A post at Metafilter titled “Domestic Violence: Women Abusers On The Rise?” is worth checking out, including the comments from readers. Posts and studies like this raise the heat in terms of domestic violence and who in fact is causing harm.

We see domestic violence if it does occur with women abusers as mutual, meaning the partners are physically abusing each other. It is a struggle to get past our overwhelming experiences of women being beaten by men and how pervasive violence against women and children has been and is in our culture. We cannot negate that men inflict the vast majority of violence on their partners and/or their children, it happens as these statistics on domestic violence from the American Bar Association (ABA), linked on the above mentioned post, state. Here is an excerpt:

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, between 1998 and 2002:

• Of the almost 3.5 million violent crimes committed against family members, 49% of these were crimes against spouses.
• 84% of spouse abuse victims were females, and 86% of victims of dating partner abuse at were female.
• Males were 83% of spouse murderers and 75% of dating partner murderers
• 50% of offenders in state prison for spousal abuse had killed their victims. Wives were more likely than husbands to be killed by their spouses: wives were about half of all spouses in the population in 2002, but 81% of all persons killed by their spouse.

Matthew R. Durose et al., U.S. Dep’t of Just., NCJ 207846, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Family Violence Statistics: Including Statistics on Strangers and Acquaintances, at 31-32 (2005), available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/fvs.pdf.

As women continue to take on larger roles as the primary bread winners in their families, climbing up corporate ladders, taking on more leadership positions, leading the way in higher education, working in stressful jobs, being mothers while working more then full-time, all while the economy is in a tailspin, we are seeing some increased symptoms of stress and anxiety. And, in more marginal households where poverty exists and/or incidents of abuse, abandonment and neglect are extreme and generational the chances for violence by both parents remains high. Either way, when violence does occur it can be viewed in many instances as an outgrowth of the overwhelming day to day challenges people are facing and how meeting these challenges, or not, was modeled for them when they were young.

This said, men continue to be the primary perpetrators of domestic violence and this fact cannot be marginalized, or thought to be decreasing or equal to the numbers of female batterers, especially as more women are noted to be physically abusing their partners and/or children. What can be taken from studies that may be showing more women who are violent is that stress and anxiety are on the rise across the board and have a relationship to abuse. It can also be stated that the violence we witness as children and then repeat in our adult lives is not mutually exclusive to men. Girls on their way to becoming women may see violence as an alternative if it was modeled for them in the home, just like we know the case is for boys as they become men.

The difficulty of discussing women who are violent is obvious because in doing so we feel like we are taking much needed attention away from the larger problems associated with violent men. So, I would again take these studies on violence as a point of awareness where we understand the inordinate amount of pressures women are under and as a way of looking at total human behavior where men and women are prone to violence if they feel pushed too far or do not have models for how to cope. Every case is different in the sense of who and what motivates a person to act out violently against their partner, children, or themselves. What can be said definitively is that violence wherever or to whomever it happens is not acceptable. A zero tolerance for violence in the home must be genderless.

The incidents where women do physically abuse their children is disturbing to us, if not more so than when it comes to men because they are much rarer. The times when women do abuse goes against our understanding of and reverence for the “nurturing” mother. But, this fantasy of an only nurturing, always loving, mother does not match our own realities and it is not fair to women because it creates an expectation that no woman can live up to all of the time. It may be why many feel so let down by their mothers and give their father’s a break when they are violent. The expectations are not so high for men. We do in some tragic underlying way accept that boys and men will be violent, that they will act out.

This gets at the heart about women, men and violence. I often hear women and many men say that only if women were in charge the world will be a more peaceful place. How can we know. I wonder. Perhaps violence is a human condition, not gender based, again it is hard to know. As far as I know, there are no definitive studies suggesting that biologically women are less prone to be violent then men, but statistics, our experiences and history show this to be the case. Violence is as much a cultural phenomenon as it is a physical reality. Are men being battered? The answer must be yes because it is happening. To what degree and how pervasive are these incidents, it is hard to know. Does the incidents of men being physically abused by their female partners come close to the violence against women by men, no. We can say with certainty that domestic violence is a problem and it is not going away. Where the power lies the potential for violence is not far away.

(See also How To Survive Domestic Violence)