PARTNER ABUSE INDEX

Increasingly over the past twenty years, the media and various institutions in this society have pounded out messages against the abuse of an intimate partner. Given that it was once taboo even to admit that such an evil exists, in a way this represents progress. Unfortunately, the messages have been overwhelmingly dominated by stereotypes and blind ideology rather than by genuine knowledge and genuine compassion. The result has itself been a massive abuse of the truth, and countless injustices and tragedies have occurred in the resulting societal atmosphere of anti-male attitudes. Those who have worked for a more balanced treatment of the subject have found themselves viciously smeared by the ideologues. Even so, the truth must be told. That is the purpose of this section. The general discussions (labels beginning with A) and individual case histories (labels beginning with B) below are meant to reveal the problem graphically in hopes of spurring all the needed reforms.

Of special concern among the resulting injustices is the fact that, based on the pervasive stereotypes, abusive women have been encouraged to commit more abuse rather than getting help for their problem. And the largest category of this further abuse is proxy violence: getting someone else, especially the powers of the state, to commit violence for them through the making of false accusations. As a tactic for winning control of the children and financial assets in divorce, fabricated allegations of wife abuse have become endemic. These stories in particular will be told here.

This document, distributed as a flyer by MERGE while a bill authorizing restraining orders for spousal abuse was before the Alberta legislature, expressed our grave reservations about the proposed law. Because much opposition was aired in the media, and because it was not initially a government bill, the government dropped its support and the bill was defeated.

This document, distributed to members of the Alberta legislature while they were rushing a second restraining-order bill through, had little impact. This time, there was no chance for opposition to the bill to galvanize--it was a last-minute substitution for a reasonable bill on the subject which the government had presented to the public for discussion. And the Edmonton Journal, which had failed to print any facts about the bill's unjust provisions or the government's underhanded tactics, also refused to publish this piece as a letter to the editor.

The Edmonton Journal prominently featured a pair of letters to the editor critical of MERGE's human-rights victory over biased family-violence literature, but would not publish our reply correcting their distortions; hence it is presented to the public here.

This document was one of many submitted to the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission in the course of our complaint against The Family Centre. It outlines some of the reasons why a test-case of this kind is so important.

This is MERGE's extended reply to the one extended response written by The Family Centre in the course of the investigation of our complaint against their family-violence brochure. Their response was, to put it mildly, very revealing.

After MERGE launched its complaint against The Family Centre's biased literature on family violence, they replaced it with a set of four closely similar brochures. This is MERGE's response, submitted to Alberta's human-rights commission in the course of its investigation of our complaint. After the investigator sided with MERGE, The Family Centre opted not to have any literature specifically describing the problem of partner abuse, but simply to mention in its general literature that it provides services to victims and perpetrators of both sexes.

This article was published in the Ottawa Citizen in the summer of 1998, following the hearings of the Senate-House of Commons Committee on Child Custody and Access. That process had seen massive use of the stereotype that only men are violent in the family, used to oppose reforms toward parental equality in divorce.

This article explains in brief the serious current connection between distortion of the facts on partner violence and anti-male injustices in society, notably regarding separation and divorce.