#ViolenceIsViolence downplays the gendered-nature of violence

Date: September 15, 2014 - 11:59PM

6 reading now
(5)

Kasey Edwards

View more articles from Kasey Edwards

Follow Kasey on Twitter

Tweet
3
This page has been shared 3 times. View these Tweets.
Share
2120
Share

0
submit to reddit
Email article
Print

Photo: Getty Images

Prompted by concerns that female victims of domestic violence are getting too much attention, the Mankind Initiative have sought to rectify the problem with a ‘you think that’s bad, what about me’ video.

The first scene of the video, which has been viewed by 8 million people, depicts a man physically and verbally assaulting a woman in a street.

Some bystanders look on in horror while others rush to the woman’s defense, threatening to call the police and telling her that she doesn’t need to put up with that abuse.

This is followed by essentially the same scene except that the roles are reversed. The woman assaults the man, who tries in vain to reason with her. Unlike the first scene, bystanders don’t intervene and are instead shown to be smirking or even laughing.

It’s supposed to prove that female victims of domestic violence receive sympathy and protection while male victims are scorned and humiliated.

The video concludes with the surprising statistic that 40 per cent of domestic violence victims in the United Kingdom are men — I’ll get back to that figure in a moment — and the handy hashtag that #ViolenceIsViolence.

#ViolenceIsViolence has since taken off, and has been used in response to the elevator attack on Jay Z by Solange and revelations that model Kelly Brook hit her boyfriends. From this, we’re supposed to conclude that violence against men is the same as violence against women, except one is taken seriously and the other isn’t.

All violence is unacceptable, and there’s no doubt many men have suffered, and continue to suffer, at the hands of their female partners. And we can all agree that yes, violence is violence.

But to leave the discussion there is to miss the point about domestic violence entirely. It is an attempt to generalise domestic violence so that some inconvenient truths about the gendered nature of this crime can be swept under the carpet.

Let’s look at that 40 per cent statistic a little more closely.

It is true that the UK’s Office of National Statistics reports that 40 per cent of domestic violence victims are men. But the report also defines violence as the following: ‘Violent and sexual crime covers a range of offence types…. [including] minor assaults, such as pushing and shoving that result in no physical harm through to serious assault and murder.’

In the Mankind Initiative video, it’s clear that the male victim isn’t in any physical danger. He could have easily defended himself against the woman, or he could have simply walked away. The scenario is farcical, which is perhaps why some of the onlookers were laughing.

But, had it been real and reported, this incident would have been included in the same figures as two UK women who, on average, are murdered every week by the hand of a partner or ex-partner. In Australia, the statistic is one woman every week.

The statistics also begin to look quite different when you consider that men were also responsible for all murder-suicides in Australia from 2008-2010. And as we saw just last week with the suspected familicide by Geoff Hunt, children can also be the victims of this violence.

According to findings from the British Crime Survey, women are also much more likely to be the victims of multiple attacks and the violence they experience is more severe and they suffer more serious psychological consequences, than that experienced by men.

Of the 500,000 victims of sexual assault each year in the UK, 85–90 per cent are women. A 2004 report in the British Journal of Criminology found that all perpetrators of sexual assault were men.

It is highly likely that domestic violence against men is under-reported due to social stigma. However, it’s not at all possible that one man is killed every week by his female partner or that it has somehow been omitted from the official statistics.

Public discussion of domestic violence is welcome and long overdue. We have come a long way from a time when police, political and community leaders regarded it as a ‘private matter’. Understanding the extent of the problem, through statistics and survivor’s stories is also an important step in the direction of addressing this heinous crime.

But the #ViolenceIsViolence slogan is not a helpful contribution to this discussion. It is, rather, an invitation to leave our brains at the door. By uncritically deploying statistics and universalising — thereby downplaying the gendered-nature of violence — this ‘me too’ campaign clouds the issue, diluting, and misdirecting attention from the source of the problem.

Rather than playing the victim card, men need to take responsibility both individually and collectively for male violence towards women.

Kasey Edwards is a writer and best-selling author. kaseyedwards.com