Japanese Women

POSTED BY DANNY CHOO On Thu 2008/08/21 10:38 JST in Japan
The full title of this article should be "Violence against Women in Japan" but we all know long titles are bad for SEO ^^;
I've seen many more "stop violence against women" posters here but only had the camera on these two occasions.
These posters suddenly started to appear at the end of last year - never noticed any before that. I'm guessing that some sort of decision was made to highlight what could be a problem in Japanese society.
Not an knowledgeable on the subject at all but tried to look up more info and came across a survey concerning the prevention of violence against women.
There are interesting findings in particular answers to "what would you do if you discovered somebody being violently treated by their husband?" The results are as follows. 1.Definitely report the incident (21.8%)
2.Report the incident only if its excessive violence (67.8)
3.Do nothing (5.5%)
4.Not sure (3.3%)
5.No answer (1.6) Those who answered "Do nothing" where asked why and answered as follows.
1.Don't know who to report the incident to (23.6%)
2.Should not get involved in other couples matters (68.9%)
3.Risk of getting beaten up if it was discovered that I reported the incident (19.3)
4.Violence between couples should be expected and endured (8.1%)
5.Other (26.1%) When I saw number 4 above I thought "whaaaat?!"
What would you do (or have done in the past) when you find out that a woman is being violently treated?
When I first visited Japan as a student, I saw some bloke pushing around a woman in the street and swearing at her. She didn't react and just let him continue. Being a young visitor in a foreign land at the time, I didn't have the pair of round steel objects to intervene.
When I was a wee lad back in the UK, I saw posters and TV commercials raising the awareness of violence against women. Whats it like in your region?