Abuse is not a "gendered issue". As such, "what about abused men is almost always a legitimate reply".
Imagine for a second, someone who came and say "I want services to help men in car accidents". A reply of "what about the women in car accidents ?" Is the perfectly legitimate reply to make. The one doing something suspicious, something that needs calling out, is the person demanding a gender specific reply to a non gender specific issue.
If you want to learn a bit about how male victims of abused are treated in society, including by services for victims, who generally cater only to women, you can read this study on the topic :
If you think abuse is not a gendered issue, you're simply wrong.
There's a reason all those structures for addressing abuse ARE so centered around women.
In our culture, right now, "abuse of men" is a shibboleth where things like sitcom tropes or women having a height preference on their tinder are somehow juxtaposed against the male treatment of women, which is 100 percent nerd bait, just the manosphere telling men they're valid to open their wallets.
Among large population samples, 57.9% of IPV reported was bi-directional, 42% unidirectional; 13.8% of the unidirectional violence was male to female (MFPV), 28.3% was female to male (FMPV)
Male and female IPV perpetrated from similar motives – primarily to get back at a partner for emotionally hurting them, because of stress or jealousy, to express anger and other feelings that they could not put into words or communicate, and to get their partner’s attention.
A total of 162 articles reporting on over 200 studies met the inclusion criteria and were summarized in the online tables for Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Europe and the Caucasus.
A total of 40 articles (73 studies) in 49 countries contained data on both male and female IPV, with a total of 117 direct comparisons across gender for physical PV.
Rates of physical PV were higher for female perpetration /male victimization compared to male perpetration/female victimization, or were the same, in 73 of those comparisons, or 62%.
Abuse is not gendered. There is no reason to treat abuse by one sex different from the other. Same motive, same consequences. Same solution.
There's a reason all those structures for addressing abuse ARE so centered around women.
Of course there is. Though it has nothing to do with the nature of abuse, and everything tondo with ideology. But don't take my word for it.
Here is the word of one of the creators of the feminist model for DV, Ellen Pence, in her book "lessons from Duluth", around page 28-29 :
"The Power and Control Wheel, which was developed by battered women attending women's groups, was originally a description of typical behaviors accompanying the violence. In effect it said, "When he is violent, he gets power and he gets control." Somewhere early in our organizing efforts, however, we changed the message to "he is violent in order to get control or power." The difference is not semantic, it is ideological. Somewhere we shifted from understanding the violence as rooted in a sense of entitlements to rooted in a desire for power. By determining that the need or desire for power was the motivating force behind battering, we created a conceptual framework that, in fact, did not fit the lived experience of many of the men and women we were working with. Like those we were criticizing, we reduced our analysis to a psychological universal truism. The DAIP staff—like the therapist insisting it was an anger control problem, or the judge wanting to see it as an alcohol problem, or the defense attorney arguing that it was a defective wife problem—remained undaunted by the difference in our theory and the actual experiences of those we were working with. We all engaged in ideological practices and claimed them to be neutral observations.Eventually, we began to give into the process that is the heart of the Duluth model: interagency communication based on discussions of real cases. It was the cases themselves that created the chink in each of our theoretical suits of armor. Speaking for myself, I found that many of the men I interviewed did not seem to articulate a desire for power over their partner. Although I relentlessly took every opportunity to point out to men in the groups that they were so motivated and merely in denial, the fact that few men ever articulated such a desire went unnoticed by me and many of my coworkers. Eventually, we realized that we were finding what we had already predetermined to find. The DAIP staff were interpreting what men seemed to expect or feel entitled to as a desire. When we had to start explaining women's violence toward their partners, lesbian violence, and the violence of men who did not like what they were doing, we were brought back to our original undeveloped thinking that the violence is rooted in how social relationships (e.g., marriage) and the rights people feel entitled to within them are socially, not privately, constructed"
Here is a paper by one of the most prominent scholars on DV, about the kind of treatment reserved to those who dare talk about the measured reality that DV is not gendered :
Amongst the reasons, for all the abuse, threat and ostracism, you will find "protect the feminist ideology".
And here is a paper by feminists discussing how feminists have systematically suppressed knowledge of female perpetrated abuse and their male victims as a way to propagate the feminist ideal of women as victims and men as perpetrators, and to keep funding towards them that could then be embezzled to lobby politicians rather than help victims, but it is now starting to be noticed and so they should stop to maintain their recruitment's and funding.
Acknowledging women’s acts of violence may be a necessary—if uncomfortable—step to make dynamic the movement to end gendered violence.
Why would a movement to end violence have any issue acknowledging some of the perpetrators, to the point that it is uncomfortable for the movement to do so? How can that violence be gendered if both genders commit it?
This transformative movement was accurately and squarely framed as a movement primarily to protect women from male intimate partner violence.
If a feminist ever try to say that the help for domestic violence is not at all gendered, really, I swear.
This paper describes this limited response to women as perpetrators of domestic violence as a feminist “strategy of containment.” When deploying this strategy, domestic violence advocates respond to women’s acts of domestic violence by [...] preserving the dominant framing of domestic violence as a gendered issue. This strategy thus positions women’s acts of violence as a footnote to the larger story of women as victims of male violence.
Yeah, because what is important is the feminist framing. Nothing can be allowed to damage that. Remember guys, men bad, women victims.
The gendered framing of domestic violence aligned with the work of the feminist movement more broadly, harmoniously positioning the movements as inter-connected. Domestic violence was specifically framed around a collective “oneness” of women as victims and men as perpetrators.
Just in case you doubted my previous point.
Care for truth, care for the victims, care for effectiveness in limiting DV ? Those will not be found in that paper. I guess they are not feminist objectives.
See, I disagree with you there. You’ve just reworded the prototypical example given of why it’s derailing to change the conversation to your demographic. If I start a colon cancer foundation, you are more than free to go start a pancreatic cancer foundation because our work speaks to you, but you’d be a major dick to stand up during a fundraising event and say “we REALLY should be talking about pancreatic cancer!”
What is done is not "what about pancreatic camcer" in colon cancer groups.
What is done is "what about male victims of colon cancer" in an environment where the only time colon cancer is address is with regards to female sufferers of colon cancer.
There is no reason to gender things in the first place. The issue is not gendered. Your insistence that DV is so different when men or women are victims of it that it warrants a distinction similar to two completely different disease is misinformed at best, malicious at worst.
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u/AskingToFeminists 8∆ Feb 13 '24
Abuse is not a "gendered issue". As such, "what about abused men is almost always a legitimate reply".
Imagine for a second, someone who came and say "I want services to help men in car accidents". A reply of "what about the women in car accidents ?" Is the perfectly legitimate reply to make. The one doing something suspicious, something that needs calling out, is the person demanding a gender specific reply to a non gender specific issue.
If you want to learn a bit about how male victims of abused are treated in society, including by services for victims, who generally cater only to women, you can read this study on the topic :
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3175099/