DOMINANCE AND SYMMETRY IN PARTNER VIOLENCE BY MALE AND FEMALE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IN 32 NATIONS 1

The study investigated the widely held belief that violence against partners in marital, cohabiting, and dating relationships is almost entirely perpetrated by men, and that when women assault their partners, it has a different etiology than assaults by men. The empirical data on these issues were provided by 13,601 university students who participated in the International Dating Violence Study in 32 nations. The results in the first part of this paper show that almost a third of the female as well as male students physically assaulted a dating partner in the 12 month study period, and that the most frequent pattern was mutuality in violence, i.e. both were violent, followed by “female-only” violence. Violence by only the male partner was the least frequent pattern according to both male and female participants. The second part of the paper focuses on whether there is gender symmetry in a crucial aspect of the etiology of partner violence -dominance by one partner, The results show that dominance by either the male or the female partner is associated with an increased probability of violence. These results, in combination with results from many other studies, call into question the assumption that partner violence is primarily a male crime and that, when women are violent, it is self-defense. Because these assumptions are crucial elements in almost all partner violence prevention and treatment programs, a fundamental revision is needed to bring these programs into alignment with the empirical data. Prevention and treatment of partner violence could become more effective if the programs recognize that most partner violence is mutual and act on the high rate of perpetration by women and the similar etiology of partner violence by men and women. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Other information on the International Dating Violence Study, and papers reporting results can be downloaded from htttp://pubpages.unh. edu/~mas2. I am indebted to Jennifer Hagberg for preparation of the tables and to Rose A. Medeiros for the charts. It is a pleasure to express appreciation to the members of the Family Research Laboratory Seminar for valuable comments and suggestions. The work has been supported by National Institute of Mental Health grant T32MH15161 and by the University of New Hampshire. ID41H2.doc/PR41,5June2006, Page 1 This paper reports the results of an empirical investigation of two of the most controversial and important issues in understanding physical violence between partners in a marital, cohabiting, or dating relationships. The answers to these questions can have profound implications for prevention and treatment of partner violence. 1. Is partner violence primarily perpetrated by men, as compared to women, and as compared to both partners engaging in violence? 2. To what extent is dominance by the male partner associated with partner violence, as compared to dominance by the female partner? In short is the issue one of male dominance or one of inequality between partners? Just mentioning these two issues as topics for empirical investigation is often regarded as undermining the efforts to end partner violence. This is because these questions implicitly challenge two core principles that underlie most efforts to prevent and treat partner violence. In relation to the first principle, that partner violence is primarily perpetrated by men, in an article on “Sexual Inequality, Cultural Norms, and Wife-Beating” published 30 years ago (Straus, 1976) I stated that “wives are much more often the victim of violence by their husbands than the reverse. ” In relation to the second principle, in that article I attributed male partner violence to “the hierarchical and male-dominant nature of society. ” A correlated principle is that when men are violent the purpose is to coerce and dominate, whereas when women are violent it is almost always an act of self-defense or a response to unbearably humiliating and dominating behavior by the male partner. The idea that women are motivated to hit in order to coerce a male partner, or out of rage and anger over misbehavior by a male partner (such as sexual infidelity), is regarded as outrageous, and is taken as a sign of sexism and misogyny. In the 35 years since I began research on partner violence, bit by bit, I have seen my assumptions about prevalence and etiology contradicted by a mass of empirical evidence from my own research and from research by many others. Consequently, I have gradually come to a much more multi-faceted view of partner violence. This view recognizes the overwhelming evidence that women assault their partners at about the same rate as men, and that the motives for violence by both males and females are diverse. However, few others have reached the same conclusion, and some of those few will not publicly express their position for fear of the type of ostracism that I have experienced (partly described in Straus and Gelles (Straus & Gelles, 1990)). Instead, the evidence on gender symmetry in prevalence and etiology is typically disregarded and often explicitly denied (Straus & Scott, In press). As will be suggested in the conclusion, this denial has crippled prevention and treatment efforts. As implied by the previous paragraphs, there are at least two aspects of gender symmetry in partner violence: mutuality of perpetration by men and women and parallel etiology of violence. The main objectives of this paper are to present the results of a cross national study of these two aspects of gender symmetry and to draw out their implications for prevention and treatment programs. An additional objective is to illustrate use of an easily applied typology. This classifies cases into Male-Only violence, Female-Only violence, and Both Violent. Use of these simple but crucial categories are needed to help research and prevention and treatment programs act on the implications for prevention and treatment which flow from the empirical results presented in this paper. PREVIOUS STUDIES OF MUTUALITY ID41H2.doc/PR41,5June2006, Page 2 The importance of data on mutuality is based on the assumption that violence occurs in the context of an ongoing system of family relationships. Therefore research and clinical work on partner violence can benefit from taking into account the behavior of both partners in the family system. This applies even when it might seem that only information on the behavior of one of the partners is needed, such as measuring progress in a treatment program for male batterers. Research has shown that the cessation of violence by one partner is highly dependent on whether the other partner also stops hitting (Feld & Straus, 1989; Gelles & Straus, 1988). Thus, even when monitoring a treatment program for a designated perpetrator, it is crucial to know the extent to which the partner has also ceased acts of physical aggression. Several studies, including large and nationally representative samples, have found that female-only violence is as prevalent or more prevalent than male-only violence, and that the most prevalent pattern is mutual violence The 1975 and the 1985 National Family Violence Surveys both found that about half of the violence was mutual, one quarter was male-only, and one quarter was female-only (Gelles & Straus, 1988; Straus, Gelles, & Steinmetz, 1980). The National Comorbidity Study (Kessler, Molnar, Feurer et al., 2001) found similar percentages. Other studies showing similar results include (Anderson, 2002; Capaldi & Owen, 2001; McCarroll, Ursano, Fan et al., 2004; Moffitt, Caspi, Rutter et al., 2001; Williams & Frieze, 2005). In all of these studies, the predominant pattern was mutual violence. Despite the clear evidence that couples differ in respect to symmetry and asymmetry in PV, the etiology of even the three types just described has seldom been investigated. If each has a different etiology, as is often claimed, especially for female perpetrators (see below), those differences need to be considered by prevention and treatment programs. Previous research by Medeiros and Straus (Medeiros & Straus, 2006a; Medeiros & Straus, 2006b), did find a similar pattern of risk factors for men and women, but they did not differentiate male-only, female-only, mutually violent couples, as was done for this paper. RESEARCH ON GENDER SYMMETRY IN DOMINANCE The literature on PV contains innumerable assertions that the etiology of PV is different for men and women. Violence by male partners is attributed to an effort to dominate and control whereas violence by female partners is attributed to self-defense or as a justified response to an overwhelming pattern of domination and degradation. The existence of dominated and demeaned female victims is clearly documented. However, the available evidence suggests that such cases are a very small percentage of partner violence (Gelles & Straus, 1988; Kaufman Kantor & Straus, 1990; Straus, 1991). Dominance And Control The idea that it is primarily men who use violence to dominate and control can be found in hundreds of journal articles. To take just one example by an experienced and respected research, Hamberger and Guse (Hamberger & Guse, 2002) assert that “Men in contrast {to women} appear to use violence to dominate and control. ” But, even though their article cited about 80 studies, none provided empirical evidence on gender differences in dominance and control motivation. This is not because there are no studies comparing dominance as a motive by men and women. There are at least six such studies, including at least one very well known study. This is the 1975 National Family Violence Survey, as reported in the book Behind Closed Doors: Violence In The American Family (Straus et al., 1980). This book reports results from a study of a nationally representative sample of 2,143 American couples. That study found ID41H2.doc/PR41,5June2006, Page 3 that equalitarian couples were the least violent, and that both m