If Your Man Knew You Feared His Potential For Violence by Warren Farrell, Ph.D.
If Your Man Knew You Feared His Potential For Violence by Warren Farrell, Ph.D.© 1999 Warren Farrell
Chapter 6 of Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say
Used with permission of the author
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Save The Whales, Batter The Males
Exactly how do husbands and wives abuse each other
If men are battered more, why do they report it less?
The male "Learned Helplessness Syndrome"
The elderly man's "Learned Helplessness Syndrome"
Do men experience a "Battered Man Syndrome"?
Aren't women injured more than men?
When women batter, isn't it in self-defense?
Is this female violence against men a recent phenomenon?
Has violence against men been censored — Is this why we don't know about it?
Are these statistics for real?
What happens in other cultures?
Is abuse the result of patriarchy?
Is abuse the result of power — or powerlessness?
If men have learned "Never hit a woman," then why do men batter at all?
Don't husbands actually kill their wives more than wives kill husbands, thus making battering scarier to women?
Domestic Violence, Female Style
"Reputation ruining" via false accusations of abuse
Property abuse and career destruction
"My partner knows just which buttons to push"
How innocent women get hurt when guilty women go free
How innocent children get hurt when guilty women go free
Does the law protect women more than men?
Are laws against physical abuse helpful?
Love him or leave him; love her or leave her?
The five catalysts to violence-after-leaving
If a man slaps a woman, should she leave him?
Inventing the victim: A Stage II luxury
The politics of abuse: The great inequality
It is cheaper to empower than to imprison
"Thank you for printing the warning signs of an abusive partner. However, you have unfairly portrayed men as the only abusers. Not so; women can also be abusers.
My brother was married to a physically abusive woman who exhibited all 15 points you mentioned in your column. It wasn't until he joined a support group and realized he wasn't the only man who got beat up by a woman.
After much research, I find that women are just as abusive as men in relationships.
Women are able to get away with abusing men because most men are too embarrassed to report it. With the massive attention now given to domestic violence, it's time the other side of the story is told.
Dear E. V. Liland: If what you state is true, I would like to see the statistics. Although I have no doubt that many men have been subjected to abuse by their spouses, experts tell me that their numbers are dwarfed by the vast number of women who experience physical abuse at the hands of their husbands or boyfriends.
Abused women are often captives in the abusive relationship, fearing that if they leave, they will be killed. Frequently they have been isolated by their abuser, have no money, credit, or job skills, and feel they'll be unable to support themselves and their children. The same is not true for men." 1
Even men who share their personal experiences find that, instead of empathy, they get the response Dear Abby gave this man: "Women have it worse." This belief is so strong that over the past quarter century, women's old fantasy of marrying a man-as-protector has been tainted by women's new nightmare of husband-as-batterer. She feels she is being told to Marry-the-Enemy.
Because men are part of every family, this anger and fear divides families and poisons love. Yet domestic violence is a domestic reality. So why is it that on our wedding day, while almost all of us desire a life of giving and receiving love, some couples end up giving and receiving black eyes and bruises?
I believe that slide into violence is quickened by the popular assumptions about domestic violence: that it is men who batter women, rarely the other way around; that women hit men only in self-defense; that women can't walk out because they will be found by enraged men who will be even more likely to harm them; that this "male approach" to relationship problem-solving emanates from men's feelings of women-as-property and of male power and privilege.
If we believe that it is predominantly men who batter women, it is hard to see why women also need to change: We will continue saying, "Just change the men... they're the batterers," as this United Way brochure stresses.
This assumption prevents us from redoing the male-female dance from a non-blame perspective. The first step is men taking responsibility for sharing their reality. But even as men do, it always surprises me how differently we listen to men's reality...
1. Abigail VanBuren, "Dear Abby," syndicated column, San Diego Union-Tribune, Tuesday, May 28, 1996.
Item.
The Oprah Winfrey Show.
2
Four men describe how their wives hit them in the lower back with a pole, cracked them over the head or in the neck with a frying pan...the audience renews its laughter after each story. The men are part of a
"PMS Men's Support Group."
Imagine an audience of men laughing as battered women describe how their husbands threatened them with brain or spinal cord injuries by battering them over their heads or in their necks with a frying pan.
Note that all of these battered husbands are still with their wives. When a woman stays with a man who batters, we provide shelters to encourage her to escape. If she decides not to escape, we say she is a victim of "Battered Woman Syndrome."
When battered women form support groups, we call it a Battered Women's group — her victimization is cited. In the PMS Men's support group, the woman's excuse is cited — the fact that the men were battered is left out. For men, unemployment often precedes battering, but women rarely form a "Wives with Unemployed Husbands' Support Group" (no mentioning of the battering) to help them understand the cause of the battering — the unemployment. The emphasis of the men's group was on understanding, coping, changing the situation and then, if all else failed, getting out; the emphasis of battered women's groups is on getting out first, and second, locking up the problem (the man).
In brief, when women batter, men's first priority is to support the women and help them change; when men batter, women's first priority is to escape the men and put them in prison. The motto of feminists: "There is never an excuse for hitting a woman." Shouldn't it be, "There is never an excuse for hitting."? None of these distinctions were made by anyone on the show.
An attitude in American culture actually supports the battering of males, as it does the saving of whales. In 100% of advertisements in which only one sex is hitting or beating the other, it is the woman who is beating the man. 3 One-hundred percent. Sitcoms routinely portray women hitting men, almost never portray men hitting women. When he fails to leave, it is not called "Battered Man Syndrome"; it is called comedy. In the chapter on man bashing, we will see this pattern in everything from greeting cards sent by women to Disney films watched by children. This makes it hard to listen to a different reality, that of men who are abused...
2. Oprah Winfrey Show, June 26, 1991.
3. Fred Hayward, Director of Men's Rights, Inc., Media Watch Annual Survey, 1991.
Item. "Michael, 38, a construction worker and amateur rugby player, barricaded himself in a spare bedroom at nights to avoid beatings from his diminutive wife. During a three-year marriage he was stabbed, punched, kicked and pelted with plant pots. Despite his muscular, 15-stone [210 lbs] build, he was frightened to sleep for fear of attack. 'Nobody would have believed me if I'd told them the constant bruising was from beatings by my wife. I still have the scars from where she tore at my flesh with her fingernails. The screams from my daughter as she witnessed the abuse will haunt me for the rest of my life.'" 4
Item. "Paul, 32, a former Royal Marine, said his wife, Claire, an advertising executive, could suddenly become like 'a ferocious wild cat.' The slightest thing would set her off. 'She would pull me to the ground, kick me and pull large clumps of hair out of my head. I never fought back because she was a slightly built, petite woman.'" 5
Item. A 42-year-old British police officer, trained in tackling armed criminals (British police don't carry guns), was twice hospitalized by his 5-foot wife. He didn't report it. When asked why, he explained, "If I was to go up to my mates on the force and tell them my wife was regularly hitting me over the head and body with anything she could get her hands on, they would crease themselves [die laughing]." 6
Notice that all three of these examples are from the London Times. It is rare for equally reputable American papers to run a story in which men's feelings and experiences about being battered are reported in their own words in such depth. Notice also that the wives are clearly weaker physically, and the men are not the passive, hen-pecked stereotype of a battered man. And note the men's fear that if they reported this to the authorities, not only would they not be believed, they would be ridiculed ("my mates...would crease themselves").
