Baskerville challenges a host of dearly held beliefs: that divorce results from philandering men, that women are in grave danger of violence by men at all times, that the most dangerous place for a child is the nuclear family. All this, he shows, is completely, monstrously wrong. Fathers, caricatured as embodiments of the hated patriarchy, have been unseated so that a bureaucratic state might increase its power.

The New Politics of Sex:
The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Governmental Power
by Stephen Baskerville
Angelico, 408 pages, $30

Divorce cases in the U.S. now account for 35 to 50 percent of civil litigation, at a cost to the public purse of billions of dollars per year. Out of these cases has grown a vast panoply of ancillary bureaucracies: social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists, child protection experts and enforcers, counselors, mediators, divorce planners, forensic accountants, and so forth. Behind a smoke screen of piety concerning the difficult job they have to do in “helping” or “providing services,” their purpose is the human equivalent of the breaker’s yard: They tear asunder the superstructure of the family and then move to the foundations, demolishing relationships between husband and wife, between parents and children, and even sometimes between the children themselves.

In his scrupulously researched book on how the sexual revolution has proven a war against fathers, Stephen Baskerville, professor of government at Patrick Henry College, describes the costs of divorce:

No legislative enactment has spread more turmoil throughout the social order, transferred more power to the state, or done more to debase the legal machinery from a dispenser of justice into a weapon of plunder and aggrandizement of power.

Baskerville challenges a host of dearly held beliefs: that divorce results from philandering men, that women are in grave danger of violence by men at all times, that the most dangerous place for a child is the nuclear family. All this, he shows, is completely, monstrously wrong. Fathers, caricatured as embodiments of the hated patriarchy, have been unseated so that a bureaucratic state might increase its power.

In 2004, the U.K. government announced that it was requiring all doctors and midwives henceforth to ask pregnant women if they were being beaten by their husbands or boyfriends. In justification of this measure, the government claimed that 30 percent of domestic violence was actually “triggered” by the woman’s pregnancy. Such policies show how poorly domestic abuse is still understood. We tend to speak of “wife-beaters” and “battered women,” hardly imagining that the roles of aggressor and victim can be reversed.

A score of years ago, I accepted the conventional cultural wisdom that held women were pretty much incapable of doing really nasty things. But then a series of events led me to check out my intuition, and I discovered survey after survey showing a consistent pattern indicating that in roughly half of intimate relationships in which violence occurs, both partners are violent, with the remainder dividing equally between male-only and female-only violence. Although men are more likely to injure their victims, women are more likely to use weapons to inflict harm, and frequently strike from behind or while their victim is asleep. In 2003, Linda Kelly, a professor of law at Indiana University, summed up the consensus:

Over the last twenty-five years, leading sociologists have repeatedly found that men and women commit violence at similar rates. . . . However, despite the wealth and diversity of the sociological research and the consistency of the findings, female violence is not recognized within the extensive legal literature on domestic violence. Instead, the literature consistently suggests that only men commit domestic violence. Either explicitly, or more often implicitly, through the failure to address the subject in any objective manner, female violence is denied, defended and minimized.

At first this research seemed so counterintuitive that I was reluctant to report it. Then I spoke to Erin Pizzey, who had in 1971 opened the first-ever shelter for battered women in the United Kingdom, in Chiswick, London. She told me that she had already traveled the same road. Of the first hundred women who came to her organization seeking shelter, she said, two-thirds had been just as violent as the men they were allegedly trying to escape. When she went public about this, she was subjected to ostracism and public abuse.

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