Why are men so violent?

Question

A London newspaper ran the headline today "Dad beat up wife as kids lay stabbed". Apparently he came home, found that his wife had stabbed two of their children to death & had slashed the throat of the third, and he turned on her. According to the story she was suffering from post-natal depression, was under stress from a struggling business, and the final straw was that she failed her driving test. Most other news reports cite her mental instability in the headline e.g. that she has been arrested under the mental health act http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7429772.stm

Is it just me, or is it crazy that the headline about a woman killing her children is that her husband attacked her when he found out?

Answer 1

This is typical of the excuses often given for women suffering from PND.  This man is being held to account for the harm done to his children!  I would react the same way, and claim every right to do so.

Why is it that women are granted this "get out of jail free card" with PND, when a man who is depressed is given no grqace for his actions.  Why the PND special case?

I suffered from severe depression after a head injury a few years ago, but one thing I always maintained was that I am ultimately responsible for my actions, depressed or not.  I had the responsibility to seek help and control my actions with respect to impulses.  Depressed people are rarely so incapacitated that they cannot seek or be referred to someone qualified to help them.  

SHE is responsible for the deaths of the children, and he acted as might anyone who comes home to find their children murdered by their partner.  It might be nice to hope that he had not done that, but men are still often judged as responsible for any violent tendencies in their female partners even if the do not react violently.

I notice patois has turned it into the "evil man, woman victim" scenario.  That is the typical reaction in these cases: the bloke must be cast as the sinner, whatever the provoation.  BOLLOCKS!

MEG, your argument is typically diverting: lets divert to what you consider to be the REAL issue.  Sorry, the real issue is that a woman murdered HIS children as much as hers, and he reacted out of temporary insanity.  Fair enough really.  

As for your DV figures, they are really squiffy for Australia.  The figures are actually more along the lines of 50/50 and often with a bias that shows women as the more common perpetrator.  Female perpetrated DV in Australia is not a myth or minority.  This is one of my areas of expertise.  When I get my figures together, I will post them.

Answer 2

That made me want to puke....Poor guy, poor kids.  yuck.

Answer 3

To break up the possible ways of recovery or decision to find how that women would react to what he did.

Answer 4

Obviously you haven't been reading all the news lately because 90 percent of all homicides in Australia are domestically related and the victims are women or children and the offender is a man. It is about time the media started to pay more attention to these sort startistics and ask why and why this does not concern men. There is only one group of men in Australia that acitively protests this sort of violence.

I constantly hear on here of how men are hard done by unfortunately statistics donot back up that arguement. Mens behaviour should concern all men. Being on a site like this and pointing out one case like this does not justify being picked on by the media.

Answer 5

I read that whole article and nowhere are they blaming the husband for what the woman did and certainly not in the headline.

The husband was perfectly within his rights to attack the killer of his children, as I would have done so too, only I would have done a proper job. This particular husband was not angry enough. Nobody kills my children and gets away with it, I don't care if they say they're insane (insanity is just more good reason to execute them), or post natal or bi-polar or if they failed their driving test. NO excuse is good enough to explain away such a vile act!

Answer 6

That's unfortunate. This is the headline provided by the link, "Stab mother is detained under act". Still unfortunate though.

Answer 7

This is a really weird case that sounds to me a lot like police mis-handling.  Apparently he rang them hours beforehand and the police decided to wait for a translator.  And then when they turned up, they arrested him!  Just terrible.  I think a lot of the headlines are still catching up because of the sheer illogic of the police actions and misinformation originally put out by them :-)

Answer 8

Wow, what an evil man.  That's kind of redundant though because all men are evil.  They should try him for the murder of the two kids because -clearly- it's his fault.

Answer 9

Wow, they made it seem like the dad stabbed the kids and then attacked the mom.

How nice of the media to swing it that way....yet another reason I have trouble listening to the 5 o'clock news...

Answer 10

No media in any country is trustworthy anymore:

http://in.answers.yahoo.com/question/ind...

What I find most disturbing is that the media always finds some way to twist cases where the woman is clearly wrong into cases where she is wrong because of something a man said or did. The focus here should be more on the three kids, what happened and who killed them, not about her husband giving her what she deserved.

The media in my country is no less sexist. A Gujarat schoolbus incident saw 41 children killed, and the Times of India ran the choice headline: "Village loses 15 girls as..." I forgot the rest, but the numbers are something I never will. So, the 26 boys are apparently worth less.

Feminacentrism in the media is an old phenomenon.

It isn't just you. It is crazy what the headline was about. There are many other examples of feminacentrism in the media, treating men as if they don't matter, and magnifying men's mistakes while extenuating women's.

I'll be back with more examples.

Answer 11

Post-natal depression excuses everything.  Didnt you know?

If a women has been abused by her husband, she can pretty much kill him in cold blood, and juries will be directed to be 'understanding of the abusive relationship' that lead to his murder.   Sorry - not murder, it was self defence and all that.   He deserved to be poisoned/shot/castrated/whatever in his sleep.

Answer 12

The media LOVES to spin a story for the most emotional impact.  That's how they make money; often on other people's misery.  Tabloid papers are especially likely to do that sort of thing.

Yes, it's crazy.  But crazy sells.

Answer 13

The western prize has been infested by feminists. For this reason, the headlines are anti-male as this contributes to the feminists ideal that men are bad.

Answer 14

seems a bit odd to me. in that link it doesn't say that the woman stabbed the kids or the man turned on her but i'll assume you're telling the truth :-)

owains - men get away with their actions all the time by citing mental illness. it's a grey area and of course if people are violent they should be locked up. but genuinely mentally ill people cannot be held accountable for their actions in the same way.

if the anti-abortion squad get their way i'm sure this kind of thing will happen a lot more