GIVEN that women can be violent and often instigate domestic violence, why does society stigmatize male domestic violence more, even at the risk of punishing men wrongly? One answer can be found in the unspoken presumption of male authority. As Jesse Powell writes in this long discussion on domestic violence:

Another difference between female violence towards men in romantic relationships and male violence towards women is that there is a presumption of legitimate male authority, that male authority should be upheld and promoted, and male domestic violence against women undermines this legitimacy. This is another special harm that male domestic violence creates that female domestic violence does not. Female domestic violence does not undermine female authority, because there is no legitimacy for female authority in the first place. The societal principle that men should have authority in their relationships is undermined by male domestic violence because male authority is real. 

So, while it may seem reasonable to treat all violence the same, regardless of who commits violence against whom and regardless of the context in which the violence takes places, there are arguments against such a principle of non-discrimination between different forms of violence. It seems legitimate to treat male domestic violence against women as a different kind of offense deserving of a different treatment within the law and an enhanced level of condemnation within the culture. 

                                                   — Comments —

David Lee Mundy writes:

Jesse Powell has it backwards. Domestic violence by females upon males undermines male authority. Even more so because husbands are restrained from using reciprocal force to manage such situations without fear of having their families, their entire lives stripped from them by state power.

Is a husband ever justified in using force? We accept such when it comes to children (for now), but not when it comes to wives. Why not? If the state can interpose its judgment in this area, then what area of the family is sacred? The obvious answer is no area of the family is sacred. A man cannot protect it from the state. Hence the inevitable rise of male fraud and deception championed by the
Roissians.

Do I think the state has no say when it comes to an abusive husband? Of course not. But why aren’t family decisions given at least the same protection as business decisions? The business judgment rule gives strong legal presumptions to the legitimacy of managerial decisions. Why aren’t husbands or spousal decisions afforded the same? The issue here ultimately is a jurisdictional one. Is any part of the family exempt from state control?

Laura writes:

David makes an important point. In a society in which male authority is recognized, the state does not have the despotic oversight over family life that now exists and cannot so easily strip a man of his paternal rights and property, placing him continually under the threat of being usurped.

Unfortunately, paternal authority, indeed all authority, is not real or meaningful unless it allows for abuses of that authority. Modern liberalism has exchanged the abuses of the individual for the abuses of government, which is far more serious in its progressive undermining of liberty and the entire domestic sphere.[Laura adds: Nevertheless, there must be some authority overseeing a man. A husband and father is not a law unto himself. See this further statement from me on whether a man should ever hit his wife.]

David asks, Is a husband ever justified in using force? Most of us tend to accept the view that if a man has to resort to force to control his wife, he is doing something wrong. But there can be cases in which it is she who is doing something wrong. [Laura adds: However, given the man’s superior strength, the arguments for using force against a wife are very weak. Why should a man ever have to use force?]

David writes:

Please know that raising these issues is critical for at-risk women.

Put simply, the state doesn’t have the manpower to police the family. As they devote more resources to stranger violence, they are going to respond less to domestic disputes. In fact, police are already starting to limit the type of calls they take. That is encouraging on the one hand, as families will be left alone to police their disputes, but unsettling on the other hand because the old community and familial infrastructures that were supplanted by the police state just aren’t there anymore.

Ultimately, champions of police intervention on behalf of at-risk women are going to leave those at-risk women even more unprotected and vulnerable.

Used to be women had the protection of their family, community, and their church. My dad was a pastor. He sometimes stood between husbands and wives. Took a lot of courage and faith to do that, to personally intervene. Doesn’t take much courage to call the cops. But what happens when the cops don’t show?

Finally, on a somewhat tangential note, the question of the limited jurisdiction of the state is crucial. The family is separate from the state. The church is separate from the state. It’s for this reason that families and churches are destroyed in totalitarian regimes. Why does the Chinese government kill Christians? Why, when they are nice, law abiding citizens? Because Christians deny the supremacy of the state in matters of conscience, family, and the church.

Laura writes:

Excellent points. David is not saying there should be no policing of domestic violence.

