Research is not a random, passive process, where people sit under apple trees and wait for apples to fall out of trees and cause them to think of gravity, for example. Research is also not often a random, active process where you just look around in previously unexplored territory, to see what might be there -- though that sort of activity might occur in the pre-research process, when you know you want to do some research, and are wondering what to research about. Research itself, however, is usually driven by a hunch or an agenda, and a desire to give that hunch or agenda credibility by finding evidence for it. So there is plenty of potential for bias, as well as incompetence, to affect the way research is conducted, and the results it comes up with.

Research is not just academic -- for two reasons:

• It is often so slipshod that it can hardly be called "academic" -- if it produces the outcome that was desired, that will often be good enough to pass muster;
• There is a production-line relationship between research and legislation/policy. Research is very often used as the basis for media programmes and articles, which, in turn, make it easier for the research results to be turned into policy or legislation. Some Western legislation and policy incorporates assumptions which are pathologically anti-male, being based on the simple handing-over of research on the Sex War to one of the warring factions (the Feminists).

 

Feminist Research is oppression -- may I count the ways ?

1. It oppresses by reaching conclusions that are not indicated by the objective outcomes of the research -- or by failing to reach conclusions which are highly probable;
2. It oppresses by censoring, de-emphasising, or ignoring unwelcome conclusions that emerge from other research;
3. It oppresses by using shoddy methodology, because the conclusions are predetermined;
4. It oppresses by the selection of topics to research and of questions to include in questionnaires;
5. It oppresses by only hearing and publicising one side of the story;
6. It oppresses by giving facile explanations for inconvenient facts.

 

The above features are typical of Feminist and other Ideologically Correct research. Here are some examples:

 

1. It oppresses by reaching conclusions that are not merited by the objective outcomes of the research -- or by failing to reach conclusions which are highly probable.

For example, the official Ministry of Justice publication "Sentencing in New Zealand: a statistical analysis" states:

"Gender ‘is not in and of itself a justification for discriminating between offenders’ .... Yet, the results of the multivariate modelling show that females are more likely than males to receive community service, community programme or no sentence and less likely to receive a prison sentence, periodic detention or a monetary penalty. Thus, gender differences in sentencing persist even after taking account of differences in the type and seriousness of the offence committed (e.g. the average seriousness of offences committed by women is lower than for men) and in the extent of previous offending (e.g. women have fewer previous convictions on average ...). Indeed, gender is the amongst the most significant variables influencing the probability of receiving a community service sentence or a monetary penalty.

The reason for these gender differences in sentencing cannot be determined from the statistical analysis."

If it wasn't for the Feminist assumption that women are oppressed (and therefore men are not), the obvious conclusion based on those findings would be that the Legal System discriminates against men. At the very least, this would be seen as a prima facie (first assessment) case that men are discriminated against.

Another example is "The First Year Report of the New Jersey Supreme Court Task Force on Women in the Courts -- June 1984" -- published in 1986 in the Women's Rights Law Reporter, Volume 9, Number 2. This appears to have been the forerunner for numerous other such studies in English-speaking countries, in cluding New Zealand.

The Task Force, which had twice as many women as men in it, saw nothing wrong in preferring to accept the views of women over those of men, when their views differed on the issue of gender bias:

"The perceptions and experiences reported by female attorneys ... differed markedly from those of male attorneys in most categories of questions.... Because gender bias impacts most directly on women, it should not be surprising that female attorneys are more aware of it than are males" (page 136).

This is an extraordinary viewpoint, for two reasons:

1. It assumes, without a shred of proof, that gender bias affects women more than men (even though the Task Force itself discovered bias against men in the Courts which it never claimed explicitly to be less important than the bias against women that it also uncovered).
2. If the gender of the obervers affects their judgement as to the prevalence of gender bias, then the unequal numbers of men and women in the Task Force itself must surely, by the Task Force's own logic, condemn the Task Force's findings as inevitably biased against men. As indeed they are !

It seems to me obvious that the defendant is the person most at risk in a criminal court. He (and it is usally "he") stands to lose money, liberty, or even his life as a result of the proceedings -- yet the New Jersey study relegated the issue of gender bias against defendants in criminal cases to sections of a mere 7 pages in the 49-page report. Though evidence was found of gender bias in sentencing, it was only against men -- and so the female-dominated Task Force decided that further study was needed before any action needed to be taken.

Instead, the Task Force concentrated on the treatment of women lawyers by male judges and lawyers! And yet the Report itself indicates that most attorneys surveyed by the Task Force thought that this kind of bias did not even affect case outcomes!

