Domestic Violence As requested, I am posting the citations, excerpts and contacts I received for my posting on women and rates of domestic violence. Thanks again for all the help! Jo Reger
- Lucal, Betsy. 1995 "The Problem with 'Battered Husbands.'" Deviant Behavior 16:95-112. (Reprinted in Constructions of Deviance, 2nd ed., edited by P.A. and P. Adler, Mountain View: Mayfield, 1997.)
- Nazroo, James. 1995. Uncovering gender differences in the use of marital violence: The effect of methodology. Sociology 29:475-495.
- Johnson and Ferraro's review of the family violence literature in the Nov. 2000 Journal of Marriage and the Family.
- Macmillan and Gartner (JMF, 1999) builds on Johnson and Ferraro's ideas to show that there are different types of family violence, with different predictors.
- Straton, Jack. "The Myth of the Battered Husband Syndrome" Jack C. Straton shows some of the methodological and theoretical flaws of the often cited Straus and Gelles research. This article is published in GENDER THROUGH THE PRISM OF DIFFERENCE, Baca-Zinn, Hondagneu-Sotelo, and Messner, 2000, Allyn and Bacon.
- Goetting, Ann. GETTING OUT, published by Columbia Univ Press in 1999 (just now out in paper).
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Richard J. Gelles and Donileen Loseke, eds."Current Controversies on FAmily Violence" (Sage).
- Mary Roth Walsh, ed. "Women, Men, and Gender: Ongoing Debates" (Yale)
- Pauline Bart and Eileen Moran, eds. "Violence Against Women: the Bloody Footprints, There are 2 articles criticicizing the research in theis area by Lisa Brush and Demie Kurz.
- An edited volume by David Finkelhor, Richard Gelles, Gerald Hoteling and Murray Straus might interest you: THE DARK SIDE OF FAMILIES: CURRENT FAMILY VIOLENCE RESEARCH, Sage, 1983. Berk, Fenstermaker (Berk), Loske and Rauma: "Mutual Combat and Other Family Violence Myths". See also (in the same volume) an article by Russell and Becky Dobash, "The Context-Specific Approach".
- Lisa Brush. "Violent acts and injurious outcomes in married couples: Methodological issues in the National Survey of Families and Households." Gender & Society. Vol. 4, no. 1 (March 1990): 156-167. A slightly revised version appeared pp. 240-251 in Pauline B. Bart and Eileen Geil Moran (eds.), Violence Against Women: The Bloody Footprints, SAGE Publications (1993).
- Dobash & Dobash chapter in Yllo & Bograd eds 1988, Feminist Perspectives on Wife Abuse.
- Dobash, Dobash, Wilson, Daly (1992), "The Myth Of Sexual Symmetry In Marital Violence," in Social Problems 39:71.
- Kurz 1989, "Social Science Perspectives on Wife Abuse: Current Debates and Future Directions." in Gender & Society.
- Kurz chapter in Gelles & Loseke eds 1993, Current Controversies in Family Violence.
- Szinovacz 1983, "Using Couple Data as a Methodological Tool: The Case of Marital Violence." in the Journal of Marriage & Family.
- Straus, Hamby, Boney-McCoy, Sugarman 1996. "The Revised Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS2): Development and Preliminary Psychometric Data" in the Journal of Family Issues.
Excerpt: >In an excerpt from Intimate Violence (Gelles and Strauss, 1988) that appears in Skolnick and Skolnick, Family in Transition (1999), the authors state the following (p.424):
"Perhaps the most controversial finding from our 1975 National Family Violence Survey was the report that a substantial number of women hit and beat their husbands. Since 1975 at least ten additional investigations have confirmed the fact that women hit and beat their husbands. UNFORTUNATELY, THE DATA ON WIFE-TO-HUSBAND VIOLENCE HAVE BEEN MISREPORTED, MISINTERPRETED, AND MISUNDERSTOOD. Research uniformly shows that about as many women hit men as men hit women. HOWEVER, THOSE WHO REPORT THAT HUSBAND ABUSE IS A [sic] COMMON AS WIFE ABUSE OVERLOOK TWO IMPORTANT FACTS. First, the greater average size and strength of men and their greater agressiveness means that a man's punch will probably produce more pain, injury, and harm than a punch by a woman. Second, nearly three-fourths of the violence committed by women is done in self-defense. While violence by women should not be dismissed, neither should it be overlooked or hidden. On occasion, legislators and spokespersons like Phyllis Schlafly have used the data on violence by wives to minimize the need for services for battered women. SUCH ARGUMENTS DO A GREAT INJUSTICE TO THE VICTIMIZATION OF WOMEN. As we said, more often than not a wife who beats her husband has herself been beaten. HER VIOLENCE IS THE VIOLENCE OF SELF-DEFENSE. On some occasions she will strike back to protect herself; on others she will strike first, believing that if she does not, she will be badly beaten." [the authors go on to cite specific examples from narratives]. A similar point is made by Michael Kimmel on pp. 259-261 in The Gendered Society (2000).
