Shared post - Teen Violence - When Ideology Trumps Data - #3 Bias Against Men and Boys in Psychological Research

A friend emailed me a link a couple of months ago to an article from Great Britain about teen violence. The friend was worried that the article was biased against boys. Here’s how it started:

Teenage boys were urged not to violently abuse their girlfriends in a new Government campaign launched today.
TV, radio, internet and poster ads will target young males aged 13 to 18 in an attempt to show the consequences of abusive relationships. It is part of a wider effort by ministers to cut domestic violence against both women and younger girls.
Research published last year by the NSPCC found a quarter of teenage girls said they had been physically abused by their boyfriends.
One in six said they had been pressured into sex and one in three said they had gone further sexually than they had wanted to.

I was a bit taken back by the article considering the recent research on teen violence which has been finding that relationship violence in teens is fairly symmetrical with both boys and girls being perpetrators and victims. This article was offering a very different perspective from the studies I had been seeing. It was clearly assuming that the girls were the primary victims and the boys the primary perpetrators which reflects an archaic and outdated stereotype about domestic violence. It made me wonder exactly what was happening. I read several more articles online about the ad campaign mentioned in the first article and was shocked to see that the focus of the campaign was indeed solely to help girls and to “teach” boys about not abusing their girlfriends.

In each of the articles there was a reference to the research findings that drove the ad campaign. I decided to go back to the source and see what the original research had found.

The original study was sponsored by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) of Great Britain and was in two parts. The first part was the “full report” and was a detailed 209 page research report explaining methodology, results, implications and conclusions. The next was the Executive Summary which was a 10 page summation of the findings of the full report. It was a quick read meant to give people the essence of the larger document. I read through the “full report” and then the executive summary. It was striking to me that the data in the full report actually showed that boys were victims of teen violence. The original news article I had read had mentioned that the research had found that 25% of girls said they had been physically abused by their boyfriends. What the news article omitted saying was that the same research had also found that 18% of boys had said that they had been physically abused by their girlfriends. This meant that this research found that almost half of the victims of teen relationship violence were boys! Somehow this important fact had been omitted from the news report.

There were plenty of other headlines that could have been drawn from the data of the full report that showed the boys to have been victims and the girls perpetrators but they were nowhere to be seen in any of the news articles. Here are a couple of examples of headlines that could be written from the data of the full report:

25% of those reporting physically forcing their partners into having sexual intercourse were girls – Table 15 page 82 full report
Nearly three times as many girls reported using SEVERE violence in relationships. table 11 – page 75 full report
Over three times as many girls reported using partner violence in their relationships table 10 page 74 full report
Over 1/3 of those reporting being pressured into kissing, touching or something else were boys. table 6 page 66 full report–
Nearly half (42%) of the victims of teen relationship violence were boys  Table 3 page 44 full report
Nearly one third of the victims of severe violence were boys Table 4 page 45 full report
Twice as many girls reported physically forcing their partners into “kissing, touching, or something else” more than a few times. Table 13 page 82 full report

This is just a sampling of the sorts of findings in the full report. It is obvious that their survey clearly indicated that teen relationship violence was not gender based and both the victims and the perpetrators were both boys and girls. However, what I found after reading both the full report and the executive summary was that the full report had data that showed boys to be victims and girls to be perpetrators but the executive summary seemed to have considerably less information about male victims and female perpetrators. In fact the executive summary seemed to focus more on female victims and male perpetrators.

I found myself wondering how this transition could take place. Boys were shown to be victims in the original study, often not in as great a number as the girls but victims all the same. Generally the boys comprised about 25-42% of the victims. Certainly not the majority but also not a small number that could be ignored. But ignore them they did!

The NSPCC introduced this research to the media via a press release. We can see the same tendency of moving away from focusing on boys when looking at the words in the press release. What started in the full report as an apparently egalitarian look into teen relationship violence progressively looked less so in the Executive Summary and now with the press release it looks to have moved one more step towards focusing solely on girls. Here’s the opening of the press release. Note the focus on “girls only” in both the headline and the first paragraphs:

Teen girls abused by boyfriends warns NSPCC
Press releases
01 September 2009
A third of teenage girls in a relationship suffer unwanted sexual acts and a quarter physical violence, reveals new research(1) launched today (01 September 2009) by the NSPCC(2) and the University of Bristol(3).

The survey of 13 to 17-year-olds found that nearly nine out of ten girls had been in an intimate relationship. Of these, one in six said they had been pressured into sexual intercourse and 1 in 16 said they had been raped. Others had been pressured or forced to kiss or sexually touch.

A quarter of girls had suffered physical violence such as being slapped, punched, or beaten by their boyfriends.

Girls are highlighted repeatedly in the press release. If one only read the press release you might assume that the boys were incidental and that the girls were clearly the identified victims of teen relationship violence. The boys actually did get mentioned in one paragraph (one out of 18 paragraphs, eleven of which were about girls). Here it is:

Nearly nine out of ten boys also said they had been in a relationship. A smaller number reported pressure or violence from girls. (Only one in seventeen boys in a relationship reported being pressured or forced into sexual activity and almost one in five suffered physical violence in a relationship).

Note how the boys victimization is minimized with words like “a smaller number” and “only one in seventeen.” Keep in mind that the “smaller number” referred to in the second sentence was 18% versus 25% which had been the figure for girls. While 18 is smaller than 25, it is not that much smaller. Another important difference is that the girls 25% stat was mentioned in the opening sentence of the document (and indirectly in the headline) while the boys 18% stat was mentioned as an afterthought in parentheses. Yes, the boys percentage was smaller but it seems very obvious that this press release is trying to marginalize the victimization of boys.

