Group items tagged

This sound clip interview discusses the first UK studies and survey of violence against women... well, not so much women as adolescent girls. I appreciated this news bit as it was addressing younger girls and women who are facing some of the same problems that older women are facing in marital or intimate relationships. Many of these young women are dealing with battering and typical types of domestic violence that most people only relate to older women. Christine Barter, senior research fellow for the School of Policy Studies at Bristol University is head of the research. Once the research is obtained, it is examined in relation to the government's policies. People are hoping to catch this violence early and teach girls about it so as to prevent it later in their lives. I find this to be a noble and valuable effort. Relates to past readings like Crenshaw, Yllo, Ptacek, Tjaden, and DeKeseredy.

This site is about domestic violence perpetrated by police officers. I thought this site was interesting because it deals with a subset of domestic violence that is not always on the top of the discussion list. It talks about the added problems that victims have when their abuser is a cop who has been trained to be the authority figure.

I agree that this site is interesting and worth noting because it does happen and when it does, there is practically nothing a civilian victim can do against a government paid law enforcement officer. It was difficult for me to read because it reminded me of a classmate I had in high school who had been physically abused by his father who was a judge. His story was particularly difficult for me to understand because he had volunteered all of this information about his horrible home life without warning. It was also interesting to me because he had decided to leave his house to live with his grandmother, which is actually how we started carpooling. He was a year older than I, but he has a younger brother in my year who stayed at home with his parents. I never knew how to act around him knowing what I did even though he hadn't told me. The boy in my year must have had a crush on one of my best friends and had a poor way of showing it, which I think was partly due to his violent family dynamic. My girlfriend still tells me about how he stalked her and still calls and sends her odd and unwelcome messages.

I also agree that this site is very interesting. Not only does it expose a flaw of prosecuting domestic violence in our legal system, but also shows how traditional "masculine" roles influence domestic violence. I like that the author shows how police culture, which conforms to many stereotypes about masculinity, works to increase rates and intensity of domestic violence, rather than only looking at problems with the individual abusers. The only thing I didn't like about this article was that I felt it down played the difficulties that women who have not been abused by officers face. The beginning of the article made it seem as if there was a wide network of support and help for victims of domestic violence within the legal system, which is not typically the case.