What David says reminds me of a recent conversation I hand offline with a reader whose husband had been hitting her. Calling the police wasn’t something she planned to do. She said the only thing that helped was when she told her mother and brother and they put pressure on her husband. Unfortunately, strong communities, families and church authority that might serve as an alternative to the state have been seriously weakened.

Jesse responds:

David says, “Jesse Powell has it backwards. Domestic violence by females upon males undermines male authority. Even more so because husbands are restrained from using reciprocal force to manage such situations without fear of having their families, their entire lives stripped from them by state power.” 

There are two points I want to make in regards to the above. First of all, when I talked about male domestic violence undermining the legitimacy of male authority while female domestic violence does not, I was referring to the legitimacy of male authority, not the effectiveness of male authority. When I argue in favor of male authority I am only arguing in favor of male authority under the presumption that the male authority is legitimate, that it serves a social purpose and promotes a social good. When men behave badly by using violence they undermine their own right to authority, and by association weaken the legitimacy of male authority in general, while when women behave badly by using violence the legitimacy of the man’s authority is not diminished at all, because it is the woman in this case who is behaving badly, not the man. 

The second point I want to make is the issue of self defense. According to self-defense doctrine, you are entitled to use force to defend yourself or to defend another from bodily harm, but you are only entitled to use the minimum force necessary to prevent the injury that you seek to prevent by using force. Men are not denied the legal right to use force against their wives or girlfriends in this self-defense context. Now if your wife hits you and you hit her back it is likely you both will be considered to be guilty of assault and domestic violence, but in this case you are both acting as aggressors against each other. If the man is acting in a restrained way maintaining a level of self-control while the woman is violently flaying around and the man then uses some level of force to prevent harm or injury to himself or to others, then the man’s behavior would fall under the self-defense doctrine and he would not be guilty of any crime. 

On the issue of “is violence ever justified?,” there is the self-defense exception I detailed above, but in more general terms I believe it is good to hold to the principle that violence is never justified within a romantic context, that violence should be rejected on principle. There are ways for men to assert authority without using violence. Violence is an abusive and illegitimate means to assert authority, and it should be condemned and punished. The assertion of authority on the part of men is moral and legitimate, but some means of asserting this authority are good and appropriate and some means are bad and destructive, violence being in the bad and destructive category. 

My rule of thumb is, a man has the right to impose punishments on a woman within a relationship by withholding rewards but not by inflicting harm. In a relationship with a woman a man gives the woman many rewards, and it is these rewards, these bribes, in a sense, that the man has the right to withhold if the woman is acting in an abusive fashion or in a way that undermines the functioning of the family. Inflicting harm is different, and is what I consider to be abusive. In the withholding of a reward, the woman is not worse off than if she was not in the relationship with the man at all, she is simply not as well off as she could be, as she would be if she acted in accordance with the man’s rules. In inflicting a harm, however, the man makes the woman worse off than she would have been if she had never been with the man in the first place. 

In the case of domestic violence, this fits under the harm inflicted category, and is therefore abusive, rather than the reward withheld category, which is not abusive and is therefore appropriate. If you hit someone you cause pain and potential injury. The woman, in the absence of the man, would not suffer this pain or injury, therefore, the act of hitting falls under the category of harm inflicted, not under the category of reward withheld.

As to the state’s right to intervene, yes, it is true, it is better if family disputes can be resolved through social pressure or condemnation of the guilty party by their peers; however, in more extreme cases of a man engaging in abusive behavior, the state does have the right to intervene. What does the state represent, after all? The state represents community standards that are enforced by the community. The state lays down a law, that a husband shall not physically attack his wife, the state sets out some punishment if this order is not obeyed, and then a legal process, involving a jury of one’s own peers, decides upon guilt or innocence and the sentence to be imposed upon a guilty verdict.

Laura writes:

Unfortunately, the modern state does not care if any one marriage survives or not. Why should it be considered more trustworthy than the individual man, who does indeed has a very personal stake in his own marriage? The state has no interest in preserving the family and is happy to pursue the claims of the individual to the point of destroying the family.

Slwerner writes:

Jesse writes, “Men are not denied the legal right to use force against their wives or girlfriends in this self-defense context. Now if your wife hits you and you hit her back it is likely you both will be considered to be guilty of assault and domestic violence, but in this case you are both acting as aggressors against each other. If the man is acting in a restrained way maintaining a level of self-control while the woman is violently flaying around and the man then uses some level of force to prevent harm or injury to himself or to others, then the man’s behavior would fall under the self-defense doctrine and he would not be guilty of any crime.”

While I do agree regarding the ” legitimacy of male authority” and the harms done to it by men resorting to violence, this statement above is seriously wrong and misleading.

For those of us who have seem the real world of the court system (I get additional insight in that my wife is a long-time prosecutor, and count many of her colleagues amongst my close friends – and I get to hear all their stories about what actually happens in real cases, in real court), understand the difference between what ought to be the law, and what actually is.

 Unless man has discernable physical injuries, the simple fact is that the word of the woman WILL REIGN SUPREME, both with police and with the courts when it comes to DV claims. Men may have a theoretical right to self-defense, but not a practical one. And, the idea that if they act only in a restraining manner, they are immune is pure speculation.

Comments such as the one quoted below are dangerously (for men) misleading.

Jesse writes,  “the man has the right to withhold if the woman is acting in an abusive fashion or in a way that undermines the functioning of the family. Inflicting harm is different, and is what I consider to be abusive. In the withholding of a reward, the woman is not worse off than if she was not in the relationship with the man at all, she is simply not as well off as she could be, as she would be if she acted in accordance with the man’s rules.”

If you read the CDC’s documentation of how Intimate Partner Violence is determined and measured (in keeping with the tenants of the VAWA), the Intimate Partner Violence Survey, you will find in the section: Psychological/Emotional Abuse (page 12) there is a lengthy list of what can be interpreted to be abuse. Included in that list (page 13), you will find these elements:

Humiliating the victim
Controlling what the victim can and cannot do
Withholding information from the victim
Getting annoyed if the victim disagrees
Disregarding what the victim wants
Denying the victim access to money or other basic resources”

A man who follows your advise and who believes that he can “withhold rewards” is going to find that he may be guilty of intimate partner psychological/emotional abuse should his wife decide to pursue her legal rights to destroy him. His wife can easily obtain a restraining order (based on his violation of the law) and have him removed from the home, and denied access to his children. 

I’m afraid your “rule of thumb,” in that it is not part of the “rule of law,” could well be the undoing of many men.

Reader N. writes:

Jesse Powell writes:

“According to self-defense doctrine, you are entitled to use force to defend yourself or to defend another from bodily harm, but you are only entitled to use the minimum force necessary to prevent the injury that you seek to prevent by using force.”

I would very much like to see a citation from a legal code on this. Frankly I am skeptical that this is settled law in much of the US.

Reader N. adds:

With all due respect, the discussion between you, Jesse Powell and others on domestic violence is moot for the simple reason that it is entirely based upon opinion and personal experience.
I wasn’t surprised to learn that you do not know anything about the law, nor was I surprised that Jesse Powell doesn’t either.

With all due respect to the woman from West Virginia who works with other women that have been physically attacked, she is writing from a very one-sided perspective. She doesn’t work
with men who have been physically attacked, nor does she work with women who have committed abuse, so she only sees one facet of the problem. For her to take that one facet, and extrapolate
to the entire universe of men, women and children is a logical fallacy. It may be just fine emotionally, but you are discussing the law, not emotions. So while I respect her work, I do not
find her opinion to have merit.

The effects of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act have been quite extensive and far reaching. Some of them have surely been good. Others have not. Since no one on the thread knows anything
about Federal law and the state laws that follow from it, the discussion is moot at best. Unhappily at least one of Jesse Powell’s statements would very likely put a man in jail on
charges of Domestic Violence (DV) under VAWA.

I humbly suggest that arguing from ignorance is not a good plan. It serves no one, not the writers, nor any readers, very well.

Laura writes:

It is untrue that no one who participated in the thread knows anything about federal and state laws.  David Lee Mundy teaches law at a university and he began the discussion. He was not arguing from ignorance and if it appeared that he was I would never have posted his short piece. What followed was discussion. The reader Slwerner also appears to know about domestic violence statutes and he participated. It is untrue that the discussion was entirely based on personal experience. I think N. has only glanced at some of the comments. 

N. fails to recognize the distinction between discussion and authoritative articles. Jesse’s statement above was not an “article,” but a comment drawn from the previous discussion. This conversation has not been worthless, in my opinion; uninformed statements have been corrected. For readers who know nothing about VAWA, this may be an inspiration to learn more. There is abundant information about it on the Internet.

The question of whether there should be a presumption of male authority in domestic violence statutes has been settled for me. I know enough about VAWA to say that it represents an egregious extension of state authority into family life. The details are complex and cannot even begin to be exhausted in this forum. What interests me most is the underlying objectives of domestic abuse statutes.

Reader N.writes:

I was unaware that Mundy teaches law, and do not see that information anywhere in the thread.[Laura writes: He does state that his field is immigration law and that he teaches.]  Slwerner’s most recent posting cites the exact CDC document that I have just downloaded with intent to post; he essentially posted what I intended to say, and clearly demonstrates some knowledge of the law. Therefore I retract my statement; the discussion is not moot, now that facts are being posted and errors corrected.

Laura writes: “N. fails to recognize the distinction between discussion and authoritative articles. Jesse’s statement above was not an “article,” but a comment drawn from the previous discussion.”

Jesse Powell seemed to be writing in a style that was both authoritative and proscriptive. Unhappily, on legal topics, his opinion is not relevant because it is uninformed by fact, and therefore moot. Once again, any man following his advice is putting himself at risk for arrest and jail time.

“For readers who know nothing about VAWA, this may be an inspiration to learn more. There is abundant information about it on the Internet.”Some of the best places to learn the full implications of VAWA are in the men’s rights area…rather despised by some participants. 

“I know enough about VAWA to say that it represents an egregious extension of state authority into family life. The details are complex and cannot even begin to be exhausted in this forum. What interests me most is the underlying objectives of domestic abuse statutes.”

In my somewhat humble opinion, the domestic abuse statutes contain within them various objectives: the traditional objective of protecting women, which Jesse Powell and others see clearly,
and the much wider objective of enabling the state to micromanage families, which they do not see. There is, of course, the third objective that is not so obvious: to render the nuclear family
impracticable and therefore obsolete. This may seem an extreme claim. Do I exaggerate? [Laura writes: Both David LeeMundy and I stated that this did appear to be the intention of recent domestic abuses legislation.] Go and look at legislative history, and see what persons and organizations were involved in the back-room drafting of such legislation as VAWA. Note the mandatory federal funding of women’s centers, and the organizations that get paid to run them.

The year 1994 wasn’t that long ago, we all should be able to recall it. VAWA was sold strictly as protecting women, and plenty of traditionalist men supported it because of that patina. The devil, as often, is in the details and Slwerner has shown some — a very few — of them. [Laura writes: David also mentioned the immigration ramifications of VAWA.] There are more — mandatory arrest, the nature of advice given to all women in women’s shelters, the rubber-stamp issuing of restraining orders — but perhaps that is for another time.

Laura writes:

As I have stated before, there is some excellent and truthful analysis on men’s sites, (in addition, I should add, to outrageous exaggeration and the demonizing of women.) Links to a few of the best articles on VAWA would be helpful.

Here is a piece by Phyllis Schlafly at Townhall about VAWA.

Schlafly writes:

VAWA is not designed to eliminate or punish violence, but to punish only alleged violence against women. Most of the shelters financed by VAWA do not accept men as victims.

VAWA has been known from the get-go as “feminist pork” because it puts nearly $1 billion a year of U.S. taxpayers’ money into the hands of the radical feminists without any accountability for how the money is spent. Feminists have set up shop in shelters where they promote divorce, marriage breakup, hatred of men and false accusations, while rejecting marriage counseling, reconciliation, drug-abuse treatment and evidence of mutual-partner abuse.

