Male Peer Support, Theory of

Woman abuse has many determinants or sources. Still, one of the most significant risk factors is male peer support, which is defined as attachments to male peers and as the resources they provide that perpetuate and legitimate woman abuse. Approximately 20 years ago, Walter DeKeseredy developed the first male peer support model of woman abuse in college dating, and it is heavily informed by social support theory. Social support theory is generally used to explain the role of social support in health maintenance and disease prevention. However, DeKeseredy reconceptualized it to apply to woman abuse.

Male peer support theory argues that many men experience various types of stress in dating relationships, ranging from sexual problems to challenges to their male authority. Some men try to deal with these problems themselves, while others turn to their male friends for advice, guidance, and various other kinds of social support. The resources provided by these peers may encourage and justify woman abuse under certain conditions. Further, male peer support can influence men to victimize their dating partners regardless of stress.

There is some support for this model. For example, based on analyses of self-report survey data gathered from a convenience sample of 333 Canadian male undergraduates, DeKeseredy found that social ties with physically, sexually, and/or psychologically abusive peers are strongly related to abuse among men who experience high levels of dating life-events stress. This finding supports a basic sociological argument promoted by differential association theorists and other scholars: that the victimization of women is behavior that is socially learned from interaction with others. Nevertheless, the model does not account for other explanatory variables; therefore, in 1993, DeKeseredy and Martin Schwartz developed the modified male peer support model of woman abuse in college dating.

In addition to addressing the importance of factors identified above, the modified model focuses on the contributions of the ideology of familial and courtship patriarchy, alcohol consumption, membership in formal groups (e.g., fraternities), and the absence of deterrence. Although it is better than the original, the modified perspective also has several limitations. Perhaps the most important one is that although each of the individual elements has been tested empirically, there has not yet been a test of the entire model. In fact, given its complexity, it may very well be that it has more value as a heuristic or teaching model than as a predictive one.

Since the late 1990s, researchers and theorists have continued to modify male peer support theory and have constructed integrated versions that attempt to explain woman abuse in public housing, sexual and physical assaults in dating, variations in woman abuse across different marital status categories, and separation and divorce sexual assault.