MENZ Issues: news and discussion about New Zealand men, fathers, family law, divorce, courts, protests, gender politics, and male health.

Will the real New Zealand journalists please step up to the plate and write the New Zealand stories.

Michigan man lingers in prison on questionable rape conviction.

By Phyllis Schlafly

Feb 6, 2006

William J. Hetherington has been incarcerated in Michigan prisons for more than 20 years for having sex with his wife Linda. In 1986, he became the first man in Genesee County convicted of the new Michigan crime called spousal rape.

Linda was not a battered wife; she testified at the trial that he had never beaten her in their 16 years of marriage. Hetherington was honorably discharged from the U.S. Air Force, received a National Defense Service Medal, and had no police record of any sort.

The sentencing guideline for this new offense was 12 months to 10 years. But, without showing cause, the judge sentenced him to 15 to 30 years (twice the time served by the average convicted rapist in Michigan). Twenty years later, despite an exemplary prison record, the parole board routinely refuses to parole him, giving as its sole reason “prisoner denies the offense.”

Hetherington has always maintained his innocence. It was a he-said-she-said case during a custody battle; he said it was consensual sex, she said it was rape. The judge used Michigan’s new Rape Shield Law to prohibit cross-examination of Linda.
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A new publication calls into question the generally held view that casts males as the perpetrators of domestic violence and females as the victims. The study found that in most couples, men and women are about equally violent.

Lead researcher David Fergusson said agencies dealing with domestic violence should not assume men were the perpetrators or that women hit out only in self-defence.

“In fact, women initiate violence more than men.”

He said domestic violence typically involved both parties.

“If one partner was violent, so was the other one. This contrasts quite sharply with the dominant popular view that domestic violence is largely perpetrated by men on women.”

Professor Ferguson told TV3 News [download 5,421 KB wmv video], that our response to domestic violence has been shaped by a small amount of extreme violence.

“In those extreme incidents we find a predominance of males. But when we move away from the extreme to the more commonplace, both men and woman behave badly in the home.”

MENZ activist Darrell Carlin told TV3 News that he is not surprised by the findings:

“There is a big industry out there, a violence industry. It’s all based on men being the bad guys.”

At the end of the interview Prof Ferguson said:

“There should be broader recognition of the wider issue of couple violence, and services there to assist people to deal with couple violence and its implications.”

Ferguson told the NZ Herald that those who dished out the violence were generally victims too.

“It’s mutual conflict, so they are violent households.”

The study may be seen to contradict the view that men are more violent in relationships.

“It is the case that severe assaults, the kind you see in women’s refuges, are probably committed by males, but most of the family violence that goes on involves mutual conflict between couples,” Professor Fergusson said.

“This study should reshape what we think about gender and violence …

“These are black-and-white stereotypes – males are brutes and females are victims – that dominate our thinking. The evidence doesn’t suggest that, but changing that view is going to take a lot of work. Anybody who challenges that view is likely to be criticised.”