The Family Centre has finally submitted a reply (hereafter, "the Response") to MERGE’s complaint against them which goes beyond being angry and dismissive (their first written reply) or patronising and dismissive (their second). This one contains arguments requiring an extended reply of our own. Unfortunately, it also continues the pattern of dishonesty which we have had to protest before. Some sophistical techniques are pretty shallow, though still capable of deceiving; it will be best to get these out of the way before going to the issues of genuine substance.

One such technique is the "red herring", an attempt to evade the real issues by leading the discussion away after irrelevant ones. Nearly half of the Response’s 8 text pages are taken up with such irrelevancies, we submit.

Consider the Response’s charge (page 1, paragraphs 6 and 7) that a particular statement in MERGE’s submission to the Commission accuses the Family Centre of engaging in a "conspiracy" with agencies in the justice system. The phrase ‘in other words’ expresses a plain falsehood; the actual meaning of that sentence of ours is perfectly clear. It speaks simply of all the harm stereotypes promoted to the public do, in the justice system in particular. No one in Canada today can be ignorant of how prejudiced portrayal of societal groups can lead to prejudiced actions against those groups. It does not require any collusion for depictions by some to lead to actions by others. The acts of the latter can be performed, unjust but in good faith, simply because they have been deceived by the falsehoods of the former. In grossly mislabeling our actual accusation—and using a loaded term like ‘conspiracy’ at that—the Response engages in misrepresentation as well as evasion. To escape facing the fact that they have promoted harmful stereotypes to the public, Rod Rode and others who dominate the Family Centre continue their pattern of dishonesty on this serious subject.

Pages 2 and 3 of the Response are taken up by a list of Family Centre areas of endeavor, currently and over time; page 4 lists its current workers’ credentials and experience. No explicit reason is given for presenting all that, but the implicit arguments are evidently something like this: The brochure could not have been discriminatory, because [1] the Family Centre engages in so many good works, and because [2] its people are so well trained. (Regarding the latter, it is interesting that the Response would list all the employees’ degrees while consistently referring to the president of MERGE as "Mr." For the record, Professor Christensen has a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Science, with 25 years of teaching such subjects as ethics and scientific methodology.)

The essence of this argument is the fallacy of black-and-white reasoning: Having done so much good, the Family Centre couldn’t have done one bad thing; being so knowledgeable, it couldn’t have had one blind spot. But humans do not come in all black and all white. Indeed, prejudices notoriously occur in people who are decent and intelligent in other ways. One has learned nothing from a century dominated by ideologies which distort perception of facts, and by prejudices which impair ethical judgement, if one has not learned to be ever vigilant for such failings in his or her own self. As regards organizations rather than individuals, there is nothing to say that an organization with a noble history cannot have changed in recent years, or that one decent in most respects now cannot be dominated in certain areas by a few who have a dark side.

These latter comments are not meant to make claims about the actual situation in the Family Centre; they are about the logic of the argument under discussion. For as long as there are many ways in which any organization could be good overall and still be guilty of a seriously wrong act, the argument that general goodness precludes specific bad acts is virtually worthless. (Further to this, the Commission’s Mr. Haynes has informed MERGE that the motives behind production of the brochure are not considered relevant to whether it violates the Act.) In this context, moreover, the argument is another evasion. It is reminiscent of stories of medieval scholars debating at length how many teeth a horse must have, when what was required was to look and see how many it actually has. In the present debate, the only relevant arguments are those which address the question, Does that brochure promote a prejudicial stereotype? To repeat, much of the Response is composed of irrelevance rather than honest argument.

Other irrelevancies in the Response are unclear in their purpose. Notably, page 8’s "Why use statistics" section states nothing which MERGE has denied, or would deny. Importantly missing, however, is any warning about the counterproductive effects and other dangers of promoting false statistics. It is to be hoped that, in extolling the utilitarian values of publicising statistics in their own work, the Family Centre is not implying that truth and falsity are of secondary importance. For it is a fact (see our submission on their more recent brochures, and later discussion in this brief) that the Family Centre has published grossly false statistics on the topic under discussion.

The subjects of the opening two paragraphs of the Response are certainly relevant to the issue before us. Unfortunately, the arguments there still employ an outrageous level of sophistry in order to avoid facing the issue squarely.

One such argument is slipped by very quickly, and must be held up to the light. "The brochure was labeled ‘Family Violence’. It is evident upon reading that it dealt specifically with violence toward women, not any other type of violence." The evident intent here is to imply that, in dealing only with abuse of women partners, the brochure actually conveyed no message at all regarding abuse by wives/of husbands—even though the title was inclusive of violence by and toward both sexes. This sort of ploy is precisely why in our various submissions, MERGE has stressed the evil of deceiving without actually stating falsehoods.

In the brochure itself, that evil took the form of suppressing information highly relevant to the context, in spite of knowing the probable effect on readers. In discussing family violence, at great length, without once mentioning that women do it too, the brochure clearly promotes the idea that there is not enough serious violence by wives to be worthy of mention. (One specific point to be discussed more later: The brochure went to the trouble of citing Alberta survey-statistics on spouse abuse, yet reported only the half of those numbers which summarize abuse by men. It suppressed the half of the data about abuse by women, and hence hid the surveys’ finding that women do it about equally often.) Stereotyping doesn’t have to be done using explicit false statements; in fact, it is usually not done that way.