Note that the press release mentions that one in 17 girls had been raped. This works out to about 5.8% of the females surveyed. What they don’t mention is that the same table in the full report that showed that 5.8% of girls were raped also showed that 3.3% of the boys were also raped. This stat never made it beyond the full report. The press release mentions the rape of girls but is completely silent on the shocking statistic that 3.3% of the boys were raped. The fact is that their data from the full report shows boys comprised over one third of the rape victims. Not a word about this.

It now seems easy to understand how the media articles focused so exclusively on girls and ignored the needs of boys. They likely only read the press release and maybe a part of the executive summary. The press release might very well have been the only document they read about the study and it clearly focused almost exclusively on girls while ignoring the needs of boys. How bad did it get in focusing on just girls? Here is a sampling of typical headlines from actual news articles on this research and ad campaign:

Many Girls’ Abused by Boyfriends  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8230844.stm

Third of teenage girls forced into sex, NSPCC survey finds  http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/sep/01/teenage-sexual-abuse-nspcc-report

1 in 3 Teenage Girls Tell of Sexual Abuse by Their Boyfriends  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1210375/One-teenage-girls-physically-abused-boyfriend.html

Teen Girls Abused by Boyfriends Warns NSPCC   http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2009/6524.html

Almost every headline I found focused on girls as victims. I never found one headline that focused on boys. The articles would occasionally mention that boys were vulnerable but the main thrust was surely the girls vulnerability and victimhood.
The ad campaign is the real world response to the findings of this research using TV, radio, internet and poster ads in attempts to change behaviours of teen relationship violence. It is where the theoretical ends and the actual support and tax dollars begin. Inexplicably, the focus of the ad campaign is entirely on girls as victims of relationship violence while boys are seen as the problem and are taught to not abuse their girlfriends. Somehow the original research had shown that both boys and girls were victims of relationship violence and by the time we made our way to the media articles and then to the ad campaign we find that the original data is all but forgotten.
How did this happen?

The Full Report and then boys disappear

The full report offers an abundance of data that shows that boys are victims of teen partner violence but somehow the recommendations of both the full report and the executive summary seem to focus primarily on girls. Here’s a quick summary extrapolated from the full report:

According to their survey:

72% girls reported experiencing emotional violence
51% of boys reported emotional violence
BOYS WERE 41% of the victims of emotional violence in teen relationships

25% of girls experienced physical partner violence
18% of the boys experienced physical partner violence
BOYS WERE 42% of the victims of physical partner violence in teen relationships

31% of girls experienced sexual partner violence
16% of boys experienced sexual partner violence
BOYS WERE 34% of the victims of sexual partner violence in teen relationships.

So the boys ranged between 34-42% of the victims as recorded in the survey, The full report states this loud and clear in the data but then with the recommendations of both the full report and the executive summary and then the press release the boys seems to simply disappear. Why could that be? The researchers fail to explain fully the reasons for this but if you read between the lines you can find that they offer two reasons. The first is that the survey responses indicate that girls are more “impacted” by relationship violence than the boys. There is a question on the survey that asks about emotional reactions to the violence and the girls were much more likely to check the boxes that indicated they were scared/upset/humiliated. The boys were more likely to check boxes that said they were angry/annoyed or the box that said there was no effect on them. The researchers seem to have taken this difference and decided that since the girls were more “impacted” from the experience of violence that they should be the ones to get the attention and services. There are a number of places in the full report where this is implied. Here is one:

This research has demonstrated that a fundamental divide exists in relation to how girls and boys are affected by partner violence, and this divide needs to be a central component in the development of professional responses to this issue.

Just what does “professional responses to this issue” mean? They don’t say but we can only assume that they are suggesting that girls receive more attention and services due to their being more impacted by the violence. Considering the recommendations focus on girls and ignore the needs of boys I think the above assumption is a good one. I would be happy to be corrected on this assumption if I am incorrect.

The researchers seem willing to basically ignore their own substantial evidence that boys are victims of violence simply because the girls have a greater emotional reaction. Here’s another quote:

These findings are further elaborated on in the interview data where girls consistently described the harmful impact that the violence had on their welfare, often long term, while boy victims routinely stated they were unaffected or, at the very worst, annoyed. These results provide the wider context in which teenage partner violence needs to be viewed.

Let’s keep in mind that the above quoted interview data, which we will examine later, included only 62 hand-selected girls and 29 similarly selected boys. Importantly, only one of the 29 boys was a victim of non-reciprocal violence so making generalizations based on the interview data is likely unreliable especially considering the survey data was collected from over 1300 teens. Note also that by saying “the wider context in which teenage partner violence needs to be viewed” we can only assume the researchers are again suggesting that girls be given preference in services and aid. What we do know is that the data on violence against boys is ignored in the recommendation sections and also in the ad campaign. The following quote gives us a bit more clarity regarding the views of the researchers:

Intervention programmes need to reflect this fundamental difference by ensuring that the significant impact of violence on girls’ wellbeing is recognised and responded to, while enabling boys to recognise the implications of partner violence for their partners and themselves.

This statement clearly shows that the researchers believe that the girls should be treated differently and intervention programs need to “reflect” the difference that girls are more impacted by the violence.

But are girls more impacted? I am not so sure. Let’s start by looking at the actual question on the survey:

3 How did it make you feel when force was used against you?   scared/frightened  angry/annoyed  humiliated  upset/unhappy  loved/protected  thought it was funny  no effect

“If you don’t see it, it must not exist.”

