BATTERED HUSBAND CONTROVERSY

January 10, 2006

The Battered Husband Controversy
Anti-feminists often claim that men and women are equally the perpetrators of, and the victims of, domestic violence. They then attack shelters for women as sexist, and feminists as liars. This essay looks at research and statistics, and debunks the myth of equal violence. A full list of citations and further reading is provided.

What Behind Closed Doors really said
The 1985 follow-up study

But what about Current Controversies on Family Violence?

Problems with the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS)

What are the real figures on husband battering?

What about murder?

What’s the result of the myth?

Citations and further reading

Introduction
Research by Murray Straus, Richard Gelles, Suzanne Steinmetz, and others is sometimes used to “prove” the claim that men and women are equal victims of domestic violence. This “proof” is used to attack feminism and services for battered wives.

Straus and Gelles have both expressed concern at the misuse of their research findings to attacks services for battered women. Gelles (1995b) has described claims of equal numbers of victims as “misogynistic” and “a significant distortion of well-grounded research data”.

Gelles (1995a) lists the equal violence claim in his collection of Domestic Violence Factoids:
Women are as violent as are men, and women initiate violence as often do men. […] 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, such 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).

Claims based solely on CTS studies that husbands and wives are equally violent ignore a great deal of conflicting evidence. Also, the ability of the CTS to give a complete picture of domestic violence has been much challenged.

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.”
(p79-80 - “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 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, and 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 unfairly 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. (Gelles (1994) too describes himself as 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 old 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.

The US Department of Justice (February 2003) reports that women were 85% of the victims of intimate violence (other than murder) in 2001. Previously (October 2001), the Department had also reported that “Women accounted for 85% of the victims from among the more than 790,000 victims of intimate violence in 1999″.

The National Violence Against Women Survey found that “approximately 1.5 million women and 834,732 men are raped and/or physically assaulted by an intimate partner annually in the United States.” Almost 25% of women, and 7.5% of men, had been raped and/or assaulted by a date or partner at some time in their lives. Women who were assaulted by an intimate sustained a higher number of assaults, and were more likely to have been injured in the most recent attack, than men who were assaulted. In addition, the study found that “503,485 women and 185,496 men are stalked by an intimate partner annually in the United States.” (National Institute of Justice, 2000).

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.”

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. Of the 243,000 people who had been injured by an intimate, 39,000 (16%) were men and 204,000 (84%) were women. (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 1999 General Social Survey, held in Canada, found that 8% of women and 7% of men, married or living in a common-law relationship, had experienced violence from their partner at least once. But the violence was far from equal. Women were much more likely to have been beaten, choked, raped, or to have faced a knife or gun. “In addition,” reports Statistics Canada (2000), “women in violent unions were almost five times more likely than men to fear for their lives. They were three times more likely than men to report having been physically injured by the assault, and they were five times as likely to have required medical attention.”

In a study of calls to police in the UK during one day, 80% of victims were women attacked by men. (Hopkins, 2000.)

A random phone survey of 3,061 adult residents of Perth, Western Australia, in 1994 recorded 266 reported incidents of domestic violence. Only three men were victims in incidents involving a partner. (Two of the men may have actually been witnesses, not victims, or caught up in an incident involving someone else’s partner.) (Ferrante et al 1996)

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 who called in Queensland, 92.1% of victims in Western Australia, 94.4% of victims in Victoria, and 98% of victims in Canberra.

In a 1988 study of domestic violence cases reported to Queensland police, an offender was identified in 84% of cases, and where identified, 85% were male. (Queensland Domestic Violence Task Force 1988)

Do men report their wives’ violence?
Are men deciding not to report their wives’ violence, out of chivalry or embarrassment? 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.

Dating Violence
Research into violence between dating couples shows that “while both boys and girls may be victims, girls are injured more often and males more frequently use violence deliberately to exert control, while females are more apt to perceive themselves as acting in self defense.” (Bonnefil 1992.)

Escaping Violence
Not only are battered husbands much rarer than battered wives, they generally 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.

What about murder?

In the USA in 1999 and in 2000, women were 74% of the victims in murders committed by intimates. (US Department of Justice, October 2001 and February 2003.)

In Canada between 1979 and 1998, three times as many wives were killed by husbands as vice versa. (Statistics Canada, 2000)

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.” (Wallace, 1986.)

What’s the result of the myth?
“While no one would want to minimise the plight of men in this situation 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 primarily want to help abused husbands, but want to attack women and feminism, and shift the spotlight of blame away from men. Showing that “women are just as bad” takes the pressure off men to take responsibility for their behaviour.

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. Attacks on help for battered women may put men’s lives at risk; one possible factor in the recent decline in women killing husbands and boyfriends is women’s improved ability to escape domestic violence (Paulozzi et al, 2001). Activists who genuinely care about men will fight for more resources for men, not fewer resources for women.

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.

Gelles (1994) has written about attempts to silence researcher Murray Straus, who has even received death threats. As victims of such tactics ourselves, feminists should reject and condemn such behaviour. Rather than putting aside research findings because they’re being distorted and misused to hurt women, we should make clear the real facts about those findings.

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.

Citations and Further Reading
Footnotes

“Domestic violence” means repeated attacks by one sexual intimate on another. For more on this, see my Introduction.

“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)