As promised to Mr. Haynes at his first meeting with Professor Christensen, this document is written to discuss the relevance of spouse-abuse literature which has been produced by the Family Centre since the lodging of MERGE’s complaint to the AHRCC about its earlier family-violence literature.

Mr. Haynes made it clear at the meeting that the later brochures, not being mentioned in the original complaint, are not relevant to whether that complaint will be upheld; any objection under the Human Rights Act regarding their content would require a new complaint to be laid. That seems perfectly correct to us; their existence in no way answers the question of whether the original document itself does or does not violate the Act.

As expressed to him at the time, however, as we see it the later literature does potentially bear on a related issue: the issue of what kind of penalty would be appropriate, in addition to finding that original piece of literature in violation. For it can help to reveal how willing those in control of the Family Centre are to avoid that sort of stereotyping discrimination in future. In principle, how they have changed their publicity on the subject could signal the intent to be fully honest and unbiased henceforth, thus indicating that stern measures are not needed. Or it could signal the opposite.

Our claim is that the latter is the case. We argue below that the content of the new literature reflects tokenism instead: an attempt to appear now balanced in the approach to family violence, while in fact promoting essentially the same stereotype as before. The average person, and even agents of this Commission, might be taken in by the tokenism. It is therefore imperative for us to reveal the deception here.

‘Deception’ is a strong word, and we would not make it without solid grounds. But it is important to be clear that attempts to deceive take many forms. One can successfully promote a falsehood without ever actually telling the falsehood. That is why language is replete with words such as ‘dissimulation’ and ‘sophistry’ (and, of late, ‘clintonesque’). It is why not just perjury but also obstruction of justice, which includes various other attempts (such as suppressing evidence) to mislead the court, are criminal offenses. But because people in general see outright falsehood as more serious, many who would deceive turn to other tactics instead. Then, if caught, they can say "Hey, I didn’t lie!" But morally, there is no difference: the desire to deceive is the same, and the potential for harm is the same. In this document and in our reply to the Family Centre’s latest defence, we must expose that kind of behavior on their part.

Unlike the brochure under complaint, the new brochures discuss abused husbands and abusive wives, not just abused wives and abusive husbands. In all of its lengthy discussion, that original piece of literature always talks as if only men commit violence against their partners and only women suffer it. At first glance, then, the replacements appear to have corrected the problem. In fact, however, the new ones arguably promote the prejudicial stereotype worse than before. Here is why.

Point number one: In daily life, people often approximate or round-off their crude statistical claims; they often say or imply ‘all’, for instance, when correctness would require them to say ‘nearly all’, or ‘98%’, or the like. Knowing this, few readers of the original brochure would have been led to think that there literally never are any assaultive wives at all. Instead, they would read it as saying that for all practical purposes the percentage of such women is zero; that there are some, but not enough to be worth mentioning. Hence, what the new brochures do with their statistics is to say explicitly what the old one was saying implicitly: that there are almost no assaultive wives or assaulted husbands. In other words, the serious falsehood they were promoting—the whole point of our complaint—has not really changed with the new brochures.

In an important way, in fact, it is even worse. This brings us to point number two: In the modern world, claims made under the imprimatur or with the trappings of science—notably with statistics—are much more apt to be believed. "Gee, there are actual numbers behind that claim—it must be what scientific research has discovered." Consequently, efforts to deceive which employ statistics represent a particularly calculating and reprehensible variety of such efforts. A discriminatory stereotype backed up by bogus statistics is much more likely to be accepted as fact by the public at large. Let us consider some details of the present case.

One statistic is presented in the brochure’s sentence, "Some researchers state that 1% of the cases of violence in the home is husband abuse. Others believe that it occurs more frequently."

To reveal how outrageous this piece of sophistry is, suppose a certain piece of Holocaust-denial literature contained the claim "Some researchers state that a few thousand Jews were deliberately killed because of their race by the Nazis; others believe there were more." Given the extreme vagueness of the two words ‘some’ and ‘more’, this statement is perfectly true. There are "some" such researchers—a very few individuals, deep in the thrall of ideology, who make claims of that ilk. And since ‘more’ can mean anything from a few more thousands to millions more, that part of the claim is also not false. But in [1] focusing on what is believed rather than reporting what the evidence says, and in [2] suppressing the facts about what the large majority of such researchers believe, the hypothetical Holocaust passage nevertheless grotesquely distorts the truth of the matter. And so it is with that statement in the new brochures.

Even the word ‘researcher’ here is interestingly vague; it need not refer to anyone with scientific credentials. And though there are undoubtedly clinicians sufficiently steeped in ideology to make the "1%" claim, it is doubtful that even the most extreme ideologues among scientific researchers today would use such a low figure. Certainly, the researchers selectively cited by the Family Centre itself in its latest response to MERGE’s complaint do not do so. The claim that even "some" researchers believe a minuscule 1% of spouse abuse is by women is thus of highly dubious origins.

But wait—don’t the new brochures themselves tell us the source of the "1%" figure? After all, they present two pieces of claimed statistical information and, at the bottom of the page, two "information sources". Then since the citation to Alberta Justice clearly refers to the statistic on police arrests, the other citation must be the source of the other statistic, the one on researchers, must it not? Certainly, that is what the reasonable reader would be led to believe. "They are being responsible reporters of statistics; they are telling us where they got the facts they claim, and doing so in the standard way." And, to repeat, misleading without actually lying is what dissimulation consists in.

