Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to B Jones,
Perhaps there’s something to that – we worry less about boys doing dodgy stuff, and we therefore do a worse job of protecting them.
I think we (in general) worry about what will be done to girls, but about what boys will do. The casting of boys in the active role makes them seem less vulnerable, when the greatest danger to the average teenager is often themselves.
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Also worth bringing up: one of the reasons there isn't hard data on the effects of gun ownership in the US is that the NRA can't be having with any of that namby-pamby "research" stuff.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I said that testosterone make males different from females and is almost certainly the difference that make males more violent than females and almost certainly the difference that means men commit these crimes more than women.
And also makes men between the ages of about fifteen and twenty-five really good at getting themselves killed in various ways, compared to their female counterparts in the age cohort. Which makes the social stuff - how and what they learn about masculinity and acceptable social behaviours and being good to themselves and other people - all the more important.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to B Jones,
. Provocation as a defence is more designed to let people off for losing it than to let people off for escaping from a slow-burning life-threatening situation. There’s an argument that provocation is functionally sexist in doing so.
Insomuch as it reflects a view of society that privileges loss of control in what are perceived as masculinised ways - i.e. losing your shit - yeah, it totally is. But we ditched provocation recently, right?
Some of those decisions require a clear eyed view of reality and some hard decisions about the course of action that leads to the least harm.
I want to thank you, James, for perfectly epitomizing that counterfactual American view that guns make you safer to which I referred earlier in the thread. I could not have illustrated it better myself.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to BenWilson,
It’s not a matter of no consequence, but part of the reason it’s under-reported is that the consequences of it are less fatal by orders of magnitude. Men can easily kill women with blows alone, or choking them. The reverse is not true.
And, bluntly, men *do* kill their partners, frequently. Women do at much lower rates – even in the US, where, theoretically, if female-on-male DV was happening at the same scale as male-on-female DV, they could access weapons allowing them to kill them. And yet that doesn’t show up in the homicide statistics. Funny, that.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Russell Brown,
And it’s equally logical that there are also complex social reasons for the ways men behave, particularly in families. Apart from anything else, the young, white, male killers Danielle was talking about weren't generally aggressive, testosterone types.
"Testosterone" is adequate as an explanation for why, on balance, a randomly picked murderer is more likely to be male than female, same as the explanation for why a randomly picked tall person is more likely to be male than female. Same with rapists. But it's not a useful explanation for why that particular person committed that particular crime, and that's where the complex social reasons - and prevention - come in.
What I think Bart is arguing - and I do agree with him - is that testosterone is why you're very unlikely to ever see a society where violent crime is skewed female (or even 50/50), But that has nothing to do with the overall rates of violent crime.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to DexterX,
The thrust of debate, research and policy on family violence is aimed at "Men" as perpetrators - the matter of "Women" as perpetrators scarcely gets a mention though anecdotally it appears as prevalent – Men tend to be more resilient in dealing with being on the receiving end and there is not the networked support – the research is skewed as a result - and does not reflect the reality.
Actually, no, for basically every type of violence you want to name, the perpetration skews overwhelmingly male. This is not in contest.The difference with partner violence is that the victims are far more likely to be female, whereas if you take homicides as a whole male-on-male violence is by far the largest category.
This is not to say that DV which is not male-on-female does not happen, because it does and it is every bit as problematic. But if you pick any given DV-related murder, the odds are very high that it will be a man killing a woman - and that if it was a woman killing a man, she will have been abused by him beforehand. As with rape, acknowledging that the scenario largely plays out one way in terms of perpetrator/victim gender does not mean ignoring the other possibilities.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Danielle,
The Lord has politely bowed out and Lucifer is in the schools because of the separation of church and state! (Also, Christians are totally persecuted in America something something Obama is a Muslim.)
You know you can hide people's feeds on Facebook and only check in on them when your blood pressure is dangerously low, right?
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Martin Lindberg,
Self-defence is not a valid or legal reason.
Isn't it not only not a valid reason, but a "no firearms licence for YOU" reason? Which is an utterly different attitude to the US in every possible way.
Oh, and while I'm having a moan: can we also talk about gender? Why are these shooters pretty much always dudes? What is it about the ways in which we construct masculinity which allows this to happen? How do we change THAT?
Well, the same reasons that most violence is committed by men upon men, I guess. It's hardly exclusive to mass gun killings.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
If you successfully target #2, you'll have none - not only no gun deaths, but also deaths by other methods.
I am absolutely in favour of better mental health treatment in the US, but the main problem with gun violence in the US is not mass killings, as horrific as they are. It's the people dying by ones and twos and threes, by accident and by design, by their own hand or another's, because a gun is at hand at the moment a child crawls into the back of a closet or someone contemplating suicide decides to go through with it or someone tells their abusive partner they're leaving. I would take a significant wager that mentally ill people in the US are far more likely to kill themselves with a gun than use it to kill someone else.
The US needs to address the lack of mental health treatment for a significant portion of the population, but the "because" is not "because otherwise they'll go crazy and kill someone", it's "because they are not well", the same as with any health problem. If you want to stop mass shootings, you have to take away access to the tools that make them easy to commit. It's easy to look at this horror and say "only someone not sane would do that". But most murders are committed by people who are quite sane. That's the scary bit.