Future Directions - SAGE Journals - SAGE Publications

Future Directions Walter S. DeKeseredy

Violence Against Women Volume 12 Number 11 November 2006 1078-1085 © 2006 Sage Publications 10.1177/1077801206293337 http://vaw.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com

University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Oshawa, Canada

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s Claire Renzetti (this issue) correctly points out in her commentary on Swan and Snow’s (this issue) article, in a relatively short period of time, the social scientific literature on gender differences in intimate partner violence (IPV) has increased “exponentially.” Consider, too, that a growing number of scholars, such as Swan and Snow (this issue), are now trying to theorize the complex nature of women’s use of violence in intimate relationships. However, as was the case 12 years ago when Martin Schwartz and I responded to some researchers who argued that women are just as violent as men in intimate relationships (e.g., Straus, 1993), there is still an important battle being waged over the nature of women’s behavior and its role in woman abuse (Schwartz & DeKeseredy, 1993). Indeed, the respectful but often heated scholarly exchanges that occurred at the Gender Symmetry Workshop organized by the National Institute of Justice are not representative of much popular discourse on the nature and extent of women’s use of violence. For example, on June 21, 2005, lawyer David Burroughs sent Schwartz and me an electronic message criticizing our critique of Statistics Canada’s 1999 General Social Survey on Victimization (see DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 2003). Included in his message was this statement: To deny that women do not regularly, and, almost as second nature, practice the art of manipulation and control that is part of the broader definition of domestic abuse (the definition used by the feminists when they conduct their research and then put it forward to promote their agenda) is simply dishonest and nefarious. (n.p.)

Of course, this message and many others like it that I have received since 1992 could be considered extreme because they are vitriolic. Still, it is common to read and hear statements such as, “Women are just as violent as men.” However, are they really? From my standpoint and that of many others in the field (e.g., Dobash, Dobash, Wilson, & Daly, 1992), claims of sexual symmetry in marital and/or cohabiting and dating violence are highly injurious myths. Nevertheless, rather than again simply reproduce the major debates surrounding the question of whether men and women are equally violent, the main objective of this commentary is to focus on some key concerns about future efforts to examine gender variations in IPV.

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DeKeseredy / Future Directions

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“Let’s Put It in Context” The above subheading is the title of an article written by criminologist Stephen Lab (2003). Although his piece is a commentary on public housing violence research done by Ireland, Thornberry, and Loeber (2003), some of the arguments he raised are applicable to most types of social scientific research, including the work included in this special issue of Violence Against Women. For example, he contended that: One of the most important things that criminologists often fail to address is the context within which they (their projects or topics) are operating. This is true whether they are proposing a new theory, testing an existing explanation, investigating an emerging phenomenon, or evaluating an intervention or program. (Lab, 2003, p. 39)

What is the broader political economic context in which empirical and theoretical work on gender variations in IPV is operating in North America? Although many readers are likely to disagree, I contend that it is characterized by a rabid, ongoing, antifeminist backlash, one that routinely involves people distorting or misinterpreting research to serve their political purposes. Consider what “wedfare” advocates are currently doing. As my colleagues and I describe (see DeKeseredy, Alvi, & Schwartz, 2006), these neo-conservatives use research showing that cohabiting relationships are more violent than marriages to justify the claim that marriage is a panacea for IPV without a careful assessment of the role of other factors that predict woman abuse. These factors include depression, alcohol and drug problems, social and economic exclusion, and hypermasculine attempts to compensate for lack of access to legitimate activities or challenges to men’s traditional superiority in earnings and employment (DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 2002; Fox, Benson, DeMaris, & Van Wyk, 2002; Riger & Krieglstein, 2000). The main issue that we point out is that these factors are more likely to be associated with the condition of poverty than marital status (DeKeseredy, Alvi, Schwartz, & Tomaszewski, 2003; Rennison & Welchans, 2000). Indeed, cohabitation alone cannot explain why there is more violence in cohabitation than in marriage; however, this does not seem to matter to people intent on misconstruing and deliberately using crude counts of behaviors against vulnerable populations (Sokoloff & Dupont, 2005), such as poor people in cohabiting relationships. Of course, as Koss and Cook (1993) reminded us, “No scientist can guarantee that his or her research will always be appropriately used” (p. 115). Moreover, attacking researchers because their careful examination of women’s use of violence is being misused is like what Koss and Cook referred to as “holding the car manufacturer responsible for a purchaser’s reckless driving” (p. 115). Nevertheless, researchers should release their findings to the general public with these concerns in mind and develop strategies that help prevent what Stark-Adamec (1994) referred to as “unscrupulous others” from using women’s use of violence data to dismiss women’s experiences as the main survivors of abuse and to support cuts for social services for women who are

