FREE ESSAY ON SPOUSAL VIOLENCE

SPOUSAL VIOLENCE

Violence against family members is something women do at least as often as men. There are
dozens of solid scientific studies that reveal in a startlingly different picture of
family violence than what we usually see in the media. For instance, Murray Straus, a
sociologist and co-director for the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New
Hampshire gave some statistics that blew my mind away. He concluded saying that women
were three times more likely than men to use weapons in spousal violence. He also said
that women hit their male children more than they hit their female children and women
commit 52 percent of spousal killings and are convicted of 41 percent of spousal murders.
There are also some misleading statistics about family violence. One, men do not usually
report their violent wives to police, because they have too much pride. Two is that
children do not usually report their violent mothers to the police.
A reason why we do not see many women get reported is because the media does not
encourage men to report the crime. Women are the ones who are encouraged to report the
spousal violence by countless media reminders. The media always portray the woman to be
the victim and the male to be the perpetrator. Men and children may not report when a
woman injures them, but the dead bodies of the men and children who are the victims of
violent women are usually reported.
There is much confusion about whom to believe in the debate about spousal violence. On
one side we have the women's feminist groups whom rely on law enforcement statistics. On
the other side we have social scientist who rely on scientifically structured studies,
which do not get any media attention. America's press is more concerned with the
political correctness than scientific accuracy. That is why our society is so screwed up
now, because of the media.
It is important to note that there have been the same kind of studies done in many
countries. There is cross-cultural verification that women are more violent than men in
family settings. When behavior has cross-cultural verification it means that it is part
of human nature rather than a result of cultural conditioning. Females are most often the
perpetrators in spousal violence in all cultures that have been studied to date. That
leads many professionals to conclude that there is something biological about violent
females in family situations. Women see the home as their territory. Like many other
species on the planet, we human will ignore size difference when we experience conflict
in our own territory. World wide, women are more violent than men in family settings. 
Women usually initiate spousal abuse. That means they hit first, and women hit more
frequently, as well as using weapons three times more often than men. This combination of
violent acts means that efforts to find solutions to the family violence problem need to
include appropriate focus on female perpetrators. We need to recognize that women are
violent, and we need nationwide educational programs that portray women are perpetrators.
Other studies show that men are becoming less violent at the same time that women are
becoming more violent. Educating men seems to be working. Educating men seems to be
working. Educating women to be less violent should now be the main thrust of public
education programs.
Just as bad cases make bad laws, so can celebrity cases reinforce old myths. The biggest
myth the O.J. Simpson case is likely to reinforce is the myth that domestic violence is a
one way street (male-to-female), and its corollary, that male violence against women in
an outgrowth of masculinity. I felt violence was an out growth of masculinity. But, men
are responsible for most of the violence, which occurs outside the home. However, when 54
percent of women in lesbian relationships acknowledge violence in their current
relationship, vs. only 11 percent of heterosexual couples reporting violence, I realize
that domestic violence is not an outgrowth of male biology.
There are some good men out there that will not hit back no matter what the woman does.
This is an article that appeared in the April 20, 1997 edition of the Detroit News: He
never hit back -- and he never filed charges. But more shocking to Gillhepsy are the
reactions she encountered telling her story. They told me I was the victim, said
Gillhespy, 34, of Marquette. Here's no way any of this was his fault. ... I knew the
difference between being the victim and being the perpetrator. I am ashamed for what I
did. Gillhespy believes most people don't believe men can be victims. She knows they are
wrong. I think it is just as serious as (violence against women) -- you just don't hear
about it, Gillhespy says. Maybe more men would come forward if you did. Gillhespy, who
wed at 16, says she began beating her husband early in their 16-year marriage. Her former
husband, reached by phone, declined to comment but confirmed that abuse took place. 
