Violence Against Women in Papua New Guinea | Hacker News Reader

Violence Against Women in Papua New Guinea

vladsokhin.com

112 pointsmonort38 comments

Port Moresby is one of the more dangerous places to travel, no matter what gender you are:

https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/papua-new-guinea/sa...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/22/population.dav...

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/inpictures/2012/09/20129289...

If you're male you're less likely to get raped by the local criminal gangs (who I presume are predominantly not interested in sexual relations with men), but just as likely to get stabbed/beaten/robbed and left in a ditch.

Thank you for saying that violence can happen to anyone. In Australia, we have a very sexist attitude toward violence. The media (and our own minister for sexism) only ever talk about male perpetrators and female victims.

This article mentions twice that the majority of victims are women(about 2/3), but it purposely ignores violence against men.

My wife said to me the other day, "today's society is more sexist than we've ever seen, isn't it". Unfortunately, I couldn't agree more.

Violence against anyone should be condemned, regardless of the gender of the perpetrator and the gender of the victim.

I like HN because it is less sexist than most information sources, however, the price of non-sexism is eternal vigilance. This article raises a tragic issue In an unnecessarily sexist way. My wife is right yet again.

So they say "Female Lives Matter" and you say "All Lives Matter".

If I learned anything from "Black Lives Matter", it is that this type of response is not acceptable and does a lot to diminish the original message.

The original message is divisive in nature.

Without getting too political, I'd like to point out that the purpose of the Black Lives Matters movement is to address differences between the life the average black person is afforded vs. that of a non-minority person (ie. white).

There's a strong correlation between black and being poor, and perhaps the solution is not to create a divide by race, but rather by socioeconomic status. A lot of problems we have today, faced both by black people and poor people alike, can be solved by addressing the problems in poor neighbourhoods.

Of course that is not to say all black people are poor, that would be ridiculous. But in the mind of someone who thinks in a certain way, because a person is black it means that they are in fact more likely to be from a poorer family, may have received lesser education, etc. So I think socioeconomic status is a much more fair and less divisive way grouping people.

"All lives matter" is certainly reactionary, but I think there's truth to the idea the BLM isn't the correct way to solve the problem.

I think the issue some people have with the BLMM is that it focuses on one aspect of the violence: police vs black population, while not confronting other sources of violence from within the population. Now, me, I think they are both valid concerns. Violence from the police is a big issue (for black and for any population, but they suffer from it the most, proportionately speaking) and it's a complex issue. As recent studies have shown, depolicing/trepidation by police is likely a factor in the increase in violence in large metro areas studied. That said, while being poor is a factor in violence (we can go to Japan or China (more homogenous groups) and we see more violence among the poor or disenfranchised (Yakuza). But that does not absolve the populations from looking inwardly and addressing inter-group violence.

With regard to violence on women, as depicted here in the story, it's not from other women but by males and they also bear the brunt of the violence (2/3 of the cases). So I think it's fair to address this as a special case of violence needing added attention due to the disproportionality of where the violence comes from and who it impacts.

Do you happen to have (or ever looked at) the statistics for criminality of low-income whites? I'd be curious for that comparison - let's say murder rate (as these things are less likely to be covered up) across bottom 10% of income by race.

The mortality gap between white and black Americans still exists, but has closed dramatically in recent decades.

Mortality rates are still far worse for men than women though. But particularly, that poverty affects male mortality far more than poverty affects female mortality. E.g. Mortality rates for financially disadvantaged white males is still very significantly worse than for black women (where as black male mortality is still worse than for either - but dramatically less worse compared to white males than it was a couple of decades ago).

http://voxeu.org/article/mortality-inequality-good-news-coun...

I was talking about homicide rate rather - ie if poor whites commit serious crime at the same rate as poor blacks.

That said, black Americans are relatively more likely to be financially disadvantaged in the first place (which skews the weight of attention warranted I guess).

As a fellow Australian, you're misrepresenting the issue. Yes, there is currently a government program to try and reduce domestic violence against women. Yes, domestic violence happens in the other direction, and in gay couples as well, but the preponderance of the damage done is received by women. It's a social problem, and the government's job is to try to help social problems.

