Domestic violence stats?

[Ringsender2]

Hi

I came across this item in the comments of a tweet about DV.
www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2020/0123/1110351-7-myths-about-domestic-violence/

It's by a PhD candidate in an Irish uni.

It doesn't ring true to me but maybe that's just my received knowledge being inaccurate.

Does anyone know of other studies that assess comparable things and what their conclusions are?

TIA

I.also don't understand the child hitting the parent analogy. Are we saying that women are less emotionally mature than men and act like children at times? I'm not sure I agree with this although I do believe men's hormones fuel aggression and women's sometimes emotional instability.

Kay-

Interesting thank you.

Morality being raised is interesting. I've not come across views re DV that get into morality before.

You see interpersonal violence in general as immoral? And while I haven't seen stats about women Vs men engaging in violence related to partners. Happy to carry on for the sake of ease with the idea it is.

As a feminist you take the view that the action is just as important as the result.

In law that would mean big changes around severity of result to put more weight on action rather than consequence.

Maybe change definitions of things like assault, abh, gbh.
Would you introduce different levels in terms of the actions? Many different actions with violence and they are linked to likelihood of different levels of harm.

And then to bring back what was known as the crime of passion defence?

Is that a fair understanding?

So the actions would be segmented out with maybe categories grouping them to differentiate?

You'd include things like-
Punching in face (once, twice, more being different levels?)
Shoving (distance travelled/ what person hits eg bed Vs glass table)
Kicking in body
Kicking in head
Throttling
Smacking head against hard surface
Holding head under water
Cutting
Stabbing
Throwing- across car/ onto floor/ into busy road/ off bridge/ off balcony
....

The list would be very long and even then not covering everything, surely?

And some are still linked to result. Eg throttling is a very common method used when men kill women. Definitely massively more likely than the other way round. How would you detach result from action?

As with a good punch to face, it's common knowledge that one way is much more likely to cause serious injury/ death than the other.

You favour disregarding that and focusing on the action.

You can’t decouple the known effect of hitting someone from the action. They are interlinked. Men know that hitting women is wrong due to the strength difference. Those who do it tend to do it to cause fear and to control their partner. They wouldn’t hit some random guy in a pub because they know he’d probably fight back.
Women hitting a male partner is blameworthy too but by treating it the same in terms of culpability as a man hitting a woman trivialises male violence. Male violence has the potential to strike terror in female victims, affecting their lives forever. Female violence against men rarely does this (there are of course some exceptions but it is not a pattern). Also, punching someone physically weaker or throttling them is very different from an open hand slap.

@NiceGerbil

Kay-

Interesting thank you.

Morality being raised is interesting. I've not come across views re DV that get into morality before.

You see interpersonal violence in general as immoral? And while I haven't seen stats about women Vs men engaging in violence related to partners. Happy to carry on for the sake of ease with the idea it is.

As a feminist you take the view that the action is just as important as the result.

In law that would mean big changes around severity of result to put more weight on action rather than consequence.

Maybe change definitions of things like assault, abh, gbh.
Would you introduce different levels in terms of the actions? Many different actions with violence and they are linked to likelihood of different levels of harm.

And then to bring back what was known as the crime of passion defence?

Is that a fair understanding?

So the actions would be segmented out with maybe categories grouping them to differentiate?

You'd include things like-
Punching in face (once, twice, more being different levels?)
Shoving (distance travelled/ what person hits eg bed Vs glass table)
Kicking in body
Kicking in head
Throttling
Smacking head against hard surface
Holding head under water
Cutting
Stabbing
Throwing- across car/ onto floor/ into busy road/ off bridge/ off balcony
....

The list would be very long and even then not covering everything, surely?

And some are still linked to result. Eg throttling is a very common method used when men kill women. Definitely massively more likely than the other way round. How would you detach result from action?

As with a good punch to face, it's common knowledge that one way is much more likely to cause serious injury/ death than the other.

You favour disregarding that and focusing on the action.

It's a difficult concept in terms of criminal prosecution etc, because I don't think you can in reality decouple the effect from the action. But my feeling is that somebody who shoots at another and happens to miss is not really much better than somebody who does the same but happens by chance to kill them. Although of course in reality the latter will almost certainly receive a bigger sentence.

Some parts of law seem to almost take this view, for example if you kill somebody in self defence it is sometimes judged on the perception of risk or your intention. E.g. if you kill a home intruder thinking your life was genuinely at risk then you will sometimes get off. Not quite the same but still judged on your intention (genuine fear for your life vs getting payback).

Men know that hitting women is wrong due to the strength difference. Those who do it tend to do it to cause fear and to control their partner.

I strongly disagree with this.

My mother was a bit of a bully. My father was a docile type and she would literally follow him around the house until she got a reaction. She would kick off over some really minor thing which he would never dare criticise her over (and she wouldn't accept if tables were turned) and it would be "don't you walk away from me, I'm talking to you, I'm not going to stop until you listen" etc.

She would go as far as turning off electrical devices whilst he was using them and did things like change the computer password and hide his car keys, not giving them back until he had listened to a long rant and apologised profusely (something she would never do). For this reason all my sister's are very low contact with her nowadays which is a shame as he wouldn't dare see them without her as she would make his life an utter misery.

He may not have feared for his life but he absolutely feared her and I think this is a more common situation than people literally fearing death. I also think it may have contributed to his heart/blood pressure problems he now has. I often feared he would snap but he never did. However, I think many other men might have.

Not saying at all that male violence is down to women baiting them, but I do think this behaviour is much more common in women. Men tend to sort out things quicker and more directly and many women also exploit the fact that men 'can't' hit them (until the day they finally do).

In fact I think there have actually been recent studies confirming that women are more likely to domestic abuse and coerce (DA not being same as DV). I can certainly believe it from my own experiences.

Last statistics form Met police (2018) so only in London were

Number of Women Killed by men = 26

Number of Males Killed by Women = 13

So twice as many women killed by males as the other way around. Still significant if you’r the mother father of the person being murdered.

Important to understand that the women murdered is 0.172 of the population and men is 0.3465 of the population. Horrendous but not an ‘epidemic’ as reported in many media outlets.

It's interesting how disparate the different studies are. It seems common knowledge that men commit the vast majority of domestic abuse, but then there are also loads of studies spanning decades which appear to show the prevalence as being close to equal.

I remember this bloke banging on about 'gender symmetry' ages ago and when I googled it there were loads of studies on Wikipedia which were only in the 'domestic violence against men' page and not the normal DV page, which seemed odd as they were mostly looking at both sexes and not just concerning men.

Yep. All peer reviewed journal articles and the founder of Refuge (Erin Pizzey) agree with this. Its largely 50% men/women with Lesbian couples perpetrating greater violence. Unfortunately the facts are ignored as its a multi-million pound industry (DV 'charities' receiving 45 million from government mainly to fund staff to lobby the government to say they aren't doing enough). Upset me when my sister and myself were beaten within an inch of our life by our respective spouses, police attending (who were very good) but no charity actually helped on the ground (apart from some leaflets). Good research which looks at data not how we feel is useful,

I think 0.172 does sound very high, as far as I can see. Is that the percentage of the population in Wales & England ? According to the link here for ONS figures for year ending March 2021 the number of female victims of homicide was 177. And that figure was for all homicides, so includes murder, manslaughter and infanticide. Rounding up the population for W&E as 59 million, the % figure of 177 works out as 0.0003. Or...is my maths wrong ? (wouldn't surprise me)