Book Review: Violence Towards Men By Straus

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While reading the book chapters, I could see the bias in each of the materials I was reading. I think the bias in the readings did help prove points that helped me come to my position on the subject. The first book chapter I read was Violence Towards Men by Straus. The first point Straus brings up is the issues between “family conflict” studies and “crime studies” (Straus, 1999). This issue made sense to why there is a big difference between reports of abuse on women compared to reports of abuse on men. Crime studies focus primarily on crimes that have happened to a person or actual reports that have been filed. For women, they are more likely to go to the police compared to men for reports of abuse by a partner. Where the controversy comes in is when we begin to look into family conflict studies. “Without exception, family conflict studies find approximately equal rates of assault by women and men (Archer, 200; Fiebert, 1997). When looking at family conflict studies there are equal rates of abuse found. Why is one study so much higher than the other? This is because men do not report the crime of domestic violence as much as women do, giving women a higher percentage of abuse in the crime studies.
In the study involving 2,143 married couples living together completed in 1975 and the study involving 6,002 couples completed in 1985 these studies showed that females had a slightly higher rate of assaulting their spouse than men did (Straus & Gelles, 1986, 1990). The overall rates in the 1985 National Family Violence Survey was 124 per 1,000 women assaulted their male partners compared to 122 per 1000 men who assaulted their female partners (Dutton, 1988; Stets & Straus, 1990). These studies show that women have the same if not hig...

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...partner used house items like silverware and chairs. When psychological abuse was used against the male, bullying and threatening were the most common forms. Only 117 participants reported the abuse to the police. The victims were more likely to report to the police if an object was used against them by their intimate partner. The study also asked men why they were reluctant to report the abuse to the police. Almost half of the victims did not report the abuse to the police because they were scared that they would not be taken seriously. The case revealed that majority of men who did report domestic violence to the police were taken as a joke and sometimes they would end up being blamed (J Fam Viol, 2013). Males who were to report to the police were sometimes blamed for the abuse. Why would a man want to report their abuse if they will end up getting blamed for it?

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