The researchers stated that the answers to this question showed a big difference in boys and girls responses about the impact that the violence had on them. They don’t give the raw data about the responses and don’t offer the numbers each sex chose for each answer but they give us the summary saying that girls were much more “impacted.” There are very good reasons for that. This question is a set up since boys and girls will naturally answer it very differently. The creators of this question seem to fail to understand the hierarchical nature of boys and their strong natural reluctance to show any lack of independence. If the boys had checked “scared/frightened”, “humiliated” or “upset/unhappy” they would be admitting that they were less than independent. This is usually avoided while a choice such as “no effect” or “angry/annoyed” would be much more likely in order to maintain their image. As Warren Farrell would say “The weakness of men is the facade of strength: the strength of women is the facade of weakness.”

The men and boys are much more likely to choose a response that will portray them as strong. If this is correct it is easy to understand how boys’ responses might not accurately convey their degree of hurt or upset. It is very possible that the boys who checked the “no effect” box were just as impacted by the violence as their female counterparts. With these sorts of questions it leaves us simply not knowing. To suggest the direction of future services based on the responses to this question would be very risky and likely give very poor results.

I wonder if the researchers would think that a rape victim who claimed there there was no impact on her would not need support services? Would clinicians simply ignore her? No, I would bet they wouldn’t. If a group of domestic violence victims claimed that the violence had no impact on them would they quickly assume that group did not need support services? No. Then why would they dismiss the trauma of boys simply because they have marked a survey question differently and reported to be less upset? They would realize that people have very unique responses to trauma and that not having an immediate or verbal emotional reaction to a trauma does not in any way indicate that that person should be ignored. That is simply ridiculous.

Having worked with trauma victims for many years I know very well that some people will sometimes not even begin to feel the negative impact of a trauma for months and others for years. Restricting services for victims of trauma due to their response seeming to show less emotional impact is one of the zaniest ideas I have heard for some time. Denying services to a birth group for this reason seems to simply be bigoted.

Are the researchers biased against boys?

There are numerous indications, in addition to what has already been described, that the researchers have an anti-boy bias. There are the obvious dismissals of the survey data that shows boys to be victims of partner violence and the complete focus on girls as victims. But there are a number of more subtle clues in the study that seem to indicate a disdain for boys.

When they did mention boys as victims the report tended to minimize their experience. Here is a quote:

Boys’ experiences of violence
Little evidence existed to support the possibility that boys, although they were negatively affected by their partner’s violence, felt unable either to voice or to recognise their vulnerability. Boys minimised their own use of violence as “messing around”. Boys also reported the violence as mutual, although they often used disproportionate force compared to their female partners.

Rather than comment on the experience of the boys to violence the researchers focus on whether they could “give voice” to the negative affects of their partners violence. This seems to be a weak attempt to show that boys could indeed voice their concerns about being victims of violence and since they were able to voice that response they must not be “held back” by traditional masculinity from being able to express their vulnerability. The unspoken assumption seems to be that since they can voice the pain they are not holding back due to traditional masculinity and simply aren’t impacted by the violence. It just doesn’t matter while for the girls it really does matter. These seem to be distractions from the reality that the boys have been victimized. Reading the above paragraph will give the reader a sense of how the boys were treated differently in this study. Their pain was minimized and rationalized by claiming the were really not so impacted. The thrust is to say that boys do experience violence from their female partners but they aren’t so negatively impacted! They are able to voice or recognize their vulnerability. It is well known that men and boys will try to minimize any sort of hurt or injury and try to maintain an independent stance. This by no means indicates they are not impacted, it just means that will try to not let you know it. It is for this very reason that we need to take a different approach with boys who may be victimized but this study seems to prefer to simply ignore the pain of boys and focus just on the girls.

Messing Around

The quote above states that “Boys minimised their own use of violence as “messing around.” The full report affirms that boys label their own violence as “messing around” 56% of the time. This is given later in the recommendations section as a reason that boys should be taught about being aware of their violence. (see below) But what about the girls? When you see that boys are singled out for this perception of “messing around” you would think that the girls would not explain their own violence in that manner. Not in the Alice in Wonderland environment of this study. Actually by the researchers own numbers the girls labelled their own violence as “messing around” 43% of the time. Just 13% points below the boys. You would think that both boys and girls would need to learn about their own violence but somehow the only ones that need to learn are the boys! That is an anti-boy bias.

Here is the quote:

“However, although intervention programmes should ensure that the needs of both girls and boys are recognised, it is important that the wider experiences of girls remain a focus. In addition, boys’ minimisation of their own use of violence – by dismissing it as “messing around” and justifications based on mutual aggression – needs to be challenged.”

Why would the boys need to be challenged about this and the girls not? The boys said their violence was “messing around” 56% of the time and the girls said their violence was a slightly lower “messing around” 43% of the time. Clearly a strong bias in favor of girls and anti-boys.

The researchers went a step farther than just recommending that girls victimisation should be the focus. The researchers made the claim that boys lower scores on the impact question actually made them more dangerous to their female partners. Here is a quote:

If boys view the impact of their victimisation as negligible, they may also apply this understanding to their own actions. Thus, they may believe that their partners are also unaffected by their use of violence.

The implication here is that the boys ignorance/insensitivity of the impact of violence against them shows that they would be less than sensitive to their own violence used against a partner. I don’t believe that for a second considering almost every boy has had it drilled into their brains that they are never to hit a girl. Let’s use the same sort of reasoning but apply it instead to girls. According to the survey the girls suffer a much greater emotional impact from being victims of violence. Yet by the girls report, they use violence three times MORE in relationships than boys even though they know it’s negative impact and is hurtful. This would lead us to believe that girls are aware of the power to hurt others with violence and choose to do so far more often than boys. This doesn’t put the girls in a particularly good light now does it?

