Domestic Violent Relationships - Tumblr Posts

Well shit i think ive been abused again lmao

anyone have any resources on leaving when you have no one to rely on and no car and no job???

My MYP Project: The Gabby Petito Case

Alright, this is a bit of a different post compared to normal. I mentioned this project in two other post, My OW/OW2 Update + News post and my New Years post. Like the title suggests, I will be talking about my MYP project. Doing the project is required at my school and it is a project we do through our English class. We pick a topic and create a product for it. Part of the project was to share it with others, so I decided to share it here. Here's the link!

The original topic of my project was going to be COVID-19 misinformation, but I ended up not doing that since I was tired of hearing about COVID-19. Although, I am going to be writing my US Government research paper on misinformation in the media.

The topic I ended up choosing was the Gabby Petito case. If you haven't heard of the Gabby Petito case here is the gist of it: Gabby Petito and her fiancé, Brian Laundrie, were on a trip through the US. They were visiting National and State parks. They traveled together for about two months. Eventually, Petito's family couldn't get in contact with her and Laundrie showed up at his family's house in Florida without Petito. Petito's parents filed her as a missing person, Laundrie became a person of interest, and then Laundrie disappeared. The remains of both Petito and Laundrie were eventually found.

I want to issues a trigger warning here and now. Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence and Death(human remains/murder/suicide). On the timeline page, I talk about domestic violence based on multiple sources including a police report on Aug. 12th and Aug 27th. I end up talking about death(mention of human remains, homicide, and suicide) on Sept. 19th, Sept. 21st, Oct. 12th, Oct. 20th, Oct. 21st, and Nov. 23rd. Nothing is awfully explicit, but if you are not in the right state of mind to read about those subjects, put your mental health first and don't read it!

Due to the project being very research heavy, I chose to make a google site as my product and that's what I'm going to be sharing with you all! Again, you should be able to access it with this link. If you do look at the site, please let me know that you are able to see it. There is also a page about charities I wanted to promote, so if you would want to donate anything, that will be there.

So... yeah. I don't have anything else to really say, please check out the site if you have time! I will be putting out either a few short posts or one long one about Overwatch stuff soon, but I need to figure out some stuff first! Anyways, I hope you all have a good day and a great week! ~ Nova.

A man doesn't have to be poor to have a poor wife. It doesn't get talked about nearly enough.

A lot of these "stable" and even "rich" men that women are encouraged to seek out on dating advice columns, in romances, and in fairy tales; will buy gifts and show out BEFORE the marriage, and then deeply restrict household spending -- even to the point of closing you out of accounts or cutting off your access to healthcare or other services that he has on lock, under HIS name -- AFTER the marriage.

There are many women who literally wind up physically disabled, and therefore dependent on their abusers, due to the *purposeful* long-term medical neglect of these men.

Hell: my father, despite enjoying himself with daily steaks and new car after new car; still had my mother so financially shut down, that she was compelled to pattern and sew the curtains in order to keep me clothed throughout elementary school.

Wives of middle and upper class men do not necessarily share in their husband's wealth or opportunities. We're just told that they do, to help romanticize the idea of women "marrying up".

Now, it doesn't feels different.

Now, all those untouched part of my skin is being touched by some unknown hands.

Now, even when any known hand touches those known part of skin it feels unknown.

tw: child abuse, domestic abuse, violence, topic of divorce, (its not about SA, but you can also interpret it this way, so it also might be triggering), trauma, dark themes, alcoholism

This is by no means self-inserted, by the way. It was created to practice story-telling and perhaps spread awareness.

Be a Lilith FOR the Eves.

Theres a certain phrase going around: "Be a Lilith, not an Eve."

I hate it. It's a goth version of a "pick me" phrase.

So many women are born and raised into thinking they can't be anything more than an Eve. We all know the abuse and brainwashing that goes into such a mindset.

If one claims themselves to be a feminist or a fighter of women's rights, an advocate for abused women. Then this phrase should send anger rippling through you. Do not scoff, or side eye someone you see as an Eve. We've seen too much of that.

We need to be a Lilith for the Eve. To show them they can be more if they want to.

Please.

Currently re-watching the Depp v. Heard case and realizing I could easily write pages and pages of why I think what I think, and about male victims of domestic violence and abuse, and how we're not morally prepared to deal with them.

please write your rant about male domestic abuse victims

Okay, I'll do this but fair warning, I might include some kind of parallels to the Depp vs Heard trial(s) because my mind functions better if I have some kind of real-life or fictional literature to support me through the development of my thoughts, so if you believe Amber Heard for some reason, you might not like what I have to say. Also, please if you're gonna comment, be gentle and polite, I'm always open to new (well-based) points of view and I promise I'm open to an honest conversation with anyone who is kind <3

Observation: I will use Domestic Violence (DV) as a broad term throughout this but know that I refer mostly to Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) here. The difference between the two is that DV can happen between members of the same nuclear family (between brothers, partners, or child and parents) while IPV happens only between romantic partners.

