h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

No backlash from me BC.

Spousal abuse of men generally takes an emotional twist (personal experience). If prolonged, this can lead to fights of a more physical nature where the man ends up being forced to leave the premises for no shorter than 24 hours and often times for much longer than that (again, personal experience). There is, of course, no legal recourse for emotional abuse. There are no physical scars or bruises.

My X keeps asking me how the "woman front" is going and I keep telling her that I am not even looking right now. I was hurt by her so much that, for the most part, I don't want much to do with women. I do not blame all women for my X's actions, I just need time to recuperate.

They idea of "if he hits me he loves me" is widely known in Russia.
And then there are people who enjoy being a martyr (sp?).
In one crisis centre in Norway I saw a big house for abused women and children and a little house beside it for abused men. People working there said that perhaps there is almost as much abused men than women but traditionally it's hard for a man to admit his wife beats him or terrorises him.

I think it goes both ways, and men are socialized not to talk about it.

That said, I agree with some of what you say, Bryce. I've known plenty of women who kept going back. The first time, I was sympathetic, and even the second and third. After a while, it gets hard to be that person's friend, and watch them go back again and again. I don't know that they've equated hitting with love, however. I think they're convinced of their own worthlessness (both by their own problems with low self-esteem and their partner's constant verbal and emotional abuse) that by the time the hitting starts, they really do believe they deserve it. But again, both men and women experience it. It's just more socially acceptable for women to acknowledge it.

Abuse, regardless of which way it goes, is a bad thing.

Life in general isn't the best either, but what else is new.

*curls up on the sofa under a blanket and sips *

[MTG, sorry I've not much to say we are currently outside of my area of expertise]

The first things I learned in Anger Management are "Life Sucks" and "Life is not fair". Coming to that realization made me a much happier person of course, getting my divorce made me ecstatic.

Regardless, abuse of any sort is to be abhorred.

You have no opinion on the subject?

Ok, how amusing that we would get on the Domestic Violence issue just as I walk in the door. I am a bit well schooled on the subject, the hard way.
In April of 2002 my then girlfriend and I had the mother of all fights. There was no hitting involved. However, she decided to tell the cops that there was. Not a single mark on her and I went straight to jail. I spent three months in there waiting on a trial. No evidence outside her word. Long story real short, I took a plea bargain. I was afraid of the victim support group she kept showing up to court with, and the fact that she was a class A actor. Got a year of probation left and six months after that I can have my record expunged.
So, like all things we take a genuine problem (DV) and overreact so hard to it that innocents can be burned hard by it. The whole affair cost my $40,000 (to include the $6,000 that she drained from my bank account while I was too incarcerated to do anything about it) and worst of all my good name.
The problem as I see it is this. Men who beat women are dirtbags, it is the way I was raised. I remember when my father's secretary showed up at her house with a black eye. My old man almost killed her boyfriend. So laws to prevent that are a good thing. Yet, the women who most need the protection of those laws are the same women who will never ever use them. They excuse the beatings. It is the women who use the system as a weapon and abuse the protection that the laws "protect" most often.
Just a man who whose violated by the law's take on the sunject.

Tamberlaine. I'm sorry that happened to you, but it illustrates another pet peeve of mine. Women who lie about abuse make it harder for the others to get legitimate and real help. No one believes them because of those that lie.

There was a man here who spent 8 months in jail recently because a couple of 12 year old girls didn't want to get in trouble for getting home late, so they said he attacked them in the park. It looked like he'd be convicted, but then one of the girls finally told her mother the truth. It was awful.

I think that women who lie about abuse should be sent to jail for the amount of time their accused abuser would have been. The same goes for parents who accuse their spouse of molesting the children in custody cases.

My poor X! lol She would be away for quite some time.

First off - Lil, let me apologise to you for the silliness last night. I meant it when I said sorry.

Secondly, I agree with all of the above posts. I have never been in a physically abusive relationship but was once in a mentally abusive one. The loss of the ability to think was strange, profound and only disturbing in retrospective, which is disturbing in itself.

For that reason I am never judgemental about people who are victims in abusive relationships, though like MR, my patience is not infinite.

And women who lie about abuse or attacks should certainly be jailed for as long as the perpetrator of such an attack would be.

Ben
*off to work for three days - either limited access or none at all*

A huge topic and not one I can do justice to first thing in the morning.

