Assessing the Incidence of domestic violence
Donald G. Dutton
Professor Emeritus
Department of Psychology
University of British Columbia
To assess the incidence (the number of people who report an event occurring) of domestic violence, victim surveys are the best technique. This is because, all other techniques see only self- selected numbers- for example, police arrests only occur if the event has been called in to police, they attended , decided an assault had occurred and wrote a report indicating the arrest was made1. For a variety of reasons, if one or more of these criteria is missing, the arrest will not be recorded. There is considerable evidence that police in Canada do not arrest females who commit DV2. Victim surveys contact a much broader group- literally everyone who has a telephone.
Initially crime surveys were used to assess how widespread DV was. The Stats Can survey still uses this method, asking people contacted about crimes. Sociologist Murray Straus found that this was not an effective way of assessing domestic violence because most people do not perceive DV as a crime. As a result , crime surveys generate only about 1-2% rates of reported victimization. By contrast a technique that Straus developed, called the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) , generates 14-16% rates of victimization reports 3. This involves stating that the survey is about family conflict, a universal phenomenon. This frees people up from feeling judged and they report more acts as consequences of conflict resolution. A copy of the CTS is shown in Appendix 1. Because the CTS removed the crime filter, and normalized family conflict, it obtained reports of abuse that were about 16 times greater than crime surveys3. In short, the CTS was a far more sensitive and differentiated instrument and achieved this by removing the crime filter that suppressed reports of DV victimization.
The CTS asks people how they attempted to resolve family conflicts and has a preamble that describes such conflicts as universal, so it gets around the embarrassment of reporting negative events. The questions are asked of people who respond to a random digit dialing survey. The surveys are anonymous. No one has to give their name or identify themselves. Such surveys have been used since 1975 when the first US National Survey was conducted by Straus4. The results of that survey were famous because of the high levels of violence reported in American families.
Table 1
Rates of Reported Sub-Types of Family Violence
Violence Type / Any Reported (%) / Severe Reported (%)Sister to Sister / 78.5 / 52.2
Brother to Brother / 69.5 / 43.8
Mother to Child / 67.8 / 17.7
Father to Child / 57.9 / 10.1
Wife to Husband / 11.5 / 4.8
Husband to Wife / 11.1 / 3.8
The above Table summarizes Straus et al’s findings. It is reproduced from Dutton et al.5
You might think that with the higher disclosures of Husband to wife violence , that feminist activists would be happy with the CTS. Instead there was a vitriolic attack on the CTS. The problem was, it revealed wife to husband violence that feminist ideology wanted to ignore.
Returning specifically to spousal violence, the following table shows the patterns of spousal violence obtained by surveys. Each partner was asked to report DV towards them and DV committed by them.
Table 2
This table, taken from a published article by Jan Stets and Murray Straus6 shows that DV is not a uniform event but that various patterns exist, classified here as no violence , minor violence and severe violence. Severe violence includes all potentially injurious actions such as kicking, hitting, beating up or using a weapon. Minor violence is typically pushing’ shoving or slapping. 2/3 of all reported DV is minor violence. The Stets and Straus study was interested in dating violence and in comparing married couples to those living together. If you focus on the middle two columns: Male Severe/Female None and Female Severe /Male none, you see the numbers for stereotypic DV. These % are the % of those who reported and DV that fall into this section. So, of all those who reported DV, and were married, 5.7% reported stereotypic wife beating. Keep in mind however, that only about 15% of respondents reported any form of DV, so the incidence of stereotypic wife beating is 15% X 5.7% = .008 % for married couples. For cohabiting couples it is .001%.
However, you may have noticed that the rates for husband beating are higher than those for wife beating. This is the reason the CTS was hated by activists, it revealed a truth that they did not want to acknowledge. That this occurs when men are non-violent refutes the activist claim that female violence is always in self- defense. These data, with one exception are not different when aggregate female respondents and male respondents report.
The Stats Can survey does not ask “victims” if they were also perpetrators of DV. To see why this is mis-leading, look at the Married data in Table 2. If asked if they were victims of DV, the following would have been classified as yes for females: Male Minor/Female None (7.5%) , Both Minor (28.3%), Male Severe/Female None (5.7%), Male Severe/ Female Minor (2.4%),Male Minor/ Female Severe (7.1%) and Both Severe (10.5%). In all cases, there was DV to a woman. But victims also used violence in the Both Minor, Both Sever, Male Minor/ Female Severe and Male Severe/Female Minor categories. If you tally up, “victims” used DV in 81.2 % of all categories where Stats Can designated them as victims. For cohabiting couples the number is 82.9%. This is important to capture the true interactive feature of most DV. Capaldi and her colleagues found that police arrest of men typically occurred when bilaterally violent couples escalated above their usual level of DV7. A study by the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta found that women were most likely to be injured in bilaterally violent DV8. In short, adherence to the stereotypical notion of DV keeps women at risk.
National surveys have been done in the U.S. that used CTS type questions and asked respondents about both victimization and perpetration of DV. The first of these was the Stets and Straus data we just reviewed in Table 2. However, other surveys have been done independently.
These surveys have, in some cases been focused on other issues but also asked about DV (e.g. The National Longitudinal Survey 8on Adolescent Health8, the National Comorbidity Survey9, the national Youth Survey10, the National Survey of Couples11). The results of these independent surveys conducted between 1985 and 2007 are remarkably consistent. They find the following:
- The most common form of DV is bilateral, matched for v level of severity
- Women are more likely than men to commit DV against a non-violent partner
- Male violence against non-violent women is about 15% of all reported DV, and 5% involves serious (potentially injurious acts)
- The most powerful demographic predictor of DV incidence is age
In short, five large sample surveys have found that 5% of all reported DV roughly fits the stereotype of wife beating. About 1/3 of those who commit DV do so repeatedly12. There are two predictors of chronic DV: 1) perpetrator chronicity- tied to a personality disorder in the perpetrator and2) couple chronicity – tied to a dysfunctional interactive pattern.
Table 3
Summary of five large sample independent surveys (U.S.) that asked about both victimization and perpetration by Domestic Violence
Two meta analytic studies have been done on DV perpetration by gender. A meta analytic study combines all previous studies into a giant summary. The first of these by John Archer13 found that women were slightly more likely than men to use DV and also that women were slightly more likely to be injured. The second, by Sara Desmarais14 found these results based on 249 separate studies:
The curiosity is that men report less victimization than women report perpetration. This is consistent with historical reports of men being shamed if they were found to be abused15.
The Conflict Tactics Scale
Preamble: No matter how well a couple gets along, there are times when they disagree on major decisions, or they just have spats or fights because they are tired or in a bad mood or for some other reason. They also use different ways of trying to settle their differences. How often have you and your partner used each of the following in the past year?
Appendix 1 Conflict Tactics Scale- it has subscales (negotiation ,psychological aggression, physical assault, sexual coercion). The Physical assault category is used to assess DV incidence. The two most frequently endorsed items in this category are 1. Grabbed and 2. Pushed or shoved. The other items are considered Serious Assault items because of the greater likelihood of injury.
References
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