to want to kill my gf

[theBOD]

she was meant to be home after work so we could go out for dinner but apparently got rail roaded into dinner (yeah right) with her boss and couldn't say no.
i really feel like putting my fist through her face as soon as she walks through the door pissed out of her mind to make sure she never does it again.

Well gosh, don't any of you serious types EVER accidentally say something like "Ooh, I could kill him/her" in sheer utter frustration sometimes? or are you just too perfect? And does that make the rest of us imperfect mortals violent aggressive abusive sociopaths if we do say it?

I disagree with the "thought, word, deed" progression - too generalistic.

Venting frustration - isn't that what these chats are about? And by venting, it diminishes the frustration so that the feeling of wanting to inflict punishment on your other half should dissipate.

Physical and verbal violence and abuse can both be pretty damaging, although obviously in different ways, and should never be condoned.

I'd be very interested to see what form domestic violence against males takes. Because I'd be surprised if it is a punch in the face, tbh.

I remember a thread here from a poster whose brother was a victim of domestic violence. She got lots of sympathy and support. It is simply not true to say that MNers are prejudiced - that claim is in the eye of men like theBod who resent women and want to teach us all a lesson. An attitude that is not that far from men who control women with violence - it's certainly one end of a spectrum.

There is a huge difference between harmless exaggeration for comic effect, which is clearly what the threads theBod complained about were, and a real threat of violence, which is what he pretended he was making.

Domestic violence against women is, sadly, still seen as funny - Jimmy Carr, for one, makes a living joking about it.

Bod - I thought you sounded like a really uneducated prat in your OP but having read more I get your point - you were always going to be flamed for it though

i agree with edam, and i think the issue of control through violence is very interesting, given the differences in physical/financial/parental clout between men and women and tbh i Just Don't Believe the figs hedgewitch has quoted. how was that data collected, when and by whom?

do me a favour, hedgewitch, so i don't have to look through a mammoth pdf (that is taking ages to load on my computer) and link to the relevant page. i find it enormously difficult to believe that 40% of men in relationships can expect to sustain violent attacks from their partner (which is the only way that the figure would be relevant to this thread).

info about the British Crime Survey

www.statistics.gov.uk/ssd/surveys/british_crime_survey.asp

when I studied law it was, whilst not perfect, a pretty respected measure of all crime, including unreported.

I haven't checked through, I am assuming that Hedgewitch has given us the correct figures.

i can't read through an entire 193-page doc this morning, obv, but having skimmed it and searched the term 'domestic violence' i'm not seeing anywhere where DV is broken up along gender lines. i'd be interested to see it, as i say.

The only refs to male vs female victims of DV I could find in that document reads as follows:

Conversely 33 per cent of violent incidents against women were domestic violence, compared with six per cent of incidents against men
? The majority of victims of domestic violence were women (77%)

Which doesn't seem to support your assertions THW

i've found some stuff broken up along gender lines but it doesn't relate to DV, it relates to violent crime on the person.

I have to say also that if a woman had posted this thread and swapped genders around, I think she would have got equally short shrift.

There is a huge difference in saying 'AIBU in giving my DH a slap for getting drunk' and 'i really feel like putting my fist through her face'

AMEN spicemonster. too right, why has no-one pointed that out before? of course if a woman on here said she wanted to put her fist through her partner's face there would be a list of s as long as your arm.

hedgewitch, didn't your first link emanate from a male site? i'm not equating them with fathers 4 justice et al, of course, but they by would appear to have a lot of reasons for magnifying the issue, which is why i'd rather see it in black and white on the survey.

Sometimes people just come on here for a soundoff they may say "I want to slap him/her" and the literal brigade will immediately get their pitchforks out but it IS just that a soundoff with no intention to actually DO anything.

Either the pitchforks come out for comments about both male to female AND female to male violence or they come out for neither - of course the constructive thing to do is to discuss it intelligently rather than get into a pissing contest about who is the victim of the most violence.

We are unlikely to know how many men are the victim of domestic violence because it isnt something most men would feel comfortable discussing.

Having scanned the report it would seem that in 2006/07:

• 93,000 men (23% of total victims) were the victim of domestic violence vs. 312,000 (77% of total victims) - p.69.

• 2.0% of all men aged 16-75 were the victim of domestic violence or one or more occasions vs. 4.8% of all women - p.67

This would seem to support THW's assertion that whilst women are clearly more likely to be the victim of domestic violence a sizeable proportion of men are also the victim.

Spicemonster: your figures are accurate but distorted by the fact that (a) men are much more likely to be the victims of violence per se and (b) much more likely to be the victims of stranger violence and violence from acquaintances. The percentage amount for men for domestic violence is therefore a lot lower and in any event is not the right metric.

The amount of men who ARE victims is going to be considerably higher than the amount who admit to being victims.

i'd like to know what that means, though. Did it mean that the woman slapped him once and so that's what he told the survey, or does it mean that it's a pattern of behaviour and sustained abuse. because the male pattern of DV by and large is escalation. certainly no mention of it in the repeat crimes section, which is odd.

While I don't dispute that there are many men who are victims of DV, where does the '40% of men are victims of DV' come from cestlavie?

And while I don't think it's a laughing matter anymore than DV against women is, the fact is that according to that document nearly 80% of DV is committed against women by men.

FWIW I wasn't enamoured with that slapping thread either.

no willy, that's the good thing about this data, it's not culled from reported crimes. however it does then suffer from the two gender's definition of DV. i don't know about men, but the stats i've read from WA suppport that it takes a Long Time for women to admit that they are being beaten in the first place.