Recent research on gender and aggression raises some difficult questions: Do women commit as much domestic violence as men? And does it matter?
In Scientific American, Scott O. Lilienfeld and Hal Arkowitz review recent studies on men’s and women’s aggressive behavior. They conclude that while women do exhibit the much-vaunted “relational aggression” (“spreading rumors, gossiping, glaring, eye rolling, giving others the ‘silent treatment,’ sending nasty notes or text messages behind rivals’ backs”), men are more prone to all types of violence except one: domestic abuse. They cite research by psychologist John Archer and sociologist Murray Straus, writing,
[T]heir analyses demonstrate that men and women exhibit roughly equal rates of violence within relationships; some studies hint that women’s rates of physical aggression are slightly higher. This apparent equality is not solely a result of women fighting back, because it holds even for altercations that women start.
Straus’s work, at least, has been around for a while, and has its share of detractors. In November, Double X’s Kathryn Joyce noted that men’s rights groups sometimes use Straus’s research to support their arguments “that false allegations are rampant, that a feminist-run court system fraudulently separates innocent fathers from children, that battered women’s shelters are running a racket that funnels federal dollars to feminists, that domestic-violence laws give cover to cagey mail-order brides seeking Green Cards, and finally, that men are victims of an unrecognized epidemic of violence at the hands of abusive wives.” Joyce quoted Portland State University professor Jack Straton, who says Straus “fails to distinguish between the intent and effect of violence, equating ‘a woman pushing a man in self-defense to a man pushing a woman down the stairs,’ or a single act of female violence with years of male abuse; that Straus only interviewed one partner, when couples’ accounts of violence commonly diverge; and that he excludes from his study post-separation violence, which accounts for more than 75 percent of spouse-on-spouse violence, 93 percent of which is committed by men.” But Cathy Young, responding Forbes, disagreed, saying that Straus actually does distinguish between habitual and one-time violence: