The Unfair Sex?

THE April 9 march on Washington to protest violence against women was yet another attempt to politicize the crimes of rape and domestic assault. Boosted by fresh funding from last year’s Omnibus Crime Act, feminist advocacy groups are pushing the images of women as victims and men as beasts. Gloria Steinem declares that “the most dangerous situation for a woman is . . . [to be with] a husband or lover in the isolation of their own home.” A massive billboard campaign proclaims: “One woman is battered every 15 seconds.” Upon appointing the head of the Justice Department’s new Violence Against Women Office, President Clinton declared that rape has increased three times faster than other crimes in the last decade. Yet according to the latest National Crime Victimization Survey, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, sexual assaults on women declined 20 per cent from 1992 to 1993. And the same survey that found that a woman is beaten every 15 seconds also found that a man is battered every 14 seconds. This research indicates that 54 per cent of all “severe” domestic violence is committed by women. It’s strange that we rarely hear these statistics.

In the current climate of hysteria, those who question the conventional wisdom are denounced as enemies of women. Radical feminists are using the issues of domestic violence and rape to create a new jurisprudence that assesses guilt and imposes punishment based on gender. In Feminism Unmodified, University of Michigan law professor Catharine MacKinnon argues that “some of the same reasons children are granted some specific legal avenues of redress . . . also hold true . . . for women.” Lenore Walker, director of the Domestic Violence Institute and the leading exponent of “battered woman syndrome,” explains the political underpinnings of violence against women: “A feminist political gender analysis has reframed the problem of violence against women as one of misuse of power by men who have been socialized into believing they have the right to control the women in their lives, even through violent means.”

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Wendy McElroy

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THE April 9 march on Washington to protest violence against women was yet another attempt to politicize the crimes of rape and domestic assault. Boosted by fresh funding from last year’s Omnibus Crime Act, feminist advocacy groups are pushing the images of women as victims and men as beasts. Gloria Steinem declares that “the most dangerous situation for a woman is . . . [to be with] a husband or lover in the isolation of their own home.” A massive billboard campaign proclaims: “One woman is battered every 15 seconds.” Upon appointing the head of the Justice Department’s new Violence Against Women Office, President Clinton declared that rape has increased three times faster than other crimes in the last decade. Yet according to the latest National Crime Victimization Survey, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, sexual assaults on women declined 20 per cent from 1992 to 1993. And the same survey that found that a woman is beaten every 15 seconds also found that a man is battered every 14 seconds. This research indicates that 54 per cent of all “severe” domestic violence is committed by women. It’s strange that we rarely hear these statistics.

In the current climate of hysteria, those who question the conventional wisdom are denounced as enemies of women. Radical feminists are using the issues of domestic violence and rape to create a new jurisprudence that assesses guilt and imposes punishment based on gender. In Feminism Unmodified, University of Michigan law professor Catharine MacKinnon argues that “some of the same reasons children are granted some specific legal avenues of redress . . . also hold true . . . for women.” Lenore Walker, director of the Domestic Violence Institute and the leading exponent of “battered woman syndrome,” explains the political underpinnings of violence against women: “A feminist political gender analysis has reframed the problem of violence against women as one of misuse of power by men who have been socialized into believing they have the right to control the women in their lives, even through violent means.”