Imagine you are sitting in a Dallas Area Rapid Transport bus one day and you happen to notice the two posters shown above. One shows the fresh face of a young boy with the caption “One day my mother will kill me”; the other shows the innocent face of a young girl with the words “When I grow up I will abuse my children”. I expect you’d be rather shocked, and if you asked the driver of the bus why his company was spreading such misinformation about domestic violence, and he answered “Well, most child abuse is by Moms and most of their victims are boys”, you’d be staggered by this truth; but you’d still not think it was depicting the actions of most women.

I expect this was the reaction of the majority of people travelling on DART transport when they saw the actual posters which the buses carried, shown below.

Husbands do occasionally kill their wives, just as wives also kill their husbands, but young girls who see these posters should not expect to be killed by their husbands as the posters suggest, and young boys should not think that they will be expected to kill their wives.

This whole idea is a travesty of the true situation and all concerned with this campaign have good reason to bow their heads in shame at such misuse of these photographs and the promulgation of such obviously misleading ideas about domestic violence.

Fortunately the situation was brought to the attention of Glenn Sacks who, through his large and popular website, and by other means, informed the world about this child-hating campaign by “The Family Place”. Paige Flink is the Executive Director of this organization and she was happy to pay $25,000 for what turned out in the end to be a massive international backlash against her organization and DART who allowed her to engage in this tacky campaign. Thousands of protests poured in from all over the world; DART didn’t have the staff to deal with them.

The biased Miss Flink said that “Ninety percent of the victims of the reported cases of domestic violence in Dallas are females”. I think the important word here is “reported“. Men who are victims of female domestic violence rarely report the matter either because they are ashamed to admit it or for some other reason. In the UK, even the misandric BBC admit that men are six times less likely to report DV against them as women are.

Glenn Sacks truthfully pointed out that up-to-date research clearly shows that men account for half of all domestic violence victims and about one third of all domestic violence injuries. In the UK the ManKind website, which specialises in accurate and up-to-date information on domestic abuse, publishes very similar figures.

Glenn Sacks also provided the world with the statistics published by the US Department of Health and Human Services in their Child Maltreatment report  from 2001 to 2006 which show that:

70.8% of children who are killed by one parent are killed by their mothers and

70.6% of children abused by one parent are abused by their mothers.

60% of the victims are boys.

This clearly proves that the information contained in the top two posters on this post are much more accurate than the second two. But, even so, I think most fair thinking and responsible adults would consider that, to use any of the above posters, is putting children at risk and is thoroughly reprehensible. I do hope that Miss Flink has learned a lesson from her expensive $25,000 headache!