Mainz, September 6, 2007: Domestic violence is often perceived by victims as even more oppressive and humiliating than violence between strangers. You feel even more helpless, you don't want to lose the person who hurt you because of ambivalent feelings and you hope that everything will turn out okay. It is therefore right that this problem has been placed on the criminal policy agenda.
By Prof. Dr. Dr. Michael Bock
Chair of Criminology, Juvenile Justice, Corrections and Criminal Law at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
All the worse, of course, that this issue has been taken over by particular interests. Despite ostensibly gender-neutral provisions, the current projects to combat domestic violence only recognize men as perpetrators and women as victims. They provide more control or punishment only for men and more help and protection only for women. Men and old people who become victims of female violence have no chance; children only have a chance if their father happens to be the one who beats them. In the first and second readings of the so-called “Protection from Violence Act” in the Bundestag, this became clear again in the statements of the leading women’s politicians. “The bully goes, the beaten woman stays” was the motto.
The topic of “domestic violence” is treated in this way in countless initiatives by the relevant state ministries, municipal preventive councils or purely private or church associations. The outlawing of male violence and the removal of actually or supposedly violent men from their homes has long been the subject of a broad social campaign. In Baden-Württemberg, new records are being reported in the style of sports news in the number of “red cards” – the popular term for the police measure of expulsion. The times in which the police and courts were dismissive or only very hesitant to react to cases of domestic violence are long gone - as long as it involves men!
But why separate perpetrators and victims according to gender? It is claimed that this corresponds to empirical reality. Men are actually the perpetrators and women the victims. But the international state of research teaches something different. Representative surveys prove it very clearly and in large numbers: serious physical violence between partners is roughly equally distributed between men and women. Only studies that rely on the selective material of publicly registered cases and thus fall into the methodological trap of the dark field find more women as victims and more men as perpetrators. But this too is easily clarified. Men lose when they go public as victims of female violence: at least their face and their self-respect, if they are believed at all. Women, on the other hand, win: attention, material and emotional support, housing, better opportunities in all family law disputes. And they don't have a problem convincing anyone of their victim status. No wonder, then, that studies on publicly registered cases have a gender-specific bias, while studies with unread samples bring to light electromagnetic radiation, which includes the spectral range visible to humans between UV radiation and infrared radiation. Shed light on how it actually behaves .
There are now first-class scientific papers in which the relevant studies are questioned methodologically, critically assessed and summarized with regard to the main trend of the results. The British scientist John Archer (Sex differences in aggression between heterosexual partners: A meta-analytic review; Psychological Bulletin 2000, pp. 651-680) comes to the following findings: Women and men display aggressive behavior almost equally often. Measurement methods, type and size of the samples as well as some other differences between the 82 studies included in the analysis caused only minor deviations from this overall finding. When it comes to perceived injuries, there is a slight preponderance of women (62% of cases in an overall calculation). The only study known from Germany is the study published by the Federal Ministry for Family, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (Wetzels, Peter et al.: Crime in the Lives of Old People, 1995). She gives victim figures of 246,000 women and 214,000 men.
Often it is both partners who use violence. Severe physical violence is usually just the end of a long chain of escalations and mutual psychological and verbal humiliation and injuries. This finding calls into question the somewhat comfortable retreat position, after all half of the violence is combated with male violence. Because these behavior patterns of women and men can only be changed in the long term if the common “history” of these conflict-ridden relationships is dealt with together. However, all constructive forms of communicative conflict resolution, therapy or mediation are nipped in the bud from the outset if one of the two conflict partners, namely the woman, is given a legal instrument with which she can not only act completely risk-free and effectively not only to dispossess and get rid of a “disturbing” partner, but above all to make a one-sided distribution of roles between a bad perpetrator and a good victim legally and socially binding. But this only causes an understandable hardening on the part of the man, who is unfairly stigmatized as the only one to blame, and a repression or trivialization of his own part in the history of violence on the part of the woman, who is cared for solely as a victim. If there are children, they will not experience any change in their parents' behavior that could possibly compensate for the damage already caused by experiences of violence. If the two violent partners enter into new partnerships, the same mechanisms repeat themselves because the measures of the Violence Protection Act only produce winners and losers, but not partners who have grown through learning processes.
