Let's talk about domestic aggression

     There has been much discussion in recent years about domestic violence in our society – in fact there has been way too much.

     Domestic violence is a practical problem that needs a practical solution. A woman comes to a refuge seeking help from a domestic violence incident. She has a fractured cheek bone and a broken arm. She has three kids in tow and has five dollars in her pocket. She has nowhere to stay and no one to help her. She desperately needs practical help to mend her wounds, look after her children, give her some money and provide her with a safe haven. She is not interested at that particular time in recriminations against her partner. She is not interested in who is to blame or in feminist theories about men that proclaim all men as bastards. She has a practical problem and she needs a practical solution.

     It is obvious from this woman's state that a particular man has behaved in a violent way. It serves no purpose whatsoever to indulge in blaming that man or in regaling all men in general and yet this is precisely the way so many women's groups spend their energy.

     They do this because for many their primary aim is not to help women but to hurt men. They want to attack and hurt all men whether they have ever been violent or not. They want all men to feel bad about themselves because each one of these women has a personal agenda about one or a few particular men in their own lives and this is how they seek to deal with that agenda. Nearly all women have had a father, some have had brothers, uncles, male teachers, husbands, partners and boyfriends. Many women have been hurt by men who were very close to them and whom they trusted. Many women have been deeply hurt by their fathers whose responsibility it was to care for them. Many women have felt betrayed and abandoned by men with whom they shared a great intimacy. Facing these issues especially in relation to their fathers is too painful for these women so they seek to make themselves feel better by a more general attack on other men who are not so emotionally close to them. If a woman was sexually abused by the father she adored as a young girl it is extremely difficult to admit to herself that her father may not have been so adorable. She may compensate by trying to denounce all men in general. If she felt powerless because that same father threatened to harm her if she exposed the abuse then she may try to 'empower' herself as a woman by doing her best to hurt all men in a more general way.

     There are many women in such situations. Many of them have huge grudges against some of the men in their lives. These women group together and comfort each other in their neurotic ways. It is neurotic when you try to solve a personal emotional problem by some compensatory behaviour that can never really alleviate your stress. These groups have become quite powerful and very vocal. They have become a political force and gain substantial government funds. They have power through their access to the media where they compile very negative attitudes towards men in general. These attitudes are becoming ingrained in the consciousness of the society and lead to both women and men as well as girls and boys having some very mistaken ideas about the nature of maleness.

     These women try to hurt men by putting them down in all sorts of ways and blaming men for many situations that are not their fault. One of the areas where these women try to put men down and promote a negative attitude is in the area of domestic violence and aggression. There are constant insinuations that men are essentially flawed in this area and do not behave as well as women do. This orchestrated campaign has become very pervasive in the minds of many neutral and impressionable people. If you fling enough mud some of it will surely stick and this has happened. Men need to redress the balance so they can present an honest picture to open minded people about their own nature.

REDRESSING THE BALANCE

     It is futile for men to get involved in slanging matches with women's groups who are driven by neurotic agendas. These women are entitled to their opinion no matter how embittered it might be. The problem is that these opinions are now being taught in schools and in homes by teachers and parents who may not have any particular neurotic agenda to push. They are also being accepted by many adults as the truth. These impartial people are open to the truth and want to see a balanced picture about how men deal with domestic violence and aggression. The only opinions that seem readily available to them are the opinions promoted by women. There seems to be very few opinions by men about men. Many of the opinions by men are restrained by the agendas set by women and do not force women to look at the complete picture. Some men present opinions which show that they are equally embittered about women. If men want a balanced picture then it is up to them to present it and to offset the damage that has been done.

     Many neutral people are of the impression that men are fundamentally flawed when it comes to dealing with domestic violence and aggression. They are fundamentally flawed when compared to women. Men are worse than women when it comes to these types of behaviour. Men are more violent and more aggressive than women. We need to look at both of these issues as separate things.