Jesse Powell writes:

I did a careful analysis of David’s comments, and I counted four different times where he belittled women and violence against women, two times where he insulted those advocating that men who hit women should be punished, four times where he legitimized male domestic violence, and three different times where David just blatantly came out and said that the state has no right to intervene in family matters, implying that the state has no right to criminalize domestic violence at all. Only once did David say something that could be seen as condemning violence towards women.

David’s agenda was obviously to legitimize domestic violence and to bash VAWA. The question in my mind is, why did David think he might be successful in pushing this agenda at your website? What is the men’s rights agenda in terms of domestic violence? The men’s rights agenda in regards to domestic violence is to make domestic violence harder to prosecute, less likely to lead to punishment against the man. The goal is for male domestic violence to be excused, to be minimized, for allegations to not be believed, etc. That is the agenda of the MRM in regards to domestic violence. It exactly parallels the MRM agenda in regards to rape. The MRM wants rape accusations to not be believed, for rape to be minimized, for prosecution to be more difficult, etc. 

What if the agenda of the MRM in regards to domestic violence was achieved, at least part way, would that lead to less domestic violence? No, it would just mean the restraints against men would be lessened and they could get away with more abusive behavior. 

Why does someone like David, who quite obviously is sympathetic towards “men’s rights”, go on and on about how the state has no right to intervene in the family, that the state imposing standards of conduct upon men is tyrannical? Is it because David has some noble mission of creating an ideal family life where all problems are solved through informal channels, through social pressure? The point in arguing against the right of the state to intervene is to remove restrictions from men’s behavior, not to guide men’s behavior in a socially conformist direction following the rules of the community or the church.

Laura writes:

Jesse does not acknowledge the context in which David wrote. That context is a domestic abuse industry aimed at destroying the family and perpetuating itself, an industry which demonizes men and is tied to the state-subsidized promotion of divorce. Phyllis Schlafly is hardly a men’s rights advocate and yet she writes:

Feminists have changed state laws to include a loosey-goosey definition of family violence. It doesn’t have to be violent — it can simply be what a man says or how he looks at a woman.

Domestic violence can even be what a woman thinks a man might do or say. Definitions of violence include calling your partner a naughty word, raising your voice, causing “annoyance” or “emotional distress,” or just not doing what your partner wants.

VAWA makes taxpayers’ money available to the feminists to lobby state legislators to pass feminist laws, to train law enforcement personnel and judges in using those laws, and to fund their enforcement. VAWA provides women with free legal counsel to pursue their allegations while men are left on their own to find and pay a lawyer, or struggle without one.

Feminists have lobbied most states to adopt mandatory-arrest laws, which means that when the police arrive at a disturbance and lack good information on who is to blame, they are nevertheless legally bound to arrest somebody. Three guesses who is usually arrested.

Feminists have lobbied most states to pass no-drop prosecution laws, which require proceeding with prosecution even if the woman recants her charges or wants to drop them. Studies show that women do recant or ask to drop the charges in 60 percent of criminal allegations, but the law requires the man to be prosecuted anyway, which means he loses his constitutional right to confront his accuser.

Charging domestic violence practically guarantees that a woman will get custody of the children and sever forever the father’s relationship with his children even though the alleged violence had nothing whatever to do with any abuse of the children. Judges are required to consider allegations of domestic violence in awarding child custody, even though no evidence of abuse was ever presented or proven.

Brendan writes:

On the application of self-defense in DV situations, unless the woman is armed, generally men are not viewed as legitimately exercising self-defense if they do anything other than block blows. Men should be aware of that — because it’s pretty limited, in its practical application, given the general size/strength difference between men and women (again, assuming the woman is not armed). So while it’s available as a defense in theory, in practice it’s very limited. And it has no impact at all on must arrest laws — that is, if your wife is beating on you, and you just put up your arms in self defense to block her from your face and so on, and someone calls 911, the man is still going to get arrested because most of these laws require the cops to arrest the stronger person, regardless of who initiated the incident and what actually happened (person most likely to cause harm, which generally is interpreted to be the guy because he is generally bigger and stronger). In many cases, the charges will be dropped if there is no evidence of actual physical harm to the woman, but you still get a free night in jail — the main reason why a man should never call 911 if his wife is beating on him, because he’s probably just buying himself a night in jail.

