Family of Men Support Society | |
A Canadian crisis center....with some interesting stuff: Quote: FAMILY VIOLENCE
Why we publish this report
We are sending this report to the media, and those persons and organizations who deal with family violence, in the hope that we can correct a serious misunderstanding about this very important issue.
Much of the women’s shelter movement is seriously misinformed about the causes and scope of family violence. We were also seriously misinformed. We have learned a lot over the years.
This misunderstanding of the family violence issue is so pervasive that city and county governments, the courts, law enforcement, prosecutor’s offices, mental health clinics, and other tax supported agencies are now funding programs based on feminist propaganda rather than responsible scientific studies.
How can this be?
Violence against family members is something women do at least as often as men! There are dozens of solid scientific studies that reveal a startlingly different picture of family violence than what we usually see in the media. For instance:
· Women are three times more likely than men to use weapons in spousal violence.
· Women initiate most incidents of spousal violence.
· Women commit most child abuse and most elder abuse.
· Women hit their male children more frequently and more severely than they hit their female children.
· Women commit most child murders and 64% of their victims are male children.
· When women murder adults the majority of their victims are men.
· Women commit 52% of spousal killings and are convicted of 41% of spousal murders.
· Eighty two percent of the general population had their first experience of violence at the hands of women.
Why we don’t know the truth.
How could we all be so mistaken about family violence? Have we been conned? Have we been taken in by one of the slickest “stings” ever executed? Here is how the truth has been hidden.
Misleading statistics - Men do not usually report their violent wives to police. Children do not usually report their violent mothers to the police. Women are far more likely to report men to the police. One study done of emergency room patients shows that only 1% of men who were injured by their wives reported the incident to police. That should be enough to be suspicious of police statistics on spousal violence. Some women need to call the police because there is a real need for intervention, however, there is more than one reason for a wife to report a husband.
Women are encouraged to report spousal violence by countless media reminders. Propaganda always includes the female victim and the male perpetrator. Men are discouraged from claiming to be victims of violent women.
Some wives call police because they are frightened by a minor incident. Perhaps she thought calling the police was a “trump card” in an argument. These women do not realize that with one phone call they have invited the government and feminism into their home.
Some wives make false reports because there are legal, financial, and child custody rewards for making a false report.
These factors distort police statistics beyond usefulness to anyone who is sincerely looking for the truth about family violence. Other factors also contribute to the truth being hidden and the public being “scammed”.
Anti male hate groups- It suits the political agenda of feminists to quote statistics that make men look bad. Most of the feminist empire depends on their success in demonizing men. The term “family violence” is familiar to professionals and is inclusive of violent females. Feminists began to use the term “domestic violence” while quoting arrest statistics that emphasized male abusers and female victims. This was necessary so the public focus would be on the only police statistics that made their scam look believable. Con artists call this the “hook”.
The Media- To make the feminist “sting” complete; the media obsequiously seeks out the women’s shelter, or another feminist source, whenever they do a story on family violence. The feminist party line gets transmitted to the public almost verbatim. Scientific studies on family violence are ignored or are deliberately censored by most of America’s media outlets.
This sting has been operating successfully for 30 years. It’s time to shut it down! This misuse of distorted police statistics to push a “female victims” agenda is widespread and very misleading. Feminists have high jacked the legitimate issue of family violence and turned it into “America’s Most Successful Political Hoax”.
The promotion of family violence myths and misleading statistics detracts from the importance and scope of the family violence problem. A falsely framed issue skews understanding and jeopardizes justice. For example, former Massachusetts Bar Association President Elaine Epstein stated, “It has become essentially impossible to effectively represent a man against whom any allegation of domestic violence has been made.”
The other police statistics you don’t hear about
Men and children may not report when they are injured by a woman, however, the dead bodies of the men and children who are the victims of violent women are usually reported. Murder statistics are far more reliable than reported abuse statistics. The Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report of family homicides in 33 urban counties. These quoted statistics represent convictions only:
“In spouse murders, women represented 41 percent of killers.”
“In murders of their offspring, women predominated, accounting for 55 percent of killers.”
“Among black marital partners, wives were just about as likely to kill their husbands as husbands were to kill their wives: 47 percent of the victims of a spouse were husbands and 53 percent were wives.”
This is a long way from the feminist claim that “men are responsible for 90% of family violence”. Those who quote law enforcement statistics to support the “male villain-female victim” dogma are either misled or deliberately attempting to mislead. We have been scammed!
The hidden victims
The scientific data shows that both men and women are violent to a far greater extent than police statistics reveal. This scientific data shows that spousal violence is mostly unreported. In fact, some degree of violence occurs at a rate of 113 incidents per 1000 couples per year (husband. on wife) and 121 incidents per 1000 couples per year (wife on husband)! The feminist’s use of crime statistics to support their argument gives the misleading impression that spousal violence is rare.
Many local women’s shelters emphasize female victims reported to the police, and ignore much larger numbers of women, children, and men who are also victims of family violence. I quote from a brochure from a battered women’s shelter: “What Is Domestic Violence? Domestic violence is an increasingly visible social and legal problem wherein women are abused by their partners.” Notice that it doesn’t say that this is one aspect of domestic violence, or that this is the aspect that they deal with, but rather that this is domestic violence.
Surely domestic violence is violence which takes place at home, the word ‘domestic’ referring to the definition “of or relating to the household or the family”.And after using ‘physical abuse’ as the topic to begin the discussion of abuse, (more accurately, “the physical abuse of women by men”), many shelter workers go on to mention all the other types of abuse men do to women, like emotional and psychological.
