It sound like that is about how the system works, and that sucks. “Taking your lumps and keeping quiet” is what a lot of women do, too, and it isn’t right then, either.
I dunno - I (or just about any woman) could do serious damage to anybody if I used a baseball bat or a frying pan.
athelas, violence against women has been a highly-publicized cause for the last ten years or so (and great that it has raised awareness and helped many people) but I think it’s about time to expand it to violence against people.
My eldest brother was the victim of spousal abuse. He ended up in the hospital on more than one occasion; once, his girlfriend had stabbed him in the back and only missed his heart by a half-inch. He should have been dead from what she put him through.
Even now, five (or is it six?) years after her suicide (they had split long before that), he will not talk about it nor admit that he abused her. He sort of just laughs it off and says ‘she had a temper’, that sort of thing, then changes the subject. He’s not overly macho and he (like me) was not raised to believe in the complete inequality of the sexes, so I just don’t understand and he’ll never give me an answer. I know him better than anyone, so I guess I’ll never know.
I’m 5’10", 200lbs, I can bench more than my wieght and can easily put my fist through a 5/8" piece of wallboard. My girlfriend, in what appears to be a typical BF/GF size differential, is about 4" shorter than me and 70 lbs lighter. Her “physically abusing” me would result in a “honey…why don’t you calm down because your little fists tickle”. Me physically abusing her would result in a trip to the hospital. I have to think that a significantly higher percent comes from men abusing women by the simple fact that we’re generally bigger and stronger than our mate.
If you are including verbal abuse, that’s a different story and I think it might be more even.
GingerOfTheNorth’s example is what I would call “attempted murder” or “assault with a deadly weapon”, not your run of the mill “bitch! git me mah beer!” domestic violence.
Fortunately, the most abuse I have to endure is being forced not to move because my GF has cuddled herself into a comfortible (if awkward for me) sleeping position
One of my sisters-in-law would abuse her (now-ex) husband when they were together. It was her standard operating procedure in a fight; she did that with her sisters growing up, and just continued - she would cat-fight, pulling hair, clawing with her fingernails, and just turn into a raging beast. When it suited her, though, she would suddenly switch her behavior and act the sobbing victim. (She did this during a fight with a sister when they were late teens, and was so convincing that her dad threw the other sister out of the house, telling her to move out, and refusing to listen to her defense.)
After one fight with her husband while on vacation, I suspect the cops might’ve arrested him even though he was bloody from her scratches, if not for the fact that the combo of drugs and alcohol had her whacked out, running down the street in nothing but a bikini and acting nearly out of her mind.
It got to the point where when she claimed that her latest boyfriend had broken her door lock and beat her, cracking a rib, that we just kind of all thought “yeah, right,” and assumed she was in a mutual fight like usual and blowing it out of proportion. Then we visited and saw the door, and the copy of the police report and medical exam. OK, so she wasn’t exaggerating… (She didn’t leave him like she said. In fact, the two of them even went on to get thrown in the lockup in a resort town in Michigan for disturbing the peace, and harassed the various relatives for bail money.)
Fair enough, but I think that the extreme success of that campaign has led, quite possibly by design, to a public stereotype of sobbing woman = victim, much more than is actually the case. The examples cited in the above posts seem to clearly demonstrate that that stereotype has been very effectively exploited by these women to exculpate themselves and pin blame on the man, who then becomes too busy defending himself to explain the truth. At this point, I see those campaigns doing more harm than good, when viewing it, as you say, in a violence-against-people reference frame.
msmith, I think you’re missing the point that it isn’t the physical harm that causes the damage. The real damage is psychological (as we know from women being abused) - a slap on the face hurts, but the hurt soon fades. It wouldn’t be such a big deal if all that was hurt was your cheek for a day or so. Think about it - your girlfriend probably can’t hurt you badly with just her fists and hands (although a punch to the groin will drop you and any other guy out there), but who wants to get kicked, punched, slapped, whatever, for anything or nothing?
My Marriage & Family class had a speaker from the local Women’s Resource Center. They do provide services for men, but she said that it almost always involved a same-sex couple. She could recall a few cases on female-on-male physical abuse, but no cases of female-on-male sexual abuse (they deal with alot of male-on-female, male-on-male, and the occasional female-on-female sexual abuse.).
