Before I give my two cents I'd first like to stress this;
I do not in any way mean to downplay how serious the issue of domestic abuse towards women is. That said; I have grown up surrounded by women and have been in the 'friend zone' long enough to understand that many (not most - because that I will never be able to verify) women - even from a young age - have a scary perspective on how relationships and the legal system behind domestic relations should work. Women can be scarily manipulative. Even the innocent frail types. While I have seen a quite a few women go through rough relationships I have also experienced women who've acted so despicable to their partners - mostly while they were not together - and still managed to make it out to be their 'boyfriend's' fault. Interesting psychology if you ask me.
Now, what I do want to put out there is this;
Abuse in relationships towards men is severely downplayed.
JochemDude said:
Shark Wrangler said:
I love how a great majority of women don't take responsibility for their actions.
That's crossing the line between a opinion and a sexist insult.
And what if it's true? We can't say for sure that it isn't. I've met more women who likes to find excuses than that wants to own up for their actions. Does that make me a sexist? Ever thought about how many women out there believe that men are one of the biggest causes to all their problems, and how few men believe that women are the cause to theirs? There is a flicker of truth in even the most outrageous statements.
Fagotto said:
twistedmic said:
Fagotto said:
A: Did you even look? First google hit for 'Domestic abuse statistics':
http://www.ncadv.org/files/DomesticViolenceFactSheet%28National%29.pdf
85% of domestic abuse victims are women. So unless you have something countering the plethora of sources they cite your claim that there is no definite proof is quite flimsy.
B: And why does it need to be less than 1%? One is a bigger problem than the other. Nearly 8 times as common. So what is the problem with focusing on the bigger problem? You're the one that took focusing on the bigger problem as saying the smaller one never happens.
That would be 85% of
reported domestic abuse situations. There could be hundreds or thousands of cases where men have been physically abused by women that haven't been reported, either because the victim was too embarrassed to make the report or felt that they would receive no help from the authorities. Also, of those reported cases, there's the possibility that some of those reports were false. The women claims to have been abused to get back at the man for one reason or another (i.e. to get sole custody of children, to get more alimony, to get ownership of the house, etc.). Please note that I do not believe that all, or even most women, lie about physical abuse. Only a very few (hopefully) do that.
There could also be a conspiracy to hide a flat earth, but what reason is there to believe in one? Similarly, why would I think that it would be THAT under reported? The amount of error would need to be pretty huge. If someone wants to claim an error that huge I want something more substantial than possibilities like that =/
I feel I can safely say that women are much more likely to falsely report domestic abuse than men. They are also more likely to actually be abused full stop, so I'm not disagreeing with statistics completely. Here's an interesting example from something I heard from a woman classmate from the days I still studied psychology. We were talking about relationships, and somehow managed to drift to how to "discipline/condition behaviour" in a relationship. In my class I was the only man, and the other 6 were women. 5 of the women thought were united in the idea that women should be allowed to hit their partner for disobedience/loyalty or repeated failure to follow instruction but were outraged when I suggested that if they felt that this was an acceptable practice then it should be okay if it was done in the reverse too. Their idea was that in the feminist world that we live in today women shouldn't be afraid of being unfairly or unjustly treated by their men (a fair view), but women should be allowed to tease, bully and in some cases hit men because
in their minds men are stronger than women and should be able to stand such treatment, otherwise it's not equality. A worrying opinion to have if you ask me.
I also feel that I can safely say that men are extremely unlikely to report domestic abuse at all - even anonymously - because it takes a certain type of man to be able to live with an abusive spouse without retaliating or divorcing. Even in the case of divorce men are unlikely to take legal action for the abuse, but just use it to justify the split (unless he lies and just says it's only down to mutual unhappiness). Having known quite a few men who live with abusive spouses - even physically abusing - I have come to understand a common denominator; self-esteem. Most of these men had in common that they all felt that they were lucky to have the partner they did now, even though they were regularly debased, assaulted verbally or physically and deprived of affection or in some cases their own belongings and earnings. Another problem men face in an abusive relationship is that if they one day snap and hit back or verbally lash out at their spouse it is easy for the woman to report this as domestic abuse and downplay the part she had to play that provoked the incident in the first place. It is a well known fact that the legal system currently sometimes completely overlook the idea that women can be abusive (which I feel is sexist, because I know that women can punch hard too), and doctors world-wide have anonymously leaked that there is an alarming amount of men that come into their clinics or hospitals with bruises and wounds that they got from home. While the doctors and nurses managed to get it to light that it was their spouses who had caused them they couldn't convince the men to file for legal action. Saaaaaad!
