McGowan: Fatherhood — Tussling With the WSJ
by Richard McGowan, Ph.D.
My experience with the Wall Street Journal, chronicled in this column a year and a half ago, showed how little awareness the paper had regarding domestic violence. My recent experience with the newspaper shows how much improvement the WSJ and United States could make in order to promote equality among the individuals in our great country.
The Wall Street Journal invites reader comments after an article. The article, “Divorce Plunged in Kentucky. Equal Custody for Fathers Is a Big Reason Why,” focused on custody decisions in divorce cases. The article suggested child abuse as an ostensible reason for favoring mothers and awarding custody of the children to them.
Of course, that reasoning suggests fathers are a malicious, pernicious lot.
So I responded in the reader comments section as follows: “Type ‘data on child abuse deaths’ into Google and here is what you will get: ‘Mothers acting alone were responsible for 30 percent of child abuse fatalities in 2022. Mothers and fathers acting together accounted for 23 percent of child fatalities in 2022. Fathers acting alone were responsible for 15 percent of child fatalities in 2022.’ Claire Renzetti’s book, Violent Betrayal, notes, I’m pretty sure on page 114, that lesbian couples show the same rate of domestic abuse as heterosexual couples. It would be better if that sort of data appeared in an article about parenting.”
The comment drew this response from the WSJ: “Your comment is waiting for approval due to the site’s policy.” Why? “Your comment has been sent to review since the current site policy requires manual approval for all comments.”
Six hours after I posted that comment, the WSJ still had not accepted it. So I tried again with another message. “Department of Health and Human Services report, Child Maltreatment 2022, Exhibit 4-4, Child Fatalities by Relationship to their Perpetrators, shows that mothers acting alone or with a non-parent are responsible for 40.8 percent of the child abuse fatalities acting alone or with a non-parent are responsible for 15.8 percent of child abuse fatalities. That kind of data ought to be included in discussions of child abuse.”
The comment drew the same response: “Your comment is waiting for approval due to the site’s policy.” Why? “Your comment has been sent to review since the current site policy requires manual approval for all comments.”
Five hours after I posted that comment, the WSJ had not accepted it. Being the sort of person who is persistent (and possibly prone to banging his head against the wall; think ‘Don Quixote’), I tried again:
“According to an NIH article (2007), ‘Several studies have found that men and women initiate violence against an intimate partner at approximately the same rate.’ That situation was documented in 1979 by Gelles and Strauss.”
This last one did, in fact, appear, but only after a 15-minute wait.
The WSJ appears ambivalent about reliable data. Or, perhaps, the folks who read the comment section could not find the data despite the precision about its location in my comments. Or perhaps the WSJ is following the popular narrative: men are violent, women are as pure as the driven snow. Some men, like some women, are violent but the vast majority of men and women are not.
Harboring popular tropes and being indifferent to data is the kind of attitude that will produce more violence. Further, lazy thinking based on some narrative, not the data, is a poor way of solving problems. Policy based on the narrative, prevalent in so many court cases and legal decisions in the past, is demeaning to men and, to put the matter bluntly, built on a malicious ignorance.
Richard McGowan, Ph.D., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, has taught philosophy and ethics cores for more than 40 years, most recently at Butler University.
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