When is Domestic Violence not Domestic Violence?

The news stores linked below have caught my eye. There is something very odd about them in that they don’t mention the buzz words “Domestic Violence”, despite the fact that the crimes committed clearly are domestic violence (DV). The stories also fail to mention other fashionable terms, such as “Intimate Partner Violence (IPV)” and “spousal abuse”.

The one thing that all the stories have in common is that the perpetrators of the DV are women. It appears that when women commit DV against men, the salient point that it is domestic violence goes unmentioned. Instead it is called manslaughter, murder, assault, grievous bodily harm, actual bodily harm, malicious wounding etc.

However, when men attack their girlfriends or wives, reporters fall over themselves to speak of domestic violence and spousal abuse. Indeed, with monotonous regularity, they also seek to warn us that there is an epidemic of the same.

Spot the difference

Women committing domestic violence (shhh – but don’t tell anyone)

• Poisoning – Woman poisons her husband using anti-freeze
• Kicking – Woman kicks heel of high-heeled shoe into boyfriend’s brain
• Stabbing – Woman stabs and kills boyfriend
• Shooting – Wife shoots husband after arguments
• Another stabbing (but we’re told she didn’t commit DV, he did) – Woman stabs and kills boyfriend

Men committing domestic violence (shout it from the rooftops!)

• Punching & Kicking – Husband charged for DV
• Strangling – Man kills his girlfriend
• Charged with murder – Man kills himself
• Slap – Man delivers a backhander
• Murder suicide – Man kills wife and then himself

This conspiracy of omission is too common, too consistent and too concerted a pattern of behaviour from the news media to be considered anything other than deliberate editorial policy.

The news stories above are merely a sample of an easily verifiable trend in news reporting. It amounts to a closet consensus to deny the evidence in front of their eyes and simply pretend that serious DV is not committed by women. To the extent that even with clear and obvious occurrences, they choose to determinedly ignore the elephant in the room and call it something else.

But why? Why is domestic violence committed by women against men downplayed and even buried under generic criminal labels, whereas violent acts committed by men against women are heavily emphasised as DV? What’s the point of deliberately deciding to not call domestic violence committed by women, “domestic violence”?

Well, one answer is to consider the effects of this suppression of the facts in story after story where women are seriously violent. The main effect is that when one performs an Internet search for news items concerning DV, virtually all results that appear concern only stories of men hurting or killing women. Story, after story, after story are listed for you detailing male violence against females.

In contrast, the stories of women hurting or killing men are classified – or rather misclassified - under other categories and so simply do not appear in a search for “Domestic Violence”. With this neat trick, the men killed and wounded as a result of female domestic violence are successfully “disappeared” from the search results of those who might be looking into the prevalence of DV. Impressive stuff.

Is this all a sophisticated attempt to cook search results?

Feminist SEO?

I wonder…