See What You Made Me Do
Page 25
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These are terrible cases of domestic abuse. But anecdotal research can only tell us so much. Do these stories reflect what women’s violence commonly looks like? And at what rate do women perpetrate violence against men?
Finding reliable answers to these questions is incredibly difficult. The study of domestic abuse is broadly divided into two camps: ‘family conflict’ researchers on one side, and ‘violence against women’ (VAW) researchers on the other.
Family conflict researchers – many of whom recoil at being labelled ‘anti-feminist’ – insist that in the home women are just as violent as men. They have credible statistics to prove this, as we’ll see. What’s more, in the battle for public opinion, they appear to be winning: in a 2017 national survey, only 64 per cent of Australians agreed that domestic violence is ‘mainly perpetrated’ by men – down from 86 per cent in 1995.6 It seems the more we’ve become aware of domestic abuse, the less convinced we are that men are the main perpetrators.
In the other camp – in fierce opposition – are a disparate group of VAW researchers: feminist scholars, domestic violence workers, police and medicos. They rubbish claims of ‘gender symmetry’ and insist that perpetrators are overwhelmingly men. They have credible and persuasive statistics too.
What’s especially bewildering about this academic feud is that on both sides are respected experts who have come to reasonable conclusions. If we were to judge by statistics alone, we’d have to say that both sides are right. But they can’t be: the realities they claim to describe are – on the surface at least – utterly contradictory.*
Consider for a minute the claim by family conflict researchers that within intimate relationships women are as violent as men. How could this be true? Outside the home, where acts of violence are more reliably measured, men are the heavyweight champions of assault: they outperform women by a rate of at least nine to one.7 Why would such a clear distinction suddenly disappear when the violence is behind closed doors? Plus, if women’s violence is such a real and present threat to men, how has it remained a secret for so long? Despite what men’s rights activists believe, feminists don’t actually run the world, and are thus unlikely to have orchestrated a global conspiracy of silence. Chances are, if women were attacking their intimate partners at the same rate as men, we would have heard about it – a lot.
So where does this idea of ‘gender symmetry’ come from? Like so many of our modern ideas about domestic violence, we can trace this idea back to the 1970s – specifically, 1975. This was a time when public violence was at the front of the American mind: men in their thousands were returning from Vietnam damaged or dangerously disturbed, assassinations and terrorism seemed almost commonplace, and Republicans were eagerly stoking paranoia about crime. What still wasn’t being talked about, though, was the private violence in millions of American homes. There was almost no research on domestic violence in the mid-1970s; the entire oeuvre could be read in a single afternoon. But two New Hampshire sociologists, Richard Gelles and Murray Straus, had a hunch. Much of this public violence, they believed, had its origins in violent American homes. To test their theory – and against the strong advice of their academic peers – Gelles and Straus conducted the first nationwide survey on family violence. The surveyors they dispatched asked 2143 randomly selected individuals a simple question: in the past twelve months, have you used violence to settle disputes with your partner and, if so, exactly what kind of violence was used?
The results were surprisingly candid and sensationally grim: ‘With the exception of the police and the military,’ the authors found, ‘the family is perhaps the most violent social group, and the home the most violent social setting, in our society.’ In the previous year, 16 per cent of American couples had experienced violence, and 28 per cent over the course of their marriage. To the enormous surprise of Gelles and Straus, the victims were not predominantly women: in fact, the numbers of men and women who said they had experienced violence in their current relationship were almost equal (12 per cent of women and 11.6 per cent of men). When they narrowed that field to those who had experienced severe violence, they again found almost equivalent numbers, only this time women were even more culpable than men: 4.6 per cent of men had experienced severe violence, compared to 3.8 per cent of women. In the 51 per cent of relationships that featured a primary aggressor, the result split virtually down the middle: 27 per cent men, 24 per cent women.8
This was not what Gelles and Straus expected to find, but it did echo the findings of a small study Gelles had conducted in 1972. In this limited sample (of eighty informal interviews), he had found that ‘the eruption of conjugal violence occurs with equal frequency among both husbands and wives’. This early study recorded statements from women explaining why they had used violence against their husbands. Said one, ‘He would just yell and yell – not really yelling, just talk loudly. And I couldn’t say anything because he kept talking. So I’d swing.’ Said another, ‘I spent all that time by myself and sometimes the kids would get on my nerves … so when I got mad I hit him.’ A third openly admitted, ‘I probably had no reason to get angry with him … but it was such a bore … He was such a rotten lover anyway. So I’d yell at him and hit him to stir him up.’9
Despite the statistics indicating women were as violent as men, Gelles and Straus were quick to add caveats. It was still men who exhibited the highest degree of dangerous behaviour – the kind that would leave women injured, hospitalised or dead. Women were also, they noted, less likely to have enough money to leave the relationship. It was also possible, they added, that some women were using violence in self-defence (they estimated that the vast majority of husbands who experienced severe violence were probably also being violent towards their wives).
