At a well-attended Capitol Hill Briefing in February, the IWF presented Canadian Senator Anne C. Cools, an innovator in commonsense solutions to the problems of domestic violence.
Anita K. Blair
Domestic violence — violence between intimates — is as old as Cain and Abel. Despite the thousands of years that we’ve had human beings getting angry with one another, sometimes doing things that they shouldn’t, the understanding of the dynamic between people has really not progressed much until recently.
In the United States, we have a federal law called the Violence Against Women Act or VAWA. The IWF and other prominent organizations have been somewhat critical of many parts of VAWA. We believe that the most important thing to be done by the government for the citizens is to protect people who are victims or potential victims of violence, whether it be in their homes, in the streets, at the mall, or in their neighborhoods.
We are delighted to present Sen. Anne Cools from Canada. Senator Cools has been a leader in the creation of social services to help battered women, families in crisis, and families troubled by domestic violence.
Sen. Anne C. Cools
My area of expertise is domestic violence, the family, fatherhood, and politics. I am a Senator — the very first female, black Canadian Senator, and I frequently speak about the current political condition and the gross distortion of the law — both family and criminal law — by radical gender-feminist ideology.
I have asserted the obvious, that both men and women are equally capable of being good parents, just as they are equally capable of being bad parents. I have repudiated the concept of the moral superiority of biology and gender, that is, the proposition that women are morally superior to men and that men are morally defective and inferior to women. I have repudiated the proposition that women can do no wrong and that men can do no right, the proposition that virtue and love are women’s and that vice and selfishness are men’s.
Aggression, violence, and personal imperfection are human afflictions. They are human problems, not gender problems. I have also asserted that the legal term the “best interests of the child” has always included the children’s interests in a meaningful involvement with both parents, fathers and mothers, and that children are not the chattel of their mothers.
In politics, men have received little concern in recent times. In fact, they have received much diminution, even scorn, under the guise of concern about sexism and women’s rights. The data shows that in divorce women are granted custody about 80 percent of the time, while fathers are commonly and frequently alienated from their children.
Empirically, the shorter average life expectancy, the performance of more dangerous and heavy jobs, the higher morbidity rates, and now divorce, stress, and oppression suggest to me that male survival is truly miraculous. Fathers alienation from their children is rampant, yet this fact raises little interest from governments and cabinet ministers.
My comparisons are purely to illustrate that the male of the species has had some difficulty not only in obtaining life but in sustaining it as well. That women suffer at the hands of men is now well debated and documented, but that men suffer at the hands of women and female aggression is deserving of attention.
My focus is largely on fathers, on men’s suffering as fathers, on fathers’ punishment in divorce and family law, and the consequences of the radical feminists’ ideological dominion in family law — the consequences for society, for family, for children, and for fathers themselves.
I assert that anything that diminishes fatherhood diminishes motherhood, and inflicts pain on children. Any social or legal theory that promotes or causes the alienation of fathers from their children is intellectually and morally fraudulent and bankrupt and should be roundly condemned, particularly the mischief that has flowed from the radical feminist theory of patriarchal society.
Men and women, connected by current or former sexual relationships, can inflict hurt on each other, and tragically, some even kill one another. My life’s work has been in spousal and family violence. In many of these relationships, there are tangles of pathologies, coercive patterns, and numerous dynamics that reinforce one another.
Aggression and violence are scourges of the human condition. Human nature’s dark side is reflected in both genders, male and female, as is human nature’s better side.
Aggression and violence are human problems, not gender problems. My position is supported by the evidence and by the scholarly studies on domestic violence that show symmetry and reciprocity in domestic violence. Men and women attack and hit each other equally and as often. Because men are usually bigger and stronger than women they may inflict more physical harm, but women are equally likely as men to commit physical violence against their intimate partners or children.
Both men and women are capable of terrible deeds. But, both men and women are capable of good deeds, great love, and humanity.
Canadian Liberal Party Senator Anne C. Cools from Ontario has been a leader in the creation of social services to help battered women, families in crisis, and families troubled by domestic violence.