In U.S. v. Morrison (2000), a dissenting Supreme Court opinion reproduced false claims about domestic violence against women in finding a rational basis for provisions of the Violence Against Women Act. That Supreme Court opinion, which four justices supported, observed that Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act after “extended hearings,” “vast amounts of testimony and documentary evidence,” “years of the most thorough legislative consideration,” and the assembly of a “mountain of data.” The opinion explicitly presented twenty Congressional statistical findings. Among that list of statistical findings were the following two:

1. “Violence is the leading cause of injuries to women ages 15 to 44….” S.Rep. No. 103-138, p. 38 (1993) (citing Surgeon General Antonia Novello, From the Surgeon General, U.S. Public Health Services, 267 JAMA 3132 (1992)).
2. “[B]attering ‘is the single largest cause of injury to women in the United States.’ ” S.Rep. No. 101-545, at 37 (quoting Van Hightower & McManus, Limits of State Constitutional Guarantees: Lessons from Efforts to Implement Domestic Violence Policies, 49 Pub. Admin. Rev. 269 (May/June 1989).^

Both of these statistical findings are variants of the prevalent false claim that domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women. While the Supreme Court opinion cited these findings from two different Congressional reports, they also occur within a single Congressional report.

The justices reviewed to some extant these findings. The Senate report cited for the first finding above incorrectly attributed the finding to Surgeon General Antonio Novello. The Supreme Court opinion correctly substituted Antonia for Antonio. The opinion’s presentation of the Senate’s finding also suggests some substantial evaluation. The Senate’s finding was actually reported by the Senate thus:

Violence is the leading cause of injuries to women ages 15 to 44, more common than automobile accidents, muggings, and cancer deaths combined.3 {footnote 3} Surgeon General Antonio Novello, “From the Surgeon General, U.S. Public Health Services,” “Journal of the American Medical Association,” vol. 267, No. 23, at 3132 (June 17, 1992).^

In presenting that Senate finding, the Supreme Court opinion omitted the frightening comparators “more common than automobile accidents, muggings, and cancer deaths combined.” Those frightening comparators underscore the irrationality of the reported finding. The Supreme Court opinion’s editing and selective quotation of the Senate’s finding suggests some consideration of that finding.

The Supreme Court opinion did not provide additional, simple review of the above two Congressional findings. The frightening comparators in the Senate’s finding (“more common than automobile accidents, muggings, and cancer deaths combined’) don’t actually occur in the Senate’s cited text for the finding. Moreover, the finding as reported in the Senate report, even without the frightening comparators, isn’t a fair representation of the statement in the Senate report’s cited text. Thus the Supreme Court opinion produced, as formal evidence of a rational basis for a law, a specific Senate finding that is formally false at the first level of reference.

The findings that Supreme Court opinion cited are formally false in more sophisticated ways. The source (“Van Hightower & McManus”) cited for the second of those findings actually attributed that finding to the Surgeon General:

In fact, the United States Surgeon General identifies battering as the single largest cause of injury to women in the United States.^

MacManus and Van Hightower’s article provides no citation to support attributing this claim to the Surgeon General. The Senate report eliminated that problem by moving down the chain of claim reproduction. In addition, the first finding refers to violence, while the second refers to battering. Battering (repeated, severe abuse) is a subset of domestic violence, which itself is a subset of violence. The first finding addresses the population “women ages 15 to 44,” while the second finding addresses women in general. Causes of injury, not surprisingly, vary substantially between young women and elderly women. The two findings are inconsistent at their surface levels. An exercise of reason could easily reveal that the these Congressional findings are formally factual, but also formally inconsistent, formally ill-supported, and substantially false. Such an exercise of reason apparently was not part of the Supreme Court opinion’s marshaling of those findings to indicate a rational basis for the Violence Against Women Act.

In reproducing such findings, the Supreme Court opinion did not analyze how gender affects motivation, but rather expressed an impression of gender motivation. The opinion noted:

It is true that these data {findings} relate to the effects of violence against women generally, while the civil rights remedy limits its scope to “crimes of violence motivated by gender” – presumably a somewhat narrower subset of acts. See 42 U.S.C. § 13981(b). But the meaning of “motivated by gender” has not been elucidated by lower courts, much less by this one, so the degree to which the findings rely on acts not redressable by the civil rights remedy is unclear. As will appear, however, much of the data seems to indicate behavior with just such motivation.^

In specific cases of violence, motivation is typically described with case-specific facts. Impressions of motivation for highly aggregated classes of behavior reflect more general feeling. Consider, for comparison, a true finding: as measured by visits to hospital emergency departments, men suffer 45% more injuries from violence than do women. In aggregate, a man is more likely to attack a man than to attack a woman. Is violence against men motivated by gender? The current impression in public discourse seems to be that violence against men is not motivated by gender. That factually incongruous impression seems best understood, like the presentation of findings on domestic violence, as motivated by gender.

Prevalent reproduction of false claims about domestic violence against women indicates men’s vulnerability to criminal suspicion in public discourse. In U.S. federal and state courts, 21 judicial opinions have explicitly reproduced claims like the claim that domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women. False claims about domestic violence against women have gained support at pinnacles of public reasoning such as the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court. Such institutions have supported false claims about domestic violence against women through highly formal processes of reasoning such as extensive public hearings and lengthy court proceedings. These results, which are examples of a more general pattern of judicial reasoning about domestic violence, are weighty evidence for gender motivation in public reasoning. These results should inform public consideration of sex disparity among persons incarcerated.

Highly damaging criminal suspicion of men persists with little rational basis across a wide variety of public discourses. Consider claims of the form “domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women.” In the criminal shadow of such claims, without the need for explicit mention, are men — men as a stereotyped class of persons who commit violent crimes against persons most closely associated with them in love. Such claims have great significant for individuals’ lives and for the public allocation of resources. Such claims have been prevalent in public discourse for more than two decades. Nonetheless, under reasonable consideration of facts, such claims are clearly false.

Public discourse’s fundamental weakness with respect to such claims isn’t in the processing of facts, but rather in the processing of criminal suspicion of men. A Yale Law Review article entitled “‘The Rule of Love’: Wife Beating as Prerogative and Privacy” declared:

as this Article opens by observing, battering of women by husbands, ex-husbands, and lovers remains the single largest cause of injury to women in the United States today.^

Falsely claiming a greatly exaggerated scope for love’s failures supports a greatly expanded scope for punishment’s application. An article in the McGeorge Law Review used the false claim in identifying an epidemic of unreported crime:

Domestic violence is a national epidemic. It is “the leading cause of injury to women between 15 and 44 years of age in the U.S.–more than car accidents, muggings, and rapes combined.” In fact, domestic violence “is believed to be the most common yet least reported crime in our nation.”^

An article in the Nevada Lawyer placed such a false claim squarely within the administration of the criminal justice system:

The City Attorney’s office vigorously prosecutes domestic violence cases and has a victim advocate on staff who helps prepare victims for the case. “Domestic violence is the leading cause of death and injury to women,” she says, and her program’s goal is to break the cycle of violence.^

The state substitutes for interpersonal violence incarcerating, by physical force if necessary, persons in prison. The appeal in public discourse of that trade-off in violence dominates economic interests. Thus a DePaul Law Review article entitled “Mandatory Arrest Of Domestic Abusers: Panacea Or Perpetuation Of The Problem Of Abuse?” reasoned:

Domestic violence remains a leading cause of death and injury among women. In 1992, for example, injuries from domestic violence exceeded the combined number of injuries to women caused by auto accidents, rapes, and muggings during the year. Current estimates suggest that as many as six million women are the victims of domestic violence each year. … In light of the fact that domestic violence poses a greater threat to women than any other violent crime, and in consideration of the fact that this crime is the leading cause of injury among women, this trade-off regarding jail space should be mandated.^

If domestic violence really were the leading cause of injury to women, the amount of additional jail space required to incarcerate all the (implicitly male) domestic-violence perpetrators would greatly expand the U.S.’s world-leading system of mass incarceration. The cost of such jail space generates relatively little concern.

