Just feeling really angry at all the murder, assault, rape of females that goes on

This thread have a serious case of "what about the men"

Just because men are violent to other men doesn't mean men's violence against women isn't a terrible problem. Yes even in good ol UK. It's still a patriarchal country with an alarming amount of violent and misogynist men.
Just read the news paper any day. I can't stick my head in the sand, nothing good comes out of it. Things must be done.

I think I remeber hearing/reading the same thing, viv - WRT men being statistically more likely to be victims of violence.

Also, IIRC, missing persons are more often male than female, and missing children are more often boys than girls. But for some reason this doesn't get reported as often or as widely as incidents of missing girls and women do.

And then, of course, WRT press reporting, there's 'Missing White Woman' 'syndrome'...

Men are mostly at risk from stranger violence, women who are violently attacked are usually the victims of people they know.

However, let's not all hang ourselves just yet. Let's not forget that actually the present day UK is about the best place it is to be a woman so far. It's not perfect; male violence against women still occurs but we have economic independence, full human status, reproductive rights, we do not have to be owned by a man or answerable to one, we can vote, work, own money etc.

Thing is though, sexual violence is so gendered. Not only are the vast majority of perpetrators male, but the vast majority of victims are female. It's hard not to feel angry about that and frankly I don't think we should try.

SGM - the US department of justice stats I linked to do include sexualised violence and domestic violence.

Whiskey4tea - "Pointing out how women are abused at the hands of men is not making them victims or victimising them" ... No indeed, but the OP saying she would like her child to be a boy because girls and women are in more danger of violence is not based on fact and so is victimising women.

That most violence is committed by men is undeniable and important for both society and parents to face up to. But it is just not true (at least as far as any statistics I have seen) that women are the predominant victims.

Sorry, I maybe wasn't clear: part of my problem is that citing from wiki is not a good idea, because (as quoted), it tends to be full of 'citation needed' annotations and, if references are there, you might as well look at those.

I don't think any violence ever 'pales into insignificance', and I still do not really understand (sorry, everyone) why people are coming up with different views on the stats. Are there genuinely different statistics circulating? Or are we just all looking at different things or evaulating the stats differently?

Does that make sense?

LRD in answer to your question....

DV of 213000 and 88000 over a lifetime (assume 8o years is a lifetime) is about 2500 and 1100 per annum respectively

Set that against a total of 880,000 violence crimes per year (and i think we can safely assume the majority are against men) you can see it pales into insignificance. In fact even 50,000 sexual violence crimes are only about 6% of the number of violent crimes.

And you can read stats after stats and this is the basic picture

This sort of thread illustrates a basic human problem, we over-accentuate the more scary risks we feel ourselves under to a huge degree, and massively under-estimate more mainstream risk

That's true, vivienne - goes back to the point about violence by men affecting other men. There's no good side to any of this.

I shall take your word for it Stewie. But I still think young men are quite vulnerable. A lot of shootings and gang attacks and killings are younger men.

I've never met anyone who's not an 'exception' ... are you sure it's men you're thinking of, who don't say what they're thinking aloud, not the sphinx/the sibyl of Cumae? I'm fairly sure sphinxes don't say a lot of what they're thinking out loud, but you can usually distinguish them from men, who usually have fully functioning mouths, brains, and (as President Bartlett would say), the necessary connections between them.

That is a sweeping generation and distortion of fact. I think somebody told me once that a young man was the most in danger of being seriously attacked. Statistically speaking.

Sure they do.

Men I know say what they're thinking out loud.

I also do talk to them about this stuff.

The only bloke I know who is routinely afraid of going out in situations where I would also be afraid, is a big scary-looking 6'4 guy who constantly gets drunk idiots wanting to take a swing at the big guy. It's really unpleasant for him, I will admit, and I am sure it does have to do with what he looks like.

Men dont say a lot of what they are thinking, out loud.

Ask some discreetly.See what they say in private to you.

Pointing out how women are abused at the hands of men is not making them victims or victimising them. The men who abuse them make them victims. I would have thought that was obvious. If i didn't know better, I would think those argung against the OP were trying to make out that protesting against violence against women is the cause of this violence. But they wouldn't be doing that would they? Because that would be patently silly.

