase is vile bigotry--and so is the original.

Certainly, the Status of Women report under discussion here is far less extreme than the documents mentioned in the last two paragraphs. Its stereotypes of men and women are not of the black-and-white but the very-dark-and-very-light variety, and its level of dishonesty in promoting those stereotypes is appreciably lower than that of some. But it is none the less censurable for that. Work by a Canadian researcher who has testified before the Committee and who has long demonstrated a very high level of dishonesty on this subject will be looked at next.

2. THE DEKESEREDY SUBMISSION

Walter DeKeseredy's consistent pattern of distorting the facts about partner abuse research is documented at some length in the Appendix to this submission. That paper was originally completed two years after his war-against-women announcement, on front pages across Canada, of half-truths about results from his nationwide dating-abuse survey. (An attempt was made at the time of that announcement to alert the media to his suppression of data and other varieties of dissimulation, but it fell on deaf ears. Overtures to government and science officials to expose and condemn the unethical behavior were attempted after the paper was prepared, but they suffered the same fate. An offer to publish it, made by the editor of a scientific-ethics journal in the US, has been on hold while a more effective means of exposing the behavior has been sought.) Note well that, as before, it is distortion of facts about research that is at issue here; the statistical facts about intimate violence itself are never fully certain, being subject to many sources of possible error. But claiming knowledge when the scientific evidence is not there (or for that matter, claiming high uncertainty when the evidence is very solid) is intellectual dishonesty. And promoting such claims to others by suppressing evidence which is there is the regular kind of dishonesty.

In his oral presentation to the Committee, Professor DeKeseredy revealed the standard statistical result of equality between the sexes in partner abuse (DeKeseredy 1998). This is in stark contrast to the complete withholding of such information in his report and statements to government and to the people of Canada five years ago. (The failed efforts to expose him publicly did at least get the information into certain government quarters.) Under pressure from the Committee, he also revealed that his own survey had gotten the same basic result--and that he had never released any of his data on violence by women to the general public, just in tiny specialist quarters. (Recently, he has also published the questionnaires he used. Back then, it required a pirated copy to discover its biases, and to reveal that he had even asked any questions about female acts of violence.) He led the Canadian public to believe there is not enough partner violence by women to mention, and has never corrected that misinformation. But this is the only one of his distortions which he corrected to the Committee that day; in other ways he continued the old pattern.

2a. Survey questionnaires

The infrastructure for DeKeseredy's testimony was a critique of the survey instrument most commonly used in representative partner-abuse studies, the Conflict Tactics Scales designed by Murray Straus and associates. Much of what he said in that criticism, though somewhat biased, is still fairly reasonable and already well discussed in the literature. All survey questionnaires have their drawbacks (though some are much worse than others--see below), sometimes requiring the trading off of conflicting considerations. But the specific claims he made regarding the proportions of violence by men and women--claims that Straus's questions elicit incorrect results--are unfounded or misleadingly stated when not clearly false. They do, however, provide a natural lead-in to the details of his deceit.

To begin, his point is well taken that the introduction to the CTS--read to or by respondents before they answer the questions--describes the survey as being about conflict. Hence it does not specifically ask about assaults which come "out of the blue". The rationale for the conflict approach lies in the general difficulty of getting people to open up about painful personal matters, even anonymously: telling the respondents, in effect, "Hey, everybody goes through this, so it's not so bad to admit it if you do it or it's done to you" increases the disclosure rate. What is not nearly so clear as DeKeseredy suggests, however, is whether large numbers of non-argument-spawned attacks really aren't elicited in spite of the way the questioning is begun. And his insinuation that it is overwhelmingly men who commit out-of-the-blue attacks has not been tested by any representative studies (DeKeseredy 1998, ll. 1310-12). More blatantly, he implies that the roughly-equal-rates-of-violence result is undermined by men's being less willing to admit their assaults (ll. 1308-10). That dissimulation was exposed here above.

Moreover, his insinuation that Straus's questionnaires have, until recently, failed to address such issues as degree of harm done, sexual abuse, and the context of the violent actions is false. As can be easily verified, questions on these topics were added as far back as the 1985 national survey. (E.g., see Appendix B in Gelles and Straus, 1988.) It is true that the added questions are not actually part of the Conflict Tactics Scales. But DeKeseredy's only plausible purpose in failing to mention all those other questions at all was to mislead regarding the contents of others' research. It is correct that Straus's list has contained no questions on motivation and only two on context: one on drinking at the time of the violence (known from many studies to be an extremely common factor) and one on who initiated it when both were violent. (And, arguably, his questions on degree of harm are poorly designed to measure male injury rates.) But others who have used Straus's questions have added new ones of their own, to gather information about a great many matters of context, causation and motivation. This fact DeKeseredy also did not report to the Committee.

The purpose of DeKeseredy's critique of earlier research is to make the following claim: When matters of the context of and motivation for partner violence are taken into account, the "sexual symmetry" of equal numbers of violent acts is seen to be grossly misleading; the origins of the two sexes' violence are then seen to be vastly different. Specifically, he has claimed for years--when admitting at all that women commit appreciable amounts of partner violence--that their violence is overwhelmingly just in response to aggression by men: self defence, or sometimes retaliation. And he still asserts it to be "well founded" that women are the "overwhelmingly predominant victims of intimate violence in heterosexual relationships" (ll. 1305-7). In describing the rates of women's acts of self defence, he often uses vague terms such as 'substantial number', and 'frequent' and 'much'--words which can refer to anything from a small (though larger than expected) minority to a big majority. But the innuendo accompanying these imprecise terms is still that women's violence is mostly for self protection. As in "much--not all, but much--of the violence...women consider self defence" (ll. 1332-34).

Causation and motivation of violence Now, the causes and motives for people's actions fall naturally into two categories, general-background and immediate-specific. To begin with the former, the underlying claim in DeKeseredy's corpus of writing is that of many extremist feminists: that "woman abuse" is largely if not solely the result of "patriarchy". The thesis is that doctrines of male dominance still thoroughly pervade society, with the consequences that [a] men in general feel they have a right to control their partners which women rarely feel, and that [b] a great many men feel they have a right to use violence to exercise that control whereas women rarely do. A corollary of this thesis is that such attitudes are maintained by "male culture". Now, a recent comment by him on the subject is curiously vague. It denies that he espoused this view in a couple of particular articles published after collecting his survey data, therein claiming only a correlation between "patriarchal" beliefs and such violence. (DeKeseredy and MacLeod 1997, Ch. 6. Answering all the sophistries there would require a document of equal length.) But he does not deny having held the doctrine that "patriarchy" is the underlying source of violence against women. And he cannot deny the fact (see below) that in his expensive taxpayer-funded survey he left out all potential background causes other than "patriarchy". Ignoring motives and meanings, indeed.

The fact is, only an extremist could ever believe that this "patriarchal" culture tells men it's all right to hurt women; to the contrary, special protection for "women and children" has long been a corollary of male dominance. What about that more restricted correlation thesis, then? Even in this case--though the fact is consistently hidden by DeKeseredy--a fair amount of survey research on partner abuse argues strongly against it. Canadian spouse-abuse researcher Donald Dutton's survey of the evidence reveals this fact very well (Dutton 1994). Though certainly, the "man is boss" attitude plausibly leads some men to use violence to exert control even today, that evidence argues that the "man is protector" attitude far outweighs it in our society. The possibility remains that in a limited part of the population (an outweighed part), attitudes of male privilege are still linked with higher levels of male violence toward females. As a hypothesis to be tested regarding some men, this patriarchal-power idea would be worth examining. (Though whether the male-dominance ideas are the cause of, or instead a rationalization for, the violence would be a further issue.) Honest hypothesis testing is the engine of science. But treating hypotheses as already known facts is the violation of science. On this other issue, DeKeseredy's dishonesty lies in what he does to pretend, without any evidence, that the attitude of being privileged by one's gender to commit violence is unique to males. We will return to that matter shortly.

Contrary to the dogma that patriarchy is the underlying cause of violence against women, the major background sources of intimate violence, for both sexes, are the same as those for crime and violence in general. These notably include alcohol and drug abuse, the psychological harms caused by the offender having been abused when young, and the socializing effects of having been exposed to violence in key forms in earlier life. Statistically, males are evidently influenced by all three somewhat more than females, and this may well affect the rates of really severe partner violence. But other major background causes of such behavior are quite similar for the two sexes, notably mental illness, borderline-personality traits and just selfish disregard for the welfare of others. Then there are some basic human emotions of anger and mistrust--especially toward those on whom one is dependent for one's emotional needs. Perceived threats to emotional security are a major source of violence by both sexes. And though the specific dynamic of jealousy appears to be a greater motive in males, the fact that women--so much more than men--have their emotional needs bound up in home and relationships is, plausibly, a major reason why their level of aggression is so much higher there than it is outside those domains. The literature on all these aspects of human behavior is huge--but is all but ignored by DeKeseredy in favor of "patriarchy" explanations.

