The Battered Husband Controversy

[dreamer_easy]

OK doke, here's the essay. (I was just going to post some of the links, but then decided I might as well share the whole thing.) Very flatteringly, it's been quoted once or twice in the professional literature. This version is dated May 1999 - one day I'd like to bring it up to date with more recent research.
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The Battered Husband Controversy

Anti-feminists often attack services for battered wives, claiming that men and women are equally the perpetrators of, and the victims of, domestic violence. This essay looks at research and statistics, and debunks that myth. A full list of citations and further reading is provided.

Introduction

Domestic violence research by Murray Straus, Richard Gelles, Suzanne Steinmetz, and others is sometimes used to "prove" that husbands and wives are equally the victims of domestic violence. This "proof" is often then used to attack shelters and services for battered wives as unnecessary or sexist.

Gelles (1995) lists the claim of equal violence in his collection of Domestic Violence Factoids:

Women are as violent as are men, and women initiate violence as often as do men. This factoid cites research by Murray Straus, Suzanne Steinmetz, and Richard Gelles, as well as a host of other self-report surveys. Those using this factoid tend to conveniently leave out the fact that Straus and his colleague's surveys as well as data collected from the National Crime Victimization Survey (Bureau of Justice Statistics) consistently find that no matter what the rate of violence or who initiates the violence, women are 7 to 10 times more likely to be injured in acts of intimate violence than are men." (My emphasis)

Typically, these claims mean presenting the results of Straus, Gelles, and Steinmetz's survey using the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS), as published in Behind Closed Doors: Violence in American Families (1980). However, Behind Closed Doors did not conclude that men and women were equally the victims of domestic violence.

Both the 1985 follow-up study (Straus and Gelles, 1986), and Straus' chapter in Current Controversies on Family Violence, while emphasising the need to recognise wives' violence, express concern at the misuse of the research findings.

Claims based solely on CTS studies that husbands and wives are equally violent ignore conflicting evidence. Also, the accuracy of the CTS has been much criticised.

What Behind Closed Doors really said

The authors of Behind Closed Doors did not conclude that wives and husbands were equally the victims of domestic violence. They said:

"This study shows a high rate of violence by wives as well as husbands. But it would be a great mistake if that fact distracted us from giving first attention to wives as victims as the focus of social policy." (Emphasis in original)

The researchers pointed out that:

• The CTS survey doesn't tell us if violent acts were in self-defence.
  
• The CTS survey shows that "husbands have higher rates of the most dangerous and injurious forms of violence (beating up and using a gun)."
  
• An earlier study by Steinmetz showed that abuse by husbands does more damage.
  
• Violent acts by a husband are repeated more often than violent acts by wives.
  
• An earlier study by Gelles showed that "a large number of attacks seem to occur when the wife is pregnant".
  
• "Women are locked into marriage to a much greater extent than men... and they often have no alternative to putting up with beatings by their husbands."
  

Gelles reiterated this conclusion in Intimate violence in families (1985):

"It is quite clear that men are struck by their wives. It is also clear that because men are typically larger than their wives and usually have more social resources at their command, that they do not have as much physical or social damage inflicted on them as is inflicted on women. Data from studies of households where the police intervened in domestic violence, clearly indicate that men are rarely the victims of "battery" (Berk et al, 1983). Thus, although [the CTS figures] show similar rates of hitting, when injury is considered, marital violence is primarily a problem of victimised women."
(pp 79-80 - "A note on husbands as victims".)

The 1985 follow-up study

Ten years after the original 1975 CTS survey, Straus and Gelles (1986) conducted a second survey, to see if rates of domestic violence had changed. This survey found the same similarity in rates of reported violence by husbands and wives.

While rightly emphasising the need to recognise women's violence, the researchers pointed out that these results should be carefully interpreted. They noted that:

• Because men are usually stronger and more aggressive, a violent act by a husband is more likely to cause pain and injury than the same act carried out by a wife.
  
• A great deal of violence by wives against husbands is retaliatory or in self-defence.

They also expressed concern that their original 1975 survey had been used against battered women in court, and to minimise the need for shelters for abused wives.

But what about Current Controversies on Family Violence?

Current Controversies on Family Violence is a collection of essays on various aspects of domestic violence and rape. In his chapter, Physical assaults by wives: a major social problem, Murray Straus rightly argues that violence by wives deserves attention and is no more acceptable than violence by husbands.

He reviews the research which shows equal rates of violence by husbands and wives, questions whether women's violence can be explained as self-defence. He also speculates that wives' violence might increase the probability of husbands' violence (while being careful to point out that this is only a hypothesis, and that it could be misused to blame women.)

