The Need for Research-Informed Policy and Practice: Lessons from the United States by Donald Dutton, Ph.D.
The Need for Research-Informed Policy and Practice: Lessons from the United States by Donald Dutton, Ph.D.In the Routledge Handbook on Men's Victimization in Intimate Relationships (eds: Louise Dixon, Denise Hines, Emily Douglas)
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Attempts by states to enact sociolegal control of domestic violence (DV) have a lengthy history; Roman law viewed wives as existing under guardianship of their husbands who possessed patria potestas, including the power to sell their wives and children into slavery or put them to death (Davidson 1977). Historically, this unlimited power of husbands has eroded while the rights of women and children have increased. Parents have a right to discipline but not to injure, husbands do not have a right to non-consensual sex with their wives, families have a limited right to privacy from state interference, and women's traditional duty to be bound to marriage is now balanced by her autonomy. These values and ideals have waxed and waned over time. Davidson (1977) noted Gratian's Decretum, written in 1140 CE, as the first canonization of church law, and specifying that women were “subject to their men” and needed to be punished for correction, due to their inherent susceptibility to diabolic influences (Davidson 1977). Modern concepts of personal responsibility for violent behavior were foreign to this medieval thinking and violence in the family was viewed as a part of a cosmological scheme, necessary for correction (Davidson 1977, Dutton 1988).
According to Pleck (1987), the first wave of legal response to domestic violence in North America occurred from 1640 to 1680 when the Puritans of Colonial Massachusetts enacted the first laws anywhere in the world against wife beating or “unnatural severity” to children. The Puritans did so because they believed family violence threatened to disrupt divinely sanctioned behavior. They did this despite the domestic murder rate in their settlement being the lowest ever reported in American history. The Puritan response was part of a larger moral initiative that also saw the punishment of those who had committed “fornication before marriage” and included charges brought against mothers of illegitimate children and both husbands and wives who produced children less than nine months after marriage. This enactment of social control was also heightened by a wave of belief that the state was responsible for previously private behavior. This moral wave was opposed by Benjamin Franklin who believed the state should differentiate sin from crime and that sex between unmarried people was not the concern of the state. He was supported in this view by William Blackstone, author of the Commentaries on the Laws of England (1760) who argued that a crime was an act that produced mischief in a civil society and that private vices lay outside the domain of law. Blackstone argued that drunkenness in one's own home was not a crime but public drunkenness was. In so doing, he reflected the Castle Doctrine; that a man's home was his castle and the state needed special permission to intrude, an attitude and belief that had been argued in court in England since 1572 (Balko 2013). This legal principle required officers of the state to identify themselves before entering a private domicile. In 1757 in England a man named Richard Curtis was charged with the murder of a sheriff who had come to his home with an arrest warrant and forced entry without announcing himself. Curtis argued that he did not know the intruder was a sheriff. The court sided with Curtis, ruling that peace officers could break open a door only after having given due notice, demanded admittance and stated that they came not as a trespasser but acting under proper authority. The issue of private property limiting state rights has a long history. This has been challenged of late both by the War on Drugs leading to “no knock” policies by police to prevent flushing of evidence and also by domestic violence.
Parallel to this notion of private property was a simultaneous formation of vigilante groups to enforce norms against wife assault. In the 1750s, the Regulators of Elizabethtown, New Jersey, painted their faces, dressed up like women and whipped reputed wife beaters (Pleck, p 33). Some church groups at that time also brought husbands to trial who had assaulted their wives. Vigilante groups were also prominent at the beginning of the second wave of reform, beginning around 1870. These included the Ku Klux Klan in the South and the White Caps in the Midwest. These groups enacted public floggings of wife assaulters, child abusers, drunken men, adulterers, prostitutes and mothers of illegitimate children (p 109).
The second wave of reform lasted from 1874 to 1890 and included the passing of laws preventing cruelty to children, which had been normative behavior due to a Calvinist belief in the innate sinfulness of children, an idea dating in Christianity to Augustine's writings about Original Sin (Dutton 2019). Toward the end of this era, public support began to develop for the idea of physically punishing wife beaters.
