A British study recently suggested that a rather large minority of women approve of domestic violence, but unfortunately it’s hard to tell exactly what the study means.

According to a report in the Sunday Times (UK) on the study,

…[500] women taking part were asked to comment on a situation where a man argued with his wife about her long working hours. At the end of the row he slapped her face and locked her in the bathroom.

About 25 percent of the women said they sympathized with the man, and 30 percent said they didn’t believe he should be arrested. Caroline Healy, who conducted the study, interpreted this result as evidence of the failure to communicate the anti-domestic violence message:

Although the Government is spending a lot on publicity to say that violence shouldn’t be dealt with in the home, that message isn’t always getting through. This research shows a clear need for more public awareness and public education work, particularly in primary schools. More needs to be spent on teaching people about it and more research needs to be done.

But the results are ambiguous at best even taking them at their face value. The first result is hardly even interesting — it is possible for men and women to feel sympathy for someone without approving of his or her actions.

Much the same problem occurs with whether or not the husband should be arrested for assaulting his wife. Some studies tend to show that legal intervention in low level acts of violence tends to worsen rather than improve the situation. Those who don’t think the husband should be arrested might think that some form of family counseling might be more likely to change his behavior than arrest.

It’s a shame that studies like this usually only ask the 500 women to react to scenarios where men assault women. It would be interesting to have asked the same people about a situation where a woman slaps her husband after a verbal argument. Would they have felt any sympathy for the woman? Would they have thought the woman should have been arrested?

I know personally my wife and I have never committed acts of violence against each other (and I really can’t imagine this happening), but if my wife should slap me after a heated argument calling the police as the first strategy would be counter-productive over the long term. Does it follow then that, as Healy puts it, I am “implicitly condon[ing] the use of force in intimate relationships”? No, of course not, but neither does every relationship fit into the same cookie cutter mode that requires legal intervention for resolving incidents of low level violence.

Source:

Not all women condemn wife beaters. Gillian Harris, The Sunday Times, July 11, 2000.

The Does Study Really Mean Women Approve of Domestic Violence? by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

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