http://www.kut.org/items/show/9883

Quote: The cause of death is different between two genders. For men, it’s typically transportation. For women, it’s actually assaults on the job where women are attacked physically. That’s typically the leading cause of deaths for women on work related fatalities.”

Of course, this is not surprising to anyone familiar with domestic violence.

The report stated that the #1 cause of workplace deaths for men was auto accidents.

For women: workplace violence.

(Off-topic: MAJeff, everything you write makes me love you more and more. I wish I could take a class of yours!)

I’m morbidly curious, but my googlefu turned up nothing, even when I combined Cooey with “teddy bear” and “buried alive”.

I think the point is, evil people have hearts too, human weaknesses, but it certainly doesn’t make them good or a get-out-of-jail-free card.

i’ve had the opportunity to attend some mitigation conferences in the last couple of years and what i’ve been learning from the neuropsych community is that it actually takes substantially less than outright physical or severe emotional abuse to inhibit frontal lobe brain development and that we are learning that this is totally predictive. as little as non emotional engagement from the caretaker, no caretaker, and not enough nurturing touching casues stresses and elevations in certain enzymes/hormones in the brain and stops or interferes with the frontal lobe from developing normally. i have never heard or read anything that has suggested that violence during early development without intervention is not predictive of of future maladaptive behavior.

my non scientific opinion based on my own rexperience with violent criminals is that, violence/abusive behavior is caused by brain damage and brain disorders which is why w/o early intervention it’s nearly impossible to rehabilitate adults. pedophiles are the most depressing examples of this. brain’s just not that elastic anymore.

the cooey case is probably the most awful example of this i’ve seen in a long time. low iq/mental retardation together with severe physical and sexual abuse in early development. what made the case so aggravating was also mitigating in my mind. he kidnapped her b/c he didn’t want to be alone, buried her alive b/c he cdn’t bear to kill her but knew what he did was wrong and gave her, her teddy bear b/c he knew that she really liked it and didnt’ want her to be scared. it’s fucking awful. tragic doesn’t begin to decribe it really. a broken person committing such awful acts, not being able to stop himself, and knowing what he did was disgusting. the victim and her family, it’s indescrible that kind of pain and suffering. it makes you want to scream.

my own armchair opinion on abuse, is that i think that abuse exacted agaisnt women and children is cultural. i def agree that women and children are on the receiving of the violence b/c of misogyny/patriarchy. but if the cultural pressures to, or perhaps cultural privileges is more appropriate, beat women weren’t there, the men would be beating someone else. their brains don’t work right. and i think this issue crosses genders. i think women are just as likely to commit violence for the same reasons. take a typical family that is coming through the criminal justice system. more often than not, both parents and children have been coming thry system for various charges of battery. both partners have battery charges against each other at various times and/or abuse charges against their children. the children are coming thru juvenile system for hitting their parents, kids at school, etc. etc. just hang out the courthouse for a few weeks, you see the same pattern over and over again.

bottom line, you put people who have experienced physical abuse as kids in a family of their own where there are extreme amounts of stress: unemployment, children, no air conditioning, lack of food, etc. etc. etc. and everyone is going to be yelling, screaming, and hitting each other. those of us who didn’t experience violence and have better higher order thought processes will be having a really tough go of it too yelling and screaming but probably not beating the crap out of each other.

and i think if we really want to stop violence we need to be trying to learn and treat the causes of violence. which means on some level we need to stop dehumanizing the perpetrators.

Most of what they discovered violates cultural assumptions, but only some of it will surprise feminists.

I know those cultural assumptions. *sigh* I hate them. But I know them very well. I had a disturbing phone conversation with my mother this summer. She was telling me about a young man she works with; how this bright and talented young man had been touched by family tragedy.

A: “Oh. I’m sorry to hear it. What happened?”
M: “It was terrible. His father was a doctor, and he worked long hours the way doctors do. And his mother was having an affair with another man, for years.”
A: “How sad. Did they get a divorce?”
M: “No! [Young man]’s father shot his mother and her lover. She died and he was badly hurt, and the father went to prison for 6 years. It was horrible for the whole family.”
A: “I’m sure it was very hard for [young man].”
M: “The worst of it is that he is still so isolated from his father. His father has been out of prison for years now, but he won’t even speak to him. Can you believe carrying a grudge that far?”
A: “Well, murder is pretty extraordinary. I’m not surprised [young man] reacted strongly.”
M: “After his mother made him shoot them, so he wound up in prison, he didn’t have any contact at all with his father-”
A: “Wait a minute! She did not ‘make him shoot them,’ at all. He shot them because he was a criminal who likes shooting people who offend him.”
M: “Sure, sure, whatever. I was trying to say [young man] and his father didn’t have any contact for 10 years, since his father was in prison because his mother had made him–”
A: “No. She did not make him do anything violent. When non-violent people discover their spouses are committing adultery, they might scream and cry and file for divorce, but they don’t shoot anyone.”

Aaarrgh. I feel sorry for the young man. I wish him well in his attempt to build a peaceful, happy, life and raise a child with no contact with his father (the child’s grandfather). It’s too bad he has to do it surrounded by patriarchy.

One the mistakes I think has been made by a few people in this thread is to simply equate “domestic violence” with physical violence. A pattern of emotional and verbal abuse (controlling behavior, isolation from friends and family, relentlessly cutting you down) is domestic violence in itself, and the effects in many ways can be worse. Any abusive personality, also, whatever they’ve done in the past, is always potentially capable of turning violent in the future.

“That’s the thing though, they’re not really. They are products of our patriarchal, misogynistic society, and aspects of their behaviour are present in many of the expectations and behaviours of relationships that don’t present as abusive.”

Yeah, I tend to be a bit of a broken record and bring this up in threads about rape and sexual assault a lot. It’s part of why so many people don’t notice the whole “blame the victim” cycle. If such people are just sick - end of story, and society has no ability to influence them, then rape (and partner violence) prevention that focuses on changing the abuser/rapist doesn’t make any sense.

The common response you get to “why is the focus always on the victim’s behavior?” is something along the lines of “Rapists/abusers are sick bastards. You aren’t stupid enough to think you can change the mind of sick bastards, do you?” The absolutes make it really hard to point out the difference between taking reasonable precautions and being consious of the possibility of sexualized violence practically 24/7. It makes it even harder to start any kind of dialogue about how we can stop and reverse the patriarchy’s training. “I teach my boys to respect women!” is hardly useful. Especially since, as others have pointed out, a lot of abuse gets excused internally by abusers who have put their partners on a pedastal, and then get angry when they act like real people.

Did a comment not show up? Happens to all of us because of the spam filters, and it will show up eventually.

Is your ego so huge you assume it must be about you?