equal means equal

I joined the fathers' and family rights movement to make equality in child custody a reality. During the last three years I have seen other areas where men are discriminated against. One of them is domestic violence prevention and treatment. I prefer promoting shared parenting on this blog, and I resent organizations that state they exist to promote shared parenting but actually have other agendas, (more on that later). But now I want to address the inequity of the Violence Against Women Act.

I was reading Cathy Young's piece, “Ending bias in domestic assault law” in the July issue of The Globe. In her discription of VAWA she said, “the legislation requires states and jurisdictions eligible for federal domestic violence grants not only to encourage arrests in domestic assault cases, but also to ''discourage dual arrest of the offender and the victim." This provision is based on the false belief that in cases of mutual violence, one can nearly always draw a clear line between the aggressor and the victim striking back in self-defense. While the language is ostensibly gender-neutral, the assumption is that the aggressor is male; the feminist groups which pushed for this clause made no secret of the fact that its goal was to curb arrests of women.”

Being an egalitarian, reading these words, “the feminist groups which pushed for this clause made no secret of the fact that its goal was to curb arrests of women," disturbs me.

She went on to say, “The law has also created a symbiotic relationship between the federal government and the battered women's advocacy movement, which is heavily permeated by radical feminist ideology. The state coalitions against domestic violence, which formally require member organizations to embrace the feminist analysis of abuse as patriarchal coercion, play a vital role in the allocation of federal grants and in overseeing the implementation of programs and policies. Among other things, these groups frown on any batterer intervention programs that focus on drug and alcohol abuse or mental illness as causes of domestic violence.”

When I was in Sacramento testifying on behalf of AB1307, California’s Shared Parenting bill, I watched Mira Fox of Child Abuse Solutions misrepresent facts in her testimony to oppose it, stating statistics about child abuse and fathers that have long been debunked. She seems to believe that children need to be protected from their fathers, instead of the truth, that fathers are the least likely to abuse compared to mothers and mothers' boyfriends. Upon further investigation I found that her organization also trains court personnel. This disturbs me also.

No real feminist can support VAWA in its current gender-bias state. Until it is made gender-neutral, it is unacceptable to this egalitarian feminist. I know David Burroughs and VAWA4ALL have been working extremely hard to make this a possibility, and I’d like to see their hard work pay off for all of us.

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