So the news came out today that the FBI got a warning a month prior that Scott Roeder was a danger to Dr. George Tiller. The FBI disregarded the letter as not credible, for a number of reasons, including the fact that the guy who wrote it had no specifics. But it’s also likely that the FBI was annoyed because the letter came from a personal enemy of Roeder’s, a Mark Archer. Archer’s wife had a baby by Roeder after she married Archer, and Roeder had managed to secure visitation rights. For somewhat understandable reasons, Archer didn’t want Roeder visiting the little girl—-the story implies that Archer is raising the little girl as his own, and the Archers want to get Roeder out of their life completely. Of course, the strategy of trying to run someone out of your life by getting him on a “no fly” list is unethical, but it seems that Archer was also freaked out by Roeder, who bragged to Archer’s wife that he wanted to blow up abortion clinics.
Now, I know the FBI probably gets a ton of people trying to use them in order to attack personal enemies, and as such, they probably just write most of this stuff right away. But since this letter was inspired by a custody dispute, I think perhaps they should have had more follow-up. Custody disputes should be a red flag for violence, in no small part because of the right wing’s growing interest in using child custody issues as a way to oppress and control women. The anti-choice movement attracts a lot of angry, bitter men with major masculinity issues and bitterness over divorce and the loss of control over the lives of specific women they feel they have a claim to, and that sort of thing needs to be taken into consideration when warnings like this are issued.
Of course, angry, violent, bitter men don’t need to go into anti-choice activism to work out their violent hatred of women, because now they have the “men’s rights” movement. And while individual MRAs (men’s rights activists) might be seriously anti-choice, the movement on the whole tends to be neutral on abortion, because they aren’t particularly anti-sex. Indeed, MRAs tend to be more concerned about the fact that men don’t have a right to force women to have abortions than the fact that legal abortion exists.
I bring this up, because Kathryn Joyce published the definitive article on the men’s rights movement last week. In it, she really carefully shows that while many men who are attracted to the MRA thing aren’t necessarily wife beaters, the movement exists because a lot of wife beaters can’t accept that they’ve lost control of their victims. Indeed, the MRA strategy of encouraging men to continue to find new, creative ways to sue their ex-wives is exactly the sort of thing that would attract wife beaters, who need a way to maintain power over their victims. Lawsuits that force the victim to continue showing up at court, hiring an attorney, etc. are a good way to keep some kind of control over a woman. Many family court observers call it “abuse by court”.
Kathryn spells out all the MRA tactics: denying the reality of domestic violence, using children and money as leverage to get their way with women, supporting rapists and making excuses for them, claiming that the real victims are men who get punished for beating their wives. Specifically, MRAs pull the same stunt that wife beaters do, which is blaming the victim. MRA “studies” trying to demonstrate that domestic violence isn’t gendered do so by folding any attempt by women at self-defense into the statistics, and conflating that with attacking someone. They also conflate slapping someone in the face once with the ongoing beating, berating, and mental destruction that is the pattern of abuse inflicted by batterers on their wives. (Not that it’s ever okay to slap, but there are huge differences that responsible researchers take into account.) Not that there’s no such thing as a female batterer, but responsible statistics show that it’s rare. And that makes sense—-domestic violence is the direct result of a culture that teaches that women are servants for men. Some men with sadistic streaks are going to see that as license to break a specific woman down, to control her completely.