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4 | Do Violent Acts Equal Abuse? Resolving the Gender Parity and Asymmetry Dilemma
- Northeastern University Press
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Evan Stark, Rutgers university 4 Do Violent Acts Equal Abuse? Resolving the Gender Parity and Asymmetry Dilemma This chapter concerns two issues that have become increasingly contentious in the United States and parts of Europe, whether gender matters to the understanding of partner abuse and how it matters. Behind these questions lie two seemingly contradictory findings—that male and female partners appear to use violence in equal numbers and that women make up the vast majority of those who seek outside assistance because of abuse.* Most of the world takes for granted that violence in relationships is a pervasive expression of male violence against women and that our major challenge is to identify and win government support for the optimum combination of protection and support for victimized women and the punishment and rehabilitation of perpetrators. From this vantage point, it seems both intellectually and politically absurd to debate whether a significant population of men are physically abused by their wives or other female partners. In the United States and United Kingdom, this question has been put on the policy agenda as part of a major backlash against women’s attempts to extend their substantive gains in law, economics, and politics into personal life. The triumph of the Conservatives in the United Kingdom and the rise of the Tea Party and its allies on the Religious Right in the United States have resulted in a push to dismantle or render ineffectual a range of reforms that supported women’s rights, including legislation focused on the plight of female victims of male violence. One facet of this effort is often associated with the campaign to debunk the gendered asym- *It is currently fashionable in the United States to refer to “gender violence” when describing partner abuse. Ironically, this term was adapted in response to right-wing criticism of the emphasis on violence against women. In other words, the term “gender violence” is used to mean that violence is not gendered. 79 80 | Gender Parity and Domestic Violence metry of abuse by organizations that tout fighting for fathers’ rights or men’s rights, supported by a small group of psychologists and sociologists. The prevailing assumption, that partner violence is largely committed by men against women, is based on massive anecdotal evidence and crime surveys as well as data from police, courts, hospitals, child welfare agencies, and other sites where abused persons seek assistance. For example, by the early 1980s male violence against women had been shown to be a more common cause of police calls than all other serious crimes combined (Parnas, 1967) and the most common source of women’s injury visits to hospitals (Stark and Flitcraft, 1996). Starting in the 1970s a parallel set of studies documented that all family members , including wives, in the United States commonly used violence to address conflicts. Since the implications of this work for our understanding of abuse seemed counterintuitive—almost none of those surveyed sought outside assistance , for instance—little attention was paid to it until it was embraced by selfproclaimed “conservative feminists” opposing the Violence against Women Act (VAWA) in the United States and groups hoping to neutralize the growing propensity for family courts to consider partner abuse in awarding child custody and child support.* Initially, debate about how seriously to take women’s violence against men focused on methodological issues, with each side seeking to discredit the research methods used to reach their opponents’ conclusions (Dutton, 2005; Johnson, 2005). More recently, however, attention has focused on how to reconcile the fairly consistent finding that similar proportions of men and women use violence in relationships with the fact that female victims make up the overwhelming majority of those who seek outside assistance for abuse. The only credible explanation for the discrepant findings is that the types of behavior recorded by surveys and at helping sites are as different as the heart disease presented at emergency rooms and the heartburn endured in the privacy of one’s home. The most widely disseminated typology of partner violence was developed by sociologist Michael Johnson (2006, 2008), who distinguished the “common couple violence” recorded by surveys from the “intimate terrorism” that *The background for the domestic violence revolution was the unprecedented economic and political gains women in the United States and United Kingdom have made since the 1960s and the increasing indispensability of working-class and professional women to the service economy in these countries. Because of this, the disproportionate impact on women from the current recession...