Gato_Solo
Out-freaking-standing OTC member
Originally posted by Glok
There is no doubt that men are abused along with women, but there is doubt that those women can cause great physical harm to 'their' men, as much as these men can cause damage to 'their' women.
The Oprah Winfrey Show. 2 Four men describe how their wives hit them in the lower back with a pole, cracked them over the head or in the neck with a frying pan...the audience renews its laughter after each story. The men are part of a "PMS Men's Support Group."
Imagine an audience of men laughing as battered women describe how their husbands threatened them with brain or spinal cord injuries by battering them over their heads or in their necks with a frying pan.
Note that all of these battered husbands are still with their wives. When a woman stays with a man who batters, we provide shelters to encourage her to escape. If she decides not to escape, we say she is a victim of "Battered Woman Syndrome."
When battered women form support groups, we call it a Battered Women's group — her victimization is cited. In the PMS Men's support group, the woman's excuse is cited — the fact that the men were battered is left out. For men, unemployment often precedes battering, but women rarely form a "Wives with Unemployed Husbands' Support Group" (no mentioning of the battering) to help them understand the cause of the battering — the unemployment. The emphasis of the men's group was on understanding, coping, changing the situation and then, if all else failed, getting out; the emphasis of battered women's groups is on getting out first, and second, locking up the problem (the man).
In brief, when women batter, men's first priority is to support the women and help them change; when men batter, women's first priority is to escape the men and put them in prison. The motto of feminists: "There is never an excuse for hitting a woman." Shouldn't it be, "There is never an excuse for hitting."? None of these distinctions were made by anyone on the show.
An attitude in American culture actually supports the battering of males, as it does the saving of whales. In 100% of advertisements in which only one sex is hitting or beating the other, it is the woman who is beating the man. 3 One-hundred percent. Sitcoms routinely portray women hitting men, almost never portray men hitting women. When he fails to leave, it is not called "Battered Man Syndrome"; it is called comedy. In the chapter on man bashing, we will see this pattern in everything from greeting cards sent by women to Disney films watched by children. This makes it hard to listen to a different reality, that of men who are abused...
Item. "Michael, 38, a construction worker and amateur rugby player, barricaded himself in a spare bedroom at nights to avoid beatings from his diminutive wife. During a three-year marriage he was stabbed, punched, kicked and pelted with plant pots. Despite his muscular, 15-stone [210 lbs] build, he was frightened to sleep for fear of attack. 'Nobody would have believed me if I'd told them the constant bruising was from beatings by my wife. I still have the scars from where she tore at my flesh with her fingernails. The screams from my daughter as she witnessed the abuse will haunt me for the rest of my life.'" 4
Item. "Paul, 32, a former Royal Marine, said his wife, Claire, an advertising executive, could suddenly become like 'a ferocious wild cat.' The slightest thing would set her off. 'She would pull me to the ground, kick me and pull large clumps of hair out of my head. I never fought back because she was a slightly built, petite woman.'" 5
Item. A 42-year-old British police officer, trained in tackling armed criminals (British police don't carry guns), was twice hospitalized by his 5-foot wife. He didn't report it. When asked why, he explained, "If I was to go up to my mates on the force and tell them my wife was regularly hitting me over the head and body with anything she could get her hands on, they would crease themselves [die laughing]." 6
Notice that all three of these examples are from the London Times. It is rare for equally reputable American papers to run a story in which men's feelings and experiences about being battered are reported in their own words in such depth. Notice also that the wives are clearly weaker physically, and the men are not the passive, hen-pecked stereotype of a battered man. And note the men's fear that if they reported this to the authorities, not only would they not be believed, they would be ridiculed ("my mates...would crease themselves").
The London Times article spoke of the shock experienced by many police officers at the violence meted out by women. As one officer put it, "We have had to review our attitude. Ten years ago it wasn't thought possible that a woman could beat up a man. Now it's a regular occurrence." 7 In reality, husband beating may have occurred just as often ten years ago, but the unwillingness to consider it as a possibility may have blinded the officers to the regularity of the occurrence.