The conversation seldom returns to look at any type of abuse by women to men eventhough dozens of scientific studies indicate women are at least as violent as men in “domestic” settings. Some leaders in the women’s shelter movement arefully aware of the broader scope of family violence but hold fast to the villain/victim dogma. Why? They must maintain their power and fund raising base. If they lose their special “victim status” they will rapidly go out of business. They may also be guilty of fraudulent fund raising.
Feminism Vs Science and the Law
There is much confusion about whom to believe in the debate about spousal violence. On one side we have women’s shelter advocates and feminists who rely on law enforcement statistics. On the other side we have social scientists who rely on scientifically structured studies. Unfortunately, the results of scientific studies do not receive media attention. America’s press is seemingly more interested in political correctness than scientific accuracy. Therefore, the public perception, and the perception of many well-intentioned domestic violence activists, is radically skewed away from the more balanced perception of social scientists.
Many abuse shelter personnel are unaware of the scientific studies, even though they claim to be “domestic violence experts” and often conduct “training” sessions for government agencies. How could someone be an expert without awareness of the scientific studies in their field? There are towns and cities in our country where the entire legal establishment, including law enforcement, family law attorneys, and judges, are making decisions about family violence based on political propaganda rather than well established research.
Here is a comment on the subject from a judge who asked for our report. We have rescued him from any consequences resulting from his candor by disguising his identity.
Thanks for the interesting information. I am a judge in xxxxx who regularly hearsrequests for domestic violence orders of protection. The DV issue has been politicized big time in our area. We judges are ordered to attend “consciousness raising” seminars where we are harangued by feminist “experts”. Supervising judges have been courted and won over, and now we have annual breakfasts honoring judges who cooperate with the feminist “agenda”.
As a former prosecutor and divorce lawyer I know that the best deterrent to violence by human beings is arrest, prosecution and appropriate consequences. With well-prepared cases, vigorous prosecution, and no nonsense consequences thecycle of abuse can be broken, no matter who the abuser is. Humans become habitual abusers because they get away with it. It is impossible to make progress in reducing domestic violence until we recognize that women are violent.
As a member of an advisory committee for the local shelter I was shocked at the attitudes of the ladies who ran the center: The ONLY solution championed by the shelter was to get free from that big bad male. The committee expressed concern about the underlying anti-male bias which even showed up in the name of the shelter and recommended that the name be changed to The Center for Victims of Abuse - rather than Women’s Strength.
Anyway, I forwarded your piece on to a couple of other judges - some of whom will undoubtedly immediately reject it’s premise.
Judge xxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx
The typical response of the abuse shelter feminists upon first hearing the results of the scientific studies is to “shoot the messenger”. You can almost hear their minds snap closed. There is an almost cult like “party line” among victim advocates. Much of the belief system of their “cult” has no more scientific orrational basis than that of fanatical religious cults.
On theother hand, some abuse agency personnel have not accepted the feminist “partyline”; particularly religiously sponsored family services organizations. They are eager to have accurate information upon which to plan and implementrational programs for prevention, intervention, and treatment for abusers and victims of both genders.
Are the family violence “experts” in your community aware of the scientific studies? What is happening at the abuse shelter in your community?
Spousal Violence in Other Countries
We think it is important to note that there have been the same kind of studies done in many countries. There is cross-cultural verification that women are more violent than men in family settings. When behavior has cross-cultural verification it means that it is part of human nature rather than a result of cultural conditioning. Females are most often the perpetrators in spousal violence in most cultures that have been studied to date. That leads many professionals to conclude that there is something biological about violent females in family situations. Researchers are now exploring the role of the “territorial imperative” as a factor in women’s violence against men. Women see the home as their territory. Like many other species on the planet, we humans will ignore size difference when we experience conflict on our own territory. So, the scientific results that reveal the violence of American women are not unique to our culture, and do not indicate a special pathology among American women.
World wide, women are more violent than men in family settings.
One of the leading researchers in this field is Susan Steinmetz, Ph.D. She did across-cultural comparison of marital abuse published in Journal of Sociology, and Social Welfare, entitled “Married Couples from 9 Different Cultures”. These cross-cultural studies yielded results very similar to family violence studies done in the United States and other nations. Another survey of couples in Canada found the same familiar pattern in that the rate of severe husband-to-wife violence was 4.8%, while severe wife-to-husband violence was10%. Brinkerhoff & Lupri, Canadian Journal of Sociology, (1989)
The Propaganda Problem
Abuse shelter advocates and feminists have severely distorted the picture and deliberately produce fraudulent statistics and dis-information. Even when they quote well-grounded statistics, they misuse the information. Here is an example: One of the favorite statistics quoted by abuse shelter advocates is that a woman is the victim of spousal violence every 15 seconds. This statisticis deduced from a well conducted piece of research which was published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, a respected professional journal for marriage and family therapists. The Abuse Shelter advocates arrived at this figure by using one of the conclusions of the study, i.e.; 1.8 million women suffer an assault from a husband or boyfriend per year. What abuse shelter advocates always fail to report is another finding of the same study, i.e.; 2 million men are assaulted by a wife or girl friend per year, which translates as, a man is the victim of spousal violence every 14 seconds. This is typical of the widespread deception practiced by abuse shelter advocates. America’s press establishment is a party to this deception, and shares the blame for exacerbating the problem by helping to perpetuate a false diagnosis.
Acknowledging that women are abusers leads to better solutions.
