The Women's refuge centres are apparently overflowing. Their National Manager, Heather Henare says, "If anyone knows a violent person within a family they must ensure the safety of the women and children."
She was obviously trying to be diplomatic on one hand with her use of the word "person" but then drops any ambiguity about the sex of the person by referring to the safety of women and children.
Unfortunately men hit women and they injure them. It's nasty and it's cowardly.
But scant attention is ever given to the fact that women hit men.
The highly regarded and on-going Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study followed a cohort from ages 5 to 21. One aspect of the study looked at partner violence.
Although the research relied on self-reporting, when the reports from each of a couple were matched up there was a high correlation, that is 70-80 percent of one partner's report agreed with the other partners.
What did the reserchers find?
"About 27 percent of women and 34 percent of men among the Dunedin study members reported they had been physically abused by their partner. About 37 percent of women and 22 percent of men said they had perpetrated the violence."
Yet we assiduously avoid the issue of women hitting men. The portrayal of domestic violence is nearly always about women as victims. Treating the issue in black and white terms isn't honest and it isn't helpful.
I am reminded too about about an anecodote from the British pyschiatrist Theodore Dalrymple.When he asks a female victim of abuse, if she thinks he could have predicted the male's behaviour, she responds, yes. He asks how? She then lists all the clues which she herself had determinedly ignored.
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I do not think that I am alone in this but twice in my mariage my wife lost her temper after drinking too much and let fly at me. I could have ended it with one return blow but did not as I was able to block or deflect the blows so only got a few bruises on my forearms. If I had flattened her with a return blow who would have been believed if it came to court? I am sure it would not have been me.
Tsk! Lindsay...what will Ruth say about this? You are just continuing down your woman hating road to self loathing etc. ;-)
So glad I live in your head rent free...there was another woman hated for her views - her name was Ayn Rand.
Maybe Islam is the ideal for Mitchell and her odious ilk -
http://abcnews.go.com/International/CSM/story?id=1443717 - so many western converts.
"A lot of women are reacting to the moral uncertainties of Western society," says Dr. Jawad. "They like the sense of belonging and caring and sharing that Islam offers."
{Women} are attracted by "a certain idea of womanhood and manhood that Islam offers," suggests Karin van Nieuwkerk, who has studied Dutch women converts. "There is more space for family and motherhood in Islam, and women are not sex objects."
Not that some ever were.
I was not going to say this - but I have noted that Mitchell is a "self employed painter" - ie someone who has in effect contributed NOTHING to the NZ economy. What right does she have to opine about the DPB?
Maybe she can't get an Alpha Male who will support his kids and not beat his wife.
Way to go, Ruth :) Lindsay's blatant pitch for male approval is nauseating.
"The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study followed a cohort from ages 5 to 21."
So, the "partners" are very young, probably with no kids - hardly representative of most couples involved in family violence.
You've selected a particular research finding to suit your argument.
We're having a debate in this household as to whether Lindsay is an asset or a liability to ACT, given that it doesn't poll well with females. The jury's still out...
Two excerpts from the paper;
"One of the most worrisome findings from the Dunedin study is that young adults most likely to be involved in partner violence are most likely to be parents."
And from the preamble; "Rates of non-lethal violence are highest amongst women ages 16-24 and women in low-income households."
The second quote pertains to US statistics, hence the US Justice Dept's interest in the Dunedin study.
Our own social statistics often mirror the US.
Here it the url to the paper;
www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/170078.pdf
Ayn Rand would not have got her panties in a bunch worrying about the stupid feminist crap you do Ruth. She would have used her reason and seen that Lindsay was right on this issue and then she would have issued a cutting response to the drivel you expouse...Rand was no champion of dizzy wimmin.
In the report on the Dunedin study that you provided a link to, only 10 percent, or 52, of the study women had a baby by age 21, and just five percent, or 25, of the study men were fathers at age 21. If partner violence is associated with parenthood, it would be better to study an age group in which there are higher proportions of parents. Perhaps in time the Dunedin researchers will be able to do this.
