Peter Adams
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/health/news/article.cfm?c_id=204&objectid=10896956
Dear Professor Dr Peter Adams,
Your commentary above seems to be a completely veiled rebuff to the research of one of the worlds leading Intimate Partner Violence Experts, Professor Dr Donald Dutton of UBC Vancouver. Your comment "Violence of this scale couldn't be committed by a small number of pathological abusers" which is an assertion by Dutton that most relationship jostling doesn't escalate to extreme violence and a small group, say 4% are genuinely in need of treatment of personality disorders, gives away your literature review activities.
Your assertion that " this gender-blindness masks the stark reality that both the depth and breadth of violence in our homes takes the form of men abusing women", has to be one of the most appallingly biased and politically contrived form of INGSOC or similar Orwellian language thought control admissions that I have had the disbelief to read in our media for quite some time.
We run a completely Gender biased approach in this country based on the Duluth Model through our Family Courts, Support Services and Social Welfare Department and have done so at the behest of activist groups for nearly 30 years with no measurable effect on child deaths, the ultimate KPI of any DV programme. The model that all men are violent pervades every office of bureaucracy in this country. You are completely cognisant of these facts. To represent otherwise and create an image of a Gender neutral establishment that needs to be assailed and defeated in your article is a completely delusional misrepresentation of reality. I find it completely incomprehensible that an academic such as your self can persist with such strong and blatantly "politically-religious" delusional perceptions of reality.
As an apologist for people like Ruth Herbert and other seasoned Gender campaigners you seem to be attempting to continue selling the delusion to the public in an effort to garner sympathy for your, and by default their position(s). I believe there is a diagnosable form of group hysteria amongst women, recently manifested in Le Roy New York http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/398320/20121025/town-caught-tourette-s-channel-4-documentary.htm and is a classic example of how mental health issues can spread amongst a group of occupationally related people. An older name for this in management science is of course just good old "Group think".
This rehash of "all Men are rapists" from radical Feminism in the 70's and 80's is as anachronistic as the rhetoric of the Union movement referring to the "oppression of the working classes by the bosses" of the 20's, 30's and 40's. Collectivist Policies are usually the product of purposefully failed analysis, incomplete understanding of wider issues and overt politicisation.
Please consider your choice of title for your article "Gender blind view of violence lets men off the hook", and ask an internal question, what objectivity exists in this type of by-line ? No need of research, no need for collecting opinions, you have an entrenched position and are actually waging full scale war against what ever you perceive to be a counter argument. The many comments on your article are pointing this out and you seem to have almost zero support for your position. The real world awaits you without recriminations when you are ready to accept reality.
However, whilst we have an academic community overtly exhibiting signs of delusional mental health issues, read political programming, I doubt it will be impossible to address DV for the Political Issue that it actually is, a contrived misrepresentation of Relationships in Stress, and continue to misappropriate funding from Relationship Counselling Services into "Failed Tautological and Pseudo Scientific and Unethical programmes" such as the Duluth Model, blaming all violence on men and any violence by women excused as provocation.
Obviously somewhere at some level heated academic debate is happening around this issue. Using the media to look for and rally collective support as a knee jerk reaction is sadly naïve and almost bordering on desperation. I had sincerely hoped Owen Glenn's enquiry would have exposed the issues, but it seems to have been sabotaged but the very delusions it was set out to discover. In a sence its history can probably be considered as a cathartic psycho drama representing the larger Governmental Policy issues we face as a nation.
Just in case you have refused to consider one of the worlds leading IPV Experts here is a digest of his work that is appropriate to address your article.
I sincerely hope that you read it, and at least attempt some form of critical analysis to compare it to your overtly divergent system of beliefs that you defend so dearly on this issue. The "Cult Duluth" is oft mentioned in critical analysis and I rather suspect you are one of its highly politicised evangelists. Belief and Science are not really interchangeable, you may wish to start from that premise.
DuttonandCorvo.pdf
to quote Dr Dutton....from his conclusions about Evidence Based Procedure, the link is below the quote.
"The current best evidence clearly does not support investing substantial
public funds in the continuation, let alone the mandating, of the standard
DV program model. In the face of overwhelming countervailing evidence,
why does this model persist? There is no scientific reason why causal
explanations of DV and the principles of perpetrator treatment should exist
outside the biopsychosocial framework used to understand and address
contemporary mental health and social problems. In some sense, then, the
political issues in the policy framework "trump" the science to a greater
degree perhaps than in most other social problems."
CORVO-K.-DUTTON-D.G-CHEN-W.Y.-2008-TOWARDS-EVIDENCE-BASED-PRACTICE-WITH-DOMESTIC-VIOLENCE-PERPETRATORS.pdf
Your attack on Dutton's work is to the effect that the scale of violence is actually only based on YOUR belief that the violence is of such a large scale. By reducing the "threshold of abuse under the Duluth Model" practitioners such as yourself have conspired to skew reporting statistics to support final arguments such as you have made in your article. I find this to be abhorrent, manipulative and unscientific.
sincerely yours
Christopher Smith