Excerpt from Coltrane and Collins' textbook (Soc of Marriage and Family) from page 465 - 468.
"Using national survey data, researchers have found that in homes with couple violence, about 1/4 of the respondents report that men were victims but not offenders; another fourth allege that women were victims but not offenders; and one-half of the respondents reprot that both husbands and wives were violent (Straus, Gelles, and Steinmetz 1980). Such surveys cannot detect whether violence by wives was retaliatroy or not, and the reporting of simple estimates of incidence has touched off heated controversies. What appears to be consistent across studies using teh Conflict Tactics is that reported wife-to-husband assault is about as common as husband-to-wife assault. One set of questions about these patterns concerns the reasons for, and the consequence of, these different types of assault.
One important difference between men and women is physical size and strnegth. If a husband assaults his wife, he is much more likely to inflict pain and injury than if she assaults him. In addition, men tend to be more aggressive, so the same act, such as hitting with a fist, tends to be more violent coming from a man than from a woman. This does not imply that some women aren't bigger, stronger, and more aggressive than some men, but on average a husband punching a wife is much more apt to inflict injury than a wife punching a husband. When studies focus on the differences between husbands' and wives' violence, they discover that it is women, not men, who more frequently receive bruises, cuts, broken bones, and internal injuries from the assault. Official statistics show that of those treated in a hospital emergency department for injuries infliected by an intimate partner, 84% are women (Rand 1997). Usually only the woman is injured, but in the relatively rare cases in which both spouses are injured, the wife's injuries tend to b emuch more severe than the husband's (Berk et al. 1983). In light of the general pattern of greater harm to wives, it is inappropriate to label examples of women hitting men as "husband abuse" or to consider marital violence simply a case of "mutual combat."...
Many of the assaults by women against their husbands should be considered as retailiation or self-defense (Johnson 2000; Straus 1980). In fact, the most frequent motive for violence reported by battered women is 'fighting back' (Saunders 1988). Rarely do women report initiating an attack of severe violence, and their assaults are attempted in self-defense. As to those women who do initiate violence, some researchers speculate that they often sense impending violence from their husbands and initiate the violence the mselves to stop the overwhelming buildup of tension (Walker 1984)...
Other concerns surrounding the reporting of supposed equal levels of violence between men and women pertain to the samples used in national surveys, the types of violence measured, and various unintended biases that influence the results. Michael Johnson and Kathleen Ferraro (2000) note that surveys like the Conflict Tactics Scale are criticized because they merely count acts of violence, making no distinctions in terms of motives or consequences. They suggest that there are at least two types of couple violence. The first type, which they call common couple violence is roughly gender symmetric and involves occasional outbursts of vilence that arise in response to escalating arguments. Much of the 'mutuality' in these violent altercations should also be understood as self-defense by women, and Johnson (2000) also notes that women readily admit hitting men because both they and their partners see it as relatively harmless. The second type of intimate partner violence, which Johnson and Ferraro call patriarchal terrorism is decidedly male and involves violence as one tactic in the implementation of a general pattern of power and control. Among violent women living with patriarchal terrorists, 85% report that their violence was self-defensive (Johnson 2000). Contrary to popular myths, most of these women eventually leave their abusive partners. Johnson suggests that evidence about the nature of patriarchal terrorism is more accessible through samples obtained from battered women's shelters, whereas estimates of common couple violence are more readily accessible through general sample surveys like the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS).
Evidence from courts and police records suggest that women constitute roughly 95% of the victims in reported cases of domestic violence e(Dobash et al 1992). Criminal victimization surveys using national probability studies similarly indicate that wives are much more often victimized than husbands, as do national crime surveys. Even in national probability surveys like the CTS, women are much more likely to report that they are injured than are men, with men often downplaying the women's injuries (Brush 1990)...Many researchers thus reject the notion that there is sexual symmetry in domestic violence, even though sample surveys sometimes erroneously draw this conclusion. Yllo (1998, 613) points out that CTS-like surveys ask parallel questions to men and women abbot violent acts as if they were simply at the end of a normal continuum of items, including 'discussed an issue calmly,' 'cried,' and 'stomped out.' Such surveys do not assess the meaning, contexts, or consequences of these individual acts and do not include consideration of economic deprivation, sexual abuse, intimidation, isolation, stalking, and terrorizing -- all common elements of wife battering and all rarely perpetrated by women (Yllo 1998). On the basis of putative equal reports of violence from phone surveys, it is absurd to consider 'husband battering' to be the equivalent of 'wife battering.'"