At the time, Gillhespy was a crack user, heroin addict and alcoholic. She says she beat
her husband in fits of rage, usually when she wanted money or the car. I told him he was
no good, and that he was loser. I kicked him and threw things at him, she says. I used
him and used him and used him. The turning point came in February 1993, when Gillhespy
struck two pregnant women in Grand Rapids while driving drunk. Gillhespy received 45 days
in jail and was sent to a drug treatment program in Marquette. She has gotten a divorce,
finished high school and stayed sober. In a year, she will receive a degree from Northern
Michigan University. And although Gillhespy now understands the issues that led her to
violence, she says she accepts full responsibility for her actions. Her strength, she
says, comes from admitting that she had a problem -- and from trying to help others
accept that domestic violence goes both ways. I'm the other side of the coin, she says
simply. If you're abused, you're abused. 
Strange as it sounds, some people fear that publishing a study about battered men might
shift much-needed attention away from the abuse of women, the scope of which researchers
agree is underestimated. But at least there have been attempts to document the battered
woman problem. For instance, a new Johns Hopkins University survey of 3,400 women
published in this week's JAMA finds that nearly four in 10 women surveyed in emergency
rooms say they've been physically or emotionally abused in their lifetimes. Numbers like
that are rare when it comes to abused men. In fact, many people believe that battered
husbands are practically nonexistent. Or they believe that they're such a minute
fraction, compared to the numbers of battered women, that they don't represent a trend
that needs attention. But family violence expert Murray Straus says that abused men do
exist, in higher numbers than we care to acknowledge. 
"I've interviewed guys who have been stabbed by their wives," says Straus. "One guy had
his teeth knocked out when his girlfriend threw a brass crucifix at his face. But when
you ask them if they were being beaten, they say no." 
Straus, director of the University of New Hampshire Family Research Laboratory, is one of
a smattering of scientists in this country studying domestic violence as a human
phenomenon, rather than focusing on the female as victim. 
In 1985, Straus and colleagues Richard Gelles and Suzanne Steinmetz reported a
groundbreaking study of 6,000 Americans that contradicted conventional wisdom about
domestic abuse. They found that 12 percent of men-and 11.6 percent of women-reported
having hit, slapped or kicked their partners. Contrary to the common preconception that
women hit back only in self-defense, the survey also found that women initiated the
violence just as often as men. 
Nonetheless, Straus points out, the men's injuries generally weren't as severe as the
women's injuries. "Women are overwhelmingly the 'victim,' he says. "They are injured more
and are afraid for their lives more often. 
We don't need shelters for battered men, but if we ever want to stop this cycle of abuse
in families, it requires nonviolence by all parties." Such talk is feverishly contested
by women's advocates, who point to criminal statistics that paint men as the typical
perpetrators of domestic abuse. Jacquelyn Campbell, Johns Hopkins University nursing
professor and lead author of the violence against females survey in this week's JAMA,
points out one of these statistics: For every man battered by a female partner, eight
women are battered by male partners. Why such a massive discrepancy in the stats?
Patricia Pearson, author of When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence,
explains it this way: "When battered women's activists talk about abuse, they focus on
the most extreme statistics, the 3 to 4 percent of domestic violence in which women are
beaten severely." Doing that gives us a skewed view of what's really going on in
families, Pearson says. "We need to realize women are capable of physical aggression,"
she says. "It's not just a masculine trait." 
Despite more than 100 epidemiological studies demonstrating the existence of female
aggression against men, no major government research arm has ever looked at the pattern.
But as Pearson points out, the fastest growing group of violent criminal offenders today
is teen girls. Given that, the time to study "battered men's syndrome" may have finally
arrived. 
Even though the statistics are shown here in this paper, people still will never believe
that men get more abused than women. There probably will never be media coverage of such
things, because the media has influenced the society so much in regard to women being the
victim and the man being the abuser that people would not take a case seriously if the
man was the victim. People would laugh or make fun of the individual and that would make
other men scared to come forth. This problem must cease. 
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