Incomparable aggregates and frightening comparators help to suppress better-quality public reasoning about domestic-violence claims. Consider the phrase “leading cause of death and injury among women.” Death is orders of magnitude less frequent than injury. Leading causes of death are much different from leading causes of injury. Domestic violence is far from the leading cause of death to women and far from the leading cause of injury to women. Nonetheless, claims that domestic violence is the leading cause of death and injury to women occur in relatively high-quality fields of public discourse. For example, that claim occurs four times in Congressional records, including this instance:

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, domestic violence is the leading cause of death and injury to women between the ages of 15 and 44.^

Similar claims aggregating death and injury also occur in eight law journal articles. The invocation of death is not plausibly related to serious statistical evaluation. The function of death seems to be to prompt fear, horror, and anger.

Frightening comparators similarly function to prompt fear, horror, and anger . Claims that domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women are commonly extended with claims that injuries from domestic violence exceed injuries from other sources of harm. Frightening comparators that have been used include car accidents, muggings, rapes, occupational hazards, cancer deaths, heart attacks, strokes, and war. For example, a note in the Yale Law Journal advanced its argument with this statement:

The Senate Judiciary Committee, after reviewing a wide array of studies on violence against women in the United States, reported that “[v]iolence is the leading cause of injuries to women ages 15 to 44, more common than automobile accidents, muggings, and cancer deaths combined.”^

An article in the Harvard Women’s Law Journal advanced its argument with a similar claim:

In 1992, the United States Surgeon General Antonia Novello cited intimate violence as the leading cause of injury to women — more than car accidents, muggings, occupational hazards and cancer deaths combined.^

In conjunction with deploying frightening comparators, an article in the Yale Law and Policy Review more explicitly identified the male perpetrators:

In spite of an increasing number of legal reforms, the single largest cause of injury to women in the United States remains battering by husbands, ex-husbands, and lovers, who collectively inflict more injury upon women than car accidents, muggings, and rape combined.^

Car accidents and muggings are the most commonly used frightening comparators. In high-quality, nationally representative U.S. statistics on serious injuries, car accidents are the second-leading cause of injury. Muggings are a component of the fifth-leading cause of injury (assault other than sexual assault). By far the leading cause of injury to women ages 15 to 44 is unintentional falls. Unintentional falls do not occur as a comparator in any instance found that asserts as true the claim that domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women. A simple explanation is that unintentional falls aren’t commonly perceived as a frightening cause of injury. Unintentional falls also don’t cast a criminal shadow on (explicitly or implicitly male) perpetrators of harm.

Highly affective, false claims that domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women don’t serve broad public interests. Respect for truth and respect for reason are fundamental public interests. Such claims do great violence to truth and reason. Some might judge that false claims about domestic violence against women are justified because they serve the laudable public purpose of raising public awareness about domestic violence against women. Domestic violence against women is an important public problem that needs to be publicly addressed. However, highly exaggerated claims of domestic violence against women support gender stereotypes that constrain public recognition of domestic violence against men. Scholars have argued bitterly for decades over the extent of domestic violence against men. Even if domestic violence factually affects a smaller share of men than women, that doesn’t justify promoting highly sex-biased public concern about domestic violence.

Strong anti-men bias in public concern about domestic violence relates through criminal suspicion to highly disproportionate imprisonment of men. Frightening, false claims about domestic violence against women show that public discourse favors criminal suspicion of men. Criminal suspicion of men in public discourse supports having many more men incarcerated than women incarcerated. That sex-biased communicative-penal process undermines the ideal of equal justice under law.

The sensationally false claim that domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women is entrenched in the criminal justice system. Variants of that claim have been quoted in judicial opinions from high courts. Variants of that claim have appeared as statements of fact in law-review articles, including ones that judges have authored. Variants of that claim are not just a characteristic of elite discourse on domestic violence. Variants of the claim that domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women have appeared throughout the criminal justice system, including on web pages of police departments, prosecuting attorneys, district attorneys, and attorneys general.

The absurdly false claim that domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women typically occurs on criminal justice agencies’ web pages purporting to inform the public about domestic violence. Here are examples of that false claim from criminal justice agencies’ web pages early in 2006:

• FACT: …Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women between the ages of 15 and 44 in our country, and the FBI estimates that a woman is beaten every 15 seconds. {Office of the District Attorney, 18^th Judicial District, Kansas, web page: “Myths and Facts About Domestic Violence”}
• Domestic violence is the single largest cause of injury to women between the ages of 15 and 44 in the United States, more than muggings, car accidents, and rapes combined. {St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office, Saint Augustine, Florida, web page: “Domestic Violence”}
• Domestic violence is the single largest cause of injury to women between the ages of 15 and 44 in the United States. Each year, between 2 to 4 million women are battered, and 2,000 of those die of their injuries. {Walnut Creek Policy Department, Contra Costa County, California, web page: “Domestic Violence”}
• Battering is the single largest cause of injury to women in the U.S. It exceeds rapes, muggings, and auto accidents combined. {Bonham Police Department, Fannin County, Texas, web page: “Crime Prevention / Family Violence”}
• Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women. {Office of the Louisiana Attorney General, web page: “The Impact of Domestic Violence on the American Workplace is Significant}
• Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women in the United States. {Clark County Sheriff, Washington, web page: “Domestic Violence – Community Information”}
• {Domestic Violence} is the leading cause of injury and death to women between the ages of 15-44, exceeding car accidents, muggings and rapes. {Office of the District Attorney, Tulare County, California, web page: “Domestic Violence / Violence Against Women”}
• FACTS: …Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women between ages 15 and 44 in the united States – more than car accidents, muggings, and rapes combined. (Uniform Crime Reports, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1991) {San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, California, web page: “Domestic Violence Myths and Facts”}
• Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women between ages 15 and 44 in the United States – more than car accidents, muggings, and rapes combined. (Uniform Crime Reports, Federal Bureau of Investigation,1991) {Eaton County, Michigan, Prosecuting Attorney, web page of the “domestic violence specialist,” section entitled “Did you know…?”}
• Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women between the ages of 15 and 44 in the United States; more than car accidents, muggings, and rapes combined. {Prosecuting Attorney, Clark County, Indiana, web page: “Domestic Violence: Fast Facts on Domestic Violence”}
• Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury for women age 15 to 44. More women are injured from domestic violence than {sic} rape, muggings and auto crashes combined. {Milwaukee County District Attorney, Wisconsin, web pdf document: “Domestic Violence”, section “Did You Know…?”}

The false claim about domestic violence has been used directly to prejudice jurors. About 2004, the Co-Director of the University of Texas School of Law Domestic Violence Clinic prepared teaching material entitled, “Voire Dire in Domestic Violence Cases.” That teaching material was adapted from materials by the City Attorney, San Diego, California and an Assistant Criminal District Attorney, Dallas, Texas. Among the questions for jurors being screened for hearing domestic violence cases:

With domestic violence as the number one cause of injury to women in this country, how many of you disagree with the state’s decision to press charges even if the victim does not want them to?^

According to the Internet Archive, that prejudicial teaching material on questioning jurors was being distributed on the National Center on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault’s website from at least 2007 to 2012.

The wildly false claim that domestic violence is the leading cause of injuries to women has proliferated within the criminal justice system. That communicative effect should be deeply troubling to persons concerned for public communication and justice. Persons criminally injuring those that they claim to love is a horrifying reality. Grotesque exaggeration of that horrifying reality indicates poorly functioning public reason and points to sex-biased administration of justice.

Criminal justice agencies have financial interests in domestic violence policy. From 1995 to 2005, the U.S. Congress appropriated $4.3 billion under the Violence Against Women Act to programs addressing violence against women. To receive federal money under the Violence Against Women Act, agencies needed to establish programs showing that they were treating domestic violence as a serious violation of criminal law. Agencies also had to “demonstrate that their laws, policies, or practices and their training programs discourage dual arrests of offender and victim” and “prohibit issuance of mutual restraining orders of protection.” Iin the specific context of an act explicitly directed at domestic violence against women, such policies implicitly identify men as the domestic-violence offenders. Criminal justice agencies have made exaggerated claims about the extent of domestic violence against women. At the level of narrow programmatic financial interests, such claims probably indicate criminal justice agencies attempting to show that they treat domestic violence (against women) as a serious violation of criminal law in order to get federal money under the Violence Against Women Act. Such public claims have the more general public effect of supporting highly disproportionate imprisonment of men.