In Massachusetts in 1885, the state legislature passed a law enabling the use of a whipping post to punish abusive husbands. Jail and fines were seen as depriving the family of income and the whipping post would circumvent that. It was also seen as a way of preventing vigilante groups from taking the law into their own hands. Several states passed whipping post legislation, including Maryland, Delaware, Oregon and the District of Columbia. President Theodore Roosevelt, in his fourth annual message to Congress, gave the campaign a boost, writing “The wife beater, for example, is inadequately punished by imprisonment, for imprisonment may often mean nothing to him, while it may cause hunger and want to the wife and children who have been the victim of his brutality, Probably some form of corporal punishment would be the most adequate way of meeting this crime” (Pleck, p 119). Wife beaters were sentenced to floggings until the 1920's and the punishment was used disproportionately against African- American men.
Severe criminal justice punishment for wife assault, was, according to Pleck, favored as an offshoot of Victorian times and its' concomitant view of men as brutes and women as pure. It was favored by Republican lawyers and judges who at that time, favored government efforts to legislate morality, including family violence, drunkenness and Sunday blue laws. (Pleck, p 109). As social views altered, the “brutish drunkard” became the pitiable alcoholic and social policy changed from a criminal justice to a therapeutic approach (Pleck 1987, Dutton 1995). These waves swung back and forth throughout the 20 th Century with family privacy being the paramount value until the women's movement raised the issue of criminal justice laxity in the 1960s.
A confluence of forces resurrected societal interest in criminalization of wife assault in the 1960s. Traditionally, Republican lawmakers had been the main supporters of women's causes, consistent with their adherence to Christian beliefs about morality and the sanctity of marriage. By the 60s, they were joined by the political left who now promoted women's equality and freedom from oppression and crystallized gender relations into a Marxist view, with women as the new proletariat (MacKinnon 1989). The result was an absence of any political opposition to criminalization of wife assault. The movement was strengthened by the addition of functionalist sociology that viewed wife assault through a theoretical lens as serving to enhance patriarchy or male power structure and evolutionary psychology that viewed male dominance as an inherited characteristic that had outlived its evolutionary utility (Dobash, Dobash et al. 1992). Once, dominance served to promote the passing of genes to offspring, but now was simply an outdated relic of this tendency (Buss 1994). The predominant viewpoint, generated by this confluence was termed the “gender paradigm” (Dutton and Nicholls 2005, Dutton and Corvo 2006, Dutton 2011) and held a constellation of beliefs that shaped legal doctrine and policy to the present. A paradigm is a constellation of beliefs relevant to a central theme, in this case beliefs about the causes of wife assault, and the best remedy to diminish it.
The gender paradigm included the belief that domestic violence was predominantly male perpetrated. As it was put in 1979 “Men who assault their wives are actually living up to cultural prescriptions that are cherished in Western society, aggressiveness, male dominance and female subordination, and they are using physical force as a means to enforce that dominance” (Dobash and Dobash 1978, Dobash and Dobash 1979). Hence, domestic violence was seen as being used instrumentally to enforce male domination, hence it was a conscious act and was not a product of any psychological malfunction. The focus of societal intervention became broad-a change in societal consciousness. As Bograd put it “Feminist researchers, clinicians and activists address a primary question 'Why do men beat their wives?'....feminists seek to understand why men in general use physical force against their partners and what functions this serves for a given society in a specific historical context” (Bograd 1988) (p. 13). “Male domination influences everything” (p 15) and men as a class benefit from women's lives being restricted and limited because of their fear of violence by husbands and lovers as well as strangers” (p 14).
The gender paradigm that contained these beliefs, has been contradicted by research on causes, incidence and treatment of domestic violence (Dutton 2012). In the first place, men in general do not assault their wives, surveys show repeatedly that the incidence of injurious physical assault in North America is about 4% (with some variation) across various racial and class groups (Cazaneave and Straus 1992, Straus and Smith 1992). This incidence is so small, that broad societal theories cannot apply to its causality. Wife assault is far from normative and is not considered acceptable by the vast majority of North American males; only 2% of males (and 1.8% of females) believe it is acceptable for a man to hit his wife to “keep her in line” (Simon, Anderson et al. 2001). Furthermore, as we shall see below, large sample surveys that assess incidence of domestic violence find that about 50% of such violence is bilateral, matched for level of severity (Dutton, Tetreault et al. 2016). A review of all studies of incidence of domestic violence by gender (Desmarais, Reeves et al. 2012) found, that in 249 studies, female perpetration of domestic violence was more frequent than male perpetration. The feminist view of wife assault being normative is contradicted by these data on both incidence and attitudes. Effects on victims were similar; both males and female experience “poor health, depressive symptoms, substance use, chronic disease and chronic mental Illness” (Coker, Davis et al. 2002)(p 260) and women, while more often injured, showed injury rates only 1/5 of a standard deviation more often than men (Archer 2000). The empirical data on domestic violence offer a vastly different picture from that of feminist sociology. Women are more likely than men to perpetrate domestic violence (see Table 2).When asked what prompted their violence, women responded with “anger, frustration or a wish to gain attention” (Raison and Dutton 2019) in a review of 20 articles assessing this motivation.
