Do Violent Acts Equal Abuse? Resolving the Gender Parity/Asymmetry Dilemma

Abstract

This commentary revisits a core dilemma in “Controversies involving Gender and Intimate Partner Violence in the United States”
by Langhinrichsen-Rohling (2010), how to reconcile gender parity in the use of force by partners with the gender asymmetry in the dynamics and effects of
partner abuse. This dilemma is a byproduct of a domestic violence paradigm that confounds the normative use of violence in
families and relationships and the types of partner assault and coercive control targeted by the advocacy movement. I argue
that the dimensions of abuse victims present at points of service contradict the basic assumptions of the paradigm and outline
an alternative model of coercive control that sets violent acts in their historical, experiential and political context.

KeywordsAbuse-Coercive control-Domestic violence-Feminism-Sexual inequality

Full text

Do Violent Acts Equal Abuse? Resolving the Gender Parity/Asymmetry Dilemma
Evan Stark
Professor, School of Public Affairs and Administration
Rutgers University
111 Washington Street
Newark, NJ 07102
Eds203@juno.com

Abstract
This commentary revisits a core dilemma in “Controversies involving Gender and
Intimate Partner Violence in the United States” by Langhinrichsen-Rohling (2010), how
to reconcile gender parity in the use of force by partners with the gender asymmetry in
the dynamics and effects of partner abuse. This dilemma is a byproduct of a domestic
violence paradigm that confounds the normative use of violence in families and
relationships and the types of partner assault and coercive control targeted by the
advocacy movement. I argue that the dimensions of abuse victims present at points of
service contradict the basic assumptions of the paradigm and outline an alternative model
of coercive control that sets violent acts in their historical, experiential and political
context.
Keywords: Abuse, Coercive Control, Domestic Violence, Feminism, Genderual
Inequality

Introduction
This commentary is a response to “Controversies involving Gender and Intimate
Partner Violence in the United States” by Langhinrichsen-Rohling (2010) I argue that her
emphasis on gender parity in violence as a basis for intervention confounds two distinct
realities, the normative use of violence in families and relationships and the types of
partner assault and coercive control targeted by the advocacy movement and by public
policy and that lead their primarily female victims to seek outside assistance. I trace this
confusion to the domestic violence paradigm that abstracts violent acts from the history,
contextual dynamics, experience and consequences of abuse in relationships. After
reviewing the evidence for gender parity in violence and asymmetry in abuse, I outline an
alternative paradigm that distinguishes partner assaults from coercive control; sets violent
acts in an historical, experiential and political context; includes multiple tactics in
addition to violence; and emphasizes harms to autonomy, personhood and basic rights as
well as to physical security. I close by describing why I believe feminist researchers
should focus on domestic violence that reinforces gender inequality or male domination,
what Michelle Dempsey (2009) terms “domestic violence in its strong sense,” rather than
domestic violence that does not, “domestic violence in the weak sense.”
Overview
. Relying largely on evidence from population surveys, Langhinrichsen-Rohling
(2010) argued that women are as prone to use violence as men in relationships and that
the modal dynamic in these situations involves “bi-directional” violence. She reviewed
the challenges these data pose to measuring abuse, showed why it is critical to address

women’s violence even among victims who use shelters, proposed a typology of bi-
directional violence and highlighted the role of alcohol and psychopathology in abuse,
two important problems that deserve more attention in domestic violence research. She
acknowledged important differences in the dynamics and outcomes of male and female
partner violence, but argued that these reflect cultural and individual factors that are best
managed when clinicians attend to the bi-valent patterns she highlighted.
With the qualifications outlined below, I concur with Langhinrichsen-Rohling’s
general empirical claim, that female as well as male partners resort to violence in large
numbers, that their motives for doing so are often similar, and that both parties are often
violent. I also agree that advocates as well as clinicians would benefit from a greater
appreciation of the extent, dynamics and roots of women’s use of force in relationships,
including the role of behavioral and psychological problems. The typology
Langhinrichsen-Rohling (2010) proposed might be useful in clinical work with couples
or families where violence is an issue and may have specific applicability to designing
programs to treat relationship violence by women.
Where I depart from Langhinrichsen-Rohling’s analysis is in whether and how the
evidence of gender parity in violent acts bears on our understanding of or response to
“abuse” or battering, the problem which the domestic violence revolution set out to
address (Stark & Flitcraft, 1996; Stark 2007; Schechter (l982); Dobash & Dobash, l992).
I use the term “abuse” cautiously, recognizing that where dependent persons are involved,
it refers to the illegitimate use of power by someone who has an otherwise legitimate or
formal responsibility for their care and protection such as a parent or guardian. Since
formal equality is the norm among adult partners, however, at least in highly

