Battered Men: Research
Reveals A Secret Side To Domestic Violence - Women Are Doing The
Abusing, Too
by
Keith Thompson
© 2002
When I first heard the phrase “male victims of
domestic violence” I rolled my eyes. My mind served up an image of a
sniveling bully with a bandaged hand wishing he’d had the presence of
mind to pound his wife’s head with an ashtray instead of his fist. But
the men I encountered two months later weren’t perpetrators; reports
of police and prosecutors made that obvious. Yet neither did they
describe themselves as “victims.” This greatly surprised me, because
the accounts I heard that day were nothing if not anguished: an auto
mechanic whose fiancée pushed him down a flight of stairs, causing a
concussion; a teacher whose wife went to jail after stabbing him with
a coiled coat hanger and leaving her teeth marks on his leg; and a
40-year-old insurance broker whose wife kicked him in the groin,
propelling him through a sliding glass door.
“Men are socialized not to see males as victims, and
not to want to,” the broker said. “Most of all you don’t want to be
one yourself, because victims are weak, and men aren’t ever supposed
to be weak, guys have the power, we’re supposed to be strong all the
time, a victim is a pathetic feeble loser wuss – and that’s not a
man.”
“Forget what you’ve heard about domestic violence,”
says Patricia Pearson, author of
When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence.
“The truth is that women are just as likely to batter as men.”
The largest and most recent survey, conducted three
years ago by the U.S. Department of Justice, reported that 39 per cent
of spousal assault victims are men. Professor John Archer of the
University of Central Lancashire in England reached a similar
conclusion after analyzing 17 international studies from the US,
Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom published over the last 20
years.
"If you take into account all acts of physical
aggression, then there's about equal numbers of men and women being
abused," Archer said. He noted that women were more likely than men to
receive physical injuries as a result of domestic attacks, but men
were equally likely to be victims of less violent forms of abuse.
"The expectation I had was that it was going to be
overwhelmingly the women who got injured,” Archer continued. “Given
that they are more likely to be injured, why is it that they engage in
acts of aggression with their partners?"
The first research to show that violence in the home
claimed victims of both sexes was conducted over 25 years ago by two
respected New Hampshire family violence researchers, Richard J. Gelles
and Murray A. Straus. They published results of a survey stating that
“women assault their partners at about the same rate as men assault
their partners.” This applied to both minor and severe assaults. The
findings were published in 1977 as was a book with co-author Suzanne
Steinmetz Ph.D., in 1980. Responding to feminist criticism of their
research methods, Straus and Gelles reworked their questions and
sampled several thousand households again. Published in 1985, their
findings were virtually identical, with the additional revelation that
women initiated the aggression as often as the men. In minor violence
(slap, spank, throw something, push, grab or shove) the incident rates
were equal for men and women. In severe violence (kick, bite, hit
with a fist, hit or try to hit with something, beat up the other,
threaten with a knife or gun, use a knife or gun) more men were
victimized than women.
Projecting the surveys onto the national population
of married couples, the results showed more than eight million couples
a year engaging in some form of domestic violence, 1.8 million women
victims of severe violence, and two million male victims of severe
violence. The study also found that half of spousal murders are
committed by wives.
To say these findings sparked controversy is a
colossal understatement. Feminist activists on the frontlines of the
domestic violence movement continue to insist that the overwhelming
majority (the figure 95% is typically cited) of spousal violence cases
involve women as victims and men as perpetrators.
“In the rare instances where women behave violently
in domestic situations, the violence is most often a matter of a woman
acting in self defense,” says Donna Garske, executive director of
Marin Abused Women’s Services. “The fundamental cause of partner
violence is a belief system in which men are conditioned to expect to
have authority over and services from their partners, a worldview
which sanctions systematic violence against women.”
Researcher David L. Fontes agrees that male partner
violence against women is real and must be vigorously challenged. He
also says there are far more male victims of spousal violence by women
than is widely recognized.
Noting that proponents of the patriarchy theory of
domestic violence often quote a 1977 research study by Murray Straus
showing that a woman is severely assaulted by her husband/boyfriend
every 15 second in this country, Fontes says he finds its interesting
that the same proponents regularly fail to mention that the same study
indicated that a man is severely assaulted by his wife/girlfriend
every 14.6 seconds.
“Feminist leaders deserve real credit for rallying
around the first women who had the courage to go public with their
accounts of being physically assaulted by their male partners,” says
psychologist Fontes, Employee Assistance Program (EAP) manger for
5,000 employees of the California Department of Social Services (CDSS).
