Women are more aggressive partners than men.....

[BloominNora]

(Apologies if this has already been posted - I had a quick look but couldn't see anything....)

I'm currently doing an OU module on Forensic Psychology and have just come across this article posted by another student on the forums:

Women more aggressive to partners than men

The Times take on the story

The Huff Post

As I read it, one of my first thoughts was "I wonder what Mumsnet would make of this" (clearly yet another indication that I spend far too much time on here).

The key paragraph seems to be:

"This study found that women demonstrated a desire to control their partners and were more likely to use physical aggression than men. This suggests that IPV may not be motivated by patriarchal values and needs to be studied within the context of other forms of aggression, which has potential implications for interventions."

Interestingly she has focussed the study on students in their late teens and early 20's so I would question the level to which (excessive?) drinking may had on the responses and she also surveyed double the number of females than males which does not seem particularly statistically sound,

However, other than that - interesting study or more likely that men will not recognise themselves / admit to, even in an anonymous survey as being violent and controlling to women?

Would love to know what the MN Feminist consensus is.

[almondcakes]

I cannot find a copy of the original research paper to comment on.

There have been a lot of discussions on here recently about the difficulty of women advancing careers in academia, getting academic jobs, getting grants to study women's issues or being able to study women's issues at all.

Without wishing to diminish her achievements, Dr Bates primary research interest (according to her) is female interpersonal violence against men. She has moved straight from PhD to a lectureship, with no publications at the time she was given a lectureship in 2011 and no prior career in a related field to explain her success.

That is a rare, exceptional and incredible situation.

[SabrinaMulhollandJjones]

I think there is far better and more reliable data on this subject than Dr Bates's study.

The facts and crime statistics speak for themselves.

[BloominNora]

almondcakes Here is the full research paper Would be interested in your comments on the actual research rather than Dr. Bates publication history - after all, everyone has to start somewhere

I've only skim read at the minute, but it seems that she started with the feminist hypothesis that the results would show men as more controlling and more violent and the results are therefore quite surprising.

It makes me wonder whether she was doing as it is the dominant social discourse and to prevent criticism from feminist researchers or whether her interest in female on male violence is coming from a feminist perspective of wanting to prove that men are more violent, making her results even more surprising. It's not entirely clear to me which one it is.

From what I can see, there may be an issue with the levels of seriousness of the aggression and violence - so overall women may be more violent and controlling although where males are violent it is more serious / catastrophic (which would account for the differences in homicide statistics)

Here is Dr. Bates' PHD Thesis Again, I haven't had chance to read it in detail, but it is very much the pre-curser to the later study.

Sabrina Actually, as I am currently ploughing through crime statistics, I would disagree with them 'speaking for themselves' as they are inherently flawed, relying as they do on people actually reporting the crimes. What is interesting about this study is that it is self-reported. The only truly accurate crime statistics tend to be those for murder as almost all murders are reported.

What other 'facts' are you referring to?

If you have links to more reliable data that involved survey or interviews with people who are commenting on their own propensity for inter-relationship violence that contradicts this study, I would be interested to see it.

[LurcioAgain]

Okay, quick skim later, I have a some questions about methodology (I am not a social scientist by the way, so would be interested in the thoughts of social scientists on this). The participants were selected through responses to an e-mail request to undergraduates at a university. This suggests to me that:

1. we need to think about educational level as a confounding factor;
   
2. we need to think about social class as a confounding factor;
   
3. the participants were in a sense "self-selecting" - they chose to respond (or not) so may not be representative of the population at large (even the population of university students).
   
   How much of an impact are these things likely to have on the results?
   
   On the plus side, the issue of d values and t values for the results seems to be quite carefully calculated.
   
   Another question for the social scientists out there - is a d value of 0.2 (or thereabouts) indicative of a difference between populations that actually matters? I just tried out a test case, with mu1=0.0, mu2=0.2 and sigma for both distributions of 1.0 (assumption!) and the results are two gaussians which are only fractionally displaced relative to one another, so not something I'd be inclined to think of as a particular interesting difference between a couple of populations (eyeballing it, I'd say that if one looks at the mean for distribution 1, about 55% or thereabouts of the population for distribution 2 is greater than the mean for 1 - in other words, there ain't much difference... but then, I'm a physical scientist, so I stand ready to be corrected on this one).

[almondcakes]

BloominNora, I am not criticising her level of experience in terms of the validity of this research. There is plenty of good research published from work done by research students. I have no issue with that at all.

