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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