luke wilson
The Living Force
Is this true?
Uncovering why so many Swedish families are torn apart by violence.
_http://www.thelocal.se/20140305/sweden-out-top-in-eu-domestic-violence-league
_http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/7430122/The-dark-side-of-Swedish-society.html
_http://sciencenordic.com/swedish-gender-equal-man-myth
Is this true.....? Looks like it is...
Uncovering why so many Swedish families are torn apart by violence.
_http://www.thelocal.se/20140305/sweden-out-top-in-eu-domestic-violence-league
A new EU review of violence against women has revealed that one in three European women has been assaulted, and one in twenty has been raped, with the Scandinavian countries at the top of the league tables. [...]
In Sweden, 81 percent of women said they had been harassed at some point after the age of 15 - compared to the EU average of 55 percent. After Sweden, which had the highest rate, Denmark, France, the Netherland and Finland all saw rates above 70 percent. The EU member state with the lowest rate - 24 percent - was Bulgaria.
_http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/7430122/The-dark-side-of-Swedish-society.html
In 2007, the US State Department recorded 6,192 cases of child abuse in Sweden by November of that year. It also reported homophobic crime was on the rise, and tens of thousands of rapes and domestic violence incidents in a population of just nine million. “Violence against women remains a problem,” its report concluded. Likewise, a 2006 report from the group Global Monitoring on the commercial sexual exploitation of children found systemic faults in Sweden, including allowing child pornography to be viewed, although not downloaded, and failing to care properly for children caught up in sex trafficking.
Little of this would come as a surprise to Larsson, Blomkvist or Salander, who encounter all of this and more while investigating the brutal murder of a child, apparently at the hands of her rich, Nazi-sympathising family. “Sweden has yet to come to terms with its Nazi past,” says Anna Blondell, who runs a Swedish restaurant in London. “We were neutral during the war, and our Nazi party still lives on. In fact, I think it will do well at the next election, under a different name. Many people in the older generation were very sympathetic to Nazi ideas like eugenics but, unlike Germany, we have not so open about this.”
Certainly the country practised forced sterilisation of women deemed unfit to be mothers until as recently as 1975. Branded low class, or mentally slow, they were kept in Institutes for Misled and Morally Neglected Children, where they were eventually “treated”. In 1997, the government admitted that 60,000 women had been sterilised.
_http://sciencenordic.com/swedish-gender-equal-man-myth
Gender-biased reality
“Swedish politicians have been good at presenting and exporting Sweden as the world’s most gender-equal country. But the reality is that we’re not so gender equal,” says the researcher.
“In reality the statistics hide the fact that Swedish men aren’t as gender equal as we think. Today parents take parental leave, but little is said about the fact the fathers take less leave than mothers. In addition, it is men who subject women and children to a variety of problems, such as paedophilia, violence, rape, etc. These realities run parallel with a self-understanding that at our core we are in favour of gender equality and that we perceive ourselves as very gender equal.”
Gottzén has used qualitative methodology and interviewed men who are in therapy at treatment centres in Sweden for having perpetrated violence against women. Several of the institutions have been influenced by Alternative to Violence, a treatment and knowledge centre started by the Norwegian psychologists Per Isdal and Per Nørbech in 1987.
Ordinary men
The men in the study are getting treatment voluntarily. Some come because they have been reported to the police, who have told them about this form of therapy. Several of them have been encouraged by their partners to seek help or they have found the treatment centre on their own. But who are they?
“Most of them are completely ordinary, Swedish men. A few are ethnic minorities and some have a criminal background or addiction problems, but the majority are white, working class and middle class men with normal jobs such as engineers, teachers, journalists, factory workers or they’re looking for a job,” explains Gottzén. {I was expecting a large migrant proportion to be at these centres to the tune of around 80% going by what I read in a youtube comment today? Oh wait, this article was written before the refugee crisis - see Frustration-aggression-displacement i.e. scapegoating in action}
The number of violent incidents also varies, from once to several times. This can be everything from pushing, hitting and choking to material violence. When the violence is material, the person breaks things, usually something the other person likes, or throws the phone against the wall, or hits the wall with his fist in front of his partner.
Born like that
“Very few of them have a hard time talking about the violence,” says the masculinities researcher.
Here are some examples: “I’ve been physically abusive, but I take responsibility for it.” “I was drunk the first time.” “I was in a psychologically/financially difficult situation, and she was bitchy.”
“More often than not, they say their violent episodes are caused by substances in the brain, ADHD, or problems with drugs, impulse control or aggression. Often they conclude by saying, ‘I take medicine now, and as long as I take it, I won’t become violent,” says Gottzén, and continues:
“Many of them would like to explain away the violence by saying they were born like that. It’s becoming more and more common not to place the blame on a bad childhood but rather find explanations that have to do with different levels of serotonin in the brain or other neuropsychological or physiological factors.”
The myth about men
“The Swedish, gender-equal man who hits his partner never thinks of himself as a domestic abuser who continually carries out systematic, controlled and gross violence. An ordinary, Swedish man understands himself as a father, or partner, husband or boyfriend – but some of them in addition hit their partners. From this perspective, he doesn’t view the violence he inflicts as an expression of domestic abuse,” explains the masculinities researcher.
Based on this line of reasoning, the researcher says that the Swedish, gender-equal man is a myth.
Myths obscure reality. The myths themselves become the truth. The myth about the Swedish, gender-equal man works like this. It masks the actual situation while excluding everyone who does not fit, everyone who is defined as the Other.
To do good, or not
A myth can recognize certain failures, but it hides everything that resembles systematic problems, according to Gottzén.
"For instance, everything that deals with the oppression of women is turned into something that is history, that is behind us. And through our modern self-consciousness, we as men place ourselves outside of the oppression.”
“Ugly” incidents must disappear
“This idea about not hitting a woman can be viewed as a gender equality issue, but it can also be seen as a patriarchal argument: Since I as a man am physically stronger, I shouldn’t hit a woman. These two ideologies don’t fit well together at all,” explains Gottzén.
In order to maintain the self-understanding as gender equal, all of the ‘ugly’ incidents need to disappear. That is why there is a tendency to explain it in ethnic or cultural terms.
"For example, we see that violence perpetrated by men from other countries is explained by saying they are immigrant men and thus are naturally violent and patriarchal. In contrast, violence perpetrated by ethnic Swedish men is not understood as cultural, but as a pathology or illness, or it is explained with socio-economic reasons at the individual level,” says Gottzén.
Is this true.....? Looks like it is...
