Free The Murder of Jeffrey Dryden: The Grim Truth Surrounding Male Domestic Abuse by Troy Veenstra

powerful and the female as completely
powerless.”
    As you will read in the pages below, by
having this principle as their basic construct, feminist will not
accept anything that cast a poor light on their gender, unless,
however, it is required to get the support and financial funding
they need to continue their cause. For the most part, feminist and
the organizations that they support will not and do not accept the
fundamental truth of over 200 reports, surveys, and studies that
show women are just as, if not more so, prone to use violence in a
relationship as their alleged male equals. Nor will they accept the
idea that, “the all-powerful,” man can be beaten and/or abused by
the, “completely powerless,” female, and thus through political
influence, continue to do everything in their authority to keep
this idealism, this false truth, the societal norm for which we
have all unknowingly come to accept as fact. Think I’m wrong? It
may surprise you that the phrases stated at the beginning of this
chapter. The phrases that invoked the image of a female being
abused by her male lover were actually statements made by men who
had been abused by their wives or live-in girlfriend, bet you
didn’t see a dude as the first image that came to mind did
you?
     
    Boys Don’t Hit Girls; Girls
Hit Boys
    “ When she got mad, she’d
start hitting me. She’d slap at my face, and then keep slapping and
try to scratch my face. I’d put up my arms, or just grab and hold
her hands. I never hit her back; as a child I was taught that you
never hit a woman, no matter what.” – Anonymous male married to an
abusive woman of 10 years…
    As a child; a young boy, I can remember
both my parents telling me not to hit girls, that hitting girls for
any reason was wrong and that real men do not get into fights or
hit girls. Thus, from the moment I was taught this, I knew there
was a difference between girls and boys, the ideal; the basic
construct of women as the weaker of the two, whether true or not,
was entrenched in my mind. After reading the surveys and studies on
male domestic abuse for this book, I began to wonder, “What, if
anything, are girls taught when it comes to hitting
boys?”
    Consequently, I posed this question to
my sister recently, asking her when the time comes and my 3
year-old niece goes to school, what will she be taught when it
comes to hitting boys?
    “ Em, will be taught, not to
hit anyone unless they hit her first,” my sister said, “I don’t
want her growing up being picked on and thinking she can’t fight
back, but at the same time I don’t want her to think that it’s
alright to hit first,” she added (Veenstra, 2011).
    Sadly, though I agree fully with my
sister’s reply, I found that most girls my niece’s age might be
taught the exact opposite. In a study on adolescent violence done
by Peter Stringham of Boston University Medical, “30-50% of all
adolescent girls hit or kick adolescent males, vs. 20-35% of
adolescent males hitting females.”
    This apparently only gets worse as time
goes on and adolescent females grow into young adults. In a youth
survey done in 1995 of 1,725 participating young adults,
researchers found that nearly, “48% of the female partners
committed acts of violence against their male partners, of that
48%, 22.4% of the women perpetrated severe violence.” Most
noteworthy from this study was the fact that, “women were the sole
perpetrators in nearly 37% of the couple’s vs. 14% of the men that
were sole perpetrators, (Morse, 1995).”
    Furthermore, a study that looked
specifically at physical abuse against male college students found
that, “40% of the males surveyed reported that they were recipients
of physical aggression from their girlfriends. 29% reported that
they received serious physical abuse at the hand of their
girlfriend resulting in a visit to the hospital or other forms of
medical treatment (C.J. Simonellie, 1998).” Thus, it seems, “In
today’s