Just for the record, what I wrote was not in direct response to your experiences, Vector, sorry if it sounded insensitive in context.
What I wrote about "special treatment" was really about how other people bring up some lone statistic like it's meant to prove something, but by not taking the bigger picture we might miss opportunities to deal with deeper underlying issues. By not taking on board the stats for men, we might even be failing to address deeper causes that hurt women, too. Basically, I disagree that excluding inconvenient facts improves a discussion. Again, this had nothing to do with anything you said, Vector.
Overall (and the rest of this post is addressing the set of all posters who are not-Vector), for many types of gender-based violence the prevailing trend is that for each 2 male victims there are 3 female victims (this holds true for quite a few phenomena, such as
domestic violence surveys and also surveys of workplace sexual harassment,
here it's 16% for men vs 25% for women, and for child sexual abuse, it's also around
16% male to 25% female victims (page 5)). The commonality is a bigger problem than the difference.
An example of the gendered-approach failing to help is the Duluth Model of dealing with domestic violence, which is the most common form of intervention program in the USA. This treats all men as perps, all women as victims and believes that all violence stems from a single factor: patriarchy. The Duluth Model thus single-mindedly tries to "de-program" the men from their patriarchal views, and Duluth Model proponents are very hostile to alternative approaches such as "anger management" or approaches that see drug and alcohol abuse as major factors in domestic abuse. Not because those alternatives don't help, however. They do. But they don't stroke the same ideological itch.
According to controlled studies, the Duluth Model makes absolutely zero difference to the recurrence of domestic violence when you compare to a control group who received no treatment. And even the original creators of the program now say it's a load of shit, yet it's still pushed as the "only" way to deal with domestic violence, because it appeals to a hardline ideology, results be damned! And clearly, this model of "treatment" isn't just hurting men by ignoring abuse against them, the case could be made that it's hurting women even more than men, by stifling discussion of alternative viewpoints and solutions.
Another example of how ignoring male-victims-of-women hurts women, is in child abuse. Many people will scoff at the idea that we should seriously look at female pedophiles as a "real" issue, since they are so rare. And anyway, girls have it worse, so forget about the boys. It's probably men's fault 99% of the time anyway. But the CDC estimated in 2011 that there are over 4 million girls/women in the USA that were sexually abused by a female perpetrator in childhood, that's 4 million abused girls we're turning a blind eye to if we stick to the "patriarchy" line. And female pedophiles go for boys about 4x as often as they go for girls, so the total number of victims of female pedophilia might be around 20 million people just in the USA. That's not so "rare". Additionally,
being sexually abused in childhood by a woman is the single biggest risk factor for becoming a future male rapist. So, turning a blind eye to female perps is hurting other women down the track.
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Topic: Murrican Politics Megathread 2016: There Will Be Hell Toupée (Read 1570309 times)