In an online video that went viral last weekend, artists and media celebrities presented the personal testimonies women and children who were victims of domestic violence. The testimonies are important and painful, but they also create the false impression that only men are violent. The video cites the Women's International Zionist Organization's domestic violence index for 2017, which claims that 200,000 women in Israel suffer domestic abuse.
The empirical basis for this statistic is flimsy and misleading. In Israel, only one noteworthy survey on this issue has been conducted, using around 2,500 women, and it is from 1999. The WIZO poll did not inquire about violence within the family in a general sense; rather it focused primarily on violence against women because it was financed by people influenced by biases promoted by women's groups. Since 1999, it has not dawned on the State of Israel to re-examine this issue in an equal and applicable manner.
Despite the poll's gender bias against men, the percentage of women who reported being violent against men is significant and certainly not trivial. In general, the most important finding showed that violent relationships are characterized by multiple layers of conflict and that violent domestic interaction consists of mutually harmful behavior that goes both ways. Therefore, the aforementioned figure of 200,000 women who suffer from domestic abuse, which WIZO presents every year in every report, is merely recycled and baseless speculation buoyed more by special interests than proper research.
When examining the hundreds of surveys and research papers conducted in Western countries on violence between domestic partners, we find that women are no less prone to violence than men. Studies have shown that the most significant and dangerous predictor of violence toward women has is often their own violent behavior. Many violent men suffer from continual violence and aggression themselves, which ultimately leads to a dangerous cycle of violence. As for children, some polls show that domestic abuse from the mother is more prevalent than from the father.
How is it possible that the 50 years of research comprising consistent findings from hundreds of surveys have failed to alter the false impression that men are solely responsible for domestic abuse?
To answer this question we must first look at the public discourse, which is driven more by ideology and less by actual research. Secondly, this false picture coincides with our gender prejudices. And thirdly, the public discourse is dominated by just one actor who controls the messages disseminated via the media – women's groups and their lobby in the Knesset.
These groups receive funds in accordance with how they present the problem to the public. If their conclusions are correct, the time has come to ask how, after the many millions of shekels they have received over the decades, the magnitude of the problem remains unaffected?
Where has the money gone, aside from the unremitting campaign of demonization aimed at the male gender? And what good has it done?
Domestic violence, more than any other subject in the social sciences, has remained entrenched in its prejudiced views. This is because it relies on the erroneous paradigm endowed upon us by the radical feminist movement, whereby the entire problem stems from the "patriarchal" nature of society.
This paradigm does not bring us closer to solving the problem, but it does taint the relationship between the genders. It amplifies women's fear of men and vice versa, encourages the cynical use of sexual harassment and domestic abuse complaints, and exacerbates the discriminatory treatment of men in divorce proceedings, which consequently increases the number of children who grow up without a father present in their lives.
The time has come for us to stop talking about the problem of domestic violence as some patriarchal conspiracy and see it for what it is: a dynamic of escalating tensions between partners who, in their failure to communicate healthily and properly, use violence as a desperate recourse.
