From: payner@netcom.com (Rich Payne)
Subject: violence equality?  was(Re: feminist sound bytes)
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services (408 241-9760 guest)
Distribution: usa
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 1992 14:55:36 GMT

In article <1992Dec14.015443.26133@midway.uchicago.edu> mec6@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
>payner@netcom.com (Rich Payne) writes:
>
>>Wait a sec, the stats Bronis Vidugiris posted earlier show about as many
>>male victims of domestic violence as female victims. Note further that
>>in both surveys, the reported number for "severe violence" has more male 
>>victims.
>>
>>At any rate, these two surveys show roughly equivalant domestic violence
>>directed against both sexes. The third is useless for comparison.
>
>I've seen Bronis' statistics a number of times, so I thought I'd add
>my own.  These are from the National Survey of Families and Households,
>which was carried out in 1988.
>                                               Men        Women
>Perpetrators:
>Respondent ever hit/threw/shoved spouse:      63.6%        62.0%
>Respondent cut, bruised, or seriously
>injured spouse:                                6.5%         8.6%
>
>Victims:
>Spouse ever hit/threw/shoved respondent:      56.3%        62.2%
>Spouse ever cut, bruised, or seriously
>injured respondent:                            6.5%        15.9%
>
>From these numbers, it is fairly clear that women have a broader
>defintion of violence than men.  Only 6.5% of men claim to have
>seriously injured a spouse, but 16% of women claim to have been
>seriously injured.  Interestingly, it works the other way too.  More
>women claim to be abusers than there are abused husbands.

From a posting by (d) on Dec 14 1992, originally by Dave Gross on 30 OCT 1991...

 
|     In 1976, for instance, in a critique of the Curtis report (which found
|women less likely to assault, but as likely to murder, as men), Wilt & Bannon
|wrote that "nonfatal violence committed by women against men is less likely
|to be reported to the police than is violence by men against women; thus,
|women assaulters who come to the attention of the police are likely to be
|those who have produced a fatal result."
|
|     In 1977, Suzanne Steinmetz released results from several studies showing
|that the percentage of wives who have used physical violence is higher than
|the percentage of husbands, and that the wives' average violence score tended
|to be higher, although men were somewhat more likely to cause greater injury.
|She also found that women were as likely as men to initiate physical
|violence, and that they had similar motives for their violent acts (Steinmetz
|1977-78).
|
|     Steinmetz concluded that "the most unreported crime is not wife beating
|-- it's husband beating" (Langley & Levy 1977).
 
>If you go by victim's reports only, women are much more often abused,
>especially seriously abused.  
> 
>If you go by the perpetrators word, the levels of abuse are similar, with 
>women committing slightly more of the serious injuries.
>
>Official statistics show the heavy slant towards wife abuse, of
>course.  The average yearly rate of wife abuse is 2.7 per 1000 as
>compared to 0.2 for husband abuse. (Sourcebook of Criminal Justice
>Studies, 1984.)  This probably reflects, to an unknown extent, the 
>greater tendency for males not to report abuse. 
>
>Finally, of homicide victims who were killed by their spouse, 40% were
>husbands killed by wives; 60% were wives killed by husbands.  In some
>cases, the wives killing of the husband "has been justified on the
>grounds of long-term physical abuse at his hands." (Source: Family
>Violence.  Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report. 1982.)

From the same report...

|    Also note actions like that of Ohio governor Richard F. Celeste who
|granted clemency to 25 women who were in prison for murdering their husbands.
|The reason he gave for this was the "Battered Woman Syndrome" which,
|obviously, no man can claim as his defense (Wilkerson 1990).  There is very
|little concern shown either for the idea of making spousal abuse a capital
|crime with the victim as extra-judicial executioner, nor for the idea that
|perhaps some of the men who murder their spouses might be suffering from an
|analogous "Battered Man Syndrome."
|
|     There is only one case I am aware of in which a man was able to use a
|similar defense.  Warren Farrell writes about it in his book _Why Men Are the
|Way They Are_ (Farrell 1986, p. 231):
|
|        Betty King had beaten, slashed, stabbed, thrown dry acid on,
|        and shot her husband.  Eddie King had not sought prosecution
|        when she slashed his face with a carpet knife, nor when she
|        left him in a parking lot with a blade in his back.  Neither
|        of these incidents even made the police records as
|        statistics.  She was only arrested twice -- when she stabbed
|        him so severely in the back and so publicly (in a bar) that
|        the incidents had to be reported.
|
|        All these stabbings, shootings, and acid-throwings happened
|        during a four-year marriage.  During a subsequent shouting
|        match on the porch of a friend's house, Betty King once again
|        reached into her purse.  This time Eddie King shot her.  When
|        an investigation led to a verdict of self-defense, there was
|        an outcry of opposition from feminists and the media.
|
|     Farrell compares this case, in which "a two-second delay could have
|meant his death," to that of the celebrated case made into the television
|movie The Burning Bed in which the protagonist murdered her husband while he
|slept.
|
|     In conclusion, I think that the available data show that husband
|battering is a serious problem, comparable to the problem of wife battering.
|Even if the statistics collected in the last several years are completely
|wrong and only one in 14 victims of spousal abuse are men, these are men who
|are hurting and need services that are currently not available.

 
>rini


Rich

payner@netcom.com


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