Sydney Herald "Younger men failing to recognise domestic violence" shocking survey.

In the UK the legal system recognises domestic abuse as being as serious as physical violence.
There isn't a hierarchy with one being worse than the other, any more than there is a hierarchy of sexual assault and rape.

If you believe the threat of violence cant be as bad as actual violence you haven't really understood how living with the threat of violence can destroy your sense of self, as much as physical violence can destroy your body.

www.cps.gov.uk/crime-info/domestic-abuse

In what way is using force/power to inflict psychological injuries on someone not violent?

I am still not sure that it is helpful to classify something non-physical as violence. Abuse should surely be a powerful enough word? If not, Ibthink the appropriate thing is to make people understand that emotional/mental abuse can have devastating effects (And I agree the effects can be even more devastating than violence), not to try and ride on the abhorrence that is already felt about violence (though apparently not amongst large swathes of young men). I want words to be accurate so that we know what we are talking about.

I agree. I said it is abuse, but it isn’t violence. The abuse might be as bad as if it were actual violence, but we need words to have meanings.

I had no idea what such a behaviour meant, but over time I learned that isolating the victim is a very common aspect of long-term abuse. It makes the victim much less able to seek help when the abuse happens.

I agree. Maybe my post was too rushed and didn’t de-emphasise my point enough. It is a tiny point given the overall horrors of this, survey, but it leaped out at me so I thought I’d say it.

It's not like they are missing the finer points of coercive control.

Is part of the problem here classifying domestic abuse as violence? It troubles me that we call things that aren’t violent, violence. If asked, I wouldn’t agree that isolating someone from their friends is violence.

However, I certainly don’t think this is the important take away message here, given the horrors in this survey.

Though they are likely to believe 'she asked for it', I suppose.

I think they don't accept the concept of DV.

I don't think the young men fail to recognise it. They know hitting someone, punching her, is violent. They're not idiots. I bet they all know it's wrong, abusive and illegal.

They just don't think it matters. Because women don't matter, except for sex. And other domestic services.

I have to ask - what acts would the 40% consider to be DV? Given they don’t accept that hitting, restraining, raping are....

I'm not surprised.

When we are going backwards on women's rights, it will be reflected in the parts of the community most vulnerable to being shaped ie young people.

The more women are dehumanised, through porn, decrim of buying sex, TRA and MRA views of women as privileged and pampered, the less likely it is that young boys see hitting us as so bad.

I'd assume it reflects a desensitisation - these young men have seen violence normalised at home.

Not sure if it was this study or an earlier one, but Gen X men actually have better recognition of what VAWG involves, and it's unacceptability, suggesting that we are indeed going backwards in terms of education.

How interesting to find that age gradient! The oldest men were the best informed. And the young women were less informed than middle-aged men.

This must show a change in the popular culture and not in a good direction. It would be interesting to see similar studies done in other countries.

It reminds me of this:

Almost a third of the men (31.7 percent) said that in a consequence-free situation, they’d force a woman to have sexual intercourse

www.thecut.com/2015/01/lots-of-men-dont-think-rape-is-rape.html