Domestic violence: are women guilty more often than we think?
(Update: I horribly bungled the point I was trying to make. See here for a revisit)
It is a common stereotype that men are the batterers, and women the victims.
Now, I’ve always found absolutistic either-or thinking fascinating – and dangerous. Even if, for the sake of argument, men were predominantly more violent than women, so that (thumbsuck) 90% of all domestic abuse were perpetrated by men, that would still mean that 1 in 10 victims of domestic abuse would be men,
Now, to my mind, the hypothetical 90% would be an extremely skewed distribution of violence, and as such would be a very generous admission of the premise that men are more violent than women. But even then: 1 in 10 male victims is far from nothing, and surely warrants a few shelters for battered men here, or magazine articles there?
The 90% was made up, of course.
This is where the black or white thinking comes in: it seems to me that even people who would quite freely grant that the notion of “men as batters” is a simplification, and that male victims do exist – even they seem to speak and act as if for all practical purposes male victims of domestic violence are sufficiently few to ignore for practical purposes.
In Woman Comparable to Men in Domestic Violence: Stereotypes and their Consequences on Brainblogger, Robbert Yourrel presents a telling anecdote:
A volunteer who presents about male victims was presenting to a police department. She had 200 law enforcement personnel present. At the end, she got a police officer to volunteer a call to a shelter, posing as a male victim. He called a hotline for a battered womens program and asked about services for men, explaining that he was experiencing violence at the hands of a female. The hotline worker said, “You should be in jail.”
He then cites a litany of 22 research papers from 1980 – 2007 that either show a more or less equal victim vs. aggressor distribution between men and women for physical and/or emotional abuse – or show a ration that is significantly less skewed than my hypothetical 90/10 ratio above.
It feels to me as if there is a strong pressure to either admit that men can be victims too – in which case one is immediately branded as denying that women are victims at all. Or one can be concerned about the number of female victims of abuse – in which case there is strong political pressure to not just say that there are more female victims, but that there are only female victims.
Just consider the tone of this comment:
This guy Hamel sounds like a male supremacist. His idea of being equal is to cast blame onto women who are the victims 90% of the time. He does bogus studies to attempt to undermine protection for women and children.
Again with the black-and-white thinking. Why on earth would a reasoned discussion that men sometimes are victims too be and attempt to “undermine protection for women and children”? And if women really are the victims 90% of the time, why do the 10% victims not deserve the rare blog post or research paper here and there?
One thing seems clear to me: is such a strident person, who most likely is vastly exaggerating their case, can only dare reach for a number as relatively small as 90% to make the case that “only women are victims, male victims do not exist” – then likely the true ratio is likely closer to 60/40 or 40/60.
And that would be a very different reality than the one we mutually pretend to live in.
Just to be clear: I do not deny that women are victimized. And if they are, I wish them to break free from their abuse. I wish them to have the support they need to do so, and heal from the abuse.
All I want is to go a bit further than that: when those therapists or counsellors have helped the women, I wish the therapists would go grab a beer and shoptalk and compare notes with their buddies – the therapists and counsellors that assist the men.
In the battle of the sexes, why can’t we all just make love, not war?