By Marc Angelucci
Having spent years watching a friend get repeatedly battered by
his drunk, abusive wife, I was very bothered by Michael
Schwartz’s attack on the studies that show a high frequency
of male victims of domestic violence (“Men are aggressors in most domestic
cases,” Viewpoint, May 31).
The feeling was similar to what I felt when I read the
statistics in a pamphlet distributed by the Clothesline Project
that excluded straight male survivors. As I explained at the Take
Back the Night rally on May 18, reading that pamphlet made me feel
battered, because I felt like a friend of mine who can’t find
domestic violence services is not taken seriously as a male victim.
Thankfully, the audience was very receptive to my message.
But then came Schwartz’s column, which re-sparked the very
anger I thought I’d overcome.
It’s one thing for him to dispute a study’s
methodology or to dispute data with other data. It’s another
thing for him to completely disregard the reality of people’s
experiences, give harsher scrutiny to studies he doesn’t like
and cite statistics in a deceptive way so as to propagate his
bias.
For example, when Schwartz cites the National Violence Against
Women Survey, he conflates rape and domestic violence figures in
order to hide the study’s findings that 1.5 million women and
835,000 men are victims of domestic violence every year (http://www.vix.com/menmag/nvawrisk.htm).
Schwartz also argues that the studies showing equal violence
fail to ask who struck first. That is just plain false. The 1985
National Family Violence Survey, which sampled 6,000 respondents
and was funded by the National Institute for Mental Health,
specifically asked who struck first and found that, even when
looking only at women’s responses, 52.7 percent of women said
they struck the first blow.
In a detailed 1997 study of 100 college women by Dr. Denise
Gonzales and Dr. Martin Feibert of California State University,
Long Beach, 20 percent of the women had initiated violence against
male partners, and the most common reasons were: “my partner
wasn’t sensitive to my needs” (46 percent); “I
wished to gain my partner’s attention” (44 percent);
“my partner was not listening to me” (43 percent);
“my partner was being verbally abusive to me” (38
percent); and “I didn’t believe my actions would hurt
my partner” (38 percent). This study can be read at http://www.vix.com/menmag/fiebertg.htm.
There are two 1994 studies, demonstrating equal violence, that
asked about context and self-defense. One is the largest ever
conducted in England. It found that 80 percent of assaults by wives
on husbands were not in self-defense, and that men and women batter
partners for very much the same reasons, mainly “to get
through to them” (Carrado, “Aggressive Behavior,”
1996). The other was conducted in Canada and found that 90 percent
of the women who reported being violent said they didn’t
strike in self-defense but because of jealousy, drugs, alcohol,
frustration, need for control and impulse problems.
There isn’t space to adequately address self-defense,
severity of harm, homicide, and other issues. But before
misrepresenting data to discredit others’ experiences,
Schwartz should try reading “Violent Touch” by Dr.
David Fontes, an abuse counselor for the California Department of
Social Services, which can be read at http://www.safe4all.org/news.html.