In New Zealand a proposed amendment, Social Security (Conjugal Status) Amendment Bill, has the purpose of enabling the government to pay a welfare benefit to people who are living with violent partners. The idea behind this is that people with violent partners may not have access to the money they need to care for themselves and their families. The NZMERA is not against the principle of this Bill, but we have reservations about how widespread the problem actually is, and how the Bill will be interpreted once it is passed.
We submit that all reference to the so-called "Battered Woman's Syndrome" should be removed from this Bill (i.e. from the Explanatory Note). This would not affect the purpose of the Bill in the slightest. The Bill is intended to benefit both male and female victims of heterosexual and homosexual partners, so it is superfluous to give sexist emphasis to women in particular.
The use of the term "Battered Woman's Syndrome" is purely a genuflexion in the direction of establishment anti-male ideologues, and the term could just as easily be replaced with the gender-neutral term "Masochistic Partner Syndrome". The repeated emphasis in our society on women-as-victims severely disadvantages men when they are in any form of dispute with a woman.
The book which invented the "Battered Woman Syndrome" is junk science:
We have all heard of the"Battered Woman Syndrome" which originated with this book.... The Battered Woman is unsatisfactory as a serious work, and completely unacceptable as a foundation for family law. First, it is profoundly unscholarly. Without objective verification of the incidents herein described, they are nothing more than hearsay. Second, the book does not even pretend to be objective: the woman's side, and only the woman's side, is presented, when it is undeniable that in a large percentage of cases, the woman initiates violence against the man. Third, Prof. Walker's expanded definition of "battering" that includes verbal abuse does not even address the issue of female verbal abuse of men. Fourth, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that Prof. Walker's sample of 'battered women' is in any way a representative sample, and even if it were, she presents no statistics to support her conclusions. In fact, most of her conclusions are utterly unsupported by any kind of hard data, and are simply pronounced ex cathedra.
Review: The Battered Woman, by Lenore Walker (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1979, reviewed by Robert Sheaffer
Horney, Dr. Karen, M.D.: "The Problem of Feminine Masochism", in Feminine Psychology (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1967, p. 214). First published 1935.
Gelles, Richard J: Family Violence (Beverly Hills, Sage Publications, 1979).
Ofshe, Richard and Watters, Ethan: Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria (New York: Charles Scribners' Sons, 1994).
Sommers, Christina Hoff: Who Stole Feminism? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
Straus, Murray A.; Gelles, Richard J.; and Steinmetz, Suzanne K. Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family. (New York: Anchor Doubleday Books, 1980.)
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