No that’s not violence
The Sydney Morning Herald tells us:
Four in ten young men do not consider punching and hitting to constitute domestic violence, a national survey has found.
The survey of 1074 adults for anti-violence campaign group White Ribbon found 42 per cent of men aged 18 to 34 did not consider “hitting, punching or restraining” another person to be “a type of domestic violence”.
Were they raised by wolves? In what world is punching not violence? Also in what world is it ok for men to hit women?
The research found older men were more likely to recognise domestic violence. The proportion of men who did not consider hitting and punching to be domestic violence dropped to less than a third of men aged 35 to 54, and just 3 per cent of those aged over 55. Nearly nine out of 10 men aged over 55 also agreed non-consensual sex was domestic violence.
You wouldn’t think it would take that long to learn.
The charitable interpretation would be that they either have some very specific definition of “domestic violence” or they simply have no clue what it is at all, so while they’d consider these acts to be “violence” and wrong, they wouldn’t specifically put them under the category of “domestic violence”.
Or maybe people are even more horrible than I thought (at least in Australia).
I would say that the laws against animal cruelty are stronger in Australia than those against domestic violence. People can and do get prosecuted by the police for abuse of dogs and other animals. But domestic violence is another matter. A woman who reports a violent husband (say) to the police can take the matter to court, but may be in no position financially to leave him and set up in a home of her own, or in a setup such as a shared home.
So many of them just put up with it as best they can, as it happens again, and again, and again.
The age differences are not measures of increasing wisdom. It’s cultural decay. The younger ‘men’ have been steeped in modern misogyny, rape-culture etc.
JtD. that’s exactly what I was thinking. I don’t know if they’ve done studies across the generations, like, when the older men were younger, but I can’t imagine a finding like this when I was in high school or my twenties. So many things seem to be heading in the wrong direction, thanks to the internet normalizing behaviors, particularly misogynistic behaviors, that were once seen as wrong.
It would also be interesting to see what women think. I suspect there are too many women (though not as many as men, I imagine) who would agree this is not domestic violence. I also suspect for the most part those would be women who are steeped in conservative religion and who have not had it happen to them.