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The ManKind Initiative, a UK organization devoted to fighting domestic violence against men, recently put out a video that’s been getting a lot of attention in the media and online, racking up more than six million views on YouTube in a little over a week.
The brief video, titled #ViolenceIsViolence, purports to depict the radically different reactions of bystanders to staged incidents of domestic violence between a couple in a London plaza. When the man was the aggressor, shoving the woman and grabbing her face, bystanders intervened and threatened to call the police. When the woman was the aggressor, the video shows bystanders laughing, and no one does a thing.
The video has been praised by assorted Men’s Rights Activists, naturally enough, but it has also gotten uncritical attention in some prominent media outlets as well, from Marie Claire to the Huffington Post.
There’s just one problem: The video may be a fraud, using deceptive editing to distort incidents that may well have played out quite differently in real life.
A shot-by-shot analysis of the video from beginning to end reveals that the first “incident” depicted is actually a composite of footage shot of at least two separate incidents, filmed on at least three different times of day and edited together into one narrative.
A careful viewing of the video also reveals that many of the supposed “reaction shots” in the video are not “reaction shots” at all, but shots taken in the same plaza at different times and edited in as if they are happening at the same time as the staged “incidents” depicted.
Moreover, none of the people depicted as laughing at the second incident are shown in the same frame as the fighting couple. There is no evidence that any of them were actually laughing at the woman attacking the man.
The editing tricks used in the video were brought to my attention by a reader who sent me a link to a blog entry by Miguel Lorente Acosta, a Professor of Legal Medicine at the University of Granada in Spain, and a Government Delegate for Gender Violence in Spain’s Ministry of Equality. He goes through the video shot by shot, showing each trick for what it is.
The post in Spanish, and his argument is a little hard to follow through the filter of Google Translate, so I will offer my own analysis of the video below, drawing heavily on his post. (His post is still worth reading, as he covers several examples of deceptive editing I’ve left out.)
I urge you to watch the video above through once, then follow me through the following analysis.
The first “incident” is made up of footage taken at three distinct times, if not more. The proof is in the bench.
In the opening shot of the video, we see an overview of the plaza. We see two people sitting on a bench, a man in black to the left and a woman in white to the right, with a trash can to the right of them. (All of these lefts and rights are relative to us, the viewers.) The trash can has an empty green bag hanging off of it.
As the first incident begins, we see the same bench, only now we see two women sitting where the man was previously sitting. The trash can now has a full bag of trash sitting next to it.
In this shot, showing bystanders intervening in what is portrayed as the same fight, and supposedly depicting a moment in time only about 30 seconds after the previous shot, we see that the two women on the bench have been replaced by two men, one in a suit and the other in a red hoodie. The full trash bag has been removed, and the trash can again has an empty trash bag hanging off of it.
Clearly this portion of the video does not depict a single incident.
What about the reaction shots? The easiest way to tell that the reaction shots in the video did not chronologically follow the shots that they come after in the video is by looking at the shadows. Some of the video was shot when the sky was cloudy and shadows were indistinct. Other shots were taken in direct sunlight. In the video, shots in cloudy weather are followed immediately by shots in roughly the same location where we see bright sunlight and clear shadows.
Here’s one shot, 9 seconds in. Notice the lack of clear shadows; the shadow of the sitting woman is little more than a vague smudge.
Here’s another shot from less than a second later in the same video – the timestamp is still at 9 seconds in. Now the plaza is in direct sunlight and the shadows are sharp and distinct.
If you watch the video carefully, you can see these sorts of discontinuities throughout. It seems highly unlikely that the various reaction shots actually depict reactions to what they appear to be reactions to. Which wouldn’t matter if this were a feature film; that’s standard practice. But this purports to be a depiction of real incidents caught on hidden camera and presented as they happened in real time.
The issue of non-reaction reaction shots is especially important when it comes to the second incident. In the first incident, we see a number of women, and one man, intervening to stop the violence. There is no question that’s what’s going on, because we see them in the same frame as the couple.