Turning from background causes and attitudes to the immediate motives and contexts of the violent acts, here, too, there is a fair amount of research. And here, too, DeKeseredy consistently hides it from his readers and listeners. Attachment E is an example of immediate-motive-and-context research, and of the variety of questions which have been asked. It is certainly true that much more work needs to be done, but a fair number of motives have been explored. And although some statistical differences of motivation between males and females are found on the representative surveys, overall their illegitimate motives--the unjust or downright nasty reasons for employing violence--are remarkably similar for the two sexes. An important case in point is desire to control the partner, and belief that violence is an acceptable means to do so. (Those two attitudes might in turn stem from, as an underlying cause, the belief that one's gender entitles one to control or be violent toward the other; again, that issue is postponed for the moment.) The Appendix to this submission cites some key research debunking both of his claims in this regard: that women's violent acts are motivated much less than men's by desire for control, and that women feel much less entitled than men to use violence on a partner. Might the survey evidence be biased, however? DeKeseredy has claimed that the way in which the CTS questions are introduced to subjects, speaking of arguments and conflicts, "ignores a large number of control-instigated assaults that do not have their root in conflicts or disputes" (DeKeseredy and Schwartz 1998, p. 2). But this is nonsensical. There is no need to exercise control, much less to employ violence to achieve it, if there is no disagreement.

Then what about that all-important legitimate use of violence, self defence? One complaint DeKeseredy makes with some cogency about other research is that questions regarding initiation may fail to capture cases of pre-emptive strikes. Since an anticipatory first strike on one occasion presupposes assaultive first strikes by the partner on earlier occasions, this hypothesis does not fit well with the large numbers of women who report that only they were violent for the preceding year or longer. But in principle, it could account for an appreciable minority of cases of initiatory physical violence, especially by women. Since striking out in anticipation of violence by the other is a defensive action, specific questions regarding self defence should provide the answer. And specific questions about retaliation, or "getting even", should further clarify the picture on context. Then, since self defence and retaliation are the only non-initiating motives for violent acts, all the acts which remain should identify the real originator of the physical violence. If, say, half or fewer of the women's (or men's) reported acts were either self defence or retaliation, then--apart from mutually escalated conflict with no clear initiator--half or more of those acts were original aggression on their part.

What have the representative surveys on these questions found? As indicated earlier and in the Appendix, the result from self-reports has always been that about half or fewer than half of violent acts by women have been in the combined self defence-or-retaliation category. The highest result for self defence so far, 36%, is one based upon reports of only the most serious incident of mutual violence (Makepeace 1986). Since there would be a need for protecting one's safety only in cases where real physical harm is threatened, it is not surprising that other studies' proportions of defensive violence by women are much lower. Yet in all his voluminous writings, DeKeseredy suppresses this information--as he did when testifying before the Committee. He often cites the research which found the 36% result, but never reports that figure; when he does actually quote the article, it is to present a statement by the researcher referring to a small subcategory of women's reports of violence, to the effect that self defence was the motive in a majority of those cases. (See DeKeseredy and Schwartz 1998a, p. 70, and Makepeace p. 385. The special category was that of acts admittedly committed with intent to injure; without further information, the significance--if any--of the answers by those few subjects is hard to assess. But admitting intent to injure in any situation except self defence would be difficult for many people to do.) His pattern of ideology-driven selective disclosure continues. But it gets worse.

2b. DeKeseredy's own questions

Having hidden the existence of all the research by others on context and motives, and all of their results contrary to his claims, DeKeseredy announced to the Committee that he himself has researched the question and found the answers. It is extremely revealing to look closely at the questions he employed to do it--and at the responses he got from his subjects. As mentioned above and discussed in the Appendix, though he asked male and female subjects many questions relevant to motivation, the only negative motives addressed in them were involved with the "patriarchy" explanation: Man should be boss so it's OK for him to use violence for control. For all his complaints about others' lack of questions on motives for the violent acts, he himself inquired about no other illegitimate motives. (To repeat: if you know you won't like the answers, you're careful not to ask the questions. Oddly enough, though also complaining falsely about others' lack of questions regarding degrees of injury from the acts, he asked no such questions of his own.) Consequently, he did not give female students a chance to reveal any illegitimate motives whatever for their own violence.

As for legitimate motives for violent acts, the three relevant queries he employed--borrowed from ideological allies--are equally revealing. The question on self defence is clear, and needs no comment. But the matter of retaliation would be problematic for anyone who doesn't want to admit negative motives on the part of women: after all, that reason for violence--especially when labeled with a term like 'revenge', or even 'getting even'--is not generally regarded as very noble. Whatever DeKeseredy's own motives may have been, he did not ask a question specifically on this motive. What he did include was one on "fighting back". Now, in ordinary parlance--and plainly, in this context--fighting back includes self defence, and also retaliation. Hence that second question involves double counting of cases of self protection, and is worthless for getting statistical information about either retaliation or self defence. In some instances, the person might want to say--unless instructed to pick a primary motive--that her/his action was spurred by both motives. But there is no way to discover this without cleanly asking about each motivation separately.

As for the third question in this category, it is also fatally flawed. It is reportedly a query about initiation, but unlike other surveys' questions on that subject, it does not specify that both persons are to have been violent on any occasions responded about. The wording is "what percentage of these times overall do you estimate that you used these actions on your dating partners before they actually attacked you or threatened to attack you?" In other words, in what proportion of instances of your violence did it occur before he was violent or threatened violence? The problem is most clear when we consider a totally negative response: In effect, "my admitted violence never occurred before he attacked or threatened me". (Or "my violence never occurred before some violence or threats by him occurred", or "never was my violence followed by some violence or threats by him".) But did he commit any violence or threats toward her before she committed hers on him? This answer does not tell us one way or the other. She could add: "My acts didn't occur before he attacked me, because he didn't attack me. I alone was violent." So a negative answer to the question allows for both cases: where she responded with violence to his threats or violence, and where she was the only violent one. In addition, even among events of the former type, the wording of the question does not allow distinguishing pre-emptive strikes (following threats from him) from self defence and retaliation (following an attack from him)--in spite of DeKeseredy's own complaints about conflation of the former with assaultive acts in Straus's initiation question. In short, this question could yield no useful information.

What, then, were the results of his own survey on dating abuse? In spite of the pervasive one-sidedness and answer-biasing framework of the questions (see Appendix), the responses resoundingly repudiate his claims. That is, they do so when they yield any useful information at all. That is not, of course, what he has reported to this Committee and elsewhere. He has pretended that the results vindicate the ideology he has espoused all along. Let us look at the details.

DeKeseredy's own results First off, consider the responses to his questions about students feeling, based on "patriarchal" attitudes, that violence toward female partners is justified. Only a tiny few of the male students admitted to holding such views. (See Attachment F.) Certainly, now, many who do hold them might be loath to admit it, even on an anonymous questionnaire --after all, the views are generally condemned in this society today. (But DeKeseredy himself can hardly use this excuse for the low numbers, if he continues to maintain that such attitudes, so far from being condemned, are actually very popular in this "patriarchy".) On the other hand, even those very low numbers might be misleadingly high; post-adolescent males having the sort of humor they often do, some of them might represent rebellious prank answers. But as always in this submission, ways in which the survey responses might systematically misrepresent reality is not the issue; it is ways in which certain individuals systematically misrepresent survey responses.

What about those survey results themselves, then: do they at least argue for a small but important difference between motives underlying male and female violence, with males having more illegitimate ones? They do not. As the other item in Attachment F reveals, at least one survey which did ask females questions on this matter--whether their gender gives them a right to be violent toward the opposite one--has gotten higher figures than DeKeseredy did for males. So: wearing the mantle of a scientist, he informs the public and this Committee that men are nasty in certain ways in which women are not. Yet he refuses to gather all the evidence needed to actually test the claim empirically, and systematically hides the scientific evidence found by others disproving the claim. And he does this in regard to issue after issue.

Over four years after announcing his claimed war-against-women result to the nation, he and some ideological allies finally published, in a small specialist journal, his basic data on violence by women. (To repeat, in spite of the biases in the questionnaire, they are close to his figures for violence by men and in the same ballpark as results from other date-abuse surveys.) The article is full of the usual dissimulations, and cannot be discussed in detail here. The key point is that it falsely claims vindication for their long-promoted claim on self defence. Let us consider its main conclusions.

Regarding the "initiation"question, the article announces triumphantly that "only a distinct minority of women reported that they had ever (1% to 100% of the time) initiated an attack". (DeKeseredy et al. 1997, p. 209, reproduced here as Attachment G; Table 2 provides the relevant numbers.) This is about as good an example of lying with statistics as one is likely to find. To repeat what was noted above, saying "he did not hit or threaten me after I hit him" does not address the question of whether or not he did hit or threaten her before she hit him. It leaves completely open the question of whether he committed or threatened any violence at all on that occasion. So consider the 63% who answered "never" to the question about proportion of acts in this category. They were not saying, in effect, "my reported acts of violence always followed acts or threats of violence committed by him" (which would represent initiation of a physical conflict by him). They were instead saying "my reported acts of violence never occurred prior to acts or threats of violence by him". Her violence might always have been preceded by some from him--or it might have been the only violence on every occasion. And to say "She didn't end up initiating a fight, because, after all, he didn't fight back and so there was no fight" would be sophistical beyond words. As to how many of the responding students might have had in mind each of the two possibilities--sole violence by her and mutual violence started by him--it is impossible now to know. But few read it the latter way, given the next result.

What we can know are the results from the unproblematic question on self defence. And it is specifically on that subject that DeKeseredy has claimed support from his survey before this Committee. The facts are perfectly plain. As Table 2 reveals, only about 20% of women students who admitted committing violent acts and who answered this question said that half or more of said violence was in self defence. Around 60% of women who answered it stated that none of their reported violent acts were ever in self defence. There are other ways to divide up the figures, but they are quite in line with those of previous representative surveys. (Recall the Manitoba result, and see Attachment E again.) The article's authors try in various ways to spin-doctor this result, including adding in the numbers for "fighting back" (double counting, again). But even such illegitimate tactics as that leave them far short of their long-held claim that the great bulk of women's violence is not original aggression: "Although not most acts, much of women's acts of violence were either self-defensive or fighting back" (DeKeseredy et al. 1997, p. 210 ). Since other surveys have reported that the rates of men's and women's reported self-defensive acts are close to equal to each other, the "symmetry thesis" on context and motives stands unassailed. In fact, given the massive overlap between the responses to this question and that on "fighting back", the total numbers for self defence and retaliation together would be quite far below one half of all the women's acts of violence. If anything, then, the total numbers add up to leave the women--by their own account--collectively more responsible for the physical violence than the men.

