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.

I shall take your word for it Stewie. But I still think young men are quite vulnerable. A lot of shootings and gang attacks and killings are younger men.

That's true, vivienne - goes back to the point about violence by men affecting other men. There's no good side to any of this.

LRD in answer to your question....

DV of 213000 and 88000 over a lifetime (assume 8o years is a lifetime) is about 2500 and 1100 per annum respectively

Set that against a total of 880,000 violence crimes per year (and i think we can safely assume the majority are against men) you can see it pales into insignificance. In fact even 50,000 sexual violence crimes are only about 6% of the number of violent crimes.

And you can read stats after stats and this is the basic picture

This sort of thread illustrates a basic human problem, we over-accentuate the more scary risks we feel ourselves under to a huge degree, and massively under-estimate more mainstream risk

Sorry, I maybe wasn't clear: part of my problem is that citing from wiki is not a good idea, because (as quoted), it tends to be full of 'citation needed' annotations and, if references are there, you might as well look at those.

I don't think any violence ever 'pales into insignificance', and I still do not really understand (sorry, everyone) why people are coming up with different views on the stats. Are there genuinely different statistics circulating? Or are we just all looking at different things or evaulating the stats differently?

Does that make sense?

SGM - the US department of justice stats I linked to do include sexualised violence and domestic violence.

Whiskey4tea - "Pointing out how women are abused at the hands of men is not making them victims or victimising them" ... No indeed, but the OP saying she would like her child to be a boy because girls and women are in more danger of violence is not based on fact and so is victimising women.

That most violence is committed by men is undeniable and important for both society and parents to face up to. But it is just not true (at least as far as any statistics I have seen) that women are the predominant victims.

Thing is though, sexual violence is so gendered. Not only are the vast majority of perpetrators male, but the vast majority of victims are female. It's hard not to feel angry about that and frankly I don't think we should try.

Men are mostly at risk from stranger violence, women who are violently attacked are usually the victims of people they know.

However, let's not all hang ourselves just yet. Let's not forget that actually the present day UK is about the best place it is to be a woman so far. It's not perfect; male violence against women still occurs but we have economic independence, full human status, reproductive rights, we do not have to be owned by a man or answerable to one, we can vote, work, own money etc.

I think I remeber hearing/reading the same thing, viv - WRT men being statistically more likely to be victims of violence.

Also, IIRC, missing persons are more often male than female, and missing children are more often boys than girls. But for some reason this doesn't get reported as often or as widely as incidents of missing girls and women do.

And then, of course, WRT press reporting, there's 'Missing White Woman' 'syndrome'...

This thread have a serious case of "what about the men"

Just because men are violent to other men doesn't mean men's violence against women isn't a terrible problem. Yes even in good ol UK. It's still a patriarchal country with an alarming amount of violent and misogynist men.
Just read the news paper any day. I can't stick my head in the sand, nothing good comes out of it. Things must be done.

ISWYM that violence against men doesn't negate the horror of violence against women, Card, but WRT 'just read the papers'... why is it that missing girls and women are considered more 'newsworthy' than missing boys and men? (I ask that as a genuine question, BTW.)

That's a good thought, SGB.

Looking over at the thread about the Saudi olympians ... we could have it much worse.

mango - now I wonder if that is to do with the manipulation of fear, as someone was saying upthread? That as a society we are scared of the idea of a missing woman or girl more because we think worse things might happen to women who are lost/alone?

Probably is, LRD - but it's possible that sadly this is about the manipulation of fear, as you say, and not about real dangers. Actually, is there any reason to believe that what might happen to missing men and boys would be any worse than what might happen to women and girls?

Of course there are different ways to interpret why there's apparently a tradition of encouraging us to fear more for our daughters than our sons.

Oh dear - meant to say: any reason that what might happen to women and girls would be any worse than what might happen to men and boys.

Dear oh dear.

Interested to hear what posters think about this, though....

Gosh, I don't know how to even think about evaluating 'worse'. I think pretty awful things can happen to boys and men who go missing, can't they? I've always lived in areas with high homeless populations and, well, freezing to death, getting run over, getting killed for tiny amounts of money, dying of alcoholism or bad drugs, these things all happen pretty often and they almost never make the papers. And they must be somebody's sons and daughters. I don't know how much homelessness is gendered overall, but the charity at my church claims there are far more men than women in our area on the streets.

Sorry if I am being 'what about the menz' but it seems to me it's the flip side of the same coin, when people assume a young lad is somehow more capable and protected than a young woman the same age, and they are both vulnerable if they go missing.

As the mother of boys I worry - they are statistically far more likely to be the victims of violence.

Terrible things happen to boys too - it just so happens that the latest one in the news is a girl.

cardgames - I really dont think it is a case of "what about the men?" to question the belief that women are more likely to be the victim of of violent crime than men. It is a case of "what does the data say".

The OP said she would rather have a boy, because girls are more likely to be assaulted, murdered etc... All the data i have seen says that isnt true.

Agree, LRD - but I think there's an assumption that women and girls will almost certainly be targetted victims of predators whereas boys and men will just be 'out there on their own'.

For whatever reason, there's traditionally been an assumption that women and girls are more liley to be targetted by stranger-predators than boys and men will be. I think I remember hearing that in fact, statistically, men and boys are more likely to be the victims of 'stranger' violence - (as viv and solid have said upthread. And IME - or at least from remembering experiences and anecdotes of friends and acquaintances - this seems to be the case).

I'm interested in posters opinions about what might be the dynamics behind this, IYSWIM?

Personal experience tells me that boys are more likely to be victims and the data certainly backs it up.

I think it's about othering violence done to women.

We like to think that women (who're pure and lovely and need protecting, of course) only get harmed by people outside the community. That way, we don't need to take responsibility.

It's like the way when girls/women do go missing, the media likes to identify a 'loner', some kind of social outcast, to pin the blame on, if they possibly can.

"The OP said she would rather have a boy, because girls are more likely to be assaulted, murdered etc... All the data i have seen says that isnt true. "

OK. Yes being a boy will def not save your child from violence. (the risk of experiencing sexual violence is much smaller though)
I just came to the thread sick and sad of all horrible shit men keep doing to women and children. It's in the news all the time like some normal background noise, people hardly raise an eyebrow...it wears one down.

Interesting points about stranger violence. I have also heard that the ones most in danger of it are young men. Girls and women however are most likely to be harmed by someone they know :(

Boys may also be less likely to tell because 'they should be tough and not let it happen'.

I agree that as far as we know women and girls are much more likely to be victims of sexual violence and DV/violence from someone already known.
But here's a thought: male rape was (so I'm told) virtually unheard of until comparitively recently, as were sexual assaults on men.
Could it be that in fact men are not so much less vulnerable to male violence than women are, but that this remains a sort of 'last taboo'?
I ask this hypothetically, and not as a 'what about the menz' red herring, BTW. It's just a question that occurs to me from time to time.

x-post with exotic. That was more or less what I was trying to say. exoctic put it a lot more succinctly and straightforwardly.