To address such dissimulation in the most concrete way, MERGE included its own racial paraphrase (nowhere mentioned in the Response) of the brochure in our original complaint submission. If Mr. Rode’s people genuinely believe their argument—believe that failing to mention one category of violent person in such a context really conveys no stereotyping message about the complementary category—let us propose an empirical test. Let the Family Centre distribute our paraphrase from its offices to persons of color, and see how they react. For good measure, we could even replace the "Racial Relations Centre" name and the clip-art world-globe logo with the Family Centre’s name and logo on the paraphrase brochure. Then we could also see how persons of color react when Mr. Rode explains to them that, after all, the publication just doesn’t happen to mention violence by whites against non-whites. And there just doesn’t happen to be any other brochure which does so. And therefore, it really doesn’t do any stereotyping and you people have no business complaining about us responsible professionals.

We don’t need to conduct such a test to know what the response would be. Any honest person today knows that such a brochure, intended seriously, would be judged by the public at large as gross stereotyping, and that any human rights commission in Canada would so judge it. Mr. Rode, YOU know that. Your persistent evasion on this core matter—that of what constitutes stereotyping—is nothing short of grotesque.

Let it be noted that the title of the "Family Violence" brochure, though certainly revealing, is not crucial to the issue. Such a totally one-sided portrayal in a brochure labeled "Violence by non-whites" would still be recognized by the public as gross stereotyping. Indeed, they would recognize it as hate-propaganda. The main difference in the case of the actual brochure is this: the public at large does not realize to just how strong a degree the brochure misrepresents the facts on spouse abuse. We will turn to that subject shortly.

But the sophistry in those two beginning paragraphs does not end there. Consider this assertion: "The brochure in question is one of several pieces of literature that relate to family violence. We think it implausible that one brochure of many could represent a violation of human rights." Well, for the record, a single act of speech or a single publication has not infrequently been so adjudged in Canada. But the point of this argument in the Response is evidently that those "many" other pieces of literature told the rest of the story on spouse abuse—and hence served to balance out the one under complaint. If that is not what is being implied, then mention of the other literature would be quite pointless. But if that is the intent, it is certainly important to the question before us: it would mean that during the time period involved, at least overall, the Family Centre was not publicly promoting the image that only men commit spousal abuse and only women suffer it.

So the question now before us is this. Were there in fact, during or around the time this brochure was being distributed by the Family Centre, other brochures disseminated by them which, through telling the rest of the story, balanced out the picture of spousal abuse being presented to the public? Yet if such literature existed, it is very odd that the Response merely insinuates its existence, rather than saying explicitly that other brochures talked about violence by wives and against husbands. This looks for all the world like yet another instance of trying to mislead.

And for whatever it may mean, during the two years before deciding to launch our complaint, members of MERGE repeatedly inspected the publicity rack in the Family Centre’s main office for literature by them. Over that time we found, in succession, three different versions of a family-violence brochure (Attachment A), launching our complaint on the worst of them. But we never found a word indicating that anyone but men commit it. Also for the record, we have a fair selection of the writings on family violence by key persons in the Family Centre’s counseling program in recent years. Their anti-male bias is constant. (Attachment B is one example.)

The paragraphs in question conclude with the statement: "Old brochures have developed over time based on the needs of the community, and in response to MERGE we have no difficulty in having developed new brochures to reflect a wider range of patterns of violence." (A closely similar assertion composes the first paragraph of the Conclusion.) MERGE’s complaint hardly constitutes a change in community needs—the real needs are those of violent women for deterrence and counseling, and of abused husbands and their children for help and counseling. True, during the years of only-men-do-it propaganda, survey incidence of abused wives across the continent has steadily decreased, while that of abused husbands has not. This is one of many pieces of evidence that stereotypes and other messages to the public influence behavior; in this case, the seeming influence is over whether individuals will commit such violence. But there has not just suddenly been an emergence of a new need. It has been there all along.

As for the Family Centre’s attempt at self-exculpation in the sentence "Nevertheless, concepts and terminology change over time", it is too transparent to require discussion.

In contrast to all this irrelevance, the fact that the Family Centre has responded to our complaint by producing new literature on spousal abuse is certainly relevant to the complaint, relevant in the sense laid out in MERGE’s submission specifically addressing the new brochures. (Attachment C.) Now, since the Family Centre absolutely denies there was anything objectionable about the original brochure, they are evidently trying to have it both ways. In any case, as is argued carefully in Attachment C, and contrary to what is claimed in the Response’s conclusion, the new literature was not produced in good faith. And it certainly does not replace the stereotyping of the earlier brochure with correct, non-stereotyping information. Quite the contrary.

Whether the Family Centre’s brochures do in fact stereotype depends partly upon what actual proportions of spouse abusers are male and female. Upon whether, as they imply and claim in all brochures, the percentage who are female is minuscule, or whether it is substantial. Paragraph 3 of the Response opens discussion of that question with the words, "Mr. Christensen questions the degree to which TFC personnel are aware of relevant research, and implies that TFC practitioners are not professionally responsible. This brief will speak to the credibility of the organization…." Their brief has indeed already done that, and will continue to do so.

One short but important defence of its claims about percentages of violent husbands and wives is made in the Response’s section labeled "Our experience". It refers to the abused husbands and abusive wives they have allegedly treated on an individual basis over time, and asserts the belief that the Family Centre’s experience reflects fairly well the actual percentages of abused husbands and abusive wives in the community they are supposed to serve. Unfortunately, the statements on this matter are totally unclear regarding the actual numbers, hedging through use of the extremely vague word ‘small’ in describing those numbers. It could refer to anything from a substantial minority of cases of spousal abuse to the minuscule numbers they have been claiming and implying in their brochures.