There's also social movements around violence against men. Have a look at Aussie Rules and how 'family-oriented' it has become. Long gone are the days where playing on through a bloody face was a mark of honour. The official football groups condemn violence left, right, and centre. It's absolute nonsense that it's only violence against women that's being condemned.

If you honestly think today's Australia is more sexist than we've ever seen, then you haven't had a look at how it was before. Women were legally paid 2/3rds as much as men - my mother was a teacher in the 70s and tells that story. Similarly, it was shameful to be seen as simply being pregnant in public, let alone breastfeeding, and there was no male analogue for that, no physical state men could be in where they had to hide from public view. There is plenty more, so I'd strongly encourage you to look at the rights that first-wave feminists were fighting for, if you think that it's more sexist now than ever before.

He's not misrepresenting the DV policy when Turnbull makes comments like, quote: "domestic violence - which is just violence against women". 40% of DV homicide victims in Australia are male and 20% are children (52% of those kids killed by women). That's from Australian Institute of Criminology (2015) on 10 years of official National Homicide Monitoring Program data. Women aren't even the majority of DV homicide victims in Australia - and homicides are at the extreme end of gendered violence - let alone DV being exclusively against women. Yet DV funding & research in Australia is exclusively for women. ANROWS, WLS, White Ribbon, OurWatch, DV NSW & Vic (which are really Women's refuge, just renamed), etc etc. all have officially gender discriminatory chartered mandates and act accordingly. Funding isn't put towards "reducing DV" and assigned proportionately to injury or anything. It's assigned for "reducing DV against women", ONLY (or maybe 'women and their children', as if fathers simply don't exist). In NSW for instance, the DV portfolio isn't part of Health or Justice, but is officially owned by "Women NSW" (a genuine matriarchy). Now feminism is all well and good when in cases where it truly is about equal rights, fair opportunities, etc. But that's not what's going on here.

DV has become massively politicised, and if you can't recognise that, when a $30M media campaign is announced within 24 hours of a Federal election, then you're not paying attention. The DV agenda in Australia is far more about helping Turnbull look different to Abbott, because LNP was (rightfully) hemorrhaging in female voter polls. Every other party to the Left has just been trying to out-do him on that since.

If you're genuinely interested in reducing harm against women, then I recommend taking into account data like https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1854883/.

Australia is not PNG. Our DV problem is not caused by gender pay inequality etc. Neither is that the cause in most advanced economies (look at Scandinavian countries with up to 50% of women reporting DV, which having the highest rates of gender equality in pay, opportunities, etc in the world).

I agree first-wave feminism had a lot to fight for. I agree there's still issues for gender equality in Australia. But we're also completely ignoring other gender inequalities, like that 20% more women are graduating from universities today than men, while the overwhelming number of gender-based scholarships here still exclusively support women.

Australia has a long way to go before it starts truly understanding what being anti gender discrimination actually means. "The standard you want past is the standard you accept", should also imply a single standard. When we talk about violence being cause by a lack of respect in relationships, we should be dealing with that by building mutual respect, not just building more gender divides. There's no discussion at all of the impact of psychological abuse in DV relationships against men, despite there being more male suicides every week than all the women killed in DV here each year. Nor is there of plenty of other issues related to DV.

I'm aware this is particularly sensitive topic in IT, because I know discrimination against women still exists in a lot of companies. I've witnessed it more in private companies than public ones, but can attest that it varies WIDELY between companies. There's times when I've even sought to hire women over men, for the sole reason that some environments were severely unbalanced, that it was harming performance. There's also cases though where it goes the other way, including that women are generally paid more than males upon graduation in this industry (maybe the ones who make it through are better, but who knows).

Anyway, I just think the whole discussion needs to be FAR more nuanced than what we've seen across media and government.

You are making the mistake of assuming that DV is only represented by homicide counts. It's a bit like those anti-abortion campaigners who only use third-trimester abortion as their talking point, when third-trimester abortion accounts for less than 0.1% of abortions. Using the extreme case in place of the general case doesn't do anyone any favours. Your link does point out that violence swings both ways and that women tend to be the more violent partner, but it also points out that women are more likely to be injured. Men aren't getting dangerously injured by DV to the point where there's enough to support several battered men's shelters in every major city.