The reason I don't use DV especially is because abuse against boys (by parents, sisters, etc.) also falls under this category and then it's a whole other discussion about the socialization of children and teenagers, the social minority they represent and how that's a whole new discussion (that I'd be happy to extend in another post actually if there are any other people interested).

To begin with, we have to understand some things: we don't have exact data about male victims of domestic abuse, not only because it's severely under-reported but also because many reports are not even filed because the lines for escaping domestic violence (police, shelters, phone lines, etcetera.) attend only women and girls, or demonstrate a clear bias towards those victims. Plus, as it happens with women as well, abuse doesn't present just physically, but also emotionally and psychologically.

However, just to give you all an idea, in the UK, for example, it's estimated that almost 20% of domestic violence reports were from men in the last two years (2022-23), according to ManKind Initiative. In the US, according to The Tech Report, almost 45% of men believe they were victims of abusive relationships in their lives. In Australia, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 38% of victims of violence in the country were men, 64% being DV-related.

Now, there is a reason for this, and this is called patriarchy. Patriarchy is the concept of one of the pillars of how our society is built, and it means the subjugation of one binary gender (female) by another binary gender (male) - although this definition is more for this essay's purpose than accurate for an academic study for example. It's important to note that gender violence presents itself against women institutionally (through proper institutions, such as the legal system, for example, or a company's hierarchy) and structurally (it's in the roots of our society culturally and thus, infecting everything else).

According to The Patriarchs, journalist Angela Saini's latest book, the Patriarchy is something tricky to explore even for our earlier academics, such as Engels, for example, because it presents itself in many different ways. For example, it changes its characterization according to culture, environmental needs, History, and other factors. Still, the important thing is that it has various different aspects in the areas it's present.

What I want to explore goes a little bit further: I want to understand how the oppression of women affects men because, unlike many other kinds of oppression, gender-related violence affects their enforcers (men) as well as their victims (women). Now, I am not saying this violence is equal to each other: violence against women permeates our societies' very core, it's ingrained in our institutions, in our culture. But on an interpersonal level, gender violence affects men and women both.

Men are pressured into "being a man" (a white person doesn't have to prove they're white in the same sense or with the same intensity as a man has to prove his man-ness), they're molded to become people in disconnection to their own emotions, they're encouraged to be violent or at least not to be "emotional", to the point of not even noticing when they're suffering some kind of violence or from a mental disorder, for example.

This plays a significant role in how we view abuse when perpetrated by women against men but it's not all we need to observe when talking about male DV victims.

Another matter I'd like to point out is the way we view feminine violence: in the Introduction of her best-seller, Lady Killers, Tori Telfer talks about how violence committed by women is often put under one of three categories: the mysticism, the sexualization, or the banalization. That is, socially, we have a habit of thinking about violence perpetrated by women as either mythological, sexy, or just plain silly, and therefore dumb and/or laughable.

Telfer's examples throughout the book are great and I recommend the book for more insight, but to me, three cases stick out to follow as examples:

How the first woman serial killer we have Historical records of, Elizabeth Ridgeway, was killed for being a witch (mysticism);

How Nannie Doss, an old lady who fit all the 50s housewife stereotypes and killed men with poison in her cakes, had her intelligence belittled by people trying to paint her as insane despite many psychiatrical reports of her being exceptionally clever, how she was labeled by the media as "Arsenic Nannie" (banalization)

And finally, how women who perpetrate violence are often sexualized, such as Raya and Sakina, from the beginning of 20th-century Egypt, who were tied closely to the criminal underworld of their neighborhood and who actually developed a method of killing four people with little blood and avoiding messes; or Lizzie Halliday, who was labeled "the worst woman on earth" with clear implications of her ugliness; or at last, Erzsébet Báthory, known more popularly as Countess Dracula despite having been a lot crueler than the name leads you to believe; they were all sexualized one way or another, their crimes fitting their appearances rather than their acts.

What I mean to point out by that is that feminine violence is something we as a society have a tendency to downplay to a dangerous level. Part of that is a result of downplaying violence as a whole, doesn't matter the perpetrator, but a big part of it is because we see violence as a men's trait. Culturally, violence is a characteristic we attribute to men while women are "even-tempered", motherly, nurturing, and delicate.

Those are the traits of femininity. Violence is not something we easily attribute to women, while men can be only violent, domineering, "warriors".

Now, intimate partner violence (IPV) against males and perpetrated by women is significantly overlooked and under-researched. Hell, there was a real and huge doubt whether men could be r*ped at the beginning of the 2000s, and even now there are people who still don't see how men can be sexually abused.

What we do know about IPV is that, according to this article, women and men have roughly the same rate of occurrences of physical abuse against their partners, and in most of the non-reciprocal violent relationships, women were mostly the perpetrators, although it is true that the more violent abuse occurrences are mostly perpetrated by men:

"Archer Reference Archer5 attempted to resolve two competing hypotheses about partner violence, either that it involves a considerable degree of mutual combat or that it generally involves male perpetrators and female victims. His meta-analysis of 82 studies of gender differences in physical aggression between heterosexual partners showed that men were more likely to inflict an injury; 62% of those injured by a partner were women, but men still accounted for a substantial minority of those injured. However, women were slightly more likely than men to use one or more act of physical aggression and to use such acts more frequently. Younger aged couples showed more female-perpetrated aggression."

