Posted on 07/30/2002 4:01:03 PM PDT by chance33_98
Study: Women, Men Equally Violent With Partners When Only Partner Is Violent, It's Usually The Woman Posted: 4:18 p.m. EDT July 30, 2002
DURHAM, N.H.-- A study by the University of New Hampshire of college students says women are as violent as men toward their partners. The Family Research Laboratory study suggests that when only one partner is violent, it is twice as likely to be the woman.
The survey questioned 1,446 students from: the Universidad Autonoma de Ciudad in Juarez, Mexico; University of Texas at El Paso; Texas Tech; and UNH.
Study author Murray Straus says the findings suggest that programs and policies aimed at preventing intimate partner violence by some women are crucial.
Straus was offering details Tuesday in Montreal at the 15th World Meeting of the International Society for Research on Aggression.
But the findings were disputed by the director of Portsmouth, N.H.-based Sexual Assault Support Services.
The executive director says her first take, after reading this, is that it seems like an oversimplified response to a complex problem.
That doesn't preclude here from providing supporting evidence, other than anecdotes, to contest the stats presented in the article and by posters hence.
Sorry, I know that there some legit cases out there, but its far from an epidemic as portrayed by Violette. Nor do I accept anecdotal evidence, particularly when one has an axe to grind. I'll concede that I haven't been in a shelter for quite a while. In fact, I've never spent more than 1 minute in such a place. But I imagine its full of the wide array of women that I described in post 66, though my ratios may be off a bit. Perhaps if I heard both sides of some of the stories, I could at least get something of a realistic opinion.
As well, many researchers consider the Bonobos to be most like humans than the chimpanzee. Among the Bonobos you will see that not only do they have an interesting way to deal with confrontation, but that they also choose to participate in homosexual behavior.
Good point, biased because they have been beaten, or abused!
Thats exactly what our point is about. Thank you for your assistance in bringing that point to light!!
Are we searching for objectivity here? If I talked to a room full of men who had been abused by women, just what in the HELL do you think they'd tell me?
Were you people born stupid, or did you have to work at it?!?!?!
Lashing out with words is not ok, but is not as violent as physical aggression. Both are destructive. However, to imply that the person receiving the aggresive behavior has done something to bring it on is faulty. If that is not what you are implying here by stating that it does not occur in a vacuum, please let me know. Physical aggression is not always displayed or released upon the person or event which precipitated it. It is often held by the aggressor until home has been reached, and then "all Hell breaks loose"! Not upon the spouse who did something to "deserve it", by any means. Though that is often what the abuser will tell the victim --that they deserve it for one reason or another.
This is a form of abuse. Verbal is abusive just as much as physical. You have just helped to prove the points of several women (and some men).
Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
Excerpts:
"Our ability to interpret what is really going on is confounded, however, by the advent, in feminist scholarship, of 'standpoint epistemology.' This research framework holds that history must be told from the standpoint of woman/victim." (p.55)
There are two dimensions which we should be aware of. First, that of violence as commonly ascribed to men, and second, other forms of expression of violent intent. On the former, Pearson presents some alarming information. The rate of women's physical violence is rapidly rising, especially among the young. "In Canada young women now account for 24 percent of all violent offences in their age group: in the United States, it is 18 percent." (p.32)
She describes women in prison, suggesting that they do not have men's experience of impersonal hierarchies. This makes them potentially more dangerous as there are fewer accepted ground rules. Hence in England the incidence of violence in women's prisons is two and a half time higher than in men's. Women in prison also use different tactics, being more willing to involve guards, frame each other, etc. This is an example of the other dimension, violence expressed in "indirect aggression":
" ... as soon as girls hone their verbal and social skills, at around ten or eleven, they become aggressors of a different kind. They abandon physical aggression, even though their pre-pubescent hormones are still no different than boys', and adopt a new set of tactics: they bully, they name call, they set up and frame fellow kids. They become masters of indirection.