What I have issue with is this - if anybody said to me that they were going to get a degree, then a second degree, then a PhD and then were going to immediately get a job as a lecturer, I would say maybe that is possible if you have had numerous research papers published and/or you have previously had a succesful career in a field related to your research area.

I would say the more likely outcome for somebody with a PhD, no previous career and not a single publication is that they might get a post doc research position if they were both good and lucky, on a temporary contract, and then they might get another such contract and eventually they might become a lecturer once they established a publication record.


If somebody was in that position and they were researching violence against women, I would think their chances of even getting a post doc were reduced.

So somebody like Finn Mackay, an award winning activist with multiple publications and work behind her has gone from PhD student (research area - violence against women) to research fellow. And maybe that was her choice, because she wanted to prioritise activism (I don't know). But very many highly qualified people with PhDs do not get given lectureships and careers in academia. There are groups of females with doctorates sitting around going, 'what shall I do with all my knowledge of violence against women? I've not published anything but I can't decide if I should take up a job as a lecturer at York or Manchester Met.' There aren't people sitting around in an any academic research area with those options.

So when I read that somebody with far less experience and no publications has been given a lectureship in the research area of inter personal violence, they must have that job based on the value given to their particular analysis, presumably over other more experienced candidates with other research interests. I think it is worth considering what their particular field of expertise is and what particular analysis of violence their research is advocating to make them the best person to have that job. And it would seem that the analysis valued is the alleged problem of female's greater violence towards men.

And that speaks volumes about academia as a system, not about Dr Bates as a person or an academic.

[almondcakes]

Sorry, 'there aren't groups of women.'

[DadWasHere]

Hrmmm. I don’t doubt that women could very easily be more aggressive in terms of quantity but certainly not in terms of the commonness and extent of severity. I doubt the study takes into account perceived threat. I mean, technically, I was sexually assaulted by a teenage girl I barely knew back in my 20's, woken up finding her straddling me, grinding her crotch against mine as she worked on getting my pants off. It was a huge WTF experience and I pushed her off but I felt no threat, since I was stronger and she was not armed with anything except raging lust for my cock. I did not feel assaulted or damaged by the experience so while it would show in a scientific study the damage done to me was nothing really, not comparable to what a woman would probably feel in a gender reversed situation.

[MontyGlee]

Women being more aggressive than men sounds bollocks.

Are we allowed to talk about this or do we have to compare the size of our phds before we do that?

[BloominNora]

almond I can see where you are coming from, however, from her biography it seems she has not been given a lectureship in the research area of inter personal violence - that is her personal interest field of research.

Her lectureship is first year social psychology which appears to have a focus on infant development and mainstream social psychological mainstream approaches and second year statistics.

Her other area of interest is pedagogic research examining the student experience, transition and employability which given the current vast changes around student populations is probably much more relevant to the universities at the minute than IPV.

Even if her research into IPV has been instrumental in getting her a lectureship position, it doesn't make the results any less valid unless you believe the studies to be inherently flawed in some way.

Focussing on whether she gained her position via some kind of patriarchal nepotism based on her research giving the 'correct' answer, even though she is not lecturing in that research area, which is what you imply, does not critically evaluate the results it just obfuscates what could potentially be a quite valid discussion.

[almondcakes]

Dad, I think other things like age come into it. I would have felt very differently in that situation if I was 16 and the other person in their twenties than I would have done at 25.

I also think what is and is not abuse is not a series of broad simplistic statements.

'hitting with an object' is abuse.
Hitting your partner with a baseball bat on purpose so that require medical attention and not done in self defence - abuse.
Hitting your partner by throwing a piece of jam on toast at their knee in the middle of a mutual heated argument in a one off, not repeated act of childishness - not abuse?

'Asking who they have been with' is controlling behaviour.

'Have you been out with Janice again? that bitch. And she is just using you. She's not really your friend. Stop seeing her.' - controlling.

Have you been out with Janice lately? Is her mum feeling any better. - probably not controlling.

[BloominNora]

Why does it sound bollocks Monty? What is it about the research, in your view, that is flawed?

Dad - I think that is the main problem I have with it. There is plenty of research out there which suggests that aggression is pretty equal between the sexes, but it is the form which that aggression takes and the damage done that is the differing factor and I am not sure this particular piece of research sufficiently addresses that difference between aggression and violence and the differing levels of violence.

