The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,249

violence called “wife-beating,” but rather both sexes have always been equally victimized by “spouse-beating,” it would be misleading to ask whether wife-beating has declined over time as a part of the campaign to end violence against women.

To make sense of the survey findings, one has to be careful about what one means by domestic violence. It turns out that there really is a distinction between common marital spats that escalate into violence (“the conversations with the flying plates,” as Rodgers and Hart put it) and the systematic intimidation and coercion of one partner by another.83 The sociologist Michael Johnson analyzed data on the interactions between partners in violent relationships and discovered a cluster of controlling tactics that tended to go together. In some couples, one partner threatens the other with force, controls the family finances, restricts the other’s movements, redirects anger and violence against the children or pets, and strategically withholds praise and affection. Among couples with a controller, the controllers who used violence were almost exclusively men; the spouses who used violence were almost entirely women, presumably defending themselves or their children. When neither partner was a controller, violence erupted only when an argument got out of hand, and in those couples the men were just a shade more prone to using force than the women. The distinction between controllers and squabblers, then, resolves the mystery of the genderneutral violence statistics. The numbers in violence surveys are dominated by spats between noncontrolling partners, in which the women give as good as they get. But the numbers from shelter admissions, court records, emergency rooms, and police statistics are dominated by couples with a controller, usually the man intimidating the woman, and occasionally a woman defending herself. The asymmetry is even greater with estranged partners, in which it is the men who do most of the stalking, threatening, and harming. Other studies have confirmed that chronic intimidation, serious violence, and maleness tend to go together.84

FIGURE 7–12. Approval of husband slapping wife in the United States, 1968–1994

Source: Graph from Straus et al., 1997.

So has anything changed over time? With the small stuff—the mutual slapping and shoving—perhaps not.85 But with violence that is severe enough to count as an assault, so that it turns up in the National Crime Victimization Survey, the rates have plunged. As with estimates of rape, the numbers from a victimization study can’t be treated as exact measures of rates of domestic violence, but they are useful as a measure of trends over time, especially since the new concern over domestic violence should make the recent respondents more willing to report abuse. The Bureau of Justice provides data from 1993 to 2005, which are plotted in figure 7–13. The rate of reported violence against women by their intimate partners has fallen by almost two-thirds, and the rate against men has fallen by almost half.

The decline almost certainly began earlier. In Straus’s surveys, women in 1985 reported twice the number of severe assaults by their husbands as did the women in 1992, the year the federal victimization data begin.86

What about the most extreme form of domestic violence, uxoricide and mariticide? To a social scientist, the killing of one intimate partner by another has the great advantage that one needn’t haggle over definitions or worry about reporting biases: dead is dead. Figure 7–14 shows the rates of killing of intimate partners from 1976 to 2005, expressed as a ratio per 100,000 people of the same sex.

FIGURE 7–13. Assaults by intimate partners in the United States, 1993–2005

Source: Data from U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2010.

FIGURE 7–14. Homicides of intimate partners in the United States, 1976–2005

Sources: Data from U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2011, with adjustments by the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics Online (http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/csv/t31312005.csv). Population figures from the U.S. Census.

Once again, we see a substantial decline, though with an interesting twist: feminism has been very good for men. In the years since the ascendancy of the women’s movement, the chance that a man would be killed by his wife, ex-wife, or girlfriend has fallen sixfold. Since there was no campaign to end violence against men during this period, and since women in general are the less homicidal sex, the likeliest explanation is that a woman was apt to kill an abusive husband or boyfriend when he threatened to harm her if she left him. The advent of women’s shelters and restraining orders gave women an escape plan that was a bit less extreme.87

What about the rest of the world? Unfortunately it is