Aggression and Violent Behavior 17 (2012) 99104

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Aggression and Violent Behavior

Invited response

The case against the role of gender in intimate partner violence

Donald G. Dutton
University of British Columbia, Department of Psychology, 2136 West Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z4

a r t i c l e

i n f o

a b s t r a c t
I argue that Gondolf, Johnson and Dekeseredy, in a recent issue of Aggression and Violent Behavior: A Review Journal, presented one sided arguments and misleading evidence for the role of gender in intimate partner violence (IPV). Johnson and Dekeseredy use only female victim samples and Gondolf only a male perpetrator sample. These methods generate spurious support for the gender paradigm. Better methodology; longitudinal and laboratory studies indicate that bilateral IPV, matched for level of severity is the most common form of IPV. Our policies should be directed towards this most common form not the relatively rare "wife battering". The stereotype of IPV proffered by the gender paradigm has obscured the dyadic patterns and psychological proles of IPV so that a "one size ts all" approach has been the normative response. The future of IPV policy lies in prevention and in models that treat abusive families as coherent systems. 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Article history: Received 22 August 2011 Received in revised form 1 September 2011 Accepted 2 September 2011 Available online 10 September 2011

A recent issue of Aggression and Violent Behavior : A Review Journal (AVB) (2011,16,(4)) contained papers by Johnson, Dekeseredy and Gondolf criticizing my portrayal of their work in my writing on the "gender paradigm"(Dutton & Corvo, 2006; Dutton, Corvo, & Hamel, 2009; Dutton, Hamel, & Aaronson, 2010). The gender paradigm is the concept that intimate partner violence is primarily perpetrated by males against females in defense of patriarchy, a hierarchical social arrangement commuting power to males (Dutton, 2010). It has been the dominant paradigm inuencing social and criminal justice policy for at least 25 years (Dutton, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c). As originally stated in the work of Dobash and Dobash (1979), wife assault served a social function of preserving male power. These authors, MacKinnon (1989) and those who later followed in their conceptual footprints (e.g., Johnson, Dekeseredy, & Gondolf) adhere to this view of functional sociology, i.e. that wife assault is a political act serving to preserve patriarchy. In the recent AVB issue, Johnson describes this denition as a caricature of the "feminist view", although my co-authors and I carefully cited the exact words from the gender paradigm texts (Bograd, 1988; Dobash & Dobash, 1979; MacKinnon, 1989) and nd this set of central beliefs still expressed in current "feminist" literature (e.g. Dragiewicz, 2008).To briey restate "men who assault their wives are actually living up to the cultural prescriptions that are cherished in Western society aggressiveness, male dominance and female subordination and they are using physical force to assert that domination" (Dobash & Dobash, 1979, p. 24) and "Feminists seek to understand why men in general use physical force against their partners" (Bograd, 1988, p. 13). Johnson and Dekeseredy describe my view as "confusing early rhetoric of the battered woman's movement with

E-mail address: dondutton@shaw.ca. 1359-1789/$ see front matter 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.avb.2011.09.002

