I saw this poster on the bus today. In case you can’t make it out, there is an image of a punchbag set in a dishevelled kitchen, and the caption says:”A domestic violence victim will be beaten 20 times in the next year, unless a friend stops it sooner” with a line at the bottom saying “Enough. Call the National Domestic Violence Helpline for support.”
I did think for a horrified moment that this might be a campaign sponsored by Women’s Aid and/or Refuge, who I think run the helpline. It’s not. Surprise! It’s the Home Office.
There’s another similar poster where the image and main caption are the same, but the sub-caption reads: “If your friend is being hit, she’s probably too scared to do anything to stop it. So her beatings will just go on and on. Help her take the first step, call the National Domestic Violence Helpline for support.”
(Link to the similar poster – PDF)
Just who is doing the beating here?
These women – sorry, not “women”, “domestic violence victims” – are magically getting beaten by – who?
As usual in the case of crimes against women, the perpetrator drops out of the limelight.
I do get that a campaign encouraging friends to support those who are being abused has a place. I do get that perpetrators often seek to isolate their partners, to cut them off from the friends who may help them to escape – that encouraging friends to see through what is going on, encouraging friends to take an active role in helping victims is, on the whole, a good thing.
But.
Why do we have a campaign telling a woman’s friends that they are responsible for “stopping” the violence when they can do nothing to stop the violence and can only offer support to the victim who might otherwise feel or actually be unable to escape? And why don’t we have a campaign targeted at men to just stop hitting and abusing women? And why don’t we have a campaign targeted at men to stop their friends from hitting and abusing women? And why is it always the women (and her friends) who get the spotlight, when the people who actually can stop the violence, or influence the perpetrator to stop the violence, are offstage somewhere, overlooked?
Is it that we feel these men are so far beyond the pale, so monstrously twisted, so clearly unhinged that no campaign or well-meaning friend could possibly influence them to modify their behaviour? Because that aint so. Men who beat and abuse their partners are human beings, just like us. Human beings, not monsters. Maybe when we search our souls for solutions to the problem of domestic violence we should ask ourselves fewer questions about how we can help women to escape and a great deal more about why these men commit this violence and what can be done to make them stop.
To make them stop.
18 May 2008 at 8:12 am
this just makes me angry.
18 May 2008 at 11:13 am
I get what you’re saying…and also about the ‘keep yourself safe from rape’ stuff…but we don’t have posters saying ‘Stop murdering people’ or ‘Don’t nick things from people’s cars’ (apart from warning signs about CCTV etc.) so why would we do different for different crimes? The trouble is that people who commit crimes, of all sorts, are set up for that long, long before any campaigning is going to help them. Men who beat up their partners have huge power issues that have been instilled in them during their childhood – apart from locking them up, how will that ever change? Surely the most effective measures are to get parents to bring their children up properly in the first place and to protect yourselves from these sad people? A programme to reeducate them would cost so much and is likely to have little effect, whereas a programme to give those at risk of these crimes a chance to protect themselves costs less and has more chance of being effective. Maybe the money saved should be put towards giving mums money for caring for their children instead of forcing them out to work.
18 May 2008 at 12:42 pm
Been wondering. And I still am. Wondering.
Why women are responsible? It´s clearly targeted for women´s women friends – they should feel the guilt. Feel responsible for their friends getting beaten up. What?
Andrea Gibson puts that well:”It´s not what you´re gonna tell your daughter. It´s what you´re gonna teach your son.”
It´s the same as that same old issue about rapists and rapes. That women should be aware, be clever enough not to run down streets in the middle of the night. It´s women who are responsible if they get raped or not.
It´s insane.
18 May 2008 at 8:17 pm
oh i see…
it’s the mother’s fault…
women ARE to blame!
18 May 2008 at 8:19 pm
sarcasm…by the way!
9 November 2008 at 7:34 pm
[snip] You’re reading way too much into this. It’s a spin-off of the child abuse campaign. A recycled successful capaign. There’s no conspiracy, no veiled accusation. It’s simply asking fellow citizens in a rule of law nation to take responsibility and HELP a fellow human being. Someone that you know and care about. I mean, if you care about someone; doesn’t stand to reason that you don’t want to see them hurt? Would you sit on your thumbs and allow someone to beat your mother, sister, son, daughter?
It’s just plain common sense.
2 December 2008 at 8:36 pm
We don’t have posters telling people not to commit murder or steal because our culture already deeply disapproves of murder and theft, and blames the perpetrator. It’s kind of a given. But our culture does not quite so deeply disapprove of sexual coercion, or of men “taking advantage” of vulnerable women, of men being the boss in the home and throwing their weight about. And our culture does routinely blame victims for these crimes – why did you let it happen? what did you do to provoke it? why didn’t you run away?
Victims of murder or theft are rarely subject to the same cross-examination about whether they really “asked for it” and, even if they did do something to make the crime easier, the fact that they did so is rarely considered a mitigating factor. And *that culture* is why it is wrong and inappropriate in the context of crimes against women for public information campaigns to have this focus on the victim (and her friends and family) without also working hard to educate society at large and men in particular (whether they are yet committing these crimes or not) that domestic and sexual violence is wrong and unacceptable. They perpetuate victim-blaming and they perpetuate the idea that women are responsible for avoiding male violence.
The huge power issues that men have instilled in them at childhood could be wiped out in a generation if the adults around boys, and the media to which boys are exposed ceased to glorify “masculine” power and violence, and ceased to perpetuate a culture of blaming victims and of putting the onus on victims to avoid being abused. It’s not just the parents. It really isn’t.
2 December 2008 at 8:44 pm
James Mcelvoy I let most of your comment through despite the bad start and despite the fact that you have completely missed the point. There is nothing wrong with encouraging women and others to help one another and look out for each other. We do that anyway. What is wrong is that victim blaming is endemic in this type of crime and these posters perpetuate that, and they allow the abusers to continue escaping the direct criticism they so richly deserve and yet so seldom get.
15 March 2009 at 11:42 pm
Your implication that females are the sole victims of domestic violence is throughly discriminatory and very much belittles the suffering which male victims endure. Unfortunately its rarely a subject which is broached and in any instance, many males are particularly loathe to discuss this (particularly if the perpetrator is a woman). Sadly it’s a reality though and one-sided, preferential advertising campaigns do nothing to promote support for ALL VICTIMS of domestic violence (IRRESPECTIVE OF SEX).
For god sake we’re all human beings…
18 March 2009 at 7:56 pm
Yes, we are all human beings. But if, on my woman-centred blog, in the context of a poster about domestic violence against women, I choose to focus on domestic violence against women – well, the fact that I do not mention male victims is not something I feel ashamed of. Yes, men do suffer domestic violence, and yes, sometimes the abuser is a woman. But that was not the subject of my post. If you think this issue needs more attention, perhaps you could write a post about it yourself rather than hijacking this thread, which is about something else?
Incidentally, over 80% of reported domestic violence is committed against women (and more than half of male victims have a male abuser, meaning that more than 90% of reported domestic violence is committed by men). On average, a woman will be beaten 35 times before she reports her abuser to the police.
http://www.amnesty.org.uk/content.asp?CategoryID=10309
http://www.thesite.org/homelawandmoney/law/victims/malevictimsofdomesticviolence