And you know something? "So what"? So what if women get this one in their favour? Who really gives a fuck? Men get plenty of other things in their favour, let the women 'win' one for once. I never see this kind of impassioned reasoning and stats-counting from men arguing for things that benefit women. Women's sport funding is an absolute joke in comparison to men's funding in this country, but I don't see frothy stats about that. Similarly there are government awareness programs targeting men's depression that women don't get. And is 20% more women graduating uni really that much of an advantage, given that men heavily outgun women in trades apprenticeships (more lucrative than many uni degrees, certainly more lucrative than mine), and degrees mean less and less as time goes on?

You talk about building respect, but you're also arguing against any effort that's not totally even-handed if it benefits women. Targeted campaigns work, and there's no reason why we can't have one for men in the future, but seriously, by demanding perfect you are being the enemy of good.

Yes, there's sexism against men. I remember in my early twenties when a woman who liked me punched me on the arm so hard it left a sizable bruise. I didn't mention it, because as a man you're 'supposed to just take it', and of course if I did the opposite it'd make the entire pub fall silent. Likewise, a hippy acquaintance of mine says that he feels like he can't watch children play in the park because people act like he's a paedophile, when he's just enjoying kids having fun. That doesn't mean we should mope about government initiatives because they don't target us. Do you decry any assistance aborigines get that white folks don't? Think that Abstudy is unfair compared to Austudy? Do you decry language assistance to immigrants because aussies don't get assistance to learn foreign languages?

I fully support the anti-domestic-violence ads, because they get this distasteful topic out into the open and overtly say "this is not on". I don't care that it's targeted to violence against women. It's a good thing in and of itself (the ads, not the violence :) ), and whether or not it's politically motivated is beside the point of the good it can do. And if you want actual gender equality, that means giving up a lot of things that us men take for granted, like the aforementioned sports funding.

Perhaps a better way for me to put it is this: stop whiteanting things that women have built to better their lot, and do something to better men's lot (or everyone's lot). I see this in a lot of complaints that men have about gender bias against men - they only start talking when women succeed at getting a project off the ground. I have never seen a man talk about DV in a public forum without DV against women starting that conversation, and a decade ago I used to do the same thing: pointing out DV against men and supplying links, but only in response to discussion of DV against women. Thing is though, those projects to help people do take a lot of work, and they're better for society in general. So instead of decrying the ones that do exist, people should promote ones that aren't off the ground yet if they feel there's an imbalance. Do something constructive for the men (or for all), rather than destroying something for the women. Inevitably the "what about the men" is forgotten about until the next time a women's initiative takes off. So rather than say "God, that's sexist!", say "Fucking about time we got into a public discussion about DV and how to stop it!". Talking about DV doesn't mean we can't also talk about mental health, and it may even help strengthen the push to improve mental health.

I do agree that the topic is more nuanced, but the media, government, and general public aren't into talking that level of nuance (to whit: One Nation is going to get two senators and possibly a lower house seat, and Hanson makes Trump look educated).

I should probably clarify and TL;DR a bit - I don't think you personally are coming from a place of "what about the menz", but out of a sense of fairness. I felt the same a decade ago when I did the same thing - these discussions 'aren't fair'. But I also didn't do anything about it afterwards, despite my passionate words, and the net effect of stopping a program like this would be a disadvantage to both sides.

Ultimately, the anti-DV ads here in Australia can't be gamed for advantage. A cunning woman can't game being hit less to gain advantage over men. No man is going to lose his chance at employment or education because a woman was beaten less. It's not a zero-sum game. We can have the dialogue about DV against men separately to this one about women; even though there is some overlap, the general experience is different. The men's DV discussion also necessarily includes getting men to open up about emotions more; be more willing to ask for personal help and so forth.

But the final TL;DR is that this particular program is not much of a vehicle for one gender to gain significant advantage over the other.

So White Ribbon Australia was a women's initiative now (before they entirely took it over and turned it against men)? Well that's some nice rewriting of history.

Maybe a few more women should be focusing on what THEY can do to reduce their contribution to violence too, rather than just expecting men to do that for them.

If you want to know what women actually did to get DV shelters off the ground, then I highly recommend you do some research on who Erin Pizzey is (who founded the whole movement) and what she thinks of the situation.

