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A major source of statistical information behind these stories is research conducted by a colleague of mine, the sociologist Richard Gelles, director of the Family Violence Research Program at the University of Rhode Island. The writers accurately identified Gelles’s research as the best available studies, but they wrongly reported the findings. Gelles does not hold that millions of men get beaten by their wives, as a casual reader of newspapers and magazines might be led to believe. On the contrary, he maintains that 100,000 to 200,000 men are battered in the United States—a number that pales in comparison to the 2 million battered women. Supporting Gelles’s findings, FBI data show that one in four female murder victims is killed by a husband or boyfriend, compared to just 3 percent of murdered men slain by wives or girlfriends.50

By overlooking or downplaying what Gelles considers vital, writers make his assertions seem like evidence of an epidemic of moms beating up dads. “The statement that men and women hit one another in roughly equal numbers is true,” Gelles admits. “But it cannot be made in a vacuum without the qualifiers I always include in my writing: number one, women are seriously injured at seven times the rate of men; and number two, women are killed by partners at more than two times the rate of men.” When women do kill their husbands, he adds, they are often reacting to years of brutal assaults or to a current attack. In reality, when mommies hit daddies most of the time they don’t hurt them very much, but unfortunately the same cannot be said the other way around. As Gelles puts it, “The most brutal, terrorizing, and continuing pattern of harmful intimate violence is carried out primarily by men.”51

Husband abuse never became a predominant scare on a par with, say, teenage motherhood. Yet the fact that several respectable publications helped to promote it evinces how intense the moral panic over motherhood became in the 1990s. That conservative columnists and talk show hosts continue to promote the scare in the late 1990s—half a decade after Gelles began publicly condemning it as misogynistic—also demonstrates something. Fear mongers do not have to stop performing their hocus-pocus just because their secrets have been revealed.52

5

BLACK MEN

How to Perpetuate Prejudice Without Really Trying

Journalists, politicians, and other opinion leaders foster fears about particular groups of people both by what they play up and what they play down. Consider Americans’ fears of black men. These are perpetuated by the excessive attention paid to dangers that a small percentage of African-American men create for other people, and by a relative lack of attention to dangers that a majority of black men face themselves.

The dangers to black men recede from public view whenever people paint color-blind pictures of hazards that particularly threaten African-American men: discussions of disease trends that fail to mention that black men are four times more likely to be infected with the AIDS virus and twice as likely to suffer from prostate cancer and heart disease than are white men; reports about upturns in teen suicide rates that neglect to note evidence that the rate for white males crept up only 22 percent between 1980 and 1995 while the rate for black males jumped 146 percent; or explorations of the gap between what middle-class Americans earn and the expenses of maintaining a middle-class lifestyle that fail to point out that the problem is more acute for black men. (College-educated black men earn only as much as white men with high school diplomas.)1

The most egregious omissions occur in the coverage of crime. Many more black men are casualties of crime than are perpetrators, but their victimization does not attract the media spotlight the way their crimes do. Thanks to profuse coverage of violent crime on local TV news programs, “night after night, black men rob, rape, loot, and pillage in the living room,” Caryl Rivers, a journalism instructor