The London Times article spoke of the shock experienced by many police officers at the violence meted out by women. As one officer put it, "We have had to review our attitude. Ten years ago it wasn't thought possible that a woman could beat up a man. Now it's a regular occurrence." 7 In reality, husband beating may have occurred just as often ten years ago, but the unwillingness to consider it as a possibility may have blinded the officers to the regularity of the occurrence.
American newspapers are just beginning to acknowledge the feelings of some boys who are the victims of violence by a girl, but not the feelings of victims who are men. For example, 15 year old Bobby Papiere explains:
"One of my parents' lines that I just hate is, "Like your sister can hit you hard," meaning that if my sister hits me, it's no big deal because she can't hit hard. But sometimes it is hard. And my parents don't let me hit her back. So (when they're not around) she'll stand there and hit me — and then she'll say, "I'll tell if you hit me." I hate that."
—Bobby Papiere, 15, Houston, TX 8
Notice that the boy could have told this story to his parents, but didn't. Nowhere is the title Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say more relevant than to boys' and men's silence about domestic violence.
Why the silence? Think of all the ways we teach boys to become men by enduring pain: Football, rugby, ice hockey, boxing, boot camp, rodeos, car racing. Men learn to call pain "glory"; women learn to call the police.
Why did virtually every culture reward its men for enduring violence? So it would have a cadre of people available to protect it in war. The people considered the most in need of protection were women and children. The sex considered most disposable was men — or males....
The more a man is trained to "be a man," the more he is trained to protect women and children, not hurt women and children. He is trained to volunteer to die before even a stranger is hurt — especially a woman or child. Thus most firefighters are volunteers, and almost all the volunteers are men.
Part of the pressure men put on each other to carry out this mandate is ridiculing a man who complains when he is hurt. We often think that when a man insults another man by calling him a "girl," the insult reflects a contempt for women. No. It reflects a contempt for any man who is unwilling to make himself strong enough to protect someone as precious as a woman. It is an insult to any man unwilling to endure the pain it takes to save a woman's life — including the pain of losing his own life. If you are a woman, imagine someone calling you a "baby" because you cried rather than trying to save your daughter's life at the risk of your own — you would know the term "baby" was meant not to insult babies, but to insult you for being unwilling to protect someone as precious as a baby. The ridicule is pressure to consider ourselves less important than someone even more precious: A baby is more precious than a mother; a woman is more precious than a man.
Those feminists who say that masculinity is about men believing they can batter women display the deepest ignorance possible about men and masculinity. Battering a woman is the male role broken down. A man who batters a woman is like a cross-dresser: he's out of role. In a Stage I survival-based culture, it is the male role to protect women by taking control of survival needs. Which is why, for example, 19th century British and American law required a husband to go to debtors' prison even if it was his wife who spent them into debt. 9 With responsibility came the ability to enforce. The male role was to his family what the role of the military is to a nation: Both are assigned the role of protector; but the power it takes to protect, when broken down, can be abusive. But the abuse is not the role, it is the role broken down. He was not treating her as property, he was taking responsibility for keeping the property intact for the entire family's protection. If he should fail, he's off to jail. That's why I call it the responsibility to discipline, as opposed to male privilege.
In virtually every culture, then, manhood rests on men learning to protect women, not hurt women.
4. Ian Burrell and Lisa Brinkworth, "Police Alarm over Battered Husbands," Sunday Times [London], April 24, 1994, pp. 1 & 6.
7. Ibid., p. 1. Quote from Inspector Stephen Bloomfield of Kilburn, northwest London.
8. "Sisters Can Hit Hard," from the Teen page of Parade, September 27, 1998.
9. In England and in 19th-century America, a man was imprisoned for his wife's crime. Calvin Bradley v. the State, 156, Mississippi, 1824. See R. J. Walker, Reports of Case Adjudged in the Supreme Court of Mississippi (St. Paul: West Publishing, 1910), p. 73, section 157.
If we look at only police reports and all-female self-help groups, it appears that men perpetrate about 90% of the domestic violence. But when we study male-only self-help groups, we get a different picture: Only 6% of the men involved in domestic violence say they were the perpetrator; 81% said their wives were the perpetrator (13% said it was mutual). 10 So who do we believe?: Ninety percent male perpetrators, or 6%?
Consider the possibility that the percentages are so different because the people we asked were so different — that everyone might be telling their version of the truth. There was something missing: a nationwide domestic violence study of both sexes.
When the first scientific nationwide sample was conducted in 1975 — by Suzanne Steinmetz, Murray Straus and Richard Gelles 11 the researchers could hardly believe their results. The sexes appeared to batter each other about equally. Dozens of questions arose ("Don't women batter only in self-defense?"; "Aren't women hurt more?"). Over a hundred researchers during the next quarter century double-checked via their own studies. About half of these researchers were women, and most of the women who were academics were feminists. Most expected to disprove the Steinmetz, Straus, and Gelles findings.
To their credit, despite their assumptions that men were the abusers, every domestic violence survey done of both sexes over the next quarter century in the U.S. Canada, England, New Zealand and Australia — more than 50 of which are annotated in the Appendix — found one of two things: Women and men batter each other about equally, or women batter men more. In addition, almost all studies found women were more likely to initiate violence, and much more likely to inflict the severe violence. Women themselves acknowledged they are more likely to be violent and to be the initiators of violence. Finally, women were more likely to engage in severe violence that was not reciprocated. The larger and better-designed the study, the more likely the finding that women were significantly more violent.
Studies also make it clear that the women were 70% more likely to use weapons against men than men were to use weapons against women. 12 The weapons women use are more varied and creative than men's, doubtless in compensation for less muscle strength....
Item. "One well-to-do wife I know of turned the tables on her husband. After suffering repeated beatings, she waited until he fell asleep one night, sewed him in the sheets, and broke his bones with a baseball bat."
— Barbara Spencer-Powell; Overland Park, KS 13
The fact that women were more likely to use severe violence does not necessarily mean the men were injured more. I will explain later why we do not yet have valid information about which sex is injured more.
Here are the most basic findings of the most responsible representative nationwide domestic violence study concerning how often wives vs. husbands were victims of severe violence.
If we saw a headline saying, "Severe 'Husband-Beating' Twice as Common as Severe 'Wife-Beating,' " we would think there was a misprint.
Because this chapter's very foundation rests on the counter-intuitive findings that women and men batter about equally — or that women batter more — I am including all of the studies, and a summary of their findings, in the Appendix [to the book ]. I do this because it is important for the reader to know that I am not just reporting selected studies "in order to prove a point."
It is also important to know that I contacted the national NOW headquarters and the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund to ask them if they knew of any two-sex domestic violence studies that showed any study I had not included in the Appendix. They could not cite a single one. They had relied on crime statistics from the National Crime Victimization Survey 14 to say that women were battered more.
The National Crime Victimization Survey is not a survey of domestic violence, but a survey of crime (as the title indicates). That's a big problem. Why? When a man is asked, "Have you ever been hit," or "kicked" and the context is his wife, his answer has his wife in mind; if we ask him if he's ever been hit in the context of a crime, he thinks of whether he's been hit by someone other than his wife. How do we know this? By comparing crime surveys to domestic violence surveys. In all domestic violence surveys the men are much more likely to say they've been victims of violence from their partner.
What creates this difference? We have educated women to think of being punched or kicked by a man as a crime, so a crime survey can get women to report that as a crime; we have not yet educated men to think of being bitten, punched, kicked, or hit with a frying pan as a crime, so a crime survey fails to get men to report these behaviors as a crime. A crime survey can not hear what men do not say.