“Yet many of these leaders seem to be exclusively interested in
showcasing the maltreatment of females by males in society. This
ignores the clear and convincing body of evidence, numbering more than
100 well-controlled two-sex studies, which shows there are also male
victims of domestic violence by women, independent of self-defense or
the evils of patriarchy.”
Fontes maintains that the controversy about the
ratio of male to female victims is fueled by a confusion between two
very different kinds of research: archival research (based on data
from specialized or clinical sources like police reports, domestic
violence centers, hospital ER rooms, and government agencies) and
randomized survey research (based on data collected from a randomized
sample of the entire population).
“The major problem with archival studies is that
they should not be used to make generalizations about the larger
population,” Fontes says. “Unfortunately, that is exactly what many in
the domestic violence movement do with archival (clinical samples)
data. The serious problem with the claim that 95 percent of domestic
violence victim are women is that archival data only comes from
reported cases of domestic violence.
“If there is a population that’s less likely to
report their victimization, then the archival data is skewed and
should not be used to make generalizations from. Research suggests
that men are five to nine time less likely to report their
victimization than women, which will have a major affect on archival
results. This is why scientific randomized survey studies are critical
in understanding the complete picture of domestic violence.”
Lenore Walker, one of the matriarchs of the domestic
violence movement, echoes Fontes' concerns about the dangers of using
only the reported cases of partner abuse to make generalizations. Of
the women she studied for her 1979 book The Battered Woman,
Walker writes: "These women were not randomly selected and they cannot
be considered a legitimate data base from which to make specific
generalizations."
In a report called
Violent Touch:
Breaking Through the Stereotypes, Fontes reviewed more than
one hundred survey-based research studies conducted over the past two
decades. He concluded that men and women are assaulting each other at
nearly the same rate, or between 35 and 50 percent male victims.
Survey data suggest that 50 to 80 percent of domestic violence is
mutual assault. About 25 percent of the violence is men only, and
25 percent from women only. Women are more likely to receive serious
injuries than men, owing to the greater size and strength of men. Only
between 10 and 20 percent of women assault their partner for clear
reasons of self-defense.
Covering up for abusive wives is a widespread male
response, says Petaluma men’s advocate Joe Manthey, director of
Kid Culture in the Schools, a
seminar for educators and parents that focuses on the educational
issues facing boys. “A key issue in male silence is child custody. In
the same sense that many female victims stay in an abusive
relationship for economic reasons, many male victims stay because they
fear not only losing custody but also leaving their kids in a
dangerous household.”
Robert Mitchell agrees, but adds there’s a bigger
reason most men refuse to go public: “As males we’re taught to
suppress our physical and emotional pain as a sign of personal
strength.” A Sonoma County building contractor, Mitchell says he
reached his limit on both counts the day his live-in romantic partner
ended an argument they were having by extending a left hook to his
jaw. She was arrested and jailed until Robert convinced the district
attorney to drop the charges against her on condition that they would
undergo couples therapy. Things escalated further when she got a
temporary restraining order against him. Mitchell arrested when his
(now former) partner claimed he had stopped her on the street at a
time Mitchell that says he had proof of being elsewhere.
Even more amazing that being jailed for a crime he
didn’t commit, Mitchell says, was “the automatic assumption of the
arresting officer that the accused male is guilty, simply by virtue of
being male and accused by a woman.” He believes some feminist
activists and many police departments share secret common ground.
“Feminists who despise patriarchy can’t tolerate the idea of women as
perpetrators. Police officers who embody the essence of patriarchy
can’t tolerate the idea of men as victims – of anything. The result is
feminists and law enforcement agreeing to cast men as exclusive
perpetrators and women as exclusive victims.”
Claudia Dias has seen her share of women and men in
both roles, and she's doing her best to reduce the numbers all around.
An attorney by training and currently a counselor by practice, Dias is
director of Changing Courses, the only authorized treatment program in
Sacramento that works with female abusers. She conducts separate
weekly anger management groups for women and men.
Speaking at a domestic violence conference organized
by the Petaluma Health Care District, Dias identified domestic
violence “as far more of a family system problem than a power and
control problem." She declared that only about 15 percent of the men
who assaulted or abused their female partner did so because they felt
the had the “male privilege” to do so. “The primary goal of anger and
violent behavior” – for male and female perpetrators alike – is to
"protect the personal and/or emotional integrity of the perpetrator."
Based on over 20 years of working with perpetrators
of both women and men, Dias sees socialization as the main gender
distinction. “Women try to keep dialogue going, while men typically
walk away and refuse to talk. Men very often say ‘I hit her to make
her shut up. She just wouldn’t shut up.’ Women say ‘I hit him to make
him listen to me. He wouldn’t stay and listen, he just walks away.’
