An Ongoing Battle

Domestic violence, or, as it is now called, intimate partner violence, has been the subject of analysis and social policy since at least the beginning of the 19th century. The current wave of interest started in the 1970s when domestic violence was called wife assault and was viewed as a way for male perpetrators to suppress women’s rights. Males, after all, are bigger and stronger and use that advantage to enforce their belief in patriarchy, or so the feminists would have everyone believe. Walter DeKeseredy, a sociologist and professor of criminology at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, takes this view, and it is probably important for me to state at the outset that I do not. As DeKeseredy writes in his introduction to Violence Against Women: Myths, Facts, Controversies, “Canadian scholars, practitioners and activists are constantly generating new empirical, theoretical and political ways of understanding sexual assaults, wife beating, femicide and the like,” and that makes the whole field both complicated and controversial.

Walter DeKeseredy has followed the pioneers of gender-based domestic violence analysis, and through twelve books and about 70 articles for scientific journals he has never looked back, despite a tsunami of data collected in the past 30 years that shows male violence in intimate relationships is not more prevalent than female violence and is not motivated by “power and control” or the exercise of patriarchal rights, and that intimate partner violence in gay relationships is at least as frequent as in heterosexual relationships. In this book, DeKeseredy reviews his definition of violence against women as “any male expression of power and control against an intimate female,” as well as his view of how it should be measured. He also takes off after what he calls the “backlash critics,” those who refuse to view domestic violence solely as male-on-female behaviour, and he attacks “the manipulation and use of sensational cases” by these critics and the media. He focuses in this section on Karla Homolka and Kelly Ellard. Homolka, who of course was Paul Bernardo’s partner in serial murder, and Ellard (whom he does not mention by name but who was eventually found guilty of the murder of Reena Virk in Victoria, British Columbia) are, in DeKeseredy’s view, “not typical Canadian female offenders.” He sees a “moral panic” in contemporary society about rising female youth violence, but apparently no parallel moral panic about the earlier societal certitude that domestic violence was always a case of male-perpetrated “wife assault” or “femicide,” which he also describes as an “epidemic.” After listing many of the negative factors acting on adolescent girls, DeKeseredy argues that most adolescent girls in North America “are happy, having fun and not on the path to becoming ‘unruly women.’” No argument here, except to say, why can he not see that this argument also applies to men and to adolescent boys?

So many of DeKeseredy’s concerns go against the prevailing research. Despite his warning against sensational examples, he recounts a detailed case of a child traumatized by her stepfather. The reader needs to know that, according to a 2004 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services study, the main source of violence toward children in the United States comes from their biological mothers. In Canada mothers and fathers are equally likely to be perpetrators of child abuse. He introduces Marc Lépine, whose hatred of women is “a feeling shared by many serial and mass killers.” Actually, apart from Lépine and George Sodini, whom DeKeseredy also highlights, most mass murderers focus on male victims. With serial killers, the victims vary with their sexual predilections and may be female (e.g., Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway) or male (e.g., Jeffrey Dahmer, Wayne Williams). Of course, one of the most infamous serial killers of all time, Countess Elizabeth Bathory, operating in the early 17th century, had a predilection for young girls.

Terrie Moffitt’s classic examination of the development of antisocial behaviour in boys and girls found more similarities than differences between the sexes. DeKeseredy does not cite this major work although it resulted in the sociological equivalent of the Nobel Prize for Moffitt and has a direct bearing on his argument. Nor does he cite Lisa Serbin’s outstanding work in Montreal from the Concordia Longitudinal Risk Study that found aggressive girls selected aggressive boys as mates and went on to become aggressive mothers with children who have above average numbers of emergency ward visits. Also missing from these pages are Natacha Godbout’s and Miriam Ehrensaft’s work on how exposure to child abuse crystallizes into personality disorders that lead to domestic violence in both sexes; Deborah Capaldi’s work on assortative mating (the choice of sexual partners with the same behavioural traits); and the police misclassification of domestic violence calls—all examples of ground breaking new work. Also missing is Radya Iyengar’s study on how femicide rates are higher in U.S. states with mandatory arrest. She concludes that this occurs because women in these states are less likely to recall police after getting more than they wanted on the first visit. (That is, the women wanted their partner stopped and warned but not arrested.) All of this exciting research by outstanding female researchers challenges the conventional gender paradigm and, for this very reason, does not find its way into this book.

DeKeseredy’s use of language and categories betrays his biases as well. Heterosexual male violence toward the partner is “violence towards women” but gay male violence, which exists for the same reasons and at about the same frequency, is missing from his review. Similarly, violence against lesbians is not mentioned because it is committed by women. Where the patriarchal explanation cannot shine, it will not look. Hence, in an extraordinary example, heterosexual female domestic violence is “self-defence,” even if DeKeseredy’s own female respondents overwhelmingly say it was not. The attribution of female domestic violence to self-defence has been a shibboleth in the gender-biased world where DeKeseredy resides. It was invented as an explanation for the potentially embarrassing yet persistent finding that females perpetrated violence against their intimate partners as much or more than males. But DeKeseredy is also a researcher. In his own published data, more than 90 percent of his female respondents denied using violence in domestic situations solely for self-defence and a majority said they never used it for this reason. Amazingly, DeKeseredy summed up: “[the] overall conclusion is that much of the violence by Canadian undergraduate women is self-defence and should not be labeled mutual combat or male partner abuse.” (1) It is one thing for academics to cherry-pick data from atypical samples in women’s shelters or police statistics, but it is rare to see reported data being the complete opposite of the researcher’s conclusions. This can only be characterized as an example of the extremity of DeKeseredy’s bias in these matters. It is important to keep this in mind when one reads a book by him subtitled “Myths, Facts, Controversies.”

