Female Perpetrators of Intimate Partner Violence

Despite the reported increase in arrests of women for use of violence against their current or former intimate partners, research suggests that two findings are crucial to use in interpreting what these arrest increases actually mean: first, women's violence is more self-defensive than aggressive; and second, changes in law enforcement strategies are significantly responsible for changes in domestic violence arrest patterns. Moreover, one of the key questions that needs to be addressed when exploring intimate partner violence (IPV) and the criminal justice system is: Within intimate relationships in which women use violence and are arrested, are they batterers? Recent scholarship explores this issue, demonstrating that while some women use violence and are aggressive, most women are not the aggressors in the relationships and do not exert the power and control that seem inextricably connected to batterers. Understanding the context in which IPV occurs, rather than simply relying on arrest statistics or surveys to explore the issue, offers the most help in determining the motivation and consequences of women's use of violence.

Measurement issues confound the problem. Most studies rely on the Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS) and the revised version, the CTS2, which are empirical measures of IPV developed by Murray Straus and his colleagues to explore family violence. These scales are used in national surveys of households of married or cohabitating heterosexual couples. Despite improvements in measurement, these quantitative surveys rely on respondents checking boxes that indicate various levels of violence use without distinguishing between the meaning and motivation of the acts; tallies from these surveys provide the false impression that IPV is committed by women at rates equal to or higher than those of men. For example, in one study that uses the CTS, researchers found that 61% of the sample in which respondents reported “mutual violence” actually showed something very different: that women respond to men's acts of violence in self-defensive ways. Self-report data also raise reliability issues in that men underreport their use of violence, while women underreport their victimization by men. CTS measures also exclude complete information on injury and sexual assault; other studies show that women are six times more likely than men to need medical care for their injuries and that 4% of murdered men are killed by their current or former partner, compared to about one third of murdered women. Findings from the National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAWS) revealed that 7.7% of female respondents were raped by their intimate partners, yet the category of “sexual coercion” is excluded from the original CTS, the basis for a huge number of studies that claim mutual violence. Finally, violence perpetrated by ex-partners and ex-spouses is also excluded; the National Crime Victimization Survey statistics show that rates of IPV perpetration against women by their former intimates are eight times higher than rates of perpetration against married women.

Despite the research findings presented by scholars and federal agencies within the Department of Justice, men's rights groups (such as the Men's Defense Association, Men's Activism, and the National Coalition of Free Men) routinely point to numerous investigations and empirical studies demonstrating that women are as physically aggressive as or more aggressive than men in their relationships. Members of the National Coalition of Free Men even filed suit against the state of Minnesota, demanding the end of state funding for domestic violence programs on gender discrimination grounds. However, these assertions are proved faulty upon greater scrutiny of the empirical studies.

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