From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Wed May 22 2002 - 14:32:30 MDT
On Wed, 2002-05-22 at 12:16, Dickey, Michael F wrote:
>
> The studies I have read about have shown that women initiate acts of
> violence just as often as men do, but the repurcussions from male initated
> violence is greater because men are, on average, stronger (note too
> everyone, I did say 'on average')
We've discussed this before. My own anecdotal stories are from police
officers who investigate "domestic disturbance" calls made by neighbors.
Their experience is that roughly a third of the time for those types of
calls, the male is clearly the sole recipient of physical abuse (the
other cases being where both male and female parties show evidence of
abuse, neither show evidence of abuse, or only the female shows evidence
of abuse). My own experience in life suggests that women are at least as
likely as men to engage in senseless physical violence, and possibly a
little more.
In fact, I think one of the problems hampering any reasonable attempt to
solve the problem of domestic and inter-personal violence is the fact
that almost all attempts are based on perceptions and assumptions that
are deeply ingrained and patently false. We treat the myth of the
disease rather than the reality of the disease.
An analogous situation was studied by the makers of US military doctrine
and policy in the latter part of the 20th century. For a century or
more, US military doctrine assumed that the majority of their soldiers
were reasonably effective at killing the enemy in combat, and many
decisions on structure and deployment were based on this. Around the
time of the Korean and Vietnam wars, the US military engaged in the
first honest self-assessment study of what their soldiers were actually
like in combat. When they discovered that only around 4% of soldiers
were actually effective in combat and that no more than a quarter were
even psychologically and mentally fit for combat, they restructured the
military to vastly reduce the exposed profile of the military to only
include those soldiers that were actually competent and effective under
fire; there is no need to expose soldiers on the field of combat if they
don't contribute to the battlefield objective. The results of the
studies were not comfortable to the military establishment, but working
within the reality of the situation has allowed them to greatly reduce
the casualty exposure of the military. To do this though, they first
had to come to terms with and address the deep-seated cultural myth that
most American soldiers are heroes on the battlefield (or some such
nonsense).
Cheers,
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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