It now seems clearer than ever why Professor DeKeseredy has kept his data from general public scrutiny. But it is only clear if one takes the time to examine it. It is crucial that Committee members not just accept his word that his research vindicated his claims, but look at the numerical output itself. Like any good con-man, he says "It's all in the documents--you can read it for yourselves!", while counting on people not to read the documents. And when the message is politically correct, few do. These are strong words, but the evidence is massive and unequivocal. Nor are DeKeseredy's actions a one-time slip-up. They are not merely the sort of thing which any of us, with our pre-existing opinions and pre-existing emotional involvements, might fall into. Instead, his actions compose a consistent pattern of dishonesty over a span of years. He has deceived the Canadian people. And now, quite arguably, he has perjured himself to this Committee and is hence guilty of contempt of Parliament.

3. A WIDER PATTERN OF BIAS

A consistent pattern of dishonesty such as has been documented in the first two sections of this submission does not occur for no reason. It is born of a prior attitude, a mindset of prejudice against a category of human beings. That being so, it is apt to reveal itself in various other ways as well. It may also express itself [a] in a tendency to blame members of that category unjustly, in ways not applied to those in another category, and [b] in a lack of compassion and concern for the wellbeing and pain of members of that category. Such certainly appears to be the case in the Status of Women report. We will now consider that wider pattern of prejudice. What will be revealed in the process is a scholarly dishonesty in the rest of the report parallel to the scientific dishonesty in the first part of the report.

Because of the tendency for people's perception to be governed by indoctrination and other sources of preconception, and because of the tendency for humans, independently of perception, to say publicly only what is "politically correct", few will openly acknowledge the existence of widespread anti-male bias in our society today. Instead the grotesque myth of massive bias against women only--even in areas of life where even traditionally the discrimination was in women's favor--is the common currency. This is a huge topic. But it is crucial to display the anti-male bias in the Bala-Hornick report in order to prevent that document from making things yet worse.

By way of background--though evidence cannot be adduced here except for appealing to common human experience--it must be pointed out that gender bias is very different from other group-based prejudices. The standard bigotries of clan against clan, nation against nation, and race against race are based in apartness. But the lives of males and females are intimately intertwined. And because intragender competiton (between male and male or female and female, not between male and female) is biologically programmed, biases against either sex can very easily be promoted by members of either sex. Quite possibly the oldest male sex role is that of bashing other males for the approval of females. This tendency is especially pronounced among high-status males, from professors to legislators. ("Alpha males", to use the primate-troop terminology, whose dominant position over other males depends on support from females.) Note well, then, that bias against males strongly involves class as well as gender. The societal dominance enjoyed by some men does nothing to help Joe Lunchbucket--and very often does him a lot of harm. The present topic is a classic case in point.

3a. Concern for victims

Repeatedly, the Bala-Hornick report urges special consideration in divorce litigation for what it refers to as women's special vulnerability, particularly in connection with spousal violence. Now, special solicitousness for those who are weaker, in situations where that fact puts them at a serious disadvantage, is altogether morally proper. And physically, as well as in certain other ways, women certainly are, statistically, more vulnerable. The morally relevant kind of equality, moreover, is equality of the similarly situated, with differential treatment being proportionate to the difference in situations. Then might it be argued on this basis that after all, the report was justified in putting its emphasis so overwhelmingly on victimized women? The answer is flatly negative--and the authors of the report had a duty of care to recognize the fact.

To begin, there are some constant dangers in human thinking on such matters: for one, a propensity in thought to turn statistical differences into virtual universal differences, into stereotypes. A related tendency is the association error of mistaking one specific sort of power or vulnerability as an advantage or disadvantage in all aspects of life. The result of such thinking is a tendency to overcompensate, and hence to create more injustice rather than less. Examples abound. From time immemorial, larger children have bullied smaller children--and smaller children have bullied larger ones, through manipulating adults. Life is complex, not black-and-white. Or consider: "Jews in the 1990's make a third more money than others, and have disproportionate power in society through their predominance in universities and banking and media. Therefore we'll make things more even by discriminating against other Jews." (Except that the thought process is usually not this obvious, because usually unconscious.)

Let there be special help, where needed, for vulnerable individuals of either sex or any ethnicity, and then let the group statistics fall where they will. When aid is given on this equal basis, groups which collectively need more help automatically get more help. But when the report goes so far as to urge even "legislative provisions that specifically acknowledge...the special vulnerability of women" (Executive Summary; emphasis added), it is well down the slippery slope of treating individuals as stereotypes. And tokenism is not a whole lot better than black-and-white caricatures. In fact, as we shall illustrate, the report applies virtually 100% of its concern to the vulnerability and wellbeing of women, almost 0% to those of men.

The Bala-Hornick report makes only brief comments on this vulnerability theme, crucially important to all its recommendations though the point is. But it is evidently meant to include economic vulnerability and perhaps other kinds. In his personal presentation to the Committee, Professor Bala worried about a woman who has not worked for pay married to a doctor or lawyer, and who hence cannot afford the lengthy litigation which the husband might wage over custody of the children (Bala 1998, p. 35). But he makes no mention at all of what may be a much more common case: Joe Lunchbucket's job prevents him from qualifying for legal aid, whereas his ex-wife does qualify and so can easily carry on the litigation until his few resources are used up. Not to mention the help she can get which he cannot from a variety of taxpayer-funded agencies--especially if she alleges any sort of misbehavior on his part--from women's shelter professionals to victim services professionals. To repeat: achieving justice for everyone is thwarted when stereotypes rule.

Men's vulnerability as parents The most important point to be made regarding power and lack of power, however, is that in litigation over children in separation and divorce, it is men who are far more vulnerable. If statistical facts about vulnerability are importantly relevant in this setting--and they are--then this one is of paramount importance. Thus, the report's silence on the point is stunning, and powerfully revealing. Bias against fathers in custody cases has dominated this century (the "tender years" doctrine and all that), and continues to do so, merely in somewhat lesser degree. In fact, this judicial bias is merely part of a much broader social pattern of gender stereotypes, gender value-attitudes and gender roles. To this day, fathers are not seen as being nearly as important to children as mothers, or nearly as caring toward them.

These attitudes systemically prevent justice from being done in huge numbers of individual custody and access cases. Indeed, most such cases never even get to court, as "the shadow of the law" and awareness of the general societal attitudes discourage fathers and their lawyers from even attempting that long demoralizing battle. Those who do attempt it generally find that, for all their supposed "male dominance" in society, they cannot get sole or even meaningful joint custody of their children. And the parent who does have sole custody or control has massive power over the other--"vulnerability", indeed. If this society has learned anything from the egalitarian feminists, it is that unbalanced power--wherever it is found--is bound to be abused. To those of us who have repeatedly watched the terrible pain of fathers trying desperately to remain part of their children's lives--and doing so in the face of opposition by the biased and all-powerful state--those who have hearts only for women's varieties of vulnerability are uncaring beyond belief.

The comparison to women's traditional economic vulnerability is very instructive. Just as women were once assured that their "place" was in the home, and that they weren't very good in most of the paid workforce anyway, men were told the parallel things in regard to parenting. But whereas huge societal efforts have gone into changing that traditional situation for women, men have been expected to make their own progress regarding theirs. This is an especially remarkable omission for the following reason: the two roles were the complements of one another. Women were kept out of the paid workforce and in the home precisely because of the perceived need for extensive hands-on child care; men were kept out of the home and in the paid workforce precisely because of the need for economic support for children. It is only rational, then, that efforts to change that system would address both halves of it, not just one. Only in minor ways has this been happening. To the contrary, in fact, inegalitarian feminism--the dominant kind of feminism for about the past 20 years--has opposed efforts toward equality in parenting with a reactionary zeal that male chauvinists could only envy.

Though this subject is not the central focus of this presentation--many others have presumably addressed it before the Committee--it is worthwhile presenting a bit of the evidence on gender bias over child custody. In regard to judge-decided cases, Bala said to the Committee: "Who wins more cases, fathers or mothers?...we actually don't know in this country even that kind of basic information, although we have some sense of it..." (Bala 1998, pp. 8, 34. Later on he admitted that some Canadian judges have a bias toward mothers when the children are young.) This seems oddly disingenuous. At least one major Canadian study (Department of Justice 1990, Sec. 4.3.2) has revealed that to a strong degree, contested custody cases are decided in favor of the mother (who is also favored with primary care and control in joint custody decisions), and all other indicators point the same way.

Now, this statistical information by itself does not argue overwhelmingly for the existence of bias; for all those figures alone tell us, the mothers might have deserved custody much more often. (Though courts standardly consider salary differentials between the sexes as presumptive proof of discrimination these days.) Attachment H provides some of the solid evidence that the statistics are the result of actual bias against fathers in court. Indeed, the available evidence argues that the Department of Justice figures for contested custody cases understate the level of discrimination: aware of the societal bias and warned by counsel of the judicial bias, men tend not to fight for custody in the first place unless they are exceptionally motivated or have an exceptionally good case. And some of us who have observed the system in operation for years have seen a lot of the discrimination close up. Ironically, however, the societal bias has so far guaranteed that the judicial-system bias has remained undisclosed to the public. Judges who show insensitivity (real or imagined) to women's concerns get pilloried for it in the press; but the many anti-male and anti-father comments and decisions the fathers' support groups encounter are regarded as not worth reporting by the same journalists.

