Baltimore Orioles pitcher Scott Erickson was arrested after an altercation with his girlfriend last week--the latest example of how police often arrest men who have been attacked by their female partners.

According to the Associated Press, the Baltimore police concluded that Erickson's girlfriend Lisa Ortiz: initiated the fight by hurling objects; decided to come back twice after Erickson carried her out of the apartment; repeatedly kicked the apartment door; caused Erickson two minor injuries, one of them to his pitching arm; and herself suffered no injuries.  

Domestic violence activist Greg Schmidt, a police lieutenant who created the Seattle police department's domestic violence investigation unit in 1994, says that cases like Erickson's demonstrate the way men are often presumed guilty in domestic disputes.  He notes that mandatory arrest laws, such as California's, frustrate police officers because they are "expected to make arrests in petty incidents, often where the woman is the aggressor, the abuse is mutual, or it is unclear who the aggressor was."

"The domestic violence industry--the trainers, the shelter directors, etc.--can spin things however they want," he says, "but most street cops know that women are just as likely to start domestic disputes as men are.  But arresting women puts you under lot of scrutiny.  It's bad for your career."

Schmidt also criticizes the dominant aggressor doctrine which discourages dual arrests (which are often an appropriate measure) and instructs police to downplay who struck the first blow. Instead, police are asked to focus on who is (supposedly) in control of the situation and who is more fearful--often code words for "arrest the man."

Part of the problem is the training that police officers receive from the domestic violence industry, which insists that 95% of domestic violence is committed by men. Southern California domestic violence consultant Anne O'Dell, who has conducted over 500 domestic violence trainings of police officers and commanders, judges, district attorneys, and victim advocates, tells her trainees that "if a police officer is arresting more than 8% women, you've got a real problem.  When an officer arrests 12% or 15% women, I'm outraged." O'Dell says that dual arrests should occur in no more than 3% of incidents.

There is virtually no current data which supports the "95%" myth. According to the US Department of Justice's 1998 Report on the National Violence Against Women Survey, men comprise nearly 40% of all domestic violence victims. California State Long Beach University professor Martin Fiebert has compiled an on-line bibliography (www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm) which examines 130 scholarly investigations (104 empirical studies and 26 reviews and/or analyses) which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners.  The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies exceeds 77,000.

Domestic violence researchers Susan Steinmetz, Richard Gelles, and Murray Straus, early advocates for battered women and authors of the influential and groundbreaking Behind Closed Doors: Violence in American Families, conducted two major studies for the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, both of which found similar rates of abuse between husbands and wives.

As Gelles explained in "The Missing Persons of Domestic Violence: Male Victims," "Contrary to the claim that women only hit in self-defense, we found that women were as likely to initiate the violence as were men."