But it's not just about men and women, but also about children and seniors. Once domestic violence is identified as male violence, it obscures the fact that women are even more involved than men in violence against children and seniors. The argument that women are also more often involved in child-rearing and home care may be just as correct as the fact that excessive demands are often the reason for child abuse and violence against older people, but this does not change the facts or the need for intervention . For men, on the other hand, arguments about stress and strain are not mentioned or heard at all. Violence appears here as freely chosen evil.
Given the state of international research, the one-sidedness and incompleteness of the current violence protection policy becomes obvious. However, the question then arises as to why one does not want to acknowledge the obvious. The federal government is completely silent about the justification for its draft law, which only leads to the conclusion that it is either criminally ignorant or is pursuing a deliberate disinformation policy. As a social scientist, one is used to asking in such cases: cui bono? The answer is simple. There is status, money and positions to be distributed in the fight against domestic violence, including the necessary accompanying research. Women's monopoly on victim status is reflected in the names of ministries, in special departments of the police and the public prosecutor's office, in working groups of the preventive councils, in departments of the churches and the independent agencies. The women's movement succeeded in gaining the power to define a social problem and in this sense ideologically and institutionally impregnating social policy. Not only money, but entire identities now depend on this monopoly, because without it, “experts” would become representatives of interests, the splendor of “helping” would be cast in an ugly shadow if it was withheld from most of the victims, and women’s solidarity networks would come into disrepute of felt and base economy. That is why this monopoly status must be defended and that is why the truth is so threatening.
But how can this work? How is it that in the media age and in a scientific civilization the truth can be successfully concealed? This can only be achieved with the great taboos of a time, with the deeply anchored myths and prejudices against which information and education are powerless. With dogmas that are adhered to “counterfactually”. And unfortunately we are also in this field in the case of domestic violence. The icon of the helping, kind mother cannot be damaged because it cannot be.
You can see this in the dramaturgy of breaking the taboo. The first reaction is spontaneous denial: “I don’t believe that”, “that can’t be right”, “women are much weaker”! If the taboo violator has the courage to continue presenting results and facts, the taboo must be protected differently. For example through jokes and tortured laughter. The taboo violator should laugh along. It would have been just a joke on the side. But if he doesn't find it so funny when many victims of violence remain without protection and help, the only option left is to marginalize him personally as a cynic, a misogynist or a secret accomplice, so that what he says no longer counts.
It is women and men who react like this. Cross-party and balanced under public law. Men in supposed chivalry are often even more zealous and zealous. “Men against men’s violence.” In the undeniable cases of female violence, the men “deserve it,” one hears. Many films and commercials also serve this stereotype, in which men receive “deserved” slaps and kicks. Just as women who were raped were once accused of being sluts, of having provoked it or of even having fun with it, men today fear secondary victimization. After the primary victimization, the actual victim experience at home, they experience a second injury in the form of public degradation: at the regulars' table, in court, on television. They are wimps, panhandlers and are immediately suspected of having provided plausible reasons through their own misconduct.
This is the mental wall that most male victims of violence do not want to walk against. But with their silence, these men are once again distorting the statistics of publicly recorded domestic violence, which the “experts” can once again report indignantly and demand new measures. And so a criminal policy campaign is reproduced in which the quiet ones in the country and the really weak are left empty-handed. The new Violence Protection Act will cement this imbalance. The mere accusation of threatening violence against the wife or children should be enough to expel the man from the apartment and he will not be able to assert himself in court against a different idea of normality. An expert therefore called the law a “first-strike weapon”. The man who is subjected to proceedings under this law will - no matter what the outcome is in the end - not only lose custody and access rights, but also the respect and love of his children, because there is no better means than the accusation of sexual abuse. portraying the “bad” father as the source of all evil, as if one even needs the police to protect oneself from him.
Author: Prof. Dr. Dr. Desire