The Truth About VAWA
Violence Against Women Act
Puritan America has a talent for creating moral panics around nonexistent threats.
VAWA was fabricated completely from whole cloth. Its sponsor’s purpose is to permanently separate men and women and destroy their families.
Those responsible for drafting, inventing the "factoids" to justify it, and implementing this unprovoked and unprecedented federal attack on the sanctity of the American family should be tracked down and punished like the vicious animals they are. They are a more serious threat to national security than Hitler or Hussein. The loss of life, liberty, and property attributable directly these unconscionable actions exceeds tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars. Every shred of available data refutes any notion that this law has saved one life, prevented one act of domestic violence, or protected one woman.
An American wife is the safest woman on planet Earth. Despite the philandering ways of a Commander in Chief who repeatedly sends men into harm’s way, there is no credible threat to any American woman from any foreign enemies.
The American woman who marries will nearly double her standard of living and find that they are one fourth as likely to be assaulted as women who cohabit [read: those women who do not derive the benefits of marriage]. Conversely, a married woman who divorces will see a similar drop in her living standards and increase her and her children’s risk of violence by up to 33 times.
An American woman is one fourth as likely to be murdered or commit suicide as a man, one twentieth as likely to die on the job, and has a life expectancy seven years longer. Even if such minor acts as "pushing and shoving" are included to inflate incidents of "domestic violence" by a factor of three, numerous studies show that nineteen out of twenty American wives are never subjected to domestic violence. And when domestic violence does occur that leads to injury, it is the woman who initiates the majority of it.
Table No. 340 of the 1998 Statistical Abstract of the United States, states that 3,631 females are murdered in the United States. Using 3,631 as a baseline, from Table No. 1 of the report "Murder in Families" (Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report #NCJ143498), 5.5% or 199 are wives murdered by husbands, 2.7% or 98 were mothers murdered by children, 1.6% or 58 were daughters murdered by parents, 1.3% were girls murdered by siblings, and 2.3% or 84 were girls murdered by "other". Of the remaining 86.6% or 3,144 females who were murdered by non-family members, 107 were children, leaving 3,077 women murdered by non-family members. Thus, fifteen times as many women are murdered by non-family members as wives are murdered by husbands. Clearly, the safest place a woman can be is in her home with the biological father of her children.
Compared to wives who are murdered by their husbands:
By whatever standard is applied, marriage is a safe haven for American women. If the 31 million divorced or never married women over age 18 had the same average overall mortality rate as married women, 62 thousand fewer of them would die prematurely each year compared to 200 married women killed by their husbands, a factor of 315. Similarly, 11,000 fewer of the 11 million widows would die each year.
Had VAWA been a program to encourage men and women to marry and enhance marital stability, rather than to destroy families, an estimated 74 thousand fewer women and 437 thousand fewer men would die prematurely each year based on mortality statistics compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and eleven credible scholarly studies of the lower mortality rates of both married men and women.
Not only is the federal government incapable of reducing the number of wives murdered by husbands each year from 199 to even, say, 198; not only is such social engineering far beyond the scope of their Constitutional authority; not only is it totally sexist to even propose to exclude the majority of the victims of violent crime, i.e., men, from such benefits in violation of the Fifth Amendment guaranteeing equal protection; but this legislation removes from families, churches, and local communities the ability to deal with such problems in a more humane, less socially destructive manner.
Social pathology cannot be resolved by focusing only on murder when murder is only 0.7% of all deaths. It cannot be resolved by focusing only on females when females are only a quarter of murder victims. It cannot be resolved by focusing only on domestic violence against women by husbands when this accounts for only 1.3% of all murders and less than 25% of all intimate violence. It cannot be resolved by ignoring the 12,000 men who are murdered each year, the 2.3 million men and women who die from other causes besides murder, the 511,000 deaths of men and women that could have been prevented by proper action from Congress, e.g., funding research to find the underlying causes and possible cures. Yet VAWA takes all of these impossible steps and gender feminists reap the financial benefits of placing the blame on men without any attempt at solving the problems in the form of grants and social programs.
The situation with regard to our countries' children under the madness of VAWA is even more bleak. NIS-3 shows that a married woman’s children are one tenth as likely to be physically abused, one twentieth as likely to be fatally abused, sexually abused, seriously abused, moderately abused, or emotionally abused, one thirtieth as likely to be emotionally neglected, and one fiftieth as likely to be educationally neglected, than children of single or divorced mothers.
