According to a study published by
UN
Women, “It is estimated that 35 percent of women worldwide have
experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or sexual
violence by a non-partner at some point in their lives. However, some national
studies show that up to 70 percent of women have experienced physical and/or
sexual violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime.” All of these
shocking figures understate the incidence of violence for two reasons: first,
because most of them refer exclusively to violence against women which are
perpetrated by intimate partners and, second, because most of the cases of
violence go unreported. As per the words of Sara Springer, a victim of a brutal
assault and co-founder of a self-defense gloves for women Think
Again Gloves: “it is no news that women are the commonest victims of
attacks across the globe. With the world becoming even more violent, it has
become imperative for women and other such victims to prevent themselves
against such attacks.”
That whole range of issues often
referred to in shorthand as "gender violence issues", have been seen
as women's issues that some good men help out with. However, I don't see these
as women's issues that some good men help out with; the truth is that calling
gender violence a women's issue is part of the problem. Men use the “gender
violence issue” as an excuse to not pay attention. A lot of men hear the term
"women's issues" and tend to tune it out, and think, “I'm a guy;
that's for the girls,” or "that's for the women." It's almost like a
natural automation of our minds that makes us take a different direction when
we are faced in front of the violence against women. This also applies to the word
"gender," because a lot of people associate the word
"gender" with "women." So, let’s talk for a moment about
race. In the US, when we hear the word "race," a lot of people think
that means African-American, Latino, Asian-American, Native American, South
Asian, Pacific Islander, and on and on.
A lot of people, when they hear
the word "gender," don’t see the full extension of the word, but they
think it means women. This is one of the ways that dominant systems maintain
and reproduce themselves, which is to say the dominant group is rarely
challenged to even think about its dominance because that's one of the key
characteristics of power and privilege: the ability to go unexamined, lacking
introspection, being rendered invisible, in large measure, in the discourse
about issues that are primarily about us. And when it comes to domestic and
sexual violence, it is interesting how men have been erased from most of the
discussions around this topic, about a topic that instead is men-centered. And
I'm going to illustrate what I'm talking about by using a phrasing sample.
This comes from the work of
feminist linguist Julia Penelope. It starts with a very basic English sentence:
“Peter beats Kim”. Peter is the subject, to beat is the verb, Kim is the
object. Now we're going to revert this sentence making it on a passive voice. Kim
was beaten by Peter. So we've moved from "Peter beats Kim" to "Kim
was beaten by Peter." By doing this we have shifted our focus from Peter
to Kim. Now let’s reverse again our sentence making it as "Kim was
beaten." Now, it's all about Kim and we're not longer thinking about Peter;
our focus is all on Kim.
But let's be clear: Asking
questions about Kim is not going to get us anywhere in terms of preventing
violence. We have to ask a different set of questions. The questions are not
about Kim, they're about Peter. They include things like, why does Peter beat Kim?
Why do so many men abuse physically, emotionally, verbally, and other ways, the
women, and girls, and the men and boys, that they claim to love? What's going
on with men? Because this isn't about individual perpetrators: that's a naive
way of understanding what is a much deeper and more systematic social problem.
The perpetrators aren't these monsters who crawl out of the swamp and come into
town and do their nasty business and then retreat into the darkness. That's a
very naïve notion, right? So the question is: what are we doing here in our
society and in the world?