Women usually initiate spousal violence episodes (they hit first), and women hit more frequently, as well as using weapons three times more often then men. This combination of violent acts means that efforts to find solutions to the family violence problem need to include appropriate focus on female perpetrators. We need to recognize that women are violent, and we need nationwide educational programs that portray women as perpetrators. Other studies show that men are becoming less violent at the same time that women are becoming more violent. Educating men seems to be working. Educating women to be less violent should now be the main thrust of public education programs.
Any family violence program which accepts the “male abuser - female victim” paradigm is based on a false premise. These kind of family violence programs actually perpetuate the problem of abuse and do not deserve to be supported by private citizens or government agencies. Many government agencies, and legitimate charities, have been funding a feminist political cause, rather than funding rational, solution focused, family violence prevention and treatment programs.
What kind of family violence program do you have in your community? Does your local program encourage the healing of families, or do they take the “divorce” approach? Does the family violence prevention program in your community devote as much attention to violent females, as it does to violent males? If not, why not?
Women’s shelters are usually feminist front organizations. We need a family-friendly agency in our community that delivers services to all family members and works to preserve families, not tear them apart. We don’t need a feminist group with an anti-male, anti-family political axe to grind.
We need to separate gender politics from the issue of family violence. We need to look at the full spectrum of family violence, not just female victims. We need to consult scientific studies when we make policy decisions. We cannot hope to implement rational, solution-focused programs and policies until we face the fact that “behind closed doors” women are at least as violent as men. | Family of Men Support Society Website
A link of cases, all published on that site Ah a link to a Gallery of female paedophiles: The Dishonor Roll - Women Arrested for Indecent Behavior With Kids
And a link to another interesting blog listing female offenders Yahoo! 360° - My Blog
Theres good stuff like: Quote: The twelve “female only” defenses“Women Who Kill Too Much and the Courts That Free Them:
The Twelve ‘Female-Only’ Defenses” excerpted from The Myth of Male Power
(Chapter 17 — Social Goals) by Warren Farrell, Ph.D.
(1) The innocent woman defense
Farrell starts with the innocent woman defense because it underlies all twelve defenses. At first he called this the “Female Credibility Principle” due to the tendency to see women as more credible than men because of being thought more innocent. However, even when women admitted making false allegations that they were raped or that their husbands abused them, for example, their admission that they lied was often not believed. Therefore, he found the belief in the innocent woman ran even deeper than the tendency to believe women.
(2) The PMS defense (“My body, no choice”)
In 1970, when Dr. Edgar Berman said women’s hormones during menstruation and menopause could have a detrimental influence on women’s decision making, feminists were outraged. He was soon served up as the quintessential example of medical male chauvinism. But by the 1980s, some feminists were saying that PMS was the reason a woman who deliberately killed a man should go free. In England, the PMS defense freed Christine English after confessed to killing her boyfriend by deliberately ramming him into a utility pole with her car; and after killing a co-worker, Sandie Smith was put on probation — with one condition: she must report monthly for injections of progesterone to control symptoms of PMS. By the 1990s, the PMS defense paved the way for other hormonal defenses.
Sheryl Lynn Massip could place her 6 month old son under a car, run over him repeatedly, and then, uncertain he was dead, do it again, then claim post partum depression and be given outpatient medical help. No feminist protested.
(3) The husband defense
The film “I Love You to Death” was based on a true story of a woman who tried to kill her husband when she discovered he had been unfaithful. She and her mom tried to poison him, then hired a mugger to beat him and shoot him through the head. A fluke led to their being caught and sent to jail.
Miraculously, the husband survived.
The husband’s first response? Soon after he recovered he informed
authorities that he would not press charges.
His second response? He defended his wife’s attempts to kill him. He felt so guilty being sexually unfaithful that he thanked his wife!
He then re-proposed to her. She verbally abused him, then accepted.
(4) The “ Battered Woman Syndrome” defense, AKA learned helplessness.
Until 1982, anyone who called premeditated murder self-defense would have been laughed out of court.But in 1982, [Denver-based psychologist] Lenore Walker won the first legal victory for her women-only theory of learned helplessness, which suggests that a woman whose husband or boyfriend batters her becomes fearful for her life and helplessness to leave him so if she kills him, it is really self-defense — even if she has premeditated his murder. The woman is said to be a victim of the Battered Woman Syndrome. Is it possible a woman could kill, let’s say, for insurance money? Lenore Walker says no: she claims, “Women don’t kill men unless they’ve been pushed to a point of desperation.” Ironically feminists had often said, “There’s never an excuse for violence against a woman.” Now they were saying, “But there’s always an excuse for violence against a man... if a woman does it.” That sexism is now called the law in 15 states.
(5) “ The depressed mother” defense; Baby blues
Remember Sheryl Lynn Massip, a mother in her mid-twenties who murdered her 6-month old son by crushing its head under the wheel of the family car? Massip systematically covered up the murder until she was discovered. Then she testified that she suffered from post-partum depression, or “baby blues.”
Her sentence? Treatment.
Mothers do get the baby blues. As do dads. Were the husband to kill his baby, as Sheryl Lynn did, it is unlikely that we would just treat him for baby blues or Save the Marriage Syndrome. Why does her version of baby blues allow her to receive treatment for child murder, when he would receive life in prison for child murder, with or without baby blues?
The terrible twos;
Josephine Mesa beat her 2-year-old son to death with the wooden handle of a toilet plunger. She buried the battered child in a trash bin. When scavengers found the boy outside her Oceanside, California apartment, she denied she knew him. When the evidence became overwhelming, she confessed.
