Seriously?

Via my Twitter friend NoIzAngel:

The brilliant anti-woman abuse ad starring Keira Knightley, the one I touted earlier this month, has been banned from television in the UK for being ''too violent.'' It may only be telecast if the most relevant scenes are snipped.

Seriously.

The gripping ad shows the actress returning home from a film set, where she is confronted by a violent boyfriend who accuses her of having an affair with a co-star, before launching into a vicious attack. The disturbing footage ends with Knightley left sprawled on the floor, being repeatedly kicked.

The Cut was made for the charity Women's Aid, and launched in cinemas at the beginning of this month.

Charities working to combat domestic violence branded the decision by Clearcast, the ad approval body, "pathetic", arguing that, in banning the advert, it is shielding the public from the reality of domestic violence.

"It seems pathetic. It is really important to raise awareness about domestic violence, and TV gets into people's homes" said Sandra Horely, chief executive of Refuge, a charity that provides accommodation for women and children escaping from domestic violence.

"Many women who are victims of domestic violence are isolated by their partner, and in these situations TV is very helpful. It is also a great way to reach the public and raise awareness of the issue," said Ms Horely.

The ad, created by Joe Wright, the director of the films Atonement and Pride and Prejudice, in both of which Knightley starred, has been viewed more than a million times on YouTube. It was hoped that the ad would air on TV this month, but it will now only be seen on British television if scenes showing Knightley being thrown to the floor and kicked are axed.

So let's play this back, shall we?

Real women are getting beaten up -- and killed -- by their partners all the time but the media don't treat it as the epidemic of violence it is.

Fictional women get assaulted by their partners and the media make money off that.

But when a real woman plays a fictional woman getting beaten up to help real women who get beaten up all the time, well, kick that off the air because it might upset somebody.

Seriously.

Comments

[Martin Dufresne]

I wish the UK banned the reality of DV rather than a dramatic call to end it! Batterers are basically cowards: follow-up studies done in Philadelphia have shown that when they know for sure that there will be a steep price to pay for any further abuse (automatic jail term, a steep fine, loss of parental rights), most of them stop. And it is easier for women to leave if they see society take their plight seriously and tell HIM off (rather than her), regardless of his pretenses.

[sooey]

Who is on the board of Clearcast?

[Wascally Wabbit]

I'm leaning your way - but with caveats.
Do we shelter the fortunate women who have male partners who don't use them as punching bags - from similated visuals of what the unfortunate have to suffer - or focus on changing laws and empowering courts and the justice system on the means to prevent this?
I think the latter - unless your campaign will expand into banning all intergender physical abuse from the TV screen in fictional stories too!
Better Antonia - to give Chris Bentley and Deb Matthews in the McGuinty ogvernment a little Rah Rah for the powerful changes they have been making to family law recently in Ontario.

[Paul]

"media don't treat it as the epidemic of violence it is" - Antonia
----

Despite StatsCan's Family Violence in Canada 2001 profile indicating that abuse rates are nearly identical (7% vs 6%) in rate, all depictions of such violence indicate a male attacking a female.

While the death of one or even several people is a tragedy, it does not make an epidemic. The words "epidemic" and the prefix "The War on..." are panic laden soundbites that tend to collapse easily upon examination of the statistical data.

Taking the obligatory statistical incantation that graces the endpanel in that spot at face value (2 women die every week of DV, I'm assuming in the UK), that makes 104 murdered DV victims in the UK per year.
There are 30,845,603 females in the UK. That means the odds of a woman being killed by DV in the UK in a year's span is about 0.0003%, or 3 in a million, or 333,000 to 1.

Or, virtually no chance at all.

Let's put that figure in context:
> According to the US weather service, your odds of getting struck by lightning within a single year time span is 700,000 to one.
> the usual flu epidemic mortality rate (in a non-pandemic year) is about 0.1% - which means there's a lot more women dying of flu than there are of DV in a normal year.

Same numbers, but it sure makes for a weaksauce endtitle, doesn't it?

Hardly an epidemic, these kinds of panic stats aren't being used as scientific support; they are being used as propaganda.

[MensRightsNow]

Paul: You're using logic to trump emotion.