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National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent (18-28) Health (n= 11,370) |
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The bulk of research on domestic violence has been done in the US which raises a question about its' generalizability to other countries. Archer (2006) found that incidence rates of domestic violence varied according to the socio-legal power of women in a country. Using measures of women's relative power utilized in United Nations statistics (the GEM or Gender Empowerment Index, and the GDI or Gender Development Index), and data on violence from the World Health Report on Violence and Health for 1995-2000, and measures of women's socio legal power (proportion of women in managerial, administrative, professional and technical posts and women's share of earned income and parliamentary representation), Archer found that, consistent with feminist theory, violence towards women diminished as this socio-legal power increased (correlations from -.45 to -.75). However, in those same countries male domestic violence victimization increased. Archer assessed reports from surveys using data from the Conflict Tactics Scale (Straus 1979). Straus had demonstrated how the CTS provided a much richer and more thorough measure of domestic violence incidence than crime victim surveys (Straus 1999) by removing the “crime filter” from reports. Archer calculated d', a measure of the difference between distributions of domestic violence towards men and towards women that reports these differences as a portion of a standard deviation difference between the two distributions (d' of zero indicates equal perpetration by gender). In countries where women's power was low (typically middle Eastern or Central American countries, GEM or GDI below 0.6), violence towards women was relatively high (d' was positive 0.16 to 0.53). In countries where women's power was relatively equal to men's (e.g. United States, Canada, New Zealand, Finland, Sweden, Norway) women's perpetration of domestic violence exceeded men's (d' was negative, -0.02 (US) to -0.25 (New Zealand)). These latter countries are the ones that have also enacted legislation protecting women from domestic violence, legislation that was needed at a particular historical era but now no longer reflects the reality of domestic violence perpetration. Gender, per se, does not predict DV perpetration but gender times power does, albeit not in the way feminism surmises.
The U.S. Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) became federal law in the US in 1994, providing $1.6 billion for the investigation and prosecution of violent crimes against women and the establishment of an Office on Violence Against Women in the federal Department of Justice. The act covered domestic violence but also sex crimes. The original bill raised concerns from the American Civil Liberties Union about the act's provisions for pretrial detention and mandatory HIV testing of men who were charged but not convicted. However, the ACLU supported the 2005 re-authorization of VAWA (VAWA has been re-authorized several times up to March 17,2021). Despite the title of the act, the operative text is gender neutral. However, the act does not ensure equal access to services for men and men do not receive equal protection from abuse (Hines, Brown et al. 2007). The act provided resources to U.S. communities to end domestic violence and support victims who were presumed to be women. It stipulated a form of court sanctioned intervention called the Duluth Model — that viewed DV as instrumental and as a product of patriarchy and re-educated convicted males. It specifically ruled out forms of treatment of psychological issues empirically related to DV perpetration (e.g.(Dutton 2007). Subsequent evaluations of Duluth model programs found they tended to increase recidivism while treatment programs focusing on psychological causes decreased recidivism (Miller, Drake et al. 2013). Men in Duluth programs who claim their wives are also violent are told they are blaming the victim. In fact, in a predictive outcome study of treatment programs, 40%of female partners of men in treatment say they started the bilateral physical aggression (Gondolf 2000). The American Psychological Association has never publicly opposed the Duluth Model. The website of the American Bar Association made several unsubstantiated claims about domestic violence, based on the gender paradigm (such as that women never invent abuse allegations to win custody and that custody was often based on child abuse). Dutton and his colleagues (Dutton, Corvo et al. 2009) showed how each claim made by the ABA website was unsubstantiated and, in most cases, based on a government publication rather than an empirical study, or else based on allegations rather than convictions.
Other countries followed in short order; Scotland (2011) and Australia (2006) both enacted DV legislation with the Scottish legislation criminalizing “coercive control,” focusing on a lengthy pattern of abuse, and no longer requiring proof for claims of trauma. Instead, the court decided whether a pattern of behavior could reasonably indicate intent to induce trauma. In the United Kingdom the Safe Homes Act, allowed victims of DV who were renting a home to change locks and end a lease early if they felt threatened by an abuser. The website describing the Scottish law claims that “gender inequality is both a cause and consequence of domestic violence.”