In the second incident, none of the supposed laughing onlookers ever appear in the same frame as the fighting couple. We have no proof that their laughter is in fact a reaction to the woman attacking the man. And given the dishonest way that the video is edited overall, I have little faith that they are real reaction shots.
The people who are in frame with the fighting couple are either trying resolutely to ignore the incident – as many of the onlookers also did in the first incident – or are clearly troubled by it.
I noticed one blonde woman who looked at first glance like she might have been laughing, but after pausing the video it became clear that she was actually alarmed and trying to move out of the way.
There is one other thing to note about the two incidents. In the first case, the onlookers didn’t intervene until after the man escalated his aggression by grabbing the woman by her face. In the second video, the screen fades to black shortly after the woman escalates her aggression to a similar level. We don’t know what, if anything, happened after that.
Is it possible that the first part of the video, despite being a composite of several incidents, depicts more or less accurately what happened each time the video makers tried this experiment? Yes. Is it possible that onlookers did indeed laugh as the woman attacked the man? Yes.
But there is only one way for The ManKind Initiative to come clean and clear up any suspicion: they need to post the unedited, time-stamped footage of each of the incidents they filmed from each of their three cameras so we can see how each incident really played out in real time and which, if any, of the alleged reactions were actual reactions.
In addition to the editing tricks mentioned above, we don’t know if the video makers edited out portions of the staged attacks that might have influenced how the bystanders reacted.
The video makers should also post the footage of the incidents that they did not use for the advert, so we can see if reactions to the violence were consistently different when the genders of attackers and victims were switched. Two incidents make up a rather small sample – even if one of these incidents is actually two incidents disguised as one.
Domestic violence against men is a real and serious problem. But you can’t fight it effectively with smoke and mirrors.
That sounds like an idea Soraya Chemaly presented when she and David were both guests for “On Point” last week. Early childhood, she said, can feed into how you perceive the world and how you behave in that world when you’re grown. She described an incident at her daughter’s preschool in which a little boy continuously knocked down her daughter’s building block castles. Chemaly and her husband spent a lot of time telling her daughter how to fend off the one-man wrecking crew; no one, the little boy’s parents included, bothered to tell the other kid “hey, leave other people alone.”
That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, since I have a couple of kids of my own. I’m hoping that if my husband I send a strong enough message about respect for another person’s boundaries – heck, for their humanity – we can drown out some of the greater cultural narratives about how men and women should act around each other.
Ally Frogg’s comment section is always full of MRAssholes. He’s taking shots at David now? I’m not surprised. I cannot believe that there are people who consider him a progressive ally.
He threatens to ban people if they utter anything negative about MRAs without first submitting folders full of examples of MRAs being awful. The reality that MRAs are generally terrible is UNACCEPTABLE. How DARE you correctly determine the MRM and it’s adherents as vile and horrible!
ABC News did the exact same thing with much the same result. So I’m not quite so sure that this is as fake as you claim it is.
I get really irritated when guys like me are used as a beating stick on fellow rape survivors. I have more in common with female rape survivors than those assholes trying to play Gotcha.
Due to being trans, I’ve disclosed my rape history to people who perceived me as male OR female, and they took it in different ways. The most assholic responses were ALWAYS FROM MEN. (Women, the worst they said was, “Why did you stay so long?” Small change.)
When they saw me as female, they saw me as a bad PERSON. I was attacking my abuser, I was ruining his life. Nothing happened to him, but just SAYING he raped me was an attack. It was a sign of my degraded moral character. They would express indignation, rush to defend themselves (as though my saying I’d been raped was an attack on THEM!), or tell me all the ways I was being terrible.
When they saw me as male, they saw me as a bad MAN. I was weak, cowardly, unable to defend myself. I wasn’t a morally bankrupt person, just a complete failure at masculinity. They would make jokes about how gay I was, or about how I must have trouble getting it up now (only time I ever hit someone in real-life), or about how THEY would do it to me next. It was all about expressing dominance over me, proving that unlike me, they were masculine, so it would NEVER happen to them.
