Fun Facts about Domestic Violence

Welmer points to a 2007 study on domestic violence by CDC researcher Daniel Whitaker, published in the Journal of Public Health. Here are the results:

Weighted Estimates of Violence Occurrence for Reciprocally and Nonreciprocally Violent Relationships

Variable	Overall %	Men %	Women %
All relationships
- Nonviolent	76.1	80.7	71.6
- Violent	23.9	19.3	28.4
Among violent relationships
- Reciprocal	49.7	46.9	51.5
- Nonreciprocal	50.3	53.1	48.5
Among cases with nonreciprocal IPV
- Perpetrated by men	29.3	25.1	32.3
- Perpetrated by women	70.7	74.9	67.7

A couple of thoughts on this. First, I will happily betray my middle-class innocence by saying that 23.9% sounds like an awfully high number of heterosexual relationships in which violence occurs. But note that the survey questions (“How often in the past year have you threatened your partner with violence, pushed or shoved him/her, or thrown something at him/her that could hurt,” and “How often in the past year have you slapped, hit, or kicked your partner”) include both threats of violence and attempts at violence in the same category as, you know, actual violence. (Though one could argue that the willingness of respondents to characterize mere threats and attempts as "violence" is a measure of their psychological impact.)

The study gives us an idea of the prevalence of actual violence by asking about injury. Again the results:

Weighted Estimates of Injury Occurrence by Reciprocity Status and Perpetrator Gender

Variable	Injury occurrency (%)
- Nonreciprocal	11.6
- Reciprocal	28.4
Perpetrator gender
- Men against women	28.8
- Women against men	18.1
Gender by reciprocity
- Men against women: nonreciprocal	20.0
- Men against women: reciprocal	31.4
- Women against men: nonreciprocal	8.1
- Women against men: reciprocal	25.3

Note that "injury" as used herein refers to a "sprain, bruise, or cut" and, presumably, anything worse. This, I submit, is a minimum threshold for what constitutes actual "domestic violence" as opposed to simple boorishness.

My second thought is: wow, women inflict 70% of the non-reciprocal domestic violence on men! But let's limit our consideration to violence causing injury. Looking at the non-reciprocal violence numbers, my back of the envelope calculation is that (.293)(.2)/[(.293)(.2) + (.707)(.081)] = 51% of non-reciprocal, injury-producing domestic violence is perpetrated by men, leaving the other 49% to be perpetrated by women.

But what about reciprocal violence, i.e. men and women deciding to have at it together? Waving aside, for the moment, whether this constitutes as morally deserving a category as non-reciprocal violence, we see that 31.4% of women in reciprocally violent relationships suffered injury, while only 25.3% of men in reciprocally violent relatonships suffered injury. (Keep in mind that, as the violence was reciprocal, these categories are not mutually exclusive -- no doubt some relationships included injuries to both the man and the woman.)

Looking at the raw numbers, we can combine the categories and see that of the injuries sustained in domestic violence, 55% were suffered by women while only 45% were suffered by men. This isn't as dramatic as the 70% mentioned above, but does illustrate that the popular notion that domestic violence is suffered exclusively by women appears to be a misconception.

A few caveats. First, the study only considers heterosexual couples ages 18 - 28. Second, while the study did include a racially representative sample, racial correlations were evidently not part of the study. (The original data can be downloaded here, I think.)

Finally, the study has only one injury category. It doesn't break out separately those DV victims receiving "the full Rhianna", i.e. victims suffering injuries of sufficient severity to merit either professional medical and/or law enforcement attention.

Still. This study provides a lot of nuance on the question of who perpetrates domestic violence.