Abuse: Who's Abusing Whom?

By Rod Van Mechelen In the years after I wrote this, when feminists finally admitted that women do commit more child abuse than men, they excused it by saying this is only because women are around children, more, and that if men were around children just as much, then men would be responsible for the majority of child abuse. While that may be true, I never did see the relevance. Children don't care about the sex of their abuser; they just want to be loved and to feel safe. So instead of focusing all of our attention on male perpetrators, we should focus on all perpetrators, regardless of their sex. In the sexist paradigm of the feminists, however, they see women only as victims, and all men as predators. Public Education and Soft Spoken Assaults

1992 Bellevue, Wash. - The public school system abuses boys. From kindergarten on, boys are subjected to the frustration of having to compete with girls who generally have superior verbal and motor skills: "As long as education is principally an 'I talk -- you listen' affair, it will be biased towards the technique of learning which suits the female brain up to a certain age." ( Brain Sex: The Real Difference Between Men and Women , Anne Moir, Ph.D. & David Jessel) Additionally, boys often suffer the subtle verbal assaults of female teachers and girls. By definition, this is abuse: "Abuse is defined as any behavior that is designed to control and subjugate another human being through the use of fear, humiliation, and verbal or physical assaults. In other words, you don't have to be hit to be abused." ( Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why , Dr. Susan Forward and Joan Torres) These verbal attacks are seldom loud, and often deceptively quiet: "Johnny, you wouldn't want us to think you're a bad boy, would you?" To a child, approval can be of such vital importance that the implication of disapproval can be devastating. By the time they are 18, many men have suffered so much abuse in the highly feminized educational environment that they hurl themselves into the social institutions, like Football that celebrate their pain. Under such conditions, the critical question should not be why are some men sexual predators, but how is it that most men are not? Sex abuse

One common pop-feminist assertion is, most child-molesters are men, and most of their victims are girls. ( Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape , Susan Brownmiller) Whether they are right about this or not is not important. Fundamentally, the genders of the victim and the perpetrator are utterly irrelevant. All that really matters is, helping today's victims and preventing future criminal acts. Pop-feminists, however, have reduced this entire issue to an "us versus men" diatribe, thereby making it necessary for us to look at this within the context of gender. Note: Starting October 2011, I began archiving headlines about women who were arrested or convicted of violent crimes, including rape and sexual assault. The reports sometimes mention that the rate of reported rape and sexual assault by women is increasing. Does this reflect any actual increase, or does it reflect a growing sensitivity to the fact that when a women has sex with a boy, in most cases it leaves deep and enduring emotional scars, and truly is an egregious crime? In Abused Boys: The Neglected Victims of Sexual Abuse , Mic Hunter notes that, "Society tends to view the sexual offenses of women as relatively insignificant." With such a bias working against them, it's easy to see how many social scientists may overlook the offenses of women: "It is estimated that women make up 5 percent of the perpetrators in all cases of abuse of girls and 20 percent in the abuse of boys." (Abused Boys, Mic Hunter, p 40) Our society tends to think boys who are abused by women are "lucky," while girls who have sex with men are "victims." Consequently, we ignore male victims, praise female sexual predators, and boys who don't enjoy their molestation "are likely to question their masculinity or sexual orientation." (Abused Boys, Mic Hunter, p 36) Overshadowed by the pop-feminist diatribes against men, this problem is more prevalent than many realize: "A study done by the Canadian government and by the Canadian Gallup Polls interviewed two thousand people of various ages and found that one-third of the males had experienced some type of sexual abuse as a child." (Abused Boys, Mic Hunter, p 26) What this means is, during the past twenty-odd years while pop-feminists spouted their self-serving anti-male rhetoric about the sexual nature of men, almost 100,000 American boys were being victimized each year by both male and female sexual predators. ( Abused Boys: The Neglected Victims of Sexual Abuse , Mic Hunter, p 26) Newspapers, radio and TV have sensationalized the criminal acts of men, but few have been willing to reveal either the extent or the depth of the suffering silently endured by millions of men. Pop-feminist attacks have only added to their burden with lurid portrayals of men as sexual predators. Regards Rod Van Mechelen Rod Van Mechelen is the author of What Everyone Should Know about Feminist Issues: The Male-Positive Perspective (the page now includes several articles by other authors), and the publisher of The Backlash! @ Backlash.com . He is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and served for 9-1/2 years on the Cowlitz Indian Tribal Council.