Additionally, in the U.S., state domestic violence laws were in effect. In Washington State, an accusation of domestic violence made to an attending police officer means that the accused must vacate the premises, even if he is the property owner. This legal requirement contradicts the presumption of innocence, a tenet of common law for centuries (Kadri 2005). In California, domestic violence is defined as when your current or former spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend, someone you have a child in common with, someone you live(d) with, or someone you are related to through blood or marriage does one of the following: causes or attempts to cause you physical injury; sexually assaults you; makes you fear that you or another person is in danger of immediate, serious physical injury; molests, attacks, batters (uses force), or strikes you; stalks you; threatens or harasses you — either in person or through phone calls, emails, or other methods; destroys your personal property; or “disturbs your peace,” which refers to conduct that destroys your mental or emotional calm (Source: WomensLaw.org ).
The Tennessee U.S. State's Attorney's Office website notes that domestic violence is a federal crime and hence, a felony. The State of Georgia family violence website states that 87% of domestic assaults are committed against women. In Georgia, an assault that results in “swelling to a body part” can result in a charge of Aggravated Battery and 20 years in prison. Colorado Law (Corry 2005) stipulates that when convicted of domestic assault, the guilty party cannot enter his home, hold a government job, or a military post. The conviction can be used as evidence in subsequent divorce proceedings, and the convicted will lose custody of their children and will only be able to see their children under supervision.
State and national coalitions against domestic violence tend to view it as male perpetrated and lethal. Victims are typically referred to as “survivors.” By contrast, incidence studies of domestic violence find that about 50% of domestic violence is bilateral and that of the remaining unilateral DV, 35% is perpetrated by women, 15% by men (see Table 2) (Dutton, Tetreault et al. 2016). This result is based on reports from five independent, large-sample US surveys (Stets and Straus 1992, Morse 1995, Williams and Frieze 2005, Whitaker, Haileyesus et al. 2007, Caetano, Vaeth et al. 2008) with a cumulative total sample size of 25,000+. It is based on the use of the Conflict Tactics Scale as the measuring instrument. This scale generates 16 times greater reports of DV than scales using “crime victim” filters (Straus 1999). In short, the best scientific evidence is that domestic violence is not gender based as portrayed by the gender paradigm. The surveys indicate that 15% of reported DV is male perpetrated but of that, 2/3 is comprised on non-injurious actions such as pushing or slapping (Straus, Gelles et al. 1980). Hence, about 5% of all DV reported to researchers fits criteria for unilateral and potentially injurious wife assault.
A review of 249 incidence studies by (Desmarais, Reeves et al. 2012) found women to be more often the aggressors of DV. In terms on injuries sustained, women sustain 1/5 of a standard deviation more injuries than do men (Archer 2000) but when psychological and physical injuries are assessed, no gender differences emerge (Coker, Smith et al. 2000, Coker, Davis et al. 2002). However, as a result of activist information campaigns, citizens have contrasting views of domestic violence committed by men and women. A survey of public perceptions of DV by Sorensen (Sorenson and Taylor 2005) counter balanced DV vignettes (describing the act of DV and its injurious consequences) for members of the public with gender of perpetrator and victim switched for identical vignettes. Sorenson found that, when the perpetrator was male, the public were more likely to believe the police should have been called, the perpetrator charged and arrested, should serve jail or prison time and that a restraining order should have been issued. These reactions were for identical actions as described, with identical consequences.