The inattention to gay violence happens because gay violence cannot be fitted into DeKeseredy’s Procrustean bed of heterosexual (“patriarchal”) male violence. Yet all studies on gay violence indicate that it occurs at the same rate and because of the same psychological causes as straight domestic violence. In DeKeseredy’s drift net sociological categories, psychological causes do not exist. He does not appear to understand them, yet consistently attempts to downplay and criticize them. Yet these very causes—based more in attachment, identity issues and interactive coercion traps (in which each person raises the ante to gain control over his or her partner)—explain much better the presence of intimate partner violence in both gay and straight relationships. We define hate crime as crime committed for reasons of a victim’s race, ethnicity or sexual orientation. We do not see gay male domestic violence as a hate crime. If we applied the same standard to heterosexual situations, much of DeKeseredy’s work on crimes against women would similarly diminish because these crimes are not committed on the basis of the victim’s gender but largely because of the victim’s intimacy with the perpetrator. This is why violence perpetrated by gay and heterosexual males is the same in both frequency and causation. It differs only in the gender of the intimate other.

A men’s shelter—the first in the world—opened a few years ago in New Hampshire and the male victims of intimate partner violence there have been studied by Denise Hines. A majority of them sustained severe physical injuries (over a third of them had injuries requiring medical attention), but when they called their local shelter for help, most were told they were the “real batterer” and were referred to a batterers’ program. Battered and now accused, they turned eventually to a hotline implemented by the New Hampshire shelter. This view—that the man must somehow have caused the problem—is the central belief of DeKeseredy and his cohort and goes unchallenged in the domestic violence industry generated by political fiat in both the United States and Canada. Only when the scope is broadened to include male victims and female perpetrators does the insufficiency of the gender paradigm become obvious.

What answers are there then to the problem as DeKeseredy defines it? Criminal justice solutions have failed miserably, more so than he acknowledges. He persists in arguing that more police presence is better. However, summaries of the mandatory arrest experiments (which he does not cite) in several U.S. cities say this is not so. Arrest reduces recidivism by tiny amounts, if at all, and seems to work best with perpetrators who were the best candidates for reform, whether state imposed or not.

When all is said and done and the data carefully reviewed, the ultimate failure of DeKeseredy’s work is endemic to the sociological perspective he maintains. Such a perspective can discuss differences in the incidence of a behaviour in large aggregates such as gender, race or socioeconomic class, but it cannot explain the inevitable within-group distributions that occur within aggregates. Only a tiny number of men abuse their wives in the fashion DeKeseredy describes—“intimate terrorism.” The use of instrumental violence against intimate partners is reported in the 2004 Statistics Canada survey by a mere 4.2 percent of women and 2.6 percent of men. The same argument applies to DeKeseredy’s analysis of femicide. Turning for evidence to a newspaper and a university magazine, and forgetting his own ministrations about moral panic, DeKeseredy describes spousal homicide involving women victims as “systemic violence against women in this country” and asserts that it is definitely not an issue of “mental health problems.” In fact, the rate of spousal homicide in Canada is about eight per million (for male perpetrators) and three per million (for female perpetrators), according to Margo Wilson and Martin Daly at McMaster University. Separation, job loss and major reactive depression are related to most spousal homicides. Males do react more strongly to separation (their intimate homicide rate is almost three times as high as women’s), but the numbers are extremely small for either gender. Males are far more likely to kill themselves than their mates. It is not “systemic” but rather a rare event.

If the social structural features to which DeKeseredy alludes have the power he ascribes to them, then why do they affect such small numbers, and why is the overwhelming majority of the aggregate not affected at all? Within broad categories—such as male or female, middle class or working class—are distributions showing individual differences on any measure taken. Only a small percentage of men (and women) are spouse assaulters, yet all are exposed to the same social influences. Sociology cannot answer this question because it requires some knowledge of the differential individual psychologies of the abusers vis-à-vis the non-abusers, and DeKeseredy does not understand this psychology. Nothing makes this clearer than his assertion that for men who commit intimate partner violence to be “mentally ill” they should also commit violence toward others in their life. That pattern is rarely realized, even for those found in court to be not criminally responsible by reason of a mental defect. Perhaps for this reason, he rejects psychological explanations out of hand and hence remains incapable of generating the very explanations his subject matter requires.

Violence in families will continue to perplex. We can, as DeKeseredy suggests, raise awareness of its unacceptability, although 98 percent of North American men already see it as unacceptable. We need to recognize that abusiveness in individuals begins early in their development. Serbin’s aggressive girls were first spotted through teachers’ ratings in grade one. The current gender-based paradigm is myopic and incorrect, beginning with Catharine MacKinnon’s seminal assumption that sexual relations were equivalent to economic relations. They are not and Marxist models thus do not fit and are ultimately counterproductive. Relationships are infinitely more layered and complex than either MacKinnon or DeKeseredy realizes, but in psychological ways, not broad social aggregates. One can cite numerous detailed examples of mistreatment of women, as DeKeseredy does, but focusing on such behaviour alone presents only one side of the coin. In the final analysis, the question must be asked: how is gender analysis any different from stereotyping?

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