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Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences (1994)

Chapter: Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships

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Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships

Jeffrey Fagan and Angela Browne

INTRODUCTION

In the 1960s, Americans began to ask important questions about violence. The National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, known as the Kerner Commission, concluded in 1969 that the United States was the world's leader in rates of homicide, assault, rape, and robbery. To most people, crime in general and violent crime in particular became major sources of discontent (Gurr, 1989; Weiner and Wolfgang, 1985). However, this early concern with criminal victimization focused primarily on violent incidents outside the home. Like the commission, most Americans believed that the risk of personal attack or injury lay in individuals beyond one's circle of intimates. Violence in the family-if recognized at all-was rarely considered criminal unless a death occurred. The average family, it was assumed, afforded at least some measure of nurturance and protection to its members. Twenty years later, we are now aware of the extent of violence between family members in our society and the seriousness of that violence in terms of physical and non-physical injury.

Jeffrey Fagan is at the School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University. Angela Browne is at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

In the past two decades, there has been an upsurge of inquiry into violence between intimates. The growth of social services in the 1960s, designed primarily to wrestle with extramarital social problems such as stranger crime or substance abuse, not only focused public policy on the economic behavior of families (Gilbert, 1983), but also opened up the family as a social institution amenable to public scrutiny. Accordingly, family social interactions became increasingly subject to social interventions and legal sanctions (Wexler, 1982). Until public policy focused attention on the private realm of family life, few people considered the home to be other than ''a compassionate, egalitarian, peaceful affair in which violence played no part" (Wardell et al., 1983).

Three major trends in this era raised doubts about this tranquil view of American family life. First, the "discovery" of child abuse through medical and sociological research in the mid-1960s focused public attention on family violence (e.g., Caffey, 1946; Silverman, 1953; Kempe et al., 1962; see also Gil, 1970). Child abuse victims had a visceral and emotional public appeal. Several national organizations came into being to promote services and financial support for child victims, and to work for statutory changes and improved protections. A nationwide reporting system was implemented during the 1970s, and laws mandated formal reports to designated agencies by parents, teachers, and police officers who became aware of child abuse or neglect.

Second, political activism by feminist organizations at that time helped make visible the use of physical force as a means of intimidation or coercion within the family and elevated it to prominence as a social concern (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1978; Schechter, 1982). Much of this awareness was engendered by the modern women's movement which, in the 1960s, began to examine violence against women around the issue of rape. Such discussion revealed the prevalence of women experiencing sexual assaults by intimate male partners, rather than strangers, and provided a forum for the identification of the physical assault of wives as a problem of previously unrecognized national proportions.

Concern over the harm to women (specifically, serious injuries and fatalities), and also to the children for whom they cared, intensified as the public became aware of the confluence of family violence and other violent behaviors outside the family. Violence in the home, previously informally condoned because it was "private," was now defined in a social context as deviant and placed in the public domain, marking a "moral passage" in American

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

social history (Gusfield, 1967). As incidence and prevalence estimates became established, family violence became an issue of focus for researchers, medical and mental health treatment providers, and policy makers.

Third, the emphasis on victimization in criminal justice research and practice in the 1970s identified family violence as an important and complex phenomenon confronting the police and courts (Parnas, 1967; Bard and Zacker, 1971; Wilson, 1977). During the 1970s, sweeping legal and police policy changes were instituted in response to public concern and social science investigations. Victim support was an important component of political activism that sought to reorient legal institutions toward fulfilling the entitlement of the rights of victims. Feminist groups decried the secondary victimization of "special victims," including victims of rape and wife abuse.

Research on marital violence in the United States has now spanned nearly three decades. National surveys estimate that an act of physical violence is committed by a family member in nearly half of all homes during an average 12-month period in the United States (see, e.g., Straus et al., 1980; Gelles and Straus, 1988). Minimum estimates from these surveys indicate that acts of physical aggression between spouses occur in one of six homes each year. Injuries and lethal injuries from partner violence fall disproportionately on women. A minimum of two million women are severely assaulted annually by their male partners (Straus and Gelles, 1986), and more than half the women murdered in the United States are killed by male partners or ex-partners (Browne and Williams, 1989; Zahn, 1989). Rosenberg et al. (1984) estimated that more than 20,000 hospitalizations occur each year due to acts of violence in the home. These estimates have remained remarkably consistent over time, even in the face of increased awareness and intervention.

Yet, despite the growing evidence that criminal violence frequently occurs between family members as well as between acquaintances and strangers, criminologists today continue to study these patterns separately. There have been few efforts to integrate the empirical literature on aggression within families with other perspectives on violence. Knowledge utilization in the policy development process also has selectively incorporated the independent bodies of empirical research and theoretical traditions. Family violence continues to be defined and studied by criminologists as a separate crime type, rather than as a specific variety of violence or aggression (cf. Williams and Flewelling, 1988), and is

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

more often treated as a "specialization" similar to white-collar crime or substance use. In turn, criminal justice policy toward wife assault has reflected research paradigms and theories of criminal or violent behavior toward strangers, rather than either an integrated perspective or a perspective incorporating the unique contributions of family violence research.

MARITAL VIOLENCE DEFINED

In this paper, the discussion of research and policy on violence between intimate adult partners includes physical assault, sexual assault, and homicide, committed, threatened, or attempted by spouses, ex-spouses, common-law spouses, or cohabitants toward their partners. We also note other harmful behaviors that occur as part of the natural history of marital violence: psychological abuse, economic deprivation, threats to others in the family, and threats as a method of coercion. These behaviors co-occur with physical assault, and although we do not focus on them specifically, they are part of the "ecology of aggression" that characterizes marital violence. They may also constitute antecedents of physical aggression, part of the maintenance of a pattern of marital violence, or displacements of aggression when assaults desist.

Definitions in the study of violence between intimates have varied extensively. Bandura (1973) defined aggression as behavior that results in personal injury or property destruction. Bandura's definition is consistent with the definition of family violence offered by Gelles and Straus (1979) as "an act carried out with the intention of, or perceived intention of, physically hurting another person." Gelles and Straus distinguished violence from aggression, which includes any malevolent action, regardless of whether physical harm is involved. However, they excluded verbal aggression, marital rape, and sexual assaults from their definition of family violence.

Collins (1988), focusing exclusively on violent behaviors, defines violence as an actual or attempted physical attack and terms this "expressive interpersonal violence." Such broad conceptual definitions require careful attention to the operational definitions and attendant measures in the studies reviewed. For example, although Straus and Gelles define violence as actions undertaken with the intent or perceived intent to harm, their measure assesses neither intent nor perceptions.

In this paper, we are concerned with aggression between adults

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

in families or intimate cohabitating relationships that reflects the intent to harm or to create a painful condition. These behaviors include attempted or completed physical assaults, homicides, and sexual assaults. We are also concerned with property destruction that is intended to harm the partner and with the threat of force. The extensive literature on victimization of spouses or partners-along with its broader implications for the understanding and control of violent behavior-warrants focusing this essay specifically on aggression between intimately related adults. Also, the differences in jurisprudential issues regarding children and elderly dependents, and the variations in administrative response systems, require a broader and more complex analysis. Accordingly, the terms wife assault, marital violence, and spouse abuse are sometimes used interchangeably to describe the phenomenon of assaults and abuse by partners or spouses in current or former intimate relationships in which they are or were cohabiting.

ORGANIZATION OF THIS PAPER

In this paper, we examine empirical and theoretical knowledge on violence between adult partners. The first section traces the evolution of theory, research, and policy on partner violence. The historical, cultural, social, and legal foundations of current efforts are reviewed. In the following section, a social epidemiology of assaults between partners is established, including estimates of participation and frequency rates, characteristics of victims and assailants, and an assessment of "risk markers" for marital violence. Patterns of spousal homicide and their relationship to other forms of partner and stranger violence are also discussed. This section includes a critical review that assesses the limitations and strengths of empirical research and theory. Specifically, we examine the validity and reliability of current indices and the overall strength and limitations of current knowledge. We discuss the unique context of families that complicates sampling and measurement decisions, as well as the critical interdependence of definition, measurement, and interpretation.

Then the broader implications of empirical knowledge for explanation and theory are assessed. We examine several explanatory frameworks suggested by the epidemiology and risk factors evident in marital violence and integrate them within a broader conceptual framework. The examination concludes with discussions linking research on marital violence to the larger study of violent behavior.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

After that, current policies and interventions are examined, including empirical evidence of their effectiveness and their validity in terms of current knowledge. Both social and legal interventions are discussed, as is the interaction among policy, theory, definition, and knowledge of family violence. This includes an analysis of the social processes of problem definition and the sociology of knowledge about violence between adult intimates. The influence of these processes on what we know and do about marital violence is analyzed.

Finally a research agenda is set forth for the advancement of theory, methods, and empirical knowledge of partner violence, and research to integrate the perspectives is specifically (but not exclusively) recommended. We conclude with a discussion that integrates knowledge of assaults between intimate partners with other forms of violence within families and violence outside the context of families.

EVOLUTION OF KNOWLEDGE AND POLICY ON MARITAL VIOLENCE

The new social knowledge of violence between adult partners developed during an era in which social intervention in family life had gained widespread support and created a context for defining marital violence as an urgent social problem. The ensuing social and political processes shaped both the knowledge of marital violence and policy responses. The nature of the problem and its etiological roots were subjected to varying interpretations and definitions. As would be expected, definitions, research traditions, and policy development all varied according to the interests and perspectives of the definers. Thus, the perspectives that were influential in the development of knowledge and policy responses to marital violence reflect differing assumptions regarding its definition and etiology, as well as concerns with the "ownership" of marital violence as a social problem.

CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES

Marital violence is intrinsic to many cultures. Levinson (1988) using cross-cultural data on family violence from the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) data base (Lagace, 1979) identified eight varieties of marital violence in 330 societies.1 Levinson (1988, 1989) estimated the prevalence of wife beating2 in a representative sample of 90 societies from the 330 cultural groups in the

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

HRAF data base. Wife beating occurred in 84.5 percent of the 90 cultures. It occurred "at least occasionally" in all or nearly all households in 18.8 percent of the societies, and in a majority (but not all) in 29.9 percent. Husband beating was reported in 6.7 percent of all societies; it was rare or unheard of in 73.1 percent and occurred in a minority of households in 20.2 percent. Other studies (cited in Levinson, 1989) report comparable data: Wife beating occurs in 71 to 92 percent of the societies studied.

Motivations for wife beating in these societies included sexual jealousy or infidelity (45.5%), insubordination or disobedience by the wife (25.5%), and the wife's failure to meet "household responsibilities" (23.3%). Societal responses to wife beating varied extensively. In 91.2 percent of the societies, intervention by outsiders occurred. These interventions included help or intercession by kin or neighbors (17.6%), shelter for the wife (14.7%), legal intervention (17.6%), marital violence as grounds for divorce (11.8%), and supernatural sanctions (e.g., casting a spell)-in an unspecified proportion. In 29.4 percent of the societies, interventions are limited to beatings that exceed societal norms for the "physical discipline" of wives. Interventions were reportedly unavailable in 8.8 percent of the societies. The study gave no indication of the legal status of wife or husband assaults in the societies studied.

Such comparative studies are complicated by several methodological and design issues. Family configurations and kinship networks vary extensively across societies, and the meaning of family and the nature of marital bonds are obviously culture specific. Consensus on a universal definition of family violence is no more evident in cross-cultural research than in contemporary research in the United States (Korbin, 1977). Variations in injury, motivation, and context are consistent with variations in the social organization of these societies, the meanings attached to marital violence, and the unique family configurations (e.g., Gartner, 1990). Other sources of design variability include measurement inconsistencies, sampling problems in defining the boundaries of cultures and stratifying them, and uneven attention to the variables that are thought to cause cross-cultural variation. Anthropological studies also tend to avoid explicit comparisons of two or more cultures, limiting tests of the factors that actually influence cultural variations (Levinson, 1988). However, coding and validation procedures in the HRAF data base may have offset some of these limitations.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

HISTORICAL LEGACIES OF PUBLIC POLICY ON MARITAL VIOLENCE

Cultural and legal supports for marital violence toward wives have existed in Western civilization for more than 3,000 years. In ancient Rome, physical domination of wives by husbands was acknowledged in the "law of marriage," formalized by Romulus in 753 B.C. (Pagelow, 1984). Davidson (1978) quotes Friar Cherubino of Siena in the late 1400s as recommending in his Rules of Marriage that husbands respond to an offense by a wife by first scolding, bullying, and terrifying. If that did not produce the desired results, they were then instructed to "take up a stick and beat her soundly ...". Blackstone's (1765) commentary on English common law accorded legal rather than moral authority to men's domination in family matters. In a system in which wives occupied the same status as children, Blackstone noted that the civil law ''gave the husband the same, or a larger, authority over his wife: allowing him for some misdemeanors, to beat his wife severely with scourges and cudgels ... for others only moderate chastisement."

After the colonization of North America, the social and legal history of reform efforts for marital violence shows cyclical patterns dating to the Puritan era in Massachusetts in the 1640s (Pleck, 1987). Throughout American history, interest in criminal sanctions against marital violence has coincided with both heightened concern about state responsibility to enforce public morality and increased fear of crime (Pleck, 1989). According to Stark and Flitcraft (1983:330), "Virtually every 20 years ... the popular press has joined women's groups and charitable organizations to denounce wife beating, child abuse, and related forms of family violence in the strongest terms."

Reform Movements Toward Women and Children From the Puritans Through the Nineteenth Century

The first American law prohibiting beating female spouses was enacted in the Puritan era in 1641 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This law was modified two years later to include violence against husbands. Pleck (1989:24) notes that laws against wife and child beating were intended primarily to serve as a "symbolic affirmation" of biblical principles, and that the Puritans upheld and justified the use of "legitimate" physical force by parents, masters, or husbands. Men were allowed to punish their children and wives physically, whereas wives or children were never allowed

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

to punish their husbands or parents. Respect for family privacy and the husband's authority sharply limited the number of arrests under these sanctions. By 1663, enforcement under these laws had virtually ceased. The next law against wife beating (and evidently the last one for 200 years) was passed in 1672 in the Plymouth Colony. However, only 12 cases of spouse assault against wives were prosecuted in the Plymouth Colony court from 1633 to 1802 (Pleck, 1987).3

No further laws against wife assault or other forms of family violence were enacted until a Tennessee law was passed in 1850, followed by a Georgia law seven years later and by an Alabama Supreme Court ruling in 1871. Rather, during this time court rulings continued to define the limitations of legal intervention for spouse assault. A Mississippi court ruling in 1824 said that a husband, in cases of "great emergency," had the right to discipline his wife physically so long as it was done in a moderate manner, "without being subjected to vexatious prosecution (Bradley v. State, 1 Miss. 157). The "rule of thumb" (1866) permitted a man to beat his wife "with a stick as large as his finger but not larger than his thumb," a reform that was deemed "compassionate" by limiting the weapons a man could use against his spouse (State v. Rhodes, 61 Phil. L. [N.C.] 453; cited by Browne, 1987).4 However, in a subsequent ruling in the same case, the court declined to ''interfere with family government in trifling cases" (State v. Rhodes, 61 N.C. 453, 353, 1868; cited in Pleck, 1989).

The era beginning in the 1870s and continuing through the turn of the century was again a period of activism to stop wife beating and other forms of family violence. It was fueled by growing sympathy with victims of domestic abuse and was coupled with the child protection movement, itself a function of middle-class outrage over the conditions of the urban poor, primarily immigrants who labored in increasingly industrialized cities (Platt, 1969). Dobash and Dobash (1979) describe two short-lived periods of public concern and social action against wife beating. Mill's (1869) famous essay, "The Subjection of Women" decried the battering of wives and resulted in a report to the British parliament in 1874. In the same decade, both British and American legislatures took some limited actions to protect women. Americans revoked a few laws of chastisement, while the British offered "meager protection against cruelty and allowed divorce on this ground" (Mill, 1869:5).

In 1871, Alabama became the first state to rescind a husband's legal right to beat his wife, noting that the "wife is entitled to the

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

same protection of the law that the husband can invoke for himself ..." (Fulgham v. State, 46 Ala. 146-147). A North Carolina court followed suit in 1874 but qualified its ruling by advising that if no permanent injury was inflicted or "dangerous" violence shown, it was best to "draw the curtain, shut out the public gaze, and leave the parties to forget and forgive" (State v. Oliver, 70 N.C. 60, 61-62). Although Pleck (1987) contends that these were atypical legal opinions, the lack of prosecution of cases of wife assault, and the public priorities on family privacy and patriarchal authority, suggest that such legal opinions accurately reflected the attitudes of the times, even if not cited in subsequent cases.

Fear of crime and perceived threat to the moral order were prime motivators of fueling public concern during this period. The crime rate escalated rapidly after the Civil War, both within and outside the home. Laws against wife beating at this time often called for stiff punishment: statutes authorized flogging at the whipping post in three states, an expression of the regard for domestic violence as a serious crime with strong accountability for violators (Pleck, 1989). However, only a few perpetrators were ever flogged for wife abuse, and those who were flogged were disproportionately African American. During this period, family stability and Victorian morality were guiding ethics, and Pleck (1989) reports that more attention was given to the protection of victims and to stabilizing the family unit that to the punishment of offenders. Reconciliation was the goal of intervention, and divorce from an abusive mate was not encouraged.

By the 1890s, Pleck (1989) reports that concern with wife and child abuse began to fade. Society turned to social casework, rather than law enforcement, as the preferred intervention, and cases that were identified were attributed increasingly to economic hardship, family problems, or psychiatric disturbance (Gordon, 1988). General interest in family violence declined until the 1960s.

EMERGENCE OF MARITAL VIOLENCE AS A POLICY ISSUE

The rediscovery of wife abuse in this century was due in large part to the work of feminist activists and clinical researchers who documented and publicized the issue (Martin, 1976; Roy, 1977; Hilberman and Munson, 1978; Walker, 1979). Victims of spouse assault, overwhelmingly women, presented themselves to feminist grassroots organizations via rape hot lines started by these groups, as well as victim assistance agencies or rape crisis centers (Schechter, 1982). These grassroots organizations quickly defined

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

a wide range of services needed by marital violence victims: shelter, transportation, counseling, legal assistance, and child care (Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1983). They also defined the limitations of existing legal remedies to sanction offenders or offer protection to victims.

Recognition by feminists of the problems and limitations of justice system responses spurred the development of other services for women victims of marital violence as well. Building on the models developed for rape victims, feminist organizations opened crisis intervention and victim assistance programs for women victims of marital violence, started shelters for victims and their children, and formed specialized legal assistance programs for both civil and criminal actions (Schechter, 1982). Through state and national political organizations, they mobilized to reform legislation regarding laws of protection, to eliminate requirements for divorce filing to obtain an order of protection, and to simplify the prosecution of marital rape.

Their early influence was critical in defining wife battering as a multifaceted public policy issue whose solutions spanned the organizational boundaries of specific social or legal institutions.

As marital violence became a public issue, the criminal justice system was obliged to respond in new ways. Traditionally, marital violence was perceived as an ever-present and perhaps intractable problem, creating dangerous situations for the police and difficult-to-resolve cases for the courts (Parnas, 1967; Fields, 1978). Early writings on police responses to family violence were critical, citing their refusal to get involved in family disputes (Fields, 1978), their avoidance of arrest and other criminal sanctions (Field and Field, 1973; Martin, 1976; Roy, 1977; Dobash and Dobash, 1979), and their inappropriate use of nonlegal remedies such as mediation (Eisenberg and Micklow, 1977). Police viewed family disturbance calls as dangerous to responding officers (Parnas, 1967; Bard, 1970; cf. Garner and Clemmer, 1986), and otherwise viewed family disturbances as problematic and intractable interpersonal conflicts that were inappropriate for police attention (Wilson, 1977).

Prior to the early 1970s, many police departments actually had "hands-off" policies (Elliott, 1989). Police training manuals clearly specified that, in responding to domestic disputes, arrest was to be avoided whenever possible (International Association of Chiefs of Police, IACP, 1967).5 When arrests were made, they often were classified as misdemeanors, which typed them as less serious from the outset (Goolkasian, 1986). A wife usually could

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

not obtain a restraining order against a violent husband unless she were willing to file for divorce at the same time (Fleming, 1979; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1978, 1982). Orders of protection were typically not available on an emergency basis and often carried no provisions for enforcement or penalties for violation. In some states, a single assault was not considered sufficient grounds for a divorce action, and until the mid-1970s, women who eventually killed their mates to protect themselves or their children from harm or death found the traditional plea of self-defense unavailable.

The new social knowledge of family violence led to recognition that domestic disputes were a major problem facing law enforcement and that specific solutions needed to be framed within a legal context (Langan and Innes, 1986; Dutton, 1988a). Political activity by feminists exerted pressure on the criminal justice system to fulfill its mandate to treat violence toward women as a serious crime (Martin, 1976; Fields, 1978). In addition to changes in protection orders, law reform efforts also focused on statutory changes to permit or mandate arrests without corroboration in wife assault cases (Browne and Williams, 1989).

By 1980, 47 states had passed some type of domestic violence legislation (Kalmuss and Straus, 1983; Lerman and Livingston, 1983). The emphasis of this legislation was on enforcing victims' rights, increasing their legal options, and protecting victims and those near them from further assault. Substantive criminal law was also challenged to recognize a history of abuse and threat as part of a legal defense in marital homicides by women in cases in which the male was not actively threatening or abusing his wife at the time of the incident (Schneider, 1980; Schneider and Jordan, 1981; Sonkin, 1987).

Within the criminal justice system and among its stakeholders, there were several movements that created favorable conditions for developing responses to marital violence. Police training in crisis intervention implicitly acknowledged the responsibility to respond effectively to violent situations.6 Victim-witness services proliferated in the early 1970s and were magnets within the criminal justice system for victims of marital violence, who quickly became a major portion of the caseloads of victim advocates' programs. Victimization as a social movement reflected the concerns of several constituencies with divergent interests. Groups opposed to what they perceived as lenient sentencing of offenders saw the victims' "movement" as a force to balance the rights of the accused against the rights of the victims. Victims of child

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

abuse and wife assault were sympathetic victims. As special constituencies, their needs for protection from both offenders and shabby treatment by criminal justice agencies were seen by victims' rights advocates as staking legitimate claims to their share of the "finite rights" in criminal law.

The responses of criminal justice systems varied. In Philadelphia, a women's group started a voluntary program of legal counseling in the District Attorney's office to inform victims of their options. Class action lawsuits in New York (Bruno v. McGuire), California (Scott v. Hart), and Connecticut (Thurman v. City of Torrington) set the groundwork for later legislation that strengthened legal options and mandated police reactions to marital violence. Special prosecutors for marital violence, supported by federal grants, were appointed in locations such as Santa Barbara, California, and White Plains, New York.

DISAGGREGATION OF RESPONSES TO MARITAL VIOLENCE

Although the feminist community's interest in domestic violence and the victims' services trends coincided in time, there still remained distinctions between the way the problem of and solutions to marital violence were viewed in the respective quarters. The separate origins of the responses to marital violence-feminist grassroots organizations on the one hand and criminal justice system auspices on the other-led to different approaches to stopping violence. These differences were reflected in the service emphases of programs sponsored in these divergent milieus, their interpretation of the role of criminal law, and ultimately, the types of organizations involved in social interventions. Fagan et al. (1984) identified three types of approaches: feminist, social control, and legalistic.

Feminist Approaches

Feminist approaches focused their attention on the woman victim. Little attention was paid to the family unit as a whole, apart from children who were at risk for injury. In fact, many marital violence projects generally believed there was a conflict of interest in serving both the victim and a "family" unit that included her victimizer. Feminism was an explicit part of the conceptualization of these efforts, and informed the types of interventions and the approaches to working with victims. The emphasis was on protecting women from further harm, on providing

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

options and means for them to take concrete steps to end the abuse, and on an empowerment model of service delivery to victims.

In addition to political and legal activism, feminist approaches most often were expressed in shelters or crisis intervention programs. These originated in grassroots organizations and later in private (usually nonprofit) organizations. Shelters and crisis intervention programs reflected concerns with victim protection. They also held fundamentally different views about the resolution of marital violence (Fagan et al., 1984) and defined wife abuse more broadly, consistent with their central concern about the harm to women and their intimate understanding of the progression of marital violence from nonphysical aggression to attacks resulting in severe physical injury. Shelter clients typically included both mothers and children, and their needs were complex.

Issues such as the relationship between wife abuse and sex roles in the family or sex inequalities in society remain part of the fundamental assumptions underlying a feminist service approach and are incorporated explicitly into the services offered. The feminist perspective sees the social institutions of marriage and the family as special contexts that may "promote, maintain, and even support men's use of physical force against women" (Bograd, 1988:12). In the feminist approach, the critical task is working to ensure freedom from violence for women; the critical question is why men use physical force against their partners and what function this serves society in a given historical context (Yllo, 1988).

Social Control Approaches

In contrast, social control approaches generally emphasized the family unit. The family was viewed as the client, and the victim was incorporated into this perspective as a cocontributor to the problem. The theoretical position of programs with this approach is often a family systems model: all family members are seen as part of a "system" of violence, with roles in maintaining that violence. Solutions are believed to require "treating" all members, and the treatment approach is typically based on the supposition that early intervention will be able to head off severe violence before criminal justice sanctions are necessary. Social control interventions-in sharp contrast to empowerment models-are predicated on the notion that the authority of the legal system will exercise control over the "disputants" and coerce or

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

influence family members to stop the violence. These approaches gravitated toward social service agencies, either with formal ties to the courts (e.g., diversion or mediation programs) or with access to legal interventions (e.g., protective service or mental health agencies).

In this model, decisions to invoke legal or quasi-legal sanctions are more likely to occur when violence has reached a severe level that is drastically affecting the family system (Frieze and Browne, 1989). By focusing on family integrity and maintenance, this approach often does not address the risks posed by a persistent pattern of violence in the relationship for some period of time prior to help seeking by a family member, or weigh risks from a lengthy pattern of violence toward intimates and strangers that an assaultive spouse may have brought with him to the relationship (Fagan et al., 1983; Shields et al., 1988). Thus social control approaches may underestimate the severity of risk to victims from their insistence on working with the family as a coresponsible unit, exacerbating patterns of rationalization and threats already present in the situation.

Legalistic Approaches

Legalistic approaches most often were sponsored by and affiliated with criminal justice agencies. These approaches focused on the victim and the assailant in the context of laws that were being broken, and were rooted in assumptions of specific deterrence (Sherman and Berk, 1984; Berk and Newton, 1985; Langan and Innes, 1986; Williams and Hawkins, 1989a). Deterrence approaches emphasized the application of legal sanctions through arrest and prosecution of assailants, or invoking the threat of legal sanction through civil remedies that carried criminal penalties if violated. Mandatory arrest policies in several states (Goolkasian, 1986) reflect this approach to marital violence. Innovations included special prosecutors to enhance prosecution services and make them more accessible to victims of marital violence. A small number of these programs linked extralegal services (e.g., shelter, counseling, civil legal representation) to the special prosecution units (Fagan et al., 1984).

Differences in approaches, values, and presuppositions in these perspectives began the process of disaggregation of interventions for marital violence and laid the foundation for separate but sometimes parallel response systems. Each approach was informed and conditioned by different assumptions about, and definitions of, marital

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

violence and victimization, and relied on different research traditions and bodies of knowledge to foster its approach. Each type developed within divergent institutional bases consistent with their definition of the problem, their approach to working with victims, their philosophy of organizational administration, and their theory about why violence occurs and how it stops (Fagan et al., 1984).

CONTROVERSIES IN DEFINITION, MEASUREMENT, AND EXPLANATION

Once marital violence rose to the status of a "social problem," several definitions emerged that varied according to the interests and perspectives of the definer. These definitions varied on several dimensions: the victim-offender relationship, the type of abusive or violent behavior, the nature of harm or injury to the victim, and the motivation or situational context of violent events. Explanatory models of marital violence also varied, particularly in the level of explanation or the locus of etiological factors.

Early definitions were rooted in the experiences and activities of public and private agencies that saw the victims of family violence. Fundamental differences between community-based and public agencies in clientele, philosophical bases of service delivery, advocacy orientation for their clients, and professional styles contributed to the separate understanding and knowledge of aggression in families.

Following the publication of Kempe et al.'s (1962) "The Battered Child Syndrome," child welfare agencies saw battered children in increasing numbers, as hospital staff and social workers identified and reported children as suspected victims of child abuse. Workers viewed family violence primarily as a problem affecting children (and later, adolescents) and broadened the definition to include sexual and emotional abuse, as well as physical neglect.

The emergence of grassroots programs for rape victims in the 1960s and, soon after, the development of shelter services for women began to identify significant numbers of adult victims of family violence who also fit the definition of "battered." Victim assistance and police crisis intervention programs further identified a wide range of family victims, from children to the elderly. Government activity in family violence in the 1970s not only legitimated wife and child assaults as social problems, but also subtly redefined them as valid areas of state intervention.

Partly because of the early influences of the medical community (child abuse) and the criminal justice system (wife abuse),

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

disagreements arose over the importance of physical injury in the definition of marital violence. The importance of emotional maltreatment, and harassment, and persistent denigration or the accrual of harm from isolated and relatively inconsequential acts that nevertheless occurred in regular episodes became the subject of debate, because little or no physical injury resulted. Although important to the well-being of victims, definitions that included these dimensions were considered to have little relevance to the codified behaviors of concern to the criminal court. Instead, criminal justice policy and research relied on definitions that stressed codified behavior to inform legal policy or response.

Some researchers followed suit. Straus (1990b) explicitly focused on these dimensions of spouse assault precisely because of their presumed fit with legal statutes on assault (Straus, 1989; Browne, 1993). Although their use was not incorporated into standard assessments of partner assault, dimensions of harm have been well integrated into other criminological research measures (e.g., Sellin and Wolfgang, 1964). Some wife abuse researchers, concerned with the measurement of harm and the explanation of behavior, employed definitions of physical and nonphysical injury (e.g., psychological harm) and their corresponding measures (Walker, 1979; Dobash and Dobash, 1979; Tolman, 1989), and contended that wife assault could not be understood without more complex measures of the actions perpetrated and their impact on the victims.

The context of marital violence also was the focus of disagreement in definition and research methods. Like nonphysical injuries, it was considered irrelevant to legal decision making or to epidemiological measurement. Nevertheless, because of the complex family dynamics in marital violence and its recurrent pattern in families, aggression within families is difficult to understand in isolation from the context in which it occurs (Dobash and Dobash, 1983; Browne, 1987). Context-dependent methods have been used in a variety of other research arenas (e.g., Moore, 1978, with youth gangs; Waldorf, 1973, with opiate users; Adler, 1985, with cocaine sellers).

The uneven application of these methods in spouse abuse became a source of controversy and confusion about the parameters of marital violence. The Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS; Straus, 1978, 1990a) became the most consistent instrument for assessing the types of violence that occur between couples and their frequency. It typifies approaches that separate the context from the assaultive acts, as well as the injuries sustained, and has become

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

the baseline for providing epidemiological estimates and comparisons across samples (see discussion in following section). The controversy surrounding the CTS symbolized the debate over how to conceptualize, define, measure, and explain violence between spouses.

For example, prevalence rates of violence by males and females were similar (Steinmetz, 1977; Straus, 1989), yet the frequency of both general and serious violence was higher for men (Gelles and Straus, 1990) whereas the prevalence rate of injury was substantially higher for women (Stets and Straus, 1990). Estimates of violence also changed when the "seriousness" of an act was arbitrarily determined apart from situational factors such as the relative strength or size of the participants, the repetition of assaultive acts during an incident, the threats and menace that accompanied physical actions, or the injuries incurred (Straus, 1978; Straus et al., 1980; Browne, 1993; Saunders, 1988).

Accordingly, conclusions about the severity of marital violence or its explanations were fundamentally different for researchers using context-specific approaches (e.g., Frieze et al., 1980; Berk et al., 1983) versus cross-sectional surveys (Straus et al., 1980). However, these differences also reflected the confounding of samples, methods, and measures among the researchers who were criticizing each other. Even so, context was rarely viewed as a separate dimension of marital violence, often for reasons as simple as the difficulty of measuring it (e.g., Straus, 1990a).

In sum, divergent views and definitions of marital violence, as well as the disparate programs and services that followed, fostered the separation of research paradigms according to the milieus in which they were applied. Marital violence was alternately explained as a result of family dysfunction or interaction patterns, individual pathology, situational factors that influenced marital dynamics, social pathology, or the behavioral product of ideological supports or cultural beliefs in the patriarchical social and economic organization of society. Research on marital violence conducted in one paradigm had limited utility in another social arena. The study of marital violence remained separate from the study of violence toward strangers, and criminologists made few attempts to integrate the emerging knowledge of violence in the home with other research or policy on violence. The policies that followed each definition and explanation, and the balkanization of the literature, were the natural outcomes of these developments.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

SOCIAL EPIDEMIOLOGY OF MARITAL VIOLENCE

Empirical reports of violence between adults in families first appeared in the social science literature in the 1960s (e.g., Parnas, 1967; Pitman and Handy, 1964). Within 10 years, numerous studies of wife beating and spouse abuse had been published (O'Brien, 1971; Sprey, 1971; Straus, 1973; Gelles, 1974; Martin, 1976; Roy, 1977; Hilberman and Munson, 1978; Gaquin, 1977-1978, among others). In many cases, these studies relied on small samples of battered women or violent couples who defined themselves as experiencing family violence before being included in the research. In 1977, the first epidemiological estimates of family violence from a general population sample were published (Straus, 1978). In the 1980s, research on abusive men appeared (Sonkin and Durphy, 1985; Gondolf, 1985b; Dutton and Browning, 1987, 1988). Today, hundreds of studies have been published on violence between spouses and intimates.

However, this burgeoning literature on violence between partners is inconsistent. It reflects the definitional controversies and methodological concerns that have shaped and influenced empirical research (Fagan, 1988). Meta-analyses show that design artifacts (samples, measures, definitions, and aggregation of data) may explain the broad variation in estimates of the extent, severity, and correlates of family violence (Weis, 1989; Bridges and Weis, 1989), as well as in theoretical interpretations. In this section, we review basic knowledge on violence between spouses and intimates. The epidemiology of marital violence is examined, and estimates are compared for the research paradigms that have most influenced theory and knowledge. Next, we review the characteristics of victims, assailants, and couples involved in violence. The validity of contemporary knowledge is reviewed, and sources of error and bias are examined. The section concludes with an analysis of risk factors that characterize marital violence.

PARTICIPATION AND FREQUENCY OF MARITAL VIOLENCE

The two primary sources of epidemiological data on marital violence-the National Family Violence Surveys and the National Crime Survey-are based on nationwide probability samples of households. In each method, brief interviews with respondents are completed. Beyond that, there are fundamental differences in their methodologies that heavily influence their results. Nevertheless, these two efforts have provided baseline knowledge about national trends in family violence for nearly two decades. Our

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

discussion of the distribution of marital violence examines primarily dimensions of participation (the prevalence rate). Yet research on criminal careers has shown that the correlates differ for the various dimensions of criminality: participation, frequency, and seriousness (Blumstein et al., 1985). Accordingly, we also examine these other dimensions of marital violence to better understand its distribution and complexity.

Surveys of Violence in the Home: National and Local Studies

National estimates of the incidence and prevalence of marital violence have been derived from self-reports of assaultive behavior. Data are obtained through telephone surveys or interviews with general probability samples of couples. Researchers typically report the percentage of respondents who have exhibited assaultive behaviors or at least one item on a scale of specific behaviors. This is termed the participation rate per 1,000 respondents. Rarely do family violence researchers calculate offending rates (cf. Williams and Hawkins, 1989b), despite their obvious importance in differentiating offender types (e.g., see Blumstein et al., 1985, 1986). Local studies have used variations of these techniques, modifying sampling or data collection procedures to reflect specific hypotheses about the distribution of marital violence and appropriate methods for eliciting sensitive information.