It’s likely that the peak rate of partner violence occurs at a somewhat higher age in NZ than in the US because their birth rates at younger ages are considerably higher than ours. For example, in 2003, the birth rate for 20-24 year olds was 103.6 per 1,000 for US women compared to 69.0 per 1,000 for NZ women, and teen birth rates are also very different (43.0 per 1,000 US, as against 26.3 per 1,000 in NZ in 2003). Our fertility patterns do NOT mirror those of the US.
The crucial point, however, since you started this thread with a reference to Women’s Refuge, is this (see page 9):
“Other studies have shown that although partner violence behaviors are similar across genders, consequences differ. Women are much more likely to be physically injured by men than men are to be physically harmed by women.”
The US report that you quoted from includes statistics on homicide by partners: “In 1996, just over 1,800 murders were attributable to intimates; nearly 3 out of 4 had a female victim.”
Incidentally, the link didn’t work. The report on the Dunedin study is now at:
http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/170018.pdf
Thank you Anonymous (or anonymouses if there is more than one of you posting) for a reasoned response. I should have said our social statistics often "resemble" those of the United States. We join them in the top two or three developed countries for teenage birth, pregnancy and abortion rates (depending on which years and sources you use). We also share the phenomenon of having those statistics heavily influenced by minority groups. In the States by Blacks and Hispanic people, here Maori and Pacific people. The commonality may lie in cultural differences or in economic disparity or both.
It is certainly not my intention to downplay that women get injured and women are killed by their partners. But I go back to my initial point which is we ignore that the violence occurs in both sexes. The outcomes differ.
If there were two children aged ten and four, and the four year- old pinches and pulls the hair of the ten year old relentlessly, to the point where the ten year-old, with his much greater weight and strength, lets rip and shoves the four year-old causing more physical harm than would occur if the situation was reversed, would we have any sympathy for the ten year-old?
What I am challenging here is society's propensity to blame the male for domestic violence. In any given situation blaming the wrong party tends to aggravate the problem.
When making comparisons between countries the level is more important than the rank. New Zealand’s teenage fertility rate is much lower than that of the US, as I showed above. It is similar to that of the UK, despite New Zealand having a higher proportion of non-European ethnic groups than the UK. Maori and Pacific teenage women have considerably lower fertility rates than Black or Hispanic American teenage women and it is inappropriate to compare them simply because they are non-white. They have quite different historical patterns of childbearing.
Back to partner violence:
Your example implies that injuries resulting from violence are solely the result of imbalances in physical strength, a rather benign view of domestic violence in my opinion. There’s a vast difference between spontaneous retaliation (which is probably quite common - I have had a couple of black eyes myself, many years ago), and the systematic abuse of physical power that we see in the serious cases of partner violence that reach the courts and are reported in the newspaper.
Women’s Refuges were set up to meet a need in the community and if some people feel there is a need for Men’s Refuges there is nothing to stop them setting them up, too.
If what you are really concerned about is stereotyping, then I have no argument with that. The vast majority of men are not violent towards their partners and are just as horrified by serious partner violence as are most women.
Here’s another example for you: if a skinhead taunts a big Maori guy with racist comments and he retaliates by breaking his jaw, which one do we sympathise with? Which one has broken the law?
Do you think that the law should be changed so that verbal and emotional violence are criminalised? Do you favour legislation against hate speech? Now there’s a curly one for a Liberal like yourself to consider!
I'm not sure that your quote from Theodore Dalrymple quite captured his views on domestic violence. Here's someone paraphrasing an article he wrote for The Spectator in 1998:
Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, in his September 18, 1998 article in the New Statesman, Why women are tortured by jealous men, suggests that one reason domestic violence happens could be jealousy of the morbid type. "The jealous man demands that a freshly cooked meal be ready for him the moment he arrives home, though he either does not say when he is coming home, or is hours later or earlier than expected. He lays down conditions that his lover cannot possibly meet, precisely that he may have a pretext to be violent," Dalrymple explains.
Doing this, Dalrymple continues, serves several advantages to the jealous man: the more trivial the occasion of this violence, the better, for the more fearful she becomes. And the more fearful she is, the less she can think for herself, the more he becomes the total focus of her being. The worse he behaves, and the more she declares her love for him, the more wonderful he considers himself.
