Here in Canada, you CAN'T arrest anybody under 12, and children under 15 can't be expelled from school, just transferred to another one. Child protection can be called in to figure out what is going on, but they can't tell anyone what they find or what actions they took, so speculation in cases like these tends to run rampant and idiotic.

This is a SIX year old, in Grade 1, what the hell does he know? You'd be amazed at some of the stuff the three and four year olds in my child care centres get up to-- this summer, they had a game where the girls wearing dresses would take off their underwear and go down the slide, while all the boys would cluster at the bottom of the slide and try and catch a peak. Everyone seemed to be having a good old time before we shut it down, as gently as possible.

The scratch may have been accidental, may have been stupidly deliberate, may have been the result of abuse, may have been bullying, may have been innocent: we have no context at all about the incident, and so on.

Back when I was 5 or 6, it was usually the (more mature at that age) girls that initiated and led the doctor games, but somehow it was the boys that got in trouble when we got caught. We often forget how erotic young children can be with each other.

She isn't American, so she isn't sensitive to American racial subtexts, because whatever else you say about the Islamic world, racism doesn't figure much. Plenty of bigotry and intolerance to go around, to be sure, but it has nothing to do with Western racial constructs: slurs about watermelon and kinky hair just don't figure in the Middle East at all (there being no shortage of either).

It happens again and again, viewing Middle East realities through North American & Western lenses. For example, the matters of the hijab and burqa are much more nuanced and ambiguous than many Western reductionists imagine. In some contexts, wearing a hijab can be a profoundly feminist act, in others a pretty straight-forward expression of theocratic oppression.

Satrapi's comment illustrates things perfectly, really. It isn't the thing itself, it is the behaviour and motivations behind it that are reductionist.

I would just love it if he showed up at one of these things, and the media brought in some stone butch dykes to nastily critique his outfit and bearing. Snark.

I don't know if there is any one article that was my fav. But mostly, BroadSheet has generally opened my eyes by showing that battles I thought had been long won are by no means over. I just cannot believe the comment mayhem, I just could not believe that in this day and age women speaking up would meet with such harsh jeering and offensive behaviour. It continues to appall me, and has given my feminist impulses a major shot in the arm.

I don't think anybody has to agree with some or all of what BroadSheet posts, but I very strongly believe that crassness, rudeness, attempted bullying, jeering, insults, and downright viciousness are not acceptable. Those engaging in such behaviour have had the opposite effect from what they presumably intend: this particular feminist's blood has been all angried up.

Damn straight the research is all over the map, and the field is awash in factoids, disputing gurus, and pundits grinding axes. I expect our 'enthusiastic' posters are shortly going to be sharing many of them with us.

You can account for the high numbers of females hitting men by looking at the definition of "hit" or "violence." You get it broad enough, a playful slug in the shoulder gets counted. (Early in our relationship, I had to sit down with the spousal unit and explain that even though I was a largish athelete, I was not a Gumby doll and it did in fact hurt, even if I acted all manly about it, and could she please stop? She did. But I suppose I could be counted as a male "victim.") There is also the factor that women are going to be a lot less ashamed to self-report than men are.

On the other end, you can account for the violence causing injury statistics being so much higher in women because a) as other posters have pointed out, there is a size/strength differential, and b) once again, women these days are much more likely to tell hospital personnel the truth. Similarly with crime stats.

In my professional experience, I most certainly see women getting damaged rather more often than men, and needing to flee the house. I have seen no signs of an epidemic of husband battering, but it does happen. We are specifically funded to provide shelter for men and their children fleeing abuse; in the last four years not one single request has come in, while at the same time the secure women's shelters are packed. I don't think that this indicates it doesn't happen, my guess is that men tend to have more resources to fall back on and don't need it.

In terms of psychological abuse, my sense is that women have the upper hand there, what with better verbal and social skills, so the victimizers are probably women somewhat more often than men. But just try and come up with a concrete definition of psychological abuse, usable in a research context.

Interestingly, domestic violence & abuse seems to occur at almost the same rate in same-sex relationships of both genders, though somewhat less often than with het couples. The lower likelihood of children in family tends to make it a good deal easier for a victim to flee I suspect, that and there being less social/family pressure to "keep the family together."