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June 14, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

20:43

2722 The Truth About Domestic Violence - You'll Never Believe...

Stefan Molyneux breaks down the unspoken truth about domestic violence, including: dating violence statistics, gender related statistical breakdowns, emergency room reports, perpetration, physiological aggression, chivalry, injuries and much much more. For a full reference of sources, go to: http://www.fdrurl.com/dvsources

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	Hi everybody, this is Devan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	I hope you're doing well.
	This is the largely unguessed and in general actively hidden truth about domestic violence.
	And if you're a man, I really strongly suggest that you watch this.
	So, let's start with definitions.
	What is domestic violence?
	Well, in most of the studies that are going to be cited and, as always, the references are below in the description bar, minor violence is when you throw something at someone, you push, you grab, you shove, or you slap an intimate partner.
	Severe violence is kicked, bit, punched, hit or tried to hit with object, beat up or choked, threatened with a knife or a gun, or when you are using a knife or a gun.
	So this is the rate per 1,000 couples.
	This is a graph of marital violence, and the first on the left is husband to wife, the second on the right is wife to husband.
	So rates of overall violence, husband to wife per 1,000 couples, 121.
	In 1975, 113 in 1985.
	Severe violence, 38 versus 30.
	So this is husband to wife.
	Husband attacking wife.
	Wife attacking husband.
	Let's see what we get.
	Overall violence, 1975, 116.
	1985, Achieved parity with male and female violence from 1975 at 121 per 1,000 couples.
	Severe violence 61 and 58 for 75 to 85 respectively.
	And as you can see, overall violence is similar, but severe violence is more common, significantly more common, almost twice as common from wife to husband.
	Male victims of severe violence on behalf, on the part of the spouse.
	Trends in minor and severe assaults by husbands and wives.
	So this is rate per 1,000 couples and this is 1975, 1985 and 1992.
	As you can see, minor results by husband's decline and then rise, by wife's lower and then rise to be actually higher than husband's.
	Severe assaults always remain higher for wives than for husbands.
	In other words, husbands are the victims far more often.
	They remain close to 50 to 40 and stay high, whereas severe assaults from husbands decline by almost half, from just below 40 to 20, from 1975 to 1992.
	These are very, very important statistics to really understand.
	So, in 1978, Susan Steinmetz identifies battered husband syndrome.
	I'm sure you've heard in the general Woman in Peril movie of the week, battered wife syndrome.
	What about battered husband syndrome?
	Have you ever heard of that?
	Well, it's over 30 years ago that it was first defined, and she suggested that Husband beating was similar in incidents to wife beating.
	But of course, have you ever heard of that?
	Of course not.
	A firestorm of protest comes up from the left and from feminist groups and so on.
	Death threats, bomb threats, violence, intimidation.
	And of course, a lot of researchers shy away.
	You know, death threats and bomb threats and reporting people to the police and having Bomb-sniffing dogs in your office.
	Not everybody's idea of a tasty way to while away your brain rot of academia, so unfortunately this remains somewhat underreported, I guess we could say.
	So changes in severe spousal beatings, again from 1975 to 1992.
	Where the wife is the victim, it declines significantly from 3% to under 1%.
	And this is the result, I would argue, of a significant Exposure and visibility of spousal abuse on the part of the husband, the husband beating the wife.
	What happens to the husband who is the victim of severe spousal beatings?
	Well, because this stuff remains underreported, it remains tragically high, remaining above 4%.
	It started off higher than the man's, and as the men's declined as a result of social pressure and enlightenment, The wife spousal abuse on the husband remains high and does not decline because this stuff remains vastly underreported and for reasons we'll get into in a few minutes.
	So this is a meta-analysis which is an analysis of a wide variety of published studies and reports.
	These are all peer-reviewed and very professional and so on.
	Sex differences in aggression, which is who is initiating.
	So, female violence, and this is not a zero-based scale.
