stuff
The proposed theory on the antidepressant effect on neurons as akin to pizza delivery porn will have to wait.
Firstly, eee! NYC tomorrow! Bus leaves at 7am and I get there at 11:05am. Yay!
Secondly, I went to a presentation on domestic violence today. I was really glad I went,
Current statistics are indicating that non-escalating, frequently mutual, arguments turned violent between men and women make up about 44% of domestic violence situations, and it is roughly equal men and women participation. This IS an anger management situation. This IS where I think we're seeing a lot of women being violent towards their partners, not as part of system of control and punishment, but in not being able to manage themselves well. And their partners join in sometimes too. The difference between this group and the next one is that there is remorse and hope for change. I don't think it is okay, but it is different, and there is a lot more room here for just leaving your partner if they don't feel like working on controlling themselves. Or agreeing to being mutual punching bags, whatever. There is room here, as mentioned, for anger management and for couples counseling.
Two other groups make up the remaining 66%, a bigger chunk (29%) is men violent against women as part of regimen of control, of emotional/sexual/economic abuse. It might not be the most violent, as much of the control is in other arenas. They're calling it intimate terrorism, although I'm adverse to slapping 'terrorism' on everything personally, if it works globally - great. The remaining 23% is women fighting back. Homicide thereof is dropping, by the way, with expanded programs - no longer feeling like nobody believes you and the only solution is the abuser dying - has decreased those killings significantly.
And it is scary. This is not something, from all my years hanging around men and women's forums on the subject, that men really experience (statistic: 97% is against women from men). They don't talk about having a partner that watches their every move, that controls their work, their friends, their children, their health, their clothing, their own family even and goes up to violence against them. There isn't a lot of calculated, controlling and manipulation tactics that are the hallmarks.
To give an example, when I worked at KB, I worked with B. B's husband called the store twenty times a day to make sure she was working and had not lied about her schedule in order to leave the house for longer. B's husband smelled her breath every time she came home to make sure she hadn't stopped at the bar with her friends. B's husband didn't 'really' want to stop having children, so B had more children, even though she didn't really want to. B's husband asked for her paycheck every week, because 'he manages money better.' B's husband, when he was angry at her, would ask a friend to give him a ride to her work, find her car, and drive it home so she would be stranded. B came into work with bruises and actively bleeding wounds on occasion. When she had been told her husband was cheating on her, she threw a handful of gravel at him. Was B an abuser for a handful of gravel?
It finished with, first, telling us that batterer recovery programs are pretty useless in terms of preventing further acts of violence. However, follow-up is not necessarily useless. Because the classic batterer is smart and controlled. Someone might show-up at any point, they will take care to hide their abuse. After that was a video interviewing two men who had completed a batterer program. That was terrifying. The way that they said, clearly, they waited until they were married, or until they'd been together a long time, before they started being violent, the way they minimized everything "I came at her with a machete, but to spank her. I liked to test her, you know, just so she'd know I could get a reaction out of her every time because I knew her, I guess the worst was when I tried to hit her with my car." And how they would lie to everyone about actually being a victim, about their wife being a crazy drunk, how they'd purposefully engineer the situation so that when they knew the police would show up the police would think it was the wife's fault.
Not everyone was thrilled with the program. It scored best with the people already involved in domestic violence treatment or assistance, and worst I'd say with our substance abuse and counseling folks, who didn't want to hear that counseling doesn't do much good or that abusers lie loudly and long about being the abused.
It was biased, sure, the woman having her background in domestic violence counseling and not in batterer programs. But I've heard plenty of the other side and I'm just not buying it anymore. I'll agree there are wives/girlfriends that are violent towards their partners, and there are a small percentage where it is the other way around, and that small percentage should be able to have access to treatment or protection where appropriate.
Firstly, eee! NYC tomorrow! Bus leaves at 7am and I get there at 11:05am. Yay!
Secondly, I went to a presentation on domestic violence today. I was really glad I went,
Current statistics are indicating that non-escalating, frequently mutual, arguments turned violent between men and women make up about 44% of domestic violence situations, and it is roughly equal men and women participation. This IS an anger management situation. This IS where I think we're seeing a lot of women being violent towards their partners, not as part of system of control and punishment, but in not being able to manage themselves well. And their partners join in sometimes too. The difference between this group and the next one is that there is remorse and hope for change. I don't think it is okay, but it is different, and there is a lot more room here for just leaving your partner if they don't feel like working on controlling themselves. Or agreeing to being mutual punching bags, whatever. There is room here, as mentioned, for anger management and for couples counseling.
Two other groups make up the remaining 66%, a bigger chunk (29%) is men violent against women as part of regimen of control, of emotional/sexual/economic abuse. It might not be the most violent, as much of the control is in other arenas. They're calling it intimate terrorism, although I'm adverse to slapping 'terrorism' on everything personally, if it works globally - great. The remaining 23% is women fighting back. Homicide thereof is dropping, by the way, with expanded programs - no longer feeling like nobody believes you and the only solution is the abuser dying - has decreased those killings significantly.
And it is scary. This is not something, from all my years hanging around men and women's forums on the subject, that men really experience (statistic: 97% is against women from men). They don't talk about having a partner that watches their every move, that controls their work, their friends, their children, their health, their clothing, their own family even and goes up to violence against them. There isn't a lot of calculated, controlling and manipulation tactics that are the hallmarks.
To give an example, when I worked at KB, I worked with B. B's husband called the store twenty times a day to make sure she was working and had not lied about her schedule in order to leave the house for longer. B's husband smelled her breath every time she came home to make sure she hadn't stopped at the bar with her friends. B's husband didn't 'really' want to stop having children, so B had more children, even though she didn't really want to. B's husband asked for her paycheck every week, because 'he manages money better.' B's husband, when he was angry at her, would ask a friend to give him a ride to her work, find her car, and drive it home so she would be stranded. B came into work with bruises and actively bleeding wounds on occasion. When she had been told her husband was cheating on her, she threw a handful of gravel at him. Was B an abuser for a handful of gravel?
It finished with, first, telling us that batterer recovery programs are pretty useless in terms of preventing further acts of violence. However, follow-up is not necessarily useless. Because the classic batterer is smart and controlled. Someone might show-up at any point, they will take care to hide their abuse. After that was a video interviewing two men who had completed a batterer program. That was terrifying. The way that they said, clearly, they waited until they were married, or until they'd been together a long time, before they started being violent, the way they minimized everything "I came at her with a machete, but to spank her. I liked to test her, you know, just so she'd know I could get a reaction out of her every time because I knew her, I guess the worst was when I tried to hit her with my car." And how they would lie to everyone about actually being a victim, about their wife being a crazy drunk, how they'd purposefully engineer the situation so that when they knew the police would show up the police would think it was the wife's fault.
Not everyone was thrilled with the program. It scored best with the people already involved in domestic violence treatment or assistance, and worst I'd say with our substance abuse and counseling folks, who didn't want to hear that counseling doesn't do much good or that abusers lie loudly and long about being the abused.
It was biased, sure, the woman having her background in domestic violence counseling and not in batterer programs. But I've heard plenty of the other side and I'm just not buying it anymore. I'll agree there are wives/girlfriends that are violent towards their partners, and there are a small percentage where it is the other way around, and that small percentage should be able to have access to treatment or protection where appropriate.