An especially relevant aspect of this matter is de facto discrimination: if a mother is judged objectively to satisfy the criteria for getting sole custody, but the criteria themselves are unfair in a way which disadvantages greater percentages of men, then gender justice is still violated. Consider in particular a doctrine which the report strongly supports--and which Canadian judges seem to be applying even though it is no part of the Divorce Act: a presumption in favor of the person who was the "primary caregiver" to the child before separation. The Status of Women report simply assumes, without ever offering argumentation, that that is an appropriate stance. And unlike the "tender years" doctrine, this one is de jure gender-neutral. But few would ever dream of endorsing, or describing as gender-fair, the parallel doctrine of a "primary breadwinner" presumption: that in divorce, sole ownership of the couple's financial assets should go to the party who has brought most of those assets into the family. The reason so few would accept this is obvious: marriage is supposed to be an equal partnership. And (to focus on the simpler case of the traditional pattern) her staying at home to take care of the kids left him free to pursue economic gains outside the home. Hence by rights, half of the fruits of his economic efforts belong to her. By parity of reasoning, however, his going off to work enabled her to care for the children; hence he has an equal moral right to the fruits of her labors as well. Fair is fair.

Even in the 1990's, all sorts of "affirmative action" measures are in place for women in the workforce, on grounds that their traditional role disadvantaged them in that regard. And hardly anyone today is saying it would be fair (and de facto gender equal) for those who have shown more commitment to careers in the past to get preference in hiring over those more likely to drop out to take care of children. Nevertheless, to repeat, we do not hear concerns about all the societal pressures which have kept fathers from being "primary parents" in the first place--just calls to deprive them of their children if they have not. Injustice hiding behind a facade of gender neutrality doesn't get much more brazen than this. On the basis of an equal partnership, the "primary caregiver" assumption is as wrong as a "primary breadwinner" assumption would be. By all natural justice, moreover, the state should be as reluctant to sever the rights of either parent in a divorcing family as in an intact one. What follows from these two principles is a presumption of joint custody, and, in whatever proportion of the cases it is practicable, joint care and control. The very same presumption follows, in general, from consideration of the "best interests of the children", given their love and need for both parents. But again, this subject is left to others to explore in detail.

Men's general vulnerability What is relevant to the primary topic here is how family violence might impact on any of the above assumptions. And that brings us to a second kind of male vulnerability arising from bias in society and its legal system: not specifically anti-father bias this time, but general anti-male bias. The stereotypes promoted in the first section of the Status of Women report, that women rarely do malevolent things and men often do, pervade this society. Hence in any sort of conflict over the facts between a man and a woman, the stereotypes make him vulnerable indeed. Additionally, there is a powerful attitude that male suffering just is not as important as female suffering--even when they are equally harmed or equally vulnerable. This stems from those same long-entrenched roles: a man is supposed to be able to take it, whether he in fact can or not. Add to all this the fact that the overcompensation warned against above is already hard at work in society, and the result is that men are very vulnerable to various kinds of injustice.

A large amount of data on this vulnerability-inducing prejudice could be assembled, and could be provided to the Committee if desired. One item on bias against men in criminal law is enclosed as Attachment I; but another example has almost arisen here already in regard to the specific matter of spousal abuse. In all but a very few jurisdictions, the statistics on police action toward spouse abusers look nothing like those the public surveys reveal; typically, only about 5% of those arrested or charged are women, not 50%. The police figures for male and female offenders are even very different from those of the crime surveys, with their higher percentages of female injuries--and very different from the comparative injury statistics found by researchers examining the same police cases! (See the items in Attachment B.) From these facts and a mass of others, it is clear that the level of anti-male bias in arrests and charges over partner violence is very high.

Apart from the fact that many assaulted husbands are even more ashamed than assaulted wives to call for help, the police will not, on average, take equal harm or equal threat to a man and woman equally seriously. This leaves many assaulted husbands in a serious bind: if he calls police he is apt to get no help--and may even be arrested himself on some sexist grounds such as that 'less vulnerable' equals 'aggressor'; but if he tries to defend himself, he will almost certainly be treated as an aggressor. Yet there is not a hint of all this gender bias in the Bala-Hornick report. It decries (quite rightly) the former attitudes toward "private affairs" which de facto allowed wife battering to go unpunished, and it expresses concern that police statistics fail to reveal the high levels of wife abuse. But on this massive direct discrimination against men, in spite of its central significance to the entire report, not one word is said. (Unless, that is, one counts as an indirect admission of bias the question in footnote 61 of Section 2.) We shall repeatedly see how this silence impacts upon various specific issues below.

When the two issues of spousal violence accusations and disputes over children in divorce and separation are combined, the anti-male biases and anti-father biases compound each other with a vengeance. When the facts of the matter are the least bit ambiguous--the most common case--the instinct of enforcers and adjudicators is to "err on the side of safety". And in a milieu where the gender biases and stereotypes regarding victims and victimizers inform those instincts--and where it is considered "safe" to rip a child away from a father--the result is highly predictable. Not wholly unlike the result, in kind even though not in degree, of race-neutral laws against rape in a milieu of anti-black stereotypes and value-attitudes. Yet the only concern expressed in the Bala-Hornick report about prejudice in the legal system is about wives; for example, minority wives of abusive husbands losing their children to child-protective services. About the countless numbers of men losing children daily--in divorce, and to child welfare because of actions by abusive wives and mothers--it sheds not one damned tear.

One special injustice In recent years, one particular locus of this injustice has been the issuance of restraining orders, those involving sole occupancy of the family home and related issues. Attachment J reveals the alarm felt by certain highly-placed US attorneys over the masses of injustices arising from overzealous, sexist efforts in this regard. It also contains an item revealing how willing alpha-male politicians are to violate basic rights in order to gain their protector-of-women badges. (Some tiny changes were made at the last minute in response to the complaint letter. The new law should not, by all justice, survive a court challenge. See Legislative Assembly of Alberta 1998, initial and final versions.) Carefully written and carefully controlled, such orders have their place in a range of legal remedies. But the widespread abuse of them which has occurred, committed by the legal system itself, is particularly senseless, since there is no greater good to outweigh such injustice: no seriously violent person will be deterred by that piece of paper. To the contrary, this kind of injustice is more likely to push an unstable individual to violence.

There is something else, however, which these orders are very good for indeed: grabbing de facto custody of the children, and of important property, pursuant to divorce plans. It is plain which sex is able to do this, and that it is being done in large numbers of cases. It isn't necessary to resort to false accusations; she has only to say "I hardly know him any more--I'm afraid of him", and a lot of judges will comply. On that basis alone, he gets thrown out of his house and ripped away from his children--and delaying tactics in court being as they are, this initial injustice may keep on multiplying. For just one thing, as any matrimonial lawyer can tell you, judges are reluctant to move children from their home or from the parent they are currently residing with. Hence tactics such as these have a powerful biasing influence on the final outcome.

It is not essential here to get agreement on how common these abuses are. What is crucial is that, as usual, the Bala-Hornick report does not acknowledge the problem at all. On the contrary, it describes the situation with reassuring words such as "judges will generally expect some evidence" of recent spousal violence--reassuring, that is, until one reflects on the cavalier way in which it regards decisions in the un-general case, those without any decent evidence. (Sec. 2.2.1. Under Alberta's new law, a justice of the peace--not necessarily even a judge--getting a phone call from an accuser can issue such an order; lots of evidence there.) This prejudice of the Status of Women report becomes charged with hypocrisy when it acknowledges that a parent might set up "a possible de facto-continuity argument for custody of the children" through taking control of them illegitimately--but only the case of a violent father driving the mother from the home is considered (Sec. 2.1.4). This in spite of the fact that there is little chance of such happening to an abused woman, since she can take them to a shelter or get him removed instead by police. On the contrary, a child-grabbing tactic is far easier for a woman to get away with, through pretending he is abusive--and then running with them to a shelter, getting a sole possession order, or the like. Male vulnerability is always ignored in the Bala-Hornick report, even when, as in this case, it is by far the more serious vulnerability. Indeed, if the report has its way (Sec. 2.2.1), she'll be able to gain interim legal custody through a quick restraining order--and if she decides to hide the children, mere allegations of wrongdoing against him will be adequate to get a court order to keep her location, hence that of the children, secret (Sec. 5.1, Recommendation #8).

Other divorce-system biases And so it continues through the Bala-Hornick report: blindness to fathers' vulnerability and recommendations to increase it. It worries that "there are sometimes difficulties in getting the police to enforce" the restraining orders (Sec. 2.2.1), but shows no concern about police overzealousness in enforcing orders against fathers. Honest scholarship could have reported on many such. Likewise, it never mentions difficulties getting police or judges to enforce access orders. This latter represents a very large area of injustice for fathers in divorce, one which the Committee should have heard much about from others; it will be discussed here in a special context later on.