[LurcioAgain]

Okay, here's my quick plot for a pair of generic normalised gaussians. Apologies for actually showing you some diagrams and talking maths here, but I think this is a case where a picture is worth a thousand words.

Both assume a d-value (crudely, a measure of how different the means of two populations are given the spread within each population) of 0.2.

I've looked at two possible pairs of distributions, one where the two sigmas are the same (1.0) and the other where the sigmas are different (1.0 and 5.0), assuming a mean of 0 (entirely arbitrary - this bit doesn't matter - just slide sideways to whatever value you're actually interested in!) for one distribution, then calculating the other mean according to the formula for the d value (which is our starting assumption, because that's the value we are given in the paper).

The plot on the left shows both sigmas equal to 1. I'd argue that, to use a technical phrase, to a close approximation, there's sod all difference between these two distributions.

The plot on the right shows a bigger difference between means - but ties up nicely with Dadwashere's suggestion that we may be looking at a situation where there could be more low-level violence in one population, but the other population (the broader one) shows much more violence out at the extreme end of the spectrum.

In other words, I think the d-values in this study are so low that we're not looking at a difference that is of any interest, even if other groups were able to replicate it.

(NB, would concur with the comment that given how cut throat academia is, it is interesting to be given a lectureship with no publications behind you).

[almondcakes]

BN, I didn't comment on the validity of her research in either of my posts about lectureships, and made it clear I wasn't trying to in them.

I don't know anything about psychology and don't really know anything about inter personal violence, either from an academic point of view or a general activism point of view. I'm not capable of commenting on her work. I can only look at her abstract and see if she was mis-reported. I don't think she has been.

I still think it is exceptional for anyone to be given a lectureship based on no publications, and a lectureship is usually about what you then are going to research; teaching is a side issue.

If you don't want to discuss academic careers, don't! Respond to the posters posting about the content of the study.

[LurcioAgain]

Bloomin - any comments on my questions re. methodology - i.e. selection methods for sample, possible confounding factors (class, educational level), whether the d-values are indicative of any significant difference between populations?

(NB I am not offering these as "flaws" because I'm not a social scientist so not qualified to comment, but I am very interested to hear your thoughts on it).

[LurcioAgain]

Good points about age, length of relationship and children, Buffy - because (as far as I can tell, reading stuff at second hand) violence often begins or escalates dramatically when the woman in the relationship becomes pregnant for the first time.

[AMumInScotland]

Participants were all students recruited via e?mail and
undergraduate lectures - so we have a fairly unrepresentative sample of men and women for a start. They are younger, more educated, more 'motivated' in terms of education and career. Are the men typical of all men, or are they less likely to be aggressive and controlling because they don't think women are making them feel inferior? Are the women more likely to be 'competitive' and 'driven' (sorry for the choice of words, I can't think how better to put it).

all participants were required
to be in a romantic relationship, or have been in a
romantic relationship, of at least 1 month’s duration - That's very early days for relationships, is it typical of most relationships? Are student relationships typical anyway?

And what about the 'stages' that relationships go through? They are unlikely to be living together, very unlikely to have children, unlikely to have one partner (generally the woman) no longer in paid employment and financially vulnerable. Unlikely to have money or job worries in general - or at least not the kind that involve car loans and mortgages.

The 'controlling behaviour' indiicators sound like a lot of things that immature people are likely to do in their earliest relationships. “Want to know where the other went
and who they spoke to when not together,” “Use nasty
looks and gestures to make the other one feel bad or
silly,” “Try and restrict time one spent with family or
friends” and “act suspicious and jealous of the other
one.” People tend to grow out of those!

There are also things like self-reporting - are they actually being 'fair' to themselves? Many people agree that they are 'as bad as each other' in a relationship, when an outsider would actually say differently.

[AMumInScotland]

Sorry the bolding went astray.

[AMumInScotland]

I'd be prepared to argue that (on average) men are quicker to forget times they've behaved aggressively, as they might be more inclined to 'dismiss' the effect their behaviour had on others. And women more likely to 'dwell on it' long after the event when they have been aggressive, because they are more aware of it being 'a problem' and more aware of how others (including their partner) might perceive their 'unfeminine' behaviour.

But that's obviously just guesswork on my part, and projecting how I respond to things onto the subjects. I don't often lose my temper, and never get physical, but when I do it sticks in my memory far longer than it probably deserves.