Policy analysts and scholars have career interests in domestic violence policy. Much of the study of domestic violence is by persons who have specialized in that field and closely related fields. For more than a decade, persons studying domestic violence have viciously attacked each other. Academics typically form scholarly tribes and seek to achieve tribal control of particular scholarly journals to ratify their scholarly expertise. That’s a reasonable reading of the context for journals such as Violence Against Women.

Persons claiming expertise in domestic violence have made the further step of seeking national legislation. A law professor nationally recognized as an expert on battered women has proposed a “battered woman expert statute.” The proposed statute:

would require that anyone testifying on battered women syndrome, battered woman’s experiences, domestic violence, actually have some expertise in the area, be familiar with the literature on domestic violence and its effects on victims as well as the literature on abusers and actively engaged in domestic violence issues through teaching, writing or research.^

Such an initiative highlights both conflicting claims to expertise in domestic violence and career interests in such claims of expertise. Given prevalent gender-profiling men as domestic violence offenders and lack of services for men victims of domestic violence, anti-men domestic violence experts have exerted astonishing power and control over authority on domestic violence.

Unraveling the web of financial interests and conflicting claims to expertise in domestic violence isn’t necessary to recognize highly damaging failures of domestic violence authority. Claims that domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women are grotesquely false. Acutely sex-biased concern about domestic violence is sexist. Responding to economic incentives is normal behavior, including for government agencies. Battling over expertise is typical for persons seeking to establish or preserve claims to expertise. Such behavior usually occurs within broad constraints of not appearing ridiculous under public reason, not fundamentally assailing the equal human dignity of a class of persons, and not undermining basic public trust in the fair administration of justice. Such deliberative constraints appear to have little effect on public discourse about domestic violence against women. That deliberative failure is central to the rise of extraordinary U.S. mass incarceration.

Whether domestic violence should be addressed in terms of gender stereotypes has been extraordinarily controversial among scholars for more than three decades. Consider, for example, Current Controversies on Family Violence, published in 2005. It included an article entitled “Women’s Violence Toward Men Is a Serious Social Problem.”^ That article was matched with another, more aggressively titled article, “Men’s Violence toward Women Is the Serious Social Problem” (relevant emphasis added).^ In 2011, the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior issued with the subtitle Current Controversies on the Role of Gender in Partner Violence. Its editorial preface observed:

Forty years of research, social activism and practice in the field of partner violence (PV) have created a certain amount of consensus but have mainly led to controversies. … The collection of papers presented here reiterates the conflict-ridden environment in which the understanding of PV emerges.^

The controversy centers on competing frameworks. The gender-stereotyping framework sees the problem of violence as the problem of men attacking women. The holistic framework takes seriously social-scientific evidence of approximate gender equality in the perpetration of domestic and partner violence. The holistic framework views domestic violence as a complex and multifaceted interpersonal problem.

The gender-stereotyping framework has overwhelmingly dominated domestic-violence research and policy. The scholarly field of domestic violence research is largely a horrifying, repulsive spectacle of irrationality, gender animus, and symbolic violence. Objective, social-scientific study of domestic violence has had little public significance.^ Given the importance of family law and the criminal justice system, caring persons should not avert their eyes and close their ears to the intellectual brutality of domestic violence and partner violence scholarship.

Symbolic violence in the field of domestic and partner violence research has a long history. It began in 1975 with the pioneering National Family Violence Survey. Using a broad measure of physical violence, that survey found that roughly 12% of both men and women physically assaulted their partners.^ One lead author of the study, who identifies himself as a feminist^, ignored the implications of these statistics and initially focused on male domination of women as the cause of partner violence.^ His female scholarly colleague, however, in 1977 wrote a scholarly article, “The Battered Husband Syndrome.” That article explored the characteristics of men victims of partner violence. In response to her article, the author received a deluge of scholarly abuse, as well as a bomb threat at her daughter’s wedding.^

All three lead authors of the 1975 study suffered-long lasting personal attacks as result of their finding of gender symmetry in domestic violence. One of the lead authors more than two decades later observed:

our finding that the rate of female-to-male family violence was equal to the rate of male-to-female violence not only produced heated scholarly criticism, but intense and long-lasting personal attacks. All three of us received death threats. Bomb threats were phoned in to conference centers and buildings where we were scheduled to present. {The female lead author} received the brunt of the attacks—individuals wrote and called her university urging that she be denied tenure; calls were made and letters were written to government agencies urging that her grant funding be rescinded. All three of us became ‘non persons’ among advocates. Invitations to conferences dwindled and dried up. Advocacy literature and feminist writing would cite our research, but not attribute it to us. Librarians publicly stated they would not order or shelve our books.^

Despite the attacks, one of the lead authors persevered. He became a leading scholar in objective, social-scientific study of family violence. In 2011, at age 85, he wrote the lead review article for Current Controversies on the Role of Gender in Partner Violence. He declared:

The high prevalence of PV {partner violence} by women, either minor violence or clinical-level violence, is not perceived by the public and is often denied or concealed by academics. The denial and concealment is documented in {references}. It is crucial to change academic denial and public perception because ending PV by women is morally, legally, and therapeutically necessary. It is also an essential step in reducing violence against women because, as {reference} found, “…a woman’s perpetration of violence was the strongest predictor of her being a victim of partner violence.” Similar conclusions follow from the longitudinal study of {reference} and {reference}’s meta analysis of risk factors for victimization. The effort to end PV by women must include attention to psychological aggression and minor violence by women such as slapping and throwing things at a partner because those behaviors are harmful themselves and because they tend to evoke retaliation and escalate into more severe attacks by both parties {references}.^

In 2010, in a scholarly article entitled “Thirty Years of Denying the Evidence on Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence: Implications for Prevention and Treatment,” he made a similar argument:

It is time to make the effort to end all family violence, not just violence against women partners, because this is morally and legally necessary and because it is crucial to protect women. This must include PV {partner violence} by women, which is widely viewed as mostly harmless {reference}, because physical injury inflicted by women is more rare than physical injury inflicted by men {reference}. On the contrary, even when attacks by women result in no physical injury, ending PV by women is a basic prevention step to reduce violence against women and all other humans.^

Acronyms, jargon, and numerous scholar references make these journal articles unappealing reading for ordinary persons. Nonetheless, close reading of the above passages reveals symptoms of a long history of abuse. Note that the above text makes no direct reference to violence against men. The concluding reference to “reduce violence against women and all other humans” shows the male scholar’s wounded sense of self. From his female colleague’s explicitness in describing “the battered husband,” he withdrew.

Evincing the social power of the label “feminist,” supporters of gender-stereotyping domestic violence have attacked studies showing gender symmetry as being the work of anti-feminists or pseudo-feminists. In Current Controversies on the Role of Gender in Partner Violence (2011), the leading review article is entitled, “Gender symmetry and mutuality in perpetration of clinical-level partner violence: Empirical evidence and implications for prevention and treatment.” The abstract for that article begins:

This paper addresses the contradiction between the conceptualization of partner violence as almost exclusively perpetrated by men and over 200 studies with data on both men and women which found “gender symmetry,” i.e., that about the same percentage of women as men physically assault a partner.

Apart from its conclusion and addenda, the article has eight primary sections:

1. “The gender symmetry controversy”
2. “Method”
3. “Results”
4. “Does the high rate of female assault result from self-defense?”
5. “Asymmetry in effects: the basis for denial of symmetry in perpetration”
6. “Limitations”
7. “Theoretical implications”
8. “Prevention and treatment implications”

This article concludes:

Although denial and concealment of gender symmetry in perpetration describes the current situation, recognition of the symmetrical and predominantly mutual nature of PV {partner violence} perpetration is starting to happen, as indicated by a growing number of articles and books which recognize the importance of gender symmetry in PV {references} and new journals that explicitly recognize that PV is perpetrated by both men and women (Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research, and Partner Abuse). These publications are part of a process that is likely to ultimately end the present ineffective ideological approach to PV and replace it with evidence-based approaches that do not deny the overwhelming evidence on the prevalence and importance of female perpetration of PV. If this continues, it is likely to open the way to more effective prevention and treatment of PV.^

The author of that article elsewhere described himself as a feminist.^ Nonetheless, the subsequent article in that issue is entitled, “Gender and types of intimate partner violence: A response to an anti-feminist literature review.” Apart from its introduction and conclusion, this scholarly article has two primary sections:

1. “A feminist perspective on domestic violence”
2. “The anti-feminist backlash”^

This article places social-scientific study of domestic violence within a battle about feminism. It organizes that battle under the banners “feminist” and “anti-feminist.” A third article in Current Controversies on the Role of Gender in Partner Violence joined the battle. It is entitled “Feminist contributions to understanding woman abuse: Myths, controversies, and realities.” Apart from its introductory section, it has three primary sections:

1. “What is feminism?”
2. “Myths and realities about feminism”
3. “Studying woman abuse: academic apartheid or the genuine sharing of knowledge”^

Academic apartheid seems to refer to rigid separation between work labeled “feminist” and work labeled “anti-feminist.” That’s a socially constructed, ideological division. The article describing it also documents its social construction. Even in scholarly work, division between “feminist” and “anti-feminist” dominates division between tendentious ideology-pushing and objective truth-seeking.

