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Poll: Some Alberta men believe violence against women is okay

Almost one in 10 Alberta men believes hitting a woman is okay if she makes them angry, says a recent poll.

The Leger Marketing survey also found 40 per cent of the men say women who dress provocatively risk being raped

“This is first study of its kind that has been done in Alberta and I believe in the rest of the country,” Ian Large, vice-president for the Alberta branch of Leger Marketing, said told the Star Wednesday.

“Alberta has a particularly bad reputation in this area,” he said, adding that the 1,000 men surveyed were remarkably honest.

According to a report released by Statistics Canada in 2011, Alberta and Saskatchewan have the highest rates of spousal abuse in the country.

Those taken aback by the “ground-breaking” results include Alberta Premier Alison Redford, who says she was sickened by some of the findings.

Redford said the statistic showing that 21 per cent of men surveyed said slapping a child’s face is acceptable behaviour “made me sick to my stomach.”

“I think that is very troubling, and as a mother of a 9-year-old, I want us to do better as a community,” she said. “We have to start saying to people that this behaviour is inappropriate . . . It’s not acceptable in Alberta in 2012.”

Redford said the “silent majority” has a role in ensuring this kind of behaviour is not tolerated and that families feel safe in their own homes.

The Leger survey results were released Monday in Calgary at the Alberta Council of Women’s Shelters (ACWS) annual “Breakfast With the Guys” fundraiser, designed to encourage men and boys to take a stand against domestic violence.

The survey was completed between Feb. 6 and Feb. 27, with 1,000 men, 18 or older, living in Alberta. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Among the alarming results:

 • 13 per cent of the survey respondents said domestic violence is not as serious if it results from people getting so angry they temporarily lose control.

 • 8 per cent did not agree that it’s never acceptable to physically assault a woman if she did something to incite the anger.

 • 14 per cent agreed that women often say “no” when they mean “yes.”

Jan Reimer, provincial coordinator for the Alberta Council of Women’s Shelters, told reporters she has “mixed emotions” about the survey results.

Reimer said some of the responses are cause for optimism, citing the fact that 56 per cent of men say they are more aware of domestic violence issues than they were five years ago, and 91 per cent say they would intervene if they knew someone in a violent relationship.

However, Reimer found it troubling that despite the changing views, 9 per cent still said they’d physically assault a woman if she had sex with another man.

Reimer said the information gleaned from the survey will be useful to those who work in the field of domestic violence response and prevention, helping them to target their message and design programs.

“This is where we’re at,” she said. “We’ve got a realistic appraisal here, so now let’s take what we know and see how we can make a difference to make things better.”

Just Asking: Why Doesn’t Henry Call the Women’s Hotline?

I want to talk about two kinds of domestic violence advocates.

Traditional battered women’s advocates, who have spent decades fighting to bring recognition, services and just laws to victims of intimate partner violence, are more and more being called out for their one-sided approach to intimate partner violence. Make no mistake: the use of violence to control and dominate an intimate partner is a horrendously cowardly act, and abusers should be held accountable.

But traditional advocates tend to see domestic violence as rooted in “male privilege.” Barbara J. Hart of the Minnesota Center Against Violence and Abuse captured this on her website:

 As long as we as a culture accept the principle and privilege of male dominance, men will continue to be abusive. As long as we as a culture accept and tolerate violence against women, men will continue to be abusive.

There is another kind of advocate for victims of domestic violence, one who gets beyond the gender stereotypes of the traditional advocates and sees not gender or sexual orientation, but a person who has been harmed by a domestic partner. This group recognizes a fact that traditionalist refuse to see: sometimes it is the men who are victims of domestic violence at the hands of their female partners.

With the Violence Against Women Act coming up for reauthorization, it is important to recognize that it is the traditional advocates who continue to play a key  role in deciding what is written into this piece of legislation that sets aside billions of federal dollars to be used to combat violence against women.  These advocate work hard to turn a blind eye to violence against men.  After all, admitting that more than the rare man is abused by a woman would devalue their core belief.

A segment on the Diane Rehm radio talk show featured two traditional advocates, Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, and Amy Myers, professor and director of the Domestic Violence Clinic at Washington College of Law. Dr. Janice Crouse, of Concerned Women for America, who does recognize that women can also be guilty of violence, was also a guest. Topic: ”Objections to Reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act.”

Dr. Crouse addressed some of the problems with VAWA, including an overly broad definition of intimate partner violence and the breakup of marriages that might have been saved because of VAWA’s mandatory arrest mandate.  Most important here, Dr. Crouse noted that many studies show that a significant percentage of domestic violence victims are men who were attacked by female partners.  Feminist  ideology has a stranglehold (no pun intended) on the way victim services are delivered.

When asked if VAWA covers men as well as women, Ms. O’Neil was quick to say that it would. But her “facts” left something to be desired.

Both Ms. Myers and Ms. O’Neill quoted from the same study, National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NIPSVS), but they both failed to mention an important finding of that study:

“One in seven men have experienced severe violence at the hands of an intimate partner, the survey found….”