Table 6-4 of NIS-3 shows that 1,170 of the 1,500 children murdered in the US were murdered by women. Thus nearly five times as many children are murdered by women as men and the person least likely to harm a child is the biological father.
The United States Congress knows that VAWA does not, and cannot, reduce domestic violence. Congress is almost exclusively lawyers who understand precisely how and why such a law can do nothing but undermine family stability. They are mostly the lawyers who have witnessed firsthand the dynamics of the conflicts between husband and wife caused by such legislation. They understand exactly how interference by courts in private family matters, and such State-supported denigration of men fattens lawyers’ wallets, justifies new prisons, and counsellors and psychiatrists who preach the feminist gospel. And how this legislation creates ever more single-mother households who raise children most likely to need government services, and ultimately grows government at the expense of America’s personal savings accounts. The Congress knows that VAWA never will reduce domestic violence, and that it was never intended to.
The men and women who sit in Congress are more aware than the average citizen that the incessant media barrage of promises to wives to "rescue them from violent men" emboldens many women to initiate all manner of domestic violence — exactly the opposite of what it’s authors pretend it is designed to do. They are fully aware that the theory that men are more violent than women is disputed by every independent scholarly study of both men and women. Such studies report exactly the opposite of the VAWA premise — that is women are more violent in relationships than men. Congress understands precisely that VAWA was fabricated from whole cloth.
Congress has better access to the facts than the general public, so each Congressman understands intimately that VAWA is based purely on fiction and mass hysteria. Many of them might well believe that this mass hysteria was initiated by government itself. They know better than their constituents that the notion the federal government can solve the problem of "domestic violence" is disputed by government’s well documented failure to ever solve any social problem it has undertaken, be it welfare, poverty, child abuse, education, or a host of other noble causes. They know better than the general public that the broken families caused by such legislation as VAWA causes far more harm and death to the children of divorce than the entire sum of domestic violence causes to all the parties involved.
Congress knows, for example, that 25 million men of marriageable age understand precisely how such legislation makes marriage a hostile environment for any man, causing them to refuse to take on that risk and responsibility with fewer and fewer rewards. They know that this left 21 million potential wives and single mothers alone at the altar, quintupling our illegitimacy rate to two out of every five childbirths. They know that a father whose family is destroyed by a divorce supported and encouraged by programs like VAWA is twice as likely to die of heart disease and cancer, three times as likely to die of diabetes or an accident, four times as likely to die of respiratory disease or to commit suicide or to be murdered, and five times as likely to die of cirrhosis, than he was before his children were taken from him in the name of a cause whose terms have yet to be defined.
To assume that a member of Congress does not know these simple facts, collected at great expense to the taxpayer, testified to by "the finest judicial system in the world," would be tantamount to claiming that a member of Congress is a fool. Fools don’t get elected to Congress. Fools run for office and fail. Our electoral process doesn’t allow such people to become Senators or Representatives of we the people. Congress knows these facts better than we the people know them.
In other words, they know that if there is a violence-against-anything-act, it should be a Violence Against Families Act which severely penalizes those who take, threaten to take, or attempt to take children away from their natural fathers. They should do as the Code of Hammurabi did 3,800 years ago:
Indeed, many crimes associated with marriage were made punishable with death in the Hammurabi Code, including:
Our Congress is fully aware that, rather than discouraging adulteresses as any law should, VAWA sends a clear message that any wife can commit adultery at will, give birth to a child not genetically linked to her husband, call the police if her husband dares to raise his voice against her for such misdeeds, and get him imprisoned so she can legally and stealthily rob him of his castle, cash, cars, and kids. Such a financial incentive, one that gives a woman a man’s entire life’s work with one 911 call, would turn a nun to prostitution. It is what inspired John Bauer http://www.egroups.com/group/demand/1278.html? to write:
Consider the sheer mass hysteria created by the following statement, among many falsehoods, from the Violence Against Women Office:
You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to realize that one out of every thirty women of the more than 135 million in this country aren’t raped or assaulted each year, or that every one of them is not raped or assaulted within three decades as implied by this statement. A business proposal based on such outlandish claims would be laughed out of the office in two seconds. But the Violence Against Women Office thrives at the expense of civil liberties and on taxpayer monies by demonizing men, promoting the vilest lies, and issuing propaganda that would make a Stalinist proud.
Modified Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Copyright @ 2007 by Fathers' Manifesto & Christian Party