DART Campaign Wrap-up (11/24/08)

As many of you know, the anti-father Dallas domestic violence bus ads we protested come down this week (11/30). While the ads remained up a few weeks longer than we desired, overall our campaign was very successful, and I am grateful that so many of you participated.

Among the campaign's achievements:

1) Widespread, positive media coverage which allowed us to educate the public on domestic violence and child abuse. Coverage included CNN, The Associated Press, FOX, CBS, hundreds of radio stations throughout the country, and many newspapers.

This was particularly remarkable considering we launched the Campaign seven days before the presidential election.

2) To its credit, The Family Place, the prominent Dallas-area domestic violence service provider which placed the controversial ads on DART buses, backed away from the gender exclusivity which was previously prominent in their public materials. They changed several areas of their website to specifically include male victims, and issued a statement that "We are not a male-bashing organization. Our services support all victims—male and female, children and adults." Some examples are here and here. I commend them for this.

3) A sub-group of our protesters who I selected called over 50 of The Family Place's financial contributors to express our concerns about the ads. Most contributors said they sympathized with us, and many told us they thought the ads and the subsequent protest were an embarrassment to The Family Place. Many contacted Family Place Executive Director Paige Flink with their concerns.

Several of The Family Place's financial contributors withdrew or reduced the financial gifts they planned for the end-of-the-year giving season. I don't say this with pleasure--I would have preferred that The Family Place do the right thing from the beginning rather than lose the funding they did.

4) Father-bashing is so prevalent in the media today because there is little political cost to be paid for doing it. We launched the campaign in part because we wanted to show that there is a political cost to demeaning fathers, and in that regard we more than succeeded.

5) We compiled an impressive endorsers list which included some of the world's leading authorities on domestic violence, as well as many other experts, media figures, and prominent citizens.

6) Our efforts generated 10,000 calls, letters, and faxes.

7) Our contingent was gender-balanced, including many women who opposed anti-father stereotyping and the ads' noxious message to boys.

One of the Dallas journalists who covered the campaign told me "You guys got 98% of what you wanted." I think 98% is a little high, but we certainly did well. Both I and Fathers & Families--my partner in the DART campaign--again thank all who participated.

Best Wishes,
Glenn Sacks

One ad depicts a happy little girl with the message "One day my husband will kill me." Another shows a smiling boy with the message "When I grow up, I will beat my wife."

The kids are talking about their fathers, and their pathology is due to their fathers' violence. The ads perpetuate misleading stereotypes of fathers.

To depict only males as perpetrators of domestic violence, and only females as victims, is a severe distortion. DV research clearly establishes that men account for half of all DV victims and incur a third of DV-related injuries, as women often employ the element of surprise and weapons to compensate for men’s strength.

In earlier years, it was common to see crime stories presented as if only African-Americans and Latinos were perps, and whites their only victims. We now recognize that these distortions are bigoted. DART's ads are the same kind of distortions, only the "perps" are now dads.

The offending ads were placed on the buses by The Family Place, a Dallas Domestic Violence service provider. Family Place Executive Director Paige Flink told Fox News in Dallas that says she designed the ads to provoke, saying "I hope you are offended."

Flink assumes that domestic violence organizations can insult men with impunity. As a general rule, she has been correct--the domestic violence establishment, much of it funded with your tax dollars, has been allowed to get away with serving the public the false woman-as-victim/man-as-monster domestic violence model.

DART Buses & Trains serve a total of 10 million commuters per month. To read the Associated Press' and others' coverage of the ads, click here.

The message of the DART ads is clear--kids need to be afraid of fathers. Boys need to be afraid to grow up to be like dad, and girls need to fear marrying a man like dad.

Dads-as-Monsters ads such as these influence our popular culture, our news media, our legislators, and our family law courts. If you're a divorced dad who can only see his kids a few days a month, or who's the victim of false accusations of abuse, ads like these are one reason.

Two major billboard companies--Clear Channel Outdoor and CBS Outdoor--have already rejected these ads. Jodi Senese of CBS said the ads "can be both misleading and disturbing."

There are three ads in this series--the two mentioned above and also one apparently gender-neutral ad which discusses the issue of domestic violence and teen suicide. We have no problem with the third, but we want the first two--"One day my husband will kill me" and "When I grow up, I will beat my wife"--removed.

We abhor domestic violence and child abuse in all forms, and give credit to agencies like The Family Place which help victims. However, by failing (or refusing) to recognize male victims of domestic violence, the domestic violence establishment and The Family Place harm male victims and their children.

Society once swept domestic violence under the rug, marginalizing abused women and their children. As California's Third District Court of Appeal recognized in a recent decision, today male victims and their children are marginalized. These DART ads are part of that marginalization.

