Thomas B. James, Cokato Minnesota attorney at the Law Office of Tom James, explains the truth and dispels the myths and misinformation surrounding the social problem of domestic violence.
Meticulously researched and annotated.
Professional Reviews
Truth, not fiction
The book is thoroughly researched, and well written. Very clear and easy to read. The twelve points may surprise you, but James provides the citations to prove they are true. As a lawyer, expect that he has sufficient experience and knowledge of the subject. Profiteers in the domestic violence industry won't like it, but honest people will.
Truth Trumps Propaganda
Tom James book, Domestic Violence: The Twelve Things You Aren't Supposed to Know, is an accurate and scholarly work that is long overdue. This book is a breath of fresh air after years of incompetent, ideologically driven, advocacy research by gender feminists who want to deny the cold, hard, documented facts about domestic violence.
For too long America has been presented only a biased view of domestic violence, based on bigoted perceptions of gender roles, rather than documented facts and truth. Such misandrist propaganda and gender feminist myths have created the monstrous domestic violence industry we know today. Such misandrist propaganda has promoted the gender feminist/women's studies agenda that loudly says, "Men are not allowed to be victims of domestic violence." Such misandrist propaganda harms us all.
Tom James is an American hero for presenting abundant scholarly documentation that solidly tells the truth about domestic violence. James honestly shows the degree to which men are not only victims of domestic violence; he also illuminates how all men are disserved by America's corrupt domestic violence industry.
Tom James abundantly backs up his proof with supporting documentation and footnotes. Contrast Tom James's solid research against the call for ignorance and more prejudice, towards male victims of domestic violence, that many in today's domestic violence industry are want to do.
Any sane, rational person reading this book will not only see the "hate war" that is being waged against America's men by the gender feminist ideologues in America's domestic violence industry, he/she will also see the underlying, obdurate pathology that makes those propagandist so totally unfit to handle the truth about domestic violence.
5.0 out of 5 stars Extensively Researches, Great Humor and Skill at Crystallizing Absurdity
Men's rights attorney Thomas B. James has crafted a stunner of a book. Wisely choosing not to attempt to replicate Philip W. Cook's classic Abused Men (1997), which was one of the first books I ever reviewed, he instead has devised and expertly executed a more focused program of dispelling an even dozen of the leading lies regarding domestic violence. While the book concentrates on the United States, Canadian readers will also find much of value here.
Although readers of these pages are probably already aware of many of the issues James discusses, nevertheless Domestic Violence bears buying and reading for a number of reasons. James pulls off no mean feat by proving himself an entertaining writer on such a grim subject, also displaying to good effect his lawyerly skills at careful reasoning and picking apart flaws in feminist lies regarding domestic violence. He shows us the alarming growth of feminist domestic violence research aimed at producing specific results and the more disturbing acceptance such absence of objectivity now receives in at least certain sectors of academia.
All of Chapter 11 is devoted to a detailed discussion of the multifarious problems with much domestic violence research including: selection bias, gender-specific reporting laws, gender-specific crimes, gender-based interviewing, gender-based definitions of abuse, manipulation of definitions, scorn for and/or inability to use logic and reason, and circular reasoning, not to mention the two biggies--lying and violence against researchers. James trenchantly demolishes throughout the book a number of famous lies including the Super Bowl Sunday hoax, the lie that a high percentage of women in emergency rooms were brought in due to domestic violence, and the myth that most teenagers who are serving time for homicide have killed their mother's abuser, and so on. The author shows us in details why attempts to minimize female violence and exaggerate male violence amount to misrepresentation at best and often outright fraud. James reminds us that contrary to perceived wisdom, domestic abuse against men tends to be more violent than does wife-beating.
Although K.C. Wilson beat him to the punch with an even more exhaustive list, page for page you can hardly do better than James' six-page briefly annotated list of scores of studies showing that women are at least as likely to abuse men as vice versa. His chapter 9 contains a tour de force listing of no fewer than 78 possible explanations for men's under-reporting of domestic violence they have suffered.
The author also provides a fairly extensive exposition of the numerous ways in which the judicial and penal systems actively and drastically discriminate against folks of the male persuasion. James reports that in one case, the police responded to a man's report that his wife had attacked him with a knife by advising him to buy plastic knives! Both the legal and social research definitions discriminate against males by defining a kick or other intentionally inflicted wound to the man's external sexual organs--which can be just as painful and humiliating as the penetration of a female sexual organ--as simple assault, while of course the parallel act against a female is treated as a more grievous sex crime.
One of the things the author does most powerfully of all is to repeatedly point out in different ways how incredibly prejudiced our social service agencies and legal systems are against males. Although child neglect can be just as devastating to a child as sexual abuse, and only about 8% of all child maltreatment cases investigated by child protection agencies involve sexual abuse, and moreover although male children are actually sexually abused more frequently than are female children, the majority of all child abuse cases that are referred for prosecution involve male sexual abuse of a female child. When probable cause exists to charge a juvenile with a sex offense, the offender is no fewer than a stunning 46.5 times more likely to be arrested and charged with a crime if the accused made the mistake of being born with a Y chromosome. By contrast, arrests for criminal neglect, which is predominantly committed by women, are virtually nonexistent. Here's another stunner: A man is over 25 times more likely to be sentenced to prison for inappropriately fondling a child than a woman is for murdering or maiming one! As James adroitly notes, the United States fails to meet two separate sets of minimum standards for prison conditions--set by the United Nations and the European Union--due to its mistreatment of male prisoners.
I could only find one minor, if surprising, mistake: The statement that there are "no" men's shelters in the United States is not quite true, as for a number of years there has been one in Lancaster, California and unless it closed in recent years, another with which Roy Schenck was involved in Wisconsin.
James' conclusions and recommendations bear close attention: Anyone who is really concerned about helping battered women should also be working to end violence against men. The true causes and correlates of domestic violence need to be acknowledged. Treatment programs should be for treatment, not proliferation of ideology. And perhaps most importantly, domestic violence is a human phenomenon.
The author has an admirable sense of humor and a great skill at crystallizing absurdity with a few deft strokes, as when he notes that under some states' overzealous definitions of "stalking," a "man who, seeing an attractive women sitting at a bar, sits next to her (1st act) and then asks her, `Do you come here often?' (2nd act) would be guilty of `stalking' if the woman doesn't happen to find him attractive, but would not be guilty of `stalking' if the woman did happen to find him attractive."
Extensively annotated with over 700 endnotes and a 28-page bibliography, the book applies its considerable documentation toward a laudable goal to "encourage members of both camps in the gender war to lay down their arms and see what we can achieve as a nation by working together, rather than constantly trying to malign, smear and abuse one another." I suspect most readers will agree with James that: "Once we get past our collective gender myopia, I think we will see that the problem of violence in our country has much deeper roots and much wider branches than most of us realize; that domestic violence is a symptom of a much deeper problem than misogyny, misandry, matriarchy or patriarchy alone."
This book is for all first responders (law enforcement, fire, or other emergency personnel) who are or want to be supervisors in their agencies. It goes through all facets of being a good supervisor.
Being a supervisor in any occupation is