Thus, from these findings it seems conclusive that partner sexual violence
represents a problem for girls, while boys report being unaffected.

That pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it?

Boys are more violent! When the subjective trumps the objective

The survey was supposed to be the main source of data but in some ways the researchers seem to put much more stock in the subjective information they had obtained via the interviews. While the survey in the full report showed clearly that the girls were three times more likely to report using violence in relationship suddenly the researchers are exclaiming that there was a clear consensus from the girls that boys used physical violence in relationship more often than girls. Here’s the quote:

“There was a clear consensus within girls’ accounts that boys used physical violence in relationships more often than girls. This common understanding regarding the gendered nature of physical violence was reported by almost all girls, whether they themselves had experienced violence or not.”

This is from page 94 of the full report and shows the researchers evaluations of the girls interviews. The most glaring part of this is that the survey portion of the study showed clearly that girls were 3-6 times more likely to report being violent in relationships and yet the subjective data drawn from the interviews claims that there was a “common understanding regarding the gendered nature of physical violence” for “almost all girls” that “boys used physical violence in relationships more often than girls.” This is a huge discrepancy when one half of the study shows girls to report being much more inclined to be violent than the boys and the other half claiming that “boys used physical violence in relationship more often than girls.” This demands an explanation but there was little to be found. The closest the researchers come is to use the hackneyed claim that girls high rates of violence in relationships is due to their using violence as self defense. But if you look at the numbers this claim falls flat on its face. The facts are that 25% of the girls reported being violent in relationship compared to 8% of the boys. When you subtract the percentages of violence claimed to be in self defense from both boys (30%) and girls (44%) you find that 14% of girls were violent in relationship and 5.6% of the boys for reasons other than self defense. That’s nearly three times more girls than boys. (-30% of 8%= 5.6% and -44% of 25%= 14%) Not making this an important point in this research is very suspect. This difference is huge. Girls reported almost three times as often that they perpetrated violence in their relationships and yet there is a claim that almost all girls believed boys used “physical violence in relationship more often” and this leads us to the idea that girls are in need of services and boys in need of changing their behaviors? Baffling. Clearly misandry.

One partial explanation of this is shown in the following quote:

Only 6 per cent of boys, compared to a third of girls, claimed that they were negatively affected by the emotional violence they experienced. This gendered impact disparity upholds Stark’s (2007) contention that coercive control, which many of our components of emotional violence reflect, is made meaningful only when placed within a gendered power understanding of intimate violence. Thus, although girls had used emotional violence, without it being underpinned by other forms of inequality and power, their attempts were rendered largely ineffectual.

Incredibly, this section seems to be giving girls a pass for their emotional violence. The pattern continues: When girls are perpetrators they are given excuses, when boys are victims they are ignored and minimized.

Reporting oddities

When you look closely at the section about girls reporting more frequent perpetration of violence in relationship you notice something very odd. Look at the following paragraph and note the researchers choice of words. Note that girls “report” and boys “admit” (emphasis mine):

Page 74 More girls reported using physical violence against their partner than did boys; this represented a significant difference (x2 (1) = 60.804, p<.001). A quarter (n=148) of girls compared to 8 per cent (n=44) of boys stated that they had used some form of physical violence against their partner. Looking first at less severe physical violence (see table 10), the vast majority of girls (89 per cent) reporting the use of physical violence had used it once or a few times. Only a few (11 per cent) used it more frequently. Similarly, the small proportion of boys who admitted using physical violence also generally used it infrequently (83 per cent).

Perhaps the words “report” and “admit” have different meanings in Great Britain but here in the US they aren’t usually the same. Report generally means to make a statement or announcement. The word admit however has a different spin. Often it has more to do with conceding or confessing. One assumption from the wording the researchers have chosen would be to think that they simply didn’t believe what the boys reported. In other words they would only concede or admit to a certain amount of violence. Basically, implying that they are not telling the entire story. This is of course conjecture on my part but it simply seems like more anti-boy bias.

The Interview Section

As was previously explained the research had both a quantitative section and qualitative section. The qualitative section consisted of semi-structured interviews which included the utilization of five vignettes. The vignettes were stories that were told to the participant and then the stories relevance was discussed as a part of the interview. The stated goals of the researchers was to use the quantitative survey to gain data and use the interviews to enhance their understanding.

The researchers claimed that they had problems in getting participants for the interviews in the manner they had originally planned so they switched mid-stream to a different approach described below:

“We therefore moved to a system whereby researchers observed which young people seemed to be engaging with the survey. They then asked those young people if they would like to take part in the interview stage.”

So they hand picked the interview participants based on their own subjective impression of whether the young person was “engaging with the survey.” This sounds to me to be a direct invitation to a very biased sample. Then you find out that the choices they made of those who were “engaging in the survey” were 62 girls but only 29 boys. You also find that of the 29 boys only one had experienced being a victim of non reciprocal violence in relationship! Makes you wonder about their ideas of “engaging in the survey.” Needless to say the boys section describing the interviews was only 22 pages long while the section about the girls was over 60 pages. Even with such a short section for the boys most of the writing was about boys violence not their reaction to being victims of violence. Girls victimization was highlighted as was boys violence. Even in the section on boys as victims.

