Take a moment to think of a domestic violence case. Chances are you are imagining a brutal man, towering over a badly beaten woman. I think of this too. It is an image we’ve seen splashed across newspaper articles, billboards, news bulletins and domestic violence campaigns for our entire lives. The image of a big burly man and the ‘battered woman’ beneath him, repeatedly lazered into our memory for the past fifty years. And whilst such situations certainly do exist, and demand attention, in reality they actually make up just a small minority of cases. In fact, incidents of severe male-dominant violence are about 5% of all reported cases – and yet they make up about 100% of domestic abuse related imagery. The hidden realty of domestic violence, is that about half of it is bilateral (or mutual), with both partners engaging in it. And more shocking, when it’s not bilateral, it’s more often driven by women, and not men. This means our shared image of that burly man, is actually the third (and least) common form of domestic violence, if we go by the data. So is it time we threw out our limited, decades old trope of ‘domestic violence’, and painted a picture more modern, more nuanced and more inclusive of all survivors? Is it time we allowed ourselves to see women in the full gamut of human behaviour, including both good and the bad? Is it time we stopped endlessly telling men to ‘be vulnerable’, and challenged ourselves to see them in such a way, ourselves? Is it time we gave abused men their time in the public spotlight too? So tell me, what is your view of domestic violence? ~ Study [1] Professor Don Dutton full presentation Images by Vackground, Bruce Dixon and Kiwi hug from Unsplash Illustrations by Wilson Joseph from the Noun Project #domesticviolence

2023-02-17