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Attention Buzzfeed readers: Here's more, much more, about the charming Paul Elam

Paul Elam, saying something terrible, probably.
Paul Elam, saying something terrible, probably.

For those coming here from the excellent Buzzfeed article on Paul Elam, here are some posts of mine that will give you an even fuller picture of this not only sleazy but dangerous man and the little army of fanatical assholes he has assembled to pester and often outright harass (mostly) women online.

Start here:

Paul Elam of A Voice for Men: In His Own Words

Aside from some of the information Buzzfeed found out about him, nothing is more damning to Elam than his own words.

Here are some posts on Elam’s  peculiar approach to “activism,” which generally involves harassing individual women.

7 Tactics of Highly Effective Harassers: How A Voice for Men’s Internet Hate Machine works

Elam falsely accuses a random woman of trashing applications from white men while working for a college admissions office.

Elam Launches a Hate Campaign Against a College Student for Attending a Demonstration and Making Twitter Jokes

Paul Elam, you’re no MLK: A Voice for Men offers a $100 bounty for a clear photo of its latest feminist foe

Here’s a post on the phony “offenders registry” Elam and company put up in order to demonize feminists and other women they don’t like by posting unflattering profiles of them alongside actual female murderers and sex offenders.

Register-Her was a Fake “Offenders Registry” Run By Misogynists, Designed to Vilify and Intimidate Women

And here are a couple of posts on AVFM’s attempt to co-opt the name and the reputation of the White Ribbon anti-domestic violence campaign:

A Voice for Men has set up a phony White Ribbon website to coopt the international anti-violence campaign of that name — and raise some money using the name.

Some posts that quote Elam’s perverse justifications for violence against women:

Paul Elam: “If a woman five feet tall and 110 pounds soaking wet hits me, I am going to hit her back.”

She deserved the ass-kicking of a lifetime: Elam justifies violence against women in a disturbing short story

Paul Elam, you’re no Jonathan Swift

And then there was this:

Paul Elam, alleged human rights champion, tells me to kill myself

And a few, er, lighter reads on the man:

Elam to A Voice for Men conference goers: Don’t say terrible things about women in public, because someone might hear you

A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam and Dean Esmay explain the proper slurs to use for “nasty women.”

Elam: “This world deserves a jerk on the collar and a slap across the face and the flying spittle of rage.”

Elam on “stupid lying whores,” Rebecca Watson, and how he never claims to be a victim even though he totally is one.

(This last one is about a post he wrote attacking Skepchick founder Watson in which he used the word “whore” literally two dozen times.)

And there are more in the archives if you want to search for them.

I guess I kind of write about him a lot, huh?

Well, for better or worse, he’s the most prominent and influential Men’s Rights Activist out there. For now.

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mildlymagnificent
9 years ago

Just in case a casual visitor drops by and is curious about the “scientific” evidence for “equivalence” of domestic violence carried out by men and by women, here’s a brief bit of background. If you do happen to follow up any reports or papers on the subject, watch out for researchers relying on the Conflict Tactics Scale. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_tactics_scale

The wiki item gives some details, but there are two things to watch out for.

1. Listen to Einstein.

Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.

Researchers can be misled by being presented with a method for counting something and overlooking what isn’t counted, and whether what is counted should be given equal weight.

2. The word “conflict” in the title of the scale itself. There’s a whole lot of inference and implication in the mere word itself.
Who says that there is any conflict in an incident or a pattern of domestic violence? If it’s a bad habit carried over from childhood or a conscious exercise of discipline (see anything about the worst examples of advice to religious couples for more on this idea) or control or exerting power. There are plenty of violent families where the victim(s) never raise a question, let alone their voice or their hand, to the perpetrator.
—————————————————————–

As for everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted, why is it preferable to use _only_ the CTS and not all the other numbers of possible events that are measured in other ways by other people.

Hospitals, ambulance services, crisis services, police and courts all keep records relating to some of the outcomes of family violence. Why do researchers think it is “better” to work with numbers from self-reporting surveys at the same time as excluding independent records of complaints, murders, injuries and attendances by emergency services/police?

There’s nothing wrong with researchers deciding to narrow their focus to make their project manageable. There’s a lot wrong with overlooking or ignoring the limitations of any studies.
—————————————————————————
Numbers can be misleading. Mrmagnificent once needed some help with a project on public health. So I looked at what he’d done and I agreed with him. Four separate sets of numbers from health surveys — all conducted by respected researchers with standard protocols. What did we see?
The conditions that people complained of experiencing in the previous weeks/months were not the conditions that people went to the doctor for.
The conditions that took people to the doctor were not the same as those that got them admitted to hospital.
And the reasons for the doctor visits/hospital admissions were not the same as the causes of death.

