A reader who suggested I was being a bit unfair in my use of pronouns reflecting that men are generally the batterers and women the victims politely admonished me recently. In a fair world, she’s right. In my career, I have to be fair. Each investigation starts from the neutral position and works toward the truth based on the evidence. It is unfair and sloppy police work if I walk into a home and accuse the man of being the bad guy based solely on the fact that he is male. It would be no different than if I accused a black man of being the suspect in a burglary based solely on the fact that he is black. I assure you, I would not do either as a police officer.
As a blog writer, however, I choose to focus more on violence of men against women. If you are likely to get up in arms about the fact that these postings have little discussion dealing with male victims of domestic violence, please close the window now because these pages will likely not suit you.
Not that there isn’t violence perpetrated against men by women. I bear a scar on the inside of my upper lip from just such a woman. She was tiny; no more than five-two, one-hundred pounds with clothes on. She was also angry, as I should have surmised by the fact that she’d just tried to kill her husband by smashing an air conditioner window unit on his head.
The problem, it seemed, was that he refused to engage with her, as a sexual partner, as a business associate, or as her husband. Oh, he was her husband all right, but he’d given up completely on the idea of participating as such in any manner, preferring, I suppose, to simply existing at the same address as her.
This made her homicidal one evening, thus the attack with the Sears B500 Iceberg (or some such) rendering him a bloody, pulpy fellow still reclined in his favorite chair, but much the worse for wear.
Enter young rookie officer Williams, gung ho, confident in my abilities to assess the situation and bring matters into successful control. It became clear after a time that she’d done what she did, and there was nothing for it except to make an arrest. The fact that she kept shouting, “I wish I’d killed you,” was what we call a clue in law enforcement, and as two EMT’s worked on keeping the husband’s face from falling off, I went to make the arrest.
Mind you, I had participated in some form of martial arts since high school. The hand-to-hand combat training at the Academy had come fairly easy to me because of that background, and I outweighed her by at least eighty pounds.
Pride cometh before a fall, and my fall came when this angry, ignored pixie hit me so hard in the mouth with a telephone that I know, I know my eyeballs switched places for a moment.
Mouth blood went everywhere, and her husband feebly pointed at me in a “see, I told you,” fashion. She clawed at me like a cat in a bathtub, and the EMT’s stared in shock as I finally wrestled her long enough to get her handcuffed—which didn’t stop her from continuing to try to bite, head butt, and kick my shins all the way out to the car.
Where was my senior partner, you might ask? Laughing his ass off.
I eventually almost forgave him.
The point is I am fully aware of the fact that some women are violent and dangerous, and it doesn’t matter if they are tiny and cute. They can kill you, and that is why every allegation of domestic violence must be thoroughly and fairly investigated before blame, arrest or conviction takes place. That having been said, the vast majority of all physical attacks in the home involve a male as the predominant aggressor, and the female as the victim.
At this point in any lecture I have ever given on the topic, someone raises his hand to point out that the numbers are probably skewed in light of the fact that men don’t report domestic violence as often. The reasonable and honest answer to that comment is that women don’t either. Some women don’t report because they don’t want their neighbors to know; some don’t because they are living in the U.S. without documentation and they’re terrified of deportation; many don’t involve the police because they’ve been threatened with their very lives if they do so; others because the man who would go to jail is the only breadwinner in the family and the choice of getting beaten up on occasion is an easy one to make over homelessness. There’s lots of reasons, all of which we’ll discuss, but be clear from the outset that people of both genders, different sexual persuasions, all races and cultures, and at every level of financial income avoid making formal complaints in these matters.
Cage Fight In The Kitchen, however, is primarily about physical and emotional abuse of men toward women, and I have no apology to offer for that. Now, that’s going to make a bunch of folks just silly with indignation. I hope they are able to get over it. Men tend to be more violent and persistent in their attacks than women. Women are six hundred percent more likely to be attacked by an intimate partner, and a current or former intimate male partner is the perpetrator in approximately forty percent of all female homicide victims. Furthermore, husbands, boyfriends, or former male partners commit nearly thirty percent of all rapes and sexual assaults*. So, if you want to write a blog about the oppression of men by aggressive women, get to typing. I’m going to primarily stick with this topic.
The truth is all that matters at work, and the truth is all I want to speak of in these pages. As always, thank you for reading and commenting.
The information provided in this article comes from your lived experience as an Officer. I think violence has it's own life and gender would have to be part of the equation. It seems that there is always some comparison in men and women issues, but the bottom line is no one deserves to be mentally or phycially abused and needs to be stopped before more harm happens.
ReplyDeleteDr Phil McGraw, during a show dealing with a husband's abuse of his wife, made a very stunning and revelatory - to me - comment in answer to the husband's protestations that his wife was also abusive towards him, implying that to blame him was unfair. Dr Phil pointed out that, for one thing, as a man who outweighed his wife by considerable poundage, his actions toward her were flat out abusive. Her actions were IN RESPONSE or IN REACTION to his abuse, therefore their relationship problems, not because she is also an abuser. (This because Dr Phil obviously has in-depth knowledge of the situation from background interviews.)
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