Male Peer Support and Violence Against Women: The History and Verification of a Theory

5 | What Do the Data Say?

5 What Do the Data Say? Be a good craftsman: Avoid any rigid set of procedures. Above all, seek to develop and to use the sociological imagination. Avoid the fetishism of method and technique. Urge the rehabilitation of the unpretentious intellectual craftsman, and try to become such a craftsman yourself. Let every man be his own methodologist: let every man be his own theorist; let theory and method again become part of the practice of a craft. Stand for the primacy of the individual scholar; stand opposed to the ascendancy of research teams of technicians. Be one mind that is on its own confronting the problems of man and society. —C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination North American criminology is characterized by a diverse and wide-ranging variety of theoretical perspectives. Yet, one would not know this if she or he only read Criminology and Criminology and Public Policy, which are the two official journals of the American Society of Criminology, or Justice Quarterly, the primary official journal of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. Positivism and empiricism dominate mainstream American criminology and these journals are classic examples of this orthodox way of thinking. If one is only interested in complex mathematical models of criminal and criminal justice system behavior, then American criminology is the place to go. And, of course, this methodology is greatly influential in the rest of the world. As Jock Young (1988) stated twenty-five years ago: “American criminology is a powerhouse of ideas, research techniques and interventions which understandably dominate Western thinking about crime” (p. 293). More recently Young (2011) has reminded us that “abstracted empiricism has expanded on a level which would have surely astonished Mills himself” (p. viii). Something else that would have amazed Mills is the simultaneous expansion of feminism. Michael Burawoy (2008) points out some of the gender-blind nature of Mills’s work in his open letter to him: 93 94 | Male Peer Support and Violence against Women Finally, we turn to the modern history of feminism. This is an area of social thought quite beyond your ken. Students were appalled by your condescending characterization of women in White Collar,1 especially the sections on the “salesgirls” and “the white-collar girl.” I was surprised you so completely missed the boat on gender since your hero Thorstein Veblen2 was such an ardent feminist and spoke about the exploitation of women in a consumer culture with such vitriol. (p. 368) Some readers may be asking, “If Mills was not a feminist, why, then, in the introduction do you state that your gendered theories are heavily grounded in his concept of the sociological imagination?” There are four main answers to this question. First, in the words of Burawoy, “It is, indeed, a powerful idea” (p. 368). Second, we are critical criminologists, which like “Mills’ radicalism,” puts us on “the periphery of American Sociology” and criminology for that matter (Ritzer, 2008, p. 213). Third, Mills compels us to look beyond the personal troubles of one or two women assaulted by a male partner and rather to look at the broader problem of woman abuse in our society. Finally, like the writings of Hirschi (1969) and Cohen (1955), Mills’s contributions can be useful when integrated with strands of feminist thought. Another reason for drawing from Mills is that he was a strong advocate of linking theory with research and this has always been a primary concern for us. In fact, almost all of the research on male peer support, ranging from the early work of Eugene J. Kanin (1967a, 1967b) to our most recent study (DeKeseredy and Schwartz, 2009), is driven by some theoretical perspective that, in the spirit of Mills, converts the personal troubles of woman abuse into public issues. This chapter reviews an extensive array of qualitative and quantitative studies guided by male peer support theories, and we suggest new directions in theory and research. College/University Studies Kanin’s Research3 Eugene Kanin pioneered empirical and theoretical work on male peer support in institutions of higher learning, and his offerings continue to influence us. He argues that some men come to college with either a history of sexual aggression or a desire to engage in this behavior. These are often men who were highly trained as far back as elementary school to treat women as sexual objects and What Do the Data Say? | 95 to use women simply as...