Straus reiterates that regardless of the rates of hitting, women suffer greater physical, financial, and emotional injury from domestic violence, and should continue to receive "first priority" in services and prevention. He once again expresses his concern that "the statistics are likely to be misused by misogynists and apologists for male violence". He is adamant that he is a feminist.

Problems with the CTS Survey

The CTS is both much used and much criticised (Dobash et al, 1992). Here are three important problems with taking CTS results at face value.

Forgotten violence

The CTS does not include rape or other sexual assault, or violent acts such as choking, suffocating, and scratching. Also, it excludes violence which begins after an abused partner declares their intention to leave - as it often does. Stalking is omitted. And, obviously, marital murder cannot be measured by self-report
surveys.

Out of context

The CTS counts up violent acts only. It does not tell us whether the acts were in self-defence. It does not tell us whether they were a single incident, or part of a pattern of violence. It does not tell us whether the act was intended to hurt the other person; a joking kick or a slapped hand are counted the same as a violent kick or blow to the face. It does not tell us whether the victim was injured, or how badly. (Dobash et al 1992)

Szinovacz (1983) points out that couples sometimes engage in "mock physical aggression", such as throwing pillows, with no intention of hurting one another, but it's left up to the interviewee whether to report a tossed pillow as "threw object". This ambiguity might lead to harmless horseplay being reported as real violence.

Interspousal reliability

Husbands' and wives' responses to the CTS don't agree. The Behind Closed Doors study interviewed one member of each family, the wife or the husband. Szinovacz (1983) checked the validity of this approach by interviewing couples, and found that couples' accounts of their violence, measured by the CTS, didn't match much better than could be
expected by chance.

Wives and husbands disagreed considerably both about what violence was used, and how often it was used. For example, though some men and women said they had "beaten up" their partners, and some men and women said they had been "beaten up", no couple contained one person who said they'd done the beating and one who said they had been beaten!

Szinovacz also found that when couple data, rather than "aggregate data", were used, there was 50% more violence from husbands and 20% more violence from wives. Husbands tended to report less of their own violence than their wives indicated; wives were somewhat more likely than husbands to admit to their own violence.

Similarly, Jouriles and O'Leary (1985) found that agreement between partners given the CTS was "low to moderate".

These findings cast some doubt on the reliability of the CTS to detect violence, because it depends on self-reporting. Szinovacz suggests a number of reasons for discrepancies in husbands' and wives' reports of violence, including reluctance to admit to violent acts and ambiguous questions. She suggests that a husband may not report or even remember a wife's useless attempt to hurt him, and that men might be reluctant to report their own use of "female" tactics such as kicking or biting.

What are the real figures on husband battering?

Relying solely on CTS surveys which indicate equal violence by husbands and wives means ignoring a large amount of conflicting evidence. (Dobash et al, 1992). Here's some of it.

According the US Department of Justice (1994), "Annually, compared to males, females experienced over 10 times as many incidents of violence by an intimate. On average each year, women experienced over 572,000 violent victimizations committed by an intimate, compared to approximately 49,000 incidents committed against men."

This survey is based on reports from about 49,000 households, as compared to the 2143 households of the 1975 CTS survey and the 3,520 households of the 1985 CTS survey (Straus and Gelles, 1986).

The Study of Injured Victims of Violence (US Department of Justice, 1997) surveyed injuries treated in hospital emergency departments. 4.5% of male victims had been injured by an intimate, compared to 36.8% of the female victims. This gives a ratio of about 8.2:1. If we consider only the violence by spouses and ex-spouses, the ratio is about 8.8:1. Those ratios are consistent with Gelles' above remark. (In 30% of cases, the relationship between the injured person and their attacker was not identified.)

In 1978, the US state of Minnesota began an inquiry into whether men needed the same kinds of shelters and social service programs as battered women. Out of 966 reports of domestic violence (mandatory from all legal and medical agencies), 95% were husbands bashing wives (Minnesota Department of Corrections, 1979). In 1981, the Minnesota Department of Corrections found that only 4% of 3900 reports were of women battering men (Watkins 1982, 38).

Using police and court records for one year, Dobash and Dobash (1978) found that men and boys were responsible for 97.4% of all violence between family members.

The Family Violence Professional Education Taskforce (1991) is unequivocal. "Studies overseas and in Australia consistently indicate that women constitute the large majority of victims in family violence. In Australia, all available data on family violence show that men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of violence in the home." For example, they note the results of phone-ins around Australia: women were 98.3% of
victims in Queensland, 92.1% of victims in Western Australia, 94.4% of victims in Victoria, and 98% of victims in Canberra.