industrialized societies like the U.S., I use partner abuse to refer to the non-voluntary
establishment of unreciprocated authority by one party over the other and the
corresponding reallocation of resources and opportunities in ways that benefit the
dominant party (Young, l990). To clarify our differences, I return to the puzzle that
underlies the challenges Langhinrichsen-Rohling (2010) identifies, how to reconcile
evidence of gender parity in violent acts by partners with the equally well documented
gender asymmetry in the dynamics and effects of partner abuse. I focus on the distinction
between the patterned subjugation of one partner by the other that characterizes the
dynamic the advocacy movement has identified as abuse with the widespread propensity
for individuals or couples to use violence when they fight, to express jealousy, frustration
or anger, settle conflicts, or to negotiate power differences. While I recognize that clients
and treaters may contract to address violence used in these latter contexts through
individual or couples’ work, this behavior rarely involves abuse as I use the term and
does not merit non-voluntary consignment to institutional or therapeutic management.
The current domestic violence paradigm takes violent acts as its unit of analysis
so long as their source is a partner and disregards their history, motive, dynamic, context,
consequence or meaning to those involved. From this vantage, the only way to
distinguish normative from abusive violence is in the physical valence and proximate
outcome of these acts. The same confusion attends the distinction between so-called
“psychological abuse“ (Tolman, l989) and the insults, jealousy, demands for compliance
and types of controlling behavior that are commonplace in relationships. Application of
this paradigm, I believe, has led to mistaken generalizations about the nature of abuse
based on survey evidence of violent acts.

Except in the relatively rare instances involving extreme violence, to understand
whether and how the use of force in relationships contributes to abuse, we have to set
violent acts in their historical context, consider the co-occurrence of other coercive and
controlling tactics, take the subjective experience of those who are targeted into account,
whether they experience themselves as victimized and seek outside assistance, for
instance, and assess individual and societal harms that extend beyond physical injury,
fear or psychological trauma. The model of coercive control has the distinct advantage of
allowing us to make these connections and so eliminates the confusion occasioned when
evidence of gender parity in violent acts is juxtaposed to gender asymmetries in help-
seeking by domestic violence victims.
I remain agnostic about whether force is always unacceptable in relationships or
families. I exclude what I call “fights” involving physical force from the category of
abuse not because I believe they are inconsequential or acceptable, but because I believe
that special societal attention is merited by coercion that occurs in the context of and
reinforces inequality, in this case gender inequality. This is both an ethical position that
derives from the special vulnerability of persons who are unequal because of their age,
race, sex or societal status, and reflects the fact that coercion in the context of structural
inequality has different dynamics and individual and societal consequence even when it
is bi-directional than the use of force among relative equals. Because male-female abuse
(but not female-male abuse) demonstrably harms women’s chances for equal personhood
within and outside of relationships, I believe it should be the legitimate object of feminist
research and activism. Conversely, I do not believe there is compelling evidence that any

substantial proportion of men assaulted by female partners want or require more
protections, assistance and support than are currently available.
The Domestic Violence Paradigm
Summarizing the dominant view in the domestic violence field, Gelles (1997)
defined violence as an “act carried out with the intention or perceived intention of
causing physical pain or injury to another person” (p. l4). From here, identifying
domestic violence should have been a simple matter of determining whether partners or
former partners are responsible for assaults. Instead, applying the definition has proved
extremely problematic. Despite the publication of thousands of research monographs on
domestic violence since the mid-70’s, there is still no consensus on the prevalence of
abuse, who commits it, the principal causes and dynamics involved, and what types of
assistance are required or effective. To cite just one example, surveys using the incident-
specific definition have generated vastly divergent estimates of the annual prevalence of
woman abuse based on whether respondents were asked about “conflicts” (l36/l000),
“safety” concerns (l5/l000) or “crime”(7/1000) (Straus, l995; Tjaden and Thoennes,
2000; Schafer, Caetano, &Clark, 1998). Without a consensus on the baseline we’re working
from, service planning and evaluation will remain scattershot.
The definition contains three core assumptions that have guided research, policy
and intervention in the field. The first is that partner abuse can be equated with violence.
Despite attempts to broaden the definition of domestic violence to include “psychological
abuse” or “control” (Salzman, 2000; DeKeserdey, 2000; Dutton & Goodman, 2005),
criminal and family law, medical identification protocols, and other major intervention
strategies or policies continue to focus on violence almost exclusively.

