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June
Ch. 5 Domestic Violence: Who is Doing the Battering
and What’s the Solution?
Excerpts from Does
Feminism Discriminate Against
Men? A debate by Warren Farrell
“Men learn to call pain
‘glory;’ women learn to call the
police”
Don’t Men Batter Women More Because Men
Have More Power?
This question falsely assumes men batter women
more. Here’s why that’s a false
assumption...
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 both these
figures are dependent on a person’s
willingness to volunteer a complaint. The
women’s movement taught us, though, that many
women keep feelings to themselves if they feel they
will be ridiculed. The only way to know if this
might also be true of men is to ask men, (rather
than wait for the men to call a police station and
say, “My wife is beating me. Help me” and
fear the police will die laughing.)
We began including men in questions about
domestic violence in 1975, when Suzanne Steinmetz,
Murray Straus and Richard Gelles conducted the
first scientific nationwide sample of both
sexes.[i] The researchers
could hardly believe their results. The sexes
appeared to batter each other about equally.
Dozens of objections arose (“Don’t
women batter only in self-defense?”;
“Aren’t women hurt more?”). Over a
hundred researchers during the next thirty years
double-checked via their own studies. About half of
these researchers were women, and almost all of the
women were feminist academics. 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 thirty years in
the U.S., Canada, England, New Zealand and
Australia found one of two things: Women and men
batter each other about equally, or women
batter men more.
To the researchers’ greater amazement,
women themselves acknowledged they are more
likely to be violent, and to be the initiators of
violence. [ii]
Finally, women were more likely to engage in
severe violence that was not reciprocated.
[iii]
Studies also make it clear that the women are
more likely to inflict the severe violence. How?
Women are 70% more likely to use weapons against
men than men are to use weapons against
women...[iv] They are more
likely to wait until men are asleep, drunk, or
otherwise incapacitated. For example, one woman
waited until her husband fell asleep, then
“sewed him in the sheets, and broke his bones
with a baseball bat.”[v]
Abuse against men is most common among the
elderly, when a frustrated female caretaker starts
battering her older, sicker husband. He feels he
can’t do anything about it because he is
dependent on her for his care.
When I first investigated this research, for
Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t
Say, my preliminary readers expressed
considerable skepticism until I created an Appendix
with each of the fifty most significant studies and
their findings. The larger and better-designed the
study, the more likely the finding that women were
significantly more violent.
Since Women Can’t Hear What Men
Don’t Say was published in 1999, have new
studies have confirmed these findings? Yes. For
example, in 2006, Dr. Murray Straus presented data
from 68 studies in 32 nations, concluding that
college women worldwide commit more dating violence
than their male counterparts.[vi]
More specifically, about a third of dating
relationships had some violence, and most dating
violence was mutual. The second largest category
was couples where the female partner was the only
one who was violent. Perhaps the most revealing
finding is that when a woman is the dominant
partner, she is more likely to be violent than when
a man is dominant.
Aren’t Women Injured More Than Men?
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.[vii]
Here’s why I believe that grossly
underestimates the injuries to men. When I do a
radio show and ask men who have been severely
battered to call in anonymously, I ask them if they
reported their injury to a hospital or police. The
answer almost invariably is “no.” Even
for a broken arm , if they seek medical attention,
it is reported as an athletic injury. And doctors
are not trained to cross examine the man to see
whether the claim of an athletic injury might be a
cover up….
[i]Murray A. Straus,
Richard J. Gelles, and Suzanne K. Steinmetz, Behind
Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family (NY:
Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980). repeated
[ii]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. repeated
[iii]Straus, Richard J.
Gelles, Suzanne K. Steinmetz, Behind Closed Doors:
Violence in the American Family (NY:
Doubleday/Anchor, 1980), op. cit., p. 43-44.
repeated
[iv]US Department of
Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics,
“Violence by Intimates,” March, 1998,
NCJ-167237 www.ojp.usodj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/vi.pdf.
[v]" Barbara
Spencer-Powell, Overland Park, KS. In Letters”
section, Time, January 11, 1988, p. 12. repeated
below
[vi] Murray A. Straus,
“Men are More Likely than Women to be Victims
of Dating Violence,” based on data from 68
coordinated studies including 13,601 students at 68
universities in 32 nations. by the Family Research
Lab of the University of New Hampshire, May 21,
2006.
[vii]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. not rep
© 2010, Warren
Farrell (with Steven Svoboda) vs. James P.
Sterba
* * *
Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow
victim. - Betty Friedan
Warren
Farrell, Ph.D., is the author of numerous
international best-sellers on men and women,
including Why
Men Are The Way They Are
and The
Myth of Male Power.
Women
Can't Hear What Men Don't
Say was a
Book-of-the-Month Club selection and
Father
and Child Reunion has
led to Dr. Farrell doing expert witness work that
has encouraged many judges to keep dads in
children’s lives. Dr. Farrell’s released
Why
Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay
Gap and What Women Can Do About
It in 2005 and
Does
Feminism Discriminate Against
Men? A debate
in 2008.
Warren is the only man in the US
ever elected three times to the Board of Directors
of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in New
York City. He has been chosen by The Financial
Times as one of the world’s top 100
thought leaders, is in Who’s Who in America
and in Who’s Who in the World. He has taught
in five disciplines, most recently at the School of
Medicine at the University of California in San
Diego, and is ranked by the International
Biographic Centre of London as one of the
world’s top 2000 scholars of the Twentieth
Century. He has appeared on over 1,000 TV shows
worldwide and lives in Mill Valley, California with
his wife and two daughters.You can visit him at
www.warrenfarrell.com
or E-Mail
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