This survey on domestic violence, conducted at Glasgow Caledonian University as part of a much wider international survey, puts domestic violence in a new perspective. Gone is the stereotye of the man beating up his female partner. It would appear that in reality women feel entitled to be violent, at least in England and Scotland. Gone, too, is the madonna image of women ... But perhaps I'm reading far too much into one report.

Comments please!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/5092100.stm

Quote:

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Survey finds male abuse approval
More than half of women questioned at a Glasgow university said they approved of wives hitting their husbands.
The Glasgow Caledonian students were among 6,500 women surveyed from 36 universities for an international study into attitudes on domestic violence.

Of the 200 women, 60% said it was acceptable for women to hit their husbands while 35% admitted assaulting their partner.

A total of 8% admitted injuring them - the highest rate in the study.

The injured men suffered bruises, cuts or broken bones.

Among European students, only English women were more likely to have carried out assaults, with 41% admitting that they had punched or kicked their partners.


We need make the same 'big deal' about violence by women as we do about men who behave violently
Murray Straus
Report co-author

However those inflicting injury was less than in Scotland, at 5%.

Just under a quarter of those in Scotland admitted there were occasions when it would be acceptable for a husband to slap his wife.

Worldwide, more than 4,800 female students approved of assaulting their partner and 2,000 admitted to pushing, shoving, slapping, throwing objects and twisting their partner's arms or hair.

The findings, printed in the Sunday Times, will be published next month in the European Journal of Criminology.

'Bottom line'

Professor Murray Straus, co-author of the study, told the paper there was a need for better rehabilitation programmes for women with violent tendencies.

"This study raises questions about why there's so much violence between partners whether they're married, cohabiting or dating," he said.

"The bottom line is that we need make the same 'big deal' about violence by women as we do about men who behave violently."

In recent years, the Scottish Executive has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on raising awareness of domestic abuse, including a helpline for victims which received more than 20,000 calls in 2005 - an increase of 38% on the previous year.

David Smith, honorary professor of criminology at Edinburgh university and editor of the European Journal of Criminology, said he found the results "surprising".

"The number of women who admit to assaulting men is interesting as it's well known that men are more violent than woman."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/5092100.stm

Published: 2006/06/18 12:39:05 GMT

© BBC MMVI

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This isn't at all surprising. I know such a thing happens in the US, too. In fact, often enough if woman is beating on her partner, the man is expected just to take it because it is still thought that he shouldn't hit a woman. This is one of the reasons women feel entitled to do it; there will likely be no consequences. And also often, the police take that view of it as well.

As an example, a friend of my sister in law came home to find his girlfriend trying to destroy his Harley Davidson motorcycle (she did succeed in doing about $5,000 damage to it) and tried to stop her, so she turned on him, throwing items at him, punching him in the head... He pushed her away from him but refused to hit her, and finally got her out of his house. He called the police, and one of the first things they did was to take pictures of his hands, to prove he didn't have any marks on them that indicated he hit HER.

Over the past twenty or so years I have noticed that young women drivers are getting to be as dumb as young men drivers. The aggressive manner in which they drive along with the risk taking is matching young guys, and at times surpassing them.

The language used by many women these days has evolved into the language one would only hear from those of the streets in days gone past. I`m not saying that women who swear are lowly bred, just stating a fact.

The fact that women are becoming physically more aggressive could be tied into a number of things.

Perhaps the womens equality movement has progressed such that women now feel they must act like men, the aggression and the swearing in particular.

Maybe the violence against men is a backlash against mens violence against women both currently and in the past.

Possibly women are getting tired of the new "metro-sexual" male image and are trying subconsciously to toughen up men again.

The fact that it is generally drilled into males that hitting women isn`t something that happens (in western societies anyway) could mean that women are enjoying taking unfair advantage. As stated by Lothruin.

Perhaps as a group men have lost respect for women and the women have lost respect for men and are now showing it more openly.

I am sure that there are some women who are taking advantage. Just as women are no worse then men, they are also no better.

Some may be because the idea of being a 'lady', which I was brought up with, has been mostly discredited. This is not necessarily a bad thing - there was a lot of unnecessary restriction in that old ideal. As usual though, we seem to have thrown out the baby with the bath water.

Roos, the sad thing is, I don't have any idea whether any of those things are true, and some of them I don't want to be, but it is entirely possible that any of them are. As with any cultural shift, some people handle it and some people don't. I would say that women who believe they should be more aggressive or be more like men, have rather missed the point of the womens' equality movement. I would say there have always been aggressive women, but societal constraints made them act out their aggression in more subtle ways. I suspect that perhaps the move to treat young women not much differently than young men has led them to begin acting more similarly. (I.e. I wasn't raised believing I was a delicate flower, and I don't act like one.)

I think you really touched on something there, roos. People in general seem to have lost a great deal of respect for one another...Many of us in the west aren't really taught to respect others and behave decently in public the way we once were. Couple that with driver's ed. programs being deemed 'too expensive' to offer in high school and over the course of a generation or two one starts seeing people of both sexes drive as though they're out to get somebody.

I totally agree that nobody has the right to abuse anybody else, and that anybody who is a victim of abuse, deserves support. But I am wondering how these statistics were obtained, since some of the findings seem to be contrary to the majority of studies out in the field. I'm also wondering how the questions were worded to get such high approval of violent behaviour. For example, I might approve of violent behaviour if it's necessary to protect my 3-year-old.

This site is from the Canada Department of Justice:

http://canada.justice.gc.ca/en/ps/fm/spouseafs.html#widespread

I imagine that if the survey is published in a journal of criminology matters like the questions and the sampling, and much else besides, will be very closely scrutinized.

Incidentally, I don't find anything in the BBC Report counter-intuitive. I think there's tendency not to want to know about things that don't fit conventional stereotypes. Consider, for example, the level of child abuse by mothers - which is something that courts find hard to believe.

Here's the thing about the information Catamount posted a link to: It appears to be a somewhat small sampling, and though it doesn't exactly say this, it sort of implies that it is a sampling of people who had reported being victimized (which might account for the smallish sample data). The simple fact is, that creates a discrepency in the data. In the example I posted above, the major reason the incident was reported to the police was for insurance purposes, as the woman had done considerable damage to his motorcycle, as well as breaking the front bay window of their home by throwing a large candlestick at him and missing. He was somewhat bruised, but being much stronger than she, had taken the abuse without doing much to defend himself lest he hurt her, or be accused of assaulting her. If it had been the assault alone, he likely would not have bothered making a police report, but the damage to his property needed to be noted in a police report so that his insurance would cover it.

A large, random sampling is the only way to overcome the factor of people who don't report. I realize, having been one myself, that many women do not report abuse as well, but of the men I've known, it seems much more likely that a man, who probably is less likely to get seriously injured, or even really injured at all, during an assault by their spouse, will NOT report it. And if women seem more likely to be abused emotionally, I suspect this is at least in part to women being more suspectible to emotional abuse. I, for example, know for a fact that if my husband were to say to me that I was being stupid, I would be more likely to take deeper offense at it than he would if I did that to him. So, the questions asked become pretty important, because "name calling and put downs" (for instance) might be of more consequence to women, and therefore remembered more readily during a survey of that nature.

In short, I just don't think that a study of criminal statistics, when compiled from victims of crimes, is really likely to paint a reasonable picture of the world at large. It leaves out whole chunks of data.

A random sample will include people who have no experience of domestic violence and whose answers will therefore be hypothetical.

Well, only if the questions aren't specific enough or they lie. I still feel it would be the only way to get aywhere close to an accurate idea.