Last year was an important year in the exposition of the Orwellian lies about men, peddled by industrial feminism for 30 years. Two core notions, intact at the start of last year, are now under the most rigorous scrutiny: (1) that all but the most aberrant instances of violence between the sexes is initiated by men:(2) that all men are potential abusers of women and children, writes John Waters.
That those who have challenged these beliefs are winning the argument is visible in the emerging public receptivity towards ideas previously regarded as counter-intuitive, and in the consternation of those on the other side of the argument.
An example of the latter was the pitiful clutching on to the garments of Prof Michael Kimmel, who visited Ireland at the end of last year. Prof Kimmel is an American feminist, engaged by the Department of Education and Science in an effort to defend its doomed Exploring Masculinities project. He produced what the Department insists upon describing as a "report". The Department could have saved the Irish taxpayer the £8,000 paid to Prof Kimmel by adopting the study of Kieran McKeown and Philippa Kidd, commissioned a year earlier by the Department of Health, at a cost to the public purse of £10,000.
My fellow columnist Medb Ruane wrote following Prof Kimmel's departure that he had "devastated" the "gender symmetry" argument.
The only thing devastated by Prof Kimmel, however, was the truth. In an article for this newspaper published on December 4th, Prof Kimmel stated that "virtually all the empirical studies that find gender symmetry" ask married people how many times in the previous 12 months they had pushed, shoved, hit or slapped their spouses during an argument.
By contrast, he stated, what he called "the major studies" which find asymmetry in the incidence of domestic violence "are based on nationally representative samples of crime victimisation surveys". This is close to the opposite of the truth.
According to Prof Kimmel, surveys which find that men and women abuse each other equally "ask only about violence that is used to resolve a conflict (ignoring violence that is used to terrorise, or that is used to protect others, like one's children)". This is not so. (It is interesting that Prof Kimmel assumes that only women must ever act to protect their children; this enables us to observe the nature of his bias.) Just the previous day, I had summarised here the contents of the McKeown/Kidd study, currently in the possession of the Department of Health and Children, but as yet unpublished. The casual reader of Prof Kimmel's article, prompted to make a connection with what I had written, might be forgiven for believing that Prof Kimmel had demolished this report. He referred in his article to "a recent study in Ireland by Dr Kieran McKeown", which was "not conducted with a nationally representative sample, but only of people in marital therapy".
Prof Kimmel said that "even Dr McKeown is more cirsumspect than those who would use his study to discredit the remarkably credible work done by social scientists over the past 30 years".
In fact, nobody had sought to make of this particular report anything other than what was obvious about it. Prof Kimmel, although he did not make this clear, was referring to a report carried out last year by Dr McKeown for the Marriage and Relationship Counselling Services (MRCS), which indicated that female clients of MRCS were significantly more likely to be the instigators of domestic violence. Nobody had claimed this was a scientific or representative survey. All that was suggested was that these findings were indicative of a reality vastly different to the "intuitive" paradigm.
The survey to which I'd referred on the previous day was a different one - a report entitled Men and Domestic Violence: What Research Tells Us, for which Kieran McKeown and Philippa Kidd studied research in the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand. All this research was based on representative samples, and did not relate to marriage only, the specific brief being to establish the position concerning the worldwide prevalence of domestic violence in the general population. One of the surveys assessed was the 1996 British Crime Survey, which surveyed 10,844 people, across all categories of British life.
This research, which comes down on the side of "gender symmetry", is everything Prof Kimmel suggests such research is not, indicating that the results of representative studies are consistent in showing that, in half of intimate relationships where domestic violence occurs, both partners use violence, with the remainder divided equally between male-only violence and female-only violence.
There are, to be sure, variations in the patterns of violence suffered by men and women. There is some evidence, for example, that women suffer more in episodes of violence which do not involve the use of weapons. But there is also significant evidence that women are more likely to use weapons.
The next step should be the publication of the McKeown/Kidd report, which would enable the debate to enter its next phase with a clear basis for discussion. At the very least, it would obviate the need for further expenditure of taxpayers' money on engaging foreign "experts" to tell us what goes on in Irish homes. After all, how can the truth be hurt by more information?
jwaters@irish-times.ie