Whatever he might have done,
OJ Simpson is not Everyman. Whatever
she may have suffered, Nicole
Simpson was not Everywoman. As the
trial goes on, we must expect
to be told repeatedly, by domestic
violence lobbyists and professional
feminists, that OJ's crazed
possessiveness, demented rages
and alleged murderous violence
symbolise and personify domestic
relations between men and women.
Campaigners have already been
filmed outside the court claiming
that: "All women are at risk:
all women are unprotected." They do
not seem to care that one of
OJ's two alleged victims was a man.
We should be wary of these voices
and their cant, for they
promote one of the central fictions
of our age. Men, in general,
are not violent; women, in general,
are not victims. The
allegations against OJ Simpson
are no more typical of the behaviour
of men in our time than the
allegations against the mother of Rikki
Neave typify women.
It is now possible, for the first
time, to show clearly that the
phenomenon of domestic violence
has been egregiously misrepresented
and ludicrously exaggerated.
We have all been had.
Domestic violence against women
has been one of the few points of
social consensus in the past
25 years, agreed from left to right by
feminist criminologists and
journalists, agony aunts, police
officers and Home Office ministers.
They have all decided that
women who reported violence
to the police were "the tip of the
iceberg".
The existence of domestic violence
on a large scale has become an
unquestionable fact of our age.
As Rosalind Miles has written, in
an exemplary passage of feminist
reasoning: "The patriarch at bay
usually has to look no further
than the ends of his arms ...
beating the wife, `teaching
her a lesson' or `just giving her a
reminder' becomes `what your
right hand is for'."
Last November David Maclean,
the Home Office minister, announced
that the government was to spend
Pounds 170,000 on yet another
advertising campaign to encourage
women to report incidents of
domestic violence. Announcing
the campaign, he said: "Denying that
the abuse exists or playing
it down will not make it go away."
These words precisely express
the political and social consensus
on domestic violence that has
been orthodox in our time. There is
another view: insisting that
the abuse exists and playing it up
might make everybody believe
that women, in general, are menaced by
men, in general whether or not
that is true.
Evidence for the existence of
domestic violence as a broad
phenomenon has always been profoundly
shaky. Before 1993, records
were not routinely kept by British
police forces of complaints
about or recorded incidents
of domestic violence. The true extent
of "wife battering" was, therefore,
an open field for speculation,
guesswork and statistical jiggery-pokery.
Those most interested in the
subject were ideological and media
feminists, feminist criminologists,
professional workers in the
women's refuge business and
the police. They all had much to gain
from amplification of the problem.
The more the public and the
political establishment could
be persuaded to believe that lots of
men bashed their women, the
more money the professionals would earn
or receive.
How they jiggery-pokered. How
they speculated and guessed.
Throughout the past 25 years,
as many figures for domestic violence
have been published as there
are numbers in the national lottery.
None of the figures was small.
All appeared to confirm the
existence of a vast and menacing
problem.
Figures for London may be taken
as general examples. In 1990, a
spokesman on domestic violence
for the Metropolitan police told one
of the authors of this article
that it received "about 25,000 calls
a year" reporting incidents
of domestic violence. That would
represent 1.44% of all women
in London living with a partner.
Therefore, one woman in every
70 living with a man in London
would be reporting domestic
violence to the police. That figure,
said the man from the Met, was
"an extrapolation for London as a
whole drawn from research in
specific areas".
The research upon which the Met
depended was conducted by a
feminist criminologist, Dr Susan
SM Edwards. The figure she had
actually given, in The London
Policing Study, was more than double
the number supplied by the Met.
She wrote: "The number of women
who officially reported violence
to the police in the Metropolitan
police district alone in one year
was estimated at 58,000." That
figure would represent 3.35% of
women living with a partner,
or one woman in every 30 a disturbing
proportion.
Not disturbing enough, though,
for Sandra Horley, director of the
Chiswick Family Refuge and one
of Britain's leading experts on
domestic violence. According
to Horley, even that terrible number
of 58,000 was an immense understatement.
In a letter to The
Independent in 1990, she wrote:
"The Metropolitan police receives
approximately 100,000 calls
a year from women who are trying to
escape male violence."
This would represent 5.8% of
women living with partners in
London, or one woman in 17:
an appalling number, representing a
sickening general incidence
of violence.
Miles took Horley's figure even
further. In her respectfully
reviewed book, The Rites of
Man, published in 1991, she wrote: "In
the London area alone, more
than 100,000 women a year need hospital
treatment after violence in
the home."
This, truly, is a frightful statement.
If one woman in every 17
living with a man in London
needs hospital treatment for injuries
inflicted by her man, the true
figure for incidents of domestic
violence, including those unreported
to the police and untreated by
hospitals, must be gigantic.
It would follow that the feminists and
the violence lobbyists must
be right and that they deserve all our
sympathy and support.
The truth, however, is that the
feminists and their supporters
were and are wrong. Worse than
that: they have not just made an
honest mistake; they have concocted
the figures upon which the
domestic violence industry has
depended, wilfully enlarging and
simplifying an issue that is
probably small in size and certainly
complex in truth.
We know now that all of the figures
given above are ludicrous and
baseless exaggerations. It is
reasonable to assume that they
reflect a general pattern of
grotesque misrepresentation of the
domestic violence phenomenon.
Police forces in England and
Wales published figures on reports
of domestic violence for the
first time last year. The figures were
given to parliament on October
26 when David Alton, the Liberal
Democrat MP for Liverpool Mossley
Hill, put a question to Mr
Maclean.
In reply, Mr Maclean produced
a table of figures prepared by Her
Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary.
This shows that the number
of domestic violence incidents
recorded by the Metropolitan police
in 1993 was 11,420.