Provisions for supervised access for the father where abuse has been alleged by the mother, however, are discussed repeatedly. Though sometimes certainly needed, supervised access is expensive, and places severe and unnatural restraints on the parent-child relationship, at least when the supervision is required to be by a suspicious stranger; hence it can be itself another officially sanctioned weapon of abuse employed by a hostile ex-partner. This, too, is never mentioned. A case is cited (Sec. 2.1.1) in which a couple are described as mutually abusive, and yet no concern is raised that only the father suffered consequences--by being required to accept supervised access. Indeed, the report frets that "there may be a tendency for some judges to order supervised access as a 'compromise' rather than make the difficult decision of terminating all access". (Sec. 2.1.1, "Supervised Access" subsection; emphasis added.) Yet no concern is shown over the extremely common "compromise" of ordering supervision when there is no presentable evidence of abuse by him but she alleges it. And as always, no appreciation is displayed that "terminating all access" means totally destroying a child's relationship with a father, and hence should be carried out only when all avenues of saving the relationship have failed.

When the subject of help for victims of domestic abuse is raised, male victims are almost never mentioned. (Often the language is gender neutral, but, as noted here earlier, seldom for long before turning gender specific again--with male victimizers and female victims.) Yes, women need such help much more often than men, but black-and-white thinking is the core of extremism. Especially crucially, the Bala-Hornick report, like the standard propaganda on the subject, links help for women organically with help for children. The phrase 'women and their children' is treated almost as a single word. There are no shelters where men may take their children to escape violent wives or mothers--nor any other kind of help specifically for men and their children--yet of course this fact is also never mentioned. This massive prejudice has terrible consequences. Fathers--especially separated or divorced fathers--trying to protect their children from abusive mothers have to fight the prejudice to do it. They are sometimes opposed by the child-welfare and justice systems, where such bias is often well entrenched. Indeed, some of the very abuses just discussed--using restraining orders as weapons, fleeing with the children, access denial, etc.--are committed precisely in order to hide child abuse by the mother or her new partner. The Committee has heard many of the resulting tragedies. When bigotry is backed by the power of the state, the evil resulting is immense.

As it fails even to mention any of the foregoing problems of men's legal vulnerability, the Bala-Hornick report certainly does not attempt to document any of them in its extensive coverage of the current legislative and judicial scene. But it inadvertently reveals some evidence of the judicial bias against men. In its brief subsection on abusive wives (under Sec. 2.1.1) are described two cases which look like classic examples of the maxim that a good-enough mother trumps any father--even if she is violent. But the report cites no cases of abusive wives losing custody at all--just lots of cases of abusive husbands doing so. (Have there even been any Canadian cases of abusive wives losing custody for that reason?) Like the arrest and conviction statistics on spouse abuse itself, this tells a story of prejudice and injustice--one which you won't read in the Bala-Hornick report. All of their comments about "insensitive" judges are reserved for women victims of injustice.

3b. Concern over victimizers

Standard fallacies notwithstanding, being more vulnerable is not a moral virtue. The weaker person who starts a fight and ends up getting the worst of it is no less culpable because of the outcome. And standard sexist stereotypes notwithstanding, the available evidence indicates that women, on average, are no less willing to harm others to achieve their ends than men are. The real difference between the sexes in this regard consists in women's lesser physical strength, and in their greater (but diminishing) social constraints and lesser (but increasing) opportunities to do ill. When victimizers are considered rather than victims, then, there is the same degree of justification for focusing on women as for focusing on men. Nevertheless, just as the Bala-Hornick report consistently notices only ways in which women are vulnerable or actually victimized, it consistently sees only ways in which men are or may be victimizers. This is even more reprehensible, for the following reason: the main thrust of the report is what to do about abusers, not what to do about the abused. It presents a few recommendations involving succor for abused women, but the bulk of its proposals, at bottom, are restrictions and punishments for abusers--most seriously, loss of their children in divorce. We will now consider the consequences of this second major kind of prejudice.

On the few occasions when it does admit female wrongdoing, the report is usually quick to claim excusing circumstances: "her emotional condition", or psychosis, or abuse by him. (E.g., the "Abusive Women" subsection of Sec. 2.1.1.) But about the only cause or motive it attributes to the man is desire for control. On one occasion this is again done in a cheap sophistical way: "Many men who hold traditional patriarchal views of marriage do not abuse their wives"--implying that many other such men do abuse their wives (Sec. 1.3.2) . To repeat: the research to date has found no appreciable connection, if any, between traditional role-beliefs and spousal violence by men; but it has found that women are equally motivated by desire for control over others, and that they resort about equally often to violence to get it. In this the Bala-Hornick report appears simply to be echoing the extremist-feminist party line, and yet again suppressing the scientific evidence.

That is particularly objectionable in this context of proposals to government involving children in divorce, where the claims made include: "abusive men often use the threat of seeking custody as a means of maintaining control of their spouses and keeping them in abusive relationships" (Sec. 1.1). Certainly there are viciously controlling men, and women. (Though how is it a threat to announce the intention to do what one has a legal and moral right to do? The real culprit in that regard is the winner-take-all system of sole custody.) It is not acknowledged, however, that the reason some men become abusive in divorce is, not to retain control over their wives, but because of being out of their minds with grief over the imminent loss of their children. And perhaps precisely because she has threatened--a far more credible threat by a woman than by a man--to take them away forever. The report makes a special point of stressing men's high rates of spousal violence in divorce. They may indeed be higher than women's, and certainly are so in extreme cases; extreme male possessiveness or anxiety is clearly more physically dangerous than that of women. But if as many women as men were losing their children in this way, women's rates of serious violence in that circumstance would be much higher than they now are.

In other specific matters of wrongdoing, men are still the only sex mentioned. Consider the case of child-snatching. It was discussed here earlier how men are more vulnerable, through the biases of the justice system, to illegitimate attempts by a spouse to take away their children. But in the report, only men illegitimately seize children from the other spouse, or threaten (see the paragraph above) to do so. Women merely take "flight from the matrimonial home for fear of safety" with the children, whereas men "abduct" them. A woman may "change her name and go 'underground'", but never because she maliciously wants to cut the father out of the children's lives; and if a man does any such thing, it is not out of love for the children, however misguided, but out of desire "to obtain control of them". It is certainly true that more men than women break the law in this serious way, the abduction of their children. But they don't have the same advantages from a biased system to help them--in the short term (with restraining orders, shelters, etc.) and the long term (with sole custody, move-away orders, etc.)--to do it more or less legally. Moreover, if women had as little hope of keeping interim or final custody as men have, a lot more of them would be engaging in plain abduction.

Proxy violence Hinted at in the above is the fact that lesser physical strength, just as it does not make one more principled, need not make one commit less harm. It can instead lead to employment of indirect, non-physical means for controlling and abusing others. Recent Canadian studies on school bullies have noted (in addition to rising levels of violence by girls) much greater usage of "social weapons"--turning the group against someone they wish to harm --by girls than by boys. And the obvious way of doing this is through false or misleading accusations. Whatever the actual gender statistics on such things may be, it is only a small step to using the same tactics to get the state, with all of its collective physical strength, to do one's dirty work for one. So let us be very plain on this basic principle: proxy violence is still violence, whether it is done by hiring a hit-man or by illegitimately manipulating the power of the police and courts. The legal label under which false accusation is standardly (though not commonly) punished is thus terribly inappropriate: 'public mischief'. "False alarms" are seen as wasting government resources. We must come to see reckless and knowingly false accusations to authorities for what they really are: as assault with a dangerous, even deadly, weapon.

That being so, any discussion of partner violence which fails to count wrongful accusations of abuse on its list of abusive acts is not counting all abusive acts. And not counting some of the worst ones, at that. The Bala-Hornick report fails, in various ways, to count this category of wrongdoing. It is in fact a very serious problem in Canada today, especially as a means of getting the other parent out of the children's lives in divorce. Yet it is rarely punished by the legal system, and even more rarely punished to a degree befitting the harm done. And by all the evidence, it is overwhelmingly a gendered ploy: one used successfully mostly by women. The Committee will have heard much personal testimony about reckless and knowingly false claims of spouse abuse and child abuse in such cases. Yet only after a long discussion of various kinds of abuse does the report raise the problem (Sec. 1.5) of wrongfully accusing someone of abuse. And how does it do so then? As one of a list of three "common arguments made by abusive husbands"! The report cannot even introduce the subject impartially, let alone gender-neutrally.

Once broached in its own right (Sec. 1.5.3), moreover, the problem is dismissed as unimportant. This is done partly with tactics of evasion. The issue of fabricated charges is camouflaged through putting much greater emphasis on exaggerated accounts of abuse (serious enough sometimes, but a very different issue). Women don't lie, you see, they just get carried away describing their ordeal, or in some other way the story "genuinely reflect[s] the victim's interpretation of her past". And the only court case described is one in which exaggeration was adjudged (with another in a footnote also claiming an actually abusive husband). This constitutes serious suppression of evidence, for many court cases finding malicious false accusation in divorce have occurred--including one so outrageous that the Durham Children's Aid Society was successfully sued for its role in the hateful affair (Schmitz 1994).

But the main diversionary tactic in this subsection is that of repeated negative comparison with other, related problems. The first statement on the problem of wrongful accusation itself claims--without offering any evidence for what is evidently a stereotype-based judgement--that "minimization of domestic violence is more common than exaggeration". Later, the problem of minimization and false denial by men is described as more serious "from a societal perspective" (without explanation of what is meant by that) than that of false or exaggerated accusations. Then in two other places, buttressed by a quotation from Peter Jaffe, the report makes another unfavorable comparison: "the real problems" are those stemming from underreporting of actual abuse by women. Even after admitting that wrongful allegations can be used "to gain an advantage in litigation", the report quickly adds that "the more supportive climate has facilitated more genuine victims of abuse coming forward". In stark contrast, in all the rest of the report, no reminders of more important problems dilute or divert the message of the seriousness of the abuse of women. Indeed, in all the rest of the discussion, the possibility of false accusations is not raised--and only rarely are allegations made by women against men spoken of as allegations rather than as simple facts. And there are certainly no cheerful messages there that, after all, fewer false accusers will get away with it if less emphasis is placed on battered women. "Minimization", indeed.

