Was Tiger a Victim of Domestic Violence?

It’s extremely unpopular to sympathize with a man who’s cheated on his wife, especially if that man happens to be rich.  That’s probably why the underside of the Tiger Woods scandal was ignored, both by the media and by law enforcement who had the option of investigating Tiger’s wife for the golf club incident.  Nevertheless, shattering a vehicle’s windows with a nine iron while someone is driving it is obviously a cause of action for assault and battery.  The shortfall here is motivation.  No one wants to prosecute an aggressor, on the one hand who was a victim on the other.  And even fewer people want to side against a woman on a domestic violence charge, whatever the situation.

In fact, someone who asked whether women are accountable at all for domestic violence in America wouldn’t seem that out of touch.  The laws of some countries, which are of course considered progressive, have specifically defined domestic violence to exclude violence committed against men.  And in violence against women, they have even deprived male offenders of the classic adage of “innocent until proven guilty”, instead requiring men themselves to prove that it wasn’t them when their spouse shows up with injuries.

But even in the comparatively more traditional United States, there are certain female only defenses to a charge of domestic violence.  The laws of some states grant an exception to the self-defense doctrine in a murder charge.  In those states, a woman may kill her husband to defend herself against an act of violence that hasn’t actually happened, as long as she meets the classification of a “battered woman” and testifies that she “sensed” violence was coming on.  Federal law seems gender based also.  Recent legislation from congress even survived with a facially discriminatory name: “The Violence Against Women Act”.

These are the palpable results of a cultural force that society “senses” the same way a sufferer of battered woman’s syndrome supposedly “senses” the intent of her husband.  In either case, nobody wants to get in the way of what’s behind it.  But in arming women with spears and clubs, literally, the force has taken on widespread popularity.  Some have even said that 2009 was the year women finally fought back.  Regardless of whether it is illegal or not, some have had no qualms in saying women are justified, openly suggesting physical force as a solution for women in marital disputes.  But recommending an illegal means of resolution to one class while simultaneously cracking down on it for another seems to be an inconsistency of the kind that equal protections was designed to avoid.  Furthermore, if lawyers are sworn officers of the court, how can groups composed primarily of lawyers suggest something illegal?

Well, that’s the beauty of the adversarial system.  There are two sides to every issue, and so one side never needs to worry about restraint.  That would be doing the other side’s job for it.  And the other side of this particular issue argues that the true objective of equal protections is just that, equal footing for men and women.  Any less would be a legal insult to the disadvantaged group.  And so quite surprisingly, this side is full of women’s rights gladiators as well.  And of course, it never hurts when those gladiators happen to be former NFL cheerleaders.  There’s a certain contradiction in becoming the very models of all the grueling diet regimes, Barbie doll figures and airbrushed photos that shouldn’t theoretically be required for female success.  But that doesn’t mean that this side doesn’t exalt women’s rights as priority one as well.  There’s just a different approach, one of theory rather than results.  The belief is that once men and women are truly equal under the law, inequities in the real world will simply resolve themselves.  There’s an idealistic warm fuzzy that accompanies such directness.  Because of course, all women ever needed to defend themselves was the legal right.

But whether the protection of women requires affirmative action or not, both sides are pushing from the same angle to start this ball rolling.  In fact, the only thing they seem to agree on is who is going to get crushed by it.  In what’s literally a “you hit me, I hit you” playground mentality, the men actually getting abused at home are the ones left out to dry with diminished legal protection.

It’s not just a few isolated cases of superstar athletes either.  Statistics show that about one in four people killed by their domestic partner are men.  Additionally, Dr. Martin Fiebert has compiled a comprehensive bibliography of various studies of domestic abuse, arriving on the conclusion that women are just as aggressive at home, if not more so, than men.  Some criticize these studies for seemingly not considering that male violence is more severe, and certainly hospitalization is shown to be more frequent for female victims.  However, it’s also clear statistically that women are much more likely to use weapons in their domestic violence, whether a gun or a nine-iron.  Maybe it’s because they know that the law most likely won’t stop them.

But of course, when science leads to a politically unpopular conclusion, there must have been something wrong with the methodology.  Right?  Well, these methods were certainly criticized, but from the other angle.  Warren Farell has been among the most vocal to point out that the studies have rarely concerned themselves with who initiated the violence.  He observes that women are statistically more inclined to resort to physical abuse first, and concludes that men sometimes defend themselves.  When this happens, the predictable outcome causes many men to be recorded as offenders.  In the reverse case of women defending themselves against men, sympathetic political forces almost always uncover grounds for self defense if they exist.  Societal stereotypes and norms have skewed statistics that already show a fair number of men, causing violence against men to go even more severely underreported.

The state of domestic violence laws is unique.  The intent has not been to grant public rights, but rather, to empower a supposedly disadvantaged class in the most private of settings.  It’s to make sure that in the few, regrettable cases of physical combat between spouses, women are just as capable of emerging victorious as men.  And if Tiger is too beefed up from working in a field of athletics that does not test for steroids, women are to be given legal stimulants.  After those, he’ll look like a little boy who just spends his time watching grass grow around a little hole in the ground.  I don’t know what you saw in the press conference, but I was truly disheartened.  I’d go as far to say that I saw a victim.  It’s an emerging class of people victimized as the incumbent generation attempts to correct the perceived wrongs of those who gave them their inheritance.