[The article continues.., but this part may be the author's own views, not Dalrymple's]
But again, this is just one aspect of the bigger picture. Domestic violence, aside from the intimate partner relationship scenario, also happens in parent-child, employer-employee, teacher-student, elder-younger sibling, among other types of relationships. And unless the victims finally break the silence and go out in the open to tell their stories or seek assistance, nothing much can be done about it. Expectedly, the violence continues.
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http://gina.ph/CyberDyaryo/features/cd1999_0415_003.htm
On the other hand, in the 20 December 2005 issue of Spectator, "Theodore Dalrymple believes that wearing proper hats — not hoods or woollen beanies — could encourage self-respect and civility in the young"
The man obviously has many opinions unrelated to his career as a doctor and it must be difficult to summarise them fairly!
The article you describe by Theodore Dalrymple appears as "Tough Love" in his book "Life at the Bottom", a harrowing but compelling read. About violently abused women, he says they have told him that they find non-violent men intolerably indifferent and emotionally distant, rage the only emotion they've ever seen a man express.
They stay in violent relationships, or experience a series of them "because, perversely, violence is the only token she has of his commitment to her."
That is very sad. But in this type of 'violence as an expression as sexual jealousy' there is a complicity going on which delays or prevents a resolution.
In response to your previous comment; You said, "Maori and Pacific teenage women have considerably lower fertility rates than Black or Hispanic American teenage women and it is inappropriate to compare them simply because they are non-white. They have quite different historical patterns of childbearing."
The 2004 Hispanic teen birth rate was 82.6 and for non-Hispanic black teens, 62.7
In 2000-2002 Maori teen birth rate was 70 and Pacific was 44. These have probably dropped slightly.
We are both right and we are both wrong.
I didn't compare the groups because they are non-white. I described them as minority groups. That the UK also has a similar teen birth rate to ours but a greater European population is a reason not to compare it to NZ.
But I am happy to be pulled up when I get it wrong.
The hate speech issue really is too much of a departure from the original thread. But as you asked I wouldn't support hate speech legislation. What is legal is not necessarily moral. Which is why we have judges and jurys. Apart from which, there will be no hate speech legislation passing through Parliament this term due to United Future's agreement with Labour.
I won't comment further on this subject because I risk completely p.....g off everybody else in my house who wants to use the computer. But I've appreciated reading your views.
Thank you for your response, Lindsay, and for the Tough Love reference, which I found here:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_1_oh_to_be.html
Now that I’ve read the article I have some further comments that I think are pertinent to this thread.
Firstly, on the article as a whole: I think Dalrymple’s understanding of human psychology is better than his explanation of social change. If poor men’s fragile sense of self-worth now derives solely from possession of a woman, then mass unemployment induced by Thatcherism seems a more plausible explanation than the sexual revolution as promoted by liberal intellectuals in the 1960s, yet he doesn’t mention unemployment AT ALL!
It’s interesting that you’ve selected only that part of Dalrymple’s argument that places responsibility on the female victims of partner violence. He’s also highly critical of the tolerant attitudes of his female staff towards violent men and women’s failure to make accurate judgements of men’s character in spite of ample evidence and experience. I think your response to the Women’s Refuge news item – essentially “women do it, too” – together with your selective reporting of research findings, is an example of that reluctance to judge in the face of overwhelming evidence of the disproportionate impact of serious partner violence on women. Your blindness is wilful, too!
Dalrymple’s understanding of why women stay with violent partners is spot on. As he says, most do eventually leave, but:
“It is not his violence as such that causes her to leave him, but the eventual realization that his violence is not, in fact, a sign of his commitment to her.”
Women’s Refuge volunteers can help battered and abused women cope with that uncomfortable realization, while the DPB gives them the means to support themselves and their children when they leave. Compassion from civic society and cash support from the government.
Do you have a better, more compassionate, more practical alternative? Surely you have more to say on this than let’s be more sympathetic to men.
What ever the solution is it does not rquire the taking of money from those who have nothing to do with the situation and are looking after their own lives.Subsidising poor and destructive values as the welfare system does will only keep making things worse...
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