It matters not in the least what other problems are more common or more serious than this one, from world hunger to nuclear armageddon; ripping a parent and child apart on false pretenses--and perhaps even using the child as a tool of the process--is a horrible thing to do. Only those insensitive to this kind of trauma, for both parent and child, would so assiduously seek to downplay the fact. Very few people kill their spouses, either, but each individual case should be treated with utmost seriousness. Physical or sexual abuse and abuse by false accusation should be treated with full seriousness under the law--and each individual case should be investigated on its own merits, regardless of the numbers of other cases. However, the Bala-Hornick report continues to show its unconcern for abuse through accusation by recommending special new divorce laws recognizing and remedying only the other kinds of abuse. The weapon of accusation is to be made even more powerful, with no corresponding protection for that class of persons--overwhelmingly men (and their children)--against whom it is already being used.

In some ways, of course, the relative and absolute numbers of an offence are important. And it is important not to simply let stand the insinuation of very small percentages of accusations being false. As regards child sex-abuse in particular, a November, 1991 news release from the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers (through the Dilenschneider Group Inc., Chicago) announced that among members attending its annual meeting, three-quarters felt that in their practices, allegations of such abuse were valid only about 50% of the time. In 1988, the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts reported a study saying that sexual abuse charges were made in 5% of divorces, and were probably false a third of the time. A survey of studies made in recent years on the incidence of child sex-abuse accusations in divorce has reported that their results range thus: such are made in 2-5% of divorces (many more in contested divorces), and are backed by no credible evidence in 50-80% of those cases (Guyer 1995). It must be stressed that getting reliable statistics in an area so fraught with emotion and subjective judgement is very difficult. The crucial point, rather, is that there are no adequate grounds for dismissing false accusations as an insignificant problem in comparison with that of real abuse, and good reasons to believe it is a major one. Yet the Bala-Hornick report presents no evidence of its own on this serious matter, just unsupported assertions and worthless rhetoric.

On the matter of false accusations of spouse abuse in divorce, the author of the present submission has located no statistical work. He is aware of a small mountain of individual cases, however, and even that is worthwhile evidence, not for the actual statistical size of the problem, but for its being large enough to be very serious. In fact, there are indications that as courts and police have become more cautious about child sex abuse allegations in divorce over the past half-dozen years, false allegations of spousal abuse in divorce have increased. A particularly illuminating example is the case of Jeanette Harris, dismissed as an O.J. Simpson juror for having lied when being chosen for jury duty. She stated at that time that she had never been an abused wife, but court records revealed she had earlier alleged such. She then vehemently insisted that the violence had never happened, saying, in effect, "Of course I alleged abuse--I was getting a divorce!" It is too tragic to be funny.

Much more basic than the issue of false accusations itself is what lies behind the Bala-Hornick report's treatment of it. The plain message of its minimization of the numbers of false accusations--together with various other messages, including the unethical suppression of evidence on women's physical violence detailed above in Section 1--is that overwhelmingly, it is men who do evil things. Men abuse, and they lie about it; but women, even when equally capable of the type of wrongdoing in question, do not commit enough malevolent acts for us to spend the time discussing. Women are rarely borderline personalities or malicious or just plain unprincipled. Women are rarely angry enough, and rarely self-serving enough--even in an emotionally wrenching, high-stakes experience such as divorce--to do nasty things; but men frequently are. This is the orthodox message of a great deal of family violence literature in Canada. It is a vicious, contemptible libel.

Selective liberalism Even when a woman's culpability is admitted--established in an individual case or just hypothetically assumed--another anti-male bias surfaces: this society is (with a very few role-related exceptions) more reluctant to punish her than to punish an equally guilty man. (For a small bit of all the available evidence on this, see Attachment I again; but it is another large subject which can be addressed here only in its direct relevance to the present topic.)

This showed up quite clearly in Bala's remarks to the Committee. Asked about punishments for custodial parents (read: women) who violate child-access orders, he twice dodged the question with diversions of the "there's a bigger problem" ilk. Finally he proposed that the solution lies in educating custodial parents to the children's need for the other parent--then diluted that fine idea with the suggestion that spouse abuse or child abuse by the non-custodial parent might be the reason for denial. Pressed pointedly on the case of purely malicious denial, he refused to consider punishment except in the rarest of circumstances. Even in the rare cases, he flatly rejected the possibility of jail time for violating this type of court order--and refused to consider any new legislation on the matter (Bala 1998, pp. 12-13). In spite of its being pointed out that non-custodial parents (read: men) are routinely handed heavy punishments--including jail time--for violating support orders, Bala raised no objection to those practices, nor suggested that education might be the sole needed solution for non-payment of child support. (Backhandedly, he did acknowledge that fathers who are a meaningful part of their children's lives have the desire to support them financially--this is so whether they are married or divorced-- whereas those now supporting someone else's children lose their motivation;see p. 14. This is another of those subjects this paper leaves for others to discuss.) In sum: education for women, punishment for men.

The point is not how harsh or lenient punishments toward either party should be, but the totally unselfconscious double standard involved here. Reconciliation and education are always better than punishment if they work; but if the latter must sometimes be used, justice demands absolutely that it be applied impartially. One of the Committee members has expressed some views which, it is to be hoped, do not reflect this double standard toward the two sexes. She objected to punishments for falsely accusing parents on the grounds that this is just "creating another weapon". (She was concerned about both criminal penalties and loss of child custody for such accusations. In light of the Status of Women report's readiness to invoke custody-loss for other types of wrongdoing, the latter option has high relevance to that report--see below.) The metaphor is apt; the seeming conclusion is not. An adversarial situation in which one of the combatants has a dangerous weapon and the other has none is grossly unjust; it is an invitation to the first to employ the weapon. Malicious individuals must not be exempted from punishment because of their choice of weapon--or because of their sex.

3c. Other types of abuse

Child abuse The Status of Women report does not discuss child abuse as a topic in its own right; hence that subject does not need to be treated at length here. As hinted earlier, the reliable sources of statistics indicate that fathers do not commit it more than mothers. (See Attachment K for a sampling of data, but beware that without further analysis, some of them make female levels of abuse appear misleadingly high.) As with other abuse statistics, legal system figures exaggerate fathers' levels of child abuse, for reasons which include conflation of fathers with stepfathers in the calculations and anti-male bias in the arrests. (This is itself a subject needing examination on its own. The interaction between the gender bias and the plea-bargaining system has some terrible consequences.) Though the report does not mention child abuse statistics in general, only fathers (or non-custodial parents) are described in it as abusing or manipulating or threatening the children--about the only exception being when child abuse by a mother is attributed to her being an abused wife. And of course, in the report's world, only mothers protect children.

What the Status of Women report does make a point of mentioning is the rare case in which a distraught parent kills the children (and perhaps the spouse) and commits suicide, nearly always men--as if the acts of a person driven beyond hope provided grounds for even more punitive anti-father measures. Yet in spite of all its stress on the higher amounts of spouse abuse in separation and divorce, the report mentions none of the statistics on child abuse relevant to separated families: the greater amounts of violence by mothers in single-parent households (owing in part, surely, to the stress of doing the parenting alone) and by second husbands and new boyfriends (who lack having bonded with the child from birth). Ironically, the best assurance of protecting the child from abuse, in general, may be keeping the father strongly involved in his or her life following separation, both to carry part of the load of parenting and to keep watch. However this may be, such assurance most certainly does not lie in policies based on selective statistics.

What the report does make a central issue of in regard to children is special connections between child abuse and spouse abuse. The point of focusing on such connections is to make a case for explicitly including presumptions and considerations involving spouse abuse in legislation on the disposition of children in divorce. Though the reasoning is not quite fully detailed, it goes pretty well like this: [1] Being a spouse abuser is statistically predictive of being a child abuser; hence, on grounds of the best interests of the children, there should be presumptions against joint or sole custody, and other protections for the child of an abusive spouse in divorce. [2] Observing or just being aware of spouse abuse hurts the children emotionally or psychologically; hence preventing that harm to them provides further child-based grounds for such presumptions and protections. And [3] being a spouse abuser means one has character flaws and is hence apt to be a bad role model and a bad parent; so the best interests of the children again argue for these presumptions. (Sec. 2.1.1.)

Now, one has only to state such ideas plainly to begin to see serious weaknesses. We sometimes have no choice but to deal with people statistically in categories. But morally, it is to be strictly avoided in cases where we can look directly and carefully at individual circumstances. Such a case is a trial in a court of law, where loss of a person's liberty--or a person's children--is at stake. Saying to Donald Marshall "You belong to a category of persons which statistically commits more crime, so we will convict you of this one" would be--was--an outrage. As for the second argument, its indirectness makes it suspect as a basis for such a drastic outcome as loss of one's children. As long as there has never been abuse of the children themselves, and if there can be reasonable promise that abuse of the partner will not recur (because of counselling, or the parents no longer having to live together, or whatever), then surely an outright presumption against sole or joint custody would not genuinely be based on the future wellbeing of the children, but on some such thing as punishment for past wrongs. As regards the third argument, having abused the spouse but not the children reveals that one's character is not entirely bad; to the contrary, the problem with spouse abuse might have been quite limited and situational--and hence certainly does not support anything so global and sweeping as a legislative presumption against sole or joint custody. Finally, as regards both the latter two arguments, logical consistency would demand that other indirect indicators of harm to the children--say, commission of other crimes--be presumptively planted in the divorce law as well. But this is a rather slippery slope, and the wisdom of setting the first foot on it is very much in doubt.