contemporary feminist analysis of intimate partner violence" (p. 291). My position is that this radical view of IPV causation cannot evolve because of a methodology that can only reinforce the dogma. There are numerous aws in the gender paradigm view; men in general do not beat their wives, only small subgroups do (Laroche, 2005; Magdol et al., 1997; Stets & Straus, 1989; Whitaker, Haileyesus, Swahn, & Saltzman, 2007), nor do they believe that wife assault is acceptable (Simon et al., 2001), with about 4% qualifying as "wife batterers" in any given year (Laroche, 2005; Stets & Straus, 1989), women beat their husbands more frequently than husbands beat their wives (Archer, 2002; Fergusson, Horwood, & Ridder, 2005; Magdol et al., 1997; Stets & Straus, 1992a, 1992b; Whitaker et al., 2007), intimate partner violence clearly occurs for psychological not political reasons (Babcock, Jacobson, Gottman, & Yerington, 2000; Dutton & Parkin, 1999; Dutton & Starzomski, 1993a, 1993b; Ehrensaft, Cohen, & Johnson, 2006; Ehrensaft, Moftt, & Caspi, 2004; Fergusson et al., 2005; Follingstad, Wright, Lloyd, & Sebastian, 1991; Henning & Feder, 2004; Holtzworth-Munroe & Stuart, 1994). While women are more frequently injured by IPV, men are injured as well (Hines, Brown, & Dunning, 2007; Mechem, Shofer, Reinhard, Hornig, & Datner, 1999)and are fearful of female IPV(Capaldi, Kim, & Shortt, 2004; Laroche, 2005). Studies of the use of violence for control in intimate relationships have reported no differences by gender (Felson & Outlaw, 2007; Stets & Hammond, 2002). Abusiveness in females, rather than being a self defensive reaction to male IPV, develops early and exhibits a life course trajectory, as it does with males (Moftt, Caspi, Rutter, & Silva, 2001; Serbin et al., 2004), aggressive females and males attract each other through a process called assortative mating (Capaldi et al., 2004; Serbin et al., 2004). Biological mothers are the most frequent perpetrators of physical child abuse (Gaudiosi, 2006; Trocme et al., 2001). Although these experimental ndings have been repeatedly pointed

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out to Johnson and the gender paradigm cult (Dutton, 2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c, 2010; Dutton & Corvo, 2007; Dutton et al., 2010), they simply ignore all "inconvenient" data sets in their relentless pursuit of belief (in this case "dogma") perseverance (see Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979). 1. The ad hominem attack Gondolf et al. repeatedly ignore the serious methodological problems with their research raised in the above cited papers and instead fall back on one of the oldest non sequiturs in rhetoric, ad hominem attacks on the author. Gondolf accuses me of being a "men's rights" advocate, Johnson and Dekeseredy of my being "anti feminist". In an earlier paper he wrote "by denouncing feminist approaches and advancing psychological work, Dutton is engaged in a process of activism and is trying to advance his own political agenda" (Dekeserdy & Dragiewicz, 2007, p. 877). The closest I have come to men's rights advocacy is insisting that the gender paradigm stop using quotations around the term "men's rights"(see Dragiewicz, 2008, for example) as though men already had all the rightsconveyed to them, of course, by patriarchy. As far as being anti-feminist, I am a supporter of women's rights on any issue from abortion to workplace equality. My grievances with the gender paradigm as an explanation for domestic violence were initiated by female colleagues and I have coauthored with female colleagues. These female colleagues dene themselves as feminists, as do many of the women who do research generating results incompatible with the gender paradigm. I resent the self serving argument that the gender paradigm group somehow represent women's interests and are the only "feminists" and take a moral higher ground associated with women's rights. I say that IPV is not an issue of women's rights but of couples with dysfunctional conict management styles or psychopathology. The gender paradigm thinking has led to criminal justice practices that do not protect women or men (Buzawa, Austin, Bannon, & Jackson, 1992; Garner & Maxwell, 2000; Iyengar, 2007) and obfuscate focus on serious high risk offenders of each gender. My critiques of the gender paradigm grew not from gender politics but from a review of the domestic violence literature I was doing for the third edition of my book The Domestic Assault of Women (Dutton, 1995). In so doing I discovered a voluminous literature indicating that the modal form of IPV was bilateral matched for level of severity. More disturbingly, I also discovered a series of studies that had serious aws in sample selection, extrapolation from criminal justice or shelter samples to the general culture (without identifying the selection factors that initially created the sample), cherry picked data, and conclusions that did not t the reported data. These were not random errors; they all lay in one directionto support the gender paradigm. I reported these solecisms and re-titled the book Rethinking Domestic Violence (Dutton, 2006c). 2. The aws of the gender paradigm methodology My critique of the gender paradigm is not based on anti-feminism, it is based on muddled thinking by writers in that paradigm, and by biased research studies, and distortion of research ndings to consistently t a political agenda. The gender paradigm exclusively studies samples of female victims drawn from shelter samples or male perpetrators drawn from criminal justice samples to consistently reinforce the notion that all IPV perpetrators are male and all victims female. When it does venture into the community, it uses questionnaires that focus on male perpetration and female victimization (e.g. DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 2003). Gondolf focuses exclusively on features of male perpetrators that contribute to their success in court mandated treatment without assessing the context of dyadic treatment in their homes (Gondolf, 2000). Forty percent of the men Gondolf focused on came from homes where, according to his own data, the female partner reported initiating the IPV

