Quick Hit: Australian study on violence against women
One in three Australian boys thinks that it's okay to hit girls; one in seven think "it's OK to make a girl have sex with you if she was flirting."
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Disappointing but not surprising.
With regards to thinking that "it's ok to hit girls," I think the cultural problem is not so much violence against women, but violence by men. Men are cultured to use violence to deal with problems, so it's to be expected that will cross over into relationships with women. Violence between men is a problem too, but it's one that is so culturally accepted it's not nearly as visible.
Violence against women is most certainly a culture problem all it’s own. Violence against women is often sexualized in a way that is not with men. Women are portrayed as weaker than men and as such, they are portrayed as deserving of violence and deserving of rape (hence, one in seven children said raping a girl was ok if she flirted). Violence is a tried and true way to put a woman in her place and control her behavior.
Assaulting another guy down at the bar is one thing, constantly abusing your wife in order to silence and control her is quite another. Both are horrible and need to be addressed (encouraging male violence as a sign of authority is certainly at the root of both issues), but one type is used to regularly control and silence and individual, thus setting it apart from other types of violence.
It's things like this that just make me feel hopeless.
yeah, the studdy is disappointing but the comments are even worse. i went to one of the follow-up sites, which was really just a repeat, and the general tone was on one of two lines: women deserve it for being manipulative prick teases who are more abusive anyway and that's where the kids are REALLY learning it, or smack some better sence into kids. now, i'm all for keeping spankings as part of a parental tool kit for disciplin (along with time-outs, talking, etc) but that's a whole other kettle.
but to see a very real expression of the kind of thinking the article is trying to point out was jsut sickening. and sad making.
Without context, the statement about "hitting" is virtually meaningless. Is it okay to hit a girl just for fun because she happens to be there? No. Is it okay to hit a girl if she is violently attacking you with some sort of weapon. Yes. The classic reason for that question is to enforce that boys should not hit girls, but are free to hit other boys. I suppose in the sense the Australians are more progressive for being willing to hit equally.
Regardless, the other statistics are shocking at best.
yes, the article fails to give the exact wording of the questions but to assume that the people designing the study were trying to scew numbers by asking really out there questions like that is..... perpetuating i think is the best way of putting it. i think we can safely say the questions were asked more than once with different wording. in studies like this the question is usually along the lines of, is it ok to hit a girl? is it ok to hit a girl if she is mena to you? is it ok to hit a girl who sasses you? is it ok to hit a girl who pushes you? and so on.
This is extremely disturbing. I'm shocked. I'm also worried about what the results of this study would be if it were done in the United States.
The 'unwanted sex' bit stood out to me. At first I was shocked at the wording. I thought that it was being used instead of 'rape' or 'sexual assualt', and it made me beyond mad.
But thinking about it in terms of how the questions might have been asked, it makes me think how slanted the figures might be. Iv had 'unwanted sex' before. That doesnt mean I was raped. I wasnt really in the mood, but still wanted to please my SO and did the deed anyway. I think saying that teenaged girls have had 'unwanted sex' is very misleading. Were they raped? Did they regret the sex they had after the fact? Were they pressured by their partner or their culture? Did the other person even know they didnt want to have sex?
I think I just really hate statistics that are so vague.
Also, I think its ok to hit a girl. I get very insulted if my friends are horsing around and I cant join in because they 'were raised better.' Its not ok to abuse or beat a girl, or take advantage of the fact that she is probably smaller or weaker than a boy, but a 'hit' can mean anything in between a playful punch, and sending some one to the ER. Not hitting girls EVER is just another type of sexism. I can take a punch now and then, I dont need to be looked out for 24/7.
The rest of the article(the clear parts) are heartbreaking. I think I'm just trying to hold out hope that the world isnt totally fucked by focusing on the little parts that are worded badly.
Sebaceous, I agree that its annoying when this kind of thing is so vaguely worded, but the surveyors mights have deliberately worded the question "unwanted sex" precisely *because* it contains more nuance than "rape".
I can't recall the exact details, but I remember reading recently (I'm pretty sure it was on Feministing) something about a survey showed that when women were asked "have you ever been raped", they often said (and believed) that they hadn't, but when they were asked "have you ever had sex when you didn't want to, but were pressured, bribed, threatened, or manipulated?" a lot more of the same women said yes. So the people who created the questions for this survey might have had this kind of mindset in mind. Of course we know that we can't rely on reported rapes for accurate statistics of rape, because most aren't reported, and if a culture trains a woman to be unclear about the definition of rape, then people collecting data might try a more indirect tactic.