Not only are battered husbands much rarer than battered wives, they need less assistance to escape their situation. Pagelow (1984) points out that unlike women, most men aren't physically or economically prevented from leaving a violent spouse. Men's greater average strength gives them more options - defending themselves with violence or without violence, or leaving the premises.

It's sometimes claimed that men's shame or chivalry prevent them from reporting violence by wives or girlfriends. However, the evidence we have doesn't support this assumption. For example, Schwartz (1987), analysing nine years' worth of US National Crime Survey data, found that 67.2% of men and 56.8% of wives called the police after an assault by their spouse. Rouse et al (1988) also found that men were more likely to
call the police, and Kincaid (1982) found that men were more likely to press charges and less likely to drop them.

What about murder?

In 1992, women were 70% of the victims in intimate murders. About a third of female murder victims older than 14 were killed by an intimate; only 4% of male murder victims were killed by an intimate. (US Department of Justice, 1994)

From 1989-1991, 19.3% of intimate murders in Australia were committed by women. (Eastel 1993)

"Marital murder in New South Wales is, as it was 100 years ago, a practice largely confined to men: 73.3% (217) of the 296 spouse killings were committed by husbands; 26.7% (79) were committed by wives. Thus women were three times more likely than men to be killed by their spouse. Both numerically and proportionately, more women than men were killed by their marital partner." (Wallace, Alison. "Homicide: the social reality." NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research. Attorney General's Department. August, 1986.)

What's the result of the myth?

"While no one would want to minimise the plight of men in this sitation or deny them assistance and support, workers and activists throughout the domestic violence field know from everyday experience that it is simply not true that as many men are abused by women as vice versa. There are no refuges for abused men, and no widespread demand for anyone to establish one. One phone line exists in the country which men who have suffered violence can use as well as women, and one small house for such men existed for a matter of weeks at the end of 1992." (Hague and Malos, 1993)

"In the overwhelming majority of cases, it is women who are being routinely and severely victimized by men. To be sure, abused men do exist and must be protected, but the incidents of husband and boyfriend battering are rare." (San Diego Police Department, 1996)

It's my belief that many of those who distort or misrepresent this research don't want to help abused husbands, but want to attack women and feminism, and shift the spotlight of blame away from men.

As Straus and Gelles (1986) and Saunders (1988) note, reports on battered husbands are used to attack help for battered wives. Pagelow (1984) mentions two battered women's shelters which have been denied funding because of these attacks.

How can we help battered husbands if we don't have the true facts about their experiences and needs? According to Pagelow (1984), battered husbands need counselling and legal advice rather than shelters. Providing the help that abused husbands need should not mean attacking resources for abused wives.

Abused men deserve better than to be used for political points scoring. They should have sympathy, recognition, and help - and they don't need to be 50% of the victims to deserve it.

Notes

"Domestic violence" means repeated attacks by one sexual intimate on another. "Intimates" are "sexual intimates" (Eastel, 1993), "spouses, ex-spouses, boyfriends, or girlfriends" (US Department of Justice, 1994). They do not include other family members such as children.

The Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) is a questionnaire which asks respondents to think back over the last year to disagreements with other family members, and to say how often they committed one of the listed acts. Eight of these acts are physically violent - "threw something", "pushed/ grabbed/shoved", and "slapped or spanked" are classified as "minor violence"; "kicked/bit/hit with fist", "hit, tried to hit with something", "beat up", "threatened with gun or knife", and "used gun or knife" are classified as "severe violence". (Straus and Gelles, 1986)

Citations and Further Reading

Citations

Berk, R et al. 1983. "Mutual combat and other family violence myths", pp 197- 212 in D. Finkelhor et al (eds) The Dark Side of Families: current family violence research. Sage, Beverly Hills.

Dobash, R. Emerson, and Russell P. Dobash. 1978. Wives: the 'appropriate' victims of marital violence. Victimology 2(3/4): 426-42.

Dobash, Russell P., R. Emerson Dobash, Margo Wilson and Martin Daly. 1992. The myth of sexual symmetry in marital violence. Social Problems, 39(1), pp 71-91.

Eastel, PW. 1993. Killing the beloved: homicide between adult sexual intimates. Canberra, Australian Institute of Criminology.

Family Violence Professional Education Taskforce. 1991. Family Violence. Federation Press, Sydney.

