Just got this in the mail. Can anyone forward me to a feminist critique of Reena Sommer's stuff?

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fwd fyi...

http://www.travel-net.com/~retap/sommer.htm

Document retrieved from Men's Issues Page

From: [email protected] (Garth Wood)
Date: 6 Aug 1994 02:02:32 -0600

The latest study to be produced on domestic violence was a Manitoba, Canada
study by Reena Sommer, a research associate at the Manitoba Centre for
Health Policy and Evaluation. Entitled "Male and Female Partner Abuse:
Testing a Diathesis-Stress Model," the study, an integral component of Ms.
Sommer's Ph.D. thesis (which she successfully defended last month, thus
earning her the title of Doctor), was conducted in two waves over a
four-year period. The first wave, during 1989-90, collected data from a
random sample of 452 married or cohabiting women and 447 married or
cohabiting men, who completed self-administered questionnaires as well as a
90-minute formal interview with a researcher. The second wave, during
1991-92, gathered follow-up interviews from 369 of the same women and 368
of the same men.

In both waves of data collection, and both by self-report and report by
their partners, women were found to be more abusive than men. The study
defined abuse as "an act (or acts) carried out with intention, or perceived
intention, of causing physical pain or injury to another person." (Note:
this definition removes from consideration such incredibly dubious types of
"abuse" as simple yelling, while including abuse such as threatening
violence without actually doing violence). Acts of abuse also included
throwing an object, pushing, grabbing, shoving or hitting. The study also
examined "who started it," i.e., the initial perpetrators of the violent
act. Some statistics follow:

WHO STARTED IT:
Breakdown of Female- and Male-Perpetrated Violence
as a Percentage of all Survey Respondents

=======================================

Minor Violence: Hers His
- Threw or smashed an object (not at partner) 23.6 15.8
- Threatened to throw an object 14.9 7.3
- Threw an object at partner 16.2 4.6
- Pushed, shoved or grabbed a partner 19.8 17.2

Severe Violence:
- Slapped, punched or kicked 15.8 7.3
- Struck partner with a weapon 3.1 0.9
- Violence Perpetrated in Self-Defense: 9.9 14.8
- Consumption of Alcohol during Violent Incident: 8.0 16.0
- My Partner needed Medical Attention: 14.3 21.4

OVERALL VIOLENCE: 39.1 26.3

------------------------------------------------------------

Source: Dr. Reena Sommer, "Male and Female Partner Abuse: Testing a
Diathesis-Stress Model," unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, Dept. of Sociology,
University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, June 1994. The above is
from Wave One data.

Women are twice as likely to be agressive, but produce injury 50% less frequently.
Men respond violently 50% more often in 'self defence'.
Men are involved with violence while drunk twice as often as women.

I read that to mean that men hit more often with the intent to injure. If he swings his fist half as often, but puts her in the hospital 50% more often, then each swing is 3 times more likely to injure.

A friend of mine and his wife just split up. They are both about the same size, and they have a large collection of issues. She uses anger as a tool and a weapon. He is refuses to feel. They have been having fights since long before they got married. He said he never once felt that he was in any danger. Which is daft - she's easily big enough that if she wanted to hurt him, she certainly could. That she didn't in 12 years of a disfunctional marriage means she was hitting him without the intent to hurt him.

However, your friends aside, I think it's much more likely that assaults by men will more often lead to injuries than assaults by women for the same reason that you don't see men and women compete against each other in professional sports (or amateur events as the Olympics). That is, that men are on average stronger and larger than women.

Of course, this puts men in a precarious situation if they are attacked by a female partner and have to defend themselves. If it's the woman who has a sign of injury and not the man, then unless the woman admits to police that she attacked first, it's the man who's going to get arrested and held in custody for a bail hearing.

[ 05 May 2004: Message edited by: barb_anello ]

Here is a suggestion: test the assertion that Canadian women are more violent than men by collecting data from same sex relationships and then compare the data from gay couples and lesbian couples.

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test the assertion that Canadian women are more violent than men by collecting data from same sex relationships and then compare the data from gay couples and lesbian couples.

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Unfortunately the gay and lesbian community, for fairly self-evident reasons, will suffer from underreportage at a higher rate than heterosexual women or possibly even heterosexual men. If you find, for example, very few reports of woman-woman battering, don't take that stat too far. It's probably more to do with underreportage and less to do with innate factors.

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I just have a very difficult time believing that the need is anywhere near what the need is for women's shelters.

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In terms of sheer numbers, only a fool would argue with you. But the same could be said of women and prisons — namely, that there's much less need for them (numbers-wise) and that rather than funding separate women's prisons we could just stream female prisoners into the men's system. Of course we realize that that won't do, and that female prisoners can have requirements that male prisons aren't ready for. So, for the most part, we house women separately anyway, even though the overall demand isn't that great.

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Originally posted by Mr. Magoo:
Even one abused woman is unacceptable; how many abused men are?

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touchè. Whoops. I mean "touché."

