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OOPS! They want $ to read it if you're not in the UK. Maybe somebody over there has access and can sneak it to me in e-mail. THX!
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T______
"A woman needs a man like a fish needs the river."
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I had no problem clicking on it. Shall I reprint it here?
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"I had no problem clicking on it. Shall I reprint it here?"
Yes, please.
I love feminism!
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I'd reprint it, but someone already has. See below.
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by Anonymous User on Thursday June 26, @06:08AM EST (#4)
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The article:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,172-7168 00,00.html
Sometimes she hits him
By Anthea Rowan
Domestic violence is not always against women. Men can be victims, too, but their complaints are often met with scepticism
“THE FIRST time it happened I was stunned. It came out of the blue, a blow to the side of my face. I tried not to dwell on it. I assumed it was a one-off and would not happen again.” R is a victim of domestic violence, a problem that accounts for a quarter of all violent crime in Britain and a third of murders. This is why the Government is considering setting up a register of every man convicted of assaulting his wife or partner. The thing is, R is a man. This week’s White Paper on domestic violence will recognise the plight of men attacked by violent partners for the first time. Acknowledgement has been slow because of widespread scepticism and the view of women’s groups that many male victims of domestic violence are gay.
The British Crime Survey of 2001-02, however, found that 19 per cent of those claiming to have been victims of domestic violence were men, of whom half were attacked by female partners. This followed a study based on the analysis of 34,000 men and women by John Archer, professor of psychology at the University of Central Lancashire and the president of the International Society for Research on Aggression, who found that there were “equal numbers of men and women whose partners had used one or more acts of physical aggression towards them”.
Terrie Moffitt, professor of social development at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, believes that women are the perpetrators of domestic violence at least as often as men. In non-clinically abusive relationships (not resulting in injury or official intervention), the perpetrators are primarily women, she concludes in a report due to be released soon. In clinically abusive relationships (resulting in injury and/or intervention) abuse is mutual, though more women than men seek medical treatment for injury.
Figures released by Accord, Ireland’s Catholic Counselling Service, in November 2002 back both of these studies — women initiated relationship violence in 30 per cent of cases reviewed and men in 24 per cent; the balance of aggression was deemed “mutual”.
Why, then, has society flinched from accepting that men, as well as women and children, are victims of domestic violence, particularly as the number of male casualties is rising? A Home Office study stated that between 1981 and 1995 the increase in domestic violence against men was 512 per cent, compared with an increase of 185 per cent for women. The answer is partly because the evidence of male victims has been suppressed by biased reporting. Police, for example, do not regard male victimisation to be as serious as female victimisation: a 1997 Home Office report, Understanding the Sentencing of Women, suggests that the law is more likely to define women as “troubled” and worthy of sympathy, and men as “troublesome” and deserving of punishment. This may explain why 25 per cent of all men who report domestic abuse to the police in the UK are arrested as perpetrators. It is also true that we find it difficult to accept that women are capable of violence, and male victims can be reluctant to identify themselves because of the ridicule, doubt and lack of support that they fear they will face. The idea of a man being hit by a woman challenges our stereotypical views of men as macho and women as the fairer (and weaker) sex.
I didn’t know much about domestic violence — except, of course, that it happened only to women and children — until a year ago. Then, suddenly and bizarrely, at a wedding, my friend R told me that his wife hit him. What? This kind of thing doesn’t happen to people with middle-class backgrounds and first-class degrees. Not big, strapping chaps who played rugby for the first XV at school. Not doting fathers who have houses in the country with lawns to mow and views to admire. Why? “Because she has had a bad day, because I have put too much milk on Jake’s Rice Krispies, because I haven’t put enough on Chloe’s. Because she feels like it.”
When did this start? I asked. “Three years ago.” Why didn’t he say something? “I thought it would stop. I bury myself in work at the office. The fear bubbles up as I drive home. What will the evening bring?” But she is so small, how can she inflict such injuries? “The ingenuity with which she turns household objects into weapons is something to behold. A mug of scalding tea into my face, a dustpan and brush used to beat me around the head; a fork into the back of a hand; my son’s fishing rod as a whip against my bare back; a heeled kick in the groin; a knife into my arm.”
Later he e-mailed me. “The nurse who stitched me up asked how the injury occurred. I told her: ‘My wife stabbed me.’ The look in her eyes was the same that I had seen in my son’s when I told him that I had cut myself slicing cheese. Disbelief. She didn’t ask any more questions. Nor did she suggest that I contact the police. I did — it was the third occasion I had done so — but the reaction was the same: faces clouded with suspicion, eyes cast downwards, an awkward shuffling of paper. They didn’t know what to do with me. So they passed the buck: ‘Talk to your GP’. I haven’t bothered. What for?” Many male victims don’t call it “domestic violence”. To adopt a mindset that scales down the seriousness makes the problem easier to deal with on their own, which is a safer option than taking it to the authorities, who are often both sceptical and unsympathetic.
Female victims are more likely to acknowledge it for what it is and report it, just as they are more inclined to consult a doctor for injuries sustained. They are also more likely to be treated as victims. Marriage is the safest place for women and children. Paradoxically this is not the case for male victims, the majority of whom are subjected to violence within a committed relationship.
Dave Gordon, project manager at Men’s Aid, says: “It is strange that when a man does call the police or use the courts, everyone is astounded and wonders why he didn’t protect himself. Of course such protection would inevitably escalate the violence and the man would be regarded as the aggressor. It is a no-win situation for such men.”
