29/05/2004 00:00
TW
0
Staff Reporter THE only characteristic common to all men who act violently towards women, is their chauvinist ideology rooted in patriarchal societies.... Or so say the results of a study, released yesterday by researchers at the Balearic University (UIB), which reveal that instead of being primary causes, the consumption of drugs and alcohol and being “down and out”, are merely circumstantial factors.


Psychologists Esperanza Bosch and Victoria Ferrer base these findings on 142 interviews, where women who have fallen victim to domestic violence describe the behaviour of their aggressors.

The UIB explained yesterday that the researchers, who have spent 10 years dedicating their time and skill to analysing the phenomenon of violence against women, assert that “it is in the purported inferiority of women and in the so-called dominance and control that certain men believe they exert over women, through the simple fact of being born men, where the origin of this explosion of violence is to be found”. “The most alarming factor, however,” the report continues “is that these old myths persist in the younger generation”, which means that formal educational channels which attempt to highlight equality between the sexes, is doomed to failure, because the issue is not addressed in “informal channels” of upbringing, such as the cinema, literature, religion and the family, which contribute to transmitting the fallacious “body of beliefs” which have persisted since time immemorial from one generation to another.

For the psychologists of the UIB, addiction to alcohol and other drugs, being unemployed and poverty-stricken, (which are factors believed by 80 percent of Spaniards in 1999 to be causes of domestic violence) are used on occasions as justification, when in reality, these aspects are “preconceived ideas without scientific foundation”.