American newspapers are just beginning to acknowledge the feelings of some boys who are the victims of violence by a girl, but not the feelings of victims who are men. For example, 15 year old Bobby Papiere explains:
One of my parents' lines that I just hate is, "Like your sister can hit you hard," meaning that if my sister hits me, it's no big deal because she can't hit hard. But sometimes it is hard. And my parents don't let me hit her back. So (when they're not around) she'll stand there and hit me — and then she'll say, "I'll tell if you hit me." I hate that.
—Bobby Papiere, 15, Houston, TX 8
Notice that the boy could have told this story to his parents, but didn't. Nowhere is the title Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say more relevant than to boys' and men's silence about domestic violence.
Why the silence? Think of all the ways we teach boys to become men by enduring pain: Football, rugby, ice hockey, boxing, boot camp, rodeos, car racing. Men learn to call pain "glory"; women learn to call the police.
Why did virtually every culture reward its men for enduring violence? So it would have a cadre of people available to protect it in war. The people considered the most in need of protection were women and children. The sex considered most disposable was men — or males....
The more a man is trained to "be a man," the more he is trained to protect women and children, not hurt women and children. He is trained to volunteer to die before even a stranger is hurt — especially a woman or child. Thus most firefighters are volunteers, and almost all the volunteers are men.
Part of the pressure men put on each other to carry out this mandate is ridiculing a man who complains when he is hurt. We often think that when a man insults another man by calling him a "girl," the insult reflects a contempt for women. No. It reflects a contempt for any man who is unwilling to make himself strong enough to protect someone as precious as a woman. It is an insult to any man unwilling to endure the pain it takes to save a woman's life — including the pain of losing his own life. If you are a woman, imagine someone calling you a "baby" because you cried rather than trying to save your daughter's life at the risk of your own — you would know the term "baby" was meant not to insult babies, but to insult you for being unwilling to protect someone as precious as a baby. The ridicule is pressure to consider ourselves less important than someone even more precious: A baby is more precious than a mother; a woman is more precious than a man.
Those feminists who say that masculinity is about men believing they can batter women display the deepest ignorance possible about men and masculinity. Battering a woman is the male role broken down. A man who batters a woman is like a cross-dresser: he's out of role. In a Stage I survival-based culture, it is the male role to protect women by taking control of survival needs. Which is why, for example, 19th century British and American law required a husband to go to debtors' prison even if it was his wife who spent them into debt. 9 With responsibility came the ability to enforce. The male role was to his family what the role of the military is to a nation: Both are assigned the role of protector; but the power it takes to protect, when broken down, can be abusive. But the abuse is not the role, it is the role broken down. He was not treating her as property, he was taking responsibility for keeping the property intact for the entire family's protection. If he should fail, he's off to jail. That's why I call it the responsibility to discipline, as opposed to male privilege.
In virtually every culture, then, manhood rests on men learning to protect women, not hurt women.
4. Ian Burrell and Lisa Brinkworth, "Police Alarm over Battered Husbands," Sunday Times [London], April 24, 1994, pp. 1 & 6.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., p. 1. Quote from Inspector Stephen Bloomfield of Kilburn, northwest London.
8. "Sisters Can Hit Hard," from the Teen page of Parade, September 27, 1998.
9. In England and in 19th-century America, a man was imprisoned for his wife's crime. Calvin Bradley v. the State, 156, Mississippi, 1824. See R. J. Walker, Reports of Case Adjudged in the Supreme Court of Mississippi (St. Paul: West Publishing, 1910), p. 73, section 157.
If we look at only police reports and all-female self-help groups, it appears that men perpetrate about 90% of the domestic violence. But when we study male-only self-help groups, we get a different picture: Only 6% of the men involved in domestic violence say they were the perpetrator; 81% said their wives were the perpetrator (13% said it was mutual). 10 So who do we believe?: Ninety percent male perpetrators, or 6%?
Consider the possibility that the percentages are so different because the people we asked were so different — that everyone might be telling their version of the truth. There was something missing: a nationwide domestic violence study of both sexes.
When the first scientific nationwide sample was conducted in 1975 — by Suzanne Steinmetz, Murray Straus and Richard Gelles 11 the researchers could hardly believe their results. The sexes appeared to batter each other about equally. Dozens of questions arose ("Don't women batter only in self-defense?"; "Aren't women hurt more?"). Over a hundred researchers during the next quarter century double-checked via their own studies. About half of these researchers were women, and most of the women who were academics were feminists. Most expected to disprove the Steinmetz, Straus, and Gelles findings.