Another important consideration leads to men not seeing domestic violence as a crime: the devaluation both sexes place on men's injuries — even when those injuries are equal to their wife's. For example, a US Department of Justice survey finds that Americans consider it 41% less severe when a wife stabs her husband to death as they do when a husband stabs his wife to death. 15
Both sexes evaluate it more seriously if a woman is being hurt than a man on the less-severe level as well, as when a man or woman hit, bite, or throw something at their partner. 16 When we add this to the male mandate to not "air their dirty laundry in public," we can see why crime surveys do not uncover domestic violence to the man, just by the man.
The second key to eliciting accurate information from men is "be specific." If we ask a man a vague question, like, "have you been battered," the answer is likely to be "no" even if he's been repeatedly hit with a frying pan or repeatedly stabbed. But if we ask him specifically, "Have you ever been hit with a frying pan," he'll be more likely to say "yes." (Also, the word "battered" connotes using the fist, which is the male method; it does not imply using an object, the female method. The word "battered," then, holds an implicit bias against men; "domestic violence" is gender neutral.)
When I first became aware of these studies, I mentioned them to a woman friend, Liz, who was the chair of her high school math department. 17 At first, she looked incredulous. But when I asked her to think of what she saw at school, she smiled, "Well, it is true that I do see a lot of the girls hit the guys, but I can think of only one or two cases of guys hitting girls." Then she laughed, "But we sent only the guys to the vice-principal's office, so they got all the attention — including, it seems, my attention. I guess that's an example of why it was hard for me to believe you at first."
Not one to let a math teacher get away with a subjective observation, I asked if she would keep track of the frequency with which the boys and girls hit each other the first time. She agreed, but not one to miss a potential math lesson, she asked one of her classes to "do a survey," to keep track of all the times the boys and girls initiated a slap or punch of a member of the other sex on the playground or in their classes.
When Liz reported the results, she was a tad embarrassed,
"Well, it was almost 20 to 1 when I first started keeping track — mostly girls hitting guys on the arm, occasionally slapping them. But I'm afraid I screwed up the survey. I got so furious at the girls for 'beginning the cycle of violence,' as you put it, that I began to do mini-lectures in class, and the girls and guys doing the survey started lecturing the people they were observing, and soon there weren't nearly as many girls hitting guys.... I contaminated the results!"
I assured Liz that stopping violence was more valuable than surveying violence, but it made me wonder whether Liz' quasi-survey held up in real surveys, once high school and college students started dating. The answer? To some degree. Female high school students are four times as likely as male students to be the sole abuser of the other sex (5.7% vs. 1.4%). 18
Of course, we have much more information on college students, since academics teach college and their students are captive! The average study showed college women being about 40% more likely to be violent than the men. But when the questions were very specific, both sexes acknowledged the women hit, kicked, bit or struck their partner with an object between two and three times as often.
Surveying college women and men, though, may be a bias against men, since it seems that among women and men who have not gone to college, women hit men proportionately even more than among those who have gone to college. (Currently, the tendency of less educated females to hit less educated males more than vice versa can be observed anecdotally on the Jerry Springer show every weekday. So far, I've never seen a man hit a woman, but about 80 women hit men. That was as much of the show as I could stomach.)
Among all populations, most violence was mutual. But when it was unilateral, it was more likely to have been initiated by the woman. For example, in a study of over 500 university students, women were three times as likely (9% vs. 3%) to have initiated unilateral violence. 19
10. Eric Anderson, Jimmy Boyd, Tom Prihoda, "Fifty-One City Study of Issues Concerning Divorcing Fathers in Self-Help Groups," conducted by the Texas Children's Rights Coalition (Austin, TX), September 10, 1990.
11. Murray A. Straus, Richard J. Gelles, and Suzanne K. Steinmetz, Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family (NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980). This was the original nationwide random sample that sparked the controversy after finding that 3.8% of husbands beat their wives; 4.6% of wives beat their husbands.
12. US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, "Violence by Intimates," March, 1998, NCJ-167237, from the BJS web site: www.ojp.usodj.gov/bjs/. Twenty-nine percent of male victims vs. 17% of female victims reported that the offender had used a weapon.
13. "Letters" section, Time, January 11, 1988, p. 12.
14. US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Criminal Victimization in the United States, 1993 (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1995), p. 10.
15. US Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Survey of Crime Severity (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1985), #NCJ-96017; conducted by Marvin E. Wolfgang, Robert M. Figlio, Paul E. Tracy, and Simon I. Singer from the Center for Studies in Criminology and Criminal Law, the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
16. Ileana Arias and Patti Johnson, "Evaluations of Physical Aggression Among Intimate Dyads," Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Vol. 4, September, 1989, p. 303.
17. Liz Brookins, Chairperson, Math Department, El Camino High School, Oceanside, CA; currently on leave, teaching at the University of California, San Diego.
18. June Henton, Rodney Cate, James Koval, Sally Lloyd, and Scott Christopher, "Romance and Violence in Dating Relationships," Journal of Family Issues, Vol. 4, September, 1983, pp. 467-482. Sample size: 644. The smaller survey was by Nona K. O'Keefe, Karen Brockopp, and Esther Chew, "Teen Dating Violence," Social Work, Vol. 31, 1986, pp. 465. Two hundred fifty-six high school students reveal that more girls than boys were perpetrators of abuse (11.9% to 7.4%).
19. R. E. Billingham and A. R. Sack, "Courtship Violence and the Interactive Status of the Relationship," Journal of Adolescent Research, Vol. 1, 1986, pp. 315-325.
Exactly what do husbands and wives do to abuse each other? The most recent scientific national study analyzes violence according to the level of severity by using an updated version of the Conflict Tactics Scale, which has become by far the most acceptable measure in the field. Throughout this chapter, when I refer to severe violence, I am talking about items four through nine below:
Once we get to couples who are not college students, findings of other large studies are fairly reflective of this one. Many, though, show a much greater propensity for women to engage in severe violence. For example, in a national sample of men and women dating, women were five times more likely to be severely violent. 20 Women were more likely to be more violent in the more-involved relationships, as their emotions got invested. 21
20. Jan E. Stets and Debra A. Henderson, "Contextual Factors Surrounding a Conflict Resolution While Dating: Results from a National Study," Family Relations, Vol. 40, January, 1991, pp. 29-36.
21. Mary Riege Laner and Jeanine Thompson, "Abuse and Aggression in Courting Couples," Deviant Behavior, Vol. 3, 1982, pp. 229-244. In "more-involved" dating relationships, higher percentages of women slapped, scratched, and grabbed (23% vs. 11%); punched or kicked (5.5% vs. 4%); and hit with a hard object (0.5% vs. 0%) than in the less-involved relationships.
Item. Men rarely report being battered until their wives have attempted to kill them with a knife or a gun. 22
Item.
The film is
Love at Large,
with Tom Berenger. The TV promo features a woman slugging Tom. The punch knocks him back, but his response is one of gratitude,
"[Wow,] that's the first time we've touched."
A man is fearful of reporting being battered to the police because a man being hurt provokes laughter, a problem reinforced in ads and shows such as this.
Why does a promo of a man being hurt show the man laughing, or in Berenger's case, show gratitude, while a promo for a woman being slugged in which a woman was laughing or expressing gratitude to the man for slugging her would provoke outrage? It tickles our funny bone because we love the "weaker" underdog defeating the "stronger" man; because of our anger at men, and in part because of our unconscious understanding of how men reframe abuse and call it love.
