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Thank you for saying that violence can happen to anyone. In Australia, we have a very sexist attitude toward violence. The media (and our own minister for sex

Thank you for saying that violence can happen to anyone. In Australia, we have a very sexist attitude toward violence. The media (and our own minister for sexism) only ever talk about male perpetrators and female victims. This article mentions twice that the majority of victims are women(about 2/3), but it purposely ignores violence against men. My wife said to me the other day, "today's society is more sexist than we've ever seen, isn't it". Unfortunately, I couldn't agree more. Violence against anyone should be condemned, regardless of the gender of the perpetrator and the gender of the victim. I like HN because it is less sexist than most information sources, however, the price of non-sexism is eternal vigilance. This article raises a tragic issue In an unnecessarily sexist way. My wife is right yet again.

socialist_coder 10y ago
So they say "Female Lives Matter" and you say "All Lives Matter". If I learned anything from "Black Lives Matter", it is that this type of response is not acceptable and does a lot to diminish the original message.
- mmel 10y ago
  The original message is divisive in nature.
- iLoch 10y ago
  Without getting too political, I'd like to point out that the purpose of the Black Lives Matters movement is to address differences between the life the average black person is afforded vs. that of a non-minority person (ie. white). There's a strong correlation between black and being poor, and perhaps the solution is not to create a divide by race, but rather by socioeconomic status. A lot of problems we have today, faced both by black people and poor people alike, can be solved by addressing the problems in poor neighbourhoods. Of course that is not to say all black people are poor, that would be ridiculous. But in the mind of someone who thinks in a certain way, because a person is black it means that they are in fact more likely to be from a poorer family, may have received lesser education, etc. So I think socioeconomic status is a much more fair and less divisive way grouping people. "All lives matter" is certainly reactionary, but I think there's truth to the idea the BLM isn't the correct way to solve the problem.
  - mc32 10y ago
    I think the issue some people have with the BLMM is that it focuses on one aspect of the violence: police vs black population, while not confronting other sources of violence from within the population. Now, me, I think they are both valid concerns. Violence from the police is a big issue (for black and for any population, but they suffer from it the most, proportionately speaking) and it's a complex issue. As recent studies have shown, depolicing/trepidation by police is likely a factor in the increase in violence in large metro areas studied. That said, while being poor is a factor in violence (we can go to Japan or China (more homogenous groups) and we see more violence among the poor or disenfranchised (Yakuza). But that does not absolve the populations from looking inwardly and addressing inter-group violence. With regard to violence on women, as depicted here in the story, it's not from other women but by males and they also bear the brunt of the violence (2/3 of the cases). So I think it's fair to address this as a special case of violence needing added attention due to the disproportionality of where the violence comes from and who it impacts.
  - omonra 10y ago
    Do you happen to have (or ever looked at) the statistics for criminality of low-income whites? I'd be curious for that comparison - let's say murder rate (as these things are less likely to be covered up) across bottom 10% of income by race.
    - dlmetcalf 10y ago
      The mortality gap between white and black Americans still exists, but has closed dramatically in recent decades. Mortality rates are still far worse for men than women though. But particularly, that poverty affects male mortality far more than poverty affects female mortality. E.g. Mortality rates for financially disadvantaged white males is still very significantly worse than for black women (where as black male mortality is still worse than for either - but dramatically less worse compared to white males than it was a couple of decades ago). http://voxeu.org/article/mortality-inequality-good-news-county-level-approach http://voxeu.org/article/mortality-inequality-good-news-coun...
      - 10y ago
vacri 10y ago
As a fellow Australian, you're misrepresenting the issue. Yes, there is currently a government program to try and reduce domestic violence against women. Yes, domestic violence happens in the other direction, and in gay couples as well, but the preponderance of the damage done is received by women. It's a social problem, and the government's job is to try to help social problems. There's also social movements around violence against men. Have a look at Aussie Rules and how 'family-oriented' it has become. Long gone are the days where playing on through a bloody face was a mark of honour. The official football groups condemn violence left, right, and centre. It's absolute nonsense that it's only violence against women that's being condemned. If you honestly think today's Australia is more sexist than we've ever seen, then you haven't had a look at how it was before. Women were legally paid 2/3rds as much as men - my mother was a teacher in the 70s and tells that story. Similarly, it was shameful to be seen as simply being pregnant in public, let alone breastfeeding, and there was no male analogue for that, no physical state men could be in where they had to hide from public view. There is plenty more, so I'd strongly encourage you to look at the rights that first-wave feminists were fighting for, if you think that it's more sexist now than ever before.
- dlmetcalf 10y ago
  He's not misrepresenting the DV policy when Turnbull makes comments like, quote: "domestic violence - which is just violence against women". 40% of DV homicide victims in Australia are male and 20% are children (52% of those kids killed by women). That's from Australian Institute of Criminology (2015) on 10 years of official National Homicide Monitoring Program data. Women aren't even the majority of DV homicide victims in Australia - and homicides are at the extreme end of gendered violence - let alone DV being exclusively against women. Yet DV funding & research in Australia is exclusively for women. ANROWS, WLS, White Ribbon, OurWatch, DV NSW & Vic (which are really Women's refuge, just renamed), etc etc. all have officially gender discriminatory chartered mandates and act accordingly. Funding isn't put towards "reducing DV" and assigned proportionately to injury or anything. It's assigned for "reducing DV against women", ONLY (or maybe 'women and their children', as if fathers simply don't exist). In NSW for instance, the DV portfolio isn't part of Health or Justice, but is officially owned by "Women NSW" (a genuine matriarchy). Now feminism is all well and good when in cases where it truly is about equal rights, fair opportunities, etc. But that's not what's going on here. DV has become massively politicised, and if you can't recognise that, when a $30M media campaign is announced within 24 hours of a Federal election, then you're not paying attention. The DV agenda in Australia is far more about helping Turnbull look different to Abbott, because LNP was (rightfully) hemorrhaging in female voter polls. Every other party to the Left has just been trying to out-do him on that since. If you're genuinely interested in reducing harm against women, then I recommend taking into account data like https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1854883/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1854883/. Australia is not PNG. Our DV problem is not caused by gender pay inequality etc. Neither is that the cause in most advanced economies (look at Scandinavian countries with up to 50% of women reporting DV, which having the highest rates of gender equality in pay, opportunities, etc in the world). I agree first-wave feminism had a lot to fight for. I agree there's still issues for gender equality in Australia. But we're also completely ignoring other gender inequalities, like that 20% more women are graduating from universities today than men, while the overwhelming number of gender-based scholarships here still exclusively support women. Australia has a long way to go before it starts truly understanding what being anti gender discrimination actually means. "The standard you want past is the standard you accept", should also imply a single standard. When we talk about violence being cause by a lack of respect in relationships, we should be dealing with that by building mutual respect, not just building more gender divides. There's no discussion at all of the impact of psychological abuse in DV relationships against men, despite there being more male suicides every week than all the women killed in DV here each year. Nor is there of plenty of other issues related to DV. I'm aware this is particularly sensitive topic in IT, because I know discrimination against women still exists in a lot of companies. I've witnessed it more in private companies than public ones, but can attest that it varies WIDELY between companies. There's times when I've even sought to hire women over men, for the sole reason that some environments were severely unbalanced, that it was harming performance. There's also cases though where it goes the other way, including that women are generally paid more than males upon graduation in this industry (maybe the ones who make it through are better, but who knows). Anyway, I just think the whole discussion needs to be FAR more nuanced than what we've seen across media and government.

