Hey, What's Wrong with a Little Domestic Violence? Amiright?

When Women Became No Longer Equal, Part 9: Nothing Wrong with a Little Domestic Violence, right?

It's all the fault of those pesky women, isn't it? Always wanting to be treated as if they are human beings. Those damn women are the reason things have gone to shit. At least according to the repugnant J.D. Vance, a misogynist who is hoping to be able to lord it over women as a U.S. Senator, representing the state of Ohio (or, maybe, the men of Ohio).

Sure, Vance wants all those demanding womenfolk "to have opportunities . . . to have choices," really, he does, but while that's all fine and good and he's perfectly okay with it, really, he is, still, you gotta agree with him when he says that "women and boys in the womb" (huh????) obviously should have greater rights to "opportunity" and "choices" than those full-grown female human beings. In other words, he's forced birth all the way. 

For women (or girls, like the 10-year-old Ohio child who had to go to Indiana for her necessary reproductive care), Vance is just full of sympathy--every pregnancy, without exception, is just a wonderful "opportunity," he declares. A woman whose pregnancy is the result of incest--or a little girl whose pregnancy is caused by rape--well, they should take advantage of these wonderful opportunities. They shouldn't be able to have an abortion, just because their pregnancies might be a bit "inconvenient" for them. (Again, his words.)

Abortion is "slavery," he proclaims. Women's loss of their fundamental rights is really an "amazing victory!" he cheers. Up is down! Black is white!

And another damn thing women have tried to ruin is marriage. Because, you know, if women have rights, if they are actual, real, human beings with thoughts, feelings, and the freedom to make decisions for themselves, well, they can just decide to end a bad marriage. (Or maybe not get married in the first place, but Vance doesn't even consider that horror.)

At Pacifica Christian High School (I'm not sure if he was speaking to high-school students, but I sure as hell hope not), as part of an event billed as part of "The Great Conversation Series" (here's the announcement), Vance weighed in, offering an astonishing and benighted view of marriage: 

Culturally, something has clearly shifted. I think it’s easy but also probably true to blame the sexual revolution of the 1960s. My grandparents had an incredibly chaotic marriage in a lot of ways, but they never got divorced, right? They were together to the end, ’til death do us part. That was a really important thing to my grandmother and my grandfather. That was clearly not true by the 70s or 80s. And I think that probably, I was personally and a lot of kids in my community, who grew up in my generation, personally suffered from the fact that a lot of moms and dads saw marriage as a basic contract, right? Like any other business deal, once it becomes no longer good for one of the parties or both of the parties, you just dissolve it and go onto a new business relationship. But that recognition that marriage was sacred I think was a really powerful thing that held a lot of families together. And when it disappeared, unfortunately I think a lot of kids suffered. . . .

His grandmother and grandfather's marriage? As Vance detailed in his fantasy "memoir," Hillbilly Elegy, his grandparents tried their best to kill one another. 'Til "death do us part" indeed. 

As for deciding to end a marriage? To consider that "one of the parties" (always have to be "moms and dads," right?) might decide a marriage "no longer good"? Stick it out no matter what! Vance insists. (Or, I suppose, until one partner kills the other.)

And while Vance gestures toward the notion that "dads" as well as "moms" who might find a marriage needs to end, look again--the real blame is to be found in "the sexual revolution of the 1960s." Guess who was liberated as a result of that revolution . . . 

So what's his advice? Here's the thing that has caused an uproar since Vance's comments, recorded in September 2021, were published by Vice this week: 

This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent [emphasis added], but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term. . . .

Sure, J.D., what's wrong with a little domestic violence? Gotta stay on brand . . . 

Meanwhile, may I remind you: 

• On average, nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States. During one year, this equates to more than 10 million women and men.
• 1 in 4 women and 1 in 9 men experience severe intimate partner physical violence, intimate partner contact sexual violence, and/or intimate partner stalking with impacts such as injury, fearfulness, post-traumatic stress disorder, use of victim services, contraction of sexually transmitted diseases, etc. 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men have experienced some form of physical violence by an intimate partner. This includes a range of behaviors (e.g. slapping, shoving, pushing) and in some cases might not be considered "domestic violence."
• 1 in 7 women and 1 in 25 men have been injured by an intimate partner.
• 1 in 10 women have been raped by an intimate partner. Data is unavailable on male victims.
• 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men have been victims of severe physical violence (e.g. beating, burning, strangling) by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
• 1 in 7 women and 1 in 18 men have been stalked by an intimate partner during their lifetime to the point in which they felt very fearful or believed that they or someone close to them would be harmed or killed.
• On a typical day, there are more than 20,000 phone calls placed to domestic violence hotlines nationwide.
• The presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation increases the risk of homicide by 500%.
• Intimate partner violence accounts for 15% of all violent crime.
• Women between the ages of 18-24 are most commonly abused by an intimate partner.
• 19% of domestic violence involves a weapon.
• Domestic victimization is correlated with a higher rate of depression and suicidal behavior.
• Only 34% of people who are injured by intimate partners receive medical care for their injuries.

