To think that women are often not abusive unless she's being abused?

[Bigbrookie]

I was in a domestic abuse training session this week and the person leading the training said that she has never seen, in 20 years of doing her role as a support worker for domestic abuse, a situation where the man isn't actually abusing the woman where a woman is accused of abusing a man. She said this is particularly the case where young dependents are involved because the woman usually is less powerful than the man in the first place and the man is often using his power to take advantage over the woman.

She said that in all the cases she has seen where a woman has reacted physically towards a man, there has been manipulative and controlling behaviour towards the woman first and the have reacted with overwhelm. I thought this was interesting.

What is other people's take on this?

And she literally said that this was in 100% of cases where a woman was accused of domestic abuse.

The person leading the training is a misandrist. Both genders can be abusive.

I can believe that is true in the vast majority of cases.

I think it's likely to be most common, but also women who were abused as children might know no other way to behave and lash out, so there are relationships in which the man is not abusive and the woman is, too.

I watched a terrible documentary about a man who had been beaten by his female partner, had boiling water poured over him, hot irons pressed on his skin and acid burns. He died in hospital whilst the police were trying to convince him to press charges. My friend was beaten by her ex wife. Both sexes can be abusers.

HOWEVER reactive violence is a thing. Abused victims can lash out either in self defence or because violence has become normalised. The abuser then uses this against the victim and claims they are being abused.

so, to coin a phrase, the men were asking for it?

I would only partly agree with your trainer. There are women who have been violent and sometimes killed their partner when they are themselves the victim of physical abuse/control. This is often to provoke the violence they know is coming their way to kind of get it over with. Sometimes it’s to end the violence permanently. But it’s also true that women can be violent in relationships just as any two people can do. These instances are more loss of control rather than the instrumental violence that is typical of power/control abuse.

I think it's quite common. Often the end goal of an abusive man is to target a woman's children and if she gets messed up enough then she will hit them or abuse them if they step out of line in order to please or placate him.

Some women are very weak. It can be as simple as turning a blind eye to what the man is doing. Or blaming a child for actually saying that there is abuse.

Criminal cases often show a violent abusive man with a long history. The woman has no history until she gets involved with him and then... the children are "disciplined" in accordance with the man's violent and abusive standards that the woman either does not stop or adopts.

In the worst cases, the children die.

It might be her personal experience in her work, suggesting it's a common pattern, but that doesn't make it 100 percent true across the board.

I think it's absolutely fair to comment on percentages. Men are undoubtedly more predisposed to commit abuse on the whole.

But this abusers charter your trainer is proposing? Ridiculous.

And in terms of abusive women towards men; I agree with your trainer. When I worked in criminal justice I never had a case where the man claimed abuse where it did not come out later that he had been psychologically or physically abusive himself. Usually for years prior to any incident by the woman. There was a pattern to it.

OP, I hope you challenged that trainer's view. Not all cases of domestic abuse by females are reactive violence, and as a pp said, both males and females are capable of domestic abuse. A lot of it has to do with power and control.

Just because the trainer has not seen something, does not mean it doesn't exist. Your trainer needs some training herself.

And you sadly see a number of posters on here who are stuck in an abusive dynamic with a mother or sister. Their female relatives are certainly not incapable of unprovoked abuse.

Please explain domestic violence in same sex relationships.

That's interesting and rings true with my personal experience. My exH went to my parents to tell them that I'd tried to hit him. They were obviously horrified and pulled me up on it. What could I say? It was true, I had tried to hit him on more than one occasion. At the time I was so ashamed of myself that it seemed like explaining the circumstances would be making excuses, which could only make the situation worse.

With a lot of counselling, I'm still not proud of it but I can see that it was the action of an abused woman who was either terrified or had reached serious depths of desperation. ExH abused me physically, verbally, emotionally, financially throughout our marriage, adding on sexual abuse after we had children. On the first two occasions I tried to hit him, he was physically blocking me from getting away from him. On the third, he had left me stranded a 2-hour walk from home and wouldn't answer the phone, with the DC's nursery due to close for the day and no money for me to get a taxi. When I finally got home he laughed at me crying and jeered at me and I just snapped and tried to slap him. That's when he went to my parents. I wasn't acting in self-defence so agreed that I had been physically abusive towards him.

I tend to believe there are equal numbers of a**holes amongst men and women. I don’t think being controlling or abusive is a male thing per se.

I believe it’s much less likely for women to be physically abusive because men tend to be bigger and we tend to be socialised to deal with our feelings in non-violent ways.

However logically whatever stats there are on male victims of abuse must be under reported as many of the agencies are not able to recognise it, and men themselves can’t recognise it, and so won’t report. If we were educating young men about warning signs of abuse as we are (thankfully starting to) with women and girls, we might see more stats around it to make a reasoned view.

