Still Waiting for Bob Herbert to Condemn the Kuwaiti Massacre

This is to follow up on Glenn’s piece Monday about the ex-wife in Kuwait who set fire to a tent in which women and children were celebrating the upcoming wedding of one of the assembled.  She killed 41 people in what may be the single worst act of domestic violence in history.

The horror of that atrocity comes, as they all do, with a context – in this case, female abuse and killing of children.  I don’t know the figures in Kuwait, but in the United States, two-thirds of child homicide victims are killed by women.  When parents kill children, mothers are twice as likely to be the perpetrator as are fathers.  Those are the facts of child homicide here.  When it comes to abuse that falls short of killing the child, similar figures apply.  The bottom line is this: children in this country are at far greater risk of harm from women than from men.  (My figures come from the Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families and the Centers for Disease Control.)

So the Kuwaiti woman’s heinous act reminds us of the significant, though largely unreported, fact that the chief harmers of children are women.

Now, recently, Bob Herbert at the New York Times used a deranged man’s tragic and senseless killing of three women in a Pennsylvania exercise gym to condemn men collectively.  According to him, the killings were not those of a disturbed individual but of a culture that uniquely targets women for injury and abuse by men.  Herbert ignored the fact that women are far less likely than men to be victims of violent crime, since that would have contradicted his patently screwy theory.

But what I wonder is if Herbert will apply the same “logic” to the Kuwaiti massacre.  According to him, in some way I’ve yet to figure out, men generally bear responsibility for the crime of a single man.  So isn’t the same thing true here?  Women are the main killers and abusers of children.  So aren’t women generally responsible, in some weird, unexplained way, for the actions of this one woman?

I’m waiting for the outraged op-eds.

Stephen Baskerville’s Taken Into Custody Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fatherhood, Marriage, and the Family by Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D. examines one of the greatest and most destructive civil rights abuses in America today–our family law system. Baskerville has authored many articles on fatherhood and family issues and is a frequent media commentator. To learn more or to purchase Taken Into Custody, click here.

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