Spousal Abuse - Home

Publication: Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice
Publication Date: 01-SEP-06
Author: Minaker, Joanne C. ; Snider, Laureen

The most recurrent backlash against women's safety is the myth that men are battered as often as women ... Of course we must have compassion for those relatively few men who are harmed by their wives and partners, but it makes logical sense to focus our attention and work on the vast problem of male violence ... and not get side-tracked by the relatively tiny problem of male victimization. (Straton 1994: 79-80)

This article employs the phenomenon of "husband abuse" to analyse feminist initiatives to ameliorate and empower women through criminal-law reform. A decade ago, one of the present authors argued that the dependence of second-wave feminist movements on institutions of criminal justice to improve women's lives and lessen sexual and domestic assault was "theoretically, politically, ideologically and morally wrong" (Snider 1994: 77). The 1994 article also argued that the criminal-justice system, because of its structural position in the modern Western state, did not offer the same possibilities for counter-hegemonic movement building as other institutions. Unlike hospitals, schools, welfare, or immigration, the criminal-justice system takes as its stated purpose and official task not to heal, teach, or provision but to hold, discipline, and control. Therefore the classic resistance and consciousness-building strategy of oppositional social movements--namely, publicizing the gap between how institutions are supposed to work and how they actually operate--has no "aha!" potential. Calling police, courts, and prisons to account by naming, blaming, and shaming means, at most, telling these institutions to deliver gender-neutral oppression. Since the goals of feminism have always been to empower and ameliorate women's lives, not simply to analyse different forms of patriarchy or to equalize oppression, fighting for equal-opportunity punishment may well be counter-productive.

Our original intention was to look at women as victims and as offenders today, to investigate the continuing validity (or not) of the 1994 critique. However, it soon became clear that today's realities are too complex and contradictory to allow such an analysis. Instead, we have done a case study of a phenomenon that, we argue, exemplifies these complexities: the newly discovered problem of "husband abuse." "Wife battering"--the original problem constituted by 1970s feminists--has morphed into "domestic violence" and then into "husband abuse." The husband-abuse argument runs counter to decades of feminist research, theory, and activism. One of the battered women's movement's key goals was to challenge the silence over woman abuse and decrease public tolerance of it. With the proliferation of "husband abuse" discourse, feminist assumptions, research evidence, and claims--that women are more likely to be injured, that women are murdered at three times the rate of men, and that, when separated, they are eight times as likely to be killed (Jiwani 2000; Statistics Canada 2005)--are under attack. As we shall show, the claim that spousal abuse is a gender-neutral phenomenon has become the new "common sense," the dominant lens used by policy makers, media, and influential interest groups. To understand how and why this has happened, "husband abuse" must be situated in the social, economic, and political milieu that produced it and that reinforces it to this day. This article demonstrates how the very successes of feminism, combined with neo-liberal governance, the burgeoning power of men's movements, and new communication media, have given rise to new subjects, mentalities, and practices.

The article is organized as follows. Part 1 is a case study of husband abuse, showing how husband battering as a social problem and fact/ claim developed and progressed. Resurgent men's movements, Web-and Internet-based modes of communication, and the claims of social science "experts," we argue, have successfully constituted Woman as equally violent, aggressive, and destructive to Man. The science-based claims with "legs," those heard by policy makers and media (Snider 2000), are those "proving" that spousal violence is an equal-opportunity occurrence. Part 2 shifts focus from "what" to "why." Its purpose is to explain the dominant social, economic, and political forces that have shaped and enabled the consciousness, law, and policy of today.

I. A case of backlash: Male victims and female abusers

Rationale and claims: Domestic violence as gender neutral

The claim/myth that domestic violence is an equal-opportunity activity--that is, women are as violent as men, women initiate violence as often as men, and male victims are as likely to be harmed as female victims--is a striking example of feminist backlash (see Cook 1997; Macchettio 1992; Straus 1993). The creation of a "female aggressor" to match male aggressors suggests mutual battering as well as an even playing field inside and outside the family. In other words, Canada has a husband-battering problem, but it remains hidden because of cultural scripts that keep men silent and because powerful women's groups overstate male-against-female violence. We do not challenge the fact that some men are victimized in the context of intimate relationships, nor do we seek to minimize their suffering. Rather, we assert that focusing on "female aggressors" ignores the damaging violence men inflict on other men and on women, obscures who is doing what to whom, and undermines the ideological climate feminists struggle(d) to create, wherein instances of male domination, gender inequality, and systemic violence are called into question.

This section sets out the truth claims of husband abuse, the role of the mass media (including the Internet, books, and newspaper articles), and the new common sense that has resulted. Below we identify three critical fault lines: (1) the use of tautological arguments; (2) connections to larger symbolic structures; and (3) implications. As we shall demonstrate, the problem of husband abuse is primarily a constructed and symbolic one. Our purpose is to challenge the material and ideological effects these claims have had on women's lives, particularly the decline--symbolic and financial--in support for abused women.

The first question to ask, then, is whether men really are highly vulnerable to attacks from their wives and girlfriends. Are patriarchy and sexism obsolete, no longer ongoing realities in women's lives? The term "husband abuse" was coined back in 1978, apparently by Suzanne Steinmetz, in an article reviewing several U.S. studies and one Canadian one (the latter with a sample of 52 college students). Steinmetz reported that half of both men and women admitted using "some form" of violence toward a partner and that 12% of women admitted to being the sole aggressor. The Cycle of Violence, Steinmetz's 1977 book, was the first of what became a steady stream of writings discussing female-on-male violence. Shortly thereafter, Murray Straus and Richard Gelles (1986; Straus, Gelles, and Steinmetz 1980) published the first widely accepted "data" appearing to confirm that domestic violence was/is indeed symmetrical. Twenty years of subsequent research built on this base.

In 1999 social work professor Leslie Tutty published a government-commissioned study summarizing this work. Titled Husband Abuse: An Overview of Research and Perspectives, Tutty's report drew attention to a new "problem." Tutty asks why "it is rare to hear" stories of men abused by their wives. She relies on three sources of evidence: community studies, a summary of two small studies of abused men, and conversations with representatives of 40 family-violence treatment programs and men's groups. Tutty reports "many" tales of male victimization, but the family violence intervention practitioners in her sample reported that they saw few or no male victims. None offered specialized services for abused husbands. The city of Edmonton, unlike most cities, where shelters are exclusively for females and children, operates an emergency shelter open to both sexes; however, the majority of residents are women. Vancouver opened an abused men's shelter in the 1990s, but it had to close for lack of clients. Similarly, in Britain, a shelter for men closed its doors because it was not being used. For Tutty, this shortage of victims can be explained only by examining the lack of societal recognition of husband abuse as a problem. The reasoning is tautological: men won't come forward without more services available, but governments will only provide services if men come forward. We argue that just the opposite is true--that an over-recognition of male victimization by women has occurred. Tutty concludes that abuse is unacceptable regardless of the gender of the perpetrator and that services for men appropriate to their need should be made.