Mandatory arrest policies mean an arrest must be made if there is probable cause for assault, which often means merely an accusation. If there are accusations by both parties, the “primary aggressor” must be established. Via both police training and commonly held public perceptions (Sorenson and Taylor 2005), this points towards the male who is larger. One of the criteria for establishing primary aggressor is “fear of physical injury,” which can be claimed without supporting evidence * . This policy came to be as a result of domestic abuse advocates pressure on police departments (Buzawa and Buzawa 1996). The policy removes discretion from police officers and was enacted, in many cases, without consultation with police, leading to an inconsistent application. Mandatory arrest is usually coupled with “no drop” prosecution policies, designed to circumvent victims dropping of charges subsequent to arrest. Mills has argued that these policies, which remove discretion from both police and prosecutors, and may override the wishes of the complainant, revictimize the complainant by removing her power to influence the criminal justice process (Mills 1999). A study in Colorado found that, once a mandatory arrest/ no drop policy was instituted in Colorado Springs, calls for DV assistance dropped while other calls increased with population increases. Advocates may believe that incidents of DV dropped with the policy change but an alternative explanation is that victims stopped using the system (Dugan 2003). Consistent with the latter explanation is a finding by Hotaling and Buzawa (Hotaling and Buzawa 2003, Dutton 2006) of the Quincy, Massachusetts specialized domestic violence court who used mandatory/no drop guidelines. Women who “re-reported” — i.e. reported recidivist violence after a court hearing were compared to “non reporters” (no recidivist reports) based on follow up interviews. These revealed that about half of all offenders had violated court imposed no contact orders but fewer than half the women had re-reported. The reason given was original frustration with the criminal justice system and the perception that it was unreceptive to their preferences, consistent with Mill's argument. It is also consistent with Iyengar's (2007) finding that states with mandatory arrest had the highest number of intimate homicides, which she attributed to a reluctance of victims to use police services which they perceived as heavy handed. A large scale (n = 529,829) analysis of National Crime Victim Survey data (Dugan 2003) examined whether recidivist DV was deterred by criminal justice sanctions by examining contributors to subsequent DV. The main contributors (odds ratios (OR) greater than 1) were separation/divorce (OR 4.3), race (whites were higher, OR 1.9) and custody sanctions (OR 1.2). Mandatory arrest had an odds ratio of 0.89. Dugan suggested that in states with mandatory arrest, the cases are less likely to be reported and “discovered” by police and that by “assuring arrest, persons are less inclined to seek assistance” (p. 302).
One of the arguments for mandatory arrest was that it suppressed escalating DV up to the point of intimate partner homicide (IPH). However, it may well be that DV is over estimated as a precursor to intimate partner homicide (IPH). In a study of 6,458 IPH cases in the US, Velopolous et al (Velopolous, Carmichael et al. 2019) found that only 5% of male victims and 0.8% of female victims were perpetrators of DV in the preceding month. Earlier studies (Wilt and Breedlove 1977) that had suggested a stronger connection were retrospective and overlooked the vast number of DV interventions that never escalated to the lethal level.
The well- known studies of effects of police arrest on recidivism (Sherman and Berk 1984, Sherman, Schmidt et al. 1992, Garner and Maxwell 2000) indicated that police arrest diminished recidivist assault for short terms only (about 7 months), and had variable effects on offenders who had or did not have a “stake in conformity” (marriage, employment, etc.). Garner and Maxwell (2000) indicated that offender characteristics such as age or prior criminal history were ten times as powerful as arrest in predicting recidivist assault. Mills (2005) argued that, based on the Milwaukee arrest study data (Sherman et al 2002), race differentially impacts recidivism, diminishing it in white offenders and increasing it in black offenders. That being the case, mandatory arrest policies increase subsequent risk to black women.
The police arrest studies were all conducted on the assumption that DV offenders were male and all victims female. Capaldi and her colleagues (Capaldi, Wu Shortt et al. 2009) collected longitudinal data on a community sample of 206 couples in Oregon, aged 17-27,collecting data on, inter alia, domestic abuse. They found the normative pattern in this sample was bilateral abuse which would increase in severity on occasion, leading to a call for police assistance. Police arrested the male 85% of the time, despite Oregon being a “dual arrest” state and despite the abuse background of the couple being bilateral (74% of the men in the arrested group and 87% of the women had used prior aggression).
It could be that the failure of the arrests experiments to detect recidivism drops was because a substantial subset of respondents were bilaterally violent. This study also demonstrates why the use of police arrest statistics to demonstrate gender differences in perpetration is flawed.
Gender discrepancies in the criminal justice handling of putative assault cases arose as the result of the gender paradigm view of domestic violence. In short, male perpetration is assumed and female violence underestimated, the result of the operational categories generated by the gender paradigm. In a Canadian study, Brown (2004) studied differences in responses by the criminal justice system to assaults committed by males and females equated for severity. Using police and prosecutorial case files, Brown examined 2,044 cases where the man was charged, 155 where the woman was charged, 118 where both were charged, and 617 where a complaint was filed but neither was charged. There were 206 cases where only the male partner was injured, and the female was charged in 60.2% of those. However, when the female partner was injured, the male was charged 91.1% of the time. Arrested women were significantly more likely to have used knives or blunt instruments than were arrested men. In short, they needed to commit more serious crimes to be arrested.