In any case, the suggestion that the numbers the Family Centre has been seeing is anything like those in the community is wholly unjustified. Of all people, social services providers should know the sorry history of bringing family abuse out of the closet. Not until there was large-scale publicity about child abuse were any but the farthest advanced cases of child battering discovered; after the problem was widely publicised, cases began coming to the attention of authorities in large numbers. Not until there was wide-scale publicity of wife abuse did large numbers of women begin to come forward and identify themselves. Common publicity on spousal abuse, including the Family Centre’s past brochures, has sent the plain messages "abused husbands need not apply" and "abusive wives really don’t exist". Yet the Family Centre thinks such persons would still have come forward in numbers proportionate to their existence in the community. To the contrary: they are being pushed back into the closet by such messages.

Another parallel exists from recent history. In the 1980’s, there was large-scale publicity on child sexual abuse in Canada. The therapists were largely feminists, which is understandable in the circumstances. But extremist feminists, with their vicious sexist mentality, controlled much of what was being done. In certain quarters, some attempted to keep the treatment and publicity limited to female victims; when others tried to get child sex-abuse of boys publicly recognized as a real problem too, even though a smaller one, they were met with fierce opposition and cries of "backlash". Only when there were appreciable amounts of publicity over sexual abuse of boys—this is the point of the comparison—did large numbers of boys and men begin to come forward. People were amazed at how many there turned out to be. In the case of spousal abuse, the Family Centre pretends to know the actual percentages of males and females based on their own past experience. Given the circumstances, this claim is self-serving in the extreme.

There is a broader problem here which must be pointed out. Very often, official reports of wrongdoing reflect only a small percentage of the actual cases that have occurred. Clinical statistics, police statistics, and so on can be very different from real-world statistics, both in overall size and in their sub-category distribution. Especially when reasons are already known as to why the official numbers might be unrepresentative of the actual ones, it is crucial to seek a more direct source of information about the actual numbers—some way of going to the "total population" rather than relying on the "clinical population". Attempts to do so standardly involve starting with a sample of individuals from the total population which is representative (randomly chosen or in some other way plausibly representative). Then, in circumstances arranged to best elicit honest answers, these persons are questioned regarding the kind of experience or action about which knowledge is being sought. Make no mistake: there are many ways in which the information so gathered can itself be erroneous. But in general, this method of getting statistical information has many advantages over self-initiated reports to officials.

The Response from the Family Centre spends nearly all of its discussion of statistics on those gathered from surveys of the general public. On pages 5 and 6 are given a series of arguments regarding the credibility of certain survey research, research which consistently finds that women assault their partners about as often as men do. The paragraphs laying out the reasoning are complete with numerous citations to the scientific literature, the works cited being, together with a few others, compiled in the bibliography at the end of the Response. To ordinary people, not being acquainted with the scientific survey literature, that list of arguments and experts certainly would look impressive, and so it must be addressed here.

First, however, an important observation must be made. Placed inconspicuously among all the other citations on those pages are two seemingly non-existent works by "Johnson" dated 1988 and 1998. In the bibliography, however, is to be found a 1996 book by H[olly] Johnson, a feminist researcher for Statistics Canada. The whole passage on pages 5 and 6 was taken, almost totally word-for-word including all the other citations, from a few pages in that one book by her. (See Attachment D.) And this was all done without attribution—with no indication that this entire part of the Response was not written by the Family Centre but lifted from someone else. Now, the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission is not in the business of judging plagiarism. But its occurrence in the context of MERGE’s complaint is powerfully significant for two reasons.

First, by tossing off so many arguments from so many sources in the survey literature, the authors of the Response calculatingly give the impression of themselves having a solid acquaintance with scientific sources of information on family violence. In fact, to one actually knowing the scientific literature reasonably well, every document which the Family Centre has produced to date suggests that they do not know that literature at all. (Which is what made it immediately obvious to look for plagiarism.) But others—notably members of the Commission —might be influenced by the impressive appearances. They might even be impressed enough to say, "These people at the Family Centre are responsible professionals, clearly well acquainted with the technical evidence on this complex subject. It is not for us to second-guess them." Deceit must not be allowed to win this case.

Secondly, it is strongly suggested by this episode that when the Family Centre people do want information about what the scientific literature reveals, they do not seek, or themselves make, an impartial survey of that literature. Nor do they make it a point to track down the evidence needed to weigh both sides of disputed issues. Instead, they do what ideologues of every stripe do: they go to the claims of people on the side they antecedently want to believe, and take their words for gospel truth. They blindly parrot a party line. Not only is this not being scientific, it is another form of dishonesty. Those at the Family Centre who decide what is written on family violence issues are not responsible professionals; they are corrupt professionals.

All that said, some things must be pointed out here in reply to Holly Johnson’s arguments. Though genuinely knowledgeable in the area herself, she is also highly biased, notably in her failure to present both sides of the issues she raises. There is reason to believe that her own reading of much scientific literature does not extend very far beyond her circle of ideological allies. But her partisan treatment of this particular topic is ultra-brief, and so, necessarily, is the reply here. (The arguments of the next three sections are solely those of Professor Christensen; some other members of the Board of MERGE possess statistical skills, but not the required background in the scientific literature specifically on partner abuse, to be able to judge most matters at issue.) For all that, as it turns out, she is a better witness for our complaint than for the Family Centre’s defence. But the record should be set straight.

