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After thirty years of struggle and effort, the battered womens movement, along with a larger feminist movement has successfully framed the issue of intimate partner abuse, or domestic violence as it is more popularly known, as a one-sided problem that involves controlling and brutal men who deliberately abuse women 'because they can'. This belief is an important tenet of the movements philosophy and one that captures the perceived sexist nature of intimate partner abuse. However, it fails in a major way to acknowledge womens contribution to family and intimate abuse.
In the 1980's, sociologists Murray Strauss, Richard Gelles and Professor Suzanne Steinmetz published a groundbreaking study on family violence in the American family. They found that 27 percent of married couples in the United States experiencing domestic violence, the husbands were physically abusive toward their wives and the wives did not fight back. More suprising was that in another 24 percent of cases the wives were physically abusive to their husbands and the husbands did not retaliate. Even more shocking was that the remaining 49 percent of couples both of the partners actively participated in the violence. The results of this study were so disturbing that over one hundred follow up studies - many by other researchers as well - confirmed the fact that men and women assault each other at roughly equal rates.
There are now over four hundred studies from large sample bases of the population that continue to reveal these statistics. Even when women are asked themselves, they admit to initiating abuse at similar levels to men - this is not a self defence reaction from the female partner. Other will argue that even if this is true women will always come off worse because of a mans superior physical strength, however, during the research it was revealed that women use weapons three times more often than men and many men also have serious injuries inflicted upon them.
We believe at FamilySpace that the original definition of domestic violence is not sufficiently inclusive. Therefore we have solutions that address both male and female abuse and we approach this serious social issue within a gender neutral framework.