On November 18, the Washington Post ran an article ("Increasingly, Abuse Shows Female Side," by Leef Smith, p. B1) about a rise in the domestic violence arrests of women in the Washington area, mainly as a result of mandatory arrest policies. (In Prince William County, Md., for instance, 21% of those arrested for DV last year were women.)

While the article quoted a criminologist from American University who said that female violence was a real phenomenon and a police lieutenant who said that men were more willing than in the past to admit that they had been assaulted by a woman, it also quoted three battered women's advocates who asserted that women were being arrested inappropriately and that evil men were using domestic violence laws as a weapon against women, sometimes in child custody battles.

It was these advocates' views that the article emphasized. The only "blow-up quote" (the portion of the text reproduced in large letters and in bold type) was from Sue Osthoff of the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women: "Women are being charged with assault when it's self-defense or it's fictitious." Also, the article ended with a quotation from Cathy Maxfield, a coordinator for Virginians Against Domestic Violence, who said that most of the women charged with abuse tell her they were merely responding to the husband's violence. (Of course, a lot of men charged with abuse also say that they were merely responding to their wives' violence, but the article doesn't mention that.)

This is the second time that a major newspaper has done a story on the rising rates of female arrests for domestic violence stressing this angle. The first one ran in the Los Angeles Times on April 27 of this year ("A New Side to Domestic Violence," by John Johnson, p. A1) and was even more tendentious. It opened with the story of a weeping woman arrested for biting her husband in a fight because he wouldn't give her the car keys. Both the husband and the wife were Middle Eastern immigrants and the wife said that he had kept her a virtual prisoner in their apartment, battered her for years, and refused to allow her access to a car or a credit card. (Assuming for the moment that her story was true, is this story really typical of female DV arrests?)

Out of the 1,752-word story, only a 367-word section in the middle (21% of the text) presented the views of those who believed that female abuse of men was a real problem and that the higher rate of female arrests reflected this problem. The rest quoted "experts" and advocates who mouthed the party line. A woman who runs a therapy group for women convicted of battering in Long Beach, CA said that most of the women in her group were "really victims." Others said that the arrests of women were a form of backlash by policemen who dislike mandatory arrests and take a "well, we'll show you" attitude. They also described three incidents in which men allegedly faked injuries in order to falsely accuse their wives of DV. (Women, of course, never, ever do such things!) The article did not feature a single case of a man who was a genuine domestic violence victim.

Sounds like this is getting to be the politically correct "spin" on the rising rate of female arrests for domestic violence.