The first general population study of family violence in the United States was the 1975 National Family Violence Survey (NFVS), based on interviews with a probability sample of 2,143 intact couples in households. Straus (1978) and Straus et al. (1980) reported that 16 percent of all marital couples experienced physical aggression during the year before the survey; 28 percent had experienced physical aggression at some point in their relationship. Among those reporting at least one act of violence in the past year, more than one in three involved acts such as punching, kicking, hitting with an object, beating up, and assaults with a gun or knife. These items formed the ''severe violence" scale7 (or what Straus initially termed "wife beating"). Straus and his colleagues reported that 3.8 percent of female respondents and 4.6 percent of males were victims of at least one of these acts of "severe violence." (Unfortunately, only one spouse per couple was included in each sampled family, so comparisons of violence were based on aggregate rates of unrelated males and females.) Questions on rape or other forms of sexual aggressive acts were not included in the 1975 study but were included in the 1985 survey.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

The NFVS used the Conflict Tactics Scales (Straus, 1978, 1979)-items that operationalized tactics used by couples to settle conflicts into specific acts. Rational, verbal, and physically aggressive acts were included in the scale. Aggressive acts included eight items, ranging in severity from throwing objects to using a gun or knife. An additional item on "choking" was included in the 1985 survey and two later waves with the 1985 panel. Threats of violence were considered nonviolent acts (Straus and Gelles, 1990). Respondents reported whether and how often they had engaged in each of the CTS behaviors during the past year. They also reported whether each behavior had ever happened during their lifetime. Straus et al. (1980) reported "violence participation" rates for both members of the couple.

In the years following the first publication of data based on the CTS scales, more than 40 other researchers have used modified versions of the CTS to estimate physical aggression between couples (Straus and Gelles, 1990). The samples, the conditions for administering the CTS items, and the procedures for aggregating scale scores varied widely in these studies. For example, some researchers have used the CTS indices to measure abuse by including threats of violence, others have confined their analyses to physical attacks, and others have expanded the scale to include marital rape. Together with sample differences, these measurement decisions no doubt explain much of the extraordinary variation in the rates of marital violence that are evident in these studies. Table 1 shows participation rates per 1,000 persons for studies that have used the CTS, with samples classified as general population probability samples, local probability samples, or nonprobability samples of victims or assailants. Only studies with reports of marital violence in the past year were included.

National Probability Samples  Among the national probability samples, participation rates for overall violence (number of persons per 1,000 population) are consistent for the 1975 and 1985 National Family Violence Surveys (Straus et al., 1980; Straus and Gelles, 1990). Straus and colleagues report a decrease in male participation in wife assault from 121 to 110 per 1,000 males from the 1975 to the 1985 surveys, and a slight increase in female participation in husband assault from 110 to 120 per 1,000 females. Recall that the 1975 surveys were based on in-person interviews with married or intact couples, whereas the 1985 surveys were conducted via telephone with one adult member of the

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

TABLE 1 Past Year Prevalence Rates of Violence Among Intimates (per 1,000 population)a

 

 

Any Violence by

Study

Sample (N)

Husband or Male Partner

Wife or Female Partner

1. National Probability Samples

Straus and Gelles (1990)

6,002

116

124

Straus et al. (1980)

2,143 couples

121

116

Straus and Gelles (1986)

3,520 couples

110

120

Elliott et al. (1985)

1,725 (ages 18-24)

368

471

2. Local or Statewide

Probability Samples

 

 

 

Schulman (1979)

1,793 Kentucky women

100

-

Russell (1982)

644 San Francisco womenb

260

-

Kennedy and Dutton (1987)

708

112

-

Nisonoff and Bitman (1979)

297 household sample

160

110

M.D. Smith (1986)c

315

206

-

M.D. Smith (1987)

604 Toronto women

144

-

3. Nonprobability Local Samples

Rouse (1984)

120 men

108

-

Makepeace (1983)d

244 dating couples, college students

137

93

Brutz and Ingoldsby (1984)

288 Quakers

146

152

Dutton (1986a)

75 batterers

183

-

Makepeace (1981)c

2338 students and dating couples

206

120

Meredith et al. (1986)

304

220

180

O'Leary and Arias (1988)

393 dating couples

340

420

Szinovacz (1983)

103

260

300

Clarke (1987)

318 women

274

102

Lockhart (1987)

307 blacks and whites

355

-

Barling et al. (1987)d

187

740

730

Frieze et al. (1980)

137 Pennsylvania women ever married and comparison group

340

270

Levinger (1966)

600 divorce filings

370

-

Mason and Blankenship (1987)

155 Michigan undergraduates

18

22

a Rates are for acts occurring during the previous 12 months.

b Currently or ever married at time of interview.

c Rates only for lifetime prevalence.

d Study did not report whether rates are for the previous year or lifetime.

SOURCES: Straus and Gelles (1990); Frieze and Browne (1989); Ellis (1989).

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

household randomly selected and nonintact couples (recently divorced or separated) included.

When CTS measures are used in face-to-face interviews with a younger sample, the prevalence rates increase substantially. Elliott et al. (1985) reported rates among a national probability sample of 1,725 young adults (ages 18-24) in 1983 that were more than three times higher than the rates obtained by Straus and colleagues in any of the iterations of the NFVS. These data were obtained from the National Youth Survey (NYS), a panel study of a national probability sample of youths in which data are obtained through in-person interviews. In the sixth wave, conducted in 1983, Elliott et al. (1985) found higher rates for violence by women than by men, for both general and serious violence, whereas Straus and colleagues found few differences by gender for either type of violence.

Yet when the 1985 NFVS rates are calculated for the 18-24 age group, the results still show important differences in prevalence estimates for the NFVS and NYS data sets. Table 2 compares male and female participation rates in spouse assault using the CTS items for three samples: the NYS sample, the 1975 NFVS sample, and the 18- to 24-year-old respondents from the 1985 NFVS. The NYS analyses included a third index, severe violence, comprised of the three most serious items from the CTS scales: used a gun or knife, beat up, and hit with an object.

Table 2 illustrates the influence of study design and methods on prevalence estimates. Prevalence rates were higher for respondents ages 18 to 24 in the 1985 NFVS than for the total NFVS samples (1975 and 1985). This is consistent with the high participation rates in stranger violence for general populations in this age range (Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990; Greenberg, 1985). In fact, Straus et al. (1980) report the highest violence rates for families in which the respondent is under 30 years old, nearly three times the rate of those between 31 and 50 years of age. Accordingly, the higher rate for the age 18 to 24 NFVS sets suggests that age-related patterns of marital violence are consistent with patterns of stranger violence.

However, participation rates for the 18- to 24-year age group in the NFVS are substantially lower than for the 18-24 NYS data set. The NYS data show higher rates overall than the NFVS data for respondents ages 18-24 for both wife-to-husband and husband-to-wife violence, for both male and female respondents, and for all three levels of violence. Patterns of gender differences in the two data sets vary by type and severity of violence. For general

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

TABLE 2 Prevalence of Marital Violence by Sex of Respondent

 

Violence Level

 

General

Serious

Severe

Study

Male

Female

Male

Female

Male

Female

1975 National Family Violence Studya Straus et al. (1980)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Husband-to-wife

12.8

11.3

3.5

4.1

na

na

Wife-to-husband

11.2

11.7

5.1

4.3

na

na

National Youth Surveyb Elliott et al. (1985)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Husband-to-wife

37.5

36.1

7.4

11.4

2.3

6.7

Wife-to-husband

42.9

51.2

22.0

22.7

2.3

1.2

1985 National Family Violence Studyc

 

 

 

 

 

 

Husband-to-wife

10.8

12.3

1.4

5.0

0.7

2.1

Wife-to-husband

12.6

12.4

5.0

4.6

1.9

0.8

1985 National Family Violence Study, 24 years of age and younger (N = 397)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Husband-to-wife

22.6

29.8

1.3

13.8

0.5

4.8

Wife-to-husband

26.6

36.4

8.0

16.6

1.1

2.9

NOTE: na indicates data not available.

a The data were collected through 2,143 face-to-face interviews and include only married and cohabiting couples of any age.

b The data were collected through one interview from a six-year panel design of youths aged 18-24.

c The data were collected through 5,360 telephone interviews. Thereis also an added item on the 1985 CTS, "choked him/her/you," inserted after "beat him/her/you up." This item was included in the severe violence type. In addition, the 1985 sampling frame also included recently separated or divorced individuals and single parents.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

violence, females in the NYS and 18-24 1985 NFVS data sets report higher rates of wife-to-husband violence than do males. For serious violence, women in the 18-24 1985 NFVS sample report higher rates of serious violence for both male and female perpetrators. For the NYS data, gender differences are evident only for female reports of husband-to-wife serious violence and wife-to-husband general violence. The most consistent pattern across the data sets is the higher rate of serious husband-to-wife violence by males reported by female partners.

These inconsistencies across data sets for the 18- to 24-year-old groups point to several methodological influences on the variations in base rates and patterns of gender differences. The NYS was a panel design, and the rates were obtained in the sixth interview. Respondents were more likely to be acclimated to the interview format and to offer more open responses. Both NFVS interviews involved the first contact with the research. The NYS is a private face-to-face interview, compared to the telephone interview in the 1985 NFVS. The NFVS respondents had no prior contact with the research, and the interview conditions for respondents were not controlled. Although the effects of telephone versus in-person interviews on response bias or base rates have been questioned for general social or opinion surveys (Groves and Kahn, 1979), these effects remain unknown for the more complex domain of marital dynamics. Moreover, the data sets vary on the inclusionary criteria for "couple": the 1975 NFVS was limited to intact couples; the 1985 NFVS included both intact and recently separated or divorced couples.

Finally, although both studies used the CTS items, differences in the context of the interviews and social desirability may have influenced the reports. The NYS tapped a wide range of deviant behaviors, whereas the NFVS was a study of family dynamics. These differences may have contributed to the lower base rates reported in both iterations of the NFVS interviews, and after controlling for age in the NFVS, compared to the NYS results. Further analyses and experimentation with methodological strategies are needed to unravel the sources of these disparities, but the implications of study design for prevalence estimates are evident from this comparison.

State and Local Probability Samples Table 1 also shows wide variation in prevalence estimates of marital violence among local probability samples. Prevalence estimates of marital violence vary from 100 to 260 per 1,000 respondents for husbands or male partners.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

The rates again reflect differences in study design and methodology. For example, a 1979 telephone survey with 1,793 women in Kentucky (Schulman, 1979) found that 21 percent of the respondents had been physically attacked at least once and that 4.1 percent were victims of severe violence, consistent with the Straus et al. (1980) reports. Similar results were obtained by Kennedy and Dutton (1989) for a Canadian sample of males and females. However, Russell's (1982) interviews with a random sample of San Francisco women who reported that they were or had been married yielded past year prevalence estimates more than two times higher than Schulman's estimates. Yet the lifetime prevalence estimates (26%) were comparable to both the Schulman (1979) and the Straus et al. (1980) estimates. Again, especially for past year prevalence estimates, face-to-face interviews seem to result in higher prevalence estimates than telephone interviews.

Other design artifacts also influence prevalence estimates, especially marital status of respondents. In the Kentucky survey, two-thirds of the women who had been recently divorced or separated from their partners reported physical violence in their former relationships, compared to fewer than one in three married women (Schulman, 1979). A review by Ellis (1989) of research on marital violence by males found that aggression among married couples was lower than among unmarried cohabitating couples. Ellis also found consistent evidence of more severely violent acts toward separated women by their estranged partners than in other marital or cohabitational statuses. A Long Island sample of 297 residents again showed that violence rates among those previously married (and separated at the time of interview) were higher than for those currently married (Nisonoff and Bitman, 1979).

Thus, the exclusion of noncohabitating couples in the 1975 NFVS may have underestimated the rates of physical aggression toward women. Other segments of the population at risk for marital violence are often not represented in national and local surveys: for example, those who do not speak English fluently (Chin, 1994); the very poor and all individuals who are homeless; and persons hospitalized, institutionalized, or incarcerated at the time a survey is conducted.

Nonprobability Local Samples Researchers have attempted to estimate prevalence rates among specific samples using convenience, purposive, or other nonrandom sampling methods. Table 1 shows that the estimates generally are higher among these samples for reports of violence by male partners. Reports of marital violence

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

by victims in intervention programs are predictably higher, as are reports of severe violence. For example, weapon use was reported by 25.7 percent of 2,792 victims in family violence intervention programs (Fagan et al., 1984), compared to less than 3 percent in the Straus et al. (1980) survey. Downs et al. (1989) found that 41 percent of a Buffalo, New York, sample (N = 45) of battered women in shelters or support groups had been threatened with a gun or a knife in the past year. Fagan et al. (1984) reported that the severity of violence was greater for women in shelters than in any other type of legal or social intervention.

Washburn and Frieze (1981) compared three groups of self-selected women in the Pittsburgh area who had experienced physical assault at the hands of their spouses: (1) women who had sought help from area shelters, (2) women who had filed legal action to have the husband removed from the home for abuse, and (3) women who responded to posted notices in business establishments about the research project (as cited in Frieze and Browne, 1989). Women filing legal action were less seriously abused than women from the shelter but more seriously abused than the nonintervention group. Researchers attempting to find a group of nonabused women to compare with a sample of physically abused wives in Pittsburgh found that 34 percent of a control comparison group (matched by residential block) also reported being attacked by a partner in the past year (Frieze et al., 1980).

Estimates of Severe Violence Among both probability and convenience samples, based rate of severe violence are lower than the rates of general violence, but differences across studies again reflect research design characteristics. Straus and Gelles (1990) report that rates of severe violence varied across several studies, from 8 to 102 per 1,000 men and from 25 to 59 per 1,000 women. Participation in severe violence by males was far higher in the Kentucky telephone survey of women than comparable reports in the NFVS data: 87 per 1,000 respondents (Schulman, 1979).

Prevalence estimates decrease when both males and females report on male-to-female violence: 34 per 1,000 women in the Straus et al. (1980) study and 23 per 1,000 women in a Canadian sample (Kennedy and Dutton, 1987) were victims of severe violence, compared to the rates obtained by Russell (1982), Schulman (1979), and Frieze et al. (1980). This trend suggests that although males and females may agree on the prevalence of marital violence, they rate its severity differently. Reports by women of rates of severe violence by males in dating, cohabitating, or engaged

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

couples were also far higher than in studies with probability samples of only intact or married couples (Makepeace, 1983; Clarke, 1987; Billingham and Sack, 1987; Roscoe and Benaske, 1985; Pirog-Good and Stets, 1989).

Incidence Estimates: Frequency of Offending Few studies using the CTS items report the mean number of aggressive acts between adults in the home within a time period. This index could be calculated from the CTS scales: CTS items in the 1985 survey included past year frequency measures as well as prevalence rates. The items are constructed as categorical scales rather than specific numbers. Calculations of the specific incidence of marital violence would require estimation and substitution of midpoint frequencies for each category.8 However, these results are rarely reported. Although information is lost when high-end estimates are truncated, validity threats (for the small percentage whose behaviors lie at the extremes of the distribution) are outweighed by the elimination of skewness in estimates of the number of acts.

Table 3 shows participation and offending rates calculated for 6,002 respondents in the 1985 NFVS data set. Only rates of male-to-female violence are shown: male reports of offending and female reports of victimization. We focus on violence toward female partners in this table because of women's higher risks of injury (Stets and Straus, 1990) and also to provide comparisons with the empirical literature on marital violence that has emphasized the victimization of women. Each cell shows the percentage of respondents within each demographic group participating in the behavior, the number (in parentheses), and the past year offending rates for the active offenders (Lambda) for respondents reporting at least one event. To illustrate, 17.1 percent of African American males reported at least one incident of marital violence in the past year, and they averaged 4.3 incidents in that time. The offending rates were calculated by using midpoint substitutions for the categorical items in the 1985 NFVS (Gelles and Straus, 1988). Chi-square tests were conducted for prevalence rates, and F-tests for offending rates.

Table 3 shows that females reported victimization rates for general violence that are comparable to male reports of offending (10.4 versus 10.7). However, females report male offending rates (7.3 assaults per year) more than twice as high as those that males report (3.1). Rates are disaggregated by relationship history and sociodemographic characteristics of the respondent's household.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

Unfortunately, reliable data on employment patterns of both partners were not available for these analyses.

Race For male reports, participation rates are highest for African American males. There were no significant differences in participation rates for female reports. Offending rates did not differ significantly by race. However, rates overall were higher for female [p(F) < .01] than for male reports.

Age As in Table 2, younger respondents indicated significantly higher participation rates. More than one in five reported that at least one incident of marital violence had occurred in the past year. Offending rates were significantly higher for female reports, again p(F). < .001.

Income There were no significant differences for participation rates, but there were significant differences by both sex of respondents and income level for offending rates. Rates overall were higher for female reports and for incomes of less than $20,000 annually.

Urbanism There were no significant differences for male reports of general violence, but women in central cities were significantly more likely to report male violence. Once again, there were significant differences in male offending rates as reported by females [p(F) < .001].

Marital Status Intact couples were significantly more likely to experience marital violence, according to male and female reports. Nearly one in three women of married couples (31.9%) reported victimization within the past year, a rate almost twice the 17.7 percent reported by males. The same patterns of sex differences were reported here too: females reported higher offending rates by males than male reports of their own offending rates [p(F) < .001].

Length of Relationship Participation rates were highest among couples who had been together the shortest time. Patterns were similar and statistically significant for both male and female reports. The greater risk for short relationships may reflect the early termination of these relationships and the survival of nonviolent relationships for longer periods. Once again, females reported

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

TABLE 3 Participation and Offending Rates for Interpersonal Violence Toward Female Partners in the Past Year (male self-reports of offending, female reports of victimization) (N = 6,002)a,b

 

General Violence

Serious Violence

 

 

 

p(F)

 

 

p(F)

 

Male

Female

Group

Sex

Group by Sex

Male

Female

Group

Sex

Group

by Sex

Total sample

10.4 (255)

10.7 (368)

 

 

 

1.3 (32)

4.3 (148)

 

 

 

 

3.1

7.3

 

 

 

4.5

6.1

 

 

 

Race

ns

c

ns

 

 

ns

ns

ns

African American

17.1 (24)

10.7 (30)

 

 

 

4.2 (6)

5.2 (14)

 

 

 

 

4.3

8.6

 

 

 

3.8

7.9

 

 

 

Hispanic

14.1 (12)

14.4 (27)

 

 

 

3.9 (3)

6.9 (13)

 

 

 

 

3.9

10.1

 

 

 

1.8

8.8

 

 

 

White

9.7 (195)

10.6 (290)

 

 

 

1.1 (21)

4.8 (110)

 

 

 

 

3.9

6.8

 

 

 

5.4

5.6

 

 

 

Other

12.4 (22)

9.3 (17)

 

 

 

0.9 (2)

4.2 (7)

 

 

 

2.7

7.9

 

 

 

1.0

6.8

 

 

 

 

Chi square

9.74d

3.09

 

 

 

14.13e

4.13

 

 

 

Gamma

(.19)

(.04)

 

 

 

(.36)

(.14)

 

 

 

Respondents age

ns

f

ns

 

 

ns

ns

ns

18-25

20.2 (43)

20.6 (81)

 

 

 

1.1 (2)

9.5 (37)

 

 

 

 

2.5

6.7

 

 

 

1.8

4.5

 

 

 

26-35

16.9 (122)

14.2 (152)

 

 

 

2.9 (21)

5.5 (59)

 

 

 

 

3.5

6.7

 

 

 

4.1

5.3

 

 

 

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

36-50

7.2 (57)

8.8 (98)

 

 

 

0.9 (7)

3.1 (35)

 

 

 

 

3.2

7.2

 

 

 

7.4

7.0

 

 

 

Over 50

4.5 (32)

4.4 (38)

 

 

 

0.2 (2)

1.9 (17)

 

 

 

 

2.3

11.0

 

 

 

1.0

10.9

 

 

 

Chi square

91.85g

95.82g

 

 

 

23.16g

45.54g

 

 

 

Gamma

(-.45)

(-.40)

 

 

 

(-.52)

(-.40)

 

 

 

Family income (thousands of dollars)

f

f

ns

 

 

ns

ns

ns

0.0-9.9

10.3 (19)

12.0 (51)

 

 

 

2.2 (4)

6.6 (28)

 

 

 

 

4.2

9.7

 

 

 

2.7

5.6

 

 

 

10.0-19.9

13.9 (65)

8.3 (60)

 

 

 

1.9 (9)

4.4 (32)

 

 

 

 

3.2

11.0

 

 

 

1.4

8.8

 

 

 

20.0-29.9

11.2 (62)

12.3 (97)

 

 

 

1.9 (5)

5.0 (39)

 

 

 

 

2.5

6.4

 

 

 

2.5

4.1

 

 

 

30.0-39.9

9.4 (46)

10.9 (58)

 

 

 

1.6 (8)

3.8 (20)

 

 

 

 

4.1

4.8

 

 

 

7.2

4.8

 

 

 

40.0-49.9

7.8 (21)

12.6 (39)

 

 

 

1.2 (3)

3.4 (10)

 

 

 

 

2.4

4.3

 

 

 

2.8

2.4

 

 

 

50.9 and over

8.7 (34)

10.7 (46)

 

 

 

0.3 (1)

2.5 (11)

 

 

 

 

1.7

3.2

 

 

 

2.2

4.2

 

 

 

Chi square

10.20

7.75

 

 

 

6.97

10.26

 

 

 

Gamma

(-.12)

(.03)

 

 

 

(-.24)

(-.27)

 

 

 

Household location

ns

f

ns

 

 

ns

ns

ns

Central city

10.6 (67)

14.1 (132)

 

 

 

1.1 (7)

6.0 (56)

 

 

 

 

2.9

6.3

 

 

 

2.8

5.4

 

 

 

Suburb of central city

10.8 (132)

10.4 (171)

 

 

 

1.5 (18)

4.1 (68)

 

 

 

 

3.2

7.8

 

 

 

6.4

6.3

 

 

 

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

 

General Violence

Serious Violence

 

 

 

p(F)

 

 

p(F)

 

Male

Female

Group

Sex

Group by Sex

Male

Female

Group

Sex

Group by Sex

City of 2,500 outside of urban area

9.3 (56)

7.4 (56)

 

 

 

1.2 (7)

2.8 (24)

 

 

 

 

3.1

7.9

 

 

 

1.6

7.3

 

 

 

Chi square

1.03

21.63g

 

 

 

.42

11.76e

 

 

 

Gamma

(-104)

(-.21)

 

 

 

(.02)

(-.24)

 

 

 

Marital status

ns

f

ns

 

 

ns

ns

ns

Never married

12.1 (6)

4.3 (6)

 

 

 

0.0 (0)

0.0 (0)

 

 

 

 

1.9

10.1

 

 

 

0.0

0.0

 

 

 

Couple

17.7 (20)

31.9 (40)

 

 

 

2.7 (3)

18.3 (23)

 

 

 

 

2.7

7.0

 

 

 

3.8

4.2

 

 

 

Married

10.1 (220)

11.1 (314)

 

 

 

1.2 (26

4.3 (122)

 

 

 

 

3.2

7.2

 

 

 

5.0

6.3

 

 

 

Divorced/separated

7.8 (9)

2.2 (8)

 

 

 

2.3 (3)

0.6 (2)

 

 

 

 

2.9

8.8

 

 

 

1.6

14.6

 

 

 

Chi square

7.90h

92.77g

 

 

 

2.9

77.87g

 

 

 

Gamma

(-.22)

(-.44)

 

 

 

(-.03)

(-.50)

 

 

 

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

Years with present partner

ns

f

ns

 

 

ns

ns

ns

0-3

17.2 (72)

23.8 (108)

 

 

 

2.5 (11)

10.2 (46)

 

 

 

 

2.8

5.6

 

 

 

3.1

4.4

 

 

 

4-10

15.2 (85)

18.5 (124)

 

 

 

2.0 (11)

8.1 (54)

 

 

 

 

3.6

8.6

 

 

 

2.1

6.5

 

 

 

11-20

10.2 (58)

9.2 (65)

 

 

 

0.9 (5)

3.4 (24)

 

 

 

 

3.4

6.0

 

 

 

16.0

5.2

 

 

 

More than 20

3.4 (26)

5.1 (57)

 

 

 

0.3 (2)

1.9 (21)

 

 

 

 

1.9

8.6

 

 

 

1.3

9.3

 

 

 

Chi square

74.40g

143.30g

 

 

 

14.50e

66.43g

 

 

 

Gamma

(-.42)

(-.42)

 

 

 

(-.51)

(-.48)

 

 

 

Educational disparity

ns

f

ns

 

 

ns

ns

ns

< Wife

10.7 (51)

14.5 (96)

 

 

 

1.5 (7)

7.7 (51)

 

 

 

 

3.6

8.9

 

 

 

3.6

5.3

 

 

 

Equal

10.0 (117)

13.1 (202)

 

 

 

1.1 (12)

4.8 (74)

 

 

 

 

3.3

7.3

 

 

 

7.9

1.8

 

 

 

< Husband

11.7 (85)

8.4 (66)

 

 

 

1.8 (13)

2.4 (18)

 

 

 

 

2.7

4.8

 

 

 

1.8

6.4

 

 

 

Chi square

1.36

14.74g

 

 

 

1.68

22.38g

 

 

 

Gamma

(.04)

(-.06)

 

 

 

(.10)

(-.31)

 

 

 

Parent-to-child violence

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

General violence

f

ns

f

 

 

ns

ns

ns

Yes

17.2 (112)

14.1 (156)

 

 

 

1.3 (9)

6.3 (68)

 

 

 

 

2.9

8.4

 

 

 

2.2

6.1

 

 

 

No

7.8 (143)

8.8 (214)

 

 

 

1.3 (24)

3.4 (81)

 

 

 

 

3.3

6.4

 

 

 

5.4

6.1

 

 

 

Chi square

46.08g

22.36g

 

 

 

0.00

14.91g

 

 

 

Gamma

(.42)

(.26)

 

 

 

(.00)

(.31)

 

 

 

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

 

General Violence

Serious Violence

 

 

 

p(F)

 

 

p(F)

 

Male

Female

Group

Sex

Group by Sex

Male

Female

Group

Sex

Group by Sex

Serious violence

ns

c

f

 

 

ns

ns

ns

Yes

26.6 (31)

22.4 (44)

 

 

 

4.6 (5)

12.1 (24)

 

 

 

 

3.7

13.3

 

 

 

2.4

9.4

 

 

 

No

9.5 (225)

9.8 (325)

 

 

 

1.1 (27)

3.8 (125)

 

 

 

 

3.0

6.5

 

 

 

4.9

5.5

 

 

 

Chi square

35.28g

30.88g

 

 

 

10.12e

31.83g

 

 

 

Gamma

(.55)

(.45)

 

 

 

(.61)

(.55)

 

 

 

Woman was pregnant during abuse

ns

f

ns

 

 

ns

ns

ns

Yes

14.5 (14)

16.4 (16)

 

 

 

2.4 (30)

8.1 (139)

 

 

 

 

2.8

6.3

 

 

 

2.1

3.6

 

 

 

Chi square

1.63

3.03

 

 

 

.77

3.20

 

 

 

Gamma

(.18)

(.24)

 

 

 

(.29)

(.32)

 

 

 

a For males, each cell shows the participation rate, the number of males in the category participating, and the annual offending rate for males with at least one violent act. For females, each cell shows the prevanence of victimization, the number of women victimized in the category, and the incidents of victimization of those women victimized at least once.

b ns .05.

cp(F) = .01.

dp(X2) = .05.

ep(X2) = .01.

fp(F) = .001.

gp(X2) = .001.

hp(F) = .05.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

higher offending rates than did males, regardless of the length of the relationship [p(F) < .001].

Educational Disparity We computed participation and offending rates based on respondent reports of their educational level relative to their partner. The first row includes couples where the male partner's educational attainment was greater than the female's. The second row includes couples in which both partners had equal educational attainment, and the third row shows couples for which the female partner had a higher educational attainment. There were no significant differences in participation rates reported by males, but females reported significantly higher participation in marital violence by men in couples where the male had higher educational attainment or where the partners had equal education. Where the female had higher educational attainment, there were lower participation rates. Offending rates were higher for female reports of victimization, but there were no differences by educational disparity in offending rates.

Comorbidity With Other Family Violence We also computed participation and offending rates for two comorbidity factors: violence during pregnancy and parent-to-child violence. For those involved in abuse during pregnancy, there were no significant differences in participation rates for either male or female reports of marital violence, but offending rates once again were higher for female reports of male offending rates.

Male self-reports of their own comorbidity of marital violence with any parent-to-child violence (17.4%) were greater than female reports about males (14.3%). That is, for both males and females, the probability of marital violence was significantly greater for couples in which there was also parent-to-child violence. These estimates include couples where either parent is involved in parent-to-child violence. Females reported higher offending rates of marital violence by males than males did of their own behavior [p(F) < .001].

For serious parent-to-child violence, we found similar patterns, but at higher base rates. That is, among males in couples involved in severe parent-to-child violence, 26.9 percent also were involved in marital violence, a rate higher than the 22.5 percent reported by females about males. However, females once again reported higher offending rates by males than males did about themselves. Moreover, there were significant group differences: offending rates for marital violence were higher for those involved

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

in parent-to-child violence [p(F) < .01]. The significant interaction effect [p(F) < .05] suggests that female reports of male offending rates in couples with severe parent-to-child violence were higher than male self-reported rates, regardless of participation in severe parent-to-child violence. In other words, where comorbidity was reported by females, female reports of male offending rates for marital violence by males was greatest.

Severe Marital Violence There were fewer distinct patterns found for participation in serious marital violence and no significant differences in offending rates by sex or demographic group. Participation rates were slightly (and significantly) higher for African American males. Although males and females reported significant differences by age group, the patterns differed: females reported the highest participation for younger males (ages 18-25), but males between ages 26 and 35 reported higher participation rates. Once again, female reports of base rates of participation were higher for all age groups. There were no differences by family income.

There were significant differences by marital status for female reports but not males: serious violence by males (as reported by females) was most prevalent among married couples. Serious violence also was more prevalent among couples in shorter marriages, and significant differences were reported by males and females. Female reports showed higher base rates. According to females, serious marital violence was more prevalent in central-city households and least prevalent in rural areas. Males reported no significant difference by area size. Participation rates in serious violence were lowest (according to females) in couples where the woman had higher educational attainment. Males reported no differences and lower base rates.

There were no significant differences in the prevalence of serious marital violence in couples where the female partner was pregnant. For any parent-to-child violence, participation rates by males in marital violence were significantly higher according to female reports, but not for male self-reports. In couples where there was severe parent-to-child violence, both males and females reported significantly higher participation in marital violence. However, females reported higher participation rates by men in severe marital violence (12.2%) than did men (4.6%).

Summary By using parameters of criminal careers, Table 3 shows that females are no more likely than males to report marital

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

violence perpetrated by males, but they are more likely to rate it as more severe and more frequent. That is, females consistently reported higher offending rates than did males for general violence, but there were few differences in the perceptions of participation rates. The use of offending rates illustrates differences in marital violence that are not evident when only participation rates are reported, particularly within sociodemographic groups. For severe violence, female reports of male participation were consistently higher. Although females also reported higher offending rates by males for severe marital violence than did men, these differences were not significant, owing to the very small cell populations. The results also show the importance of comorbidity as a cue for identifying risk factors and epidemiological surveillance of violence risks.

Continuity, Discontinuity, and Desistance in Marital Violence There is some evidence that careers in marital violence follow patterns similar to careers in stranger violence or property crime, with discernible patterns of initiation, escalation, continuity (or persistence) and then desistance. For example, marital homicide seems to follow an age distribution similar to robbery (Mercy and Saltzman, 1989), peaking between 18 and 24 years of age. Straus et al. (1980) also found similar age peaks, with participation rates nearly three times greater among persons between 18 and 25 years of age than older persons. There also is evidence that marital violence escalates in frequency and severity over time (Walker, 1984; Pagelow, 1984; Fagan et al., 1984), evidence gathered primarily from samples of female victims of marital violence. Bowker (1983, 1986a), Fagan (1989), and Feld and Straus (1989) found evidence of desistance from wife assault.

Whether there is a continuity of marital violence over multiyear periods may vary by research design and samples. Feld and Straus (1989) used panel data from the 1985 NFVS and a second wave in 1986 to determine whether marital violence is stable across a two-year period. They found that among 380 male and female respondents, patterns of desistance and continuity varied by severity of violence in the first year. More than half (53%) continued their participation in severe violence, 10 percent reduced the severity of their violence to minor, and 33 percent reported no violence during the second year. Minor assaults in year 1 by either spouse were associated with more serious assaults over year 2, suggesting patterns of escalation.

Recidivism studies also illustrate the discontinuity, either lasting

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

or temporary, that may result from interventions. Sherman and Berk (1984) found a six-month desistance rate after police intervention of 81.2 percent from official records (new complaints) and 71.1 percent from victim reports. Dunford et al. (1990, 82.6%) and Hirschel et al. (1991, 76.5%) found similar desistance rates in experiments involving police intervention. Using victim reports, Fagan et al. (1984) reported a six-month desistance rate of 72 percent for women who had sought help from several types of intervention, and 90 percent among those whose cases proceeded to criminal prosecution. When injury was used as the recidivism criterion, the six-month desistance rate was 94 percent.

There are several limitations to these analyses. The brevity of the study periods (six months to two years) may not capture the developmental patterns of marital violence that seem to unfold over far longer periods (Fagan, 1989) and may overestimate desistance. For example, in desistance studies (e.g., Bowker, 1983), marital violence was continuous or escalating over periods lasting 3 to 15 years. Also, males who are serial assailants, who move to commit assaults in one marriage after another, are not captured in either the household surveys or the criminal justice experiments. These men in particular are likely to minimize or deny their marital violence in interviews.

Nevertheless, the criminal justice experiments and the Feld and Straus (1989) contribution show the varied career trajectories of escalation, continuity, and desistance that are evident in marital violence. Marital violence may be episodic, with lengthy intervals of nonviolence interrupted by shorter periods of intensive violence (Walker, 1984; Browne, 1987). Similar to desistance from other patterned behaviors, desistance during short periods may simply be a lull in a recurring cyclical pattern or false desistance. Fagan (1989) suggests that at least two years of nonviolent partnership is necessary to use the term desistance. Advances in knowledge of battering careers will come from research to identify the correlates of marital violence that persists, escalates, or desists over lengthier time periods.

Victimization Surveys

Data on violence between couples also has been collected through the National Crime Survey (NCS) and less often through surveys of personal victimization within the family. The National Crime Survey reports extensive information about personal victimization, based on interviews with a probability sample of households

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

who are interviewed in consecutive six-month periods. A period of six months is thought to improve the accuracy of recall of victimization incidents. Indications of victim-offender relationship, including specific questions about spouses, cohabitating partners, and ex-spouses, as well as ''familiar acquaintances," also provide estimates based on the social distance of victim and offender. The inclusion of frequency measures allows calculation of both offending and victimization rates.

The NCS does not use the CTS measures that are ubiquitous in studies of marital violence. NCS items are designed to correspond with Uniform Crime Report (UCR) categories that law enforcement agencies use to compile official crime statistics, rather than to specific acts of violence or conflict resolution within families. Accordingly, comparisons of victimization and offending rates are limited to aggregate indices of violence and do not address severity or specific acts. The aggregation procedures for family violence in the NCS also differ from specific family violence surveys, with estimates of the distribution of violent acts receiving more emphasis than the prevalence of specific types of behaviors within marriages or couple relationships. Moreover, specific analyses of violence within marriages or between ex-spouses or current or formerly cohabitating partners are not routinely reported.