I am not in favour of such behaviour, but I make two points here:

• These issues are trivial compared to the penalties suffered by mainly male defendants, and a high proportion of these penalties are the result of Feminist-inspired anti-male bias all the way down the chain from funding for research, to funding for pressure-groups, to framing of legislation, to enforcement of legislation, to rules of evidence, to conviction-rates, to sentencing practices -- all the way down to prison conditions and rehabilitation, and beyond.
• The Task Force (op. cit., 137) cited statistics which showed that bias in favour of women was just as prevalent in courtrooms as bias against women. Even the Task Force's assumption that women were more aware of bias against women than men were does not excuse it for virtually ignoring this point: Yet the Report mentioned only ways that bias against women could be diminished -- no mention was made of any possible measures to diminish bias in favour of women (i.e. against men).

Here is another example of how Feminism blinkers researchers: Genevieve Poirier, in "Parental Alienation Syndrome in New Zealand" (2002, LLB (Hons) Research Paper, Law Faculty, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)., sums up her survey of the cases reported so far that have involved allegations of Parental Alienation Syndrome as follows:

"Interestingly four of the five cases involved children in the primary custody of their fathers against whom PAS was alleged. This is contrary to the majority of cases in New Zealand, where children of the relationship continue to live in the primary custody of their mother after separation. This sample size is too small to come to any conclusion on that fact, however it is merely noted that this seems not to coincide with Gardner's original opinion that the mother is the alienating parent in 90 per cent of cases, or even with his recent contention that the split between alienating parents is equal."

Poirier is quite right to emphasise the smallness of the sample, but if one were to say anything further about this at all (as she does), it would seem appropriate to link it to the well-known claim by Fathers' Rights activists that the Family Court is biased against fathers. Here we have some of the few cases where fathers actually have been granted custody, and so what does the court do ? -- it resorts to the notion of Parental Alienation which (as the small number of cases shows) is a relatively new and uncertain diagnosis in New Zealand, in order to strip the fathers of their custodial rights ! It is, indeed, a recurrent feature of the Law that breakthroughs and new causes of action are usually created by chivalrous courts to applicant women against men -- and almost never by applicant men against women.

 

2. It oppresses by censoring, de-emphasising, or ignoring unwelcome conclusions that emerge from other research.

The Domestic Violence and the Justice System report commissioned by the "Victims Task Force" quotes Hilary Lapsley: The Measurement of Family Violence: A Critical Review of the Literature, 1993, Wellington: Social Policy Agency, as follows (page 32):

"However, physical attacks on men by women are likely to be less damaging, are more likely to occur in self-defence and are less likely to occur in an atmosphere of fear and coercion. Although men may sometimes be on the receiving end of physical assaults, they are seldom victimised by continual abuse."

The above passage misquotes Lapsely (on page 35) by missing out the words "or in exchange" after the words "likely to occur in self-defence" (above), which distorts the meaning of the sentence in a way that disadvantages men. It would be an optimist who thought that was unintentional.

 

3. It oppresses by using shoddy methodology, because the conclusions are predetermined.

One phenomenal example of this is Lenore Walker's book, "The Battered Woman", which is so sexist and man-hating that it is practically a recruiting poster for Al Qaeda. In his review of it, Robert Sheaffer says:

The Battered Woman is unsatisfactory as a serious work, and completely unacceptable as a foundation for family law. First, it is profoundly unscholarly. Without objective verification of the incidents herein described, they are nothing more than hearsay. Second, the book does not even pretend to be objective: the woman's side, and only the woman's side, is presented, when it is undeniable that in a large percentage of cases, the woman initiates violence against the man. Third, Prof. Walker's expanded definition of "battering" that includes verbal abuse does not even address the issue of female verbal abuse of men. Fourth, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that Prof. Walker's sample of "battered women" is in any way a representative sample, and even if it were, she presents no statistics to support her conclusions. In fact, most of her conclusions are utterly unsupported by any kind of data, and are simply pronounced ex cathedra."

 

4. It oppresses by the selection of topics to research and of questions to include in questionnaires.

Lapsley (on page 37) focuses on the concept of fear in family violence research, because fear is an emotion that women -- more than men -- often express in the context of Domestic Violence, and focusing on this might be a way of diverting attention away from the essential equality of Domestic Violence, as measured by Straus, Gelles and their colleagues.

"It may well be that fear is a factor which, if measured, could help distinguish between abusive violence and more minor types of family violence.... making this distinction has been a problem for survey-type research."

Lapsley's distinction between "abusive violence" and "more minor types of family violence" is subjective (see below), and is really just a way of claiming (without comparative evidence) that male violence is worse than female violence.