To their credit, despite their assumptions that men were the abusers, every domestic violence survey done of both sexes over the next quarter century in the U.S. Canada, England, New Zealand and Australia — more than 50 of which are annotated in the Appendix — found one of two things: Women and men batter each other about equally, or women batter men more. In addition, almost all studies found women were more likely to initiate violence, and much more likely to inflict the severe violence. Women themselves acknowledged they are more likely to be violent and to be the initiators of violence. Finally, women were more likely to engage in severe violence that was not reciprocated. The larger and better-designed the study, the more likely the finding that women were significantly more violent.
Studies also make it clear that the women were 70% more likely to use weapons against men than men were to use weapons against women. 12 The weapons women use are more varied and creative than men's, doubtless in compensation for less muscle strength....
Item. "One well-to-do wife I know of turned the tables on her husband. After suffering repeated beatings, she waited until he fell asleep one night, sewed him in the sheets, and broke his bones with a baseball bat."
— Barbara Spencer-Powell; Overland Park, KS 13
The fact that women were more likely to use severe violence does not necessarily mean the men were injured more. I will explain later why we do not yet have valid information about which sex is injured more.
Here are the most basic findings of the most responsible representative nationwide domestic violence study concerning how often wives vs. husbands were victims of severe violence.
Severe "Wife-Beating" vs. Severe "Husband-Beating"
Wife victim
1.9%
Husband victim
4.5%
Explanation. During the year prior to being surveyed, less than 2% of wives and more than 4% of husbands were victims of severe domestic violence. "Severe violence" was measured via Murray Straus' Conflict Tactics Scale as: kicking or biting; being hit with an object or a fist; being beaten up; being threatened with a knife or gun; or being stabbed or wounded. Murray A. Straus, "Measuring Intrafamily Conflict and Violence: The Conflict Tactics (CT) Scales, " Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 41, pp. 75-88.
Source: 1992 National Alcohol and Family Violence Survey, a nationwide representative population sample of 1970 persons, conducted by the Institute for Survey Research (Temple University).See Murray Straus and Glenda Kaufman Kantor, in "Change in Spousal Assault Rates from 1975 to 1992: A Comparison of Three National Surveys in the United States," paper presented at the 13th World Congress of Sociology, Bielefeld, Germany, July 19, 1994.
Much more, and here is the source...
Depending on one's point of view and interpretation of the available evidence, male victims of spousal violence, or so-called "battered men," are either the missing persons of the family violence research literature and clinical caseloads or are an over-stated issue concocted to distract attention from battered women.
Source...
I met Alan and Faith nearly 25 years ago. I was in the process of interviewing men and women on what were then both a taboo topic and an issue that had been treated as an unmentionable personal trouble—violence in the family. I was one of the first researchers in the United States to attempt to study the extent, patterns, and causes of what I then called ”conjugal violence,” and what today advocates label ”domestic violence.” There was precious little research or information to guide my study—the entire scientific literature was two journal articles. With the exception of the tabloids, the media and daytime talk shows had not yet discovered the dark side of family relations. Both Alan and Faith discussed their experiences with violence in their intimate relations and marriages. The violence was sometimes severe, including a stabbing and broken bones. And yet, Alan and Faith ended up as mere footnotes in my initial book, The Violent Home (Sage Publications, 1974). I admit now and knew then that I had overlooked the stories of Alan and Faith. The reason why their stories were relegated to mere notes was they did not fit the perceptual framework of my research. Although I titled my study an examination of family or conjugal violence, my main focus, the issue I hoped to raise consciousness about, was violence toward women. Alan, as it turned out, had never hit his wife. The broken bones and abrasions that occurred in his home were inflicted by his wife. Faith was a victim of violence; her husband, ex-husband, and boyfriends had struck her and abused her numerous times. These events were dutifully counted and reported in my book and subsequent articles. Faith’s situation was the focus of my article ”Abused Wives: Why Do They Stay?” However, Faith’s violence, which included stabbing her husband while he read the morning paper, was reported as a small quote in my book, with little analysis or discussion. In my first study of family violence, I had overlooked violence toward men. I would not, and could not, ever do that again.
Source...
I'm surprised you found them, being buried betwixt the encyclopaedia segments as they are 
me either... 
? 
