Why don't we hear more about men being abused by women?

In My Humble Opinion
1

From what I’m reading, women batter men as often as men batter women. Women are as likely as men to initiate violence. The studies were done many years ago - this isn’t new information. And still, all we ever hear is about battered women, women’s shelters, and abusive men. Not to trivialize women who have experienced violence in their lives, but there is a serious disconnect going on here. Do we somehow have an idea that men are big and tough, and it doesn’t affect them to be slapped, kicked, punched, and stabbed? Men are raised to not hit women, ever. What’s a guy supposed to do when his woman is beating him? Women who hit men know this. Yes, women who are battered tend to get injured more severely than men, but that doesn’t make it okay for women to batter men.

Men vastly under-report violence perpetrated on them by women, causing a problem with statistics. If you take your statistics on violence only from hospital ER rooms and shelters, you will not get the same data as a random sampling from the general population. Men are many times less likely to report abuse than women.

Men themselves don’t look at the abuse they are suffering as “abuse.” We still have a societal idea that it’s perfectly okay for a woman to slap a man - girls are weaker, right? A little 90 pound woman can’t hurt a big, burly guy, right? Well, any size of woman can kick, punch, bite, throw things, and use weapons on any size of guy.

I think at this point we all know that the harmful effects of violence aren’t limited to physical damage, either. A guy who’s afraid to say anything to set his wife off is enduring the same type of psychological trauma as a woman in a similar circumstance. A guy who’s afraid to leave his physically violent wife because he fears for his children’s safety is in the same boat as the woman who’s afraid to leave a bad marriage.

There is also a myth that women batter men only in self-protection. There is no doubt that this is the case some times, but in the majority of cases of women beating men, it is not. It is simply women beating men because they haven’t learned better.

How, at this stage in the game, are we not focusing on violence against people, period, and the focus is still on men beating women only? Don’t we care about men, too? Shouldn’t men and boys be educated about what they shouldn’t tolerate from women? Shouldn’t women be educated that they can’t be volent towards men, either?

My goal in this thread is to try to raise some awareness of a problem that is being virtually ignored, to the detriment of the men (and women) who are living with it. Women can’t be allowed to think they have permission to be violent towards men any more than men can be violent towards women. Abusive violence of all kinds needs to be addressed and not condoned.

2

Perhaps because we still live with the stereotype that a man who allows himself to get beaten by a “girl” is somehow less of a man, and that he should suck it up, or that it’s his own damned fault.

3

Oh, and sorry for the double post, but I’d just like to add that no, I personally do NOT view that as true-but that’s sadly a huge stereotype in our society that must be done away with.

4

There was kinda-sorta a thread about this
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=389394&page=2&pp=50

5

Yeah, but kinda-sorta not, since that was apparently a pit thread that was so inside I understood absolutely none of it after the mod’s warning about trolling, and frankly, I don’t even understand what the hell trolling is, so I probably do it all the time and look like a complete dweeb with not knowing why.

But getting back to the OP, I’m surprised at the contention that men are abused by women as often as women are by men. If you’re talking about verbal and psychological abuse too, then I guess yeah, it could be true. But physical abuse? Really?

Having said that, of course, I remember stories my father (a small-town policeman for over 30 years) used to tell about guys – usually drunken ne’er-do-wells – getting their come-uppances from their wives, and the stories usually involved cast iron skillets or rolling pins. But they were generally told in the vein of, “Ol’ Otis never drank another drop after that night!” I dunno, maybe the skillet was the reason Ol’ Otis drank in the first place.

I checked out the links from featherlou’s OP, and my skepticism alarm went off when I saw the menstuff.org URL. Not sure why, but it seems to me I’ve seen this on Keith Olbermann’s program, or on Salon.com … something.

