Violence against Women

I obtained some very interesting statistics about violence against women from the National Organization for Women website (NOW). I used the statistics that follow to conduct my four interviews:

“Murder: Every day 4 women die as a result of domestic violence totaling 1,400 women a year.

Battering: 572,000 reports of assault are reported each year. 170,000 of these are serious enough to require hospitalization, emergency room care or doctor’s attention.

Sexual Assault: 132,000 women report being victims of rape and more than half know their attacker. Two to six times that many are raped and don’t report it. Every year 1.2 million women are forcibly raped by their current or former male partners, some more than once.

Women are ten times more likely than men to be victimized by an intimate person.”

I interviewed two of my close friends, one female and one male, my boyfriend and also my mother to get their opinions and reactions to women being victims of violence. After I read these statistics to these four people they all had the same first general reaction to the statistics. They were all very surprised by the enormous numbers of women that were victims. A few of them were even more surprised by the number of women who are actually raped and never reported the incident. Thankfully none of them had any personal stories that they could share about their experiences dealing with this issue. I went on to ask each one what they believed was the cause of all this violence against women. Most of their answers were the same, but varied slightly. The females felt that it was because the men that carry out these acts were insecure with themselves and felt like they needed to show that they could control someone in their lives, basically to show that they have some power over someone that they view as weak. The men on the other hand kind of felt that women who are very flirtatious kind of bring on the negative attention, which leads men to believe that they are loose and they are entitled to their bodies. They weren’t saying that women were at fault for this happening to them cause most of the women that are beaten and battered do nothing to bring it on, but the women that go out to bars and wear really skimpy clothing portray the wrong idea. Both groups, male and female, felt that men who have very little social interaction with women, maybe because they are shy or not as attractive, rape women because that is the only way that they can get any kind of intimate relationship with that particular woman. Most of the people felt that if women felt more comfortable reporting what happened to them then more women would be more likely to tell the police and press charges against their attacker and maybe that would cut down on the number of rapes. There is such a negative stigma surrounding the court system when it comes to when women have to go to trial to have their attackers charged. They also felt that if there were stronger punishments for rape and murder of women then it would decrease the number of men who actually commit the crimes. The murder and battery of women should also be considered a hate crime and this also goes along with the stronger punishment idea. The men felt that maybe women should dress more conservatively and not give off the wrong persona, again they weren’t blaming the females but they just felt like it leads men on.

I thought that this was a valuable experience, because it kind of brought to light the different perceptions that men and women have about why these horrible crimes are being committed. Men are more likely to try to put some fault on the women involved instead of realizing that men are fully in control of their own actions and reactions. I myself was pretty surprised by the statistics that I found on the NOW website. I mean I knew that women were being murdered, battered and raped, but I had no idea that the numbers were that large. I agree with what the interviewees were saying about what should be done to eliminate these problems, but I think that it will take a long time before any drastic changes are made and by then millions of lives will have been wasted. I just hope and pray that these issues never hit me close to home.