I tell every person who comes in that if someone hits you, or calls the police on you, the relationship is over. But they rarely listen.
The normal case is when the alleged victim calls to get me to get the defendant out of jail and/or for representation. For example, a someone calls to get his or her girlfriend/boyfriend out of jail - and pays for it - and has huge bloody claw marks on his/her face. The second time he’s got a black eye and a bloody nose, and still pays to get her out. Only then they slap in-jail GPS on her, so she can’t go near him. That’s when the relationship finally ends.
I can’t speak to Europe. But here, if you slapped a woman several times, and that’s the story the police heard, you’d be going to jail.
It might well be self-defense. But that’s an argument you’d have to make at trial, which is why I outlined the consequences before you ever get to trial.
The general cultural paradigm in the US is if you’re a man, you never hit a woman. Some women take advantage of that: they know they can hit without getting hit back.
I’m just interjecting this FWIW: please, don’t hit your kids. It conditions them into thinking violence is acceptable to inflict and endure in their later relationships.
The “predominant aggressor” approach comes from the “Duluth model”:
It is based, in other words, on theory, not evidence. The Duluth model created the “Power and Control” wheel, which you can see here. What you might notice is that the “wheel” is entirely gendered: every victimizer is male; every victim is female.
The Duluth model website explains the reasoning here:
Two things to notice about the explanation:
1.) it uses “criminal assaults” rather than intimate partner violence, or domestic violence, to obtain the 86% to 97% figure. (While also ignoring the fact that men are far more likely to be victims of criminal assaults than women.)
2.) It says that women are killed 3.5 times more often than men in domestic homicides. But the number it uses an FBI report that says 1181 females and 329 males were killed by their intimate partners. To put that in perspective, if there are 160 million women in the US - which is approximately right - the chance of being killed by a male intimate partner is 0.000007. 77.4 percent of all homicide victims are male, according to the FBI.
Which brings me to predominant aggressor policies:
To determine the predominant aggressor, police must consider:
[ol]
[li]Offensive and defensive injuries[/li][li]The seriousness of injuries received by each party[/li][li]Threats made by a party against the other or a family member or a pet[/li][li]Whether a party acted in self-defense or in the defense of another[/li][li]The height and weight of the parties[/li][li]Which party has the potential to seriously injure the other party[/li][li]Any history of domestic violence between the parties[/li][li]Prior convictions of assault[/li][li]Orders for protection that have been filed by a party[/li][li]Whether a party has a fearful demeanor[/li][li]Whether a party has a controlling demeanor[/li][li]Witness statements[/li][/ol]
One, four and 12 are fine.
The height and weight of the parties is irrelevant. Are you going to arrest somebody because she’s fat? Because he’s tall? Seriously?
Which party “has the potential to seriously injure the other party,” is ridiculous. Anybody has the “potential” to seriously injure somebody else. All you need is a weapon. (Or someone who won’t fight back.) It’s not whether someone has the “potential” to harm someone: it’s whether they actually harmed them.
“Fearful demeanor” is also ridiculous. Someone could have a fearful demeanor because he or she is afraid they’re about to go to jail; which in turn could indicate they were in fact the guilty party. Some people are afraid of bugs. Others jump out of airplanes. Whether someone is “fearful” has more to do with his or her personality than it does with who is guilty.
Using prior allegations or convictions is just “the usual suspects” routine. The point of an investigation is to determine who did it this time. Not who did it in the past. As a practical example, suppose a woman is convicted family violence. Should she be fearful of ever calling the police again, because of her past?
Anyway, I don’t have time to go through all of them. Suffice it to say, that when the police arrive at a potential domestic assault, they should determine, from the actual evidence, who actually committed the assault(s). Not who’s bigger or taller or more fearful. The “primary aggressor” policy is a not-so-subtle way of telling police: arrest the man. Something they’re predisposed to do anyway.
When you have statistics that show that women are as likely to resort to violence in intimate relationships as men, and men are overwhelmingly the ones getting arrested and convicted, something is wrong. “Primary aggressor” policies are just a way to break a system more than it’s already broken.
