I would suggest that this figure might be a result of what I addressed in my OP, that it is difficult to get statistics on abuse of men because they under-report it so much. The 85% figure in that study came from the Bureau of Justice Statistics Crime Data Brief from 1993-2001 - the stats would naturally be badly skewed if men aren’t reporting abuse, and police aren’t charging women abusers.
I think all spousal abuse is under reported. There are some serious emotional issues when the person that loves you and that you love, smacks you.
I did have a spouse that abused me in every way she could think to do, including hitting me. When that didn’t work she moved on to bankrupting me and having sex with lots of other people doing it.
But I loved her. (at the time it seemed the logical thing to do) So I put up with it, blamed myself and was convinced that some how, if I were a better husband, she would stop this.
It didn’t, we’re divorced. She ultimately left and moved in with someone else. That is where I put my foot down.
I used to think so. Until I heard many stories from people who had been physically abused or tortured. Seems that the brain provides us with protection from extreme pain in the form of dissociation. I’ve yet to hear a victim of either violence or torture say that the physical pain was harder to take than the emotional abuse.
My last SO was a victim of domestic abuse. His self-esteem had already been trashed because he had a learning disorder (and, as it turned out, undiagnosed ADHD) and he felt he had no option but to stay with the woman - which he did for six years. He was a big guy and very strong but he would never hit a woman because he knew he could cause major physical damage. So when she’d wake him up to beat him up, he just took it.
He had a lot of issues and some clearly were related to his experiences with abusive/controlling women. I don’t know if he’ll ever resolve them but I found it just too difficult to pay the price for that woman’s sins. But I still feel bad for what happened to him and how he felt about himself because of it.
Breaking a person’s spirit is worse than breaking his body. Please don’t buy the ‘it’s not abuse until there’s bruises’ myth.
Precisely. I recall when I was a kid, a man in our neighborhood was nearly beaten to death by his wife with a sledgehammer. The cops arrested him, of course.
I’d say “misreported” rather that “underreported”. On the one hand, you have the people who won’t report abuse for all the reasons mentioned in this thread. On the other hand, you have the women also mentioned in this thread who falsely claim abuse, in order to hurt the man in the relationship. Not to mention that at least one point some feminists were openly calling for women to falsely claim abuse, in order to send innocent men to prison and “teach them a lesson”.
Cite?
I know that I could hurt my husband if I attacked him. I’m strong and I could definitely catch him off guard. I wouldn’t need a weapon, either. (Er, not planning on attacking him, but just throwing in the other end of the spectrum. He’s a lot bigger than I am, but I could definitely hurt him.)
My brother was a victim of domestic abuse. He finally did report it but nothing was done. She’s in prison now, but not for that. Scary woman.
I can’t find one, but the last time I heard anything about it was years ago, in a TIME magazine with the cover story “Are men really pigs”. Several feminists were quoted expressing the idea, and a later issue had letters that approved of it IIRC.
Why do you need a cite, anyway ? It’s hardly the most extreme or bizarre thing I’ve heard from feminists. Or any number of other groups.
Because I have never heard of such a thing before, despite having been a feminist for decades (M.A. thesis yadda yadda yadda).
While I have no doubt that some people might say such things (and I accept your reference from the magazine), I would not take them as being representative, any more than I would take a neo-nazi as being representative of conservatives, or a tree-spiker or bridge-blower as being representative of environmentalists.
To bad a lunatic fringe in feminism is such attractive fodder for media, for it draws attention away from far more important feminist issues.
Which is why I said “some” feminists. Although I do they they are more prevalent that you would likely want to admit in the feminist movement, and I do think that neonazis aren’t too far off from the conservative mainstream; they are just cruder, more open about their bigotry.
I’m going to disagree with you on this. You see, I was emotionally abused throughout my childhood and there were times I found myself wishing I had been beaten simply because, if there were some kind of physical evidence, some kind of bruise or scar, there’d be proof that something was wrong. Instead, I kept thinking it was all in my head and I was just a silly, stupid thing for thinking something was wrong. If you’re beaten to death, at least the pain stops and you don’t have to walk around knowing you’re a useless, worthless creature who doesn’t deserve to live.
I would think for a man in an abusive relationship, it would be even worse. As things are now, society is more likely to believe that a woman is abused by a man, rather than vice versa. A man who has legitimate complaints is, I think, more likely to have them dismissed. There are women out there who are nasty, manipulative, and just plain cruel. I can easily see such a woman saying, “One word of this, and I’ll claim you abused me and you’ll never see you’re kids again!” There’s also an expectation, at least in some circles, that a good man is one who stands by his wife and kids and doesn’t desert them. The men I know try to live up to that model and, if in an abusive relationship (none of them are, as far as I know) would hesitate to end it because that’s not what a man is supposed to do. An old friend of mine still has the odd fit of guilt for divorcing his “poor, crippled wife” (she’d had a stroke) even though she was the one who initiated the divorce and pushed it through.
We as a society and as the friends and parents can’t remain silent on this. We have to make it clear that it’s as unacceptable for a woman to abuse a man as it is for a man to abuse a woman or any combination thereof, throwing in children, dogs, cats, etc. We have to make it clear that this behaviour is not acceptable in a civilized society, and women are as capable of initiating violence and abuse as men are. We also need to change the perception that women are automatically the best parent, but that’s a subject for another thread, perhaps.