Internationally-recognized domestic violence expert John Hamel, LCSW, a court-certified batterer treatment provider and author of the book Gender-Inclusive Treatment of Intimate Partner Abuse, explains:

“Men account for half of all DV victims and incur a third of DV-related injuries. Ignoring female-on-male violence inhibits our efforts to combat domestic violence.”

In the column to the right we provide quotes from numerous internationally-respected domestic violence authorities, all of whom, attest that domestic violence is committed by both men and women.

To learn more about the ads, click here.

We oppose DART's Anti-Father Bus Ads Because:

• To depict only males as perpetrators of domestic violence, and only females as victims, is a severe distortion of domestic violence research. A mountain of DV research clearly establishes that women are frequently the aggressors in domestic combat, often employing the element of surprise and weapons to compensate for men’s strength.

  The most recent large-scale study of domestic violence was published in the American Journal of Public Health last year. The researchers analyzed data concerning 11,370 respondents. According to the researchers, “[H]alf of [violent relationships] were reciprocally violent. In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases.” (This study is illustrated in the diagram at right from the Psychiatric News, 8/3/07).

  A quarter of the women surveyed admitted perpetrating violence, and when the violence involved both parties, women were more likely to have been the first to strike.

  Such findings are consistent with decades of domestic violence research. The National Institute of Mental Health funded and oversaw two of the largest studies of domestic violence ever conducted, both of which found equal rates of abuse between husbands and wives.

  New California Appeal Court Ruling: 'Domestic Violence Is a Serious Problem for both Women and Men'

  "California domestic violence laws violate men's rights because they provide state funding only for women and their children who use shelters and other programs, a state appeals court has ruled. "The decision by the Third District Court of Appeal in Sacramento requires the programs to be available to male as well as female victims of domestic violence... "Justice Fred Morrison said in Tuesday's 3-0 ruling, the state acknowledges that 'domestic violence is a serious problem for both women and men.'" --(San Francisco Chronicle, 10/16/08)

  California State Long Beach University professor Martin Fiebert maintains an online bibliography summarizing 219 scholarly investigations, with an aggregate sample size exceeding 220,000, which concludes "women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners."
  
  Nor is this violence trivial. A meta-analytic review of 552 domestic violence studies published in the Psychological Bulletin found that 38% of the physical injuries in heterosexual domestic assaults are suffered by men.
  
  Dr. Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling of the University of South Alabama says that as she and other researchers grappled with this research, "Every time we tried to say that women's intimate partner abuse is different than men's, the evidence did not support it."
  
  According to Dr. Donald Dutton, author of Rethinking Domestic Violence, research shows that domestic violence is actually more common in lesbian relationships than in heterosexual relationships. For example, one study of 1,100 lesbian or bisexual women who are in abusive lesbian relationships found that the women were more likely to have experienced violence in their previous relationships with women than in their previous relationships with men.

  Domestic violence service sometimes providers justify their exclusion of male victims by citing crime and/or crime survey statistics which show that most reports of domestic violence are by women. Dr. Dutton explains:

  "Domestic violence 'research' has been misleading, in that data has been extracted from crime reports and/or crime victim surveys – in which men underreport more than women – and have been publicized as indicating domestic violence is a gender issue (male-perpetrator/female-victims).

  "In fact, when larger surveys with representative samples are examined, perpetration of domestic violence perpetration is slightly more common for females..."

  In the column to the right we provide quotes from numerous internationally-respected domestic violence authorities, all of whom, attest that domestic violence is committed by both men and women.

• The Ads Send the Message That Kids Must Fear Dads, When Most Child Abuse and Parental Murder of Children Is Committed by Mothers, not Fathers The child victims of male violence depicted in the DART ads are, in fact, most likely to be abused by a woman, not a man.

  According to the most recent data available from the US Department of Health and Human Services, mothers are more likely to commit physical child abuse, emotional maltreatment, and neglect than fathers. The only form of child abuse fathers are more likely to commit is the one that’s the most infrequent—child sexual abuse.

  

  According to Child Maltreatment 2006 (pictured), a report by the Federal Administration for Children & Families, leaving aside killings by nonparents or by mothers and fathers acting together, mothers committed almost three-quarters of the parental murders of children. If one looks only at murders committed by mothers and fathers acting alone, the ratio is over 2 to 1 committed by mothers.

  

  Leaving aside child abuse by nonparents or by mothers and fathers acting together, mothers committed almost three-quarters of child abuse.

  If one looks only at child abuse committed by mothers and fathers acting alone, the ratio is 2.3 to 1 committed by mothers.

  The data cited here are raw statistics, and all raw statistics are subject to various biases and influences. However, they do very much contradict the DART ads' de facto claim that it's fathers and only fathers who are a threat to their children.

Fathers & Families, a national shared parenting organization, and Los Angeles journalist/radio commentator Glenn Sacks are partnering in a campaign to ask DART to remove these anti-father ads.

Complete the form below to email and fax DART Officials.