Domestic Violence

Gender differences

Domestic violence tends to be hidden; the visibility of different types of domestic violence varies relating to whether it is more physical or psychological. Easily visible and physical forms domestic violence (so-called 'male') not the less visible, psychological (so-called 'female') forms of domestic violence.

The discussion of domestic violence needs to include a discussion of the role gender. This can overwhelm any other issues, due to the degree of emotion that is evoked by the idea of vulnerable people powerless and hurt at the hands of a partner, spouse or other relative.

Erin Pizzey, the founder of an early women's shelter in Chiswick, London, has expressed her dismay at how the issue has become a gender-political football, and expressed an unpopular view in her book Prone to Violence that some women in the refuge system had a predisposition to seek abusive relationships. She also expressed the view that domestic violence can occur against any vulnerable intimates, regardless of their sex. Given the violence that she herself experienced in the UK for voicing her views, one might be suspicious of some of those who opposed her views, which remain very relevant. In the same book, Erin Pizzey stated that, of the first 100 women to enter the refuge, 62 were as violent, or more violent, than the men they were, allegedly, running away from.

There are women and men who seek to put forward the idea, that abusive men are sexy. This can be shown in the media with the genre of bad boy romance novels. This promotes a culture of supporting abusive men, and of even seeing non abusive men as somehow missing something for not being abusive.

Men or women as violent

There continues to be discussion about whether men are more abusive than women, whether men's abuse of women is worse than women's abuse of men, and whether abused men should be provided resources similar to those available for abused women. What is often missing in such discussions is that, being equal, both genders commit more or less equal aggression, the difference being in the form that aggression takes (See External links).

Males often prefer physical aggression while women often prefer psychological aggression. Unlike physical violence, psychological violence leaves no visible scars but its consequences, to the target, can be just as terrible.

The statistics cited by Women's Aid and Ahimsa are that violence by women against men is a tiny proportion of all domestic violence is rejected by advocates for male victims of domestic violence. They hold that this finding is based in the situation that many studies report only male-on-female violence because that is all they ask about, those studies that do examine prevalence in both directions overwhelmingly find little difference by gender. This is particularly true when questions are specific: for example, men typically do not report being slapped if they are simply asked about "violence"; women do.

Martin S. Fiebert of the Department of Psychology at California State University, Long Beach, provides an annotated bibliography of 174 scholarly studies that have found significant incidence of female-on-male domestic violence.

Studies have been carried out to explore these issues, and results have seemed somewhat contradictory. A problem in conducting such studies is the amount of silence, fear and shame that results from abuse within families and relationships. Another is that abusive patterns can tend to seem normal to those who have lived in them for a length of time. Similarly, subtle forms of abuse can be quite transparent even as they set the stage for further abuse seeming normal. Finally, inconsistent definition of what domestic violence is makes strong conclusions hard to reach when compiling the available studies.

Both men and women have been arrested and convicted of assaulting their partners in both heterosexual and homosexual relationships. The bulk of these arrests have been men being arrested for assaulting women, but that has been shifting somewhat over time and clearly arrest records are not the whole story. Actual studies of behaviour show that whilst half of male/female intimate violence is best described as mutual brawling, a quarter is the male attacking the female and the remaining quarter being females attacking their male partner. Determining how many instances of domestic violence actually involve male victims is difficult. Male domestic violence victims may be reluctant to get help for a number of reasons (see this article) (Article checked August 8, 2004.) A man who calls for help may even risk being arrested as the "perpetrator" even though he was the victim.

The general consensus seems to be that male on female domestic violence is more likely to result in serious injury or death, whereas female on male (which, under the definition used by the UK Government if no others, includes preventing the father seeing the children), is more likely to result in male suicide. Men on average have more upper body strength and socialization that predisposes them to resort to violence more than women do, and that can give them a higher average lethality than women. However, women can and do use weapons to equalize whatever deficit in physical power which may be present, and can also use social constraints against men hitting women even in self-defence, to provide them with sufficient lethality to be dangerous in conflict situations. The US National Family Violence Survey has consistently indicated, in repeated surveys over more than 30 years, that women are more than twice as likely as men to initiate domestic assault, and more than twice as likely to use weapons. The oft-repeated claim that all violence by women is self-defence has similarly been proven to be based on circular reasoning. Women also are at least as well equipped to use psychological violence that forms a pattern of coercive and controlling behaviour (to use the Women's Aid definition given above). Women are also equally capable of using a proxy, which would further skew the results (since a proxy murder is not recorded as a case of domestic violence.)