In 1977, their colleague Suzanne Steinmetz released a different interpretation of their findings. Her short, incendiary paper would drive a deep chasm into domestic violence research. ‘Battered husband syndrome’ was the first paper to claim that within American families there were as many battered husbands as there were wives: a fact Steinmetz claimed had been hidden beneath a ‘cloak of secrecy’ by journalists and researchers guilty of ‘selective inattention’.10 This was no dispassionate academic treatise. It was an unabashed polemic – and that’s how it was received. The reaction was fast and furious: from attempts to block Steinmetz’s academic career to accusations of fraud. VAW researchers were both incensed and amused, quipping that her paper suffered from ‘battered data syndrome’.
But despite widespread condemnation, Steinmetz’s secret society of battered husbands did not sink back into obscurity. Instead, ‘battered husband syndrome’ became the founding text of the ‘gender symmetry’ argument and spawned a field of researchers dedicated to proving domestic violence was an equal-opportunity crime. As Straus writes, the more empirical evidence he gathered on women’s violence, the more he was persuaded that Steinmetz was right. When both he and Gelles – once towering figures in domestic violence research – also began arguing in support of gender symmetry, they too were shunned. ‘Bomb threats were phoned in to conference centers and buildings where we were scheduled to present,’ they claimed. ‘Invitations to conferences dwindled and dried up … Advocacy literature and feminist writing would cite our research, but not attribute it to us … All three of us became “non persons” among domestic violence advocates.’11
For years, Steinmetz, Gelles and Straus pursued the notion of gender symmetry in virtual isolation. Today, a growing number of academics and more than a hundred empirical studies show that when it comes to intimate partner violence, women are just as violent as men. Data from these studies is legitimate and, as Gelles points out, even quoted by the domestic violence sector – when the data refers to female victims.
So is there really a vast cohort of abused men? Are these the men who, after suffering for so long in silence, are now seeking protection in Southport? The answer depends on how you define ‘domestic violence’. When it c
omes to the statistics on women’s violence, the devil is not in the details – it’s in the way those details are collected and presented.
To get a good look at this devil, we need to do a little academic detective work. Almost all the studies that ‘prove’ women are as violent as men get their data via an instrument known as the Conflict Tactics Scale, or CTS. It’s the survey instrument Gelles and Straus used in their first study back in 1975, and it is still in wide use today. It asks respondents to answer a series of questions: does violence occur in their relationship? How frequently does it occur? What does it look like?# But what exactly do these surveys measure, and how do they measure it? How does the CTS come up with statistics that show equal levels of domestic violence by men and women?
Let’s run an experiment. Say you’re sitting at home and there’s a knock at the door. When you open it, the stranger on your step is not trying to sell you something or convert you to Jehovah. Instead, they want to come into your house and ask you incredibly intimate questions about your relationship – all in the name of research, of course. You’ve just finished the last season of Game of Thrones and are at a loose end, so you invite them in. The researcher takes a seat in your living room and brings out their clipboard. If they are using the boilerplate CTS survey – the one devised by Gelles and Straus – they will start like this: ‘No matter how well a couple gets along, there are times when they disagree, get annoyed with the other person, want different things from each other, or just have spats or fights because they’re in a bad mood, are tired, or for some other reason. Couples also have many different ways of trying to settle their differences. This is a list of things that might happen when you have differences.’12†
Stop right there, say the critics. Michael Kimmel, one of the world’s leading experts on masculinity and domestic violence, argues that from the start the survey errs in framing domestic violence as an argument that gets out of control. As we have seen, the most dangerous form of domestic violence – coercive control – is not about losing one’s temper, and it doesn’t occur as the result of a fight. Rather, it’s a pattern of behaviour, in which abusers manufacture conflict (while using a dizzying array of other methods) to confuse and dominate their partners. A tally of one-off incidents – slaps, shoves, threats – cannot capture the subtle pattern of cruelty common to coercive control. Even among less controlling abusers – the ‘insecure reactors’ – conflict is still something they largely manufacture.
But let’s get back to your living room. The researcher wants to know if, during the past twelve months, either of you has used force to ‘settle your differences’ and, if so, what kind of force you used. The CTS ranks forceful acts on a scale of severity. At the least severe end is ‘saying something to spite your partner’; further up the scale is slapping; higher still is kicking, biting or hitting with a fist; above that is hitting or trying to hit your partner with something. The most severe acts involve threats or attacks with a knife or a gun. You have something to confess: a couple of months ago, you bit your partner. The surveyor nods and notes your violent act on their survey. But when you try to explain why you did it, their pen goes still. They’re not interested in why. Their job is to record and rank each incident according to severity. Context is irrelevant.
