More Anguish About Attitudes Towards DV
For over three decades, we've been "educating" ourselves about domestic violence. We've gone from not really being aware of it as an issue to reading articles and seeing TV news about it every day. Countless organizations exist solely because of domestic violence, federal laws with vast funding mechanisms have come into being, DV shelters are a common part of everyday life, classes are taught about DV and the matter is studied, studied, studied.
And the message is clear and has been for a long time - DV is always wrong. Like the bumper sticker says, "There's no excuse for domestic violence."
But just last week, a Boston area study of teenagers showed that they hadn't gotten that message at all. The "shocking" news was that 52% of polled teens viewed Rihanna as responsible for her DV incident with Chris Brown as he was (see my blog post "Teens in Crisis!").
Now we have this study about attitudes toward DV in the United Kingdom (The Sun, 3/9/09). The "shock survey" finds that 20% of Britons believe it's OK for a man to slap a woman under certain circumstances.
And now there's this piece in Slate (Slate, 3/13/09). While in college, the writer took part in a program that sent volunteer college students to high schools to teach various health issues. Sex, drugs, nutrition and of course DV were part of the curriculum. Tellingly, the writer relates how the kids were quite receptive to the messages - all except DV. They could "rattle off the ins and outs of contraception," but the message about DV "never sunk (sic) in." And of course, like the ones agonizing over the Boston and UK studies, the Slate writer professes to be totally mystified about how these attitudes can persist in the face of so much "education" about DV.
I think there's no mystery about people's attitudes. I think that, as long as the message is false, people will ignore it. I think that when institutions preach a message that people know to be false based on their everyday experiences, people will tune it out. I think that is exactly what is happening here.
And the clear, uniform message that we've been sending lo these many years is false. We're still doing it every day, many times a day. The message we send on DV is that men are perpetrators and women aren't, that women are victims and men aren't. Google the term "domestic violence" any day of the week and you'll turn up a lot of recent articles on the subject. The vast majority of them make no reference to the possibility of a man as a victim or a woman as a perpetrator.
Indeed, the three pieces linked to here betray not the slightest awareness of the basic fact that women are perpetrators and men are victims. Listen to UK Home Secretary Jacqui Smith: "Violence against women and girls is unacceptable." Hypocrisy doesn't get any clearer than that.
People know that the sermon we hear every day about DV just isn't true. You can preach that message till the cows come home, but when teens see Mom hit Dad with the lamp, they know to a dead certainty that the sermon is wrong. So they tune it out and draw their own conclusions.
My guess is that the ones wringing their hands over people's failure to accept their false message will simply redouble their efforts and become even more strident and dogmatic. If you don't believe me, read The Sun article linked to.
My modest proposal is that we start telling the truth about DV. Men do it; women do it; so do boys and girls. Men injure women more than women injure men, but women still injure men in large numbers.
If domestic violence is wrong, it's wrong for everybody, not just men. Start sending that message and see if attitudes don't change.
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