No. You are once again conflating two disparate situations to create a false equivalence. The crucial difference between woman aggressor violence and man aggressor violence is order of magnitude. You are trying to compare minor violence like shoving, pushing, and hitting that leaves no injury, with violence that causes major injury or death.
**Men are overwhelmingly the ones getting arrested and convicted because men are overwhelmingly the ones inflicting serious injuries or killing their partner. **
Continuing to post your cut and paste Karen Straughan talking points doesn’t make that fact go away.
The number of women slapped, pushed or shoved was 4,322,000 (3.6%) vs. 5,066,000 (4.5%) men.
The number of women who experienced “any severe physical violence,” including hair pulling, hit or kicked, among other things, was 4,028,000, or 2.7%. The number of men was 2,266,000, or 2.0%.
So men were more likely to experience intimate partner violence overall, but women were more likely to experience “any severe physical violence,” including hair pulling. Pages 44 & 45.
According to the CDC, 2.3% of women and 2.1% of men had been victims of “severe physical violence by an intimate partner” in the 12 months.
According to US Dept. of Justice statistics, “About 4% of females and 8% of males who were victimized by an intimate partner were shot at, stabbed, or hit with a weapon in 2002–11.”
I know the statistics are all over the place. this might be part of the reason:
Link.
Interestingly, programs developed under the Duluth Mode (based in feminist theory positing that “domestic violence is the result of patriarchal ideology in which men are encouraged and expected to control their partners”) have questionable success, at least according to Wikipedia.
So, why not go back to putting your comments in bold, since that makes them true.
Also, don’t forget to add an ad hominem or two, since that makes your case especially strong.
Your cites from that linked source don’t seem very representative of the information in that linked source. Some other things the source says:
So overall, women are more likely to be victims of both non-severe and severe intimate partner violence.
Mind you, I’m not denying that intimate partner violence by women is criminal and unacceptable. Nor do I disagree that many women who engage in IPV are taking advantage of the cultural prohibition against men hitting women. I’m just pointing out that in general, according to the data you cite, women are more likely to be IPV victims than men, and women are at higher risk for more severe forms of IPV than men.
Also, if you take a look at Table 1 in this report that breaks down IPV prevalence by same-sex vs. opposite relationship, it appears that while men and women are about equally likely to be victims of physical IPV from same-sex partners, the disparity in opposite-sex relationships is much greater. There are significantly more men inflicting physical violence on female partners than women inflicting physical violence on male partners.
Non-weaselly members of the board, should they accidentally stumble upon and read this post against their better judgment, would be well served to follow the above link and read the sentences immediately before and immediately after the weaselly nonsense provided above.
Let’s just cut out the weasling entirely and go for maximal info, shall we?
I’m really not seeing the quoted bit as an inaccurate summary. Based on the analogous models for AA, where the most motivated to change their behavior do a whole bunch of things which don’t necessarily affect the behavior, we don’t see evidence of effectiveness for the Duluth model.
Does this really matter, though? Is the effectiveness of the Duluth model something that anyone here is really invested in demonstrating?
'Course not. It’s a one sided conversation on the subject in typical OP fashion: Witness using cherry picked sources; Ignore questions; Move the goalposts; Witness some more.
Men are stronger than women, they can do much more physical damage, so it makes sense we should have a much stronger legal and cultural taboo about men using force on women than vice versa. If a woman hits her domestic partner, he can just walk away. The same is not true in reverse.
That’s a way oversimplistic take on crimes of domestic physical violence. Women are not toddlers whose physical ability to inflict damage is negligible compared to men’s. Most women can indeed do severe physical damage to most men if they try, and “just walking away” isn’t always an option for their victims.
It’s true that on average, women who physically assault a domestic partner do less damage than men do, either because they’re not trying as hard or because it’s easier for their victims to restrain them. But the law already takes into account the severity of the damage in judging and punishing the crime. We certainly don’t need to second-guess that assessment with arbitrary gender-based criteria.
