Domestic Abuse
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Started by khamsek. Original thread.
Contents |
Intro
khamsek
I get terribly angry when people post about child brides in Yemen or victims of acid attacks in Pakistan because you're all a bunch of smart people and you should be equally outraged by the fact that every day in the United States three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends. But I don't see that here as often as I should. Now, I'll hopefully be going into a career one day where I can change how people perceive women in places like Yemen and Pakistan, but not all of you are planning a future in public service. So instead of talking about things you may care much about but can probably do nothing to help, I'm going to talk about things you don't care enough about and can actually start changing right now.
Statistics would have me believe that at least one or two people reading this post will be a rapist or an abuser of a woman at some point in your life if you're not already. So let me talk to you too. You can stop. You can get help. You can move past whatever it is that can make you a bad person. Read some philosophy, smoke a joint, I don't care. Just stop abusing your girlfriend, wife, mother, or sister.
One in four women will report being abused in America during their lifetime. These are not women who have abused by strangers, but by the men are supposed to trust and love most. Children who are born into an abusive situation will often be scarred for life and possibly become abusers someday as well.
Where do women go in these situations? As many as there are who seek help from family or their community, there are women suffering in deadly silence in hopeless and abusive relationships. There are women whose only family consists of the abuser/s. They do not stay because they love their attacker, they stay because they are terrified for their lives. If they convince themselves or others that they love the man who is slowly killing them, they are simply trapped in denial fashioned out of fear. The fact of the matter is that we do not live in a society where it is easy for abused women to survive their ordeals. Thousands of women every year die as a result of men in their lives, often at their own hand. Thousands more lonely suicides can account for more.
But the revolutionary thing about being a human is that you can change things on a massive scale by just bearing certain realities in your mind. Racism is wrong. Economic inequality is wrong. We can clearly see the results of these terrible practices in the lessons we teach our children and the media we consume as a culture. But violence against women? Printing photos of an victim of acid in Pakistan or executed women in Iran can lure one into thinking that violence against women is a distant problem. Media depictions of domestic violence can lead one to believe that it is a class or race related issue. These depictions are incorrect. Women of all ages, races, and class background are raped and murdered by men they are supposed to love and trust every year. Bear this in your mind as you go about your business in the world. Look carefully at the women you see in the street and realize that a significant portion of them are or will be victims of domestic violence.
How do you start? Some like to brush the problem away with money but it is much more effective and revolutionary to simply live your life in constant opposition to the harsh reality women all over the world have to endure. Tell your friends. Stand up for women and for the dignity of men who could enjoy healthy relationships with others if only they could get help. Men and women are conditioned in a certain way within this Western culture, work to change that. Point out these facts to others and carry them in your mind always. We can never solve all problems and the world will never be a perfect, painless existence for everyone. But if you don't go through your life doing your damndest to ease the suffering of others, you are contributing to the problem. Stop contributing to the problem. Help stop violence against women. Be kind.
I understand that this is entirely a heteronormative / American-centered post, but I'm not completely up to snuff on facts, figures, and arguments in that regard. I would welcome an addendum from one of you in regards to domestic abuse in the LGBT community in America, or an addendum regarding domestic violence in your home country. Please keep orientalism and bigotry out of this. Thanks.
Complicity
Gyrofry
I think you're unlikely to find many who sincerely disagree with you, so maybe we can have a more interesting discussion by talking about a more controversial contributing factor to domestic violence: the (sometimes entirely rational) complicity of the abused.
The social forces that educate / persuade / incentivize abused women to remain in abusive relationships are powerful and quite possibly more amenable to significant improvement via social action than would be equivalently substantial improvements on the abuse (supply) side.
I certainly don't believe that the Nature of Man is Abuse, but I do think that the point in our future where domestic violence will be entirely eradicated is extremely distant. We can know with near certainty that domestic abuse is going to continue to occur for the foreseeable future. It should thus be incumbent upon us to strive to create and/or augment social institutions that either enable victims of abuse to escape their situations or to avoid them in the first place.
A major component of this is education -- both formal/academic education to the end of enabling individual empowerment / independence / material self-sufficiency for women and also social education about the nature of abuse.
Another is the fostering of a climate that instills women with the idea that abuse is not a tolerable option. We don't permit people to sell organs or enter into indentured servitude, even if they believe themselves to be best served by doing so. Women should be inculcated with the view that tolerating abuse is similarly unacceptable, even if it does involve a reduction in material standard of living.
Another is the creation of a sufficiently adequate social safety net / health care system.
You're absolutely correct to decry the abusers, but it's simply not enough.
Thank you and god bless.
