B.C.'s Domestic-Violence Programs Based on 'False' Theory Article Analysis

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Douglas Todd: B.C.'s domestic-violence programs based on 'false' theory

Theo Boere, executive director of The Men's Centre, is critical of the way the B.C. government's documents repeatedly refer to perpetrators of domestic violence as "he" and victims as "she."

One of North America's leading scholars on domestic violence is trying to persuade the B.C. government that it has adopted a failing approach to a serious problem.

UBC psychology professor Don Dutton, who has studied domestic violence for 40 years and written eight books, has told the B.C. Liberal government it has adopted a "false" premise that will do little to diminish partner-on-partner violence.

"It is understandable how an uninformed observer in British Columbia would tend to believe that family violence perpetrators are male and victims are female," Dutton wrote in a recent letter to Premier Christy Clark.

"But that assumption could not be more incorrect," Dutton said, objecting to the way virtually all B.C. government documents describe domestic violence as being perpetrated by men, with women as the victims.

As a result, Dutton said, B.C.'s police procedures, court policy and prevention programs are based on a misleading theory.

The UBC psychologist, B.C. government officials and a group of therapists are engaged in a behind-the-scenes debate over the way the Liberals spend tens of millions of dollars earmarked for domestic violence programs and women's shelters.

"Social science research contradicts the assumption the B.C. government is making," Dutton said in his letter to the premier.

Large peer-reviewed surveys have repeatedly found, he said, "the most common form of domestic violence, 50 per cent, is bilateral, matched for severity by each party (male and female)."

The author of Rethinking Domestic Violence and The Domestic Assault of Women (both published by UBC Press) told Clark the second most common form of domestic violence, accounting for 35 per cent of all cases, is perpetrated by women against non-violent men.

"The third-most common (15 per cent) is male violence against females."

Dutton and counsellors at Nanaimo's Men's Centre maintain the vast majority of the tens of millions of dollars the B.C. government spends on domestic violence goes to women, with little going to directly support males.

Theo Boere, executive director of The Men's Centre, is critical of the way the B.C. government's documents repeatedly refer to perpetrators of domestic violence as "he" and victims as "she."

Boere believes the Liberal leadership is "going backwards" by taking a stereotypical approach to intimate-partner violence.

Data contradicts B.C. approach

In his letter to Clark, Dutton emphasized the research of Prof. Sara Desmarais, who has a PhD in psychology from Simon Fraser University.

Desmairais led the team that recently conducted a "meta-analysis" of 249 domestic-violence studies, which were based on personal interviews with men and women involved in more than 135,000 incidents.

Desmarais' researchers confirmed that female domestic violence is more prevalent than male, Dutton told the premier. "Social science data does not get more persuasive than this."

"These data sets, found repeatedly by independent investigators, make it abundantly clear that the assumptions of the B.C. policy are false and cannot, therefore, have any appreciable effect on the diminution of domestic violence."

In an interview, Dutton said that, in addition to regularly speaking in the U.S., he has recently been invited to offer his expertise on domestic violence to the Ontario Legal Aid Society, Toronto police and the Canadian Senate.

There are two reasons the B.C. government operates on the false assumption males are virtually always the perpetrators of domestic violence.

One, Dutton said, is gender politics.

On that score, Kim Bartholomew, an SFU professor emerita of psychology, is among those who admire Dutton for the way he is "courageous in maintaining his intellectual integrity in a field in which ideology is often more influential than data, and in which there are strong pressures against challenging the dominant ideology."

The second reason female-on-male domestic violence is under-reported relates to the way Statistics Canada normally collects data: Police reports.

Men are more reluctant than women to tell police they are victims of intimate-partner violence. Most men are ashamed to admit a woman has physically assaulted them. Many men also correctly fear, as shown in a study by Denise Hines, they will not believed by police and will be treated as the aggressors.

In contrast, both men and women are more forthcoming about their own contribution to domestic violence when interviewed by social workers or researchers, which is the case in the scholarly studies Dutton cites.

