Michael P Johnson Domestic Violence Summary

Gender Symmetry and Asymmetry in Domestic Violence, an article by Michael P. Johnson (2006), begins by discussing the four different types of domestic violence and how they relate the gender symmetry. In reviewing this article, I will first summarize its contents and then give my own opinion on the subject matter. Johnson (2006) starts his argument by posing two opposite sides of research: 1) heterosexual intimate partner violence is mostly men assaulting their female partner and 2) women are at least as violent as men in their intimate relationships. He then presents evidence on how both can be true. He argues that “partner violence is not a unitary phenomenon”, that researchers normally use different types of sampling strategies, that these different strategies look at different types of domestic violence, and that these types of domestic violence are different in relation to gender. Because of this, Johnson (2006) argues that without differentiating the different types of domestic violence we cannot draw conclusions from these types of studies. In Johnson's 1995 study he controls for sampling

It was a predominantly white sample and working class. Many were full time home-makers and the median age was 32. It was not a totally representative sample, but informative non-the-less. Johnson (2006) identified seven measures that were created to tap control tactics: they were threats, economic control, use of privilege and punishment, using children, isolation, emotional abuse, and sexual control. Each measure was standardized and entered into a cluster analysis. The results show that men were more involved in intimate terrorism, women were more involved in violent resistance, and situational couple violence and mutual violent control were both basically