The Vignettes

When I first started looking at the issue of this survey I emailed the folks at NSPCC and asked for a copy of the original questionnaire and copies of the vignettes. They were kind enough to email me both. I had suspected that the vignettes would be slanted towards the girls and so I was not surprised to see that the stories were mostly about boys possessiveness, shouting, name calling, violence, and sexual pressuring. Only one story of the five portrayed the female as the perpetrator and in that story the perpetrated act was very mild. The girl (and her cronies) stole the boys cell phone, made unkind comments the next day and then apologized. In the other vignettes we see boys being violent or pushing girls into sexual behaviors that they don’t want. In one we see the girls using violence, but in self defense. To the researchers credit the first three vignettes have questions following the story which ask if this sort of behavior might also exist in the opposite sex. Inexplicably they omit that important question on the final two vignettes which focus on sexual demands. This is highly suspect and leads one to guess that their ideological bias may have disallowed them to see boys as sexual victims and/or the girls as perpetrators. Interestingly their data from the full report shows that girls freely admit to sexually pressuring their male boyfriends so this again leaves us wondering why they would avoid the question in the interview section.

Would the researchers tolerate a set of vignettes that showed 80% of the perpetrators to be female and the only male perpetrator was portrayed as having stolen a cell phone and then apologized? I would bet we would hear loud rants about inclusiveness and marginalization and they would be correct! It seems to me that these vignettes seriously marginalized the boys in this survey and likely left them feeling misunderstood and left out since their situations were simply not portrayed, acknowledged or included.

I was thinking that an alternative to these five stories could have easily been to keep the five stories as is but for the girls tell the story with female victims and male perpetrators and for the boys use the same stories but do the opposite and tell it from the boys perspective. It would take a little bit of editing but I think it would have been much more effective and would have left both boys and girls with a sense that their side of the story was heard and understood to exist. Victims are much more likely to come forward when they see that their plight is acknowledged. Maybe a possibility would have been to use neutral names for all parties in the stories and therefore not even know the sex of the offender or victim! Another option might have been to have six stories with three being male perpetrators and three being female perpetrators. One story each for the three categories of violence. I think any of the above would have been an improvement over what they used.

The fact that girls were portrayed in four of five vignettes more as victims and boys more as perpetrators and that any suggestion about girls perpetration of sexual pressuring was absent seems to be more evidence that the project has been impacted by an ideology that prefers to see women/girls as victims and men/boys as perpetrators. If we allow this sort of bias to continue in our midst we are failing both our boys and our girls. If we allow it to continue in social science research literature then we are surely in trouble.

Recommendation Section

Here’s a brief look at the recommendations section of the executive summary. There is only one paragraph in the recommendation section that mentions boys. Here it is:

Impact of teenage partner violence – the gender divide
The impact of partner violence is indisputably differentiated by gender; girl victims report much higher levels of negative impact than do boys. This is not to imply that boys’ experiences of victimisation should be ignored. It may be that boys minimise the impact of the violence due to the need to portray a certain form of masculinity. However, although intervention programmes should ensure that the needs of both girls and boys are recognised, it is important that the wider experiences of girls remain a focus. In addition, boys’ minimisation of their own use of violence – by dismissing it as “messing around” and justifications based on mutual aggression – needs to be challenged.

This paragraph is baffling. Let’s break it down. Here is the first section:

The impact of partner violence is indisputably differentiated by gender; girl victims report much higher levels of negative impact than do boys. This is not to imply that boys’ experiences of victimisation should be ignored.

It first makes a claim that partner violence is differentiated by gender and that girls experience more negative impact, implying that boys should be ignored. Then they deny that they mean to ignore boys.

It may be that boys minimise the impact of the violence due to the need to portray a certain form of masculinity.

They offer a possibility for an explanation.

However, although intervention programmes should ensure that the needs of both girls and boys are recognised, it is important that the wider experiences of girls remain a focus

Then they ignore their own explanation and aver that the “wider experiences of girls” (whatever that means) should take precedence.

In addition, boys’ minimisation of their own use of violence – by dismissing it as “messing around” and justifications based on mutual aggression – needs to be challenged.

Then they finalize things by saying that the emphasis on boys should be their violence and especially their minimization of their own violence as has been previously discussed.

I find this paragraph to be very vague and unclear. I am guessing this is intentional since what they really want to say is likely girls are worthy victims and boys are not is hard for them to put into words since it would clearly leave them looking bigoted. Being vague and obfuscating is a much safer strategy and it still gets the job done! One thing is clear after reading it: The reader is sure that for whatever reasons, girls need to get the lions share of services and help and boys need to shape up!

Is the ideology of the researchers driving their focus on girls?

If you look at this from purely a marketing standpoint these researchers have accomplished a remarkable feat. They have been able to create a document that has been labelled a “study” which has found objective data and then made conclusions and recommendations that ignore their own data. They took it a step farther and got the conclusions and recommendations printed in a vast number of media articles which established to millions of viewers, listeners and readers that their “half-stories” were actually facts. Truly amazing when you think about it.

One can only assume that the researchers are aging feminists who are addicted to the outdated and disproven idea that domestic violence is simply dominated by males who batter and women who are victims. We have seen from the Straus article how grossly inaccurate that ideology has been and the extent to which its adherents would go to propagate such mis-information.

I have always thought that science was designed to gather data and then use that data to adjust your theory and ideology based on the new discoveries and information. It seems to me in this case that rather than science being used to shift ones ideology it is the ideology that is governing science and determining which data should come forward and which not. This is very dangerous ground for humanitarians and those who want the best for all victims.