The Response introduces the issue of what the scientific research reveals in the fourth paragraph of page 1: "The brief will also speak to the research cited by Mr. Christensen. It is our opinion that the research he cites fails to support his conclusions because the instrument upon which it is based, the Conflict Tactics Scale, is not appropriate to capture the reality of violence in adult relationships." The Family Centre’s conscienceless misrepresentation continues, pretending now that our sole source of research data is a single partner-abuse questionnaire. On page 6, they back off from this claim by saying that "Much of the research cited in the complaint" employs that particular research tool—but still alleging that it is not a legitimate measure of partner violence. In fact, a half-dozen or so different questionnaires have been employed by social scientists to discover violence by both spouses, and there is good agreement among their results. The Conflict Tactics Scale has been an important element of the research, however, and so does deserve special discussion.

Even this revised charge against our complaint is deceptive, moreover. It subtly suggests that MERGE’s own presentation of evidence on the matter was selective, focusing on a particular source of data to the exclusion of others which would tell a different story. For the record, then, what we enclosed with our complaint was meant to be a fairly representative sampling to illustrate the statistical data available on a core issue: the proportions of men and women committing physical partner abuse. It was a small sampling—we had no idea how much evidence the Commission might want to see, but made it clear that we are prepared to supply large amounts more if so called upon. We did make a point, however, to enclose an annotated bibliography compiled by a social scientist for the purpose of summarizing the results of all of the available representative-sample questionnaire research on partner assault. He appears to have succeeded in that purpose fairly well.

So the reason why use of the CTS is involved in so many of the scientific studies in that particular list is simple: most of the public-survey studies which have been done have employed that questionnaire. The fact is, it is an instrument well trusted by scientists doing research on violence between partners. Though Johnson and her allies reject its use for that purpose (more on this shortly), a large majority of the scientists who do such research hold the contrary view. Here, then, is the Family Centre’s latest suppression of important information: hiding the fact that the CTS is so used and so regarded. Johnson herself was frank about the fact that the CTS is so well accepted by scientists, but her words on the matter did not make it into the Response.

The Family Centre’s overall charge against the CTS—exaggerated far beyond Johnson’s own position—is expressed in its words "This instrument was not designed to measure violence but to look at tactics of conflict and conflict resolution. It is not legitimate to equate conflict with violence." Now, when people grab factoids from others without knowing the subject themselves, they often make absurd mistakes; such is the case here. No researcher would be so foolish as to equate conflict with violence; conflict includes violence. And the CTS asks questions about various ways in which persons deal with conflicts with their partners, both violent and non-violent; hence the inclusive name. But it certainly was "designed to measure violence": it asks a long list of questions about highly specific acts of violence. (A complete copy of the questionnaire, with much discussion of results, is to be found in Intimate Violence, listed in the Response’s bibliography.)

Johnson’s actual complaint about the CTS in this regard stems largely from the way the whole set of questions is introduced to the people answering them, which does talk of conflict in general. And there is such a thing as totally unprovoked violence against others-—that is the kernel of truth in her criticism on this point. (Recounted as numbers 7 and 8, starting at the bottom of page 5 in the Response.) Her terse treatment of this issue cites only her own allies. But one good defence and overview of the topic is Murray Straus’s "The Conflict Tactics Scales and its critics" in Straus and Gelles (eds.), Physical Violence in American Families, pp. 75-91.

Even without going into the scientific literature’s technical discussion of the wording of the CTS’s introduction, however, one can see that Johnson is stretching. Surely, the great bulk of partner violence is engaged in because one (or both) wants to punish or control the other; this is a standard claim even in the nonscientific literature known to the Family Centre. And the desire to punish or control arises out of conflicting wills: My partner has the effrontery not to be compliant with my wishes! (The surveys find that about half of the time, there is mutual physical violence; the other half of the time, the one partner’s violent acts are not returned. In both categories, men and women are about equally represented.) Whatever the failings of the CTS may be in general, this criticism cannot appreciably discount its statistical results. We will see more evidence of that fact shortly.

Points 2, 3 and 4 of the anti-CTS criticisms on page 5 are really a single basic point: the claim that men are, on average, less likely than women are to report the men’s violence against the women. The Response’s implicit conclusion from this, and Johnson’s own, is that the roughly 50-50 results of the surveys on partner violence by the two sexes do not represent the actual proportions; that in actual fact, men are the victimizers much more often than women are.

Putting off that conclusion for a moment, the basic point itself is certainly true—though the difference between male and female responses should not be described unqualifiedly as "large". It is also not a criticism unique to the CTS; any survey trying to get information about both sexes as offenders and victims would face gender differences in responding. (In spite of the title "Problems with the Conflict Tactics Scale", only points 1 and 7-8 are even prima facie objections unique to it.) Actually, such denial of one’s own behavior in an anonymously answered survey is less likely than in any other setting. And for the record, the inclusive "general conflict" approach used by the introduction to the CTS is taken partly to make subjects less likely to go into denial. The point about male denial also conflicts curiously with point number 5, which indicates that even female victims may be inclined not to report incidents; to the degree that that also happens, the two sexes’ reports are apt to be alike!

But the real problem with points 2-4 is a fact which renders perfectly irrelevant the objection that men are less willing than their wives are to report violence against the wives. That fact is that the two sexes’ answers are actually in good enough agreement, in general, that even when only the women’s answers are considered, the proportions of reported male and female acts of violence still come out about 50-50. (Men’s reports sometimes tend to make the women’s violence figures higher than 50%, so to be "safe", the lower 50-50 numbers are used by some.) Anyone genuinely acquainted with the Conflict Tactics Scale literature knows this. See, for example, Murray Straus’s article on abusive wives in Richard J. Gelles and D. Loseke (eds.), Current Controversies on Family Violence (Sage, 1993). The authors of the CTS have reported this fact for years—mostly because the fallacious argument employed here by Johnson, passed from one ideologue to another, is so tenacious.

