Revisiting my post on male and female abuse
Well, I (rightly) got some flak for my previous post Domestic violence: are women guilty more often than we think? That forces me to try and disentangle what I really wanted to say – always a good thing.
Although the particular article that prompted me to write was about domestic abuse, domestic abuse was not the issue I wanted to write about – the article merely tickled other broader concerns that have been gnawing at me for years. This caused me to be much more casual about conflating physical, psychological and other abusive behaviours than I should have been.
Someone with an intense concern about physical abuse would see physical abuse being mentioned, assume my post was all about physical abuse – and naturally so, since we all read our own fears and hopes and issues into the world around us. From that perspective I would seem distressingly dishonest for suggesting that women are physically as violent as men are – and do so by making reference to psychological aggression.
And since my post was jumbled enough to permit that kind of misunderstanding, I apologise.
Also, the fact that I mentioned scholarly studies about men and women in roles of aggressor and victim could have created the impression that my post was itself trying to be a factual, scholarly discussion on what the actual percentages of various categories of abuse are. Instead, I was talking about common attitudes about male and female culpability – culpability in general, not just for domestic violence. Only to the extent that I am just another human animal swimming my part of that sea of attitudes do I lay claim to any special knowledge – and then of my experience of swimming that sea only.
The big point of my juggling the various real, proposed and thumb-sucked statistics of various kinds of male-to-female ratios of domestic violence was not to try and argue that any specific one of those statistics were true.
Much of what “everybody knows” is often false. Often scholarly research that the popular media presents as “settled” and proven is often not settled at all. Therefore, I felt willing to entertain the notion that maybe much of what “everybody knows” about male and female violence is skewed too.
I juggled hypothetical numbers in my head because my question was: is it the factual reality of various statistics that make people commit to them, or are there underlying attitudes and biases that also play a role in people’s commitments to various stances? The fact that it felt politically incorrect to even entertain that temporary suspension of disbelief – what if there are in fact more violent women, even physically violent women, that is commonly thought? – confirmed to me that maybe there is a larger component of bias to “what everyone knows” than we realise.
All in all, I could have brought across my actual point much clearer if I didn’t drag the random blog post that triggered it into the discussion at all.
So, instead of trying to rehabilitate my original post, I’ll try and re-state the original underlying point I was trying to make, with no distractions – in a future post to come.
(Update: the “”future post” is here.)