That figure is equal to 0.66%
of all women living with partners
in the capital, and less than
half the figure of 25,000 reported
incidents previously given to
us by the Met. It is less than a
quarter of the figure given
by Edwards, whose work has been
sympathetically received by
the Metropolitan police. It is less
than one eighth of the figure
given by Horley, whose Chiswick
Family Refuge has been supported
by public funds.
As for the 100,000 figure given
by Miles for women receiving
treatment in London hospitals
after domestic violence, we can now
see plainly that her figure
is clearly a fiction. When we
telephoned her to ask where
she had got the figure from, she said
at first that she could not
remember; and when she was asked to
comment on the discrepancy between
her figure and the Home
Office's, she terminated the
interview because "there is someone at
the door".
Next day, she remembered "reading
it" (the figure of 100,000) in
the Evening Standard the year
before the book was published"; but
she could give no date, author,
context or origin for this item of
scholarly research.
Explaining the discrepancy between
its previous estimate and the
published facts, a spokesman
for the Metropolitan police said: "I
can't explain that at all, but
25,000 is a wrong figure."
Defending her figure of 58,000,
Edwards told us: "You should not
regard my higher figure as representative
of the number of cases of
domestic violence which should
be regarded as crimes." Eh? Come
again? Why would 58,000 London
women a year be calling the police
if not to report criminal violence?
"Many women," she said, "report
incidents of violence which do
not actually constitute a crime."
In that case, one might ask, why
should anybody think of them
as being battered women?
Horley was not available to be
challenged on her figure of
100,000. Feminists and their
fellow travellers will try to wriggle
out of this exposure of their
errors by answering that the figures
given by the Met only include
the number of recorded incidents of
domestic violence. The true
extent of the phenomenon is much
greater, they will say, because
many women who are victims of
violence do not report the fact;
and of those who do report it,
many are not recorded.
They can go and jump off a cliff.
They have been running that
line for 25 years and it just
ran out. We have not been arguing
here about the true extent of
domestic violence. We are questioning
figures that have previously
been stated for the number of women
complaining to the police. Those
figures, previously given by
academics and professionals,
do not stand up to examination.
If, however, anybody wants to
argue about the hidden extent of
our domestic violence, the figures
which have just been published
put them and their case even
deeper in trouble.
Of the 11,420 domestic violence
incidents in the Metropolitan
police area in 1993, how many
would you guess involved the same
individuals more than once?
How many complaints were of the threat,
rather than the reality, of
violence? How many of those incidents
were reported by men who were
living with men? How many incidents
of domestic violence were reported
by men living with women?
You would have to guess the answers
to these questions because
the facts are hard to find.
For instance, Scotland Yard
acknowledges that: "Every district
has its share of repeat or
persistent callers but the number
are unquantifiable."
We cannot know, therefore, how
many reported or recorded
incidents of violence involve
the same individuals more than once.
Similarly, Scotland Yard cannot
say how many callers are
complaining about the threat
rather than the reality of an act of
violence; but that 68% of reported
cases of domestic violence constituted "mental cruelty" or "threats of
force".
Of those incidents, a proportion
are not women reporting that
they have been bashed but men
reporting that a woman, or another
man, is bashing or threatening
to bash them. If, as we have
repeatedly been told for 25
years, women are reluctant to tell the
police about violence in the
home, we can be certain that men will
be even less eager to report
such shameful incidents.
According to one estimate recently
published in the Los Angeles
Times, American men are nine
times less likely than women to seek
the protection of the police
from a violent partner at home.
Our analysis of Britain's figures
confirms this picture. Women
are eight times more likely
than men to report an incident of
domestic violence to the police,
yet it now appears certain that
the most likely victims of domestic
violence are not women but men.
A Mori survey recently commissioned
and published by the BBC
programme, Here and Now, showed
that 5% of women living with men
had experienced an incident
of violence from that man; but 11% of
men living with women said that
they had experienced an incident of
violence from their woman.
It therefore follows from this
survey that men are more than
twice as likely to be the victims
of attack in the home, though
they are eight times less likely
to report it.
These figures would seem to be
confirmed by statistics compiled
by Scotland Yard, which show
that 21% of all domestic violence
victims in 1993-94 were men.
In that year an overall increase of
15.33% was recorded in recorded
incidents of domestic violence; but
there was a 35% increase in
the number of male victims.
Given these figures, why is the
Home Office spending money on an
advertising campaign to get
women to report incidents of domestic
violence?
Nobody denies or disputes that
violence occurs in the home.
Nobody denies that some men
are violent to their women (though it
is inconceivable to the official
mind that a woman might be violent
to her man). We may well believe
it to be true that 0.7%, or one in
150, of women living with men
in London are subjected to a criminal
assault in the house.
Nobody should be surprised by
that figure, except the
professional parasites on the
domestic violence racket who will be
dismayed at the prospect of
their easy money drying up.
However, if that figure is true,
or even nearly true, we should
ask ourselves this: is it big
enough to justify the colossal
national flapdoodle and panic
which has been made out of domestic
violence towards women for the
past 25 years? Or have we all been
had?
The truth is that we have no
idea how many women in London or
elsewhere in the country are
living with men who habitually beat
them up. It might be one in
100. It might be one in 200 or 1,000 or
2,000. But we do know now that
the true picture is much less
horrible and much less extensive
than the grotesque exaggerations
which have been brandished by
the domestic violence racketeers.
If you doubt the reasoning and
the evidence of this article, ask
yourself this: how many women
have you known who were regularly
beaten up by their men?
If it is true that domestic violence
is an unacknowledged horror
of our time, a phenomenon which
illustrates the general attitudes
of all men to all women and
the relations of power between them,
why don't you know tens or hundreds
of battered women? Nicole
Simpson may have been one; but
how many OJs do you know?