Thursday, October 20, 2005

Breaking the Silence

I am watching Breaking the Silence: Children's Stories on PBS TV. An "abuse intervention specialist" named Lundy Bancroft just said:
There is a societal misconception that mothers are very heavily favored in custody and visitation litigation over fathers and that will somehow will take care of the needs of mothers who need to protect their children from a battering or sexually abusive father. In fact the maternal preference went out more than 20 years ... fathers now have preference for custody.
This is really wacky. The family courts still have a heavy preference for mothers. Most child abuse is from mothers, not fathers. Child sexual abuse is nearly always the result of mothers winning custody, and fathers being unable to protect their kids.

Another opinion by Carey Roberts:
Breaking the Silence leads off with this whopper: “One-third of mothers lose custody to abusive husbands.” That outrageous statement contains two falsehoods.

First, divorced fathers win custody of their children only 15% of the time, so the one-third figure is obviously suspect.

Second, women are known to be just as abusive as men. As a recent report from the Independent Women’s Forum notes, “approximately half of all couple violence is mutual…when only one partner is abusive, it is as likely to be the woman as the man.”

Continuing its mean-spirited dissing of dads, Breaking the Silence goes on to claim that children are “most often in danger from the father.” Apparently the producers never bothered to read the recent report from the US Department of Health and Human Services which reveals that the majority of perpetrators of child abuse and neglect are female.

But the real objective of the PBS fusillade is to whitewash the problem of Parental Alienation Syndrome. Divorcing parents – usually mothers – sometimes try to turn the children against the other parent. If the mother can claim that the kids are refusing to talk to dad, she is almost certain to win child custody.
Here is another review by Mark B. Rosenthal.

This might well be the most hate-filled show that I have ever seen. It was a documentary without a single valid fact.

1 comment:

CalgAdvocate said...

There is no credible research that demonstrates that domestic violence is other than an
equal opportunity experience.
http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
SUMMARY: This bibliography examines 174 scholarly investigations: 138
empirical studies and 36 reviews and/or analyses, which demonstrate that
women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their
relationships with their spouses or male partners. The aggregate sample
size in the reviewed studies exceeds 163,800.


Below are the actual statements from the US Department of Justice
1) In 1996 women experienced an estimated 840,000 rape, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault victimizations at the hands of an
intimate, down from 1.1 million in 1993.

2) In 1996 men were victims of about 150,000 violent crimes committed by an intimate.

A couple of things to note;
-In the women experienced list included; rape, sexual assault, robbery,aggravated assault, as well as simple assault victimizations at the hands of an intimate.
-Whereas in the men victim list only had violent crimes committed by an intimate.

You also stated; ""while women are less likely than men to be victims of violent crimes overall, women are five to eight times more likely than men to be victimized by an intimate partner."
violent crimes were included in the numbers for women but not for men; is there a bias?
*Notice how the numbers are loaded by including, for the women, what is not
included for the men. How many women only were victims of simple assault
victimizations at the hands of an intimate?
Do you agree that the numbers are loaded?

-While the ratio of men to women (150,000 verses 840,000) is approximately 1
to 6 (albeit the numbers are loaded to reflect more incidences against
women), while not undervaluing the issues of family violence, how
significant are the numbers?
-The population of US in 1996 was approximately 270 million people; women
victims in comparison to the population is 0.3%, while for men it is .0.05%.
Yes the ratio is almost 6 times higher but how significant are the numbers?
In comparison, I believe that 6% of the population of US believe that they
have been abducted by aliens. To hold statistical significant the percentage
difference must be or exceed 9%.
-The reality is that instead of providing the % of victims they only
provided the ration between the victims to ensure that the numbers sound
huge. How threatening to women does this sound; In 1996 women experienced
an estimated 0.3% rape, sexual assault, robbery,
aggravated assault, and simple assault victimizations at the hands of an
intimate?