My ex-wife battered me a bit during our difficult period before we divorced, but I had already been advised by my family law expert lawyer what to do — say nothing, block her blows but do not touch her, and when she’s done, leave where you were and put distance between yourself and her. Do not call 911. So I managed to avoid spending a night in jail due to my (then) wife deciding to hit me.

Keep in mind also that the feminist bar is not done with these laws, yet, as extreme as many of us see laws like VAWA and the state implementation of it. In particular, they are looking at two areas of the law. The first is self-defense, where they want to get rid of the requirement that the act of self-defense be in actual defense of actual pending harm and that it be proportionate — because they say this discriminates against women. The idea is that women are weaker than men and don’t really have an opportunity to use self-defense effectively when being physically confronted by a man — so that a woman should be able to come back later, or even the next day, or when the guy is asleep and so on, and exercise force against him — preferably deadly force — to “defend” herself from further attacks. If this kind of change comes into the law, it would amount to changing what would be, in most cases, premeditated murder (i.e., first degree murder) into manslaughter (in some jurisdictions) or no crime at all (in others, and what they are pushing for). It would give women the right to murder their husbands, in effect. The second change they are pushing for has to do with the “heat of passion” defense to first degree murder — under traditional common law, a person who murders his/her spouse when caught “in flagrante delicto” (i.e., whilst copulating with someone else) can have that murder reduced to manslaughter, in many jurisdictions. The feminist bar objects to this for the same reasons that it wants self-defense changed — in other words, the time-frame for a woman to get the benefit of the “heat of passion” mitigation should be extended to allow enough time for the woman to procure a weapon or a hitman or plan a murder, because of her lesser physical strength — pretty much directly against the underlying idea, here, which is that the very act of confronting your spouse with someone else is so emotionally inflammatory as to result in a lower culpability for actions committed whilst in that very temporary emotional state.

So the discussion is not over about this, and the changes that are being advocated are going to make things worse, not better, in terms of the “balance of power” in marriages and with respect to marital violence.

Of course all of this undermines male authority in marriage, that was one of the main purposes of making VAWA so expansive in its definitions of what constitutes domestic violence. But other changes in the legal system will be used to shore that up and make it worse, I think, in the years ahead.

Slwerner writes:

I challenge Jesse Powell to cite evidence that those in the main of the MRM have ever suggested that crimes against women should be minimized and/or go unpunished. [hint – see Pierce Harlan of
the False Rape Society for his statements about the evil crime of rape. He constantly condemns that crime, while simultaneously pointing out that making false accusation of that crime is, in fact, a crime with consequence equaling that of rape.]

This is as bad as Jesse’s earlier suggestion that innocent men (those who’ve never raped a woman) should be imprisoned as a means of protecting women from rape. I had, at one point, considered that he might simply have failed to think-out what he was saying, but now, I’m convinced that he actually meant that he believed it quite okay for innocent men to be imprison – so long as it was done under the pretense of defending women.

Frankly, it is men such as him who make the MRM necessary, as he allies himself lockstep with many of the more radical notions fostered by gender-feminists (i.e. – the MRM is all about promoting the rape of  women and violence against them). Go read some of the man-hating gender-feminist sites.

Laura writes:

Paul Elam’s call for jury nullification in rape trials was tantamount to a call for the guilty to go unpunished.

To clarify, Jesse did not say that innocent men should go to prison for rape, but that if occasional false convictions were the result of strenuous rape laws, that was a risk worth taking. My position is the same as it is with any other crime: everything should be done to prosecute rape and to prevent false convictions.

Note to readers: I do not wish to get into the separate issue of rape laws at this time.