The £20 billion annual cost of family breakdown

by STEVE DOUGHTY

Last updated at 22:00 08 December 2006

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The report notes the disparity in family background between children most likely to do well in school and those who fail

Family breakdown costs the country £20 billion a year, a report produced for the Tory party found yesterday.

It estimated the cost of family collapse including the burden of welfare benefits on the taxpayer, the amount of debt incurred by single parents trying to survive, and the price to society of coping with associated problems like drug abuse.

And the inquiry set up to provide a basis for party leader David Cameron's policy reviews linked the failures of white boys at school to the increasing likelihood that boys from poor white backgrounds will come from families without fathers.

The full report of the Tory's social justice review group, called Breakdown Britain, is to be published on Monday.

It puts Mr Cameron under pressure to reverse Labour's attempt to sideline marriage and put support for the married family at the heart of party policy when he produces firm ideas to back his promises of cutting poverty next year.

The social justice group, led by former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, said that half of all live-in cohabiting couples who have children have split by the time the child reaches the age of five.

But only one in 12 married couples break up in the first five years of their child's life.

The report also notes the disparity in family background between children most likely to do well in school and those who fail.

Last month the Daily Mail revealed figures showing that poor white boys have now become the worst-performing group in schools, falling behind poor Caribbean boys who have in the past been expected to do worst. The report links performance with family background. Children from Indian families - only 15 per cent of whom come from broken or single-parent families - do best in schools. Poor white boys, as measured by whether they get free school meals, come from single parent families more frequently than the national average, which shows that just under one in four children are brought up by one parent. Caribbean boys have the highest rate of single parent families of all. More than half are brought up by one parent.

Mr Duncan Smith told the BBC yesterday: "What we found was one of the fastest growing groups that are having children in society are cohabting parents. "But what was startling about the figures was that among cohabitees one in two are going to break up and leave a single parent household before the child is five." He said the state was left to 'pick up the pieces' of impoverished broken homes. "We can't have a stable workforce and a productive economy if a grwoing number of people at the bottom end of society are workless and without hope," he added.

The report suggests the welfare state has replaced the 'welfare society' of self-supporting stable married families and the links between them. Labour ministers have increasingly sought to intervene in family life to try to improve the lives of poor children.

Chancellor Gordon Brown's welfare system of tax credits has pumped more than £15 billion a year in extra benefits mainly into single parent families, while projects like the £3 billion Sure Start system have tried to supervise the upbringing of their children. Ministers have advised on how children should brush their teeth and called for classes to teach mothers how to sing their children nursery rhymes. But at the same time remaining tax support for married couples has been stripped away, and the Government insists that marriage is a mere lifestyle choice that has no bearing on the success of families.

Women more likely to be perpetrators of abuse as well as victims

Filed under Education, Family, Gender, Law, Research on Thursday, July 13, 2006.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Women are more likely than men to stalk, attack and psychologically abuse their partners, according to a University of Florida study that finds college women have a new view of the dating scene.

“We’re seeing women in relationships acting differently nowadays than we have in the past,” said Angela Gover, a UF criminologist who led the research. “The nature of criminality has been changing for females, and this change is reflected in intimate relationships as well.”

In a survey of 2,500 students at UF and the University of South Carolina between August and December 2005, more than a quarter (29 percent) reported physically assaulting their dates and 22 percent reported being the victims of attacks during the past year. Thirty-two percent of women reported being the perpetrators of this violence, compared with 24 percent of men. The students took selected liberal arts and sciences courses. Forty percent were men and 60 percent were women, reflecting the gender composition of these classes.

In a separate survey of 1,490 UF students, one quarter (25 percent) said they had been stalked during the past year and 7 percent reported engaging in stalking, of whom a majority (58 percent) were female.

Although women were the predominant abusers, they still made up the largest number of victims in both surveys, accounting for 70 percent of those being stalked, for example.

The reason more college men weren’t victims may be that women in the study did not exclusively date them, preferring men who had already graduated, not yet enrolled in college or chose not to attend college at all, Gover said. “It shows that students who are perpetrating these attacks aren’t just targeting other students on campus,” she said.

It also is possible that some of the physical attacks women claim they are responsible for are actually acts of self-defense, Gover added. “Maybe some of these women have been abused by their partner for some time and they’re finally fighting back,” she said.

Recent studies on domestic violence suggest that whereas in the past victims might have felt trapped in violent situations, today’s women are more likely to understand they have options instead of putting up with mistreatment, she said.

“I think we may also be seeing sort of a new dynamic in dating relationships in terms of women feeling more empowered,” she said. “They recognize they don’t have to be in a dating relationship forever. They can get out of it.”

