I agree completely with the spirit of the headline on the article in this newspaper last Tuesday by the executive director of Amnesty International (Ireland), Sean Love: We should indeed save our anger for "the perpetrators of abuse". I agree, too, with the sub-heading: "Polarising the current debate on domestic violence along gender lines does no service to any of the victims", writes John Waters
I find it disorienting, therefore, that Mr Love seemed to be attacking me, who had simply asked that men and women, perpetrators and victims, be treated equally. It is Amnesty that has taken the one-side position, chiming in with a chorus of malevolent vested interests demanding draconian treatment of men in the domestic arena and opposing every attempt to have domestic violence approached in an even-handed and truthful manner.
Mr Love hopes the recent National Crime Council report on domestic violence (produced for the NCC by the ESRI) will "end the erroneous claim that severe violence in the home happens on a 50-50 basis to men and women". I, too, hope that the report will put an end to erroneous claims, such as, for example, those made by Amnesty Inernational.
Mr Love claims the NCC figures are "substantially higher for female victims". Well, some are. Media reports emphasised one statistic: 88,000 men and 213,000 women had experienced "severe violence" by a partner or spouse. But this figure, which translates into 6 per cent of men and 15 per cent of women, includes physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
When we look at the figures for physical abuse, (ie violence strictly defined), we see that 13 per cent of women and 13 per cent of men are affected - precisely 50-50. When "minor" forms of domestic violence are included, the figures retain an approximate symmetry: 29 per cent of women and 26 per cent of men.
It was feminist campaigners who made common currency the broadest conceivable concept of domestic violence, precisely to render it easier for women to remove inconvenient men from their lives. This is what makes so odious the pious hand-wringing by such as Sean Love about "polarisation".
It is men who suffer the brunt of domestic violence legislation, often regardless of guilt, innocence or even evidence. Despite the broadly symmetrical nature of such violence, it is men, all but invariably, who lose their families and homes, and often such men have themselves been violently abused.
All this results from decades of campaigning by feather-bedded feminist groups, which have trivialised violence in the home by ensuring that a man who throws a wet dishcloth "aggressively' into a sink faces the same sanction (a barring order) as one who holds a knife to his wife's throat.
Mr Love states: "That so many victims do not even report to the Garda is a major problem." Sure enough, the NCC report confirms what has long been suspected: 29 per cent of women (one in 3) but only 5 per cent of men (one in 20) report domestic violence to the Garda.
And putting in context Amnesty's constant lamentations about women being turned away from refuges due to underfunding (women's groups get about €15 million of taxpayer's money under this heading annually; men's groups get virtually nothing), the report reveals that 46 per cent of those denied access were refused for reasons other than that the refuges were full. We learn also that 49 per cent of admissions to women's refuges are Travellers, though that community constitutes just 0.6 per cent of the overall population.
Most remarkable about this report, however, is that, despite assiduous efforts to procure an outcome congenial to the prevailing mendacious ideology, the findings substantially vindicate those who have questioned this. In one fell swoop, we have moved from the incidence of domestic violence by women against men being described as "not worth talking about", to an acknowledgment that one in three abused persons are male.
And this despite the fact that, in the conduct of this research, groups representing male victims of domestic violence were deliberately excluded, the steering group in the end comprising only individuals with track histories of activism on the issue of "violence against women".
The sole member with an unambiguous record of scientific detachment resigned due to concerns about the design, direction and scope of the study, as did a key researcher. I have been told that the issues provoking these resignations reflected concerns that the project seemed directed at creating a context in which men could be criminalised.
Following these upheavals, with the research well advanced, the project went through a process of redefinition, and was in effect started over by the ESRI. It may have been relevant that the ESRI had previously produced a survey on domestic violence in which the questionnaire advised interviewees to contact Women's Aid if they needed help answering the questions! If you didn't laugh, you'd cry.