The other night, I watched Adam’s Rib, and old Tracy/Hepburn comedy. There were a couple of scenes in it which bothered me. In the movie, a woman is being tried for shooting at her husband and his mistress. First they have the wife on the scene being asked about her marriage. The defence attorney (Hepburn) asks if her husband beat her, scolded her, and stayed out all night. In the next scene the husband is on the stand being asked the same questions by the Assistant District Attorney (Tracy). He’s asked if she beat him, scolded him, and stayed out all night. He, in turn, answers “Yes” to the first two and “I wished she would” to the last one. This doesn’t seem to be anything radical or shocking, just the facts of an unpleasant marriage. We’ve got society to accept that a man beating his wife is unacceptable. Now we need to work on the second half of the equation.
So you are saying that you would prefer to be dead than alive right now? Because that’s the difference between “it was so horrible I sincerely wished I was dead” and… being dead.
There is no excuse for domestic violence against anyone.
I’m six foot two and hovering in the 240lb range. My wife is four foot eleven and around 120.
She has the wicked temper. I don’t hit. Ever. Not the kids, not her, nobody. She’s had to punch pillows or throw things ( not at me. yet ) over the years when fighting with me to avoid physically going after me.
So, let’s say she really lets loose. She, of the 1st don Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do. I run to call the cops, and they come.
Be serious. Who the hell do you think gets dragged way in cuffs, immediately barred from seeing his children again, immediate restraining order issued by judge? Me. Not her.
No cop would care to hear the truth, nor would they believe it. Nor would a judge. It’s really that simple. Every encounter that has the potential for escalating also has the potential for me to wind up in handcuffs, and thrown very neatly and permanently out of my house and life.
It isn’t the macho thing that folks are talking about. I would have zero problem telling a cop that I was assaulted and did not raise a hand to defend, no less strike back. It doesn’t matter. They wouldn’t buy it for a second.
Upon Preview, I am apparently living the scenario that Seige described.
Cartooniverse
Women are more likely than men to use a proxy, paying someone to kill their husband/boyfriend, than men are. So those murders don’t go down as the men being ‘killed by’ their intimate partner. The Donna Moonda case recently in this area was of that type: she convinced the guy she had an affair with to kill her husband. Homicide by hit-man is recorded by the US DOJ as ‘multiple offender homicide’, which also skews the results.
By they way this comes from “The Myth of Male Power” by Warren Farrell, Ph.D.
:rolleyes:
Because you’re making a specific claim, and you’ve been here long enough to KNOW that doing so is going to warrant a cite for you claim.
Yes, feminist extremists have made some pretty out there statements-and I wouldn’t put this past them. BUT, there are also a lot of ones that are simply urban legends, and it’s nice to tell fact from fiction.
Ah yes, just like the Pam Smart case.
Odd thing, too…police manuals often advise the police to not assume the larger partner is the aggressor when responding to domestic dispute calls involving same-sex couples. So, that’s good advice for police responding to violent gays and lesbians, but not straights? WTF?
I’m not familiar with this one. I am familiar with the glorification of Betty Broderick. Killed her husband because he left her for another, younger, woman. She’s apparently still quite the hero on her blog where they beg money and plaster the front page with stuff about battered women.
Guess she still thinks he deserved to die.
Then again when the jury foreman from her first murder trial says "We just wonder why it took her so long. to kill Dan Broderick and Linda Kolkena and despite Betty Broderick’s repeated verbal assaults and the fact that Dan and Linda so feared violence from her that they had armed security at their wedding and Linda asked him to wear a bullet proof vest, it was supposedly evident to the jury that he put her through “legal and psychological hell”
Apparently she’s still a hero to some feminists:
It’s not hard to find people who, even if they don’t hold her out as some kind of hero, feel sorry for her or think that Dan and Linda had it coming.
Men who kill their wives, no matter what, are held out as scum. Women who kill their husbands become folk heroes. Apparently even in Bella Stumbo’s Until the Twelfth of Never book about Betty Broderick, which depicts Betty’s violence toward the Broderick children and Dan (digging her nails into their flesh and leaving them ‘half moons’ when she didn’t get her way), she’s still the one who deserves the sympathy because of Dan’s ‘legal abuse’. It really wasn’t her fault that she killed him, as one reader says:
Yeah, we hear about men who are abused. We hear about how evil they are.
It was my brother-in-law who made false claims of abuse against my sister. To top it off, he had actually physically abused her. But he’s the one who made the first move, went off to a shelter, stole the baby…
See, it’s not always the women making the false accusations of abuse. I hope you feel better about that now.
I heard about this one MAN who rounded up a whole bunch of this one religious-ethnic group and tried to kill them all. I think it was in Germany.
Yes, we feel better now. Men are pure evil.
It’s pretty amazing that your brother in law was able to find a shelter for men. Those are very rare. Then again, so are cops who believe a man when he says he’s abused, which is why most abused men don’t report it.
Does your brother-in-law make Dan Broderick or Linda Kolkena or David Harris any less dead? Does it make the women who killed them any less murderers? Or maybe you’re one of those who holds female murderers up as heroes:
42Geek pointed out another example of a stone cold, violent woman, Pam Smart, who still claims that she’s innocent.
And there’s Donna Moonda, who played the grieving wife after the drug addict she was having an affair with shot her husband to death on the side of the road. Pay no attention to the bank payment book for the vehicle loan found with Donna’s maiden name on it. Who knows how it wound up in the Land Rover at Donna’s boyfriend’s apartment along with the bloody bath towels.
I wonder if she’ll try one of those old ‘Woe is me, I was mistreated. Woman scorned, bastard got what was coming to him.’ defenses.