Child abuse was the single biggest determining factor for men and women becoming perpetrators or victims of either dating violence or stalking, Gover said. Even if one never personally experienced abuse, witnessing violence between one’s parents as a child increased the likelihood of stalking or being stalked as a young adult and it made girls more susceptible to becoming victims of dating violence when they grew up, she said.

The survey found that men and women who were abused as children were 43 percent more likely than their peers who were not mistreated to perpetrate physical violence and 51 percent more likely to be victims of physical violence in a dating relationship. Violent acts included kicking or slapping, pushing or shoving, punching or hitting with a hand or object, slamming someone against a wall and using force to make a partner have sex, she said.

Sexual risk-taking – the age when survey respondents first had sex and the number of sexual partners in their lifetime – was another important risk factor, but surprisingly, attitudes toward women made no difference, said Gover, who did her research with Catherine Kaukinen, a University of South Carolina criminology professor, and Kathleen Fox, a UF graduate student in criminology. Some of the findings were presented at the American Society of Criminology annual meeting in November in Toronto.

The study also was among the first to look at psychological abuse. Examples included preventing partners from seeing family or friends, shouting at them and using threats to have sex. Fifty-four percent of respondents reported being psychologically abusive, and 52 percent said they were victims of this type of behavior. Women were more likely to be psychologically abusive, with 57 percent saying they were perpetrators versus 50 percent of males.

Shelley Serdahely, executive director of Men Stopping Violence, in Decatur, Ga., questions the validity of studies showing women are more violent. “Women might be more likely to get frustrated because men are not taught how to be active listeners and women feel like they are not being heard,” she said. “Often women are more emotional because the relationship matters a lot to them, and while that may come out in a push or a shove or a grab, all of which are considered dating violence, it doesn’t have the effect of intimidating the man.”

Feminists Deny Truth on Domestic Violence

Tuesday , May 30, 2006

By Wendy McElroy

In the last three decades, feminism has revolutionized daily life from the legal system and social mores down to the story books children use in kindergarten. Feminist discussion seems to be 'always' and 'everywhere'.

But I believe the contrary is true. Genuine discussion of feminist issues ended in the 1970s when one school came to dominate and moved to silence competing views both within the movement and outside.

Politically correct feminists maintain that women as a class are politically oppressed by men as a class, which means that every woman is oppressed by every man. Class oppression is the ideological lens through which PC feminism views all issues.

Tammy Bruce's book "The New Thought Police" (2001) received media buzz as a former insider's expose of how PC feminists smear their intellectual opponents in an attempt to silence and discredit them. For example, Bruce described how PC feminists led a campaign of defamation against the conservative Dr. Laura Schlessinger by misrepresenting her as homophobic.

Joan Garry, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, was quoted as saying, "If she can't be controlled, she must be stopped."

The PC treatment of heretics within feminism has been no less brutal. Indeed, heretics are commonly reviled more than infidels.

Consider Erin Pizzey.

In 1971, Pizzey opened the first battered wives shelter in England, which she ran until 1982. Arguably, the Chiswick Family Rescue was the second domestic violence shelter in the world. Pizzey's book "Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear" (1974, out of print) was one of the first to explore and expose wife battering.

Today, the shelter Pizzey founded denies her entry; her name does not appear in its official history.

Pizzey's 'mistake' was to diverge from the theory of domestic violence that feminists at the time insisted dominate all discussion. She believed that men could also be the victims of domestic violence, and that women could be as violent toward their partners as men.

Pizzey's views put her on a collision course with PC feminists who, according to Pizzey's own published account of events, initiated a campaign of harassment and violence against her.

Pizzey described this harassment in an article she published in the Scotsman in 1999.

"Because of my opposition to the hijacking of the refuge movement, I was a target for abuse. Anywhere I spoke there was a contingent of screaming, heckling feminists waiting for me," Pizzey wrote. "Abusive telephone calls to my home, death threats and bomb scares, became a way of living for me and for my family. Finally, the bomb squad, asked me to have all my mail delivered to their head quarters."

One night, the family dog was killed.

Eventually, "exhausted and disillusioned," Pizzey said she went into "exile with her children and grandchildren," leaving England in 1982 to live in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Pizzey returned to England that same year for the book tour of her next book, "Prone to Violence," which once again ignited a violent reaction among feminists. Pizzey wrote that when she arrived in England for her book tour, she was "met with a solid wall of feminist demonstrators" carrying signs that read "ALL MEN ARE RAPISTS, ALL MEN ARE BATTERERS."

"The police insisted that I have an escort all round England for my book tour," Pizzey wrote in the Scotsman.