(Dutton & Corvo, 2007). Johnson draws his ideas about IPV exclusively from interviews with women in shelter houses, and then only about violence done to them (Dutton et al., 2010). When this ideological methodology is broadened, the results change. In Rethinking Domestic Violence, I cited Dekeseredy's risible conclusion that Canadian college women use IPV in self defense, "Our overall conclusion is that much of the violence by Canadian undergraduate women is self defense and should not be labeled mutual combat or male partner abuse" (DeKeseredy, 1988, p. 91, Dutton, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c, p. 28 29). This conclusion was based on the majority of women in Dekeresedy's own survey reporting that they never used IPV in self defense and only a small group (7.2%) saying they only had used IPV in self defense (op.cit. p. 77). An even larger group (9.9%) said they always initiated the IPV. More women in that survey reported using IPV (46%) than reported it used against them (35%). The data (which obviously do not support the gender paradigm) and the conclusion drawn by Dekeseredy are diametric opposites. In this survey, Dekeseredy focused on female victimization and provided his female respondents with acceptable excuses for their IPV on his questionnaire. Men, on the other hand, were only asked about perpetration. They were also asked if they had been counseled by friends to use IPV. Only 3.9% said yes. Dekeseredy and Schwartz then concluded that male social networks may reinforce wider patriarchal social relations by perpetuating and legitimating woman abuse. Having stacked the research deck as far as possible to guarantee a conrmation of gender paradigm dogma, and still not getting it, Dekeseredy then took the nal step and misread the ndings. It is hard for me to see how these were honest mistakes, they are too enormous. They had to be deliberate, especially given Dekeseredy's view on how "empirical studies" should be subservient to political dogma (DeKeseredy, 1999). My "political" view here is that social scientists should honor their data and honestly report their conclusions. That view, that I believe virtually all social scientists hold, is what Dekeseredy calls an "agenda"(Dekeseredy, 2011). 3. Intimate terrorism Johnson's work (Johnson, 1995, 2008; Johnson & Leone, 2005) is also quite clear about the biased choice of methodology: "I chose one question to determine whether the husband and/or the wife had been violent, as reported by the wife" (2008, p. 20). The implication of this research choice is that Johnson trusts only women's versions of events and bases his entire typology of patterns of IPV on this version. Johnson makes no assessment of whether the reports he obtains under these conditions are veridical or are self serving inations of victimization or enhanced with stories overheard from other shelter clients. He does not know. Is it any wonder then that "intimate terrorism" depicted by this sample appears male perpetrated, or involves "violent resistance" (i.e. self defense) in women. This awed and one sided design is intended not to discover the truth about IPV but instead to prove a political theory. Dekeseredy and Johnson's research is not scientic research, strictly speaking. It fails the fundamental criterion of science; the possibility of empirically disconrming an experimental hypothesis. To argue as they do, that all research is biased, is disingenuous and wrong. There are numerous studies, many cited by myself in other works (Dutton & Corvo, 2007; Dutton, Corvo, & Hamel, 2008; Dutton & Nicholls, 2005; Dutton et al., 2009), that fairly assess gender issues and present far superior methodologies to the gender paradigm sample. It is their entire approach that is biased, in the selection of the samples, the framing of the research questions and the interpretation of the answers. Johnson argues that surveys tap "situational couple violence" but not intimate terrorism (Johnson, 2011), p. 290, 294). However, Stets and Straus (1989) found that 15% of their respondents who reported any abuse, reported a pattern where one spouse used severe violence against a non-violent spouse, consistent with intimate terrorism. Ten percent of these perpetrators against a non-violent spouse were women, the other 5% were men. It also found, as did a more recent

