McGowan: Domestic Abuse Revisited

January 10, 2024

by Richard McGowan, Ph.D.

Periodically, the Indianapolis Star has an article about domestic abuse. Consequently, I periodically research the data on domestic abuse.

In mid December, Danyette Smith was featured in a Star news article, “Sunglasses to Survival: Indy woman wants to help stop hiding abuse.” (Dec. 13) The article was timely. Domestic abuse occurs more frequently on major holidays, including Christmas and New Year’s, according to the group Women against Crime. That group focused on women, with the attendant implication that men are the perpetrators, women are relatively blameless. The Star reported that Ms. Smith wanted to prevent “the same from happening to other women” with regard to her suffering domestic abuse.

The article in the Star, though, recognized indirectly that men suffer domestic abuse, too, at the hands of their partners. The article noted that Ms. Smith hoped “to provide services for people going through abuse,” suggesting men and women, i.e., people, suffer domestic abuse.

Further, the inclusive “people” is more accurate with regard to domestic abuse. The Department of Justice, in an October 2023 report, said “Data from the last National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey indicate that 41 percent of women and 26 percent of men stated that they had experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime and experienced an intimate partner violence-related impact.”

Indiana aligns closely with the national data. In 2019, the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, noted that “42.5 percent of Indiana women and 27.9 percent of Indiana men experience intimate partner physical violence, intimate partner sexual violence and/or intimate partner stalking in their lifetimes.”

Following the data, men are also victims of domestic abuse. As Dutton and Nicholls reported in an academic journal as long ago as 2006, several studies found “the levels of violence by female perpetrators higher than those reported for males.” The two researchers reviewed studies “indicating high levels of unilateral intimate violence by females to both males and females. Males appear to report their own victimization less than females do and to not view female violence against them as a crime. Hence, they differentially under-report being victimized by partners on crime victim surveys.”

The last statement is consistent with a 2017 article by Myhill. He stated that “many surveys suggest women and men experience similar levels of domestic violence, but added that “domestic violence practitioners see abuse as perpetrated primarily by men against women.”

The surveys and research confirm the observation made decades ago by Murray and Strauss. They reported in their 1990 book, Physical Violence in American Families, that women initiate violence, both major and minor, at the same rate as men, not that the data were taken seriously by policymakers.

Of course, given men’s secondary sex characteristics, the characteristics that “enable” a man to become a woman and win all sorts of athletics contests, a man’s physique can normally overpower a woman’s physique. Given the superior strength of a man when domestic abuse occurs, I would counsel men to refrain from retaliating were a woman to start a domestic brawl.

I would also counsel policymakers to acknowledge that men do not always begin a violent domestic spat, major or minor. Policy-makers could televise ads that show a man, obviously angry but also rubbing a cheek to ease the pain, looking at a camera. The voice overlay would say, “Yeah, she hit you. Yes, it hurts. But be a man. Control your urge to strike back. That shows strength, too.”

Such an appeal is likely to lower the incidence of retaliatory violence by men. That kind of appeal follows the data and acknowledges that men can feel the sting of domestic violence, both physically and emotionally. And acknowledgement often brings peace.

Richard McGowan, Ph.D., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, has taught philosophy and ethics cores for more than 40 years, most recently at Butler University. Citations viewable at www.inpolicy.org.



Comments...

Leave a Reply