The Problem of Intimate Partner Domestic Violence

Like many topics, domestic violence is not easy to write about or read about, mainly because most humans tend to feel bad when they learn about others’ painful experiences. That bad feeling is called empathy. Empathy involves experiencing, to some degree, someone else’s thoughts and/or feelings. If you’ve ever been moved by a character’s tragic or heart-wrenching experience while watching a movie or reading a book, that’s empathy. People vary on their tendency to experience empathy. For example, one of the signature traits of people with Antisocial Personality Disorder (people who are more popularly called psychopaths or sociopaths) is the incapacity to experience empathy.

Even people who have fully functioning empathy mechanisms can avoid such uncomfortable feelings in several ways. One way is active avoidance of knowledge about other peoples’ pain and perspective. A person can’t feel empathy if they don’t expose themselves to information having to do with other peoples’ painful experiences. Also, a person won’t feel much empathy if they decide to view someone else’s pain as well-deserved. Painful feelings of empathy can be halted by the (often unfair and cruel) tendency for people to blame victims for the horrible event or events that have happened to them. That way, victims of abuse get doubly-victimized: once from the assault they experienced and again through people’s lack of compassion and tendency to consider the victim as having “had it coming to them”. Victim-blamers get to sidestep their own fears and the sad feelings that come from empathy by interpreting tragedies that others experience as due to some defect in people who have been victimized.

A psychologist does not have the luxury of managing their own emotional reactions by ignoring other peoples’ pain or dismissing it as somehow deserved or exaggerated. A scientist of human behaviour could choose to only study the sweetness of humans, but they’ll be left with a very incomplete understanding of what humanity is all about. Psychology is the SCIENCE of human thoughts, emotions, and behaviour. To be fully competent, a psychologist must face the dark side of the human experience head-on, and must disengage whatever mechanisms reside within them that would otherwise make them feel better and safer about the horrible things that do happen to people on a daily basis. At the same time, psychologists must be concerned about their own compassion for victims of crime and abuse distorting their conclusions about the nature and motives of criminals, abuse perpetrators, and their victims. (For example, in defense of victims, it is possible to oversimplify abusers as just evil people. Doing so makes it more difficult to understand what causes a person to be an abuser, in the first place. Understanding that can have the useful consequence of making it possible to help abusers stop abusing people or it might help in the development of strategies to prevent people from becoming abusers before they start.) To be legitimately scientific about issues that naturally generate strong emotions, psychologists must be objective and must try, as much as possible, to base conclusions on facts; to not go very far beyond what is known to be true when generating theories about humanity. The main purpose of these posts is to give you a taste of the knowledge that psychology can contribute to making sense about a difficult, but also an extraordinarily traumatizing and costly social problem.

When some psychologist is interested in researching a topic, they need to narrow things down a bit. Suppose our main interest is in understanding the nature, causes, and consequences of violent behaviour engaged in by humans. That topic is might be too large to make any progress with, given limits on time and money. We’ve chosen to focus on domestic violence, so that emphasis eliminates acts of violent aggression engaged in by armies, street gangs, schoolyard bullies, etc. Those are all important social concerns, but we and our readers don’t have the time to deal with all of that, right now. Even the topic of domestic violence might be too big and complicated, since researchers publish thousands of research articles on the different facets of domestic violence, each year. (Part of the challenge of conducting research in an area of psychology is getting up-to-speed on what is already known and what sorts of studies have already been done.) Consequently, we’ve decided to orient mainly to intimate partner violence, which eliminates the need to thoroughly investigate the vast amount of published research on domestic violence involving the abuse of children. Can you see how painful psychological research can be? Do you feel any empathy for the psychologist who must, for practical purposes, set aside investigating the very alarming and real problem of child abuse to get a better handle on intimate partner abuse? (If it makes you feel better, reader, the pain of studying one important thing and not another is not all that comparable to the trauma of experiencing domestic violence, so don’t feel too bad.)

Stubbs and Fife (2012, p. 51) describe Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) as a “public health epidemic”. Both men and women can be victims of IPV, but an estimated 85% of IPV involves abuse of women by men. For example, in Canada 83% of spousal assaults involve attacks on women by men (Statistics Canada, 2009). There are many instances in which people assume the existence of gender differences that are actually non-existent or too small to have much practical relevance; this is not one of those instances. Risk factors for women include being unmarried, younger than 35 years old, and having an annual income of less than $15,000. These factors only somewhat elevate the risk. IPV is something that women may experience, regardless as to their marital status, age, or income. In the United States, about 5 million women are assaulted by their intimate partners each year. Intimate partner assaults directly result in the death of 17,000 people each year in the United States, and most of those people are women. To put the homicide aspect in perspective, 1/3 of female victims of homicide in the United States are murdered by their intimate partners. The cost of these assaults is financial for society, in addition to causing extraordinary physical and emotional harm to the victim of IPV. IPV-related medical and mental health treatment costs more than $4 million, annually, in the United States and costs victims of IPV (and the companies they work for) a total of approximately 8 million lost work days per year (Stubbs & Fife, 2012).

As for Canada, with 40,200 incidents in 2007, spousal violence was responsible for 12% of all police-reported violent crime. Four times as many women (51) than men (14) were killed by a current or former spouse (Statistics Canada, 2009).  

In subsequent posts, we will discuss the nature, causes, and consequences of Intimate Partner Violence from the various perspectives that psychology provides, beginning with the neuropsychological perspective.

References

Family violence in Canada: A statistical profile. (2009). Statistics Canada: Canada's national statistical agency / Statistique Canada : Organisme statistique national du Canada. Retrieved July 17, 2012, from http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-224-x/85-224-x2009000-eng.pdf.

Stubbs, D., & Fife, R. S. (2012). Intimate partner violence. In R. S. Fife & S. B. Schrager (Eds.), Family violence: What health care providers need to know. Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.