Just feeling really angry at all the murder, assault, rape of females that goes on

[BornStroppy]

I told my husband how horrible it is being part of a gender that is constantly attacked, murdered, etc. He had never thought about it. He doesn´t need to. So we have Tia Sharp, the lady who disappeard in London, an old lady in Scotland murdered by son´s friend, another one murdered in a taxi in Birmingham - this is just over two weeks.

I have one son, pregnant again and just hope its another boy to be honest.

Why is it OK? Apart from raising gentlemen, what the hell can we do? As a gender, we give birth, nurture, raise, care for them, and as a gender we are the ones who suffer at their hands.

its so depressing.

did i say violence? i meant the history of war, so ritualised violece i suppose, whoops.

here it is

anyway i remeber one chilling quote from german WW1 soldiers who had been rampaging and were admonished that the war was over - they responded that this couldn't possibly be true, since they themselves were the war

brrr

SGM - but aren't you interested in knowing if your assumptions are sound or not?

The OP said she did not want to have a girl because women are the gender that are more likely to be attacked, murdered etc...

You said yes this is true.

A bunch of people said actually men are statistically more likely to be the victims of violent crime. Some even linked to data. How is that derailing?

Are we all just supposed to nod and say yes you are right women are more likely to be murdered. Why?

I dont think it is minimising VAW to look at the data. Every act of violence against women is one too many. Especially if it treeted with impunity. It doesn't depend on females being the victims of the majority of cases.

Yes it bugs me if feminist arguments are built on flimsy data, when they dont need to be so I do call it out. I don't think this is derailing.

LRD.

The difference is / was that the men were doing the killing. The women and children whitness it ( child soldiers apart ) and suffer the consiquences of a victorious force who go on to take whatever they please which usually includes the rape of women.

It does bring up uncomfortable questions about whether violence is justified or required ( not in the realm of DV of course ).

Would be intersted to hear a more informed view.

No, women have been involved in killing people too, MrGin, that was what I was saying. Not on the same scale, I think, but they did, and so surely we'd expect an equivalent proportion of women (5%? 10%) to be as violent as men, and although some women are violent, I don't think it's as many as that. I may be wrong, of course.

Himalaya, do you have data that comes from another source? Given the drug and gang and gun culture that has blighted US cities and is not replicated elsewhere, it's difficult to see those figures as demonstrating anything that can be applied in a general sense. They reflect a specific set of cultural circumstances. You wouldn't extrapolate an expected number of gun shot wound victims for every hospital in the developed world based on US figures.

the whole idea of women and children as witnesses of war who are only directly affected once an invading army comes is problematic. are there any modern conflicts where fighting takes place, perhaps in a field somewhere, far away from civilian populations?

this wasn't even true in the second world war

Yes, chibi, and to me the idea of women as witnesses or sufferers is troubling.

When wars involve fighting over the bits of land you're living on - which they still do for most of the world, we're odd in that the wars of the last century occurred not in the UK - you do not find that men fight while women cower. Women fight too.

I don't want to minimize warfare. I completely believe that could leave someone, male or female, very traumatized and that might show itself as violence. But I don't see how it could explain the gendering of violence that we see?

Or is it the fact of men being in a formal, trained army that is the issue? I could believe, actually, that the trauma of compartmentalizing things deliberately, of saying 'I'm a solider, what I'm doing is right and noble - and I'm killing people' - that could possibly prompt the violence to spill over into normal life? And that would affect more men than women because women tend not to be in the trained bit of the army.

I'm not sure though. It's still such a short period of time where warfare has worked like this.

LRD

well I think female on male DV accounts for 40% of reported DV cases in the UK, at least according to gov statistics I've seen and in T'Guardian.

But that's not the point I'm making. I'm just putting forward the idea that violence in the home has some root in traumatised soldiers returning to civey st after the horrers of war.

I know that poverty and cramped living spaces play a part too.

Well , honestly, if you think that there were large amounts of women in the trenches or battle fields of the 20thC and before I'm not sure I can take you seriously.

stalingrad

sarajevo

vietnam

baghdad

beirut

aleppo

just to name a few...

also rwanda, congo, sudan

the idea of two rows of men in flashy coats approaching each other from opposite sides of a field far far far away from anybody else...that kind of warfare has not been seen in aaaaages

you might also like to ask yourself how those troops in the way back when days behaved when they commandeered farmhouses and billeted their men there, or what kind of jolly japes they got up to in taverns, or passing through villages

I haven't / don't dispute that women have had to deal with trauma during warfare at all.

I'm positing that going upto someone with a knife and killing them is going to have a different effect on your soul than being the person dealing with the aftermath of a bombing campain.

people dealing with the aftermath of bombing campaign?

novi sad

belgrade

MrGin, women did go up to people and kill them. 'Dealing with the aftermath' can be awful, I agree, and is incredibly traumatic, but women aren't somehow separate from killing. That view only holds from a particular perspective on WWI, really.

Women I went to school with have been killed in action in the war in Iraq.

SGM I'm sure it goes both ways to a greater lesser degree, I've seen it happen. But that's not the point, let's just agree that the small percenage of women in frontline killing relects , at least, the percentage of violent women .

I'm not stating warfare - DV as a fact, I'm just exploring the idea.

there is no frontline in warfare anymore and hasnèt been in a long long time

LRD. I am not saying that women have never in the history of humankind killed people in war. The Russians had a lot of female frontline troops. I'm sure that there are millions of cases in history where a woman had killed someone in war.

But you can't seriously argue that it isn't a small minority, possibly reflecting female violence in the home. Maybe not.

I follow you, MrGin. I do think your idea that the psychological effects of being a trained soldier might indeed be different from those of being anything else during a war, and it's possible to say that without making value judgements about suffering.

I just wanted to stress that women have historically been pretty heavily involved in the killing people bit of war. I'm not sure what counts as a 'small minority', and I expect the numbers vary, but I would be interested to know.

I think where I wonder about this idea, though, is that if the psychological effects of being a trained soldier prompty violence in some unique way that other war trauma doesn't, wouldn't violence ebb and flow along with wars? And what about the very different ways men and women have been trained to fight wars over time? You'd think that might have an effect (or I would).

I do think there is an interesting possible correlation between warfare and violence in non-war contexts, I don't want to dismiss that at all.