The second assumption is that violence can be usefully disaggregated into discrete
acts or episodes of coercion. Like the criminal law, the population surveys from which
Langhinrichsen-Rohling (2010) draws her evidence of gender parity ask respondents
about whether they have engaged in or been the target of specific violent acts during the
study year. Reflecting the same approach, safety planning, protection orders, counseling
for batterers, and other intervention strategies are predicated on the assumption that
perpetrators and victims exercise sufficient decisional autonomy ‘between’ episodes to
end the abuse, what is called “time to violence” in the treatment literature.
The third assumption is that the severity of abuse can be assessed by applying a
calculus of physical injury and psychological trauma to violent episodes. The presence of
injury is typically not a formal prerequisite to access criminal justice, shelter, medical or
other services. As a practical matter, however, decisions regarding intervention are often
based on a calculus of relative physical and/or psychological harm (Buzawa and Buzawa,
2003; Berk & Loeseke, 1980-81). In the National Family Violence Surveys (NFVS) for
instance, acts with a low probability of causing injury were classified as “not abuse” or as
a “normal” part of interacting with children or a spouse (Gelles, 1997, p.14).
The Failure of the Paradigm
There is considerable evidence that the actual experience of abuse victims
contradicts each of the major assumptions at the heart of the domestic violence paradigm.
Evidence on the context, dynamic, meaning and consequence of partner violence comes
from studies conducted at points of service, crime surveys, such as the National Crime
Victimization Survey (NCVS) (Maxwell, Robinson & Klein, 2009), and from the
National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAWS) conducted in l995- l996 (Tjaden &

Thonnes, l998; 2000), which identified coercive acts that caused safety concerns. These
data consistently show that the hallmark of women’s physical abuse is frequent, but
predominantly minor assault extending over a considerable period and with a cumulative
impact on women’s health that is unparalleled among other classes of assault victims.
Partner assault is limited to isolated incidents in only a tiny proportion of
cases (Stark and Flitcraft, l996). The average victim suffers between 3.5 and 8 assaults
annually with well over a third report experiencing “serial” abuse (once a week or more)
(Teske & Parker, l983; Klaus & Rand, l984; Mooney, l993; Stark & Flitcraft, l996).
Meanwhile, the average duration of an abusive relationship is between 5.5 and 7 years
(Stark & Flitcraft, 1996; Campbell, Rose, Kub, & Nedd, l998). Importantly, well over 95%
of partner assaults are minor from a medical or criminal justice standpoint, even among
the populations where we would expect to find the highest rates of serious injury—in the
Emergency Room (96%), among women who call police (97%), and in the military
(93%) (Stark & Flitcraft, l996; Connecticut Department of Public Safety, Family
Violence Arrests, Annual Report, 2006; Caliber Associates, 2002). This does not mean
the consequences are minor, of course. Battered women who use the health system have
been distinguished from non-battered women by a profile of medical, psychosocial and
behavioral problems that includes disproportionate rates of alcohol and drug abuse,
depression, attempted suicide, homelessness, an elevated risk of HIV and other SDTs,
unwanted high risk pregnancies and fear of child abuse (Stark & Flitcraft, l996; Frieze,
2005). The emergence of this profile post-dates the onset of abuse, pointing to ongoing
abuse as its cause (Stark and Flitcraft, l996). Nor is violence typically the only or even
the most salient issue in these cases. Depending on whether the data are drawn from

arrests, shelter populations or batterer intervention programs, in 60% to 80% of the cases
where female victims are involved coercion is accompanied by a range of tactics
designed to isolate, intimidate, exploit, degrade and/or control a partner in ways that
violate a victim’s dignity, autonomy and liberty as much as their physical integrity or
security. (Buzawa, E., Hotaling, 2001; Tolman, l989; Rees, Agnew-Davies, & Barkham, 2006;
Stark, 2007). In one well-designed study, for instance, 6 out of l0 of the men arrested for domestic
violence reported they had taken their partner’s money as well as assaulted them, and had
restricted their partners in three or more additional ways (Buzawa et al., l999).
Given these findings, it is hardly surprising that the female population who seek
assistance reports experiencing abuse as continuous rather than as comprised of discrete
episodes (Hall-Smith, Tesaro & Earp, l990).
When shelters, police, courts, health or mental health providers interpolate male
partner abuse through the prism of the violent-incident frame, the oppression battered
women experience is disaggregated, trivialized, normalized or rendered invisible, with
interventions actually becoming more perfunctory as abuse becomes more
comprehensive over time (Stark & Flitcraft, l996; Stark, 2007). This has tragic
consequences for victims. Since the vast majority of violent episodes are minor, for instance,
when criminal justice bases its assessment of the severity of abuse on these incidents, domestic
violence is reduced to a second-class misdemeanor for which few are sanctioned (Stark, 2007).
Langhinrichsen-Rohling (2010) suggested that the greater fear reported by female
than male victims of similar violent acts may reflect the differential socialization of men
to minimize pain and fear. But a more parsimonious explanation is that the fear presented
by female victims is the cumulative byproduct of the history of coercion and control in
their relationships, an experience which may have no parallel in the experience of male