Three specific studies of family violence have been reported from the NCS data. Gaquin (1977-1978) analyzed 1973-1976 NCS data on victims of spouse abuse,9 reporting both the occurrence of spouse abuse and the rates of victimizations of individuals. For occurrences, spouses or ex-spouses committed 3.9 assaults per 1,000 women over the three years, whereas 0.3 assault per 1,000 males was committed by women spouses or ex-spouses. Spouse abuse accounted for 14.8 percent of all assaults against women. Moreover, the risk of assault was far greater for separated and divorced women than for married women. Among separated women, for example, 11.5 percent were victims of assault; more than half of these assaults (54.6%) were spouse abuse incidents. Among divorced women, 7.6 percent were victims of assault, and 27.9 percent of the assaults were spouse abuse incidents. However, these estimates counted occurrences, not individuals. Nevertheless, similar trends emerge after adjustments to reflect the rates of persons victimized. Among separated women, 27.1 per 1,000 respondents were victims of spouse abuse, with an average of 2.4 incidents per individual each year. Among divorced women, only 10 per 1,000 were victimized at a rate of 2.1 incidents.

Lentzner and DeBerry (1980) analyzed "intimate violence" using

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

NCS data, also from 1973-1976. "Intimates" included both related individuals (spouses and ex-spouses) and others who were well-known to each other (e.g., friends, neighbors, classmates, coworkers). Strangers, near-strangers (someone known by sight only), or casual acquaintances were included in the "nonintimate" category. Nearly one-third of all incidents of violence were committed by intimates over the four-year interval; two-fifths resulted in injuries, and 13 percent were serious enough to require hospitalization or medical care. Lentzner and DeBerry also found that women in estranged couples (divorced or separated) were at far greater risk for intimate violence than widowed, never-married, or currently married women.

Langan and Innes (1986) reported prevalence rates and calculated an individual's risk of being victimized for certain crime types using NCS data from 1978 to 1982. They included rape, robbery, and assault as violent crimes. Violent victimizations of women by family members averaged 420,000 over the five years, for a prevalence rate of 4.2 victims per 1,000 women. Langan and Innes (1986) estimated that 2.1 million men were victims of domestic violence at least once during an average 12-month period, consistent with the 1980 NFVS estimates. They also noted that, compared with victims of stranger violence, victims of domestic violence were at far greater risk of recurring victimization. Of those assaulted at least once by an adult domestic partner, 32 percent were victimized again within six months of the initial report. Among victims of stranger violence, victimization recurred among 13 percent of those reporting at least one incident in the previous six months.10 The expected frequency of victimizations for this group was 1.62.

Langan and Innes (1986) also analyzed 1982 data and compared all forms of violence as well as specific types of assault for victimizations by family members of males and females. Violent victimization rates for females were lower than males (2.31 per 1,000, compared to 4.07), but the incidence (frequency) of victimization was similar (1.11 and 1.07 incidents per victim). Analyses from later years of NCS data on assaults by intimates provide similar estimates of violence against women. Wiersema and Loftin (1994) report a prevalence rate of 2.3 incidents per 1,000 women in 1987. Similar to Langan and Innes (1986), their definition specified rape, robbery, and assaults by spouses, ex-spouses, boyfriends, or ex-boyfriends. Table 4 shows annual rates of violent victimizations, focusing on assault and based on compilations of assault data from NCS annual reports from 1983 to 1987. For assaults

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

TABLE 4 Percent Distribution of Crimes of Violence Involving Nonstranger Victimizations by Victim-Offender Relationshipa

 

 

Victim-Offender Relationship

 

 

Percent Victimized

Spouse

Ex-Spouse

Well-Known, Not Related

1987

Assault

19.5

6.6

3.9

79.0

 

Aggravated

18.3

5.0

3.9

80.6

 

Simple

20.0

7.1

3.9

78.5

1986

Assault

19.8

7.8

3.7

69.4

 

Aggravated

20.3

6.0

2.4b

69.7

 

Simple

19.6

8.5

4.2

69.3

1985

Assault

23.1

8.3

6.0

40.0

 

Aggravated

21.0

7.7

2.3b

40.3

 

Simple

24.0

8.6

7.5

41.2

1984

Assault

23.2

9.2

4.7

43.8

 

Aggravated

24.3

10.6

4.3

44.8

 

Simple

22.8

8.5

4.9

43.4

1983

Assault

18.9

8.1

3.5

44.8

 

Aggravated

17.9

8.4

2.7b

44.2

 

Simple

19.2

7.9

3.8

45.1

a Single-offender victimizations only.

b Estimate based on 10 or fewer sample cases.

SOURCE: Criminal Victimization in the United States, 1983-1987 Reports.

against females (over age 14), Table 4 illustrates the greater risk to separated and divorced women from assaults by nonstrangers over an 11-year period from 1977 to 1987. The overall victimization rate of females peaked at 19.2 per 1,000 population in 1982 and reached its lowest levels for the two most recent years reported. Nearly three in four single-offender victimizations of separated or divorced women were committed by nonstrangers, compared to less than half the assaults against married or widowed women.11 This disparity was greatest for the two most recent years, when the overall rate of victimization of females was at its lowest point. Unfortunately, these estimates are limited by NCS procedures that do not report annual gender-specific victimizations by spouses, boyfriends, or girlfriends. Nevertheless, the greater risk to divorced/separated females of victimization by a nonstranger again is evident.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

Accordingly, prevalence rates from the National Crime Survey have been consistent over nearly 15 years and several types of analyses. Fluctuations reflect variations in the definitions used in annual reports, as well as definitions and aggregation procedures used in special analyses of marital violence. Moreover, changes in item construction in later years of the study to include nonmarital cohabitants created new designations that complicated assessments of long-term trends. Nevertheless, the NCS data consistently show the extent to which women face risks of violent victimization in the home from nonstrangers, whereas men are at greater risk of violence from strangers. In particular, the critical period of separation of married women from spouses seems to pose the highest risk of violent victimization.

Official Records

Prior to the first victimization or household surveys, research on family violence relied on official data drawn from the criminal justice, mental health, social work, and clinical records of both public and private agencies (Weis, 1989). These sources of official data remain unreconciled and marked by discrepancies, due to their focus on different aspects of the problem. Unlike child abuse, there are few central repositories or mandatory reporting laws that govern the aggregation of data on marital violence. Although criminal justice data focus on offenders, nearly all other sources of official data focus on victims. Moreover, there is little cross-reporting of incidents of marital violence across official agencies.

Medical facilities, safe houses and shelters, and psychotherapists also may provide information on victims of family violence but are limited in estimating its extent, frequency, or severity. These data are narrow in focus, usually contain little information on violent events, and are limited by the decision of individuals to seek help or treatment (Frieze and Browne, 1989).

For severe marital violence against females, both police calls and emergency rooms provide some indicators of its incidence. Stark et al. (1979) found that few cases of marital violence treated in an emergency room were reported to police. Nevertheless, they estimated that 22.5 percent of all injuries presented by women to an urban hospital emergency ward were caused by a male partner's assault.12 A later study by Stark et al. (1981) estimated that more than 1.5 million women in the United States seek medical assistance annually for injuries sustained in an assault by a male partner.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

The same study found very low treatment rates for male victims of female violence.

Although their limitations are well known, criminal justice records may be the most critical source among these, due to the regularity with which they are collected and reported, their wide availability, and the legal proscriptions on reporting categories and practices. However, they also produce biased samples of offenders and offenses, and are especially prone to selective underreporting of assaults and rapes (Skogan, 1981). The few direct comparisons of self-report and official data reveal that official underreporting is most serious for respondents who are the most frequent assailants (see Elliott and Huizinga, 1984, regarding adolescents; Petersilia, 1980, for adults). Moreover, NCS data are unequivocal on the severe underreporting of marital violence to criminal justice agencies (Gaquin, 1977-1978; Lentzner and DeBerry, 1980; Langan and Innes, 1986).

In general, criminal justice records are limited in providing accurate estimates of the epidemiology of marital violence (cf. Saltzman et al., 1990). They focus on crime events, rather than individuals, and are problematic for developing incidence estimates (cf. Sherman et al., 1989). Limitations include the willingness of victims to report marital violence to the police, and variations in local arrest policies and documentation procedures. For example, Sherman et al. (1990) reported that arrests for marital violence in Milwaukee exceeded 5,000 per year during 1986-1989, but that fewer than 1,000 arrests for marital violence were made in Washington, D.C., a city of comparable size, during the same period.

Nevertheless, police records have provided important information about the distribution of marital violence and assessments of the effectiveness of criminal justice responses. Levens and Dutton (1980), in a study of calls for service to the Vancouver (British Columbia) police switchboard, determined that 17.5 percent of all calls for police service were for "family disturbances" and 13.5 percent were for husband-wife disputes. Sherman and Berk (1984), Dunford et al. (1989), and Sherman et al. (1990) have conducted experiments on the specific deterrent effects of arrest in cases of marital violence that provide estimates of its prevalence. Berk and Newton (1985) studied the effects of police responses to 262 incidents of marital violence in Santa Barbara, California, sampled from police records of domestic disturbances. To determine the spatial dimensions of marital violence, Sherman et al. (1989) examined the distribution of calls to police in Minneapolis

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

for domestic distrubances according to their concentration in specific social areas.

Estimates of the prevalence of marital violence were made from police records in Atlanta, Georgia, by Saltzman et al. (1990), using incident reports to identify fatal and nonfatal intimate and family assaults. In addition to married couples, they included as "intimate" those couples who were emotionally intimate at the time of the incident or in the time before it. These were defined as relationships among relatives and in-laws, married and unmarried partnerships, or terminated partnerships. They relied on police classifications of victim-offender relationships that appeared in incident descriptions.

Extrapolating to the Atlanta population, the prevalence of family and intimate assault victimization was 4.9 per 1,000 males and 11.6 per 1,000 females. Rates of fatal assaults were comparable for men and women, but therefore were higher for women as a percentage of all assaults. Rates for married and cohabiting couples were not reported. By linking these reports to police records, Saltzman et al. (1990) concluded that family and intimate assaults occur within a context of repeated violence both by and toward the same individuals. Their efforts represent an important step in realizing the potential of official records for epidemiological surveillance of marital violence. The sensitivity of prevalence estimates to definitions of "family," "intimate," or "marital'' is also evident in this effort.

Official records evidently have improved with the social activism that resulted in the "criminalization" of family violence. Mandatory arrest laws in states such as Washington and local policies elsewhere (e.g., Milwaukee) will create new criminal justice data bases on domestic violence that correspond more closely to the populations whose violent behavior is reported to the police. Easing access to restraining orders in states such as Massachusetts and Pennsylvania can be expected to have similar effects. New Jersey also has mandated data collection on reports of domestic violence to police, even if those reports do not result in arrest.

HOMICIDES OF SPOUSES AND INTIMATES

Homicide rates in the United States vastly exceed rates for other countries. Gartner (1990) reported that U.S. homicide rates for victims over 14 years of age during 1950-1980 were 14.92 per 100,000 males and 4.18 per 100,000 females. These rates were

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

nearly three times higher than the next highest country (4.89 for males in Finland and 1.51 for females in Canada). Many studies have shown that homicides in the United States are frequently committed by family members, often in marital relationships (Wolfgang, 1958; Zimring et al., 1983; Browne and Flewelling, 1986; Daly and Wilson, 1987, 1988; Reidel et al., 1985; Williams and Flewelling, 1988; Mercy and Saltzman, 1989; Jurik and Winn, 1990).

For example, Reidel et al. (1985), using UCR Supplemental Homicide Reports (SHRs) from eight cities, showed that 18.7 percent of all homicides from 1978 occurred within families. Straus (1986) calculated that nearly half of the intrafamily homicides (48%) were spouse murders. Of these "family" homicides, 39.7 percent were committed by women, but there was extensive intercity variation (from 50.0 to 27.9%). Using SHRs, Mercy and Saltzman (1989) identified 16,595 homicides among legal or common-law spouses between 1976 and 1985, or 8.8 percent of all homicides nationally over the 10-year period. Using presentence investigations for 158 homicide defendants, Jurik and Winn (1990) found that 52 percent of female perpetrators killed partners or expartners, compared to 10 percent of males.

Williams and Flewelling (1988) disaggregated homicides in 168 cities in 1980-1984 by victim-offender relationship and the nature of the precipitating event. Two-thirds of the homicides involved either family members or acquaintances and were attributed to interpersonal conflicts. Using the same data, Carmody and Williams (1987) showed that 52 percent of women victims were killed by spouses, former spouses, cohabitating partners, or noncohabitating boyfriends. Browne and Williams (1989) showed that the homicide rate for female partners is 56 percent of the rate of male spouses. Yet their involvement is disproportionately in marital homicide: outside the family, women were responsible for only 14 percent of all murders, compared to 38 percent in the home.

Women also are disproportionately the victims of marital homicide. Using SHRs, both Straus (1986) and Browne and Williams (1989) found that more wives were killed by husbands than husbands killed by wives: a ratio of two to one similar to the Reidel et al. (1985) study. Mercy and Saltzman (1989) reported that women were 1.3 times more likely to be killed by a spouse than were men.

Using aggregate data from SHRs, Browne and Williams (1989) found more than a 25 percent decrease in female-perpetrated partner homicides from 1976 through 1984. (These data were for all individuals age 15 and over, and included marital, ex-marital, and

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

common-law partners, as well as boyfriends and girlfriends.) This decline began in 1979, at about the time that domestic violence legislation and extralegal resources for abused women were coming into place. States having more domestic violence legislation and other resources targeted for abused women (e.g., shelters, crisis lines, and specialized legal assistance) tended to have lower rates of female-perpetrated partner homicide overall, and Browne and Williams (1989) speculated that the presence of such resources was associated with the decline in homicides from 1979 through 1984. The strongest correlation was with the presence of shelters and other extralegal resources for escape and support. Although SHRs do not provide information about couples' histories prior to the lethal incidents, this finding is compatible with studies that show a substantial proportion of homicides by women against their male partners occurring in response to the male partner's aggression, or what Zimring et al. (1983) call the "female use of lethal counterforce" (e.g., see Wolfgang, 1958, 1967; Chimbos, 1978; Totman, 1978; Wilbanks, 1983).

Findings on partner homicides perpetrated by males were much less clear. Although there was a weak negative association between the presence of extralegal resources (such as shelters) and male-perpetrated partner homicide, no association was found between domestic violence legislation and rates of female homicide victimization. Apparently, for homicidal assaults, the increase in legal and extralegal resources-designed in part to increase the salience of legal sanctions and to deter marital, and particularly severe, assaults-was effective only in reducing the use of "last-resort" options by women.

Homicide and Ethnicity

Until recently, the focus of most studies on lethal violence has been restricted to formal or common-law marriages (Silverman and Mukherjee, 1987; Mercy and Saltzman, 1989; Straus, 1986). In part, this may be because studies of nonfatal violence or aggression between unmarried couples have only recently been undertaken, and many of these studies fail to disaggregate their data into victim/offender or gender-based categories (Sugarman and Hotaling, 1989; see Miller and Simpson, 1991, for an exception). Studies of "dating violence" are limited almost exclusively to students in high school or college, leaving unknown the incidence or severity of intimate assaults for individuals who are not attending school or who are past school age and dating or living

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

with intimate partners. Although recent analyses report a slight decrease in lethal violence for married couples, generalizations of these trends to other forms of intimate relationships may be incorrect or misleading.

In further analyses, again using aggregated data from the SHR, Browne and Williams (1993) analyzed trends in partner homicide from 1976 through 1987 both by gender and type of intimate relationship (i.e., married versus unmarried couples). Unmarried was used to refer to individuals who were dating or living with their partners but who had not resided together long enough to meet general criteria for common-law marriages as determined by the police at the time of the homicide incident. Marital was used to indicate formally married, common-law, and ex-married partners. These three categories were combined for two reasons: First, common-law and ex-married partner homicides account for a relatively small percentage of lethal violence between intimate partners during this period-11 percent and 4 percent, respectively. Second, initial analyses revealed that trends for common-law homicides were similar to those for formal marriages, and that rates for homicides involving ex-partners showed no consistent trend. Using these categorizations, analyses of trends in lethal victimization by intimate partners for 1976 through 1987 revealed quite different patterns for married and unmarried couples: there was a slight decrease in lethal violence for married couples, but an increase in such violence between women and men in unmarried relationships.

Again, analyses of the data by gender confirmed the differential risks for women in partner relationships, regardless of relationship type. For married couples, although the rate of lethal victimization declined for both women and men during the 12-year period, the drop in the rate at which husbands were killed by their wives was greater than the rate at which wives were killed by their husbands. For unmarried couples, although the lethal victimization rate for men in nonmarital relationships varied unsystematically during this period, the rate of unmarried women being killed by their partners increased significantly. This increase occurred, moreover, in the face of intensified social control attempts (e.g., sanctions and shelter) during the same years.

One possible explanation for this divergence in trends is that the general decrease in the rates of marital homicide-as well as the absence of a decrease in the lethal victimization rates for unmarried women-is related to the targeting of societal interventions primarily toward women and men in formal or marriage-like

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

relationships (Browne and Williams, 1993). For example, in many states, domestic violence legislation focuses primarily on addressing problems of safety and access for those who are married or in common-law relationships. Few if any services (except on a few high school or college campuses) are structured for individuals in dating or living-together relationships in which assault occurs. Thus it is possible that the failure of social control attempts to also emphasize the dangers for unmarried couples may leave out those relationship types with potentially the highest risk for lethal violence against women.

In addition to gender differences, the social epidemiology of marital homicide reveals distinct patterns of risk by ethnicity. Block (1987) analyzed 12,872 domestic homicides in Chicago from 1965-1981, and found substantially fewer marital homicides in Chicago for 1965-1981 among Latinos than among African Americans and whites. She also found that the rates per 100,000 population changed over time for each of four racial/ethnic groups. These estimates were further complicated by changes in the census definition of ethnicity in the 1980 iteration. Nevertheless, she did find that marital homicides as a percentage of domestic homicides were relatively constant across racial groups, ranging from 72 to 80 percent. However, the percentage of marital homicides committed by males varied from 33.6 percent for non-Latino African Americans to 53.2 percent for non-Latino whites.

From police incident reports, Saltzman et al. (1990) found that the risk of fatal assaults was three times greater for nonwhites than for whites in Atlanta. Kuhl's (1989) analysis of spousal homicides in California from 1974-1986 also revealed that non-Latino women more often were victims of spousal homicide outside Los Angeles, but that African American males were victims most often in that county. Jurik and Winn (1990), using logit models to examine gender differences, however, found that race was not a significant predictor of gender differences in homicide.

Partner Homicides as Situated Events

Several studies (Gelles, 1974; Chimbos, 1978; Totman, 1978; Luckenbill, 1977; Steadman, 1982; Browne, 1987) found that spousal homicides occur most often inside the home and take place in a series of stages that often follow other types of assaultive incidents. Zahn (1989) characterizes spousal homicide as an escalating series of events beginning with personal criticisms or defiance of behavioral edicts. Katz (1988) suggests that marital homicide

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

is a last-resort effort of spouses to maintain control or to rectify a subjectively perceived violation of some personal moral belief. Jurik and Winn (1990:239) found that women were more likely than men to kill in the home within a context of economic dependence, past attacks, and victim-initiated physical conflicts. Local studies, primarily with samples of women incarcerated for homicide, suggest that a substantial portion of homicides by women against their male partners are in response to the partners' physical aggression and threat (see Browne, 1987, for a review of these studies).

Although more men kill their spouses or partners than are killed by women, Browne (1987) found that abused women kill in response to different provocations than do abusive men. Browne studied women charged in the death or serious injury of violent mates. These women had often endured years of severe assault and threat. Most had unsuccessfully searched for alternative solutions, killing only when they felt hopelessly trapped in a desperate situation from which they could see no practical avenue of escape. Almost all had sought police intervention, although during the period in which these women were living with their partners-from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s-legal and extralegal resources targeted for abused wives either were not available or were just beginning to be put in place. Many of the women had attempted to leave the relationship but in retaliation were even more seriously threatened or attacked. A few had been separated or divorced from their partners for up to two years yet were still experiencing life-threatening violence and harassment before the final incident.

Typically, the killing of the abuser was unplanned and occurred during the period of threat before an assault, in the midst of a violent episode, or during a failed escape attempt by the women. In some cases, women who had endured abuse for years killed only when the partners' violence and threat turned toward their children. Most of the women in the homicide group had no prior history of violent or even illegal behavior, yet their attempts to survive with an increasingly assaultive and threatening mate-and their inability to find resources that would effectively mitigate the danger-eventually led to their own acts of violence (see Totman, 1978, for similar findings).

Estimates of marital homicides remain problematic due to different methods of aggregation in different jurisdictions, the difficulty of classifying the marital or cohabitational status of the victim and offender, and equally difficult classifications of homicides

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

as assault or robbery homicides. Samples reflect diversity similar to the studies in Table 1 and, as noted, the SHR form contains no information about prior histories of assault between the couples. As measurement improves in these dimensions, estimates of the locations and risk factors for marital homicide are likely to improve and contribute substantively to policy interventions.

MARITAL RAPE

Marital rape is a dimension of family violence often excluded from the marital violence research of the 1970s. Although items on the 1985 NFVS (Gelles and Straus, 1988) asked whether sexual assaults have occurred,13 the question was asked only of women married or "partnered" at the time of the interview. Our analyses of the 1985 NFVS show that among the 2,942 currently married or partnered women, 1.3 percent reported an attempt to force them to have sex with their partner in the past year. Less than one percent (0.8%) completed the attempt. More than half (53%) reported only one attempt, and about one in five (19%) reported more than two attempts. Also, similar to other research (Fagan et al., 1984; Browne, 1987), nearly all (93%) the women who experienced repeated attempts to force sex in the past year also endured multiple incidents of other forms of marital violence.

Researchers studying marital rape typically avoid the term "rape" and instead usually ask respondents if they were ever sexually assaulted by their spouse or partner (Fagan et al., 1984) or if they were "forced to have sex" with their partner (Walker, 1984). Some studies ask about "unwanted sexual experiences" (Russell, 1982), or having sex in response to force or to the threat of force or violence (Finkelhor and Yllo, 1983). Pagelow (1984) asked women if they had submitted to sexual demands to prevent beatings or other reprisals. Such diversity in item construction obviously suggests caution in comparing studies or drawing conclusions.

Empirical research has shown consistently that marital rape is an integral part of patterns of marital "violence" (Russell, 1982; Frieze, 1983; Fagan et al., 1984; Walker, 1984) and may be an antecedent to marital homicide (Browne, 1987). Marital rape has been reported in relationships in which no other forms of physical abuse has occurred (e.g., Russell, 1982; Finkelhor and Yllo, 1983). However, it seems to be most frequently reported as a form of domination in relationships in which other violent behaviors co-occur (Russell, 1982; Frieze, 1983).

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

In Russell's (1982) study of women in San Francisco, among women who had ever been married 14 percent said they had been raped by a husband or ex-husband. Finkelhor and Yllo (1983, 1985) found that 10 percent of the women cohabitating with a spouse or intimate male in a representative sample of 323 women in Boston reported at least one sexual assault, and 50 percent reported they had been raped at least 20 times, by their spouses. Fagan et al. (1984) reported that 6.3 percent of women seeking services from domestic violence intervention programs said they sought help because of a sexual assault, and 23 percent reported having been sexually assaulted at some point in the relationship.

Marital rape is highly correlated with other forms of marital assault. In Bowker's (1983) volunteer sample of (N = 146) women victims of marital violence, 23 percent reported both sexual and nonsexual physical assaults. Other studies report slightly higher rates. Sexual assaults were reported by one-third of the women victims of marital violence studied by Prescott and Lesko (1977; cited in Frieze and Browne, 1989 and Frieze, 1983); 37 percent of the women (N = 325) studied by Pagelow (1984); 46 percent of the women interviewed by Shields and Hannecke (1983); and 51 percent of the women in Walker's (1984) study of 435 self-identified victims of marital violence. Accordingly, rates appear to be slightly lower in representative samples than in volunteer samples of women victims of marital violence or women in shelters or intervention programs. (Although, as noted, "representative" samples tend to exclude some groups in which the prevalence of intimate aggression is thought to be quite high.)

Fagan and Wexler (1985) examined sexual assault as part of marital violence based on self-reports from 2,792 women in 23 family violence intervention programs. The authors used Guttman scaling procedures to construct indices from the CTS items, modifying the scales in two ways. A CTS abuse scale added verbal abuse (threats, insults, harassment) and sexual assault to the CTS assault items. A CTS violence scale added only sexual assault, but excluded verbal abuse. For the CTS violence measure, sexual assault scaled as the most serious of the CTS items (coefficient of scalability = .639; coefficient of reproducibility = .890). Moreover, explained variance of marital violence using ordinary least squares regression models was significantly higher for the modified CTS violence measure (including sexual assault) than for measures in which it was excluded. The results provided empirical support for the inclusion of marital rape as a dimension of severe marital

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

violence, and perhaps the most severe nonfatal type of marital assault.

Browne (1987) also found that sexual assault occurred as part of the most violent physical attacks. Bowker (1983), Shields and Hannecke (1983), and Browne (1987) reported that nonsexual physical assaults were more severe among women who experience both sexual and nonsexual assaults than among those who are spared sexual assault.

The exclusion of marital rape from research on marital violence is difficult to understand empirically or to justify conceptually. Straus (1990a) agrees that marital rape is "harmful" but cautions that subsuming it within a definition of family violence or abuse would create conceptual confusion and inhibit theory development. He argues that definitions of violence should include specific acts that are consistent with legal usage, and that reflect normative standards of conduct and humane values.

Normative ambiguity regarding sexual assault in marriage may stem from the changing legal status of marital rape. Until the mid-1970s in the United States, rape of one's wife was not a criminal offense. By 1980, only three states had completely eliminated the marital rape exemption from their laws, and five others had modified it (Frieze and Browne, 1989). National trends, in fact, moved in quite the opposite direction. By 1982, 13 other states had extended their exemptions to include cohabitating couples as well as those legally married (Mettger, 1982). Marriage laws also traditionally have viewed marriage as giving implied consent by the wife to grant sexual relations to her husband and granting to husbands the right to use force to obtain compliance. In many states, this implied consent may extend to a couple when separated, unless specifically prohibited through a legal separation order.

The convergence of extreme forms of nonsexual marital violence and sexual assault suggests that they share etiological factors and are manifestations of a particularly dangerous pattern of marital violence. There is substantial evidence to concur with the conclusion of Frieze (1983:552) that marital rape is "one of the most serious forms of battering." For some couples, marital rape is an antecedent to homicide. In considering marital violence as a problem that society wants to remedy, and in the implicit focus on harm and risk markers for patterns of severe violence and lethal assault, this is a neglected aspect-both empirically and legally-that must be integrated into the study of and response to violence occurring between adult partners for our knowledge to be complete or our remedies effective.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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GENDER DIFFERENCES IN MARITAL VIOLENCE: OFFENDING AND VICTIMIZATION

Although there may be circumstances in which men and women share equal proclivities for aggressive behavior, Maccoby and Jacklin (1974:274) concluded that "there is a sex-linked differential readiness to respond in aggressive ways to the relevant experiences." Eron and Huesmann (1989:65) concluded that male aggression is more prevalent and serious, more stable over time, and attributable to different socialization experiences in our society. Outside the home, it is widely accepted that men are more likely to commit robberies or assaults (Weiner and Wolfgang, 1985) and homicides (Zahn, 1989) than women (see Kruttschnitt, in this volume). Simon and Baxter (1989) reported that the increased participation in crime by women in the United States following World War II has been limited to property crimes, not crimes of violence.

However, there is a lively and contentious debate on gender differences between men and women in physical assaults between spouses or partners. Depending on the data source and the dimension of marital violence, gender differences may point to greater injury risk for women or, conversely, higher "violence" rates for women. The two perspectives are not easily reconciled, and the disparity goes to the heart of definitional and philosophical debates in the study of family violence. Moreover, perceptions of the relative violence rates for men and women may reflect different parameters of criminal careers that are used to weigh the evidence.

Both victimization data and intervention reports suggest that more women are victimized than men (Browne, 1993). NCS data suggest that women are victimized more often by male spouses or ex-spouses than strangers, and also by the broader group of "intimates" (Gaquin, 1977-1978; Lentzner and DeBerry, 1980; Langan and Innes, 1986). NCS data also show that injuries sustained by women from marital violence were more frequent, more serious, and more often required medical care (Langan and Innes, 1986). Stets and Straus (1990) showed that more women than men are injured from marital assault in the home and are also injured more often. Homicide data shows that more women than men are victims of marital homicide. From the earliest origins of family violence intervention programs, women victims sought services and protection more often than men (Fagan et al., 1984). However, these programs often directed their outreach to women, were staffed by women, oriented their services toward women, and in residential programs, could only accommodate women.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

However, self-reports reveal a different and more complex pattern. Gender-specific participation rates for marital violence are about 10 percent in both the 1975 NFVS data (Straus et al., 1980) and the 1985 resurvey (Straus and Gelles, 1986). The participation rates of reported wife-to-husband assaults14 were slightly higher than husband-to-wife assault rates when data were aggregated over the two surveys, but the prevalence of severe assaults was slightly higher for males.15 Statistical significance was not reported. The rates were computed based on combined male and female reports and then recomputed from the reports of only women in the 1985 sample. Adjusting the rates for assaults that produced injuries showed marked gender differences; however, males inflicted injury-assaults at a rate of 3.5 per 1,000, compared to 0.6 per 1,000 for women (Straus, 1989). These reports correspond more closely to the NCS rates reported by Gaquin (1977-1978), Langan and Innes (1986), and others.

Offending rates for males are also much higher. Straus (1989) reports that assault and severe assault frequencies (lambdas) for male spouses or partners are 21 percent greater than the rates for women. The offending rate (lambda) for males committing at least one assault in the 1985 NFVS was more than 7.21 assaults in the previous year and for females, 5.95 assaults (Straus, 1989).16 For severe assault, the rates were 6.1 for men and 4.28 for women, a 42 percent difference. These disparities are even higher among younger respondents (ages 18-25), the group with the highest participation rates (see Table 3). Unfortunately, the limited research on offending rates precludes theory tests that distinguish parameters of ''battering careers" for offenders, despite empirical evidence of different predictors of participation versus frequency rates (Blumstein et al., 1985, 1986).

Although the prevalence of injury is reported in the NCS and the NFVS, the frequency of injury is rarely reported (Fagan and Wexler, 1985). Stets and Straus (1990) report only whether either partner was hurt badly enough to "need to see a doctor." No specific list of injuries was provided, confounding the measure of injury with economic and geographical variables, as well as the willingness to disclose injuries from family violence publicly. Thus, the psychometric properties of the measure of injury are uncertain. Yet the severity and frequency of specific acts of violence have been found to correlate with the severity of injury in other studies (Fagan and Wexler, 1985; Frieze et al., 1980) and in turn bear on the question of gender differences.

Moreover, sampling decisions that exclude other than intact

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

couples or include only women using interventions can skew estimates of gender-specific offending rates. For example, women in shelters report far higher offending rates by male partners (Straus, 1990b). Separated/divorced women reported higher victimization rates in the NCS than did married women (Lentzner and DeBerry, 1980). Okun (1986) studied 300 women in a Michigan shelter and found a rate of 68.7 assaults per year. Fagan et al. (1984) found that more than half of the women (N = 270) in a variety of intervention programs reported "frequent" (more than once a month) severe abuse (physical and sexual assaults, weapon use, weapon threats) in the past year. Other validity threats to these data are discussed below.

Methodological Problems in Interpreting Gender Differences and Mutuality

The question of "mutual combat" (Berk et al., 1983) goes to the heart of the debate on gender differences in marital violence. Stets and Straus (1990), using 1985 NFVS data, show that for 49 percent of the 825 respondents who experienced one or more assaults during the past year, both parties engaged in assaultive behaviors. Similar rates were obtained in the 1975 NFVS. Despite the comparable rates of assaultive behaviors between men and women in the two NFVS data sets, it is misleading to characterize marital violence as mutual violence. Unlike the Berk et al. (1983) study, the sequencing of events in the NFVS does not address mutuality in the same incident. Events may have occurred far apart in time, yet be aggregated for the same reporting year. Mutuality is also difficult to assess because of gender differences in self-reports of assaultive behaviors. Underreporting of the incidence and severity of marital violence by men has been well-established (Szinovacz, 1983; Edelson and Brygger, 1986; O'Leary and Arias, 1988), and raises questions about the "mutuality" of assaults-especially severe assaults, in which women are more likely to be injured. Correcting this bias would in fact increase the rate of mutuality. Other data suggest that men and women rate the severity of violence differently, even when they agree that it occurred (see Table 3).

Although published research from the NFVS data has emphasized the "equality" of violence participation rates for women and men, Straus et al. (1980) list five reasons to interpret issues of gender equality in marital violence cautiously: (1) the perpetration of "severely" violent acts is greater for men than women; (2)

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

violence by husbands does more damage due to their greater size and physical strength; (3) the offending rate (Lambda) for men is higher than for women-that is, the number of times that men hit women is greater; (4) men often hit women when they are pregnant, posing dangers of miscarriage and infertility; and (5) women remain in marriages and thus at risk for injury more often than men, primarily due to their economic circumstances (Gelles, 1974).

In addition, methodological problems in both the NCS and the NFVS limit comparisons of gender differences or conclusions. Perhaps most important is the infrequent reporting of offending rates (lambdas) for both data sources. Rarely are marital violence events analyzed in which multiple acts occur, perhaps by both parties, in a complex interaction. For example, one battering event may involve several specific acts, yet either these acts are given even weight or only the most serious act is reported. The order of individual acts is almost never obtained in national surveys; that is, over the course of a reporting period, we cannot state who hit whom first.17 Even when questions are posed about who initiated conflict, these items are not specific to the use or threat of violence. Also, in the NFVS, assessments of agreement in the CTS are precluded because only one marital partner participates. Thus, assessments of male-and female-perpetrated assaults are based on aggregated data from different households.

In the NCS, data are limited to reporting the number of "serial victimizations." Problems of interpretation and validity concerns also limit conclusions about gender differences based on NCS data. NCS questions are posed in the context of a "crime" survey, raising difficulties for respondents who may define spouse assaults as a "family" matter. Items about spouse assault are framed as an act by a former spouse who "has no right to that'' (Langan and Innes, 1986), introducing subjectivity into respondents' classifications of events and possible confusion among respondents about the appropriateness of certain behaviors by role of the perpetrator (e.g., husband or father) and the legal context of a specific event. Similarly, NFVS surveys pose their items in the context of "family conflict," thus ruling out reports of assaults that may be interpreted in some other way.

Moreover, to extrapolate from estimates of assault occurrences to classifications of individuals as violent (as is done in the interpretation of NFVS results) skips over important conceptual and definitional concerns about the interpretation of "assault" by respondents, decisions on aggregation and reporting of data on discrete behaviors, and what behaviors constitute violence. Certainly,

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

the comparative assault, severe assault, and injury assault rates reported by Straus and his colleagues suggest that men more often commit assaultive acts than women. Yet by classifying respondents as "violent" or "assaultive" on the basis of participation rates on CTS or NCS items, a framework of interpretation is imposed that suggests no gender differences (see Browne, 1993; Dobash et al., 1992).

