NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/soc/women/23051

Text File | 1993-01-25 | 3.0 KB | 56 lines

Newsgroups: soc.women
Path: sparky!uunet!panther!mothost!lmpsbbs!areaplg2.corp.mot.com!bhv
From: [e-mail] (Bronis Vidugiris)
Subject: Re: What does "Male-dominated society" mean?
Organization: Motorola, CCR&D, CORP, Schaumburg, IL
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 18:21:52 GMT
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In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (ljf) writes:

)And yet we keep seeing posters maintain that there is a
)cultural/societal proscription against violence towards women.  How
)does it work, then, that men and women in fairly equal numbers abuse
)their mates, but there is a proscription in favor of women but not in
)favor of men?  By this reasoning, it appears that women are much
)better at controlling their violence than men, since men commit
)violence in spite of a proscription and women commit violence in the
)absence of one.  This nearly sounds like a moral superiority of women
)that a few feminists suggest.

)And, of course, we haven't touched on your stats which (if I remember
)correctly) suggest that women are more severely injured by domestic
)violence and the fact that ~70% of rape victims are women.

The 70% figure isn't mine - I haven't seen any figures I trust on how
often women and girls  vs men and boys are raped.  Rapes among adult
non-institutionalized people are almost certainly not as large as 30% men,
IMO.

Women do seek treatment for injuries more often than men as a result of
domestic violence.  I believe that at least some of the difference
is because men are less willing to seek treatment, but I doubt this
explains all the difference, as it was rather large.

I think that there is still more of a prescription of violence against women
than against men, but I can't back this opinion up with any particular
statistics.  There was certainly more of a prescription of violence
against women than against men in my own upbringing - however it is risky
to generalize this to the society at large.  The place I would look to
check out my impressions is to look at the relative punishments meeted out
to people who were violent to men vs. those who were violent towards women,
attempting to control for the level of the violence.  I've never seen this
done and it sounds like a lot more trouble than it's worth - IMO.

To try and put domestic violence into perspective from statistics, it appears
that once every 8-10 years or so, the average couple does get upset enough
with one another for one of them to slap, grab, shove, hit, or throw
something at the other.  This average is probably pushed up by more violent
families where hitting is much more common, so looking at the 'average'
figure as being a typical family  may be misleading.  More severe violence is
more rare than this.