Our thanks to Jeff for this on the BBC. As with all reporting of domestic abuse case on the BBC (and thw wider mainstream media) the ‘reporter’ is a woman. The purpose is always to sustain the myth that the overwhelming majority of perpetrators are men, the overwhelming majority of victims women. Just one extract, early in the piece, will illustrate the point:
Det Con Sophie Ward of Cheshire Police described Rigby having a “stranglehold” over her victim, adding: “Many people think that only women can be victims of controlling and coercive behaviour, but as this case demonstrates, that is not always the case.”
Where to start?
- why do “many people think that only women…”? Maybe – in large part – because the mainstream media, with the BBC being a particularly egregious example, has been spouting that narrative 24/7/365 for decades, regardless of the existence of evidence to the contrary for over the past half-century.
- “… as this case demonstrates, that is not always the case.”
Not always the case?!!! A clear inference there that it’s nearly always the case, and naive readers will take away that inference and internalise it.
Predictably, despite the devastating impact of her cruelty on her partner, Sarah Rigby received only a suspended sentence i.e. no punishment. Why? Because vagina, as always.
Not a week goes by without me posting the following comments in response to one or more articles in major publications about domestic abuse:
“The Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project (PASK) https://domesticviolenceresearch.org/ was published in May 2013 in the journal Partner Abuse and is the most comprehensive review of domestic violence research ever carried out. This unparallelled three-year research project was conducted by 42 scholars at 20 universities and research centres. The headline finding of the PASK review was that:
“Men and women perpetrate physical and non-physical forms of abuse at comparable rates, most domestic violence is mutual, women are as controlling as men, domestic violence by men and women is correlated with essentially the same risk factors, and male and female perpetrators are motivated for similar reasons.”
A key numerical result from the PASK review was:
“Among large population samples, 57.9% of intimate-partner violence (IPV) reported was bi-directional, 42.1% unidirectional, 13.8% of the unidirectional violence was male-to-female, 28.3% was female-to-male.”
The last point is worth emphasising. In the 42.1% of (heterosexual) couples in which one partner is always the perpetrator and the other the victim, the woman is TWICE as likely to be the perpetrator and (therefore) half as likely to be the victim.”
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Justice for Men & Boys 
And reverse the sexes and imagine a suspended sentence for a male offender. Of course it wouldn’t happen. “two tier” justice.
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Beyond sickening!! I hope this rotten female gets justice another way!!
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To be honest I’d be happy if HMG simply used its own data from the ONS, and which they quote often, yet still pursue a VAWG strategy. For decades now the ONS data shows that a third of of those experiencing domestic abuse are male as are a third of those killed by a current or recent partner. Going form the current situation where 99% of funding and attention goes to female “victims” to 30% going to males would be a game changer and would break the “gendered” narrative and probably start to road to what Erin Pizzey has always said that Domestic Abuse is nothing like the parody of it presented by the DV “industry”. For well over two decades research reports have identified that the two main reasons men don’t seek help is that A. they are convinced that no one will believe them (and all to often this is rooted in their experience). B. They don’t recognize that the behaviours they experience are a pattern of behaviours that escalates, because of course in any education or publicity on this it assumes always a female victim. In my own experience in the past and still made clear by current charities it is frequently other women in the male victim’s life that either seek help or support him to seek it Sisters, mothers, ex partners, female friends/colleagues see what is happening because they are alerted by messaging for 50 years. In effect males have been deliberately rendered vulnerable by being kept ignorant.
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Thanks Nigel. Much of that would require a driven non-feminist Home Secretary to challenge the DV industry and mainstream media, there’s enver been one of those! The post has almost always been held by women for many years, no accident.
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