Until there are (1) a more complete understanding of differential validity by gender of self-reports of marital violence, (2) calculations of offending rates as well as participation rates across a variety of sampling and measurement conditions, and (3) careful attention to definitional parameters of assaultiveness and violence, conclusions about the absence of gender differences are unwarranted. The weight of current empirical evidence on frequency, injury, victimization, and homicide suggests that such conclusions are premature and incomplete.

SOCIAL LOCATION OF MARITAL VIOLENCE AND HOMICIDE

The social structural correlates of marital violence vary according to the data source and design features of various studies, as well as the type of violence. Research using official records or samples of families that present themselves for services suggests that marital violence occurs more often among poor minority families in which neither spouse has attained more than a high school education (Fagan et al., 1984; Saltzman et al., 1990). Self-report studies (Straus et al., 1980) and voluntary samples (Bowker, 1983; Walker, 1984; Shields et al., 1988) typically have found a weaker but still inverse relationship between social class and marital violence. Bridges and Weis (1989) attribute these disparities to differences in study designs and basic methods of measurement that are typical of various data sources.

Nonlethal Marital Violence

Comparisons of social structural correlates of marital violence from either the NCS or the NFVS have been limited to participation rates. Table 3 briefly shows social structural correlates of male-to-female marital violence for both participation and offending rates. Moreover, the data suggest region-specific models, variation by male or female participation in violence, and ethnicity by region interactions.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

Household Surveys Straus et al. (1980) report that violence did not vary by region but was correlated with urbanism. However, the rates of marital violence were higher both in cities and in rural areas and lowest in suburbs. They reported higher participation rates for both male and female racial minorities, male high school graduates (with no college education) and female high school dropouts, younger couples with the lowest incomes, and those with "blue-collar" occupations or unemployed men.

Table 3, using 1985 NFVS data, showed higher participation rates in general violence for younger couples in central-city areas with incomes below $20,000 who were under 25 years of age.

Information on Latinos in these surveys is limited; no information was provided in the 1975 NFVS. Straus and Smith (1990) provided more detailed comparisons of Hispanics and whites from the 1985 NFVS data. However, these comparisons did not differentiate between white and nonwhite Hispanics, or Hispanics from varying countries and cultures. Overall, marital violence was more prevalent among Hispanics for both assault and severe assault, particularly in the Northeast and South, in cities, among both blue-and white-collar families, and in poor families.

Ethnic-specific rates of all forms of family violence were constructed for Mexican Americans by Sorenson and Telles (1991). They compared family violence among whites and Mexican Americans using global measures of "family violence" from Epidemiological Catchment Area surveys. The items combined several CTS items into one.

Victimization Surveys NCS data suggest similar patterns. Nearly two in three (65.6 percent) victims of assault by spouses or exspouses had incomes of less than $10,000 in 1978 (Lentzner and DeBerry, 1980). NCS data for 1985-1987 show that income and victim-offender relationships are inversely associated for violent victimizations. In higher-income families, violent victimizations more often involved strangers; in lower income families, nonstrangers were assailants in more than half of the reported victimizations for assault and robbery. However, there is little evidence of consistent patterns of victimization in the NCS by other social structural factors. Whites and African Americans reported comparable victimization rates for assaults by spouses and ex-spouses (Lentzner and DeBerry, 1980; Langan and Innes, 1986), in contrast to the NFVS data presented in Table 3 and by Straus et al. (1980).

Participants in Intervention Programs Among participants in intervention

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

programs, similar correlates emerge. Fagan et al. (1983) analyzed reports about male spouses from 270 women participants in social and legal intervention programs. OLS regressions showed that the race of the assailant (nonwhite) predicted his concurrent involvement in both stranger and marital violence, but was a weak predictor of either the severity or the frequency of marital violence. However, low educational attainment of assailants was a strong predictor of both their marital and their stranger dimensions of violence. Fagan et al. also found interactions between situational (e.g., respondents' alcohol use, childhood violence experiences of victim and assailant) and social structural correlates for each dimension of violence.

The obvious sampling biases here suggest caution, but the findings illustrate the concentration of social correlates of violence with the most violent couples. Nevertheless, we know little about middle-and upper-class couples that experience extreme forms of violence but avoid participation in the public sector. They also are undersampled in national surveys and likely use their higher social status to resolve or escape violence (Bowker, 1983, 1986b).

Spatial Distribution of Marital Violence Research on the social locations of domestic violence also suggest that there may be spatial or ecological concentrations. Research in Kansas City (Meyer and Lorimor, 1977) showed that 5.2 percent of police calls for disturbances were dispatched to addresses with five to eight calls in the same year. Sherman et al. (1989) analyzed data on locations of repeat calls for service for "domestic disturbances," a broad category that includes loud stereos, family fights, neighbor disputes, and family violence. Nearly 25,000 domestic disturbances in Minneapolis in 1986 (from December 1985 to December 1986) were recorded in 8.6 percent of all locations; 9.1 percent of the addresses with at least one domestic disturbance call accounted for 35.9 percent of all domestic calls. Sherman et al. (1989) reported results of a Boston study (Pierce et al., 1988) in which 9 percent of apartments reporting any calls for "family trouble" over a five-year period accounted for about 28 percent of all such calls.

The criminogenic influence of place on domestic disturbances remains ambiguous, however. Many of the areas in which calls were concentrated involved high-rise buildings with multiple addresses. In these settings, close proximity between neighbors may result in greater reporting of disturbances. Sherman et al. (1989)

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

also posit that these areas or buildings may be receptors for the types of people most likely to experience, or to call police about, domestic problems. Without knowing either specific addresses or the nature of the calls, the correlation of domestic disturbance with place remains speculative. Weisburd et al. (1989) argued that situation-specific models of crime commission would lead naturally to identification of "hot spots" of specific crime types such as violent offenses. Instead, they found strong correlations between domestic disturbances and other crime types that occurred in residences, such as residential burglaries and robberies of persons. In general, these were areas that manifested signs of the incivilities that suggest growing social disorganization, but there was no evidence of crime-specific patterns regarding violence within or outside the home.

Evidently, there are weak correlations between social area and the occurrence of violent crimes among nonstrangers or in domestic situations. Rather than signifying causal relationships, the concentration suggests that ecological factors may be facilitators or supportive of marital violence. The correlations may also represent reciprocal processes; for example, men who are assaultive and threatening with their families may also exhibit problematic behaviors at work and experience job or income loss.

The evidence of effects of place (social location) also are equivocal. Although places themselves may be criminogenic, it is unclear whether they directly contribute to marital violence, simply host individuals who are more likely to engage in it (i.e., concentration effects), or indirectly facilitate crime through weak social controls. The unique context of the home itself in our societal structure seems to contribute to the disproportionate occurrence of victimization of spouses or partners. These correlations suggest the presence of other ecological factors in socially disorganized areas that place certain couples at greater risk than others.

Marital Homicides

Historically, there has been regional variation in homicide rates (Zahn, 1989). As noted, Browne and Williams (1989) found variations by state in female-perpetrated partner homicides that were negatively correlated with legal resources and social spending for interventions for abused women. Indicators of urbanism18 and the male homicide rate predicted the female homicide rate, suggesting an urban concentration of female-perpetrated partner homicides. However, Browne and Williams (1989) did not examine

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

the availability of resources by race. Other researchers (Schechter, 1982) have noted that resources for women at risk often are unavailable or inaccessible to minority women.

Analyses of intrafamily homicides by Williams and Flewelling (1988) revealed strong correlations between ecological variables and marital homicides resulting from family conflict. Homicides resulting from family conflict were highly correlated with two indicators of poverty: percent black (.605) and percent poor (.560), exceeded only by the correlations for acquaintance homicide. However, in multivariate relationships, the contributions to explained variance for these variables were consistent across models for other homicide types. Evidently, resource deprivation and social disintegration (measured by the divorce rate) have a pervasive impact on city-to-city variations in all forms of criminal homicide.

Several studies of marital homicides using local and national data (Block, 1987; Zimring et al., 1983; Kuhl, 1989; Saltzman et al., 1990; Mercy and Saltzman, 1989) identified disproportionate involvement of racial minorities. For example, Kuhl found gender-region-race interactions in California that resulted in higher marital violence rates for African American males in Los Angeles and Hispanic women in other areas of the state.

Using 1976-1985 SHR data, Mercy and Saltzman (1989) found that African Americans accounted for 45.4 percent of all spouse homicide victims, and their rate was 8.4 times higher than the white rate. White wives had twice the risk of spousal homicide, but African American women had homicide victimization rates moderately lower than the rate for African American males. Age adjustment did not change these rates overall or for whites; however, the risk of spouse homicide decreased for African Americans after age 24 (Mercy and Saltzman, 1989:595). Overall, racial differences declined with age. The prevalence of spouse homicides was 7.7 times higher in interracial couples (2.9% of all homicides) than intraracial marriages. This discussion should not deflect the greater importance of socioeconomic factors than race in explaining domestic homicide (Centerwall, 1984) or the fact that family or nonstranger homicide rates are more sensitive to socioeconomic factors than are stranger homicide rates (Parker and Smith, 1979; Smith and Parker, 1980).

Research on domestic homicides in Kansas City in the 1970s (Breedlove et al., 1977) showed that police had responded to at least five prior calls for service at about 50 percent of the addresses where domestic homicides occurred in the two years preceding the homicide. Sherman et al. (1990) contend, however,

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

that residential mobility among both domestic and stranger homicide victims and perpetrators mitigates any linkage between addresses and individuals. They found weak predictions of domestic homicides from recurring prior calls for service linked to individuals among domestic homicides in Milwaukee. Homicide victims evidently reside in the types of buildings that have high prevalence and frequency of police calls for recurring domestic disturbances. These studies suggest that a safer conclusion would attribute residential patterns and ecological processes to places rather than individuals in establishing social locations of domestic homicides.

Accordingly, there is some evidence that marital homicide is an urban phenomenon, more often located in social areas that typify the problems of urban areas: poverty, residential mobility, weak family structures, and concentrations of minority populations. Although the data suggest an ecological concentration of marital homicide, more specific studies are needed that tie homicides to specific locales; that measure their social area characteristics; and that are disaggregated by the race, social status, and abuse histories of the participants.

EPIDEMIOLOGY OF INJURIES

The relative risks and severity of injuries sustained in marital violence vary according to data sources. NCS data provide the only consistent basis for comparing marital and other violence, and consistently reaffirm the greater risks of injury to people in the home. Lentzner and DeBerry (1980) reported that more than 75 percent of the victims of violence (assault, rape, and robbery) involving "related intimates" suffered injuries, compared to 54 percent of victims of nonstranger violence. More than 80 percent of all assaults against spouses and ex-spouses resulted in injuries, and spouses and ex-spouses had the highest rates of internal injuries or unconsciousness (7.0 percent) and broken bones (6.9%).

Similar trends persisted in NCS data on assault through the 1980s, although NCS data do not consistently use the "intimate" designation. Victimization data show that 36 percent of victims of nonstranger assault sustained physical injury in the 1987 survey, compared to 22 percent of victims of stranger assaults. Unfortunately, the NCS data do not permit injury breakdowns by victim-offender relationship and victim gender.

Stets and Straus (1990) used three measures of "injury" to compare injury risk for males and females from the National Family Violence Surveys (1975 and 1985). First, respondents were asked

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

whether they had been hurt badly enough as a result of any assault in the past year to require medical attention (need to or actually see a doctor). Second, assaulted respondents were asked whether they took time off from work because of violent incidents. Third, they were asked how many days they spent in bed due to illness. The latter was collapsed into a dichotomous measure. Few victims reported "needing" to see a doctor: 3 percent of women victims and 0.4 percent of male victims.

These rates increased after controlling for the severity of assault: among victims of severe assault, 7.3 percent of the women needed medical attention, compared to 1.0 percent of the males (p < .05). Similar findings were reported for time off from work. For days in bed, women were more likely to report being bedridden for one or more days, but differences were not significant for severe violence. Reports using NCS data, in contrast, showed that 19.0 percent of the spouse or ex-spouse victims of assault sought medical care and 13 percent were treated in a hospital (Lentzner and DeBerry, 1980).

The injury rates based on these measures should be considered underestimates. As noted earlier, no direct measure of injury was employed in the 1975 or 1985 NFVS protocols. Responses to the question of needing to see a doctor would be confounded with individual respondents' thresholds of severity of physical injuries or pain to motivate them to seek formal medical care. Further, women victims of marital violence often refrain from actually seeing a doctor, even when injured quite severely, due to shame, threats by the abuser against seeking outside help, and fear that seeking medical attention would identify them as the victims of marital violence (Walker, 1984; Browne, 1987; Stark and Flitcraft, 1983).

To measure nonphysical or psychological injuries, Stets and Straus (1990) used self-reports of psychosomatic symptoms, depression and stress. More women victims than men reported all three forms of nonphysical injury, and the gender differences intensified with the severity of violence. Even with these limited measures of injury, and the absence of specific types of injuries or standardized measures of depression or stress, the negative consequences of marital violence were greater for women. However, the cross-sectional data complicate any causal inferences from these results.

Although comparisons are confounded by design differences between the NCS and the NFVS, injury rates in the NFVS appear lower than in the NCS data, despite the higher rates of marital

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

violence in the former. Stets and Straus (1990:158) dismiss gender differences as being "not particularly strong or large," although their measures did not differentiate among types of injury and required subjective judgments of unproven psychometric validity. Neither data source reported the frequency of injuries, and only the NCS considered specific types of injury. Accordingly, injury as a dimension of marital violence is difficult to evaluate in the NFVS, and participation-incidence confounding may exist in the NCS analysis of injury.

Studies that measured both the frequency and the severity of injury show the strong association between behavior and injury, and between the frequency of behavior and the frequency and severity of injury. Among women who sought help from family violence intervention programs (N = 270), 56 percent reported being the victim of abuse19 at least once a month (Fagan and Wexler, 1985). Bruises, lacerations, broken bones, or more serious injuries were reported by 66 percent of the victims, and 59 percent reported being injured "occasionally" or "frequently." About one in three women who had children were victims of marital violence during pregnancy, and 4 percent of the women overall reported miscarriages due to marital violence.

Table 5 shows the zero-order correlations between the specific types of violence from the CTS and injury scales. As mentioned earlier, the CTS (violence) scale was created by using Guttman scaling methods and was modified from the Straus (1979) CTS scale to include sexual assault. Nearly all the specific behavioral items were significantly correlated with the severity of injury and the frequency of violence. The acts of nonphysical violence (verbal threats) are correlated only with the injury variables. However, the Pearson correlation coefficients are lower than would be expected if injuries and violent acts were dimensions of one phenomenon.

Evidently, injury and violent behaviors represent dimensions of marital violence that overlap only partially, yet add considerably to its measurement by including the dimension of harm. In turn, the epidemiology of marital violence may be vulnerable to criterion-dependent biases. When applied to tests of theory, varying measurement strategies also yield differential explanations and validity of theoretical models (see Table 6 below) or evaluations of the effects of interventions (see Table 7 below). Accordingly, using one dimension or the other exclusively is likely to yield an incomplete understanding of the etiology of marital violence. Estimates based solely on behavioral counts merely identify individuals

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

TABLE 5 Zero-Order Correlation Coefficients for Marital Violence Measures (N = 2,792)

Violence Measure

Verbal Threats or Abuse

Push, Slap, or Scratch

Threaten Punch, Choke, or Kick

With Object or Weapon

Hit With Object or Weapon

Sexual Assault

CTS (violence)

.62a

.53a

.41a

.57a

.52a

.53a

Frequency of abuse

.08

.14b

.13b

.15c

.16c

.16c

Most serious injury

.17c

.28a

.31a

.06

.13c

.09

Abuse during pregnancy

.14c

.17c

.13b

.05

.12b

-.009

Duration of abuse

.02

-.01

.07

.07

.05

-.008

Frequency of injury

.12

.07

.26a

.00

-.04

-.05

a p = .001.

b p = .01.

c p = .05.

SOURCE: Fagan and Wexler (1985).

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

that engage in assaultive acts; the injury and harm from these acts, as well as their meaning, should also be addressed to fully explain the behaviors (see Carmody and Williams, 1987; Browne, 1993; Fagan and Wexler, 1985).

VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY OF EPIDEMIOLOGICAL RESEARCH

Several factors that may affect the validity of estimates of marital violence have already been discussed in the context of gender differences: data sources, samples, measurement strategies, interviewing procedures, methods of aggregating and analyzing data, and definition-classification links. The extensive validation procedures for the NCS support its utility as a general crime survey, but validity threats remain that are specific to the measurement of marital violence. In this section, we review other validity and reliability issues in epidemiological research on marital violence, and also identify some of the validation efforts for the NFVS and other studies.

Official Records

Official records have the obvious limitations of serving the data collection needs of the agencies that gather them and the variability that characterizes definitions of behaviors as well as procedures for recording and reporting. Accordingly, law enforcement data will collapse a wide variety of acts into categories such as ''domestic disturbance," or even "spouse assault," under new legislation that calls for mandatory arrest or criminal penalties for violations of court orders. Mental health agencies collect information appropriate for diagnosis, treatment planning, monitoring services provided, and decision making. Medical records also chart diagnoses and treatments.

Victimization Surveys

The NCS survey, as a measure of criminal victimization, partially addresses the specific varieties of marital violence. Behaviors are measured in items that correspond to penal code categories, but these may overlook conceptually important distinctions in the severity of marital violence. The NCS is usually administered in the presence of both adults in an intact household (interviewers are instructed to interview separately when possible, but joint interviews generally occur). In this context, the intimate

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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relationship between offender and victim poses obvious validity threats that are less salient for stranger victimizations. When faced with an ongoing relationship between victim and offender, victims may be likely to minimize the severity of marital violence or underreport its occurrence (Gelles, 1978). The disparity between NCS and NFVS estimates of marital assault rates may in part reflect these differences in interview formats.

Self-Report Studies

Because marital violence by definition occurs most often in private settings, self-reports must play a central role in empirical research. Research on measures of sensitive topics, including violent behaviors, shows the self-report method to be quite reliable (Straus, 1979; Hindelang et al., 1981; Bridges and Weis, 1989). Unlike official records, self-reports also have a greater potential for modification and improvement than official records (Bridges and Weis, 1989; Weis, 1989). The CTS measures used in the NFVS represent the most widely cited metric of epidemiological data on family violence. The CTS has been used in a variety of sampling and procedural conditions. Accordingly, the extensive research on its validity and reliability describes the state of self-report research in marital violence and its inherent problems.

Reliability Estimates Several studies have confirmed the general factor structure of the Conflict Tactics Scales under a variety of sampling and measurement conditions. Three factors have been identified in several studies that replicate those derived by Straus (1979): verbal reasoning, verbal aggression, and physical aggression. For example, Jorgensen (1977) found three factors that he labeled "high-," "medium-," and "low-" intensity factors that parallel the three factors identified by Straus (1979). Hornung et al. (1981) assessed the reliability of the CTS for the study of 1,793 women in Kentucky (Schulman, 1979) and found four factors: reasoning, psychological abuse, physical aggression, and "life-threatening violence." Barling et al. (1987) also identified a fourth factor for psychological aggression. Straus (1990b) reconciles the differences between his 1979 factor analyses and these studies by citing variations in sampling and data collection procedures, as well as modifications of certain CTS items.

Straus (1990b) summarized data from six studies that reported Alpha reliability coefficients for these three scales of the CTS, including three that measured marital violence. For physical aggression,

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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Barling et al. (1987) reported an Alpha coefficient of .88 for husband-to-wife violence; Mitchell and Hodson (1983) reported an Alpha coefficient of .69 for reports by battered women; and Winkler and Doherty (1983) reported an Alpha coefficient of .83 for couples.

Validity Estimates Validation research generally has lagged behind other research efforts in marital violence, with greater interest and attention to epidemiological estimates and tests of etiological theory. Despite the common use of official records in self-report studies of stranger crime (e.g., Hindelang et al., 1981; Elliott and Huizinga, 1984), few studies on marital violence have used either known group differences or external criteria for validation.20

Validity strategies have ranged from parental confirmation of college students' reports of violence in the home (Bulcroft and Straus, 1975), to using reports from a couple to assess agreements on how often and seriously marital violence occurred (Szinovacz, 1983; Browning and Dutton, 1986). However, neither adolescents (Fagan and Wexler, 1987b; Kruttschnitt and Dornfield, 1992) nor parents (Marsh et al., 1983) may be reliable informants about violence in their families. Straus (1979, 1990b) is equivocal about the concurrent validity of the CTS measures, citing evidence that establishes neither their validity nor their invalidity. For example, the highest correlation of parent and student reports in Bulcroft and Straus (1975) was .64, whereas other correlations varied extensively. Weis (1989) suggests that validity is inflated due to same-method effects.

Other studies that estimated concurrent validity show similarly varied results. We have already mentioned the limitations of the NVFS due to reliance on reports from one member of each couple. Yet Szinovacz (1983) found differential validity by respondent characteristics for both spouse assault and child abuse. She found only 40 percent agreement for violence by female spouses in 103 couples, and 27 percent agreement on the male partner's violence, but substantial agreement on the nonoccurrence of violence. Browning and Dutton (1986) reported correlations between men's and women's reports of the husband's violence of .65. Edelson and Brygger (1986) found that female partners of 29 males in treatment reported significantly higher rates of violence than the males for 4 of 13 specific acts. They cautioned that inappropriate treatment decisions might result, endangering female partners of male assailants in treatment.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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O'Leary and Arias (1988) studied 369 couples recruited through newspaper advertisements and radio announcements to assess violence before marriage as an antecedent of later discord and aggression. Overall, agreement rates for violence by either husband and wife were high (68-72%), but agreement on violence by the husband was only moderate (39-40%). Jouriles and O'Leary (1985) reported nearly identical results with samples (N = 65) of couples in marital therapy and matched samples (N = 37) from a nearby community. All these studies examined the validity of prevalence rates from various samples; no studies were found that analyzed concurrent validity on the frequency of violence.

There has been little research on response effects or task effects in family violence research, two other important sources of error. Weis (1989) suggests that marital violence is especially prone to response errors for several reasons: marital violence is highly emotional and often traumatic, it is very salient because of its low frequency but harmful consequences, and it is serial or chronic in that the same behaviors often occur over a long period of time. Response errors also may result from the weak social desirability of violence toward loved ones (Gelles, 1978; Loftus, 1980; Resick and Reese, 1986; cf. Straus, 1990b) and the presence of alcohol in a large percentage of cases (Fagan et al., 1983; Miller et al., 1988). Unfortunately, randomized response techniques (Fox and Tracy, 1986) have been underutilized in research on marital violence. Other sources of error and threats to validity in applications of the CTS include the telephone method of administration in the 1985 survey (i.e., task-related errors), the setting, the anonymity of respondents, the recall period, and respondent characteristics that may affect responses.

Construct validity for the CTS seems to be high because it produces findings consistent with both theoretical and empirical propositions (Straus, 1990b). This includes research on risk factors for violence that are evident in both general population and treatment or clinical samples, marital dynamics of violent and nonviolent couples (Szinovacz, 1983), personality factors associated with both stranger and family violence, and lack of social desirability (Resick and Reese, 1986).

However, the construct validity of the CTS is far weaker when harm and consequence measures are used as criteria (Fagan and Wexler, 1985) or when other measures of violence in marriage are included in the scales, such as marital rape. Straus (1990b) suggests that these strategies confound physical aggression with other domains of marital conflict. Yet this controversy raises the fundamental

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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question of operational definitions of marital violence. Whether marital violence is defined unidimensionally (Straus, 1979, 1990b) or multidimensionally (Hudson and McIntosh, 1981; Alford, 1982; Fagan and Wexler, 1985; Bridges and Weis, 1989) is not simply a matter of preference. These divergent measurement strategies reflects approaches to measurement of a complex phenomenon that occurs in specific contexts and situations. Such factors mediate and shape the very behaviors implied by the term "family" violence. Although criminological research has recognized the multidimensionality of violence and the sensitivity of theory tests to measurement, the hegemony of CTS measures has limited the development of validation criteria in research on marital violence and, in turn, the advance of theory and explanation.

Finally, the wide range of participation rates for Tables 1 and 2 raises questions about the external validity of the findings of the research using self-reports and suggests, as noted earlier, that method-dependent biases (Widom, 1990) may contribute to disparate findings. Sampling decisions in both victimization and self-report methods have excluded vulnerable populations that have reported high rates of victimization or offending in other studies. Specific exclusions have included separated and divorced people and those without telephones.

Some critics (e.g., Pelton, 1979) suggest that valid and reliable self-reports of intrafamilial violence are unattainable. Response effects that emanate from interview formats and item construction are persistent validity threats in both victimization and self-report research on assaults between partners (Weis, 1989). In the context of the family, response effects are especially acute for assaultive behaviors that are frequent, emotionally traumatic, and acted out between people who are intimates and have ongoing relationships that themselves are modified by the violence between them (Gelles, 1978). Weis (1989) poses a research agenda to address these concerns that requires a step back before we take steps forward. The unique methodological issues in research on marital violence suggest the need for greater attention to the psychometric properties of measures and their validity in various study designs and samples. This specifically requires multimethod efforts and multi-indicator research to settle empirically the dimensionality of marital violence and to assess the validity of competing definitions and their measures.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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CHARACTERISTICS OF PERPETRATORS, VICTIMS, AND COUPLES

There has been much research on the prevalence of assaults within marriage, the damage it does, its female victims, and the dynamics of relationships in which violence occurs. There also is much knowledge about marital violence that results in self-defensive homicide by abused women, and about the characteristics of victims who seek help from shelters or other resources for women who are threatened or abused by their partners. Less is known about the characteristics of men who engage in marital violence, or about those men who kill current or ex-wives or girlfriends. Interview studies with women victims have supplied most of the current knowledge, although research with samples of assaultive spouses has grown in recent years. In this section, we summarize knowledge on the characteristics of assaultive partners and couples in which one or both partners are assaultive, and we evaluate the status of current research.

Men Who Engage in Marital Violence

Until recently, research on marital violence has relied on victim reports, mostly from women, for information on the nature of violent events and the characteristics of victims and assailants (see Frieze and Browne, 1989, for a review of this literature). The few studies of violent men have been limited to small samples of repeatedly assaultive participants in treatment programs (Sonkin, 1987; Maiuro et al., 1986), voluntary or self-selected samples (Shields et al., 1988; Rosenbaum and O'Leary, 1981), or assailants identified by the criminal justice system who also frequently are violent (Dutton and Strachan, 1987; Hamberger and Hastings, 1988; Edelson and Brygger, 1986). Accordingly, variations in definitions, researcher effects, sampling strategies, program criteria, and measurement techniques introduce validity threats into the emerging literature on assaultive partners.

For example, clinicians working with abusive or violent men and couples note that men vastly underreport their violent behaviors, minimize the harm it does or its severity, or even deny the behavior (Szinovacz, 1983; Ganley and Harris, 1978; O'Leary and Arias, 1988). Even when confirming their participation in assaultive behaviors, assaultive partners may claim more involvement by the victim (provocation, mutuality) than is justified by either witness or police reports (Sonkin and Durphy, 1985) or may excuse violent behavior as the result of alcohol (Kantor and Straus, 1987). The elements of coercion and social control in criminal justice

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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settings may also affect the validity of self-reports and the assessment of behavioral variables in research with assaultive males. Thus, Dutton (1988a) concludes that differing profiles of wife assaulters may reflect the variations in research strategies more than substantive differences in typologies. With these limitations in mind, this section reviews empirical knowledge on the characteristics of male partners and violent relationships.

Personality Characteristics and Concurrent Behaviors A brief review of profiles of assaultive men reveals a bewildering array of findings. In general, wife abusers have been reported to have the following characteristics: low self-esteem (Ganley and Harris, 1978; Pagelow, 1984; Neidig et al., 1986); extreme jealousy (Davidson, 1978; Rounsaville, 1978; Bowker, 1983); need for control (Elbow, 1977; Fleming, 1979; Browning and Dutton, 1986) but lacking in assertiveness (Rosenbaum and O'Leary, 1981; Telch and Lindquist, 1984); suicidal personality (Browne, 1987); abusiveness toward children (Washburn and Frieze, 1981; Straus, 1983); involvement in alcohol and drug abuse (Walker, 1984; Coleman and Straus, 1983; Kantor and Straus, 1987, 1989; Miller et al., 1988); wide variations in moods (Fleming, 1979; Walker, 1979); hostility or anger (Novaco, 1976; Maiuro et al., 1986); distortion of cognitive perceptions of social cues (Novaco, 1976; Bandura, 1973); strong sex-role stereotypes (Gondolf, 1988; Saunders, 1987); and lack of verbal skills (Novaco, 1976; Browning and Dutton, 1986; Maiuro et al., 1986; Rosenbaum and O'Leary, 1981).

Conditioning and social learning processes also may contribute to the development and habituation of assaultive behavior. Dutton and Strachan (1987) characterized assaultive men as needing to exert power in marital relationships but lacking the verbal resources to do so, which leads to chronic frustration that increases the risk for aggression. Violence may be gratifying and therefore self-reinforcing as a response to marital conflict (Novaco, 1976, cited in Dutton, 1988b). Moreover, once aggressive habits are developed, any form of arousal (even self-generated arousal) can be construed as anger provoking and, in turn, can trigger an incident involving aggression (Bandura, 1973). In this view, assaultive men may be inclined to respond to a variety of stimuli by initiating anger and then aggression toward spouses or partners as a source of gratification (Dutton, 1988a). This in turn may explain the habituation of assault within marriage. However, the interaction of gratification processes and other personality factors is unknown.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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Efforts to develop typologies of assaultive men have tried to reconcile the complex literature on personality factors (see Dutton, 1988a, for a comprehensive review). One of the sources of discrepancy in these findings may be their aggregation of several types of assaultive men into homogeneous categories of assailants. However, as in homicide research, disaggregation of distinct assailant types may result in unique configurations of personality and background characteristics for each type.

Efforts to construct typologies of assaultive men divide them on personality factors (Elbow, 1977; Hamberger and Hastings, 1986a,b; Caesar, 1988), their involvement in violence toward strangers and intimates (Fagan et al., 1983; Shields et al., 1988; Hotaling and Straus, 1989); combinations of assaultive and other behaviors such as alcohol use (Gondolf, 1988); or sex-role stereotyping (Saunders, 1987). However, these efforts have confounded dependent and explanatory variables in typology development. The procedures for typology construction also may contribute to different configurations or typologies. Typologies have been based on cluster analysis (Saunders, 1987), a priori categories (Shields et al., 1988), and principal components techniques (Hamberger and Hastings, 1986a).

Profiles or typologies typically identify more and less assaultive males who vary on the frequency and severity of their behaviors. Typologies also have detected categories in which severe violence and other behaviors (e.g., excessive alcohol use), developmental histories (e.g., childhood exposure to parental violence), or personality factors (sex-role stereotyping) conjoin. For example, Saunders (1987) found one type of severely assaultive male who was abused in his family of origin and also abuses alcohol.

This is a promising strategy for reconciling the complex array of personality factors and behavioral variables evident among assaultive males. Yet much of the research is limited to self-selected samples of wife assaulters (Saunders, 1987) or to reports from victims about their assailants (Gondolf, 1988). Realization of the potential of these strategies for explaining violence awaits further research with samples of both assaultive and nonassaultive men, as well as validation efforts using alternate measures and research designs.

In an effort to sort out the extensive and conflicting evidence on personality and behavioral characteristics that typify assaultive men, Hotaling and Sugarman (1986) reviewed more than 400 empirical studies of husband-to-wife violence. Their review focused on 52 studies that employed case-comparison designs assessing 97 specific variables. Hotaling and Sugarman (1986) identified three

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

"risk markers" that showed consistently strong associations with male violence toward women in case-control or experimental studies: sexual aggression toward wives, experiencing or witnessing violence during childhood, and perpetrating violence toward their own (and/or their partners') children. Alcohol usage also was consistently associated with assaultive behavior by male partners in seven of nine studies reviewed.

Variables that comprise measures of socioeconomic status also were associated with assaultive partners, but the associations obtained in studies with small clinical samples were not replicated with larger general population samples (Straus et al., 1980; Schulman, 1979). Other studies reported curvilinear relationships between either educational or occupational status and assaultive behaviors. Another factor also consistently associated with marital violence (but in a small number of studies) was involvement in violence toward strangers. Sexual aggression toward spouses has been discussed earlier in the section on marital rape. Below, we briefly review research on violence toward both intimates and strangers, childhood exposure to violence, concurrent violence toward children, and alcohol usage among assaultive males.

Alcohol Consumption and Marital Violence A Gallup poll, cited by Coleman and Straus (1983), found that almost one in four respondents believed alcohol to be the cause of family violence. Historical analyses by Pleck (1987) trace popular beliefs about alcohol use and marital violence to the colonial era. Winick (1983) described how popular culture portrays the effects of drinking and drug use on wife assaults: in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, a drunken Stanley Kowalski strikes his pregnant wife Stella and later strikes his sister-in-law Blanche DuBois (herself a former alcoholic) on the night that Stella delivers their first baby. Similar episodes occurred in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, when George and Martha drink through the night and become increasingly abusive to each other, although only verbally.21 In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevski hints (but does not directly imply) that alcohol may have led Dmitri to kill his father. In the 1980s, the musical satirist Kinky Friedman penned the darkly humorous song "I'd Kill My Mother for Another Line of Cocaine." Kantor and Straus (1987) point out that these images not only link substance abuse and family violence, but also depict causal relationships and portray these behaviors as an underclass phenomenon.

Empirical evidence on the contributions of intoxication to aggression

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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in families shows a persistent correlation, especially for severe assaults and injuries, but only for alcohol.22 Several studies mentioned earlier show that the strong correlation is evident in a variety of sampling and measurement conditions. Kantor and Straus (1987) reviewed 15 empirical studies on alcohol and spouse assault, and found a wide range of reports of the presence of alcohol among couples experiencing violence-from 6 to 85 percent. As would be expected, reports on the incidence of alcohol use among assaultive spouses in clinical samples23 were higher than in general population studies or police samples. Using victim reports about assaultive partners, both Gondolf (1988) and Fagan et al. (1983) found that the severity of wife abuse was positively associated with alcohol use by the assailant. Saunders (1987) reported similar results with samples of assaultive men in treatment. Shields et al. (1988) found that men violent only toward their spouses less often used drugs or sought help for drug problems than men violent outside the home, and that alcohol use did not discriminate among different types of assailants.

Two studies examined the incidence of alcohol use in a nationally representative population of families. Coleman and Straus (1983) analyzed data from the first NFVS, which asked about the frequency of intoxication from alcohol but not whether drinking preceded or co-occurred with spouse assault. The frequency of alcohol consumption and assaults between cohabitants were positively associated. Past year rates of assaults were nearly 15 times greater for husbands who were drunk "often" compared to "never" during that time. However, for the most frequent alcohol users (i.e., those who were "almost always" drunk), assault rates were half those of the often drunk respondents.24 The authors conclude that the heaviest drinkers are "anesthetized" both emotionally and physiologically, but although rates of alcohol use were high among assaultive spouses, they were no higher than among the general population.

Kantor and Straus (1987) analyzed data from the 1985 NFVS to examine the "drunken-bum" theory of wife assault by males. Unlike the first version, the second survey asked if there was drinking at the time of a violent incident. In 76 percent of the households where assaults occurred, alcohol was not used immediately prior to the incident. However, after controlling for respondents' usual drinking patterns, there was a positive association between the percentage who were assaultive and drinking immediately prior to assaults. Among "binge" drinkers, nearly half (48.4%) were drinking prior to an assault, compared to fewer than one in five

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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(19.4%) for ''infrequent" drinkers. Analyzing their data by social class and occupational status, Kantor and Straus (1987) found that the relationships of violence to (1) approval of violence, (2) general drinking patterns, and (3) drinking antecedent to violence were strongest for blue-collar workers. However, the authors caution that more than 80 percent of all respondents in the highest-frequency drinking categories did not assault their female partners at all in the year prior to the survey, and nearly two-thirds of blue-collar workers were nonviolent during the study year.

