A shame he doesn't give a crap about the men who are victims.
OFFS
He's talking about his personal experiences. In his case, as in the majority of cases, the abuser was a man. He does mention as an aside that male victims are in the minority, which may rankle with a group who have problems with being marginalised, but he's
not silent on the issue. More importantly than that, he's outing
himself - a man - as a survivor of emotional domestic abuse. So I think, yeah, he probably gives a shit.
Dismissing people who do talk about domestic abuse because you don't think they're doing it the right way is another silencing technique and helps absolutely nobody.
Alright, Deranged Nasat. I think maybe we can get a useful discussion out of this if you'd like to give it a shot.
I'll start with an apology. I made certain assumptions about where you were coming from and reacted based on that. It's been my experience too often in the past that when somebody responds to a topic about intimate-partner violence with "what about the men?" they usually aren't actually interested in that discussion. Usually it takes about two posts for it to turn into an excuse to attack women survivors and brand them every sort of liar and cheat - while male victims disappear from the discussion again, since they were only brought in as a straw man to derail the discussion.
So, I apologise for making the assumption that that was your play too. I saw an angry one-liner, and snapped from past experience.
No. Male victims are not a minority, nor is it true that men are the majority of abusers. Women abuse men and children (and women) as often as men abuse women and children (and men). Any and all studies NOT performed by radical feminists in the last 20 years have demonstrated that men and women are equally likely to be abusers and equally likely to be victims. If either you or Stewart can't distinguish between reality and feminist propaganda, that isn't my fault.
The stats I was thinking of when reading Stewart's article were, I think, the UK Crime Report stats, UN reports, and a paper by Michael Kimmel which I read lately. I don't have them at the tips of my fingers, so it may be that it's received wisdom and I need to recheck sources. Which I will do, because I'm not interested in spreading misinformation on this.
I know you've said below that Google can give us the stats you're talking about, but if you do have the time I would very much appreciate some links. It's not that I'm lazy per se, but I've experienced a problem with this kind of research before.
The problem is that I keep coming across hits to certain MRA blogs and sites that I don't trust. My experience with a lot of these blogs is that they purport to be resources to help deal with gender-discrimination as it effects men. However, when I look through them and find invectives against women, ugly attacks on other progressive movements, or arguments that we need to stop helping women in order to help men.
Again, to make myself clear on this, I believe there are gender-discrimination issues which are particular to men's experience, and that needs to be part of the discussion. But this is a problem I've had with certain hot-button issues when trying to Google - sites which co-opt legitimate debate in order to hate and belittle others.
(For instance, I went looking once for peer-reviewed studies and statistics promoting the need for extended paternity leave, and hit a Google deluge of ranting which purported to be about men's rights, but was mostly name-calling. I eventually found what I needed by searching intersectional feminist blogs and LGBT blogs. Familiarity and knowing which ones I could trust to cite their sources probably helped with that.)
So links would really help, or even the Google string you're using to help avoid the BS.
And don't you DARE suggest I'm encouraging silence. YOU are the one doing that, saying I should be silent about the blatant mistruths Stewart- and you- are spreading, those that prevent action being taken to give men equal protection to women.
In my defense, I wasn't telling you to be silent about any of that. You didn't say anything about that. I was narked at your one-liner.
Do you have any clue how few shelters for battered men there are?
Yes, actually. I do. And I think it's shitty. And I think it's shitty that male victims aren't believed, or that they're ridiculed for somehow having failed to meet an impossible standard for being a 'real man' because they've had the misfortune to be victimised by an abuser.
I also hate that we have to fight so hard for for funding for shelters for women and children. I hate that gendered narratives say women should expect to be victimised, and don't allow space or understanding for men who have been victimised. I think that it's foul that victims who are LGBT can be denied legal recourse. I think it stinks that a few years ago the donkey sancuary recieved more voluntary contributions than all the domestic abuse shelters in the UK combined. I think that I can think all of this, and that it's all part of my feminism.
So maybe we can salvage this, and shoot the breeze about the myths of IPV, the difficulty in getting a clear picture about it, the problem for all genders of making it an either/or gender war, or even bias-problems in the way studies get framed. What do you reckon?
