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Battered Men: Research Reveals A Secret Side
To Domestic Violence - Women Are Doing The Abusing,
Too
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 (Violence
in the Family) 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,
(Behind
Closed Doors) 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) manager 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.
Source: 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. © 2002
Keith Thompson
Related Issues: Domestic
Violence, Violent
Women, Violent
Girls, Violence
Books: Domestic
Violence, Violent
Women
Resources
* * *
In violence we forget who we are. - Mary
McCarthy
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