The excuse? She was depressed. The child was going through the terrible twos.
The punishment? Counselling, probation and anti-depressants. She never spent a day behind bars.
(6) The “Mothers don’t kill” defense;
ITEM: Illinois.Paula Sims reported that her first daughter, Loralei, was abducted by a masked gunman.In fact she murdered Loralei. But she got away with it. So when her next daughter, Heather Lee, disappointed her, she suffocated her, threw her in the trashbarrel, and said another masked gunman had abducted her daughter. It wasn’t until the second “masked gunman” abduction that a serious search was conducted. Only the serious search led to evidence.
Might Heather Lee be alive today if mothers did not have a special immunity from serious investigation?
Or see the case of Marybeth Tinning in Patricia Pearson’s book When She Was Bad: How and Why Women Get Away with Murder.
(Chapter 17 — Social Goals) Marybeth killed nine (9) of her own children and wasn’t caught until the ninth one died.
(7) The “Children need their mother” defense
ITEM: Colorado. Lory Foster’s husband had returned from Vietnam and was going through mood-swings both from post traumatic stress syndrome and diabetes.
They had gotten into a fight and he had abused her. So she killed him.
Even the prosecutor did not ask for a jail term. Why not? So Lory could care for the children. Lory was given counselling and vocational training at state expense.
The most frequent justification for freeing mothers who kill their children is that their children need them. Moreover, if mothers were freed because “children are the first priority,” then fathers would be freed just as often.
But they are not. Even when no mother is available.
(8) The “Blame the father, understand the mother” defense
ITEM: Ramiro Rodriguez was driving back from the supermarket. His daughter was sitting on his wife’s lap. As Ramiro made a left turn, a van crashed into the car and his daughter was killed. Ramiro was charged with homicide. The reason? His daughter was not placed in a safety seat. Ramiro explained that his daughter was sick and wanted to be held so his wife decided to hold her. Yet only Ramiro was charged. The mother was charged with nothing. Ramiro was eventually acquitted after protests over the racism. No one saw the sexism.
(9) The “My child, my right to abuse it” defense
A million crack-addicted children since 1987, but only sixty of the mothers have faced criminal charges. One was convicted. That conviction was reversed by the Michigan Supreme Court.
Three percent of infants in Washington D.C. die from cocaine addiction, but no mothers go to prison. The right to choose means the right to kill — not a fetus but a child.
Should the mother who addicts her child to crack have any more rights than any other child abuser or drug dealer?
How can we give a normal drug dealer a life sentence but claim that a mother that deals drugs to her own child should not so much as stand trial?
If we feel compassion for the circumstances that drove her to drugs, where is our compassion for the circumstances that drove the drug dealer to drugs, the child abuser to abuse, the murderer...?
(10) The plea bargain defense
Once a woman is seen as more innocent, her testimony is more valued, which leads to prosecutors offering the woman a plea bargain in crimes committed jointly by a woman and a man. And if a District Attorney is up for reelection, the Chivalry Factor allows him to look like a hero when his office prosecutes a man, or portray him as a bully if he should put a woman behind bars.
(11) The Svengali defense
A beautiful woman dubbed “The Miss America Bandit” conducted an armed robbery of a bank. Federal sentencing guidelines called fora minimum of four and a half to five years in federal prison. The federal judge gave her two years because she told the judge that she was in love with her hairdresser and he had wanted her to rob the bank.
The judge concluded, “Men have always exercised malevolent influence over women, and women seem to be soft-touches for it, particularly if sex is involved... It seems to me the Svengali-Trilby relationship is the motivating force behind this lady...the main thing is sex.”[Svengali is a fictional character said to have hypnotic qualities of persuasion over the innocent Trilby.]
(12) The contract killing defense: Defend self by hiring someone else.
When Farrell did the first review of his files in preparation for a section on contract killing, he was struck by some fascinating patterns.
· First, all of these women hired boys or men.
· Second, their targets were usually husbands, ex-husbands, or fathers — men they had once loved.
· Third, the targeted man usually had an insurance policy significantly larger than the man’s next few years income.
· Fourth, the women often were never serious suspects until some coincidence exposed their plot.
· Fifth, the women usually chose one of three methods by which to kill: she
(1) persuaded her boyfriend to do the killing (in reverse Svengali style);
(2) hired some young boys from a disadvantaged background to do it for a small amount of money; or
(3) hired a professional killer, thus usually using money her husband earned to kill him.
An example, Dixie Dyson tucked in her husband for his last night’s sleep.
She had arranged to have a lifelong friend and a boyfriend pretend to “break and enter,” then rape her, kill her husband, then “escape.”She would collect the insurance money. At the last moment, the lifelong friend backed out, but the boyfriend and Dixie managed to kill Dixie’s husband after 27 stabbings.
They were caught. Dixie “cut a deal” to reduce her sentence by reporting the boyfriend and his friend. The friend who backed out got 25 years for conspiracy.
Deborah Ann Werner was due one third of her dad’s estate. She asked her daughter to find some boys to murder him by plunging a knife through his neck.
Diana Bogadanoff hired two young men to kill her husband on an isolated nudist beach, while she watched. After he was shot through the head, she reported the killers but produced no motive for the murder — no money was stolen and she was not sexually molested. Diana did not become a suspect until an anonymous caller contacted a nationwide crime hotline. The caller coincidentally heard about the murder on the radio and remembered a friend describing just such a murder he had refused to do...on an isolated nudist beach while a woman named Diana watched. Without this tip, Diana would never even have become a suspect.
