That is a scary number, but it matches the number of women who report being the victims of intimate partner violence. It's worth noting, however, since it is seldom discussed, that intimate partner violence is almost equally perpetrated by women and men (53% by men, 47% by women, according to the CDC), but men cause more damage.

One in five men reports violence toward intimate partners

September 15, 2014
Source: University of Michigan Health System

Summary:
Intimate partner violence is more prevalent than diabetes, research shows. One in five men in the U.S. reports violence towards their spouse or significant other, says a new nationally-representative study. The analysis also found that male aggression toward a partner is associated with warning signs that could come up during routine health care visits, including irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and insomnia, in addition to better known risks like substance abuse and a history of either experiencing or witnessing violence as a child.

One in five men in the U.S. reports violence towards their spouse or significant other, says a new nationally-representative study by the University of Michigan.

The analysis also found that male aggression toward a partner is associated with warning signs that could come up during routine health care visits, including irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and insomnia, in addition to better known risks like substance abuse and a history of either experiencing or witnessing violence as a child.

The findings appear in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine and are based on the most recent data available from the National Comorbidity Survey-Replication from 2001-2003. The survey assesses intimate partner violence and characteristics among male perpetrators.

"When people think of men who abuse their partners, they often think of violent people who they have never come across, or people they have only heard about in the news," says lead author Vijay Singh, M.D., MPH, MS, a clinical lecturer in the Departments of Emergency Medicine and Family Medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School.

"However, our study showed one out of every five men in the U.S. reported physical violence toward an intimate partner. It's likely that we've all met these men in our daily environment. This is an issue that cuts across all communities, regardless of race, income, or any other demographics."

Domestic violence has become a growing health concern. In the U.S. each year, roughly 320,000 outpatient health visits and 1,200 deaths among women are due to intimate partner violence, and $8.3 billion is spent in related medical and mental health services alone. The new U-M findings show that the prevalence of partner violence in the country is even greater than that of diabetes.

The subject has also recently been in the headlines, with the case of NFL running back Ray Rice. The Baltimore Ravens released Rice after a video of him hitting his wife in a casino elevator surfaced in the news.

The U-M study found that more than half of the men who reported violence toward a partner had at least one routine health visit over the last year and nearly one third noted at least one emergency room visit over the last year.

"Most of our efforts to prevent intimate partner violence have focused on screening and improving outcomes for women who are victims, because their health and well-being is our priority. Very little work, however, has been done on how to identify male perpetrators," says Singh, who is also a member of the University of Michigan Injury Center and Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation.

"Our research shows that male perpetrators of intimate partner violence seek routine medical services, and they have physical symptoms that are common reasons patients seek medical care. This suggests that we may be missing an important opportunity in the primary care setting to identify their aggressive behavior and potentially intervene."

Singh says further work needs to be done on developing identification and intervention programs focused to on male aggression toward a partner.

The nationally-representative sample included 530 men with an average age of 42. Roughly 78 percent were non-Hispanic white, 56 percent were educated beyond high school and 84 percent were employed.

Intimate partner violence was defined as pushing, grabbing, shoving, throwing something, slapping or hitting, kicking, biting, beating up, choking, burning or scalding, or threatening a partner with a knife or gun.

Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by University of Michigan Health System. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Journal Reference:
V. Singh, R. Tolman, M. Walton, S. Chermack, R. Cunningham. (2014). Characteristics of Men Who Perpetrate Intimate Partner Violence. The Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine; 27(5): 661 DOI: 10.3122/jabfm.2014.05.130247

New Insights Into Why Some Men Assault Women

New research reveals what many of us have known for years - men who are insecure in their masculinity are more likely to commit intimate partner violence. This is article is particularly relevant to the killings at UCSB on Friday of last week. That young man was incredibly insecure in his masculinity, not to mention in his sense of self as a whole.

Granted, most men who fit this profile do not progress beyond beating and/or emotionally abusing their partners, but fueled by grandiosity and delusions, with some misogyny from the MRAs and PUAs thrown in to make it even more toxic, Elliott Rodger exemplifies the most extreme end of the violence curve -  it's no longer a woman, it's all women; and it's no longer physical abuse, it's murder (and torture in his fantasies).

