Douglas Todd: Domestic abuse cuts differently for women and men

Simon Fraser University criminologist Alexandra Lysova began to investigate spousal violence in her home city of Vladivostok, Russia, almost two decades ago. NICK PROCAYLO / PNG

Domestic abuse or intrafamily violence is a concept used to refer to “the violence exerted in the field of cohabitation assimilated, by one of the members against another, against some of the others or against all of them”. It includes all those violent acts, from the use of physical force to harassment, harassment, or intimidation, which occur in a household and perpetrated by at least one member of the family against another family member.

It should be noted that the term includes a wide variety of phenomena, including some components of violence against women, violence against men, child abuse, parental violence and abuse of the elderly.

For her part, Simon Fraser University criminologist Alexandra Lysova has been working with the best researchers from around the world since she began almost two decades ago to investigate conjugal violence in her hometown of Vladivostok, Russia. According to her, Supporting survivors ‘should not be a zero-sum game’ in which only one gender receives empathy.

Beyond what is said

Clearly, the general opinion is that women are more likely than men to be victims of domestic violence that has a sexual component. And, in the escalation of marital conflicts, it is often also observed that women tend to endure the most serious types of physical violence, including homicide, in part because men tend to be stronger.

Now, it is necessary to indicate that, what is not so well known is that men are more prone to receive different types of conjugal violence, such as slapping, kicking, biting and punching. Men also experience emotional abuse more often when their jealous husbands try to limit their contact with friends or relatives or demand to know who they were with and where they were at all times.

Likewise, Lysova soon discovered that many Russian men are also on the receiving end of a wide range of violence and abuse, often related to alcohol. In this way, as Lysova removes the layers of data from the General Social Survey of Canada on partner violence (IPV), she and her colleagues discovered that 418,000 Canadian men and 341,000 women report having been victims of physical violence or sexual conjugal.

Lysova knows that the type of data they are discovering may disturb some people, who do not want to see information about the domestic anguish of men used to erode hard-won programs for women victims of violence. But Lysova emphasizes that supporting survivors “should not be a zero-sum game” in which only one gender receives empathy.

Source: Douglas Todd | Vancouver Sun