Partner Violence

This one is not politically correct.  But it's something which frustrates me, so I wanted to get it out there.

Every so often, some well-meaning person starts going off on "violence against women" as a problem in our society, and to the extent that violence against PEOPLE is a problem, and women are people, yes, violence against women is a problem.

My frustration is that the term is bandied about so often, many are left with the clear implication that when there is violence, it's against women.

Here are some statistics from the FBI on murder from 1995 and 1996.  More than five times as many men are murdered each year than are women.  So there's that.

The long "oh, please save the poor women" posts usually focus on partner on partner violence, so let's look at those numbers specifically.  Yes, the number of women murdered by their husband or boyfriend is higher for women than the converse for men.  But is it so overwhelmingly higher as to be almost trivial for men?  No.  Men are murdered by a wife/girlfriend more than once for every twice women are murdered by a husband/boyfriend.

Yes, the number is higher for women.  But it is not so much higher that we should be dismissing the men who are thus murdered, or portraying this as an act universally perpetrated BY men AGAINST women.

Statistically, men report less abuse than women do, but some studies have indicated this has less to do with a lower AMOUNT of abuse and more to do with societal attitudes.  Abused men are seen as weak, sissies, or just complainers.  How could a man POSSIBLY be abused?  They're so much bigger and stronger, says the sexist stereotype by some of the same people who would bristle if you were to bring up men as the stronger, more in-control gender under most other circumstances.

We have a plethora of abused women/children's shelters, but try finding one for abused men.  They're very difficult to find, even though again, statistically about half of relationship violence is perpetrated AGAINST men.

When police are called to a "domestic", overwhelmingly when one member of the couple is arrested or taken away to "cool off", it is the man, even when the woman was the one doing the abusing.  We just assume that if there's violence going on, it was perpetrated by, or at least initiated by, the man, or that he's such a high risk to accelerate it that he must be removed from the situation.

And let's take a look at the highly publicized violent acts.  For example, Lorena Bobbitt.  She cut her sleeping husband's penis off, and then discarded it in a field as she fled the scene, and among many, she was seen as a cult hero, a woman who stood up for herself.  She was arrested and tried and found not guilty.

Really?  Imagine the situation had been reversed.  Imagine a man who was taking the kinds of systematic abuse Ms. Bobbitt is reported to have taken at the hands of her husband.  Imagine that husband snapping one night and, instead of just leaving, filing for divorce and getting a restraining order, he'd physically cut some portion of her body off before leaving.

Do you imagine ANYONE would have considered him to be a hero?  It seems to me that he'd have been tried and convicted, with scores of "anti-violence-against-women" types claiming that no matter WHAT punishment he got, it was not sufficient, and in all likelihood, he'd have been required to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

Look, I'm not saying partner violence isn't a problem.  I'm really not.

But PLEASE, let's talk about it as partner violence, not violence-on-women, because statistically the incidence in both directions is not that different, and so to try to make it out as a single-direction problem merely dismisses (and thus, further victimizes) roughly half of all of the victims.