Domestic Violence - Far from gender neutral

[scallopsrgreat]

Domestic abuse could not be further from gender neutral. Wake up Britain

Yep so those MRAs are gaslighting us. Just in case you had any doubt.

I've just skim read it and it doesn't seem to link to the research which I'd be interested to read.

"This is due to a 'cap' on the number of crimes recorded, which stops counting after five repeat incidents against one victim. When this cap is removed, she said, violence against women by intimate partners rises by 70 per cent and violence against women by acquaintances by 100 per cent. It particularly affects those women who know, or even live with, the perpetrator. " Pretty shocking.

"...the Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW) doesn't account for a significant proportion of attacks on women (and that nearly half of all violent crime is committed against women)."

It also links to another article about the same thing: Million violent crimes a year 'cut out' of official figures

None of this can offset the reality that, if budgets are limited and resources are disproportionately allocated between two issues, the allocation is a clear 'target' to look at, just as the NHS is doing every day when choosing between oncology/cardiology/physiotherapy/obstetrics etc.

Bear, I don't want to speak for the OP, but the post referenced the way many men have tried to change the perception of domestic violence to be an issue that affects men and women in equally high numbers. I took that posting the article was in response to the wider discussion being purposefully derailed. There is a very vocal group of people who believe that we now live in a society that benefits women disproportionately, and they actively try to derail any conversation about issues that affect women.

The article mentions that the statistics often used are that domestic violence affects 1 in 4 women, and 1 in 6 men. But 1 incidence is counted the same as multiple incidences in that statistic, does not mention the severity of the violence, and the sex of the perpetrator is not included. How many men are victims of domestic violence perpetrated by a female partner, as opposed to a male partner for example?

Of course women commit violence against men, and men who experience violence should be protected, but the article isn't calling for money to be stripped from men's resources and moved to women's - it's saying that the 1 in 4/1in 6 statistic

'Prefaces many of the tender specifications drawn up by local authorities. For example: documents which then call for a "gender-neutral approach", and in some cases even for the allocation of resources for abuse victims to move towards a ratio where 40 per cent of provision is set aside for men - meaning an even greater loss of support for women than is happening anyway as a result of "austerity".'

As far as I can see it's an attempt to halt the transfer of funding from women's services to men's services - the opposite of what you're saying is being advocated.

I'm reminded of the Live Aid incident Where, I think, Bob Dylan suggested on stage that some of the money raised should go to American farmers. Now To be fair, they were going through a recession at the time and many were going under, but the the event was to raise money for people who were dying. The sheer inability to appreciate the difference in scale between bankruptcy and starvation was simply staggeringly obvious to most people outside the USA though it did gain quite a bit of traction inside. To their credit, Willie Nelson and others did set up a Farm Aid benefit later, but not before ther was quite a movement to divert cash from starving and dying Ethiopians to first world farmers.

Not that this is in any way analogous to domestic violence funding........

I'm amazed that even the (now incorrect) figures of 60% female victims and 40% male victims that have influenced government and support agency attitudes to domestic violence in recent years, were ever seen as gender-neutral. In other words, even when the proportion of female victims was believed to be "only" 50% higher than male victims, domestic violence has still come to be seen as gender-neutral. (From a social policy viewpoint, I'd describe domestic violence as gender-neutral only if it was 50-50 in numbers of female and male victims, and injuries inflicted were also of equal severity).

This week's revelations about under-recording of domestic violence against women suggest it is even less gender-neutral than it was thought to have been, but some people are still resisting the idea that domestic violence is gendered, not gender-neutral (at a society-wide level).

How gendered does domestic violence have to be before it's accepted as gendered? Perhaps 95 female to 5 male, 99 female to 1 male, 100 female to 0 male? For me, even 60-40 makes domestic violence gendered.

In 2014, 8.8% more girls than boys achieved GCSE C-grade passes. This gap has led to consternation that boys are being failed by a supposedly gendered education system.

But, when there are (at least) 50% more female victims than male victims of domestic violence, somehow domestic violence is supposedly "gender-neutral".

The gap in female to male domestic violence victim numbers is at least 20% (with at least 50% more female victims).

But of course boys are being failed if girls are doing better. Everyone knows that possession of a Y chromosome increases your IQ by at least 50% which makes it fine when boys are doing better but not if girls are because they should be doing at least 33% worse.

