John Hamel: The Domestic Violence Field & its Challenges

About PASK

The Partner Abuse State of Knowledge project (PASK) is the most comprehensive review of the scholarly domestic violence research literature ever conducted. The unprecedented study:

• spanned three years,
• was carried out by 42 scholars at 20 universities and research centres, and
• covers 17 areas of domestic violence research.

It affirms, among other things, that women perpetrate physical and emotional abuse at comparable rates to men. PASK findings were published in special issues of Partner Abuse.

For more information, visit the journal's webpage, or explore the world's largest domestic violence research database at domesticviolenceresearch.org for free access to thousands of pages summarising 1,700 peer-reviewed studies.

Watch

Two short interview clips with John Hamel, courtesy of Springer Publishing Company.

1. Policy implications of PASK

Transcript

Interviewer: Mr Hamel, what do you think are some important policy implications resulting from PASK?

John Hamel: Well, let's just quickly summarise some of the main findings from the Partner Abuse State of Knowledge project: equivalent, comparable rates of violence between men and women; comparable rates of emotional abuse and control; similar risk factors for men and women perpetrators; and similar motives. The caveat is that women are far more impacted. These findings suggest that partner abuse is primarily a mutual phenomenon.

I may have neglected to say that one of the Partner Abuse State of Knowledge manuscripts looked at the extent to which domestic violence is bidirectional as opposed to unidirectional — in other words, how much domestic violence is perpetrated by a single perpetrator versus both partners. It turns out that about 60% of domestic violence and partner abuse is mutual: it's bidirectional, both partners are violent.

Given the fact that most domestic violence involves lower-level violence — pushing, grabbing, that does not lead to injury — there's no reason whatsoever why couples counselling and family therapy, for example, should not be at least a consideration for treatment providers who want to work with families where there's domestic violence. Unfortunately, in the United States, only a few states allow couples counselling or family therapy for individuals who have been arrested for domestic violence. In California, where I live, it is forbidden to conduct any kind of couples counselling — even if the couple both want it, even if the victim insists on it, and even if a licensed mental health professional and expert in the field has assessed both partners to determine that it is safe and possibly effective.

Secondly, although women make up about 50% of domestic violence perpetrators, and arguably somewhere around 40% of perpetrators of more severe violence, only about 10% of individuals who have been court-ordered into a Batterer Intervention Program — a program appropriate for someone convicted of a domestic violence crime — are women. About 90% are men.

A couple of the Partner Abuse State of Knowledge manuscripts looked at gender and ethnicity in terms of how people are arrested and the law enforcement response to domestic violence, and determined that there is gender bias — primarily in terms of men being arrested in situations where it's clear that it's either dual-perpetrated or the perpetrator was not clearly identified. When the police arrive at the scene of a domestic violence crime, there are certain laws that encourage them to make an arrest — these are called mandatory arrest policies. As a result of these policies, and as a result of the inherent assumption that perpetrators are male, police tend to arrest men, even though in many cases the man may not be the primary perpetrator. In other words, both partners may be violent, or in some cases the female partner may be the one who's actually the most violent.

So one of the implications of PASK is that there probably should be more women arrested, more dual arrests — or perhaps not so much more arrests, but a more sophisticated approach to assessing the problem so that the proper response can be used, rather than the one-size-fits-all reflexive response that we have now.

Interviewer: Mr Hamel, thank you again for talking with me. For our viewers, the last instalment of PASK will be printed in issue number two, coming out in mid-2013. To subscribe or for more information, visit the journal's webpage at springerpub.com. Thank you.

John Hamel: You're welcome.

2. How the field became politicised

Transcript

The field of partner violence or domestic violence has been very politicised. Let's go back 35 years, into the 1970s, when there were really few — if any — domestic violence laws on the books in the United States. It has, of course, always been illegal to hit or assault people, and people were arrested in the 60s and 70s for domestic violence. But there were no statutes, for example, against marital rape — marital rape was not against the law. Stalking laws were not put into effect for partner-abuse-related crimes until the 70s.

So the people who advocated on behalf of victims of domestic violence were women and men who, at least in the beginning, advocated for women. As I said before, the research is clear that women are more impacted — they suffer more injuries, they're more likely to go to the hospital, they're more likely to be killed than are male victims. Therefore, in the 70s and 80s, the domestic violence advocacy movement focused on battered women.

The problem is that at that time there were two separate movements, or schools of thought, in terms of how to conceptualise and treat domestic violence. One was a feminist approach, which was favoured by advocates — the very same people that pushed legislators around the country to enact domestic violence laws to protect battered women. Then there were the researchers, such as Murray Straus at the University of New Hampshire and others, who took a more scientific, empirically based approach to the study of domestic violence.

What happened was that the individuals who took a more feminist, socio-cultural approach had the most influence — frankly because they were more likely to be working in the field on the front lines and actively lobbying the legislature. That was fine at the beginning, but it has presented problems since then, because the power the victims' advocates were able to secure — which was understandably necessary in order to sway legislatures to take domestic violence seriously — has, in the opinion of many scholars today, been misused.

For example, government-sponsored studies on domestic violence rarely, if ever, allow study of male victims, female perpetrators, mutual violence, or interventions such as couples counselling, which can be fraught with politics and controversy. The major piece of legislation that was put into law in the United States to combat domestic violence was the Violence Against Women Act, signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996. It's called the Violence Against Women Act — and only recently did VAWA update its language to reflect the reality of male victims.

So it's been a long road. There are some vested interests in keeping the status quo. There are individuals who are ideologues who, against all empirical evidence to the contrary, will insist that domestic violence is a gendered problem. And then there are people who simply don't know the facts.

I've given talks at many battered-women's shelters, and when I speak to advocates for battered women on a one-on-one basis and we discuss the needs of victims — whether they're male or female — we have a lot in common. It turns out that a lot of individuals who work in the field (not all of them, but a number) come to the field because of their own previous experiences with abuse, and sometimes people generalise from their own experiences.

The whole idea of scholarship — the whole idea of using the scientific method to study subjects such as domestic violence — is to find some clarity that can illustrate the problem beyond simply subjective opinions and personal experience.

I see some signs of progress in terms of the politics, insofar as scholars are now publishing a lot more articles in our journal and others showing gender symmetry in domestic violence, and taking seriously such subjects as female perpetrators and male victims. But in terms of public policy, there is still a long way to go. uh unfortunately the picture does not look that great I don't see a lot of major legislation that's um that's really uh uh you know move forward uh uh to reflect the the new findings in the field for the most part uh domestic violence in United States it continues to be framed as a women's issue