 (These numbers are from the National Coalition against Domestic Violence; for full statistics, click here.)

I've written about this topic before (click here and here and here and here and even here, with another asshole whining about when marriage and women were "sacred"). It never goes away.

And let's not forget. The Violence against Women's Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994. The law was expanded and improved in reauthorizations of 2000, 2005, and 2013. Republican opposition to reauthorization of the VAWA delayed its authorization--yeah, those guys again. The act was finally reauthorized in March 2022, but it could never manage to get support from Republicans, much less a vote, in the U.S. Senate. It was finally passed as part of an omnibus appropriations package.*

The video of Vance's remarks is widely available online, but I refuse to embed it or link to it here. You can find it if you must. 

*The assholes running things now have removed the “Fact Sheet: Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA)” from the White House “Briefing Room” where this was originally posted. Because of course they have. It’s been preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and I’ve updated the link here. 

Back to the Future, Part 13: Men Killing Women, New and Improved!

Back to the Future, Part 13: More Intimate Partner Violence! What a Surprise!

First, I hate the anodyne phrase "intimate partner violence." Because we wouldn't want to offend anyone's tender sensibilities by saying "men slaughtering wives, girlfriends, and children," now would we?

"Domestic Violence" is better than "Intimate Partner Violence--
but does it say enough?

And second, such acts of domestic terrorism (a phrase I first heard Gloria Steinem use to describe men killing women several years ago) are so commonplace that they are frequently overlooked in the media. For example, today the Huffington Post reports on the deadly slaughter of his wife and two daughters by a Phoenix man. (He also killed a family friend while he was murdering his family.) The death of his oldest daughter was particularly gruesome--instead of shooting her, as he had his wife and five-year-old daughter, he clubbed the seven-year-old to death. (Police found the youngest daughter, three, hiding under a bed.)

While this horrific murder merited an article in today's Huffington Post, the story did not appear in The New York Times, but a quick Google search shows that it was reported in the Washington Post two days ago, and on NBC, ABC, and CNN. 

But what did appear in today's New York Times was this story: "Murders by Intimate Partners Are on the Rise, Study Shows."

Yup. Rather than less frequently, horrific slaughter like the one in Phoenix is happening MORE frequently: "Homicides by intimate partners are increasing, driven primarily by gun violence after almost four decades of decline." 

Just a few facts: "The number of victims rose to 2,237 in 2017, a 19 percent increase from the 1,875 killed in 2014." Yes, men are killed too, but the "majority of the victims in 2017 were women, a total of 1,527." 

And, "gun-related domestic killings increased by 26 percent from 2010 to 2017. . . . In 2017, 926 of the 1,527 women murdered by partners were killed with guns. In 2014, it was 752 of 1,321 women."

The Times article refers to the findings of Emma E. Fridel and James Alan Fox, "Gender Differences in Patterns and Trends in U.S. Homicide, 1976–2017" (in Violence and Gender 6 [March 2019]).

Interestingly, it was the Huffington Post that first reported on this new study. And adds these gems to what appears in the Times story: "Domestic violence groups often repeat the statistic that three women a day are killed by domestic violence. But according to Fox’s most recent data, it is four."

And: "Nearly half of all women who are murdered die at the hands of their partners. Only 5 percent of men suffer the same fate."

And: "Every 16 hours, according to one estimate, a woman is fatally shot by her boyfriend, husband or ex."

The House of Representatives recently voted to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, which had expired in February of this year.

Reauthorization of the act is opposed by the NRA. 

The Senate has yet to act.

Here's my modest proposal.

For more in the "Back to the Future" series of blog posts, click on the label, below. The label "domestic terrorism" will take you to more posts on men killing women.

Back to the Future, Part 11: Gilead Redux

Back to the Future, Part 11: Home, The Most Dangerous Place for Women (or, Gilead Redux)

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has just issued a stunning new report, a Global Study on Homicide: Gender-Related Killing of Women and Girls.*

In the press-release announcing the publication, the UNODC begins with a statement that is shocking but, upon reflection, is not at all surprising: "Home," the study says, is "the most dangerous place for women." 

