Third Wave feminism - A fight for equality or the spread of myths? Part 1 - Domestic Violence

You've probably seen it everywhere in the news these days, with the happenings of #gamergate, but feminism is a prominent feature in our news again, particularly the third wave. Third wave feminism originally fought for representation of minorities within feminism, claiming the second wave of feminism didn't do enough to address racial minorities.

However, this purpose has faded into obscurity, with no one clear goal of third wave feminism. There is, however, one clear narrative of third wave feminism and that is this; men and a cultural patriachy are to blame for the current issues women face.

How much of this is true, and are we to trust feminist rhetoric to solve these problems? This article will cover what feminists believe they are fighting for, addressing each issue and dissecting the feminist claim and provoke thought in the hopes to further discussion of feminist rhetoric.

What feminists fight for

While I was doing research for this, it seemed that feminists didn't even know what they were fighting for, with news source Huffington Post never being consistent and websites like Everydayfeminist and Feministing backpeddling claims every now and then. However, they all have somewhat common arguments and that's what we'll talk about.

Feminism claims to be a fight against the following;

• Gender violence, in particular reference to the female sex organ
• An inherent rape culture within first world society, wherein men are the perpetrator's almost 100% of the time
• Domestic violence, relating to physical abuse over the female partner in a relationship
• The glass ceiling and gender pay gap, where women only make 77 cents in contrast to men who work the same job for $1.00
• Male privilege i.e. men receive special privileges in life on the basis that they are men, specifically white males.

The claims behind feminist arguments - gender violence

Surprisingly, this takes many forms and isn't exclusive to just domestic violence. Gender violence covers the following;

• Domestic violence against women
• Female genital mutilation
• The use of tampons and OB/GYNs
• and finally General Assault

For this article, we'll be covering all of those beyond OB/GYN and tampon use (genital mutilation will be covered at the end). Before we can look at the feminist claims for gender violence, we need to know what domestic violence and the types of domestic violence. Since most feminist rhetoric uses U.S. statistics, we'll be using those in the rest of the article.

As defined by the department of justice, domestic violence is described as abusive behaviour in any relationship that is used by one of the partners to maintain power and control over the other, generally through physical and mental abuse.

Feminist rhetoric tackles physical abuse in a violent relationship, often leaving the mental abuse to the side. There are two different kinds of physical abuse, minor and severe.

Minor violence covers the following;

• An item was thrown
• Pushing/Grabbing and/or Shoving
• Slapping

Severe violence covers the following;

• Kicking/Biting or Punching
• Hitting or tried to hit with an object
• Beating up/choking
• Threatening with a knife or gun
• Using said kinfe or gun

As you can see, there is a massive difference between both kinds of violence. Feminists will use graphs like Figure 1 to try and assert the fact that women are victims of more serious violence than men are (which is statistically true, however the difference between severe violence against men and women is next to none).

Figure 1: Rate of intimate partner violence, by victim's sex, 1994-2011 (U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2014)

As can be seen in Figure 1, of all reported cases 5 per 1,000 women were victims of simple assaulst and approximately 2 per 1,000 were victim's of serious violence in 2011. Male simple assault and serious violence rates remained relatively unchanged trhoughout 15 years.

As soon as marital statistics are looked at the whole argument falls apart. In Figure 2, we can see the rates of Husband to Wife violence (on the left) and Wife to Husband violence (on the right).

Figure 2: Marital violence rates - Husband to Wife (left) and Wife to Husband (right) (Jouriles, E. .N., & O'Leary, K. D. (1985). Interpersonal reliabitlity reports of marital violence. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 53, 419-421)

The overall violence rates in 1975 and 1985 were fairly similar, with a small rise in Wife to Husband violence whereas a descrease was seen in Husband to Wife violence. In 1975, Husband to Wife severe violence was at a rate of 38 per 1,000 cases. In 1985 it dropped to 30 per 1,000 cases. This is a drop of 12% in Husband to Wife severe violence, with an overall drop in violence of  7%.

On the other hand, Wife to Husband severe violence in n1975 was at 61 per 1,000 cases. This is almost double the amount of Husband to Wife severe violence rate in 1975. In 1985, there wasn't much of a change. The Wife to Husband severe violence rate was at 58 per 1,000 cases. This is a drop of 5%. This is again, almsot double the Husband to Wife severe violence rate of 1985, which was again, only 30 per 1,000. The overall violence rate of Wife to Husband abuse however is the most interesting statistic. It rose from 116 per 1,000 in 1975 to 121 per 1,000 in 1985. This is a total increase of 5%. This means that Wife to Husband violence is more prevalent than Husband to Wife violence.

Furtheremore, in a study from Harvard University, it found that in a sample size of 11,000 men and women that almost 25% of people (28% of women and 19% of men) - said there was some kind of violence in their relationship. Women admitted to perpertrating more violence (a whopping 25% of women versus 11% of men) as well as being victimized more by violence (19% of women versus 16% of men).

The study found that approximately 50% of violence was reciprocal i.e. two-way violence. However, 70% of the non-reciprocal violence, it was found, was perpetrated by women. Women were more likely to be the instigators of violence than men were. The study also found that men were more likely to be injured in reciprocally violent relationships (25%) than were women when violence was one-sided (20%).

In conclusion to part 1, domestic violence is a 2-way street and men are actually more likely to be victims of not only severe violence, but one-sided violence and are more likely to be injured by domestic violence.

There will be more articles about third wave feminist rhetoric, the next article will tackle the rape culture argument and possibly the glass ceiling.

What did you think of the article? Have any issues, arguments or burning questions? Leave them in the comments below and I'll try to address them.