The op-ed below was posted on Men’s News Daily on Monday July 11, 2011.

Gordon E. Finley, Ph.D.

VAWA: An Idea Whose Time Never Should Have Come

Like facing a hurricane, America now faces the reauthorization of a powerful and destructive feminist-made disaster tearing through the lives of children, fathers, families and the nation’s formerly bedrock institution of marriage. The reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) begins on July 13, 2011. Now is the time to engage in disaster mitigation to either defund VAWA or to redirect it to serve equally the other half of domestic violence victims – men.

VAWA was born of fraud and in this year of towering economic devastation – unless the law is rewritten to grant men full due process rights and equal justice under law – it should be defunded. The seminal presumption of VAWA, embodied in the Duluth Power Wheel, was that there only could be patriarchal male perpetrators and innocent female victims. All else follows from this core presumption.

The ideological fraud of VAWA is exposed both from the lived experiences of everyday citizens and from hundreds of research studies. As ordinary citizens peruse the media and look about them in their daily lives, they find abundant examples of women being violent towards men. These lived experiences of ordinary men and women challenge the core ideological presumptions of VAWA.

Scientific research from hundreds of empirical studies likewise exposes the ideological – rather than the scientific – foundations of VAWA. The key research findings are: males and females initiate domestic violence in approximately equal numbers; physical harm befalls females somewhat more frequently than males; and the initiation rates for females have been increasing.

Even more devastating to the ideological foundations of VAWA, there now is some evidence that the highest levels of domestic violence are found not in heterosexual male-female relationships, but rather in homosexual lesbian relationships. What is critically important in these findings, of course, is that there is no patriarchal male in lesbian relationships. With the absence of a patriarchal male in lesbian domestic violence, the entire ideological superstructure of VAWA collapses.

So, what difference does it make if VAWA and related programs are re-funded at billions of dollars a year? A great deal as it turns out. For taxpayers, the national debt, and the national deficit, VAWA represents billions of dollars of government waste that creates even more waste. By ending marriages, destroying families and removing fathers from their children, we are left with the consequence of single-mother families. Single-mother families overall yield the worst developmental outcomes for children and create a demand for yet more billions of dollars in taxpayer funded government entitlement programs. Yes, VAWA does all this.

Much of the damage is accomplished through restraining orders based on nonsensically broad definitions of domestic violence. VAWA restraining orders strip men of their due process rights, deny them the right to be present at hearings, and deny men their right to cross-examine their accuser. The consequences of one-sided, judicially granted restraining orders are that the police remove the man from the home, give the woman temporary (generally morphing into permanent) custody of the house, the children, and order the man to pay child support. False restraining orders along with false child sexual abuse allegations are widely used by women to gain advantage in divorce proceedings.

Unfortunately for men, the broad social attitudes spawned by VAWA have created a social, legal, and media environment in which it is extremely difficult for men to defend themselves. Under VAWA and related prosecutions, such as false rape allegations, there is a presumption of guilt until proven innocent and a rush to judgment. Think Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

The Senate Judiciary Hearing is titled “The Violence Against Women Act: Building on Seventeen Years of Accomplishments.” It more accurately should be sub-titled “Seventeen Years of Devastating Fathers, Families, Children, and Defrauding Taxpayers.” In my view, and in light of the consequences of VAWA for the economy and for families, VAWA either should defunded or redirected to grant fathers and children due process, equal justice under law, and equal treatment as victims.

Gordon E. Finley, Ph.D. is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Florida International University in Miami.