The official MSD position on partner violence and gender symmetry/asymmetry can be summed up by the following;
Leaving basic prevalence levels aside, there is rather more consensus that more physically serious and psychologically threatening assaults are more likely to be perpetrated by male partners...The Scale and Nature of Family Violence in New Zealand: A Review and Evaluation of Knowledge, April 2007
Most of the statistical data about violence between partners comes from surveys and police data. But here is some new and interesting evidence that women do indeed perpetrate serious physical violence against men. The source is hospital emergency departments in the state of Victoria, Australia.
In almost 70 per cent of cases the victims were female, and most of the injuries occurred at home. Emergency departments dealt with 693 "human intent injuries" related to family violence in 2004-05 and 672 in 2005-06, according to the report.
So in over 30 percent of the cases the victim was a man. Interestingly the rest of the media report typically focusses on violence against women and the need for more intervention.
And in this country the following 'facts' as presented by Living Without Violence are your typical approach to the problem of family violence.
* One woman is killed by her partner or ex-partner every five weeks
* 10 children are killed every year in acts of domestic violence
* Half of all female homicides are the result of domestic violence
* Domestic violence is the fifth leading cause of death from injury for New Zealand women
* One in seven women has been assaulted by her partner
* Women's refuge assisted about 20,000 women and children last year
* 15 per cent of Women's refuge residents have a permanent disability as a result of battery and four per cent can no longer have children
* 21 per cent of New Zealand men admit they have physically abused their partners in the past year
* Battered women are five times more likely than other women to use psychiatric services
Not a mention of women hurting men. (Although, to their credit, they do run a programme for female perpetrators of domestic violence, detailed elsewhere at their site.)
Certainly some women need help and protection and I accept that men are physically, potentially more dangerous than women. But a more balanced and honest approach to the problem of family violence is overdue. Too many self-interested, ideologically driven parties are involved.
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4 comments:
It is naive to take anything from the bureaucracy at face value, including, especially, their propaganda about domestic violence, given that the Women's Refuge (which ignores violence against men) is nestled in the heart of the bureaucracy, as if the Women's Refuge were anything more than a bunch of sexist half-wits.
The Ministry of Social Development only stopped using the Duluth (Power and Control) model -- much loved by Feminists -- once I pointed out to them, to various politicians and to the Ombudsmen that you could not find any evidence for that model if you googled "evidence for the Duluth model" or "evidence for the Power and Control model".
In fact, my webpage http://equality.netfirms.com/dvsumary.html points out that the research is almost equally divided between that which finds more injuries to men and that which finds more injuries to women, from domestic violence.
Domestic violence is an area where people feel they can go by instinct and prejudice, rather than by fact, and they forget that women are just as capable of using weapons as men are.
The document from which Lindsay Mitchell quotes talks about a "consensus", but the MSD is not in a neutral position to judge where the so-called "consensus" lies, since the Women's Refuge is part of the MSD's policy-making process on domestic violence, and no men's groups are there.
The url I cited should have read as follows:
http://equality.netfirms.com/dvsumary.html
Every time I try to cite an url, the "ml" ending gets deleted!
In connection with the hospital data whih Lindsay Mitchell cites, it is important to realise that not all research is of the same value. To produce statistics about arrests for domestic violence, or about hospital cases of injuries caused by domestic violence, someone (e.g. the victim) has to have taken the initiative to ring the police or go to the hospital, as the case may be.
Men are not so likely to ring the police or go to hospital if it means saying that they have been beaten up by their wives -- because of the sexist reactions which they can expect to receive from police, nurses, and doctors.
So studies based on questionnaires are more likely to give accurate figures on domestic violence than are studies of arrests or hospital visits.
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