Why? Because 58% of all murders of women and girls occur at the hands of their intimate partners or family members. To put this in terms that are painfully stark, every hour of every day, some six women are killed "by people they know." 

In other words, "137 women across the world are killed by a member of their own family every day. More than a third (30,000) of the women intentionally killed in 2017 were killed by their current or former intimate partner ̶ someone they would normally expect to trust" (Gender-Related Killing, 10).

And, even more painfully stark,  "little progress has been made in preventing such murders." In fact, the "annual number of female deaths worldwide resulting from intimate partner/family-related homicide . . . seems be on the increase" (10).

The study also examines other forms of "femicide": "gender-related killings perpetrated outside the family sphere." Such gender-related killings include systematic killings of women in armed conflicts, gender-based killing of aboriginal/indigenous women, killing of female sex workers, killings as a result of sexual orientation and/or gender identity, among others (30-38).

UNODC, Gender-Related Killing of Women and Girls, p. 7

Globally, 1 of every 5 homicides is "perpetrated by an intimate partner or family member." But, 

women and girls make up the vast majority of those deaths. Victim/perpetrator disaggregations reveal a large disparity in the shares attributable to male and female victims of homicides committed by intimate partners or family members: 36 per cent male versus 64 per cent female victims. Women also bear the greatest burden in terms of intimate partner violence. The disparity between the shares of male and female victims of homicide perpetrated exclusively by an intimate partner is substantially larger than of victims of homicide perpetrated by intimate partners or family members: roughly 82 per cent female victims versus 18 per cent male victims. (11)

UNODC, Gender-Related Killing of Women and Girls, p. 11

As if all this isn't enough, here's one last cheerful note: "While the killing of a person tends to be recorded by the police more effectively than other crimes, it is well evidenced that violence against women is poorly reported to the police and that a large share of it remains hidden." And, of course, "[v]iolence against women is almost universally underreported" (42-43). 

The problem is global--many of the graphs in the report show statistics for specific countries all around the world. While none of the charts and/or graphs gives statistics for the United States, the situation in homes in the United States is no different than in other countries; as the CDC reported earlier this year, “[o]ver half of all female homicides (55.3%) are Intimate Partner Violence related." 

So, happy holidays?

*As the UNODC notes, "not all female homicides are gender related. Therefore, only a specific, if considerable, share can be labelled 'gender-related killings of women and girls,' i.e. 'femicide'" (9).

For more fun stories on the state of affairs for women and girls, click on the label "Back to the Future," below.

Back to the Future, Part 7: Nothing to See Here--Just a "Deranged" Guy with a Gun

Another Day, Another Mass Shooting . . . 

Unfortunately, nothing is new in the latest mass shooting--just another young, "upset" white guy who picks up a gun and shoots a bunch of people. 

In response to which, 45 takes a break from golf to fill a little airspace with meaningless word bubbles: thoughts and prayers, a guy with "problems," "this isn't a guns situation."

And maybe, as more details are released, there really is nothing new here. 

A violent young man, who has previously beaten the crap out of his wife and small child, packs up his guns (a Ruger AR-556--a "military style" semi-automatic "tactical rifle"--and two handguns, a Glock 9mm and a Ruger 22-caliber), heads off to a place where he can find lots of easy targets, and starts firing.

In this case, the shooter chose a church that his in-laws attended--although, as it turned out, they were not in the church on Sunday morning. But that didn't make any difference to the shooter. Twenty-five innocent men, women, and children are now dead.

As the research group Everytown for Gun Safety reported just months ago, "domestic violence is a driving factor in mass shootings."

The data published in Mass Shootings in the United States: 2009-2016 (March 2017) makes the link between domestic violence and mass shooting painfully obvious.

In the eight years under analysis, there were 156 mass shootings in the United States using FBI definitions for what constitutes "mass murder": "a number of murders (four or more) occurring during the same incident, with no distinctive time period between the murders. These events typically involved a single location, where the killer murdered a number of victims in an ongoing incident." 

These 156 "mass shootings" resulted in 848 deaths and 339 injuries. 

The majority of the cases--"at least 54%," or 85 of the 156 incidents--"were related to domestic or family violence" (3).

The carnage is shocking: 422 victims killed, 40% of them children (3).

The data in Mass Shootings was drawn from FBI homicide statistics and "media reports." Now that the FBI (and Department of Justice) have scrubbed pesky data like the relationship between murderers and their victims and the ages of homicide victims from their annual Crime in the United States report, good luck keeping track of the numbers . . . 

Just another deranged guy with a gun? Here's a modest proposal for what to do.

