This is a good point. Given that men commit more violence in general, it seems likely that they commit more domestic violence. However, I’m not sure that there is much evidence as to how large this difference is. One could look at the rates of domestic violence in male and female gay relationships, as this removes the ‘the man is always arrested’ bias, but there is evidence of differences in violence behaviour between gay and straight people, so this wouldn’t help all that much.
Perhaps look at the rates of mothers vs fathers beating children?
Different kinds of domestic violence (against children, spouses, parents, etc.) have significant psychological or behavioral differences. I don’t want to generalize from “parents of gender X more likely to beat their children” to “people of gender X more likely to beat their spouse” without evidence.
In any case, how do you propose to look at the rates of any kind of violence? If we don’t trust data from the justice system, or from the police, and we obviously can’t trust self-reporting and surveys, then what do we do?
All data is relative to a definition of what constitutes domestic violence. Fifty or a hundred years ago, men raping their wives wasn’t violence. Today, some surveyors (or police or judges) sometimes consider a wife hitting or raping her husband not to be violence, but the husband hitting his wife to be violence. We need to agree on a definition of violence, and then to find a reliable data source that uses the same definition.
Well, this is one of the many problems with sociology. There are some obvious approaches to use, such as finding crimes which are solved far beyond doubt, such as where there are many witnesses or DNA evidence, and hope this generalises to crimes which are harder to solve, such as domestic violence.
Of course, as you point out, these different kinds of violence might not generalise, as different people commit different crimes for different reasons. So I really don’t know what to do about crimes that happen in private where there are no witnesses, short of putting cameras in every room of every house.
This is a good point. Given that men commit more violence in general, it seems likely that they commit more domestic violence. However, I’m not sure that there is much evidence as to how large this difference is. One could look at the rates of domestic violence in male and female gay relationships, as this removes the ‘the man is always arrested’ bias, but there is evidence of differences in violence behaviour between gay and straight people, so this wouldn’t help all that much.
Perhaps look at the rates of mothers vs fathers beating children?
Different kinds of domestic violence (against children, spouses, parents, etc.) have significant psychological or behavioral differences. I don’t want to generalize from “parents of gender X more likely to beat their children” to “people of gender X more likely to beat their spouse” without evidence.
In any case, how do you propose to look at the rates of any kind of violence? If we don’t trust data from the justice system, or from the police, and we obviously can’t trust self-reporting and surveys, then what do we do?
All data is relative to a definition of what constitutes domestic violence. Fifty or a hundred years ago, men raping their wives wasn’t violence. Today, some surveyors (or police or judges) sometimes consider a wife hitting or raping her husband not to be violence, but the husband hitting his wife to be violence. We need to agree on a definition of violence, and then to find a reliable data source that uses the same definition.
Well, this is one of the many problems with sociology. There are some obvious approaches to use, such as finding crimes which are solved far beyond doubt, such as where there are many witnesses or DNA evidence, and hope this generalises to crimes which are harder to solve, such as domestic violence.
Of course, as you point out, these different kinds of violence might not generalise, as different people commit different crimes for different reasons. So I really don’t know what to do about crimes that happen in private where there are no witnesses, short of putting cameras in every room of every house.