The article appears (will appear - this is an "online early" offering, likely due to the killings in Isla Vista) in Personality and Individual Differences (Volume 68, October 2014, Pages 160–164). The abstract is followed by a summary of the research from Pacific Standard (the article is pay-walled).

Full Citation:
Reidy, DE,  Berke, DS, Gentile, B, and Zeichner, A. (2014, Oct). Man enough? Masculine discrepancy stress and intimate partner violence. Personality and Individual Differences; 68, Pages 160–164. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2014.04.021

Man enough? Masculine discrepancy stress and intimate partner violence

Dennis E. Reidya, Danielle S. Berkeb, Brittany Gentileb, Amos Zeichner

Highlights

• Masculine socialization has been theorized to predispose men to IPV.
• However, gender role discrepancy stress has not been investigated.
• Gender role discrepancy stress and IPV were assessed via the M-Turk website.
• Discrepancy stress predicted psychological, physical, and sexual IPV.
• Implications for prevention are discussed.

Abstract

Research on gender roles suggests that men who strongly adhere to traditional masculine gender norms are at increased risk for the perpetration of violent and abusive acts toward their female intimate partners. Yet, gender norms alone fail to provide a comprehensive explanation of the multifaceted construct of intimate partner violence (IPV) and there is theoretical reason to suspect that men who fail to conform to masculine roles may equally be at risk for IPV. In the present study, we assessed effect of masculine discrepancy stress, a form of distress arising from perceived failure to conform to socially-prescribed masculine gender role norms, on IPV. Six-hundred men completed online surveys assessing their experience of discrepancy stress, masculine gender role norms, and history of IPV. Results indicated that masculine discrepancy stress significantly predicted men’s historical perpetration of IPV independent of other masculinity related variables. Findings are discussed in terms of potential distress engendered by masculine socialization as well as putative implications of gender role discrepancy stress for understanding and intervening in partner violence perpetrated by men.

* * * * * * * * *

New Insights Into Why Some Men Assault Women

By Tom Jacobs • May 28, 2014

A view over the University of California-Santa Barbara's lagoon to one of the Channel Islands. (Photo: Superchilum/Wikimedia Commons)

For some, the sense that they are not sufficiently masculine leads to stress, and ultimately to striking out at the women closest to them.

•

Last weekend’s tragic events outside the University of California-Santa Barbara, have ignited an impassioned national conversation about misogyny, male anger, and violence against women. Timely new research suggests physical abuse against wives and girlfriends may be triggered by a specific psychological state: The emotional stress that can result when males perceive themselves as less masculine than their peers and cultural role models.

A research team led by Dennis Reidy, a violence-prevention scholar at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, refers to this as “discrepancy stress,” and defines it as “a form of distress arising from perceived failure to conform to socially prescribed masculine gender role norms.”

In the journal Personality and Individual Differences, the researchers present evidence of a link between this type of stress and interpersonal violence, even “independent of other masculinity related variables.”

Along with three colleagues from the University of Georgia, Reidy conducted a study of 600 heterosexual American men who were recruited online. Along with basic demographic information, study participants responded to a series of statements revealing how they view their own masculinity.

On a one-to-seven scale, they expressed their level of agreement or disagreement with such statements as “I am less masculine than the average guy,” “I worry that people judge me because I’m not like the typical man,” and “I wish I was more manly.”

In addition, they noted the extent to which they endorse traditional gender roles, and the “degree of conflict” they encounter when such roles are challenged. Finally, they reported the extent to which they have engaged in “psychological, physical, or sexually violent behavior” with their current partner, most recent partner, or past partners.

The key result: Men who felt stress over their perceived inadequate level of masculinity were more likely to have admitted abusing their partners, even after a variety of other factors were taken into consideration.

“Men who experience stress related to perceiving themselves as being less masculine than the typical man—or believing that they are perceived as such by others—may be more likely to interpret ambiguous interactions as challenges to their masculinity,” Reidy and his colleagues write.