Gelles, Richard J and Cornell, Claire Pedrick. 1985. Intimate Violence in families. Sage, Beverly Hills Ca.

Gelles, Richard J. "Domestic violence factoids". 1995. Available at: http://www.mincava.umn.edu/documents/factoid/factoid.html

Hague, Gill and Malos, Ellen. 1993. Domestic Violence: Action for Change. New Clarion Press, Great Britain.

Jouriles, Ernest N. and O'Leary, K. Daniel. 1985. Interspousal reliability of reports of marital violence. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology, 53(3) pp 419-421.

Kincaid, Pat J. 1982. The omitted reality: Husband-wife violence in Ontario and policy implications for education. Maple, Ontario, Learner's Press.

Minnesota Department of Corrections. 1979. Report to the Legislature. St Paul, the Department.

Pagelow, Mildred Daley. 1984. Family Violence. Praeger Scientific, New York, 1984.

Rouse, Linda P., Richard Breen, and Marilyn Howell. 1988. Abuse in intimate relationships. A comparison of married and dating college students. Journal of interpersonal violence, 3, pp 414-419.

San Diego Police Department. 1995. Domestic Violence Policing in San Diego. [No longer online.]

Saunders, Daniel G. 1988. "Wife abuse, husband abuse, or mutual combat?" in Yllo, Kersti and Bogard, Michele. Feminist perspectives on wife abuse. Sage, Newbury Park.

Schwartz, Martin D. 1987. Gender and injury in spousal assault. Sociological Focus 20, 61-75.

Straus, Murray A. "Physical assaults by wives: a major social problem". In Current Controversies on Family Violence. Edited by Richard J. Gelles and Donileen R Loseke. Sage, California, 1993.

Straus, Murray A. and Richard J. Gelles. 1986. Societal change and change in family violence from 1975 to 1985 as revealed by two national surveys. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 48, pp 465-480.

Straus, Murray A., Gelles, Richard J., and Steinmetz , S.K. 1980. Behind closed doors: Violence in American families. Anchor/Doubleday, Garden City NY.

Szinovacz, Maxaimiliane E. 1983. Using couple data as a methodological tool: The case of marital violence. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 45(3) pp 633-44.

US Department of Justice. Bureau of Justice Statistics. November 1994. Domestic violence: Violence between Intimates. [Can't find this online any more, but here's the current BJS section on Intimate Partner Violence in the U.S.]

US Department of Justice. Bureau of Justice Statistics. August 1997. Violence-Related Injuries Treated in Hospital Emergency Departments.
Available at:
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/VRITHED.PDF

Watkins, Carol R. 1982. Victims, Aggressors, and the Family Secret: an Exploration into Family Violence. St Paul, Minnesota Department of Public Welfare.

Further reading:

Bachman, Ronet. Incidence Rates of Violence Against Women: A Comparison of the Redesigned National Crime Victimization Survey and the 1985 National Family Violence Survey. Paper written for VAWnet, February 1998.
Available at:
http://www.vawnet.org/applied-research-papers/print-document.php?doc_id=385

Battered Men? Battered Facts. EXTRA! Update, October 1994.

US Department of Justice. Bureau of Justice Statistics. January 1994. Two-Thirds of Women Violence Victims are Attacked by Relatives or Acquaintances (press release).

DeKeresedy, Walter and Martin Schwartz. Measuring the Extent of Woman Abuse in Intimate Heterosexual Relationships: a Critique of the Conflict Tactics Scales. Paper written for VAWnet, February 1998.
Available at: http://www.vawnet.org/applied-research-papers/print-document.php?doc_id=388

Easton, Steven. Family Violence: what you haven't heard. Everyman, a Men's Journal, 1994.

Gelles, Richard J. Domestic Violence: Not An Even Playing Field. Unpublished note, 1995. Available at: http://replay.web.archive.org/20070217112141/http://thesafetyzone.org/everyone/gelles.html

Health Department of Western Australia. Gendered Crimes. in Family and Domestic Violence Training Package - Participants' Kit. 1998. Available at http://www.health.wa.gov.au/publications/fdv.cfm.

Matheson, Angela. Battered husbands: myth or fact? and "I covered up for him.". Green Left Weekly, 234, 5 June 1996.

The State of the Court. Opening Address by The Hon Alastair Nicholson AO RFD, Chief Justice of the Family Court of Australia, Third National Family Court Conference, 20 October 1998. See sections 16 - 20 for comments about domestic violence. [Can't find this online any more.]

Woodham, Ben. The myth of male violence?. XY Magazine 6(1), Autumn 1996.