Four separate sets of health statistics. If you tried to use any one of them as a basis for public policy without looking at the others, you’d very likely make some serious errors of judgment and misallocations of resources.

People who try to use domestic violence, CTS-based statistics could make horrible mistakes. Just think what would happen if policy makers ignored the murder and serious injury research.

Argenti Aertheri
Argenti Aertheri
9 years ago

Doesn’t the fucking CTS ignore sexual violence altogether? Such that if someone doesn’t understand that “no” means “put your pants back on”, and gets shoved off, the person doing the shoving gets a point scored against them, and the naked partner trying to commit sexual assault gets no points against them?

And yes, it is scored in points. Cuz DV is totally like a ball game. Huh, the CTS kinda is like a ball game huh? Scored in points and rapes don’t count against you? *is still bitter about Roethlisberger*

mildlymagnificent
9 years ago

Irritatingly, this problem has been known for a long time. Check out this http://www.vawnet.org/applied-research-papers/print-document.php?doc_id=388 paper from 1998 — it’s nearly come of age. And they’re talking freely about how even the revised CTS misses a whole lot of really important stuff.

And it’s not just the research criteria, even the way survey respondents are approached can skew the results.

However, several studies have shown that if respondents are asked again later by an interviewer or asked to complete self-reported, supplementary open- and closed-ended questions, some silent or forgetful participants will reveal in this second round having been victimized or abusive (DeKeseredy and Schwartz, 1998; Junger, 1990; Kelly, 1988). For example, Smith (1987) found that a substantial number of respondents changed their answers when asked the questions again in different words by a telephone interviewer. Belated responses increased the overall violence prevalence rate by approximately 10%. However, for the narrower set of question about severe violence, the prevalence rate increased by close to 60%, from 7.1% to 11.3%. It should also be noted that in addition to giving respondents more opportunities to disclose events, supplementary open-ended questions (where the respondent is given the opportunity to use her own words) build researcher-respondent rapport, allow respondents to qualify their responses, and overcome or minimize the hierarchical nature of traditional or mainstream survey research (Smith, 1994).

chthonicgames
chthonicgames
9 years ago

I feel I should point that scoring systems for difficulty-to-quantify things are not, in principle, bad statistics. Of course, for them to valid they need to be constructed sensibly, so that they do make something resembling a useful ordering you can use for analysis. It seems like the CTS doesn’t do this (I’ve not looked at it in depth), so it’s not a good tool. A separate issue is people misusing scores, treating them like linear quantities rather than an order statistic. You can’t just add them up, or say that 4 is twice 2. The wp article doesn’t say how the final score is constructed, but reading between the lines it looks as though naive addition might be used, which is so invalid it makes my head spin.

AcidTrial had a good idea – a link to round-up posts like this might make a good addition to the topbar (and maybe linked to from some of the about pages). Sort of a ‘start here’ to complement the glossary and FAQs.

Argenti Aertheri
Argenti Aertheri
9 years ago

Yeah, I know scoring like that isn’t inherently bad — some of the most relied on psych surveys use it, but indeed Beck’s depression one doesn’t say that 30 is twice as depressed as 15 (let’s just ignore that that’s kinda nonsensically on face value). And when you’re looking at both types of violence, sorry “conflict”, and frequency, simple addition gets extra side eye.

Plus the fact that, for an extreme example, two thrown pillows is not equal to a punch and a kick, and it’s certainly not worse than a rape, no matter how many pillows are thrown. (Disclaimer: don’t throw anything, even pillows, without this being an established friendly teasing sort of thing, or with a cat around!) But the first example would be scored as equally violent, and the second would have the pillow thrower as having two points, and the rapist zero. Which is how you end up with women having around the same rates as men. When you count acts unlikely to result in injury the same as broken bones, and remove sexual assaults from the equation entirely, and then for extra dumb count self-defense the same as the attack being defended against…

Fuck it, that’s not skewed data, that’s fundamentally useless data.