Self-defense arguments by men tended to be disbelieved by police. Women who were prosecuted tended to have inflicted higher levels of injury against their victim than prosecuted men and, as with arrested women, were more likely than men to have used weapons. In severe injury cases, 71.4% of men and 22.2% of women were found guilty. The low percentage of women found guilty was due to “witness problems” (few men being willing to testify). More than half the male victims refused to testify, and female perpetrators of severe injuries had charges withdrawn 77.8% of the time. This pattern was reversed for woman victims; the more seriously injured, the more likely they were to testify. Brown commented that “All of the evidence indicates that abused men fit the theory of the 'battered woman' better than abused women do.” In a similar study in the U.S., Henning and Renauer (2005) found the same thing: almost one-half (47%) of the cases involving women arrested for domestic violence against a heterosexual intimate partner were rejected by prosecutors, and another 16% were dismissed by a judge. Legal factors, such as a defendant's prior criminal arrests, use of a weapon, victim injury, and, most importantly, the type of arrest (i.e., dual vs. single arrest), all affected prosecutors' decisions to take these cases. Female defendants arrested for offending against a male intimate partner were treated more leniently than either male defendants or women arrested for domestic offenses involving other types of relationships (i.e. familial, homosexual).
The Brown study focused specifically on domestic violence offenses. In a broader US study of all felony cases. Johnston et al (Johnston, Kennedy et al. 1987) reviewed prior studies and data from Maricopa County Arizona for a variety of offenses committed by men and women. When offense characteristics (e.g. seriousness of offense, defendant's prior record, use of weapons, victim injuries) were controlled for, it was still found that “treatment of males and females in the criminal justice system present ... consistent pattern of preferential treatment for females” (p 53). In a study of 5,461 domestic violence offenses in Tennessee, Henning and Feder (Henning and Feder 2005) found that prosecutors were more likely to take the case to court (84% vs 60%) for arrested males and, when found guilty the male received longer sentences. A study by Henning and Renauer (2005) also found that
Starr (2012) also found gender disparities favoring women in large sample of US Federal cases, with men receiving 63% longer sentences on average. Women were significantly more likely to avoid charges and convictions, and twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted. By using a technique to trace cases from arrest through sentencing, she found sentencing disparities by gender occurred early in the process, e.g. through decisions on whether a crime had been committed was actionable and how severe it was. Only a small percentage of the variance in sentencing was explained by reluctance to jail mothers of children, higher levels of cooperation from female arrestees, and more troubling life circumstances. The gender gap was even more pronounced amongst black arrestees. The attributes prosecutors used are the very attributes that Sorensen found were differentially viewed by her community sample and that Henning and Feder found occurring. While both the Starr and Johnston studies assessed all types of felonies, similar results were found with the Brown and Henning studies focusing on domestic violence. Starr observed that the discounting factors used in sentencing women (hardship, mental health, etc.) are routinely disregarded in sentencing men.
Wife assault legislation is a product of its' times and of political tides, favored by both the political right and left and, if focused solely on worst offenders, probably effective. However, it is applied in cases of minor DV and in cases of bilateral DV and is frequently misapplied in these cases. It represents an ideological view of DV, one that is not confirmed by the bulk of research evidence, about the incidence and causation of DV. In this sense, current sociolegal policies fail and will continue to do so until they fit an empirical profile of the nature of DV (Wilson 1983). The elasticity of the definition of DV and the response to it is the most compelling feature; in 1965 a woman could not get police intervention for obvious spouse assault, in 2021 a career can be suspended for “disturbing emotional calm.” The punitive response of the past 30 years is reminiscent of the early 20 th Century response. It may well be time to consider a more flexible approach, such as diverting non-injurious DV to treatment systems that improve emotional control and conflict resolution skills (Dutton 2008).
* Fear of injury or death from domestic violence is problematic: Pinker (2021) outlines several features that affect subjective estimates of fear, including controllability and novelty which combine into what he calls the “dread risk.” Americans for example estimate their risk of being killed by a terrorist as quite high, although the annual rate is lower than death from bee stings or drowning in a bathtub (p. 122). Women calculate a much higher risk of being killed by a divorcing husband — a Chicago study indicates 98 intimate homicides (of which half are by females) annually out of 175,000 marriages in Chicago, 1/3 of which will terminate (Block and Christakos 1995). Brown (2004) estimated that for every 700 women who feared for their life, one(1) would be killed. Risk for violence during/after divorce is much more likely to involve male suicide than spousal homicide (Kposowa 2003).
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