And there's the biggie: Men have learned to associate being abused with being loved. For example, becoming the football or ice hockey player some woman will love (and men will respect) requires his enduring physical abuse, name-calling, hazing, or emotional humbling. News magazines such as Maclean's help us reinforce our propensity to call men who are physically beaten "heroes," even as we call women who are physically beaten "victims."
Taking abuse will get him through boot camp so he can become the officer some woman will adore; and it is part of the territory of
"death professions"
like firefighting or coal mining, where he hopes to earn enough to afford a wife. By the time he is eligible for love, he has been trained to be humbled, hazed, and abused.
22. M. McLeod, "Women Against Men: An Examination of Domestic Violence Based on an Analysis of Official Data And National Victimization Data," Justice Quarterly, Volume 1, 1984, p. 171-193. As cited in R. L. McNeely and Gloria Robinson-Simpson, "The Truth About Domestic Violence: A Falsely Framed Issue," Social Work, November/December 1987, p. 485-490.
"The weakness of men is their facade of strength; the strength of women is their facade of weakness." 23
Men expect neither life to protect them nor their wife to protect them. But we do expect ourselves to protect our wife. So even when men batter in self-defense, they expect to be reported; and even when their wives hit first, men rarely report.
Many men don't report being battered because they believe "private problems must be solved privately." They consider "airing dirty laundry in public" a violation of a relationship's sacredness. Which is also why we don't even report it to our men friends.
Other men don't report abuse because their translation of "when the going gets tough, the tough get going" is "when the going gets tough, the tough don't blame — they do something differently." So even when he's beaten, he still expects himself to be "Timex Tough" (to "take a licking and keep on ticking") .
Like women, men feel it's up to them to change. They are amazed when they hear women say the same thing ("I felt it was my fault") and then see the woman call the police. To the man, if you genuinely feel it's your fault, you don't call the police.
A battered man imagines that if he calls the police and says, "Please come over, my wife just hit me," he'll become the precinct's "Wimp of the Night." A battered man knows there are no shelters for battered men because no one really believes he exists. Men fear being denounced as an abuser if he beats a woman and laughed at as a wimp if he is beaten by a woman.
Both sexes feel helpless when the love of their life turns into the nightmare of their life. But men, for all these reasons, feel much more helpless about asking for outside help. In brief, women's strength is in knowing when they feel helpless. Men's weakness is not knowing. The fact that we have identified women's "learned helplessness" but not men's is, it turns out, a sign that the women's problem is on its way to being solved, while the men's is as yet unrecognized.
23. Lawrence Diggs, "Sexual Abuse of Men by Women," Transitions, November/December, 1990, p. 10.
Carlos Mello's wife wouldn't let him sleep. He reported that his wife would grab him by his genitals and "pull, squeeze, and twist them until I could not stand the pain any longer and I would just stay awake." 24 He didn't report to the hospital until she had prevented his sleeping for three days and his genital area was "swollen to the size of a small balloon," according to the report. Although neighbors confirmed they had been hearing loud screams and moans for three days, Mello had been reluctant to discuss the ruckus when neighbors knocked on his door. When he finally did report to the police, his wife denied she had beaten him, dismissing his condition as "he must have fallen out of bed."
Many elderly men who are abused by their wives report their wives' anger at their failure to be useful — as a breadwinner or home repairer. The man has gone from protector to needing protection, and that is a set up for her anger. The man's shame and dependency often prevents him from reporting his wife's abuse.
The unwillingness of abused men to come forward is a classic symptom of "Male Learned Helplessness." The elderly man feels helpless physically, emotionally, and socially: physically, because he is often 10 to 15 years closer to death; emotionally, because male socialization is a retardant to emotional communication; socially, because the network of friends he built up at work are more likely to be spread out among many communities whereas the network of friends his wife built up are more likely to be in her neighborhood and her community. This physical, emotional, and social combination creates the Elderly Man's Learned Helplessness Syndrome.
24. Associated Press, "Elderly Man Says Wife Beat Him for Three Days," Dayton Daily News, March 9, 1984, p. 32.
Feminist literature has helped us understand the many reasons a woman may remain in an abusive relationship — from economic fears to low self-esteem to fears of enraging the man and having him track her down and become even more abusive. The usual image is that the woman cannot afford to leave, but low-income wives are more likely than high-income wives to leave abusive situations. 25 This suggests that the man's money may keep a woman but his lack of money does not prevent her from leaving.
Men's fears of leaving can include those, but they are usually quite different. I've already discussed men's fears of asking for help and reporting abuse, and the plight of elderly men's experience of learned helplessness. But three other reasons battered men fear leaving are even more crucial...
A battered man knows that if his wife has been abusing him, she has often been abusing the children; leaving her means leaving his children unprotected from her abuse.
Second, a man who loses his wife often feels his children are his only remaining source of love.
Finally, abused men know that if they leave, their wives will not only get the children, but the home. For many men, "Home, Home on the Range" is more appealing than "Apartment, Apartment on the Range."
Many men, then, endure the physical hurt of being beaten rather than endure the emotional torture of feeling they've left their own children unprotected, lost love, and lost their home. When these combine with the helplessness that emerges from the fear of asking for help, they create the "Battered Man Syndrome."
25. Suzanne Steinmetz, "Women and Violence," American Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol. 34, No. 3, 1980, pp. 334-350.
" Dear Editor: Your article [Time] on domestic violence states that women are unlikely to inflict much damage on men because wives are generally smaller. Yet in my experience as an emergency-room physician, I treated more men than women for such injuries.... I have seen men cut with an ax, scalded with hot water, smashed with a fireplace poker, and knocked out by a brick, not to mention suffering the common gunshot wound. One incident involved a woman who walked into the hospital with a broken nose after being punched by her husband during an argument. We set the nasal bones and discharged her. Two hours later, her husband was wheeled in. He was admitted with a fractured spine. As soon as she got home, she had grabbed him by the lapels and thrown him against the kitchen stove."
— Velimir Svoren, MD; Chatsworth, GA 26
Despite the fact that women are more likely to use weapons and severe violence against men, 1.9% of the men and 2.3% of the women surveyed said they had sought medical treatment for an injury due to partner abuse in 1992. 27 Is this because a frying pan hurts a man less than a fist hurts a woman — because, as a female classmate of Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) put it, "They can't paddle me!...Girls have more delicate heinies"? 28
Or is there something wrong with the way we are measuring who is injured? To measure which sex is injured more by measuring which sex reports to the doctor more is to make the same mistake we made by assuming women were battered more because they reported domestic violence to the police more. Women are almost twice as likely to go to doctors as are men — men's injuries have to be much more serious before they seek attention.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg. When I do a radio show and ask men who have been severely battered to call in anonymously, it is rare for them to have sought medical attention even for a broken arm. But if they do, they almost always report it as an athletic injury ("I was going up for a basket, this guy put his elbow in my eye, I come down on my arm. I end up with a black eye, a broken arm and a 'gee, sorry, man'"). No man I ever spoke with said that such an explanation created skepticism. So the second reason that measuring which sex is injured more by looking at the reporting of injuries to doctors is that men's rougher sports gives them a natural excuse to avoid the association of the injury with domestic violence.
