Family Homicides
- rates by gender - DoJ, 94
In July 1994 the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice released a Special Report detailing the results of a survey of family homicides in 33 urban U.S. counties. The report covered ONLY convictions, which should respond to any contention that female-on-male family violence is almost always reactive. The report said:
"A third of family murders involved a female as the killer. In sibling murders, females were 15 percent of killers, and in murders of parents, 18 percent. But in spouse murders, women represented 41 percent of killers. In murders of their offspring, women predominated, accounting for 55 percent of killers.
"Among black marital partners, wives were just about as likely to kill their husbands as husbands were to kill their wives: 47 percent of the victims of a spouse were husbands and 53 percent were wives."
- from Murder in Families Special Report, July 1994 Bureau of Justice Statistics U.S. Department of Justice
Much of the discussion on this list of the issue of female-on-male domestic violence has centered on a denial by some members that such family violence exists, contentions by others that acknowledging the prevalence of female-on-male violence somehow constitutes a denial that the reverse occurs (though not one person who has spoken to the issue has denied the reality or even the severity of male violence), and attempts by some members to get the list to deal realistically with family violence in ALL its dimensions.
Female-on-male domestic violence is a reality. It is a reality established over and over by non-advocacy research. Murray Straus notes that there has never been a random sampling study (as opposed to clinical populations or self-selected respondents) that has failed to establish virtual parity in the initiation of physical violence between intimate partners -- and he cites about 30 such studies.
That aside, though, it is difficult to explain away a stone-cold body on a kitchen floor, and the BJS survey found a startling number of them to be male. Unless we are going to redefine domestic violence to excise homicide from the definition, then a reexamination of our perceptions of who is perpetrator and who is victim seems to be order.
The questions we should be addressing are:
How much would the 7 to 10 differential (as cited by Dr. Gelles) in injury rates for women vs men be reduced if we got the message to women that when they convert a previously non-violent family confrontation into a physically violent one by slapping, hitting, scratching, biting, kicking, throwing objects, etc., it is very likely they.
Do law enforcement, medical personnel, courts, counselors, and even the allegedly abused male himself apply a different level of identification and acknowledgement of injury for men than for women?
There are some 1,500 shelters for abused women in this country. There is not one single publicly funded safe house for males where a father can take his children to remove them and himself from a dangerous or potentially lethal family situation. Whatever the level of female-perpetrated domestic violence, it is patently NOT zero, yet in the allocation of public resources and in the formulation of public policy, that is the way we treat it.
Is it not time we began approaching family violence as a family problem, rather than as one more method of cannonading the opposite sex in the ongoing gender wars?
Hugh Nations, esq.