Update, 9 November 2017: For more on this topic, you may be interested in this podcast from WBUR (Boston) and its On Point broadcast, "The Link Between Domestic Violence and Mass Shootings" (9 November 2017)--to listen, click here.

One of the people interviewed for this broadcast is German Lopez, senior reporter for Vox. To read his piece, "America's Domestic Violence Problem is a Big Part of Its Gun Problem," click here.

American Women and Domestic Terrorism, Part 2

The Deadly War on Women Continues

Almost a year ago, I wrote about violence against American women--domestic terrorism--and its horrific and unrelenting toll. As Gloria Steinem noted in stark terms on 11 May 2016,

Domestic violence in this country has killed since 9/11 — if you take the number of [Americans] who were killed in 9/11 and in two wars in Iraq, and in the 14-year war in Afghanistan — more women have been murdered by their husbands and boyfriends in the United States in that period of time than [the number of Americans who] have been killed in all of those incidences of terrorism and wars.” 

And now here we are, almost a year later, once more forced to face the facts.

On Monday, 10 April 2017, a school shooter opened fire at North Park Elementary School in San Bernardino, California--the same city where, in 2015, another mass shooting occurred.

When it was all over, four people had been shot, including two children. The shooter died, along with one woman and an eight-year-old boy.

There was no continuing "breaking news" coverage on the cable news networks as there had been in 2015. The president of the United States made no public statement. Anderson Cooper didn't jet to the scene. And, as Michael Calderone notes in the Huffington Post, even major newspapers didn't consider the story all that newsworthy: "The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal didn’t run front page stories on it." (The story that was front-page-worthy was the viral video of a United Airlines passenger being forcibly removed from an airplane.)

School shootings are usually followed by days, if not weeks, of blaring news accounts, but not this one. It's now Friday, just four days after the shooting, and the story has virtually  disappeared. 

Why? Because this horrific school shooting was deemed to be "just" another story of domestic violence. A pissed-off man who shoots his wife and then himself--and who shoots two small children in the process, killing one of them. Too routine to be worth news coverage

This wasn't the act of some "radical Islamic terrorist." Just an ordinary kind of terrorist--the kind that lives in our homes and wreaks deadly vengeance on women and children.

And as Steinem noted, it occurs all too often, and it kills far more people than the kind of terroism we all seem much more worried about

Politifact, fact-checking the numbers, reports that, in the decade between 2005 and 2015, a total of 24 Americans were killed by terrorist attacks "on U. S. soil"--in the same ten years, 280,024 Americans were killed by guns. 

But, more relevant to the story here, three women are killed every single day by their intimate partners. 

In 2014, according to FBI data, 1,613 women were murdered by men in single victim/single offender incidents: 

• For homicides in which the victim to offender relationship could be identified, 93 percent of female victims (1,388 out of 1,495) were murdered by a male they knew.
• Thirteen times as many females were murdered by a male they knew (1,388 victims) than were killed by male strangers (107 victims).
• For victims who knew their offenders, 63 percent (870) of female homicide victims were wives or intimate acquaintances of their killers.
• There were 239 women shot and killed by either their husband or intimate acquaintance during the course of an argument. 

(For this data, see "When Men Murder Women" (2016), published by the Violence Prevention Center.)

In 2015, in just one state--California--91 women were murdered, their deaths the result of domestic violence. (During the same year, the murders of 27 men were also attributed to domestic violence.) If you're one of those people always yelling "fake news," take a look at the source of the evidence--it's reported in Table 25 of "Homicide in California" (2015), a publication of the California Department of Justice.

In that year, "only" 39 of of 358 mass shootings nationwide were related to domestic violence, as reported in the New York Times, but they were "among the deadliest," accounting for 145 of the 462 total deaths as a result of mass shootings in that year.

In just the first month of 2016--January 2016, as Melissa Jeltsen reported in The Huffington Post--112 people were killed in intimate partner violence. 

And on average, there are 11 murder-suicides, like the one in San Bernardino, every single solitary week--most of them involving a man who kills his wife or girlfriend with a gun.. 

As reported in Mass Shootings in the United States: 2009-2016,* published on 11 April 2017, just a day after the San Bernardino shootings, there have been 156 mass shootings in the United States during this eight-year period. And "the majority of mass shootings in the United States are related to domestic or family violence":

In at least 54 percent of mass shootings (85), the perpetrator shot a current or former intimate partner or family member. These domestic violence mass shootings resulted in 422 victims being killed—more than 40 percent (181) of whom were children. A majority of these cases—56—also ended with the perpetrators killing themselves.