Third, doctors are not trained to cross examine the man to see whether the claim of an athletic injury might be a cover up. If the doctor's a man, he's more likely to bond with the basketball player by asking him if he made the basket! In contrast, doctors are now trained to cross examine a woman. The US Surgeon General sends out information on spouse abuse only to doctors who deal with women (28,000 obstetricians and gynecologists). 29 It is designed to assist doctors in recognizing the subtle signs of spouse abuse among women and to encourage doctors to encourage women to report it. This is a result of feminist pressure to educate the medical community. Men's silence has not created much pressure.
It is exactly the feeling that men are stronger — usually true — that gives women permission for hitting them harder and using weapons. This is even true in mother's attitudes toward their sons vs. their daughters. Sons are more than twice as likely as daughters to be injured when their mothers hit them. 30
How do we learn who actually does experience more injury? First, we need to remember that a "my-injury-is-worse-than-your-injury" approach to family violence does nothing to solve the problem — it just reinforces the one-sided blaming that undermines real solutions like communication.
If we do want data on who is more hurt, we need to stop asking about coping mechanisms — which is what who sees a doctor measures — and start asking both sexes specific questions about the actual damage and healing time of the injuries: "Was your skin broken — did you bleed? Did you suffer any bruises? Any scratches?...black eyes?...broken bones? How long did they take to heal? Was that the time it took with or without treatment?" But again, let's work on solutions rather than on "who's the biggest victim?" The only reason, throughout the book, that I concern myself with men as victims at all is because the pretense that men are only the perpetrators has led us to ignoring men or blaming men — and that poisons love between the sexes.
26. "Letters" section, Time, January 11, 1988, p. 12, referring to article in "Behavior" section, Time, December 21, 1987.
27. Barbara J. Morse, "Beyond the Conflict Tactics Scale: Assessing Gender Differences in Partner Violence," Violence and Victims, Vol. 10, No. 4, 1995, pp. 251-272. Of the 13.5% of men who were injured, 14.3% of them sought medical attention (0.135 x 0.143 ~ 0.019 or 1.9%). Similarly, of the 20.1% of women who were injured, 11.8% of them sought medical attention (0.201 x 0.118 ~ 0.023 or 2.3%). Acknowledgement to Cathy Young.
28. Bill Waterson, Calvin and Hobbes, June 5,1986.
29. The packet was sent by US Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, January, 1989. See "US To Help Doctors Spot Spouse Abuse," Chicago Sun-Times Wires, Chicago Sun-Times, January 4, 1989.
30. Suzanne K. Steinmetz, "Women and Violence," op. cit.,: Victims and Perpetrators," American Journal of Psychotherapy, Volume 34, 1980, p. 339. As cited in R. L. McNeely and Gloria Robinson-Simpson, "The Truth About Domestic Violence," op. cit.: A Falsely Framed Issue," Social Work, November/December 1987, p. 485-490.
One of the valid objections to the initial domestic violence surveys was that perhaps women were violent only in self-defense. Interestingly, when Straus and Gelles checked this out, they asked only women their opinion as to who had struck the first blow. Their findings? Even 53% of the women acknowledged they had struck the first blow. 31
Other researchers asked both sexes. And asked not only who struck the first blow, but who did so without retaliation. Here is what they found:
Many studies now confirm women being more likely to strike the first blow, or to be severely violent without the husband reciprocating. 32 We saw above that this started in high school. I'm unaware of any significant two-sex domestic violence study showing the opposite, nor could NOW headquarters cite any.
Isn't it often claimed that when women kill their husbands, it is in self-defense? Yes. However, when Dr. Coramae Richey Mann checked out these claims, she discovered only 10% were valid. 33 That is, when women killed their husbands, they usually claimed self-defense, even when their husbands were in wheel chairs. Others explained it was when their husband was asleep. If self-defense is defined as it always has been by the law, as a response to an immediate threat to one's life, from which one cannot escape, then neither meets the self-defense standard. But feminists have created a for-women-only defense (the Learned Helplessness Defense, based on the "Battered Woman Syndrome"), allowing a woman who could escape, but was fearful, to kill a sleeping man and then claim in court it was self-defense because he had previously abused her repeatedly and she was afraid to leave. The problem is, the husband is too dead to defend himself. And the court can't hear what men are too dead to say.
In contrast, when men claim self-defense, they are often not even believed by their counselors. For example, when Steve Murray describes the abusive men he counsels, he explains, "They whine and they bitch and they cry and they say, 'She attacked me first.' Pretty soon another guy is saying, 'That's the way it happened to me!'" 34 A second later Murray adds, "When a man resolves a conflict by hitting his wife, there are no longer two sides to the story. No one ever deserves to get hit."
Although Murray says, "No one ever deserves to get hit," he discounts the men the moment they say they were hit. Even when the men claim self-defense ("She attacked me first"), they are discounted as whiners, bitchers, and crybabies. By not believing the men — but believing only their wives — the social worker is able to justify putting the men in groups for perpetrators, their wives in groups for victims. If the women had all claimed the men hit them first, it would be used to reinforce the stereotype that women never hit except in self-defense.
31. Murray A. Straus and Richard J. Gelles, Physical Violence in American Families: Risk Factors and Adaptations to Violence in 8,145 Families (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 1990). As cited in Murray A. Straus, "Assaults on Wives by Husbands: Implications for Primary Prevention of Marital Violence," Family Research Laboratory, University of New Hampshire, November, 1989.
32. See for examples: Susan B. Sorenson and Cynthia A. Telles, "Self-Reports of Spousal Violence in a Mexican-American and Non-Hispanic White Population," Violence and Victims, Vol. 6, 1991, pp. 3-15; June Henton, et. al., Rodney Cate, James Koval, Sally Lloyd, and Scott Christopher, "Romance and Violence in Dating Relationships," op. cit., Journal of Family Issues, Vol. 4, September, 1983, pp. 467-482; and Boyd C. Rollins and Yaw Oheneba-Sakyi, "Physical Violence in Utah Households," Journal of Family Violence, Vol. 5, 1990, pp. 301-309.
33. Coramae Richey Mann, "Getting Even? Women Who Kill in Domestic Encounters," Justice Quarterly (Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences: 1988), Vol. 5, No. 1, March, 1988, p. 33-51.
34. I. P. Weston, "Battered Women Walk Legal, Lethal Tightropes," Santa Barbara News-Press, May 13, 1991, p. A1.
Is this gap between male and female violence in the home just recent (since laws against wife-battering have just recently become tougher)? It is unlikely, but we can't be positive of the answer, since the first large nationwide random sample study was not done until 1975. Here is how the 1975 results compare to 1992.
Fortunately, severe violence against wives decreased 48%; against husbands, it decreased 2%. However, what the table does not mention is another result of the comparison: Although overall violence (including minor violence, like shoving or slapping) against women decreased, overall violence against men increased. 35
35. 1975 and 1985 National Family Violence Surveys, based on nationwide random population samples of 2143 cases in 1975 and 3520 cases in 1985, conducted by the Family Research Lab (University of New Hampshire), as cited in Murray Straus and Richard Gelles, "Societal Change and Change in Family Violence from 1975 to 1985 as Revealed by Two National Surveys," Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 48, 1986, p. 470, Table 2.
Yes, studies reporting violence against men have been censored. How this censorship occurs is the subject of chapter eight on the lace curtain, but when it comes to domestic violence, the censorship is both direct, which is quite a story; and indirect, which is the real story.
