I would question if the concept of “Gender Violence” really exists. I would like to understand a definition of what that concept really means.
Are we talking specifically about violence of one gender against another? Are we referring to violence between members of the same gender? Or is there some other meaning or set of unspoken assumptions tucked away within a weasel word somewhere?
The best way to sum up the definition of a weasel word is as follows:
“When a weasel sucks eggs the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a ‘weasel word’ after another there is nothing left of the other.”
Let’s have a look at the term Gender Violence.
In this case, I believe the weasel word sits right at the beginning of the term.
What is Gender Violence and how is it any different to just plain and simple Violence?
I don’t see any difference!
What is Gender doing before the word Violence other than just sitting there PRETENDING to communicate something specific? Gender in this context doesn’t communicate anything at all. It just hangs there like a dead weight off the shoulders of the word following it. I almost want to yell:-
“Oi! Violence! You should know that Gender is beyond your help, you’d be better off leaving it for dead. Dragging that heavy word around all day will only break your back!”
Just like the definition of a weasel word given above, the word Gender sucks the meaning out of the word Violence.
I guess this is because from my point of view ANY violence committed against another human being is still violence. One act of violence against another human being is still one too many. It does not matter if the violence was committed by or against man, woman or child.
This makes me conclude that Gender Violence is yet another loaded term to redefine our perceptions of what violence really is, and how it exists within our societies.
Ultimately all of this leads me to the following question:
Who commits “Gender Violence” and who suffers as a result of it?”
16 Comments
December 22, 2007 at 6:55 am
Good question. Just what is “Gender Violence”? Is it any different from violence?
My opinion: It isn’t.
Gender violence is just a term. Much like Black violence, Asian violence, Latino Violence, etc. It takes away from the latter word and puts undeserved emphasis on the subject. With Gender, it’s split into two fanctions: Men and Women.
In Today’s times, Gender Violence is strongly associated with abuse of women by men. Any male who is a victim of abuse isn’t looked at much. Violence against men is also given the cold-shoulder due to the supposed rarity of men as victims. Nor can anyone, with a straight face, admit that men are prone to violence against men and women.
So you have an association slanted in favor of women these days.
I don’t like the term as it makes too much attention out of the individual’s sex as if it should need so much light from above shining down as a beacon to solving the problem.
Another thing I want to talk about is the issue, probably unrelated, of helping young boys so they don’t commit violence against women. This trend to mentor them so oppression can be eliminated and they in turn will grow up decent citizens. Providing positive male role models to learn from who love women and are free of sexist dogma.
Mentor young boys because the lives of women depend on it. No, not because it’s the right thing to do. Goodness knows the dearth of positive male role models out there for boys to grow and learn from. That’s not enough. Violence against women must be stopped and they will adhere to this. Otherwise, they are going to grow into rapists and sexists.
It’s sickening double-talk to me. Charity without heart if it doesn’t beat in respect to all the women struggling in a male-dominated society. “I love you, so long as you love women. THINK OF THE WOMEN. PLEASE THINK OF THE WOMEN!”
Why not just mentor a young boy for the sake of mentoring? Do it out of respect for the fact he is as much an individual as a woman. That’s what I’d do if the offer came to me. And I wouldn’t do it with an agenda favoring one gender over the other.
Respect for women, yes. But not at the expense of loving a boy for being who he is and the effort he puts into becoming a model citizen.
December 22, 2007 at 6:57 am
Actually, I meant to say it’s hard for someone to admit, with a straight face, that men are prone to violence FROM men and women.
December 22, 2007 at 3:09 pm
What I find offensive with respect to this mentor concept for young boys you mentioned is the assumption that all boys are potential wife-batterers, like it were something born in their genes. How can that be right?
December 22, 2007 at 3:13 pm
Sam, do you have any links for this mentor program for young boys? I would like to find out more about that – I never knew such a concept existed. Is it a US-based program or does it run in the UK and Australia too? Has anyone else heard of this?
Thanks
Emmah
December 22, 2007 at 7:15 pm
It’s one of many. A friend sent a link to me when I was in another one of my moods regarding my distrust of feminism due to this very reason: Always looking at helping young boys as a gender and sexism issue and not as an issue of boys needing role models in their lives. Period.
Here it is:
http://mensresourcesinternational.org/uncommonman/archives/mens_movement/index.html
Don’t get me wrong. I really love their stance on masculinity and that there are different ways of being masculine. However, I do not agree, at all, with the propaganda of “All boys are prone to violence wethere they’re privledged or not.” There’s that word again: Privledged.
Nor their obvious slant towards violence against women. They say violence affects men too, but the way they say it seems to play second fiddle to women.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, mentor boys because they need it. Don’t treat them, unconciously, as problems for women if they aren’t mentored.