Forty percent of the fatalities in domestic violence shootings are children.

The biggest threat to women is not some crazy-eyed Muslim terrorist who wants to destroy the United States and impose Sharia law on those of us who survive the conquest. 

The biggest threat to women has always been, and remains, men--their husbands, boyfriends, fathers, brothers, sons, dates, exes, colleagues, neighbors, acquaintances, the guys in their yoga class, the man in the Safeway store . . . 

*As of January 2021, this resource has been updated--it is now titled Mass Shootings in America 2009-2019. To access this report, with its current data, click here.

What Should We Do about Male Violence?

A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Sons of American Families from Being a Danger to Their Fellow Citizens . . . 

"It is a melancholy object to all those who live in this formerly great country when they see their cities and towns, their streets and their neighborhoods, their elementary schools and their college campuses, their houses of worship and their places of work, their shopping malls, movie theaters, and nightclubs, even the very homes in which they reside, terrorized by malefactors of the male sex, who daily prove themselves utterly unfit for a meaningful and productive life. These men, lacking all empathy, self-control, and humanity, unsuited in every way for civil society, turn their rage on their families and communities, committing acts of unspeakable violence.

I think it is agreed by all parties that this prodigious number of disaffected and dangerous men is, in the present deplorable state of the country, a very great additional grievance, and, therefore, whoever could find out a fair, reasonable, and workable method of making these young men sound and useful members of the state would deserve so well of the public as to have her statue set up as a preserver of the nation. . . . 

To read and enjoy this satiric essay,  modeled on Jonathan Swift's 1729 "A Modest Proposal," click here.

American Women and Domestic Terrorism

The Deadly War on Women

I was doing a little baking this afternoon, and while I was making my son's favorite cookies (Martha Stewart's Double-Chocolate Chunk cookies, if you're interested), I was catching up on my podcasts.

And so it was that I listened to Gloria Steinem in conversation with Tom Ashbrook, an On Point episode broadcast earlier this week. The starting point for the discussion was Steinem's new documentary series, Woman (airing on the Viceland channel), but the talk ranged widely--though it maintained its focus on women's status in the world, particularly as victims of violence.

(For some reason, the mere discussion of this topic--that, globally, women are the victims of extraordinary levels of violence, enrages some people. The comments section at the On Point website is brutal . . . Apparently the idea that global violence against women is linked to political, social, and economic instability cannot be tolerated.)

One of the very first posts I wrote on this site was about Gloria Steinem (to see that earlier piece, click here.) What prompted me to write today was a comment she made in this recent conversation with Ashbrook--she noted that, in the U.S., since 9/11, more women have been killed by their husbands or boyfriends--domestic terrorists--than "all the Americans who were killed by 9/11 or in Afghanistan and Iraq."

I had heard her make this statement before--but it struck me particularly hard as I was standing in my kitchen making cookies. 

As it turns out, the statement seems to date back to 2014--and as shocking as it may sound, it has been fact-checked and proved to be true:

James A. Fox, a Northeastern University criminology professor, found that from 2002-12, the number of women killed by intimate partners was 15,462. A tally from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics showed 10,470 women killed in intimate partner homicides from 2002-10.

Fewer than 3,000 Americans died in the terrorist attacks on Sept.11, 2001. (There were 2,978 victims, but that includes people from 90 countries.) American deaths tied to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq total 6,838, according the Pentagon. Together, there were about 9,838 deaths.

In her 2015 Boston Globe story, headlined "In This War on Women, the Death Toll Mounts," columnist Renée Graham makes a similar point, using comparable statistics, adding:

We fret about terrorism and mass murders in public places, though violence against women claims far more victims while receiving a fraction of the attention. It cuts across race, class, religion, and every other demographic line, and is as much a repulsive trait of our national character as racism. With each lethal encounter, there are just as many imperishable scars — children dead or orphaned, families and friends shattered. Every day these women are dying among us; we owe them more than makeshift memorials and weary resignation.

And here is a direct quotation from Steinem, from an 11 May 2016 interview on PRI's The Takeaway:

Domestic violence in this country has killed since 9/11 — if you take the number of [Americans] who were killed in 9/11 and in two wars in Iraq, and in the 14-year war in Afghanistan — more women have been murdered by their husbands and boyfriends in the United States in that period of time than [the number of Americans who] have been killed in all of those incidences of terrorism and wars,” Steinem says. “We are not exempt here by any means. If all of us could raise one generation of children without violence, we don’t know what might be possible.

The Martha Stewart double-chocolate cookies are really good. But I sorta lost my appetite.