Analysis: Your suspicions are correct -- the results are being misinterpreted. It is true that Straus and Gelles, as well as Steinmetz finds that women and men are equally violent (in some studies women are found to be even more violent than men). The problem, however, is that the sequence of violence was not examined. The original Conflict Tactics Scale (Straus and Gelles' instrument) did not ask whether or not aggression was used in self-defense. As a result, women's self-defense strategies are being reported as unprovoked aggression. Newer studies that take timing into account find that most of women's violence is in retaliation to men's. This is very different than the picture of the "battered husband" that keeps popping up in the popular press. The early literature (particularly Steinmetz, it seems) also ignores the fact that women's violence tends to be less violent than men's -- even when it is used in self-defense. The result is that men not only initiate more violence, but the violence they initiate is MORE violent. I'm afraid most of my citations for this info are at home, but check out Gelles and Loeske "Current Controversies on Family Violence," as well and Yllo's work.
Lecture: Here is an excerpt from my lecture that critiques Gelles and Straus. Jennifer Keys Denison University
II. Types: What Constitutes Domestic Violence
A. Strauss and Gelles
1. conducted two national surveys in 1975 and again in 1985, quantitative methods to estimate the prevalence
2. asked respondents to think of situations in the past year when they had a disagreement with a family member and indicate how often they engaged in particular acts of aggression
3. find that between 20 and 25% of adult women in the US have been physically abused at least once by a male intimate.
4. restrict their definition to physical abuse
5. Indexes from the Conflict Tactics Scale
a. minor acts: threw something, pushed, grabbed, shoved, slapped
b. severe acts: (defined as a high probability of causing injury): kicked, bit, punched, hit with an object, beat up, threatened with a gun or a knife, attacked w/gun/knife
5. Limitations: respondent's answers do not tell how long the incident lasted, whether the victim was injured or what the circumstances were. Separated and divorced couples were excluded. Finally, respondents may not admit to violence.
C. What other types of abuse are there besides physical? HANDOUT
1. Verbal: put downs, name calling
2. Psychological or emotional: insults, threats, humiliation, manipulation, withhold information
3. economic: use of male privilege, preventing victim from getting a job
4. environmental: Isolation, control what she does, jealousy
5. sexual: forced sex, demeaning remarks
III. Are men and women equally as violent in intimate relationships?
A. Strauss and Gelles think so. Using the CTS, they conclude that women are equally as likely as men to initiate physical violence to resolve marital conflicts.
B. Other researchers pointed out that a higher percentage of men report being hit by women.
C. McLeod found 82% of male victimizations involved weapons used by females compared to 25% of female victimizations. Males are often attacked while they are asleep or intoxicated.
D. They contend, the average man's size is nullified by boiling water, bricks, fireplace pokers.
E. This led one researcher to claim the existence of a Battered Husband Syndrome
F. Feminist researchers and activists took issue with this finding,
arguing that women's acts of violence are often in self defense.
1. In the CTS, a wife punching her husband's arm with no bruises is rated as more severe than a husband pushing his wife into the wall and breaking her nose.
2. Berk,Berk, Loseke, and Rauma examined criminal justice records and concluded that women suffer physical consequences more than men. 43% of women were injured, compared to 7% of men and men's injuries often came from confrontations with police officers.
3. Estimate that only about 5% of abused spouses are men which is serious, but hardly enough to constitute a syndrome.
4. Women's use of defensive violence, smaller physical size and economic dependence explain why women are the real victims
5. Portraying domestic violence as a two way street has had had unfortunate implications.
D. Judges influenced by Strauss and Gelles findings of gender symmetry began issuing mutual restraining orders. It has also been used to justify cuts in shelter spending. This misuse was clearly not the intention of the researchers.
IV. Michael Johnson attempts to bridge these different perspectivess
A. He distinguishes between (who can define?)
1. common couple violence: occasional outbursts of violence from either husbands or wives with virtually no tendency to escalate, an intermittent response to occasional conflicts, the majority do not seek shelter services
2. patriarchal terrorism: systematic male violence which increases over time, adopted by men who feel that they must control women at any cost
B. So the two schools of research (feminist and family violence researchers) may actually studying two separate phenomena
I do not personally know the answer to your question, but you might try contacting Mike Johnson here at Penn State. Domestic violence and differences in men's and women's domestic violence are his areas of expertise. His email is mpj@psu.edu.
The people at the Family Research lab are really reasonable people. I think you might want to contact them to ask for an explanation of the articles and how they obtained the data. Their goal is to reduce violence and they believe that by understanding the role of all the actors the can better find a way to reduce the violence and ultimately the risk to women. This is not my field of study, but I have had some interesting conversations with the people at UNH.
Jo Reger
Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work
Skidmore College
Saratoga Springs, NY 12866
Office:(518)580-5428
Department: (518) 580-5411
Email: jreger@skidmore.edu