Antonia simply repeats the same myths or hyperbole over and over again as radical feminism experiences its final convulsions. It's over.

Fight for changes in legislation to equilibrate law.

[sooey]

Please do fight to bring equilibrium to the law. Then you can call yourself a Feminist, too.

[Jen Pollock]

Paul: If you look at Table 4.2 in the same report, you'll see that abused women are far more likely than abused men to be physically injured, to receive medical attention, and to fear their lives were in danger. There's a big difference between shoving or slapping someone and seriously injuring them; that's not to say that milder forms of violence are right, they're not, but they aren't the same problem.

As for your other argument, it may be the case that not many women are killed by their partners in the UK, but I suspect more than two a week are seriously injured. Just because the commercial didn't end with a detailed list of how women are being hurt doesn't mean that the two women a week who are killed by their partners are the only victims.

[Jim]

Kinda hypocritical, this claim of yours to care about violence against women, when you write that marksmen should take aim at Michelle Malkin. Oh, I know dear, it's all being taken out of context.

But if you were intellectually honest, you would admit you're OK with violence against the "right" type of women......

[A.N.]

Its about time. This is real and should be shown as a commercial. Maybe the men around are feeling a little under the gun because of it. Everyone needs to know this really does happen.

[MensRightsNow]

A.N.: Men are beaten, mugged and murdered at 3-4X the rate of women. We already feel...."under the gun".

Violence against women is no more important an issue than violence against men or children. Except one is funded by the government at the request of screaming feminists bent on privilege and superiority.

Maybe it is time we begin a govenrnment funded program to decrease the number of mothers who abuse or murder their children. Maybe we can call it the "Deadbeat Mother Law"? TV commercials of mothers beating their children, drowning them, leaving them in dumpsters...kinda like the one above...what do you think ladies?

[Nancy LeBourgeois]

Why is it that Antonia Zerbisias is OK with violence against some women but not others???

[MensRightsNow]

sooey...no problem then...I'll call myself a feminist if that's what it takes...

[Paul]

Jen, I'll address your two points.

1. The rate of incidence is the same, but the rate of reported injury is higher for women. This can mean a few things things:

a) Most reasonably, that men are more likely to cause physical injury in a physical altercation, regardless of who starts it, at the lower levels of violence where most of the violence occurs (ie non-weapons). This is likely due to their larger size and general greater strength - both to dish out and absorb impact. It is not necessarily a factor of greater ferocity or aggressiveness. Indeed, it can and often is a situation of a man fighting back to defend himself and/or end a physical altercation started by a woman, in which the man injures the woman as a result. As a result, this would still be counted as a female injury. Data on lesbian and gay DV, which all indicate that it is just as common as hetero dv, also support that notion. Specifically, there is no correlation within DV cases of physical size to their likelihood to start a physical altercation. As is proven in those cases, it may be impossible or impractical for a partner to leave a household, while their smaller partner behaves aggressively toward them.

b) Men may be less likely to report being victimized. Given the lack of resources for them (and their kids) coupled with outright skepticism and hostility toward them in this situation (from so-called DV advocates), this is not unreasonable.

[...pat.]

MRN: Then, as a man, persuade your fellow men to stop being violent. You're not only "under the gun" but you're holding it, too.

[MensRightsNow]

...pat, personally I've never held a gun, but those on the left love to evoke "root causes" of violence....maybe some of these violent men were abused or neglected by their mothers? Feminism believes fathers are irrelevent, so the onus is on you. Just a thought.

I'm sure you are aware mothers abuse and kill their children more than biological fathers do. Seriously...put a commercial together like the one above and denounce abusive mothers...single them out, suggest it is because they are female. You've got all the funding. Do it!

[Jen Pollock]

Paul, it's my understanding that domestic violence is nearly always ongoing. I have difficulty believing that there are large numbers of women who continually attack their partners so violently that the partners are repeatedly forced to injure them in self-defence. Not because I think women are better people than that, or less violent than men, but because so far as I am aware most abusers are better at controlling their victims than that.

As well, regardless of the specifics, I tend to think that a situation where many women and few men are injured is a bigger problem for women.