Anyway, in the interest of adding something intelligent to the thread, let me say that I wrote a ton of domestic abuse stories in my years as a newspaper reporter (for personal reasons, it was something of a crusade for me) and the one thing that kept coming up was that abused women didn’t leave because they believed they couldn’t live without the abuser. Over and over again my “field research” showed that abused women tended to be self-denigrating to the point that they believed they couldn’t survive without the abuser’s support, and when children were involved the abuser’s hold was even stronger. Traditional role modeling was always (or almost always) blamed as the glue that bound the abused to the abuser – he “brought home the bacon” (even if he really didn’t, that was the propaganda spin he put on it) and she couldn’t survive without him. When I would question social workers who specialized in domestic abuse, I would always say, “If somebody ever hit me, the next thing I’d hit would be the front door, and my backside would be the last thing she’d ever see of me.” And they always – and I mean ALWAYS – replied, “That’s the difference between the way we raise our girls and the way we raise our boys. Abuse victims (and they always meant women) are dependent on the abuser.”

Is it possible that even the people who work with domestic abuse victims have an old-fashioned, maybe even completely wrong perspective about domestic abuse?

6

Well, I think part of it is than many men don’t want to report abuse or stand up to an abuser because men are stereotypically supposed to be “tough” and they feel they would be made fun of or thought less of in society. Another part of it is these men may have been abused by or seen their mothers abuse other people, so to them this is normal. I am a woman, and I can tell you right now any man (or woman for that matter) who hits me better knock me out cold with that first hit. If I think I can take you I will battle it out with you right there before I leave, and if I think you could take me I will make you think you won, wait until you leave or you are asleep, pack up my stuff, and file a police report on the way out of town. Not everyone thinks this way though.

I used to work with a woman who had to quit her job one day because her husband thought she was getting a little too independant for her own good and burned her work clothes in the bathtub. She wasn’t allowed to have a driver’s license or anything. To her this was acceptable behavior. I am sure there are men who find it acceptable to be in an abusive relationship for one reason or another, the same way she did.

7

Oh yeah…I just LOVE those men’s rights whiners. Not that there isn’t abuse and things like that going on out there. There IS. However it has been my experiance that a lot of the “mens rights” folks tend to be “oh boo hoo hoo…It’s not our fault we fathered a kid! So I’m gonna be noninvolved in my offspring’s life!” or “feminism is teh evil! So we have to pull a bunch of statistics out of our asses to “prove” that we are the ones who are REALLY unequal.”
Well I gotta admit…I think that a lot of the women who are abused were raised in really strictly gender roled households, and so think that they can’t get along without a MAN. Also maybe a lot of it is about crappy relationships. A lot of people are raised to believe they are nothing without being in a relationship. If some people can’t get a good person or a good realtionship, then bad people or bad realtionships are better then none at all.

8

Really: http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/85-224-XIE/free.htm from Statistics Canada. Have a look at section 2.1 of the 2000 report. It found that there is a similar rate of domestic violence, but a difference in severity (women hit, men whollop):
“While this survey indicates that relatively equal proportions
of women and men report spousal violence, it also
indicates that women are abused more severely than men.
For example, women are more likely to be subjected to
severe forms of violence (e.g. beaten, choked, sexually
assaulted), are three times more likely to suffer injury, five
times as likely to receive medical attention, and five times
more likely to fear for their lives as a result of the violence.
In other words, the severity and the impact of spousal
violence on women and men have different outcomes and
consequences.”

My own conjucture, as a family lawyer, is that spousal abuse against males is not that big an issue because usually the physical damage is far less severe, and the frequency of death is far less.

As far as men being far less willing to report being physically assaulted to authorities (as opposed to reporting in statistical surveys such as above), bear in mind that it would not do much good, and could worsen the situation. Since the violence will probably not be severe, reporting will not get the wife hauled off to jail. Any accusation of assault can be expected to be met with a counter-accusation of assault by the other party even if the man never touched her, which in turn would lead to the court temporarily granting a restraining order and also granting temporary possession of the home to one or the other party – with the children continuing to reside in the home with whichever parent was the primary caregiver, and the restraining order limiting access, putting a very big black mark against the husband. Usually this means that the husband is put out on the street while the abusive wive continues to live with the children in the family home, until the court sorts it out at trial many months down the road. During this time, the husband then pays her spousal and child support, reducing his ability to find suitable living quarters. Come trial, the wife will rely on a status quo argument, saying that the stability of the children’s lives will best be served if they continue to live with her, as they have been doing since the husband was removed from the home many months ago. He loses big time – his children, his home, and about half of his disposable income, despite it beng his wife who is the abuser.