Establishing a precise relationship between intoxication and marital violence is made difficult by variation in measures of spouse assault, alcohol or drug use (frequency, severity of intoxication, and impairment), and sampling and research designs. There also has been little research on ethnic-specific relationships between alcohol and marital violence, despite important distinctions in alcohol and violence patterns among various Hispanic ethnicities (Glick and Moore, 1990). The causal order of marital violence and alcohol use may be difficult to establish or may even reverse in order, depending on specific incidents (Kantor and Straus, 1987).

Experimental research shows that the intoxication-aggression association is mediated by expectancies about the effects of the substance (Taylor, 1983; Fagan, 1990), which in turn reflect cultural norms and beliefs about alcohol. (However, most of the experimental evidence is based on studies with college students and has not been tested with married or cohabitating couples or in the complex context of the home.) Both the Kantor and Straus (1987) and the Coleman and Straus (1983) studies also suggest that expectancies develop through social learning processes: for example, reactions to alcohol and behaviors while intoxicated are observed in the family context (witnessing family violence and the instrumental use of physical aggression).

There are several alternative interpretations of the alcohol-assault relationship in marital violence. Personality factors may interact with intoxicants to contribute to marital violence. Alcohol may modulate psychopathology (Hamberger and Hastings, 1988); that is, it may produce aggression, depression (the "maudlin" drunk), excessive gaiety and exaggerated behavior, or simply a flattened affect. Star (1980) characterized persons violent toward family members as needing power and control, and likens violent male spouses to alcohol users in such characteristics as extreme jealousy, external blame, sexual dysfunction, and bizarre mood shifts. Speiker (1983) found that both assaultive partners and their victims

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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tended to blame alcohol for the violence, and that men used it as an excuse for their violence.

Intoxication and marital violence also may be spuriously associated or explained by some third factor. For stranger violence, there is consistent evidence that the association with intoxicants is spurious and mediated by the context in which intoxication occurs and the social set of individuals in that scene (Fagan, 1990). Shields et al. (1988) found that intoxication preceding assault (from drugs other than alcohol) occurred more often among "generally" and "stranger-only" men than among "family-only" assaultive husbands, and that alcohol did not discriminate among their three types. They interpret both violence and drug use as part of an "overall deviant lifestyle." Alcohol use may be a response to an anger or aggression stimulus that simultaneously provokes assaultive behaviors. For example, needs for power and control have been associated with both marital violence and alcohol use.

Alcohol also may alter cognitions, and thus vary perceptions and interpretations of cues that occur during interactions from neutral to threatening (Taylor, 1983; Frieze and Browne, 1989). Coleman and Straus (1983) draw on deviance disavowal theories to explain behaviors among people who do not view themselves (or their behaviors) as deviant but need some excuse (such as alcohol) for their unacceptable behavior (see also Gelles, 1974). By "explaining" violence toward spouses as the result of intoxication, their social standing and self-image are preserved. The behavior is deviant, but not the individual (see Scott and Lyman, 1968, for a discussion of how people give accounts of their deviant acts).

Intoxication also may provide a "time out" for such deviance to occur. This is similar to the processes described by MacAndrew and Edgerton in their (1969) cross-cultural studies, when the norms for conventional and appropriate behavior can be set aside temporarily. However, this process is seen as the result of some external factor (e.g., intoxicants), rather than as a conscious decision to behave outside acceptable boundaries (see, for example, Critchlow-Leigh, 1986). Coleman and Straus (1983) suggest that these processes actually could promote the behavior by offering an advance excuse for the acts.

Other theories also would apply if we accept the claims of Star (1980) and Speiker (1983) that male violence in the family is an expression of power and control. Power motivation theory (McClelland and Davis, 1972; McClelland, 1975) suggests that drinking and violence may be a means of asserting power and control in

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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the family. However, other studies of family violence (Dobash and Dobash, 1979; Bowker, 1983) conclude that the maintenance of masculine power and control is a motivation for all domestic violence, independent of external factors and without explicit disavowal of their acts.

The findings regarding alcohol and the Bowker (1983) and Dobash and Dobash (1979) studies agree that socioeconomic status also is important and interacts with intoxication to increase the severity of violence. 25 However, the intoxication-family aggression relationship is present even when there is disapproval of violence. Also, the relationship is not confined to working-class men; it is evident among middle-class men who threaten or assault their wives. For middle-class men, processes of deviance disavowal and "time out" may permit the assault of spouses. For working-class men, expectancy of behaviors during intoxication, reinforced by both social learning experiences and societal approval for the use of force within families to assert and to maintain supremacy, may contribute to violence during intoxication. Kantor and Straus (1989) suggest that both processes operate among working-class men. Bowker (1983) found that the men most violent toward spouses were working-class men who were most deeply embedded in "male subcultures," as measured by time spent in bars with male comrades. Thus, the interaction of personality, social network, situation or setting, and cultural norms provides a powerful influence on individual behaviors in the family while intoxicated.

Concurrent Violence Toward Children Family violence researchers have looked most closely at the co-occurrence of wife and child abuse. For example, Washburn and Frieze (1981) found that males who abused their wives were more likely to be abusive toward their children than were nonviolent men. Walker (1979) and Browne (1987) found that extreme violence toward women was associated with violence toward children. Telch and Lindquist (1984) discriminated between maritally violent and nonviolent couples based on the male partner's violence toward children. Similarly, a 1978 evaluation of child abuse programs found that 38 percent of the children in the programs came from families in which the wife was also abused (American Humane Association, 1980). Victims in family violence intervention programs reported that about one male in four physically punished one or more children "too harshly" (Fagan et al., 1984).

However, at least some of the reported child abuse or neglect in maritally violent families may come from the female victim of

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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spouse assault. Gil (1970) found that in families with physically abused children, fathers were more often the abuser, whereas mothers were more likely to be reported as neglecting the child. Reports from battered women's shelters (Fagan et al., 1984) and NCS data (Lentzner and DeBerry, 1980) indicate that some child and adolescent abuse may be the unintended result of parental violence. For instance, the adolescent who attempts to intervene in the parental fight may receive blows intended for the mother.

We reported earlier in Table 3 that 17.4 percent of the men who reported any violence toward the child in the family also reported that they were violent toward their spouse (and female reports of male violence were higher than men's self-reports). Hotaling and Straus (1989) reported both child and spouse assault in 21.6 percent of the 1975 NFVS and 18.4 percent of the 1985 survey. In families for which both spouse and child assault were reported in the 1985 survey, participation rates for husbands in both aggression and severe violence toward strangers were significantly higher than in families for which only one (or no) form of family violence was reported. For example, 6.6 percent of the husbands who assaulted both children and wives also were involved in severe violence toward strangers (involving injury), compared to 0.9 percent of husbands who assaulted only wives but not children (p = .000).

Straus (1983) also reported a strong association between frequent child abuse and severe marital violence in the 1975 NFVS. Of parents reporting no marital violence, 7 to 10 percent frequently abused their children. For those engaged in marital violence, Straus distinguished between "ordinary violence" (or simple assault) and severe violence. More than half of the males who were severely violent toward female partners (about 5% of all male partners) abused their children three or more times during the year prior to the survey. For males involved in "ordinary" violence, less than 15 percent were involved in frequent child abuse. Straus also showed that mothers who were victims of frequent abuse victimized their children more often and more seriously. Although neither cell percentages nor statistics were reported, the sample size and large between-group differences suggest that the results were significant.

Evidently, the risk of generalized violence within the home increases with the frequency and severity of assaults toward any single target of aggression. Nevertheless, the cognitive processes of victim selection are not well understood, and there is insufficient evidence to determine whether personality factors or socialization

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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experiences influence the identity and number of individuals victimized by a violent parent or spouse. Controlled studies using samples of high-risk groups (similar to Shields et al., 1988) may be necessary to take the first steps in understanding victim selection and the generalization of violence in the home.

Childhood Exposure to Violence Exposure to violence as a child-either as a witness of parental violence or as a victim of child abuse-is an important precursor of adult violence toward children or toward spouses (Gelles, 1974; Pagelow, 1984; Fagan et al., 1983; Straus, 1983; Hotaling and Sugarman, 1986; Browne, 1987; Caesar, 1988; Rosenbaum and O'Leary, 1981). Most studies have cited the importance of childhood exposure to violence in later domestic violence (see Browne, 1987:23-35). The strength of the link to subsequent involvement in marital violence has been revealed in a variety of reports. In general, both national and special population studies indicate the following:

  • Boys and girls are more at risk to abuse their own children as adults if they were abused themselves as children or adolescents.

  • Both boys and girls, but particularly boys, are at increased risk to abuse an intimate partner in later adult relationships if they were abused as children or adolescents.

  • Boys are at greatly increased risk to abuse female partners in adult relationships if they witnessed abuse between parental figures in their childhood homes.

  • Girls are at somewhat increased risk to be abused by a male partner in adulthood if they witnessed abuse in their childhood homes.

  • Children who have both experienced child (or adolescent) abuse and witnessed abuse between parental figures demonstrate a sharply increased risk of being involved in an abusive relationship as adults, compared to individuals without these dual experiences (e.g., Straus et al., 1980; Kalmuss, 1984; Hotaling and Sugarman, 1986).

In a review of case-control studies, Hotaling and Sugarman (1986) found childhood exposure to violence for males to be a particularly strong risk factor for marital violence as an adult. They differentiated between witnessing violence as a child, a strong risk factor, and being a victim of violence by a parent or caregiver. Nevertheless, Hotaling and Sugarman (1986:111) concluded that "the use and past exposure to violent behavior is common in the

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

lives of batterers." Other studies have shown that from 37 to 47 percent of male assailants had witnessed parental violence, and about a third had been beaten or frequently suffered harsh discipline as children (e.g., Fagan et al., 1983).

In a study of the backgrounds of 270 men involved in marital violence (men who assaulted their partners) compared to "generally" violent men, childhood exposure to violence was the strongest predictor (explaining 26% of the variance) of involvement in both intra-and extrafamilial violence (Fagan et al., 1983). This study also found that the same variables were strong predictors of the severity of injury to the spouse, especially among those involved in "generally" violent behavior.

Pagelow (1984) provides specific examples of the social psychological processes that comprise intergenerational transmission: the internalization of violence through modeling, reinforcement, opportunities for practice, and teaching of its functional value. Miller and Challas (1981) offer a more complex view. They found that childhood violence experiences were mediated by other factors, including poverty and educational attainment. Rather than becoming violent adults, child abuse victims may instead lead adult lives marked by poor socialization, financial dependency, and emotional instability. Such detailed analyses may explain the differential contributions of intermittent versus contingent childhood victimization toward later violence.

Although empirical evidence underscores the importance of early childhood socialization to violence, intergenerational theories have not adequately specified the structures, processes, and contingencies that shape the "transfer" of violence from one generation to the next. Moreover, social learning processes may be mitigated by other socialization processes (Widom, 1988). Intergenerational theory suggests that abusive parents serve as role models for their children, who learn that such family behavior is normative, is an acceptable mode for dealing with anger and conflict (Straus, 1979), and-most important-has a functional value in establishing and maintaining dominance and control in the marital relationship.

Lacking in these theories, however, are constructs that describe the natural or social processes whereby values are transmitted or behaviors modeled. For example, learning may occur through an accumulation of small transactions or in major events, and can be reinforced by either social rewards or some other form of gratification. Accordingly, Bowker (1983) suggests that the maintenance of power in the relationship may have elements of gratification that are powerful reinforcers.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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Marital Violence and Stranger Violence A few studies have attempted to explore the involvement of wife batterers in other violent behaviors. Gayford (1975) found that 50 percent of a sample of wife abusers reportedly had spent time in prison, and 33 percent of these prison terms were for violent offenses toward strangers (although Gayford's sample was highly skewed toward extreme behaviors). Flynn (1977), in a study of abused women, found that at least one-third of the assailants had previous records of other types of criminal assaults, and Walker (1979) estimated that 20 percent of the husbands of the women she interviewed were violent with other individuals besides their wives. White and Straus (1981) reported that men who are violent toward their wives were arrested or convicted for a "serious" crime (a property or violence crime toward a stranger) at almost twice the rate-and "severely" violent husbands at almost four times the rate-of nonviolent spouses.

Only recently has there been any systematic study on the intersection of these behaviors. Using newspaper advertisements and chain referral methods (Biernacki and Waldorf, 1981), Shields et al. (1988) recruited men from the St. Louis area who had committed assaults against their female partners or toward strangers. Through interviews, they examined socialization patterns and other characteristics of three types of violent men: those violent only toward spouses, those violent only toward persons outside the family, and the overlapping "generally" violent men. Their results suggest that "generally" violent men and men violent only toward non-family members are virtually indistinguishable in terms of background characteristics, but that wife abusers were in fact quite different in terms of social structural variables (e.g., socioeconomic status), educational attainment, attitudes, and prior conviction rates. However, these patterns were far from static: nearly 45 percent of the "generally" violent men began their adult violence careers victimizing only non-family members.

Fagan et al. (1983), based on reports from 270 women in family violence intervention programs, found that 46 percent of spouse abusers had been arrested previously for other violence. These men were also the most frequently and severely violent in the home. The most violent spousal assailants were also those who were violent toward strangers, whereas those less violent at home usually were not violent toward strangers. The longer the duration and more severe the abuse at home, the more likely were these men to also assault strangers. This finding is consistent with Frieze et al. (1980), whose severely battering husbands were

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

more likely to have been involved in fights outside the home than were "mildly" violent (or nonviolent) husbands.

Bandura (1973) cautions that different types of violence may have different determinants. Consistent with this, some researchers have argued that family violence in general-and spousal violence in particular-are special and distinct types of violence and should not be viewed as a subset of violent behavior (Dobash and Dobash, 1979; Wardell et al., 1983). The few studies of generally violent men show, however, that they are more similar to stranger assailants than to those violent only within their families (Shields and Hannecke, 1983).

In sum, adult violence in general, and particularly the more severe forms of marital violence by men, may be strongly linked to childhood exposure to violence and to early socialization experiences. Thus, it seems that for at least some individuals, "violence begets violence" and may well be passed through generations. This suggests that our knowledge of adult violence by males toward both strangers and family members may be enhanced by knowledge of violence socialization in early childhood, as well as by evidence of adult violence toward intimates. What remain unknown are exactly how such socialization occurs-how it is perceived, learned, and reinforced, both in childhood and during other crucial developmental stages-and the mediating variables and cognitive processes that influence the substance of what is learned. Missing also from this framework is the specific trigger that allows the lessons of early childhood to be activated.

Women Victims of Marital Violence

For many years, empirical research on marital violence focused predominantly on women, most of whom were victims who had sought services. The types of services sought by victims are associated with their social and economic circumstances, as well as with the severity of assaults and injuries they sustained (Frieze and Browne, 1989; Fagan et al., 1984). Moreover, help-seeking behaviors further influence the characteristics of victims in different settings. Accordingly, knowledge of victim' backgrounds was confined for some time to higher-risk groups of women whose resources limited them to public services. For example, Washburn and Frieze (1980), in a study in southwestern Pennsylvania, reported systematic differences among groups of women in shelters, women who filed for legal assistance, and women who responded to a research solicitation. Shelter clients more often were separated

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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from their partners, were African American, and were unemployed. They were younger, had lower incomes and were less educated, and more often had small children. They had the fewest resources and were most in need of financial support. Other women in the study commented that they preferred to seek temporary shelter with relatives or to use credit cards to pay for a motel.

Women who had filed for legal assistance comprised an intermediate group. They were separated, worked full time, had higher educational and family income levels than women in shelters, and had older children. Their racial composition was consistent with the area makeup. They experienced similar levels of violence to the women in shelters, but more often were violent toward their male partners. They less often expressed powerlessness, and they felt that they were doing something to change the situation. The third group, respondents to solicitations, most often were still married to their assailants and generally had higher socioeconomic status. Their victimizations had not occurred recently, and they had experienced the least serious violence among the three groups.

Fagan et al. (1984), in a sample of nearly 2,800 victims in 23 intervention programs across the country, reported similar differences in victim characteristics according to the type of program service and setting. Consistent with Washburn and Frieze (1980), shelter victims were younger, poorer, and less educated, and more often had small children than participants in legal or other social interventions. Women in shelters had experienced more frequent and serious abuse, although women in other groups had longer histories of marital violence. Shelter residents more often reported abuse during pregnancy, miscarriages due to abuse, and sexual assaults by their spouses. Also, they had more often witnessed violence between their parents as children.

The NFVS, NCS, and other general population studies indicated the diverse socioeconomic backgrounds of victims. Although these studies indicated that younger women from lower social class backgrounds more often were victims of both simple and severe marital violence, the association with social class and income was weaker but still positive.

Other than their abuse histories and socioeconomic status, there do not appear to be consistent patterns that differentiate women victims from nonvictims. Hotaling and Sugarman's (1986) review of 52 case-control studies found that only one of 42 potential risk markers for women-witnessing parental violence as a

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

child or adolescent-was consistently associated with being a victim of marital violence. This was also the one factor that characterized both assaultive spouses and their victims. Neither personality nor behavioral characteristics were evident as risk markers for women in the Hotaling and Sugarman review. For example, the weight of empirical evidence suggests that alcohol use does not distinguish women victims from other women.26 Many of the symptoms that victims exhibit evidently are sequelae of marital violence rather than antecedents or concurrent factors (Walker, 1984; Margolin, 1988).

Patterns of Homicide Between Intimates

There is little information on the characteristics and dynamics of couples in which marital homicides occur. Wolfgang (1967) reported that 60 percent of the men who were killed by spouses "precipitated" their own deaths through physical violence toward their spouses, compared to 5 percent of the women perpetrators. Wilbanks (1983) reported similar findings: Men killed by their spouses were more likely to have been violent toward those spouses than were the victims of male offenders. Other studies show that marital homicide is often the culmination of a lengthy history of violence and threats (Browne, 1987; Chimbos, 1978; Gillespie, 1988). Jurik and Winn (1990) found that 86 percent of the women perpetrators of homicide reported physical conflicts with their male partner-victims, and 44 percent of the homicides resulted directly from conflict with their partners (defined as domestic disputes, marital violence, or conflicts over property). However, among male perpetrators, 27 percent reported prior physical conflict with their victims, and only 8 percent reported partner conflict.

Chimbos (1978) found that nearly all the female perpetrators had been beaten by their partners. Women victims of marital violence accounted for 40 percent of all women convicted of murder or manslaughter in an Illinois women's correctional center (Lindsey, 1978). In a study of women incarcerated in California for killing their partners, Totman (1978) stated that 93 percent reported being physically abused and 67 percent said that the homicide was in defense of themselves or a child. Lindsey and other researchers also reported that these women had frequently called the police for help prior to the fatal incident (Frieze and Browne, 1989).

Recent studies have examined the characteristics of abusive relationships in which women commit partner homicides. Browne

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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(1986, 1987) compared 42 cases of women charged with the death or serious injury of their mates (based on in-depth, face-to-face pretrial interviews, as well reviews of available evidence) with 205 cases in which women were in abusive relationships but did not take severely violent action. Several factors distinguished the homicide group from the abuse-only group: Men in the homicide group were more likely to abuse alcohol-many were intoxicated daily or nearly every day by the end of the relationship (80 versus 40%); they were more likely to use street drugs (primarily cocaine) (29 versus 8%); and they were more likely to have made threats to kill the woman and others (89 versus 59%). Physical attacks on women in the homicide group were more frequent, and more severe in terms of the infliction of injuries. Women in the homicide group also were more likely to have been sexually abused-and sexually abused frequently-by their partners than women in the nonhomicide group (respectively, 75 versus 59%) had been sexually assaulted by their mates at least once). All of these differences were statistically significant.

In addition, men in the homicide group were significantly more likely to abuse their own or their partners' children (71 versus 51%). They also were the most violent toward strangers and more often had witnessed violence between parental figures (according to the womens' reports). Most (92%) of the men in the homicide group had arrest histories ranging from drunk driving to murder, compared to almost none of the women. In the majority of cases resulting in homicide, the severity of the man's violence and threats toward family members escalated over time, although the frequency of violent assaults showed varying patterns. As previously noted, almost all of the women in the homicide group had sought intervention from the criminal justice system, obviously without success, before the fatal event (see also Lindsey, 1978; Saltzman et al., 1990; and Sherman and Berk, 1984, as cited in Browne and Williams, 1989).

Just as homicide is the extreme violent act, early studies suggest that relationships in which marital homicide occurs might be the most violent of all relationships before homicide occurs. (As mentioned earlier, however, little detail is known about abuse histories in relationships in which men kill their female partners, due in part to the paucity of research on this topic and in part to the difficulty of obtaining reports from male abusers that accurately reflect frequency, severity, or actions.) These cases also represent the greatest disparity between the need for help and the ineffectiveness of protective interventions. Later, we discuss the

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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social psychological processes that explain how a nonviolent women can commit a homicide under these circumstances.

RISK FACTORS FOR MARITAL VIOLENCE

From the accumulation of knowledge on marital violence, patterns are evident in the characteristics of individuals and couples who engage in, or are victimized by, assaultive behaviors. These characteristics comprise a set of epidemiological risk factors to assess the probability of the occurrence of partner assault (see Last, 1983, for a discussion of the concept of ''risk marker"). The probability of assaultive behavior within a couple is associated with any of these factors individually, and the probability increases as a function of the number of factors present.27 Obviously, the presence of risk factors within a family should not be construed as a causal relationship. It is difficult to explain, for example, how age "causes" spouse assault. In the following material, risk factors that are associated with the occurrence of marital violence are discussed. The presence of combinations of these factors, in turn, suggests explanatory frameworks for understanding their contributions to marital violence. These frameworks are discussed later in this paper.

Risk Factors Shared by Both Partners

The presence of risk factors shared by both partners suggests a strong probability of the occurrence of partner assault within that family. Three factors are evident as risks for both males and females: witnessing family violence as a child or adolescent, age, and problematic alcohol use. Although Hotaling and Sugarman (1986) found weak evidence of alcohol use as a risk of victimization of women in their review of case-control studies, recent evidence (Kantor and Straus, 1987; Miller et al., 1988) more consistently suggests a greater use of alcohol among women victims compared to nonvictims. Moreover, Miller et al. (1988) also found associations of both victimization and problematic alcohol use with women's childhood exposure to marital violence.

Age is correlated with marital violence for men, but only weakly for women. Age also is a consistent risk marker for men's involvement in stranger violence (see Sampson and Lauritsen, in this volume) and nonviolent crime (Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1986). Correspondingly, consistent evidence in probability samples and community surveys shows the greater risk of victimization among

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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younger women. The evidence on witnessing violence for both men and women (Goodwin and Guze, 1984) is discussed earlier, as are patterns of alcohol use among assaultive males.

Risk Factors for Wife Assaults by Males

Empirical evidence indicates that males who are most frequently and severely assaultive toward female partners also are assaultive toward others in the family and toward strangers. Accordingly, risk factors for frequent and severe wife assault include assaults against female partners during their pregnancy, sexual violence toward women partners, physical (and/or sexual) victimization of their own or their partners' children, and assaults on strangers. The convergence of violent behaviors among the most seriously assaultive males strongly suggests a generalized pattern of violence with indiscriminate processes of victim selection, although intimate victims are likely to experience the most frequent-and possibly the most severe-assaults.

Family income and socioeconomic status are risk markers for assaults by men, but not for victimization of women. They may also be mediating influences through which attitudes supportive of marital violence can be reinforced (Bowker, 1983; Smith, 1990). However, as in the study of social class and violence generally (Brownfield, 1986), measurement and sampling problems suggest caution in weighing these factors. Nevertheless, the evidence on educational attainment and occupational status (but not unemployment per se) is consistent with the findings on family income level.

Personality characteristics overall do not appear to be risk factors for partner assault by males, with the exception of verbal skills and assertiveness. Assertiveness deficits were found in several studies (e.g., Rosenbaum and O'Leary, 1981; Telch and Lindquist, 1984; Dutton and Browning, 1988).

Attitudes toward traditional sex roles did not appear to be consistent risk factors in case-control studies (Hotaling and Sugarman, 1986), but sex-role orientation may contribute to spouse assault by males as cultural or ecological factors (Yllo, 1983, 1988; Dutton, 1988b), rather than as situational factors or microsocial interactional processes. For example, concentrated attitudes regarding male dominance, objectification of women as chattel, and warrior-like virility have been validated as a scale of hypermasculinity by Sullivan and Mosher (1990). In experimental studies with college men using guided imagery, Mosher and Tomkins (1988) found

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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that hypermasculinity contributed to attitudes supportive of marital rape among a voluntary sample of 146 college men.

In telephone interviews with a probability sample of 604 Toronto women, Smith (1990) found that male partners who (in the view of their female partners) expressed attitudes and beliefs supportive of patriarchy (defined as power of males over women in the home regarding money, social interactions, and sex) were significantly more likely to engage in marital violence in the past year. They also expressed approval for the use of violence against wives in response to arguments, defiance of their will, or insults. Smith goes on to describe "patriarchical wife beaters" as low-income spouses, less educated, and in relatively low-status jobs.

Viewing sex-role orientation as a proximal influence may mask the actual contributions of pervasive attitudinal factors toward wife assault. Moreover, most research on sex roles has focused on the presence of these attitudes, rather than on their strength. Yet other research (Saunders et al., 1987) shows that the strength of sex-role expectations is associated with attitudes supportive of the assault of female partners. Accordingly, traditional sex-role orientation appears to be a risk factor, although it appears to be more appropriately conceived as a distal influence medicated through other individual or situational factors. Thus, as we discuss further, male assailants whose sex-role orientation is strongest may use it as a cultural defense, a neutralization technique (Sykes and Matza, 1957), or as an account (Scott and Lyman, 1968) or excuse for wife assault.

Risk Factors for Victimization Among Women

Fewer risk markers are evident for victimization of women. Witnessing violence as children or adolescents and problematic alcohol use are consistent risk factors. However, there is little evidence to confirm the temporal order of drinking and victimization, leaving open the question of drinking as a reciprocal process or response to assaults. Pregnancy and either separation or divorce also place women at greater risk during victimization by spouses or partners. Unlike the evidence for males, social structural variables are weakly associated with victimization of women, with the exception of age. Evidence of victims' traditional sex-role orientation is weak and inconclusive. Hotaling and Sugarman (1986) report no other research that has uncovered personality variables or predispositions that are valid risk factors for women's

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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victimization (e.g., passivity, aggressivity, hostility, dominance) or that can discriminate victims from women not victimized.

Risk Factors for Assaults in Couple Relationships

Risk factors for wife assault within couples generally describe either demographic characteristics or relationship dynamics. Family social status (income, specifically) is a consistent risk marker, as are the recency of separation or divorce and the recency of the start of the relationship. Couples that are socially isolated and have status differentials due to educational or occupational incompatibility are at greater risk. Marital power, a complex concept involving decision-making power, access to resources, and status variables, evidently is a factor, but Hotaling and Sugarman (1986) caution that this attribute interacts with other variables (e.g., absolute resources of the family, tactics used to assert power) in the occurrence of spousal assault. However, these variables are consistently risk factors for victims of severe violence (Walker, 1984; Browne, 1987).

Theoretical Implication of Risk Factors

These risk factors suggest several important trends with implications for the explanation of wife assault and its connections to other forms of violence. First, the results suggest that, for women victims, only variables relating to their socioeconomic and marital status place them at greater risk. There is little evidence regarding personality variables that place women at risk for victimization, and there seem to be no factors suggesting that women contribute to their own victimization. Second, the consistent evidence for both men and women that witnessing violence as a child contributes to either assault or victimization supports social learning explanations. Witnessing violence evidently conveys functional value to spouse assault that differs for men and women, or may even establish it as a normative behavior that does not require a response. Similar research on the intergenerational nature of alcohol use also suggests that these factors may converge across generations.

Third, the generalized and multiple violence of seriously assaultive male partners suggests that explanations of violent behavior within families and toward strangers may be reconciled. Although there appear to be unique processes and factors that make women partners more frequent targets of violence, the co-occurrence of multiple

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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forms of violence also suggests that victim selection is a meditating process in need of further theoretical attention. Related to this is the fourth implication: risk factors for stranger violence overlap extensively with risk factors for wife assault. As wife assault becomes more serious, both the behaviors and the risk factors become nearly isomorphic. There is consistent evidence that severe violence toward both female partners and strangers is part of a generalized pattern of violence with shared risk factors. In turn, stranger and wife assaults seem to be dimensions of violence careers.

Fifth, the convergence of risk factors that implicate social class and social status for assaultive males suggests that there are social structural correlates of wife assault similar to stranger assaults. What is unknown is whether the assault of female partners is concentrated in areas marked by social disorganization, poverty, and other ecological risk factors of stranger violence. The correlation among men of social class and social structural variables with participation in both wife assault and stranger violence suggests that for some wife assaults, there are risk factors that reflect social area effects and social disorganization. These include the salience of formal and informal social controls, the anonymity of urban areas with high residential mobility, limited economic mobility, and patterns of family disintegration. Ecological studies of marital homicide show the association of these factors; their correlation with partner assaults is suggested but unproven.

Finally, cultural factors, such as orientation toward traditional sex roles and partriarchical beliefs,28 seem to interact with situational and personality variables that are risk factors for assaults by males. These factors may also be ecological risk factors for aggregate rates of spouse assault (Yllo, 1983, 1988) or homicide (Browne and Williams, 1989). Viewing them as ecological factors suggests influences that are mediated by social interactions, social structural variables, and specific situations in the occurrence of marital violence. An ecological approach is discussed in the next section.

Risk factors, of course, are not causal factors. They reflect the convergence of epidemiological factors, co-occurring behaviors, consequences of partner assault, and status variables. Few studies on wife assault have examined risk factors while controlling for the severity of marital violence (Fagan et al., 1984). Alternate methods, such as multiple group designs to introduce these controls, also are not common in the literature on marital violence. Whether the configuration of risk factors differs by level of violence—and

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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their mutability as relationships evolve and violence progresses—also are not clear. This does not diminish the significance of risk factors for developing conceptual frameworks and explanations of marital violence.

EXPLANATORY FRAMEWORKS

There is a basic difference between the causes of crime and its occurrence (Clarke and Cornish, 1985). The explanatory theories that address initial involvement in a behavior may address neither its continuance nor its desistance. Farrington (1979) has suggested that the different stages of a criminal career may require different explanations, whereas Blumstein et al. (1985) proposed that the predictors of noninvolvement in crime may differ from the predictors of early desistance and persistent crime. Strategies to typify assaultive spouses or couples experiencing violence also reveal that each group may reflect unique etiological factors (Dutton, 1988a). Explanations of physical aggression between adult partners range from cultural embeddedness to more individually based theories. In this section, we review some of the more prominent explanatory constructs and offer suggestions for an integration of theories to encompass individual and environmental influences.

PATRIARCHY, SOCIAL NETWORKS, AND SOCIAL EMBEDMENT

Early theories on marital violence, particularly those describing violence by husbands toward wives, viewed this aggression as an outworking of a culture that engendered and maintained the domination of men over women in every aspect of social life (e.g., Martin, 1976; Dobash and Dobash, 1979; Walker, 1979). Dobash and Dobash (1979) describe partriarchical influence as culturally normative (Yllo, 1988), whereas Straus (1976) refers to the marriage license as a "hitting license." These theorists contend that the beliefs that support marital violence simply express more general cultural norms and values that uphold a hierarchical, patriarchal social organization. Such norms have been linked with wife assault in empirical studies in the United Kingdom (Dobash and Dobash, 1979), Canada (Smith, 1990), and the United States (Bowker, 1984; Yllo and Straus, 1984).

To explain the contributions of patriarchy to marital violence, economic inequalities and cultural portrayals of women are cited as manifestations of male orientation and hegemony (Dobash and Dobash, 1979; Pagelow, 1984). Straus (1976) identified nine specific

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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manifestations of a male-dominant structure that support wife assault 29 and concluded that the relative weakness of criminal penalties in wife assault cases (until the 1980s) reflects cultural norms that have resulted in the institution of marriage carrying with it an (implied or explicit) immunity to prosecution for abuse by the male partner. Economic inequalities place a lesser value on women's labor or social contributions and reinforce the dominant role played by men in most labor markets. Fewer women occupy elective office than men, and popular culture offers fewer portrayals of women in egalitarian social positions in cinema, television, or print media. These cultural and economic indicators reflect women's lower social status, in turn reinforcing male attitudes of superiority and the legitimation of domination. Smith (1990) showed empirically that the strength of these attitudes explained marital violence by men (reported by women) in a representative sample of Toronto women.

Less clear, however, are the origins of cultural norms that emphasize male domination or the processes that translate such cultural norms into specific socialization processes that contribute to or attenuate a propensity for assaultive behavior. Subcultural explanations of marital violence emphasize the translation of broader cultural norms into microsocial interactions within specific networks. Bowker (1984) concluded that the better integrated the assaultive husband was in male subcultures, the more severe was his violence in the home.30 He located gratification from wife assault in the realm of patriarchal imperatives: the cultural transmission of values that demand male domination, and the reinforcement of those values through socialization as children in male-dominated families and later social embedment in violence-supporting social relationships in a violence-tolerant culture. The importance of reinforcing societal values, modeled in early childhood and refined in adult years, indicates that both environmental (or normative) supports for domination of women as a group and situational interactions at a social or subcultural level contribute to male violence toward women. Bowker (1984:135) contends that:

the myriad peer-relationships that support the patriarchal dominance of the family and the use of violence to enforce it may constitute a subculture of violence. The more fully a husband is immersed in this subculture, the more likely he is to batter his wife.

An expansion of these theories is needed to account for individuals raised in families not headed by a male figure. However,

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

the reinforcement of values of male domination and power is likely to occur through myriad independent social networks that tacitly condone violence toward women or at least fail to sanction it negatively. Embedment in these networks poses a high risk of severe violence in the home. In addition, engulfment within a network of social relationships often minimizes attachments to people in other social networks (Eckland-Olsen, 1982), limiting exposure to other cultural or belief orientations. With social embedment comes the gratification of social acceptance and social identity, often built up over a lifetime of socialization. Alternatively, abandoning the assaultive behavior and losing control in the home may risk social disapproval. The more deeply embedded he is in the social context, the more dependent the assailant may become on that social world for approval and for a positive interpretation of his behavior. Conversely, desistance from marital violence has been shown to be associated with changes in the micronetworks that comprise the social worlds of assailants (Fagan, 1989; Bowker, 1983, 1986a).

POWER, CONTROL, AND DOMINATION

Although power motivation theories were first developed by McClelland and colleagues (McClelland et al., 1972; McClelland and Davis, 1972; McClelland, 1975) regarding drinking behaviors, they follow naturally from patriarchal theories as explanations of assaults by males against their female partners. The basic premise unifying the more recent integration of these theories is that assault is used to assert or maintain power within the relationship, particularly the power to gain victories in confrontations. Straus (1978) and Browne (1987) argue that one episode of violence can permanently alter the balance of marital power toward a strongly husband-dominant pattern. However, the empirical evidence about marital power is inconclusive (Hotaling and Sugarman, 1986), because the conceptualization and measurement of power and adherence to traditional sex-role expectations vary extensively.31

Other studies emphasize the importance of power balances in a partner relationship. Using a three-group design, Dutton and Strachan (1987) assessed assaultive male spouses, "maritally conflicted" male spouses, and "satisfactorily married" males on their power motives, and successfully classified more than 90 percent of the subjects. In a similar effort, Coleman and Straus (1986), using 1975 NFVS data, found that marital violence was lowest in ''egalitarian" couples that shared domestic chores and decisions.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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However, both male and female aggression was highest in couples in which females were dominant (i.e., had the greatest influence in decision making and control over resources). Thus, in couples in which the female partner has greater access to resources and/or decision-making power, female aggression may be either a response to male aggression or an aggressive reaction to confrontations over power.

