I'm fucking sick of male violence

[QuentinSummers]

This poor little boy, saying sorry and still getting beaten to death
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-40522224
And we will have to all act like this is a random piece of bad luck as opposed to some absolute evil fucking man who's been taught by society that it's ok to use your physical strength to assert dominance over others.
Stop the world, I want to get off.

I don't agree with the advice btw but it's the same argument- how can women change their behaviour to protect themselves from male violence? I'm a bit tired of hearing it as the main solution.

How can children protect themselves from male violence? At what point do we look at the subject rather than the object?

I think a massive issue is the lack of strong laws to protect us. Currently domestic violence and child abuse are not taken seriously enough and I think that's partly due to severely underfunding police, prisons and social services.

It isn't just men though. There is a trial taking place as we speak about a case near me where the mother and her bf are accused of killing a 4 month old baby that had drugs found in its system including cocaine 😔 It's heartbreaking to read stories like these and it's made so much worse when there are people out there who desperately want a child

I dunno, it's a particular punch in the gut reading that when it's a child around your child's age. That little boy was so so beautiful. This is probably counter productive, and I don't feel this way very often, but I would have been inclined to have been very violent myself if I'd walked past that scene.

Reading around this tragedy it seems the murderer had form, so could there not be some kind of register? Any violence towards women and children, and you go on a list with a legal requirement to inform any new partner that you are on it? As well as an online database people can look up?

I'm at a bit of a loss really, it's been running through my head all day.

Violence can never be fully prevented. Men are biologically stronger than women and no matter what preventative measures taken, no matter the amount of public awareness, no matter the amount of education, some men will inevitably act violent in certain circumstances.

There reaches a point that the only way to prevent male violence is to have pre-crime, or thought crime. How can you prevent a man that appears non violent for his whole life and then has one flip out and kills someone. What can actually be done to stop that?

I don't agree with the advice btw but it's the same argument- how can women change their behaviour to protect themselves from male violence? I'm a bit tired of hearing it as the main solution.

I'm not at all comfortable with that analysis in terms of its practical application.

Speaking as a survivor of severe DV who had a small child at the time, I got us out and I made our lives safer. I don't like that framed as a concession or a capitulation. It was a powerful decision. It felt like powerful female action, like powerful, defiant mothering.

Maybe instead of worrying about the small number of women that commit violent crime or the small amount of men with no history of violence flipping out we could look at the large number of men who do have a previous history of violence and do something about them first?

A legal requirement to inform new partners of a history of dv and ss if you start a relationship with someone with dc?

Long prison sentences for dv and child abuse? People made examples of rather than slaps on the wrist?

Media guidelines as how dv and child abuse are reported, less he's a nice bloke normally and more his wife reported him several times for dv.

Culturally challenging the idea that any relationship is better than none, that relationships should be worked at and that inadequate men deserve chances?

That's a false equivalency, in this case the murderer had past behaviour. It's not as if he'd had a lifetime of good behaviour and then all of a sudden why mental. Yes there will always be edge cases that come out of nowhere, but I don't think this is one of them, so therefore something could have been done that wasn't.

I can't read the article, even the headlines are so heartbreaking

Why isn't male violence talked about more? Because women don't have a loud enough voice (when we raise these concerns we get dismissed as shrill and hysterical), and men either don't recognise the concern or think it's just something that Other Men do

Try it this way around;

Men have for centuries had the power (economic, social, physical) to arrange their domestic lives, their homes and their families for their convenience, comfort and preference. They haven't been noticeably timid or apologetic about it. They've just carried on and arranged things to suit themselves (and that includes family law until quite recently).

I don't see why women exercising the same agency, in the face of a threat or more generally, should be diminished and presented as an act of weakness.

Serf perhaps it's that what works on an individual level doesn't always translate to a wider context? I'm very glad for you that you left an abusive relationship and I can see that this will have been empowering and validating. Of course women should be empowered to leave abusive relationships and education on red flags is a good way to hopefully stop the relationship from starting. But men will still be violent, and what happens to that? Does he find someone more vulnerable for a relationship (age, learning difficulties, asylum seeker, addict) or does the violence spill out into the community (rape, assault, sexual assault)? I don't know, I just don't think if women are strong and reject these men then they'll just decide to not be abusive and violent or just slink away and leave us alone.

Hmm. I'm thinking this through as I'm posting, I must admit.

What I do know is that;

1. When I used to deliver the freedom project , a lot of women attending clearly had very low self esteem and the basic elements that caused "penny drop" moments were often heartbreaking.

2. The stigmatisation of single mothers by society for centuries must feed into these cases to an extent. I know plenty of educated MC divorced mothers who have spoken of feeing lesser, heading a one parent family.

3. Ditto gendered economic structures (pay gap, difficulty of securing CM, welfare state costs etc). Public policy pushes women into pairing up.

Maybe we need a Mumsnet campaign to educate the violence out of men?

Make it socially unacceptable?

Count the violence here?

We can teach our children how to grow into considerate men but we are fighting a wave of "justifiable" violence on tv, in the press, games etc, how does that work?