I’ve taken to advising my clients who are in the above position to aways carry a camcorder or dictation unit, and to keep a diary, so as to be able to provide evidence that the demure and attractive soccer mom is in fact bat shit crazy and violent when it comes to her spouse. Once the evidence is in place, then we move against the wife.

9

heh. And they also predict that their complaints are greeted with misandry, strawmen and accusations of “whining”, to which prediction you’ve very nicely conformed. That, and dragging the discussion away from the topic of domestic violence to another stick that can be used to beat men with. :dubious:

I suspect however that this may cut somewhat in both directions - that we tend to raise boys to treat girls as delicate and precious creatures who are not to be harmed under any circumstances, and that as a result even if women are violent they must not be treated with violence in return and indeed the “manly” thing to do is to shield them from the consequences of their own actions.

10

When you find out the answer, please let the RAE know (Academy of the Spanish Language).

When our current government was preparing its “law against gender violence”, the RAE protested on two grounds:

  1. in Spanish the right term is “sex” not “gender”. Words have genders, people are of one sex (or have some serious hormonal problems, but even these do not have a “gender”).
    2 and most important) the whole law was about protecting women from abuse by their men. So it excluded same-gender battery, female-on-male battery, abuse by strangers… shitty law, in other words.

The RAEs opinion is along the lines (paraphrasing an academic known for making usage of the whole dictionary) of “those assholes are so busy campaigning that if a real problem bit them in the butt they’d try to solve it with a new law on quotas.”

11

Apologies for the double post. Trolling (often done by “sock puppets”, i.e., usernames created specifically for the purpose of trolling) is when a poster expresses views that he may not necessarily hold, just for the purpose of being inflamatory; often in an inarticulate manner. Apparently these people get pleasure when others tell them “you’re a jackass, you moron!” Sort of the board version of masochism.

Since you’re not fishing for insults directing at yourself nor insulting others just in order to get them yelling back, you’re not trolling.

If I understood it right, that is :slight_smile:

12

When the reality was more likely that she became violent to protect her gallon jug of Ernest & Julio from being dumped down the sink.

When we lived in a state without a mandatory arrest law, I called the cops and they told us both th cool off. When I lifted my shirt to show the bruises they turned and walked out.

When we lived in a state that did have a mandatory arrest law, the cops took me in because I had bloody scratches on my face. When they got around to interviewing my daughter and were told that I had pulled her mom off her, they still kept me in jail for another day “to cool things off,” but didn’t arrest her.

It never occurred to me to cynically let her beat the shit our of our daughter so that then the system, denying husband-abuse, might use their child-abuse apparatus to intervene, but even so, there was the time I came home and found my daughter had been beaten with the buckle-end of a belt while my wife was barricaded in the bedroom with a jug. (“She needed discipline!”) I ran my daughter to the ER, where a cop came after two hours to take a statement. No further action was taken.

I know this is IMHO, not the pit, but I don’t have any opinion on this, just these experiences. I couldn’t give an opinion because, in light of my experience, I have no way to understand why all those cops made their decisions.

13

Man, I’m so sorry the system utterly and reprehensibly failed you. Law enforcement has to be trained that the monster in the house can just as easily be the woman.

Right now, they’ll look at the bite marks on your arm, but still shrug it off as “not so bad” because she didn’t knock you half dead. And/or they’ll assume your injuries were cause when the woman defended herself.

A buddy of mine had to plead “no contest” to assault charges when the police were called. In a rage, his girlfriend and grabbed his scrotum through his shorts and started to twist. He shoved her off without hitting her. But he was the one who ended up in cuffs because they assumed she “was only defending herself”.

So now he’s got a police record. The only good thing to come out of it is the judge gave a restraining order for BOTH of them, but he still had to move and change his phone number to an unlisted one because she kept turning up.

14

That was my husband’s experience with the police, too, with an abusive ex-girlfriend (he has given me permission to share his story). She beat him, she got to the phone first and called the police, they showed up and arrested my husband even though he was the one bleeding and she didn’t have a mark on her. The charges ended up being dropped because she moved out of the country and didn’t show up for any court dates, but it caused a major setback in my husband’s life, not to mention the trauma that occurs when ANYBODY is abused.