In the case of this study it seems likely that the researchers had a pre-conceived idea that girls were victims and boys the perpetrators. When their own data didn’t affirm such stereotypical assumptions they strained to find a way to convert their data into a message that was harmonious with their pre-conceived ideas about violence (girls are worthy victims and boys are perpetrators). This was done by making the repeated claims that girls are more impacted by the violence and because of this the girls needed to be the focus of attention and services. This claim is hollow and anemic. Most any thinking person can look at that idea and see that because one group gets more upset by a problem that in itself should not negate some victims from getting services and attention.

There were so many parts of this study that seemed misandrist to me that I literally could have written another twenty or thirty pages. I will spare the reader such a burden and leave it to others to have a detailed look and make their own comments. Leave it to say that this study is a shining example of the evils of letting an ideology steer research and the resulting public services and the manner in which the general public is brainwashed by hearing only half the story.

I think that this study also shows the dangers involved in allowing ideological zealots a platform to intentionally mold public opinion to their own version of what is real. We need to use caution when accepting studies as being “scientific” and have a much finer net to discover which studies may be biased due to the ideological underpinnings of its authors. Frankly, any high school science student should be able to read this study and and explain clearly how it is lacking. Our media and our governments are sorely failing to do just that.

tgolden@tgolden

October 26, 2026

The Lover Within

Robert Moore and the Courage to Be Fully Alive

The Lover Within

Robert Moore and the Courage to Be Fully Alive

Of Robert Moore’s four masculine archetypes, the Lover may be the easiest to reduce to something smaller than it is.

We hear the word lover and think of romance or sex. Those certainly belong to the Lover, but Moore was speaking about something much larger. The Lover is the part of us that responds to beauty, music, touch, food, poetry, friendship, nature, grief, sexuality, creativity, and the sheer strangeness of being alive.

It is the capacity to experience the world not merely as useful, dangerous, or understandable, but as valuable.

The King asks, “How shall I care for this?” The Warrior asks, “What must I do?” The Magician asks, “What does this mean?” The Lover says, “Look at this. Feel this. This matters.”

Moore’s central insight might be put this way:

The Lover is not simply the part of us that falls in love. It is the part that experiences anything as worth loving.

Without the Lover, we may remain productive, responsible, disciplined, and intelligent. We can work, lead, analyze, and endure. But something essential begins to disappear. The world loses its color. Other people become functions. Work becomes obligation. Nature becomes a resource. Intimacy becomes another task to perform.

We are still alive, but we no longer feel fully alive.

The Garden

Moore associated each archetype with a different psychic space. The traditional space of the Lover is the garden.

The garden is not the battlefield, workshop, throne room, office, or classroom. It operates according to another kind of time. The Warrior has a mission and checks the clock. The Magician analyzes what is happening. The King remains responsible for the realm. But the Lover enters a place where nothing must immediately be accomplished.

Moore said simply, “The Lover has time.”

That is a radical statement in a culture organized around production. In the garden, we are not earning, fixing, competing, proving, or even helping. We are present. We taste the food. We hear the music. We notice the face across from us. We allow experience to reach us before deciding what to do with it.

This is why Moore said the Lover is about being rather than doing.

The garden includes sexuality, but it is larger than sexuality. It includes conversation that no one wants to end, working with wood because the grain is beautiful, feeling the soil in one’s hands, hearing a song that opens something inside, grieving someone we loved, laughing until we cannot breathe, or standing before a landscape that makes us quiet.

Eden is a garden, but so is Gethsemane. The Lover does not open us only to pleasure. It opens us to sorrow, longing, betrayal, tenderness, beauty, mortality, and loss. A man who refuses grief because it hurts has not conquered the Lover. He has closed the gate to the same garden in which joy lives.

Appreciative Consciousness

Moore called the Lover’s way of seeing “appreciative consciousness.”

The phrase is important. The Lover does not first approach the world by criticizing, measuring, diagnosing, or deciding how it can be used. It appreciates. That does not mean abandoning judgment. It means allowing value to appear before dissection begins.

Moore observed that the King blesses what he encounters, the Warrior fights it, and the Magician interprets it. The Lover appreciates it.

That form of consciousness can make the world seem luminous. William Blake, Walt Whitman, D. H. Lawrence, and Robert Bly all knew something about it. They could look at an ordinary object, an animal, a human body, or a patch of earth and experience more life than most of us notice.

Moore suggested a simple diagnostic question: How much of the time are you bored?

Boredom can occur even in a frantic life. In fact, Moore pointed out that a person can be both a workaholic and deeply bored. He may be constantly occupied while rarely touched by what he is doing.

The absence of boredom does not require continual entertainment. It comes from the ability to notice. A healed Lover finds more of the world interesting because more of the world is allowed to matter.

The Man Who Cannot Feel—and the Man Who Cannot Stop

Moore repeatedly described two broad Lover problems.

At one pole is the man who appears to have too little Lover energy. He feels wooden, detached, ashamed of his body, frightened by enthusiasm, uncomfortable with beauty, or incapable of resting. He may work continuously, analyze everything, or treat intimacy as another technical problem to solve.

Moore joked about the Warrior who approaches lovemaking like a train making a brief station stop. He is still on the mission. He may even read the manual and learn the proper technique, but he has not entered the garden.

This man may say that there is nothing passionate inside him. Moore thought the opposite was often true. Deadness may be a defense against passion so strong that the man fears it will overwhelm him. He is not empty. He is frightened of what might happen if the door opens.

