The Face Slap – Our Unspoken Tolerance Of Violence and Sexism

[lumberjack_jeff]

23. Setting aside the issue of fairness or equality...

From a purely pragmatic standpoint, domestic violence escalates and frequently is only interrupted when she gets injured.

85% of women in violent relationships are themselves physically violent.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1854883/?tool=pubmed

Almost 24% of all relationships had some violence, and half (49.7%) of those were reciprocally violent. In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases. Reciprocity was associated with more frequent violence among women, but not men. Regarding injury, men were more likely to inflict injury than were women, and reciprocal intimate partner violence was associated with greater injury than was nonreciprocal intimate partner violence regardless of the gender of the perpetrator

The finding that IPV is more frequently perpetrated by women and is more likely to result in injury when perpetrated in the context of reciprocal IPV can best be understood in the context of a conflict-based theoretical model, which suggests that conflict leads to increasingly coercive interactions that may spiral into violence. For example, suppose partner A shoves partner B and that partner B does not retaliate but instead storms out of the house; the violence may end as nonreciprocal violence with no injury. If Partner B retaliates by slapping or punching partner A, the violence then becomes reciprocal and injury becomes more likely with each escalating blow. This pattern suggests that retaliation may be a primary mechanism for the increased injury associated with reciprocal violence, though we cannot test this hypothesis using this study’s data. An escalation explanation is supported by longitudinal studies that show that violence between relationship partners tends to escalate over time from verbal abuse to physical abuse and that victimization from violence is a strong predictor of perpetration of violence. The escalation of negative, coercive interactions has been central to, and strongly supported in, Patterson’s work, which describes family processes that support the development of aggression, and has been suggested to play a role in dating violence.