	I just zoomed in a little here to show the difference.
	Female violence, 34,053 incidents.
	Male violence, 30,434.
	Right, so that, of course, is less.
	It's more than 10% less.
	Male-initiated violence versus female-initiated violence in a meta-analysis of a wide variety of studies.
	Injuries, who gets injured more?
	This, I think, is probably close to what you know, but it's certainly not the entire story, as we'll talk about in a minute or two.
	So in this meta-analysis, there were over 7,000 male injuries of domestic violence, and female injuries were about 7% or 8% higher.
	At 7531.
	And, you know, men, I think, are just sort of trying to say, yes, we recognize and respect the tragedy on the right.
	Can we, to some degree, recognize and respect the tragedy on the left?
	Well, hopefully we can.
	Medical treatment received as a result of partner abuse, males almost 5,000, females 6,300 and change.
	So, quite a bit higher on the female side, but let's look into some of the reasons why.
	So why do we have such an overwhelming impression that it is husbands beating wives?
	Well, police reports say that women are reported victims of domestic violence 75 to 90 percent of the time.
	In the emergency room of the patient scene, women receive treatment for the effects of domestic violence for 75 to 90 percent of the time.
	In a recent study in 1999, found similar rates of victimization for men and women.
	So social science survey findings, gender parity in perpetration and victimization of partner assaults.
	Men and women are attacking each other about equally, yay, egalitarianism.
	And so what could be going on here?
	Well, the reality is that men are reluctant to report victimization.
	If you're beaten up by your wife, most men would never think of calling the cops for a variety of reasons.
	Social stigma, shame, a feeling that you're not going to be believed...
	And of course the most important aspect is if that you and your wife are involved in a kick and bite slugfest and you call the cops as the man the woman will say most likely that you started it and then you will be immediately hauled off to jail.
	So men do not usually feel that they have access to police protection in these kinds of situations.
	Police and courts have tended to disbelieve male victims And men in general, you know, suck it up.
	We're taught to endure pain and not complain, which is probably one reason why men are reluctant to report physical discomfort or pain or injury.
	You know, the old stereotype of nagging your husband to go to the doctor.
	And even violent men statistically are less likely to assault their partners because there's this age-old, don't-hit-a-girl chivalry norm.
	And this was established with a fair degree of certainty in 2006.
	So we're going to now go to an even bigger meta-analysis representative sample surveys, and these include the US 75, 85, 93, 2000, 02, 07, 08, 2010 and 2011, so we're getting more recent data, Canada 86 through 99,
	Great Britain 96 to 04, New Zealand 01, Australia 96, and there was a study in 98 of domestic violence in the military, And evaluated over 3000 subjects and found that more men than women were victims of physical abuse.
	And that is in the military, of course, where you would imagine not the most peaceful men are, but more men than women are the victims of physical abuse.
	Also in dating, now dating sounds kind of innocuous but basically it means relationships prior to engagement.
	123 dating studies have all been published and the results of those studies reveal equal or greater victimization of men in these pre-engagement relationships.
	Dr.
	Murray Strauss, I think quite a hero of this kind of information, a man who's been on this show, he reports data from a worldwide study of dating violence.
	Data was collected from students in 68 universities in 32 countries, consisted of over 13,600 subjects.
	Overall, 31.2% of subjects assaulted Their dating partner in the past year.
	This is universities.
	This is not ghettos and so on.
	This is mostly privileged kids.
	And just in the past year, almost a third of them had assaulted their dating partner.
	Violence is just crushingly Endemic in human society, although in general violence is in truth declining in many ways in recent history.
	So mutual violence, almost 70% of those people who were violent.
	The male only violence, in other words it's only the man who was attacking, is under 10% and female only is over 21%.
	And that I think is again something very important to really sit and ponder and process.
	I mean I myself have really never been subject to violence from a man, only from a woman, which would be my mother.