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Violence Against Women

raped, beaten, stalked, and so on. This statement is not a function of paranoia. As noted by Saunders (2002), the National Coalition of Free Men filed a suit against the State of Minnesota requesting that funding for domestic programs be stopped, and this group used research on women’s use of violence to support their claim of discrimination against men. Taking context seriously also involves moving beyond simply counting slaps, hits, and punches, an issue that has repeatedly been raised in a variety of academic and political settings. It is well known that sexually symmetrical data generated by various renditions of the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) tell us little, if anything, about the reasons why men and women use violence in intimate relationships (DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 1998). Nevertheless, these findings have had devastating effects on abused women and their struggles for effective social support services (Das Dasgupta, 2001; DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 2003; Saunders, 2002). Thus, it is always necessary to focus on the reasons why men and women use violence, which was one of the main goals of the National Institute of Justice Gender Symmetry Workshop. When researchers do such work, they often find that much of women’s violence is in self-defense or fighting back (DeKeseredy, Saunders, Schwartz, & Alvi, 1997; Gondolf, 1998; Saunders, 1986; Swan & Snow, 2003). This is not to say, however, that all women’s violence is a response to male attacks or a fear of being assaulted. Obviously, it is important to determine why some women’s violence is abusive. Still, we will never be able to do so by only relying on crude counts of behavior, and thus, it is refreshing to read the work of Swan and Snow (this issue) and that of others eager to address the complexities of the subject matter discussed at the Workshop.

What About Sexual Assault? Intimate partner violence takes many shapes and forms, and sexual assault is one major variant of this harm. However, as stated many times before (e.g., Kimmel, 2002; Saunders, 2002), researchers and others who consistently claim that women are as violent as men typically ignore sexual assault, which is a glaring omission for several reasons. First, deleting this type of victimization from research and debates assumes that it is less serious than other forms of abuse. Second, a large empirical literature clearly shows that many acts of violence in marriage and/or cohabitation, dating, and during or after separation and/or divorce are sexual assaults, and they are definitely not sexually symmetrical in nature. In fact, men commit the vast majority of sexual assaults in intimate heterosexual relationships.1 Another important point to bear in mind is that many women use violence to fend off or in response to sexual assaults. For example, the Canadian National Survey on Woman Abuse in University/College Dating (CNS) found that women using self-defensive violence experienced much higher rates of sexual abuse than other women in the survey (DeKeseredy et al., 1997). Similarly, a growing body of research shows that many


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women are sexually assaulted during and after separation and/or divorce,2 and some of these survivors must resort to using violence to protect themselves from men who could or want to kill them. Consider what happened to this rural Ohio survivor of separation sexual assault during the course of leaving her abusive boyfriend: He had taken my car for about a day, and I was, you know, by the time he finally returned it and everything, I was taking him home, back to his mom’s house and he tried to wreck the car. It was snowing, real bad weather, and he tried to wreck the car and everything. I got angry with him and I think I slapped him. He had said something and I said, “It is over. It is completely over.” You know, and he just, he just started punching me in the face and just clawing my face and punching my face and everything. And I wrestled off of him and I started beating him up until he told me to stop. And then we got to his house, and then he wouldn’t let me go, you know. He put his arms around me and was like trying to hold me there and everything like that. I was just crying hysterically, and his mom really didn’t help too much. I mean she saw what was happening, but it was like she was frozen. (cited in DeKeseredy & Joseph, 2006, p. 305)

In sum, then, sexual assault warrants just as much attention as other forms of violence in scholarly investigations of gender differences in intimate violence. Why this crime is routinely dismissed by proponents of the gender symmetry thesis is subject to interpretation and perhaps is a question that can only be answered empirically.

The Need for More Qualitative Data Thus far, the bulk of research on gender variations in IPV has been generated by selfreport surveys, especially those that neglect to include measures of the contexts, meanings, and motives of violence. This dominant trend in empirical work on topics of central concern to this special issue contributes to what Lab (2003) referred to as “the lack of contextual depth in much research” (p. 42). Following Browne (1987) and a handful of others who have done qualitative work on women’s use of violence, researchers should conduct rich in-depth interviews and actually listen to the voices of women (Tjaden, this issue). This is what feminist scholars have done for years, and they yield valuable data that can contribute to the development of even better surveys and theoretical perspectives on gender differences in intimate violence and other social problems. Furthermore, such techniques elicit data that cannot possibly be obtained in surveys, especially if they are used in longitudinal studies of women’s use of violence (Renzetti, 2000). Rural Women’s Experiences It is true, as Renzetti (this issue) reminds us in her contribution to this special issue that men and women in different ethnic subgroups “do gender differently,” which is a