At the other pole is the man who cannot close the door. He becomes flooded by appetite, infatuation, substances, sex, food, excitement, creativity, or risk. He cannot stop because no experience is ever enough to provide the union he seeks.

Moore used a country-song line to describe it: “Whoever turns you on forgot to turn you off.”

One man cannot feel. The other cannot stop. Both have difficulty maintaining a conscious relationship with the same energy.

For Moore, maturity was neither passionlessness nor permanent ecstasy. It was the growing ability to experience intensity without fleeing it, immediately discharging it, or being consumed by it. He described part of the therapeutic task as helping people learn to “stand their excitement longer.”

That is one of the most useful ideas in these lectures. Many of us have been taught how to suppress excitement or act upon it. Far fewer have learned how to remain present while it moves through us.

Shame and the Fear of Being Seen

Shame is one of the principal forces separating men from the Lover.

Men are often permitted to be useful, strong, successful, or funny. Being beautiful is more difficult. So is dancing without self-consciousness, dressing with flair, giving another man a poem, showing delight, or allowing the body to be seen without apology.

Moore said the Lover moves us from shame toward “passionate play and display.”

He was not recommending exhibitionism that ignores other people’s boundaries. He was describing the healthy capacity to appear—to inhabit one’s body, occupy one’s space, and let enthusiasm become visible.

Moore loved hats. He spoke about walking through the city in his Stetson and receiving puzzled looks from people who had lost any cultural language for male adornment. In many traditional cultures, he observed, men dress boldly. They wear brilliant colors and magnificent headdresses. They dance, perform, and display themselves without assuming that beauty belongs only to women.

“You don’t have to be rich to dress up,” he said, “except in spirit.”

That line contains much of his teaching. The healthy Lover does not require luxury. He requires permission to appreciate and participate in beauty.

The Lover Gives Power a Heart

Moore never intended the four archetypes to live in separate compartments. Each possesses a distinctive gift, but each becomes distorted when isolated from the others.

The Lover gives the King, Warrior, and Magician a heart.

The King without the Lover can organize, govern, and dominate, but he cannot bless. He does not experience the people of the realm as having inherent worth. Responsibility becomes a burdensome job because, as Moore put it, “You don’t steward things you don’t value.”

The Warrior without the Lover becomes a machine. He carries out the mission efficiently but no longer feels the value of the lives affected by it. Moore used The Terminator as his image of the loveless Warrior: focused, relentless, and utterly indifferent to the living world.

When Lover energy informs the Warrior, aggression becomes protection. The mature Warrior does not fight merely to satisfy an appetite for combat. He fights on behalf of something he loves—a child, a community, a principle, a forest, an ocean, or another person’s right to live.

The Magician without the Lover becomes detached. He can diagnose, interpret, invent, and manipulate, but may never ask whether his knowledge serves life. Moore saw this danger in scientists who ignore the moral consequences of their discoveries and therapists who become more interested in diagnosis than healing.

Knowledge alone does not make someone a healer. The Lover provides the wish that the other person actually become well.

For Moore, empathy itself contains Lover energy. It is the capacity to feel one’s way into another person’s experience while remaining ethical enough not to exploit the access.

The Lover therefore does more than provide pleasure. It humanizes power.

What Happens When the Lover Comes Through the Back Door

When the Lover is denied a legitimate room in the psyche, it does not disappear. It enters the other archetypes through what Moore called “the back door.”

In the King, denied desire may become eroticized domination. The leader, parent, teacher, therapist, or priest begins taking emotional or sexual gratification from people he is supposed to serve.

In the Warrior, Eros may become fused with aggression. Moore used Apocalypse Now—the helicopters, Wagner, napalm, surfing during combat, and rock music—to show how battle can become a source of ecstasy. Danger makes the man feel unmistakably alive, and destruction becomes exciting.

In the Magician, the Lover may appear as voyeurism. The person watches, analyzes, records, diagnoses, or lives through the intimate experiences of others while remaining outside embodied relationship himself.

Moore’s point was not that authority, aggression, or knowledge are inherently corrupt. It was that rejected desire seeks covert channels. The respectable persona may remain intact while the shadow arranges another life underneath it.

This is one reason he believed the garden needed to be acknowledged directly. We are less likely to demand unconscious gratification from our power, work, clients, children, or public role when the Lover has an honest place of its own.

Addiction as a Wounded Search for the Garden

Moore’s treatment of addiction was compassionate without being sentimental.

He regarded alcohol, drugs, compulsive sex, overeating, overwork, and other addictions as possible attempts to regulate overwhelming Lover energy. When early relationships have been shaming, rejecting, abusive, or unreliable, the person may never develop the internal structure needed to tolerate powerful feeling.

The substance then becomes a dependable companion. It is available when called. It alters the state of the self. It offers relief, intensity, communion, or oblivion without requiring the risks of a mutual human relationship.

Moore described addiction as a kind of unconscious ritual. It has an object, a sequence, a time, a place, a preparation, and a transformation of consciousness. It is a poor vessel, and often a deadly one, but it may nevertheless be performing a psychological function.

He called psychopathology a “creative compromise.” A destructive symptom may be standing between a person and something even more terrifying—fragmentation, unbearable emptiness, or suicide.

This led Moore to an important clinical caution: do not simply take away the old container until something better is available to perform the function it has been serving.

That does not make the addiction good. It means healing requires more than subtraction. The person needs relationships, structure, ritual, community, spiritual practice, and a gradually increasing ability to bear intensity without immediate discharge.

Moore admired Alcoholics Anonymous for precisely this reason. The meetings, honesty, sponsorship, repetition, steps, and shared recognition of danger create a conscious communal vessel where the solitary ritual of addiction once stood.