	The overall rate of severe assaults in this worldwide dating violence study It was 10.8%.
	Mutual violence, 54.8%.
	Male-only severe assaults of those who were engaged in these severe assaults.
	Male-only 15.7%.
	Female-only 29.4%.
	And that, again, is something really important to understand to the degree to which we do not see Women's role in the cycle of violence is the degree to which we really cannot cure this horrible Grand Hog's Day facial bludgeoning.
	So what is the myth?
	Well, the myth is that females, well, you say, well, people say, well, they may aggress against their male partners, but it's always or almost always self-defense.
	And this is not...
	Held up by the data.
	Objective studies reveal that in half of the cases it is impossible to tell who initiated the violence and male and female initiation of aggression in the other half is about equal.
	So it's about equal for men and women to initiate violence in relationships where it can be determined.
	Where it can't be determined, I think it's reasonable to assume, though it can't be proven, that the same patterns would continue.
	In general, studies of marital couples indicate that women initiate partner violence 25% of the time, men initiate partner violence 25% of the time, and mutual violence occurs 50% of the time, a grimly efficient egalitarianism of aggression.
	The dating studies, though, generally show that women initiate violence at significantly higher rates than men.
	A 2006 study on physical and psychological aggression examined partner aggression in a sample of 453 cohabiting couples with kids between three to seven years of age.
	Minor aggression, males 23.8%, women 33.8%, severe aggression, men 8.4%, women 11.5%.
	And one of the key findings that came out of this was that female physical aggression Generally occurs when a man is verbally aggressive.
	He says mean things.
	Then the woman will assault him.
	But the key reason for male aggression was female physical aggression.
	In other words, the men fought because the women started hitting them.
	The women fought because the men were speaking in a negative way or destructive way towards them.
	Which again, I think is certainly in a rational philosophy, a verbal abuse does not justify physical violence.
	So the authors of this study in 06 conclude that women may be the first to escalate a conflict and use physical aggression.
	So let's just have a look at this graphically.
	Male, minor aggression, 23.8.
	Female, 33.8.
	Male, major aggression, 8.4 versus 11.5.
	And this is a great tragedy.
	It is a great tragedy.
	Not focusing on women's capacity to violence, as I'll argue at the end, is one of the key reasons why female violence continues and in some ways even escalates.
	So another myth is that because of the strength differential, men have 40% or more greater upper body strength than women, women are significantly more likely to be injured than men are.
	But recent data suggest a parity in serious injuries.
	So in 2007, a bunch of guys found in a national study of over 11,000 young adults that there was violence in 24% of the relationships.
	Half of couple violence was reciprocal and in non-reciprocal violence, in other words, where one person was beating on the other, women were perpetrators in 70% of the cases.
	Overall, women were, in fact, more likely to be injured.
	However, in reciprocal violence, men reported more injuries than women in relationships with non-reciprocal violence.
	So where both people are beating up on each other, men get injured more than just the men in relationships where the men are beating on the women.
	So rather than self-reporting, you can go to ER data.
	This is from the late 90s, a 13-week period in the ER was studied, and found that of the 866 male patients who were admitted, 12.6% of them were victims of domestic violence.
	This compares to 14.4% of women treated for partner violence in emergency departments.
	So again, this is a less than 2% disparity, and that's again important to understand.
	48% of the male victims reported being kicked, bitten, choked, or punched.
	37% of men reported having a weapon used against them by a female partner.
	You know, one of the ways that you can make up for a strength disparity is to use a weapon, of course.
	So in 2000, a meta-analysis was published in the Psychological Bulletin, one of the most respected and peer-reviewed journals.
	56% of serious injuries were sustained by women, 44% by men.
	Of course, this is in no way to discount the horror of the women being beaten.
	We just kind of want to point out that in a marriage of evil known as domestic abuse, there is not just one person standing on top of the bloody wedding cake.
