Awful victim blaming article - Emma Pattison 😢

[Babyboomtastic]

I was shocked to see this on the metro website:

metro.co.uk/2023/02/08/emma-pattison-was-arrested-after-row-with-husband-years-before-death-18249909/

Headline: Epsom College head ‘was arrested after row with husband years before death’

Back in 2016 it seems that the husband phoned the police to say that she'll slapped him around the face, and then phoned back a few minutes later saying not to come as it was trivial. They came anyway, she was arrested, spoken to and then released without charge.

It goes on day sat that they were having counselling for marital problems and her job was one of the issues.

It comes across as 'poor man with violent workaholic wife snaps' 😡😡😡

IF she did slap him 6-7 years ago, that doesn't excuse murdering her or their child, and saying 'she was violent too, I was only defending myself, shes crazy etc' is textbook behaviour from many abusive men...

Urgh

If it’s not conditional on any of those things, why is it a majority of men that commit it, by a very long way?

Because men are biologically dispositioned to be more aggressive than women or children. It isn’t hard.

It’s not daft to assume the murderer was at fault.

So because she apparently slapped him during an argument 7 years ago the poor lamb was justified in murdering her and his 7 year old daughter.

That DM article says the case was dropped because he didn't co-operate. If we're going to indulge in speculation maybe he made it all up and withdrew when he realised how serious it might be.

As others have said, how has this come out?

Always the same isn't it. Oh she must have asked for it. Did his 7 year old daughter ask for it too?

And people wonder why women don't report DV until it's too late.

Why are so many of you denying what women KNOW to be true?

If a doctor is presented with a case, they’ll use their knowledge and experience to diagnose.

When women use their knowledge and experience to “diagnose” what happened - why are so many of you determined to deny this with namalt and “none of you knew what went on”.

we fucking know. Because we are women. And we know what happens.

how many of you when you initially heard the news thought “bet it’s a burglary gone wrong”. Every single woman I’ve spoken to knew exactly what had happened.

@FatSealSmugSoup because medicine is a science whereas knowing what goes on between a couple behind closed doors isn’t? Not hard, is it? What a ridiculous comparison.

How about sorry, you are right, I have no idea who is themselves a survivor of a violent, abusive relationship and shouldn’t go around offending them as defenders of violent men when they have opinion that differs from mine on this issue. I’d appreciate that comment.

Because men are biologically dispositioned to be more aggressive than women or children. It isn’t hard.

Ah the old biology argument! Poor men, they just can't help it - it's biology innit.

Except it isn't that easily explained by biology and it just sounds like a cop out if I'm honest.

No, it’s not - don’t be so obtuse. When a case turns up at a&e, the medic on duty makes an instant judgement call on what they know to be the most likely cause and outcome.

When someone comes in from an RTA with a leg hanging off, bleeding is stabilised before the results of the hb1ac are in.

Are menopausal women who claim the hormone changes have altered their personality also just making excuses? Or women with PMT? It doesn’t mean men shouldn’t take responsibility or be held fully accountable. But the ‘it’s just socialisation’ argument does not account for all of it and lets women down by avoiding the crux of the issue because ‘it looks like we’re excusing menz’.

Yes and then they run tests or an examination to confirm. They don’t have a quick glance or read a few lines and make their minds up.

If you can’t understand the difference between a RTA victim and this, then I’m not sure I can help you I’m afraid.

You don’t know anything about it though. You are speculating. Women don’t have to be perfect to be victims of male violence. No one is ever ‘asking for it’. It’s such a regressive attitude and your stance is buying in to that - I don’t believe it because I don’t want it to be true as it upsets my narrative. Whatever happened in the past, if anything, this woman and her child have been murdered by their husband and father. It is chilling how many of you think the press should suppress facts that you don’t like.

I never said it was just socialisation did I? But it plays a much bigger part than biology.

It does when you compare countries like Saudi Arabia to the U.K., but this happened in the U.K. and there will sadly always be this type of violence no matter how well we ‘socialise’ boys.

Those reports are both pretty straight and factual. I don't think they justify any of the more OTT reactions on here, arguing that they are victim-blaming her or somehow "justifying" her murder.

I do wonder on these threads what people want from the press. Really. Journalists' jobs are to report information they find out. Obviously they don't publish all of it if there are serious concerns about its veracity- and then of course someone will come along and accuse them of "sitting on info" and "being part of the conspiracy.)

They aren't - or shouldn't be- ideologically driven. People tell reporters things; they report them, and then people can make what they want of the facts. In this case, it's clear the couple had a stormy relationship going back years and her murder possibly wasn't the bolt from the blue that it may have seemed to the wider world.

No reasonable person absorbing that information would jump from the fact that one night seven years ago she may or may not have slapped him to "well, sounds like she had it coming." The fact that a lot of unreasonable people may read and draw that conclusion it is not the journalists' fault. They cannot not publish something for fear of making stupid people think stupid things.

You really need to understand this properly before you pronounce on a public forum that it’s a fact Emma Pattison was cautioned so “there was obviously something in it”. What an appalling thing of you to do given the circumstances of this case.