An example from my own experience;

My friend gets a new partner. Within a month they are talking about moving in together, within 6 weeks she is ‘accidentally’ pregnant. Under guise of managing family finances she shuts down his own account so all money is to be managed from a joint account. She quits her job. Under guise of helping his mental health she accesses his social media pages and edits the friends he can keep in touch with. She shuts his personal email address and moves it to a joint one which they both access. She takes away his mobile phone and installs a landline which she answers so she can filter his calls. She controls what he can and can’t eat and has made him go vegan. As she controls contact she limits how often he can see his family and has edited out most of his friends.

They have been married 10 years now and he, by all accounts, is super happy.

If the genders were reversed here we would be telling the chick to run for the hills with such a controlling guy.

As she’s beautiful and a woman, people just tell this guy he’s lucky to have such an organised wife. Only his father has ever said anything, so she stopped her husband seeing his father without her there.

I personally know a few guys in relationships like this, none of whom would even recognise the signs of abuse in the scenarios they are in.

She may just be sharing her own experiences, but it makes me wonder what the purpose was of her sharing that observation? What overall point was she trying to make?

I think it's quite dangerous with regards to abuse to assert anything as 100% always the case, and I don't think it's right to invalidate the experiences of men who have been victims of DV from a female partner.

I do agree though that in many cases reactive abuse is a thing, and absolutely needs to be talked about. I think it's basically the goal of some abusive people to push their partners to the point of acting abusive themselves. It's part of the gaslighting so they can destabilise their partners and gain control over them, whilst playing the victim themselves.

As a result, many victims of abuse neglect to seek help because they genuinely believe they're at least as equally as abusive as their partners. Thus, it's important to raise more awareness of reactive abuse, but I think it's important we keep gender out of it.

It's often done by abusing men. The teacher shot with her daughter last year had been reported to the police by the filth that eventually killed her as being "abusive". She has been arrested.

This experience probably contributed to her not seeking help from the authorities when he became dangerous and then killed them all.

This. I thought about it a lot with the johnny depp v amber heard trial. That he sought to make her reactive abuse / self defence invalidate her experience. Wanker.

I think most abusers are people who developed a bullying mentality as children and carried it on in to adulthood. Abusive behaviour comes in many forms and the abuser will use tactics most suitable given the power imbalances between them and their victim. Men are therefore more likely to use physical force, or the threat of it, because they generally have a physical advantage. Women abusers will use other tactics, except perhaps with children where they have physical superiority. I wouldn't dispute that men abusing women is infinitely more common than the other way around but I disagree with the hypothesis that women only abuse as a response to being abused.

This is not atypical with abusive men and I am glad you have had support. People often think abuse is just external. Actually the end goal of these people is to have you so broken down you cannot ever leave. I am glad to hear of your escape.

I don’t know about the case so won’t comment on specifics BUT we have a lot of cases where abused women eventually snap and kill their abuser. I’m personally supportive of the various campaigns for leniency in sentencing of crimes like this.

Again, not about this specific case, but in general would we automatically assume that if a man is in an abusive relationship and snaps, that he is in fact the abuser and hasn’t snapped in the same way a female victim of abuse might?

In the case you mentioned, if a woman had reported her male abusive partner multiple times and then killed him, I think we’d tend to assume it was self defence or she was driven to it? Rather than assume she was the abuser all along? I’m not saying he wasn’t the abuser (again, don’t know enough to say) but I’m questioning my own biases as to what I’d assume with very few facts, which like many people I think i’d assume woman = victim

Just looked up NCDV , 7% of perpetrators last year were female.

I wonder if any of these are self declared females ?

But it obviously does happen, they can't all have been abused first.

I think there is a solid logical case that male victimhood is enormously under reported. In violence because of shame and in coercive control because we still as a society have a very limited understanding that coercive control could be exercised by women against men. I’m not pretending to know the reality (i do reckon there are more male perps than female for various reasons) but i’d be flabbergasted if that 7% number wasn’t just a tiny minority or overall cases.

What gets skated over in this is the physical disparity in strength. There was a case in the court of appeal a few years ago where a woman stabbed her husband multiple times.

He had been abusing her for years.

She said she still loves him.

She picked up a weapon (as women do) to even that physical difference. That got her convicted of murder. A man can kill a woman or restrain her with her bare hands.

The women I encountered who killed partners always used a weapon. And it is totally desperate because at that point they intend to kill, but there is no way back.

A man by his physical strength can strangle, beat a women short of killing her with ease. A woman cannot so she panics and reaches for a weapon.

The background to the crime of abuse is usually very different.