Here is where the deceit really gets brazen. For the reference given is to an article by Dr. Suzanne Steinmetz, a pioneer in sociological research on wife abuse. But that article is not the source of the 1% figure. To the contrary, it is a survey and discussion of the data then available (over 20 years ago—vastly more exists now) indicating that close to equal numbers of men and women assault their partners! Professor Steinmetz has spent years using the results of scientific research to oppose the anti-male propaganda on spousal abuse. (She has even come to Edmonton to do so; the videotapes of her lecture are still available at the University of Alberta Faculty of Medicine.) To suppress her actual conclusions, and then cite her as a source of the "information" that only a tiny percentage of spouse abusers are women, goes well beyond sophistry. If done deliberately, it differs in no appreciable degree from a flat-out lie. And it is very difficult to see how it could have been an honest mistake.

For the record, a large majority of scientific researchers believe the percentage of those committing spouse abuse who are women is far, far greater than that 1% figure. (More detail on this subject in our brief.) In suppressing that fact, and instead making it appear that the researcher consensus is just above 1%, this claim in the new brochures is using techniques of deceit. And it is doing so to promote the same bigoted stereotype of men and women as the original brochure did.

The other figure cited in the new brochures, that giving Alberta police-arrest data for 1996, is correct—5%. It is in a different category: it is about the percentages of officially acted-on alleged assaults, not about percentages of actual assaults between partners. And as a source of information about actual assaults, arrest statistics are notoriously unreliable. But this fact is not hinted at in the new brochures. Though 5% is not quite so outrageous a distortion as 1%, it is still grossly far from the truth, as we reveal in our reply to the Family Centre’s "Response" brief.

At this point, the key fact is that, owing to widespread attitudes, there is massive bias against men in spouse-abuse arrests. The evidence available overwhelmingly indicates this to be the case. One such piece of evidence is Attachment I: results from a nationwide US survey in which respondents were asked anonymously how police responded to complaints of spousal assault. Another piece is the consistent result from police statistics that abused male partners of arrested women have suffered much more physical harm than abused female partners of arrested men have (noted in one of the attachments to MERGE’s original complaint): Because abusive women do more damage than abusive men?—far more likely, because a man has to suffer much more harm before he will report or police will arrest.

And then there is the fact that police arrest statistics vary greatly from one jurisdiction to another, seemingly because of differing degrees of formal or informal bias. At about the same time as Alberta police arrests were producing that 5% female-arrestee figure, the number in Manitoba was about 15%; in some places they have been much higher yet. (But not in many; in most the prejudiced attitudes and stereotypes are very strong.) More direct evidence of the bias affecting police is revealed in Attachments J and K. And, for whatever our direct testimony is worth, MERGE has encountered scores of individual cases of police bias regarding spouse abuse here in Alberta.

Because of this influence acting to keep the percentage of arrested women very low, the Family Centre’s use of police statistics to back up its stereotype involves a serious circularity. In part, that bias in arrests in Alberta has been produced by years of anti-male spouse-abuse propaganda produced by the Family Centre and its ideological allies here. The new literature’s sole redeeming feature in this regard is its statement that society has socialized men not to talk about it if they are abused.

But clearly, the new brochures’ main answer to its question "Why Don’t I Hear About [abused husbands]?" is that there aren’t enough to hear about. The blazingly important answer that people haven’t heard about it because information has been systematically suppressed in the standard publicity certainly wouldn’t be mentioned in the new brochures. And the idea that the Family Centre and its fellow travelers are themselves partially responsible for men’s failure to report—responsible by virtue of years of sending the message that deterrence for abusive women and help for abused men is not worthy of mention—is of course nowhere in sight.

In summary, the new brochures are indeed tokenism, revealing a determination to go on promoting the original stereotype.

At this point a word on the nature of stereotypes is in order. The term as commonly used is somewhat vague; but to stereotype surely does not require that only percentages of literally 100% and 0% be asserted or implied. For comparison, consider a claim that, say, 97% (a rough average of the new brochures’ two figures) of fraud between Jews and non-Jews is committed by the Jew. Given that the actual figure is far lower (and quite likely at 50%), to make this claim would be to engage in a pernicious stereotype—one surely actionable by this Commission. Even in a case of genuinely disproportionate wrongdoing, moreover, negatively distorting the facts about a category of human beings can have serious consequences. It is seemingly true that, owing to tragic societal conditions, the percentages of blacks and natives committing crimes is higher than the percentages of whites doing so. But exaggerating the figures far beyond what they actually are would have—has had—seriously harmful effects.

The reason is this: in the world of practical decision-making (notably by police, judges, social workers, etc.), near-100% probabilities are often treated the same as 100% ones. Thus, promoting the grossly false idea that almost all spouse-abusers are men is, in practical terms, about as harmful as promoting the grossly false idea that all are. And those who promote either know that that is the case. To repeat, the contents of the new Family Centre literature are not relevant to the decision as to whether the old one violated the Act. But they are surely relevant to the rest of the adjudication of this case.

From the Executive Board of MERGE

June 30, 1999