Why is it that the majority persists on making violence a gender issue? And how does showing that women can also be violent and abusive somehow soften the horror of any act of violence by a man?
If we want domestic and family violence to stop (or at the very least reduce, as I’m realistic in that it will never be fully eradicated), I believe we need to first stop creating campaigns around the precept that men are the only offenders, and women and children are the only victims.
I wasn’t planning to write on this topic for GMP, until I received the following comment on my last post on Female Privilege:
So…surely before any discussion, one must consider the source, and in this case it is Rachel Goodchild – a woman who has spoken openly about how she had to leave her abusive partner, how he left her poor and about how she is now single and the struggles finding a (GOOD) man.
Along with the inaccurate perception that I struggled to find a GOOD man (there are many of them out there!), I wonder why I am expected to hold onto victimhood and shape all my future viewpoints on it. Wouldn’t this be self-destructive and give the person who had hit me all the power forever?
I am passionate about removing the anti-male propaganda from anti-family-violence campaigns, even though in my own marriage it was me that was hit and abused. But I do believe my passion to fight for safer homes does come from my own experience.
My husband had a (then undiagnosed) severe mental health condition, and would fly into rages over the smallest thing. During my ten years with him I learnt fast to suppress my own anger, to not raise my voice or respond with even an abusive word, to always look for the exit sign, to protect my children.
I learnt a lot about why people might stay in this type of relationship. I stayed far longer than I ever expected to. It took me seven years from the first time I thought I wanted out to finally walk out and not look back. I was educated, had a professional job, am gregarious, and considered confident. I did not, and continue to not fit the mould of the “battered woman” (with the possible exception of my battles with excess weight, as I chose to “eat my feelings” though, to be fair, that was not a problem of my then husband’s making)
In my situation, I learnt that professionals would not keep confidences (such as the doctor who told him I’d rung to say he was increasingly volatile and I feared for my safety), that most friends will not step in when viewing abuse (as it might be intruding in the couple’s personal life), and that some churches still tell the woman to not tell anyone it is happening.
In my case, I also learnt forgiveness was key to moving on, not to excuse the acts of the abuser, but to release yourself from living under that abuse for the rest of your life. Forgiveness was an act I did for my children, and myself as I saw no reason to allow his anger permeate the rest of our lives. Forgiveness also helped me to not take the actions of one man, and make it the potential actions of EVERY man.
Since then I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words about all sort of relationships. I wanted to know how they work, how we find ourselves in unsafe places, or why people continue to hurt each other. I talked, and wrote, and asked, and listened to learn as much as I could about the dynamics in all forms of relationships. I did it mainly for selfish reasons, to investigate the whys that relationship had created in me. I gained a voice through that, though I was always conscious it was the voice of a fellow leaner, rather than an expert.
I’ve talked to thousands of men and women about their relationships. And while I’m not au fait with all the jargon and intellectual debates surrounding gender issues, I can tell you one thing I know for sure.
First: Relationships are fairly complicated. Very rarely does a person act in isolation of another. Dynamics need to be looked at. Patterns need to be discovered. The very worst abuse is the one that comes out of nowhere, but that is also the rarest. For most, it is an end result of many other unignored symptoms endemic in your relationship together. Continuing to make this all about the male, prevents all people in the relationship from looking at controlling their own lives and changing their own behaviour patterns. That is not about blame shifting. It is about helping people learn to regain control over their own life.
Second: Men and women both can be abusive. Both can say things they shouldn’t to each other, hit each other, and can be violent to each other. Both genders can be (in fairly equal measure, statistically speaking) abusive to their children. Statistics are inaccurate as they rely on two things, either incident reports or self-reporting. Both rely on a person to speak out. But even incident reports show that the rate of domestic violence incidents is fairly even at the hand of either gender.
Anti family-violence campaigns have been really “anti men hitting women and children” campaigns. They drive men who are being abused underground, as they fear they will find no one to advocate for them. They prevent women who struggle with acting out violently from knowing where to get help, to stop as they make it something that only men do. They idealize a women’s place in the home as peacemaker and lover, and marginalise a man’s role away from the same.
All anti-violence campaigns are started with the best of intentions. To reduce pain and suffering for those who are need it most. But for me, even though I was also a “victim” at the hands of a male, I want to see a new sort of campaign … where we focus on the eradication of any type of family violence, instead of making it all about how we stop men from hurting women.
Then we might see some actual change.
—Photo taberandrew/Flickr
Rachel, I understand what you’re getting at, but to start with your title, campaigns about battered men aren’t meant to help you or other battered women and that’s not their intention. Nor is it to see to it that you or other battered women are neglected. What they are there to do is make people aware that the flip-side is there, it is just as common and just as serious. When men abuse women it is an outrage; when women abuse men it is either “justified” or “his weakness” or even worse still, comedy. VAWA does not target women, nor… Read more »
When ABC’s What Would You Do hired a female actor to inflict an hours-long, sustained public beating on her actor “boyfriend”, hundreds of people–including an off-duty cop–walked right by and did nothing. One woman bystander punched the air in triumph as she passed, figuring he’d probably done something horrible to deserve it. I highly doubt either the cop or the female passerby would have reacted the way they did if it had been a man taking a beating from another man. Tyra Banks did something similar a few years ago. She took pairs of actors/actresses to and had them act… Read more »
IA. I think men and women pretty much have equality in DV. I read somewhere that men hit women more frequently, but when women hit men it’s more likely to be life threatening because they use weapons, drug the man, attack while asleep, etc. In fact, not to long ago there was a story of a woman who shot her husband because she thought he was cheating. Then there was the woman who cut off her husband’s penis then threw it in the garbage disposal. My ex was stabbed in the neck by a live in gf. What have observed… Read more »
I don’t want to minimize abuse committed by either sex upon their spouse/partner…but in my personal experience, the physical violence has been from a man…the receivers of the violence include myself, my mother, my babysitter, my neighbor, one of my best friends, …I have been learning karate for the past 3 years because I was stalked by an ex-abuser (20 years after I left him!) ….In karate, my teacher urges me to be more aggressive…he can’t understand why I am not more assertive in my moves…I realize that I just don’t have the physical vocabulary to attack another person, let… Read more »
“I don’t want to be a victim again…!”