Domestic violence

     When most people think of domestic violence they usually think of men being violent towards women. That is because there are many more reported incidents of men being violent than women. Since violence of any type is, for good reason, judged to be a crime it is good that it is reported and dealt with like all crimes. Women are learning how to respond appropriately to any violent behaviour directed towards them and they are setting up structures and educating other women and girls on how to deal with this behaviour. It would, however, be very poor logic to conclude that men are more violent than women on the basis of the number of reported incidents. For many centuries women endured men's violence towards them because they were often unable to do anything about it. They said nothing because they were often dependent on the same man who was violent towards them and they suffered in silence for the sake of meeting their most basic needs. This violence was generally not reported to anyone who had authority to deal with it. Just because it was not reported did not mean that it did not exist. In the same way it would be wrong to assume that because women's violence is not reported that it does not exist. There are increasing reports of women's violence but the number is still very small in comparison to the reports about men. Men may have reasons for not reporting the violence of women towards them. The lack of conclusive evidence suggests that you cannot say with certainty that men are more violent than women are.

     Human beings do not always rely on statistics to come to their conclusions about human behaviour. Sometimes they just have an intuition about something, which they are as yet unable to articulate or prove by more scientific methods. This intuition has been the starting point for most of mankind's discoveries and his self-understanding. This is the way it seems with the issue of domestic violence. Most people have a strong intuition that men are more violent than women in domestic situations. There is good logic behind this intuition.

     Some men's groups are trying to promote scientific studies, which they hope will show that women are just as violent in the home as men are. When we see studies that seem to contradict what our own human nature is telling us then we must be suspicious. When we see studies that contradict the very evidence we see with our eyes then we must have concerns about the scholarship and integrity of the study. If we see a study for instance that tells us the sun really rises in the west we would be very sceptical and rightly so. If we cannot trust our human senses which tell us quite clearly that it rises in the east then we are in big trouble. If we cannot trust our eyes then we also cannot trust the eyes of the researchers and students who come up with such outlandish conclusions because all human eyes basically see the same way.

     When we look at the problem of domestic violence we have to be honest about what our senses tell us. We have to look at certain irrefutable facts and see whether they are consistent with the findings from some studies into the problem or whether those findings are unsustainable.

     When we look with our own eyes it does not take much effort to see that men in general are taller, heavier and stronger than women. There are exceptions but the general observation remains correct. This is no one's fault it is just a fact of nature. When someone behaves violently their aim is to hurt their victim. No one becomes violent for any other reason. Violence has no other purpose. If your aim were to hurt the other person you would not even try it unless you had a reasonable chance of success. A fifty-kilo man is not going to step into the ring with Mike Tyson in the hope that he can hurt him enough to become a world champion. People by nature do not take ridiculously uncalculated risks especially when their life may be dependent on it. If you were determined to hurt the other person but had no reasonable chance of success using violence you would have to resort to some other means. You might hire a professional hit man or woman to do the job for you because they are trained to be successful.

     Imagine a petite young Japanese woman who is married to the national superheavyweight Sumo wrestling champion. There may be a disparity of over 200kg in their body weights. A domestic row erupts and the woman feels very aggressive and wants to hurt the man. The man feels very aggressive as well and wants to hurt the woman. Who is more likely to use violence and who is more likely to resort to some other method?

     If we were able to watch on video every domestic fight in history we would see that by far the men would be taller, heavier and stronger than the women. We would see with our own eyes that most women would not stand a chance of hurting their partners by using violence as it is commonly understood and identified by advocates against violence. What we would probably also see is that men had behaved violently on more occasions than women had.

     The conclusion to all this is that men do behave more violently but you cannot conclude from this that men are fundamentally flawed. The fact that men can overpower women is not a flaw in men, it is a fact of nature. If the finger of blame needs to be pointed anywhere then it needs to be pointed at nature itself. Men are more suited to violence against women in the same way they are more suited than women to engage in manual labour or combat. These things are taken for granted and they are not considered to be a flaw. What if the physical characteristics of men and women were reversed. What if nature had made women taller, heavier and stronger than women. Who would be the more violent of the sexes? Men do behave more violently than women because they can. If women could behave more violently than men then they just as surely would do so. To say that a man is flawed because of the way nature made him is very poor logic indeed. It is like blaming women for keeping motherhood to themselves. Surely it would be less selfish for women to allow men to have babies as well.

     None of this excuses violence. Violence is never an appropriate response to a problem. Violence is not a flaw – it is a choice and anyone who chooses violence is wrong. Being more physically suitable to violence in relationships with women, however, is not a choice for men but a given in human nature. The fact that more men than women choose violence is not indicative of a flaw in their nature but indicative of their nature as men. Many women's groups love to blur this distinction.