December 23, 2007 at 12:32 am
Actually, I would guess that gender violence means violence against another person primarily because of their gender. I.e. like racial violence where somebody beats up someone mostly because they are white, or somebody beating up a homosexual primarily because of their sexual orientation. Because this unique motivation often causes violence, they made a category for it. It’s violence just like any other violence except it’s fuelled by a specific psychological drive or social disorder if you will.
But that’s in theory. In practice, when a man beats up his wife or vice versa, I would say that in many cases it’s not because she is a woman. It’s because they lived together for 20 years, developed a bad relationship and drive each other crazy without having the guts to separate like flatmates would do.
Of course feminists love the term gender violence because it describes exactly this: That every violent act or rape by a man against a woman is due to the patriarchy and a gender thing; that men as a group are repressing women etc.
So it’s mostly nonsense like you say and the term has been abused, but I don’t have a problem with the strict definition of the term.
December 26, 2007 at 9:19 pm
Adding a word like ‘gender’ or ‘racial’ just gives us the opportunity to skim over it and decide it’s got nothing to do with us. Weasel or wedge ~ either way it protects us from having to look at violence with empathy. Cold comfort.
December 27, 2007 at 8:15 pm
One such “mentoring” program has been operating for years in my corner of northern California:
http://endabuse.org/
I think these folks were responsible for a PSA on the subject that struck many people as particularly offensive: at the close of an idyllic depiction of mother & child frolicking at the beach, free at last of the boy’s abusive father, the camera zooms in on the boy’s innocent face to capture a special effect – a momentary flicker in the young boy’s eyes, that satanic gleam effect one sees in horror movies just before the demon emerges to commit mayhem.
That momentary flicker revealed the core belief system of those who “mentor” young boys under “the assumption that all boys are potential wife-batterers, like it were something born in their genes.”
December 28, 2007 at 11:05 am
I’m not surprised, Edward. Not surprised at all there are more organizations like the ones you and I mentioned.
I’ll tell you one thing, if they ever ask me for a chairtable donation, then they’d better be damn prepared to offer an apology for depicting boys as potential batterers. Because I’m certainly not giving money to people with such an agenda.
January 1, 2008 at 4:07 am
This is probably a bit off-topic under this post, but I figured I’d ask anyway.
Why is the “gender” violence from men against women?* What initiated it in the first place at all? We’re the same specie after all, and there shouldn’t be rivalry, because we don’t compete and actually need each other to survive/procreate.
*Sure it works the other way around too, but not on a large scale. And perhaps those women who happen to be violent, became violent because of men’s violence?
January 4, 2008 at 1:04 am
@Sam – Thank you, for the link I shall be having a good read of them.
@Erki – Welcome, you are more than free to post. In response to your comment I have to disagree.
Women are violent the same reason as men are violent; they learn behaviours from childhood, usually from violent pasts. Of course there are many other details to this too, but this is the cut and thrust of it as far as I understand.
I urge you to read some of Erin Pizzey’s work and studies into violent-prone women. There is certainly a relationship between male and female violence, but it isn’t as simple as the female reacting to male violence. Violence isn’t always physical, either. There are some women (and men) who use emotional violence, which is just as damaging.
@Edward – the idea that boys have this “battering gene” is the most disgusting thing I have heard since reading one commenter on a blog (that shall not be named) suggesting that women actually enjoy being raped.
January 8, 2008 at 7:06 pm
@Erki – I’d add to what Emmah said by throwing in the fact that women are quite often smaller and physically weaker than the men in their lives. For that reason, they don’t usually resort to physical violence against those men but instead utilize other forms of violence like emotional or verbal. Against those who are smaller and weaker, e.g., children, women can be and often are just as physically violent as men.
January 8, 2008 at 7:09 pm
That is a very good point, Jami. Thank you very much for adding that.
January 15, 2008 at 2:55 am
Violence is one of those loaded words with a great deal of emotional power. That power accrues due to years of collective experience and not necessarily direct experience, but more indirect experience – second/third etc. vicarious experience that becomes part of the cultural backdrop to our every living moment.
People are programmed to (and by) violence today. Check out Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism a short movie on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kieyjfZDUIc
and see how ideas are used to create shock that numbs and then permits in that short period of numbness and a lessening of awareness other things to happen.
The way the media present news stories is designed and laid out to set one up for advertisement receptivity for example then you feel good about a product, that it will make you feel safer, more protected, etc. and then when you see it on a shelf, you’re already favorably disposed to purchase. If you haven’t seen it already check out and watch The Corporation and in particular the clip from a female marketing executive, about how they manipulate children so they will demand parents purchase “stuff.”
