Dominance and symmetry in partner violence by male and female university students in 32 nations

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Abstract

The study investigated the widely held beliefs that physical violence against partners (PV) in marital, cohabiting, and dating relationships is almost entirely perpetrated by men, and that the major risk factor for PV is male dominance in the relationship. The empirical data on these issues were provided by 13,601 university students in 32 nations who participated in the International Dating Violence Study. The results in the first part of this paper show that almost one-third of the female as well as male students physically assaulted a dating partner in the previous 12 months, and that the most frequent pattern was bidirectional, i.e., both were violent, followed by “female-only” violence. Violence by only the male partner was the least frequent pattern according to both male and female participants. The second part of the article focuses on whether there is gender symmetry in a crucial aspect of the etiology of partner PV — dominance by one partner. The results show that dominance by either the male or the female partner is associated with an increased probability of violence. These results, in combination with results from many other studies, call into question the assumption that PV is primarily a male crime and that, when women are violent, it is usually in self-defense. Because these assumptions are crucial elements in almost all partner PV prevention and treatment programs, a fundamental revision is needed to bring these programs into alignment with the empirical data. Prevention and treatment of PV could become more effective if the programs recognize that most PV is bidirectional and act on the high rate of perpetration by women and the fact that dominance by the female partner is as strongly related to PV as dominance by the male partner.

Introduction

This article reports the results of an empirical investigation of two of the most controversial and important issues in understanding physical violence between partners in marital, cohabiting, or dating relationships. The answers to these questions can have profound implications for prevention and treatment of partner violence.

  • 1.

    Is partner violence primarily perpetrated by men, as compared to women, and as compared to both partners engaging in physical violence?

  • 2.

    To what extent is dominance by the male partner associated with partner violence, as compared to dominance by the female partner? In short is the risk factor male dominance or dominance by one partner, regardless of whether it is the male female partner?

For reasons explained elsewhere (Straus, 2007b), mentioning these two issues as topics for empirical investigation is often regarded as undermining efforts to end partner violence (PV from here on), and often greeted with hostility because they implicitly challenge two core principles that underlie most efforts to prevent and treat PV.

The first principle is that PV is primarily perpetrated by men: In an article on “Sexual Inequality, Cultural Norms, and Wife-Beating” published 30 years ago (Straus, 1976), I stated that “wives are much more often the victim of violence by their husbands than the reverse”. In relation to the second principle, in that article I attributed male PV to “the hierarchical and male-dominant nature of society…” The second core principle is that when men are violent the purpose is to coerce and dominate, whereas when women are violent it is almost always an act of self-defense or a response to unbearably humiliating and dominating behavior by the male partner. The idea that women are motivated to hit in order to coerce a male partner, or out of rage and anger over misbehavior by a male partner (such as sexual infidelity), is regarded as outrageous, and is taken as a sign of sexism and misogyny.

In the 35 years since I began research on PV, bit by bit, these assumptions about prevalence and etiology have been contradicted by a mass of empirical evidence from my own research and from research by many others. Consequently, there is a need for a much more multi-faceted view of PV. This would recognize the overwhelming evidence that women assault their partners at about the same rate as men, and that the motives for violence by both males and females are diverse. However, until recently, few have accepted this evidence, and some of those few will not publicly express their position for fear of the type of ostracism to which it will expose them (Straus, 1990c, Straus, in press). Instead, the evidence on gender symmetry in prevalence and etiology is typically disregarded and often explicitly denied, or withheld from publication (Straus, 2007b, Straus, in press). As will be suggested in the conclusion, this denial has crippled prevention and treatment efforts.

The focus of this paper is on physical assault because that is the aspect of partner maltreatment that has been the focus of the most controversy. In the context of this paper, PV refers to physical assault. Two aspects of gender symmetry in PV will be addressed: bidirectional perpetration by men and women and parallel etiology of violence. The main objectives of this article are to present the results of a cross-national study of these two aspects of gender symmetry and to draw out their implications for prevention and treatment programs. An additional objective is to illustrate the use of an easily applied typology. This classifies cases into Male-Only violence, Female-Only violence, and Both Violent. Use of these simple but crucial categories are needed to help research and prevention and treatment programs act on the implications for prevention and treatment which flow from the empirical results presented in this article.

There are many reasons for the conceptualization of PV as a problem of violence against women, some of which will be mentioned in this article, and are presented more fully in Straus (2007b). One of the most important is that the injury rate for male perpetrated violence is much higher than the rate for physical attacks by women. For this reason and because of the lesser financial resources of women, there is a much greater need for victim services for female than for male victims of PV.

Section snippets

Previous evidence on bidirectional perpetration

The importance of data on bidirectionality is based on the assumption that violence occurs in the context of an ongoing system of family relationships (Winstok, 2007). To the extent that this is the case, research and clinical work on PV needs to take into account the behavior of both partners in the family system, including violence by both partners. This applies even when it might seem that only information on the behavior of one of the partners is needed, such as measuring progress in a

Symmetry in dominance

The scholarly literature on PV contains hundreds of publications which attribute PV as a method used by men to maintain dominance in the relationship. One of my articles (Straus, 1976) is an early example. A recent and highly influential example is the World Health Organization report on violence (Krug, Dahlberg, Mercy, Zwi, & Lozano, 2002). Another recent example by an experienced and respected researcher is the assertion by Hamberger (Hamberger & Guse, 2002) that “Men in contrast {to women}

Hypotheses

The empirical studies reviewed led to the following hypotheses:

  • 1.

    The largest single category of PV is bidirectional violence, i.e. both partners engage in physical assault. The next most frequently occurring pattern is “female-only”, i.e., the female partner is violent and the male partner is not. The least frequently occurring pattern is “male-only”.

  • 2.

    Dominance by one partner, regardless of whether it is the male or female partner, is associated with an increased probability of violence.

The International Dating Violence Study

This research is part of the International Dating Violence Study, which is being conducted by a consortium of researchers in all major world regions. Each consortium member used the same core questionnaire, except for the final section, which was reserved for each member to add questions about issues of specific local or theoretical interest. A detailed description of the study, including the questionnaire and all other key documents, is available on the website http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2,

Overall assault rate

Table 1 gives the percent of students in each national setting who reported a physical attack on a dating partner during the 12 months prior to completing the questionnaire. The data in the columns for violence by men are based on the reports by male students, and the data on violence by women are based on the reports of female students.

The first pair of columns in Table 1 under the heading Overall Assault gives the percent of male and female students that physically assaulted a dating partner.

Dominance by males and females

The column headed Males in Table 4 gives the mean Dominance scale scores of the male students in each national setting. The national settings are arrayed in rank order according to these scores. The nation with the highest score for Dominance by male partners is Tanzania, which is also the least modernized of the 32 nations in this study. The four national settings which are the next most male-dominant are Russia, Iran, Taiwan and mainland China, respectively. The national setting in which male

Relation of dominance to partner violence

A previous article tested the idea that the etiology of PV by women is different than violence by men (Medeiros & Straus, 2006). That study used all 23 risk factors measured by the Personal and Relationships Profile, but only for a sample of University of New Hampshire students. There is insufficient space in this article to present that mass of data for the 32 national settings. However, there is sufficient space to present the results for a risk factor that is central to the feminist theory

Discussion

The results reported in this article are consistent with the first hypotheses—that bidirectional violence is the most prevalent pattern, followed by Female-Only, and that Male-Only violence is the least frequently occurring pattern. The results in the section on prevalence rates add cross-national evidence to the already overwhelming evidence from North America which has found that about the same percentage of women are physically violent toward their partners as men, and for young women, the

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