     When men accept this reality about their nature they will no longer get distracted from the real issue which is the wider picture of domestic aggression.

Domestic aggression

     Although it may be true that men are more violent than women are it is not necessarily true that men are more aggressive than women are. Many people equate violence and aggression. Men are more violent and consequently men must be more aggressive but that argument shows a very poor understanding of what aggression is.

     Aggression might be defined as the attempt to hurt someone else and to cause them pain. Aggression is aggression whether it succeeds in its intent or not. If you fire a rifle at someone with the aim of causing pain to them you are being aggressive whether you hit or miss your target. If you throw a punch and your victim dodges the blow you are still behaving aggressively. If you call your husband a 'lazy pig' but he mistakenly takes it as a joke then you are being aggressive. If you try to damage your partner's car at the shopping mall but mistake a similar model for their car then you have still behaved aggressively. Not all aggression hurts but it is still aggression nevertheless. It is about defining the behaviour and not the outcome of the behaviour. It is the behaviour that we have to deal with in the hope of eradicating it and then there will be no outcomes to attend to.

     There are many ways to try and hurt someone else and all of them come under the one umbrella of aggression.

     Domestic aggression then may be defined as an attempt to hurt someone by any means in a domestic situation.

     We need to identify the different types of domestic aggressive behaviour. We need to look at what the aggressor is trying to achieve. We need to look at the different ways they seek to cause pain and upheaval in the lives of their victim. Sometimes they are not successful but many times they are and they will tend to keep trying until they find a type of aggression that does the most damage.

     Perhaps the most common type of domestic aggression is verbal aggression. The weapon of choice for most people is not the fists but the tongue. Of course an immediate claim is that violence hurts and is painful whereas verbal aggression does not hurt. Well if verbal aggression doesn't hurt why bother indulging in it at all? People use verbal aggression precisely because it does hurt and it hurts in a very real sense. It can cause physical pain and very real stress and can lead to extreme health problems. Every one of us has felt this pain and we all know the upheaval it can cause in our bodies.

     When someone verbally attacks us it can set off a chain reaction in us that upsets our equilibrium for days or even weeks. If you call me a fat, useless, good-for-nothing dole bludger it may go over my head and not affect me in any way. I recognise that you are the one with the real problem and I just take it in my stride. If, however, I am struggling with my body image due to years of sexual abuse as a child then the label 'fat' is going to hurt me. I already have a contempt for my own body because it has been abused by others and I have lost much of my own self-respect. Your attack triggers off all that pain of contempt that is still in my body as a result of those years of abuse. What I normally keep suppressed or what I have not yet had the strength to face has been cruelly exposed to me again by someone who has tried to hurt me by calling me 'fat'. If I have low self-esteem and have no confidence because of years of continual criticism, put-downs and a general attitude of disgust by my parents towards me then your verbal attack of calling me 'useless' is going to hurt. It will rip open the gaping wounds inside me and cause me to feel all that anger and fear which I have so far kept a lid on. If I am middle-aged, unskilled, uneducated and with no good prospects of getting a job then your labelling of me as a 'dole bludger' will almost certainly cause the desired pain. It could remind me of all those disadvantages I have and I may go into a depression for several weeks.

     We can feel sick in the stomach, tension in our neck and back, heaviness in our chest and have upset bowels. We can lose night after night of sleep and be thoroughly exhausted as we drag ourselves through our daily responsibilities. We can lose our appetite and not be able to eat which can cause weakness in our bodies and lowered resistance to infection. We can develop all manner of stress-related illnesses and injuries. All these things can cause us physical pain just as surely as a broken nose or a black eye.

     We hardly need to identify violence. It is plain for all to see and because it is so obvious it too often becomes synonymous with aggression rather than being seen as just one type of aggression. The aim of the aggressor in this case is to cause pain by direct physical contact using either their own body or some kind of weapon as a means of inflicting injury. It is more or less defined and identified in law and it can be judged and punished by courts.

