By Joseph A. Breidenbach

I was 4 years old when it happened. I was hiding in the stairwell, peering into the kitchen. It was not the 40-below temperature outside, but the sounds of my parent’s shouting that made me tremble. I hoped that they would notice how scared I was and stop. My petite mother’s shouting grew in intensity and then she started to scream. I saw it happen.

My mother kicked my father in the shins. She kicked him again and again. My father tried to back away but she had him cornered. It seemed like her attack would never end. I watched as my 6-foot-2-inch, 240-pound father become a victim of domestic violence.

My father never retaliated nor did he ever tell anybody. He knew what everyone knows: Women are presumed innocent, men are not. Men are not allowed to be victims.

There is no question that domestic violence directed against women is a serious problem. Former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop called it women’s number-one health problem. The statistics reported in the popular press are staggering: Nearly one-third of women in hospital emergency departments are there due to domestic violence and three out of four female homicide victims are victims of domestic violence.

No gender bias
The first survey of violent family life in America was released in 1977. This

survey by Murray Straus, Richard Gelles and Suzanne Steinmetz was published in their book, Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family. The most widely reported figures on domestic violence come from this survey and show that in the United States 6 million women a year suffer domestic violence by their partners and 1.8 million women are seriously assaulted.

What is rarely mentioned by the popular press is that this same survey reflects another dark side: that an equal number of men are victims of domestic violence and an even greater number of men are being seriously assaulted. This survey does not stand alone. More then 30 scientific studies support the same conclusion: Men and women experience domestic violence in roughly the same number.

In 1988, the Bureau of Justice Statistics surveyed approximately 8,000 homicides in 75 large urban areas. The survey revealed that among homicide victims, 40% (216) of the men and 60% (311) of the women were killed by their spouses.

Another significant study published in 1989 in the Journal of Sex Research found that 12% of gay males and 31% of lesbians reported forced sex with their current or most recent partner while another study revealed that lesbians experience domestic violence at similar rates as heterosexual women.

What’s new in the news?
The June 6, 2003 issue of USA Today quoted Richard Gelles, dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work, as saying that the lifetime risk of a woman being struck by a male intimate partner is about 28% and a man’s lifetime risk of being struck by a woman is also about 28%. The December 1, 2003 Boston Globe contained a column written by Cathy Young, who is also a contributing editor at Reason magazine. The article said:

[T]he public perception of domestic abuse as something that horrid men do to helpless women persists. . . . People who have challenged this stereotype (myself included) have been called everything from antifeminists to backlash peddlers to apologists for abusive men. . . . A woman who starts a physical confrontation with her male partner may well find herself severely battered. . . . To understand and prevent male violence . . . we must understand female violence as well.

The February 27, 2004 edition of The Star stated that “international figures suggest that in 100 domestic violence situations, about 40 cases will involve violence by women against men . . . the problem . . . has remained a taboo subject . . . . The stigma attached to being a male victim of domestic violence is so strong that it even extends to police and health professionals.”

On June 4, 2004, Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Robert Jamieson Jr. quoted Martin Fiebert, a psychology professor at California State University-Long Beach, who concluded after reviewing more than 100 research studies on domestic violence: “It turns out, in 50 percent of the cases, you can’t separate who started it . . . and in the other 50 percent, it’s equal.”

Linda G. Mills, a professor of law and social work at New York University, authored the 2003 book, From Insult to Injury: Rethinking Our Responses to Intimate Abuse. In her book, Mills revealed that about two decades ago she was a battered woman, though she would now prefer the more neutral term, i.e., “woman in an abusive relationship.” In her book, she writes, “Years of research, which mainstream feminism has glossed over or ignored, shows that when it comes to intimate abuse, women are far from powerless and seldom, if ever, just victims.”

Reality check, please
I have known about domestic violence since I was four years old. I have seen it with my own eyes. I know what it looks like. I know what it sounds like. No one, not a child, woman or man, should be a victim of domestic violence. There is no excuse.

Award-winning feminist writer and crime journalist Patricia Pearson, author of When She Was Bad, wrote that research shows “aggression is not innately masculine, but . . . evidence lies within the eye of the beholder. As long as patriarchs and feminists alike covet the notion that women are gentle, they will not look for the facts that dispute it.”