If Your Man Knew What to Say, Here’s What He Might Say If He Knew You Feared His Potential For Violence...
Excerpted from Warren Farrell's Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say.
(Permission to reprint granted by Warren Farrell.)
See www.warrenfarrell.com
and
www.warrenfarrell.info.
Are These Statistics For Real?
Headlines like these55 make it difficult to believe statistics based on equal samplings of both sexes:
Are these headlines at all true? Yes. It is true that about 50% of women are shoved, slapped, or otherwise abused during their lifetime (which is how the article explains the headline), but that is also true
of an even higher percentage of men. Why do we only know about the women? Because, as the second headline points out, it is the world’s women who are “speaking as one” against abuse – the world’s men aren't even speaking. The men are the silent battered.
The result? We have solidified our view of men as the perpetrators, making it shocking to view men as equally battered.
One of the biggest barriers to hearing this information is the belief that when women hit, it is in self-defense. So let’s check this out emotionally first. Which requires running it past our personal life experience. In my workshops I ask my audiences to ask themselves two questions about each romantic relationship they have had in their life:
- On your right hand, use one finger to represent
each
relationship in which you hit your partner (a non-playful slap or more) the
first
time – before she or he ever hit you. The number?____
- On your left hand, use one finger to represent each relationship in which your partner hit you the
first
time. The number?____
Remember, only one finger per relationship – and only the first time counts. Take out a moment to do this. It’s crucial to understanding this chapter on the emotional level.
Chances are, if you are a man, you will have a harder time remembering – a man treats a slap as forgettable; a woman does not. Nevertheless, if you’ve hit or been hit at all, it is likely more women will have hit you
the first time
than vice-versa. Now run this by a few friends.... The men are likely to recall being hit the first time more than the other way around; the women are likely to recall it being closer to equal, with their hitting the first time slightly more frequently – which basically matches the findings of the 50 surveys I reviewed. (The surveys, after all, came from real people’s reports.)
Despite all these findings, early researchers still concluded that we should not be distracted from the current social policy of giving first attention to wives.56 To rationalize their conclusion, they assumed that women as a group were more locked in to marriage and therefore less able to escape abuse. They ignored the data telling us that over 60% of divorces are initiated by women – and that when women have children it goes up to 65%.57 And they ignored findings that
men who are abused also feel locked in to marriage because they know their wives are much more likely to retain the children after divorce and they fear the children will be abused.58
55
Linda Castrone, “50% of Women Feel Cold Hand of a Batterer,” Rocky Mountain News, February 5, 1990 and Kathleen Hendrix, “World’s Women Speak as One Against Abuse,” Los Angeles Times, May 27, 1991, p. E1.
57
Wives initiate 61% of all divorce cases. When the couple has children, women initiate 65% of divorces. See “Monthly Vital Statistics Report: Advance Report of Final Divorce Statistics, 1987,” National Center for Health Statistics, Vol. 38, No. 12, Supplement 2, May 15, 1990, p. 5.
