Terry O’Neill’s talking points are lies. In her Huffington Post article[1], they are obvious lies. The president of N.O.W (an organization whose name dishonestly conflates female human beings with the ideology called feminism) begins with a repetition of the statement by Republican representative Sandy Adams. Representative Adams said, “Shame on them” after being told of groups opposing the revised Violence Against Woman Act, HR 4970.

This opposition came from “more than 300 organizations and government agencies helping victims of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking”

The agencies in question are characterized by O’Neill as: “agencies helping victims of domestic violence” but another way to express this, without any metaphorical vaseline smeared on our lens would be to note these are agencies funded by provisions in the previous version of VAWA.

“Shame on them.”

That now expired version of the Violence Against Women Act was built on the ideology of the Duluth Model of domestic violence. This is an unsound, dogmatic conception of domestic violence in which all violence is male initiated and perpetrated, but which does not correspond to valid research on domestic violence, or reality.

The Duluth Model’s website FAQ page is explicit in identifying men as abusers and women as victims going as far as justifying and excusing women’s violence against men, and imputing the motive of patriarchal domination to men in abusive or violent relationships.

Monotonous adherence to the claim of ideological motivation and sexually directional violence (men abusing women) is what makes the Duluth Model so entirely useless as a tool to reduce violence within relationships. Focusing on only half the problem in violent relationships is the logical equivalent of fighting a structure fire by pouring water on only the North and East facing walls, and allowing the South and West facing walls to burn freely.

“[W]omen’s violence against men has a trivial effect on men compared to the devastating effect of men’s violence against women” [2]

However, the sexually selective fiction of the Duluth Model is what makes it so useful as a narrative for the securing of funds. The image of a violent angry man, beating and abusing an innocent and decorative female victim is what fires everybody’s imagination and outrage, and provides easy access to their wallets for donations. The more nuanced truth, that violence is committed reciprocally by men and women[3][4][5][6][7], and that it is motivated by financial stress, mental illness, drug addiction, poor socialization, single-parent upbringing and a host of other factors[8][9], well, this isn’t such as easy sell when collecting money for shelter funding.

If “agencies helping victims of domestic violence” focus on only half the participants, using a narrative excluding possible participation of the other half – then those “helping organizations” will never run out of customers, or funding, because they will never reduce or ameliorate any violence or abuse within relationships. By using a purposefully dysfunctional model, those “agencies helping victims of domestic violence” maintain and exacerbate violence in relationships, ensuring the money keeps flowing and that their decorative and innocent female victims are never in short supply.

This is why the previous version of VAWA included almost no provision to thwart abuse of the bill by false accusation, for legal advantage in situations of divorce, immigration, and notably, by prosecutors pursuing frivolous cases against men on scanty or on no evidence – because regardless of the outcomes of those prosecutions, they were funded in the previous version VAWA.

It was a law so tailored for exploitation that under VAWA – the domestic violence grievance industry became a business of profiteers, using a system which escalates human carnage to keep lawyers, lobbyists, prosecutors, and shelter directors paid. VAWA created a system which perpetuates abuse of women and men, and destroys lives, and tears apart families for profit. Terry O’Neill knows this of course, because she is a part of that system. Which explains why she is now lying about honest attempts to reform it. Cui bono?

O’Neill notes (correctly) that the organization called Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE) authored some of the revised language in the new version of VAWA, but characterizes this as “language that rolled back protections for battered immigrants”.

This characterization is false, but the revised language does provide for increased accountability, and some checks against use of VAWA for fraudulent purposes, both by accusers, and by opportunist prosecutors like the infamously corrupt Mary Kellett. No-drop domestic violence prosecutions, such as those pursued by profiteers like Kellet were funded regardless of whether convictions were obtained. This incentivized and funded thousands of frivolous prosecutions, brought for motive of profit to District Attorneys, regardless of the attendant destruction of families and men fraudulently accused.

