What about men? Lies, statistics . . . and peddling myths about violence against women
thecitizen.org.au/features/what-about-men-lie...
thecitizen.org.auPosted Oct 19, 2015, 4:50 AM UTC
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thecitizen.org.auI wish this article went into the data a little bit more. There's a bit of the two sides accusing each other of being wrong on the data, without getting the details.
A similar op-ed in the Telegraph "Domestic abuse could not be further from gender neutral. Wake up Britain":
At a meeting of the UK Statistics Agency (UKSA) this week, she explained that the Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW) doesn't account for a significant proportion of attacks on women (and that nearly half of all violent crime is committed against women).
This is due to a 'cap' on the number of crimes recorded, which stops counting after five repeat incidents against one victim. When this cap is removed, she said, violence against women by intimate partners rises by 70 per cent and violence against women by acquaintances by 100 per cent. It particularly affects those women who know, or even live with, the perpetrator.
Simply, the systematic, repeated victimisation of women is being ignored.
One way to get "cleaner" data is to look at homicides. According to a report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2007 1,640 women were killed by intimate partners, compared to 700 men.
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1. Your 'feeling' is speculation at best, and contrary to the available evidence at worst. You don't get to round down a massive gender disparity to 50/50 just because you want it to be so.
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Differences in rates of gun ownership is not unrelated to propensity to try to kill people. People by guns for the purpose of intimate partner violence.
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My data says nothing about the gender of the attackers. A significant number of those men were killed by men.
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Obviously violence against men shouldn't be ignored. I should've made mention that I wasn't posting the Telegraph piece because I agreed with the politics, but for the take on data analysis. (I don't necessarily disagree either; I'm really not informed enough. My own instinct would be for a lot of domestic violence resources to be gender neutral - e.g., domestic violence hotlines that can take calls from all sorts of people in all sorts of situations. But I really don't know enough about supporting DV victims to comment on which resources should be gender specific.)
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I missed that you included a link; sorry about that.
What do you think of the criticism of "Conflict Tactics Scale" (the methodological source of the 50/50 perspective) contained in the original article and elsewhere? CTS seems to assume that abuse is the result of conflict turning into violence, which seems like bullshit to me. The Vancouver Sun article perspective - that it's a "gender blame game" to talk about violence against women - seems pretty fucking ridiculous when we know way more women are killed by their partners than men.
Which is not to discount the CTS findings entirely, which some folks seem eager to do. We live in a shitty world with shitty people, and maybe more to the point a lot of shitty relationships and values around relationships. I honestly don't find it hard to believe that unhealthy, harmful, abusive or violent behavior is fairly common across genders and types of relationships.
My point on guns is that being the type of person who would kill someone in a moment of "passion," and being inclined to purchase a gun are likely not completely independent variables. Someone doesn't need to admit out loud or to themselves that one outcome of owning a firearm is a sense of control over a partner - and the ability to kill them - for that to be the case. Gun ownership shouldn't be considered incidental to subsequent violence, because a gun is a tool for killing people.
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"Such myths gain traction within society because men feel that they are entitled to control women because they are the dominant members of society"
Can we please start drawing the line between SOME and the majority becuase that would be real swell
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Its definitely the majority in this case
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Should I start the #NotAllCops hashtag as well?
Tip: personal vs institutional function
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(Well in fairness it isn't every single cop that oppresses ethnic minorities)
All it needs is a "some" in front of "men" otherwise it can easily, and will easily be read, as all men being like this. It's this kind of careless wording that makes people think that feminism is about hating men.
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(Well in fairness it isn't every single cop that oppresses ethnic minorities)
Wrong again.
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This just in, cops do not have an institutional function.
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This has nothing to do with my issue with the article
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What about the men?!
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In this context it is neither. In radical contexts we often talk about groups as an abstract whole.
Men need to get over it
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We are talking about the institution, not individuals.
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"She recounts some of her research that showed that when men talked about women’s violence against men, some cited abuse as not having a hot meal on the table, not having the children bathed before bed, or women spending money on gambling or shopping. At the more severe end of the spectrum, they nominated verbal and emotional violence as abuse. Then, a tiny minority documented physical abuse, and an even smaller minority named sexual abuse.
“Women were talking about being run over, being drugged and raped at knifepoint, having their children dangled over high rise balconies till they did as they were told and of course you get verbal and emotional violence,” says McInnes. “When we were talking about physical violence against men, one of the worst examples was that she banged his head with the cupboard door – which isn’t good – but the sheer level of fear, harm and terror that women talked about was simply not present in what the men’s data showed.”"
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