Women are more aggressive partners than men.....

[BloominNora]

(Apologies if this has already been posted - I had a quick look but couldn't see anything....)

I'm currently doing an OU module on Forensic Psychology and have just come across this article posted by another student on the forums:

Women more aggressive to partners than men

The Times take on the story

The Huff Post

As I read it, one of my first thoughts was "I wonder what Mumsnet would make of this" (clearly yet another indication that I spend far too much time on here).

The key paragraph seems to be:

"This study found that women demonstrated a desire to control their partners and were more likely to use physical aggression than men. This suggests that IPV may not be motivated by patriarchal values and needs to be studied within the context of other forms of aggression, which has potential implications for interventions."

Interestingly she has focussed the study on students in their late teens and early 20's so I would question the level to which (excessive?) drinking may had on the responses and she also surveyed double the number of females than males which does not seem particularly statistically sound,

However, other than that - interesting study or more likely that men will not recognise themselves / admit to, even in an anonymous survey as being violent and controlling to women?

Would love to know what the MN Feminist consensus is.

Buffy and AMum - I agree with you about the age and relationship stability of the survey - I knew that the fact that it was students bothered me, but couldn't pinpoint why - I was starting down this route when I read your posts.

I think the distinction between aggression and violence is an important one because a number of studies have found similar levels of aggression amongst the sexes, but female aggression tends to take the form of non-direct verbal aggression rather than direct violent aggression, but as far as I can tell most of the studies seem to focus on children and stop in late teens / early 20's. I'll have to go and search the library archive and see if I can find any studies that did similar research on older adults.

The difference between male and female propensity to minimise is also an interesting point.

Sabrina - I have the 12/13 Crime survey which puts male violence at 81% which is pretty much the highest it's been in the last 10 years (apart from 09/10 when it hit 83%) and the police reported crime data puts female homicides at the hands of a partner or ex-partner at 72 for 12/13 which is the lowest its ever been (and 15 men which is also the lowest). The highest it's been in the last 10 years is 106 in 2004/05 which was also the highest year for male victims at 39. The average for women is 93 which puts is at just under 2 per week and men is one every two weeks.

However, your figures are quite different, so I'd like to get a look at the source if possible?

Wow, thank you for that Donkeyskin. I was reading the posts thinking what about context?!

I am really curious about the shift you describe from 'wife-battering' to intimate partner violence where the discourse is that women do it too, hence family violence. You are quoting literature from the early 1990s which means that Women's Aid was barely off the ground before their aims were appropriated to use against women. That is a very quick backlash.

I do think the point about the trajectory of the researcher's career and the agenda of universities, or at least her university, is valid. Although she may have a temporary lectureship, I don't like to speculate, even then you still normally need some publications behind you.

I'm not sure if you interpreted my posts of being supportive of the study or whether you judged my words as critical? It's the latter, but less on the basis of detailed knowledge of the subject matter, more on the basis that it reduces what is an extremely complicated and culturally bound phenomenon to what boils down to ask people whodunnit then count it up.

Yes, sorry, Buffy, I think I did misunderstand your position. I agree with your last sentence.

The trouble is, this type of positivistic study does carry a powerful voice.

Yes it does. And people are not aware of the methodology behind such studies and take them at face value. This is going to be a big probelm for feminist campaigners on MVAW, as the men's rights movement grows stronger. As Romeyroo notes, the backlash began a long time ago and it has been quite successful in muddying perceptions around domestic violence. IMO feminists really need to emphasise actual violence statistics as the most reliable method of assessing rates of IPV.

For anyone interested in this subject further, I highly recommend Michael Kimmel's paper on the two methods primarily used by researchers studying IPV: the Conflict Tactics Scale, and Crime Victimisation Studies. He surveyed decades of data on intimate partner violence from the US, comparing the results of 'Family Conflict Studies' (which use CTS) with Crime Victimisation Studies, which use data from police, hospitals, domestic violence shelters and the Bureau of Justice.

According to Kimmel, studies using the CTS routinely find gender parity in IPV, whereas those using the Crime Victimisation statistics find that it is overwhelmingly women who are the victims of violence by male partners.

"Crime victimization studies have large sample sizes, in part because they are funded by national, state, and local government agencies. Crime victimization studies include a wide range of assaults, including sexual assault in their samples. And they ask not only about current partner (spouse or cohabiting partner) but also about ex-spouse. But they ask only about those events that the person experiences - or even reports to municipal authorities - as a crime, and therefore miss those events that are neither perceived as nor reported as crimes.

"[CVR] studies uniformly find dramatic gender asymmetry in rates of domestic violence.* According to the U.S. Department of Justice, of the one million cases of “intimate partner violence” reported each year, female victims outnumber male victims by more than five to one. In their analysis of police data, Dobash and Dobash (1979) for example, found that only 1% of all domestic violence cases in two cities in Scotland were assaults by wives...