Neither is campaigning against this violence creating a victim mentality or scaremongering. It is simply informing women of how they could be treated. This is important. To give just one example, one of the rape myths always being challenged here and by other a anti rape groups is the idea that rape is usually a stranger-in-a-dark alley crime. Another is that how much a women has had to drink is relevant to whether she was raped or not. Both these myths are alive and kicking in most of "rape prevention" advertising (the West Mercia police campaign being the most recent). It is behind the fear of going out at night, of walking home on your own, etc.

But as we all know, stranger rape is quite rare. Most rapes are committed by someone the victim knows and/ or is already in a relationship to. In such rapes, what the victim was wearing, what she had been drinking, how she had got home is totally irrelevant. "Rape prevention" of this nature deceives women by telling them that they can "avoid" being raped by not indulging in "risky" behaviour. An emphasis on the fact that most sexual and -in fact- all other types of violence are committed against women by family members or close acquaintances is telling them where the danger lies. It is not scaremongering but fact telling.

Personally I would like to see a recognition that violence is gendered. Yes, both women and men are victims of violence; but the perpetrator is almost always male. Men hurt women and they hurt other men. Until society recognises that this a problem and takes steps to deal with it, it will continue.

Thanks SGM.

amillion - I don't get that impression - I've seldom heard men saying 'I wouldn't go out at night here, but of course, my wife would', but I know lots of women who'd say 'I wouldn't go out after dark unless my husband was with me, or a male friend'. It gets brought up pretty often when there's media discussion of rape or violence.

Not relevant to the stats, I know, just saying.

I think for lots of women, being afraid is almost something we're used to - we avoid situations where we'd be scared, like walking home alone in the dark, because we're so used to the idea it wouldn't be safe.

Under-reporting of crime seems to be a huge problem for both men and women.

Regarding sexual assault/rape of males - one charity I was involved with through work, estimates male unde reporting to be 10 times that of female.

Sadly until more work is done on supporting victims of both genders in coming forward and accessing services and support once they do - we will never really know the true picture.

Regarding sexual assault/rape of males - one charity I was involved with through work, estimates male unde reporting to be 10 times that of female.

Sadly until more work is done on supporting victims of both genders in coming forward and accessing services and support once they do - we will never really know the true picture.

Agree with Himalaya and whatmeworry.
Smaller men go around frightened of larger men all the time.

I would have to say,as a general rule,men go around frightened of other men,and in broad daylight,to a much larger degree than women going around frightened of men.

I know this is my fault, so no-one needs to answer, but I'm finding some of this hard to follow without links/details of where the stats are from. I'm looking at wiki, which seems to have a lot of 'citation needed' markers on articles, but can't find easy figures to compare as one article says:

'The National Study of Domestic Abuse for 2005 reported that 213,000 women and 88,000 men reported being victims of domestic violence at some point in their lives. According to the study, one in seven women and one in sixteen men were victims of severe physical abuse, severe emotional abuse, or sexual abuse.[4]
In the United Kingdom, the police estimate that around 35% of domestic violence against women is actually reported.[citation needed]'

That's the article on epidemiology of DV - another on statistics for violent crime is looking at different numbers and a different way of reporting:

'According to the Home Office, there were around 880,000 "Violence against the person" crimes in England and Wales in 2008?9, equivalent to 16 per thousand people in England and Wales. There were about 50,000 sexual offences during the same period, just under 1 per thousand. '

I don't know how to compare these ... if anyone does have a minute to explain I'd be grateful, but if not, please don't let me distract from the discussion.

Nope. What happens is that the government separates the states for violence (I.e. physical assaults) from stats on sexualised violence and domestic violence. If you count sexualised violence and domestic violence under the heading of 'violent crimes', the vast majority of victims are women and children.

Nah, stats say that all DV is about 15 - 25% of all violence (depending on what is counted as DV - emotional, financial etc rather than just physical), so that doesn't wash.

Google delivereth the crap, wikipedia delivereth the facts.