[SabrinaMulhollandJjones]

OP, The facts I was referring to is that 98% of violent crime is committed by men according to the Home Office. Men are actually more, not less likely to report violent crime against them (source: Karen Ingala-Smith) and 2-3 women per week die at the hands of a partner/ ex-partner. 2-3 men per week do not.

I think it's perfectly possible that women will over-estimate self-reported aggressive incidents though, and men underestimate them- simply due to socialisation of girls and boys in our society.

[DonkeySkin]

Yes, there are problems with retrospective self-report and socially desirable responding. But these are common to all such studies, I'm not sure how they'd apply particularly here, unless one could argue that men are women are likely to a) recall these events differently, maybe think of themselves in a better or worse light as time goes by and b) care in different ways or to different extents how such behaviours are perceived by others.

Buffy, this is precisely what happens in self-reporting of heterosexual domestic violence, because of the gendered power differences between men and women and the sexist norms both are likely to subscribe to.

It has been found, consistently, that women typically minimise the violence and bullying they receive from their partners and men exaggerate it. It is fairly clear why women would tend to minimise their partners' violent and controlling behaviour - sexist cultural norms they have absorbed tell them that it is normal, it is embarrassing, and it is in some way their fault. They also have a psychological need to excuse and deny men's abusive behaviour if they and their kids' are dependent on him.

But why would men tend to exaggerate the violence they receive from women? Lundy Bancroft, who has counselled violent and controlling men for decades, says the answer is simple: men who report their partners as violent towards them are very frequently abusers themselves, who have every reason in the world to portray their relationship (to themselves, and, especially, to others) as mutually abusive, in which the woman aggresses against him as much as he does to her.

Bancroft says most of the violent men he works with learn the language of domestic violence quickly (language that was developed by feminists to articulate actual domestic violence), and turn it back on their partners, many of whom they have severely abused and terrorised. Abusive men in counselling for their behaviour describe their female partners (victims) as controlling and manipulative and frequently prone to resort to violence themselves. They portray incidents in which they have beaten their partners as 'fights' in which she gave almost as good as she got (if the woman attempted to defend herself in anyway, this becomes 'she hit me').

Bancroft says reliance on self-reporting as an accurate measure of inter-personal violence between men and women is severely flawed for that reason, and it is having devastating impacts on women and children in the legal and psychiatric systems, because mental health professionals and social workers frequently take the reports of both men and women at face value, and sometimes women who are victims of abusive men end up being pegged as abusers themselves, based largely on the way the man has portrayed the relationship to case workers, in which every action the woman has done to protect herself and her children, from shoving her partner away when he attempts to intimidate her ('she is violent') to trying to ensure her husband makes the mortgage payments on time so they don't lose their house ('she nags me to the point of psychological distress and uses money to control me') becomes evidence of a female abuser. Conversely, the woman is usually trying to minimise her partner's behaviour to herself and others, and so will make constant excuses for him and downplay his violence (he has occasionally hit me when he lost his temper) and controlling behaviour ('it's because he really cares about me and the kids').

Bancroft is particularly critical of the way psychologists and others interpret family violence in terms of gender-neutral psychological conditions (loss of impulse control, a controlling personality, childhood trauma, etc.). He says family violence (defined as a pattern of abusive behaviour designed specifically to control and intimidate a partner and children) is overwhelmingly a male problem, because it is a problem of values, not mental health. Sexist values, specifically. Men who abuse their partners and children do so not because they have poor impulse control, or unresolved PTSD, but because they fundamentally believe they have a right to do so, as men. Therefore, we cannot accurately asses interpersonal violence between men and women without taking account of the sexist cultural norms both have absorbed, which have been built up over thousands of years of women and children being regarded as men's property. Ignoring this is disastrous for women and children and obscures the patriarchal dynamics at work.

This explains the huge gap between studies that rely on self-reports of interpersonal violence (which often find surprising levels of parity in female/male abusive behaviours) and the actual violence statistics coming from hospitals, battered women''s shelters, police reports and murder statistics, which show that it is overwhelmingly a male-on-female phenomenon.

www.amazon.com/Why-Does-He-That-Controlling/dp/0425191656?tag=mumsnet&ascsubtag=mnforum-21

[DonkeySkin]

And Buffy, you say this study uses the Conflict Tactics Scale - are you aware that the CTS is considered severely flawed by many researchers in this field, and is mainly used and promoted by people associated with the Men's Rights Movement?