victims of female partner abuse. Approaching abuse as an ongoing or chronic problem
rather than as episodic changes everything. A doctor who views each complaint of chest
pain as separate may become frustrated by multiple visits with identical complaints, as
many police, physicians, mental health practitioners, judges and advocates are when
abused women return repeatedly for help or “remain” in abusive relationships. The result
is that victims are viewed as exaggerating their situation, particularly when the proximate
incident is minor, being “ambivalent” about separation, or even fabricating their reports
of abuse, an allegation that is particularly common in family court. However, when
physicians recognize the particular complaints are symptoms of heart disease, a chronic
problem, they become proactive, view repeated use of their services as appropriate and
even desirable and take steps to ensure long-term risk-reduction. Even when proponents
of the domestic violence paradigm recognize the frequency of assaults against women,
instead of broadening the definition to include this reality, they attribute this to a sub-
type of batterer who is prone to “recidivism”(Jacobson & Gottman, l998; Gondolf, l988).
The Gender Parity Challenge
Starting with the National Family Violence Surveys (NFVS) conducted in the late
l970’s and 80’s (Straus & Gelles, l990; Straus, l995), women consistently reported that
they used violence against partners as often as men and, in some samples of younger
women, even more often (Archer, 2000; Swan, Caldwell, Sullivan & Snow, 2009).
Dozens of similar surveys have shown that many of these women initiate the use of force,
employ injurious levels of violence, stalk and/or sexually coercive their partners, and
insult or humiliate them (“psychological aggression”) (Archer, 2000; Tjaden & Thoennes,
2000; Swan et al., 2009). While a larger proportion of women than men identified their

violent acts as retaliatory (though not necessarily defensive), like men, they often
reported being motivated by jealousy or a desire to punish or ‘control’ their partners.
(Swan, Caldwell, Sullivan & Snow, 2009; Archer, 2000; Felson, l996; Tjaden &
Thoennes, 2000). Recent surveys have confirmed earlier findings regarding the
prevalence, scope and consequences of women’s violence against partners (Archer, 2000;
Graham-Kevan & Archer, 2008).
Langhinrichsen-Rohling (2010) is one of a number of psychologists who have
raised concerns that evidence of women’s use of force has had little impact on public
policy or intervention, particularly compared to initiatives to stem male violence against
female partners (Dutton, 2005; 2005a). Advocates who initially publicized survey
evidence on violence against women were largely silent about women’s reports of their
own violence because they feared it could undermine support for female victims. But the
principal reason there has been no public outcry for state intervention to protect “battered
men” is that, apart from cross-sectional survey data, there has been little other evidence
that female abuse constitutes a significant problem in public health or safety or that male
victims have needs for protection, treatment or support that require new funding streams
or services.
Calls to police from male victims are a marked exception to the absence of male
abuse victims from service sites. By 2000, the U.S. National Incident Based Reporting
System showed that women comprised 23.4 percent of individuals arrested for domestic
violence nationwide, approximately the same call to arrest ratio found among female
complainants (Hirschel et al. 2007). This suggests that the criminal justice system is
responding similarly and ostensibly without bias to male and female victims of partner

assault . There are also indications that some female perpetrators use control tactics as
well as violence. Women arrested for domestic violence reported they threatened or used
violence at least sometimes to make their partner do things they wanted him to do (38%)
and these threats were sometimes effective (53%), to “get control” of their partner (22%)
or to make their partner “agree” with them (l7%). (Swan et al., 2009). However, although
the motives and some behaviors reported by female perpetrators closely resemble
reported dynamics identified among male perpetrators of assault (Klein, 2009), there may
be significant differences. Case studies of violent women (Dasjupta, 2002) and voluntary
samples of women arrested for partner violence (Swan & Snow, 2002) consistently report
that the vast majority had been victimized by the male partner they assaulted, with the
proportion reporting victimization ranging from a low of 64% (the NFVS) to a high of
92% (Swan et al. 2009). The profiles of female offenders reveal higher levels of child
sexual abuse, depression and substance use than among male offenders (Swan et al, 2009)
Nor is there evidence that female partner assault evolves into the patterned subjugation
that typifies women who use shelters, emergency rooms or other services. These data
support Langhinrichsen-Rohling’s (2010) suggestion that a specialized treatment
modality that targets the unique problems female perpetrators present might be more
useful than the psycho-educational model used by most programs for male offenders.
However, while such a protocol would encompass women’s role in bi-directional
violence, the proportion of separated couples where violence occurs and women’s
reported levels of childhood and adult abuse would appear to be incompatible with the
forms of couple or family work she favors.

During the same period that arrests of female perpetrators of domestic violence
have increased sharply, the most serious forms of female partner violence have declined.
Women tend to seriously hurt or kill male partners when they feel themselves or their
children are being threatened, though not necessarily in self-defense (Dasgupta, 2002).
In the mid-1970’s, male and female partners were equally likely to be killed in a
violent confrontation. Since l976, however, the number of men killed by women in intimate
relationships has dropped 71%, much more than the overall drop in homicides, and by 80%
among African-Americans. By contrast, the number of women killed by male intimates has
dropped only 26% since 1976, far less than the overall drop in homicide. According to the FBI, in
2004 1, 596 females but only 385 males were killed by partners. (Uniform Crime Report,
2006). Since men typically kill female partners when women threaten to leave or actually
do so, these differential rates of decline suggest that available options have afforded
women only temporary respite, another reflection of the episodic approach and one
reason why women’s retaliatory violence has remained widespread.
Does Gender Parity in Violence Mean Gender Parity in Abuse?
The evidence Langhinrichsen-Rohling (2010) summarizes on gender parity in
violent acts comes almost exclusively from general population surveys that utilized the
Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) to determine how often partners use force to address their
conflicts and which tactics they have used. The researchers sought to map the use of force
in families because they were morally opposed to any and all violence as a means to
address disagreement and believed violence would be reproduced in subsequent
generations (Gelles, l995; Gelles & Straus, l988). Because they also believed that
millions of Americans were acculturated to use violence as a normal part of their problem
solving, they were unconcerned about whether respondents found the violence in their