Ah, you are actually a "what about teh menz" commentor.

Do you even see the irony of "women should see what they can do rather than expect men to do it for them" immediately before telling me to go and research the woman who started the first refuge? I mean, you're clearly comfortable using single data points to make arguments, so why do you do a self-goal like that?

White Ribbon. Started by men.

Women's refuge movement (and the Refuge organisation), started by a woman who is appalled at what feminists have done with it, because most of the women sheltered turn out to be violent themselves (and often more so than the men).

I wouldn't call WR 'one data point' when it's by FAR the most recognised product brand name in DV.

> "And you know something? \"So what\"? So what if women get this one in their favour? Who really gives a fuck? "

Maybe the rest of the family of kids who women bludgeoned to death, burnt alive, cut into pieces, stuffed down drains etc (all recent cases here). Maybe also the guys who've been stabbed a few too many times, hit in the back of the head with frying pans, etc.

p.s. Hospital record audits show extremely similar injuries for both genders from DV in Australia, with the exception that men present with more lacerations (because women use weapons more) and women present with slightly more bruising (because men rarely present unless life threatening). The only likely exception to that is Aboriginal communities, with somewhat different traditional gender roles (women at significantly higher risk) than the wider population and more commonly impacted by poverty, drugs & alcohol etc.

> You are making the mistake of assuming that DV is only represented by homicide counts.

I'm just going to quote myself here. You're both arguing from outliers and arguing from emotion.

Hell, fuck it. You win. The anti-DV campaign should stop because it's not completely even-handed. Fuck those infants beaten to death because their dads can't hear the footy. We should close down all the battered women's shelters as well. Those beaten humans with broken bones in their face are clearly benefitting at the expense of us males. Never mind that we can use success with anti-DV for women as a springboard for anti-DV for men, getting it into the public dialogue.

After all, if we can't help everyone, then we shouldn't help anyone. Absolutely no step of the way shouldn't ever be even-handed. That would be unfair.

And NO you can't use it as a springboard by socially engineering misandry and prejudice. You only springboard MORE violence by (1) complerely ignoring that women are starting the vast majority of it (2) telling those women to keep going because it's only DV when a man retaliates and too late.

Was that you who flagged me for quoting your expletives? Or are you flagging me for quoting AIC 2015 data on 10 years on NHMP and case notes?

p.s. since you mention gay couples, worth noting that 94% of male partners killed in DV are killed by women. Also that 41% of lesbian couples in Australia report having experienced abuse by same-sex partners, 29% for gay men (AIFS, 2015) and even less for hetero women. Yet, government and the radical feminists dominated DV organisations in Australia still keep pushing the line that only men are violent.

Yes and no. You could walk around downtown out to Ela beach without too much trouble as long as you don't look well off. Once outside that area, you need a crew.

When my colleagues and I were traveling there, we would play a game: What is the worst story in the paper during your trip?

I think the winner was a riot over cabbages that resulted in multiple fatalities. Also saw stories of people robbed in the lobby of the police station.

What is crazy is that PNG was a member of RAMSI, an organization that was tasked with keeping order in the Solomon Islands.

Every day most of the crimes committed are against women from the Port Moresby slum areas.

Ah, systemic poverty rears its ugly head again. This is, no doubt, related in part to the fact that 97% of the land is owned as tribal land, which seriously hampers modern economic development:

The PNG legislature has enacted laws in which a type of tenure called "customary land title" is recognised, meaning that the traditional lands of the indigenous peoples have some legal basis to inalienable tenure. This customary land notionally covers most of the usable land in the country (some 97% of total land area);[56] alienated land is either held privately under state lease or is government land. Freehold title (also known as fee simple) can only be held by Papua New Guinean citizens.[57]

Only some 3% of the land of Papua New Guinea is in private hands

American indigenous peoples also face this problem: You cannot get a mortgage to build a house if the land it sits on cannot be taken by the bank if you default on your payments. This is part of why indigenous peoples are so very poor.

I don't know what the answer is. Perhaps there is some answer that preserves the tribal lands system and also alleviates the stranglehold that has on development. But I have pondered this on and off over the years and come up with no ideas on how to fix it and have not yet seen anything written up that sounds plausible.

