Robert,
Violence between men and women also occurs in other types of relationships. I had an abusive female employer who became so violent toward me in the end that I walked out on her, it went from constant and severe verbal abuse, to a shove, then a slap every now and then until one day she struck me a terrible blow on the back of the head with an object, (I think her briefcase) at which point I could take no more. It was a small tourism related business, just me, her partner and a junior secretary and though I was making good money she had me so wrapped around her finger that I thought I couldn't leave and being a man I felt I couldn't tell anyone what I was going through. She used to say things like "You'll never find another job, you can't think for yourself", "If you quit I'll make sure you never work in this town again", "If you walk out on your contract I'll have you in court so fast your head will spin".
I'm ashamed to say that I put up with that for seven years and leaving was extremely traumatic, for weeks she was coming around to my house, calling me up in tears begging me to come back, getting the secretary and other people to come round etc, it was horrible.
Mine is a different sort of case but I understand how people come to accept worse and worse treatment from abusers and how hard it is to get away from abusive people, how I just shut down inside and became totally fixated on pleasing this psycho. It got to the point that I wasn't eating or sleeping much, I was going in to work at 4 AM just to get ahead so the screaming wouldn't start for a few hours and working through without a break until six.It's really hard for me to think about it now and I don't talk too much about it with my wife as it nearly destroyed our relationship while it was going on.

Foxy welcome to the discussion.

"Finger-pointing and blaming one
group over another - won't solve anything."

agreed but how do we move public opinion and public policy on from that position?

If it was just a few posters on this site then they could be ignored but the sad part is that the so called gender studies departments of universities have pushed the gender issue very successfully over a long period. That results in little or no support for at least half the adult victims of DV as well as a significant risk that they will also become victims of government abuse if it comes to some ones word being believed. The success of that campaign plays out for fathers in a much harder fight to retain a meaningful role in their children's lives post separation.

A number of us have been pointing out that DV is a human issue rather than a gender issue for a long time yet we still have posters on this site with views such as "These articles keep on coming because men do not want to give up the very thing that has kept them in control of the planet for last few thousand years - and that is their propensity for extreme violence against other men, women, children, animals and nature." http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16394#285589

and "I really don't care about 'studies' that tell us that , apparently, there are all these violent women out there that are really at the crux of the domestic violence problem, and that all the poor men are just unfairly vilified.

What a load of toss!" http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16394#285604

The evidence that DV is not gendered was available when the Howard was running it's Australia Says No (and provided to relevant ministers), it was available when some legislation was amended to claim that DV is mostly committed by men against women but still the highly gendered approach was taken.

R0bert

On another note the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) features heavily in research into family violence.
Some supports of a gendered view of DV are very critical of CTS.

For those wanting some background a copy of a paper by Murray Straus dealing with some of the issues and criticisms is at http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/CTS4.pdf

One of the critics is Michael Flood. Some of the criticisms can be found in a paper by him at http://aija.org.au/Family%20Violence%2006/Presentations/Flood.pdf (I think he had a more detailed paper but can't recall where).

There is quite a bit of material available on the PASK site http://domesticviolenceresearch.org/ I don't know the background of PASK however what I've found in there material so far appears to be credible.

R0bert

O Sung Wu, thank you so much for your reply to the problem we had, it was a life of dominance from a very early age until the death of my mother, if for instance my mother had married a man who would not tolerate such treatment from her I daresay you would have been writing out a police report of the bashing of a woman, she was very lucky in this regard.
Jay of Melbourne the sort of behaviour you tolerated from your employer was once again being dominated, I am the boss, you bow down, or else, marriage breakdown could happen as both my brothers wives gave the ultimatum, it's me or your mother, mother one.
Dominance and rape in the armed forces of both men & women is mainly due to rank, I am a Captain you are a Private you do as I request or I will make your life hell, so drop your pants
Men I do agree have the more physical build to be brutal and cause worse injuries to a woman than the other way around, one must remember though, how far do you go with verbal abuse before violence enters the domain.

Dear RObert,

How do we move people and policies away from the
gendered position?

I wish I had the precise answers for you but I don't.
I can only hazard guesses.

I can't really comment in great depth about your
experiences with sociological research. They're
not problems that I have personally encountered.
I'm not familiar with the entire body of work
to be able to offer an in depth critique.
I can only speak generally.

It seems to me that the sociologist's subject
matters present
research problems of a kind that natural scientists
would rarely have to deal with. The sociologist's subjects
are not inanimate objects or unreflecting animals.
They are people who are self-aware, who have
complex individual personalities, and who are capable
of choosing their own courses of action for both
rational and irrational results.

I would imagine that all sociologists
recognise the problems but probably not all agree on how to
deal with them. I would hope that
They would aim to make sociology as
rigorous and exact a science as possible. But probably
human nature being what it is -that doesn't always happen.

Studies should be as
objective as possible. We'd all agree with that.
But as we know - total objectivity
is probably impossible to achieve in any science,
since some bias is always unconscious. However a self-
conscious effort to be as objective as possibly would
produce vastly less biased results than not making this
attempt.

As for policies?

Again we have interest groups that attempt to influence
political decisions. And these groups may use a variety
of tactics from collecting petitions, advertising in the
media, organising floods of letters to legislators,
donating money to election campaigns or political
parties and so on. Our political culture encourages
interaction among parties, elected officials, and private
interest groups. So possibly that's the best way to go
to influence policy.

@ORIGINS OF MAN, Monday, 16 June 2014 5:21:54 PM, "Men are by nature hunters and killers for as far back in history and before recorded history"

Wherever do you get that stuff from? You have never seen Aboriginal women elders hunting File Snakes, just to take an example.

Back to the huddle I guess to find another way to shore up that negative stereotype of men, but for what purpose, why?