	There are, in fact, Two people and the idea of this 19th century fainting-hearted female victimization is something we should delegate to the dustbin of history and recognize that the capacity for evil and violence beats as strong in the female heart as in the male.
	So, Murray Strauss in O5 reports that women are seriously injured twice as often as men.
	LaRouche in O5 reports a similar percentage of men and women who were terrorized by the partners that received medical attention.
	But again, the 84% is not indicative of the amount of violence occurring in the relationship or whether men and women are both restarting it.
	It is indicative of one's willingness to go and get help and the perception of whether one can be believed.
	Vasquez and Falcone in 97 report equal cross-gender violence in a trauma center with male injuries more severe than female.
	Men were stabbed.
	Women were assaulted.
	So this is important to understand.
	There's a lot of mixed messages in all of this stuff, and that, of course, is understandable.
	So, 447 young men and 391 young women were assessed in New Zealand in 2005.
	Men were found to be more exposed to severe domestic violence than women.
	There were similar rates of injury, 3.9% for men versus 3.3% for women.
	Women report initiating assaults three times more than men, 34% versus 12%.
	So again, looking at that, we have almost 300% more assaults initiated by women than by men.
	And of course, if there are children involved, one of the questions is why do men stay?
	One of the reasons that men stay is if there are children involved, then almost for certain, if the woman is violent, the woman is going to be assaulting the children.
	The man stays as a human shield, knowing that he's very unlikely to get custody if he leaves, and also knowing his wife's capacity for brutality.
	The idea of linking her up at lawyers in a family court system, particularly in the United States, is so terrifying that most men would rather stay and endure.
	In 1984, researchers found that when weapons were employed in domestic violence encounters, men used weapons 25% of the time, women used weapons 86% of the time.
	And of course, in sum, both men and women used weapons.
	So, equality is equal.
	Women are equal in their capacities for evil relative to men.
	Here we're merely talking about spousal or intimate partner or dating violence.
	When we look at violence against children, women are vastly overrepresented in attacks and assaults and murders of children.
	Women do have the capacity for violence.
	They have the capacity for brutality, for control, the isolation of the victim, which is common to almost all abusive situations.
	Women have this capacity.
	It's extremely dangerous and very widespread.
	If we don't hold women accountable, then the violence is not going to diminish.
	We saw that from the graphs earlier, where as the result of an increased awareness of male and female violence, male violence diminished.
	We would like to see, of course, all good people would like to see women assaulting men less, which is occurring in male and female violence, but not on female and male violence to a large degree because it's invisible and the police don't believe you and men don't want to go for help.
	And they're hostage by family court systems often.
	We know that accountability works.
	When violence is identified and violence is condemned, then it tends to diminish.
	Negative reactions or negative repercussions work.
	People respond to incentives and disincentives.
	I mean, as recently as the 1950s, nobody really believed that child abuse existed.
	There was a doctor who first began to imagine that the concussions and contusions and broken bones and so on That the parents were bringing their children in for may not be the result of falling out of trees, but instead falling on a parent's fist.
	So it really is only 50 or 60 years since child abuse really began to be examined, and in many ways, excluding SSRIs, it has diminished enormously.
	And the same thing needs to be true for female violence.
	We need to understand its causes.
	We need to understand that if children are exposed to this level of violence among Their parents or their caregivers, there is going to be a huge amount of gender hostility that arises as a result.
	As Senator Ann Cools, who I recently spoke with at a conference said, behind every wife-beater is an abusive mother.
	Why would a man grow up with such hatred of women?
	Because maybe he saw his father being beaten up by a woman.
	Maybe he was beaten up by a woman and his father was helpless in the web that he had been caught in.
	So we have to focus on ending the cycle of violence no matter what.
	Facts cannot be sexist.
	Reality cannot be hostile to all but false agendas.
	So let us work together to recognize and expose women's capacity for violence and work to heal and diminish our capacity for repetition.
	This is Stefan Molyneux for Free Domain Radio.

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