Now there’s a word. A dumb-numb word. Such words encourage pronoun abuse, and lose the richness of language and the ability to describe what it is we are seeing, feeling, experiencing. “What’s happening?” “Oh, stuff.”
On the personal level the shock of such ideas (the package of meaning attached to words) divorces us from our ability to act rationally, unless self-discipline and a high degree of self-awareness is a well-established part of one’s character. Leastwise, that’s my experience.
It’s like the first time the Bush administration took power and the mood of America at that time, which was buoyant from the Clinton years and the word was…anybody recall?…. recession.
That word rocked America. In the moment of utterance on nationwide television it burst the bubble of abundance that characterized and cocooned the Clinton presidency. It was carefully calculated to do exactly that. These guys always plan their speeches to pursue their future agenda. In an age of recession, do you go to war and run up a couple of trillion dollars in debt? Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it. But if you want to prepare people for what comes next…, ah, that’s a different matter entirely.
Some words are symbolic of blows. They may not be a physical blow, but they do internal damage that can have greater affect upon character, personality, judgment, etc. than any physical blow, and that internal damage is the equivalent of taking a sharp blade, or a club and striking someone with it. Fate worse than death? Have your soul scarred for life. Death would be an alternative kindness.
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me!” Oh, yeah? Its an attempt at protection, but it doesn’t work. Names hurt, watch any woman’s makeover program and listen to the trauma of a wounded soul, who has been crippled by the cruelty of children in a playground.
Emmah is right, behavior is learned. But one can do something about this, though it is not without challenge: one can disagree. One can thus break the programming.
The shock of a partner’s betrayal for example could be so great as to short-circuit one’s social inclinations (cultural programming) to refrain from violence.
One can be goaded, and some people are Masters and Mistresses of the Goading Arts who provoke violence, they have a goaded end in site and how they get there is by using a manipulation mechanism, designed and intended to irritate, irk, unsettle and provoke physical violence.
Words that provoke violent reaction for example. Delivered with the right emotional package they wound, maim, hurt, and dig their way deep into the soul and character of a person. They are components of gender violence. The cut, thrust, and slice of cruelty intended to diminish stature, self-esteem, self-respect, and self-determination. They suspend judgment. And at that point one becomes vulnerable, and is set up to become a victim of the violence done one’s soul (I’m using ’soul’ in a non-biblical sense, here).
The media, art & entertainment industry and tend to load words and drive them into society in various ways. “You can’t handle the truth!” is one example. It commands agreement, it undermines judgment, and it negates the ability to know and recognize truth. Delivered with the sort of emotional force that most people spend a lifetime endeavoring to avoid, it numbs the audience and then nobody can remember the words before or after, just the impact of those words driven into them. That’s violence of the soul carried out on a collective basis. And you know it’s working because it ends up in our common parlance, as colloquialisms and becomes a part of the social and cultural environment. It signifies a shared cultural moment, and identifies a movie, but it is the phrase that sticks the intellect, jams the mind on that moment, and leaves it numb and frozen there.
The movie “Wag the Dog” prepared the way for embedded media and Video News Releases (VNRs) in Iraq and subsequently in the White House. The public had seen it, they were prepared for it, and thus accepting of it.
We learn what behavior is expected when these words are mentioned or used and we are supposed to show that we know the ‘appropriate’ social responses to their use. The facial expressions, the knee-jerk clichés, that make up the gamut of ’social and cultural behavior and expression’ that then govern the things we say, and do and the things others say and do around us, that make this all appear normal.
Communication can open your mind, or it can shut it down to one degree and another.
When you observe the effect, you can then observe, analyze consider and deduce intention, and when you grok intention, you learn the mechanisms of control and manipulation. And that information sets you free.
Understanding the effect of words on yourself and others and examining them, changes the way you respond to them the next time they are used, and it opens up the way to managing communication more positively.
It all sounds very easy, but it’s damned difficult to do at times.
Anyway, this is part of what I have observed about communication and relationships how communications are used to commit violence that is not necessarily visible, but which nonetheless scars us personally, socially and culturally. These types of communications collapse us on ourselves.
Communications that do not do this open us up, expand our internal world and that sense of expansion is a positive indicator that all is okay.
I’ve written this because verbal violence precedes physical violence, and if we had more understanding of how that occurs, we could manage such situations better and perhaps prevent them more, while strengthening the sort of communication that binds relationships in a healthy way.
Hope this little of what I know helps.
January 15, 2008 at 3:02 am
Apologies for the missing punctuation and the misplaced ‘and’.
January 15, 2008 at 3:03 am
Btw, why do women get all the makeovers and not men?