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April 29, 2020 - 2:51pm
The lockdown is putting huge focus on the home. What’s yours like? Big enough for you all? Warm and dry, or cold and damp? How is everyone getting on? Is there love, like a family pet, at the heart of it; or not? Or are you alone — because you want it that way, or has something gone wrong (or just not gone right yet)?
These may seem intrusive questions for a politician to ask (I wouldn’t actually ask a constituent any of that, except about the damp). I raise them now because the lockdown is reminding us that we need a ‘politics of home’. As the Government has recognised (and asked Roger Scruton to help advise), we need to make our houses and flats not just affordable but liveable and beautiful. And fundamentally, we need to help the families that live in them.
This struck me yesterday listening to the Commons debate on the Domestic Abuse Bill (I hoped to speak myself, but wasn’t called). The speeches were heartfelt and, in some cases, traumatic to listen to. But not a single one (I think) mentioned marriage except as an abusive relationship, or the home except as a place of fear and violence.
The Bill brings into law a series of mitigations against violence and coercion in the home. These are all welcome. If we really want to eradicate domestic abuse, however, we need more than mitigations. We need to prevent it. And that means — unless we want to go the full Pol Pot, abolishing the family altogether and rearing our children in common — strengthening and improving the couple relationship.
I founded a charity working with prisoners and ex-offenders. I therefore spent a lot of time with people convicted — or not convicted, but guilty — of domestic violence, usually amid other crimes. And without exception the men I have known who abuse women experienced parental conflict, including violence, as children themselves.
Now, very obviously, not all children of violence become violent themselves. And not all abuse is by men against women (this point was made repeatedly by MPs, in a — to me — weird refusal to accept that physical strength and the desire to rule others are more commonly male traits, and that domestic abuse is their wicked perversion). But the consequence of parental conflict for boys — the increased risk of forming broken and sometimes abusive relationships themselves — is so obvious it justifies a cultural response, or at least some policy.
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SubscribeHow refreshing to have someone speaking positively about marriage. It does seem that most of the comments we hear today regarding marriage are anything but supportive and are aimed at weakening it’s status. To make that public commitment with promises about how we will behave in a lifelong relationship is a very valuable framework that assists in holding together a relationship based on promises and commitments made, rather than on feelings, which may all too easily change.
The author of the article seems to believe that domestic violence can only be caused by a “weird refusal to accept that physical strength and the desire to rule others are more commonly male traits…”.
This is a fairly common- and erroneous- rationalization for framing domestic violence in gendered terms. In fact, it is sexist, and at odds with the facts.
The research has shown, time and again, that females initiate violence against their male partners at the same rate as men against their – 38-45% of those injured in those conflicts are men. That’s because females often employ weapons against their husbands, often when they are incapacitated by booze, or asleep.
Further, women are responsible for 50% of physical violence against children. Females are not the paragons of virtue that feminist ideology paints them as.
Why this disparity between reality and our perceptions? Forty years ago, feminists launched a campaign against DV in which they lobbied police departments to assume that it was always the husband who was the aggressor. Men are routinely charged under this misconception, spiking the statistics which are then used to justify this sexist, gendered policy. It becomes a form of confirmation bias that supports a misguided police action, a self- reinforcing tautology.
This is where the debate around DV needs to begin- by deconstructing feminist sexism and the gendered anti- male policies that stem from these deliberately misleading beliefs.
women with bad intent can benefit from knowledge that they’re favoured in law, and social prejudice will assume that they’re the victim, whatever the reality. And we don’t have a perfect magic portal into anyone’s private life, so who knows. Women can be just as self-seeking manipulative and deceitful as men in unbalanced relationships i suppose
Agreed -feminism is the dogma that says women never need take accountability or responsibility, or even acknowledge their part in, decisions they take that go wrong. The concept of ‘oppressive patriarchy’ is testimony to this. 200,000 years of humanity reduced to a simplistic trope.
Over 70,000 children in care at the moment in this country -barely a column inch from feminist commentators on how this reflects on maternal capacity.
I agree the whole debate has become badly skewed and it is not helping us all get to grips with complicated realities. It’s strange how the feminist lobby is representative of such a small fraction of women in reality but achieves such market dominance in MSM coverage -but then maybe the issue is precisely that irrespective of the impression it gives, MSM does not really reflect at all what most people think or how they behave? And of course MSM generally recruits from a particular class of person.
I am all in favour of encouragingpeople in relationships to work at them, especially where children are involved. But why does the author have the obsession with ‘marriage’? Whether marriage is or will be a success for any individual or any couple is an open question. Let’s focus on the relationship, not the bit of paper which seeks to define it.
marriage is a symbol of commitment.
And in fact a contract between parties -you both sign up to it.
Very sad that folk end up hating and hitting.
However this time of forced togetherness is also a wonderful opportunity to sort out relationships; to confront what has been swept under the carpet. I know this is happening and that marriages will be strengthened and the bonds deepened by partners accepting their responsibility to do so.
‘Two is better than one, but a cord of 3 strands is not easily broken’. Ecclesiastes 4:10
Why no mention of marriage in the domestic violence debate?
Maybe because none of those participating in the debate are married.