Power motives and adherence to patriarchical ideology converge in research on patriarchy and marital violence. The translation of partriarchical ideology into specific attitudes or perceptions of marital power is evident in empirical work by Straus (1976:note 29), Yllo and Straus (1984), and Smith (1990). (Others, such as Dobash and Dobash, 1979, view patriarchy as a system of economic and cultural control that preserves the dominance and power of males over women.) For example, Smith's items measuring patriarchical attitudes include (1) men's control over whether women work outside the home, (2) men's control over women's social activities, (3) the importance of showing that the male is head of the house, and (4) a man's right to have sex with his wife/partner, even when she does not want to.

If males are socialized to expect dominance or power within the relationship, aggression may be initiated from frustration over an inability to control their female partners. For example, Smith's items for approval of violence against wives confound marital power with violence. He includes in this scale items on violence to exert one's wishes, violence in response to insults, violence to enforce behavioral codes (e.g., prohibitions against a wife's drinking), violence to retaliate for infidelity, and violence in response to a woman's physical aggression.

Issues of intimacy and the threat of dependency also may trigger violence in partner relationships. According to Browning and Dutton (1986), males experience anger most readily in circumstances in which they perceive an impending loss of control over either intimacy or distance. For example, using vignettes, Browning and Dutton found that men reported anger at women's attempts at autonomy in the relationship, as well as attempts by women partners to intensify levels of intimacy and commitment. Unsatisfied power needs may produce physiological arousal that is interpreted as anger and, especially for males with limited verbal skills, may be expressed through physical aggression. Similarly, increased demands for intimacy may be fear producing, and trigger verbal or physical assaults as a mechanism to increase distance and restore the "balance of power" to the male's control.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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Threats to hegemony or control may also result from the male's emotional dependence on, or intimacy with, the victim (Browne, 1987). Browne suggests that many men have been conditioned to fear emotions they interpret as weakness. Thus, when they experience these emotions, they may look for alternate explanations and put the blame on others (e.g., their women partners) for "making" them feel uncomfortable or simply for making them feel too much. In a comparative study, women in severely abusive relationships reported being attacked because the man cared. Just the perception that another person was so vital to his daily existence and happiness became something to defend against: The man's need for the woman seemed to him a power in her hands, and he would lash out to balance the equation (Browne, 1987). (See also Dutton and Browning's, 1987, 1988, discussions of power struggles and intimacy anxieties as causative factors in wife assault.) For boys raised in an abusive environment, later feelings of dependency or vulnerability may be unbearable. The arousal engendered by emotions of love and desire becomes more anxiety provoking than pleasant. Thus, in addition to proactive desires for dominance and control, the neutralization of dependence and the reassertion of emotional distance may also be powerful reinforcers of marital violence.

Finally, the gratification that men experience from marital hegemony and male domination may also reinforce aggressive behaviors. Gratification from marital violence may come from achieving/maintaining the instrumental motive of dominance, from the expressive release of anger and aggression in response to perceived power deficits, from attainment of the positive social status that domination affords, or even from the "hearts-and-flowers" aftermath of many battering incidents (e.g., see Walker, 1979).

Evidence of the cessation of marital violence following restoration of the balance of marital power further suggests the importance of power equality in the prevention of violence (Bowker, 1983, 1986a). Bowker suggested that the involvement of external sources of social control (legal and social, as well as kinship networks) was a successful strategy in equalizing power relationships as an antecedent to the cessation of wife assault. In support of this theory, an association between egalitarian decision making and nonviolence was reported by Coleman and Straus (1986) using the 1985 NFVS data. In discussing criminal justice sanctions, Dunford et al. (1989) suggest that the significance of police involvement-although not necessarily by arrest-is the reallocation of marital power to victims to control offenders' behaviors

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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through the threat of legal sanction (in this case, outstanding warrants for their arrest).

In the extreme case of partner homicide, Browne and Williams (1989) found that simply the presence of resources such as domestic violence legislation, shelters, and other services for abused women was associated with a sharp decline in rates of all female-perpetrated partner homicides. Although it is known that only a minority of abused women go to shelters or become involved in legal action against their mates, Browne and Williams theorized that such resources may have symbolic as well as tangible significance, because the existence of legal and extralegal sanctions both provides a social statement that supports victims' perceptions of the seriousness of such violence and may engender a sense of empowerment and alternatives. Thus, empowerment is one explanation for the deterrent effect of legal sanctions.

EARLY CHILDHOOD SOCIALIZATION: WITNESSING AND OBSERVING VIOLENCE

As noted earlier, an individual-level explanation of marital violence is that such behavior has been modeled for both victims and assailants (Pagelow, 1984; Hotaling and Sugarman, 1986; Browne, 1987). In particular, social learning analyses view aggressive habits as developing from the learning experiences of individuals and focus on the original milieus in which such habits are acquired (e.g., by observation in the family of origin), the instigators or aversive stimuli in the current environment that trigger aggression, and the maintenance of aggressive habits through the immediate consequences that reward or punish such aggression (Dutton, 1988b). Thus, sex-role socialization may interact with observation of instrumental violence in the family of origin to shape perceptions of aversive circumstances (such as female independence) and acceptable or socially desirable responses. Further, the salience of social and legal controls in later years may determine whether circumstances reinforce or extinguish these socially learned responses.

Lessons of a Violent Home

Children growing up in violent homes learn much about the instrumental value of violence. Bandura (1973) showed that children in a laboratory setting remember and then imitate aggressive actions that are modeled for them. He also found that boys imitated

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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these behaviors more spontaneously than girls, even when not directly encouraged to do so. Acts performed by an adult male were more likely to be imitated than those performed by women, especially among male children. Children's imitation was equally strong when the male was someone they knew well but did not like, as when the child had a nurturing relationship with the male (see Pagelow, 1984).

The context of these lessons is the cultural perpetuation of a dominant role for males, which facilitates the adoption of force or threat as a model for interpersonal interactions (Herzberger, 1983). Thus, boys are encouraged as children to control their own circumstances, to express anger directly, and to not back down or compromise. When faced with a loss of control in adult (marital) relationships or frustration in their efforts to remain dominant, men raised in a violent home are more likely to respond with violence.

Men raised in violent homes also more quickly and acutely perceive threats or loss of control. Like women victims, men who grow up in violent homes experience feelings of helplessness, fear, and loss of control over their own safety, even when they themselves are not victims. As children, they may come to hate the abuser, yet still learn that the most violent person in the household also seems to be the most powerful and the least vulnerable to attack or humiliation by others (Browne, 1987). Thus, when these men perceive a threat of emotional pain or loss of control in an adult relationship, they may follow early models by resorting to violence themselves, in an attempt to avoid the potential for further victimization and pain.

Within this theoretical framework, violent behaviors learned during early childhood socialization are either strengthened or inhibited during later developmental stages by the family's connection to the broader culture and its sociocultural reinforcers (e.g., perceptions of neighborhood attitudes and behavioral norms toward violence and sex roles) (Dutton, 1985), or by the perceived deterrent effects of sanctions (Bowker, 1983; Sherman and Berk, 1984). As in social learning during adolescent years, such ecological factors may well serve to inhibit violence toward either nonfamily members, spouses, or perhaps both.

CAREERS IN VIOLENCE

Career criminal research has identified distinct phases through which behavioral patterns develop, escalate, are maintained, and

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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eventually desist. Earlier, we discuss empirical research on these career phases in marital violence. Blumstein et al. (1985) contends that different variables are needed to explain behaviors in each of these phases. Fagan (1989) specifically addressed the variables that influence the maintenance and desistance of marital violence by males. Moreover, there seem to be important differences between assailants who victimize only spouses and those who are "generally violent." However, few studies have examined the course of battering "careers," or changes in victimization patterns within and outside the family. Yet career perspectives have obvious importance regarding the conceptualization of marital violence as a phenomenon nested within a broader explanation of violence, requiring separate or integrated theory.

Ironically, the independent bodies of empirical and theoretical literatures on marital and stranger violence are in substantial agreement on many empirical and theoretical issues. For example, both disciplines are concerned with the family origins of violence and the early childhood socialization processes that shape later violent behavior (Dodge et al., 1990; Widom, 1989; Rivera and Widom, 1990). Yet few researchers have either studied the two phenomena as one, or even contrasted the extant knowledge of family abusers or stranger assailants. There has been no research on the comparative validity of theories of aggression for family versus stranger assaults, and there are few epidemiological studies to empirically measure the coincidence of family and stranger assault. However, the rare studies spanning the two behaviors suggest that there may be a critical, if overlooked, relationship between familial and extrafamilial violence.

Victim Selection and Violence Careers

Anecdotal data from victims and shelter workers suggest that men who are violent with their female partners will seek out other victims if cut off from a battering relationship. Not unlike other career violent offenders (Katz, 1988), they are likely to move on to other relationships and resume violence, albeit with another victim. Desistance for one victim may be initiation for another. Shields et al. (1988) examined the intersection of family and stranger violence, as well as shifts over time in victim relationships among a sample of self-selected male assailants. The design compared men who were assaultive toward intimate partners with a comparison group of men who were not violent at home. Respondents were classified as (1) domestic violence only;

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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(2) stranger violence only-or those violent only toward persons outside the family; and (3) generally violent men, who fell into both categories.

Victimization patterns of domestic (only) assailants were far from static, however: nearly 45 percent of the generally violent men began their adult violence careers victimizing only strangers. In other words, their circle of victims widened over time to include family members. There were no indications that generally violent men narrowed their circle of victims over time to include one group or the other, an important finding on desistance; the number of victims actually grew over time. However, it was uncertain whether the total number of violent incidents remained the same or whether some violence was displaced from one group of victims to the other. What did not occur was displacement of violence within the home to stranger victims. Although violence careers are mutable over time, men who are domestically violent only tend to remain within that pattern.

Shields et al. found that "generally violent" and "stranger violence only" males were virtually indistinguishable in terms of background characteristics such as age or length of the relationship. Yet the ''domestic violence only" men differed from the others in several ways. They were from higher social status groups and had higher educational attainment, although this may well be an artifact of the self-selected sample. These men also more often had drug and alcohol problems, had extramarital affairs, and were exposed to violence as children. They less often had evidence of psychopathology, but manifested other personality traits often associated with battering: jealousy, low self-esteem, and depression. They also had fewer contacts with the law and were less embedded in violent subcultures than the generally violent men.

Based on reports from 270 women in interventions about their partners, Fagan et al. (1983) found that 46 percent of spouse abusers had been previously arrested for other violence. Men arrested for stranger violence also were the most frequently and severely violent in the home. Men who were less violent at home usually were not violent toward strangers. The longer and more severe the abuse at home, the more likely were these men to also assault strangers. This finding is consistent with Washburn and Frieze (1981), whose severely battering husbands were more likely to have been involved in fights outside the home than were mildly violent (or nonviolent) husbands.

Thus, there may be different types of violence careers. However, Bandura (1973) cautions that different types of violence may

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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have different determinants. Consistent with this, researchers who espouse explanatory constructs such as patriarchy argue that family violence in general, and wife abuse in particular, are special and distinct types of violence and should not be viewed as a subset of violent behavior (Dobash and Dobash, 1979; Wardell et al., 1983). The few studies of "generally" violent men show, however, that they are more similar to stranger assailants than to those who are violent only within their families (Shields and Hannecke, 1983).

Integrating Theories of Marital and Stranger Violence

There is consistent evidence that violence toward both strangers and intimates is learned early on in the home (Pagelow, 1984; White and Straus, 1981; Walker, 1979, 1984; Fagan et al., 1983; Fagan and Waxler, 1987a; Dodge et al., 1990; cf. Widom, 1988). A corollary view suggests that violent behaviors result from a developmental sequence, beginning with weak parental supervision and family conflict in early childhood, leading to a pattern of successively weakening social and psychological bonds (Loeber and Stouthamer-Loeber, 1986; Patterson and Dishion, 1985). These approaches have much appeal in light of the robust findings on violence in the childhood backgrounds of violent individuals.

What may set apart stranger from marital violence-or explain its overlap for a subset of offenders-are the concepts of culturally sanctioned sexual inequalities and traditional sex-role socialization. By integrating these perspectives into a general learning model, it may be possible to understand and explain the various manifestations of violent behavior and patterns of victim selection. Therefore, where sex-role socialization during early childhood is most traditional, concurrently with socialization to violence, one would expect to find both extrafamilial and familial violence. In the presence of one of these primary socialization influences but not the other, we would expect to find men who confine their violence to either familial or extrafamilial domains.

Support for this notion derives from several theoretical and empirical perspectives. Subcultural theories (e.g., Wolfgang and Ferracuti, 1967) and social learning theories (e.g., Bandura, 1973, 1979) address the learned aspects of violent behavior. Akers et al. (1979) show that social learning processes explain a wide range of behaviors from crime to substance abuse. Hotaling and Sugarman (1986) described the empirical evidence on early childhood socialization and later violence in the home, whereas Bowker (1983)

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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showed how social supports for violence in the home are sustained and reinforced in later adult life. Where violence is learned, sanctioned, and reinforced through cultural or behavioral norms in the immediate community, violence will more likely be chronic and/or more serious.

Yet many males and females avoid violence in adult life, despite childhood victimization or other socialization to violence as children or adults (Widom, 1989). Estimates of the prevalence of adult violence among abused male children suggest that the majority avoid later violence as adults (Miller and Challas, 1981; Rivera and Widom, 1990). Accordingly, immunities toward family violence are also of etiological interest. For those who do not demonstrate later involvement with violence, either internal or external controls (or both) develop. Megargee (1983) described how such inhibitors may restrain violent behaviors, even in the presence of strong motivation or habituation toward violence. Where motivation is high, but so too are restraints on violence, violence may be unlikely.

Distinctions among "generally" violent males, those violent only toward family members, and those violent only toward nonfamily members suggest that there are processes specific to victim selection in the development of violent behaviors. Social learning processes describe how socialization occurs where both the utility and the behavioral norms that express male dominance, as well as the functional value of violence, are passed down (Bandura, 1979). Social supports for violence toward women or children may contribute to male sex-role socialization during childhood (Dobash and Dobash, 1979; Russell, 1982) and help explain in part the selection of family members as victims. When childhood and adolescent socialization includes the threat and/or use of male violence toward family members, there may exist a propensity to commit violent acts against family members during later adult years. It seems that victim selection also may be socially learned, as are violent behavior and its functional value and significance with both strangers and family members.

NEUTRALIZATION OF VIOLENT BEHAVIOR

When deviant behaviors occur that violate either self-standards or social norms, a variety of mechanisms may be mobilized to explain the behavior or neutralize self-punishment. The rationalization or externalization of blame has been used to explain other forms of deviance and criminality. Sykes and Matza (1957)

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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suggested that the denial of responsibility was one of several "techniques of neutralization" that individuals use to justify criminal behavior. The perception of being the victim rather than the perpetrator is a common technique used by delinquents to neutralize culpability for their conduct. As discussed earlier, beliefs about the effects of specific intoxicants also have fostered the "excuse function" of substances. The "relaxed standards of accountability" under the influence of certain substances are sometimes used to explain the occurrence of certain behaviors during intoxication (Collins, 1988). It is likely, then, that the "excuse" function of marital violence has cultural determinants.

Such processes appear to be evident among male perpetrators of marital violence. Shields and Hannecke (1983) found that 68 percent of male spouse assailants externalized the cause of their behavior by attributing it to the wife's behavior or to alcohol. "Excuses" for spouse assaults were offered by 21 percent of the men (N = 75) studied by Dutton (1985). Although the remainder accepted responsibility for their actions, their justifications typically blamed the victim for these actions or discounted the behaviors as due to uncontrollable arousal or subgroup norms. Moreover, those who attributed their behavior to their wives were more likely to minimize the severity of their actions. Similar reports from men in treatment for spouse assault (Ganley, 1981; Sonkin et al., 1985) describe both the minimization of spouse assault and victim blaming or, alternatively, accepting responsibility but redefining the behavior as consistent with cultural norms.

This notion of disavowal of deviance by assaultive males essentially relocates blame for behavior from the individual to an attribute or behavior of the adversary or to an imperative in the immediate context. When all else fails, disavowal leads to claiming conformity with cultural norms. This not only serves to excuse misbehavior but also reassures others that the behaviors themselves do not challenge the legitimacy of the violated norms. Thus, wife assaulters do not challenge the sanctity of marriage or societal laws against assault.

The cognitive restructuring of events that is necessary to neutralize self-punishment for disapproved behavior involves four types of mechanisms: (1) cognitive restructuring of the behavior itself through euphemistic labeling of the violence, palliative comparison, or moral justification; (2) cognitive restructuring of the behavior-effect relationship through diffusion or displacement of responsibility; (3) cognitive restructuring of the effects of violence by minimizing or ignoring them; and (4) cognitive restructuring of

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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the victim through dehumanizing or victim blame (Bandura, 1979). These processes also neutralize perceptions of social controls that proscribe behavior, leading to what Dutton (1982) referred to as "deindividuated violence," in which control over behaviors shifts from external cues to internal stimuli.

The plausibility of the disavowal framework depends on the acceptance of these accounts of behavior by society. Whether assailants can legitimate their behaviors in frameworks that are culturally salient depends on social norms. Disavowals or accounts help avoid the assignment of an identity to individuals that is consistent with their deviant behavior (e.g., Scott and Lyman, 1968). Collins (1983) suggests that there is a synergistic relationship between cultural acceptance of such accounts and the relocation of blame to external sources that are widely thought to "cause" or at least to excuse such behaviors. When cultural evaluations accept that marital conflict can cause aggressive or violent behaviors, then these accounts are more often honored by society, and the use of such excuses is greater.

SOCIAL JUDGMENT THEORY AND COMMISSION OF HOMICIDES BY ABUSED WOMEN

Most of the explanatory frameworks discussed thus far have focused on the perpetration of partner violence by males, in part because male violence is more frequent and severe, and in part because case-control studies have failed to find factors that differentiate women victims of marital violence from nonvictims. One form of violence by women-that of partner homicide in abusive relationships-has generated theory building and research, however. Although women comprise the majority of victims in marital homicides, it is the woman who kills her spouse or partner that gets public and legal attention. As discussed, many women who kill their spouses have been the victims of extreme forms of marital violence. Yet the majority of victims of severe marital violence do not kill their assailants. The factors and processes that explain such a drastic difference in the outcome of an extremely violent relationship have important theoretical implications.

Browne's (1987) comparative study of abused women who were charged with marital homicides described some of the psychosocial processes that transform marital violence into a fatal confrontation, the progression of assaults to uncontrolled rage on the part of the abusive mate, and victim and societal responses that reinforce

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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the assailant's ability to perpetrate such severe actions-and thus become the antecedents to a lethal event. Women in the homicide group killed to avert what they believed to be their own imminent death or severe harm to their children. As people involved in neither violent nor property crimes, they would be predicted to be nonviolent in nearly all social contexts. Further, there were no systematic differences in the backgrounds of these women from women in the comparison group that would constitute risk markers for their later involvement in a homicide. The women differed only in their attempts or threats to commit suicide; arguably a response to the extremity of the danger with which they lived.

Men in the two groups, however, differed in the severity of their violence both within the family and outside it, their involvement with substances, their threats to kill their partners or others, and their use of sexual violence toward their spouses. It was the extremity of the men's behaviors that distinguished the lethal cases. The male homicide victims seemed to have replaced any empathy with the need for absolute control, eliminating an important block to their continued escalation of violent aggression.

Women's difficulty in leaving these relationships is a combination of several factors: their continuing bond to the males based on a "caretaker" doctrine consistent with their own sex-role socialization, the intensification of violence and the threat of violent reprisals against them or the children if they leave the abuser, shock reactions of victims to abuse, and practical problems in actually separating (see Browne, 1987:ch. 5 and 7). The bond may also be explained, in part, by the interaction of powerful reinforcers of extreme maltreatment alternating with more positive behaviors, to produce a traumatically based bond between victim and assailant (Dutton and Painter, 1981). Given threats against leaving, as well as threats within the relationship, the constant fear of violence regardless of the action taken leaves no choices that do not carry a high risk of danger.

Browne (1986, 1987) utilizes social judgment theory as one way to understand the drastic shift that these women made from victim to perpetrator. For example, Sherif and Hovland's (1961) model of social judgment involves the concept of a continuum on which incoming stimuli are ordered. The "latitude of acceptance" is that range of possibilities with which an individual is willing to agree or to which an individual can adapt. Latitudes are defined by end points, or anchors, that determine the extremes of

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

the scale. Internal anchors are those originating within the individual, whereas external anchors are provided by outside factors or social consensus. Past learning experiences also affect how acceptable or unacceptable a person will find a particular stimulus. In the absence of external factors, an individual's internal anchors play a major role in how he or she will evaluate events. According to social judgment theory, if stimuli continue to fall at the end of the continuum or even slightly above the end point, this will produce a shift of the range toward that anchor-or assimilation. However, if a stimulus is too far beyond the others, a contrast effect will ensure, and the stimulus will be perceived as being even more extreme than it really is.

If one views the escalation of violent acts by the abuser as ordered along a continuum, the "latitude of acceptance" for a battered woman would be that range of activities to which she could adapt. This latitude would be affected by four dimensions frequently discussed in the literature on family violence: (1) the degree to which the woman had been socialized to adjust to or accept a (marital) partner's behavior; (2) prior experiences with similar stimuli-such as witnessing violence in her childhood home; (3) the degree to which external stimuli were present or absent and supported or disconfirmed the appropriateness of the events she was experiencing; and (4) the degree to which she perceived herself as trapped within the violent situation, without alternatives for escape or remediation. Because society's standards on violence against wives are ambiguous, and because abused women often become relatively isolated from others and hesitant about discussing their victimization with others, over time most abused women become primarily dependent on internal anchors to form judgments relative to the violence they are experiencing.

As abusive acts continue to fall near the extreme ends of the continuum, social judgment theory would predict that a battered woman's latitude of acceptance would shift to assimilate them. As demonstrated by findings on other victims of trauma, human beings in extreme environments are able to alter their behavior quite dramatically if it seems necessary to survive. Thus, when the behaviors of the abuser are extreme, a woman may adapt far beyond normal limits in order to coexist. A certain level of abuse and threat becomes the status quo. Survival is the salient criterion: The latitude of acceptance is what the victim believes she can live through.

However, according to social judgment theory, a "contrast" phenomenon should come into effect if an act occurs that falls

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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significantly outside the "normal" range. In recounting events preceding the lethal incidents, women in the homicide group often noted that there was a sudden change in the pattern of violence, which suggested to them that their death was imminent. Otherwise, an act would suddenly be beyond the range of what the woman was willing to assimilate. Frequently, this involved the physical abuse of a child or the discovery that the abuser had forced sexual activity with an adolescent daughter.

Contrast theory would predict that once the woman defined an event as significantly outside the latitude of what she could accept, she would then perceive that act as being more extreme than it actually was. However, given the tendency of abused women to employ denial to survive and to understate the levels of violence in their relationships, it is probable that women in the homicide group were at last simply making an assessment more in keeping with the way in which an outside observer would evaluate the level of violence. At this point, denial and minimalization gave way to sudden, often spontaneous, action, moving the victim from a concentration on internal coping strategies to the extreme agency of homicide (Browne, 1987).

Whether theory developed in extreme cases is valid elsewhere on the distribution of marital violence is uncertain. For example, there have been no similar applications of social judgment theory to other women victims of abuse and no research on whether social judgments inevitably alter perceptions of acceptable alternatives. However, Bowker (1983, 1986b) offers evidence from women who ended violence in their relationships that social judgments are not altered when there is the intercession of social and legal institutions (e.g., the presence of strong external anchors) to balance marital power. Thus it appears that the interaction between social or institutional responses and marital dynamics contributes to social judgments about acceptable behaviors by assailants and behavioral choices of victims.

INTEGRATED EXPLANATION OF MARITAL VIOLENCE

Evidence from the perspectives presented suggests that cognitive and emotional factors are interpreted through social psychological processes and cultural beliefs to explain the occurrence of marital violence. Social networks and their subcultural milieus determine the social construction of behavior patterns and shape the cognitive and emotional processes that transform arousal into marital aggression. Victimization also influences cognitive processes:

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

Dodge et al. (1990:1682) showed in longitudinal research that

harmed children are likely to develop biased and deficient patterns of processing social information, including a failure to attend to relevant cues, a bias to attribute hostile intentions to others, and a lack of competent behavioral strategies to solve interpersonal problems. These patterns in turn were found to predict the development of aggressive behavior [and lead] ... a child to conceptualize the world in ... ways that perpetuate the cycle of violence.

These cognitive processes in turn are further influenced by cultural and situational factors that determine the norms, beliefs, and sanctions regarding behaviors following arousal during marital conflict or stress.

Three major independent variables increase the probability of violence during microsocial interactions: (1) psychological proclivity for the exercise of physical violence toward the spouse (e.g., personality factors); (2) beliefs that instrumental goals will be achieved through the use of physical force; and (3) arousal that provides the motivation for the (male's) assaultive behavior against the spouse or partner. Each of these factors in turn influences cognitive processes that interpret both the situation and the appropriate behavioral response.

Cultural Factors

Stark and McEvoy (1970) found that about 25 percent of males in a national survey would approve of a male slapping his wife under certain circumstances. Smith (1990) showed the association between such beliefs and marital violence by the male in a couple. Such cultural beliefs are expressed through the individual who believes, as he perceives social norms, that violence within families is an acceptable or normative response to marital conflict. Culture therefore has both direct effects, through expectancy of appropriate behaviors when angry or aroused, and indirect effects, through its influence on mediating cognitive processes that define complex emotions such as anger. Moreover, these cultural beliefs are more likely to produce "accounts" that allow an abuser to shift blame to the victim, to alcohol, or to some other external factor and therefore neutralize any self-punishment or social sanctions for the aggression.

Cultural factors, including beliefs about permitted behaviors in specific milieus, and the cultural meaning of marital violence

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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(ceremonies, spiritual or religious uses, social interaction) shape the context in which behavioral norms are interpreted. These settings and social contexts also influence the choice of behaviors, and convey the rules and norms proscribing behaviors, the cognitive interpretation of the situation, and therefore the probability of marital violence while in that situation.

Personality Factors

A propensity toward marital violence reflects explanations regarding the use of physical force to resolve perceived conflicts. This concept resembles Megargee's (1983) concept of "habit strength" in his "algebra of aggression," but it also includes basic intrinsic motivations for violence. It is also similar to the "set" in Zinberg's (1984) explanation of behavior following intoxication as the result of interactions among set (personality), substance, and setting.

An example of an individual personality factor is the propensity to use violence to resolve interpersonal conflicts, or the habit strength of violence that has been socially reinforced through past experiences in childhood and during later stages of social and personality development. Violence may be considered the "appropriate" response to anger or the behavior that an individual has learned best achieves his goals. Accordingly, the reinforcement of experiences learned from childhood exposure (either in the home or nearby in other closely observed relationships) provides a set of behaviors that are invoked in response to conditions that raise fear, anger, vulnerability, or other strong emotions.

Specific Motivation

Arousal is a transitional state marked by emotional instability. Many of the socioeconomic markers of marital violence may also signify frustration from failure to achieve socially defined expectations of (male) success. This can contribute to a chronic state of frustration and arousal that assailants may label as anger (Browne and Dutton, 1990). These markers also can signify stresses that trigger fear, anxiety, self-derogation, or other states of emotional discomfort. Arousal may come from threats of loss of control in the relationship, feelings of rejection or abandonment, threats from intimacy or emotional dependence on the spouse or partner, or threats to social status from outside the relationship. Browne (1987) argues that even emotional states engendered in positive intimate relationships-such as desire or longing-may be reinterpreted

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

by assaultive males as frustration or displeasure; this effect is again mediated by whether intimate relationships in childhood were anxiety provoking or nurturing.

The response to arousal determines the occurrence of spouse assault. A complex calculus will determine whether the male partner becomes violent under conditions of arousal: earlier lessons about ''what works" to quell anxiety or release anger (Sonkin and Durphy, 1985), what he perceives as potential consequences (Bowker, 1983; Carmody and Williams, 1987), what he has seen others do in similar situations (Bandura, 1973; Dutton, 1988a), and his control over his rage or fear (Browne, 1987; Katz, 1988). Other factors also may influence whether an attack occurs, especially whether past attacks have been gratifying (i.e., resulted in the reduction of arousal, anger, or anxiety or in the restoration of control) and the gains have outweighed any aversive consequences.

Summary

Rather than being a linear process, marital violence is more likely a reciprocal process in which individual, situational, and cultural factors have multiple and recursive interactions leading to aggressive or nonaggressive behaviors. That is, situational variables and interactions with family members are likely to affect variations in the behaviors that follow arousal. These relationships then will alter the individual's selection of contexts or situations in which assaults may occur, his social construction or cognitive interpretation of these contexts, and the probability of aggressive behaviors. The influence of larger political, economic, and social-organizational influences-on culture and proximal social controls of violence in general, and wife assaults in particular-must also be acknowledged.

The interaction among personality, social context, and arousal seems critical to understanding marital violence. Individuals form perceptions of their environments and internalize the expected responses to social situations through the development of personality, which itself is a socially determined process. Both psychological and social experiences with intimates, shaped by the arousal produced by marital dynamics or experiences outside the marital relationship, socialize partners not only to the responses to anger but also to the expected social behaviors that accompany that state. Zinberg (1984) suggests that individuals select explanatory constructs from a range of cognitive and emotional perceptions available to them and that responses follow the available explanations

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

of the situation. The boundaries of those responses are determined by three factors: (1) perceptions of the expected environment, (2) personality variables such as relative ego autonomy, and (3) responses to the specific marital context.

These three factors are influenced strongly by social learning processes that carry forward the lessons of childhood and adolescence. Social learning processes teach male spouses about the expected behaviors in marriage (or intimate relationships) and also influence personality factors by raising apprehensions about danger or moral ambiguity. The delicate interplay of these factors responds to the social cues of the setting in which couples interact. From these cues, marital violence by male spouses may follow logically from the controls that are internally activated and the social controls present in the setting.

At the social and cultural levels, weak social organization or social ambivalence about violence against wives and children may permit or promote violence within families at the group or neighborhood level. Individuals may initially have diverse experiences with behaviors in various settings but ultimately are likely to gravitate toward social contexts that offer a match between personal proclivities (base rates of aggression, beliefs in the legitimacy of violence, use of accounts based on cultural interpretations of marital assaults) and what is both socially expected and permitted in that scene. However, such personal proclivities may also include a desire for acceptance in nonviolent social worlds, and selective processes of affiliation may ensue, depending on the type of social gratification sought.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE POLICY

Significant changes have taken place in criminal justice policy toward marital violence over the past 20 years. These developments were preceded by criticisms of the police, and the criminal justice system more generally, for failing to respond effectively to spouse assault. Specifically, critics claimed that sanctions for violence against family members were rare or weak, that criminal justice agencies often did not regard or process cases of marital violence with the seriousness accorded to stranger violence, that victims of marital violence were not afforded the protection given to victims of stranger violence via punishment and control of offenders, and that low sanction severity actually contributed to or reinforced the underlying causes of marital violence (Elliott, 1989). Moreover, several theoretical perspectives implicate weak

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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societal responses as facilitating the progression of marital violence.

The social and political processes described earlier in this paper gave rise to significant reforms and experiments in criminal justice processing of cases of marital violence. This section reviews the major developments in this era, noting the contributions of marital violence research in each area. The section also analyzes social and organizational processes in the criminal justice system that influence utilization of research on marital violence.

POLICE INTERVENTIONS

Early criticisms of police handling of cases involving assaults on wives, coupled with litigation and growing awareness of the seriousness of marital violence, have led to significant changes in policy and practice in many jurisdictions (Goolkasian, 1986). As we discuss later in this section, these efforts were focused more on sanction and control of offenders than on victim protection. In general, such efforts were designed to make the police response to marital violence more aggressive and to increase the likelihood that sanctions would be forthcoming for incidents of spouse assault. Specifically, policy changes were intended to increase the probability of arrest in reported cases of misdemeanor wife assault.

In a review of criminal justice responses to marital violence, Elliott (1989) concludes that one-third of all domestic disturbance calls involve some form of domestic violence, with the majority of these involving assaults between "intimate" cohabitants or former cohabitants. Based on observational studies of police intervention in domestic disturbances, Dutton (1987, 1988b) found that arrest occurs in only 21.2 percent of wife assault cases in which prima facie evidence exists for arrest.32 Elliott (1989) estimated that the probability of arrest varied from 12 to 50 percent, but found mixed support for the claim that arrest is less likely to occur for family than stranger violence.

Both research and litigation have led to mandatory arrest policies in some jurisdictions for incidents in which there is probable cause of wife assault.33 Class action law suits in Oakland, California (Scott v. Hart), and New York City (Bruno v. McGuire) established a legal basis for mandatory arrest policies. A civil suit in Torrington, Connecticut (Thurman v. The City of Torrington) extended Fourteenth Amendment rights to women in domestic

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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relationships. The court ruled that the police department's failure to enforce restraining orders constituted a policy that provides less protection for victims of both marital and parent-to-child violence. The policy created a de facto administrative classification that discriminates against women who are victims of domestic violence, and the municipality was liable for damages. In Hynson v. City of Chester Legal Department, the court ruled that police officers lose their limited immunity if they were aware that failure to enforce protections in domestic relationships was a violation of Fourteenth Amendment rights.

The premise is that strict and swift application of criminal sanctions in wife assault cases will better protect victims and reduce the likelihood of repeat violence. The empirical basis for these policies derives both from accumulated evidence of the ineffectiveness of nonarrest or informal police dispositions of family violence calls (Martin, 1976; Bowker, 1983; Morash, 1986) and from experimental evidence of the deterrent effects of arrest compared to nonarrest dispositions (Sherman and Berk, 1984; Tauchen et al., 1986; Jaffe et al., 1986).

The Minneapolis Domestic Violence experiment has been the most influential study in the development of policies to increase the likelihood of arrest in misdemeanor wife assault cases. It was designed as a test of the specific deterrent effects of arrest on the recurrence of wife assault and was intended to provide a critical test of the effectiveness of legal sanctions compared to nonlegal, informal police responses. Sherman and Berk (1984) used an experimental design in two Minneapolis police precincts to randomly assign violent family disputes to one of three police responses: arrest, separation of victim and assailant, and advice/mediation. The study was limited to situations in which the assailant was present when the police arrived. During the six-month follow-up, biweekly interviews with victims and reviews of official reports of family violence were collected. Despite the repeated measures on subsequent violence, dichotomous measures of recidivism were used. Neither the severity, the incidence, nor the time to recurrence was reported.

Sherman and Berk (1984) concluded that arrest was more effective in reducing subsequent violence in misdemeanor wife assault cases than other police responses. Those arrested had the lowest recidivism rate based on official (10%) and victim (19%) reports. There was no evidence of differential effects across conditions based on offender characteristics, although within-group differences were found. This led to their recommendation that

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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"police adopt arrest as the favored response to domestic assault on the basis [in the original] of its deterrence power" (as cited in Dunford et al., 1989:1). A subsequent reanalysis by Tauchen et al. (1986) offered more qualified support for the deterrent effects of arrest. Findings from the Minneapolis experiment, together with results of nonexperimental studies comparing arrest with other police dispositions of spouse assault cases (Berk and Newton, 1985), provided evidence that influenced police policy and legislation nationwide (Sherman and Cohn, 1989). Thus, for several years, the Minneapolis study provided critical, determining evidence in criminal justice policy development for wife assault.