     Another common way for people to cause pain in domestic relationships is to destroy the property of their partner. Our home is the place where we usually store our most prized and cherished possessions. If our house burns down in a bush fire and we lose all those possessions we are going to feel a great deal of sadness. We feel sadness when we lose something that is important to us or something we have invested a lot of time and money into. A domestic partner will know what is important to us and they can cause a great deal of sadness for us by destroying those things. If I have a prized bottle of Scotch in my bar and in a fit of aggression you decide to pour it down the sink then it is going to cause me sadness. It will depend on how much that Scotch meant to me of course but you would not have done it unless you already knew that it meant a lot to me. If I have spent twenty years creating the ultimate model railway in our basement and I come home from work to see that you have taken to it with a sledge hammer it will undoubtedly cause me a great deal of pain and sense of loss.

     Destruction of property not only causes sadness but anger as well. We have a right to collect possessions and to create things in our own homes. If someone breaks into our house and steals our belongings we feel very angry. Our rights have been violated. Anger can cause us a great deal of pain until we obtain justice. Sometimes that justice cannot be obtained or the effort to obtain it is not worth the time and money involved. The anger remains in our bodies causing stress until we find justice or let go of the desire to obtain justice.

     Another form of aggression that is quite common is passive aggression. This is where someone tries to cause pain for their partner by refusing to do something that could be reasonably be expected to be done. If a woman has told her partner that she will pick up the children after school because she knows her partner has a social function then he would expect it to be done unless there is a good reason that makes it impossible. The woman fails to fetch the children and turns off her mobile phone so she is uncontactable. She knows the school will have to call the father and he will have to leave his function to pick up the kids. She has just refused to co-operate in her parenting responsibilities with the intention of spoiling the man's enjoyment of the work social. When the man realises that she was just doing it to 'spite' him he becomes very angry. He may also suffer embarrassment in relation to his work colleagues and the instability in his domestic relationships could raise doubts about his stability in handling work situations.

     Passive aggression seeks to hurt the victim by embarrassment, shame, inconvenience and sometimes financial loss. People hurt others by passive aggression because they can. They can get away with it and this sense of powerlessness adds to the hurt for victims.

     People don't tell lies just for the fun of it – they do it to cause pain for their victim. A woman may say to her children that their father is having an affair with another woman even though she knows it is not true. Her aim is to hurt her partner by turning her children against him. Children are very often used as tools of aggression and this can be very painful for the parent who is the victim to see his children manipulated in this way.

     Bullying is a form of aggression that uses power as its weapon. In a domestic relationship there should be an equal balance of power but this is not always the case. The balance can shift in many areas at different times. Sometimes, for instance, a woman may have more financial power in a relationship. The man may be unemployed at a particular time and the woman becomes the breadwinner. She can use this power to cause pain for a man. She may try and make the man do things which are unreasonable or unjust and threaten to leave him without the money he needs to meet his financial commitments. This can cause him a great deal of stress as he becomes frightened about the repercussions of not meeting his bills. He may even have to deal with the stress of fear of bankruptcy or jail. Such stress is extremely painful in a very physical sense.

     A woman can often have a particular power over a man and any power can be used to bully someone into doing things that can cause them great stress and pain. The power of knowledge, the power of physical well-being when a man is sick or incapacitated, the power of certain skills like driving the car, the power of influence over the children or the power of support from interfering in-laws can all be used to bully a partner. Power in a relationship shifts as life circumstances change and abusing this power is bullying and it is a very insidious form of domestic aggression.

     Behaving in a financially irresponsible way can be a form of aggression in domestic relationships. If a woman feels aggressive toward her partner she may try to hurt him by going on a needless shopping spree and blowing all the credit on their jointly held cards. This can cause pain for the man because it can cause him stress when his financial situation becomes so poor that he is unable to meet his financial responsibilities. It can be so bad that he could lose his home and his very basic needs for food, clothing and shelter may be at risk. We all feel enormous stress and fear when our basic needs are threatened and behaviour that is aimed at creating this stress is very aggressive indeed.

     Financially irresponsible behaviour can cause a man to feel very angry as well. We all have a right to enjoy the fruits of our labour and one of those fruits is peace of mind about the security of our basic needs. When someone else's irresponsibility with money threatens that right then we become very angry and quite often we can see no way to redress that injustice and this prolongs the stress of anger in our bodies.

     There are many more types of aggression that human beings are capable of and there are thousands of nuances to each different type. It is quite obvious when you define aggression honestly that women are just as aggressive as men. Violence and aggression are not the same thing and both men and women will be better off when they accept that.