Indirect aggression, as the Finnish psychologist Kaj Bjorkqvist defines it, is 'a kind of social manipulation: the aggressor manipulates others to attack the victim, or, by other means, makes use of the social structure in order to harm the target person, without being personally involved in the attack.' " (p.17)
She follows this theme through to describe men being set up, how false claims of abuse can be effective, especially given current police policies on domestic violence, and how women can use their victim status and presumed innocence to avoid detection or get lighter sentences:
"Women can operate the system to their advantage. Donning the feminine mask, they can manipulate the biases of family and community ... in order to set men up. If he tries to leave, or fight back, a fateful moment comes when she reaches for the phone, dials 911, and has him arrested on the strength of her word: "Officer, he hit me." (p.142)
On domestic violence she says:
" ... the dynamic of domestic violence is not analogous to two differently weighted boxers in a ring. There are relational strategies and psychological issues at work in an intimate relationship that negate the fact of physical strength. At the heart of the matter lies human will. Which partner -- by dint of temperament, personality, life history -- has the will to harm the other?" (p.117)
She also points out that the abused partner in an abusive relationship may not be the weaker person. He/she is frequently the stronger, more stable one who is trying to hold things together and help the other to cope with perceived problems. This makes it hard for those familiar with the "victim" model to see themselves as abused.
Pearson discusses women serial killers, who are more numerous than might be imagined. She suggest that they achieve less notoriety because they tend to be "place specific" rather than prowlers. She gives the example of Dorothea Puente who killed eight of her tenants and buried them in her back yard. She covered herself by presenting an image of a dear sweet old lady who took care of people. Even hardened professionals found it hard to see through the pretence. Perhaps people don't want to believe that women can be nasty and vicious because it destroys a faith in women as motherly and nurturing. That they can both be the former and appear to be the latter is particularly unsettling.
Pearson concludes:
" ... it is increasingly urgent that our culture acknowledge violence as a human, rather than a gendered phenomenon." (p.232)
and:
"Perhaps above all, the denial of women's aggression profoundly undermines our attempt as a culture to understand violence, to trace its causes and to quell them." (p.243)
Excerpt:
Those of us working in the field of domestic violence are confronted daily by the difficult task of working with women in problematical families. In my work with family violence, I have come to recognise that there are women involved in emotionally and/or physically violent relationships who express and enact disturbance beyond the expected (and acceptable) scope of distress. Such individuals, spurred on by deep feelings of vengefulness, vindictiveness, and animosity, behave in a manner that is singularly destructive; destructive to themselves as well as to some or all of the other family members, making an already bad family situation worse. These women I have found it useful to describe as 'family terrorists.' In my experience, men also are capable of behaving as 'family terrorists' but male violence tends to be more physical and explosive. We have had thousands of international studies about male violence but there is very little about why or how women are violent. There seems to be a blanket of silence over the huge figures of violence expressed by women. Because 'family terrorism' is a tactic largely used by women and my work in the domestic violence field is largely with women, I address this problem discussing only my work with women.
The potential for terrorism may rest dormant for many years, emerging in its full might only under certain circumstances. I found that in many cases it is the dissolution, or threatened dissolution, of the family that calls to the fore the terrorist's destructiveness. It is essential to understand that prior to dissolution, the potential terrorist plays a role in the family that is by no means passive. The terrorist is the family member whose moods reign supreme in the family, whose whims and actions determine the emotional climate of the household. In this setting, the terrorist could be described as the family tyrant, for within the family, this individual maintains the control and power over the other members' emotions.
The family well may be characterised as violent, incestuous, dysfunctional, and unhappy, but it is the terrorist or tyrant who is primarily responsible for initiating conflict, imposing histrionic outbursts upon otherwise calm situations, or (more subtly and invisibly) quietly manipulating other family members into uproar through guilt, cunning taunts, and barely perceptive provocations. (The quiet manipulative terrorist usually is the most undetected terrorist. Through the subtle creation of perpetual turmoil, this terrorist may virtually drive other family members to alcoholism, to drug-addiction, to explosive behaviour, to suicide. The other family members, therefore, are often misperceived as the 'family problem' and the hidden terrorist as the saintly woman who 'puts up with it all.')
While the family remains together, however miserable that 'togetherness' might be, the terrorist maintains her power. However, it is often the separation of the family that promises to rend the terrorist's domain and consequently to lessen her power. Family dissolution, therefore, often is the time when the terrorist feels most threatened and most alone, and, because of that, most dangerous.