A further consideration will put these problems in startling relief. Research seems to indicate that close to half of all incidents of physical spousal abuse are mutual brawling. On the presumption that violent spouses do not get sole or even joint custody, then, children of such spouses would wind up losing both their parents in divorce! Remember, we're talking about people who need never have been violent at all to the children themselves. And about people who need never have been seriously violent: the recommendations in the Status of Women report are written so that any level of violence whatever would make the presumptions kick in. Since the surveys have found huge numbers of violent couples in society, huge numbers of children would be going off to foster homes--children whom no social worker would have removed, even temporarily, from the intact family. Something is thus very wrong with the thinking behind these recommendations. To begin with, it does not appear to see anything very serious about a child losing a parent--or a parent losing a child--else it would not be so incautious about even one such loss. In fact, however, as the recommendations have been explained here thus far, that is only an appearance. For the report does see something very wrong with a mother losing a child--it is merely unconcerned as long as, in the great majority of cases, it is not the female parent who does so. To begin to explain, let us first consider some interesting things which the report does not recommend.

First, the report does not recommend any sort of legislative presumption, or even any weaker legislative consideration, against an abusive parent getting sole or joint custody. Why on earth not? On the face of it, that is a staggering omission. For in this case, the harm to the child is not merely statistically predicted or indirect or indeterminate in nature, as in the case of the spouse-abuse reasoning; it is already real and direct. Might it be that the authors of the Status of Women report feel judges are already looking after children in this regard, so that no legislated protection is needed? They should not; there is far too much at stake. And the report itself complains (Sec. 2.1.1) of a judge, "insensitive" to an assaulted mother's fears of child abuse, who allowed unsupervised overnight visitation, concluding that the case "demonstrates" the need for specific legislation to make judges do the right thing. (For that matter, the report admits that almost universally, judges in Canada are already taking spouse abuse strongly into consideration in custody cases--so the "no need" argument would cut both ways.) As the report complains, the "best interests of the child" formula is terribly vague. Though it certainly mandates that judges consider abuse of a child in awarding custody, it by no means makes an automatic presumption of sole custody loss, and comes nowhere near all the other specific proposals the report makes regarding spousal abuse: on joint custody, the friendly-parent rule, counselling, and most of its list of 24 recommendations.

Only one explanation for this--for recommending all the new law based on spouse abuse but none on child abuse--presents itself. And, given everything else about the nature of the Bala-Hornick report, it presents itself with great force: that legislated presumptions against custody for abusive parents would mean large increases in the numbers of mothers losing custody; and that the authors of the report don't want that. For once again, the studies reveal that mothers and fathers are physically and emotionally abusive to children about equally often, causing about equal degrees of harm. And here, the differential power/vulnerability consideration does not apply in the first place; women are close to men in ability to harm children. Much more importantly, these facts about child abuse by fathers and mothers are widely sensed by the population at large--in stark contrast to the lopsided perception of spouse abuse. So those promoting the idea that only men are abusive in the family can confidently expect that women would rarely lose their children under child-custody laws following the report's recommendations, whereas men would do so on a regular basis, in spite of the actual statistical facts about spouse abuse. But under parallel laws involving child abuse, since the power of the gender stereotypes over abuse of children is not nearly so strong, custody decisions in such cases might be considerably more often against women than they are now.

Given all the evidence, it is hard to believe that such a consequence did not influence the omission of child abuse from the recommendations. Conceivably, the response from the Bala-Hornick team could be, "That wasn't our department. Our report was commissioned by Status of Women Canada, and our mandate was specifically to make recommendations regarding women, not regarding children." But at the very least, they could have mentioned their general position on adding child-abuse considerations to divorce law. And they could hardly pretend that they had no duty to this Committee to concern themselves with both justice in the law and also the best interests of children. Finally, after all the report's authors' fine words about protecting children on the way to their recommendations regarding women, such an excuse would ring hollow. So again: the evidence heavily suggests that their manifest anti-father bias lies behind their failure to recommend a child-abuse presumption at least as strongly as they do their spouse-abuse presumption. However this may be, there is further powerful evidence of how that bias affected their recommendations .

The explicit exemption Even in the case of spouse abuse, the report has no intention of letting very many abusive women fall through the cracks. For part of its recommendation, not mentioned yet here, is that an important exception be made to the presumption of spouse abusers losing their children: that it not apply to the "primary caregiver" parent. (It is left for others' consideration that this is a back-door attempt to get the judges' illegitimate use of the primary-caregiver presumption into the Divorce Act.) And by standard accounting (but see Attachment L on bias in that accounting), it is very much more often women who are primary caregivers--though frequently by only a small margin. Hence the report de facto exempts abusive wives from the threat of losing their children. Let it be carefully noted, then: the report gives no argument whatever for this proposal that primary caregiver status trump an abusive-spouse presumption. (It implicitly rejects any such trumping for child abusers.) Why such an exemption? Why not the reverse: abusive-spouse status trumps primary caregiver preference?

After all, the latter two of those three basic arguments above apply exactly the same to both primary and secondary caregivers. (The first does not apply equally to the two genders; the report makes a large point of the fact that a stronger statistical correlation has been found between spouse abuse and child abuse for men than for women. Even so, there is a correlation for both sexes. And in any case, once again, that first argument is highly suspect.) Indeed, the greater amounts of time a child spends around a primary caregiver could well result in greater amounts of harm being done to the child, if the person is indeed abusive to the other parent, and therefore of bad character and indirectly harming the child. One could even adapt the report's own conclusion from a case, which it discusses in the "Denial of Access" subsection, involving a person who abused the spouse but not the child: "legislation should be enacted to ensure that a [father and] child not be expected to live through years...with such an abusive [woman]". Thus, it is harder than ever to believe that the reason for this proposed exemption is not the usual bias: children don't really need their fathers, and fathers don't really care about or deserve their children--but mothers matter. And there's more.

Emotional abuse Remember that the second and third arguments for an abusive-spouse presumption rest on the probabilistic danger of emotional harm to the children. And note that it is widely agreed among therapists that emotional abuse and physical abuse are about equally serious problems, for both adults and children. Yet the Bala-Hornick recommendations (Sec. 5.1) are deliberately limited to explicitly mentioning only physical and sexual violence. (Though they would allow judicial expansion of "the concept of 'domestic violence' in appropriate cases". Whatever that might mean.) The report spends precious few words on the reasons. But they evidently amount to the fact that commission of emotional abuse is more difficult to establish and its effects more difficult to measure than is the case for physical abuse. This won't fly very far as a justification, however, for the courts are already constantly making decisions on whether and how much emotional harm or benefit has occurred or is likely to occur in a variety of circumstances--notably, in cases involving children and spouses. And the differences in degree of certainty between physical and emotional assault are very often rather small. (Injury can be self-inflicted or accidental rather than from abuse, etc.) The huge "sexual harassment" legal apparatus is about supposed emotional pain, so consistency alone would forbid keeping psychological abuse out of the civil law, in a context where mention of any sort of abuse is to be added to it.

Finally, this objection can hardly be the report authors' actual reason for rejecting an explicit emotional-abuse presumption, since two of their three basic arguments, to repeat, depend wholly on emotional harm. Furthermore, by far the greatest harm in the great majority of cases of sexual abuse is emotional, not physical. So they are surely including sexual abuse for its emotional-injury aspect; its physical-assault aspect could be included under physical violence without any explicit mention of sex. Why, then, the failure to include emotional abuse of spouses--not to mention emotional abuse of children? The same reasons come to mind. After all, women are equally capable of committing emotional abuse. Moreover, though the stereotypes and gender-role playing get in the way again, men may well be equally vulnerable to emotional abuse. And children are more vulnerable to emotional abuse, surely, than adult women are to physical abuse; adult women can at least flee. Consequently, once again, a new law targeting this sort of harm in divorce cases would result in more women losing their children than is now the case. Also again, then, avoiding that outcome is the only explanation for the report's treatment of the subject which makes any real sense. And there's more.

This time, the report spells the answer right out. The omission is indeed because legislation against emotional abuse might hurt women. Its actual words are: "there is a concern that the concept of spousal emotional abuse might be inappropriately used against mothers in custody or access disputes." Think about that in light of everything else which has been revealed in the course of the present essay. The Bala-Hornick report rejects explicit mention of emotional abuse in the law because it might be misapplied to the detriment of mothers. Never mind that the harsh penalty of child-loss also "might be inappropriately used against" fathers. Never mind the huge amounts of actual (not just possible) abuse of the legal system already directed against men, and how it hurts children. Never mind the large amounts of additional unfairness to fathers which would result from implementation of the draconian legal changes proposed by the report. Never mind justice and equality for all--just think about justice for women. Or, more honestly, about women's self-interest.

What makes emotional abuse especially significant, in the current biased legal milieu, to the issue of the authors' motivation is this: the prominence of certain kinds of emotional abuse which are singularly important in the context of divorce law. They leave the reader dangling in the sentence quoted above, but there can be little doubt about what the authors of the report had in mind: those kinds of emotional abuse, which only the custodial parent is usually in a position to commit, which consist in [1] illegitimately denying the other parent and the child contact with each other (access or visitation denial) and [2] manipulating and poisoning the child's mind against the other parent (parental alienation). Add to these that other serious kind of emotional assault (and physical assault, in cases where it results in a person being seized and jailed, or worse)--namely [3] the laying of false allegations against the other parent--and the extreme importance of emotional abuse in divorce cases becomes very apparent. Though these types of behavior are serious problems in only a small percentage of divorces, they infect a significant number of the conflicted divorces to which such new laws would be relevant, and have harmed many thousands of parents and children in Canada. Yet again, others have addressed the Committee on these matters; the point here is to discuss what the Bala-Hornick report says about them.

