[Niamh.]

Originally Posted by Toy Soldier

My wife is on a make-up community on FaceBook (used to admin, but no longer has time for it)... it now has just under 8000 members... and some of their discussions are utterly horrendous. Several of them DO laugh and joke about punching / hitting / slapping / verbally abusing their partners. Sometimes far worse, including (but not limited to) deliberately slamming hands in doors, or even deliberately backing a car over their partners foot. Often it's claimed to be in response to infidelity but that's not really the point (and quite often it's along the lines of "I *thought* he was texting someone else").

These messages get dozens of positive replies... "LOL go girl he won't do that again!!" ... relatively few saying that it's awful (because it's an all female community, and if any try to say that it's abuse they get shouted down)... but really the most worrying part, is that they get HUNDREDS of likes / loves / "crying laughing face" emoji responses.

It's not very common in normal adult relationships, no (but then, is domestic abuse in general?) but to suggest that it doesn't happen, or that it doesn't get treated as "omg can't believe u did that hilarious!" a hell of a lot in certain circles, is just incorrect. I've seen multiple horrendous threads.

I also can't imagine a male saying "LOL I slammed my girlfriend's hand in a door and ran over her foot " ... or even just "I thought she was cheating so I slapped her in the face" ... and not being immediately (and of course, rightly) torn to shreds for it. There's a large and actually quite well documented discrepancy.

Hell I even just watched an episode of "Friends" where Joey has a "teeny" girlfriend and she keeps punching him, and he tells them all that she's hurting him and they all treat it as a joke / make fun of him as he's "a big guy and she's so little" (until she does it to Rachel and she hits her back ... heh ... at which point they conceed that her punches really were painful). Scenarios like that are really common . Even when I was at school it was quite "accepted" for girls to hit / kick guys if they pissed them off, but DEFINITELY never the other way around.

FB comments are horrendous in general though, the s**t that people come out with on there, I really hope that most are trolling but I fear not

But anyway, why not campaign about that then, why do you expect women to do it for you? Women had to campaign for there own rights (and still do). I would stand right with you on any of your issues I agreed with