Ideological fear has been at the core of the criminal justice system’s development of domestic violence policy. Consider a scholarly article published in a prominent law review in 2004. Apart from its introduction, a tendentious historical section, and its conclusion, the article has three primary sections:

1. “The Critique from Within: Criticism of Domestic Violence Criminal Justice Policy by Battered Women’s Advocates”
2. “The Attack on the Changes in Domestic Violence Policy from Outside the Battered Women’s Movement”
3. “Progressive Strategies”

This article associates findings of gender symmetry with men’s rights groups and pseudo-feminists:

The primary goals of both the men’s rights groups and the pseudofeminists’ attack on the conception that men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of intimate violence have little to do with domestic violence policy. Their critiques of the numbers and the policy changes are simply support for their arguments that women are violent, men can be victims, and feminists are liars who distort data to suit their agenda.^

An apparently threatening claim of parties labeled “men’s rights groups and “pseudofeminists” — the claim that men can be victim of domestic violence — hasn’t been sufficiently influential to overcome unequal services for male victims of domestic violence or pervasive gender-stereotyping of domestic violence. Moreover, the scholar expressing these ideological fears played an important role in shaping the New York judicial system’s response to domestic violence. She served as Deputy Director of the Center for Court Innovation, a public-private partnership with the New York State Unified Court System. As the Director of Domestic Violence and Family Court Programs at the Center for Court Innovation, she was closely involved with the development of the influential Felony Domestic Violence Court in Brooklyn. Ideological fear of “men’s rights groups and “pseudofeminists” is deeply entrenched in the dominant public response to domestic violence.

Scholars expressing concerns about domestic-violence policy have sought to allay ideological fear with expressions of support for women’s rights and feminism. One social-scientific scholar, who described himself as “a supporter of women’s rights on any issue from abortion to workplace equality,” declared:

I resent the self serving argument that the gender paradigm group somehow represent women’s interests and are the only “feminists” and take a moral higher ground associated with women’s rights. I say that IPV {intimate partner violence} is not an issue of women’s rights but of couples with dysfunctional conflict management styles or psychopathology. The gender paradigm thinking has led to criminal justice practices that do not protect women or men {references} and obfuscate focus on serious high risk offenders of each gender. My critiques of the gender paradigm grew not from gender politics but from a review of the domestic violence literature I was doing for the third edition of my book The Domestic Assault of Women. In so doing I discovered a voluminous literature indicating that the modal form of IPV was bilateral matched for level of severity. More disturbingly, I also discovered a series of studies that had serious flaws in sample selection, extrapolation from criminal justice or shelter samples to the general culture (without identifying the selection factors that initially created the sample), cherry picked data, and conclusions that did not fit the reported data. These were not random errors; they all lay in one direction—to support the gender paradigm. I reported these solecisms and re-titled the book Rethinking Domestic Violence.^

Another scholar described an alternative approach to helping female victims of domestic violence. She described her work as part of a larger project of saving progressive feminism:

the conventional wisdom seems to be that there are two opposing progressive groups that address women’s issues—feminists and those who have receded from feminism. To many, this apparent fracture is exemplified by theorizing about domestic violence, where mainstream feminists supportive of harsh punishment of abusers square off against scholars who criticize feminism for compounding the problems faced by people of color. This article argues that, to the contrary, much of the newer scholarship on women’s issues, particularly with regard to domestic violence, does not recede from the feminist mission, de-emphasize women’s subordination, or abandon the majority of traditional feminist ideology, but rather it represents a new method of feminist theorizing. This paper is the first to systematically catalogue the specific traditional feminist views to which many modern feminist scholars object and distill the uniting principles of this new feminist or “neo-feminist” scholarship. Using the lens of domestic violence law and policy, the article demonstrates how neo-feminist theorists continue to prioritize women’s empowerment, despite their critique of certain law reforms associated with traditional feminism. For example, many of today’s domestic violence scholars reject mandatory arrest and prosecution policies in favor of recognizing battered women’s autonomy and addressing reluctance to separate through socio-economic reforms.^

This article doesn’t address the large number of studies indicating gender symmetry in the perpetration of domestic violence.^ This article doesn’t directly recognize that domestic violence policies have been central to the development of U.S. mass incarceration. Instead, it suggests that domestic violence policy hasn’t served well female victims of domestic violence. It argues that supporting a harshly punitive, gender-biased approach to domestic violence isn’t necessary to keep feminism alive. That’s the sort of scholarly argument that’s acceptable in elite legal discourse.

The long, brutal scholarly battle over domestic violence shows little shared movement toward truth and reconciliation. Consider, for example the Blackwell Companion to Criminology. This prestigious scholarly volume, published in 2004, is part of the Blackwell Companions to Sociology. That series describes itself as an “authoritative series” for “those studying sociology at advanced undergraduate or graduate level as well as scholars in the social sciences and informed readers in applied disciplines.” The preface to the list of volumes in the series states:

Essays in the Companions tackle broad themes or central puzzles within the field and are authored by key scholars who have spent considerable time in research and reflection on the questions and controversies that have activated interest in their area.

Within the Blackwell Companion to Criminology, a scholarly article entitled “Managing ‘Men’s Violence’ in the Criminological Arena” begins:

When men’s violence against women and children is made the object of analysis — say, the focus of scholarly attention or the focus of an undergraduate criminology module — all hell breaks loose. Even calling men’s violence “men’s violence,” thereby pushing home responsibility for that violence to men, can provoke uproar. It has even led to some sections of the academy in the United States, and now in the United Kingdom, to argue that, contrary to feminist claims, women are equally if not more violent than men and that there is a “sexual symmetry in marital violence”^

To the phrase “sexual symmetry in marital violence” the author appended a dated scholarly reference (from 1992) to a scholarly article supporting gender stereotypes in partner violence. The situation at the time of his writing was actually even more disordered. By 2004, at least 155 scholarly articles had found that women were as physically violent or more physically violent towards their partners than men were.^ By 2010, that count had risen to at least 271. Moreover, these scholarly article ranged far beyond the United States and the United Kingdom.^

The scholarly author in Blackwell Companion to Criminology displayed intense anxiety about what he apparently perceived as overwhelming, hostile symbolic forces besieging him and his most cherished values. He declared:

One thing’s for sure – naming men as the main perpetrators of most forms of violence, especially violence against women and children, is still not culturally permitted in non-feminist forums. Saying, without qualification, that men have responsibility for most forms of serious violence in Western jurisdictions is tantamount to declaring war on the civilized discourses of erasure and denial in which criminology and related disciplines couch the question of men’s pervasive violence against women and children. … The task at hand is to combat the discursive wizardry of the apologists as they try to flee again from the overwhelming evidence of men’s widespread and extraordinarily brutal violence against women in the “civilized” world.^

This analysis highlights men perpetrators of violence, effaces men victims of violence, and highlights men’s violence against women. Men in fact account for the majority of victims of violence. Moreover, the share of men victims is higher for more serious forms of violence.^ While ignoring men victims of violence, the scholarly author in Blackwell Companion to Criminology deploys broad martial imagery and fighting language: “declaring war,” “combat,” and the symbolic enemy fleeing. He seems to be a man engaged in violence against men. That’s the most common sexed pattern of violence.

