[Effort] Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics (DV Edition)
Domestic Violence
Unless you've been living under a rock for years, you're aware that domestic violence has long been considered a 'womens issue.' Nowadays, however, when you read stories on domestic violence, you may be shocked to discover that women are equally as violent as men, domestic violence effects millions of unknown men who are too afraid of society to come forward. And you may be thinking to yourself 'What the hell, man, you think we would have noticed a lot of men being beaten to death by their wives.' At least, that was my first thought.
A funny thing happens when you go looking for these many men. Turns out they don't really exist. 110 men were, in fact, murdered by their wives in 2010. That, however, is not even close to half, more like 18% of spousal murder. Okay, so maybe women are just really bad at beating their husbands. I guess that's an explanation.
Michael Kimmel doesn't think so. Kimmel can't find these men, either. They're not showing up in hospitals or shelters. When he went looking for them, he found the CTS. CTS stands for Conflict Tactics Scale. He's got a few things to say about it, but mostly what it boils down to is Kimmel doesn't think Straus is studying the right thing. Among his criticisms is that CTS disregards any violence that takes place after couples have separated, doesn't count rape as violence, doesn't measure intent (for example -- self defense), and doesn't measure patterns of abuse, only individual instances, only in the past year.
Well, then. Straus, have you anything to say for yourself? This is almost harder to find than the missing DV male victims. No one wants to help you find this one, they mostly point you to people claiming that the CTS scale proves the feminists have been misrepresenting domestic violence for years. However, if you manage to come up with the exact perfect wording, Google comes to your rescue. Yay, Google.
Turns out, Straus is perfectly capable of speaking for himself, and he says some very interesting things. I admit, I went into this paper thinking it would be more of the same arguments on gender parity in domestic violence bandied about by Men's Rights folks -- that criticizing the methodology doesn't actually make the results wrong, that Kimmel a man-hating feminazi, I've heard it all. Straus, however, turns out to actually be a scholar.
If we skip past the politics and posturing, we comes to the following passage:
Most of the violence that is revealed by surveys of family problems is relatively minor and relatively infrequent, whereas a large portion of the violence in crime studies and clinical studies is chronic and severe and often involves injuries that need medical attention. These two types of violence probably have different etiology and probably require a different type of intervention (see ~ohkson,1 995). If this is correct, it is important to avoid using findings based on cases known to police or shelters for battered women as the basis for understanding and dealing with the relatively minor and less chronic violence found in the population in general. That type of unwarranted generalization is often made and it is known as the "clinical fallacy."
Family conflict studies pose the opposite problem. It can he called the "representative sample fallacy" (Straus, 1990b). Family conflict studies contain very few cases involving weekly or daily assaults and injury. Consequently, family conflict studies may provide an erroneous basis for policies and interventions focused on these relatively few but extreme cases. This is a serious shortcoming because although the numbers may be relatively low, they are the cases that pose the most serious problems and which need to have priority in respect to interventions.
So who's right?
Well, that's easy. They both are. Kimmel and Straus both say they're studying different things. What it boils down to is your definition of terms. Domestic Violence is generally accepted to mean a pattern of behavior aimed at controlling another through the use or threat of violence. However, the words themselves can also mean 'violence in a domestic setting.' Not to mention what sort of broad implications the word 'violence' can have all by itself.
Straus' findings are actually not that different from what all of us know -- when in conflict, men and women react basically the same, though sometimes for different reasons, and society likes to tell us that violence will solve all our problems. Straus is studying 'relatively infrequent, relatively minor' acts of everyday violence in the population at large. These are not abusers he's studying, and very few of the people involved would ever label the acts as abuse -- these are normal American men and women acting in normal American ways. That these ways are highly unhealthy ways of acting, and should probably be worked on is not actually in question, by anybody.
And there you have it, ladies and soon-to-be-ladies, when you're arguing with someone about gender symmetry in domestic violence, rest easy knowing that you're both right, you just haven't properly defined your terms.
Addendum
Someone messaged me (worried that SRS would ban them on sight) that the Violence Against Women Act excludes men. Quoting:
Posted Feb 14, 2012, 6:57 PM UTC · edited