A Typology of Domestic Violence: Intimate Terrorism, Violent Resistance, and Situational Couple Violence

Introduction

Introduction I used to say I found the verbal abuse much worse than the physical abuse. Even though the physical abuse was terrible. Because I suppose it was only—only!? God—once, twice a year. It was the constant verbal [attacks] that used to get me down more than anything. Cause that’s how you lose your self-esteem. But the violence is awful, the violence is terrible. I think you’ve got to take that, though, as part of it. If you’re constantly being told you are a useless jerk, to be [beaten] just . . . compounds it.1 —A formerly battered woman he horrors of domestic violence are now all too well known and are regularly addressed in the mass media.2 Most of us have seen movies about domestic violence, or watched an episode of our favorite television drama that dealt with the issue, or seen it discussed on talk shows, in general interest magazines, or in the daily news. But is domestic violence perhaps an isolated problem that occurs only very rarely in U.S. families? On the contrary, in the United States, • 2–6 million women experience violence from their male partners each year.3 • 25–30 percent of women who come to emergency rooms for injuries are there for domestic violence–related problems.4 • Over 1,000 women were murdered in the year 2004 by their husbands or boyfriends.5 Domestic violence is not one of those extremely rare family horrors (such as a grandfather who sleeps with his grandson’s girlfriend) that is blown all out of proportion by the selective programming of shock-addicted talk show producers . It is clear that domestic violence is not at all unusual. It is a serious and far-reaching social problem. The numbers presented above were chosen to document the severity of the problem of domestic violence, but they also illustrate the two great debates in research on intimate partner violence. The first debate is about gender and domestic violence. A critic might ask of the numbers above, “Why are you ignoring battered husbands? There is plenty of reputable social science evidence t that wives are as likely to beat their husbands as vice versa.” The conventional answer to this challenge has been that such evidence is flawed, and that there are truly reputable studies showing that virtually all domestic violence is perpetrated by men. My answer—and the central theme of this book—is that there is more than one type of intimate partner violence: some studies address the type of violence perpetrated primarily by men, while others are getting at the kind of violence that women are involved in as well. My research demonstrates that in heterosexual relationships the violence that I call “intimate terrorism ” is perpetrated almost entirely by men, not women. And, as you will see in chapter 1, intimate terrorism refers to the sort of violence that most people think of when they think about “domestic violence,” the kind of violence described above by a battered woman. Her partner beat her, humiliated her, attacked her through a variety of tactics, both violent and nonviolent, that allowed him to control her behavior. This pattern of coercive control is largely, though not exclusively, perpetrated by men. The second major debate involves how many women are abused each year by their partners. A critic might exclaim that the estimates presented above range from two to six million: “Can’t you be more precise than that? Is it two million or is it six million?” The answer, once again, comes from the central theme of this book. If there is more than one type of intimate partner violence , then the numbers depend on what type you’re talking about. Six million female victims each year is a reasonable estimate for what I call “situational couple violence,” but this type of violence is not what most people are thinking of when they ask about domestic violence. It does not involve the systematic , controlling abuse that we associate with “battering,” or “wife beating.” If intimate terrorism, involving systematic, controlling abuse, is what we mean by domestic violence or battering, then the best estimate is that somewhere around two million women a year are battered by their husbands or male partners in the United States. The distinctions that I make among types of violence are as much about control as they are about violence. Other feminist researchers have pointed out the dangers of focusing narrowly on violent acts while...