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large sample survey (D. J. Whitaker et al., 2007) that bidirectional assault was the most frequent pattern reported. Surveys that include both sexes and ask about both perpetration and victimization generate a much fuller picture of IPV than one sided victim interviews with women in shelters. The conict tactics scale surveys by Straus also uncovered sixteen times the rate of violence revealed by the National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAWS) (M. A. Straus, 1999, p. 23). However, because it also found equal levels of IPV perpetration, it was excoriated by the gender paradigm for failing to assess the "context" of violence, something that was also not done by the NVAWS and is never done in assessing the causes of male IPV. 4. Outside the gender paradigm prism Samples of male perpetrators drawn from the criminal justice system cannot be generalized to the general population for the same reason; these samples are biased. Men call the police at a rate only 1/10 as frequently as women (Capaldi et al., 2009; Stets & Straus, 1992a, 1992b) and are less likely to generate an arrest or criminal justice record of their call (Brown, 2004). Since the police have to make an arrest of a "primary aggressor", one person (usually the man (Brown, 2004)) becomes the designated perpetrator. In a study of couples from the Oregon Youth Survey who were arrested, Capaldi et al. (2009) found that "the men arrested for IPV were involved in relationships with high levels of physical and psychological aggression by both partners. The view that those involved in ofcial IPV incidents would be couples predominantly characterized by one sided male-to-female aggression or "patriarchal" or "intimate terrorism" (Johnson, 1995; Johnson & Leone, 2005) was therefore not supported" (op. cit. p. 516). The man takes the fall in these bilateral relationships because of gender stereotyping produced by the gender paradigm effect on police training. Capaldi et al. concluded that the call to police appeared to occur during a worst incident for a couple with a history of bilateral IPV. In the ensuing, criminal justice samples of male perpetrators, these men are depicted as sole perpetrators of IPV or intimate terrorists. In his sample of men in treatment for IPV, Gondolf reported (in a footnote) that 66% had partners who had hit them as well, 40% had partners who reported initiating the violence and 25% of the women reported being heavy drinkers (Gondolf, 1996). "Batterer" intervention programs return male clients who have been blamed for the violence into a violent milieu. If the men report their partners' violence in these programs they are criticized for "victim blaming" (Pence & Paymar, 1986), although many are simply telling the truth. Having failed to make a case for Duluth style BIPs, Gondolf now criticizes the alternatives (Gondolf, 2011). No alternative has had anywhere near the support and evaluation of the Duluth model, nor failed so completely. When other researchers, using superior methodology, examine the same questions as Johnson, Gondolf or Dekeseredy, they come to opposite conclusions. Capaldi's work re-afrms the superb longitudinal studies of Serbin et al. (2004) and Moftt and her colleagues (Moftt, Caspi, Rutter, & Silva, 2001; Moftt, Robins, & Caspi, 2001). These studies also nd "assortative mating", i.e., that troubled adolescents (male and female) seek each other out and that aggressive girls (measured as early as kindergarten in the Serbin study) seek out aggressive boyfriends but still contribute to couple IPV over and above the contribution of the boyfriends. These aggressive girls grow up to be aggressive mothers with children who have more admissions to hospital emergency for physical injuries. These longitudinal studies, with the ability to sequence causation present a mixed sex picture of snowballing dysfunction with males and female both contributing. They underscore again, the one sided nature of Dekeseredy's failed search for male peer groups supporting the use of IPV. Studies of the interaction patterns of abusive couples show the same bilateral pattern; a "coercion trap" where each tries to top the other (Jacobson, Gottman, Gortner, Berns, & Shortt, 1996; Jacobson et al., 1994; Leonard & Senchak, 1993; Margolin, John,