If she had been given a police caution (which she wasn’t) that would have meant that she’d admitted committing an offence.

The reports say that she was arrested and interviewed under caution (completely standard if someone calls the police and alleges assault by their partner) and her husband then withdrew the complaint. In my experience that means that she didn’t make any admissions during interview and there was no other evidence otherwise the police would have cautioned or charged despite the complainant deciding not to co-operate. Who knows why he withdrew his allegation. For what it’s worth I thought the same as AppleKatie when I read that.

Her slapping her husband 7 years ago just shows that the relationship was unhealthy and volatile. It seems like he resented her success.

It does when you compare countries like Saudi Arabia to the U.K., but this happened in the U.K. and there will sadly always be this type of violence no matter how well we ‘socialise’ boys.

That's the issue though isn't it? We don't socialise boys to respect women, even in the UK.

I refuse the believe that the man who murdered my mum and then killed himself did it because of biology. I just don't buy that, it was clear that his upbringing and socialisation was the main driver especially when you saw that his dad beat his mum. He saw women as possessions and got upset when his possession didn't do as she was told.
He knew what he was doing when he researched the most effective way to kill someone and yourself. Biology my fucking arse.

The important thing is, that being arrested for something (NOT cautioned) does not prove that she actually did that. It’s still a conjecture. I could have anyone arrested and interviewed, by telling the police they slapped me; but that doesn’t mean it’s true. Nor does the fact of being arrested for something prove you did it. So it already isn’t a “fact” that she slapped him, only that he alleged that she did.

But we know that an indisputable “Fact” here is that he’s shot her and the child (and then himself) dead.

If people want to keep to “Fact”, that’s the relevant “fact” here.

Those comments are utterly, depressingly ignorant. Looks like he was being abused for years or maybe it was a case of six and two threes, eh? The battered wife argument has only ever come into play when women kill their partners, not when they kill their partners AND children afaik. The terrible fact of him killing his child speaks against this being a victim who snapped situation.

It’s amazing but not surprising how people are searching out any evidence for this bloke not being the guilty party or being equally culpable. Contrast with the Penelope Jackson case, where despite people testifying to her husband’s cruelty over years, nobody it seems had much sympathy for her when she killed him. I clearly remember posters on here describing her as evil.

As a society we hold men and women to different standards. Men are given the benefit of the doubt to the point people will actively search out evidence. Women aren’t.

@Byllis they are look at Olga Freeman, she killed her child while struggling to cope with his severe disabilities. Not the same as this of course but the public was widely sympathetic to her in all the comments I read.

You’ve posted something about a completely different context, cuppa. There is a tendency to want to downplay male violence/abuse against women and overplay female violence/abuse against men. There is a curious tendency on here, for example, to inflate any bad female behaviour to the level of abuse - recent thread about an 18-year-old lying about being pregnant comes to mind.

I compared social media reaction about a man killing a woman (and child) and a woman killing a man. In one I see a reluctance to discount any possible mitigation for his behaviour, whereas in the other I saw people falling over themselves to express how dreadful this woman was. In one case there was considerable evidence of ongoing abuse by the victim against the eventual killer, in the other a very shaky possibility of some level of violence - and yet it is the latter case in which people are more willing to give the benefit of the doubt.

I assume it gives women comfort to imagine it’s an equal playing field out there. No explanation needed why men are heavily invested in the idea.

Indeed - look how quick posters are to take his allegation of slapping as “fact”, when in fact all that says is that he alleged she did - it doesn’t remotely prove she actually did.

In doing so, they are elevating the word of a murderer to the same level of “fact” as the fact he shot his wife and a 7 year old child.

That’s a fine example of the fact that many people will take the word of a man as fact, no matter what he has done. And juxtapose it as somehow equivalent to the murder of a woman and child by shotgun.

In action on this thread we see the pure social conditioning that has people - including many women - taking it as read that if a man alleges a woman slapped him, that must of course be what happened; but if women say that male abusers frequently tell lies as part of their abuse, that gets a telling off as “conjecture” and “we can’t possibly know what went on”.

A man’s allegations will always be taken seriously and treated as fact above any woman’s voice. EVEN IF HE’S A DOCUMENTED CHILD MURDERER FFS.

The conditioning is so ingrained that there are posters on this thread getting seriously angry at the idea that anyone might point out their own complicity in social narratives that excuse men and treat men’s words as more truthful than women’s, no matter what he does. He can have shot a defenceless child dead in her own home, but god knows we must not question the “fact” that seven years earlier he said his wife slapped him. 🙄

I don't believe anyone is asking for it either.

You haven't provided evidence for your last claim about "perfect victims", so don't expect you to be able to point out where I have implied that any woman is "asking for it".

Ir's total victim blaming. Is he supposed to have murdered Lettie too because her mother slapped him?

The one abusive man I know personally definitely did it mostly because of socialisation, not genes. The dynamics within the family were obvious and I think even he would admit it if challenged.