Different tools, same damage.”
Dias says that to grow up female in America is to
get a clear message that certain forms of female violence are more
than acceptable – they’re a sign of virtue. “If a man does or says
something offensive, a woman gets to do something without consequence.
She gets to slap the man right in the face as hard as she can. We’ve
all seen it. Frank Sinatra propositions a woman who takes offense and
hauls off and smacks him. If a woman does this to a man, it’s
considered a prerogative of her honor. If a man does this to a woman,
it’s considered an automatic felony. Who do we think we’re kidding?”
Jenna Brooke O’Neil, who teaches classes in women in
U.S. history at Santa Rosa Junior College, says that’s pretty close to
the question that caused her to rethink her one-time flirtation with
the idea that the most fundamental feature of our society is its
unrelenting maintenance of a sex/gender system that keeps women
cowering and submissive. Describing herself as a “victim feminist in
recovery,” O’Neil says her main beef with the idea of men as sole
perpetrators in the domestic violence equation is that the idea that
women can’t be perpetrators, except in self-defense and other extreme
situations provoked by men.
“The appeal is that it reduces some very complex
issues to a manageable band of complexity, or should I say
simplicity,” she says. “Which of course is also its fundamental
limitation. Many gender feminists – myself previously included –
thrilled to the idea that masculinity is a point of view that forgets
that it is one. But that can also be true of a viewpoint that puts the
female gender in the privileged position. And it seems to me that we
get on very shaky ground when we, as women, posit that our gender
perspective is somehow truly universal and objective.”
A more pragmatic spin on the question of double
standards was on Joe Manthey’s mind last year when he challenged the
Sonoma County YWCA’s domestic violence prevention and treatment
program. “The YWCA’s literature represented partner violence as
equivalent to wife assault in all cases,” Manthey recalls. “Because
the organization gets United Way funding, I asked them to consider
making their literature gender-neutral. They declined, so I took the
issue to the county human rights commission.” The YWCA reluctantly
agreed to replace the word “man” with “abuser” in the sentence, “Abuse
is ALWAYS the responsibility and choice of the abuser.”
The Sonoma YWCA has gone further in recent months.
“Abused men who call our hotline are offered emergency motel vouchers,
if they need to get to a safe place,” says domestic violence counselor
Shari Tucker. “Men also get counseling and legal services such as
restraining orders.” In effect, the YWCA is redefining domestic
violence as a human problem rather than primarily a gender
problem, a view shared by Claudia Dias and other frontline
researchers.
That’s clear progress – or sheer regress, depending
on your perspective or more fashionably these days, your paradigm: the
lens through which you happen to make sense of life on Planet Gender.
The Marin Abused Women’s Services has a men’s program of its own, one
that gives men an opportunity altogether different from that afforded
by the Sonoma YWCA. From MAWS’ website: “The program teaches that men
use physical, verbal, emotional and sexual violence to enforce their
superiority over their partners, i.e., get what they want, when they
want it. Men have the opportunity to learn how they have confused
their sense of self worth, character and personality with the
authoritative male stereotype.”
No reasonably conscientious adult person can deny
that too many men do use those kinds of violence to get their way.
It’s very wrong, and it’s got to stop. But why should this be linked
with an implied necessity on my part to start alerting my
three-year-old son that there’s something dreadfully wrong with his
being a guy, a boy, a dude, a human male? Check out how the word
authoritative is used in the second sentence of the above passage.
It’s plainly meant to convey something destructive, even malignant. My
copy of Roget’s Thesaurus offers these synonyms for
authoritative: authentic, commanding, convincing, influential,
powerful, skillful, valid. For me these are not character flaws, or
gender defects.
As a father it hasn’t occurred to me that my son
doesn’t have the inherent capacity to be at once authoritative and
male, in life-affirming ways. Lately in fact he’s been discovering
there are lots of really cool things his hands can be other than
fists. I feel enormous gratitude to the women who, twenty-five years
ago, spoke up to say that men — as men — had to stop using their fists
against the bodies of women. They made America a better country. If
he’s lucky, my son will grow up in a world with a generation of women
who will make the equivalent discovery for themselves. We will all be
the better for it.
Keith Thompson
Independent
journalist and author Keith Thompson is a former U.S. Senate staff
assistant. This article originally appeared in the
Pacific Sun, a northern California weekly newspaper.
Copyright 2002 Keith
Thompson, all rights reserved