Directly first. Suzanne Steinmetz shared with me how shortly after she published an article titled "The Battered Husband Syndrome" in 1978, 36 she received a bomb threat at a speech she was giving at the University of Delaware. 37 She received threatening phone calls at home from women who said, "If you don't stop talking about battered men, something's going to happen to your children and it won't be safe for you to go out." It's ironic that women saying that women couldn't be violent were threatening violence.
Although the group of women never harmed Steinmetz physically, they did try to damage her career. Steinmetz recalled that it wasn't until years later that she learned these women had secretly contacted female faculty at the university where she was employed and urged the women to work against her for promotion and tenure.
Richard Gelles, the co-pioneer with Suzanne Steinmetz and Murray Straus of these early studies, reports that Straus was rarely invited to speak at conferences on domestic violence after the three of them published their initial studies. When he was, he was unable to complete his presentation because of yells and shouts from the audience that stopped only when he was driven from the stage. 38 Whereas he used to be nominated frequently for elected office in scientific societies (such as the American Sociological Association), he has not been nominated for any office since then. 39
Now, the more indirect censorship. Richard Gelles wanted to present both feminist and non-feminist perspectives on domestic violence in a book he was editing. The feminist scholar accepted until she was informed there would be other points of view. Then she told Richard Gelles that she would not only refuse to submit anything, but she would "see to it that no feminist would contribute a chapter." 40
In Canada, a University of Alberta study found 12% of husbands to be victims of violence by their wives and 11% of wives to be victims, but only the violence against women was published. 41 Even when Earl Silverman, six years later, was able to get the data from an assistant who had helped prepare the original study, and then wrote it up himself, he was unable to get it published.
Similarly, another major Canadian study of dating couples found 46% of women vs. 18% of the men to be physically violent. You guessed it. The 18% male violence was published immediately. 42 Not only was the 46% female violence left unpublished, but the authors did not acknowledge in the Canadian Journal of Sociology that their study had ever included violence against men.
When a Canadian professor found out, he requested to see the data and was refused. 43 [EJF note: In a personal communication dated July 4, 2005, Prof. Dutton states that it was actually Kim Bartholomew who shamed him into finally publishing the female violence results, not John Fekete]. It was only when he exposed the refusal in his next book combined with another three more years of pressure, that the 46% female violence was released and published. 44 By that time (1997), Canadian policy giving government support for abused women but not abused men had been entrenched. As were the bureaucracies; as were the private funding sources like United Way...
By 1999 United Way of Greater Toronto increased their yearly allocation for services to abused women and children by $1-million, to $3.3-million per year. To abused men and children: $0. I asked the research director whether the research to determine need had included abused men and children. The answer? No. 45
It was the United States, though, that set the precedent for this censorship. In 1979, Louis Harris and Associates conducted a survey of domestic violence commissioned by the Kentucky Commission on Women. However, when the results of the study were published, 46 only the abuse of the women was included; abuse by the women was censored. 47 (The women themselves acknowledged attacking men who had not attacked them 38% of the time). 48 The existence of those data became known and published only when some professors were later able to obtain the original computer tape. 49
Why would these findings be ignored by academicians whose life passion is seeking the truth? One colleague, R. L. McNeely, who pioneered the analysis of research in domestic violence, 50 told me, "I'll tell you why — as soon as I published results along these lines I received a letter threatening to stop my funding."
A portion of government funding to a professor usually goes to the university. Funding is often what allows a university to keep a professor hired. If the professor is supporting a family it creates an ethical dilemma: When does being responsible become irresponsible? And, of course, the instinct to protect-the-female makes him or her fear that acknowledging male pain means discounting female pain.
36. Suzanne Steinmetz, "The Battered Husband Syndrome," Victimology, Vol. 2, 1977/78, pp. 499-509.
37. Interview with Suzanne Steinmetz, September 11, 1997.
38. Richard J. Gelles, "Research and Advocacy: Can One Wear Two Hats?," Family Process, Vol. 33, March, 1994, p. 94. Confirmed in phone interview with Murray Straus, March 31, 1999.
39. Murray Straus, Phone interview, March 31, 1999.
40. Richard J. Gelles, "Research and Advocacy," op. cit.: "Can One Wear Two Hats?," Family Process, Vol. 33, March, 1994, p. 94. Gelles' co-editor was Donileen Loseke.
41. Leslie W. Kennedy and Donald G. Dutton, "The Incidence of Wife Assault in Alberta," Canadian Journal Of Behavioral Science, Vol. 21, 1989, pp. 40-54. The research was conducted in 1987 by the University of Alberta's Population Research Laboratory. In an interview with Earl Silverman on September 2, 1997, he explained he received the censored research six years later from Bob Adebayo, who had assisted Kennedy and Dutton in the preparation of their original data. Even after Silverman received the data, he could not get it published. See Earl Silverman, "A Proposal To Prevent Spouse Abuse Through Crisis Intervention For Male Partners," unpublished manuscript, May, 1996, p. 10.
42. Walter DeKeseredy and Katharine Kelly, "The Incidence and Prevalence of Woman Abuse in Canadian University and College Dating Relationships," Canadian Journal of Sociology, Vol. 18, 1993, pp. 137-159.
43. John Fekete, Moral Panic: Biopolitics Rising (Montreal: Robert Davies Publishing, 1994), pp. 79-80.
44. Walter S. DeKeseredy, Daniel G. Saunders, Martin D. Schwartz, and Shahlid Alvi, "The Meanings and Motives for Women's Use of Violence in Canadian College Dating Relationships: Results from a National Survey," Sociological Spectrum, Vol. 17, 1997, pp. 199-222.
45. Diane Hill, Director of Policy and Research for the United Way of Greater Toronto, email of February 22, 1999.
46. Mark Schulman, "A Survey Of Spousal Violence Against Women In Kentucky" (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, July 1979), Study No. 792701, conducted for Kentucky Commission on Women and sponsored by the US Department of Justice, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration.
47. Murray A. Straus, "Physical Assaults by Wives: A Major Social Problem," Current Controversies on Family Violence, Richard Gelles and Donileen Loseke, eds. (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993), pp. 72-73.
49. Carlton A. Hornung, B. Claire McCullough, and Taichi Sugimoto, "Status Relationships in Marriage: Risk Factors in Spouse Abuse," Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 43, August, 1981, pp. 675-692.
50. R. L. McNeely and Gloria Robinson-Simpson, "The Truth About Domestic Violence," op. cit.: A Falsely Framed Issue," Social Work, November/December 1987, p. 485-490.
Headlines like these
51
make it difficult to believe statistics based on equal samplings of both sexes:
Are these headlines at all true? Yes. It is true that about 50% of women are shoved, slapped, or otherwise abused during their lifetime (which is how the article explains the headline), but that is also true of an even higher percentage of men. Why do we only know about the women? Because, as the second headline points out, it is the world's women who are "speaking as one" against abuse — the world's men aren't even speaking. The men are the silent battered.
The result? We have solidified our view of men as the perpetrators, making it shocking to view men as equally battered.
One of the biggest barriers to hearing this information is the belief that when women hit, it is in self-defense. So let's check this out emotionally first. Which requires running it past our personal life experience. In my workshops I ask my audiences to ask themselves two questions about each romantic relationship they have had in their life:
• On your right hand, use one finger to represent each relationship in which you hit your partner (a non-playful slap or more) the first time — before she or he ever hit you. The number?____
• On your left hand, use one finger to represent each relationship in which your partner hit you the first time. The number?____
Remember, only one finger per relationship — and only the first time counts. Take out a moment to do this. It's crucial to understanding this chapter on the emotional level.