How individual women are given more power to kill than the entire U.S. Government
(She Has Met The Enemy And He Is Us by Charles E. Corry, Ph.D.)
Taken together, the twelve female-only defenses allow almost any woman to take it upon herself to “exercise the death penalty.” The government is not allowed to take it upon itself to kill someone first and declare him or her an abuser later — only a woman can do that to a man.
Do men kill women more than women kill men?
(She Has Met The Enemy And He Is Us by Charles E. Corry, Ph.D.)
The six blinders
1. A woman is more likely to poison a man than shoot him, and poisoning is often recorded as a heart attack or accident. [This will skew the figures]
2. Contract killing is also less detectable because it is premeditated and often hired out to a professional. When it is discovered the Department of Justice registers it as a “multiple offender killing” — it never gets recorded as a woman killing a man. [This will skew the figures]
3. The money factor. Women who murder husbands or boyfriends usually come from middle class backgrounds The money allows the best lawyers, more acquittals, therefore fewer female murderers to become Justice Department Statistics.
4. The Chivalry Factor,
5. and the Innocent Woman Factor prevent many women from becoming serious suspects to begin with.
6. The Plea Bargain Defense sometimes leads to the dismissal of charges.
When the six blinders are combined, we can see how we have consciously and unconsciously kept ourselves blind to women who murder men. A distortion of statistics is created by the Six Blinders. But a distortion of perception is created by the media’s tendency to make it international news when men murder women (the University of Montreal Murderer, the Hillside and Boston stranglers) and, unless the man is famous, to make it local news when a woman murders only a man.
In brief, it is impossible to know the degree to which the sexes kill each other. The only thing we know for certain is that both sexes kill more men than they kill women.
Warren Farrell, Ph.D. (mailto:wfarrell@home.com) | Or this: Quote: Female Perpetration of Child Sexual Abuse:
An Overview of the Problem
Moving Forward News journal,Vol.2, Number 6,
July/August 1994,
By Lisa Lipshires
Seven years ago, a client of Massachusetts psychologist Marcia Turner said
something that shocked her. The woman, who had been sexually abused
throughout her own childhood and was living in a house with other adults and their children, said, "The little three-year-old girl in my household is
coming on to me, and wants me to have sex with her. I think I will, because I know that I will be gentle and kind to her, and it's inevitable that she is going to be abused."
Although Turner had previously counseled male sex offenders, she had never encountered a woman who wanted to sexually abuse a child. Alarmed, she consulted other therapists, but none had ever encountered -- or even heard of-- female sex offenders. Turner realized that "this is something we needto look at," and decided to make female perpetrators of child sexual abuse the focus of her practice.
Betsy K., a survivor of sexual abuse by her father, realized five years ago
that she had also been sexually abused by her mother. As she was
confronting the abuse, other women in her area who had been sexually abused by their mothers were starting to deal openly with their experiences. "It was something that people were just barely beginning to talk about," Betsy recalled. Nonetheless, she and the other women formed a weekly self-help group for women survivors of female-perpetrated sexual abuse.
Betsy K. and Marcia Turner are part of a small, growing number of people
confronting the issue of female-perpetrated child sexual abuse. Many feel
they are fighting an uphill battle against societal denial and cultural
stereotypes of women and men.
Societal Denial
In her 1993 doctoral dissertation, "Female Sex Offenders: Societal Avoidance of Comprehending the Phenomenon of Women Who Sexually Abuse Children" (University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, MI), Boston psychologist Laurie Goldman analyzed the ways society minimizes the scope and impact of sexual abuse by women.
Goldman initially planned to conduct in-depth research of female
perpetrators. To that end, she distributed 315 letters to therapists and
clinics, took out an advertisement in a major newspaper, and contacted
several clinicians who treated sex offenders. She also placed 10 poster
advertisements in highly visible locations. Her eight-month search yielded
only one woman who was willing to discuss what she had done. Goldman knew from reliable sources that female offenders were being treated, but clinic administrators insisted that no such women were under their care.
In addition, within 48 hours of having been hung, all of her posters had
been removed. Unable to obtain subjects for her study, Goldman decided to focus on the societal denial that makes female perpetrators such an elusive population.
Goldman discovered that denial of female perpetration is woven into the very systems meant to protect children. She learned that one of her new female clients had previously disclosed that she had sexually abused a nephew, but the Massachusetts child protection agency had not referred the case to the Attorney General's office. In fact, Goldman's client subsequently admitted that she had abused two other children since her first disclosure.
This treatment of the problem by the State of Massachusetts is not unique.
In the State of Washington, for example, one human services professional
reported that when an accused female offender was brought before a judge, the judge declared, "women don't do things like this," and dismissed thecase. In another case, a New England prison warden told Goldman that she had only one woman in her system who had been convicted of child sexual abuse because "public sentiment did not allow for such charges to be brought to trial in her conservative state."
This comes as no surprise to Gail Ryan, facilitator of the Kemp Center's
Perpetrator Prevention Project in Denver.She has found that female
adolescent sex offenders "are much less likely than male adolescent
offenders to be caught or charged."
Iowa State University sociologist Craig Allen, who conducted a study Of 75
men and 65 women who had been convicted of sexually abusing a child, refers to this process as a form of societal "gate keeping." By the time femaleoffenders could be referred to a therapist for treatment, he writes in Women and Men Who Sexually Abuse Children: A Comparative Analysis (Brandon, VT: Safer Society Press, 1991), "only those women would be left whose behaviors were so deviant" that their abusiveness could not be denied "at any of the preceding 'gates' in the system." Allen's gate keeping hypothesis could account for why female perpetrators appear so rarely in therapists' case studies and why, when they do, they are generally described as psychotic or otherwise severely disturbed.