Again, that's not to say that violence committed against women in our patriarchal society is in any way equivalent to what men suffer as victims of IPV because that's not true. Violence against women is in every corner of our culture, it's in the roots of our society, and violence against men is not as institutional or structural as acts of violence perpetrated against men.

But I have to criticize how we view (or maybe it's best to say how little we view, or even consider) male victims of DV when we're talking about the matter because not only we are then perpetrating patriarchal beliefs that continue to harm us, we're also portraying women as being inherently and perpetually victims of violence, always in a place of perceived inferiority (although I need to point out there is nothing inferior about suffering violence) while men fall under the category of always the perpetrators of that violence.

That's undeniably harmful because it generates a dangerous generalization in individual cases, such as Johnny Depp, for example. Many of the people I saw defending Heard seemed to not comprehend that only because Johnny Depp was in a place of societal power in relation to AH (because he was, as an older, richer man) that wasn't enough of a reason to believe he was guilty of what she accused him of. Just because generally we might rightly point out a systemic oppression of women by men, it doesn't mean that we should apply those principles to individual cases, especially when we don't have access to concrete evidence and in high-profile cases such as Depp v Heard.

Now, after all of that, I need to point out a personal opinion of mine and bear in mind I don't have anything to base myself here so feel free to criticize it if you disagree (just remember to be nice, please): all of these facts make me ask myself how many of those cases of IPV were labeled as "mutual" (because there's actually a pretty fierce discussion on the matter of whether or not mutual abuse exists from what I could find, and mostly of academic research seem to understand that mutual abuse does exist) are actually mutual and not - in case of heterosexual relationships - emotional manipulation on the perpetrator's side.

And that leads me to ask myself how many of the false reports made by women against their male partners (which are the minority of reported DV cases, let's be clear here) were labeled as mutual because the men "fought back"? How many men who were victims of emotional manipulation didn't stay in those relationships or settle cases because of the threat of their female partners reporting them back from abuse as well?

And amongst those people, how many men did actually something that could be considered violent against their partner (talking now about emotional and psychological abuse, excluding the physical aspect for now) in an act of self-defense or instinctual nastiness as a defense mechanism against something that hurt them?

Having been a reactive victim in an emotionally abusive relationship myself, I can say with some ease that I said things that I know for sure truly hurt my abuser, I know I said things in the last days of our relationship that I would never say to other people if I wasn't so defensive right out the beginning of our latest interactions. But I refuse to fall into the trap of believing myself to be an equally abusive part of that relationship because I also know I did the work to try and better our relationship, I know because my other relationships are healthy and close and emotionally vulnerable and the whole circus.

So what I do have to ask myself is that in those IPV cases in heterosexual relationships where our first reaction is to classify them as mutual abuse or something like that... what do we expect from our male victims of IPV? What does the perfect male victim of IPV look like? Is it reasonable for us to expect men not to defend themselves at all because they're generally stronger than women?

Of course, I'm not advocating here that any kind of violence against your partner is okay because they're abusing you to any gender - self-defense has explicit rules to be applied for that exact reason. I'm simply pointing out that maybe we're diving into dangerous territory, or being overly zealous, considering mutual abuse at the maximum, or not believing men at all on the other side of the spectrum, when we're presented with a heterosexual case of IPV where the female was clearly or almost undoubtedly violent throughout the relationship.

That's the many reasons I can think to question people when they are presented with a case of DV of a woman committing abuse against their male partner. Because as much as women are socially oppressed, our biases in regard to gender affect our views of both men and women and can be really dangerous when generally applied to individual cases.

So yeah, I'm not thrilled with our critical skills when it comes to male victims of abuse, loves.

Not at all.

(if you're gonna answer, remember to be nice!)

Fuck imallexx and anyone who still supports him please seek help, pages of evidence that show this man is a prick is available, educate yourself. I support alice with my whole heart, I wish the best and I hope she heals if she hasn’t already.

All my love and support goes out to her. not only is she a victim, she’s a survivor. I’m glad she wasn’t silenced cause she deserves to be heard.

I make this post for the men who have trauma and constantly get discredited for it or ignored, silenced, and told to be quiet just because they are a man. Anyone who thinks vulnerability is weak is ridiculous. Show support for all victims no matter their gender.

Mens rape, abuse, and sexual assault matters just as equally as it does for women. My platform is for both men and women, and for anyone in between. It’s for people who need a voice because they are scared to speak up, because they are told their story doesn’t matter, because they are forced to stay quiet, because they are told it’s their fault.

I’m here to tell you it’s not your fault, that your story’s valid and there are dozens of people who understand, who gone through similar, who are here to support you through it.