Female Perpetrators of Intimate Partner Violence Essay ⋆ Criminal Justice Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Despite the reported increase in arrests of women for use of violence against their current or former intimate partners, research suggests that two findings are crucial to use in interpreting what these arrest increases actually mean: first, women’s violence is more self-defensive than aggressive; and second, changes in law enforcement strategies are significantly responsible for changes in domestic violence arrest patterns. Moreover, one of the key questions that needs to be addressed when exploring intimate partner violence (IPV) and the criminal justice system is: Within intimate relationships in which women use violence and are arrested, are they batterers? Recent scholarship explores this issue, demonstrating that while some women use violence and are aggressive, most women are not the aggressors in the relationships and do not exert the power and control that seem inextricably connected to batterers. Understanding the context in which IPV occurs, rather than simply relying on arrest statistics or surveys to explore the issue, offers the most help in determining the motivation and consequences of women’s use of violence.

Measurement issues confound the problem. Most studies rely on the Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS) and the revised version, the CTS2, which are empirical measures of IPV developed by Murray Straus and his colleagues to explore family violence. These scales are used in national surveys of households of married

or cohabitating heterosexual couples. Despite improvements in measurement, these quantitative surveys rely on respondents checking boxes that indicate various levels of violence use without distinguishing between the meaning and motivation of the acts; tallies from these surveys provide the false impression that IPV is committed by women at rates equal to or higher than those of men. For example, in one study that uses the CTS, researchers found that 61% of the sample in which respondents reported “mutual violence” actually showed something very different: that women respond to men’s acts of violence in self-defensive ways. Self-report data also raise reliability issues in that men underreport their use of violence, while women underreport their victimization by men. CTS measures also exclude complete information on injury and sexual assault; other studies show that women are six times more likely than men to need medical care for their injuries and that 4% of murdered men are killed by their current or former partner, compared to about one third of murdered women. Findings from the National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAWS) revealed that 7.7% of female respondents were raped by their intimate partners, yet the category of “sexual coercion” is excluded from the original CTS, the basis for a huge number of studies that claim mutual violence. Finally, violence perpetrated by ex-partners and ex-spouses is also excluded; the National Crime Victimization Survey statistics show that rates of IPV perpetration against women by their former intimates are eight times higher than rates of perpetration against married women.

Despite the research findings presented by scholars and federal agencies within the Department of Justice, men’s rights groups (such as the Men’s Defense Association, Men’s Activism, and the National Coalition of Free Men) routinely point to numerous investigations and empirical studies demonstrating that women are as physically aggressive as or more aggressive than men in their relationships. Members of the National Coalition of Free Men even filed suit against the state of Minnesota, demanding the end of state funding for domestic violence programs on gender discrimination grounds. However, these assertions are proved faulty upon greater scrutiny of the empirical studies.

One early study by James Makepeace that explored the context of IPV found that, when questioned for motivation, women were twice as likely as men to list self-defense as a motive for inflicting violence, whereas the men were three times more likely than women to indicate that their motive was to intimidate. Likewise, using items from a modified CTS, Christian Molidar and Richard Tolman’s work on dating violence found that when incidents of violence are placed into context, a different gendered pattern emerges, one that shows boys’ accounts of their girlfriends’ violence might really be classified as acts of self-defense. A recent 3-year study conducted by Susan Miller observed three treatment groups for women arrested on domestic violence charges. Only 5% of the women used violence in aggressive ways; these women were in one group. Another group included women who used violence when they were frustrated in situations with their abusive partners or ex-partners and the arresting incident reminded them of past abusive situations (30%). The largest group was comprised of women who described their use of violence as self-defensive (65%). From the detailed descriptions on the probation reports and in the treatment groups, it is clear that the majority of the arrested women were not batterers, but were arrested as a result of new enforcement strategies that were designed to protect women, not create additional hardships for them. These data mirror findings reported elsewhere.

The issue of women’s use of violence is further complicated by changes in domestic violence arrest policies. Pro-arrest and mandatory arrest policies were designed and have been supported as ways of responding uniformly to a problem that had suffered from years of police inaction and a trivialization of IPV. Police now respond “by the book,” meaning that police make an arrest if the law is broken. Unless they have been trained to distinguish between primary aggressor action and self-defensive action, the result is that arrests occur regardless of the history of abuse in the relationship or the meaning or motivation underlying the use of violence. Ironically, one of the results of this gender-neutral approach has been the arrest of many battered women for the use of self-defensive violence against their battering partners, and the court-ordered funneling of these women into batterer treatment programs. For example, in a study of 39 women arrested for domestic violence, Kevin Hamberger and his colleagues found that 36 of the women were identified at treatment program intake as victims of battering, not batterers, and had been arrested for using violence that was self-defensive in nature. Often, women arrested for IPV are offered treatment rather than a challenge of their arrest on self-defensive grounds. For victims who fought back, and who are desperate to prevent the personal, family, employment, and/or financial crises posed by a conviction, the treatment programs are an attractive option. However, these women remain under supervision by probation departments, and violations of probation could result in harsher penalties when it comes to custody issues or jail time. Threats of jeopardizing probation status are used by abusers to intimidate their victims.

By taking individual acts of violence out of these contexts, researchers and policymakers run the risk of furthering the harm done to battered women by discounting the abuse that is inflicted on them by their male partners and by labeling victims as offenders. The differentiation of self-defensive acts of violence from acts of violence reflective of a larger pattern of abuse is necessary for the criminal justice system to become more equitable and better able to protect victims of IPV.

Bibliography:

Anderson, K. L., & Umberson, D. (2001). Gendering violence: Masculinity and power in men’s accounts of domestic violence. Gender & Society, 15, 358–380.
Dasgupta, S. D. (2002). A framework for understanding women’s use of nonlethal violence in intimate heterosexual relationships. Violence Against Women, 8, 1368–1393.
Hamberger, L. K., & Arnold, J. (1990). The impact of mandatory arrest on domestic violence perpetrator counseling sessions. Family Violence Bulletin, 6, 10–12.
Makepeace, J. M. (1986). Gender differences in courtship violence victimization. Family Relations, 35, 383–388.
Miller, S. L. (2005). Victims as offenders: The paradox of women’s violence in relationships. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Molidar, C., & Tolman, R. (1998). Gender and contextual factors in adolescent dating violence. Violence Against Women, 4, 180–194.

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