Several years after the U.S. invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein, polls recorded that some amazingly high percentage of Americans believed that the U.S. military had uncovered "weapons of mass destruction" there.  Various people (rightly in my opinion) criticized the U.S. news media for not better informing people of the facts.  News reporting organizations that were doing their jobs, it was said, would have educated the American people about the complete absence of WMDs in Saddam's possession.

And so it is now regarding domestic violence.  News media that were doing their jobs at all competently would have gotten some basic facts and concepts across to people.  I'm not talking about arcane studies by sociologists or what obscure government-produced data suggest.  I'm talking about much simpler concepts.  I'd like to see people grasp the idea that domestic violence should be avoided.  Since it's pretty clear that actual domestic violence (i.e. violence involving physical force as opposed to what's so often called DV by advocates) is harmful to children and that people who experience DV as children tend to replicate it in adulthood, it'd be nice to see people generally understanding the need to address domestic issues in other ways.

But we don't do that and indeed we don't pretend to.  The DV industry, governmental agencies and academics are overwhelmingly likely to overlook the half of DV that's done by women to men.  When they're not overlooking it altogether, they're pretending that it's so rare as to be not worth mentioning.  Or if they notice male victims or female perpetrators at all, they manage to find an excuse for female DV.  From there they descend to the lowest depth of all - the pretense that male and female DV have different "contexts" and are therfore so entirely different as to justify villifying the former while ignoring the latter.

But as I say, I don't ask for much, just a few very basic concepts.  And one of those concepts is that if DV is bad when a man does it, it's bad when a woman does it.  Alas, it looks like I'll have to wait.  Plenty of people in this country have lauded or made light of Elin Nordgren's taking a golf club to hubby Tiger Woods, whether she in fact did so or not.  So eager were they to rush to her defense, it seems to have not much mattered what actually happened. 

Well, according to this piece, women in Sweden (Nordgren's home country) couldn't be prouder of their Elin (Washington City Paper, 12/15/09).  It quotes several female journalists and commentators as follows:

Swing it again, Elin!” wrote Jan Helin, editor in chief of Aftonbladet, the country’s biggest newspaper, on his personal blog. One of the paper’s top reporters, Ann Söderlund, proclaimed, “Thank God for girls like Elin. Next time, I hope she uses a bigger club.”

Britta Svensson, a well-known columnist at the tabloid Expressen and a former U.S.-based correspondent, commented, “Our Swedish hearts are overwhelmed with pride, because our very own Elin didn’t take any s—. Just like a tough Swedish girl shouldn’t. Elin is our heroine.”

See my point?  We've been railing about the evils of domestic violence for 40 years or so and this is what these people come up with.  For whatever the reason, in whatever the circumstances, for them, a woman attacking a man with a golf club is a source of pride.  Never mind the ignorance behind those remarks, never mind the frank hypocrisy.  Concentrate on the fact that some 40 years of preaching about domestic violence have brought us to this.  Understand that the combined forces that purvey "information" about DV have in some way managed to permit supposedly sane, literate people to call a female attacker their "heroine."

I've said it before: we'll know that we're actually serious about domestic violence when we start telling the truth about it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 at 7:57 pm and is filed under Domestic Violence/DV System.