Points 1 and 6 will be discussed shortly. For now, the following general observation should be made. Sociological surveys are not hard science; there are many ways in which they can be mistaken about what they attempt to measure. Like all other such surveys, the CTS certainly has its limitations and flaws, and some of those may even influence male-female statistics. Hence an honest person will always register cautions about how close a given survey’s results may be to the actual statistical facts. But one can misrepresent in the other direction as well: one can say or insinuate that a given instrument is far less reliable than the evidence in fact indicates it to be. Giving honest arguments, back and forth, is how science progresses and its tools get better. But there are almost no such arguments in the Response for MERGE to reply to.

Having allegedly disposed of all of the questionnaire-survey evidence on MERGE’s side of the debate, the Response next ("Statistics", page 6) presents a list of such survey evidence allegedly supporting the other side. Or, rather, all but the last-cited one used questionnaire surveys of the public. In fact, MacLeod’s methods of estimation have been so wildly speculative and slipshod that no responsible commentator would list her as a source. To credit her unquestioningly after having criticized well esteemed scientists is really over the top. Stranger still, however, is the fact that the list of citations on page 6 includes two surveys (Kennedy and Dutton, Brinkerhoff and Lupri) which got their data by employing the Conflict Tactics Scale. An amazing case of rehabilitation —or, more likely, just another manifestation of the way those who acquire their expertise instantly from allies blunder about.

Most amazing of all about the Response’s list of statistical evidence, however, is the fact that with the exception of the first citation, the figures presented are utterly irrelevant to the issue before us. All the other four descriptions of data deal exclusively with domestic violence against women; they say not a word about violence by women. Thus, for all the figures given there tell us, the female-to-male violence numbers could be equal to the male-to-female ones—or even far higher. In spite of all the other red herrings populating the Response, this irrelevancy is so extreme that we cannot guess why it is there. Or how it could sanely be seen to "form a reasonable basis for requiring the programs TFC offers be provided in the manner they are offered".

Not only could the spouse-abuse statistics from the four studies be 50-50, for all the Response’s description of them tells us; as a matter of fact, two of the four (the Alberta ones) did gather data on violent spouses of both sexes—and their results were (as is standard) about 50-50! See Attachment E for details. Just as it did in the brochure under complaint itself, the Family Centre here suppresses half of the Alberta statistics in order to promote their women-almost-never-do-it ideology. Might it be, however, that they themselves haven’t deliberately hidden this information,? Perhaps they were given the half-truths by ideological allies, and simply believed them because of their own existing prejudices? But even their source Holly Johnson notes that the Kennedy-Dutton and Brinkerhoff-Lupri surveys got the 50-50 result; had one of the passages cribbed from her for the Response begun a sentence earlier, it would have included that fact. Either way, the Family Centre’s own dishonesty is so pervasive that by this point that it hardly matters who originated the hiding of the data.

As a matter of fact, suppression of half of the survey data, promoting the impression that only men are violent in the home, has not been uncommon in the standard non-scientific literature on partner violence. Even some scientists have gotten sucked into this behavior. For example, Kennedy and Dutton originally published only their male-to-female statistics. (Though, for whatever it is worth, they at least mentioned the existence of the rest of the data in their report, so that readers knew they could get the other half.) And certain other scientists, knowing from others’ results that they would get "politically incorrect" information if they asked about both sexes’ violence, have refrained from inquiring about violence by women at all. Such was the case in the other two surveys listed on page 6. That remaining citation on page 6 (the first one) mentions no survey; and it could not be based upon one, because all the Canadian surveys which inquire about both sexes’ physical violence have yielded results in the 50-50 range. We will return to its statistics later.

The Response’s supposed analysis (page 7) of the sample research-data MERGE included with its complaint is equally presumptuous and shallow. In discussing the annotated bibliography, the Response continues its claim that the CTS is utterly worthless. Beyond that, it mostly just insinuates the irrelevance of articles which are clearly important. And does its best to obscure the fact that all surveys inquiring about all violence by both sexes get the same roughly 50-50 result. (That’s equal numbers of acts, not "symmetry". That MERGE opposes one extreme view does not mean that it proposes a different extreme view.) The Response seems to make the strange assumption that the facts mentioned in those very brief annotations are a "summary" of all the important relevant facts in the articles themselves—and also complains that said annotations don’t give enough information for judging validity of results. Regarding the US police statistics, the Response dismisses them, without a shred of evidence, as not possibly having any relevance for Canada. (As an issue to be debated, this would be worth discussing; as a dogmatic article of faith it reveals only things about those who utter it.) Yet again, an entire page of the Response is valueless as discussion of scientific evidence.

To repeat, getting really secure knowledge on a subject such as this is very difficult. The best one can do is to be honest about the current state of information, and open to changes in the evidence later on. The Family Centre’s transgression does not consist in being dishonest about the exact male-female balance on spousal assaults, which no one knows; it consists in being dishonest about what the best currently available evidence indicates on the matter. Though a thorough analysis of that huge body of evidence is impossible here, a few especially revealing points can be made. There is an interesting confluence of various kinds of evidence, narrowing the range in which may lie the actual proportions of spousal abuse by the two sexes. Very quickly, then, some key discoveries.

One crucial fact is that the more serious the effects of violence may be, the more likely it is that the violence will be reported officially: to police, to hospitals, etc. And the most serious effect of violence is death. Spousal murder is thus very likely to be reported officially, and the official numbers might well be fairly close to the actual numbers.