In my personal experience, people tended to be equally assholic, just in different ways.
I wonder how many times thr ABC video is going to get posted on this thread?
Dude, you’re not even wrong. You have completely misunderstood the goal of David’s skepticism in the first place: to show that the video in the post may in fact be a dishonest heavily-edited video that doesn’t portray the truth it claims to portray. David said nothing about the phenomenon of female-on-male abuse victims being neglected.
Dishonesty only hinders campaigns like these. Why perpetuate it?
I’m starting to wonder why FTB lets Ally Fogg blog there. I thought they were trying to be more concerned with social justice than only atheism, going by the rest of the bloggers, and letting an MRA supporter have a platform contradicts that. What next, letting someone like Grothe blog there?
Woodyred: your move
http://youtu.be/AF5zFcmIrfU
What happen to the counting!?
http://youtu.be/2AoxCkySv34
The adventures of mansplainer = every troll manboobz had and possibly will have in the future.
LBT
I am so SORRY
http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/a8/27/a4/a827a462a154c93a99e35e8bc28fa93b.jpg
A lot of people seem to me mixing up the reactions of bystanders with the reactions of police and prosecutors. Maybe people in public are less likely to intervene, but the stats say when male victims report to the police they aren’t less likely to get justice.
Dear ZenIsNotYourThing: The presence of the ABC video does not provide any evidence for or against the issues with the Mankind Initiative video (e.g. selective editing).
Posting a separate video does not constitute proof of what another entirely different video did or did not show. The plural of anecdote is not data, and neither are scientific experiments so do not treat them with that presumption as that is a completely daft thing to do. Even if the Mankind Initiative video had been a properly conducted scientific experiment, that type of data cannot be used to draw conclusions about how the results generalise outside of the experiment – you cannot make sweeping statements about how the results show X about society because that is extrapolating beyond the data points. Given the issues with editing of the video, the situation is even worse because it is not proven that the results shown in the released film in any way actually reflect what happened during filming, nor do we have confirmation on the method (e.g. whether actors were used as bystanders).
Conclusion: the Mankind Initiative clip is not scientific, therefore it does not demonstrate anything other than one can set up and edit clips to show anything one wants.
Fuck off.
RE: fruitloopsie
Hey, it’s okay! I haven’t had to deal with those asspukes in a long time, and I have a wonderful loving husband and stuff now, and it’s all okay, promise! Happy ending!
pallygirlThe plural of anecdote is not data,… well it is, but it take a significant plurality to make it data.
And isn’t pure. You have to know what the frame used to collect it was; did they ask, “have you ever raped anyone?”.
The answers will be resoundingly negative.
If they ask, “have you ever had sex with someone who wasn’t willing; or who was unable to consent”, the answers are different.
Then there is, of course, the question of how one interprets the data. Is the model good? Does the data fit the model? If it doesn’t, what does that say (the economist about whom Freakonomics was written massaged the data in his abortion study… moreover it wasn’t revealed that some of the other studies referenced had been co-authored/overseen by that guy).
One, superficially similar, video can’t “prove” the validity of another; moreover (as others have said) the question before us isn’t, “is it more socially acceptable to not get involved in female on male violence”, but “Is the methodology of this video good?” (with a secondary question of, if not does it help the cause it presents itself as championing).
@pecunium, true. I was thinking about qualitative research as I typed that, but the interpretation that the MRAs and their apologists have had on the video has been purely quantitative so I decided that if I tried to address qualitative research I would muddy the waters.
Your point resonates with me for another reason, namely how to score the quality of qualitative studies used in literature reviews. I’ve argued strongly that it’s not actually possible: because one never sees or hears the interactions between the researchers and participants, one can never know how much the answers were steered in a particular way, by picking up on only certain themes to follow in more depth, or loaded words, etc.
I think we are vigorously agreeing with each other here. 🙂
LBT
RE: fruitloopsie
Hey, it’s okay! I haven’t had to deal with those asspukes in a long time, and I have a wonderful loving husband and stuff now, and it’s all okay, promise! Happy ending!
http://youtu.be/b4810hS8weQ
The Blockquote Monster strikes again!