Frankly, I don't see how an epidemic of violence against men lessens the epidemic of violence against women. If there is a great need for services to help abused men, then we should certainly, as a society, be providing such services. But the existence of abused men does not mean that abused women don't need help.

[Paul]

Pat, why would you say MRN more responsible than you for lobbying male abusers to stop beating women? Do you believe that men meet regularly at some kind of Flinstonian Water Buffalo Lodge to make some binding heirarchichal decision on what horrors to mete out on women throughout the year? The subtext here is that you are willingly and passively exempting yourself as part of a weaker, victim class, incapable, or less capable of helping yourself, or other women. That's whiny and it's weak.

Jen, what you fail to understand, largely because of the predominant gender script on these issues - is the context in which DV often occurs. It rarely would be as depicted in the ad, where someone is simply randomly beaten upon coming home, for no apparent reason, real or imagined. It's often tied to subtance abuse and mood disorders, and a whole mess of history and fetters that keep these people together.

I have seen violent couples where both couples participate and initiate violence, and several where women initiated violence that was not returned - and that was in plain sight (who knows what happened behind closed doors.) Hitting, shoving, slapping, throwing. In those cases, I speculate that the women felt ok doing it specifically because their partners did not respond with violence (and didn't leave, not immediately, anyway).

DO NOT create the straw man argument though, that the existence of abused men is some kind of argument that abused women don't need help.

Indeed, the best way to get abused women help, is to first understand the size and shape of the issue. For that to happen, feminist advocacy needs to step back and get more invested in knowledge and proper research, and less invested in misandrist dogma. The point of raising the rate of abused men here, and in pointing out the media hysteria fanned by, frankly, poor journalism - which should be subjecting such statements to even the most basic skepticism (ie my little statistical exploration of the spot's tagline above) is not so much to diminish the importance of the issue, but to reveal it for what it is -- and in so doing, hopefully get past the divisive politics and make allies of folks like me, instead of driving us to fight you.

[Paul]

"Just because the commercial didn't end with a detailed list of how women are being hurt doesn't mean that the two women a week who are killed by their partners are the only victims." ---Jen
------------
That's a fair statement, which I could address moving further on down the rabbit hole, but I thought a reasonable statement to start with was the one that was actually used in the ad, as well as the characterization of it as an "epidemic" of violence or a "War on women".

You must grant that, in viewing that statistic (and the many others like it) that the filmmaker and the advocacy organization behind it *intended* to convey the impession that the problem was more widespread than it is, upon closer examination of the math. In the case above, I wasn't even disputing their math - I was simply taking it as a given, and pointing out the odds as they defined them. It's powerful persuasion, but it's also very misleading. I don't think that misleading people about DV is going to be very helpful in preventing it from happening.

[...pat.]

Paul:
"Do you believe that men meet regularly at some kind of Flinstonian Water Buffalo Lodge to make some binding heirarchichal decision on what horrors to mete out on women throughout the year?"

Of course they do. Just like we feminists get together, cackle, figure out how we can live without men, declare fathers irrelevant, and plot revenge against the patriarchy.

:-p

[The Stygian and his Shemitish Dogs]

"Please do fight to bring equilibrium to the law. Then you can call yourself a Feminist, too."

Sooey Sweetie,

I guess that makes me a feminist as well, then. When I bore on about, e.g., "honour killings" and "immigration", very much of my thinking is directed towards ensuring that the type of society that I am currently enjoying will be preserved for my daughters and granddaughters. All I'm asking in this context is that actually existing laws be enforced to the full, and that "kulture", "social or group status", or "poverty" be deemed NO EXCUSE for breaking them, and that deportation of non-citizens guilty of outrages such as "honour killings" (regardless of what the deportee might be sent back to) become commonplace.

Now.

From many of your postings it is klear that, essentially, you (and several others on this blog, including the Esteemed and Beautiful Moderator herself) are still fighting old battles. I'm looking to present and future battles. I suspect that the suggestions that I make on this blog may make me, in retrospect, a stronger advocate of "women's rights" than most contemporary feminists.

[MensRightsNow]

...pat.....but you do have feminist organizations that do just that. LOL!

[The Stygian and his Shemitish Dogs]

Pat Pet,

The new "patriarchy" that will come about if current trends continue will make you miss the current one, warts and all.