In this position of fear, the family terrorist sets out to achieve a specific goal. There are many possible goals for the terrorist, including: reuniting the family once again, or ensuring that the children (if there are children in the relationship) remain under the terrorist's control, or actively destroying the terrorist's spouse (or ex-spouse) emotionally, physically, and financially. When it was evident to Adolph Hitler that winning the War was an absolute impossibility, he ordered his remaining troops to destroy Berlin: If he no longer could rule, then he felt it best for his empire to share in his own personal destruction. Similarly, the family terrorist, losing or having lost supremacy, may endeavour to bring about the ruin (and, in some extreme cases, the death) of other family members.
. . .
"There are as many violent women as men, but there's a lot of money in hating men, particularly in the United States -- millions of dollars. It isn't a politically good idea to threaten the huge budgets for women's refuges by saying that some of the women who go into them aren't total victims."
-- Erin Pizzey, quoted in David Thomas, Men: Not Guilty.
Wives or girlfriends assault 2 million men every year (1.8 million women are assaulted by their spouses or boyfriends).
54% of all domestic violence termed 'severe' is committed by women against their husbands or boyfriends.(3)
Over 2/3 of the child abuse committed by a parent is committed by the mother.(4)
Mothers (55%) are more likely the fathers (45%) to murder their children.(5)
Mothers kill sons (64%) more often than daughters (36%) and 78% of the child victims are under age 11.(6)
One study of inner city child abuse found that 49% of all child abuse is committed by single parent mothers.(7)
Footnotes:
1) "Women Are Responsible Too", Judith Shervin, Ph.D. and Jim Sniechowski, Ph.D., Los Angeles Times. June 21, 1994.
2) Research by M. Strauss & R. Gelles as reported in "Women Are Responsible Too", Judith Shervin, Ph.D. & Jim Sniechowski, Ph.D., Los Angeles Times. June 21, 1994.
3) Ibid.
4) Data provided by the Child Protective Service agencies of Virginia (67% mothers, 33% fathers), New Jersey (70% mothers, 30% fathers), Texas (68% mothers, 32% fathers), and Minnesota (62% mothers, 38% fathers) , and Alaska (67% mothers, 33% fathers).
5) Bureau of Justice, "Murder in Families", NCJ-143498.
6) Ibid.
7) A study of child abuse in Lansing, Michigan. Joan Ditson and Sharon Shay in Child Abuse and Neglect, Volume 8. 1984.
Source:
http://www.vix.com/menmag/domviol2.htm
Okay, Okay, Okay! Now we are getting into the abuse on an abuse thread? Calm down. Your post was all in bold, so I take it you were yelling! Second, you pretty much called people stupid, and insulted their intelligence. You are beginning to take on similar characteristics to my ex-husband. You may want to calm yourself before posting again.
Oh! Wait a minute! I could be inciting abuse here just by my post! ::gasp:: /sarcasm
Unless you care to post opposing FACTS (note emphasis), I suggest you refrain from continuing to embarass yourself by regaling us with your exceedingly pointless stories and stereotypes.
I have not disputed the fact that women can be violent.
"In Canada young women now account for 24 percent of all violent offences in their age group: in the United States, it is 18 percent."
18 percent is a long ways away from 50 percent.
She also points out that the abused partner in an abusive relationship may not be the weaker person. He/she is frequently the stronger, more stable one who is trying to hold things together and help the other to cope with perceived problems.
May not be and frequently are much different that are/is not and always.
more numerous than might be imagined
is not the same as more numerous than that of men.
I wonder how big the studies were, and what parts of the country were covered. For instance, if the study was done primarily in Detroit, the percentage of single-parent homes could be higher than other places. Couple that with the stat that more women gain custody of children than men. Add to it the fact that most caretakers are female.... Then it should not be a surprise that the percentage of women abusing children is higher...... so are these studies good ones or quite skewed?
The stat that surprised me most was the number of assaults on husbands and boyfriends! When was that study done? 1994. Consider that the number of men who actually report was probably lower than actual/existing cases.... I acknowledge that the abuse can go either way. In any case it is wrong! Your stats surprised me on this one though.
If all you can do is play semantic games with me, don't waste my time with them, okay?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.