That is the basis to healing. Self-sufficiency and self-defnese. If you won’t defend oturslef why should anyone else defend you. You have taken all the right steps. And once you really live that, you won’t be reflexively seeing any group as possible aggressors, becaube you won’t have the worry at the back of your mind all the time.
You’re not minimizing abuse against anyone else by telling your experience and specifiying that it is your experience and not claimimg it’s something more. Don’t worry about that.
Good point,
The problem starts when people state “this is my personal experience, so therefore this is how I extrapolate reality for every1”.
You might want to try taekwondo instead. It’s actually a sport, but it has self defense applications. Consider your sparring matches as a competition and not a fight. Use your brains before a fight to try to avoid it and to plan to win it if unavoidable. I’m 5′ 7″ and the biggest opponent I beat was 6′ 3″ (I know because I asked him just prior to kicking him in the face) and outweighed me by about 100 pounds. Master Chang said if you step on the mat thinking you’ll lose, you already lost.
Good luck and stay strong.
What a wonderfully refreshing article. Here in the UK the official government campaign opposes domestic violence against ‘women and girls’ as if male children who are victims don’t matter at all – perhaps because they will go on to become perpetrators themselves.
I take issue (sorry) with the idea that such campaigns are done with the best of intentions – I don’t think they are.
I don’t think that the issue of intent really matters.
However, technically speaking you are correct. Recent MRM investigations into the connections between RadfemHub and government policy (see Agent Orange files) demonstrate that, at least in Australia, there was never an intent to do good. The efforts down under are intended specifically to harm men and boys (under the cover of an anti-DV effort). My guess is, 90% of all anti-DV efforts fall into this same “trojan horse” category.
A+++. It is wonderful to hear a compelling explenation of why a moral truth (that the law should protect men and women equally) can also be a practical truth (that nothing will improve until anti-DV campaigns become inclusive).
This is why I hate the saying “women and children” in any news report. It doesn’t drive me quite as mad as people who don’t signal for their turns, but it’s definitely up there as one of the major irritants in my life.
So it goes…
Amen to this, I cannot stand the gendered view of anti-abuse campaigns. What’s sad is I spoke out against white ribbon campaign and how it along with the other anti-violence campaigns fell short….And I was called a misogynist/woman hater. When you can’t even say men are hit too without being silenced, “whataboutthemenz”, or accused of sexism…it’s a sign there is something wrong.
Violence against EVERYONE needs to stop!
Great post. Maybe it’s just the former kick boxer in me, but I’ve always found the psychological abuse worse than the physical. Given the choice between being hit 5 or 6 times and having a six hour “discussion”, I’ll take the punches. The only exception being when a crazy ex-girlfriend tried to claw me eyes out. Didn’t quite get my head out of the way and ended up with scratches on one cheek before restraining her hands. It was somewhat embarrassing when my female boss asked about the scratches the next day at work, but she was surprisingly sympathetic. She’s… Read more »
Very well said. I personally spent a large part of my childhood being abused by female social workers (it is only recently and with professional help that I have come to fully recognize it as such, partly due to highly gendered campaigns like those you describe) and while I spent a good part of that time angry at pretty much everyone, the lesson I eventually took out of that experience was also one of forgiveness. The tipping point was my realization that, deep down, everyone is a “good person”. What I mean by that is that no one acts while… Read more »
Thank you, great post.
White ribbon campaigns do nothing to reduce family violence, violence against children or violence against men. They actually just neglect the whole problem and concentrate on a specific gender dynamic.
Even violence against men is often presented as a gender issue of women’s violence against men. This has to stop.
To be honest, though, IMO, women’s violence against men IS a gender issue, because of society’s response to it. People see a man hitting a woman and they think, “Oh hell no, no effing way! That abusive ****!” People see a woman hitting a man, and the most likely thing to leap to their minds is, “Wow, I wonder what he did to deserve THAT! I bet he cheated.” When ABC’s What Would You Do hired a female actor to inflict an hours-long, sustained public beating on her actor “boyfriend”, hundreds of people–including an off-duty cop–walked right by and did… Read more »
Thank you
Great post. I have written on this issue too but don’t want to spam with links to my blog!
I have ‘survived’ domestic violence and have felt insulted and belittled by feminist organisations casting me in a victim role.
Well said, Rachel. I agree completely.
Not only is the woman-as-perpetual-victim model a self-defeating one that inhibits female victims’ recovery… but the inconceivability of woman-as-perpetrator is likewise preventing lots of people (male AND female) from getting the help they need.