Argenti Aertheri
Argenti Aertheri
9 years ago

Ok, ignore most of that, it does look like the CTS2 dealt with the worst offenses to logic. Still doesn’t seem to actually deal with the differences in motivation and effect though. Like, gaslighting naricissist ex messed me up worse than either rapist ex, particularly the first one — you are wrong and you should feel wrong is much easier to deal with than was I wrong? did I misremember? am I overreacting? was I dressed inappropriately? is this outfit appropriate? blue pants or brown? brown got me told they were too neutral, but blue got me told they were too bold

Now, this is just me, ymmv, but this is just me aka when I was reduced to yelling through tears, was I being, per CTS standards, more… whatever their measure is… than when my every move was questioned? And how about when 200 lb 6′ tall marital artist blocked the door to scream at me, and 5’4″ me who was 115 lb soaking wet pushed past? Well, I was the only one making bodily contact, forget that I asked, in a reasonably calm manner, repeatedly, to be allowed out of the room, and then warned that I would push my way out if I had to. But hey, I’m the one who did the shoving, and I wasn’t preventing physical harm, so not self-defense, right? Forget the whole “who was being reasonable” thing!

The scale, it is dumb.

mildlymagnificent
9 years ago

And when you’re looking at both types of violence, sorry “conflict”, and frequency, simple addition gets extra side eye.

Which brings us right back to the ideas underlying something called a “conflict” scale. These people with their naive descriptions of disagreements, arguments and fights “resulting” in violence remind me all too strongly of witless teachers telling victims to go into a quiet room for a calm discussion with the person who is bullying them.

Using a presumption — well, not really, it’s overtly there in the name — that violence is related to conflict misleads people into misunderstanding the dynamics of far too many violent households. My own view is that all these people should do some preparatory work reading up about bullying in workplaces and schools and how people move into and out of bully, victim and bystander roles. It’s not directly transferable but it puts a different light on violent interactions — that victims of bullies usually have done absolutely nothing leading to them being in that position, let alone openly provoking them. Seeing the perpetrators of family violence as bullies of largely blameless* victims is often far more accurate than presuming that they are equal participants in “disagreements” which only get violent when they get out of hand.

* Unless you want to be the sort of person who agrees that a late meal or an untidy living room or refusal of sex fully justifies violence.

I’m not pretending that some violent families are full of conflict generated by everyone involved. But my own experience with lots of women victims is that I’d expect that group to be a minority, though I’d not be horrified or shocked if research proved otherwise.

Wetherby
Wetherby
9 years ago

Four separate sets of health statistics. If you tried to use any one of them as a basis for public policy without looking at the others, you’d very likely make some serious errors of judgment and misallocations of resources.

You find a similar process at work with Britain’s Human Rights Act. If you read the tabloid press, you’d be convinced that it was single-handedly responsible for the country’s decline, as every chancer under the sun attempts to bring a “human rights” prosecution for some spurious reason.

But the facts are rather different. The overwhelming majority of cases that make tabloid front pages never actually get as far as a court hearing (they’re usually thrown out as soon as the judge casts an eye over the arguments), the number of cases where the HRA was invoked at all is comparatively small, and the number of cases where the HRA directly affected the outcome is pretty negligible. (I seem to remember a survey of the HRA conducted five years after it was past concluded that the number of cases in the latter category was in the high double figures – across five years and the whole of the British legal system.)

And speaking personally, I quite like living in a country whose legislature dictates that everyone, no matter what they’re alleged to have done, enjoys certain basic rights.

Wetherby
Wetherby
9 years ago

[sorry – “five years after it was passed“. Not “past”!]

Tracy
Tracy
9 years ago

Thank you David! Also thanks to all of you explaining stats and the CTS, it helps.

Alan Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
9 years ago

@ wetherby

All the HRA did was to formally incorporate the ECHR into domestic law. It was more a procedural change than a substantive one. Don’t forget the ECHR was drafted by British lawyers. Churchill was a huge fan.

The HRA did however limit our publicly funded jollies to the Hague, and it can be rightly condemned for those reasons.

seraph4377
9 years ago

Reblogged this on Dreams of the Shining Horizon and commented:
This contains further details on the previous post’s useful information.

Robert
Robert
9 years ago

Every time someone mentions Erin Pizzey, I remember her being quoted as saying, “There’s something frightfully satisfying about throwing a glass of wine in someone’s face.” That’s how I remember it, and it represents an approach to personal violence that disturbs me. People who say things like that often believe that everyone else feels the same way. We don’t.

Anenome
Anenome
9 years ago

@ David

Could you possibly add the story about Elam making a giant ass out of himself by assuming an obviously satirical article was real?

Shows how much he actually knows about satire…

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