violence

violence has sexist and racist implications: men are more likely than women to be perpetrators of a wide range of violent activities; of all those arrested for violence in any year, the great majority (for the United States the figure is around 90%) are men. They are also more liable than women to be victims of violence, while black men are victims more often than white men. Although most violence is not sex-biased in that the sex of the offender or victim is not a contributing factor in the violence, there are two exceptions: (1) Men have died in wars solely because of their sex. While civilians of both sexes also die in wars, and while women have died in combat, particularly in recent years, their deaths were not institutionalized and their sex was not a factor in their deaths. Young men still face prison and fines for failing to register for the draft; young women do not. (2) Women suffer disproportionately from violence by men, primarily because they are women. According to the Justice Department, the majority of women can expect to be victims of at least one violent attack in their lifetime. A nationwide Louis Harris Poll found that 25% of the men in the sample approved of a husband slapping his spouse. "Men are raised with a sense of entitlement, privilege and expectation that women can and should do what we want them to do," says Edward Gondolf, a researcher on male violence. "And if they don't we resolve the problem with aggression and force." The violence continuum includes sexist language, anti-woman jokes, abusive lyrics, film and TV violence against women, sexual harassment, pornography, wife beating, rape, and murder. Chuck Niessen-Derry of BrotherPeace says men need to "start making the connection between the rape joke on Tuesday and the rape on Thursday." And Myriam Miedzian (Boys Will Be Boys) says, "At least 235 studies of the effects of showing violence in films and on television have overwhelmingly shown that watching violence increases violent behavior." Men are also abused by their wives and murdered by them, although in far smaller numbers. Many of the more serious assaults by wives have been reported as self-defense in response to abuse. This is not to discount the reality of abused men, but to give it perspective: men do not fear for their physical safety when passing a group of women on the street. (However, gay men as well as women may experience fear when approaching a group of men standing on a corner.) One of the indications of the violence in our culture is the violent death rate of our children; the U.S. has the highest homicide rate for children of any industrialized nation in the world. See also battered wife/woman, date rape, knockout, lady-killer, provoke, rape, sexual harassment, she asked for it, victim, violent language.