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

Chapter 2: The Controversy about Women’s Use of Force

Under certain circumstances, women can be as aggressive as men (Bandura 1973; White and Kowalski 1994). There is a vast difference, however, between aggression and violence used in self-defense against an aggressor. The removal of the violent behavior from its context creates inaccuracies. Yes, some women hit. Some women use force in ongoing relationships or against former partners. There is no denying that women share some of the same base emotions with men: anger, jealousy, revenge. Women cannot be essentialized as the feminine, delicate counterpoint to men’s masculine, aggressive self; this image belies reality and disempowers women by denying them access to use force legitimately under certain circumstances. However, the key questions surrounding women’s use of force are contextual: What are a woman’s motivations? What are the consequences of her violence? How do her understandings and use of violence differ from those of her (male) partner or former partner? And ultimately, what are the best ways to respond to her use of force, particularly if the meaning differs from men’s use of force? This chapter explores several bodies of literature along these lines. First, it examines the methodological, measurement, and conceptual issues that complicate the study of battering within interpersonal relationships. Second, it summarizes the literature on domestically violent women, drawing from studies that examine aggression, arrest, and treatment groups. In addition, the chapter considers issues unique to women with different race, class, and sexual orientation backgrounds. 14 The Controversy about Women’s Use of Force Chapter 2 The Gender Symmetry Argument Once contextual factors are made clear, most of the empirical evidence to date demonstrates that gender symmetry in the use of interpersonal violence is a fallacy . While women do engage in using force, its use is very different from men’s violence in terms of injury and motivation. There simply are not an equal number of battered wives and battered husbands. Yet this rancorous debate continues . A number of studies conducted by prominent scholars, endlessly rehashed and misinterpreted, continue to flame the fiery debate about mutual combat and are trotted out whenever one wants to suggest that women are equally or even more violent in relationships than are men. For instance, findings from two major reviews of the literature that look at seventy-nine and fifty-two studies respectively demonstrate that men and women are equally violent in relationships (Fiebert 1997; Archer 2000). These two studies received considerable media attention and challenged the focus of the battered women’s movement on female victims of male violence, despite criticism about the conceptualization , operation, and interpretation of the studies’ results (White et al. 2000). Support for or against the mutual combat hypothesis is shaped by the type of methods used in the research as well as by the ideological positions of the researchers making the assertions; in fact, the debate gets downright acrimonious at times. The clearest way of assessing these different perspectives is to examine three types of research: the studies in the family violence perspective; the national crime victimization surveys; and the studies characterized as the feminist perspective. family violence perspective Researchers in the family violence perspective tend to view abuse as incorporating a range of behaviors nested within a family constellation. Thus, family violence could include acts occurring between spouses, between parents and children, and between siblings. Given this wide range of possibilities, it is not surprising that many acts of violence are counted. The media sensationalizes evidence of mutual combat between husbands and wives without exploring who initiated the violence, if the violence was committed in self-defense, if injuries resulted from the violence, or if the nature of violent acts differed by gender (Osthoff 2002; Saunders 2002; S. Miller 2001). The finding of mutual combat takes on a polemical cast in that researchers argue that the political focus should shift away from violence committed by men against women and that resources should be devoted to funding male victims and female violence prevention programs (Moffit and Caspi 1999; The Controversy 15 Pearson 1997; Farrell 1999; Fiebert 1997, 1998). Anti-feminist men’s groups ride on their coattails, arguing that there is strong evidence of husband battering by wives that gets ignored or trivialized when it comes to framing the issues or dedicating resources and funding support. They support shelters for battered men and reeducation of the criminal justice system so that prosecutors and judges become more cognizant of...