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.
Who Is Abusing Who?
If we look at only police reports and all-female self-help groups, it appears that men perpetrate about 90% of the domestic violence. But when we study male-only self-help groups, we get a different picture:
Only 6% of the men involved in domestic violence say they were the perpetrator; 81% said their wives were the perpetrator (13% said it was mutual).12 So who do we believe?: Ninety percent male perpetrators, or 6%?
Consider the possibility that the percentages are so different because the people we asked were so different – that everyone might be telling their version of the truth. There was something missing: a nationwide domestic violence study of both sexes.
When the first scientific nationwide sample was conducted in 1975 – by Suzanne Steinmetz, Murray Straus and Richard Gelles13 the researchers could hardly believe their results. The sexes appeared to batter each other about equally. Dozens of questions arose (“Don’t women batter only in self-defense?”; “Aren’t women hurt more?”). Over a hundred researchers during the next quarter century double-checked via their own studies. About half of these researchers were women, and most of the women who were academics were feminists. Most expected to disprove the Steinmetz, Straus, and Gelles findings.
To their credit, despite their assumptions that men were the abusers,
every
domestic violence survey done of both sexes over the next quarter century in the U.S. Canada, England, New Zealand and Australia – more than 50 of which are annotated in the Appendix – found one of two things:
Women and men batter each other about
equally,
or
women batter men more. In addition, almost all studies found women were more likely to
initiate
violence, and much more likely to inflict the
severe
violence. Women themselves acknowledged they are more likely to be violent and to be the initiators of violence. Finally, women were more likely to engage in severe violence that was not reciprocated. The larger and better-designed the study, the more likely the finding that women were significantly more violent.
Studies also make it clear that the women were 70% more likely to use weapons against men than men were to use weapons against women.14 The weapons women use are more varied and creative than men’s, doubtless in compensation for less muscle strength....
Item. “One well-to-do wife I know of turned the tables on her husband. After suffering repeated beatings, she waited until he fell asleep one night, sewed him in the sheets, and broke his bones with a baseball bat.”
— Barbara Spencer-Powell; Overland Park, KS15
12
Eric Anderson, Jimmy Boyd, Tom Prihoda, “Fifty-One City Study of Issues Concerning Divorcing Fathers in Self-Help Groups,” conducted by the Texas Children’s Rights Coalition (Austin, TX), September 10, 1990.
13
Murray A. Straus, Richard J. Gelles, and Suzanne K. Steinmetz, Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family (NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980). This was the original nationwide random sample that sparked the controversy after finding that 3.8% of husbands beat their wives; 4.6% of wives beat their husbands.
14
US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Violence by Intimates,” March, 1998, NCJ-167237 , from the BJS web site: www.ojp.usodj.gov/bjs/. Twenty-nine percent of male victims vs. 17% of female victims reported that the offender had used a weapon.
