A recent podcast clip I saw this week made a deliberately provocative claim: “A woman’s greatest strength is her ability to be a victim.”
Taken literally, the statement is too broad. It treats women as a class rather than as individuals, and it risks trivializing the experiences of women who have genuinely suffered abuse.
But reflexive outrage should not prevent us from confronting the legitimate problem beneath the provocation: our culture—and too often our family courts—has become comfortable assigning women the role of victim and men the role of abuser before the evidence has been heard.
That is not compassion. It is prejudice dressed up as sensitivity.
Women can be victims. Men can be victims. Men can be abusers. Women can be abusers. Many divorcing spouses are neither helpless victims nor predatory monsters. They are flawed people in painful conflict—sometimes behaving badly, sometimes remembering events differently, and sometimes making allegations calculated to improve their positions in a divorce or child custody dispute.
The court’s task is not to determine which party best fits a familiar cultural script.
Let. The. Evidence. Point. The. Way.
When the Story Changes
One recurring pattern deserves serious scrutiny. During the marriage, a wife describes her husband to friends, relatives, and social-media followers as loving, devoted, generous, involved with the children, and dependable. After separation, he is suddenly described as coercive, neglectful, terrifying, or abusive throughout the marriage.
Does that change prove she is lying? No. Victims sometimes conceal abuse. They may fear retaliation, depend financially on the abusive spouse, protect appearances, or struggle to understand what is happening. Affectionate messages and complimentary social-media posts do not conclusively disprove abuse. But neither are those statements meaningless.
Prior statements are evidence. Conduct is evidence. Timing is evidence. Inconsistency is evidence. None is necessarily conclusive, but all must be considered. The problem arises when every inconsistency is automatically absorbed into the allegation.
Why did she praise him? She was afraid.
Why did she encourage others to trust him? She was protecting herself.
Why did she initiate affectionate exchanges? She was trying to maintain peace.
Why were there no contemporaneous complaints? She was too frightened to report.
Why did the accusations arise only when divorce or a child custody dispute began? That was when she finally felt safe enough to speak.
Any one of those explanations may be true. But when courts treat them as necessarily true, the allegation becomes impossible to test. Evidence supporting the accusation proves abuse. Evidence contradicting it proves how thoroughly the abuse was concealed.
That is not fact-finding. It is a closed loop.
The Presumption of Victimhood
The cultural presumption does not operate equally. A frightened woman may be viewed as credible because she appears frightened. A frightened man may be viewed as weak, vindictive, controlling, or merely involved in a mutually toxic relationship.
Conduct treated as threatening when committed by a man may be excused as emotional volatility when committed by a woman. A woman’s allegation may be treated as disclosure. A man’s allegation may be treated as strategy. That double standard is real.
It can give one party an immediate litigation advantage: possession of the home, control of property, restrictions on parent-time, enhanced negotiating leverage, and the moral authority that comes with being labeled “the victim.”
Protective relief is not a harmless placeholder. An emergency order entered on limited evidence can establish a practical status quo that becomes difficult to reverse. “Grant now and sort it out later” is not neutral when later comes after a parent has lost months of contact with the children, been removed from the home, spent thousands of dollars defending himself, and entered the divorce case under a cloud of presumed guilt.
The answer, however, is not to presume women are lying or to recast men as the true victim class. That merely changes who receives the unfair presumption. The answer is to eliminate the presumption.
Judicial Caution Is Not Evidence
Judges face real pressure when deciding requests for emergency relief. If a judge denies protection and someone is later seriously harmed, the consequences may be catastrophic and public. If the judge grants relief against an innocent person, the damage is usually quieter and more dispersed. That asymmetry encourages “better safe than sorry” reasoning.
The instinct is understandable. It is still not justice. A low burden of proof remains a burden of proof. Concern is not proof. Possibility is not probability. The gravity of an allegation does not establish its truth. Judicial caution cannot substitute for evidentiary sufficiency.
Courts should identify the specific acts alleged. They should require meaningful detail. They should compare the parties’ accounts with contemporaneous communications, documents, witnesses, physical evidence, and surrounding circumstances.
They should examine inconsistencies without reflexively declaring that inconsistency proves either deceit or trauma. They should consider motive without treating motive as automatic disproof. And they should keep the burden of proof where it belongs: on the party who bears it.
Proof, Not Assigned Roles
Real domestic violence is a tragedy. Genuine victims need meaningful, prompt, and effective protection.
But real victims do not benefit from a system that treats accusation as proof. False or exaggerated allegations consume judicial resources, distort child custody decisions, damage innocent people, and make truthful claims easier to dismiss as tactical.
Nor does an accused person receive justice from a system that requires him to disprove allegations the accuser has not proved.
We have indulged the culture of “women are born victims and men are born abusers” long enough. It is reductive, discriminatory, and incompatible with the purpose of a court.
Do not believe or reject claim just because a woman made it. Do not suspect a man because he is a man. Do not dismiss him because he says he was victimized. Make no presumptions in either direction. Have the courage to reject CYA as the evidentiary standard. Let the evidence point the way.
Utah Family Law, LC | divorceutah.com | 801-466-9277