Fear the charging Blockquote Mammoth!
pallygirl: I think we are vigorously agreeing with each other here.
Prolly. I spent a career teaching people how to ask questions. When I hear of a survey with sensational results (or a political poll) I want to see the questions.
It’s staggering how many are built with flawed ones. It’s then a question of how well the others balance it, and what the researchers do with the anomalous responses.
*chimes in* so called soft science over here! I was a psych major so I can sorta help with the research questions!
Unless you’re studying something that requires open ended responses, they’re a bad idea (e.g. frequency of word use or how people say no [that’s an interesting one btw]). This does pose a problem by limiting potential replies, but for examples like the ones pecunium gave, it’d technically be quantative binary data — yes you have or no you haven’t. Well, it ought to be anyways, bad design happens.
Political polls are usually loaded questions, a good way to deal with loaded subjects is to ask multiple forms of the same question, with different implications (and report on all of them). You need to swap up the order to account for ordering effects, but it does negate some of the problems. For example — x1% say they support abortion, x2% say they support abortion only to save the mother’s life, x3% say they only support abortion before 12 weeks, etc. with each x being its own question. Whether to repeat the questions on another sample with oppose instead of support and average the results…that one’s over my head. I might ask both sets and report the percent who said yes to either, which would likely result in a total of not 100%, but be the least deceiving. This is all in ideal funding land, which is not the world we live in.
Political push polls are the worst. The sleaziest one must be what the Bush campaign did during the 2000 primary in South Carolina. They called up Republican voters and asked them how they would feel if they found out that John McCain had fathered a child with a black woman.
He hasn’t to anyone’s knowledge had an affair with a black woman that resulted in a baby. He does have an adopted South Asian (forgot which nationality) daughter so it seemed somewhat credible.
Bush won the primary in SC. Yay racism :/
Sorry if everyone already know about this. I figure younger USian Mammotheers and Mammotheers not from the US might not have heard this one before.
Lordie! I have seen several videos (Commercials, Public Service Announcements) appear on social media recently. There is one besides this one that caused a rambling argument between countless posters. It’s real! It’s not real! Yes it is. No it’s not. And so on… It’s a VW spot intended to tell people not to text and drive. So many arguments went on that no one caught the message to not text and drive.
Have we as a society come to the point where every message we see in the Internet or see on You Tube must be determined to be real or unreal? The message be dammed because it wasn’t real seems to follow so many useful posts. I saw a movie about WW2 last week. There was a character in the movie saying he was Adolph Hitler. I did not go screaming that it wasn’t real because Hitler is (supposedly) dead as a door nail. I simply watched and enjoyed the movie.
Does it really matter if it is real? It is a video that was watched and seen by thousands. Since it was watched and seen by many people by definition the ‘video’ is a real video. It has to be ‘real’ because you just watched it. It wasn’t an imaginary video or some illusion. It exists. Therefore it is.
What I can’t comprehend is why so many have to nit pick every blood video to bits to prove it real or unreal. The folks who produced it set out to make a message. They made the message. Coca-Cola has dancing polar bears in some of its commercials. The intent or message is DRINK COKE. No one picks the spots apart to say the polar bears are not real. In a commercial for car insurance where a talking lizard proclaims the benefits or the insurance company no one screams about the fact that lizards do not talk and probably also don’t give a hoot about car insurance either. They just watch the commercials. Really!
JIm, I don’t even have to argue with you because you’ve already provided and confirmed your own counter-argument.
See this here:
This is the damage ManKind Initiative did to its message by presenting a deceptively edited video as 100% real-time real-life reactions. By claiming that it was something it wasn’t, it makes them look, well, deceptive, and takes the focus off the message and puts it onto them.
You think anyone threatened to call the police in that woman?
Except you know, SOlange Knowles physically attacked Jay-Z and all most people did, including the media, was joke about it. Had the roles been reversed, Jay-Z would be in jail. Where is the outrage?
Just like Chris Brown! Wait…