Actually, the more I think about it the more angry I am about the way the figures have been complied in the past. So after 5 incidents any further attacks didn't count as crimes? So the 6th, 7th, 8th violent attack aren't as bad as the 1st, 2nd and 3rd?! Just goes to show that DV isn't considered a proper crime.

When I was growing up, bus were outperforming girls in school, especially in STEM subjects. This was accepted as the natural order.

When it flips and girls start outperforming boys, we are "failing boys" apparently.

My reading of the article was that there is currently a move amongst local authorities to relocate funding for domestic violence services from women's provision, to men's provision. This is because of a flawed process of information gathering, and if we examine it we find that many incidents against women are discounted. So the statistic that most of the plans are based on is false, meaning we shouldn't continue with plans to take from women's provision to give to men's provision.

This seems to have been interpreted as saying we should take from men's provision to give to women's provision. If you have been particularly affected by domestic violence against men, or if it is just an issue that you feel strongly about, I can understand that you don't want those services to suffer. I would imagine that no-one who has commented wants those services to suffer, as I think Yonic has said. The subheader is provocative and in the style to be expected from the Telegraph.

Local authorities are saying the spilt of incidents is 60/40 and reallocating money based on certain statistics, and the author of the article is saying it's not 60/40, the info is flawed so don't be so hasty. This is not women saying that money for women's services should be taken from men's services because men's services are not important.

Apologies for the long post, but I just want to be very clear about what I think the position of the article is, and what people posting here have taken from it. This is because of what I mean by derailing, as I don't think the OP was about the need to take money from men's services to give to women's services, but we have spent a lot of time discussing this. This happens frequently in conversations about women's issues and I would hope that men who are genuinely interested in these issues are able to understand the frustration when we say 'x is a thing that affects women' we then spend the majority of the discussion defending against criticisms that we don't accept that there are cases where it happens to men, or that something else negative happens to men, or that we're in some way negatively affecting men by aiming to remove an obstacle faced by women.

Hermione , exactly , the double standard makes me very angry.

It's always makes me think of the studies that concluded that when in a mixed conversation if women talk more than 25% of the time they are seen as dominating the discussion.

I've never heard a woman suggest that men shouldn't have male only discussions about men's issues. As was mentioned earlier, women are happy to support Movember for example, and are generally positive about the idea that it encourages men to bring health issues to the fore so they're not ignored/something that can't be talked about. I don't think anyone has said they even want to exclude men from this discussion, they just don't want to have to change the conversation to one on someone else's terms.

Yes so there is 70% more violence against women than previously thought. And that is taken only from police recorded figures.
Well I went to the police recently about violence against me by my H, and one of the first things they said to me was a women generally experiences 35 incidents before she even phones the police. So add that into the total and multiply it up to see how bad it is.

Also, I was interested to read it was a woman who uncovered the findings.

I think the fact it was a woman highlights why we need more women on top positions. who originally capped the number of attacks at 5 and why? Was it a convenient admin decision?

In the book 'why women don't ask' they give an example that women were kept out of science studies on some kind of drug, as the scientists knew, including them skewed the results. When a female scientist was in charge, she looked at why the women tests had skewed results, and realised for years women had been treated with a drug that didn't suit them

Mide, the people killed by their partners will very frequently have suffered previous DV from them. So yes, the frequency of death is a proxy for the frequency of serious abuse.

That’s roughly what I think yonic. The ratio of deaths at the hands of an intimate partner vary nation to nation. In some parts of the world its a horror story for women, as you can imagine. In the english speaking western world who strikes the first blow is gender neutral but who ultimately sends their partner to the grave is still heavily weighted against women. Based off what I can locate if you reduce it to the level of deaths (which is very grim but since domestic violence is very much a hidden crime you could argue it will often take a corpse to reveal it) men make up no more than 25% of intimate partner homicides. Feminism focuses on domestic violence framed in terms of intimate partner violence subjected on women. Domestic violence resulting in death in terms of wider family relationships ends up with a 40:60 male-female split because male on male violence moves it there. The article this thread is based around favours working out statistics on a per incident basis, so for the articles sake if Mz X were the victim of 100 incidents it would equal 10 men being the victim of 10 incidents. But if people want to spin domestic violence statistics that way it would probably overwhelm even the ratio of male intimate partner homicides, since you can only die once. Overall if I apportioned $, based off what I can find, I think a 40:60 split in funding is too generous to men but 20:80 inadequate.