In the United States, the bulk of the decrease in rates of intimate partner homicides is accounted for the dramatic decrease in women's murders of their male intimate partners. Murders of female intimate partners by men have dropped, but not nearly as dramatically. (See, for example, the report Violence by Intimates from the US Bureau of Justice Statistics. Men kill their female intimate partners at about four times the rate that women kill their male intimate partners. Research by Jacquelyn Campbell, PhD RN FAAN has found that at least two thirds of women killed by their intimate partners were battered by those men prior to the murder. She also found that when males are killed by female intimates, the women in those relationships had been abused by their male partner about 75% of the time (see battered person syndrome and battered woman defence).

Some researchers have found a relationship between the availability of domestic violence services, improved laws and enforcement regarding domestic violence and increased access to divorce, and higher earnings for women with declines in intimate partner homicide. (Laura Dugan, Daniel S. Nagin, and Richard Rosenfeld. Explaining the Decline in Intimate Partner Homicide: The Effects of Changing Domesticity, Women's Status, and Domestic Violence Resources in Homicide Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3, 187-214, 1999)

This suggests that, ironically, male abusers have benefited from domestic violence reforms, and are less likely to be killed by their partners since women are no longer faced with murder as their "only option" to escape the violence. At the same time, men continue to kill their female partners at almost the same rate. This suggests that reforms in the civil and criminal system and social services to battered women have not impacted the fundamental causes of domestic violence. Although some presume that this indicates a gendered nature of the problem, the lack of success may itself be a result of overly simplistic gender-assumptions on the nature of violence (see notes on the Duluth model in the 'Response to domestic violence' section).

Gender roles and expectations can and do play a role in abusive situations, and exploring these roles and expectations can be helpful in addressing abusive situations, as do factors like race, class, religion, sexuality and philosophy. None of these factors cause one to abuse or another to be abused.

Gender bias in the language of domestic violence

When people, community agencies and the media discuss domestic violence, they often refer to the perpetrator as "he" and the victim as "she". This is usually done because the reported prevalence of men perpetrating violence in the U.S. is higher than women. The Full Report of the Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women, Conducted by the US Department of Justice states that "Women experience more intimate partner violence than do men: 22.1 percent of surveyed women, compared with 7.4 percent of surveyed men, reported they were physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, boyfriend or girlfriend, or date in their lifetime; 1.3 percent of surveyed women and 0.9 percent of surveyed men reported experiencing such violence in the previous 12 months. Approximately 1.3 million women and 835,000 men are physically assaulted by an intimate partner annually in the United States."

The largest survey on domestic violence ever undertaken was conducted by the British Home Office in 1999. Over 10,000 men and women were interviewed and the result published as Report 191. This stated that 4.3% of men and 4.3% of women had experienced domestic violence. This highlighted the fact that women are equally as violent as men in the home.

Domestic violence in same-sex relationships

Domestic violence occurs in 18% of lesbian couples in the US so it is obviously gender independent. In an effort to be more inclusive, many organizations have made an effort to use gender-neutral terms when referring to perpetratorship and victimhood.

Historically domestic violence has been seen as a family issue and little interest has been directed at violence in same-sex relationships. It has not been until recently, as the gay rights movement has brought the issues of gay and lesbian people into public attention, when research has been started to conduct on same-sex relationships. Several studies have indicated that partner abuse among same-sex couples (both female and male) is relatively similar in both prevalence and dynamics to that among opposite-sex couples. Gays and lesbians, however, face special obstacles in dealing with the issues that some researchers have labelled "the double closet": not only do gay and lesbian people often feel that they are discriminated against and dismissed by police and social services, they are also often met with lack of support from their peers who would rather keep quiet about the problem in order not to attract negative attention toward the gay community. Also, the supportive services are mostly designed for the needs of heterosexual women and do not always meet the needs of other groups.

Allegations of domestic violence

Allegations of domestic violence are frequent in post-divorce/separation situations. Such allegations may often be third-party abuse, using third-parties such as courts to carry out untraceable abuse against a falsely-accused 'perpetrator' (see article in Nuance Journal of Family Studies). The consequences of such allegations can be serious for the alleged perpetrator since occupation of the home and custody of the children may be at stake. In Australia, mandated allocation of family resources in court-supervised separation shifts automatically from 50:50 to 80:20 in favour of the alleged victim if there is any allegation of abuse; anecdotal reports and other evidence indicate that such allegations are accepted only from women, and that the allegation itself is required to be taken as its own proof, without any checks or balances. It is sometimes claimed that "less than 2% of reported domestic violence allegations are proved false", but anecdotal and other evidence suggests that this claim, as with many supposed statistics in domestic-violence 'research', is based more on wishful thinking and circular reasoning than on fact.