The use of VAWA by women marrying into the United States to fast-track their citizenship is well documented, feeding their erstwhile husbands to the machine of the grievance industry and gaining citizenship. The structural accommodation is of abuse and fraud, almost as if abuse of the law had been intentionally planned by the framers of the previous version of VAWA. This is what the updated version of the bill aims to correct. But Terry O’Neill claims this is the removal of the protection from victims. It is impossible to take her claim at face value. A detailed reading of the new bill’s language doesn’t support the claim, and a return to the question of who benefits suggests a more realistic reading.

This is transparent in O’Neill’s own explanation, as she says : “The principles underlying H.R. 4970’s rollbacks of existing law seem to be that victims don’t tell the truth, and that the governmental and nonprofit agencies that provide services to victims and hold perpetrators accountable are engaged in self-enrichment.”

Revealing is the use of the word victims. By the act of accusation, in O’Neill’s cosmology – accusers are transformed to the un-impeachable pseudo martyrdom of victimhood. Due process, evidentiary inquiry, and the foundation of western justice; a presumption of innocence – these are swept aside by the old VAWA. Expediently condemning those accused, and moving funds to the “victims” and their advocates and enablers.

In O’Neill’s words : “victims don’t tell the truth” but in reality, accusers often do not. In a system incentivizing false accusation, more of it will occur. O’Neill also invokes the imagery of the third Reich, with her declaration that:

Right-wing House members marched in lockstep..

Obviously, this is a metaphor, and not an actual parade, but no marching or lock-stepping public demonstrations of martial prowess are going on among elected representatives. The move to reform a badly written law which encouraged fraud and suspended due process is attacked by a profiteer who sees opportunity escaping. O’Neill also appears to count on no fact-checking as she indulges in some fantasy.

“Yet not one of them provided evidence of rampant fraud and abuse among VAWA’s thousands of grantees and subgrantees, which include law-enforcement agencies, prosecutors’ offices and courts” et-cetera, and so on, and so forth, ad infinitude. The mention in her claim of “thousands of grantees and subgrantees” likely included to discourage fact checkers by the enormity of the necessary research.

However, the repeated coverage of one such case by this website springs to mind in O’Neill’s claim of “Yet not one of them provided evidence of rampant fraud..”

Mary Kellett provides one such example.

Strictly speaking, O’Neill might be correct to say “not one of them provided evidence”, since it could be more than just one.

O’Neill falls to use of the propagandist’s tool, using repetition to establish that accusers are automatically victims, in her words “And why does the language of the bill assume victims are liars and grantees are embezzlers” ?

The language of the bill makes no such assumption, but does accommodate the reality that human beings, if presented with opportunity and advantage, will tend to capitalize on it, as has been repeatedly established under the regime of the previous VAWA. Presumption of innocence is applied to accusers who stand to profit by their accusation, but in the old VAWA, not to the accused, overturning a fundamental principal of justice.

As ever, shame is rolled out against anyone with an opposing view, or an ethical sense that human beings are not innately guilty based on sex. But according to O’Neill, rather than reason, evidence or logic, her tool of control is shame. To quote her once more: “The real shame is on you.”

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/terry-oneill/where-the-real-shame-lies_b_1555946.html

[2] http://www.theduluthmodel.org/about/faqs.html#women

[3] http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V74-gender-symmetry-with-gramham-Kevan-Method%208-.pdf

[4] http://csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm

[5] Headey, B., Scott, D., & de Vaus, D. (1999). Domestic violence in Australia: Are Women and Men Equally Violent? Australian Social Monitor 2:57-62

[6] Dutton D. G. (2007). Female Intimate Partner Violence and Developmental Trajectories of Abusive Families. International Journal of Men’s Health, 6, 54-71

[7] Archer J (2000). Sex Differences in Physically Aggressive Acts between Heterosexual Partners: A Meta-Analytic Review. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 651-680

[8] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-abusers-02-jan02,0,1147422.story?page=2

[9] http://www.themensproject.ca/sites/default/files/menandhealingfinal.pdf