So I have promised a more in-depth report on intimate partner violence, yet as I am preparing it, I figure I’ll just take you along for the ride of my intellectual journey. I will present you with my current papers that I am reading (so you can judge the analysis for yourself);

Schrading, N., Alm, C.O., Ptucha, R.W., & Homan, C. (2015). #WhyIStayed, #WhyILeft: Microblogging to Make Sense of Domestic Abuse.

Schrading, N., Alm, C.O., Ptucha, R.W., & Homan, C. (2015). An Analysis of Domestic Abuse Discourse on Reddit.

There’s another paper, I had just forgot the title of the paper and it’s in a pile of research articles stacked in my bookcase.

Throughout these articles, this is what the say; when considering physical abuse alone, 27% of victims are female, while 7% of men experience IPV. The paper on Reddit had a bit more information on domestic abuse statistics. So Globally, it turns out that 30% 15 and older (which actually pretty high) have experienced physical and/or sexual IPV at some point in their life (Devries et al., 2013). Now considering what they are including in their analysis (Woman, whom are 15 or older, who have experienced either physical or sexual abuse at some point in their lives) it really doesn’t seem all that special. I’ll have to dive into that article (if I can get my hands on it) to view how they came to that number, and what was their inclusion criteria for “abuse”.

Here’s an American statistic, by an intimate parter, 10% of women have been raped, 17% of women and 8% of men have experienced sexual violence other than rape, this is what really caught my eye; 25% of women and 14% of men have experienced severe physical violence (Black et al., 2011).

It’s hard to picture a male physically abused by a female, there were social experiments done online that showed you what happens when a female physically abuses a male; the people around viewing the act laugh, or say the guy is soft. Watch the video below;

Pretty weird huh, it’s almost like men don’t get help, did you ever wonder why men feared their wives as you were growing up? You want to check out some bullshit when the woman is even younger looking and the violence is turned up a little bit, and what happens when we fight back? Bestow your eyes, and look below closely please;

So in that mystery paper, when IPV is controlled for injurious acts, men were still responsible for the acts that cause the more severe physical harm, yet when the acts were not as severe; women out numbered men. What about harm like “social ostracism”, you saw in the videos above how men were more likely to jump to the females aid, but (especially in the last video) left the man to get abused.

“It’s so easy being a man”

So what is sexual abuse, really, does it have to be physical? Or can it be things like withholding affection and sex, making food for the husband and “tainting” it to upset his stomach, throwing out his favourite clothes when he is away at work, socially ostracizing him and so on. What happens when a man fights back; another man steps in to defend the woman, no questions asked.

My next post will talk about abuse, what these papers including as abuse, and the ways we can be abused (i.e. psychologically) and which gender abuses how. I’ll include the other paper in this post, I will edit it (if you’re really into this); as well as included it my next post again.

AA

Update: the citation of that mystery article is;

Flanagan, J.C., Jaquier, V., Overstreet, N.M., Swan, S.C., & Sullivan, T.P. (2014). The mediating role of avoidance coping between intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization, mental health, and substance abuse among women experiencing bidirectional IPV. Psychiatry research, 220 1-2, 391-6.