However, several reviews (Binder and Meeker, 1988; Fagan, 1989; Elliott, 1989; Lempert, 1989) have cited internal and external validity problems in the Minneapolis experiment that, together with contradictory results from replications in Omaha (Dunford et al., 1989, 1990) and Charlotte, North Carolina (Hirschel and Hutchinson, 1992; Hirschel et al., 1991, 1992), raise serious questions about the deterrent effects of arrest on repeat spouse assault. In both the Omaha and the Charlotte replications, there were no significant differences in recidivism for any type of police response (advice, warning, citation, arrest) for several measures of recidivism. Moreover, the incidence of recidivism in Charlotte was highest for the arrest group [p(F) = .03], which directly contradicted the results in Minneapolis.

Results of additional replication experiments are available for experiments in Colorado Springs (Berk et al., 1992), Dade County (Pate and Hamilton, 1992), and Milwaukee (Sherman et al., 1991). Only Dade County reported results similar to the original Minneapolis experiment: a reduction in the prevalence of recidivism for arrested suspects in both official records and interviews. Even here, the reduction reported in official records was not statistically significant. In the Charlotte, Colorado Springs, Milwaukee, and Omaha experiments, analysis of official records showed that arrest was associated with higher rates of reoffending; but results based on interview data showed that arrest was associated with lower rates of reoffending. Except for the Colorado Springs experiment, none of the results approached traditional levels of statistical significance.

Reviewing the five replications, together with the original Minneapolis experiment, Sherman (1992) reported that three experiments found that rates of spouse assault escalated among male arrestees who were unemployed or unmarried. The results suggest that arrest has variable effects on different types of people

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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and also people in different types of neighborhoods. Sherman (1992) claims that escalation of spouse assault following arrest was evident in neighborhoods in Milwaukee and Omaha where there were concentrations of poverty and social disorganization, but escalation was not evident in economically stable areas where employment was lower and poverty less acute.

How could replication results diverge so sharply from the original finding? Is arrest an effective deterrent only in one location due to its unique circumstances, or was the experiment flawed and were the results simply a Type II error? Several limitations in the design of the Minneapolis experiment suggest that it was a seriously flawed effort. First, the follow-up period was relatively short (six months), given the episodic and cyclical patterns of family violence observed by Walker (1979, 1984) and Frieze et al. (1980). Second, self-reports from abusers were not obtained, which left out the possibility of a "hidden" violence period toward strangers, the original victim, or other victims in the home. Third, no distinctions were made in the level and nature of violence, leaving open questions of the relative harm (e.g., injury, intimidation) that may have accrued from battering incidents.

Fourth, the biweekly interview process may have depressed recidivism rates through research effects, response-effects, or task-specific biases. Awareness by offenders of victim interviews may have deterred or simply postponed recidivism during the study period. The validity of victim' reports may have been compromised because assailants often were residing with them during the follow-up period. Victim attrition also was evident but not analyzed. Fifth, not all precincts in Minneapolis participated in the experiment. Finally, other forms of wife abuse, such as persistent denigration or economic reprisal, were not investigated. These forms of abuse, noted in several studies on wife battery (e.g., Frieze et al., 1980; Walker, 1979, 1984; Russell, 1982), are emotionally harmful even if not posing threats to physical safety and often are antecedents of physical violence (Walker, 1979, 1984).

Perhaps the most significant omission from the Minneapolis experiment was the exclusion of other than "... simple [misdemeanor] domestic assaults. ... Cases of life-threatening or severe injury, usually labelled as a felony ... were excluded from the design ..." (Sherman and Berk, 1984:263). Thus, selection biases of participating officers' processes may have been evident in the exclusion of individual cases from the randomization procedure, based on the arresting officers' judgment about the severity of violence or the risk to the victim of nonarrest. Offenders who

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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had left the scene also were excluded from the experiment. Accordingly, incomplete randomization introduced serious sampling biases and validity threats (Berk et al., 1988).

The exclusion of offenders who absconded also limits police response for potentially serious cases. Assailants' violence histories are critical to the analysis of desistance via deterrence (Fagan, 1989). Research on criminal careers shows that persistent offenders differ from the "innocents" or desisters in previous studies (Blumstein et al., 1985). Male spouses with histories of severe violence at home more often are violent toward strangers, have more often been arrested for violent offenses, and more often injure both domestic and stranger victims (Fagan et al., 1983; Shields et al., 1988). Male partners with longer histories of police contacts also more often drop out of spouse abuse treatment programs (Hamberger and Hastings, 1989).

Sanctions (including arrest with an uncertain outcome) may affect these persistent offenders far less than first-or one-time offenders, or husbands who are violent only within the home. Accordingly, the effect size in the Minneapolis experiment may be confounded with sample artifacts. Although Sherman and Berk (1984) report that most of the men in the sample had repeatedly assaulted their partners prior to the experimental incident, within-group differences are not reported. Berk (personal communication, 1986) states that assailants with lengthier histories of either wife assault or stranger violence had higher recidivism rates than others, regardless of experimental conditions.

The Omaha, Charlotte, and other replications followed experimental designs similar to the Minneapolis study, adding refinements that addressed many of its limitations. For example, all police calls for domestic violence during the 4:00 to 12:00 p.m. shift in the city of Omaha were randomly assigned to three treatment groups: (1) those in which the perpetrator would be arrested, (2) those in which the perpetrator would be separated from the victim, and (3) those in which police would "mediate" the dispute. Cases were sampled around the clock in Charlotte, where the use of a police-issued citation also presented a unique intervention option. Randomized treatment was conducted only for cases in which both perpetrator and victim were present at the scene when the police arrived. However, data on those cases in which the perpetrator was not present were collected and analyzed separately in Omaha.

Both studies employed official and self-report measures to judge the effectiveness of the treatments in deterring reassault and threats

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

over a six-month period. Official recidivism measures included new arrests and complaints for any crimes committed by the suspect against the victim, found in official police records. Victims were interviewed for self-reports of (1) fear of violence, (2) pushing or hitting, and (3) physical injury. Victims were interviewed at the end of the first week (or shortly thereafter) following the incident that resulted in police contact and again six months later.

Neither study found that arrest was an effective deterrent. In Omaha, for example, "arresting suspects had no more effect in deterring future arrests or complaints than did separating or counseling them"; similarly, victim reports showed "no significant differences between the treatment groups" (Dunford et al., 1989:34). Moreover, analyses controlling for prior arrests, ethnicity, and other variables showed no significant differences between police responses in terms of reassault and threat. Results from the other replications were inconsistent as well.

Dunford et al. (1989) argue that a policy that encourages arrest when probable cause exists may have greater promise for reducing subsequent assaults. They contend, similar to Ford (1983), that victims can then use the criminal justice process to negotiate their own security with suspects/spouses. Thus, according victims, the option for arrest becomes an empowerment strategy.

Reciprocity Between Formal and Informal Sanctions

Williams and Hawkins (1989a) expand the deterrence framework for arrests for wife assault to include both direct and indirect costs as perceived ramifications of arrest specific to the assailant's social context. For example, Williams and Hawkins (1989a) analyzed responses from telephone interviews with 494 males in a nationwide probability sample. Respondents were asked to imagine what would happen if they were arrested for an attack on their wives. All respondents had reported one or more assaults on a spouse or female partner during 1987. Respondents believed that arrest would have deleterious consequences for their personal lives were it to occur, including disrupted social relationships and humiliation before family and friends. However, responding to hypothetical scenarios, they viewed the loss of a job or a jail remand highly unlikely as a consequence of assaults.

Carmody and Williams (1987) also analyzed responses about the perceived certainty and severity of sanctions for wife assault based on the 1985 NFVS data. Responses from men who reported using physical force against their wives (N = 174) were compared

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

with nonassaultive men (N = 1,452). Four hypothetical "sanctions" were measured: arrest, social condemnation, separation or divorce from the partner, and retaliatory force by the partner. Men viewed retaliatory force by the partner as the least likely consequence of wife assault. The perceived severity of this reaction was quite low as well. The perceived certainty of arrest was also quite low, although the perceived severity score suggested that men viewed this sanction as very serious if it did occur. Male respondents did consider the possibility of a loss of respect from friends and relatives as both likely and severe. However, although the loss of the partner as a result of wife assault was considered a severe outcome, it was perceived as very unlikely.

Assaultive and nonassaultive men did not differ significantly in their perceptions of the certainty (not very likely) and severity (very severe) of arrest or of their partners separating from them or getting a divorce. However, assaultive men did perceive it as more likely that their partners would respond with physical aggression than did nonassaultive men. Conversely, nonassaultive men perceived the certainty and severity of social condemnation as significantly greater than did assaultive men. Finally, although the distributions were similar for one-time and repeat offenders, the perceived severity of arrest was significantly lower for men who had assaulted their partners more than once (Carmody and Williams, 1987).

Associations of perceived sanctions with assailants' social area and social class were not reported. However, arrest probabilities are mediated by social ecological variables (D.A. Smith, 1986). Thus, whether the deterrent effects of arrest interact with the social area in which it occurs is unknown but potentially important, given the apparent concentration of serious wife assault in poor and working-class neighborhoods. Disaggregation by social area of the findings on perceived and actual deterrent effects will resolve some of these questions.

Evidently, both the perceived and the actual deterrent effects of arrest seem to diminish for assailants familiar with the "going rates" of punishment for wife assault in the criminal justice system. These rates may be even lower for areas in which stranger violence or other crime problems are assigned a high priority. The deterrent effects of sanctions may depend not simply on police decisions to arrest, but also on the cumulative effects of sanctions at subsequent stages of criminal justice processing.

Williams and Hawkins (1986, 1989b) conceived informal controls as internalized social psychological controls that facilitate conformity or generate greater fear of law violation. Where specific

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

deterrent effects are based on the internalization of the perceived costs of law violation (that is, punishment costs), informal social controls suggest costs associated with the act itself (Williams and Hawkins, 1992). Williams and Hawkins (1986, 1989b) specify three types of costs that create informal controls: attachment costs (e.g., the loss of valued relationships), stigma (e.g., social opprobrium, embarrassment), and commitment costs (e.g., loss of job or economic opportunity) (see also, Carmody and Williams, 1987; Miller and Simpson, 1991). Thus, Williams and Hawkins (1986, 1989b) are consistent with other deterrence theorists in suggesting a reciprocal and complementary relationship between formal and informal controls for spouse assault. They state, for example, that "... persons (may) anticipate that others will disapprove of their arrest for committing a certain act, and they (may) refrain from that activity because they fear the stigma of being caught" (1986:562-563). Thus, for all these types of costs, extralegal punishment may be contingent on legal sanction.

Arrest of spouse assailants may result in deterrence processes that operate through both legal sanctions (Sherman and Berk, 1984; Dutton et al., 1991) and informal social controls (loss of self-esteem, disrupted social ties, job loss, and shame) (Berk and Newton, 1985; Dunford et al., 1989; Sherman et al., 1992). These effects were observed in paradigms using both hypothetical scenarios (Williams and Hawkins, 1986, 1989b) and actual arrests (Dutton et al., 1991). Offenders who desist from further violence following arrest may be responding not only to the potential legal costs, but also to the implications of arrest for relationships with peers, employers, spouses, and neighbors. But where social costs are low, the deterrent effects of legal sanctions may be weak. Sherman et al. (1991), for example, found that living in what they termed "ghetto poverty" neutralized the attachment and commitment costs associated to legal sanctions for spouse assault for unmarried and unemployed males. Thus, the deterrent effects of legal sanctions for spouse assault depend on raising both social costs and punishment costs. Raising social costs in turn requires that there are meaningful threats from possible job loss, social stigmatization, and relationship loss associated with spouse assault.

PROSECUTION OF MARITAL VIOLENCE

Major developments in the prosecution of family violence cases have centered on increasing the percentage of cases formally prosecuted and on improving the quality and aggressiveness of that

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

prosecution. Prosecutors receive family violence cases in two ways. In many jurisdictions, police refer nearly all arrests to the prosecutor for screening, evaluation, and formal charging. In others, police screen many cases prior to formal charging by prosecutors. In these cases, as well as those in which the police have declined to arrest, victims can sign complaints directly with prosecutors. Regardless of how the case is obtained, prosecutors then decide to decline or accept the charges and to pursue a conviction in the courts on the original or modified charges.

Historically, like the police, prosecutors were accused of disinterest in family violence cases (Ellis, 1984). Specific criticisms suggested that they failed to file charges (i.e., dismissed charges) or to aggressively pursue convictions and sanctions against the offenders (Martin, 1976; Field and Field, 1973; Fields, 1978; Lerman, 1986). Stanko (1982) described the reliance of prosecutors on gender stereotypes to determine victim credibility and the precedence of goals of successful prosecution over the needs of victims. Factors influencing prosecutorial discretion included the questionable wisdom of intervening in family affairs, the motivation and potential ''culpability" of the victim, and the perceived reluctance of victims to complete the court process.

Research on factors that influence prosecution of marital violence cases reflects the absence of specific decision-making criteria and the generalization of prosecutorial discretion for stranger and family violence cases. Schmidt and Steury (1989) analyzed screening decisions of 38 prosecutors in 408 domestic violence cases in Milwaukee. Logit analyses showed that the severity of injury and the defendant's prior arrest record influenced screening and filing decisions more than the evidentiary strength of the case. In fact, prosecutors were not reluctant to charge even in weak cases. Defendants who failed to attend charging conferences and who had drug or alcohol involvement were especially likely to be prosecuted.

Elliott (1989) suggests that a high dismissal rate by prosecutors in wife assault cases offers police further disincentives to make an arrest or to carefully investigate and gather evidence for a successful prosecution. Others (Fagan et al., 1984; Ford, 1983) suggest that prosecutors often find an unreceptive judicial audience for wife assault cases, especially in sentencing deliberations. With serious sanctions not forthcoming, prosecutors have little incentive to aggressively pursue a wife assault case through conviction and sentencing. Though there was consistent evidence that the majority of wife assault cases were dismissed, both Schmidt

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

and Steury (1989) and Elliott (1989) found little evidence that different factors were involved in the decision to prosecute family violence cases compared to stranger violence crimes. Differences were attributed in part to the quality of evidence, but primarily to differences in victim/witness cooperation-a complex issue in the prosecution of family violence cases.

Innovations in Prosecution of Marital Violence

The major developments in prosecutorial responses to wife assault have evolved from two primary sources: research on victim-witness programs in the 1970s and special prosecution programs (e.g., Forst and Hernon, 1985) more often aimed at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the prosecution function. Successful experiments with special prosecution programs for targeted offender types (e.g., organized crime, career criminals) provided incentives for organizational innovations to address marital violence.

The special concerns of abused women in the criminal courts coincided with these innovations, although the impetus for reform may have derived from other interests. Victim-witness programs established the special circumstances that "vulnerable" victims faced in the prosecution process: intimidation and fear of reprisal, a possibly lengthy adjudication process, and interruption of basic social supports such as cash or housing. They provided counsel for victims, advocacy to expedite hearings and notification of appearances whenever possible, linkages to critical social services (e.g., shelter, counseling, social service advocacy), and advocacy for protective legal interventions (e.g., restraining orders). These programs also fostered significant legislative changes regarding evidence to simplify proceedings and to minimize the emotional difficulty of confronting a hostile court setting: for example, elimination of the requirement that divorce or dissolution proceedings be initiated prior to issuing a protective (restraining) order, use of depositions or videotaped testimony in lieu of court hearings, and relaxing of corroboration requirements in misdemeanor cases.

Special prosecution programs created an atmosphere within prosecutors' offices in which family violence cases had high status, providing incentives for vigorous prosecution without competing with other units for scarce investigative or trial resources. They also simplified procedures; in some programs, prosecutors could sign complaints and serve as plaintiffs. Some programs also

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

did not allow victims to withdraw complaints or request dismissal once charges had been filed, thus increasing the likelihood of a complaint resulting in a conviction while decreasing the negative reaction from judges for consuming court calendars and resources.

In effect, these programs established policies of mandatory prosecution or pretrial diversion (with the option for prosecution retained) of all wife assault cases referred by police. Although larger jurisdictions have adopted these concepts, there remain many locales in which marital violence cases compete for the attention of prosecutors. Research on marital violence, which has identified the high likelihood of repeat violence in domestic assaults as well as the special needs of victims, rarely has influenced rural or even suburban counties to improve the prosecution of these cases.

Although research on marital violence has provided significant, influential information to inform these innovations, its contributions have been limited to establishing the range of supportive services that were critical to sustaining successful prosecutions. What has not occurred-despite strong empirical evidence of the chronic, escalating nature of family violence and its overlap in many cases with stranger crimes (Fagan and Wexler, 1987a)-is a reordering of priorities regarding prosecution of family violence cases. With few exceptions, wife assault cases continue to be evaluated and prosecuted with little difference from other violence cases (Schmidt and Steury, 1989). The organizational, fiscal, and procedural accommodations necessary within prosecutors' offices to effectively pursue sanctions in family violence cases still are not commonplace.

SANCTION AND CONTROL OF WIFE ASSAULTERS: TREATMENT INTERVENTIONS

Court-mandated treatment of wife assault is essential to the criminal justice system objective of reducing recidivism (Dutton, 1988b). Treatment options support this goal in four ways. First, treatment provides a dispositional option for judges in imposing sanctions. It is an "intermediate" sanction and form of social control that is harsher than probation but less drastic than incarceration. Whether or not incarceration is an appropriate sanction in a particular case, judges often are reluctant to invoke such "last-resort" sanctions for marital violence when the victim has not been injured severely (Dutton, 1988a; Goolkasian, 1986). They may fear the consequences to victims of the removal of economic support, and they may still (inappropriately) view marital violence

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

cases as less serious than stranger violence and thus less serious in the allocation of scarce jail space. The availability of a dispositional option makes these cases more salient for judges and, in turn, for prosecutors and police.

Second, treatment has been seen as a means to protect women who chose not to dissolve their relationship, but whose violent partners would not seek treatment voluntarily. Third, treatment placements provide a form of control that strengthens the traditional probation sanction. Monthly, superficial contacts with probation officers for misdemeanor offenses are replaced by weekly or biweekly therapeutic interventions in a structured milieu. Failure to abide by probation conditions mandating treatment participation can result in court action and possibly an escalation in sanction severity. Fourth, treatment has specific clinical value for recidivism reduction. Treatment interventions often are specifically designed to reinforce the substantive meaning of the arrest sanction (Ganley, 1981). The format challenges assailants' beliefs that their arrest and conviction were unjust or that their use of violence was justified. The specific learning components of contemporary treatment models (Sonkin et al., 1985; Saunders, 1988) enable offenders both to learn alternative responses for conflict management or anger control and to internalize the negative consequences of violent behavior.

Treatment alternatives and options have a long-standing place in the criminal justice system (Gendreau and Ross, 1979). Dispositions with treatment components are common for drug offenders, drunk driving, (diagnosed) mental illness, and other offenders whose actions are presumed to be the result of some underlying behavioral problem or social skills deficit. Also common are options for diversion prior to prosecution, in which the outcome of treatment interventions influences the disposition of the case. Treatment groups for offenders convicted of wife assault began in the 1970s. Today, the prevailing approach involves treatment as part of a court sanction following conviction, usually in conjunction with probation supervision. Important distinctions exist among family systems, anger management-assertiveness, and feminist treatment models (Dutton, 1988a). Treatment groups focusing on anger management operate by challenging the violent male's rationalization system that neutralizes self-punishment and helps attribute the cause of violence to the spouse or some other external factor. For many programs, a primary objective is to directly undermine such cognitive, habit-sustaining mechanisms in assaultive males (Browne and Dutton, 1990).

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

For example, to the extent that an assailant believes that his wife's (or partner's) injuries were minimal or that she was to blame for the conflict, the more likely he is to view his subsequent arrest as unjust. Treatment models confront these beliefs, as well as general attitudes about women (sex-role orientation) and beliefs about power in dyadic relationships (Eddy and Myers, 1984; Dutton, 1988a). Treatment also focuses on anger detection, control, and management to influence cognitive and behavioral abilities.

These programs have been widely accepted as an option for criminal justice processing, in part because they reflect explanations of wife assault that do not challenge basic assumptions within criminal justice agencies about the causes of crime. The philosophical base of offender treatment for marital violence-stressing individual responsibility and behavioral control-is compatible with contemporary intervention models in the criminal justice system. This, in turn, creates a political context in which treatment can be linked to probation sanctions. Court-ordered treatment, under probationary conditions, in effect is the social control component of the legal sanction. However, evidence of its effectiveness is inconclusive due to weak evaluation designs. Recent evaluations (Saunders and Hanusa, 1984; Dutton, 1987; Edelson et al., 1987) reported that 64 to 84 percent of treatment participants were not violent after treatment, although measurements, follow-up times, and definitions varied.

Feminist therapy calls for a more basic resocialization of men and, in lieu of anger management, a redirection of their view of women and sex roles and of their instrumental use of violence to retain power and domination (Gondolf, 1985a). The social and cultural supports that reinforce the maintenance of power are critical to this model (Gondolf, 1985b; Bowker, 1983; Fagan, 1989). Although there is much evidence to support them, critical perspectives on violence (Walker, 1984; Gondolf, 1985b; Browne, 1987) have been less influential in guiding the development of sentencing options and treatment interventions for marital violence than models based on anger management and behavior modification. Sanction and control continue today to express perspectives that regard violence as an act of individual deviance.

Improving the efficacy of mandated treatment interventions depends on the resolution of critical issues. First, retention rates of assailants in counseling programs vary according to the personality characteristics and behavioral problems of participants (Hamberger and Hastings, 1988). Models tailored to specific types of assaultive

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

males are necessary. Second, ineffective treatment compromises victim safety. Accordingly, procedures are needed to audit the effect of interventions for assailants on the safety of victims. Third, treatment experiments with credible sanctions for control conditions (that address safety issues, for example) are required to strengthen the empirical evidence on treatment effectiveness. Moreover, current programs reach only a small fraction of assaultive males (Saunders and Azar, 1989). Research is needed both on the long-term effectiveness of current approaches and on mechanisms to make such programs available to a larger number of assaulters.

CONTRIBUTIONS OF RESEARCH ON MARITAL VIOLENCE TO CRIMINAL JUSTICE POLICY

How has research on marital violence influenced criminal justice policy? The competing explanations of marital violence differ not only in their locus (from individual pathology to social structure and cultural beliefs), but also in their implications for policy and intervention. Explanations of marital violence suggest policies that range from individual offender control to resocialization or macrosocial changes in behavioral and attitudinal norms, and ultimately in the redistribution of social and economic power between women and men.

These competing explanations have drawn empirical support through quite divergent research paradigms. In this section, we briefly trace the paradigms of social science and social control that follow from the various explanations of marital violence, and examine their impact on knowledge and policy.

Paradigms of Social Science

The policy emphasis on deterrence through arrest and prosecution places greater premium on individual explanations of marital violence than on other models. Accordingly, research on marital violence that identifies the causes and remedies within individual assailants has had the strongest currency for criminal justice policy development. Research on offenders has greater utility in a system geared toward offender sanction and control. However, research that examines the validity of ecological theories or ideological explanations has been valued less in a jurisprudential setting in which the occurrence of codified behaviors is the critical issue. For researchers studying marital violence, the measurement of situation and context-critical for theory development and testing-adds

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

much to explanations of the motivational component of violence. Yet these variables have not been fully integrated in policies on arrest or prosecution, possibly limiting their effects.34

These distinctions are symbolic of deeper divisions in research traditions and paradigms. The virtual separation of family and stranger violence research (other than for homicide) reflects important differences in theory, definition, measurement, and research paradigms (Fagan and Wexler, 1987a). There have been numerous criticisms of social scientific efforts to explain marital violence (e.g., see Dobash and Dobash, 1979; Wardell et al., 1983), particularly the use of methods derived from the natural sciences and the attempt to develop a "science of man" (Becker, 1963). Such studies have difficulty acknowledging the context and meaning of specific acts. Yet theorists studying drug use (Zinberg, 1984), delinquency, and violence by gang members (Klein and Maxson, 1989), and even drug-related violence (Goldstein, 1989) have identified the importance of context in sorting out the motivation of specific acts. Further, in research on marital violence, there has been disagreement on the importance of nonphysical harm and injury, despite their usefulness in understanding the phenomenon, as well as on explicit measures of physical aggression such as the Conflict Tactics Scales (Straus, 1979, 1990a).

Fagan and Wexler (1985), for example, found that the explanatory power of risk factors in OLS models of marital violence varied according to the definition of aggression or violence used. Table 6 shows the results of OLS regression analyses predicting six different measures of marital violence for each of three sets of

TABLE 6 Summary of OLS Regression Models of Marital Violence Measures by Victim, Assailant, and Situation Variables (N = 270) (percent variance explained, F-value)

Violence or Abuse Measure

Victim Characteristics

Assailant Characteristics

Situational Factors

CTS violence

4.2 (1.43)

37.0 (15.83)a

6.3 (1.54)

CTS aggression

2.8 (0.93)

37.6 (16.26)a

2.7 (0.63)

Most serious injury

1.4 (0.56)

12.1 (3.71)b

9.3 (2.36)c

Frequency of abuse

4.7 (1.53)

7.6 (2.11)

13.2 (3.46)b

Duration of abuse

16.3 (6.31)a

28.1 (10.35)a

53.2 (26.14)a

Frequency of injury

4.7 (1.61)

10.7 (3.25)b

26.4 (8.26)a

ap(F) = .001.

bp(F) = .01.

cp(F) = .05.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

explanatory variables derived from risk markers for victims, assailants, and couples (see Hotaling and Sugarman, 1986). The CTS violence measure was a scale derived from the CTS assault items (Straus, 1983) and modified to include sexual assault. The CTS abuse scale added verbal abuse (threats, insults, harassment) and sexual assault to the CTS violence items.35 The data are based on self-reports of abuse histories from victims who participated in legal and social interventions ( N = 270). Explained variance of marital violence for each of the three predictor sets varied according to the measure of marital violence. The results show the risk of underestimation of the severity of marital violence when only one behavioral dimension of that violence is considered . Moreover, evaluations of the comparative effectiveness of interventions also may vary according to the measure of violence or accrued harm.

With the same data set, the efficacy of legal and social interventions was compared by using several measures of marital "violence" following legal or social interventions: the CTS aggression and CTS violence scales, calls to police, the severity of injuries sustained, and the occurrence of specific acts of harassment (such as threats to children or the victim, or economic reprisals). Results are shown in Table 7. (Data were based on self-reports by victims for each variable during a four-month period following participation in legal, social, or other family violence interventions.)

Results show that the efficacy of interventions varied according to the measure used. Mean scale scores for recipients of each service are shown, and significant differences with nonrecipients are indicated in the table. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) results for each intervention differed according to the measure of marital violence or abuse. For example, abuse and violence toward recipients of restraining orders were greater than for recipients of other services, but restraining order recipients called the police fewer times. The severity of injury varied little among recipients of vastly different services, but measures of aggression and violence varied extensively. Participants in mediation programs experienced less harassment but higher rates of aggression and violence than recipients of other services. Moreover, covariates for prior calls to police were significant for each measure. The implications of discrepant definitions and measures of spouse abuse for policy and program development are apparent.

Certainly, the social and legal meanings of aggression and violence differ, and theory on marital violence should encompass

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

TABLE 7 Analysis of Variance of Postintervention Aggression by Type of Interventiona

Intervention

CTS Aggression

CTS Violence

Severity of Injury

Calls to Policeb

Harassment

Legal services

0.83

0.49

1.07

0.28

0.84

Legal advocacy

-.83

0.49

1.07

0.29

0.87

Sherter services

0.90

0.47

1.08

0.32c

0.93d

Information and referral

0.79c

0.45d

1.07d

0.25

0.75

Nonlegal advocacy

0.79

0.43

1.09

0.29

0.86d

Mediation

1.06

0.53

1.12

0.24

0.35

Counseling

0.87

0.49

1.08

0.25

0.71

Restraining order

1.18d

0.71d

1.10

0.27

0.65

Covariates

 

 

 

 

 

Calls to police

e

e

e

e

e

Prior injury

d

ns

ns

ns

ns

NOTE: ns indicates data is not significant.

a Mean scale scores.

b Categorical scale for postintervention calls to police.

cp(F) = .05.

dp(F) = .10.

ep(F) = .001.

SOURCE: Fagan et al. (1984).

both dimensions. The social meaning of aggression is critical to theory that places these acts in the larger context of violence toward wives. However, these distinctions may have little bearing on criminal justice policy because the nonphysical dimensions of aggression-with the exception of threat-are less relevant (or perhaps not at all relevant) to codified law and, accordingly, to the criminal justice process. Yet, in the evaluation of legal policy, distinctions between physical injury and nonphysical harm (e.g., economic retaliation or psychological abuse) can lead to very different conclusions about behavioral change and the impact of law reform.

Family violence research has been concerned with explaining the occurrence of aggression in families, not just assaults. It has focused on identifying explanations of a broad range of aggressive acts (threats, physical abuse, harassment) to design interventions that will reduce the likelihood of their recurrence for the victim

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

and, by extension, by the assailant. In-depth research on marital violence has extensively applied a context-specific approach to discern the intention and meaning of aggressive acts as part of theory construction and validation, and has used measures that include both physical and nonphysical injury to test theory (Dobash and Dobash, 1983). Samples have generally been clinical or purposive samples of victims or former victims (Frieze and Browne, 1989). Theories derived from this research have examined the ecological and societal contributions to aggression, factors again extraneous to the logic of the criminal justice process.

Criminological research, in contrast, relies on studies of offenders more than on victimization research for policy development. Research utilization in criminal justice has emphasized studies with several discernible characteristics: offenders as subjects, not respondents; experiments or quasiexperiments, rather than descriptive studies with clinical samples; violence measures that operationalize codified law or behaviors and that also de-emphasize nonphysical aggression, injury, or harm; independent variables that operationalize official responses to marital violence or the flow of cases through the system and test explicit formulations of deterrence theory; and-most important-policy applications that directly contribute to strategies to sanction and control offenders as a means of reducing marital violence. Exceptions to this are the theories and empirical knowledge that have informed the design of treatment programs for males who assault their women partners.

Given this emphasis, important information from other studies or paradigms has not been used to inform criminal justice policy. We know, for example, that men who assault female partners often assault strangers as well; that the severity of spousal assault is well correlated with stranger assaults (Fagan et al., 1983); that domestic assailants may move on from one abusive relationship to another (Elliott, 1989); and that abusive male partners may generalize their violence from intimates to strangers (Shields et al., 1988). Yet there is little evidence that prosecutors use such information to target men who assault spouses (frequently, severely, or in conjunction with other assaults) for high-priority prosecution. Similar research suggests that prior calls to police for domestic violence are a risk factor for serious injury (Fagan and Wexler, 1987a). Yet few law enforcement agencies report routine checks for prior domestic disturbances as a criterion or guideline for specific response decisions. Threats in the context of a long-standing violent relationship should be regarded differently

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

from threats to strangers (Walker, 1984), but again these rarely inform police response decisions.

The selectivity of the criminal justice system in utilizing research on marital violence reflects policies that determine their function in marital violence cases. A narrow view-emphasizing offender detection and punishment-suggests that the current state of affairs does not merit significant change. For example, Zimring (1989) suggests that a specific jurisprudence of family violence is unnecessary, but even in this view the effectiveness of criminal justice policies may benefit from knowledge gained in research on marital violence. The reverse condition also seems to be important: Knowledge of the general violence patterns of a male who assaults his spouse should signify the risks of further violence in that couple. If criminal justice policies expand to include victim protection and the use of criminal sanctions to avert violence, the contributions of research on marital violence to improving the effectiveness of policy are obvious.

IMPACTS ON POLICY THROUGH LEGAL PRECEDENT: APPLICATION OF THE SELF-DEFENSE PLEA TO BATTERED WOMEN

Marital homicide cases illustrate the complexity of introducing research on marital violence into the adjudication process. The development of defense strategies for abused women who kill their assailants (Fiora-Gormally, 1978; Thyfault, 1984; Thyfault et al., 1987) has provided a unique opportunity to influence criminal justice policy. Unlike the processes that influenced other criminal justice or legislative reforms, the introduction of research on marital violence into courtroom deliberations-and, ultimately, into case law-is the result of tactical maneuvers by defense attorneys to establish the context of extreme violence and to show how the conditions of violence can shape the perceptions, social judgments, and responses of victims to their assailants. The result is a slow but perceptible accumulation of case law that is built on research on marital violence and reflects the foundations of its unique research paradigms (Thyfault, 1984).

In general, self-defense is defined as the justifiable use of a reasonable amount of force against an adversary, when one reasonably believes that one is in immediate danger of unlawful bodily harm and that the use of such force is necessary to avoid this harm (LaFave and Scott, 1972). This perception, and the decision on how much force is needed to prevent further assault, need only be reasonable, even if it turns out later to be erroneous. Whether

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

the use of force (or the amount of force used) against an assailant is justified on the grounds of self-defense depends in large part on the perceptions of the defender and whether those perceptions can be shown to be reasonable in light of the circumstances of the case. Components of the self-defense plea, including imminent danger, equal force, accuracy of perceptions, and (in some states) efforts to retreat, require evidence derived from analyses of the history and context of violence in the relationship.

The key to the use of the self-defense plea for abused women lies in the definition of what perceptions are reasonable for a female victim of physical or sexual assault (Schneider, 1980; Schneider and Jordan, 1981). Evidence on the basis of these perceptions in abused women derives directly from the studies of victims of severe wife assault, the context of violence and its influence on the victims' perceptions and judgments, and the circumstances surrounding the history of the assaultive relationship. A history of physical abuse alone does not justify the killing of an abuser (i.e., being a ''battered women" is not a defense for homicide). Having been physically assaulted or threatened by the abuser in the past is pertinent to such cases only as it contributes to the defendant's state of mind at the time the killing occurred, in that it formed a reasonable basis for the woman's perception of (herself or a child) being in imminent danger of severe bodily harm or death at the hands of her partner.

Thus, Browne (1987) interprets the application of the self-defense plea to battered women cases as requiring more than simply a history of physical abuse. Also necessary is a knowledge of the history of the circumstances surrounding both prior violence and the specific fatal incident. These are critical for establishing the woman's perceptions at the time of the homicide-particularly in evaluating the imminent danger to herself based on the escalating history of previous violence and the absence of any means to stop it. Browne notes that the use of this defense is not intended to establish new law, but rather that it uses family violence research to inform "existing statutes to account for differences in the experiences of women and men ... so that the same standard can be applied to all victims" (Browne, 1987:175).

SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF THE COURTS AND MARITAL VIOLENCE

In many jurisdictions the "criminalization" of marital violence resulted in a sudden, rapid increase in the number of wife assault defendants arrested and referred to lower or superior courts

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

(Goolkasian, 1986). In effect, an entire new class of defendants entered the criminal justice system, whose offenses and (at times) offender characteristics were quite different from former case types. If the utilization of research on marital violence has been selective, one explanation may lie in the unique nature of marital violence cases in the criminal court and the conflicts generated by this new class of defendants in the social organization of the court and the established norms within it. Organizational perspectives that stress the structural context of legal decision making suggest that holistic (Emerson, 1983) and working group processes of decision making (Eisenstein and Jacob, 1977) will determine case outcomes, leaving little room for the more objective contributions of research. Family violence research generally has not addressed the social organizational issues that influence policy changes in the criminal justice system.