& Gleberman, 1989). The Jacobson studies focused on male violence but noted that 40% of the female partners in the study used severe physical abuse. These couples escalated anger and coercion attempts bilaterally. Hence, laboratory studies of IPV, surveys and longitudinal studies all nd bilateral IPV as the most common form. Instead of viewing patriarchy as the culprit and demonizing men (Corvo & Johnson, 2003), we should be teaching couples how to avoid coercion traps. Douglas and Straus (2003, 2006) asked victimization and perpetration questions about IPV to both male and female university students. Part of their multi-country sample was data collected from ve Canadian universities, the same population involved in Dekeseredy's onesided survey. In the methodologically stronger study, Douglas and Straus found that incidence rates of IPV perpetrated by females against males in Canadian universities were 134.6% higher than rates for male perpetrations. Similarly, when Johnson's claim that only men commit "intimate terrorism" is tested in balanced, fairly designed studies, as opposed to a self selected and non-representative group in a woman's shelter, it also fails (Graham- Kevan & Archer, 2007; Laroche, 2005). In the Graham-Kevan and Archer (2003) study, which Johnson cites as supporting his claim that IT is primarily (always) male perpetrated, the authors found that IT was primarily male, however, as the authors put it "the 'maleness' of intimate terrorism may well be an artifact of the sampling procedure used. Indeed, if the shelter data is omitted IT shows sexual symmetry" (op, cit. p. 1261) . Eighty percent of the male intimate terrorists found were reported by their shelter sample, even though it constituted only 17% of their entire sample. Laroche (2005) assessed "intimate terrorism" in the data from the 2004 Canadian National Survey, that assessed power dynamics as well as IPV. In those national data, 4.2% of women and 2.6% of men reported being victimized by intimate terrorism. A study of men seeking help from IPV victimization (Hines & Douglas, 2010) found IT patterns were gender reversed for this group compared with a woman's shelter group (more about this below). Any study that assesses gender prevalence of IT with a non-shelter sample gets very different results from Johnson. McDonald and her colleagues asked women in shelters about their own use of violence (Jouriles, McDonald, Smith Slep, Heyman, & Garrido, 2008; McDonald, Jouriles, Ramlisetty-Mikler, Caetano, & Green, 2006; McDonald, Jouriles, Tart, & Minze, 2009) and found women's own violence was an important determinant of child behavior problems. In a community sample of 1615 dual parent households, children were 2.5 times more likely to be exposed to IPV by their mother than by their father. Previous, one-sided, methodologies (M. P. Johnson, 2008; Kelly & Johnson, 2008; McCloskey, Figueredo, & Koss, 1995) missed this nding and continued to treat female violence as non-existent or inconsequential (M. P. Johnson, 2006). Real scientists, when confronted by disconrming data sets, reevaluate their hypotheses. The gender paradigm cult never does, which is why I refer to it as a cult. Epistemologically, it resembles the cognitive processes of cult members whose prophecies have failed (Festinger, Riecken, & Schachter, 1956; Stone, 2000). These processes take the form of denial or rationalization of the disconrmation in what is called "belief perseverance"(Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982; Lord et al., 1979). It is for this reason that I refer to the data supporting the gender paradigm as the architecture of anti-science (Dutton, 2010). Instead of explaining why his conclusions are contradicted by his data, Dekeseredy focuses on whether or not I mistakenly labeled Catherine MacKinnon a Marxist-sociologist instead of a radical sociologist. I really don't care which label is used, it is not the label that is the problem, it is her mistaken notion (in her own words) that intimate relationships can be reduced to Marxist economic relationships and that they enact the same power dynamics. This glaring misconception still reduces court mandated therapy to the ludicrous "Duluth model" that eschews psychological treatment and advises "facilitators" to use a "slavery model" or the "culture of domination" in conceptualizing male abuse to their male clients (Pence & Paymar, 1993, p. 490). For the record, as far back as 1985, less than 10% of American families were male-dominant (Coleman & Straus,

