Stop Violence Against Men Day – which occurs on the first day of every month – is a day in which people are reminded that violence against men is just as wrong as is violence against anyone else.
After all, men are human beings too!
Furthermore, violence against men is, and has been, a huge problem right across the planet – for many thousands of years, spreading misery among millions of people.
Indeed, wars throughout the whole of history have, essentially, been wars against men.
True, most of the perpetrators are men, but any intelligent person knows full well that any victims of violence are victims of violence; regardless of who is the perpetrator.
And yet people nowadays seem to think that if, for example, men are violently assaulted by other men, then the assaulted men just do not count as victims.
Male victims are simply swept under the carpet |
These male victims are simply swept under the carpet, psychologically speaking, and they are cunningly disappeared from view.
Indeed, the official domestic violence statistics also sweep them under the carpet by specifically excluding male victims of domestic violence if the perpetrators are men.
There is no moral justification for this. It seems to be just a ploy to hide the true scale of the problem of violence against men.
Indeed, many media organisations such as the BBC bend over backwards to hide the sex of the victims of just about anything whenever these victims are men, but they highlight and headline their sex to an almost embarrassing degree whenever these victims are women.
Men dying from prostate cancer become ‘patients’, ‘sufferers’, ‘people’, ‘hospital inmates’, ‘those afflicted with the disease’.
When men are killed in, say, Iraq, then they are ‘Iraqis’, ‘ Americans’, ‘insurgents’, ‘terrorists’, ‘troops’, ‘soldiers’, ‘recruits’, ‘combatants’, ‘fighters”, ‘pilots’, ‘crew’, ‘the enemy’, the ‘allies’.
When men die in mines then they are ‘miners’, ‘excavators’, ‘workers’, ’employees’, ‘locals’.
Whenever any victims are women, however, then they are “women, women and women”.
The appalling levels of violence directed at men throughout |
Similarly, the appalling levels of violence directed at men throughout the whole of history is often craftily discounted by pointing out that it is men who have mostly been at the heads of the powers that have inflicted this violence.
And this is true.
For example, the reigning monarchs in Europe for the past 1500 years or so have been mostly men. And in earlier times, the great leaders of, for example, Persia, Egypt, Greece and Rome were nearly always men.
But these rulers and their elites have both gained and used their powers mostly by enslaving and/or slaughtering millions of men.
Indeed, it is mostly through inflicting violence upon men, or threatening to do so, that they managed to accrue so much power – and to hold on to it – in the first place.
Essentially, violence against men was the route to power.
(For the most part, and comparatively speaking, the women were mostly left to get on with their reproductive roles and their domestic chores.)
History provides us with countless examples of men being slaughtered or enslaved with impunity, with millions of men also being forced into becoming soldiers in order to serve their rulers; oftentimes also being heavily indoctrinated with carefully-crafted mumbo-jumbo in order to turn them into mindless sacrificial drones willing to serve their masters.
Nowadays, in western countries, the situation for men is not so bad.
The vast majority of victims of violence – unjustified violence, that is |
But it is still the case that the vast majority of victims of violence – unjustified violence, that is – are men.
This issue needs to be addressed rather than ignored.
But while billions of dollars in the western world are poured annually into campaigns designed to reduce violence against women, there is almost no money at all to support campaigns to do the same for men, even though men make up the vast majority of victims of violence; both at home and abroad.
And so Stop Violence Against Men Day is just an attempt to highlight this problem by making people more aware that violence against men is just as wrong as is violence against anyone else, and that men make up the vast majority of victims when it comes to violence.
So, please spread the word by, for example, linking to this piece, or by referring to “Stop Violence Against Men Day” whenever it seems appropriate to do so – especially on the first day of every month!
Feature image by K. Warner