Ruth Matthews, a St. Paul psychologist who has worked with 50 adolescent and 70 adult female sex offenders, says another major reason why adult female perpetrators are rarely seen in treatment is that many are mothers. In such cases, she says, dependent children are generally reluctant to turn in their mothers.
If children -- whose disclosures still provide the primary means of
reporting offenders -- are being abused by mothers who are single parents or who carry out the abuse with male partners, disclosure would cause them to beremoved from their homes and placed in foster care. By contrast, when there is an offending father and a non-offending mother, a child's disclosure would not mean "as much of a loss," says Matthews. "They still will have their home, they still will have a parent, and their family will stay intact."
Prevalence of Abuse by Females
If children seldom disclose, and if female abusers are often winnowed out of investigations and court proceedings, how much female perpetration is
actually going on? Because of the hidden nature of child sexual abuse and
because of problems with the way in which child abuse data are collected,
nobody can provide a definitive answer to this question.
There are two main sources of information on the extent of child sexual
abuse: data gathered by state child protective agencies and retrospective
studies that seek to determine the percentage of adults who were sexually
abused as children.
Two retrospective studies of adult populations are frequently quoted by
researchers and child advocates. The Los Angeles Times survey, conducted in1985, found that seven percent of the abuse reported by male and female participants in the study was perpetrated by women. Sociologist Diana Russell's1978 San Francisco-based study revealed that four percent of the women who reported having been abused indicated that the perpetrators were female.
The Times survey and the Russell study were based on a random selection of participants. Other retrospective studies focusing on narrower populations have found much higher rates of female perpetration, although some of these findings have yet to be replicated. In a 1981 study, 60 percent of 412 male and 10 percent of 540 female undergraduate psychology students at the University of Washington who recalled childhood sexual contact with a post-pubescent person at least five years older than themselves said their abusers were female. (Fritz, G., Stoll, K., and Wagner, N. "A Comparison of Males and Females Who Were Sexually Molested as Children, "Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, 1981, vol. 7,54-59.)
In another study, doctors at a New Jersey medical clinic found that 11 out
of 25 teenage males who revealed that they had been sexually molested named females (ages 16 to 36) as their assailants. These perpetrators were "usually acquaintances of the victims -- most often a neighbor, baby-sitter, or other trusted adolescent or young adult." (Johnson, R., and Shrier, D. "Past Sexual Victimization by Females of Male Patients in an Adolescent Medicine Clinic Population," American Journal Of Psychiatry,1987, vol. 144,650-662.)
Finally, a study of 582 college men found that up to 78 percent of those
abused as children had been abused by females. (Fromuth, M., and Burkhart, B."Childhood Sexual Victimization Among College Men: Definitions and Methodological Issues," Violence and Victim, 1987, vol. 2, no. 4,241-253.)
Researchers do not know why some studies uncover a higher rate of femaleperpetration than others, but The National Resource Center on Child SexualAbuse (NRCCSA) asserts that because of a lack of standardization in reportingand inconsistencies in research methods and definitions of sexual abuse,"the firm statistics everyone desires" on the prevalence of abuse"simply are not available." (NRCCSA News, May-June 1992, vol. 1, no.1.)
The inconsistencies noted by the NRCCSA can be found in the other main
source of data on child sexual abuse: yearly reports from the 50 states'
child protective agencies. The American Humane Association which was
responsible for gathering these data from 1973 through 1987, found that
approximately 20 percent of substantiated cases of child sexual abuse duringthat time period had been perpetrated by females. (Information on
perpetrator gender is not available for 1988-1992; data eventually will be
available for 1993 and subsequent years.) However, not all states require
the gender of perpetrators to be included in their reports. Thus, says John
Fluke, Director of Research and Program Analysis for the American Humane
Association, there are inherent difficulties in getting good information,
given the fact that we're working with 50 different systems of information
development."
Another difficulty, as University of New Hampshire sociologist David
Finkelhor notes in Child Sexual Abuse: New Theory and Research (New York: The Free Press, 1984), is that the "child abuse that is mandated for
reporting in most states is only child abuse committed by parents and other caretakers." As a result, abuse perpetrated by children, adolescents, and unrelated adults or strangers is unlikely to appear in yearly reports; a
sizeable proportion of sexual abuse committed by males and females is
therefore generally not recorded.
Improvements are being made in this regard. Last year the National
Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse, which has been collecting national data since 1988, began to ask states to include perpetrator gender in their reports.
Range of Abuse
The abuse that females perpetrate can range from subtle, non-contact forms such as exhibitionism and voyeurism to overt sexual touching and/or
penetration. In his study of offenders, sociologist Craig Allen found that
both genders engaged in a range of abusive behavior. Therapist Marcia
Turner says that her clients have claimed to "digitally penetrate, orally
stimulate, insert things into kids, and have kids do things to them like. .
. stimulate their genitals."
Other therapists, including those specializing in male survivors of sexual
abuse, have noticed an apparent pattern in clients' reports of
female-perpetrated abuse. Minneapolis psychologist Peter Dimock has
counseled 400 to 500 male survivors of sexual abuse since 1980. He found
that, for the 25 percent who recall being abused by a female, most
experienced the abuse as subtle or seductive. Very often, Dimock says, if
the female abuser is in a parental or caretaking role, she will perpetrate
the abuse "under the guise of caretaking, where it has involved putting
medication on the child's genitals, inserting suppositories or enemas," or
she will make an excuse to expose her body to the boy, "clearly with an
intent to arouse, but, again, under the guise of normalized behavior."
