You’ve clearly done a considerable amount of excellent research, but I do have to ask given this is Effective Altruism: Is this effectively altruistic?
Before you mod me troll, please let me explain:
* In the UK, violent crime against men is twice as high as it is against women. As in, if you are a man you are twice as likely to be the victim of a violent crime than a woman is. In fact, for just about every type of violent crime, excepting sex crime, the victims are predominantly male. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/compendium/focusonviolentcrimeandsexualoffences/yearendingmarch2016/overviewofviolentcrimeandsexualoffences#characteristics-associated-with-being-a-victim—“Men were more likely to be a victim of violent crime measured by the face-to-face Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) interview than women (2.2% of males compared with 1.4% of females”
I’d be surprised if this wasn’t the case in most other countries too, but I’m travelling right now and can’t do real research.
It’s true that the perpetrators of the violence against men are mostly men, but I’ve never understood the implied notion that that makes it fine.
* Women commit domestic violence against men, possibly more so (not that it’s a competition!). (It’s a complicated topic and I can’t find any decent research on this right now, again, travelling). There are a few reasons it’s not talked about as much:
** No-one really cares about it. It’s “normal” in an acceptable way, whereas our natural “protect the women” instincts mean we actually care if a woman is victimised.
** Men don’t report it as often.
** Women, being physically weaker than men (statistically), are less likely to cause physical harm.
* Violence in LGBT relationships is *higher* than violence in heterosexual relationships. To me at least this strongly suggests that the reasons for the heterosexual-relationship violence is more because many humans are just terrible people, rather than because there’s a sizeable contingent of men who enjoy beating on women. (https://domesticviolence.org/domestic-violence-lgbtq-community/ - can’t find any scientific references right now).
TL;DR: This is a problem, but violence against men is objectively a *bigger* problem (at least in the UK). Has anyone tried to quantify ways of solving this problem? Because otherwise how do we know whether we’re being effective prioritisation?
Interesting, I wonder if anyone can explain why this post received such a negative reaction (all the downmods)?
As someone new to the community, and who’s trying hard to keep an open mind and not revert to his natural cynicism, I’m struggling to come across any interpretation of this result beyond people either wrongly concluding I’m a troll (so not giving me the benefit of the doubt and ignoring my (admittedly limited) linked evidence), or bandwagoning and refusing to try and override their natural defend-the-women evolutionary biases.
This would seem to play into the posts about EA groupthink that seem to occasionally pop up here.
Isn’t the purpose of these forums to discuss how to be altruistic effectively? As in, achieve the best result with the least effort/expense? My post is attempting to raise discuss that. Is any part of it wrong? I’ve received no responses so don’t know.
Maybe I summed up my post wrongly, so I’ll try again: The purpose of this thread is to abate violence against women, yet an objectively much bigger problem is violence overall. It would seem reasonable to conclude that maybe trying to solve the later will help with the former. I am unclear why trying to point this out has met with such a hostile (all the downmods) reaction.