She goes on to suggest that creators of future questionnaires might look at including questions about fear, in order to increase the survey's "validity". This suggestion was taken up in the 1996 New Zealand National Survey of Crime Victims, commissioned by the Victimisation Survey Committee, comprising representatives from the Police, Ministry of Women's Affairs, and other government agencies. The questionnaire had been slanted to make it appear men hit women more frequently than the other way around. The questionnaire (from Table 2.13) did not ask men and women simply whether:

1. Any partner ever actually used force or violence on you, such as deliberately kicked, pushed, grabbed, shoved you or hit you with something; or
2. Any partner ever threatened to use force or violence on you such as threatened to kick, push, grab, or shove you; or
3. Any partner ever deliberately destroyed or threatened to destroy your belongings.

Instead of those straightforward question, the questionnaire asked whether:

1. Any partner ever actually used force or violence on you, such as deliberately kicked, pushed, grabbed, shoved you or hit you with something in a way that could hurt you; and
2. Any partner ever threatened to use force or violence on you such as threatened to kick, push, grab, or shove you in a way that actually frightened you; and
3. Any partner ever deliberately destroyed or threatened to destroy your belongings in a way that frightened you.

The bias against men responding positively is immediately obvious, since men are socialised to downplay fear and to be relatively insensitive to pain. This was confirmed by data from another table (page 81) in the very same survey, which showed that 50.5 percent of women, as compared to only 31.4 percent of men, reported experiencing fear when on the receiving end of a violent offence. So the results of this survey are useless as evidence of the comparative incidence of domestic violence committed by women, as compared to men. I cannot think of any reason for the questions being framed in that way, except in order to make women appear to be more frequent victims of family violence than men are. The focus is women's subjective experience of events, rather than the events themselves.

There are other negative emotions apart from fear. Men undoubtedly do feel such emotions when on the receiving end of female abuse -- but researchers would have to be interested in their emotions, would have to research them, and would have to publish the results, before these emotions would become widely known. Feminist researchers, however, would never "waste time" on men's emotions, when they are so busy maximising the hysteria around women's emotions.

 

5. It oppresses by only hearing and publicising one side of the story.

Lapsley (1993, page 3) writes:

'... (Straus, Gelles and their colleagues' studies) do not adequately capture the differences between male-initiated and female-initiated violence, because they do not pick up the syndrome of emotional/physical/sexual violence, which is so frequently the pattern found in men's abuse of female partners, but which is rarely found when women hit their male partners.'

This is the typical reaction of someone who is disappointed that the results of objective research do not support her preconceptions. A "syndrome" is a theoretical construct which is imposed on data by a researcher. There is inevitably some subjectivity involved in deciding when there is a syndrome present. There is an onus on anyone claiming to have found a syndrome to use rational argument to show that it is not just imaginary. However, Feminists typically do not make themselves vulnerable by resorting to rational argumentation, since that is not their strong suit. Their tactic is repetion of unfounded claims, since they have the numbers on their side, and if people hear a lie often enough they tend to believe it.

The way that Feminists "find" what Lapsley calls the "syndrome of emotional/physical/sexual violence, which is so frequently the pattern found in men's abuse of female partners" is to interview women, believe everything they say, and to avoid asking the men involved for their side of the story. This makes for good fiction -- but it is the way that it's dressed up as "research" that I object to. When she finds a study that contradicts what she wants to believe ( e.g. Suzanne Steinmetz: "The Battered Husband Syndrome", 1978, Victimology, 2, 499-509), Lapsley just chooses not to take it seriously.

 

6. It oppresses by giving facile explanations for inconvenient facts.

Referring to Suzanne Steinmetz: "The Battered Husband Syndrome" (1978, Victimology, 2, 499-509), Hilary Lapsley: The Measurement of Family Violence: A Critical Review of the Literature (1993, Wellington: Social Policy Agency, on page 34), states:

"This paper led to considerable controversy and points to the weakness of the approach to family violence measurement which focuses on counting "hits", rather than describing a syndrome, well-known to those who work with battered women (and to the women themselves), which arises from living in an atmosphere of fear, threats and violence which can be life-endangering."

Obviously, counting hits is an objective measure, whereas a "syndrome" is a theoretical/imaginary construct/pattern which a researcher places on observed events. Once you start talking about "syndromes", it becomes a subjective issue involving which syndromes you "like" and which ones you "don't like". While there are probably cases where women do live in an atmosphere of fear, threats and violence which can be life-endangering, Lapsley is indifferent to the possibility that men, too, might be living in such atmospheres -- or in atmospheres where they experience equally negative emotions of a slightly different sort.

Last Update: 22 November 2004

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