Also, probably much like dancingbear, I think the overall social attitude of violence on men at the hands of women is in need of an an update. if a wife posts online about feeling sorry she hit her spouse she gets manifest different responses than if a husband posts the same regret about hitting his in male forums. I have seen victim blamers, minimisers and perpetrator apologists emerge openly to comfort the abusive wife like it was still the 1950s. The equivalent does not happen in male social forums, the abusive guy is, at best, welcomed in terms of coming forward and counselled to seek therapy for anger management. Male on female violence is a social tragedy, female on male violence seems only somewhat further along than social entertainment. Men in particular need to give up the 'I/he should never feel abused/threatened by a woman because its unmanly'.

"In the english speaking western world who strikes the first blow is gender neutral "

This article is about victims, not perpetrators. We do not know the sex of the perpetrators. Do you have stats that perpetrators are 50:50 male:female?

Do you have stats that perpetrators are 50:50 male:female?

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1854883/

Stats are all over the place depending on the report, which is why I just looked at homicides. That particular report I linked says (short version) that violence is 50% reciprocal but for the remainder 50% women are more likely to initiate violence than men. Another report says 50% reciprocal but women initiate in only one third of the remaining 50%. Probably varies according to where the data is collected more than anything. In parts of the US violence enacted by women has increased two and a half fold per capita since the 1980's but the majority of female violence is enacted on other women, not men.

Let's talk about homicides shall we? Here's some more figures for you Dadwashere. Easier to read too.
Not exactly gender neutral.

It is interesting that in that report you linked the reciprocation is as reported by the partner.

"In analyses of reports of violence frequency and injury occurrence, 2 clear findings emerged. First, perpetrators who were men were more likely to inflict an injury on a partner than were those who were women, regardless of reciprocity "

"A second measurement issue pertains to the scope of violence measures. The 3 questions included in the Add Health study do not capture all forms of violence that occur between relationship partners, including many of the more severe forms of partner violence on the Conflict Tactics Scale (e.g., used a knife or gun, choked, or burned). Questions about emotional, verbal, psychological, or sexual aggression were also not included. Similarly, only a single item assessed injury to victims and it focused on injury frequency and excluded injury severity and whether medical attention was needed or sought. Thus, it is unclear whether the data presented here would be similar had the violence and injury assessment been more thorough or if different forms of violence had been measured and analyzed separately. Perhaps more important than the limited measures of violence and injury is the fact that no data were collected about the causes or function of violence. Such data are needed to understand why relationships with reciprocal violence are more violent and more likely to result in injury. We speculated that retaliation may lead to escalating violence and injury, but data are needed to examine this hypothesis. Future studies should focus on the causes and context of reciprocal and nonreciprocal IPV.

The article contradicts itself. Did anyone spot this:

"and that nearly half of all violent crime is committed against women"

That means men are the victims of over half of all violent crime.

And who are the perpetrators of those crimes, EE?

And as men are half the population, what's your shock factor, exactly?

"And who are the perpetrators of those crimes"

That's not the point of the article. The article is talking about the gender of victims, and while it keeps trying to make out women are the majority of victims it makes a mistake by revealing just over half of victims are male.

Article is debunked. Victims of domestic violence are more-or-less equally men and women.

And look at the way the author tries to trivialise and down-play violence against men. What a feminist.

And also a cheap propaganda tactic to use a stock image posed by actors of a man with a clenched fist standing over a woman on the floor.

DV is a gendered issue because it relies on the exploitation of an imbalance of power (not usually/only physical power). In society as it is currently structured that imbalance generally benefits men at the expense of women, hence why the perpetrators are more often male and the survivors and victims more often female.

If it is portrayed incorrectly as a gender neutral issue that hides the underlying societal cause of DV and what it is that keeps the victims of DV from escaping.

Making it about funding, addresses the symptom not the cause.

It is the underlying imbalance within domestic relationships and the roles that are pushed on to both genders but particularly women that need to be addressed.