Insult to Injury: Rethinking Our Responses to Intimate Abuse, a book on intimate partner violence published in 2003, has a more irenic orientation. But it also describes enormous harm:

What is appallingly apparent is that we have refused to address the role of women in the dynamic of intimate violence. The reasons for this are numerous. Perhaps the most important is that some feminists fear that talking about and addressing these issues reinforces the stereotypical assumption that women are somehow to blame for the abuse inflicted upon them. In my view, the research on women’s violence and the numerous studies that have clearly indicated that women are no less physically violent or emotionally abusive toward men than are men toward women creates an opportunity. It allows us to address women’s responsibility in the dynamic of abuse without blaming them for the violence inflicted back.^

Responding domestic-violence scholars aggressively placed this book in the context of battering and abuse. A law review article, entitled “Surviving the Battered Readers Syndrome…,” declared that the book’s author is “singularly ungenerous to her opponents.”^ While the book’s author identifies herself as a feminist, another law review article declared that the book’s arguments are very similar to those of “men’s rights groups and the pseudofeminists.” The review’s author fretted that the book’s author “who has a bona fide record of work with battered women, represents a potential opening to the battered women’s movement for these groups.”^ Another domestic-violence scholar asserted that Insult to Injury “reflects an inadequate understanding of feminist theories, research and policy proposals.” He warned, “her book will definitely be used and promoted by neo-conservatives, as well as members of the mainstream media.”^

The vicious scholarly battle about domestic violence mirrors failures in public communication. Since the early 1990s, false claims that domestic violence in the leading cause of injury to women in the United States have been prevalent in public discourse. In her book Framing the Victim: Domestic Violence, Media, and Social Problems, a professor-author observed:

One of my students who was taking my domestic violence class said that at the beginning of the semester he wondered how we could ever spend the whole class talking about just domestic violence. How complicated could it be? He said that he found out that there was so much more to the problem than he ever realized. I hope that this book helps others to realize how complicated social problems are and that media stories do not give us the whole picture.^

This book largely frames domestic violence through anti-men gender stereotypes and political abstractions. It illustrates the problem it describes. Taking a semester-long college course dedicated to domestic violence is not necessary to learn that domestic violence is a complicated social problem. Taking a semester-long college course isn’t necessary to learn that domestic violence policy has systematically failed to serve fully truth and caring for human hurt.

Good facts and good arguments for not viewing domestic violence through gender stereotypes have been readily available for decades. They have had little public effect. Instead, grotesquely false domestic-violence factoids supporting criminal suspicion of men have been prominent in public discussion of domestic violence. More domestic violence research and more education about domestic violence aren’t likely to solve the underlying social-communicative problem.

While vicious scholarly controversy has raged about domestic violence since the late 1970s, anyone can easily recognize that many men suffer serious injuries from domestic violence. A wide range of acts are labeled domestic violence under domestic violence law. Serious domestic violence injury here means domestic violence that physically injures a person to the extent that the victim goes to a hospital emergency department for care. According to a U.S. nationally representative, high-quality government survey, men made an estimated 230,000 U.S. emergency hospital visits for domestic violence injuries in 2008. That’s about 40% of total men’s and women’s emergency hospital visits for domestic violence injuries.

“I was writhing, crying in the corner … I couldn’t get up for two hours … she kicked me in the groin at least 12 times.”^

Regardless of their genders, persons in close relationships are vulnerable to each other. A person who destroys his life can cause intense pain to those who love him. Persons who share common assets and have common liability can destroy each other financially. Persons who are physically intimate can transmit to each other deadly diseases. A person can make a home a dangerous, hostile place for a cohabitant. Humans’ tool-using capabilities and intimates’ exposure to each other makes stereotypical sex differences in physical strength have little relevance to violent victimization among persons living together. The problem isn’t just self-hatred, accidents, imprudence, or negligence. Persons in close relationships sometimes intentionally hurt each other.

“She spit at me, pushed me, and when she couldn’t get a reaction, she hit me in the head with a cutting board. I don’t want to be hurt any more.”^

Claims that men are a minority of domestic violence victims are often used to justify domestic violence gender stereotyping. Domestic violence authorities commonly show no concern for injuries to men. They ignore scholarly controversy about domestic violence, ignore credible, publicly available data on hospital emergency department visits, and assert that many times fewer men than women are victims of domestic violence. That’s wrong. Moreover, ignoring or trivializing domestic violence against men because men are a minority among those injured is heartless and sexist.^

They {domestic violence agency} asked how much I weighed and how much she weighed and hung up on me … I was told by this agency I was full of BS.

{a domestic violence agency} told me that women don’t commit domestic violence — it must have been my fault.^

Expanding domestic violence services beyond the model of a man battering a woman faces serious obstacles among domestic violence shelters. Consider, for example, the primary provider of services to victims of domestic violence in Sacramento County, California. Like many domestic violence shelters, it opened in the 1970s to serve women. It’s called WEAVE. At its founding, WEAVE stood for Women Escaping a Violent Environment. WEAVE has admirably attempted to expand its service model to encompass mutual couple violence, domestic violence against men, and domestic violence in homosexual relationships. Doing so has required a deep rethinking of WEAVE’s values and services. The Director of Programs at WEAVE explained:

Victim services are presently intertwined with the issue of gender, but, as the complexity unravels, it is apparent that either party in a couple, either heterosexual or gay, can experience a power differential that ignites violence. The abuse is not necessarily related to gender but can be. In order to welcome and serve lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer (LGBTQ) victims, a philosophy other than one that is gender-based needs to evolve. The question is how to acknowledge the aspects that are related to gender and serve all victims regardless of gender in the most effective way. In the last five years we have worked to create a program that acknowledges the gender issues that arise without creating an unfair bias toward one or the other.

How to evolve from being a grass-roots, feminist-based organization to a professional, clinically sound model while honoring the best of both worlds is a challenge with which we have struggled. The internal conflict has created an opportunity to develop a new paradigm. There are strengths and drawbacks to each modality. The underlying question that must be asked is: Does serving male victims exclude feminist theory?^

Domestic violence service providers are acutely concerned to reconcile feminist theory and feminist global understanding of gender with the reality of specific, beaten men seeking their help. That’s a telling constraint.

“J tried to access the limited resources available in his area in an attempt to initiate couples counseling. Reaching out for help left J feeling further abused; he was treated with suspicion, disbelief and thinly veiled accusations that he was a ‘batterer.’ {DAHM (Domestic Abuse Hotline for Men) confirmed. The first response of the agency supervisor was, ‘Why would a man call a helpline if he were not the abuser.’}”

“She stabbed me with a knife, and I didn’t even defend myself, and after I got out of the hospital two weeks later, the court tells me to go to a group they say is for victims. It turns out to be for batterers and I am expected to admit to being an abuser and talk about what I did to deserve getting stabbed.”^

“I called eleven different numbers for battered women and got no help.”^

Prospects for men receiving equal protection from domestic violence are poor. Among persons in the U.S. ages 15 to 44 in 2010, men suffered 31% more injury-related visits to hospital emergency departments than women did. Men suffered 59% more injury-related visits from violence than did women. Nonetheless, men have been largely missing from the U.S. national injury research agenda. Injuries to men matter little in public discourse.^

Lack of concern for injuries to men is deeply entrenched in domestic violence victim services. U.S. federal funding for domestic violence services since 1994 have been provided under a law entitled the Violence Against Women Act. In Woods v. Shewry (2008), a California Court of Appeal ruled:

We find the gender-based classifications in the challenged statutes that provide programs for victims of domestic violence violate equal protection. We find male victims of domestic violence are similarly situated to female victims for purposes of the statutory programs and no compelling state interest justifies the gender classification. We reform the affected statutes by invalidating the exemption of males and extending the statutory benefits to men, whom the Legislature improperly excluded.^

Such rulings, like Sipuel v. Board of Regents of University of Oklahoma (1948), uphold important ideals of equal protection. Unfortunately, actual social change is much more difficult. The Woods v. Shewry opinion stated:

the only evidence that some state-funded programs discriminate against men is the declaration of Dr. Susann Steinberg that 85 percent of agencies funded by DHS {California Department of Health Services} provide services to men, from which we presume the other 15 percent do not.^

The sex-disparity in domestic violence services is much greater than that superficial analysis indicates. One might laugh with Professor Black to avoid weeping.^ Domestic violence victim services historically developed with an exclusive focus on women victims. For two decades, highly exaggerated claims about domestic violence against women have been prevalent across public discourses. At the same time, the few persons who have dared to state that domestic violence against men is a serious social problem have encountered intense personal hostility. Deeply rooted, pervasive discrimination against men in agencies and programs addressing domestic violence is as obvious as the social pressure to avoid acknowledging the problem.

