Society & Culture - Posted by Joel Schwarz-UW on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 11:58 - 11 Comments 
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(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...Men who batter think other guys do, too
“With sexual assault the more a man thought it was prevalent the more likely he was to engage in such behavior. If we can correct misperceptions about the prevalence of intimate partner violence, we have a chance to change men’s behavior. If you give them factual information it is harder for them to justify their behavior,” Clayton Neighbors says. (Courtesy: iStockphoto)
U. WASHINGTON (US)—Men who engage in domestic violence consistently overestimate how common such behavior is, and the more they overestimate, the more they engage in abusing their partner.
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“We don’t know why men make these overestimations, but there are a couple of likely reasons,” says Clayton Neighbors, an affiliate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington and a professor of psychology at the University of Houston.
“Men who engage in violent behavior justify it in their mind by thinking it is more common and saying, ‘Most guys slap their women around so it is okay to engage in it.’ Or it could be that misperceptions about violence cause the behavior.”
Neighbors says these men overestimated by two to three times the actual rates of seven behaviors ranging from throwing something at a partner to rape. Details of the study will be published in the journal Violence Against Women.
“Another way of looking at this would be wearing a red shirt. If you think everyone is wearing a red shirt then it is okay for you to wear one too. Or if you wear a red shirt you might overestimate the number of other people who are wearing red shirts,” he explains.
The work is the first to document overestimation of intimate partner violence by batterers and is consistent with findings about a variety of other harmful behaviors such as substance use, gambling, and eating disorders. This line of research looks at social norms, or what is considered to be appropriate and inappropriate behavior in society.
“Social norms theory suggests that people act in a way that they believe is consistent with what the average person does,” adds Denise Walker, research professor of social work and co-director of the Innovative Programs Research Group.
The research looked at 124 men who were enrolled in a larger treatment intervention study for domestic violence. The men, all of whom had participated in violence against a partner in the previous 90 days, were asked to estimate the percentage of men who had ever engaged in seven forms of abuse.
These included throwing something at a partner that could hurt; pushing, grabbing, or shoving a partner; slapping or hitting; choking; beating up a partner; threatening a partner with a gun; and forcing a partner have sex when they did not want to.
Data on the percentage of men who actually engaged in these abusive behaviors were drawn from the National Violence Against Women Survey, funded by the National Institute of Justice and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In every case the men vastly overestimated the actual instances of abuse. For example, the participants on average thought 27.6 percent of men had thrown something with the intent of hurting a partner while the actual number is 11.9 percent. Similarly, they believed 23.6 percent of men had forced their partner to have sex involuntary compared to 7.9 percent in reality.
“With sexual assault the more a man thought it was prevalent the more likely he was to engage in such behavior. If we can correct misperceptions about the prevalence of intimate partner violence, we have a chance to change men’s behavior. If you give them factual information it is harder for them to justify their behavior,” Neighbors says
“It is unclear if we can change perpetrators’ behavior by correcting their misperceptions about intimate partner violence,” Walker says.
However, work in alcohol use suggests that changing misperceptions about drinking changes drinking behavior among college students. Consistent with social norms theory, people are motivated to be ‘average’ in many ways, particularly if the behavior in question could be considered risky or taboo.”
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11 Comments
Gus
celia kozlowski
Did the study collect data on men with no history of abusive behavior to compare how they estimate the prevalence of abusive behavior with how the abusers estimate it?
Causal
“Had sex when the partner did not want to”.
Just say rape. :/ That’s what it is, not a partner ‘disagreement’ on who wanted to because they are together.
Radical Feminist
This is a brilliant study. The more we talk about the underlying social causes the more we can dismantle violence. More please!
Walter DeKeseredy
These results are very consistent with my own research on the strong correlation between male peer support and woman abuse. Male peer support refers to the attachments to male peers and the resources that these men provide which perpetuates and legitimates various types of male-to-female abuse.
Steve Allen
This study confirms the notion that non-abusive men need to speak up appropriateoy confront their violent/abusive brothers. This will help “normalize” the reality that most men are not violent or abusive toward women and that all men need to be part of the solution. San Diego used to have a group of men who stood for this proposition: Men’s Leadership Forum: Solutions to Gender-Based Violence. More funding needs to be found to establish and nurture these types of groups.
Anne S
@Causal, that raised my eyebrows too, but I’m betting the phrase “had sex when the partner did not want to” was lifted straight from the questionnaire given to the men in question. I’m guessing an abuser is far more likely to cop to that language than the word “rape,” especially when he sees his behavior as average.
other anne
Anne S and Causal – there’s a study published recently about that too. If you ask men if they, say, plot to get women super inebriated or use physical force such as pinning or arm twisting in order to have sex with them about one in six of them will say yes. If you ask those same guys if they rape women, they’ll say no.
Cold North Wind
I instantly thought of a snarky comment-(s) but, actually, I agree. The normalization of a behaviour-the -”everybody is doing it” theme song that I have heard all my life. First heard in teens- boys/men looking for free sex- I know of a child rapist- got ideas-at least some- from a huge collection of child porn. Today’s society with the sexed up images used to sell- everything- can lead young people to think- well- everybody is doing it – -
I’m curious if these men act they way they do because they perceive it at “normal” or what the average person would do, or if they believe its normal because they do it. Sort of like confirmation bias. They batter women, and they notice when others do it too more so than the examples of men who do not, so it seems more prevalent to them. The fact that humans are notoriously bad at regarding anecdotal evidence over evidence from data also adds to this problem.
I’m not really surprised.
Considering research has already shown that people who’s parents are abusive tend to be abusive themselves, and our parents are pretty much the blueprint for our own relationships later, is it any wonder that a kid, especially when they grow to be an abusive spouse themselves, would think that their home life would be the norm? (More-so considering the level of general violence that people still joke about in regards to one another?)
It would be interesting to see how this maps to other predictors of violence, like social status. It may just be that the aggressors actually DID have a higher-than-average number of contacts that did similar abuse.