COLUMBUS -- A common and popular belief that women are the vast majority of domestic violence victims came under fire recently in a response to The Telegram’s story entitled “Safety top priority in domestic violence calls” which published Feb. 17.
Marc E. Angelucci, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Coalition of Free Men, responded by e-mail and a blog post to the story and provided access to several studies by prominent medical, research and governmental agencies to back up his claims.
The various studies call into question the commonly held belief that female victims far outnumber male victims of intimate partner violence and/or that women do not typically initiate the violence, but only react or respond to violence committed against them.
Angelucci wrote: “Dear Editor, the article “Safety top priority in domestic violence calls” (2/17) left male victims of domestic violence and their children invisible as usual and misleadingly cited crime data to support the contention that the vast majority of domestic violence victims are women.
n See VIOLENCE, Page 2A
“Men are less likely to report it, which makes crime data unreliable, but sociological research consistently shows women initiate domestic violence at least as often as men and that men suffer one-third of (the) injuries, as Cal State University Professor Martin Fiebert shows in his online bibliography at www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/as
sault.htm.”
Some of the more credible Internet links provided included studies conducted by Harvard Medical School, The National Family Violence Legislative Resource Center, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the American Psychological Association, and university studies conducted at the universities of New Hampshire, Florida and Washington.
The CDC study reported many victims do not report intimate partner violence to police, friends or family largely due to the victims’ belief that others will not believe them or that the police cannot help.
The study reported women experience about 4.8 million intimate partner related physical assaults and rapes each year, while men are the victims of about 2.9 million partner related physical assaults. IPV resulted in 1,544 deaths in 2004. Of these deaths, 25 percent were men and 75 percent were women.
“The battered women’s movement began in the 1970s,” said Jamie Snyder of the Center for Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence Survivors in Columbus. “The movement began as a movement of women helping women. There was little or no support at the time for women who were battered, and in many cases they would be told by law enforcement to just go home and work it out.”
Snyder said as the movement evolved, more and more professionals entered into the work, which brought more social workers, medical practitioners, counselors and other professionals to the field.
“It’s very important for the public to know that we do serve men here at the center,” Snyder said. “The numbers of men are very much less than the numbers of women who access the services, and we agree that most men generally don’t report violence against them because they may be seen as weak. The stigma of a man admitting to victimization could be even worse in a rural area such as this, which could result in a greater degree of under-reporting by male victims.”
The local center provided information showing that in 2003, five men accessed the services available.
The numbers since have fluctuated, with 13 men served in 2004, 20 in 2005, five in 2006 and 12 men in 2007.
“The number of men who seek out services fluctuates greatly, but the bottom line is that no one -- male, female, children or the elderly -- should have to suffer from intimate partner abuse or domestic violence in any form,” Snyder said. “The most important thing we can say is that services here are available free to anyone who comes through our doors and those services are provided in a way that allows the victims to remain completely anonymous.”
Snyder said the true number of victims, male or female, is unknown due to under-reporting.
The Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis reports between 1992 and 2004, the number of violent victimization’s by an intimate against a female victim declined from approximately 950,750 to 475,940, a 57 percent decline from previous years. The highest number of IPV against females was measured in 1993 when 1,070,510 were estimated. In 2004, about 475,940 females and 151,470 males were victims of intimate partner violence.
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