Violent Women? The Challenge of Women's Violence in Intimate Heterosexual Relationships to Feminist Analyses of Partner Violence

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to describe the academic discussion on gender symmetry, emphasizing the responses of feminist researchers to the questions raised by reports of women's violence against men in intimate relationships. The article serves as an introduction to an academic debate that has been lively in the United States and, to some extent, in Great Britain, but hitherto not in the Nordic countries. The author argues that the discussion on gender symmetry shows that the domestic violence field is ready for multi-faceted analyses of gender and violence that make it evident that all violence is gendered.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

1 For previous treatments and comments on this debate, see Kurz (1989, 1996), Melton and Belknap, 2003, the recent papers by Allen (in press), and Langhinrichsen-Rohling (2010).

2 In response to some of these points of critique, some items on sexual violence and injuries sustained were included in the CTS2 (Straus 1999). However “the questions on impact are still limited” as noted by Hester et al. (2010: 255), cf. DeKeseredy and Schwartz (1998).

3 The literature on same-sex domestic violence also provides interesting entries into and analyses of women's use of violence in intimate partnerships; however, this is beyond the scope of this article.

4 The reader will note that some of these forms overlap; a person subjected to intimate terrorism may respond with violent resistance, and two forms of violence are then perpetrated within the relationship, according to Johnson.

5 For example, the FV box includes both representative sample surveys and samples that include only dating couples, which are mutually exclusive methodologies. Likewise, crime victimization studies are not generally based on agency-based data; it is primarily the latter that yields mainly female respondents.