In the US, tribes that have improved their economic status seem to mostly do so by taking advantage of the legal loophole that they are sovereign states, not subjected to state laws, and they create casinos on their lands. This provides employment as well as becomes a cash cow for paying for schools and the like.

Most people do not think casinos represent serious economic development per se. It is a way to filch some wealth from the pockets of the white men that stole their lands, but real wealth is generally rooted in industry and commerce. Casinos are largely a means to redistribute money, not create new value. Merely redistributing money is very much decried as a bad thing when we do it in the form of welfare.

> Casinos are largely a means to redistribute money, not create new value. Merely redistributing money is very much decried as a bad thing when we do it in the form of welfare.

This would apply just as much to the music industry as it does to the gambling industry. Casinos do create value; they create entertainment value. It doesn't become less valuable when a company you don't like produces it.

As someone who writes fiction, I respectfully disagree. Art, music and other forms of so called entertainment often elevate the mind and spirit, help people cope with emotional issues and accomplish a great deal more than pissing the night away.

Video games and other forms of entertainment are generally going to have more value for developing people than your typical game of gambling.

It has nothing to do with me personally disliking it. It has to do with me being concerned that this solution doesn't add real value to the system to help people eat nutritious food, breathe clean air and so on.

I think entertainment has real value for the human species. But not all entertainment is equally valuable.

> I think entertainment has real value for the human species. But not all entertainment is equally valuable.

> It has nothing to do with me personally disliking it.

My father was a gambler. I deal left-handed because you couldn't have a relationship to him if you didn't play cards, so I learned to deal at age 4 when I was too young to understand that mirroring what he did caused it to be the opposite hand.

I caught him cheating when I was 12 because I was skinning him alive and his ego couldn't take it. We were betting with Christmas cookies and I was winning about 2/3s of the hands and he balked at that.

I have zero problem with gambling and I no way dislike it.

I still believe that, generally speaking, music (your example of entertainment) as well as art, fiction and many other forms of entertainment generally provide greater value to the human race than gambling does.

So, please, kindly, stop with the ad hominems -- "YOU just don't like it" -- which are against the rules here, and give me your argument as to why gambling has as much or more value as other forms of entertainment or kindly leave me alone.

Thanks.

> give me your argument as to why gambling has as much or more value as other forms of entertainment or kindly leave me alone

I hardly need to do this; you are self-refuting.

You've said that better forms of entertainment produce value by "elevating the mind and spirit" (this is a raw statement of your personal values, not a phenomenon that can be observed) and "helping people cope with emotional issues" (as do all activities).

You've said that gambling is not valuable because it doesn't "help people eat nutritious food, breathe clean air, and so on". Neither do any other forms of entertainment, such as the art and fiction you praise. You've complained that the economic effect of gambling is purely redistributive. Once you've assumed away the benefits, that's true of almost all services.

Your stated concerns make no sense. People who like gambling and dislike pleasure reading are alien to me, but you have no grounds from which to say that they're wrong to believe they get more value from the gambling.

Hernando De Soto addresses this issue in specific in his book "Mystery of Capital". Very good book to read about the issue of property rights and economic growth.

It is apparently available online for free download as a pdf here: http://ebookdig.biz/ebook/q/pdf/the-mystery-of-capital-.html

If I can get it successfully downloaded, I am likely to read it. Thanks for mentioning it.

Well, I seem to have failed to cite my source:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_New_Guinea#Land_tenure

This was a harrowing article. The described cases are surreal in how the brutal violence seems to be an everyday occurrence, something that the men just happen to do when drunk.

I knew things are bad in PNG, but I didn't really comprehend how bad it can be.

I came across this a few years ago watching an interesting documentary about surfing and Papuan culture called "Splinters". Even taking into context cultural differences, this can be considered nothing but horrific.

Cruel and unusual violence is also the case for the South African townships. The crime statistics for that country are a fiction. One judge said she never met a girl over the age of twelve who had not been raped.

The problem is Western and other more developed countries still do business with the country, inevitably enabling and persisting their systemic corruption.

See ExxonMobil projects in PNG: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPIUFZl7f-U

article gave me a whole new perspective on Papua New Guinea. what these women face is horrendous.

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