Misleading campaign trying to con the UK about the horrific level of domestic violence committed by men against women

[BigChocFrenzy]

A dadsnet thread came up last night on active, asking us to sign a petition to the Royal Borough of Greenwich that they change their poster against domestic violence "Dad's have to change."

The thread claims FALSELY that "women perpetrate physical and emotional abuse at comparable rates to men"

This campaign is pushed by the usual suspects of F4J and Torygraph, part of a broader aim to downplay male violence against women. It is conning an increasing number of people, especially those inclined anyway to make excuses for men.

Karen Smith has an excellent blog analysing statistics to show domestic violence is overwhelmingly MALE:
(CPS stats over 5 years) 93.4% of those convicted were MALE.

Female victims are far more likely to suffer violence, to suffer more repeated incidents, to suffer worse injury.
Contrary to popular myth, men are MORE likely to report an incident and to continue with prosecution.

Home Office statistics for England & Wales show on average per year:
. 100 women killed by past or present male partners
. 10 men also killed by MALE partners
. 20 men killed by female partners

So, 20 female killers for every 110 male killers.

See also the very sad Counting Dead Women

Sigh. I'm going to leave this here and go.

No one disbelieved your personal experiences. However, the majority of personal experiences of family violence have been committed by the man in the family and these cumulative numbers are why the poster is as it is. Yes, it doesn't apply to all situations of family violence, but you seemed to want the few examples to trump the many, for unclear reasons.

It's always nice if people learn things, but once out of school, that's down to an individual's motivation and isn't anyone else's responsibility.

I don't think the few examples of DV, I knew of, from my experience , 'trump' the statistics given. However I was pointing out that, because the statistics cited weren't detailed enough to record any other determining factors of DV, apart from the sex of the perpetrator, they did nothing to validate the poster. Yes, the poster might have targeted men as the group which are more likely to commit DV but there was little willingness to discuss whether this campaign adequately references the state of mind of the perpetrators of violence, which frustrated me.

It is exactly the same lack of discussion / lack of willingness to discuss the motivations of the target audience of campaigns which perpetuates gender stereotyping.

Interestingly, it seems that it's mainly men who have been abused who then go on to abuse. Not women. So this campaign pretty much hits target. It shows men that DV is unacceptable something remarkable numbers of them don't truly understand and, if they were abused as children, reminds them of the fear they felt in order to maybe remind them that they are human beings. A win win

Also interestingly it is my understanding (based on a lecture at Westminster uni's domestic abuse course but I didn't really look into it further) that most of these disclousures of experances of abuse tend to come up as self reported in sentencing reports and no where else.

Needs

So what do you think this indicates?

To my mind there are two possibilities. Either the abuse went unreported and the damage to the victims of that abuse was never resolved or that the abuse was fabricated.

^or unrecorded. I have heard of abuse cases, in previous decades, where children were not believed.

I expect it's a mix of both

Ah, we're a clique as well.

You might have learned something had you listened, instead of coming with a fixed idea of who is to blame. Or not to blame, due to excuses.

The state of mind of the perpetrator is immaterial, except as mitigation in his trial. The fact of his violence is the only thing that is material to the crime he is committing.

I'm sorry you don't understand that. It's been explained several times by several people.

Anyway, you win. Having lived this shit, and helped far too many women who are living this shit, I'm not all that sympathetic to the myriad excuses men come up with, so you win, I can't argue with people with your views anymore. The poster is great. I hope it stays. I hope they put it on billboards around the country.

I'm sorry you feel like this. The facts are knowing the state of mind of the perpetrators of violence do matter if we are to prevent further violence in the future. Knowing this can help victims too as it can wrongly stop them blaming themselves or staying around for more of the same treatment.

I do understand the anger you feel towards the perpetrators of domestic violence, the fallout can be huge. But until society faces what might be going wrong and causing the abusers to abuse, as horrible a process this might be, we cannot hope to effectively tackle this.

And I can assure you, that seeking to understand the mindset of those abusers does not mean a person has to lose sight of how dysfunctional their thinking and behaviour is.

