The lowdown on domestic violence against men

There is an area of the media that complexly lacks any semblance of fairness, or journalistic investigation and credibility. And that area is in how we report domestic violence. The general image we receive is of the nasty man hitting his poor little wife.

I think that Neil Lyndon said it quite succinctly in his book “no more sex war”: [1]

Reeling home with a head full of losses and a gut full of bitter and chips, he clamps his teeth into the cartroid artery of the starving Rottweiler before he rips the rags from the back of the little woman, belabours her with the dogs studded leash and takes his prick to the anuses of his screaming children.

We do not know of this horror on the terms of personal acquaintance. He is not one of us; but we have all agreed that he is out there somewhere and that he is the All-Man.

This is the general image of the modern abusive man.

And I’m not denying that men like this can exist. This is the crux of my whole attitude towards domestic violence and it is an irrefutable position. It is that, even if only 2% of domestic violence victims were men – we would still owe these men the same protections that the government offers to women. We don’t, in this society say that we are going to exclude groups based upon the degree of their involvement in an issue, we don’t say that because a certain minority is only 10% of the population that they somehow get less rights. No, they have equal rights. This is the most sensible approach to take with all problems.

Now it’s much more than 2%, in fact we don’t have a good understanding of the real number because we don’t even try to measure it. Our domestic violence policy is driven by feminists who deny that women can falsely accuse or who downplay the fact that it can happen to men. There is a good website called DV stats.com which contains a variety of studies but a realistic treatment in the media is lacking.

This argument is NOT about stats, which is why I am not presenting any. I don’t want to hear, “well thousands of woman are abused every year” because this argument is not about repealing the protection they get, rather it is about making it fair and equal.

But when we break from our common conceptions we may be surprised. For example, this is an article from the BBC. [2]

Survey finds male abuse approval

More than half of women questioned at a Glasgow university said they approved of wives hitting their husbands.

The Glasgow Caledonian students were among 6,500 women surveyed from 36 universities for an international study into attitudes on domestic violence.

Of the 200 women, 60% said it was acceptable for women to hit their husbands while 35% admitted assaulting their partner.

A total of 8% admitted injuring them - the highest rate in the study.

The injured men suffered bruises, cuts or broken bones.

Among European students, only English women were more likely to have carried out assaults, with 41% admitting that they had punched or kicked their partners.

However those inflicting injury was less than in Scotland, at 5%. Just under a quarter of those in Scotland admitted there were occasions when it would be acceptable for a husband to slap his wife.

The article goes on, I invite you to read the whole thing linked from my page. If this indicates anything, it is that we should be addressing how we look at this subject in the media. If those amounts of women think that hitting their partners is acceptable then the onus has been on one side for too long.

And we should stop listening to the feminists telling us what these figures are, they are intellectually computed by their belief system. We don’t go by the sole word of the BNP when talking about immigration or by the words of creationists on the status of science education in America, we need to be unbiased when talking about these issues.

Is this argument only about the media. No. It is also about the laws, when I have to listen to female politicians stating that a new law is to aid the “women and children” of domestic violence, I get incensed by this. They’re called women’s shelters for a reason. And these shelters are also funded by the government which, from a layman’s perspective seems to be an anti-constitutional act.

And where was the law when singer Amy Winehouse [3] admitted to beating up her husband. Maybe the reaction of the police was the same as the reaction of a policeman I saw on a program when a man told him that his wife beat him up – he laughed and snorted. We are so off center as a society that it sickens me. She faced no retaliation for that comment and it would probably be fair to say that she expected none.

How about this article from the Daily mail [4] that reproduces a number of standard nonsensical statements about DV against women. The level of the comments that the women featured in this article make demonstrate how modern women – maybe the kind of women in that Scottish survey, think about the subject.

Not one mention of man, it’s women, women, women. And quite frankly I am insulted as a man by the idea that any pain my gender goes through is lesser when compared with women. They say “women and children first”, our attitude to men is that they are dispensable, this is offensive. We should expect more from the 21st century.