Nor should women physically assaulting men be any more socially acceptable than vice versa. Women are just as capable of self-restraint and intelligent conflict resolution as men are. Absent a self-defense or defense-of-others situation, there is absolutely no valid reason for a woman to hit a man.
This sort of deeply entrenched societal double standard is just one of the many reasons why we still need feminism.
What if the woman uses a weapon, which in a domestic setting are readily at hand? And a lot comes down to personality, an aggressive woman of average size can certainly be a greater threat to a passive man of average size.
And again because women are less physically strong than men doesn’t make them weak.
Its also one of the reasons why I imagine men are reluctant to report domestic violence, as per Rune’s comments above where he states that a woman couldn’t possibly be a threat to a man.
I just don’t see the need to downplay violence against men, we can recognise women are more often the victims without doing that.
But again I wonder how much violence against men is under-reported by the victims.
I find this kind of interesting because I remember when I was a teenager being sat down by my mum and told never to accept violence from a partner, even one act of abuse is too much and I should walk away from the relationship. She also sat my brother down at the same time and even at that age he was large and well built enough that he looked like he could tear a tractor apart with his bare hands. My mum certainly didn’t think he couldn’t be hurt or injured by a woman.
I don’t understand this one: “Another editor slapped a guy when “he told me he thought he had breast cancer.” (Okay, that one made us laugh really hard.)”. What’s the funny part? Some men, although very few, do get breast cancer. Anyway, jail or no jail, I’d have hit her so hard. She must have some astronomic feeling of entitlement and privilege to believe she can hit a man for no reason without him hitting back.
Well that’s the definition of weak – being less strong. And I was mostly talking from personal experience, because I couldn’t picture the scenario in my mind, because I hadn’t considered he wouldn’t fight back. Like I was with a girl last year. She was nice, but one day we went for a walk in an orchard because I wanted to check out some olive trees, and turns out she couldn’t jump down a dirt slope so we had to take a detour. Then I was with another for a while, she was taller, like 178cm, I liked her so one day I took her to the gym and she couldn’t bench press the barbell. Now I’m with another, she’s tiny, around 158/40kg and can’t really lift her own 20kg suitcase for more than a few steps, whereas I can pick her up like she’s a toy. The thought that she could physically harm me is just silly – she’d have to first find a chair to stand on to be able to reach my head. They are all regular slim girls in the early to mid 20s.
The average woman is about as strong as an average 11-12yo boy, and it’s not just strength, it’s just as much that they’re slow, fragile and small. And 12yo boys aren’t in general able to beat up grown men. Of course if the man insists on not fighting back, or at least restrain her, as Linus writes, then she can do harm. Also if weapons are involved I don’t classify it as domestic abuse, but as assault. Psychological abuse though, that’s another matter entirely.
Also I did read a stat somewhere which showed that lesbian relationships were by far the ones most likely to be abusive, and gay the least likely. Heterosexual somewhere in-between. There’s a direct relationship between the number of women in the relationship and the amount of abuse. Correlation or causation.
Yes. This is precisely the reason why we shouldn’t tolerate men using force on their (female) domestic partners, even in “self defence”. If a man and a 12 year old bot got in a fight, and it became clear that the 12 year old ‘started it’, I wouldn’t accept nonsense excuses like “I had to slap him until he stopped”. Because adult men are stronger than 12 year olds, we consider it a much bigger deal for adults to hit 12 year olds than the other way round. Also, the fact that women are ‘slower’ than men, as you mention (I was just average as a runner in high school, but I could still outrun most women runners), means men can just, you know, escape if they get attacked, whereas women can’t.
For the record, I weigh much, much less than the average man, and I like heavier women so the women I date are usually heavier than me. Because of the difference in body composition though, even most women that are heavier than me couldn’t do me serious harm. This is why if I was on a jury and you said something like “I slapped her until she stopped attacking me” or “she started it and I hit her back”, I would find you the guilty party, not her.
No. We give kids a break because they’re kids. A grown woman trying to do real damage do not deserve special consideration. In for a penny in for a pounding. It’s just that in my experience women never do that. Likely partially due to them knowing they don’t stand a chance. But it seems my personal experience could be wrong.