I wanted to do this thread to raise awareness of this. Before I met my husband, I didn’t know that women beat men, either.

15

I had dated a gal for a very short time who when we started to argue would start swinging. I was totally shocked at first since I was never in a physical fighting relationship before. It was as if she was wanting me to fight back against her.

The only thing I could do to defend myself was to grab her wrists so I wouldn’t get hit by her flailing fists/hands.
The next day she started saying how her wrists hurt. Then she started saying how “I” had hurt her wrists.
It didn’t take me more than 10 seconds to come to my senses and think “screw this, I don’t like where this is going, no way am I getting into this” and I refused to see her again.
She then attempted to tell our friends that she guessed I just wasn’t enough of a “man” for her. I was pretty straight forward with them and said “Well, she likes to get physical when having an arguement, I don’t, and I’m not about to go there.” They all pretty much understood.

16

I’m glad you’re trying to raise awareness of the issue, featherlou.

One aspect of woman on man violence I think needs much, much more attention is mother on son violence. According to FBI stats I’ve read male infants and children are more likely to be abused and/or murdered by their mothers. This may be partly explained by the frequent absence of a father but I don’t really care. In sheer numbers, boys get abused/killed more often by mothers than fathers.

We put so much emphasis on fathers not teaching their sons violence, or teaching boys not to be violent because apparently they just come to it naturally. We continually ignore the role women play in the perpetuation of violence from generation to generation.

When I was around 12 or so I had this friend who was on the swim team with me. We were both sons of single moms. His mom was really abusive with him, physically and verbally. Trust me, she was really mean. We were sitting in the back seat of the car one day and she’d just gotten done yelling at him and berating him for something or other. Basically not being perfect. He leaned over towards me, clenched his fist and flexed his bicep and said, “just wait. A couple more years and I’ll be big enough. I’m gonna kick the shit out of her.”

I was all, :eek: “dude, chill. You shouldn’t say things like that. My mom abused us too.”

I have no idea if this guy ever made good on his vow, but I really wouldn’t be surprised if he eventually kicked the shit out of a woman somewhere, some when. It’s NOT always a cycle of violence passed from man to man.

17

Popular culture doesn’t do us any favors when it comes to this issue, either. I’ve seen episode after episode of shows where a female character punches, slaps, or smacks a male character and it’s supposed to be funny. We don’t do it in real life; I wish they’d stop showing it on TV.

18

Exactly. We were discussing just that - how Joey on “Friends” broke up with his tiny little girlfriend because she was hurting him physically. They played it for laughs (which, in all fairness, was probably better than a “very special Friends” episode, and she wasn’t hitting him in anger) but it might have been a good place to give a nod to the idea that nobody should be hurting anyone else.

Just this week my husband was joking around with a female co-worker, and she was hitting him on the arm. He was hamming it up, telling her not to beat him, and her response was that she couldn’t do any harm to him, she’s just a tiny little woman. This was an example of people clowning around, of course, but how many woman actually do have the idea that they can hit as they please because they’re too small to do any damage?

19

My 6 foot tall ex wife used to hammer the crap out of me when she got angry, but if I reported it

1: The kids lose mommy
2: The police are unlikely to care unless they catch her in the act
3: The real world custody scenario plays out just about like Muffin represented
4: While she could bruise me she was unable to hurt me seriously, so taking your lumps and keeping quiet is the logical position in many circumstances

Beyond this, re the hit/wallop dichotomy, and the difference in the way normal men and women are built, if I retaliated I could injure her seriously and that’s a guaranteed trip to jail. Bear in mind the “hit/wallop” difference has nothing to do with women having less intent to injure, it merely reflects a lesser physical capacity to harm given strength limitations.

20

Also, let’s not forget the media’s tendency to preferrentially report stories that fit an easily recognizable mould; therefore, abusive-woman instances will be less likely to get reported even if they are recognized and punished on the same level.

Activist groups casting “domestic violence” as an exclusively female concern don’t help matters either. Amusingly, for me, two of the three google adds are all about woman victims of domestic violence.