“Thus, it would be reasonable to expect that these men would be more likely to respond in a manner intended to demonstrate and, perhaps, bolster their masculine status.”

Acts of physical violence, they chillingly add, are “common methods of demonstrating masculinity.”

The researchers found that men who did not fit into traditional masculine roles but felt comfortable about that were not, on average, more likely to abuse their partners. Rather, violent behavior was specifically linked to the “experience of distress” over one’s perceived lack of masculinity.

The researchers add several cautionary notes to their study. They concede that self-reports of interpersonal violence may not be entirely accurate, as some men surely underreported how often they engage in such activity. In addition, their study does not address women-on-men violence or violence among same-sex couples.

Finally, the correlation they found is not proof of causation. It’s conceivable (although not likely) that committing acts of violence against women led them to doubt their masculinity, rather than the other way around.

These caveats aside, their study provides new insights into the roots of male-on-female violence, and may point toward ways of preventing it. Such efforts “should focus on the role of masculine socialization, acceptance of gender norms, and how they may engender distress in adolescents and adult men,” the researchers write.

“Intervening at an early age to prevent violence in teen dating relationships may avert a series of consequences across the lifespan,” they conclude, “including the perpetration of interpersonal violence in future adult relationships.”


~ Staff writer Tom Jacobs is a veteran journalist with more than 20 years experience at daily newspapers. He has served as a staff writer for The Los Angeles Daily News and the Santa Barbara News-Press. His work has also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Ventura County Star.

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Nick Smithers - Why We Have To Talk About Male Victims of Domestic Violence

From the Good Men Project, Nick Smithers tries to raise public awareness about male victims of domestic violence (in Scotland). The numbers in this country are sobering.

According to research by the Domestic Violence Research Group, intimate partner violence (IPV) is essentially bi-directional, and when it's unidirectional (aside from sexual coercion) women are more often the perpetrators (nearly 2:1 on average), yet men are more often arrested or incarcerated.

In conclusion, our results demonstrate the amount of overall IPV differed significantly among samples, but the percent that was categorized as bi-directional did not. This indicates that bi-directional violence is a common IPV pattern and suggests that women play a larger role in the occurrence of IPV than previously thought. Such findings have considerable implications for assessment, legal, intervention, and preventive efforts. It is suggested that if one resolution of the gender symmetry/asymmetry debate is to argue that there are subtypes of male and female intimate partner violence perpetrators, or that there are different patterns of violence amongst relationships characterized by IPV (Johnson, 2005; Johnson, 2006), researchers and clinicians will need to work to together to determine how to reliably and meaningfully make these determinations in ways that will facilitate our ability to effectively prevent and treat all types of IPV.

Here are some very sobering statistics on the rates of IPV and whether it is bi-directional, MFPV (male to female) or FMPV (female to male) among three populations (epidemiological, community, and college):

Among epidemiological/population samples, the average weighted rate of IPV reported was 16.3% (22.1% unweighted). Using weighted averages, among those reporting IPV, 57.9% of the IPV reported was bi-directional. Of the remaining 42.1% that was reported as uni-directional IPV, 13.8% was MFPV, 28.3% was FMPV, and the ratio of uni-directional FMPV to MFPV was 2.05 weighted (2.02 unweighted).
Among community samples, the average weighted rate of IPV reported was 47.0%. Using weighted averages, among those reporting IPV, 59.6% was bidirectional. Of the remaining 40.4% that was reported as uni-directional IPV, 17.5% was MFPV, 22.9% was FMPV, and the ratio of uni-directional FMPV to MFPV was 1.30 weighted (1.98 unweighted).
Among school and college samples, the average weighted rate of IPV reported was 39.2%. Using weighted averages, among those reporting IPV, 51.9% was bi-directional. Of the remaining 48.1% that was reported as uni-directional IPV, 16.2% was MFPV, 31.9% was FMPV, and the ratio of uni-directional FMPV to MFPV was 1.96 weighted (2.18 unweighted).

This information remains relatively unknown among the general population. This silence about gender-based violence is perpetuated by the overwhelming emphasis on male-perpetuated violence, which does tend to be more violent when it occurs.