relationships problematic. Even so, they distinguished the commonplace violent tactics
they identified from the forms of woman abuse or “battering” with which the advocacy
movement was concerned. Thus, Gelles (l995) termed the belief that men and women are
equal perpetrators of ‘domestic violence’ a “myth” and Straus (as cited by Ellis &
Stuckless, l996) termed the equation of the violent acts they identified with battering
“ridiculous” and “unethical.” These early surveys concluded that 75% of women’s
reported violent acts involved self-defense (Straus & Gelles, l988). Only a tiny proportion
of respondents to the NFVS had called police or used other resources and almost all were
women. This suggested that these respondents might be a different population than the
abuse victims who called police or used other services, an argument that has been fully
spelled out by Johnson (2008).
Gender Asymmetry in Abuse
Not all survey evidence supported the gender parity hypothesis. Langhinrichen-
Rohling (2010) relied heavily on Archer’s meta-analysis of population surveys. Archer
(2000) concluded that women perpetrated slightly more than 50% of reported partner
violence and inflicted 35% of domestic violence injuries on men. By contrast, the NFVS
reported that both the proportion of injurious assaults by men and their frequency were
roughly 6 to 8 times greater than those committed by women (Straus & Gelles, l988),
though the absolute numbers in both cases were small. A major limit of Archer’s meta-
analysis was his decision to omit the National Violence Against Women Survey
(NVAWS) from his overview, the largest population survey to date, presumably because
its size (8000 male and 8000 female respondents) and focus on safety would have skewed
his results. Although the NVAWS was conducted more than a decade ago, it remains one

of the few population surveys to look at abuse over the adult life course and to compare
male and female rates of being stalked and sexually assaulted alongside rates of domestic
violence.
According to the NVAWS, with the marked exception of knives, which women
and men use equally, men used every other means of serious assault much more often
than women, including kicking, biting, choking, trying to drown, hitting with an object,
“beating up,” and threatening with a knife and a gun, with ratios extending from 2:l (for
kicking and biting) to more than 14:l (for beating up) (Tjaden & Thonnes, 1998, exhibit
ll, p.28). But the finding from the NVAWS that is most relevant here was the large gender
differences in victimization that emerged when attention shifted from reported violent
acts during the study year (where the male:female ratio was only l.4: l, to partner assault
over the life-course, where the ratio was more than 3:1 (22.1% vs. 7.4%) (Tjaden &
Thoennes, 2000), the same ratio reflected in domestic violence arrests. Gender
differences in sexual abuse and stalking were considerably larger.
Proponents of gender parity dismissed the findings from the NVAWS because its
focus on safety concerns excluded the less serious violent acts picked up by the NFVS
and other surveys focused on conflict tactics (Straus, 1998; Archer, 2000). However, if
we understand abuse to include the types of coercion that lead victims to apply a calculus
of fear and potential suffering to their decision-making, a subjective safety concern would
seem far more relevant than reports that force was used.
Relatively few studies have compared the abuse experiences of males and females
in clinical settings. As Langhinrichen-Rohling (2010) pointed out, these studies generally
found that the modal pattern of violence is bidirectional, with a substantial proportion of

women reporting having used violence, including some groups of women in shelters.
However, these same studies also documented significant differences in dynamics and
outcomes by gender. For instance, Phelan, Hamberger, Hare, and Edwards (2002)
compared men and women presenting complaints of injury at a Level 1 trauma center for
emergency medical services and who reported being in a currently violent or abusive
relationship. Men reported significantly higher rates of violence initiation than did
women, with 100% of the men reporting initiating violence between 50% and l00% of
the time. In contrast, 91% of the women reported initiating violence between zero and
20% of the time. These results are also important because they suggest that, even when
women initiate violence in an encounter, this is not the typical dynamic in bi-directional
violence.
Langhinrichen-Rohling (2010) cited evidence from couples in counseling to
support her emphasis on bi-directional violence, including work based on the couples’
clinic at SUNY- Stony-Brook. But were these couples engaged in “fights” or abusive
assaults? For one thing, O’Leary and his colleagues excluded couples from treatment
whose violence they deemed severe or abusive (O’Leary et al., l989). For another thing,
couples who reported violence had higher levels of marital satisfaction than the
nonviolent couples and their relationships were more stable over time. Violence in these
relationships was largely bi-directional, but probably not abusive.
The vast majority of point-of-service studies assessed the experiences of female
victims only. So it is possible that a significant population of battered men remains
hidden in medical, child welfare or mental health records. But the limited evidence we
have shows that female/male ratios in help-seeking prompted by domestic violence range