40 Days and 40 Nights was a really good movie except for Shannyn Sossamon’s character being extremely pissed off at Josh Hartnet’s character for his decision to abstain from sex for 40 days, Vinessa Shaw’s character committing rape against Josh Hartnet’s sleeping, handcuffed character (who was waiting for Sossamon’s character to show up), and Sossamon’s character treating the entire act as if it was the man’s fault, not the vengeful ex-girlfriend who found out he would be waiting for his new girlfriend and raped him while he was handcuffed.
Like when that woman ran her husband over several times in a hotel parking lot with her SUV because she found out he was having an affair. The media reported the facts, but they couldn’t resist speculating what ‘drove’ her to do it, what he had done to ‘push her over the edge’, and they failed to wipe away their ever-present ‘he got what was coming to him’ tone.
Probably due in part to the fact that men who are abused by women are unlikely to ever tell anyone, and those who have told tend to have stories like we’ve read in this thread. They were the ones who were arrested and charged and sent to anger management classes, not their abusers.
Very recently a friend of mine was stabbed by his abusive wife, who also pushed him down the stairs. He never called the police or reported this at all because he was afraid he would be arrested for abusing her. Sadly, he was probably right. It took him years to admit that her behavior, her violence, was abuse. And now that he has, he’s found that the system won’t help him.
My ex- had a cute trick where, when we having a fight and I tried to leave the room, she’d stand in the doorway and prevent me from leaving (while continuing to harague me, of course). My options at that point became
a) taking her verbal abuse
b) leaving by the window
c) pushing her out of my way
On the rare occasions I chose 3), the whole “domestic violence/police getting called in” thing began. IOW, she would dare me to lay a hand on her, and she’d cry “Bloody murder” at the slightest contact. I’d tell her “Don’t try to play the Domestic-violence card with me,” but she just loved that card. I think the most satisfying moment in our 20 year relationship was when she could play that card.
However, 33% of women who are killed, are killed by their intimate partner. Of men who are killed, only 4% are killed by their intimate partners. (Source: Dept. of Justice: Home | Bureau of Justice Statistics )
This suggests to me that while emotional harms may result comparably between men and women, physical harm and threat of death is much greater for female victims than male victims. There is no excuse for violence against anyone. However, yes, I do think there is a qualitative difference between being emotionally harmed and beaten to death. And being beaten to death is worse.
It’s definitely true that men are more effective domestic abusers than women, but your statistics skew that fact quite a bit. Men are much more likely to be murdered in the first place. You can use the actual numbers in this case, since there are roughly the same number of women as men.
The number of women killed by their intimate partners was 1247. For men it was 440. So one quarter of murders committed by an intimate partner had a male victim. Like I said, the fellas are still producing a significantly higher body count.
Of course where all aware this isn’t a men vs women issue? This is starting to remind me of when Jewish groups took umbrage a few years ago when gay right’s activists started wearing pink triangles (and yes, I know I just Goodwinized this thread).
The lowerarchy here is
(1) Abusers (2) Indifferent Organizations: police, media
I thought **Hampshire ** handled the situation he described extremely well, especially in terms of how he explained it later. It made me think that in some cases, women initiating physical violence are acting out a self-destructive pattern. In most cases, taking things into the physical arena will put the woman at a disadvantage. Sure, a woman with a frying pan or baseball bat is dangerous, but as soon as the man is similarly armed he has the advantage again. I would encourage men to try to stay calm and consider that her behavior in slapping or punching, etc. a larger opponent is essentially self-destructive. Approach it like other self-destructive behavior, with a hefty dose of “hmm, I don’t think it makes sense to stay in a relationship with this self-destructive person” or “honey, you need to get help.”
I think you could probably generalize that happy, self-confident people rarely resort to violence to settle disagreements.
That’s a good way of putting it, Slithy. The abusers (of both sexes) are to blame, but so is the media who choose not to examine something that is occurring when it would be worthwhile for them to do so, and the police system that doesn’t seem to be reacting to what is actually going on, and helping the people who need help regardless of gender.
You’ve completely overlooked the alternative: that vastly more men than women are being killed outside the home. That kinda invalidates the rest of your point.
Interesting. Would you support similarly non-criminalizing responses for abusive men, given that women also have a non-negligible incidence of killing their spouses?
This article says 85% of victims of domestic violence are women. I’m not vouching for the article, just putting it out there. http://www.endabuse.org/resources/facts/
I don’t really have an opinion about which article is more factual because I know nothing about the subject. Violence on either side is horrible especially when children are involved.
Does anyone with more knowledge of the subject know if there have ever been studies about the domestic violence and what percentage of the time alcohol was involved?