Archer suggests that there is evidence to indicate that the extent to which men are victims of physical aggression by their female partners corresponds to “gender empowerment” and the “economic emancipation” of women. Moffitt’s explanation for female violence against men is that we are taught not to hit anyone weaker or smaller than ourselves: “This indoctrination inhibits most men from being violent towards women, but at the same time it frees women to strike out at men.”
Erin Pizzey, who founded the world’s first battered women’s shelter in 1971, found that of the first 100 women admitted, 62 were as violent as the men they had left, if not more so. She concluded that some people are “violence- prone”. A violent and painful childhood tends to create in the child an addiction to such pain. R’s wife is the product of a violent home. His greatest concern is for his children, who often witness their mother’s assaults.
“It makes me especially sad when she uses the children’s toys as weapons because they invariably break. But I hate the verbal more than the physical — I cannot bear knowing that the kids see so much, hear so much. They are so little. Chloe has begun to wet her bed and develop problems at school.”
Dr Bruce Perry, executive director of the Child Trauma Academy in the US, believes that growing up as a witness to domestic violence is comparable to growing up in a war zone: “We are learning that children exposed to significant threat — such as the chaos of domestic violence — will suffer physiological changes in their brains which can result in chronic, even life-long, problems.”
Yet for the majority of victims, children form the glue that keeps their volatile partnership together. R does not want to leave his young children with a mother who is inclined to frequent violent outbursts. He knows he is unlikely to gain custody; he has spoken to a lawyer who warned him that our “feminised legal system” favours mothers.
“Why don’t I walk away? Many reasons. I know she wouldn’t be able to manage the kids if I wasn’t around. And where would I go? Some grotty bedsit — no thanks.
“Splitting up a family is a huge financial burden on the breadwinner, but most of all I would miss the children. I stand to lose more than I would gain. I know I’m a fool hoping things will work out, but the consequences of them not doing so are too awful to contemplate.”
Often, though, the strongest reason for a victim to stay with their abuser is one that outsiders cannot understand: they still love them.
Men’s Aid, 64 Langlands Rd, St Andrews, Fife KY16 8BN, 01334 474348, www.mensaid.org
AMEN 9-10 Academy Street, Navan, Co Meath, Republic of Ireland, 00-353 4623718, www.amen.ie
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"In non-clinically abusive relationships (not resulting in injury or official intervention), the perpetrators are primarily women, she concludes in a report due to be released soon. In clinically abusive relationships (resulting in injury and/or intervention) abuse is mutual, though more women than men seek medical treatment for injury."
This is by far the most powerful statement of the reality of DV that I've EVER read from a significant news outlet (other than Fox), this is VERY good stuff!
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This is by far the most powerful statement of the reality of DV that I've EVER read
It's great to see the truth coming out. It should also be noted that women commit the majority of child abuse. Rather than being holy innocents, women are in fact (when child abuse is considered, as it should be) the main perpetrators of domestic violence.
Feminism is crumbling.
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http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/jacobs.html
Mindy is basically taking the position of "Tain't so, and so what if it is?"
I'll let her own words damn herself.
Mindelle can be reached by e-mail at mindy.jacobs@edm.sunpub.com. Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@edm.sunpub.com. Let's make sure they get an earful for her sexist crap.
Hey - she's in Canada - wonder if she can be prosecuted for hate-speech? The minute that law bites a woman, watch the pheminaazis back off of it....
---- Burn, Baby, Burn ----
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It may not be Mindy's fault that men don't report their domestic violence victimization [referring to the editorial response to a letter criticizing her at the Sun's online letters page], but it most definitely is Mindy's -- and the editorial staff's -- grievous fault that her column was
grossly and blatantly bigoted and incompetent. Where are the counterquotes from men's issues advocates? None present. Where is the acknowledgement that over twenty-five years of domestic violence research in the english-speaking world has consistently documented the equal rates of assault by men and women? None present.
This is not 'news' in the recent findings sense. The awkward, non-female-chauvanist truth about women's equivalent rates of assault in the domestic setting has been known since Gelles, Steinmetz, and Straus's groundbreaking work in 1975. Erin Pizzey, founder of the first women's shelter, spoke about the severe habits of violence in the women she assisted from the very beginning -- and was hounded out of England because of it. USA researcher Susan Steinmetz, when she attempted to present her research documenting women's domestic violence victimization of men, received, like Pizzey, bomb threats. The USA femelitists apparently went one farther though -- making death threats against Steinmetz's *children*, *specifically* in the attempt to stop her from publishing.
And this naked criminal intimidation is just the tip of the iceberg -- the fact that the Sun saw fit to print Mindy's patently prejudicial, bigoted, and discriminatory derogation of
men and trivialization of their concerns is a glaring example of the lurking mass below the waterline of consciousness. Mindy deserves public editorial censure for her disgusting hate speech against men, and the Sun's readers deserve an immediate apology from both her and the rest of those responsible. Had she tried to publish such comments about any other physiologically distinct segment of the population, it would never have made it off an editor's desk. It is to the unprincipled, female-chauvanist-pandering shame of the Sun that such comments, when directed against men, were considered 'fit to print'. And the complete and utter lack of simple human decency displayed by whoever wrote the reply to Sean Beggs simply goes to underscore these inarguably condemnatory points.
Shame! Shame upon you! Have you no professional standards as journalists left whatsoever? Shame, I say!
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