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key argument consistently raised in the literature on masculinities and violent crime (Messerschmidt, 1993, 2005). So do men and women of different social class backgrounds. What about men and women in rural communities? Unfortunately, very few studies have focused on IPV in rural settings, and to the best of my knowledge, not one study has been specifically designed to examine gender differences in violence committed by those who live in these areas. Perhaps this selective inattention stems from the common presumption that there is more homogeneity in rural communities, leading to a more collective control on criminal behavior (Websdale, 1998). Certainly, researchers who accept official statistics (e.g., police data) as valid have argued that there is less overall crime in rural areas and that the greatest rural–urban difference is in violent crime. This difference is particularly striking in robbery rates (Weisheit, Falcone, & Wells, 1996). Unfortunately, under the best of circumstances, official statistics are poor at gathering information on marital rape and other types of IPV (DeKeseredy, Rogness, & Schwartz, 2004; Schwartz, 2000). Rural communities have characteristics that make it even less likely that women will report victimization or their own use of violence, including the acceptance of stereotypical gender roles (Little, 2003), geographic and social isolation, lack of social services (Dutton, Worrell, Terrell, Denaro, & Thompson, 2002; Krishnan, Hilbert, & VanLeeuwen, 2001; Logan, Walker, & Leukefeld, 2001), an absence of public transportation (Lewis, 2003), the existence of a powerful “ol’ boys network” (Websdale, 1998), and a lack of economic opportunities (DeKeseredy, Schwartz, Fagen, & Hall, 2006). This lack of support and opportunity may not affect the ability of rural communities to reduce most types of crime but would actually function to increase interpersonal violence in the family (Osgood & Chambers, 2000). Furthermore, I hypothesize that the absence of effective social support services for rural abused women may act to increase the likelihood of women using violence as a means of self-defense because this is the only remaining way of protecting themselves and their children.

Conclusion Empirical and theoretical analyses of gender differences in IPV have generated many heated debates and will continue to do so for years to come. Although the articles included in this special issue attempt to move beyond simplistic interpretations of the topic, much more work needs to be done and is being done, especially by feminist scholars who demonstrate the importance of “contextualized evaluations of women’s use of violence” (Bible, Das Dasgupta, & Osthoff, 2002, p. 1269). Still, will the general public hear their voices and those of women who volunteered to share their experiences with them? This is hardly a trivial question, given that still today, researchers and neo-conservative political groups who contend that “women are just as bad as men” seem to garner the most favorable attention by the mainstream media


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(Bible et al., 2002; Renzetti, 1994). For example, a while back, Linda Mills, author of Insult to Injury: Rethinking Our Responses to Intimate Abuse (2003) and strong supporter of the gender symmetry thesis, appeared on the widely viewed Oprah Winfrey Show, while those she defines as “mainstream feminists” rarely get such opportunities to disseminate their research and opinions.3 What, then, is to be done? Obviously, sophisticated feminist studies and activism on their own do not speak for themselves. Moreover, no matter what new directions in progressive research on women’s use of violence are taken, including those suggested here, they are not likely to be seen or heard unless proactive steps are taken to disseminate contextualized empirical and theoretical contributions to the mass media. Volunteering to appear on talk shows and holding press conferences are just a few examples of the ongoing efforts of feminist scholars to “get the word out.” As stated by Caringella-MacDonald and Humphries (1998) in a previous special issue of Violence Against Women, the fact that feminist articles and letters are periodically published by the mainstream media and that people like me and others with similar perspectives on intimate violence have been on television shows indicates that the media do not totally disregard the views of people who challenge erroneous interpretations of crude counts of women’s behaviors.

Notes 1. See Saunders (2002) for a review of the literature on gender differences in sexual assault in intimate relationships. 2. See DeKeseredy, Rogness, and Schwartz (2004) for an in-depth review of the extant social scientific literature on separation/divorce sexual assault. 3. According to Mills (2003), this group includes those calling for mandatory arrest and prosecution policies, as well as academics and activists who contend that only women are victims of domestic violence and that male perpetrators are simply “products of patriarchy.” See DeKeseredy (2004) for a feminist critique of her book.

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Walter S. DeKeseredy is professor of criminology and justice studies at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. He has published more than 50 journal articles, 11 books, and scores of scholarly book chapters on key issues related to violence against women, criminological theory, and poverty and crime. In 2004, he and M. D. Schwartz jointly received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Women and Crime.