O’Neil said that “one in five women and one in 71 men” is a victim of domestic violence, while Myers  correctly put the number at one in four women. O’Neill was citing the statistics for sexual assault, not intimate partner violence. Myers completely ignored male victims by reporting statistics for female victims  or domestic violence and neglecting to mention the same for male victims. Traditional advocates use smoke and mirrors to present their viewpoint, thereby maintaining the status quo.

The NIPSVS study was done the Center for Disease Control. It is important to note that thanks to feminist lobbying the CDC has actually changed the definition of assault so that actions against women that, in the past, would not have qualified as assault now fall into that category.

This is—ironically—another example of how traditional advocates have managed to order the term of the debate. It is a neat trick: first redefine the categories and then cite the resulting statistics that suit their purposes.

Over the years, I have repeatedly seen battered women’s advocates quote statistics in a way that minimizes male victimization. They like to say that male victims are rare, hardly any call their hotlines and to omit or rewrite statistics to fit their agenda. Could it be that male victims don’t know to call a women’s hotline? Could it be that when they do call they are considered abusers and hung up on?

When deciding if or how VAWA is to be reauthorized, members of Congress need to know the truth about female on male violence. Only then can they decide what to do about this bill.

Jan Elizabeth Brown is the Founder and Executive Director of the Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men and Women, a national nonprofit based in Maine that specializes in awareness, support, and services  for male victims of intimate partner violence.

VAWA: Do Numbers Lie?

What is at stake in deciding whether to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act is not whether women are victims of intimate partner violence—the tragic truth is that all too many woman are.  The question before us: is VAWA is the correct way to address this problem?

To answer this question, we need to have as much information as possible about the extent and nature of violence against women. Unfortunately, VAWA supporters—perhaps in an effort to ensure that business remains brisk—have conducted a campaign to skew  the numbers.

If you look at the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, you could come away thinking that, as the American Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers put it in a piece for the Washington Post, the United States is every bit as violent as the war-torn Congo.

According to the survey, approximately 1.3 million women were raped in 2010 in the U.S.  An additional additional 12. 6 million women and men suffered  sexual violence that year.  “More than 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men have experienced rape, physical violence and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime,” the survey states.

Before you write your member of Congress and ask that the VAWA budget be doubled, consider that these figures may not be an accurate reflection of reality. Hoff Sommers wrote:

The agency’s figures are wildly at odds with official crime statistics. The FBI found that 84,767 rapes were reported to law enforcement authorities in 2010. The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, the gold standard in crime research, reports 188,380 rapes and sexual assaults on females and males in 2010. Granted, not all assaults are reported to authorities. But where did the CDC find 13.7 million victims of sexual crimes that the professional criminologists had overlooked?

The answer is that the CDC’s figures are the result of redefinitions of rape and violence that came about because of lobbying from women’s organizations. As Hoff Sommers explained:

Consider: In a telephone survey with a 30 percent response rate, interviewers did not ask participants whether they had been raped. Instead of such straightforward questions, the CDC researchers described a series of sexual encounters and then they determined whether the responses indicated sexual violation. A sample of 9,086 women was asked, for example, “When you were drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent, how many people ever had vaginal sex with you?” A majority of the 1.3 million women (61.5 percent) the CDC projected as rape victims in 2010 experienced this sort of “alcohol or drug facilitated penetration.”

What does that mean? If a woman was unconscious or severely incapacitated, everyone would call it rape. But what about sex while inebriated? Few people would say that intoxicated sex alone constitutes rape — indeed, a nontrivial percentage of all customary sexual intercourse, including marital intercourse, probably falls under that definition (and is therefore criminal according to the CDC)….

Participants were asked if they had ever had sex because someone pressured them by “telling you lies, making promises about the future they knew were untrue?” All affirmative answers were counted as “sexual violence.”

Okay, any guy who tells lies or makes promises to get a woman  in bed is a rat. But a rapist?

When we talk about violence against women (and men!), we need to keep in mind that many of the numbers we hear are  ideologically-driven “statistics.” This makes deciding the fate VAWA that much harder.

Read More...
http://womenagainstvawa.org/vawa-do-numbers-lie/

Owe no!
Selected case from the 2010-2011 Annual Report

A father contacted the Ombudsman out of frustration after trying in vain to find out from the Family Responsibility Office how much he owed in child support arrears. The debt was affecting his credit rating, but each time he contacted the FRO to clarify what he owed, he was given a different amount – ranging from $6,000 to $27,000. He feared that the FRO was attempting to get him to pay for a period when his child was living with him and he was not required to pay support.

FRO staff initially told the Ombudsman that the man owed $6,063.53, but once they were asked to review the file more closely, they found that in fact no arrears were owed. The FRO admitted to the Ombudsman that it had overlooked correspondence from the child’s mother confirming that the father did not owe her any further child support.

Watch for the Ombudsman's 2011-2012 Annual Report, which will be released in June.

Ontario has an official policy about how students must behave in school. This tip sheet explains the discipline process and what happens when a student is suspended or expelled.