There is some reason to believe that "Prone to Violence" has been the target of a campaign of suppression by PC feminists. According to the web site Wikepedia, in 1996 an internet search of the world libraries that can be accessed through the Library of Congress uncovered only 13 listings for the book: an astonishingly low number for a pioneering work that caused a sensation.

Why would PC feminists nearly riot over a book and, then, ignore it?

Because Pizzey advanced a competing theory of domestic violence.

When viewed through the PC lens of class oppression, domestic violence is not an act of violence committed by one individual against another. It is an act committed by men that must be correctly understood within the larger context of women's class oppression.

"Prone to Violence" spelled out some of Pizzey's disagreements with that view.

Disagreement #1: Of the first 100 women who entered Chiswick, Pizzey found that over 60 percent were as violent or more violent than the men they were fleeing. In short, a significant percentage of the women were also batterers or otherwise active participants in the violence.

Disagreement #2: Pizzey developed the theory that many battered women were psychologically drawn to abusive relationships and they sought them out. To PC feminists, such analysis was tantamount to 'blaming the victim.'

Disagreement #3: She explained why the existing model of domestic violence shelters was ineffective. PC feminists were attempting then (and now) to secure ever greater financing for these operations. Sandra Horley, director of Chiswick in 1992, reportedly complained, "if we put across this idea that the abuse of men is as great as the abuse of women, then it could seriously affect our funding."

Pizzey may or may not have been correct; I believe she was and is.

Neverthless, her book drew upon over 10 years at the Chiswick shelter during which time Pizzey dealt with some 5,000 women and children.

"Prone to Violence" is an extremely early and honest overview of domestic violence from a woman with extensive experience of its daily realities. The book cried out to be taken seriously. At minimum, it deserved a thorough rebuttal from its PC feminist critics--not death threats directed at its author nor the ultimate silence it received.

Pizzey is not alone. In America, Suzanne Steinmetz -- author of the book "The Battered Husband" and a co-author of the much-cited "First National Family Violence Survey" -- experienced a similar drama. She and her children received death threats; an ACLU meeting at which she spoke received a bomb threat.

The reason: her research indicated that the rate at which men were victimized by domestic violence was similar to the rate for women.

In large and small ways -- from shrill protests to the tearing down of announcements, from blocking university promotions to threats and defamation -- PC feminism has attempted to stop voices it could not control.

Feminism is dying not from a backlash but from an orthodoxy that cannot tolerate real discussion...and never could.

Wendy McElroy is the editor of ifeminists.com and a research fellow for The Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. She is the author and editor of many books and articles, including the new book, "Liberty for Women: Freedom and Feminism in the 21st Century" (Ivan R. Dee/Independent Institute, 2002). She lives with her husband in Canada.

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Men are More Likely Than Women to Be Victims in Dating Violence, UNH Expert Says

Contact: Erika Mantz
603-862-1567
UNH Media Relations

May 19, 2006

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DURHAM, N.H. -- A 32-nation study of violence against dating partners by university partners found that about a third had been violent, and most incidents of partner violence involve violence by both the man and woman, according to Murray Straus, founder and co-director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire. The second largest category was couples where the female partner was the only one to carry about physical attacks, not the male partner.

Straus’ new research also found that dominance by the female partner is even more closely related to violence by women than is male dominance. These results call into question the widely held belief that partner violence is primarily a male crime and that when women are violent it is self defense.

“In the 35 years since I began research on partner violence, I have seen my assumptions about prevalence and etiology contradicted by a mass of empirical evidence from my own research and from research by many others,” Straus said. “My view on partner violence now recognizes the overwhelming evidence that women assault their partners at about the same rate as men. However, when women are violent, the injury rate is lower.”

Straus will present his controversial research at the Trends in Intimate Violence Intervention conference in New York City May 22-25, 2006. This research is part of the International Dating Violence Study, a multinational study of violence against dating partners by university students. A consortium of researchers around the world collected data from 13,601 students at 68 universities in 32 nations.

In the paper, Straus calls for an end to the focus on men as the only perpetrators of dating violence, saying the refusal to recognize the multi-causal nature of the problem is hampering the effort to end domestic violence and ignoring half the perpetrators. As recently as December 2005, the National Institute of Justice refused to consider applications for funding that dealt with male victims.

“Changes in policy that acknowledge men are not the only perpetrators of partner violence are needed immediately,” Straus said. “It is time to make the prevention and treatment effort one that is aimed at ending all family violence, including spanking children, not just violence against women.”

Straus is the author or co-author of more than 200 publications, including "Beating the Devil Out Of Them: Corporal Punishment By American Parents and Its Effects on Children." More information on the International Dating Violence Study and papers reporting results are available at http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/.

http://www.unh.edu/news/cj_nr/2006/may/em_060519male.cfm?type=n