Men or women as violent

[Guest guest]

Men or women as violent

There continues to be discussion about whether men are more abusive than women,

whether men's abuse of women is worse than women's abuse of men, and whether

abused men should be provided resources similar to those available for abused

women. What is often missing in such discussions is that, being equal, both

genders commit more or less equal aggression, the difference being in the form

that aggression takes.

 

Some psychologists claim males tend to prefer physical aggression while women

tend to prefer psychological aggression.

 

The statistics cited by Women's Aid and Ahimsa are that violence by women

against men is a tiny proportion of all domestic violence is rejected by

advocates for male victims of domestic violence. They hold that this finding is

based in the situation that many studies report only male-on-female violence

because that is all they ask about, those studies that do examine prevalence in

both directions overwhelmingly find little difference by gender. This is

particularly true when questions are specific: for example, men typically do not

report being slapped if they are simply asked about " violence " ; women do.

 

Martin S. Fiebert of the Department of Psychology at California State

University, Long Beach, provides an analysis of 195 scholarly investigations:

152 empirical studies and 43 analyses, which demonstrate women are as physically

aggressive, or more aggressive, than men. The aggregate sample size exceeds

175,700.

 

Studies have been carried out to explore these issues, and results have seemed

somewhat contradictory. A problem in conducting such studies is the amount of

silence, fear and shame that results from abuse within families and

relationships. Another is that abusive patterns can tend to seem normal to those

who have lived in them for a length of time. Similarly, subtle forms of abuse

can be quite transparent even as they set the stage for further abuse seeming

normal. Finally, inconsistent definition of what domestic violence is makes

definite conclusions difficult to reach when compiling the available studies.

 

Both men and women have been arrested and convicted of assaulting their partners

in both heterosexual and homosexual relationships. The bulk of these arrests

have been men being arrested for assaulting women, but that has been shifting

somewhat over time and clearly arrest records are not the whole story. Actual

studies of behaviour show that whilst half of male/female intimate violence is

best described as mutual brawling, a quarter is the male attacking the female

and the remaining quarter being females attacking their male partner.

Determining how many instances of domestic violence actually involve male

victims is difficult. Male domestic violence victims may be reluctant to get

help for a number of reasons. A man who calls for help may even risk being

arrested as the " perpetrator " even though he was the victim.

 

The general consensus seems to be that male on female domestic violence is more

likely to result in serious injury or death, whereas female on male (which,

under the definition used by the UK Government if no others, includes preventing

the father seeing the children), is more likely to result in male suicide. Men

on average have more upper body strength and socialization that predisposes them

to resort to violence more than women do, and that can give them a higher

average lethality than women. However, women can and do use weapons to equalize

whatever deficit in physical power which may be present, and can also use social

constraints against men hitting women even in self-defence, to provide them with

sufficient lethality to be dangerous in conflict situations. The US National

Family Violence Survey has consistently indicated, in repeated surveys over more

than 30 years, that women are more than twice as likely as men to initiate

domestic assault, and more than twice as likely to use weapons. The oft-repeated

claim that all violence by women is self-defence has similarly been proven to be

based on circular reasoning. Women also are at least as well equipped to use

psychological violence that forms a pattern of coercive and controlling

behaviour (to use the Women's Aid definition given above). Women are also

equally capable of using a proxy, which would further skew the results (since a

proxy murder is not recorded as a case of domestic violence.)

 

In the United States, the bulk of the decrease in rates of intimate partner

homicides is accounted for the dramatic decrease in women's murders of their

male intimate partners. Murders of female intimate partners by men have dropped,

but not nearly as dramatically. (See, for example, the report Violence by

Intimates from the US Bureau of Justice Statistics. Men kill their female

intimate partners at about four times the rate that women kill their male

intimate partners. Research by Jacquelyn Campbell, PhD RN FAAN has found that at

least two thirds of women killed by their intimate partners were battered by

those men prior to the murder. She also found that when males are killed by

female intimates, the women in those relationships had been abused by their male

partner about 75% of the time.

 

Some researchers have found a relationship between the availability of domestic

violence services, improved laws and enforcement regarding domestic violence and

increased access to divorce, and higher earnings for women with declines in

intimate partner homicide. (Laura Dugan, Daniel S. Nagin, and Richard Rosenfeld.

Explaining the Decline in Intimate Partner Homicide: The Effects of Changing

Domesticity, Women's Status, and Domestic Violence Resources in Homicide

Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3, 187-214, 1999)

 

This suggests that, ironically, male abusers have benefited from domestic

violence reforms, and are less likely to be killed by their partners since women

are no longer faced with murder as their " only option " to escape the violence.

At the same time, men continue to kill their female partners at almost the same

rate. This suggests that reforms in the civil and criminal system and social

services to battered women have not impacted the fundamental causes of domestic

violence. Although some presume that this indicates a gendered nature of the

problem, the lack of success may itself be a result of overly simplistic

gender-assumptions on the nature of violence (see notes on the Duluth model in

the 'Response to domestic violence' section).

 

Gender roles and expectations can and do play a role in abusive situations, and

exploring these roles and expectations can be helpful in addressing abusive

situations, as do factors like race, class, religion, sexuality and philosophy.

None of these factors cause one to abuse or another to be abused.

 

 

 

Source: www.wikipedia.org

 

 

 

Omar Ali