Crafty, I think what you're getting at is that the female cadet surely needs to own up to the consequences of her own actions, and cannot lay full blame/fault on the male cadet.
Unfortunately, I've only been following this discussion sporadically, and have likely missed something. (but here goes anyway...) What I see is that violence from strangers is lumped in with "intimate" violence, where the attacker is known or even familiar with the victim. I think it's apples v. oranges, and require very different thinking/skills to address.
I originally disagreed that violence is a male tool targeted specifically at women to "keep them down." However, that does not mean that men cannot be perpetrators of violence against women. I submit that it is not a question of gender, but of ability.
I think that perpetrators of random violence, such as a rape/robbery in the street, would be more likely to be male simply because women are generally aware of the limitations of their physical strength against most men. When you "even" the field, however, I find that women generally have no problem attacking other women, or other men they feel "they could take."
With intimate violence, the proportion of male to female perpetrators grows even more level. I have known both male and female victims, and I can vouch that they would consider it absurd to simplify their situations into solely male/female socialized gender roles.
I found this article on the web, which I found an interesting read, and thought I'd post it here as further fodder.
http://www.batteredmen.com/satel.htmIt's Always His Fault
Femininist Ideology Dominates Perpetrator Programs
? 1997 by Sally L. Satel,M.D.
Psychiatrist and lecturer at the Yale School of Medicine
Reprinted with kind permission from The Women's Quarterly (ISSN:1079-6622) published by the Independent Women's Forum.
Summer 1997 - Number 12
Battered Men - The Hidden Side of Domestic Violence
Battered Men in Washington and Nationwide
Let's call him "Joe Six Pack." Every Saturday night, he drinks way too much, cranks up the rock 'n roll way too loud, and smacks his girlfriend for acting just a bit too lippy. Or let's call him "Mr. Pillar of the Community." He's got the perfect wife, the perfect kids. But he's also got one little problem: every time he argues with his wife, he loses control. In the past year, she's been sent to the emergency ward twice. Or let's say they're the Tenants from Hell. They're always yelling at each other. Finally a neighbor calls the police.
Here is the question. Are the men in these scenarios:
a) in need of help;
b) in need of being locked up; or
c) upholders of the patriarchy?
Increasingly, public officials are buying into Gloria Steinem's assertion that "the patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself." They are deciding that perpetrators need to be indoctrinated in what are called "profeminist" treatment programs. And they are spending tax dollars to pay for these programs.
A portion of the money for the re-education of batterers comes from Washington, courtesy of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). To obtain passage of VAWA, feminist organizations like the National Organization for Women and even secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala, pelted legislators with facts and figures: "The leading cause of birth defects is battery during pregnancy." "In emergency rooms, twenty to thirty percent of women arrive because of physical abuse by their partner." "Family violence has killed more women in the last five years than Americans killed in the Viet Nam War." Happily, these alarming factoids aren't true. But the feminist advocacy groups were able to create new bogus statistics faster than the experts were able to shoot the old ones down. And some of the untruths--like the fiction that wife-beating soars on Super Bowl Sunday--have become American myths as durable as the story of young George Washington chopping down the cherry tree.
Congress generously authorized $1.6 billion to fund VAWA. But there is increasing evidence that the money is being used to further an ideological war against men--one that puts many women at even greater risk.
... The feminist theory of domestic abuse, like the feminist theory of rape, holds that all men have the same innate propensity to violence against women. ... Domestic abuse, in feminist eyes, is an essential element of the vast male conspiracy to suppress and subordinate women.
"Battering is a fulfillment of a cultural expectation, not a deviant or sick behavior."
In at least a dozen states, including Massachusetts, Colorado, Florida, Washington, and Texas, state guidelines effectively preclude any treatment other than feminist therapy for domestic batterers.
The dogma that women never provoke, incite, or aggravate domestic conflict, further, has led to some startling departures in domestic law.
there are virtually no convincing data that this feminist approach to male violence is effective.
As Judge Cannon says, "We treat women as brainless individuals who are unable to make choices."
Persuading victims of domestic violence that they need no psychological help or are never to blame can also backfire, because it pushes many women away from seeking counseling that they plainly need.
Some of these women end up doing the killing themselves, a tragedy that has happened "more than once on my watch," the prosecutor said.
And here is the cruelest failure of profeminist therapy. Since many victims of domestic abuse do want to hold their families together, and since they are trying to weigh the risks of staying with an abusive mate, it does them an enormous disservice to put a dangerous man through a program that cannot fulfill its promise to cure him.
"In the sessions, group discussions among participants were not allowed to develop--maybe the leaders were afraid we'd unite and challenge their propaganda." Rather than improve their relationships, Don felt the therapy only helped to increase polarization between men and women.
Don's group leaders were adamant that alcohol was never a cause of violence. Feminist theory downplays the relevance of alcohol abuse, and as a particularly foolish result in Don's program, failed to make sobriety a condition of the treatment for domestic batterers.
"The course leaders were fixated on male-bashing."
"I see the part I played in the drama of my relationship. .. a relationship is a dynamic interaction and if both want to change, counselors should work with them." But this, of course, is precisely what state guidelines in nearly half the country now or will soon prohibit as the first course of treatment.
Richard Heyman, of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, found that group conjoint therapy (several couples treated together) produced a significant reduction in both psychological and physical aggression immediately following treatment and one year later.
psychologist Judith Shervin writes, "men and women are bound in their dance of mutual destructiveness.... Women must share responsibility for their behavior and contributions to domestic violence."
But self-defense doesn't explain all female-on-male aggression. Women suffered actual injury at about seven times the rate of men but that they used weapons such as baseball bats, boiling water, and knives (among other things) to make up for their physical disadvantage. Many of these women freely admitted on the survey that their use of weapons was not in self-defense.
Researcher Murray Straus has been revising his views. "I [once] explained the high rate of attacks by wives largely as a response to or as a defense against assault by the partner. However, new evidence raises questions about that interpretation."
In fact, among America's rapidly growing population of elderly couples, violence by women appears more common than violence by men.
Anyone still inclined to blame domestic violence on the patriarchy and male aggression ought to take a look at the statistics on violence against children.
Consider domestic aggression within lesbian couples. If feminists are right, shouldn't these matches be exempt from the sex-driven power struggles that plague heterosexual couples? Instead, physical abuse between lesbian partners is at least as serious a problem as it is among heterosexuals.
Like so many projects of the feminist agenda, the battered women's movement has outlived its useful beginnings, which was to help women leave violent relationships and persuade the legal system to take domestic abuse more seriously. Now they have brought us to a point at which a single complaint touches off an irreversible cascade of useless and often destructive legal and therapeutic events. This could well have a chilling effect upon victims of real violence, who may be reluctant to file police reports or to seek help if it subjects them to further battery from the authorities.