Chances are, if you are a man, you will have a harder time remembering — a man treats a slap as forgettable; a woman does not. Nevertheless, if you've hit or been hit at all, it is likely more women will have hit you the first time than vice-versa. Now run this by a few friends.... The men are likely to recall being hit the first time more than the other way around; the women are likely to recall it being closer to equal, with their hitting the first time slightly more frequently — which basically matches the findings of the 50 surveys I reviewed. (The surveys, after all, came from real people's reports.)
Despite all these findings, early researchers still concluded that we should not be distracted from the current social policy of giving first attention to wives. 52 To rationalize their conclusion, they assumed that women as a group were more locked in to marriage and therefore less able to escape abuse. They ignored the data telling us that over 60% of divorces are initiated by women — and that when women have children it goes up to 65%. 53 And they ignored findings that men who are abused also feel locked in to marriage because they know their wives are much more likely to retain the children after divorce and they fear the children will be abused. 54
51. Linda Castrone, "50% of Women Feel Cold Hand of a Batterer," Rocky Mountain News, February 5, 1990 and Kathleen Hendrix, "World's Women Speak as One Against Abuse," Los Angeles Times, May 27, 1991, p. E1.
52. Murray A. Straus, Richard J. Gelles, Suzanne K. Steinmetz, Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family (NY: Doubleday/Anchor, 1980), op. cit., p. 43-44.
53. Wives initiate 61% of all divorce cases. When the couple has children, women initiate 65% of divorces. See "Monthly Vital Statistics Report: Advance Report of Final Divorce Statistics, 1987," National Center for Health Statistics, Vol. 38, No. 12, Supplement 2, May 15, 1990, p. 5.
54. Suzanne Steinmetz, "The Battered Husband Syndrome," op. cit. Victimology, Vol. 2, Nos. 3-4, 1977-78, pp. 499-509.
I reviewed a dozen studies that covered seven non-US countries (Great Britain, New Zealand, Finland, British Honduras, Canada, Puerto Rico, Israel) and a number of sub-cultures within the United States (Quakers, Mormons, military, Mexican-Americans).
In almost all of these cultures, the women were either equally violent to the men, or more violent than the men (Puerto Rico being the only exception). 55 However, the women were much more likely to exercise severe violence. It was not uncommon for the women to be three times as likely to exercise severe violence, although on average it was about twice as often.
One of the best non-US studies was a New Zealand study that followed more than 1000 children from when they were three until the age of 21. Because the researchers knew these people for 18 years, the response rate was high, as was the trust level (or at least that's what they tell us!). Their findings? By the age of 21, women had perpetrated minor violence against men in the previous year 36% of the time vs. men's 22%. 56 However, women had perpetrated severe violence against men 19% of the time vs. men's 6% — more than three times the rate of severe violence.
I was curious to see if Quakers were, in fact, less violent. The answer? Yes and no. Both husbands and wives reported pushing, shoving, and grabbing at about the 15% level, which is slightly higher than it was in the overall American population at the time of the Quaker study (12% women; 11% men 57 ). 58 However, when it came to severe violence, the Quaker women did better than the average American woman (2.5% vs. 4.4% 59 ) and the men were considerably less violent on the severe level than the average American man was (0.8% vs. 3% 60 ). Again, among the Quakers, as in many other groups, severe violence was about three times as frequent for the women as the men.
Among a mostly-Mormon sample, the violence levels were similar to the US at large. 61 Among military couples, the men and women both exhibited equal amounts of violence, and more than in the population at large. 62 Among Mexican-Americans, there was no difference between the genders. 63
The real value of studying both sexes is how many hints it gives us at reducing domestic violence — especially on the severe level. For example, in more traditional cultures, like Puerto Rico and the military, the sexes do not have the tools to know how to stop escalating violence. Whereas among Quakers, with its non-traditional emphasis on peaceful means of conflict resolution, severe violence by women is lower and by men is rare.
It appears, then, that education toward non-violence helps. Especially men. But if the Quakers are a model, the good news is that they are able to achieve this level of non-violence by men within the framework of a violent society; the more challenging news is the Quaker education process is not just a few classes, but a way of life. Which is why Part I of this book is really the biggest part of the "solution" to domestic violence.
55. Suzanne K. Steinmetz, "A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Marital Abuse," Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, Vol. 8, No. 2, July, 1981, p. 404-414. The sample from Puerto Rico was very small (82), as were the samples from Finland (44) and Canada (52) and the United States (94).
56. Lynn Magdol, Terrie E. Moffitt, Avshalom Caspi, Denise L. Newman, Jeffrey Fagan, and Phil A. Silva, "Gender Differences in Partner Violence in a Birth Cohort of 21-Year-Olds: Bridging the Gap Between Clinical and Epidemiological Approaches," Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Vol. 65. No. 1, 1997, p. 68-78.
57. Murray A. Straus and Richard J. Gelles, "Societal Change and Change in Family Violence from 1975 to 1985 as Revealed by Two National Surveys," op. cit. Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 18, 1986, pp. 465-479. I am citing the 1985 survey for comparability to the Quaker survey published in 1984.
58. Judith Brutz and Bron B. Ingoldsby, "Conflict Resolution in Quaker Families," Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 46, 1984, pp. 21-26.
59. Murray A. Straus and Richard J. Gelles, "Societal Change and Change in Family Violence from 1975 to 1985 as Revealed by Two National Surveys," op. cit. Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 18, 1986, pp. 465-479, Compare to Brutz, ibid. Judith Brutz and Bron B. Ingoldsby, "Conflict Resolution in Quaker Families," Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 46, 1984, pp. 21-26. I am citing the 1985 Straus survey for comparability to the Quaker survey published in 1984.
60. Ibid. Compare Murray A. Straus, ibid., and Richard J. Gelles, "Societal Change and Change in Family Violence from 1975 to 1985 as Revealed by Two National Surveys," op. cit., Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 18, 1986, pp. 465-479, to Judith Brutz and Bron B. Ingoldsby, "Conflict Resolution in Quaker Families," Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 46, 1984, pp. 21-26. I am citing the 1985 Straus survey for comparability to the Quaker survey published in 1984.
61. Boyd C. Rollins and Yaw Oheneba-Sakyi, "Physical Violence in Utah Households," op. cit. Journal of Family Violence, Vol. 5, 1990, p. 301-309.
62. Judy Rollins Bohannon, David A. Dosser, Jr., and S. Eugene Lindley. "Using Couple Data to Determine Domestic Violence Rates: An Attempt to Replicate Previous Work." Violence and Victims, Vol. 10, 1995, p. 133-141.
63. Susan B. Sorenson and Cynthia A. Telles, "Self-Reports of Spousal Violence in a Mexican-American and Non-Hispanic White Population," op. cit. Violence and Victims, Vol. 6, 1991, p. 3-15.
Item. Among lesbians who had prior intimate relationships with men, 32% had experienced physical aggression from any male partner; 64 45% had experienced physical aggression from their most recent female partner alone. 65
Item. When lesbians and heterosexual women (matched for age, race, education, and socioeconomic status) were given identical questionnaires, 9% of heterosexual women reported being raped by a man during a dating relationship; 7% of lesbians reported being raped by a woman during a dating relationship. 66 Statistically the difference was insignificant.
Lesbian violence shatters the myth that women abuse only when men drive them to it. It dispels the myth that male power and male privilege create violence against women. Lesbians do not have much male power and privilege.