Men are greatly under-served as victims of domestic violence. Credible but highly contested scholarly studies indicate that domestic violence victimization is roughly equal between women and men. National representative, general-purpose U.S. surveys of hospital emergency department visits indicate that men account for about 40% of U.S. adult victims of acute domestic violence. Men suffer hundreds of thousands of incidents per year of domestic violence injures that send them to hospital emergency departments. Apart from medical care for those specific injuries, domestic violence services for victimized men are separate and far inferior to those for women.

Domestic violence shelters historically arose to serve women. Women began opening domestic violence shelters for women in the early 1970s. By 1990, about 1000 such shelters for women existed. By 2004, about 2000 domestic violence shelters were operating in the U.S. Almost no one opened a domestic violence shelter for men. The executive director of a domestic violence shelter in California from 1990 to 1998 declared that men traveled long distances to her shelter because other shelters refused to provide services to men. According to this knowledgeable person, her shelter was the only shelter in the country available to battered men.^ In 2000, the first and only U.S. helpline for men suffering from domestic abuse opened.^ It has now closed. Domestic violence services for victimized men have similarly lagged in the U.K.^ In Canada, Earl Silverman struggled for years to open a domestic violence shelter for men. Driven to despair by the dominant women-centered domestic violence interests, Earl Silverman committed suicide in 2013.

Domestic violence shelters are women-dominated. Among U.S. domestic-violence programs providing shelter services to women about the year 2008, 73% reported being willing to provide shelter services for men.^ However, the median numbers of domestic violence victims served were 16 men and 800 women across the agencies surveyed.^ The first national census of domestic violence services, conducted by an organization advocating for domestic violence services, indicated that men accounted for only about one-half of one percent of domestic violence victims receiving emergency shelter or transitional housing in 2006.^ Analysis that advocated more funding for domestic violence services wrongly claimed that a 4% share of men victims is consistent with hospital emergency department data.^ Subsequent domestic-violence service censuses stopped reporting victims served by sex. Among the 117,436 victims of domestic violence served through federal domestic violence grant programs about 2009, only 8% of the victims served were men.^ These shares of men served are far less than men’s 40% share of acute domestic violence injuries as estimated from hospital emergency department visits.

Domestic violence services are often unhelpful towards men who are victims of domestic violence. In large, nationally representative crime victimization surveys from 2001 to 2005, men domestic-violence victims reporting receiving help from non-police agencies were less than half the share of that among women domestic-violence victims. Smaller, but more specific surveys from about 2008 show that 64% of male victims calling domestic violence helplines were told that the helpline helps only women. Among men victims who sought help from a local domestic violence program, 95% reported that the program “gave impression that they were biased against men.”^

Many domestic violence shelters treat men and women differently. Domestic violence shelters provide shelter for almost exclusively women and their families, excluding men in the women’s families and the women’s teenaged boys. Men and teen-aged boys sometimes receive motel vouchers. A scholarly study of domestic violence shelters justified domestic-violence gender stereotyping and housing segregation:

Although a small percentage of shelter respondents were men, female pronouns are used for linguistic ease and because domestic violence residential services for men are most commonly provided through motel vouchers or safe homes, and not through formal “shelters”, which were the focus of this study.^

The study also explained why domestic violence shelters exclude teenaged boys:

Because adolescent boys may be physically strong, some look much like adult men, and shelters have experienced incidents where teen boys have become violent toward other residents or made them fearful, many shelters have adopted policies of not accepting teen boys into shelter. Staff usually make efforts to help the survivor find other housing for the boys affected.^

As victims of domestic violence, men receive unequal service from domestic violence shelters. As non-victims of domestic violence, teen-aged boys are excluded from domestic violence shelters because they look like men or because they are stereotyped as violent persons.

Arguments against accommodating men and teenaged boys in domestic violence shelters would also justify not hiring men and not accepting men volunteers in such shelters. Whether rigidly sex-segregated domestic violence shelters are necessary is far from clear. Nonetheless, domestic violence shelters appear to be largely de facto sex-segregated. Highly unequal domestic violence victim services for men and women is an obvious and widely ignored outcome.

Separate and unequal domestic violence victim services have roots in decades of gender stereotyping domestic violence. Public discourse has supported highly exaggerated claims about domestic violence against women. Violence against men, in contrast, has relatively little public salience. Separate and unequal domestic violence victim services reflect the unequal justice that also generates highly disproportionate imprisonment of men.

Gender-stereotyping of domestic violence is prevalent throughout literature on domestic violence. A 1994 social-scientific book on domestic violence noted:

There seems to be a ritual that almost all authors of books on family violence respect. Each volume leads off with an emotional “grabber” anecdote or two that uniformly portray a rather brutal, insensitive man abusing a sympathetic, victimized woman ^

That’s also a prevalent rhetorical practice in law review articles about domestic violence.^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ For example, a law review article published in 2011 begins:

Sarah, a young bride, believes her groom, John, is perfect. Soon after they take their vows, John’s criticism of Sarah transforms into verbal abuse. His command keeps her trapped in their home. His temper places her in fear. And eventually, his fist leaves a mark on her face.

After marriage comes a baby, and then John threatens to kill Sarah. The baby cries:

the baby crying causes him {John} to relax the hands that were tightening around Sarah’s neck.

The story ends with Sarah fleeing from the marital home in Kansas to her mother’s home in Oklahoma. The author of this sensational, stereotype-laden story declares:

Hopefully, the above hypothetical is as difficult for the reader as it was for the author to imagine. Unfortunately, reality closely mirrors this situation all too often.^

This scholarly article then moves on to legal-technical analysis of whether an Oklahoma court would have jurisdiction to issue a restraining order against John at the petition of Sarah, now residing in the hypothetical story with her mother in Oklahoma. That’s a very narrow issue in the fundamentally important field of family law. Scholarly imagination continually producing gender stereotypes of domestic violence and mythic domestic-violence legal history encourages reasoning divorced from important truths. Pervasive gender-stereotyping of domestic violence also contributes to lack of public concern about domestic violence against men and expansive criminalization of men.

Gender-stereotyping women as victims of domestic violence and men as perpetrators of domestic violence has persisted for decades in formally open, competitive, rationalistic legal deliberation. Virtually all law review articles addressing domestic violence depict women as victims and men as perpetrators. Domestic-violence gender stereotyping implicitly gains support from the stereotype of women as physically weaker than men and the stereotype of men as criminals. By the standard of good public reason, law review articles justify domestic-violence gender stereotyping with astonishingly weak justifications.

Law review articles commonly justify domestic-violence gender stereotyping with factual claims. Law review articles addressing domestic violence thus explain:

This Note will refer to batterers as men and victims as women because the overwhelming majority of cases involve men abusing women. Approximately 95% of domestic violence victims are women.

Although men are also victims of domestic violence, this Comment will refer to women as victims and men as batterers because women are victims in 95% of the assaults that result in injury.^

Factual justifications for domestic-violence gender stereotyping typically don’t recognize that the claimed facts (about 95% of victims are women, or similar claims) are highly contentious among domestic-violence experts. Moreover, highly credible, nationally representative data indicate that men account for 40% of visits to hospital emergency departments for domestic-violence injuries. In addition to these problems of authority and truth, factually justifying gender stereotyping isn’t formally good reason. Stereotypes that damage a minority aren’t convincingly justified by arguing that a minority is a minority. But with respect to domestic violence, that argument has dominated in scholarly writing on domestic violence for decades.

