Men are also victims of domestic abuse

The following is a letter from a Pattaya Mail reader which appeared in the December 16 Postbag section.

Domestic violence not a gender equality issue

Dear editors,

I’m writing regarding Michael Catalanello’s column on domestic violence in the December 9 issue of the Pattaya Mail.

Dr. Catalanello rightly pointed out that, like just about everywhere else in this world, domestic violence is rampant in Thailand. Unfortunately he perpetuates the canard that women are always victims, never perpetrators, of domestic violence.

In reality, in at least half of all cases, the perpetrators are women. Domestic violence is no more a “male problem” than it is a “blond problem” or a “gay problem” or a “left-handed problem.” Women batter their men with the same frequency, the same severity, and with broadly the same causes. Domestic violence rates do not significantly differ between heterosexual couples, lesbian couples and gay male couples. In short, it is not a gender equality issue.

The academic evidence for this is overwhelming and startlingly consistent, starting right from the landmark studies by Strauss, Gelles and Steinmetz to the National Family Violence Survey and National Violence Against Women Survey (!) in the United States, the Dunedin longitudinal study in New Zealand, and the annual statistics compiled by Statistics Canada. There is no room in this letter to list the hundreds of studies I could cite, but the scientific data are voluminous and publicly available, and they all point in one direction: Women are violent to their partners, on average, just as frequently and severely as men, if not more.

The study Dr. Catalanello cited simply assumed that only women were the victims, and did not bother to survey men about their suffering. This approach is typical.

A real solution to the problem of domestic violence will not be found until we start looking for the real causes of domestic violence, instead of twisting the facts into a stick to bludgeon men with.

Informed Reader
Jomtien

In my column appearing in the Pattaya Mail on December 9, 2005, I reported on two recently published studies of domestic violence in Thailand, one by the World Health Organization (WHO), and another by the Ministry of Public Health. The WHO study interviewed 24,000 women from both rural and urban settings in 10 countries: Bangladesh, Brazil, Ethiopia, Japan, Namibia, Peru, Samoa, Serbia and Montenegro, Thailand, and the United Republic of Tanzania. The Ministry of Public Health study, likewise, focused upon violence against women and children. Both studies concluded that domestic violence is on the increase in Thailand.

I pointed out that experts in the field often point to gender inequality as an important factor in perpetuating and protecting the crime of domestic violence. For example, women in this society are often taught that it is a virtue to be submissive and accepting of male domination. Further, women who seek legal remedies for domestic abuse often encounter attitudes among public officials implying that domestic abuse is a private matter between the husband and wife.

A reader responding to my piece correctly pointed out that men, too, are often victims of domestic abuse. In fact, according to the reader, some studies have shown that men are victims of domestic abuse at the hands of women as frequently as are women at the hands of men. The reader evidently felt that I was being unfair by focusing exclusively on men’s abuse of women. He/she then reasoned that because domestic violence is found equally among heterosexual couples, lesbian couples and gay male couples, it could not be related to gender inequality.

A few points bear mentioning in this regard. First, domestic violence is not exclusively a problem of men abusing women. According to the research, women also abuse men, men abuse men, and women abuse women. Suffering produced as a result of domestic violence is suffering, regardless of the respective genders of the victim and perpetrator.

As for the relative frequency of episodes of man to woman violence versus woman to man violence, I am not aware of any studies addressing the question within Thai society, and I would be cautious in generalizing findings from the United States, New Zealand, and Canada to a society as different as that of Thailand.

I am not prepared to comment here on the methods and findings of the studies cited by the reader; however, there are some important distinctions to keep in mind in interpreting studies like these. For example, are those researchers adequately distinguishing between the initiation of violence, and violence performed in self-defense? Are they lumping together discrete episodes of violence with long-term patterns of abuse? Are they distinguishing between physical abuse and verbal/psychological abuse?

My colleague, psychologist Sombat Tapanya at Chiang Mai University has cited anecdotal reports that Thai females have become somewhat more “aggressive” in recent years, as compared to the past. He, likewise, observes that Thai women seem to favor using tactics involving psychological, rather than physical abuse against men. Obviously, questions like these could form the basis for further research on local domestic abuse which Dr. Sombat and I intend to pursue.

Finally, I fail to see the logic of concluding that if gay males and lesbians abuse their partners with equal frequency as heterosexual couples, gender inequality can not be a factor in promoting domestic abuse. That’s because even within gay male and lesbian partnerships, there is usually a partner who adopts a dominant “male” role, while the other partner adopts a submissive “female” role. Unequal gender expectations inherent in these culturally defined roles can often be observed, even within such partnerships.

As I pointed out, domestic abuse is a complex issue. Questions of what “causes” this unfortunate phenomenon are complicated. Furthermore, ethics and other practical limitations prevent us from carrying out the kind of research that would be needed to provide a definitive answer to the question of what causes domestic violence. Nevertheless, the evidence for gender inequality, particularly within Thai society, seems to me compelling. Certainly, not all individuals holding attitudes reflecting gender inequality end up in abusive relationships. It would be quite surprising, however, if the inferior status of women in Thai society were not somehow implicated in domestic abuse, whether perpetrated by men upon women, or by women upon men.