Even here, to be sure, the figures could be biased. The extreme sexist beliefs of recent years have engendered the attitude that any woman who kills her husband must have been a battered wife, acting in self defence or at least out of desperation. Killing for this awful reason certainly does happen to some women, and probably does so more often than to men. (Though the rates at which women kill their children, among much other evidence, reveal that having been battered is far from the most common reason why women kill.) In the current atmosphere, however, some women have quite literally been getting away with murder. And this would to a degree influence the official statistics on proportions of spousal murders by each sex. Nevertheless, those statistics should still be useful in the present context. True, murder represents only the tiniest proportion of acts of spousal violence. But the official percentage of spousal murders which are committed by women still suggests a possible percentage for all seriously harmful acts of spousal abuse which are committed by women.

What are the official figures for these acts, then? In Canada in recent years, wives have been credited with about one quarter of spousal murders; in the US (owing to higher availability of weapons for physically weaker women to use?), it has been over 40%. In both countries, the numbers have been trending downward from higher ones earlier, though only gradually. (The downward trend has various possible explanations—including that of prejudiced official decisions caused by the anti-male bias in the publicity around such subjects over those years.) This imbalance is not surprising. Given men’s greater strength and training in violence, on average, even if the two sexes have equal desires to harm each other, their abilities to do so are not the same. The point at present is this, however: there is nothing minuscule about the percentage of spouse-murderers who are women. The Family Centre’s ongoing pretence that women are almost never violent toward their spouses is certainly belied by the hard evidence in this extreme case.

Even more impressive is the way in which these official figures for murder accord roughly with evidence regarding serious bodily harm from spousal violence in general. To repeat, men’s greater strength would lead us to expect their attacks, on average, to do more physical harm than those of women. Hence it would be expected that the 50-50 proportions on numbers of violent actions by the two sexes result in appreciably more harm to the women. This leads us to the arguments of point 6 on page 5, which are partially correct. The claim of women being more likely to be trapped in a brutal relationship is almost certainly false, these days. With shelters for only women to run to with their children, and men’s high likelihood of losing their children in court if they leave an abusive wife, and numerous economic levers for departing wives, this claim is very outdated. (And the claims that women’s violence is mostly self defence, and that it is so appreciably more often than men’s is, has been found wrong again and again from women’s own answers on the surveys.) But women’s greater physical vulnerability, especially to the tiny minority of pathologically violent men, is unquestionable.

This certainly does not discount the seriousness of the attacks by women, however. Some men are smaller or less able emotionally to defend themselves, and all men can be harmed while asleep or otherwise disabled or off guard. And multiple sources of evidence indicate that female spouse-abusers use weapons more often than male ones do. Further, even the Family Centre’s allies standardly insist that emotional violence is as harmful as physical violence in general—and women are as capable as men of committing psychological abuse. Finally, being less able to cause physical harm is hardly a virtue; violent wives are as much in need of deterrence and counseling as violent husbands are. To ignore a sizable amount of serious violence against husbands, solely because there is much more such violence against wives, would be the height of black-and-white thinking.

What, then, does the best current evidence reveal regarding proportions of the two sexes seriously harmed in spousal violence? With the exception of one major survey which reported the percentage of male victims of such harm at about 13%, the available sources on this topic cluster around 30%. Even more remarkable is the following fact: three different types of sources of such data appear to be converging roughly around that figure. Of a dozen or so sources now known to MERGE which get that result, five are listed in Attachment F; a sixth (Canadian) source is summarized in Attachment G. Even this topic is far too complex to be done justice here, but a few details can be noted.

As regards representative surveys of the general population, most cannot provide reliable statistics about physical harm done. The reason is that overwhelmingly, the acts reported in spouse-abuse surveys cause little or no physical damage. Consequently, the absolute numbers of violent acts reported which do such harm are too small, typically, to yield "statistically significant" results regarding the proportions of the two sexes receiving such harm. It is worth noting at this point that in the typical cases of spousal assault, the two sexes are not only assaulted equally often but also harmed to an equal degree—i.e., little or not at all. But the atypical cases in which serious harm is done are another matter. To get the numbers high enough for reliable results on those cases requires that the initial sample size be very large or that long segments of respondents’ lives be covered, or both. (The latter introduces serious memory problems, however.) Few of the general-population surveys meet these requirements; one which evidently does so is the Canadian survey reported in Attachment G.

One type of large-population survey of special interest may be loosely labeled the "crime" survey. Instead of asking questions about all violent acts involving the respondents—what the CTS and other standard spouse-abuse survey questionnaires do—it in some fashion elicits information only about the fairly harmful ones. This may result because the wording of the introduction or the questions puts great stress upon violent harm. Or else because it announces its topic as crime: in the case of partner assaults, most people will not label them as crimes unless serious harm is done. As a seeming consequence of this difference, the "crime surveys" find much lower percentages of spousal assault in society than the standard spouse-assault surveys do. Speaking very roughly, the "crime surveys" find only about a tenth as much spousal violence as the "all-acts surveys" do. This difference in numbers accords, to repeat, with the point noted above that the great majority of spousal assaults (as discovered by the all-acts surveys) do not result in appreciable physical harm.

The relevant fact about such surveys here, however, is this: the proportion of victims of serious physical spousal assaults who are male, as discovered by the all-act surveys and the crime surveys, tends to be about the same: close to 30%. It is quite reassuring that the two types of survey tend to agree where they should agree, given the differences in the way they operate. But there is more: even "official" reports of spousal abuse resulting in serious harm often give results for men around that 30% mark. This fact is illustrated by the two sources of police data in Attachment F. There have also been one or two studies in which persons arriving at hospital emergency wards have been asked the cause of their injuries, and around 30% of those attributing them to spousal assault have reportedly been men.

