Men who destroy their families - help me understand

my last post seemed to disappear so apologies if this posts twice.

bucking- read the article i posted from the bmj. It considers the complexity (and research) about both nature and nurture in this.

Thanks Dione
I'd be interested stats on the motives (altruistic, psychotic, unwanted, accidental, revenge) according to sex.

I'd imagine altruism, psychosis and maybe unwanted would be higher in mothers, because of their extended proximity to the child, and then accidental and revenge to be higher in fathers, because it fits male pattern violence more.

People love to think that abuse is about nuture not nature because they fallaciously think that this way, there is 'someone' to blame and that they
therefore have protected their own children from becoming violent.

It's a way of self-comforting and trying to 'manage' a much more complex problem

It's very sad that 2 out of the 5 main reasons identified relate to mental illness

That makes for grim reading

Here's the link.
www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/07/07/health/filicide-parents-killing-kids-stats-trnd/index.html

Dione I’m not in any way trying to say you’re wrong, I just find those stats interesting. When you say ‘kill’ did it include things like mothers falling asleep and smothering babies or was the study purely based on child deaths due to violence?

We didn't cover child murders Guardian, but a study in the US gives the rates as 43% of children killed by their own parent were killed by their mother and 57% by their father.

Boys are often harder to look after as babies and are likely to be hit more and harder as children. This is a very good article (below) on their vulnerability in different ways but includes the propensity to violence. However all people who are abusive are in my opionion disturbed in some way. And it is true that most people who cause significant harm to others have been harmed themselves.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1119278/

Most physically abused children are abused by their mothers

Taken in isolation this is a bit misleading.

How about the severity of abuse? Do women kill as many children as men kill?

Also proximity. Taking 'time spent with child" into consideration.

If you looked only at samples where mothers and fathers spend equal time with a child - is the mother still more likely to physically abuse them than fathers?

I doubt it, considering the fact men perpetrate 95% of violent crimes.

Most family annihilators are fathers.

My post was not meant as NAMALT or Women do it too. There are some pervasive myths regarding child abuse and they are dangerous to children living in abusive situations. Most sexually abused children are abused by other children. Most physically abused children are abused by their mothers.

What @GuardianLions says.

I think there's real damage when every time the actual stats around male-perpetrated violence are set out, someone comes along to say "women do it too."

It's not that women do it too, it's that almost all violence in this country is perpetrated by men - against women, and violence against men.

Saying "women do it too" obscures the statistical reality of male violence, and its cost to all of us.

What you don't tend to see is angry women hurting men, and that is where the inequality lies.

I would say that the inequality lies in the fact that men perpetrate 98% of sex crimes and 95% of violent crimes and that 2 women are murdered every week by men - and women murdering men (without a male accomplice) is negligible.

There aren't all these men living silently in fear like F4J would have you believe.

Quentin men don't do 99% of it.
Angry women often hurt their children. Stop trying to deny it when there are numerous cases that prove it. And it isn't just psychological either.
What you don't tend to see is angry women hurting men, and that is where the inequality lies.

Elsie2791 Sat 27-Jan-18 00:27:20
The point I was making is that you don't become abusive unless you have an abusive background.

Thats a myth. Some people abuse because they enjoy other peoples pain, or the feeling of power they get.
It can be a lack of empathy and learned behaviour, to associate giving pain with feeling pleasure, or sexual excitement.

Comparing male predators with mothers is unhelpful to children.
In the case of a stressed out mother, it can be a lack of coping mechanisms or a lack of support that leaves women to cope whether they are adequate to the task or not. Mothers that harm their own young are not usually predators seeking out a victim.

People who breed animals know that first time mothers are pretty ham fisted and make mistakes that can harm their offspring. they usually get better with practice unless they lack maternal instinct, in which case they can kill their young.
Its only women that are expected to get it perfect all the time with no training or practice.

It makes me think of Eminem's very public issues. His hatred of his mother and gazillion complaints against her... and in one of the more recent songs he admits he never really stopped to think "where the hell [his] deadbeat dad was".
I would say abandonment to a shit parent is actually worse than being a shit parent.

we were told that mothers were the most likely perpetrators of physical abuse of children.

Which makes sense because mothers generally spend far more hours with their children than men, and are far more likely to have difficulty coping with the enormous, complicated and extremely challenging task of raising children at close quarters than men.

When I did my safe guarding training we were told that mothers were the most likely perpetrators of physical abuse of children.

There is also culturally 'normalised' abuse too.

For example a pastor advising child beating to stop them 'going astray'. If the whole community condones it, then parents will perpetrate against their own kids and also justify their own parent's abuse of themselves - and even be a bit nostalgic about it (I am horrified to have witnessed).

Or cultures where violence is just allowed and not disapproved of, such as kids hitting each other and adults don't intervene.

But where people are abused as kids and they are aware that this is 'not normal' and is in fact socially frowned upon - tend to choose to act differently.

I think it is important to avoid stigmatising victims of abuse as potential perpetrators, because I think this 'passing down' only really tends to happen in a context of normalised and culturally accepted abuse (unless there is mental illness/personality disorders running in the family).

In my experience angry men hurt others, angry women hurt themselves

Yes this is generally the pattern.

Well, it is depressing, horrible if you think about it too long. I don’t know what we can do, except keep on trying to make it visible, and unacceptable...

And to bring it back to Ted Bundy (I wasn't aware of the grandfather) - he - like most psychopaths bullshitted the psychologists, saying his mum abused him (pretty sure it was Bundy I am thinking of) I think (Freudian ideas were still big) - because he knew that's what the psychologists wanted to hear... Although he also blamed pornography and other things too.