"Gender symmetry [in domestic violence] is often reported in studies employing large, random, and national or community samples and using the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS), a questionnaire that asks about recent use of specific tactics by an intimate partner against the respondent to measure IPA (Brush, 1990; Cantos, Neidig, & O'Leary, 1994; Johnson, 1995; Morse, 1995). Morse (1995) suggests that the goal is to reconceptualize the social problem of ""woman battering"" to one of ""family violence."" From this perspective, some scholars tend to conclude that men and women are equally likely to be both perpetrators and victims of IPA.

"Several arguments have been made to explain the huge discrepancies in scholars' interpretations of findings regarding women's use of violence against intimate partners. These arguments include criticisms of the CTS as a measure of IPA, concerns over gender differences in reporting of IPA and its impact on abuse rates, the differences due to settings in which the data have been collected and the samples studied and, finally, issues related to studying victimization only versus victimization and perpetration.

"First, and at the heart of much of this criticism, is CTS: a set of scales designed by Strauss and Gelles, leaders in the ""family violence"" approach, to measure IPA (Strauss & Gelles, 1990). Some scholars have harshly criticized the CTS for ignoring the context, motivations, meanings, and consequences of IPA (see, for example, Bachman, 1998; Belknap, 2001; Berk, Berk, Loseke, & Rauma, 1983; DeKeseredy, 1995; Dasgupta , 2001; DesKeseredy & Schwartz, 1998; Dobash & Dobash, 1988; Kurz, 1993; Schwartz, 1987; Stark & Flitcraft, 1983; Yllo, 1983, for critiques). As stated previously, the studies reporting gender symmetry and the higher rates of female-perpetrated IPA predominantly use national sampling plans. These are also the studies most likely to employ the CTS to measure IPA. Thus, it is likely not the ""national"" sample that results in the different rates of female-perpetrated IPA, but rather the strong correlation between a study's likelihood of using the CTS and using a national sampling plan that leads to the reporting of gender symmetry. The use of the CTS clearly explains some of the discrepancies between the two approaches.

"Also, some researchers are concerned that the studies using the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) interpret the results incorrectly, and that this may account for the differences in the studies.

Dobash and colleagues report that in many of the studies finding higher rates of female-perpetrated IPA, a respondent who reports that he or she has ever, ""pushed,"" ""grabbed,"" ""shoved,"" ""slapped,"" or ""hit or tried to hit"" another person, is regarded as a perpetrator of IPA (Dobash et al., 1992). This may include only one instance not taken in context. Thus, when victims resist abuse in any way, including defending themselves or their children, they will mistakenly be portrayed as intimate partner abusers. For an excellent review of the history of the CTS, its past, revised, and current uses and limitations, read DeKeseredy and Schwartz (1998).

www.vawnet.org/applied-research-papers/print-document.php?doc_id=370

Sampling bias

"According to Michael Johnson, the CTS’s dependence on voluntary interviews with a representative sample population could create a strong bias against measuring the worse cases of domestic violence: “men who systematically terrorize their wives would hardly be likely to agree to participate in such a survey, and the women whom they beat would probably be terrified at the possibility that their husband might find out that they had answered such questions.

"Jack Stranton points out another important sampling bias: the CTS, as used in the original Straus/Gelles research and most of the research that follows it, excludes violence that occurs after a divorce or separation. However, such violence accounts for 76% of spousal assaults, and is overwhelmingly committed by men; excluding this violence disproportionately omits most spousal violence against women.

Contrary Social Science Data

"Many non-CTS studies have found, contrary to CTS results, that men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of domestic violence, while women are overwhelmingly the victims. Since most (but not all) of these studies are designed to measure criminal violence, Farrell dismisses them, saying men are socialized to “take it like a man” and not report their victimization. However, Russell Dobash pointed out “that women have their own reasons to be reticent, fearing both the loss of a jailed or alienated husband’s economic support and his vengeance.” Moreover, surveys of domestic violence victims in the US and Canada have found that men are more likely to call the police after being assaulted by their partner. So while it’s true that both men and women have motivation not to report their abuse, it’s just not true that men are actually less likely to report abuse than women.

"A review of the social science literature indicates that the CTS is, even according to its creators, seriously flawed when used as a comparative measure of male and female domestic victimization (i.e., the way men’s righters and anti-feminists use it)."

amptoons.com/blog/2004/06/26/on-husband-battering-are-men-equal-victims/