Now, given the serious level of anti-male bias affecting reports to and by officials, only in locations or in circumstances where that bias is less than usual would we expect the proportion of officially recorded male victims to approach the same level as in the anonymous general surveys. In the more biased places and circumstances, the proportion of men will be lower. But as in the case of spousal murder, serious harm to the victim is precisely one of the circumstances which will lower the level of bias. If a man is visibly harmed sufficiently badly, even police officers biased against men are more apt to do the right thing. And so the fact that there are any venues at all where the proportion of officially recorded male victims is this high is extremely significant. It suggests that, but for that deep and widespread bias, similar proportions of seriously harmed spouse-abuse victims who are male would also be officially recorded elsewhere.

All this said, let us return to the sole relevant statistic which the Response presents on the issue of the male and female percentages of abused spouses: the one at the top of their "Statistics" section on page 6. Unfortunately, the citation given is to one of those evidently non-existent works by Johnson; and there was no page reference and no obvious place to look in her 1996 book, in the short time available to compose MERGE’s reply, to search out her sources for critique. Her 10%-20% figures as cited there are lower than what the best available research indicates, even if they are read as applying only to seriously injurious spousal assaults.

Also, Johnson’s numbers have been influenced by the inclusion of sexual assault. (This relates as well to problem 1 on page 5.) Although anonymous surveys reveal surprisingly high levels of sexual abuse of men by women, they are surely well below the levels the other way around, and so would lower the net percentage of assaults suffered by men. MERGE has not included sexual assault figures in its presented research; not because sexual abuse is not important—it certainly is—but because it was nowhere mentioned in the original brochure under complaint. (And because it is a much more complex topic, what counts as "sexual abuse" being more subjective. And biased: for example, a man’s being kicked in the testes is not commonly considered sexual violence.)

Fortunately, there is really no need for us to critique Johnson’s numbers in the present context. Here is why: Although it nowhere admits its original position was wrong, in endorsing a figure for women’s violence in the range of 10%-20% of all partner violence, the Family Centre has in fact changed its position drastically. It is a far cry from the group defamation of the original brochure, and also from the seriously dishonest claim of the current brochures that researchers place the percentage of abused husbands around 1%. By our judgement, Johnson’s numbers are still biased. (Including sexual assault should not be able to account for the whole difference, even if one considers only assaults causing serious harm.) But use of biased statistics was not MERGE’s complaint. It was, and is, blatant stereotyping: the gross black-and-white view of reality that says there is hardly enough partner violence by women to mention. That, and all the lying prejudice behind the stereotyping.

In light of Mr. Haynes’ earlier report of the Family Centre’s oral response, at the beginning of this investigation stage of processing MERGE’s complaint, it was somewhat surprising that their written Response should turn out to be based on claims of knowing the relevant scientific evidence. For as reported by him over the telephone to us, no such claims were originally made. Instead, as he described his conversation with them, the defence of their brochures included this argument: Not being a research agency, the Family Centre is not concerned with scientific statistics, and so should not be expected to abide by them in its publications.

If such an argument was indeed originally made, then the eventual written Response represented a big change in tactics. However, we do not ourselves know firsthand whether it was employed, and do not need to know. What matters to MERGE is the fact that Mr. Haynes felt the argument significant enough to be reported to us. It thus merits a reply, even if only for his benefit.

Suppose, for comparison, that our hypothetical Holocaust-denier was challenged on his claim that only a few thousand Jews were executed. And suppose he responded by saying, "I’m not a historian—I can’t be expected to know the historical evidence. So I’m not accountable if it should turn out I’m wrong." We trust everyone can see the sophistry in this reply. This person knew he didn’t know the facts—he knew he was fabricating, or else just blindly parroting his ideological allies. Even laypersons have a moral obligation not to make claims which they cannot substantiate. And when serious harm might be done by unfounded claims, even laypersons have a legal obligation not to make them. Whether done through malice or reckless endangerment, pretending one knows when one does not know is a form of lying. Ignorance is not a defence.

In the case of professionals, that legal obligation is even stronger. A layperson who tried to administer medicine, and did harm due to not knowing standard medical practice, might get off on grounds of meaning well; a medical doctor who did the same would be considered guilty of gross negligence. Not because medical doctors are expected to be research scientists—they most certainly are not. But it is their job to put into practice on human bodies what pure medical research discovers. In this they are precisely analogous to counseling clinicians, whose job it is to apply to human lives the best available information from the social and behavioral sciences. To the degree that they fail to do so, they are guilty of professional negligence. And they have a duty of care not to allow personal or sociopolitical prejudices, or other malign influences, to enter their practice in any fashion.

A major part of the Response lies in its assertions that the Family Centre does much good in its practice directed at emotional and societal healing. The essential irrelevance of this claim as a defence of the brochure was discussed earlier; but it does raise related questions. If their literature on family violence is so consistently and determinedly and strongly prejudiced, just how likely is it that the counseling they do in that area is fair-minded and competent? Have not the brochures been written or approved by those who do that counseling? And if the Family Centre’s pious professions in regard to its printed publicity—professions of scientific knowledge and responsibility and good faith—turn out to be a sham, how much trust can a reasonable person have in the claims about their practice?

