So sad to hear another father has killed his wife and child

[spongefingeranyone]

Have heard on the news today that a recently sacked police officer has killed his wife and youngest child, with the eldest two escaping with dreadful injuries. It just makes me so sad for his family and very very angry that another father has seen fit to do this terrible thing.

My condolences to the family.

going back to those charts Lenin posted (i am going to start a Feminist Cheatsheet of statistics - i love maths):

For multiple victims: 93.5% of offenders are male. is their gender really not important?

I'm not claiming to know that this man had a history of domestic violence - I'm saying that his sense of entitlement with regards to the lives of his wife and children, comes form the same place as domestic violence/honour killing/widow burning/wife burning.

Indeed it is an extreme form of domestic violence. People don't like to examine this issue in this way because it means examining systematic male violence against women and children.

Isolated random event with no rhyme or reason to it is much less boat rocking of the status quo than admitting that there are patterns to this sort of behaviour.

forget reporting, we already know that women will experience multiple episodes of violence before reporting (if at all) - I think my breast cancer comparison is not great but good enough for the point that more women than men are affected so we think of it in those terms, something that affects and takes more female lives than male

men are simply not suffering the same rate and severity of injury as women, we may not have a true measure of the scope of their mistreatment at the hands of women but looking at wider patterns in society especially financial inequality and less quantifiable levels of fear and so on suggest they very much have the upper hand

Patriarchy is bad for men too, particularly the hypermasculine idea. Is that news?

FWIW, women have low reporting rates for incidences of violence against them as well. Average of over 30 incidents of DV before report and more than 75% (lowest figure I've seen quoted) of rapes are never reported.

unless of course women are killing as many men and are better at covering their tracks? We can fake orgasm so anything is possible

So here we have a case of male violence against a woman and children, and yet we have a whole load of posts insisting that we don't talk about that but instead discuss female domestic violence and furriner's violence against women.

No, we have one case of someone having killed his spouse, one child and severely injured two more children. We do not know whether this was a case of "systemic male violence", based on delusions of ownership, or, e.g. a psychotic episode. We know fuck all, whether there was any underlying gender issue which caused him to kill himself as well as his family. At present, this can neither be confirmed nor denied.

There's a whole lot of not very useful extrapolation going on.

we know that men kill women, their own and other children, and men every day

we know that it is rare for women to kill (unless, as I said, women are better at getting away with it)

we know that men are more violent, more often than women

it's hardly 'underlying' is it

"Yes some crimes are racially motivated. But that doesn't mean that when someone of one race attacks another it is a racist attack - it could be motivated by a number of things"

What has that got to do with the price of fish? That is obviously true, but it does not negate the fact that there is systemic racism in our society and because of that, black people are more likely to be the victims of racist attacks, than are white people. Some men kill women and / or children for other reasons than the fact that they have an over-developed sense of ownership and entitlement, that does not negate the fact that for most murders of women and children by men, the attitude which enables those men to murder their victims, is born of that sense of entitlement.

Just to answer a question posed by WidowWadman further up the thread, when she was saying it's futile to point out that it's always men who annihilate their families (with very few exceptions)

Well, the very obvious answer is, that when you present the pattern to women... I mean when you show women that they are more likely to be raped and murdered by their spouse than a stranger, and that living with men puts them at risk of all kinds of violence, hopefully women will start to choose other options.
2 women a week are murdered in their own homes by men in the UK, for example. This is because the media peddles the lie that the streets are more dangerous for women. BUt if there's a man in the home, this is definitely not the case.

What we see a lot of is denial among women. A lot of women simply refuse to comprehend that men are doing away with women with frightening regularity. They refuse to see the patterns because it's too uncomfortable to accept.
They talk about male exceptionalism: "well, my man would never do that, so there's no problem, and no pattern." "Not all men are like that, so how dare you generalize."
We're going to have to somehow get women to overcome this denial and cognitive dissonance about how dangerous men are to women.
I understand the point and purpose of denial, I really do. It's too uncomfortable for many women to accept the fact that men kill women all the time. But they're going to have to get it if anything is to change.

A man killed his baby, wife and mother in law down the street from me last year. I saw people talking about the incident on the internet. You should have seen the lengths people were going to to try to exhonerate and vindicate him. Some were even saying it's possible the wife murdered the child first and then he killed her so she wouldn't have to go to jail.
Seriously, the mental gymnastics people go through because they refuse to accept men kill women astounds me.

But what is the logical conclusion of your argument Sakura? That because most violent people are male and because most victims in the home are female, every woman that lives with a man must be perpetually on their guard? Armed and ready for the inevitable attack? Never trusting themselves to be at home alone with the man because it's only a matter of time before she finds herself dead?

the logical conclusion for me is alternative living, child rearing and sexual arrangements

The logical conclusion, is that women should not live with men.

It's a lottery out there. You might end up marrying a non-murderer, but women aren't stupid: they don't marry men they know are going to murder them, do they.

And that's before we get to all the serial killers who are happily married but don't murder their wives.

2 women a week murdered in the UK alone.

Forfeiting living with men is a small price to pay surely?

There's no way on this earth I'll be encouraging my own daughter to marry or settle down with a bloke. If she wants to fine, but I'll tell she'll be much better off living with friends, or even better, living alone financially independent. If your daughter happens to be a lesbian, for example, the chance of her being murdered by her spouse is practically non-existent.

two women murdered a week is only by partners and ex-partners, does not include male strangers, male acquaintances, male colleagues

right exactly, cuibono.
ANy other group of people and there'd be an outcry.
2 ( or more) Jews murdered a week, because they're Jews... nobody would stand for it.
Women's lives are worth shit.

aren't worth shit, whatever the Americanism is

WidowWadman there are patterns to this behaviour.

It is a phenomenon that when studied, is clearly a gendered issue with common factors such as loss of job, financial difficulty, etc.

Why is that such a big deal to admit? Like Aye says, patriarchy is bad for men too (shame they take that out on women and children though eh?).

www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/02/10/inside-the-minds-of-family-annihilators.html

*Warning** - the following is a link to a Guardian article so nothing extreme, but it does go into some upsetting detail.

The subject has been most widely studied in America, where there are 10 murder-suicides each week. According to Professor Jack Levin, a leading expert from North-Eastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, the most significant factors are family break-up, male sexual jealousy, a need to be in control and extreme possessiveness.

From the same link:

To the outside world, these crimes seem to come out of nowhere,' continued Levin. 'The perpetrators have not previously been involved in criminal behaviour. Nor do they tend to be on drugs or drinking heavily when they commit the crime. However, if psychologists had seen them in advance, they would have spotted the warning signs. They would have noticed how the person reacted to things not going his way - the irrational rage and the blaming of others. These people often also regard their partner and children as their own possessions.

The thing I don't understand is the idea that recognizing the 'underlying' gender basis somehow precludes examination of the individual circumstances in this case. It's the collection of individual case by case studies that show us the pattern. It's not either or.

sakura - you are joking, right?

So you actually are suggesting that there should be segregation between men and women, and women should try and keep away from men where they can?

This is Poe's law territory, surely.

Sakura isn't suggesting that there should be gender segregation.

She said women should consider not living with men.

That's not the same as segregation.

I don't live with a man atm, but I'm not segregated from men.

I wonder what she would tell her children if they were sons, though.