from 4:l (for police calls and arrests) to between l5:l and 20:l for calls to hot-lines,
requests for protection orders, ER visits, or use of child welfare or sexual assault services
(Stark, 2007).
Straus (l995) argued that men’s greater physical strength, hence the greater
likelihood they will inflict injury on partners, explained why there is asymmetry in
reporting despite parity in violent acts. There is some evidence to support this claim.
Because it asks respondents about partner violence they consider a crime, the NCVS
picks up the most serious acts of partner violence. According to the NCVS for 2004,
between l993 and 2004, the annual rate of male partner violence against women was
roughly four times the rate for female partner violence (8.6 vs. 2.5) and the rate of injury
was about twice as high for female than male victims, though the rate of “serious” injury
to men was just slightly lower (Klein, 2009). Gender discrepancies in injury can only
explain a small proportion of asymmetrical help-seeking, however, since, as we’ve seen,
very few of women’s calls to police or visits to the Emergency Room are prompted by
injury. Instead, the disproportionate help-seeking by female victims is almost certainly a
function of their far greater risk than men of suffering “systematic abuse,” the pattern of
frequent but minor assaults combined with other tactics I subsume under coercive control
(Macmillan and Kruttdschnitt, 2005).
A New Paradigm: Domestic Violence as Coercive Control
The gender parity/asymmetry dilemma cannot be satisfactorily resolved so long as
we embrace the violent incident-definition of abuse. When violent acts are abstracted
from their historical and experiential context and assigned meaning based on their
physical valence, the parity in violence appears to reflect a parity and relative symmetry

in abuse, making it appear that the gender asymmetry in outcomes and help-seeking is a
function of individual differences or gender socialization, the argument that grounded
Langhinrichen-Rohling (2010) article.
Any alternative model that hoped to make the asymmetry in help-seeking by
female victims intelligible would begin by incorporating the elements of abuse research
shows to be typical. Abuse would be defined as a course of conduct, i.e. as ongoing rather
than incident-specific, its historical dimension; as typically involving frequent, even
routine, but generally low-level assault; and as including a range of tactics in addition to
threats or physical force. Because the violence it anticipates is generally low-level and
frequent rather than severe and accompanied by multiple tactics, the alternative model
would also highlight the cumulative nature of the harms inflicted and a range of harms in
addition to physical injury and/or psychological trauma. The model of coercive control
offers such an alternative. Although this alternative model has been available at least
since the mid-l970’s and is widely used by advocates in one variant or another, it has
remained marginal to research in the field.
Shortly after the first shelters opened in the U.S., advocates advanced a definition of
abuse predicated on the use of violence to exercise “power and control” (Schechter, l982; Adams,
l988; Jones & Schechter, l992) rather than simply to hurt or injure a partner. This work built on a
picture of what psychologists had called “coercive control” or “conjugal terrorism,” terms they
borrowed from the brain-washing and hostage literature to apply to the range of tactics abusers
used over time to break down a victim’s will, constrain their decision-making power, exploit their
resources, and entrap them (Singer, l979; Serum, l979; Morgan, l982). In a definitive chapter on
coercive control, Okun (l986) drew an extended analogy between the techniques of “coerced
persuasion” the Chinese had used on American POWs, the experience of women being

conditioned to prostitution by pimps, and the experiences recounted to him in his counseling
work with abusive men and battered women. A similar model of domestic violence as “control”
provided the foundation for Emerge in Boston, one of the first programs for abusive men (Adams,
l988), as well as for the “Power and Control” wheel developed by the Domestic Abuse
Intervention Project (DAIP) in Duluth, Minnesota. With “power and control” as its hub and
surrounded by a rim of physical and sexual violence, the spokes of the wheel are subdivided into
economic abuse; coercion and threats; intimidation; emotional abuse; isolation; minimizing,
denying and blaming; using children; and abusing male privilege. Jones and Schechter (l992)
added “control through decision-making” to their list of abusive tactics and focused particular
attention on the abuser’s micro-management of a victim’s everyday life, including “picking out
your clothes,” “telling you what to wear” and “forbidding you to shop.”
In Coercive Control (Stark, 2007), I classified all of the dimensions of abuse identified
earlier under four tactical headings: violence, intimidation, isolation and control, including under
intimidation the varied forms of sexual degradation often associated with domestic violence and
under control, constraints over everything from basic material resources (money, food, sleep, etc.)
to imposed ‘rules’ about everyday living. In contrast to models of “psychological abuse,” I called
these control tactics “structural” because they affected forms of material deprivation and
dependence that were independent of their psychological effect on victims. Summarizing the
limited empirical data available on intimidation, isolation and control tactics, I argued that 60% to
80% of the cases seen at points-of-service in the U.S. involved coercive control. The remainder
involved partner assaults primarily, where physical and psychological abuse were combined.
These categories were roughly equivalent to those described by Johnson (2006; 2007; 2008) as
“intimate terrorism” and “situational partner violence.” However, I distinguished assaults, where
one party was victimized by violence, from “fights,” where relatively equal partners used force to
address situationally specific issues, typically bi-directionally and neither considered themself