That domestic-violence gender stereotypes are well-established in scholarly literature is also put forward as justifying continuing to gender-stereotype domestic violence. Law review articles addressing domestic violence thus explain:

This article will use the pronoun “she” when discussing victims of domestic violence. This conforms with the literature upon this topic.

the bulk of the literature on the subject refers to defendants in domestic violence cases as men.

for ease of reading and to conform to statistical data, the batterer/abuser will be referred to in the masculine form, and the victim will be referred to in the feminine form.^

Stereotyping is particularly damaging when it re-enforces historical injustices. Law reviews have for decades disseminated highly exaggerated, sensational, false claims about domestic violence against women. Law reviews have largely ignored men’s suffering from domestic violence. Law reviews have shown little concern about the highly disproportionate imprisonment of men. Conventional justifications for continuing domestic-violence gender stereotyping lack appreciation for the real, historical context of that stereotyping.

Domestic violence stereotyping also occurs through explicitly or implicitly defining domestic violence to be violence by men against women. For example, a law review article declared:

Throughout the Article, I make reference to domestic violence or domestic abuse. I use the terms interchangeably to mean acts of violence committed by men against their girlfriends, wives or intimate partners. This definition accurately reflects the fact that ninety to ninety-five percent of domestic violence victims are women.^

Men suffer about 40% of the serious injuries from domestic violence. So the cited statistic is far from accurate. Moreover, defining a generic term to explicitly exclude a minority is bigoted intellectual practice. Another law review article declared:

Throughout this Article, we use the term “domestic violence,” not in its generic (and gender-neutral) sense, but to refer to the physical, sexual, and/or psychological abuse of a woman by her male intimate partner. Similarly, we use the term “batterer” to refer to a man who engages in any form of domestic violence, including abuse that is purely psychological.^

The criminal justice response to domestic violence has conflated “battering” (repeated, severe violence) with low-level physical aggression and perceived psychological harm. That unreasonable conflation of acts in domestic violence policy has contributed to the extraordinary growth of incarceration in the U.S. Moreover, because police cannot ignore the reality of women perpetrating domestic violence as easily as law professors do, about 25% of persons arrested for domestic violence are women. Nonetheless, much research on domestic violence selects samples that explicitly exclude men as victims or men as petitioners for restraining orders.^ That’s anti-male gender bigotry deeply embedded in scholarly study.

Exaggerating domestic violence against women works to re-enforce gender stereotyping of domestic violence. A book-length personal account of horrific domestic violence, published in 1993, featured an introduction by the Co-Chair of the Battered Women’s Task Force of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Approximately half of the introduction consisted of formally factual, formally social-scientific statements. Those statements included the following:

The March of Dimes reports that more babies are now born with birth defects as a result of the mother being battered during pregnancy than from the combination of all the diseases and illnesses for which we immunize pregnant women.

Battering is the single major cause of injury to women — more frequent than auto accidents, muggings, and rapes combined.^

Under a reasonable standard, these statements are grotesquely false. They are good evidence of the power and control of gender stereotyping domestic violence in public discourse. Without good reason, public discourse across a variety of fields and for decades has stereotyped women as domestic-violence victims, and men as (implicitly or explicitly) domestic-violence perpetrators.

Domestic violence stereotyping has deeply affected law. A legal monograph examining the extraordinary development of civil-criminal domestic violence law could itself not escape normative gender stereotyping:

In this book, I generally refer to “spouses” and to male abuses and female victims because the legal practices I describe here operate on that general presumption, supported by statistics.

Appending the the defensive clause, “supported by statistics,” to the justice system’s stereotyping men as criminals is extraordinary legal argument. But that is normal for analysis of domestic violence law. The scholar further appends an end note:

Victims of DV {domestic violence} are of course not always wives, women, or in heterosexual relationships, and abusers are not always male.^

That end note concludes by referring to two law-review articles on domestic violence protection for non-marital couples. Throughout the legal monograph on domestic violence, the legal scholar does not acknowledge decades of bitter controversy among domestic violence scholars. The legal scholar does not consider highly unequal service for men who are victims of domestic violence. In the highest courts and throughout the legal academy, the rational basis for gender-stereotyping domestic violence is frighteningly weak.

Decades of domestic-violence gender stereotyping in law reviews point to deeper communicative issues. In moving away from highly exaggerated, sensational claims about domestic violence against women, law reviews have performed worse than highly politicized non-scholarly discussion and no better than commercial, market-driven reporting. The communicative record of law reviews shows limits of formal communicative structure. A formally open, competitive, rationalistic communicative field will not necessarily perform well. Despite its rational weakness, domestic violence gender stereotyping has been frighteningly successful.

Gender stereotyping has overwhelmingly prevailed in public discourse about domestic violence. For more than three decades, domestic violence has been a matter of vicious scholarly battles. These scholarly battles are likely to continue as long as at least a few scholars quixotically seek the truth about domestic violence. Nonetheless, in public discourse more generally and in domestic violence policy, gender stereotyping again and again has powerfully overcome competing ideas and controlled nearly all the deliberative territory.

In the 1970s, Erin Pizzey’s work in England was enormously influential in spurring the growth of shelters for abused women. Pizzey opened Chiswick Women’s Aid, a pioneering shelter for abused women, in 1971. Her book, Scream Quietly or the Neighbors Will Hear, was published in England in 1974. It described domestic violence and the response of Chiswick Women’s Aid. In 1977, Pizzey’s book was republished in the U.S. In the afterword to the American edition, an American academic wrote:

Rarely in recent times has a single book had such a tremendous impacts as Erin Pizzey’s Scream Quietly or the Neighbors Will Hear. Originally published in England in 1974, its effects rippled over the European continent and across the ocean to North America.^

The American academic’s afterword and subsequent workendorsed gender stereotyping of domestic violence.^ Pizzey’s book did not. Pizzey subsequently became a harsh critic of the anti-men gender bias in the domestic-violence shelter movement. Pizzey is a hero to a small number of publicly marginal persons. Her work, ideas, and experiences are now largely ignored.^

Scholars have argued strongly against gender stereotyping domestic violence since the very beginning of widespread scholarly interest in domestic violence. Suzanne Steinmetz’s scholarly article, “The Battered Husband Syndrome,” published in 1978, was a pioneering work. That work, and subsequent follow-up work, generated for Steinmetz a hostile work environment. Steinmetz’s work has been influential among academics with long-term, empirical research programs on domestic violence. Among the vast majority of persons writing about domestic violence and setting domestic violence policy, Steinmetz’s work has had little influence.

For decades well-informed articles and books, readily accessible to non-specialists, have provided facts and arguments against gender stereotyping domestic violence. Some of these works, in order of publication, are:

• Bates, R. E. 1981. “A plea for the battered husband.” Family Law vol. 11: 92-94.
• McNeely, R. L. and Gloria Robinson-Simpson. 1987. “The truth about domestic violence: a falsely framed issue.” Social Work vol. 32: 485-490; follow-up, McNeely, R. L. and Gloria Robinson-Simpson. 1988. “The truth about domestic violence revisited: a reply to Saunders.” Social Work vol. 33(2): 184-188.
• Shupe, Anson, William A. Stacey, Lonnie R. Hazlewood. 1987. Violent men, violent couples: the dynamics of domestic violence. Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books; follow-up, Stacey, William A., Lonnie R. Hazlewood and Anson Shupe. 1994. The violent couple. Westport, Conn., Praeger.
• Thomas, David. 1993. Not guilty: the case in defense of men. New York, W. Morrow, ch. 7.
• Sommers, Christina Hoff. 1994. Who stole feminism? : how women have betrayed women. New York, Simon & Schuster, preface, ch. 9.
• Cook, Philip W. 1997. Abused men: the hidden side of domestic violence. Westport, Conn., Praeger, second edition, 2009.
• Pearson, Patricia. 1997. When she was bad: violent women & the myth of innocence. New York, N.Y: Viking. Slightly revised edition, 1998, When she was bad: how and why women get away with murder. New York: Penguin Books.
• Young, Cathy. 1999. Ceasefire! : why women and men must join forces to achieve true equality. New York, Free Press, ch. 4-5.
• James, Thomas. 2003. Domestic Violence: The Twelve Things You Aren’t Supposed to Know. Chula Vista, California: Aventine Press.
• Kelley, Linda. 2003. “Disabusing the Definition of Domestic Abuse: How Women Batter Men and the Role of the Feminist State.” Florida State University Law Review. v. 30, pp. 791-855.
• Mills, Linda G. 2003. Insult to Injury: Rethinking Our Responses to Intimate Abuse. Princeton, Princeton University Press, ch. 4.

