SAFE BlogArchive

On October 28, 2005, near the end of Domestic Violence Awareness Month, four
men, including David Woods of Sacramento and his 21-year-old daughter,
Maegan Black, will file a class-action lawsuit in Sacramento against the
State of California and two state-funded domestic violence programs
(WEAVE in Sacramento, and DVSAC in Grass Valley), seeking to end the denial
of services to men and their children.

The men were denied state-funded services based solely on their gender.
Maegen Black says she was harmed by WEAVE's denial of services to her
father, having to witness years of violence by her mother against her
father that could have been avoided if her father received the services he
needed. Her mother, Ruth, has undergone counseling and now freely admits
she physically abused David in front of Maegan for years, even at
knifepoint. Ruth supports the lawsuit, stating that her violence could
recur anytime and that David will have no place to turn.

Children like Maegen are often the greatest victims in these cases,
according to attorney Marc E. Angelucci, who is representing the plaintiffs.
“When victims don't receive the help they need, the violence often
escalates, and children who witness it can be emotionally damaged." Studies
show the chances a woman will abuse her child increase every time she sees
her mother assault her father. (See, Heyman & Slep, Do Child Abuse and
Interparental Violence Lead to Adulthood Fam. Violence? (November 2003) J.
of Marriage & Fam., v. 64, issue 4, pp 864-70.)

More than 835,000 men are victims of domestic violence annually in the U.S.,
making at least 36% of the victims, according to the National Violence
Against Women Survey, sponsored by the Department of Justice.
http://www.ncjrs.org/txtfiles1/nij/181867.txt . Most other studies show that women
initiate domestic violence as often as men do.
http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm . Further, according to the California
Research Bureau, more than 4,000 men seek domestic violence shelter based
services every year in California. (See page 12 & 14 of report at
http://www.library.ca.gov/crb/02/16/02-016.pdf .)

But California Health & Safety Code § 124250 denies men the right to receive
state-funded services, including shelter, hotel vouchers, counseling and
court advocacy. Consequently, male victims are shut out of vital
state-funded services state-wide. The only exception is the Valley Oasis
shelter in Lancaster, which has defiantly sheltered both male and female
victims for over 10 years with no problems. Oasis' former director,
Patricia Overberg (patoverberg@aol.com), says she has seen men travel
hundreds of miles for services because nobody would help them, and that she
was subjected to "continuous abuse" by other shelter directors for helping
men. (http://www.ncfmla.org/pdf/overberg.pdf .) Angelucci believes hundreds of
other fathers and children could join the class-action lawsuit. The current
plaintiffs are from Los Angeles, Sacramento, Grass Valley and Sherman Oaks.

STATISTICS ON MALE VICTIMS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

"[A]pproximately 1.5 million women and 834,732 men are raped and/or
physically assaulted by an intimate partner annually in the United States"
(which means at least 36% of the victims are men), according to the National
Violence Against Women Survey, co-sponsored by the Department of Justice and
the Centers for Disease Control. http://www.ncjrs.org/txtfiles1/nij/181867.txt

The Sheriff's Department of San Bernardino County, California confirms the
above figure on its website and also documents how female DV is serious and
is usually not in self-defense.
http://www.co.san-bernardino.ca.us/sheriff/dvra/dom_viol_facts_main.htm

As for men seeking shelter services in California, this official California
government report from the California Research Bureau shows, on pages 12 and
14, that at least 4,649 men sought shelter-based domestic violence services
in 2003, and one shelter in Los Angeles reported even more male victims than
female victims seeking services.
http://www.library.ca.gov/crb/02/16/02-016.pdf

California State University maintains an online bibliography summarizing
over 100 studies/analyses which found: "women are as physically aggressive,
or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or
male partners." http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm One of them is the
most comprehensive analysis of existing research on DV ever done, which
confirmed that women initiate DV as often as men, and also found that 38
percent of physically injured victims are men and that self-defense does not
explain the female violence. (Prof. John Archer, "Sex Differences in
Aggression Between Heterosexual Partners: A Meta-Analytic Review,
Psychological Bulletin," November 2000. v. 126, n. 5, p. 651, 664.

In a University of Pennsylvania emergency room survey, 12 percent of men
reported being physically assaulted by a female partner within the previous
12 months, often with weapons or hard objects, and the male victims were
disproportionately black males with no health insurance.
http://www.aemj.org/cgi/content/abstract/6/8/786

For a scholarly analysis of the data on male victims, the historical
suppression of the data, and a solid refutation of the arguments made by
feminists who want to minimize and downplay male victims, see Professor
Linda Kelly's excellent law review article, "Disabusing the Definition of
Domestic Abuse; How Women Batter Men and the Role of the Feminist State," 30
Florida State Law Review 791 (2003), at
http://www.law.fsu.edu/journals/lawreview/downloads/304/kelly.pdf

A Canadian government report highlights some of the key data showing women
initiate domestic violence at least as often as men do.
http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/ncfv-cnivf/familyviolence/pdfs/Intimate_Partner.pdf

Patricia Overberg, former director of Valley Oasis, has a sworn declaration
about what happened when her DV shelter began helping male victims as well
as female victims. http://www.ncfmla.org/pdf/overberg.pdf

"[C]ontrary to the claim that women only hit in self-defense, we found that
women were as likely to initiate the violence as were men. In order to
correct for a possible bias in reporting, we reexamined our data looking
only at the self-reports of women. The women reported similar rates of
female-to-male violence compared to male-to-female, and women also reported
they were as likely to initiate the violence as were men."
http://www.ncfmla.org/gelles.html

Even crime surveys, which are conducted by asking participants about "crime"
(and thus limit the figures only to DV that is seen as "crime"), now show
that at least 25% of DV is against men and that 25% of perpetrators are
women. http://criminaljustice.state.ny.us/crimnet/pubs.htm#ibr