Lesbian rape further dispels the myth that rape is also an outgrowth of male power and privilege. We can claim that patriarchy causes lesbians to batter and rape — as some feminists do — but if patriarchy causes all the bad that lesbians do, it must also cause all the good that lesbians do.
64. Gwat-Yong Lie, Rebecca Schilit, Judy Bush, Marilyn Montagne, and Lynn Reyes, "Lesbians in Currently Aggressive Relationships: How Frequently Do They Report Aggressive Past Relationships?" Violence and Victims, Vol. 6, 1991, p. 125.
65. Ibid., Gwat-Yong Lie, Rebecca Schilit, Judy Bush, Marilyn Montagne, and Lynn Reyes, "Lesbians in Currently Aggressive Relationships: How Frequently Do They Report Aggressive Past Relationships?" Violence and Victims, Vol. 6, 1991, p. 126.
66. Pamela A. Brand and Aline H. Kidd, "Frequency of Physical Aggression in Heterosexual and Female," Psychological Reports, Vol. 59, 1986, p. 1311.
The domestic violence community often assumes men abuse women due to feelings of male power and privilege. Their treatment programs usually incorporate this assumption.
As it turns out, the evidence supports much different conclusions: that when women abuse, they are sometimes in a position of power, sometimes powerlessness, and sometimes both simultaneously. When men abuse, they are much more likely to be in a position of powerlessness — the act of abuse being a momentary act of power designed to compensate for underlying experiences of powerlessness. Here's the evidence for that paradigm shift, starting with women...
An elderly woman is more than four times as likely to abuse her husband as the other way around. 67 Think about why. If an elderly man is eight years older than his wife, he is an average of 15 years closer to dying — suffering from arthritis or other ailments. She becomes her own caretaker and his caretaker. He is in about as powerless a place as he can be, and he abuses very little. She is much more powerful in comparison to him, and abuses much more. But she doubtless also feels the powerlessness of being tied to her caretaking responsibilities.
Similarly, two-thirds of mothers with children six years or under hit them three or more times per week. 68 A recent study of confirmed child abuse found mothers committed the abuse 58% of the time, fathers 16%, and both parents 13%. 69 We can view this three ways: as mothers exercising their power over their children; as mothers experiencing their powerlessness vis-a-vis their children; or as both. The mother is obviously more powerful, and just as obviously more likely to abuse when the baby is screaming, not smiling: The screaming makes her feel powerless and the feelings of powerlessness tempt physical violence. (Think of how often we hear on the news of a mom putting her infant in a dumpster: The mom has the power to kill, but it is almost always a young single mom with few resources.)
Why are women more likely to abuse men who are powerless while men are more likely to protect women who are powerless? Or, put another way, why, if he feels powerless, is he more likely to be abusive and she is also more likely to feel abusive? She perceives him as no longer being able to protect her, so she acts on her instincts to get rid of a man who can't protect her. (Remember, she survived for millions of years by selecting protectors, which means knowing how to weed out men who can't protect her.) Put another way, female abuse of men who can't perform is instinctive. She feels powerless when he feels powerless.
Among lesbian women, the abused woman was likely to feel that the problem of the batter er was de pendence, not power. 70
So among women, feelings of power or powerlessness — or some combination of both — seem in various ways to catalyze abuse.
Among men it seems to be different. In 1997, the American Psychological Association's official journal, the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, found domestic violence by men was more likely to be associated with indicators of powerlessness than it was when women were violent. The researchers found that physical violence among men was more strongly associated with unemployment, low educational attainment, few social support resources, the use of drugs, personality disorders, and depression 71 — all pretty strong indicators of an underlying experience of powerlessness.
Men's greater physical strength would seem to indicate men's violence toward women involved male power. As I discussed above, this is tricky, because men learn to use that strength to protect women and will beat up or even kill a man who uses it against a woman. It is when the power of his masculinity breaks down that he is most likely to be violent toward a woman.
Many people resist looking at the powerlessness of the batterer because we have been assuming the batterer was a man and we didn't want to blame a woman who was battered. In love, though, both people can feel powerful or both can feel powerless.
The treatment implications are enormous and create much hope. Large numbers of psychologists, social workers, Y's, and battered women's shelters counsel a man who batters a woman to give up his assumptions of male privilege and power. If a woman batters a man, it is by definition in self-defense — he has the power.
This "victim-either-way" rationalization leaves men feeling blamed either way; it increases tensions and, therefore, the battering of spouses and the breakup of marriages. It leaves millions of children raised without the love of their dads. It is, though, good for the lawyers and therapists.
67. Karl Pillemer and David Finkelhor, "The Prevalence of Elder Abuse: A Random Sample Survey," The Gerontologist, Vol. 28, 1988, pp. 51-57. The physical abuse rate of husbands by their wives is 26 per 1000; of wives by their husbands, 6 per 1000.
68. The National Longitudinal Study of Youth, Appendix C in Murray A. Straus, Beating the Devil Out of Them: Corporal Punishment in American Families (NY: Lexington Books, 1994), p. 25.
69. Joan Ditson and Sharon Shay, "Use of a Home-Based Microcomputer to Analyze Community Data from Reported Cases of Child Abuse and Neglect," Child Abuse and Neglect, Volume 8, Issue 4, 1984, pp. 503-509.
70. Claire M. Renzetti, "Violence in Lesbian Relationships: A Preliminary Analysis of Causal Factors," Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Vol. 3, No. 4, December, 1988, p. 318-399, Table 2. "Relationship Characteristics: Relative Dependency versus Autonomy Indices."
71. Lynn Magdol, et al, "Gender Differences in Partner Violence in a Birth Cohort of 21-Year-Olds," op. cit.: Bridging the Gap Between Clinical and Epidemiological Approaches," Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1997, Vol. 65, No. 1, pp. 68-78.
If the beautiful princess chooses the man who is willing to die to protect her, how is it she sometimes winds up being abused by the man who was willing to die for her?
A man writes to Dear Abby that his wife broke his arms and ribs when she threw a heavy chair at him; that she frequently attacked him with his fingernails, drawing blood from his face and neck. But his training to never hit a woman stopped him from retaliating, and he made up lies when he visited emergency rooms. He stayed in the marriage for the child, but when he finally filed for divorce, she accused him of child molestation. Although acquitted, he felt devastated. 72
The Dear Abby man never hit back. So why do some men violate the male mandate and retaliate — or even initiate? When a man feels the woman he is supposed to protect is threatening him or verbally chopping him apart, he begins to make a mental transfer from protecting her to protecting himself from her. She begins to lose her status as a woman. When that nexus is reached, his protector instinct is compromised. He becomes almost a split personality: protect her; defend self. In turn, when his protector instinct is compromised, her love for him is compromised, and her fear of him becomes irrational — which is her way of protecting herself.
Once this nexus is reached another conflicting message also emerges: "Men don't hit women" conflicts with "she won't respect a man she can push around." Paradoxically, he doesn't have the ability to protect until he has the ability to stand up for himself. And sometimes, the woman may be provoking him to stimulate passion and strength, which she may find preferable to a disconnected blob. In brief, there is often an intricately woven dance going on, which makes one-sided blame so inappropriate.
72. Abigail VanBuren, "Dear Abby — Reflections From an Abused Husband," syndicated column, Los Angeles Times, March 8, 1989, Part V, p. 3.
Women's fears of men are exploited not only by women-in-jeopardy movies but also by full-page ads like the one I opened the chapter with from the Ad Council, a public service a