The goal is not to extinguish the fire. It is to build a hearth strong enough to hold it.

The Other Three Protect the Lover

Just as the Lover humanizes the other archetypes, the other three make mature love possible.

The King gives the Lover a center.

Moore compared this to balancing a powerful engine. Properly balanced, the engine can generate enormous horsepower at high speed without shaking itself apart. King energy provides the taproot or still point that allows a person to experience great passion without fragmenting.

The Warrior protects the garden.

Moore was emphatic about this: “Without the guards, there’s no garden.” The Lover itself does not love walls. It moves toward union, openness, participation, and the crossing of boundaries. The Warrior establishes the gate and decides what may enter.

That includes protecting time. Moore imagined calling upon an inner General Patton, tanks and all, to defend the weekend from work, appointments, duties, and worthy causes. Unless time for the garden is deliberately set aside, every other demand will invade it.

This is one reason intimacy so often disappears from marriage. During courtship, people will pay almost any price to reach the garden. After marriage, they begin assuming it will remain without protection. Work expands. Children, careers, obligations, and screens fill the available space. The garden does not die because marriage is inherently unromantic. It disappears because no one is guarding the gate.

The Warrior also protects the heart from abuse. Moore believed that men are frequently encouraged to become vulnerable without being taught how to defend themselves. But a man who cannot protect his heart will eventually withdraw from relationship. He may remain physically present while disappearing psychologically.

Moore’s point needs careful wording. Honesty, receptivity, and emotional openness are strengths. Defenselessness is not. Intimacy becomes sustainable when a man trusts that he can remain open and still say, “This treatment is not acceptable.”

Finally, the Magician notices.

The Magician scans the inner territory and asks which room has not been visited. A man may list all he is accomplishing, caring for, and producing while the Magician quietly asks, “Have you noticed what is missing?”

King centers the Lover. Warrior protects it. Magician remembers it. Together they make the garden inhabitable.

Men, Masculinity, and Intimacy

One of Moore’s most important observations was that many men do not need less masculinity in order to become intimate. They need a more secure masculine identity.

A man with a fragile sense of self may experience closeness as engulfment. Another person’s anger, need, or disappointment feels enormous. He fears that if he opens fully, he will disappear.

This can be difficult for women to understand, and Moore thought men were often ridiculed for it. But ridicule only deepens the wound. The man needs enough internal King and Warrior to know that he can remain himself while loving someone else.

This is why Moore distinguished sensitivity from pathological vulnerability. A secure man can be deeply receptive because he trusts his center and his boundaries. He can move toward another person without requiring that person to become an extension of himself.

Mature love recognizes a separate other.

That also means love cannot be possession. Moore spoke bluntly about relationships in which one person wants to keep another against his or her will. If the beloved chooses to leave, the loss may be agonizing. But secure selfhood makes it possible to grieve, offer a blessing, and let the person go.

Love says, “I value you.” Possession says, “I require you to keep me from collapsing.”

Restoring the Lover

Moore did not believe the Lover could be restored through explanation alone. The path back is experiential.

Read poetry. Listen to music. Attend live performances. Learn to dance. Spend time in nature. Cook something slowly. Work with your hands. Wear something that makes you feel more fully present. Protect unhurried time with the person you love. Notice beauty and resist the impulse to explain it immediately.

Moore was especially moved by men giving poems to other men at Robert Bly gatherings. He had received many things from men, he joked, including plenty of grief—but never a poem. In that ritual space, strong men could offer one another words they loved without embarrassment.

Dance mattered for the same reason. The Lover sometimes speaks in poetry or song, but often it does not want to speak at all. It wants to move.

Moore told men who felt disconnected from the Lover that they could spend a great deal of money talking about the problem in therapy—or they could take dance lessons. He was joking, but only partly.

He also recommended active imagination: entering a quiet state, allowing an image of the inner Lover to emerge, and asking what it wants. The ego does not have to obey every answer. In fact, it should not. But it is better to know what has been exiled than to discover it later through an act one cannot believe one has committed.

The larger practice is simple, though not easy: make room, protect the room, and learn to remain there.

The Whales

Moore ended the lectures by reading D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Whales Weep Not!”

It was a brilliant choice.

Lawrence’s whales are enormous, sensuous, sexual, playful, parental, and powerful. The mothers nurse their young. The bulls gather around the females and calves when danger threatens. Their strength does not compete with love. It protects love.

The whales bring Moore’s four archetypes together. The Lover supplies delight, sexuality, tenderness, and wonder. The Warrior forms the protective circle. The King preserves the order of life and family. The Magician recognizes the sacred pattern moving through it all.

The poem imagines divinity not as something removed from bodily life but flowing through it. The whales meet, mate, nurture, protect, and move through the great sea in a love beyond human explanation—what Lawrence called love “without words.”

Moore finished the poem and then added, with perfect timing, “That’s why you join Greenpeace.”

The line belongs to the time in which he spoke, and readers may have different opinions about Greenpeace today. But his larger point remains. We do not protect the living world most deeply because a policy tells us to. We protect it because we have learned to experience it as magnificent, vulnerable, sensuous, and valuable in itself.

The Lover makes ecological concern personal. A whale is no longer an abstract representative of biodiversity. It is a living presence—powerful, familial, beautiful, and worthy of protection.

That is the Lover’s final gift. It does not make a man weak. It allows him to feel what his strength is for.

The mature Lover protects the heart without closing it, transmits life without possessing it, and loves the world enough to defend it.

Men Are Good.

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