Perhaps all children should be given martial arts training where one of the most important lessons is self control?

But men will still be violent, and what happens to that? Does he find someone more vulnerable for a relationship (age, learning difficulties, asylum seeker, addict) or does the violence spill out into the community (rape, assault, sexual assault)? I don't know, I just don't think if women are strong and reject these men then they'll just decide to not be abusive and violent or just slink away and leave us alone.

Maybe they'll go and beat each other up?

It's obviously difficult but if we can't talk men out of being violent and we can't physically stop them from being violent (the "supply side" of violence as it were) then surely addressing their access and opportunities to commit violence is valid too?

Who knows (I admit I don't) maybe male on female violence can be reduced in the same way drunk driving has, by attempting society-wife attitudinal change? If so, that has to include women.

Juicy - it would be more effective if men educated the violence out of men, surely? Like Joe Biden is trying to do for locker room talk / consent / sexual assault at college

For example, the NFL has a pretty sordid history of players being involved in domestic violence. In 2014 they launched a campaign that involved everyone who works for the NFL and targetted outreach for players, in some cases led by ex-players who had themselves committed domestic violence in the past.

I think the campaign has stagnated a little, but it's still a model worth looking at. Can you imagine if the FA had done something similar, rather than brushing aside the things that players like Stan Collymore and Paul Gascoigne did (never mind the more recent rape cases)? Surely that's got to have more impact with the target audience than anything that MN can come up with?

Speaking as a survivor of severe DV who had a small child at the time, I got us out and I made our lives safer

That's great, and so did I, and so did my mother.

Unfortunately simply the act of leaving does NOT guarantee your safety, that's the point I'm getting at. DV does not end when the woman leaves. He either continues abusing her or he moves on to the next woman, or to his children.

Unfortunately simply the act of leaving does NOT guarantee your safety, that's the point I'm getting at. DV does not end when the woman leaves. He either continues abusing her or he moves on to the next woman, or to his children.

No, I know and police can still be breathtakingly useless. But in the simplest terms, isn't reducing risk, reducing male access to victims, still a huge step forward?

I think drink driving from a societal point of view is a good analogy. I do know a surprising amount of people though that still feel ok with pushing the boundary of the drink drive limit.

I think for me, it's the jumping to what women can do as the first action that frustrates me. Most women I know spend a lot of their lives appeasing others because they've been taught to and they feel it keeps them safe and I'd put myself in that category too. Learning assertiveness, self esteem and being ok on your own are not bad things to learn, I'd just like equivalent work on the side of men too

Sadly you cannot guarantee the police will protect you, it's a lottery

Of course you can't. Barring putting a police officer in every single household on a 24/7 Rota how can that be achieved?

But in the simplest terms, isn't reducing risk, reducing male access to victims, still a huge step forward?

It's a good thing for sure, the problem is it's very difficult to tackle while society overall is still permissive of violent men. Heck, it can't even bring itself to admit the problem is men!!

I don't think, en masse, men will ever concede us anything @HandbagKrabby

We have to be unapologetic about seizing our space and our choices.

See this thread is now going exactly the way that illustrates why I'm so angry
"Women do it too"
"It can come out of nowhere"
"Men will still be violent and it could spill out into the community" ( and what the fuck does that mean anyway? How much more in the community can you get than a 5 year old being beaten to death in a play park?)
I'm so fed up with society just shrugging it's shoulders while women and children die like this

freddy

Well to take the case of Robert Trigg for example, they could have prevented him from killing his second victim had they bothered to investigate the murder of his first properly.

I don't know why people get so defensive of the police. They do great work in many areas, and I certainly know some officers who are excellent advocates for female victims of DV. Unfortunately this is nowhere near as widespread as it needs to be, and yet again the reason for that comes down to the fact society as a whole refuses to see male violence as an issue of importance.

I haven't just pulled that from thin air. That is the case.

Male violence as a concept is recognised by feminists everywhere. We see the common denominator as women being considered inferior because it correlates with all other aspects of feminism - knowing that women are second class and men are entitled.

When other people look at male violence the concept is undermined. Because they see the killing of a child as having a different motivation to the killing of a girlfriend. Domestic violence as being different to a punch-up in the pub. Many people have a sneaking sympathy for a man who beats up a 'rival', for instance. Terrorism is never seen as having any relationship to a football match brawl.

So the first thing is to get an understanding that all these threads have the common denominator of 'violence committed by men'.

I can very easily see an advertising campaign.

A man pictured behind bars. Set back, his visiting wife with a black eye, her arm around their son. The son is staring at his father, the woman is glancing at her son. The caption reads 'Boys will be boys'.

Furchester indeed. Or in the cases of Shana Grice and Alice Ruggles (to name but two recent horrific cases) they could have taken the reports from the women seriously. Both reported their ex-boyfriends for harassment, stalking etc and were palmed off (I think in the case of Shana Grice she was even warned for wasting police time and for Alice Ruggles she was asked what she wanted the police to do about it the second occasion she reported an offence). It's appalling the police forces in each of these cases (and many more) were oblivious to the signs of an abusive man and didn't seem bothered.