Dirty Secrets About Domestic Violence

“I believe that we should look at all violence as equally bad. It really doesn’t matter who ends up with more damage. I get real nervous when we try to say one is more important than the other, or one needs more attention than the other.” - Susan Steinmetz

I finished up a paper today on male victims of domestic violence. That's right, men who get attacked, battered, or beaten up by their female partners. Before you laugh (as most people do when they consider the idea), think - would you laugh if we were discussing it the other way around (women being attacked, battered or beaten up)? I didn't think so.

Allow me to blow your mind. First of all, anywhere 25-30% of all families have violence as a regular part of the relationship. Statistics show that about 50% of all domestic abuse is bilateral, which means that both man and woman attack each other physically. Not how we usually see domestic violence (both parties as attackers), is it? Of the violent relationships that aren't bilateral, about 27 percent of the time men attack their women and about 23 percent of the time women attack their men in the relationship. You see, women are just as violent as women. The gentler sex? Not really. If you don't believe these, check out this link which gives summaries of over 200 studies showing women's violence against men to be as high (or higher) then that of men's violence against women. From my paper:

Why do women hit men? The conclusions of Gelles (1997, p. 133) are telling: ”Women hit men because they can.” There does not seem to be any support in the available data for the feminist proposition that women only use violence against men in self defense. The most-common reasons the women in a study by Fiebert and Gonzales (1997) gave for assaulting their male partners included: “My partner wasn’t sensitive to my needs”, “I wished to gain my partner s attention”, and “my partner was not listening to me.” The factor of the male being abusive to the woman was one of the less-frequently stated reasons reasons for the female’s assault.

Fiebert and Gonzales (1997) also asked for more profound reasons as to why the women had assaulted there male partners. The five leading reasons the women gave to that query were “I believe that men can readily protect themselves so I don t worry when I become physically
aggressive” (24%), “I have found that most men have been trained not to hit a woman and therefore I am not fearful of retaliation from my partner” (19%), “I believe if women truly are equal to men then women should be able to physically express anger at men” (13%), “I learned when growing up that I could be physically aggressive toward my brother and he would not fight back” (12%), and “I sometimes find when I express my anger physically I become turned on sexually (8%).”

The idea that domestic violence refers exclusively to wife abuse or to violence against women is deeply ingrained in Western thought. Most of us consciously or unconsciously believe that masculine power is the fountainhead of private, as well as public, violence. It is difficult to acknowledge a problem that contradicts one of our deepest beliefs about the world and how it works. We laugh at the idea of women beating up men because if we didn't we'd have to change our sexist views about women and men and what they are capable of.

For men who are battered, they have fewer resources (battered men's shelters?) and a sexist system that can't imagine their victimhood. Violence against women is terrible but so is that against men. Domestic violence is a human problem, not a gender issue.

May Light increase