HRS,
"If there are 1 in 3 girls at schools throughout the country.....' Well not necessarily. For many children who are in difficult family circumstances, school is a means of escape and not only that, the children in these cases are expected to do well in their results regardless of whats going on outside. Having spoken to quite a few articulate children who are in very difficult home environment, they see doing well at school means being able to have a good job and thus get out of home. School therefore is an escape from the home environment. Why are the girls doing well, personally I think that this generation of women have realized that they have to be self sufficient, and being dead honest as a woman of today I cannot depend upon my husband to provide all the income. What happens if he can't work for some reason, then it falls onto my shoulders. Secondly, having been divorced and literally left with nothing, but the clothes I had on, I am not going down that road to start all over again with no job, no home and no future. Women of all ages are realising that for their own security, if the marriage fell apart - they would have to look out for themselves and the only way they could do that is via a good training and a good job - hence they have to do well at school.

"it is the boy’s marks that are declining" - sadly in some public schools it is not seen as "cool" for a boy to do well in his marks. He is activatly discouraged by his mates not to do well. The old tall poppy syndrome.

SO HRS Teen culture, adults culture, world culture, media culture is a confusing mish mash of values, so perhaps Australia needs to redefine a set of Christian based values upon which Australia is built; that all peoples would be happy to abide by and obviously have been able to contribute, thereby enabling all people regards of race, religion etc etc to be respected.

HRS, I'm starting to see how you've developed this victim mentality.

The ilk argument has died, because you're the only one who thinks it's an insult. So you haven't actually been insulted on that score.

I didn't call you a female hater either.
What I said was, that you come across as someone with an axe to grind against women. There's quite a difference.
I stand by that assertion, as all your posts have been indicative of this.

I never said that the abuse of girls was all psychological. Where is this coming from? I have no idea how what you're saying here bears any relevance to my post. I was arguing that physical and psychological abuse shouldn't be treated as the same thing.

I certainly don't think most males are abusers of women and children. But I do acknowledge some are, and I don't think you can tackle the problem by glossing over it, or pretending women are worse.

TRTL,

one of the strengths and weakness of the english language is that the interpretation of the meaning of words is different to different people.

If HRS offended by it then he is with in his rights. Me? I still trying to decide.

Psychologist Toby Green wrote an interesting piece about opinions.
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22691446-5006049,00.html

"A point of view is literally what we view from the point where we’re standing. Since no two people can occupy the same space at the same time, no two people will ever see exactly the same aspect of what they are both looking at.

We can use this as an opportunity to find out what something looks like from another person’s perspective.

Or use it as a method of making that person wrong for not being able to cohabit our space and see what we see. In other words, make them wrong for not being us. " Toby Green

Typically if one of us blokes tries to present a different opinion, things are suggested like what you said that you suspected the HRS had an axe to grind with women.

My interpretation is that this is a subtle put down to discount what HRS is trying to say.

Daphne Patai,

"Threatened Children, in which he talked about the social construction of child abuse as a problem. What I learned from Best was that there's a predictable process by which a group of claims-makers sets forth a problem and brings it to public attention. There are a series of stages through which the public becomes aware of the problem and begins to accept the terms of the debate as set forth by this group of claims-makers.

They engage in a series of techniques, what Best calls "expansion of the domain of the problem." The public is told that it's not simply a specific problem occurring in a specific setting, but that it's a much broader problem. That way it tends to escape from its borders, so that we become aware that the problem is much, much larger than we thought." Patai.

more to follow.

Fair comment there JamesH - I acknowledge that having an 'axe to grind' does sound dismissive, but I think extrapolating that to 'hating women' is taking it a bit further. As far as I can see, the 'axe to grind' comment is about the harshest I've said, because I've certainly yet to see anything that compels me to believe 'ilk' was an insult.
When I see ilk being blown up as an insulting term, coupled with 'axe to grind' being transformed to 'hates women,' with the addition that I've made some argument about psychological abuse which seems at odds with what I've said, it does appear to me that HRS is falling back on a victim mentality all too quickly, which given the nature of this debate, potentially has some significance.

The point I'm making, at the end of the day, is that in hospital waiting rooms and police stations around the country, the sight of a woman who has been beaten by a man, sadly, isn't uncommon. The reverse evidently occurs, but not nearly to the same extent, and while I'm sure there are anecdotes along these lines out there, the notion that they're occurring in similar numbers is going to be rejected flat out by most people.

In relation to psychological/emotional abuse, I'm simply saying that it's a different problem that has to be looked at differently, and moves to encourage this form of abuse to be viewed on a similar platform as physical abuse, should be rejected, as ultimately I think these would water down our zero tolerance approach to violence, be it toward men, or toward women.

Turnrightthenleft.
I think it is a case of tell the same lie often enough and people will believe it.

The 1 in 3 does appear to be such a lie, and the concept that wide scale of abuse of women by men in this country is another of those lies.

There is very little evidence to support such lies.

Victoria Health found that only 0.6% of women saying that they had been abused had a physical injury.

Out of all men, 0.008% carry out a murder, so it is not even accurate to say that “some” men carry out murder, and more accurate to say that a very small % of men carry out a murder.

QLD released the statistics regards child abuse, and only 5% was sexual abuse, and the most common form of child abuse was neglect. It could be said that sexual abuse of children is being under-reported, and so could all the other forms of abuse.

So I would think that “some” men sexually abuse children is not accurate either, and it could also be “a very small % of men sexually abuse children”.

But call men ilks or abusers and sooner or latter others will begin to believe it.

TRTL,

"The point I'm making, at the end of the day, is that in hospital waiting rooms and police stations around the country, the sight of a woman who has been beaten by a man, sadly, isn't uncommon."

Firstly it is much more common to see guys who have been bashed than women, secondly there are more woman who present to A&E with a heart attack than one who has been bashed.

It was Christina Hoff-Sommers, who in "Who Stole Feminism" wrote about how when charge nurses of A&E departments were asked about how many women presented with injuries from DV.

"The nurses estimates varied from 2 per month to 8 per month in a large hospital."

Patai continued,

Patai talks about how the domain of the problem increases and once this is accepted, then new instances or new definitions get added.

For example sexual abuse of girls could include anything from dads or her brothers playboy collection, to seeing a male naked. so where once sexual abuse meant phsyical sexual abuse, it has now been expand to cover a whole range of behaviours.

So basically if a woman/girl is offended by something then this is abuse.