socialist_coder 10y ago

So they say "Female Lives Matter" and you say "All Lives Matter". If I learned anything from "Black Lives Matter", it is that this type of response is not acceptable and does a lot to diminish the original message.

mmel 10y ago
The original message is divisive in nature.
iLoch 10y ago
Without getting too political, I'd like to point out that the purpose of the Black Lives Matters movement is to address differences between the life the average black person is afforded vs. that of a non-minority person (ie. white). There's a strong correlation between black and being poor, and perhaps the solution is not to create a divide by race, but rather by socioeconomic status. A lot of problems we have today, faced both by black people and poor people alike, can be solved by addressing the problems in poor neighbourhoods. Of course that is not to say all black people are poor, that would be ridiculous. But in the mind of someone who thinks in a certain way, because a person is black it means that they are in fact more likely to be from a poorer family, may have received lesser education, etc. So I think socioeconomic status is a much more fair and less divisive way grouping people. "All lives matter" is certainly reactionary, but I think there's truth to the idea the BLM isn't the correct way to solve the problem.
- mc32 10y ago
  I think the issue some people have with the BLMM is that it focuses on one aspect of the violence: police vs black population, while not confronting other sources of violence from within the population. Now, me, I think they are both valid concerns. Violence from the police is a big issue (for black and for any population, but they suffer from it the most, proportionately speaking) and it's a complex issue. As recent studies have shown, depolicing/trepidation by police is likely a factor in the increase in violence in large metro areas studied. That said, while being poor is a factor in violence (we can go to Japan or China (more homogenous groups) and we see more violence among the poor or disenfranchised (Yakuza). But that does not absolve the populations from looking inwardly and addressing inter-group violence. With regard to violence on women, as depicted here in the story, it's not from other women but by males and they also bear the brunt of the violence (2/3 of the cases). So I think it's fair to address this as a special case of violence needing added attention due to the disproportionality of where the violence comes from and who it impacts.
- omonra 10y ago
  Do you happen to have (or ever looked at) the statistics for criminality of low-income whites? I'd be curious for that comparison - let's say murder rate (as these things are less likely to be covered up) across bottom 10% of income by race.
  - dlmetcalf 10y ago
    The mortality gap between white and black Americans still exists, but has closed dramatically in recent decades. Mortality rates are still far worse for men than women though. But particularly, that poverty affects male mortality far more than poverty affects female mortality. E.g. Mortality rates for financially disadvantaged white males is still very significantly worse than for black women (where as black male mortality is still worse than for either - but dramatically less worse compared to white males than it was a couple of decades ago). http://voxeu.org/article/mortality-inequality-good-news-county-level-approach http://voxeu.org/article/mortality-inequality-good-news-coun...
    - 10y ago