^ blaming themselves wrongly. Typo.

Men abuse women because they choose to do so. And those choices are backed up by thousands of years of oppression of women. It's only been a relatively short period of time in Western history that women have not been the property of men. The attitudes that flow from that history are still very much with us. And in many parts of the world, what for us is history is current reality for most women.

I'm really impressed by the success the mra tendency have had in convincing people that men who abuse are victims, women abuse as much as men and if you use a class argument (such as violence is perpetrated by men against women), you're basically saying your lovely old dad is a massive psychopath. And who wants to say that? So don't use 'men' as a class descriptor. Violence is just perpetrated by people in general who don't have a single relevant factor in common.

As a past victim of emotional / domestic 'abuse', the main thing that stops you from perpetrating it with your own kids is simply choosing not to. Having the support to work through your own motivations and problems is nice, but secondary. You simply have to draw a line and say 'no more'. That's what the poster is doing and I really can't see a problem with that.

It's a similar thing to alcoholics and drug addictions: you can't work through the problems until you have chosen to do so. The poster encourages that by removing the vestiges of excuses.

I recently went on a course on violence threat assessment run by two prominent experts in the field. About half way through some of us became a bit uncomfortable that all the examples were men. So we raised it as a concern. The experts told us that all the examples were men simply because there were very few incidences when the threat was from a woman. They were of course also keen to say that that didn't mean that women shouldn't be considered as potential threats, but in practice those that commit violence (this was in a post secondary educational setting) were almost all male. Later we did have an example about a woman (stalking related) but it was one out of about twenty case studies used.

Interestingly it was the women who felt uncomfortable, not the men. They all accepted the idea that men were the main threat without concern that that might mean people thought they were likely themselves to become a threat. Most people who commit violent acts are men =/= all men are violent.

Mental health and substance misuse were major risk factors in the assessment tools, but attitudes and behaviours were also key. This campaign targets attitudes and behaviours. If it changes the view that hitting your wife/girlfriend/child is normal acceptable behaviour when you get a bit pissed off/drunk then that s a very big win.

Again, you were concerned because of the success of the mras in making it clear that naming the problem is man hating - something that women must avoid having been socialised to take care of men's feelings. This care is, of course, underpinned by the threat of violence.

"(CPS stats over 5 years) 93.4% of those convicted were MALE."

That's because the chance of a female abuser being convicted (or even arrested) is almost zero, especially if she is white.

What if she's pretty? One of your chums believes that pretty women commit murder with impunity and regularity. He couldn't say where the bodies were but other than that, it was pretty convincing .

Of course, his argument that this means that mad feminazis are in charge of everything hit a bit of a bump when he had to explain why women were wommanning the courts, police and judicial systems and were refusing to convict pretty women instead of hunky men, but thankfully he didn't notice and is still fully convinced that murderous women rule the world.

abbie, I thought we'd hidden the bodies in our cleavages?

I've hidden them in my top secret lady place.

That is one possibility, Buffy.

However if they do have genuine difficulties, this course of action might just escalate conflict, as with giving orders to children with Pathological Demand Avoidance and continually punishing them, because they fail to do as they are told, does not work in education - as frustrating as this might be.

There are so many possibilities as to what is happening. This is why I thought the poster campaign just seemed a little to simplistic. There are people, who know they have problems with their mental health or substance abuse, who are seeking help but not getting it. Or parents desperately seeking help for their young children's behaviour. I guess this is what frustrates me concerning poster campaigns that seem to shout at problems rather than solve them.

What if the people who drink drive grew up in an alcoholic household?

Posters are part of the story - of course there should be freedom programmes and counselling for abused children etc as well.

But two women a week are killed by partners or ex partners, and there was usually a cycle of abuse leading up to that. If this poster has any positive impact on that, well and good.

The etiology is that it is learned behavior, supported by societal attitudes. Social marketing campaigns are just one of many ways in which domestic violence activists try to address this causation. They know that such campaigns are not enough, but campaigns are part of the overall approach alongside many other initiatives, like promoting rigorous law enforcement.