• IPV = psychological and physical violence against wives, husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends, or dating partners, same sex or different sex, of any age

 
• "aggression" is the technical term, and includes verbal and non-verbal forms of abuse, as well as coercion and controlling behavior

 
• While IPV occurs across all age groups, incomes, races and cultures, on the average, IPV victims tend to be younger, poorer, less educated, minority compared to non-victims

 
• Less injurious violence is not gender-specific-- the rate of male-female aggression and female-male aggression is roughly equivalent, as long as we don't talk about the motives for the aggression or the effects of the aggression

 
• In US families in which partner violence occurs, as reported by women in national surveys representative of the population, the aggressor is exclusively the man about 26%of the time, exclusively the woman about 26% of the time, and both about 48% of the time.

 
• In the US, as reported by women, about 1 in 6 couples (16%), married or dating, same sex or different sex, are going to have physical violence within a year

 
• Same surveys: the annual gender-specific incidence is about 1 in 8 men (12%) and 1 and 8 women (12%) (Straus & Gelles, 1986)

 
• Leaving him doesnt help: the victimization rate for seperated women is 3x that of divorced women and 25x that of married women (Bachman & Saltzman, 1995)
• IPV varies by culture; e.g. Korean data finds annual incidence of female victimization to be 3x that of U.S.

 
• Rate of IPV among both gays and lesbians is about the same as heterosexual couples: 1 in 6 annually

 
• These figures upset advocates for battered women, so we need to talk about the issue of perception

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

WHOSE PERCEPTION?
 

• Research, practitioners, and the public view IPV differently

 
• public view of IPV is best described as the drunken bum theory of violence

 
• assumes most DV is associated with alcohol or drug abuse (it isnt)

 
• assumes most DV is committed by low income people (it isnt)

 
• researchers tend to look at victims and perpetrators drawn from the population in large samples, so called "normal" or "representative" samples

 
• in normal samples, there is no single variable which is strongly correlated with, or predictive of IPV

 
• in normal samples, alcohol abuse, violence in family or origin, and low SES are the variables which have the strongest relationship with IPV, but in all three variables, less that 50% of the population with that characteristic are victims or perpetrators of violence

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

• practioners tend to look at victims or perpetrators of IPV seeking or being mandated to services in child welfare, mental health, court, medical, or victim service agencies

 
• they see people with multiple problems, and it is hard to disentangle what causes what

 
• instead of alcohol being involved in 25% of the cases of IPV as it is in the normal population, its involved in 50-75% of the cases seen by professionals

 
• many perps and victims seen in clinical and forensic settings have numerous health, mental health issues, and economic issus, lending to the popular perception that those involved in DV are poor, crazy, substance abusers

 
• differences in perspectives leads to the popular mis-understanding about violent women, which periodically surfaces in the public press,

 

THE FEMALE AGGRESSION ISSUE
 

• Common Couple Violence v. Patriarchal Terrorism (Johnson)

 
• the reason battered women's advocates object to these figures is they never see the population to which the researchers figures refer - they see a far more seriously injured group of women who have been terrified and controlled

 
• BWA object to the de-genderization of violence, as in the phrases "1 in 8 couples", "family violence", "couple violence" or even "domestic violence"

 
• most serious physical abuse is by men, pure and simple, no denying it, and cutesy articles arguing that women's violence against men is under-reported is not going to change the reality that most harmful violence is by men

 
• e.g.-I take my wife's car keys and physically block the door to keep her to keep in the house, and she punches me in the chest to escape, and Murray Straus from the NFVL calls at that moment with a few questions about DV

 
• its her 1 and me 0 on most measures of IPV
• even though I suffer no injury
• even though her motive was defensive
• even though I was using extreme coersion (most surveys don't measure that)

 
• In the US, the rate of injurious violence is about 3% for women victims and 0.4% for men victims, as reported by women

 
• In the US, when we measure domestic violence by injury, women are 6 times as likely to be the victim of domestic violence

 
• most instrumental aggression is by men

 
• Men are far more`likely to use physical violence and intimidation to get their way - we've been trained to do so by the male culture of competition and dominance, and we are usually better equipped physically to be aggressive

 
• Women tend to be better at verbal aggression