Home-Start – Family Support Worker Training – 06/03/2019

Today was the 6th week of training and the focus was on domestic abuse. Supprisingly I felt less emotionally triggered by todays topic and found it very educating.  We went through some old laws on domestic abuse which brought to light the inequility of the sexes and gendre stereotypes.  There was one particular law in the early 1900’s where men were only allowed to belt there women with sticks that were the size of their thumb and no bigger (the law of thumb) and another law where men were only allowed to beat their women and children between certian hours of the day. Not because the women and children needed to rest but because it was considered impolite and a reason for neighbours to make noise complaints.  Even up until 1991 it seemed women were still subject to horrific treatment in the family home.  A law was passed in which rape by husbands was disregarded by the courts as it was considered that a woman is agreeing to allow him to have sexual relations with her whenever he wants from the day she takes his hand in marrige.

We engaged in a task where we had to guess the correct answer for statistical occurances in domestic abuse. I recall one of them was  that 1 in 3 teenagers report being abused by a partner or something close to that, an extremly high amount of children were in the room or next room when violence was occuring, and I learned that there is less than 300 women’s refuges in the United Kingdom.

The co-ordinators offered lots of statistics about domestic abuse and the term ‘power and contol’ came up quite a lot but the term ‘mental health’ was not used at all to my suprise and it was myself that had to bring up the terms ‘evolution and psychological development’. There was definitly a focus on men abusing women which caused me to remember something I had read in a university text book last year about gendre stereotypes, which was something along the lines of, ‘Results from such and such experiement suggested that females are just as physically abusive as males in relationships but that men are less likely to report it out of shame and women are more likely to be harmed due to men being more physically strong’.  What I also took from this is that women will quite often use emotions to manipulate and a man may be terified or feel shame at expressing emotions or admitting vaulnerability.  It is quite shocking also that there is very little men’s refuges in The UK and no safe haven for men to escape to.  No support at all really and from what I learnt in todays session there isn’t even any significant amount of recognision for male sufferes of domestic abuse (Apart from in the scientific educational community).  I found it quite hard to bite my toung during a lot of the discussion.  Up until today I found I fitted in much more with these women than my peers but today I realised that it could be possible that people from older generations are more stuck  in there mindsets and less open to new information. It felt like a which hunt at times against men who really had no control over the society they were brought up in.  However, despite me feeling sympathy for all men of the human race, at times I did notice and feel the immense lack of equality of the sexes and it is apparent that women seem to have a lot less entitlement than men.  I recall a documentary on Netflix called ‘Explained’ and I recommend it to anyone who’s mind is wondering and is bored one Sunday afternoon. Each episode is a 20 minute long educational video on topics people really should but often don’t understand enough about in 2019.  One episode discussed equal pay for the sexes and it was shocking to learn that some mothers work full time and mother full time but get less pay than there husbands and careers progress at a much slower rate.

I did learn a lot in today’s session and I realise that it isn’t just people of African decent that were enslaved by the white man for  a large part of human history but anyone who was not a white man, or white rich man was not really considered human at all but considered property.  It is very sad but what I took from todays session and from experiences outside of my training is that the control rich white men have on the rest of the world is slipping but it is important for the rest of society to not slip into the old mind trick of treating someone badly because they have treated you badly. We must lead by example and treat people the way we want to be treated in order to put a stop to the destrucive and abusive cycles of human history.  I think America as a perfect example of how not to recover from pain. In my opinion it is the most racist country in the wolrd atleast in the way the American society is potrayed in the media. When ever there is a murder it is emphasised what colour skin the person had or what the profession of the person was. There is this constant right wing left wing attitued, or in the case of America black wing white wing attitude.  I noticed this on Facebook before I left the site. People from America would get into arguments on public media posts and comments would include vile insults about the colour of the other persons skin or blaming the other ‘race’, often completly innapropriate for the context of the origional  post. We really need to learn from America as a whole world and look back on our history and go ‘Ahh look what we did there that was bad, how can we not do those things again’. Instead I’m afraid that our contry could possibly be at the begining of an era quite like America’s  with the white male gradually becoming vilified by society for atrocities commited by their ancersorts they likely have no knowldge of.  I was once told by an ‘African American’ on Facebook (Likely someone who had never even been to Africa but desperate to ware their ingroup lable) that I should apologise to them for what my ancestors did to them.  Which was an extremly uneducated thing to say as my ancestors were actually victims of the haulocast.  Vise versas, I don’t expect every Deutch person I meet to apologise to me for something some stranger put my grandparents through. What I can do is not treat people like that and expect apologies there and then in the moment for peoples behaviour. As a society we need to stop blaming people NOW for things that happened in the past and find an educated and compassionate way to move foward from our pain and abuse and be consious to treat others as ‘thous’ and not ‘its’.  Blaming a man today for what a different man yesterday did is just as objectifying as racism and domestic abuse.

 

 

Reflection of todays blog: So much for feeling less emotionally attached to the subject this week.  Reading this post back to myself also brought to mind the ever changing, what I consider ingroup labels of sexuality. As I read the part where I wrote the words ‘blaming the other race’. I thought ‘But were are all one F’n race’. We are all a family, THIS IS OUR PLANET AND WE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE ONE INGROUP!! I hope that all the new gendre labels and sexuality labels help prevent an attitude like Amerca’s devloping in our contry towards todays men. I mean if there is no gendre to blame for domestic violence then we will hopefully all be forced into taking responsibility, or all refute any responsibility at all which would be a dismissive but safer way of leaving our history as a society in the past.

I would also like to note that as I progress though university I am noticing massive gaps in societies knowledge and willingness to understand and almost a ‘gap market’ for psychology.

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