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1986). Is it any wonder that Duluth type interventions are abysmal failures? (Dutton, 2006c). This is the crux of the problem with the functionalist sociological view; it is ignorant of the psychological processes necessary to explain data patterns of incidence of IPV. The "structural factors" sustaining patriarchy that the gender paradigm reveres do not explain either of the two essential features of IPV incidence statistics; that women commit IPV more than men do and that only small percentages of perpetrators (male or female) inhabit any sociological category, whether it is gender, class, race or socio-economic group. The encyclopedic studies of Straus and Gelles and their colleagues examined every social aspect of IPV (Straus & Gelles, 1992). Among the results reported are the following: percentage of black Americans where the husband slapped the wife in the past year 12%, for white Americans 5% (Cazaneave & Straus, 1992), for Hispanic Americans 16.6% (Straus & Smith, 1992). Even when income, urbanicity, employment, or occupational status are added, no incidence rate for wife assault exceeds 23%. Even when the couple's dysfunctional power dynamic is included, the highest rate found is 31% (Coleman & Straus, 1986). In short, when methodologically solid sociological research is conducted, only small minorities of any demographic group commit IPV. The reason is that psychological factors operate within and interact with social structures to determine IPV commission. Moft and her colleagues recognized this in her award winning longitudinal studies, calling these psychological predictors "Negative Emotionality" and assessing them using a psychological scale(Moftt, Caspi, Rutter, & Silva, 2001; Moftt, Robins, & Caspi, 2001). Clearly there is exemplary sociological research, such as the Moftt work cited above or the groundbreaking work of Straus and his colleagues (Straus & Gelles, 1992). The problem comes when sociological analyses purport to inuence criminal justice policy which is based on determinations of individual blameworthiness and hence, must assess individual contributors to perpetration. The result is an obfuscation by gender generated stereotypes inuencing assessments of individual culpability and/or tness for parenting. It is in this sphere of inuence that the work of gender paradigm theorists like Johnson, or Jaffe (Jaffe, Johnston, Crooks, & Bala, 2008; Jaffe, Wolfe, & Wilson, 1990) has been particularly misleading (Dutton et al., 2010). Jaffe et al. (2003) prime custody assessors to expect male denial of IPV during a custody assessment while also strongly arguing that only male IPV is serious to wives or children. This gender stereotype priming contravenes ethical practice guidelines for forensic psychologists (Weissman & DeBow, 2003). In the Jaffe paper that Johnson cites as reecting the new enlightenment of the gender paradigm (Jaffe et al., 2008), Jaffe primes assessors to be vigilant for abusive men being extra litigious in custody disputes as an extension of the power and control needs, citing Jaffe et al. (2003) as their authority for this claim. In that source, however, there are simply two second hand anecdotes for a priming process that leads assessors to be suspicious of any man ghting strenuously to maintain his connection with his children. My pointing out this "witch hunt" thinking (Dutton, 2005; Dutton et al., 2008) has led Gondolf, Dekeseredy and Johnson to try to dismiss me as a "men's rights" advocate. They seem either incapable or unwilling to believe that critiques of awed theory and methodology can be anything except politically based. Interactive models that combine psychological and socio-structural inuences have been around since the 1970's (Belsky, 1980) and are used in cross cultural research to assess the contributions of both societal and individual level variables (Li & Bond, 2010). A nested ecological model can nicely account for the effects of broader social factors on IPV rates (see, for example, Archer, 2006) and the interaction of psychological factors with microsystem social factors (Dutton, 1985). It could also be used to assess the weights of each level in determining IPV incidence (and consequent foci for effective intervention).