Many people go back into/stay in an abusive relationship the same as in any other relationship, it is even scarier outside that relationship. It can take a lot of strength to leave and when you've been abused and downtrodden (male or female) you have no strength left.

There isn't necessarily an actual lack of strength. Just one that the victim has been led to believe. Some of the strongest people I know have come out of abusive relationships - mental, physical, emotional or otherwise.

*sips *

Hmmmm

I went to one of these small single teacher village primary schools. There were only about ten of us there and it closed a little before my eighth birthday, which came as a blessed relief to me. Fatty W****o, our teacher and a vast vicious brute of a woman had knocked the living daylights out of me on more or less a daily basis for the previous three years. I never said anything back home, I just thought she didn't like me.

Twenty years on I discovered that she had once been engaged to a man who left her for my father's sister. They got married, he beat her up, they divorced very quickly (must have been around 1960). So I got an early lesson of been on the receiving end of a frustrated woman's brutality.

I've often wondered since whether it did any lasting damage to me. Not enough obviously for me to be able to say one way or the other.

Oddly enough though, I'm drawn to women who are not only an intellectual and sexual match for me, but also a physical match. Now I'm not going too far down this route but Mrs Seth is able to lift all 80 kg of me onto her shoulders, and neither of us are comfortable with verbal argument beyond a certain level of civility. But we do enjoy settling our occasional disputes with a wrestling match. All our anger and frustrations are vented and our differences resolved (never 'won' particularly either way) locked in each others arms getting hot and sweaty. Often we just forget what we were quarrelling about .......

There WILL be bruises on both sides, but we have avoided hurling damaging abuse at each other, or the even more reprehensible "let's sit down quietly and dissect each others weaknesses". (That was my first marriage)

Now, I'm sure this is by no means to everybody's cup of tea and I don't know whether this qualifies as "physical abuse" as intended in some previous postings, but both of us would have a real problem with any outsider who "heard certain noises" or "saw certain marks", and tried to interfere.

I don't know why we are the way we are: perhaps I was preconditioned by my early experiences to expect a certain level of violence in a relationship, perhaps the loss of Mrs Seth's father at an early age left a void in her life. What I do know is that neither of us outside the normal behavioural variability of humankind. (Except that Mrs Seth is b****y strong for a woman of her build!)

I quoted my mother several hundred postings back - "what goes on behind closed cutains is for man and wife alone". Some people do tend to conveniently 'forget' that divorce is available as a straightforward way out of a damaging relationship for most individuals (including the aunt I mentioned previously).

Obviously, there is a degree of violence that cannot be condoned; but I think what I am trying to say is that anyone who involves themselves with the question of domestic violence, without fully addressing the issues of individualism and consent, is treading on really thin ice.

Comments? It's okay, you don't know either me or Mrs Seth from Adam so I won't take offence. Actually, both Mrs Seth and I are regarded as a quiet easy-going couple by our friends.

While I am a proponent for privacy as well, Seth, there are some things that are cultural worries and some things that cannot be allowed. Turning a blind head towards abuse simply allows it to continue. Having been in the position myself, I cannot do that.

Agreed absolutely, Gw7en, it's just knowing at what point intervention is justified.

In Nigeria, an abused wife makes representations to her own family lineage. It is quite normal and indeed expected that the wife's brothers would visit the husband's village and give him a right good kicking in public.

The husbands lineage would not try to stop them, and any police that were around would probably just join in.

I don't say this is right either - just another point of view.

Given the reaction of my family and friends to certain recent events, I could see this happening very easily just about anywhere. I don't agree with this either, though. Its the whole cycle over again: violence leads to violence, whoever the perpetrator and whatever the reason, justified or not.

Getting out can be hard - believe you me - but it is really the best option.

*pops head in briefly*

Hello, finally made it through the blog!

Greetings and welcome to people I haven’t met here before:
Seth, Speckly, Fattylizard, Teuchter, dw2, KerrAvon, Rev paperboy, Tamberlaine – hope you can stick around.

And hello again and welcome back to returners Life is like a cup of coffee, hands from the sky...

Oh, and of course it's good to be back here with the rest of you!

Now I have to dash off to meet another h2g2 researcher I haven't seen for ages...

I'll post properly later.

Welcome back, Candi! Good to see you back online.