The above works are largely reasonable, irenic, conciliatory, and progressive. Among the vast majority of persons writing about domestic violence and setting domestic violence policy, these works have had little influence.

Hostile and belittling responses to these works have probably prevented many prudent persons from seriously considering them. For example, a well-regarded English columnist responded to David Thomas’ 1994 earnest and detailed description of battered men. The columnist entitled his column “On the myth of the battered husband.” It began with an eminent English author’s ironic description of the myth of Jonah and the whale. The columnist then urbanely transitioned to describing a novel by a highly successful English journalist turned novelist:

Guy Bellamy’s novel The Nudists, published in 1986, was about a penurious young writer who hit the jackpot by writing Battered Husbands, a furious exposé of woman’s inhumanity to man.

To help less sophisticated readers to understand, the leading columnist explained:

Bellamy’s intentions were comic; both Battered Husbands and its author were presented as being entirely risible.

Using a tool of an armchair investigative journalist, the columnist declared:

Why is David Thomas so desperate to persuade us of the prevalence of husband-bashing? Is he merely a disinterested, public-spirited chap who wants to help the police in their duties? I think not.

That was the pull quote for his column. According to this columnist, the real issue was not battered men, but that David Thomas was a “masculinist” telling men that they should stop being “cowed by feminism.” With the classism associated with Eton and Harrow and more than a whiff of homophobia, the columnist declared:

David Thomas has never, thank God, tried to sniff my bottom; and he wears Fendi ties and Versace suits rather than gorilla outfits. But he is just as dedicated a masculinist as those American nincompoops. … To quote Julian Barnes again: ‘We are sophisticated people, and we can tell the difference between reality and myth.’ Oh no we bloody well can’t.^

That final “we” in context quite clearly represents “they,” those risible intellectual and cultural inferiors. The columnist, in contrast, represents the high status, highly successful man in public life.

Public discussion of domestic violence with publicly recognized experts in domestic violence law remains a grotesque spectacle of bad reason. Consider, for example, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s article in 2009 entitled, “Myths or Facts in Feminist Scholarship? An exchange between Nancy K.D. Lemon and Christina Hoff Sommers.” Nancy K.D. Lemon has for decades been a leader in teaching domestic violence law. She is the author of the popular textbook entitled Domestic Violence Law and a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. Christina Hoff Sommers is a former philosophy professor, the author of Who Stole Feminism? and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Their written exchange produced no reasoned progress toward understanding.

Lemon and Sommers’ written exchange did not even respect the intellectual value of writing. One item of dispute was Sommers’ prior written claim in an earlier article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Zorza also informs readers that “between 20 and 35 percent of women seeking medical care in emergency rooms in America are there because of domestic violence.” Studies by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an agency of the U.S. Department of Justice, indicate that the figure is closer to 1 percent.^

In their written exchange, Lemon responded:

Sommers also challenged a statement by Zorza in my textbook regarding the high incidence of battered women in emergency rooms. Sommers says she received a message from a statistician at the Centers for Disease Control who stated that the incidence of females in emergency departments because of domestic violence was 0.01 percent in 2005 and 0.02 percent in 2003.

Apparently that statistician has not read the Centers for Disease Control Web site, which stated, when I checked it on July 15, 2009: “IPV,” or intimate-partner violence, “is a major cause of violence-related injuries. Intimate partners were identified as the perpetrators in 36 percent of all emergency department visits by women who suffered from one or more violent injuries.”^

The difference between “1 percent” and “0.01 percent” is a factor of one hundred. Moreover, emergency-department visits from domestic violence as a share of emergency department visits from all causes is a much different statistic from emergency-department visits from intimate-partner violence as a share of emergency department visits from violent injuries. Highly significant differences, fixed in writing, make no difference in expert public discussion of domestic violence.

Another example from the exchange indicates that the fundamental problem is not statistical mis-reason but the failure of writing to support good reason when the subject is domestic violence. Sommers declared in the prior article in the Chronicle:

A few pages later {in Lemon’s textbook, Domestic Violence Law}, in a selection by Joan Zorza, a domestic-violence expert, students read, “The March of Dimes found that women battered during pregnancy have more than twice the rate of miscarriages and give birth to more babies with more defects than women who may suffer from any immunizable illness or disease.” Not true. When I recently read Zorza’s assertion to Richard P. Leavitt, director of science information at the March of Dimes, he replied, “That is a total error on the part of the author. There was no such study.” The myth started in the early 1990s, he explained, and resurfaces every few years.^

Lemon responded:

Apparently the March of Dimes employee was unaware of the research this agency financed. The study Zorza sent me, “Battering During Pregnancy: Intervention Strategies,” by Anne Stewart Helton and Frances Gobble Snodgrass, appears in the September 1987 issue of the journal Birth. The article states at the bottom of the first page: “This work was supported by a March of Dimes grant for the prevention of battering during pregnancy.” The study states that battered women had twice the number of miscarriages than did nonbattered women.

Zorza also sent me a scanned copy of “Domestic Violence, a Women’s Health Issue,” a 1994 report of the N.Y. State Senate Democratic Task Force on Women’s Issues, chaired by Senator Suzi Oppenheimer. That report included a reference to the March of Dimes Protocol of Care for Battered Women, which noted that battered women are twice as likely to miscarry, four times as likely to have low-birth-weight babies, and 40 times as likely to have infants who die within the first year, compared with nonbattered women.^

“The March of Dimes found … ” evoked a response about a study that the March of Dimes financed. Comparing battered women to “women who may suffer from any immunizable illness or disease” shifted to comparing battered women to “nonbattered women.” To determine if that shift matters, one needs to understand the meaning of “women who may suffer from any immunizable illness or disease.” Read literally, that comparator means all women. The share of “nonbattered women” among all women, whether conditioned on pregnancy or not, is a matter of scholarly dispute. On and on such discussion goes. It has been largely fruitless. What specifically is written doesn’t seem to matter to the power and control of gender stereotyping in domestic violence discussion and policy.

More research, writing, and speech isn’t likely to affect the power and control of gender stereotyping in domestic violence discussion and policy. In a book on domestic violence published in 1994, three academic sociologists described the evolution of public understanding of domestic violence. With an approach deeply rooted in the history of sociology, they described stages of social understanding:

1. the victim-oriented stage: women
2. the victim-oriented stage: women and children
3. the male-perpetrator-oriented phase
4. the systems phase ^

Their 1994 work identified itself with the final, enlightened “systems phase.” They explained:

The findings of Straus and Gelles turned the whole thrust of the victim-oriented and perpetrator-oriented phases full circle. Family violence could involve both female and male victimization. The lines between perpetrator and victim in spousal abuse were no longer so clearly drawn between genders. Earlier, women had demanded that it was men who must take responsibility for male violence. A decade later, Straus and Gelles said, “Women must insist as much on non-violence by their sisters as they rightfully insist on it by men.”^

Professor Murray Straus has been doing careful, objective empirical research on domestic violence for more than three decades. More than 15 years after the sociologists described the final stage of understanding domestic violence, Straus is writing papers such as “Thirty Years of Denying the Evidence on Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence: Implications for Prevention and Treatment” (2010).^ Another leading researcher on domestic violence has recently written:

Abuse {domestic violence} is a human phenomenon, and gender is but one input in a nested ecology of causes. It {gender} says something about reactions to domestic violence but very little about causation. When it is put back in its proper perspective, it will seem as misdirected as John Stuart Mills’s 1869 claim that domestic violence was perpetrated only by “working class males,” a demographic relic reflecting the Zeitgeist of that time.^

The next step in generating an effective societal response to IPV {intimate partner violence} will focus on prevention and early detection of violence prone families. The exclusive focus on “violence against women” will be viewed as an anachronism, and the demonization and otherization of men as an aberration.^

That next step still seems as far away as the utopia of communism. In the U.S. since the early 1990s, grossly exaggerated claims that domestic violence in the leading cause of injury to women have repeatedly been disseminated in newspapers, in Congress, in the Supreme Court, and throughout the judicial system. Gender stereotyping domestic violence has been decisively victorious in the marketplace of ideas. The most important next step is to understand what that means more broadly for the criminal justice system and for the communicative structure of democratic self-governance.