4.1. Violence against women The catch all phrase "violence against women" is the political thrust of these studies and examples of violence against women are drawn from the rape literature or newspaper reports of "bride burnings", "honor killings" or clitorectomies. It does not matter to the gender paradigm that these actions have disparate etiologies and that the common grouping deects focus on the etiologies and their subsequent remediation. Most of the horror stories are embedded in vestigial patriarchal cultures in North Africa or the Middle East (J. Archer, 2006). They are then lumped in with wife assault into the catch- all "violence against women" schema. Lesbian violence (e.g. Lie, Schilit, Bush, Montague, & Reyes, 1991) is not considered violence against women because the perpetrator is from within the target group. Violence against women is dened as violence generated by patriarchal social structures or individual men. In the literature on hate crime, it is dened as actions committed against a target group because of their membership in that group (Murphy, 2006; Wellman, 2000). If that rule were applied to wife assault it would severely limit the acts considered to be violence towards women. Individual acts generated by impulse, conjugal paranoia, or dyadic coercive traps are based on a perception of an individual woman as frustrating, but may have little relation to her generic group membership. In my 15 years as a court- mandated group therapist working with assaultive men, I heard many reasons and/ rationalizations given for wife assault. I never heard anyone frame it in gender terms. This is a conceit of academic sociologists that misread the phenomenology of the abuse perpetrator. Despite the claims of the gender paradigm that wife assault is normative (Dobash & Dobash, 1979), only 2% of North American males believe it acceptable to use force against a wife or girlfriend (Simon et al., 2001). 4.2. Contemporary feminist analysis Both Gondolf and Dekeseredy criticize me for not reading the recent "feminist" research on woman abuse. Dekeserdy and Dragiewicz (2007) made the same argument in their disingenuous review of Rethinking Domestic Violence (where Dekereredy failed to disclose that his review might be colored by my outing him in that book for misreading his own data). In fact, I have read several of the "new feminist" publications (Dragiewicz, 2008; Dragiewicz & Lindgren, 2009; Swan, Gambone, Caldwell, Sullivan, & Snow, 2008) and I see nothing new. The Dragiewicz and Lindgren paper asserts that women have a "grossly disproportionate risk of violence from male partners" (op.cit.p3) and dismissed "father's rights" groups as anti-feminist. These men are never viewed as ghting for continued attachment to their children but their activities are "a systematic attack on laws designed to protect women and children" (op, cit. p. 2). The authors were arguing against any shelter services for men. The distortion of risk sources to children (portrayed as all from fathers) is endemic to the paper, the assault on the cohesion of the family unit is breathtaking. The evidence says something different; Health and Human Services large sample study (Gaudiosi, 2004) of abuse risks to children found that the biological mothers were the most common perpetrator of both child physical abuse and child homicide. Dragiewicz (2008) argues that any criticism of feminist sociology and the gender paradigm is "inseparable from the broader context of contemporary resistance to and reaction against feminism" (op.cit. p. 121). From a theoretical/empirical perspective, the Dragiewicz (2008) paper could have been written in 1978. "Feminist" theory has not advanced, but remains a closed system, unresponsive to data that would force a more complex view of IPV. 4.3. A shelter for men One of the problems with the constant sampling of women from shelters was the lack of a comparable shelter group of male victims

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(which Dragiewicz & Lindgren, 2009 argued against). When a National Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men and Women was nally established (Hines et al., 2007), a view of male victims of IPV was nally possible. Hines and Douglas (2010) reported that in this male victim sample, 20% had experienced extreme violence (choking, using a knife, burning with scalding water, targeting of their genitals) during attacks, and that 95% of the female perpetrators used controlling acts consistent with Intimate Terrorism (including death threats, threats to the family pet, display of weapons, smashing things, threats of using the criminal justice systemcalling the police and lodging a DV complaint, using the court system to obtain sole custody, etc.). Seventy-eight percent of the men were injured (Hines, 2009) sustaining on average eleven injuries. Hines and Douglas used a community sample as controls. In the community sample they found that CCV was the most common form of IPV. However, with the men's help seeking sample, "a very different picture emerged" (op, cit. p. 51). Female partners of these men use 56 times the frequency of physical and severe psychological aggression of the men themselves (by the men's reports) and vesix times the controlling behaviors. Rates of their own use of IPV by the help seeking men were similar to those reported by shelter women in the few studies that reported these data (e.g., McDonald et al., 2009, see Hines & Douglas, 2010, p. 52). They constituted a virtual mirror image (i.e., gender reversal) of the female victim samples reported by Johnson. When they sought help from a local DV program, 64% of these abused men were told that they were the ''real batterer". The gender paradigm never acknowledges the existence of male victims, in part, because shelters for men (and hence, samples of male victims) have never existed. Studies of lay persons (Sorenson & Taylor, 2005) and psychologists (Follingstad, DeHart, & Green, 2004) reveal that the stereotype created by the gender paradigm is pervasive; both groups view the same action when committed by a man as more abusive and more requiring of police intervention. The next step in generating an effective societal response to IPV will focus on prevention (Capaldi & Langhinrichsen-Rohling, in press; Whitaker & Lutzker, 2009) and early detection of violence prone families. The exclusive focus on "violence against women" will be viewed as an anachronism and the demonization and otherization of men (Corvo & Johnson, 2003; Taylor, 2009) as an aberration. References
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