Male-bashing

Let’s have some sanity in the campaign against domestic violence, by Bill Ralston.

Ralston may not be everyone's cup of tea, and some of his opinion columns that have been appearing in the NZ Listener in the last few months probably irritate more than a few people.

This particular column begins:

Recently you might have noticed people wandering about wearing white ribbons in solidarity with the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Men wear them to show that they do not tolerate or condone violence against women. Presumably if you don’t wear a ribbon, it shows that you do condone and tolerate it, in which case Auckland males must be wickedly violent because I never saw any of them wearing a ribbon.

In New Zealand, White Ribbon Day was just one of the 16 days of Activism Against Gender Violence that finish on December 10. The gender violence it refers to is violence by the male gender against the female gender.

It's an interesting essay on how statistics can be manipulated by people with different agendas, and while Ralston certainly doesn't condone violence against women, he wants the figures to be looked at a little more carefully.