Our thanks to Nigel for pointing us to this piece by Julie Bindel in the Guardian. In common with all radical feminists she inhabits a parallel universe to our own, in which all victims of interpersonal violence (IPV) are women, all perpetrators men. When I debated with her at Durham University earlier this year, I mentioned some of the official statistics on IPV, which consistently show around 40% of victims are men. Her response was to assert I was claiming an equivalence between women reporting being the victims of extreme violence, such that they were in fear of their lives, with men reporting their partners ‘nagging’. She returns to this familiar theme at the end of her Guardian article:
Many women experiencing this type of abuse will not know what coercive control actually means in law. Not because they are stupid, but for the simple reason that most behaviours defined as such are so commonplace in unequal heterosexual relationships that women have been told to put up with it, and that they are usually to blame.
This law would be used by those men who would categorise what they describe as “nagging” as coercive control.
In reality, it would be almost impossible to prove coercive control in a court of law, which means that only the most extreme cases will be acted upon. Most women who report it therefore will be left with the already widely held belief that those who report domestic violence are exaggerating or unhinged. Rather than tying us up with even more unworkable legislation, let us push even harder for the current laws to be used to arrest, charge and convict those men [our emphasis] who are currently getting away with violating those they claim to love.
Ms Bindel erroneously branded me a liar during the Durham debate, and phoned me to apologise for having done so. I asked her to apologise publicly, given that the lie had been stated publicly in front of an audience of 250+ students, but she declined to do so. I then published this account of the matter.
Not one of the feminists to whom we’ve awarded ‘Lying Feminist of the Month’ awards – Ms Bindel isn’t one of them, at this stage – has ever retracted her lie(s), let along apologised. We’ll shortly be presenting Caroline Criado-Perez with her second ‘Lying Feminist of the Month’ award, for an utterly absurd claim – one commonly stated by feminists, despite being debunked many times – she made in the online edition of the New Statesman. Her first award certificate is here.