victimized. In contrast to Johnson, I argued that the majority of violent acts identified by
population surveys fell into the category of “fights” and should not be considered “abuse.”
Three final elements of the model are relevant to the current discussion, that it linked
men’s greater capacity than women to deploy coercive control to their ability to exploit persistent
gender inequalities; identified women’s enactment of stereotypic gender roles as the principal
target of control tactics, particularity their roles as housekeepers, wives and mothers; and depicted
coercive control as a “liberty” crime that caused a range of harms to women’s autonomy, dignity,
personhood, and capacity to fulfill their responsibilities as citizens as well as to their physical
security. Because the domestic roles targeted in this form of abuse are already devalued by their
default consignment to women, the micro-management of daily activities that often accompanied
coercive control was often “invisible in plain sight.”
Coercive control may be the primary dynamic in the lives of between 8 and l0
million of the l4.5 million women in the U.S. I estimated are currently being abused by
their partners in the U.S. (Stark, 2007). Whatever the proximate motive or dynamics of a
man’s abuse in a given instance, when so large a population of persons adapt a similar
strategy to establish nonreciprocal relations in personal life, we should assume that a
broad social logic is at work, constraining the selection of means, including violence,
according to their relative efficacy. In this analysis, as in much of the early feminist
work, I conceived of abuse as a rational and instrumental strategy which affords benefits
that can be measured in increments of resources garnered, personal service, sexual
exclusivity, and subjective reinforcement of gender identity. In a given case, childhood
exposure to violence, family dysfunction or medical, psychological or behavioral
problems can play an important role. Male socialization and other individual factors
identified by Langhinrichsen-Rohling (2010) may also play a role. But coercive control is

largely a male phenomenon not because men are empirically more likely to deploy the
requisite tactics or are socialized to expect ‘control,’ but because inequality constrains
women’s options in relationships independently of their personality, mental acuity,
socialization, or physical prowess. This reality is not changed because women check
many of the same boxes on surveys as men, including the box in which they acknowledge
acts of jealousy, possessiveness or control, or because, in any given relationship, women
may hurt, control or even dominate male or female partners in many of the same ways
they are controlled.
Rather than portray the primarily female victims of abuse one-dimensionally, the coercive
control model anticipates high levels of aggression by women in relationships that correspond to
their newly won rights and resources, including their widespread use of violence. If men’s resort
to coercive control exploits persistent gender inequalities in income or opportunity for instance,
so too do women increasingly demand a status in families and relationships comparable to their
newly one rights in the public arena, challenging and attempting to displace the traditional
privileges men have enjoyed simply because they are male. The ways in which this tension is
played out in millions of homes and relationships includes the increasing willingness of
women to use violence to create an environment in which they enjoy the same autonomy,
liberty and dignity they could increasingly command in school, work and in the political
world. Many of the violent women with whom I work in my forensic practice view
deference to male partners as a choice rather than as their fate and expect a quid pro quo
in exchange that includes sexual fidelity and a certain financial commitment. These
women feel entitled to punish male partners who fail in these roles and are no less
possessive or prone to jealous rages than men. Even so, as structural inequalities ‘entered’
the relationship over time, even in many of the relationships in which violence was

initially bi-directional or female initiated, the pattern changed shape and similarities in
motive, behavior and even in the occasions for male or female violence gave way to the
differential capacity of men to construct a regime of domination based on the greater
shares of power and control they inherit from persistent inequalities simply because they
are male. At this point, there is a convergence between societal inequalities (in income,
e.g.) and structural inequities imposed in the relationship. The result is that relationships
where violence seemed symmetrical to start evolve into the type Johnson (2008) called
“violent resistance,” where women’s violence is met by the pattern of coercive control. In
sum, women’s greater equality instills a female capacity for autonomy that can turn male-
female relationships into a “battleground,” where bi-directional violence may be the norm as
Langhinrichsen-Rohling (2010) claimed it is. Differences in race, social class or in the
cultural, familial, behavioral or psychological factors she emphasized may influence how
an individual man or woman chooses to relate in this battleground, whether they will
exploit, assert, ignore, resist or submit to the assertion of female equality and male
privileges and even who makes what choice to some extent. But they cannot change the
basic fact that structural inequality endows men with an incremental advantage in
relationships that is reflected in the peculiar cast of coercive control. Asymmetry in the
social position of men and women, the fact that men cannot be unequal to women in the
same way and at the same time that women are unequal to men, explains why male and
female partner abuse have different dynamics and long-term consequences even when the
motives, tactics and proximate consequences are the same. Coercive control does not
merely play off sexual inequality. Because its deployment disables self-interested
decision-making of millions of women, coercive control also exacerbates gender
inequality.