For many scholars and statisticians, this is a big problem. When it comes to domestic abuse, they argue, context isn’t just another data point. If you don’t include why a violent incident happened, what impact it had, and what role violence plays in the abusive dynamic, then the overall picture is missing. Without context, for example, the CTS gives equal weight to a kick that barely leaves a bruise as it does to a kick that causes traumatic brain injury. The kick whose intended meaning is ‘leave me alone’ is registered as equal to a kick that means ‘if you try to leave the house again, I’ll break all your ribs’. ‘This false equivalence,’ cautions University of Southern California psychology professor Gayla Margolin, means ‘a woman’s hardest punches, which might be laughed at by her husband, would count as “husband abuse” based on actions alone.’ If her husband struck her and broke her jaw, his punch would receive an equal ranking.13
There is another, related distortion. ‘Those who have perpetrated several violent “acts” (no matter how serious) and those who have reported committing a single act (no matter how trivial) are both defined as “violent”,’ write VAW scholars Russell and Rebecca Dobash.14 A woman who tries but fails to hit her partner will be recorded as ‘violent’ – just as he will if he beats her unconscious. According to the CTS, this relationship consists of one violent woman and one violent man in a situation of mutual violence. It’s easy to see how such a method can produce misleading results. But family conflict researchers are not worried by this. That’s not because they’re sloppy. It’s because their research focuses on how couples resolve arguments – calmly or violently? From the family conflict viewpoint, both the man and woman above chose violence. Even if one of them had a greater impact, both are culpable, because both used violence.
For Kimmel, this is an abstract academic perspective, utterly disconnected from human experience. ‘Who initiates the violence,’ he writes, ‘the relative size and strength of the people involved, and the nature of the relationship all will surely shape the experience of the violence – but not the scores on the CTS.’15 This is the fatal flaw in family conflict research.
Family conflict researchers did concede one point early on – it was important to know whether one partner was acting in self-defence. In 1985, for their second national survey on family violence, Gelles, Straus and Steinmetz added a question about who had initiated the physical conflict. This produced another result that shocked many experts: women had initiated the violence at virtually equal rates to men.16 Again, the data contradicted the long list of established studies showing that women mostly use violence in self-defence.
This is another statistic that needs unpacking. Cast your mind back to the case of Jasmine and Nelson in Chapter 1. Nelson’s dominance over Jasmine was established over many years, but on the CTS, forcing Jasmine to sleep in the car would not register as violence. In fact, if Nelson hadn’t used violence in the past twelve months, he would not show up as violent at all. If, however, Jasmine finally snapped and threatened him with a knife when he tried to banish her to the car, she would be recorded as having initiated violence. Following the rules of an incident-based survey, there would have been only one act of violence, committed by one perpetrator: Jasmine. What’s more, if she threatened Nelson with a knife, Jasmine would have committed an act of severe violence. Despite enduring years of physical and psychological abuse, she would be classified as a ‘violent’ woman – a perpetrator of domestic violence – and Nelson as her victim.
The CTS has been enormously successful in alerting society to the high frequency of violence that occurs in conflicts between lovers and spouses. But, as Kimmel says, incident-based surveys like the CTS do not paint an accurate picture of domestic violence. ‘Imagine simply observing that death rates soared for men between ages nineteen and thirty during a period of a few years, without explaining that a country has declared war,’ says Kimmel. ‘Context matters.’17
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The message is plain: data alone cannot accurately portray the complex nature of women’s violence. The fact remains, however, that a large number of women in these surveys do admit to using violence in their relationships. So how do we explain this?
Penn State sociologist Michael Johnson is one of the world’s leading thinkers on domestic violence. In the early 1990s, Johnson was puzzling over the contradictory positions of family conflict researchers and VAW scholars. ‘How,’ he wrote, ‘did we come to have two groups of renowned scholars presenting ostensibly credible evidence for their obviously contradictory positions regarding the simplest possible question about partner violence: “Who does it?”’18 So Johnson ran his own experiment. He took every empirical study on domestic violence that used the CTS (showing equal o
r near-equal perpetration by men and women) and compared them to the statistics from police, hospitals and women’s shelters (showing predominantly male perpetration). The difference between the two datasets, said Johnson, was ‘dramatic’. Compared to the CTS, the agency statistics showed male violence that was more frequent, more severe, escalated over time and was rarely equal to any violence used by their female partners.
Johnson had a lightbulb moment: it wasn’t that one side was right and the other wrong. Both datasets were legitimate: these two groups of researchers were simply looking at fundamentally different kinds of violence.
Family conflict researchers, through their surveys, were identifying what Johnson called ‘situational couple violence’. This is the most common type of domestic violence: the kind that erupts out of frustration or the need to stop or win an argument. Commonly the violence is mild, and either isolated or sporadic. For some, however, ‘situational violence’ does warrant a call to police; for others it can become a dangerous and escalating pattern, which may even lead to homicide. But even in relationships where the violence is dangerous or distressing, there generally isn’t one partner totally dominating the other; instead, it’s a type of reactive violence that really does stem from low emotional intelligence and poor anger management. The absence of a severe power imbalance is why, generally speaking, in situations of situational violence, it is not a life-threatening act to leave the relationship. Situational violence usually ends when the relationship does.
Though Johnson accepted that women are just as likely as men to be the aggressors in situational couple violence, he emphasised that the impact of this violence is still distinctly gendered. ‘Men do more serious damage,’ he explained, ‘and their violence is more likely to introduce fear into a relationship and to get the authorities involved.’19 Family conflict researchers agree, especially since it shows up in their own data: in the 1985 survey, 3 per cent of females sustained injuries that needed medical attention, compared to 0.4 per cent of male victims.20