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It was on Oprah a few months or a year ago. The show was about domestic abuse. The counselors were advancing the theory that 'if he slaps you girl, he is going to hit you. If he hits you, girl, he is going to kill you. You get out of there the first and I mean FIRST time he slaps you.' One counselor even took it so far as to say, 'if he yells at you girl, you get out then, because if he yells at you, he is going to slap you'.

Oprah introduced a PhD specializing in this area, and brought up the interesting statistic that 20% of couples studied showed some form of physical abuse or other. The PhD played this down, and changed the subject the once or twice that Oprah brought it up.

I found that interesting, since it was an impressive statistic and could well show how serious the problem was. Why would the PhD not want to emphasize that?

Well, if you think about it, you can see that it proves the 'if he slaps you he's going to kill you' theory to be completely false. 20% is one out of five couples. Never in the history of this country have 1 out of 5 men beaten their wives to death. For most of that time, slapping or spanking your wife has been completely legal. Ergo, it is not true to say that 'if he slaps you, he is going to kill you'. Because he is not in most cases. Obviously in most cases, such men do not escalate, getting more and more violent and eventually killing their wives. I would expect that such incidents are more common during the first year or two of the relationship while the two persons are getting to know each other and finding out how to live with each other. A period during which tempers are bound to be tested ocassionally. I would also expect that in most cases they probably vanish after that period. In some cases not.

But that is the theory that is being advanced on the show. If the statistic was brought out and emphasized, someone might have figured out that the theory was false and/or a lie. When the PhD basically shushed Oprah about the statistic. It appeared that I was watching a PhD lie to or mislead Oprah and the american people.

No big deal. I have seen Newt and Clinton on TV before. I am used to being lied to. So, I sort of filed it away as interesting.

Later I saw a series of TV commercials enshrining this 'if he slaps you he is going to kill you' theory as holy gospel in the temple of political correctness. Well, it fits. Most of what is politically correct has no more scientific validity than articles in the National Enquirer. On the other hand, basing national policy, or national commercial campaigns on false theories and pseudoscience can be dangerous.

This particular piece of pseudoscience appears to violate one of the most ancient and fundamental principles of good government. The principle could be stated, 'Never make the punishment for a minor offense equal to or greater than the punishment for a major offense. If you do, people guilty of the minor offense will have no reason not to commit the major offense.'

This is the principle on which Solon of Athens reformed the laws of that city state. The result being his being hailed as one of the great and wise rulers in the history of the city. It won him a place in Plutarch's Lives.

In this case, you are making yelling at or slapping a woman the same crime as beating her with a baseball bat, or murdering her. Obviously, if the principle applies, this will result in a reduction in the number of men who yell at or slap women, and an increase in the number of men who brutally beat or murder women. The reduction in men who yell at or slap women will come from men who can repress their behavior to that degree. The increase in men who brutally beat and murder women will come from men who once or twice lose their tempers enough to slap their women, and who are scared into threatening to kill or killing their wives to keep it quiet. Just as in the case of a thief, if seen, if he knows that he will get the death penalty, for theft, why not add murder to it and kill the witness. The punishment is no worse.

Personally, if I were a woman, I would probably prefer to have my man yell at or slap me when he got mad, instead of beating me to death.

The question is, does the principle apply? Well, lets put up a picture of the situation.

This is pretty much the situation as described on Oprah, a fairly large group 20% of couples where the man ocassionally physically expresses negative feelings by yelling at or slapping women represented by the red beads on the left. A much smaller group, men who actually do brutally beat and murder women represented by the dot on the right.

First, if the group represented by the beads on the left did not exist, then the principle would not apply. If the theory were true, and every man who yelled at or slapped a woman were predestined by fate to automatically go on to murder a woman, then one in every five women ever married in the history of the world would have been murdered by their men. The group of beads on the left would not exist. This has never happened. The theory is false. Obviously the larger group of couples is that in which some overt physical display of negative feelings takes place and does not escalate into being a life threatening situation. The group of beads on the left does exist.

