If women hate the idea that only men can be strong, they had better reject the myth that only women can be gentle. In today's day and age the very thought of a woman abusing (abusing/abuses is referred to as either physical or mental abuse or even both) her spouse or significant other is just preposterous to think about and certainly not something one would easily believe. While it does occur far less than men battering women, some women do, in fact, abuse their male partners. Just exactly how often and/or how badly these women abuse their mates is the subject matter of much debate. If women aspire to lead, it is time they take responsibility for their own capacity to abuse and/or victimize others; namely their spouses or significant others.
Between 1975 and 1985, male-against-female domestic violence decreased, while, surprisingly, women's violence against men increased. The results of a study conducted showed that two million men were assaulted by their wife or their girlfriend while 1.8 million women suffered assaults from their husband or from their boyfriend. We, as a society, want to believe that there is absolutely no way possible for this to be true. Women are not capable of such cruelty. Men are and have always been the aggressive ones. If a woman, by some remote chance, did actually hurt a man, it had to be because she was defending herself. That is what we have been taught to believe anyway. Those are certainly some very good arguments for some to make against the fact there are women who actually abuse their male partners. Society does not want to face the reality of this ever-growing problem. If society just stopped for a moment and considered the possibility the truth may hit them between the eyes and making them see that she was not after all defending her self. There are some very cold-hearted, cruel women in this world we live in. For many years now, boys were taught to never hit girls for any reason and continue teaching this to them up into adulthood. The men that are being abused by women could be the men that actually listened to their mothers and ultimately obeyed them only to now wish they had not.
There are countless numbers of testimonies from men who are or were abused by their female partners. The Department of Justice has conducted study upon studies on this very subject alone. After compiling all of the data from a domestic violence study that was conducted and researched over a period of five years, the final results were announced in May of 2000 by the Justice Department. While some results of this study were of great relief, another part of this study was alarmingly overwhelming. The result that was of great interest was the rate at which American women were attacked or threatened by a loved one, meaning a husband or a boyfriend, declined 21 percent between the years of 1993 and 1998. However, the number of men who were attacked by their wives or girlfriends remained stable with 160,000 attacks in the last consecutive four years.
Women compensate for their size when engaged in domestic violence by using weapons. In 6,200 domestic abuse cases, 86 percent of women who assaulted men used a weapon of some kind or another such as guns, knives, boiling water, bricks, fireplace pokers, and baseball bats. Only about one-fourth of men who assaulted women have been known to use a weapon of some kind. The majority of the men used their fists, palms, as their weapon(s) of choice.
The abuses committed-and untold-by women are wide scale. Women are responsible for one-third of the sexual abuse of boys . Women are very well known to pressure men on emotional levels by saying things such as, “If you do not do it, you are not the man I thought you were”, or, “I will take you for everything you are worth and leave you with nothing”. Women know exactly how to get men to do what they want them to do, as well as when they want them to do it at any given time. If the men refuse, they are then physically and mentally abused. The outside world is left with the assumption that men are never and could never be victims of this. Thus, domestic violence against men goes unrecognized. If the men somehow muster up enough courage to tell someone or ask others for help, they are ridiculed and dismissed. If charges were made by the men, our justice system sweeps it under the rug with a great deal of harassment to go along with it.
Richard J. Gelles was accurate when he stated in an article that was published in The Woman's Quarterly “…it is necessary to reframe as something other than a "gender crime" or example of "patriarchal coercive control".” By always assuming the female is the “victim” and the male is the “offender” we, as a society, will be unable to come to a solution to this tragedy . By always offering the women help and ultimately arresting the men, the financial burden of this issue will continue as well.
If women hate the idea that only men can be strong, they had better reject the myth that only women can be gentle. If women aspire to lead, it is time they take responsibility for their own capacity to abuse and victimize others. Most have grown weary of this long, drawn-out gender war. Besides, men do not look as scary as they did ten to twenty years ago. Today, they just look like people walking down the street that you meet every day of your life and never give a second thought to whom they may or may not be or even what their life story entails. The next one you pass could possibly be hiding this awful secret of being abused.