This is not a rhetorical question for scoring debating points. It is precisely because the work they are doing in the community is so vital that it must be done without prejudice or ideological taint. Those who go to clinicians for help are often very pliable or emotionally vulnerable. And vulnerable in other ways: such crucial issues as whether they are deprived of their children by the state could hinge on biases held by practitioners in an institution such as this one. Not only great help, but also great harm to clients can result from the resulting ministrations. Now, in our complaint we have made no claims about the actual content of the Family Centre’s counseling or assessments involving family violence. But we have raised the serious question of whether it is infected by the bias of their publicity on the subject. Their practice is a public trust, and so it may well be important for the Commission to look into the matter. Now more than ever.

On the specific matter of gender bias in practice, the Family Centre claims that it has actually provided counseling to some abusive wives and some abused husbands, not just to abusive husbands and abused wives. We have no grounds to challenge this claim. As usual, however, the Response withholds information. They have evidently never given any group counseling—a form of help important to both victims and offenders—to abusive wives or to abused husbands. (Anger management groups, be it noted, are quite different.) More importantly, prejudice exists in many other forms than merely whether counseling is provided to all persons. Everything about the content of the counseling is relevant to that issue. To repeat the question raised above, do we not have grounds to fear that ideology influences that content as well? Influences the way the counseling is done, to both abusive husbands and abusive wives, and to both abused husbands and abused wives?

We must stress again that we are here making no claims about the Family Centre’s actual practices in this regard. But given their we’re-such-doers-of-good position, an alternative position must be seriously raised. To agree with one point the Response makes, just claiming something to be so doesn’t make it so. The fact is, gross anti-male bias in the providing of such counseling in other venues has been common for years; it is a major human-rights problem in Canada today. And it involves the ideological allies to whom the Family Centre reflexively turns for reinforcement.

To be specific, such doctrines as these are taught to vulnerable patients: that men’s violence stems primarily from their "patriarchal" desire to control women and children (rather than from such sources as being themselves abused as children, or from nastiness human beings have in common), whereas women’s violence is just the result of their being oppressed by the patriarchy, and is even a justified reaction. So widespread is the usurpation of science by ideology in this area, when prominent Canadian family-violence researcher Donald Dutton finally realized how much he himself had been misled by it, he began doing things such as publishing a paper debunking the "patriarchy" dogma. ("Patriarchy and wife assault: the ecological fallacy; Violence and Victims, Vol. 9, No. 2, 1994.)

So when the Response presents its others-are-doing-it-too defence (paragraph 6 on page 8), it is telling the truth. It is certainly not true that all local or national service providers share their views; Attachment H, from Health Canada, reveals that some others are publicizing correct information. But the Family Centre does have numerous ideological allies. If the problem of false stereotyping on this subject were not a common one, if that particular institution were unique in its disinformation, we would not be spending our valuable time on the issue.

And, no, it does not require a "conspiracy" for twisted ideas to become widespread. For anyone whose awareness of the history of popular prejudices is deficient, in Social Psychology 101 they’ll give you a long list of reasons why such things happen in human society. In this case, a crucial part of the explanation is the recent rise of a bigoted brand of feminism, following Jacobin-like in the train of a legitimate one. It also involves the fact that gender bias is substantially different from racial bias, in ways which often make it as easy to be prejudiced against one’s own sex as against the other. Seemingly involved, for example, is primitive inter-male competition—bashing other males for status in the eyes of females, and for proving who can best fill the male role of protector for women and children. But for the purposes of our complaint, no such theorizing is needed. To repeat, to recognize stereotyping falsehoods requires only honestly looking at the facts.

By way of background, emotional counseling is not hard science. It is in general not even soft science, partly because its practitioners often don’t avail themselves of what the behavioral sciences do proffer. It is as much art as anything else. But the mind abhors a knowledge-vacuum, and where real information is not, ideology and fashion often sweep in. The results can be tragic. These influences are the reason for such recent horrors as the repressed-and-recovered memory movement in psychotherapy, with its trail of broken human lives, and the similar horror of ideology-drenched "therapeutic" investigation of child sex-abuse accusations.

Psychological counselors do much good in the modern world, and the Family Centre undoubtedly does its share. But some of them have a dark side. And the impulse of individuals in a common profession or institution to cover for each other must not be allowed to protect behavior which harms innocent people.

This brings us to the issue of harm caused by the brochure itself. At its beginning and at its end, the Response asks the question, "whose human rights have been violated, and in what fashion?" Not only would MERGE not have brought this complaint over an uncommon problem; we would not have done so over an offense which lacked serious consequences.

Though the Family Centre’s brief nowhere admits awareness of the effects of group defamation on individual lives, no one in the modern world can be unaware of them—certainly providers of human services cannot. As noted already, misrepresentations by some often have harmful, unjust acts by others as consequences. And legislators and jurists recognize those harms, which is why various laws exist to prevent this type of verbal discrimination. As for stereotypes against men in particular, we certainly can produce evidence that they produce many individual injustices. (No, there will never be a pogrom against men; victims of anti-male discrimination suffer one at a time. And very often, their children and wives and sisters and mothers suffer with them.) Attachments I, J and K, for example, attest to such injustices.

No, it is not general unawareness of the evils of negative stereotyping which has elicited this disingenuous question, "whose rights are violated?", from the Family Centre. But there is a close relationship between prejudice and dishonesty. We suggest the following: that the source of such willful blindness is simply the same hardened ideology that originally produced, and continues to motivate, all of their other dishonesties. The ideology that says men are only victimizers, not victims; hence vilification of them is not a bad thing and human rights laws do not apply to them.

Let us respond to their question with one of our own: How on earth can you not see?

From the Executive Board of M.E.R.G.E.

July 1, 1999