As described earlier, the report does discuss (wholly inadequately) the issue of false accusations, though it does not recognize them as what they are: just another form of assault or abuse, one harming both the accused parent and--directly or indirectly--the child. And about these other two special types of emotional abuse, the report contains--one sentence. That's it. On the subject of parental alienation, the Bala-Hornick report says nothing whatever. And in regard to illegitimate access denial, it says: "The unhappiness of a custodial parent about access, or her sense of anger or hatred towards the non-custodial parent, do not justify a termination of access." As if these very faint damns were not insulting enough (compare "anger at your neighbors does not justify killing them"), it instantly adds "However, where there is a history of abuse of the custodial parent...." And the entire four-page subsection labeled 'Denial of Access' is spent defending denial of access by custodial women to men who are or have been abusive to their spouses. Certainly there are legitimate reasons for denying child contact, even in contravention of a court order. But the illegitimate situations were deliberately rendered invisible.

As already noted to some degree earlier, one of the serious kinds of anti-male bias--and of de facto anti-child bias--in the legal system is the near-universal failure to apply meaningful remedies to these three horrible problems. If men are to lose their children in divorce over any of the kinds of spouse abuse which are discussed in the report, then by all that is just, women should lose their children in divorce over these kinds of spouse (and child!) abuse. The grounds are precisely the same. But in fact, the report's major recommendation in this regard--presumption in law of losing one's child--is far too strong; it is unjust to start with, to both parents. (The authors of the report instinctively know that in regard to women--they just have to start caring about men.) On the other hand, the legal system must finally begin making good-faith efforts to curb the three special types of abuse, including some serious penalties for the really serious cases. The Bala-Hornick authors had an opportunity to do something valuable here, and they preferred to be politically correct.

For legal scholars to present such a grossly unbalanced picture of the legislative, judicial and law-enforcement issues on the topic of spouse (and child) abuse is suppression of evidence on a grand scale. On the matter of illegitimate access denial, the authors of the report could have discussed court cases involving illegitimate violation of child access orders--say, revealing what a joke "contempt of court" nearly always is when a woman does it under these circumstances. Or they could have argued for the position--which Bala later held, unsupported, before the Committee--which rejects legal remedies for this problem. Or they could even have made some legal proposals for helping to solve this problem, which, he admitted to the Committee, seriously affects many thousands. On the matter of parental alienation, they could have discussed psychological findings about its terrible effects on children--effects which they have been so anxious to present when the type of abuse in question was one they thought they could pin on men. (The American Bar Association's Section of Family Law has published at least one book on the subject: Children Held Hostage, by Stanley Clawar and Brynne Rivlin.) They could even have talked, not only about how abuse by ex-husbands leads to denial of access by ex-wives, but how denial of access and parental alienation by ex-wives lead to abuse by ex-husbands.

Instead of doing any of this, they presented the Committee with prostituted legal scholarship to match their prostituted social science.

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS Based upon the foregoing discussion

Children have a need and a presumptive natural right to the caregiving and consortium of both parents; parents have a need and a presumptive natural right to the stewardship and consortium of their children. This is true whether the parents continue to live together or not. Therefore:

Recommendation #1: No presumption of loss of child custody or consortium should be built into law. Instead, the presumption should be the same for divided parents as for "intact" families: only on very serious grounds will such legal rights of either parent be terminated by the state. It follows that joint custody and shared parenting after divorce or separation are presumed.

Recommendation #2: When conditions render joint custody or shared parenting impracticable and thereby rebut the presumption of joint custody or shared parenting, and when no fault rebuts those presumptions, then the parent most willing and able to facilitate the other parent's relationship with the child should receive sole control, and be charged with the duty of such facilitation to the full extent possible.

Severe physical or emotional abuse of a child constitutes a violation of parental trust. Severe physical or emotional abuse of the other parent also violates, indirectly, the wellbeing of the child, including the child's needs and natural rights regarding that other parent. Therefore:

Recommendation #3: It should be built into law that severe physical or emotional abuse of a child is capable of rebutting the presumption of the parent's legal right to joint custody and, in proportion to the seriousness of the abuse, of the right to the consortium of the child. It should also be built into law that, in proportion as it affects the child, severe emotional or physical abuse of the other parent can rebut the same legal presumptions. It should be specified in law that serious efforts to severely harm the relationship between the other parent and the child constitute severe abuse of both.

Society desperately needs the efforts of competent scientists and scholars to solve pressing problems, such as those facing divided families. But harm to society results instead of help when scientists or scholars engage in dishonest practices or misrepresentation for their own ends, and the taxpayers are defrauded when the work of such persons is financed by the government. Therefore:

Recommendation #4: Permanent provisions should be made in law for the government to investigate probable instances of serious misrepresentation in research work paid for through government agencies, with a view to defunding and publicly exposing the dishonesty. Punishment for such fraudulence should, for reasons of professional and academic autonomy, remain the responsibility of institutions already in place for that purpose.

Even when scientific or scholarly research contains no flat misrepresentations, it can still be seriously biased in a multitude of ways. Worse yet, when one general point of view is politically correct in a given milieu, the different researchers reinforce each other's biases. But there is a clear and familiar solution to this problem: having the work done by individuals or teams with opposing prejudices results in their keeping watch on each other. Therefore:

Recommendation #5: Permanent provisions should be made in law requiring government agencies offering research grants and contracts, to the extent practicable, to make such awards to competent scholars and scientists of differing political and ideological persuasions, rather than funneling them consistently into one camp.

The cancer of prejudice continues to plague this society--the more so because many of those charged with addressing it are doing so selectively, thereby promoting bigotry in the name of opposing bigotry. Therefore:

Recommendation #6: The government should launch a thorough investigation of all sexist and ethnic prejudice committed by public-service agencies receiving government funding, with a view to demanding replacement of literature and revamping of programs which promote false and demeaning representations of either gender or any ethnic group.

Ferrel Christensen, Ph.D. Edmonton, June 30, 1998 (Small modifications made July 17.)

REFERENCES

Bala, Nicholas, 1998. Oral presentation to the Committee, Proceedings of the Special Joint Committee on Child Custody and Access, February 25, 1998.

Bala, Nicholas, et al., 1998. Spousal violence in custody and access disputes: Recommendations for reform, written submission to the Committee, March.

Bland, Roger, and Helene Orn, 1986. "Family violence and psychiatric disorder", Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 31, March.

DeKeseredy, Walter S., 1998. Oral testimony to the Committee, June 1 (from Committee website).

DeKeseredy, Walter S. et al., 1997. "The meanings and motives for women's use of violence in Canadian college dating relationships: results from a national survey", Sociological Spectrum 17: 199-222.

DeKeseredy, Walter S. and Katharine Kelly, 1993. "Woman abuse in university and college dating relationships: the contribution of the ideology of familial patriarchy", Journal of Human Justice 4:2.

DeKeseredy, Walter S. and Linda MacLeod, 1997. Woman Abuse: A Sociological Story, Harcourt Brace Canada, Toronto. Chapter 6 submitted to the Committee by DeKeseredy. DeKeseredy, Walter S. and Martin D. Schwartz, 1998. "Measuring the extent of woman abuse in intimate heterosexual relationships: A critique of the Conflict Tactics Scales", National Electronic Network on Violence Against Women (website), National Resource on Domestic Violence (US). Submitted by DeKeseredy to the Committee.

DeKeseredy, Walter S. and Martin D. Schwartz, 1998a. Woman Abuse on Campus: Results from the Canadian National Survey. Sage, Thousand Oaks, California.

Department of Justice, 1990. Evaluation of the divorce Act; Phase II: Evaluation and Monitoring, Government of Canada, May.

Dutton, Donald G., 1994. "Patriarchy and wife assault: the ecological fallacy", Violence and Victims 9:2.

Fekete, John, Moral Panic, 1994. Robert Davies, Westmount, Quebec.

Gelles, Richard J., and Murray A. Straus, 1988. Intimate Violence, Simon and Schuster, New York.

Grandin, Elaine et al., 1997. "Couple violence and psychological distress", Canadian Journal of Public Health 88:3.

Guyer, M. J., 1995. "An overview of sexual abuse issues in child custody cases", Michigan Family Law Journal, Special Issue, pp. 15-18.

Kennedy, Leslie W., and Donald G. Dutton, 1987. "The incidence of wife assault in Alberta", Edmonton Area Series Report No. 53, Population Research Laboratory, Univ. of Alberta. [The data on husband abuse from this survey were never published, but were obtained from the PRL.]

Legislative Assembly of Alberta, 1998. "Bill 19: Protection against family violence act", Edmonton, Alberta.

Makepeace, James M., 1986. "Gender differences in courtship violence victimization", Family Relations 35, July, pp. 383-388.

Schmitz, Cristin, 1994. "CAS mishandled sex abuse claims, court awards dad $120,000 damages", Lawyers Weekly 13:46.

Sommer, Reena, 1994. Male and female-perpetrated partner abuse: Testing a diathesis-stress model, Univ. of Manitoba Ph.D. dissertation, unpublished.

Straus, Murray A., 1993. "Physical assaults by wives: A major social problem", Current Controversies on Family Violence, ed. Richard J. Gelles and Donileen R. Loseke, Sage, Newbury Park, California, pp. 67-87.