"Crime victimization studies report high rates of injury to women from domestic assault, from 76% (NVAW), 75% (NCS) and 52% (NCVS).
Crime victimization studies further find that domestic violence increases in severity over time, so that earlier “moderate” violence is likely to be followed by more sever violence later (Johnson and Ferraro, 2000). This emerges also in discussions of spousal homicide, where significant numbers of people murdered by their spouses or ex-spouses were also earlier victims of violence.

"In sum, crime victimization studies typically find that domestic violence is rare, serious, escalates over time, and is perpetrated by men.

"Those who insist on gender symmetry [in domestic violence] must also account for two statistical anomalies. First, there is the dramatic disproportion of women in shelters and hospital emergency care facilities. Why is it that when we begin at the end of the domestic violence experience – when we examine the serious injuries that often are its consequence -- the rates are so dramatically asymmetrical? Second, claims of gender symmetry in marital violence must be squared with the empirical certainty that in every single other arena of social life, men are far more disproportionately likely to use violence than women. Why are women so much more violent in the home that their rates approach, or even exceed, those of men, while in every other non-domestic arena men’s rates of violence are about nine times those of women (on rates of violence generally, see Kimmel, 2000)?"

"Let’s begin where the CTS begins. Here is the opening paragraph to the survey as administered (Straus, 1990):

No matter how well a couple gets along, there are times when they disagree, get annoyed with the other person, or just have spats or fights because they’re in a bad mood or tired or for some other reason. They also use many different ways of trying to settle their differences. I’m going to read some things that you and your (spouse/partner) might do when you have an argument. I would like you to tell me how many times...in the past 12 months you ... (Straus, 1990).

"Such a framing assumes that domestic violence is the result of an argument, that it has more to do with being tired or in a bad mood than it does with an effort to control another person. This may, of course, be true of a significant amount of domestic violence, but it is certainly not true of all.

"As we can see, the CTS asks about frequency, although only for one year. Asking how often in the past year either spouse hit the other may capture some version of reality, but does not capture an ongoing systematic pattern of abuse and violence over many years. This is akin to the difference between watching a single frame of a movie and the movie itself.

Context

"The CTS simply counts acts of violence, but takes no account of the circumstances under which these acts occur. Who initiates the violence, the relative size and strength of the people involved, the nature of the relationship all will surely shape the experience of the violence, but not the scores on the CTS. Thus, if she pushes him back after being severely beaten, it would be scored one “conflict tactic” for each. And if she punches him to get him to stop beating their children, or pushes him away after he has sexually assaulted her, it would count as one for her, none for him.

"In response to these criticisms, Straus and his colleagues acknowledge that the context is important, but believe that it is preferable to explore the context separately from the incidence. This response is unpersuasive, more like observing that death rates have soared for males between 19 and 30 without explaining that a country has declared war."

new.vawnet.org/Assoc_Files_VAWnet/GenderSymmetry.pdf

As usual, I'm really grateful that so many people on here know so much stuff.

Me too almondcakes. Thanks so much for the very insightful and well referenced critique, donkeyskin. Definitely a thread to book mark.

Great comments and links, DonkeySkin.

It all seems a bit "thin", or is it just me?

Like, if you asked a wife who did 90% of the domestic labour if she'd ever nagged and asked her husband likewise. I imagine that there would be a discrepancy in the numbers. But those 2 bald facts get us nowhere.

So controlling about amount of time spent with family and friends - maybe because the man thinks that there is less of a relationship there than the woman. Why might that be? Who is fed the romantic fairytale? Maybe he sees the relationship as more of something to do when there aren't more interesting people about? Maybe he's just after a fuck when he's bored? Maybe he thinks that women are for breeding with and providing for his physical needs and actual human interaction comes from others? Or maybe she's abusive?

Oh, and on the physical aggression thing. Self reports on this are a weak research pool. As a 5' 3" woman, I don't need a 6'+ man to do much more than get in my personal space to feel the threat. Would he report that as aggression? And, as I always point out on IPV threads, the incidences are the important number, not the existence.

Also, let's not forget that women are socialised to not be aggressive, so it may be that self reports are not reporting the same thing. The men might not class an act as aggressive, whereas a woman would do so.

Oh, I have so much to say on this, but am incoherent.

She doesn't define as a feminist, does she? Otherwise, my head might actually explode.

Very interesting posts, DonkeySkin, thank you.

OP, my figures are from the Ministry of Justice 2011-2012:

Gender of Offenders, England and Wales. There is a link to the source in the tweets underneath the graph.

I apologise, the figure of 98%, in fact, relates to the proportion of sexual violence by men. The proportions of violence against the person committed by men was around 88%. Pretty damning, and male dominated, though - as are the stats you quote in your post.

In 2012 Karen Ingala Smith started writing the Counting Dead Women blog She has continued it up to today.