Feminist Therapy
The challenge to feminist therapy follows from the political context that
differentiates female from male abuse. The abusive element in classic domestic violence
is its use to elicit obedience, submission or dependence by violating a partner’s physical
integrity or threatening to do so. The controlling effects of violence are mediated by fear
of what will happen if the victim fails to accommodate the assailant, what can be termed
its “or else” proviso. Some victims respond with violence to threats, assaults or fear, and
this retaliatory violence may limit their partner’s abuse, even if they get the worst of a
given violent encounter (Swan et al, 2009), the leveling effect noted earlier. The classic
therapeutic goal in these cases is to combine harms reduction with safety planning. But in
coercive control, the asymmetry is structural requiring a reallocation of power (not
merely of resources or in the allocation of responsibilities) and the primary harms victims
suffer are to realms of personhood, identity, and to their economic, social and political
activity. In these cases, therapeutic intervention focuses less on what the abusive partner
has done to the victimized woman than on what he has kept her from doing for herself,
recovering and then supporting her capacity for self-direction. Since the disproportionate
risk of psychological or behavioral problems among victimized women typically develop
to accommodate and manage the stress of ongoing abuse, they cannot be ameliorated
unless the objective situation is also changed. What distinguishes feminist therapy from
the generic emphasis on personal empowerment that characterizes most therapeutic work
is the recognition that a woman’s long-term vulnerability (and her capacity for self-
direction) is inextricably bound to her disadvantaged social status and its reiteration in a
specific abusive relationship. The alliance between “victim” and “witness” that Judy

Herman (l992) sees as the antidote to the trauma of interpersonal violence is rooted in our
social alignment as an advocate with women’s liberation, not merely in our clinical
alignment with a particular client.
A Final Word
Feminism works backwards from the fact of gender inequality to identify its
means and remove them through activism. Advocates selected partner violence as a point
of intervention because it appeared to be a critical link in the chain of gender inequality
(Schechter, l992; Stark, 2007). Over time, as the advocacy movement evolved and
scholars with a range of orientations entered the field alongside the feminists, a consensus
formed around “violence” as the common harm to study and prevent, replacing the earlier
focus on coercion as merely one means used to subordinate women in personal life.
When violent acts moved center-stage, the only plausible rationale for focusing on
violence against women rather than other common forms of relationship violence was
empirical, the claim that women merited special attention because they were more likely
than men to be victims of violence. Evidence of gender equity violent acts is
incompatible with this approach.
From a feminist standpoint, the singular focus on violent acts is a conceptual
dead-end, forcing us to account for the well-documented asymmetry in the experience of
abuse by highlighting individual differences rather than the interplay of structural
inequalities, the enactment of gender roles, the formation of personhood and the
relational dynamics that mediate these levels of experience in abusive relationships.
The coercive control paradigm I propose restores the original emphasis on gender
inequality as the principal wrong we hope to counter and looks beyond violence to

encompass the multiple tactics men deploy in personal life to preserve what is left of
gender inequality against women’s growing capacity for full personhood. Coercion
continues to be one key to this process. But rather than ask ‘who uses violence,’ I believe
our responsibility as feminist scholars is to identify how violence functions in
relationships to preserve and extend gender inequalities.
Feminist scholars need not deny the realities of women’s violence or posit
essentialist qualities in women that make their assaults somehow less significant or
harmful than men’s assaults. To the contrary, as Langhinrichsen-Rohling (2010) argued,
incorporating a full understanding of women’s violence into our picture of their
oppression will facilitate a shift away from the patronizing and victim-blaming practices
that are commonplace at the sites where battered women seek help, including shelters. A
full appreciation of women’s violence entails embracing a broader view of what is at
stake in abusive relationships, understanding that it is liberty and personhood and the
larger rights of women as fully entitled citizens that require defense and our support as
clinicians, not merely their physical integrity. This does not mean that we should
minimize the suffering of men abused by female partners or the challenges to an
equitable partnership posed by the use of force. What it suggests, however, is that we
make clearer than we have not only how and why male partner abuse is different than
female partner abuse and therefore merits different forms of policy and intervention, but
why our political commitment to social justice compels making a priority of forms of
abuse—“domestic violence in the strong sense”—that perpetuate structural inequality and
subordination compared to other forms of abuse that leave the status quo largely in tact,
though are no less painful for this fact. This does not change the pain experienced by

males victimized by female partners, negate the possibility that women will assault, abuse
or dominate individual men or that men’s violence can also have a leveling effect in
relationships where women’s status is higher than theirs.

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