YET ANOTHER GENDER SPECIFIC ANALYSIS OF FAMILY VIOLENCE:

This is taken from Schechter, Susan and Gary, Lisa T, "A Framework for Understanding and Empowering Battered Women", chapter 13 of Straus M.B. (ed.) (1988) Abuse and Victimization across the Life Span, Baltimore: John Hopkins UP.

"Physical abuse also includes the destruction of the things a woman may cherish most: clothing, photographs of her family, old beloved objects, or even her pet. Although this destruction is clearly emotionally abusive, we label it physical abuse because it gives the victim a profound message about the batterer's access to her and his ability to continue his assaults. the woman learns that the abuser can control her behavior even if he is not physically harming her at that moment." (p.242)

These are sweeping generalisations about behaviour. We have to be careful not to assume that the actions described here are automatically associated with direct physical abuse of women. If this is to be termed physical abuse, should we not also accept that women can be abusive in this way?

They go on (p.244) to discuss the question, "Why are women the target? The social sanctioning of battering". They draw on ideas about a woman being "a man's property", stating that, "It is clear that this belief endures". To support this statement, they say that, "Approximately two million married men in the United States beat their partners every year". Their source is Straus M, Gelles R J, and Steinmetz S K (1980), Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family, NY: Anchor/Doubleday. On page 34 of the 1981 Anchor Books edition of their source, I found:

" ... the statistics on the number of husbands and wives who had ever 'beaten up' their spouses ... [is] astonishingly high. ... well over 2 million had been beaten up by his or her spouse."

They have therefore taken data for both men and women and assumed that all assailants are men, and they have assumed that if something ever occurred, it happened every year. A bit later in their source (p.37), there is the statement that:

"Of those couples reporting any violence, 49 per cent were situations ... where both were violent. For the year previous to our study, a comparison of the number of couples in which only the husband was violent with those in which only the wife was violent shows the figures to be very close: 27 per cent violent husbands and 24 per cent violent wives."

They may be referring to a statement later in Straus et al., however: "... about one out of twenty-six American wives get beaten by their husbands every year, or a total of almost 1.8 million per year." (p.40) If so, they should have read on the next few sentences to find: "Staggering as are these figures, the real surprise lies in the statistics of husband-beating. These rates are slightly higher than those for wife-beating! ... about one out of twenty-two wives ... attacked their husbands severely enough to be included in this Husband-beating Index. That is over 2 million very violent wives." (pp.40-1)

I wonder if a man is also considered to be "a woman's property"?

It is this kind of selective "woman's perspective only" research that gives feminism and women's studies a bad name.

On a related topic, see Lapsley on domestic violence.

Stuart Birks

28 November, 1995