Psychological Aspect
iwas
the psychological reasoning behind acceptance of abuse goes fairly deep. it's well-known that human self-conception tends to mess with people's emotions and feelings in a way that rationalizes their choices. for example, if you give two people a demeaning task (say mopping a floor), and pay one guy $20 and one guy $1, the guy who got $2 will say he enjoyed the task more -- because he didn't want to accept that he was a sucker who got conned into mopping a floor for $1, he rationalized himself into thinking that his real motivation for the task was the fact that he enjoyed it.
similarly, it's well known that people like organizations that mistreat their members more than those that do not. fraternities that haze have much higher popularity than those that do not. the reasoning for the guys getting hazed is clear: rather than accept that they are losers who joined an abusive frat, they rationalize that they in fact really really like the frat. political organizations that pay their employees find that their staff are less enthusiastic than volunteers, etc
the relationship this has with domestic abuse is obvious. in cases where this is applicable, a woman who is abused doesn't want to see herself as abused, because this is a blow to her self-image. so she rationalizes the situation into something that is not abuse.
this effect, once started, is difficult to combat. one thing we know is that it's much harder to get people to change their minds about a situation that it is to get them to see it more accurately to begin with, suggesting that the way out is, as you say, to simply raise awareness about domestic abuse.
Societal Acceptance
Liberal_L33t
Well, this is quite true of course, but unfortunately the progress that has been made in recognizing the problems of domestic violence has, paradoxically, made it more difficult to combat in some ways. The reason that acid attacks etc tend to provoke such a visceral reaction from westerners (like me, obviously) is that the abuser will fearlessly announce to the whole world what he's done with little to no fear of reprisal.
Generally speaking, in the first world, a man who openly admits that he beats his wife will be regarded as scum by most people who hear it. That's a good thing, but it also means abusers know better than to admit to their crime. The important thing to remember here is that, although you can't tell exactly when a man is abusing his wife/girlfriend, you can tell when a man makes a habit of subtly physically intimidating her and other women to get his way. Clenching his fist and raising it slightly or drawing himself up to his full height and looming over her are two common examples. Don't ever do these things.
Whereas physical abuse has become heavily stigmatized by western society, rape is unfortunately still tacitly accepted, as five minutes reading a thread that involves rape or sex will quickly show you. Even if they don't endorse actual rape, a huge proportion of men would probably still say that a woman in a "sexy" outfit is 'inviting' it, and on seeing such a woman, would feel justified in threatening and harassing her as long as they don't physically attack. Don't do these things either.
But unfortunately, I'm not sure if most of us can do much about it in our day to day lives. The truth is that most goons don't know more than five or six people well enough to talk to them about these things. The larger problem is that, due to America's unfortunate notions of the 'private sphere' being the concern of noone outside it means that when you do tell a friend that he's displaying intimidating body language to women (for example), he's likely to become defensive.
In America, the most important factor is probably the various media. There's still quite a bit of justification and reinforcement for rapists and abusers, even in the mainstream. It sounds 'goony' to say it, but the Twilight books, as an example, have been a terrible blow against pushing rape out of the sphere of acceptable behavior. Sadly, many Americans probably take more cues from the media than from personal friends in deciding what is and what isn't right. In light of this, one of the most important things you can do is to not purchase/patronize works that display excessive sexism, point out their flaws to others who might consume them, and (in the case of very small media entities like local bands, independent films or internet media) send feedback to the producer.
Homosexual Abuse
shotgunbadger
Homosexual domestic abuse rates are often portrayed as more then straight, but it's important to know that these figures are often used to just paint gays as some morally lax, evil, group. In truth Lesbian and Gay rates of abuse are in the 25%-30% figures, roughly equal to heterosexual rates.
Honestly there's not a lot else to add, gay domestic abuse is the same as straight, the only difference is that gays and lesbians have an even harder time finding support from abuse then straights, with the combo of homophobia that's drilled into our heads from a young age and the idea that it's not the job of 'normal' domestic abuse centers to deal with them.
Prevalence of Domestic Violence
- In a 1995-1996 study conducted in the 50 States and the District of Columbia, nearly 25% of women and 7.6% of men were raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, or dating partner/acquaintance at some time in their lifetime (based on survey of 16,000 participants, equally male and female). [1]
- Approximately 1.3 million women and 835,000 men are physically assaulted by an intimate partner annually in the United States [2]
- Intimate partner violence made up 20% of all nonfatal violent crime experienced by women in 2001. [3]
- Intimate partners committed 3% of the nonfatal violence against men. [4]
- In 2000, 1,247 women and 440 men were killed by an intimate partner. In recent years, an intimate partner killed approximately 33% of female murder victims and 4% of male murder victims. [5]
- Access to firearms yields a more than five-fold increase in risk of intimate partner homicide when considering other factors of abuse, according to a recent study, suggesting that abusers who possess guns tend to inflict the most severe abuse on their partners. [6]
- Of females killed with a firearm, almost two-thirds were killed by their intimate partners. The number of females shot and killed by their husband or intimate partner was more than three times higher than the total number murdered by male strangers using all weapons combined in single victim/single offender incidents in 2002. [7]
- According to the U.S. Department of Justice[8], between 1998 and 2002:
- Of the almost 3.5 million violent crimes committed against family members, 49% of these were crimes against spouses.
- 84% of spouse abuse victims were females, and 86% of victims of dating partner abuse at were female.
- Males were 83% of spouse murderers and 75% of dating partner murderers
- 50% of offenders in state prison for spousal abuse had killed their victims. Wives were more likely than husbands to be killed by their spouses: Wives were about half of all spouses in the population in 2002, but 81% of all persons killed by their spouse.
