Domestic violence: causes, effects, and intervention strategies

Domestic Violence

The Reasons that Women are Violent in Relationships

The evidence demonstrates that women engage in violent activities at a rate approaching the levels engaged in by men. However, the victims of domestic violence are overwhelmingly characterized as female and the perpetrators as male. How can one reconcile the fact that women and men engage in a similar number of aggressive behaviors with the fact that the victims of domestic violence are overwhelmingly female? One hypothesis is that the majority of violence engaged in by women is defensive, where the majority of violence engaged in by men is offensive.

The objective of the proposed research is to determine whether or not men and women engage in domestic violence for different reasons. A determination of the reasons that men and women engage in violent behaviors will aid the researcher in making a determination of whether men and women are battered at the same rates. If men and women report that their violent actions are accompanied by the same type of dominating and controlling behavior that characterizes abusive relationships, then the findings that men and women are the victims of violence at equal rates enable the researcher to make a finding that men and women batter at equal rates. However, if the research reveals that women and men have different motivations when engaging in violent behavior, the findings that men and women are the victims of domestic violence at the same rates does not support a finding that men and women batter at equal rates.

Current research demonstrates that there is a difference between violence by men and violence by women. For example, 50% of female victims of domestic violence sustain injuries compared to only 3% of male victims of domestic violence (Bachman and Saltzman, 1995). Despite those findings, evidence of the number of strikes or blows given by men and women in intimate relationships has been manipulated to create the myth of sexual symmetry in violence in intimate relationship (Dobash, Dobash, Wilson, & Daly, 1992). However, at least one study has already suggested that women predominantly use violence in self-defense or to escape violence by their partner (Saunders, 1986). In fact, evidence supports the idea that violence perpetrated against women differs from violence perpetrated against men in one very significant manner; violence against women is often accompanied by emotionally abusive and controlling behavior (Tjaden and Thoennes, 2000).

In order to determine the difference in the nature of violence perpetrated by men and violence perpetrated by women, one should question the victims of those men and women found guilty of committing family violence. A survey should be distributed to the victims of men and women who have been court-ordered into family violence intervention programs. The survey would ask the victim to report incidents of violence. In addition, the survey would ask the victim to report whether or not other characteristics of an abusive relationship accompanied the violence. The survey would ask which partner had control over the finances, whether the victim was prohibited by the offender from seeing friends of family, whether the offender engaged in emotionally abusive behavior, whether the victim felt pressured into unwanted sexual activities, whether the offender engaged in hurtful words, and whether the offender used threats to force the victim to do things that the victim did not want to do. A survey would also be distributed to the offenders, asking the same questions.