Nic Hunter, a psychologist from St. Paul, author of Abused Boys: The
Neglected Victim of Sexual Abuse, and editor of The Sexually Abused Male,
Volumes I and II (all from Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1990), has also
found in his work with hundreds of male survivors that approximately 25
percent were sexually abused by females and that in general, the abuse was "very covert in that it was disguised as something other than a sexual
contact." Dimock adds that female abusers frequently treat their victims like romantic partners, taking them on "date-like outings."
Not all survivors or victims report that sexual abuse by females was subtle
or covert. Of the 93 women who perpetrated in Michigan therapist Bobbie
Rosencrans' recent four-year study of survivors of maternal incest, 65
percent reported that their abuse had been violent. Karen K., a survivor of
maternal incest from Washington State who edits the newsletter S.O.F.I.E.
(Survivors of Female Incest Emerge!), has read nearly 500 letters from
survivors in the past 18 months. She feels that "women are more creative
and more brutal in their abuse."
Abuse Aftereffects
Therapist Bobbie Rosencrans' research on 93 female and nine male survivors of maternal incest (Rosencrans had originally planned to study female survivors only, but nine men asked to be included as well.) is the most comprehensive study to date of survivors of female perpetrators. Rosencrans found among her study participants many of there actions shared by survivors of male-perpetrated abuse: depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and high rates of eating disorders and substance abuse. She also found, when she asked her participants what they would want the public to know about maternal incest, a nearly universal wish to tell society that "this really happens."
Gender Identity Issues
One of the most common reactions to female-perpetrated abuse is shame about gender identity. Phyllis E, who was sexually abused by both her mother and her father, remembers feeling a deep disgust for her mother's body -- a disgust that carried over into a hatred ofher own female self. "I couldn't stand my own body for years," she says. "I couldn't understand how men could stand women's bodies."
Tom, a therapist and survivor of abuse by three females, including his
mother, has also felt a deep confusion about his gender identity. Along with subjecting Tom to unnecessary enemas, masturbating him in the bathtub, and making him sleep in her bed and watch her dress, his mother perpetrated against him a type of behavior that Indiana therapist Christine Lawson refers to as "perversive abuse."Perversive abuse, Lawson writes in "Mother-Son Sexual Abuse: Rare or Underreported? A Critique of the Research" (Child Abuse & Neglect,vol. 17, no. 2) is abuse of a child's sexuality and "may include behavior such as forcing the boy to wear female clothing ... and generally discouraging the child's identification with males." Tom says that "until I was five, I hadn't the foggiest notion that I wasn't a girl."
Psychologist Mic Hunter says that the societal belief that "when sexual
contact takes place" between a male and female, "the male isresponsible for
it" can place an extra sense of shame and responsibility on boy victims of
female perpetrators. There is also the cultural myth, exemplified by movies
such as "Summer of '42," "Men Don't Leave," and "My Tutor," that sexual
contact between an adult female and a young boy is a desirable initiation
into manhood. Hunter has witnessed this during training sessions at the
offices of various district attorneys. Often, he says, "there will be a
female attorney on staff who is trying to prosecute a female perpetrator [of
a male victim], and the male attorneys will say, 'Look, we're not going to
waste the taxpayers' dollars on this. This is every man's fantasy.'"
Rick S., a survivor of maternal incest as well as sexual abuse by a female
nurse, confirms that he struggled to accept that what was done to him was
inappropriate and wrong. "I adored my mother," Rick says, "and she doted on
me, especially in the early years." When Rick got to high school, he says,
"I felt like I was unfaithful to her if I thought of going out with agirl."
He had "no idea that you were supposed to grow up and develop and learn." He
saw his peers growing up and finding age-appropriate dates, and wondered
what they had that he didn't.
Confronting Gender Stereotypes
A widespread societal belief that female-perpetrated sexual abuse is
improbable -- particularly if the abuser was one's mother -- has made it
especially difficult for survivors of female abusers to disclose their
experiences and has left them with perhaps an even deeper sense of
isolation. Remarkably, though 81 percent of the women in Rosencrans' study
were currently in therapy, only three percent had revealed to their
therapists that their mothers had abused them sexually.
Karen K. remembers believing for years that she was the only survivor of
mother-daughter incest. "I felt completely isolated and alone with who my
perpetrator was," Karen says. In response to Rosencrans' study (Safer
Society Press, 1994), one woman wrote, "I've never met anyone who was
sexually abused by their mother. I didn't know that 93 other people
existed."
Betsy K. believes that the sexual abuse of daughters by mothers is even more taboo than the sexual abuse of sons. Between mothers and sons, Betsy says,"People would believe, probably, that there was some sort of sexual contact, though they might not look at it as abuse." But in our homophobic culture, "females sexually abusing females -- Oh God, nobody, nobody wants to believe that. I think it's as hard to believe, or close to as hard to believe, as ritual abuse ... It doesn't get the attention it deserves."
Moving Past Secrecy and Shame
It was liberating for Betsy, in a survivors' march and rally several years
ago, to carry a sign: "Mothers Can Be Abusers, Too." She and other survivors of maternal incest glued photographs of their Mothers onto the sign, and Betsy held it up while she recounted the story of her mother's abuse. Betsy spoke so loudly, one woman later told her, that she had heard her from nearly a quarter of a mile away and she had to stop and listen. Months later, a stranger approached Betsy at a workshop and said she saw Betsy's sign at the march and that it had really helped her to reveal, for the first time, that she had also been sexually abused by her mother. "It was very moving," Betsy says."I'll never forget that. It speaks to survivors helping survivors ... I think we can, as a community, really heal each other."