Premier's response to gender violence

Dutton has never received a direct reply to his first letter to the premier, which was written on May 25, 2016.

On June 10, however, Clark had a column published in The Vancouver Sun in which she described being the teenage victim of an attempted outdoor assault by a male stranger.

Premier Christy Clark missed the vote in the legislature this week on transgendered rights, in order to attend a party fundraiser.

Like many other women and girls, the premier wrote, she never told anyone about the attempt. Clark's disclosure, and her promise to support legislation against sexual violence, went viral in the media.

Soon after, on June 14, Dutton received a response to his letter to the premier from Tami Currie, "acting assistant deputy minister" of the province's office of domestic violence.

Currie maintained that B.C. spends $70 million a year on programs for victims of violence that are "available provincially for both men and women."

Dutton and De Boere, however, argue B.C.'s programs are not truly open to or supportive of men.

B.C.'s domestic violence literature and programs, say Dutton and Boere, consistently emphasize that women are virtually always only victims.

In addition, Dutton said there is not a single shelter in B.C. for male victims of domestic violence.

In a follow-up letter Dutton wrote this month to the premier, the UBC professor re-emphasized that "B.C. has the unfortunate tendency to rely on women's advocates for information on domestic violence. The result is a one-sided advocacy view that ... recreates a self-reinforcing system that serves only one gender."

True to Dutton's scholarly approach, his most recent letter to the premier cited more empirical evidence.

"The Canadian Social Survey found that six per cent of males and seven per cent of females reported being victimized by partner violence in the past five years. Males were more likely to initiate less severe forms of intimate-partner violence, females more likely to initiate more severe forms," Dutton wrote.

It's time, he said, for a more "balanced," gender-inclusive approach to domestic violence.

After all, men suffer as much as women when they are victimized.

Citing scholar Anne Coker, Dutton told the premier that women and men exposed to domestic violence each end up struggling with depression, substance abuse and chronic mental and physical illness.

"In short, males suffer from intimate-partner violence in much the same way was females do. But they are unserved by the government of British Columbia."

Commentary for Long Article 3

1. The article believes that the British Columbia government is wrong for coming up with domestic violence programs that are based on a misleading theory.

2. I got interested in the complex nature of domestic abuse, especially because of the common misconception that the term automatically means a male partner has abused their female partner.

3. Domestic abuse is a topic that is recurring in the text because it is mentioned in different contexts. Domestic abuse is touted as one of the main reasons that pushes individuals in the society into drug and substance abuse, while in a different context domestic abuse has been singled out as the reason that affects children in a home to an extent of affecting their mental well-being and academic performance (Zimbardo et al., 2012). Psychology is interested in a family as a unit, hence the topic of domestic violence is thoroughly talked about due to its potential to bring divorces, separations, and forcing the children to grow wither one parent or none of them at all.

4. On a different note, the article revolves around a professional conversant with the issue of domestic abuse who claims that the issues commonly gets misunderstood with respect to its reference in the British Columbia legal system. This is because with the B. C. legal circles, domestic abuse is popularly seen as an even where the male is always the abuser against the female partner (Todd, 2016). Within the corridors of the courts of justices, thus, a 'he' is understood to refer to the male perpetrator of domestic abuse, while a 'she' is perceived to be the female victim of domestic abuse. The expert in question argues that this is one of the biggest misleading notions because in 50% of the domestic abuse cases, either partner could be the perpetrator against the other. The male on female partner form of domestic abuse only happens in about 15% of the domestic abuse cases.

5. While both the text and the article largely revolve around the issue of domestic abuse, they are giving different perspectives on the matter. Away from the text, the article highlights the crucial distinction that legal practitioners and other professionals handling domestic abuse cases should be aware. It is essential that such people realize that domestic abuse does not entail the violence meted on the female partner by the male partner only; because there are other situations where the female partner could be the abuser (Todd, 2016). Thus, the B. C. domestic abuse programs should be tailor-made to accommodate all possibilities and not focusing only on a man-on-woman violence as society believes.