She also wrote Can you give me a link to Counting Dead Men?

Posters have rightly criticised the Dr Bates's study - in the light of the ^ above, it is very strange to argue that women are the more aggressive and controlling in a relationship.

There are far better in depth academic studies into the gendered nature of IPV - they have been linked on here in the past - I'll try to find them.

Also: See This thing about male victims

The shame here is that this study will be gleefully leapt upon by MRAs, and over-simplistically reported in the media - as the "40% victims of dv are male" headline in the Guardian was.

I don't need a 6'+ man to do much more than get in my personal space to feel the threat. Would he report that as aggression?

But why would he? If the inverse were true, you walked into his personal space, would he report that as aggression on your part? He would probably just consider it annoying or see you as a socially awkward 'close talker'. Perhaps he would think you were hitting on him. Even if you were openly angry you could still be below his base level of perceived threat. He may even consider your aggression as sexy, if he thought it was justified and not crazy, because balanced men these days like feisty women, not demure little flowers.

Perhaps you raise your threat level by being openly hostile. Even then he might blow off your behaviour as letting off steam or blow it off as being 'cute' if you were his SO. Unless you cranked your behaviour up high enough for him your aggression may never be perceived as such, except in an abstract sense, rather than a directly threatening one.

Thus you don't get put down as an aggressive woman, even if aggressive is exactly what you feel, you are just being overly emotional.

Huh? I was talking about self reported aggression.

Self reported? But if someone felt they did not act aggressively, even if they invaded your personal space, be they male or female, why on earth would they ever self report? It would be like that old Seinfeld moment:

I think that was her point, Dad. She was discussing it as a failing of the study. Men are socialised in general, to be more aggressive. They may not always realise when their behaviour in relationships is aggressive or intimidating, and therefore won't self-report in studies like the one being discussed in the OP.

OP - it sounds to me as though you are writing an essay/paper and are getting MNetters to do your critique for you.

As I suspected, a certain father's rights organisation is all over this study like a rash, and are now slagging off Women's Aid (in addition to Gingerbread, JK Rowling and so on)

OP - it sounds to me as though you are writing an essay/paper and are getting MNetters to do your critique for you.

The module is Forensic Psychology and a link to this particular study was posted on the module website for a chapter I haven't quite got to yet. I was just procrastinating about writing my essay and was interested in the feminist critique side of things on a personal level.

Also the essay I should be am writing is on whether mental health issues are a causative factor in violent crime so as this study does not look at serious mental health issues it won't actually feature as a reference text and even if it did I am quite capable of doing my own critique thank you very much.

I do find Donkey's links interesting and will read them in detail when I have a bit more time (because I still have another 1000 words to write on Mental Health and Violent Crime), and taking on board Kimmel's criticism of the CTS this still stands out as being a bit odd to me:

According to Kimmel, studies using the CTS routinely find gender parity in IPV, whereas those using the Crime Victimisation statistics find that it is overwhelmingly women who are the victims of violence by male partners.

The CTS looks at aggression (at least in the study I originally linked to) as opposed to violence and while the two are interlinked, they are quite different. There can be no doubt of course that men are more violent than women and when they are it is more damaging, but aggression doesn't always manifest as violence.

Bjorkqvist and Niemela (1992) - (and I'd citing this study as described in my OU text book rather than having read the study myself), found that when they looked at children (from primary up to adolescence) female aggressiveness tended to take the form of indirect action (gossiping, threatening to tell teacher, shunning someone) whereas male aggressiveness tended to be more direct and violent.

Galen and Underwood (1997) also found that girls see social aggression as little difference from violent aggression in terms of hurtfulness.

While writing this reply, I had a quick look for a feminist perspective on the Bjorkqvist and Niemla work and I came across this:

DECONSTRUCTING THE MYTH OF THE NONAGGRESSIVE WOMAN: A Feminist Analysis By: Jacquelyn W. White and Robin M. Kowalski

which seems to sum up all of the points on this thread but is also quite clear that denying female aggression actually plays in to the hands of men and patriarchal notions of 'the weak female' that needs to be controlled and protected.

I agree with this, I do think by denying female aggression exists, or that women can be aggressive as men, albeit in a less physically damaging, overtly violent way, it plays directly into the hands of those who want to discredit feminism.

Nora, I certainly think aggressive is something everybody needs to feel capable of.

Having thought over what has been said on the thread, and my own knowledge of people who have been violently assaulted, I think that while violence is only one form of aggression, it is still aggression.

Many of the main forms of both violent physical abuse and other forms of abuse are not listed on the survey while most aggressive victim defences are. The survey simply does not measure a lot of violent aggression.

I do not believe that lots of men are violent towards other men. I believe a few are and the others defend themselves against that violence, hence the survey results. And the same for women defending themselves against violence.

Most of the extremely violent acts that people I know have left partners over are not listed on that survey, nor are many acts committed against men in bars etc.