[ 06 May 2004: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

No feminist that I've known has claimed that violence against men is okay. But those men who whine the loudest (not you, Magoo, but a lot of anti-feminist trolls who have come to babble) about how it's so SEXIST that there are no men's shelters neglect to remember that the reason there are women's shelters is because feminists built them in order to help ourselves when we weren't getting the help we needed from the community or police. Basically, we helped ourselves because we knew no one else was going to.

And now that we've succeeded in making safe places for women to turn when they're being abused, we get whining from some men (usually the sexist creeps we protect ourselves from) that it's not faaaaaaaaair, and we want a shelter tooooooo!

[ 06 May 2004: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

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Originally posted by Bacchus:
I think part of the whining comes from the fact that some feminists/groups etc state that women on women, women on elderly, women on men abuse cannot and does not occur.

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I think part of the whining comes from the fact that some feminists/groups etc state that women on women, women on elderly, women on men abuse cannot and does not occur.

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Can you give any examples of this? I've NEVER heard any women's group say that women are never abusive.

Edited to add:
Oops... Michelle beat me to this.

[ 06 May 2004: Message edited by: dee ]

[ 06 May 2004: Message edited by: Michelle ]

http://tinyurl.com/2hg3f

"If you think about it, you know that almost all her violence is a futile form of self-defence or pre-emptive striking back at her aggressor. Of course women arecapable of violence — most often against children — but almost none use violence to
maintain power and control in a relationship."

And here, this place feels that they must 'explode' commonly held myths about spousal abuse
http://www.womanabuseprevention.com/html/same-sex_partner_abuse.html

Like""Women are not abusive - only men are."

"Lesbians are always equal in relationships. It is not abuse, it is a relationship struggle."

[ 06 May 2004: Message edited by: Bacchus ]

I know this isn't 'proof' that feminists actively deny woman-woman abuse or anything, but I don't think it's wrong to think maybe some of them might like to downplay the whole thing as much as possible.

Feminists in the shelter movement know perfectly well that women can be violent and abusive; in fact, my women's studies professor talked to us quite a bit about the dilemma in the shelter movement about how to help victims of violence who are aggressive themselves, and disrupt the shelter. And I'm not sure how bacchus' link to the mythbusting article is supposed to help his case - those are FEMINISTS busting the myth that women aren't violent and that lesbians can't be abused by their partners.

I'm not saying there hasn't been speculation by feminist theorists in the past that when lesbians can live in open relationships that there won't be abuse because the power will be "level". It's a nice theory, but one that has been refuted by many other feminists who recognize that there are many other oppressions than gender oppression that could play a role in relationships.

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Originally posted by Michelle:
As for that Michele Landsberg article, she's talking about relationships between men and women when she says that "almost [no women] use violence to maintain power and control in a relationship". And this is true. The vast majority of battering done by women in straight relationships is in self-defence or out of anger at their abuse. That doesn't mean it never happens that way, that a woman is the dominant batterer in order to maintain control - but then, Landsberg didn't say it never happens. She left room for the small amount that it happens by saying "almost".

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I just browsed this Michelle Landsberg article and it's a kind of propaganda piece, a bit like reading George Jonas through the looking glass. The fact that Landsberg (and who the Hell is she, anyway???) includes a ritualistic denunciation of the StatCan data is pretty indicative of where she is coming from intellectually. The paragraph in question is a good example:

"If you think about it, you know that almost all her violence is a futile form of self-defence or pre-emptive striking back at her aggressor. Of course women are capable of violence — most often against children — but almost none use violence to maintain power and control in a relationship."

There are, of course, no facts here. The reader is invited to let their imagination be their guide, and then the author simply assests that such and such is the situation out there in the real world, ... meaning the fantasy world the reader was invited to conjure up at the start. It's kind of ridiculous, really, but to be tolerant, I suppose it's no worse than most other political diatribes.

I was out on a recreational scuba diving day trip a few years ago and was partnered up with a crown prosecutor. He told me that in BC the average number of times the police are called to a residence before the victim, almost always a woman, is willing to go through with a case, that is actually give testimony at trial, is about 30 or more.

So, even if you have a policy of mandatory charging, you're not going to get any real traction for some time, because the charges will fall apart when the victim refuses to cooperate in terms of offering testimony. Apparently, testimony of the police alone would not produce a conviction in most cases, so they won't proceed to trial without the woman's active participation.

As for abusive women and their male victims, he didn't relate any figures. I probably should have asked him how his figure of 30 was compiled, but I forgot.

[ 11 May 2004: Message edited by: MT VIEW ]

"If you think about it, you know that almost all her violence is a futile form of self-defence or pre-emptive striking back at her aggressor. Of course women are capable of violence — most often against children — but almost none use violence to maintain power and control in a relationship."?

She says almost all female violence is "self defence" or "pre-emptive", then says women are capable of violence "mostly against children".

Surely it's one or the other, but how can she say "most" violence by women is in self defence, then state most violence by women is against children.