Lisa Lipshires is a freelance writer and human services professional.
Suggested Reading
Allen, Craig (1991). Women and Men Who Sexually Abuse Children: A
Comparative Analysis. Brandon, VT: The Safer Society Press.
Evert, Kathy (1987). When You're Ready. A Woman's Healing from Childhood
Physical and Sexual Abuse by Her Mother. Walnut Creek, CA: Launch Press.
Kelley, Susan J., et al. (1993). Sexual Abuse of Children in Day Care.
Child Abuse & Neglect vol. 17,71-89.
Lawson, Christine (1993). Mother-Son Sexual Abuse: Rare or Under-reported?
A Critique of the Research. Child Abuse & Neglect, vol. 17, no. 2.
Middlebrook, Diane Wood (1991). Anne Sexton: A Biography. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company. (Note: Anne Sexton's daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, disclosed
in Middlebrook's biography that her mother had sexually abused her.) | Female serial Killers: Quote: FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS
Female serial killers have always been something of an anomaly in criminology and a puzzle for law enforcement. As Eric Hickey (1991) describes them, “These are the quiet killers, every bit as lethal as male serial murderers, but we are seldom aware of one in our midst because of their low visibility.” One of the first writers on female criminality, Otto Pollak, also said that most female crime is hidden. Kelleher & Kelleher (1998) argue that female serial killers are more successful, careful, precise,methodical, and quiet in committing their crimes. They examined 100 cases since 1900 and found an average duration of 8 years before being caught—double that of the male serial killer. On the other hand, Alarid, Marquart, Burton, Cullen et. al. (1996) conducted interviews with convicted female offenders and found 86% of them assumed a secondary follower role during criminal events by either working with a male or female accomplice. In all fairness, feminists and people of conscience maintain that the academic literature on female crime is fraught with misconception and that popular mythology detracts from the real reality of women as victims of crime.
Statistically, females usually account for about 15% of all violent crime and 28% of all property crime. However, there has been about a 140% increase in the number of crimes committed by women since 1970, and the upward trend is steady. Researchers typically track female offenders on FBI Part II offenses since they far outnumber men in two Part II categories: prostitution and runaway. However, they have significant numbers in embezzlement (41%), fraud (39%), forgery (36%), and larceny-theft (33%). For homicide, one of the mostf requently-cited facts is a Justice Department study in 1991 which found females who were incarcerated for murder were twice as likely as men incarcerated for murder to have killed an intimate (husband, boyfriend, orchild).
Female serial killers account for only 8% of all American serial killers, but American females account for 76% of all female serial killers worldwide. Hickey’s (2002) subsample of 62 females out of 399 serial killers used the following methods and motives.
Methods
1. Poison (80%)
2. Shooting (20%)
3. Bludgeoning (16%)
4. Suffocation (16%)
5. Stabbing (11%)
6. Drowning (5%)
Motives
1. Money (74%)
2. Control (13%)
3. Enjoyment (11%)
4. Sex (10%)
5. Drugs, Cult involvement, cover up, or feelings of inadequacy (24%)
CASES IN THE MEDIA
Three popular cases have influenced the public imagination. In1992, Aileen Carol Wuornos was convicted in Florida for the murder of 7 men she killed while hitchhiking and was (incorrectly) called America’s first female serial killer. In 1995, Susan Smith of Union, South Carolina, left her 2 sons strapped in their safety seats and rolled the car off the end of a pier andinto a lake, becoming America’s poster child for Bad Mother. The lake where the killings took place is said to be haunted. In 1998, Louise Woodward, a British nanny and former au pair, popularized the “shaken baby syndrome” in Massachusetts, and parents everywhere are now urged to secretly videotape their babysitters. None of these cases are typical of the female serial killer( Wuornos got caught early and Smith and Woodward didn’t kill 3 or more people),but each case received extensive media attention. The following is are presentative sample of the Internet websites devoted to these cases:
‘92 Wuornos: Lesbians Who Kill, Homicidal Heros, Media Monsters ‘95 Smith:Victim or Murderer, Lake Takes 7 More Lives, Handwritten Confession’98Woodward:CourtTV Nanny Murder Trial, Shaken Baby Alliance
THE KELLEHER TYPOLOGY
There are few researchers of female serial killers. The best book on the subject is by Michael & C. Kelleher (1998) Murder Most Rare NY: Dell.In it, the authors argue that the organized-disorganized typology constructed by Ressler, Burgess, and Douglass in Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives is inadequate. Instead, Kelleher & Kelleher suggest a different typology, one based on whether the female serial killer acts alone or in partnership with others. They, further, construct a nine-point categorization method (pp. 15-16) based around this acting alone-in partnership typology.
Black Widow - systematically kills multiple spouses, partners, or other family members Team Killer - kills or participates in the killing of others in conjunction with at least one other.
Angel of Death - systematically kills people who are in her care for some form of medical attention
Question of Sanity - kills in apparent random manner and later judged to be insane.
Sexual Predator - systematically kills others in clear acts of sexual homicide.
Unexplained - kills for reasons that are totally inexplicable or for unclear motives.
Revenge - systematically kills out of hate or jealousy
Unsolved -a pattern of unsolved kill | |
11th-September-2008