Why We Have To Talk About Male Victims of Domestic Violence

JULY 27, 2013 BY NICK SMITHERS 

Nick Smithers works for a Scottish charity that wants male victims to be included in the public perception of domestic violence.

I recently started a new job as the National Development Officer for Abused Men in Scotland (AMIS), a charity that’s been working to improve services of male victims of domestic violence since 2010. Part of my role is to raise awareness of male victims which often means taking our message to events where the focus has traditionally been on women. Which is why, earlier this year I ending up co-presenting a workshop with a representative of a prominent organisation which provides essential supports to women who are fleeing abusive partners.

Conversations about male and female victims of domestic violence can often get reduced to arguments about gender politics. AMIS works hard to avoid this type of dialogue. As a frontline service we bring real expertise of working with male victims and we back this up with rigorous and original research such as our recent report on Men’s Experience of Domestic Abuse in Scotland.

One of the key themes that has emerged from our research is the extent to which the “public story” of domestic abuse is extremely pervasive—that being the notion that domestic abuse is perpetrated almost exclusively by men against women. It’s one thing knowing this, the challenge we face is finding ways to create a new public story that accounts for both male and female victims.

♦◊♦

As I sat in the hall awaiting the call to step up to stage and begin my presentation I was approached by the chairperson and informed that we would be joined by the Queen’s daughter the Princess Royal and asked whether I knew royal protocol. Well for those of you who live in more evolved democracies such things as royal protocol are likely to be something of a mystery – well, they are also a mystery to me, Scots born and bred. My innate urge to conform overcame any rebelliousness and I stood when expected, sat when instructed and generally behaved myself – I wanted to make friends and influence people of course.

While I sat on stage and listened to the informative and moving presentation by my co-presenter, my anxiety grew, as the heightened atmosphere in the hall became apparent. As my co-presenter sat down there was much muttering and whispering and I could see that there was some disagreement between Her Royal Highness and her consort. Horror, against her will the Princess was being ushered from the room before having the opportunity to hear about the experience of men in Scotland who are victim to domestic abuse, she turned and offered an apology to me as she was led away and I took to the lectern.

Well I hope I can say confidently that she missed something, as the talk attracted a good deal of interest and the majority of questions afterwards were related to my presentation. Many of the professionals from around Europe recognised the iniquity that I related affecting men. I had described the ingrained, gendered conceptualisation which renders male victimhood counter-intuitive. This can create a service vacuum where repeat victimisation of men can become a common occurrence from an uncomprehending system.

I was asked my view on the introduction of the term “gender based violence” (GBV) to replace ‘domestic abuse’ in many official publications and discourse. I suggested that this could be another barrier to men getting help as the implication was that GBV was male on female—the standard assumption. My co-presenter intervened to make what, to me, was a telling clarification. It was asserted that GBV was not about ‘who does what to whom’ but about why some people were victimised due to their gender.

♦◊♦

My co-presenter then stated that social construction theory explains this phenomenon as it illuminates the fact that men are brought up to control women and that this is the context for domestic abuse. Well I was somewhat taken aback by this statement which I could neither relate to on a personal level as a man nor on a professional level having worked with men in a deprived area of Edinburgh for six years.

This exchange has been reverberating in my mind since then. It seems to encapsulate an ideology which is the hidden, guiding hand of domestic abuse policy here in Scotland and beyond. While it was surprising for me to hear such a political definition of sex roles it was highly instructive as to why abused men in Scotland often suffer in silence.

Men experiencing domestic abuse can feel stigmatised and ashamed. In many cases men will not recognise their experience as domestic abuse such is the prevalence of the public story- they will believe it is something which only happens to women. It is imperative that the narrative around domestic abuse shifts to allow gender inclusive language to become the norm.

The first step is the recognition that significant numbers of men are experiencing domestic abuse but often feel that they have nowhere to turn for help.

I believe that if we keep speaking out for male victims then the public story about domestic violence will change and everyone — including the Princess Royal—will recognize that both male and female victims of domestic violence need our help and support.

♦◊♦

Photo Credit: Flickr/The New Institute