If Your Man Knew What to Say, Here’s What He Might Say If He Knew You Feared His Potential For Violence...

Excerpted from Warren Farrell's Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say.

(Permission to reprint granted by Warren Farrell.)
See www.warrenfarrell.com and www.warrenfarrell.info.

 

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When Women Batter, Isn't It In Self-Defense?

One of the valid objections to the initial domestic violence surveys was that perhaps women were violent only in self-defense. Interestingly, when Straus and Gelles checked this out, they asked only women their opinion as to who had struck the first blow. Their findings? Even 53% of the women acknowledged they had struck the first blow. 34

Other researchers asked both sexes. And asked not only who struck the first blow, but who did so without retaliation. Here is what they found:

Who Struck the First Blow in Year Prior to Marriage?*
Men	13%
Women	26%
Who Struck the First Blow 6 to 18 Months After Marriage?
Men	8%
Women	17%
Who Struck the First Blow 18 to 30 Months After Marriage?
Men	9%
Women	16%
Explanation: The percentages average both sexes’ responses. Both sexes reported both themselves and their partner; both sexes reported their own aggression to be about 10% less than their partner's estimate. *Source: K. Daniel O'Leary, Julian Barling, Ileana Arias, Alan Rosenbaum, Jean Malone, and Andrea Tyree, “Prevalence and Stability of Physical Aggression Between Spouses: A Longitudinal Analysis,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Vol. 57, No. 2, 1989, p. 263-265.35

Many studies now confirm women being more likely to strike the first blow, or to be severely violent without the husband reciprocating.36 We saw above that this started in high school. I’m unaware of any significant two-sex domestic violence study showing the opposite, nor could NOW headquarters cite any.

Isn't it often claimed that when women kill their husbands, it is in self-defense? Yes. However, when Dr. Coramae Richey Mann checked out these claims, she discovered only 10% were valid.37 That is, when women killed their husbands, they usually claimed self-defense, even when their husbands were in wheel chairs. Others explained it was when their husband was asleep. If self-defense is defined as it always has been by the law, as a response to an immediate threat to one’s life, from which one cannot escape, then neither meets the self-defense standard. But feminists have created a for-women-only defense (the Learned Helplessness Defense, based on the “Battered Woman Syndrome”), allowing a woman who could escape, but was fearful, to kill a sleeping man and then claim in court it was self-defense because he had previously abused her repeatedly and she was afraid to leave. The problem is, the husband is too dead to defend himself. And the court can’t hear what men are too dead to say.

In contrast, when men claim self-defense, they are often not even believed by their counselors. For example, when Steve Murray describes the abusive men he counsels, he explains, “They whine and they bitch and they cry and they say, ‘She attacked me first.’ Pretty soon another guy is saying, ‘That’s the way it happened to me!’”38 A second later Murray adds, “When a man resolves a conflict by hitting his wife, there are no longer two sides to the story. No one ever deserves to get hit.”

Although Murray says, “No one ever deserves to get hit,” he discounts the men the moment they say they were hit. Even when the men claim self-defense (“She attacked me first”), they are discounted as whiners, bitchers, and crybabies. By not believing the men – but believing only their wives – the social worker is able to justify putting the men in groups for perpetrators, their wives in groups for victims. If the women had all claimed the men hit them first, it would be used to reinforce the stereotype that women never hit except in self-defense.