Victims as Offenders: The Paradox of Women's Violence in Relationships

Preface

ix It would be foolish to claim that women do not use violence. Globally, women have been leaders or participants in political revolutions, protests against government, and acts of terrorism (Dasgupta 2002). In the most private of spheres, the home front, women commit acts of abuse against children and the elderly. They join gangs that perpetrate violence, are members of New Right hate groups that advocate violence, and engage in violence against their female partners in lesbian relationships. Indeed, women do participate in violence. However, the key question that guides the research conducted for this book is simply this: within intimate relationships in which women use violence, are they batterers? The question is profoundly important because of the rise in the numbers of arrests of women for domestic violence and the increased tendency of the criminal justice system to mandate arrested women to treatment programs often intended to address male batterers’ behavior . Accurately answering this question depends upon an understanding of the definition of battering and the contextual meanings of violence that occur within a relationship, as well as a thorough examination of the history of victimization. Some people confuse the issue, counting all uses of force the same and treating all users of violence similarly, which challenges much of the research that reveals that most domestic violence perpetrators are male while most victims are female. Although the bulk of women’s violence entails self-defensive force, under some circumstances women do initiate violence or retaliate past hurts with violence. These facts are (mis)used to claim mutuality in abuse and to suggest that there are as many, if not more, “battered husbands” as there are “battered wives” in society. This contradicts the preponderance of research findings, namely that a more contextual examination of women’s use of violence within relationships demonstrates that its use is related to their male partner’s abuse. This division in the interpretation of women’s use of violence stems from the nature of the methodology Preface employed by researchers, a distinction that will be further explored in chapter 2. The questions surrounding women’s use of violence within intimate relationships have profound implications for criminal justice and treatment practices . Following the adoption of mandatory or pro-arrest laws that guide police in handling domestic violence situations, officers are responding “by the book”: police make an arrest if the law is broken. It is easy to understand how this happens. Law enforcement is incident driven, not context driven, and arrests occur regardless of the history of abuse in the relationship or the meaning or motivation underlying the use of violence. The arrest of women who may be battered introduces an ironic twist to the history of pro-arrest policies. Pro-arrest and mandatory arrest policies for domestic violence were designed and lauded as ways of responding uniformly to a problem that had suffered from years of police inaction and a trivialization of woman-battering. Although there is no reliable nationwide data on arrest rates, we do see that as a consequence of the implementation of more stringent arrest policies, more and more women are arrested on domestic violence charges despite many women’s long histories of victimization and the possibility of compelling reasons why they resorted to using violence. There are some violent women who do fit the definition of a batterer, and in these cases and in other instances, women must accept responsibility for their actions. For instance , violence used as retribution for past abuses is not the same as violence used for self-defense measures. Most women appear to use violence as a way to defend themselves or their children or to get back at their partners for past and ongoing violence. Women typically do not control, intimidate, or cause fear in their partner when they use violence, which is the opposite of the goals that most male abusers try to accomplish through their use of force against their female partners. To make matters worse, across the country female victims arrested for domestic violence are being sent routinely to batterer treatment programs intended for male abusers. The situation raises a series of questions. Should the criminal justice system respond uniformly to a situation in which many gender differences in the use and meaning of violence exist? If arrested women are court-mandated to batterer treatment programs, should the curriculum be identical to that intended to address male batterers? What could be done so that battered women do not resort to using...