vacri 10y ago

As a fellow Australian, you're misrepresenting the issue. Yes, there is currently a government program to try and reduce domestic violence against women. Yes, domestic violence happens in the other direction, and in gay couples as well, but the preponderance of the damage done is received by women. It's a social problem, and the government's job is to try to help social problems. There's also social movements around violence against men. Have a look at Aussie Rules and how 'family-oriented' it has become. Long gone are the days where playing on through a bloody face was a mark of honour. The official football groups condemn violence left, right, and centre. It's absolute nonsense that it's only violence against women that's being condemned. If you honestly think today's Australia is more sexist than we've ever seen, then you haven't had a look at how it was before. Women were legally paid 2/3rds as much as men - my mother was a teacher in the 70s and tells that story. Similarly, it was shameful to be seen as simply being pregnant in public, let alone breastfeeding, and there was no male analogue for that, no physical state men could be in where they had to hide from public view. There is plenty more, so I'd strongly encourage you to look at the rights that first-wave feminists were fighting for, if you think that it's more sexist now than ever before.

dlmetcalf 10y ago
He's not misrepresenting the DV policy when Turnbull makes comments like, quote: "domestic violence - which is just violence against women". 40% of DV homicide victims in Australia are male and 20% are children (52% of those kids killed by women). That's from Australian Institute of Criminology (2015) on 10 years of official National Homicide Monitoring Program data. Women aren't even the majority of DV homicide victims in Australia - and homicides are at the extreme end of gendered violence - let alone DV being exclusively against women. Yet DV funding & research in Australia is exclusively for women. ANROWS, WLS, White Ribbon, OurWatch, DV NSW & Vic (which are really Women's refuge, just renamed), etc etc. all have officially gender discriminatory chartered mandates and act accordingly. Funding isn't put towards "reducing DV" and assigned proportionately to injury or anything. It's assigned for "reducing DV against women", ONLY (or maybe 'women and their children', as if fathers simply don't exist). In NSW for instance, the DV portfolio isn't part of Health or Justice, but is officially owned by "Women NSW" (a genuine matriarchy). Now feminism is all well and good when in cases where it truly is about equal rights, fair opportunities, etc. But that's not what's going on here. DV has become massively politicised, and if you can't recognise that, when a $30M media campaign is announced within 24 hours of a Federal election, then you're not paying attention. The DV agenda in Australia is far more about helping Turnbull look different to Abbott, because LNP was (rightfully) hemorrhaging in female voter polls. Every other party to the Left has just been trying to out-do him on that since. If you're genuinely interested in reducing harm against women, then I recommend taking into account data like https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1854883/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1854883/. Australia is not PNG. Our DV problem is not caused by gender pay inequality etc. Neither is that the cause in most advanced economies (look at Scandinavian countries with up to 50% of women reporting DV, which having the highest rates of gender equality in pay, opportunities, etc in the world). I agree first-wave feminism had a lot to fight for. I agree there's still issues for gender equality in Australia. But we're also completely ignoring other gender inequalities, like that 20% more women are graduating from universities today than men, while the overwhelming number of gender-based scholarships here still exclusively support women. Australia has a long way to go before it starts truly understanding what being anti gender discrimination actually means. "The standard you want past is the standard you accept", should also imply a single standard. When we talk about violence being cause by a lack of respect in relationships, we should be dealing with that by building mutual respect, not just building more gender divides. There's no discussion at all of the impact of psychological abuse in DV relationships against men, despite there being more male suicides every week than all the women killed in DV here each year. Nor is there of plenty of other issues related to DV. I'm aware this is particularly sensitive topic in IT, because I know discrimination against women still exists in a lot of companies. I've witnessed it more in private companies than public ones, but can attest that it varies WIDELY between companies. There's times when I've even sought to hire women over men, for the sole reason that some environments were severely unbalanced, that it was harming performance. There's also cases though where it goes the other way, including that women are generally paid more than males upon graduation in this industry (maybe the ones who make it through are better, but who knows). Anyway, I just think the whole discussion needs to be FAR more nuanced than what we've seen across media and government.