There is a group of people guilty of minor offenses who will be subject to punishment as though they had brutally beaten or murdered their wives, if the minor offense is discovered.

Will the punishment for yelling at or slapping a woman be roughly the same as brutally beating or murdering your wife?

We are dealing with highly emotionally charged topics here. In many cases the most painful part of the punishment is losing the wife and family. If the woman leaves her husband the first time he slaps her, he loses her, and any family they have. This would also be his main punishment if he murdered her. In this sense the punishment is the same.

If she leaves him, she is going to talk about it, justify herself, and the word is going to get out that he is a 'wifebeater'. Other people will act on this, he is likely to lose his job, his career, as well as his wife and family. Again the punishment is pretty rough. Just as rough as if he had beaten his wife with a bat and threatened to kill her.

When you come right down to it, he is not going to lose much more if he murders her than if he slaps her.

If he does ever lose his temper and yell at her or slap her once, he stands to lose his wife, his home, his family, his career, everything. He is immediately desperate. He has to make sure that she does not ever tell anyone. How is he going to do that? By threatening to hurt her worse or kill her if she talks.

He is forced by the penalties facing him to threaten to kill her. She is placed in a serious lifethreatening situation, where none existed before. The mechanism is exactly the same as that in the case of the thief, who threatened with the death penalty for theft goes on to murder any witnesses to his crime.

The principle in it's exact mechanism does apply. It is necessary to move one bead from the left to the right.

The beads are now divided into two groups, men scared into repressing their feelings, and men who brutally beat and murder women. Men who yell at and slap women are not represented, they have indeed decreased in number. Men who brutally beat and murder women, however, has indeed increased in number.

Unfortunately, this is not all. In this case. More problems result when this piece of pseudoscience is 'successful'.

A man slaps a woman, the woman leaves the man. The woman is 'saved'.

There is no death penalty for slapping a woman. Everything else is taken away. Wife, family, friends, home, career, but the man is left alive to brood, live in desperation as a social outcast, and to hate.

This is the recipe for creating a monster. What can he do? Where can he go? Even his own family is likely to have turned against him because he is a 'wife abuser'.

Some of these men will become monsters. The danger to the specific woman is decreased, though, in truth, it may have never existed at all. However a man in this situation is likely to seek out and murder women who are complete strangers as symbols of the woman who, he feels, destroyed him.

The danger to all women of being brutally murdered by a complete stranger has been increased.

Society does not profit by breaking up marriages. Society has a vested interest in helping marriages work out their problems. Not in inventing pseudoscientific justifications to break up marriages that might very well have worked.

It is necessary to move another bead from the left to the right. This mechanism will increase the negative effects of this piece of pseudoscience, making them greater than the negative effects of having a death penalty for common theft.

Since this is not theft and murder, but domestic abuse, there is another factor. That factor is the psychological profile of men who kill their wives. I read some time ago, that the most common psych profile of men who kill their wives was not the wifebeater. The men who killed their wives were quiet men, men who repressed their feelings. Men who put up with this and that thing that their wives did, until after ten or twenty years, they lost it, and killed their wives because they couldn't stand tuna casserole.

This piece of pseudoscience, and the commercial campaign associated with it is going to scare men into repressing their feelings. The number of men who repress their feelings until they lose control and murder their wives will increase. It is necessary to move another bead from the left to the right.

The picture above represents the final result. A fairly large group of men have been scared into repressing their feelings for fear that they will be stigmatised as woman beaters. A much smaller group still uses a loud voice or some overt physical expression of negative emotions, but has not become the kind of men who brutally beat and murder women. Finally, a group of men who are the kind of men who brutally beat and murder women which has increased significantly.

The situation has gone from this.

To this.

This is not an improvement. Pseudoscience is not a good idea. Especially when applied to something as emotionally charged as domestic violence. The negative impacts of this piece of pseudoscience and the emotionally charged commercial campaign associated it will be directly proportional to how many people take it seriously.

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