Study: Among violent relationships, nearly half (49.7%) were characterized as reciprocally violent. Among relationships with nonreciprocal violence, women were reported to be the perpetrator in a majority of cases (70.7%), as reported by both women (67.7%) and men (74.9%).

TDenson · 2010-05-19T14:04:49+00:00

There's a very simple and logical explanation for this sort of thing and we all know it. Girls can hit guys, guys cant hit girls. That's it. Done. When we were first dating, my gf and me had a fight, she got angry and slapped me. I slapped her back, not hard(not nearly as hard as she hit me), but enough to sting. She was furious. I calmly said "You hit me. Why was that ok, but I can't hit back?" She stopped dead in her tracks and has never struck me in anger again after five years. It was the first time it had ever occurred to her that it wasn't ok to slap a guy when they pissed her off.

Men aren't as violent towards women because men know they'll go to jail. Women have a free reign to hit their men because there's no consequences.

ignatiusloyola · 2010-05-19T12:12:40+00:00

I plan to download the full text when I am on campus later to read more about their methods. But I wanted to discuss the results, in case anyone else is more familiar with their method of explaining the results:

Results. Almost 24% of all relationships had some violence, and half (49.7%) of those were reciprocally violent. In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases. Reciprocity was associated with more frequent violence among women (adjusted odds ratio [AOR]=2.3; 95% confidence interval [CI]=1.9, 2.8), but not men (AOR=1.26; 95% CI=0.9, 1.7). Regarding injury, men were more likely to inflict injury than were women (AOR=1.3; 95% CI=1.1, 1.5), and reciprocal intimate partner violence was associated with greater injury than was nonreciprocal intimate partner violence regardless of the gender of the perpetrator (AOR=4.4; 95% CI=3.6, 5.5).

To me, that is saying that women are a mean of 2.3x more frequently violent in reciprocal cases than in non-reciprocal cases, with a 95% confidence that the true value of of this ratio lies within 1.9 and 2.8. Men, on the other hand, have a mean of 1.26x the frequency of violence in reciprocal cases than in non-reciprocal cases, with a 95% confidence that the value lies between 0.9 and 1.7. Since this cannot be distinguished from 1 at the 95% confidence level, they state that men are not statistically more frequently violent when their partner is also violent.

It would be interesting to know what they think the cause of this gender difference is. Perhaps it is that women are violent for their own reasons plus they are violent as a response to violence, where as men are violent for their own reasons only, or mostly as a response to violence?

I think the most important factor to understanding this data would be to figure out the perpetrator who initiated the reciprocal violence. But that is a very difficult thing to address, I think.

shady8x · 2010-05-19T07:10:38+00:00

This study is a bit surprising to me. What does everyone else think about it, it's methods and results?

catlebrity · 2010-05-19T19:04:51+00:00

A couple things to note:

Regarding injury, men were more likely to inflict injury than were women

and

The 3 questions included in the Add Health study do not capture all forms of violence that occur between relationship partners, including many of the more severe forms of partner violence on the Conflict Tactics Scale (e.g., used a knife or gun, choked, or burned). ... Similarly, only a single item assessed injury to victims and it focused on injury frequency and excluded injury severity and whether medical attention was needed or sought. Thus, it is unclear whether the data presented here would be similar had the violence and injury assessment been more thorough or if different forms of violence had been measured and analyzed separately.

The vast majority of studies of DV find women are injured far more often than men -- at least in terms of injuries requiring a hospital visit. Insofar as it looked at injury, this study seems to back that up.

This makes a lot of intuitive sense, because generally speaking women are smaller than men, and while they may engage in DV as often as men or even more often (depending on the study you look at), the consequences of this violence may be far less severe than the consequences of the violence inflicted on them by men.

So in a sense, women may be the primary instigators of DV (in terms of the number of incidents) AND the primary victims (in terms of actual consequences like physical injuries).

My own experience may be relevant here:: I had a girlfriend some years ago who hit me on a couple of occasions. But to call me a victim of DV in any significant sense would be silly; she was much smaller than me and did absolutely no damage; I quickly grabbed her wrists and stopped her. To classify this as the same sort of DV as an attack that puts someone in the hospital is, I think, highly misleading.

EDIT: Added link above.

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