Week 2: Domestic violence

This week's lecture looked at the surprisingly complex - even contradictory - phenomenon of domestic violence.

Domestic violence is one of those things that we're all aware of and all (hopefully) agree on. Researchers don't talk about "battered wives" any more - violence doesn't have to be that extreme to count, and women don't have to be married to be victims of it - but that phrase sums up the image that comes to most people's minds when domestic violence is used: a woman who is the victim of brutal violence from her male partner.

Attacks of this sort are real, and they're a very important part of the reality of domestic violence. The Domestic Violence Day Count, carried out in 2001 by a team led by Betsy Stanko, found that on average somebody was calling the police about domestic violence somewhere in the UK once every minute; the reports included some quite serious violence, and over 80% of the victims were women. But they're not the whole picture. Survey research persistently shows that a surprisingly high proportion of domestic violence incidents have a male victim - anywhere from 30% to 50% of the total. Apparently the gender balance of domestic violence as reported on surveys - which are usually seen as the more authoritative source of data - is very different from the gender balance of attacks reported to the police.

This is a 'dark figure' problem, and an unusual one. Usually we assume that whatever the 'dark figure' of crime is, it won't differ enormously from the total of crime that we do know about, but in fact this is an unjustified assumption. If something's been stealing your hay in the night, and you wake up one morning to see a rare African nightingale making off with a couple of wisps, do you assume that there are another twenty African nightingales out there? For all you know, the culprit for most of the thefts might be some other birds that you haven't seen (and which might be more common in this country);  it might not even be birds. Similarly, if 1,000 women call the police to report extreme cases of domestic violence, and a survey reveals that there were actually 10,000 incidents of domestic violence in that period, we can't necessarily assume that the other 9,000 were all as extreme - or that they all had female victims.

The surveys do give us some help in interpreting the difference between their figures and police data. Compared to violence against men, violence against women is more likely to be repeated; more likely to be extreme; and more likely to be experienced as very upsetting and very frightening. What this also tells us, though, is that some violence against men is extreme - and some violence against women is relatively minor.

What seems to be going on is that there are two main types of domestic violence: using Carolyn Hoyle's terms, "intimate terrorism" (brutalising, intimidating, oppressive attacks by one partner on the other) and "common couple violence" (everyday, spontaneous, low-level violence between two people). "Common couple violence" is usually experienced as trivial, and both men and women inflict it on their partners; "intimate terrorism" is traumatically extreme, and it's usually (not always) inflicted by men on women.

The shifting power balance between men and women has made women victims of domestic violence much more visible than they were when Nils Christie wrote "The Ideal Victim" (as he predicted it would); there have even been improvements in the last decade, since Stanko wrote her report on the Day Count. But this process has its own drawbacks. I suggested in the lecture that an odd combination of feminism and sexism made male victims of domestic violence hard to see. On one hand, the feminist emphasis on male power over women makes researchers think of domestic violence as exclusively a problem of male violence; on the other, the persistence of sexist assumptions about male power makes police officers see men victims as figures of fun.

Increasing visibility of women victims of domestic violence, and increasing ability to claim victim status, is all to the good - but some researchers are concerned that the complexity of the phenomenon of domestic violence may get lost from sight as a result.

Instead of a seminar this week, please read the Stanko paper - it's on Moodle - and answer the questions in the "Seminar exercise" document.