Privacy Is One Thing, Silence Another

Everyone's favorite golf celebrity just spent several days in the hospital after running his SUV into a fire hydrant and tree at the end of his driveway. His face was bruised and lacerated even though the accident was minor enough that the airbags in his car didn't deploy. His neighbors called the police after they noticed him lying unconscious on the driveway. He says his wife heroically smashed the rear windows of his car with a golf club so she could drag him from the dented vehicle, but, really, he'd rather not talk about it.

So, let's go ahead and respect his privacy and leave it at that. Instead, let's talk about something completely different: domestic violence against men.

Then again, most people would really rather not talk about that either. Because really, there's nothing to talk about. We all know it doesn't happen because how could it? Women just aren't like that. And even if some of them might want to beat their boyfriends or husbands, they wouldn't be able to because men are, on average, larger than women. And the only way to attack and injure other people is by being larger than them, right?

Well, maybe that isn't right. And maybe that's part of why we either mock or ignore men who have been assaulted by their girlfriends or wives. Remember how funny it was when that professional pitcher was beaten so badly by his petite wife that he had to miss several games? It was so funny that after he had recovered and returned to pitching, the stadium's music director couldn't resist playing the music video that had made his wife famous over the PA system.

And when there's no obvious way to mock someone for being assaulted by his wife, we'll just ignore it instead, like those reports you probably didn't hear about the world champion boxer who was beaten and strangled to death by his diminutive wife last summer. Apparently, the local police wanted to rule it a suicide, but couldn't explain how the man had managed to bruise himself so badly while choking himself to death with a purse strap.

The police tend to be like that in cases like these. In fact, it's policy in most American jurisdictions for the police to arrest a man every time a report of domestic violence is made. What police learn when they arrive at the scene doesn't matter. What does matter is that someone is arrested and that the someone who is arrested is male.

The reason we have policies like these isn't because government agencies believe that domestic violence always consists of men attacking women — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have known for years that about half of all domestic violence consists of women attacking men — it's because talking about the fact that women are just as prone to violence as men will get public officials labeled as anti-feminists or misogynists.

Mandatory-arrest policies, and the associated notion that male-on-female violence is the norm, gained popularity in the mid-80s, when the Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment showed that if women were "empowered" to instantly jail a man after a fight, domestic violence decreased. If this happened, scholars reasoned, then the real problem must be men systematically bludgeoning women into submission. All women needed was to be able to threaten men with imprisonment, and the problem of domestic violence would go away.

Of course, this didn't happen. And no one has ever been able to duplicate the results of the Minneapolis experiment either. But that wasn't important, because the idea that men were oppressing women through violence turned out to be remarkably popular. It fit right in with the equally popular notion that men had been conspiring to oppress women by various means throughout history.

And so, for the last few decades, men who were once scorned for not being "manly" enough to control their wives or girlfriends were, instead, just ignored. They were turned away from family-violence shelters. The police viewed their stories with suspicion. The courts punished them for provoking their spouses. And if a male victim of domestic violence were too notable for any of those tactics, we'd just resort to the old-fashioned way of handling these things. We'd mock him for not being "man enough" to handle his wife or girlfriend in the first place.

But hiding the fact that women assault men just as often as men assault women isn't easy. Over time, people start to notice that something's wrong. The signs of domestic abuse we've all been told about seem to appear just as often in the men we know as the women. And male celebrities keep having strange accidents at home at almost the same rate as female celebrities.

Eventually, some people will get suspicious and start looking into things. And what they'll find isn't just that real data hasn't been publicized, it's that fake data has been promoted. For instance, have you been told that women are far more likely to be seriously injured in a domestic fight than men? Then you've been lied to. According to the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, men are almost twice as likely to be seriously injured in a domestic fight as women.

How can this be? Well, maybe, aggression isn't determined by gender. Maybe it's determined by temperament. And, maybe, the ability to injure someone isn't related to bulk. Maybe, its related to viciousness. And, maybe, men and women are both from the same planet after all, and both are just as prone to violence as each other. And, maybe, it's time for us to recognize this and stop pretending otherwise.

If that golfer I mentioned doesn't want to talk to the public about what happened to him the other night, that's fine. He shouldn't have to. But the police should have to talk to him about it just the same as they would if his name had been Michelle Wie instead of Tiger Woods. Domestic violence is no less harmful, or less prevalent, when the victim is male instead of female.