Violence and sex integration

Violence and sex integration may occur, although in a workplace environment promoting investment in sex-neutral, nonviolent skills is a mechanism that may produce sex integration. Often as the minority sex or completely excluded sex moves even as few as one at a time into a social endeavor, activity, or society, the individual or small group is met with violence. Attributing relative meaning to gender or sex may transcend a belief in the reality of gender or sex so as to reduce sex segregation and dominance by exclusively males or females, that may result in violence.

Sex integration
Sex integration is the intermixing of people or groups previously segregated on the basis of sex. Automatic sex integration may occur in humans naturally as indicated by studies of such early peoples as the San of southern Africa, where individuals of either sex are relatively equal and the society egalitarian.

Violence
Violence is the expression of physical or verbal force against self or other, compelling action against one's will on pain of being hurt. Worldwide, violence is used as a tool of manipulation and also is an area of concern for law and culture which make attempts to suppress and stop it. The word violence covers a broad spectrum. It can vary from a physical altercation between two beings where a slight injury may be the outcome to war and genocide where millions may die as a result.

Violence in sport
There are women hockey players of apparently comparable ability to the men in the National Hockey League (NHL), for example, Hayley Wickenheiser. However, Wickenheiser apparently had little interest in playing in the NHL because of the violence during play.

Males often enjoy the best opportunities and in most sports have achieved the highest standard of performance, but as long as females are excluded from competition with males, one important avenue for improvement - the challenge of better competition - will be blocked. One is often unable to pinpoint exactly why sex discrimination in sport is entrenched, but it is clear that patriarchal notions about masculinity and femininity play a big role. Proponents of sex segregation in sport have been explicit about their fears that integration will upset traditional sex roles:
 * 1) "You play softer when you play against women,"
 * 2) "If I were playing hockey I would be very careful about checking a woman into the boards,"
 * 3)  "I think I would refuse to box if a girl stepped into the ring because I do not think I could stand to see the blood rushing out of her nose and ears."

Though these statements appear to express a desirable concern for female safety and the quality of sport, they fly in the face of the fact that in every test case so far, the ability and competitiveness of the female athletes involved were never an issue. "When used to justify the legal perpetuation of sex segregation, these statements are revealed to be the ideological camouflage for male control." "These men are not only alleging that women have different aptitudes for sport than men do and that they are weak, passive, and in need of male protection." "They are also claiming that women should stay that way and should be legally discouraged from changing."

At a deep psychological level, the blurring of sex roles is very threatening to many men. Sharp male-female distinctions reinforce an exploitative sexual division of labor, the underdevelopment of the majority of the population, and the undervaluing of those traditionally "feminine" characteristics essential to human survival and liberation.

Public facilities
Some public facilities that may be initially sex integrated become sex segregated to ensure the safety of girls/boys in schools, for example.

In some countries, trains have designated women-only passenger cars. In India, for example, seats and compartments are reserved for women commuting to work in buses, trains, metros and by many other means as a pilot program to reduce taunting and harassment by men. Entire railway compartments are reserved for females, where men are not allowed to enter. Kolkata Metro Railways started the practice of reserving two entire compartments for females. There are even whole trains only for women.

Violence as a male preserve
The San people of southern Africa are among the five populations with the highest measured levels of genetic diversity and may be the most basal branch of the phylogenetic tree comprising all living humans. The status of women is relatively equal. Sex segregation appears to be limited. San women gather fruit, berries, tubers, bush onions and other plant materials for the band's consumption. San men traditionally hunt using poison arrows and spears in laborious, long excursions. Kudu, antelope, deer, dikdik, and buffalo are important game animals.

Men's greater physical strength and hardihood on average tend to preserve violence in all or most of its forms for them. The more women there are in any branch of police or any armed force, the less likely it is to engage in serious military operations. No society can survive without either the use of violence or the threat of it.

The majority of experience with violence in a dating relationship has been found to be reciprocal in nature with both parties (male and female) violent at some time. When the violence was not reciprocal, this study found that males were three times as likely to report victim-only experiences than females. Violent experiences in previous relationships were the main predictor of violent experiences in current relationships. There can be a greater acceptance for physical violence or abuse perpetrated by females than by males, and participants who had either perpetrated or received abuse can be the most condoning of intimate partner violence (IPV). For males, a lack of conflict skills may be associated with IPV and generally to situations outside a relationship.

Domestic violence can be a pattern of abusive behavior in any relationship that is used by one partner to gain or maintain power and control over another intimate partner. It can happen to anyone regardless of race, age, sexual orientation, religion or gender.