If sanctions are the product of structural factors in the courts (Hagan and Bumiller, 1983), then the effects of organizational characteristics should prove significant. The going rate for an offense is the sanction that officials expect an offender to receive for specific offenses and is thought to be influenced by organizational factors independent of case-specific variables (Casper and Brereton, 1984). Emerson (1983) defines the "stream of cases" facing officials as influencing legal decisions in several respects. Cases are evaluated for prosecution and sentencing relative to other cases, as well as on their merits. Thus, the relative seriousness of cases changes at different stages of processing, so that a case may appear to be more serious at arrest than at sentencing, when other cases have been winnowed out.

Accordingly, a felony assault against a wife may seem quite serious to the arresting officer faced with less serious domestic incidents, but less serious at sentencing in contrast to stranger cases involving offenders with prior criminal records. This process may be especially sensitive to the differential processes of accumulating a prior record for domestic versus other assaults. In sorting cases for prosecution-or prioritizing cases for last-resort sanctions-criminal justice officials may look for guidance to a "going rate." The relatively brief history of wife assault cases in criminal courts and the shifting priorities for prosecution in many urban areas have not allowed such a rate to develop among the closed social network of court actors involved in prosecution and adjudication policy.

The ability to invoke last-resort solutions, such as imprisonment, is a critical organizational function. Jacob (1983) observed

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

that prosecutors in criminal court possess more information than other courtroom personnel and have a disproportionate influence over the disposition of cases. By introducing a new class of cases into an established "stream," prosecutors may alter the group dynamics developed over a lengthy period and in response to a shared experience base. Moreover, prosecutors have the "upper hand" traditionally, and their actions disproportionately influence the legal culture and routines of the criminal court (Jacob, 1983). The formalization of marital violence cases by prosecutors may introduce changes in the standard operating procedures and victim characteristics for personnel routinely involved in stranger violence cases. Further, a new set of legal actors (e.g., special prosecutors, victim advocates) has been introduced into the court system, specific to these cases.

Thus, the calculus of sanction severity may be influenced by changes in the legal actors, the formality and nature of their roles, the balance of knowledge of case specifics, and the absence of a going rate for punishment. In other words, the types of consensus usually present among criminal court actors may not be present when a new class of cases is introduced. In fact, dissent might result among legal officials concerning the going rate for marital violence, based not only on the absence of a knowledge base but also on their own attitudes toward marital violence and its severity.

These processes have been observed in the introduction of juvenile offenders into criminal courts (Hassenfeld and Cheung, 1985) and more generally in studies of organizational change in criminal courts (Mather, 1979). Although not a concern easily remedied by research on marital violence, this is an area in which understanding of the dynamics of organizational change can be influential. Fagan et al. (1984) found that changes in policy and procedure occurred and endured for marital violence cases when the political incentives and fiscal resources were provided to accommodate new procedures. For example, rather than displacing organizational functions or people, systems were expanded to accommodate the new class of cases and the people to process them. Judges remained reluctant to incarcerate marital violence cases other than the most seriously injurious ones. Thus, the creation of dispositional options was especially important in maintaining the calculus of when last-resort sanctions such as incarceration were invoked.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×
Paradigms of Social Control

The problem definition of marital violence reflected in criminal justice policies is one of individual pathology, and the appropriate remedy has been a strategy of deterrence and offender control (Gelles and Cornell, 1985). Earlier, the compatibility of offender treatment with this core philosophy was seen as a facilitator to research utilization of the growing knowledge about males who assault their female partners. For example, early treatment models were based on social learning principles (Dutton, 1988b; Sonkin et al., 1985)-an outlook especially compatible with individual deviance explanations of marital violence. The creation of treatment programs for wife assaulters provided the types of social and organizational accommodation described above to sustain change throughout the systems of social and legal control.

Offender control that protects victims, however, may be more difficult to implement and may lead to conflicts in paradigms of control. Specifically, conflicts may arise when risk factors suggest incarceration, but the going rate or prevailing offender control policies do not dictate incarceration. That is, victim protection policies may suggest that offender controls be activated that might otherwise not be used in an offender-focused policy.

For example, in an overcrowded local jail, a policy might be developed to ease overcrowding in which arrestees for marital violence can be released on low bail or their own recognizance. They may appear to be less of a danger than other violent offenders or alleged drug dealers, whose crimes threaten "public safety" and not the relatively "private" matter of family conflict. Exemptions from these release policies certainly are warranted in some (if not all) marital violence cases. Yet this places victim protection considerations in marital violence cases-and attendant offender control strategies-in direct conflict with other crime control strategies and broader criminal justice policy issues. Research on marital violence is unequivocal about the danger to victims posed by the balance of policy toward offender-based decision making; the chronic, escalating nature of marital violence poses special danger when retaliation for an arrest becomes a potential trigger for a violent or lethal episode (Browne, 1987). Yet the clash of control paradigms is apparent when considerations of public danger (from "street'' criminals) and private safety of battered women compete for priority as factors in decision making and resource assignment.

Research on the differential effects of criminal justice sanctions also suggests that legal sanctions and social control of offenders

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

are more effective for less serious cases (Fagan et al., 1984), but that victim protection models (e.g., removal of victims to a shelter, mandatory overnight incarceration of offenders) are more appropriate for more serious cases. Such disaggregation and prioritization of marital violence cases has not been evident in criminal justice policy development. Although some prioritization of cases for prosecution may occur, the winnowing process following arrest (Dutton, 1988b) suggests that police responses should consider the severity of violence and the consequences of an arrest in terms of both subsequent offender control decisions and victim protection considerations.

Knowledge about patterns of wife assault indicates that victim protection should also be a basic element in an offender control strategy for more serious cases, based on the potential harm unleashed (via retaliation) for victims in serious cases where arrests have occurred but offender control is uncertain. Although threats of victim retaliation occur in some stranger cases, they are not sufficiently frequent to merit a policy response. Moreover, such threats may not be considered legally salient enough to invoke a criminal justice response. (Yet when such threats occur in politically salient cases such as organized crime or high-level drug dealing, protection from reprisals is usually afforded to witnesses.) However, there is a potential interaction between offender control and victim protection in nearly all marital violence cases, especially when the victim and assailant share the custody of children or when prior threats have occurred. If invoking victim protection is associated with offender control strategies, a disincentive may be created for intervention. This conflict in control paradigms is rooted in the larger issues of measurement and definition, system capacity, organizational dynamics among system agencies, and the social and organizational "currency" of marital violence cases.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THEORY AND RESEARCH

Several complementary directions for research are evident from the foregoing review: the integration of stranger and marital violence behaviors to expand the concepts of criminal and marital violence careers; the patterns and processes of desistance from marital and other forms of intrafamily violence; the covariation of perceptions and salience of deterrence with social area characteristics; the cognitive and developmental effects of witnessing marital violence during childhood and adolescence; the relationship among

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

variables such as intoxication, arousal, fear of intimacy, and aggression; and the interventions that empower victims and in turn strengthen the effects of those interventions. Methodological development is needed to validate and reconcile current measures of behavior and consequences. As new empirical evidence develops, triangulation of knowledge from separate research endeavors should be integrated to refine theory and explanatory models.

The literature cited in this paper also illustrates the methodological dilemmas of research on marital violence. Retrospective studies and the preponderance of victim reports as data sources highlight the limitations of theory and research on offender behavior. Victims may be too intimidated to report ongoing violence or unaware of aggression displaced onto new victims when the assailant leaves home. New efforts are needed to focus on assailants as research subjects-both to validate previous research and to answer new questions on career patterns of partner assault. Research on assailants also will help sort out the influences, perceptions, and decision-making processes of offenders in the intervals surrounding incidents of marital assault.

DO WE NEED A SPECIAL THEORY OF MARITAL VIOLENCE?

Is a special theory needed for marital violence and for violence that occurs within families? For decades, theorists have disagreed on whether specific forms of deviant behaviors are unitary or isomorphic phenomena. Similar debates within both criminology and family violence research have failed to resolve whether family violence is a special case of violence (Gelles and Straus, 1979). The continuing balkanization of marital violence research has added to the disagreement on the generality of violence in family settings. How can a broader theoretical base be developed?

If family violence is part of a generalized pattern of violent behaviors, can we then expect its career parameters and phases to parallel other types of violence patterns? The unique circumstances of, and situational influences in, family life form a special context that facilitates violence toward (particularly female) spouses. Gelles and Straus (1979) suggest that certain characteristics intrinsic to family life create the context and dynamics for violence, whereas partriarchical views (Dobash and Dobash, 1979; Yllo, 1988) suggest that cultural imperatives create motivations for violence unique to a "marital" setting.

Yet a general theory of violence has much appeal in light of the robust findings on violence in the childhood backgrounds of

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

many familial and extrafamilial offenders. We reviewed consistent evidence that violence toward both strangers and intimates is learned early on in the home and reinforced through social interactions in later development phases. Social learning theorists suggest several processes, from modeling to reinforcement (Bandura, 1973; Pagelow, 1984). What may set apart stranger from intimate violence, or explain its overlap for a subset of offenders, are the concepts of culturally sanctioned sexual inequalities and traditional sex-role socialization. 36

For example, Bowker (1983) showed how social supports for violence in the home are sustained and reinforced in later adult life. Where violence is learned, sanctioned, and reinforced through cultural or behavioral norms in the immediate community, it will more likely be chronic and/or more serious. By integrating these perspectives into a general learning model, it may be possible to understand and explain the various manifestations of violent behavior and the patterns of victim selection.

Many males avoid violence in adult life, despite strong socialization to violence as children or adults. Most abused male children avoid later violence as adults (e.g., see Miller and Challas, 1981) but may go on to live unproductive and unhappy lives marked by financial difficulties and behavioral problems such as high divorce rates and problematic alcohol use. Accordingly, the immunities toward family violence are also of etiological relevance. For those who do not grow up to become violent adults, either internal or external controls (or both) develop. Megargee (1983) described the way such inhibitors may restrain violent behaviors, even in the presence of strong motivation or habituation toward violence. Where motivation is high but so too are restraints on violence, violence is not likely to occur.

Distinctions among "generally" violent males, those violent toward family members only, and those violent toward nonfamily members only, suggest that cognitive processes shape victim selection in the development of aggression toward others. The internalization of social norms for violence toward women or children may contribute to male sex-role socialization during childhood (Dobash and Dobash, 1979; Russell, 1982), and help explain in part the selection of family members as victims. When childhood and adolescent socialization includes the threat or use of male violence toward family members, there may exist a propensity to commit violent acts against family members during adult years.

We have moved closer to understanding the relationship between different forms of family violence and their overlap with

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

stranger violence. Despite the separation of theory and research in different forms of family and stranger violence, common etiological factors and correlates are evident. The implications of this paper regarding the status of men in families, the cultural supports for socialization of sex roles, and the ecological supports for family and stranger violence, suggest common ground for further theoretical work on the triggering of violent episodes. However, we still know relatively little about why patterns of victimization vary. Understanding the cognitive processes that shape victim selection are critical to resolving the question of factors that influence the generality of violence.

RESEARCH ON DESISTANCE FROM FAMILY VIOLENCE

Desistance research is an important part of the study of criminal careers, but a neglected one in the literature on violence and aggression in families. Fagan (1989) proposed a model for desistance from marital violence that identifies social psychological processes of decision making and extrication from social supports for marital violence. Questions of central importance to desistance research focus on the role and perception of sanctions, compared to personal circumstances, and the way in which formal and informal sanctions are interpreted.

The important role of peer supports for maintaining desistance suggests research to describe how patriarchal norms originate, and are operationalized, communicated, and reinforced. It is still unclear how patriarchy is translated to legitimate the use of violence to maintain dominance in the family. The recent evidence on social approval among adolescents for sexual aggression toward women (date rape) suggests that patriarchal beliefs develop well before adulthood and marriage (e.g., see Margolin et al., 1989). For these questions, ethnographic research in naturalistic settings may be especially valuable in understanding how peer norms are enforced and how they influence the development of violence careers and interactional styles in intimate relationships. Also, research on the ability of many men to avoid the predictable consequences of patriarchal influences will point out the sociolegal and moral restraints that help avert wife assault (Morash, 1986).

Desistance research also should focus on carefully specified issues of definition: conceptualization of desistance as a total cessation, a decreasing frequency or severity, or increasing intervals between "relapses", of violence. Selection of a period for

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

desistance that is too long risks problems in recall, but selecting too short a period risks enumerating "false desistance." Desistance research with assailants in both domestic-only and general violence categories can reveal shifts in victimization patterns and factors that influence choices regarding victims.

SPECIFIC DETERRENCE

The discrepancy between the results of the Minneapolis experiment and the replication experiments calls for further experimentation. Differences in the samples and social areas from which cases were drawn, the substantive interventions of police in the experiments, and design and measurement artifacts may all explain the contradictory findings. Together with important research on the meaning and interpretation of arrest (Carmody and Williams, 1987; Williams and Hawkins, 1989a), the perception and salience of deterrent interventions seems to covary with assailant background characteristics and the social area in which the couple resides.

Longer follow-up and more sensitive measures will provide more information on the interpretation and salience of legal sanctions. Measurement and design also may produce artifactual results-for example, the use of dichotomous recidivism variables or emphasis on behavior to the exclusion of consequences-that hides both good and bad results. Concurrent extralegal sanctions, such as shelter and social disclosure, should be included in deterrence research. Strategies such as social disclosure and shelter involvement with victims also should be integrated as covariates into tests of the combined effects of legal and social sanctions. Sensible policy would recognize the variety of types of wife assaulters and incorporate these covariates in explaining the effects of sanctions. For example, police may alter their response in cases from informal to formal knowing that threats, property damage, or other nonphysical but chronic aggression has occurred as a prelude to a violent episode.

VIOLENCE CAREERS

The integration of stranger and intimate violence in career criminal research is a critical gap. Epidemiological data show not only that there are distinct types of "battering careers" but also that careers in marital and stranger violence converge as violence in either domain becomes more frequent and serious. As noted,

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

Blumstein et al. (1985) have identified specific career types-from "innocents" who have little to no criminal activity, to "desisters" who quit after a very short interval of criminal involvement, to ''persisters" who often are high-rate offenders involved in serious crime. They concluded that each type is explained by unique etiological factors, and that the social and personal processes that sustain longer patterns also vary for desisters and persisters.

The concept of different battering careers in men who assault female partners is worthy of empirical study and can accommodate etiological questions as well as the development of career parameters. Unified theoretical perspectives on family and stranger violence can be tested to determine if a "special" theory of family violence is warranted. Career studies should examine the mutability of these patterns over time, changes in the ratio of inter-and intrafamily violent acts (both frequency and severity), and the risk markers or developmental sequences that may explain these shifts. The confluence of risk factors for both stranger and marital violence also suggests that paradigms from ecological research and explanations be integrated with research on violence toward intimate female partners.

Career research requires both general population samples and representative samples of known and self-identified offenders. Sampling at the extreme of the distribution of violent behaviors is necessary to ensure sufficient representation of high-rate and serious assailants. Research on the processes of initiation, escalation, and desistance requires more intensive study with smaller samples, using ethnographic methods to sample on the dependent variable. This complementary strategy can explore processes more effectively with populations generally unknown to official sources, whose behaviors otherwise remain hidden.

Retrospective study is the characteristic limitation of such career research, but recent developments, primarily in research on narcotics use and crime (Speckart and Anglin, 1986; Anglin and Speckart, 1988), offer techniques to minimize recall problems. Using key life events to establish temporal anchors, Anglin and Speckart (1988) traced the addiction careers of treated and untreated heroin users in California. Many of their subjects were over 50 years of age and were recalling with accuracy events of more than 30 years ago. These methods can be translated to the study of intrafamily violence to construct violence histories that have evolved over many years and through a variety of influences. Victimization patterns and displacement, other shifts in the frequency or severity of violence (lulls, episodes, relapses after lengthy desistance

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

periods), and contributing situational factors (e.g., peer group embedment, legal or social sanctions, life events such as the birth of a child) can be temporally anchored over a multidecade period to establish "natural" violence careers and the factors that affect their course. How these patterns vary by social area and the social status of offenders are other important questions

ANALYSIS OF ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE AND RESEARCH UTILIZATION

Study of the implementation and organizational accommodation of reform is a potentially fruitful avenue for research. Fagan et al. (1984) analyzed the ways in which services for victims were implemented, changed over time, and became institutionalized. They also examined the conditions that influenced the process of institutionalization and accommodation. Specific factors included the ability to establish "domain" or an area of acknowledged expertise, leadership, institutional sponsorship, personal and organizational incentives, ideology, and resources.

This type of research can address the social, organizational, and political dynamics of change in criminal justice policy and factors that influence its implementation and effectiveness. Despite inroads toward strengthening criminal justice responses, police and prosecutors still are likely to resist the loss of discretion, absent broader systemic changes that increase the salience of sanctions and the options for intervention. Careful research to illustrate the circumstances of organizational accommodation in a complex social system will contribute to the integration of marital violence cases in the criminal justice system.

Further study also is needed about the conditions under which marital violence or other criminological research has informed criminal justice policy toward spouse assault. Identifying the conditions under which research has been rejected or accepted, both organizationally and in terms of the research itself, can launch a body of knowledge on research utilization. Other studies are required on the extent to which policy changes have been influenced by research.

TREATMENT RESEARCH

Experiments on treatment effectiveness are critical. Development of outlets for judges to sanction offenders will effectively increase the salience of marital violence cases in the criminal justice system. Effective treatment also will provide greater safety

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

for victims, although safety procedures should be an important element of all program designs for interventions. The development of types of treatment for specific types of assailants will also advance theory as well as effective programs.

Experimental research should include multiple group designs with multiple measures and sufficient follow-up periods to determine the supports that help avoid the decay of treatment. Implementation of experimental interventions should also receive close attention, to avoid the confounding of program failure with theory failure. Continuous measures of the independent variable are needed to discern further the reasons for the effects of treatment.

DEVELOPMENTAL EFFECTS OF WITNESSING MARITAL VIOLENCE

Research is needed to explain what is learned-and how that learning occurs-when children and adolescents observe marital violence in their homes of origin and in homes nearby. What types of stimulation or arousal occur when children observe parental conflict? How does reinforcement occur during later developmental stages? How is it linked to participation in other aggressive behaviors? What factors mediate or offset potential negative outcomes?

Experimental research in laboratory settings using vignettes and simulations should include children and adolescents of different age cohorts to examine learning processes and age-specific sensitivities to learning. Experiments should also test methods to extinguish learning or arousal as an intervention for children or adolescents who may be at risk from exposure to or witnessing marital violence. Interventions should be tested both for children in homes where marital violence occurs and for children who live in social areas with high rates of child abuse or spouse assaults.

INTERVENTIONS THAT EMPOWER VICTIMS

The complex strategies to end violence that were identified by Bowker (1983, 1986a,b) suggest that combinations of legal and social interventions, both formal and informal, can be used by victims to help bring about the cessation of marital violence. The efficacy of arrest or other sanctions depends in part on the specific means that victims want to use to end violence and bring about other changes that they may desire. Further research with victims is needed to identify the attributes of formal legal or social interventions that are effective in ending violence, by having victims participate in the substance and process of offender control.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

Similar research on informal sanctions also is necessary to determine what strategies empower victims to bring resources to bear within the relationship.

Specific strategies for empowerment should focus on neutralizing violence by raising its costs and altering the balance of marital power. Legal and social interventions should also be evaluated for their contributions to victim support and empowerment.

CONTINUING CONTROVERSY OVER GENDER DIFFERENCES

After little attention in the literature for more than a decade, gender differences in marital violence again have become a topic of debate (Straus, 1989; cf. Browne, 1993). The stakes are high in this controversy, because the interpretation of marital violence and the formulation of policies depend on the construction of definitions and measures of physical conflicts between spouses. The higher rates of severe assault by male spouses, the greater percentage of women injured by and requiring medical treatment for injuries inflicted by spouses or ex-spouses, and the twice higher rate of killings of female than male spouses, demonstrate important gender differences in assaults between intimate partners. Clearly, the victims of severe outcomes of partner assaults are women.

Evidence of the "mutuality" of violence overlooks the harm of marital violence that accrues differentially to women. The paradigm of behavioral counts brushes aside the disproportionate rate of injury and fatality among women victims, as well as their greater difficulty in restraining their assailants and in escaping. Further, there are validity problems in obtaining marital agreement about the origins of violent incidents and the frequency or level of force used. Claims that marital violence is mutual, or that women are as "violent" or assaultive as men in marriage, rely heavily on reports of participation rates-a misleading indicator of violent behavior when examined apart from offending rates.

The debate on gender differences has important implications for prevention and intervention. Browne and Williams (1989) showed that resource availability for woman victims of marital violence was associated with a reduction in the rate of female-perpetrated homicides. Yet, the implication of the "mutuality" assumption is that such interventions may be less effective than generalized violence prevention activities that target both men and women. Although these may make important contributions to reducing marital violence, they belie the greater risks to women of fatalities at the hands of their spouses (Browne and Williams, 1989).

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

CONCLUSIONS

The perspectives in this paper represent an effort to locate and explain marital violence in two larger theoretical contexts: interpersonal violence and the unique domain of family relations. The implications of the knowledge gained in the quarter century of empirical research on marital violence also can inform theory, research, and policy in other areas. Yet family violence continues to be viewed as an idiosyncratic crime, much like white-collar crime, and remains outside the mainstream of criminological theory and research (Fagan and Wexler, 1987a). The result is a focus on unique causes and solutions of specific crime types, that overlooks the common origins of different behaviors and the importance of situational influences on crime events and later stages of criminal careers. Advances in theory and practice to control marital violence may depend on integrative research that draws from a broader spectrum of empirical knowledge.

WHAT WE STILL NEED TO KNOW

As research on marital violence advances, the questions that shape these efforts have become more focused on specific issues. The theoretical integration of explanations of marital violence with other forms of family violence will require testing assumptions about the processes and specific factors that distinguish these behaviors.

The triggers for arousal leading to assaults on wives, and the cognitive restructuring (of cues or interactions) that shapes aggressive responses to arousal, are important areas for theory and research. These are the transactional processes that explain the motivational component of an assault by a male spouse. In turn, the processes that translate cultural beliefs into social contexts and subcultural influences are critical to understanding how marital violence may be ecologically nested. Finally, the learning rules that shape intergenerational processes are little understood, as are the conditions under which early childhood witnessing is mitigated for nonviolent individuals in later life.

The latter presents important avenues for research and theory. Among couples or individuals with high concentrations of risk factors, important information can be gained from understanding the factors that mitigate marital violence. What kinship networks, marital dynamics, cultural supports and sanctions, relationship dynamics, and social controls influence these individuals? How are cultural dynamics mitigated in the distribution of

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

marital power? What is the salience of legal controls and deterrents? Case-control studies can begin to answer many of these questions.

There also appear to be differences in the perception of sanctions and the interpretation of their meaning. The inconsistency between the experiments on arrest and their replications, and the implications of the Omaha study for coordination of arrest with later stages of criminal justice processing, suggest further research on how the meaning of arrest is conveyed to offenders. Are these sanctions perceived differently in different social areas and by different types of individuals?

With the early focus on the deterrent effects of arrest in misdemeanor cases of wife assault, much of the research on the criminal justice system's response to marital violence has focused on and been designed to test the effects of different police responses during domestic disturbance calls. As noted, in such research the focus in on the offenders, with women victims used as reporters of both current violence and recidivism.

However, another aspect of the justice system's response to violence in marital relationships-the existence of legislation designed to further protect and compensate victims of domestic violence-has received almost no attention by social science researchers. Such legislation would include ex parte and "permanent" (typically six months to one year) orders for the abuser to desist from abuse and/or vacate the home, orders for the transfer of custody of minor children to the victim, orders that the abuser provide monetary compensation to the victim for injuries and other losses, and stipulations that violations of such orders by the abuser constitute a criminal offense (e.g., see Browne, 1993).

In this area, it is particularly critical that the research be primarily victim focused: Although state domestic violence statutes vary somewhat in their terms, all require some degree of initiation on the part of the victim in empowering the justice system to act. Conversely, although judges and other justice system officials can express concern or disagreement, most statutes stipulate that victims' requests that orders be rescinded must be honored by the courts.

Browne (1986, 1987) point out that although such legislation is the primary legal response in most states to the problem of domestic violence, little systematic research has been done either on abused women's use of these legal options (once police contact has been made) or on the effectiveness of these options in producing the protection they are meant to provide. For example, little

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

is known empirically about (1) the frequency with which women who have been informed of these options by police initiate actions under these provisions or chose not to pursue them; (2) the exogenous (e.g., relationship and social) circumstances associated with victims' decisions to initiate or not initiate action; (3) which criminal justice responses appear to facilitate or to impede victims' use of legal provisions for protection; (4) what factors influence women to follow through with these protections or ask that they be rescinded, once the orders have been obtained; or (5) the outcomes of their decisions as they relate to an increase or decrease in reassault or threat by the partner. Thus it is important to understand both victim circumstances-in terms of threat, relationship history, other support systems, and other exogenous variables-and the interaction between victims and the criminal justice system if we are to understand the patterns of use of domestic violence legislation or its effectiveness.

Research shows that interventions focused on victims can empower them to use legal sanctions and informal social resources to assist them in stopping violence (Bowker, 1983). How the use of these strategies is promoted by efforts to broaden their reach (through legislation, services to protect women victims as they pursue options, etc.), and in turn their effectiveness, should also guide plans for victim services. The safety of women whose spouses are in treatment has become a central issue in the design of interventions. Evaluation research and experimentation for women victims pursuing legal options, as well as those with assailants in treatment, should begin to address seriously this aspect of program or system impact.

Finally, larger questions demand an integration of the study of family violence with the more general literature on violence in society. Can we realistically expect marital violence to decrease when rates of stranger violence continue at high levels? What ecological effects ensue from these high rates of violence that reciprocally alter informal social controls (e.g., family disintegration) and divert resources toward punishment and control (Skogan, 1989)? What are the effects on marital violence of marriages falling under increasing economic strain, a factor closely related to arousal states that may trigger assaults? The nesting of marital violence within larger ecological forces that influence violence rates in general suggests that efforts to reduce and control family violence are intertwined with macrosocial efforts to reduce violence throughout society.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors are grateful to Christopher Maxwell for assistance in data analysis, and to Joan McCord and Delbert Elliott for their thoughtful comments on the manuscript.

NOTES

1  

These included killing young brides, forced suicides by new wives, wife beating, husband beating, husband-wife brawling, forced suicide of wives, wife raiding, and marital rape.

2  

Wife beating was defined as the physical assault of a wife by her husband and includes slapping, shoving, hitting, pushing, hitting with an object, burning, cutting, or shooting. Its prevalence in a society was measured on an ordinal scale from rare (occurs not at all or in a small percentage of households) to common (occurs in all or nearly all households). The severity of wife beating was also measured on an ordinal scale from painful (beating results in pain but no debilitating injury) to mutilation or death (permanent physical injuries such as loss of digits or limbs, or death).

3  

Another study found that 57 wives and 128 husbands were prosecuted for both verbal and physical abuse in the six New England colonies between 1630 and 1699. The women were typically charged with "nagging," rather than with physical assaults (Koehler, 1980, cited in Pleck, 1987).

4  

According to Pleck (1989), Judge Buller in England first asserted the rule in 1783. He was ridiculed by the press, and a cartoonist lampooned him as "Judge Thumb." Pleck found no court rulings that explicitly endorsed the "rule of thumb."

5  

IACP (1967:3) training materials stated that "... in dealing with family disputes, the power of arrest should be exercised as a last resort" (cited in Elliott, 1989).

6  

Ironically, it was dissatisfaction with the "crisis intervention" and "conflict management" roles adopted by police that led to legislation in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts enabling women victims of marital violence to obtain protective orders that brought marital violence into the criminal jurisdiction. Mandatory arrest statutes and policies followed these developments.

7  

Severe violence included kicking, biting, hitting with the fist, hitting or trying to hit with an object, beating up, threatening with a gun or knife, and using a gun or knife.

8  

See Elliott and Huizinga (1983) for a discussion of the validity issues in this procedure.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

9  

Spouse abuse was defined as an assault without theft in which the offender was the victim's spouse or ex-spouse. No distinction was made between spouse or ex-spouse in that iteration of the NCS. Cohabitating adults also were excluded in the definition. Although the survey made no distinction between current and former spouses, the offender did not have a right to be in the victim's home in 26 percent of the spouse abuse victimizations. Gaquin assumed that these assaults were inflicted by exspouses.

10  

The construction of NCS items does not permit precise calculations of the interval between victimizations. Respondents are asked to indicate whether they had been victimized in the previous six months. Accordingly, the range of elapsed time between incidents may be from six months to one year, depending on when in the recall periods the incidents actually occurred.

11  

The percentage of nonstranger victimizations of females who were never married was greater than for married females but less than for divorced or separated females. However, the age range may explain disparities between never-married women and others. Never-married women were more likely to include females less than 20 years of age and involved in dating relationships with males who were at the peak age for assault victimizations.

12  

Another 10 percent were difficult to classify, but the authors suggested that they had some of the indicators of marital assaults.

13  

The items ask whether, in the past year, the husband or partner ever tried to, or forced the respondent to, have sexual relations by using physical force, such as holding the respondent down, or hitting or threatening to hit the respondent. Other items ask how many times this happened in the past year and if it happened before the reporting year.

14  

Assaults included the following: threw objects at the other person; pushed, grabbed, or shoved; slapped; kicked, bit, or hit with a fist; hit or tried to hit with something; beat up the other; choked; threatened with a gun or knife; used a gun or knife. Any one of these acts constituted an assault. The sample included married and cohabitating couples. Marital violence in separated and divorced couples was not measured because of their exclusion from the sample.

15  

As mentioned earlier, severe violence included kicking, biting, hitting with the fist, hitting or trying to hit with an object, beating up, threatening with a gun or knife, using a gun or knife.

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

16  

These rates were calculated only for couples in which a female committed at least one assault. Elsewhere, Straus (1990a) reports an offending rate for males of "over six assaults per year," presumably in all couples where at least one assault occurred. No comparable rate is provided for women.

17  

In the 1985 NFVS, the question of who struck the first blow is limited to the most recent event.

18  

Percent urban population, percent African American, population mobility.

19  

Abuse included six items: threats of violence, push/slap/shove (minor violence), punch/kick/bite, threaten with weapon, use a weapon, and sexual assault.

20  

An exception is Sherman and Berk (1984), who collected data on both official and self-reports of violence following police intervention in Minneapolis. Dunford et al. (1989) also collected both official and self-report data but did not report a correlation.

21  

Martha then went on to have sexual relations with their young dinner guest, a male assistant professor, illustrating the image of alcohol as a disinhibitor of sexual behaviors as well as aggression.

22  

Hotaling and Sugarman (1986) found that abuse of other substances was not a significant risk factor that was positively correlated with spouse assault. Rather, they found an equal number of studies that indicated either positive or negative associations of spouse abuse with other substances. Accordingly, alcohol but not the use of other substances appears to be a significant correlate of wife assault.

23  

Based on reports from spouse abuse victims (in shelters) or assailants in treatment programs.

24  

The survey did not inquire about the co-occurrence of intoxication and spouse abuse-whether violence occurred while either of the partners was intoxicated. Fagan et al. (1983) asked victims whether drug or alcohol use accompanied violence. There was a modest, positive association for alcohol use, but a weak, negative association for drug use during violent episodes.

25  

This does not deny the distribution of family violence across social classes. See Straus et al. (1980) and Straus and Gelles (1986).

26  

Only one study seems to show otherwise: Miller et al. (1988), comparing alcoholic women in treatment (N = 45) with women in a random sample of households (N = 40) and controlling for age, found that alcoholic women more often were victims of marital violence. However, alcohol use and witnessing marital

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
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violence were correlated with each other as well as with spouse assault, suggesting a spurious relationship. Kantor and Straus (1987), using NFVS data, also found an association between alcohol use and victimization, but the Miller study suggests that there is a ''third factor" in the relationship.

27  

Whether the function is linear or nonlinear has not been empirically assessed for spouse assaults, but there have been efforts to assess risk factors for child abuse and neglect (Starr, 1988). Similar efforts have been applied to adolescent substance use (Bry et al., 1982). This approach has rarely been used in criminological research.

28  

See Straus (1976) and Yllo (1983) for specific variables for patriarchy. Gender inequalities (wage differentials, labor market segmentation, political representation) and media portrayals of women are most often cited as indices of patriarchy.

29  

Use of force as defense of male authority, normative attitudes supporting violence toward wives, compulsive masculinity, economic constraints and discrimination, burdens of child care (and failure to provide relief of these burdens), myth of the intrinsic weakness of the single-parent household, preeminence of the caretaker/wife role for women, women's negative self-image, male orientation of the justice system.

30  

Bowker analyzed reports from 1,000 victims on the relation between social embedment in male subculture and the severity of husband's violence toward wives. Embedment was measured by the frequency of assailant contacts with males only and the number of visits to bars without his wife. For both measures, social embedment in male subcultures was significantly associated with the frequency and severity of spouse assault (Bowker, 1986a,b).

31  

Power is defined alternately in terms of dominance, decision making, and relative levels of resources (Frieze and McHugh, 1981); the stronger taking advantage of the weaker (Finkelhor, 1983); coercion through the threat of physical violence (Straus et al., 1980); or demographic characteristics that reflect aggregate social status of ethnic or racial groups (Berk et al., 1983).

32  

Dutton (1987) compares this to the finding of Hood and Sparks (1970) that police made arrests in 20 percent of the cases where they attended and decided that a crime had been committed.

33  

Most jurisdictions authorize arrest whenever there is probable cause that a felony assault has occurred. The degree of injury or the presence of a weapon generally qualifies a felony charge. For

Suggested Citation:"Violence Between Spouses and Intimates: Physical Aggression Between Women and Men in Intimate Relationships." National Research Council. 1994. Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 3: Social Influences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4421.
×

   

misdemeanors, there are restrictions on arrest in assault cases including corroboration or "in-presence" requirements (Lerman, 1986). Thus, victims must initiate a complaint or warrant to effect an arrest. The intent of mandatory arrest statutes is to eliminate these restrictions on misdemeanor wife assault, the most common charge category for domestic assaults, and to allow officers to make misdemeanor arrests on the basis of either the victim's hearsay or their own probable cause determination. In California, these conditions were established by providing concurrent status as both felony and misdemeanor for domestic assault. Other states (e.g., Washington) have mandated arrest in all domestic assaults based on probable cause or victim complaint.

34  

For example, the decision to prosecute an assailant charged with his nth assault should take into account the recurring nature of these events and the risk that chronic assaults pose for an escalation of violence and injury.

35  

For the abuse and violence scales, Guttman scaling procedures were used to create continuous variables. The coefficient of scalability was .639 for violence and .591 for abuse. The coefficient of reproducibility was .916 for violence and .891 for abuse, both well within the conventional thresholds for acceptance of scale properties (Edwards, 1957). As noted earlier, both procedures placed sexual assault atop the hierarchies of abuse and violence.

36  

Socialization processes also may reinforce status hierarchies based on males' economic roles in the family as well as their superior physical strength. The link among power differentials or status hierarchies, male socialization processes, and violence in the family is beyond the scope of this paper. Straus (1976) has examined these links in greater detail, showing how wife assault by males is determined in part by their acceptance of violence, which in turn is a normative process.

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This volume examines social influences on violent events and violent behavior, particularly concentrating on how the risks of violent criminal offending and victimization are influenced by communities, social situations, and individuals; the role of spouses and intimates; the differences in violence levels between males and females; and the roles of psychoactive substances in violent events.

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