Harvard Medical School just announced a national survey by researchers from the Centers for Disease Control that examined 11,000 men and women ages 18-28 and found 24% of heterosexual relationships have had violence in them, half of it reciprocal and half non-reciprocal, and women committed more than 70% of the non-reciprocal violence and were more likely to hit first in the reciprocal violence. Both sexes suffered significant injuries.
Domestic violence: Not Always One Sided
The study was also publicized at:
Men Shouldn’t Be Overlooked as Victims of Partner Violence
Differences in Frequency of Violence and Reported Injury Between Relationships With Reciprocal and Nonreciprocal Intimate Partner Violence
Background: The historic, one-of-a-kind conference “From Ideology to Inclusion: Evidence-Based Policy and Intervention in Domestic Violence” was held in Sacramento, California February 15-16 and was a major success. The conference was sponsored by the California Alliance for Families and Children and featured leading domestic violence authorities from around the world.
One of the issues Dr. Dutton discussed at the conference is domestic violence between lesbians. This is an important and relevant issue, of course, in part because it provides a look at Intimate Partner Violence without the pervasive assumption that the violence in families is almost always caused by men. It also allows us to examine Intimate Partner Violence outside of the feminist Duluth model, which says that it is men who commit IPV, and they do so as part of their role in the patriarchy.
Dutton cited one study of 1,100 lesbian or bisexual women who are in abusive lesbian relationships. The study, which was conducted in Phoenix, found that the women were more likely to have experienced violence in their previous relationships with women than in their previous relationships with men.
Dutton explained that in general research shows that domestic violence is more common in lesbian relationships than in heterosexual relationships.
Further reading:
DV Conference Report #8: Violence is more common in lesbian relationships than in heterosexual ones
(Click here for more coverage of Borderline Personality Disorder.)
The web site My Trip to Oz and Back to which this blog entry links is an apparently factual letter describing a relationship between two women, one of whom was a Borderline. When you first read it, you may identify with Chris (the non-BP) being a man and Terry (the BP) being a woman as it may be confusing as the site doesn’t come right out and state that this BP destructiveness was taking place between two women.
This goes to show that destructive Borderline behaviors have little or nothing to do with gender. There are Borderline men, too, who harm their lovers and children just as Borderline women do. We as a society need to learn to recognize Borderline behaviors and to help protect the victims and to get the ill into effective mental healthcare, regardless of their gender or sexuality.
This web site (linked here and below) has a chapter from a book written by an author (Erin Pizzey) who founded DV shelters for women in the 1970s. She talks about what many people run into during a divorce, especially with a spouse who suffers from a personality disorder such as BPD. Despite the author’s background in dealing with violence against women, she clearly states that it is not only men who are abusive. She discusses how women can be “emotional terrorists” and do immense damage to families, even leading to the deaths of family members. She notes that many of these emotional terrorists cause the breaking up of families and further become highly active during divorces, using false allegations, financial ruination, litigation, threats, defamation, child abduction, refusal to cooperate with visitation and custody orders, and other means to control and dominate their families and ex-spouses.
The Emotional Terrorist and the Violence-Prone
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