Hi Joe

Yes, despite my statistical blunder, the amount of government spending on DV awareness is still grossly dwarfed by funding for road safety awareness.

While I'm not an advocate of throwing taxpayer money at any and every social problem, government spending often reflects social values and attitudes. DV deaths and injuries, let alone the enormous psychological damage to children, just don't seem to register high enough on our list socio-political priorities.

We are still having to fight these age-old prejudices that DV is a private matter between intimate partners, that DV victims somehow provoke the violence and/or that DV victims should, and can, simply up and leave in order to avoid assault.

It's hard for me to write this comment on the back of 3 deaths a week.

I'm not sure 'hang the evil male bastards' is altogether the right general message, not on it's own anyway.
I'm sure the 'scum' stigma is probably beneficial in some way but you don't want to go to war with 'all men'.

Just as you sell the idea of 'preventing violence towards women';
You should sell the idea of 'preventing court and police involvement (and imprisonment) for men'.

That way you aren't coming at men with pitchforks in concert with all the other agendas of blaming men for everything.
This way you're making it a 'society issue' rather than specifically a 'gender issue'.
- You're looking out for both parties.

It's not mens fault that they're physically stronger, and are more prone to acting physically towards one another in a confrontation.
They learn this growing up just as they're also taught to look down upon and make fun of 'weakness'.
We all do this, even women do in filtering out and making fun of 'weaker' men.
Women need to also understand that if they back a man into a corner he might just eventually act like one.

Women need to stop tying to fix the problem by feminising men, and instead accept that we are what we are just as women are what they are.

I believe that 'education' is a big part of preventing Domestic Violence.
The female police officer mentioned earlier found a way to educate herself.
We just need to find a way to educate people without them having to firstly live through it.

Life involves opportunities and obstacles.
Sometimes I think I could teach kids more in a week of 'How not to fail in life', as I could in 10-12 years of teaching them 'How to succeed in life'.
And sometimes young people really aren't yet prepared enough for the obstacles that are going to be thrown their way.
Relationships and all it entails, the good and the bad can certainly be one of those things.

AC has just come up with an elaborate "blame the victim" on the assumption that bashing is a "men's thing" and that something has to be done to protect men from imprisonment.

But the vast majority of men are not bashers and wouldn't entertain even a passing thought of bashing a domestic partner (or anyone else for that matter). Domestic violence is the work of a very small number of inferior people (scumbags) who choose to commit the crime of assault.

Attacking DV by locking up those who assault partners is not the slightest threat to men, only to inferior men.

This avoids waiting till doomsday and wasting taxpayers' money to hide victims in shelters. It also avoids conscripting schoolchildren into lectures about something that will never enter their lives. It avoids time and money wasting inquiries and royal commissions etc into the crimes committed by a very small number of scumbags. It also brushes aside the ducking and weaving and victim-blaming of those who sympathise with "the things that batter".

Killarney:

$4.5 billion spent on road safety (including infrastructure improvement)!

That’s a nice bit of figure fudging if ever there was one! How much is spent on each part? Road safety and infrastructure? Perhaps that much is spent getting people from A to B on suitable roads.

Why is domestic violence called ‘domestic’ violence? All violence is as destructive as any other so why not just call it violence? Is violence in a domestic situation worse than violence on the street? When you get bashed the effects are exactly the same whether you get bashed by a partner or a stranger. Why the emphasis on the domestic part? Is it to attract attention to the domestic relationship in the aim of pointing out that somehow it should not happen there and should be less prevalent than in other situations?

Are women trying to make domestic violence appear worse than other types of violence? Try telling that to someone who has been ‘sucker-punched’ or beaten senseless while walking down a lane way. Is the idea to elicit more sympathy so as to heap more blame on men for ruining the dream of domestic bliss? A dream which lives in the imagination of so many women?

As AC says men are bigger and stronger than women in general and will naturally resort to violence when pushed. If women were bigger and stronger what would they do? It is easy to blame men because there is no way of knowing what women would do if the odds were in their favour but violence is a part of human nature and not just men’s nature. Put a whole bunch of women together and see what happens and let’s not talk about violence to children.

Hi Pahnto,

You ask: "As AC says men are bigger and stronger than women in general and will naturally resort to violence when pushed. If women were bigger and stronger what would they do?"

Yes, interesting hypothesis: if elephants had six legs, what would you call them ? If eggs were cubic, could they be packed differently ? If Australia was up near Iceland, would Aboriginal people be Sami or Inuit ? Probably, to take your question seriously, if women were bigger and stronger than men, then it would be probably men who bore and raised the children - and perhaps they would be called "women".

There was a Muslim sect in north and west Africa in the century around 1850-1950 which believed that the real Messiah was yet to be born, and would be born to a man, not to an inferior creature like a woman. So they all dressed in very baggy trousers. I'm not sure if they understood human biology and how a man could give birth. Perhaps you could have advised them, Phanto :)

Cheers,

Joe

Loudmouth:

To answer my own question what would women do if they were bigger and stronger? They would use violence like they do on their children.