A Brief Reply to Dutton

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A Brief Reply to Dutton

Michael P. Johnson

I do not want to unnecessarily prolong this discussion, but I do feel that I need to point out a few distortions of my work in Dutton’s response. Let me first say that I have been clear in everything I have written that I do not accept what Dutton refers to as “the common feminist notion that female violence, even in ‘common couple’ situations is always self defensive” (Dutton, p. 2). Actually, I do not think this is a common feminist notion, but in any case, I have dedicated a separate type of violence (violent resistance) to the issue of “self-defense.” I have been clear in my work that this type is considerably less frequent than situational couple violence. I have also been clear that situational couple violence is roughly gender-symmetric. When I said in 1995, as quoted by Dutton, “that women were as likely to utilize violence in response to couple conflicts as were men,” I meant exactly what I said. Women are as likely to use violence in situational couple conflict as are men. There is no hidden meaning in the phrase “in response to couple conflicts” that implies self-defense.

Second, although I do argue that most women’s (and men’s) violence falls into the situational couple violence category, I take pains to try to keep my readers from making the false assumption, as Dutton does, that such violence is “less serious” (Dutton, p. 6]) In my critique of his paper, and in all of my other writings, I am clear that “…all three types of intimate partner violence can be either frequent or infrequent within a relationship, and can range from relatively minor acts of violence to homicidal assaults…” (Johnson, p. 3)].

Third, Dutton spends considerable effort berating me for allegedly believing that agency samples are not biased: “I challenge Johnson to poll social scientists on whether shelters are self selected biased samples or not” (Dutton, p. 7). In fact, I said, “…our common sampling designs are heavily biased with regard to these different types of intimate partner violence. On one hand, agency samples gathered from shelters, hospitals, police records, or the courts are biased heavily in favor of intimate terrorism….” (Johnson, p. 3).

Fourth, in a number of places Dutton implies either that I present no evidence for the feminist position on the nature of the various types of violence or that I present evidence only from biased samples, “shaping folklore as evidence and overgeneralizing from incarcerated samples” (Dutton, p. 8). Again, he seems to be ignoring post-1995 work on typologies of intimate partner violence. My own papers have used data from three different types of samples in Pittsburgh including a general sample, from a sample of patients at various medical settings in Chicago, from a large national random sample of the U.S. population, and from a random sample of poor neighborhoods in Chicago.

Finally, let me turn to the central points of Dutton’s final paragraph, in which he addresses the alleged closed-mindedness of my work. With respect to the paper to which he is responding, he says of me, “If any further proof of the bias in the feminist paradigm is needed, just look at Johnson’s last paragraph where he asks assessors to assume that “intimate terrorism” (by which he means, male violence) is the type of violence occurring. He says this despite the low base rate of this violence in community samples” (Dutton, pp. 11-12). I thought I had been clear in my critique of his Journal of Child Custody paper that I do not assume that all intimate terrorists are women: “I hope you have noticed that I have never denied that women can be intimate terrorists. Certainly there is evidence that some of the violence in lesbian relationships involves intimate terrorism… and I have personally worked with one male client who was clearly terrorized by his controlling and violent police officer wife…. Theoretically speaking, patriarchal traditions and structures, average sex differences in the use of violence, and average size and strength differences between men and women all suggest that in heterosexual relationships intimate terrorism will be largely male-perpetrated. Empirically speaking, the evidence, both direct and indirect, confirms that intimate terrorism is largely male-perpetrated and related to gender attitudes” (Johnson, p. 8). If that is not clear enough, readers may refer to my other published works. Dutton seems to be fixated on my 1995 theory piece, in which I used the term “patriarchal terrorism” to refer to one type of men’s violence against their female partners. Quite soon thereafter I abandoned that term for the more gender-neutral “intimate terrorism” in order to avoid the sort of misinterpretation into which Dutton has fallen, and to accord with the evidence that I and others have presented that there are, indeed, women who are intimate terrorists.

Perhaps the more essential point about Dutton’s final paragraph, however, addresses the meaning of his general term “assessors.” It is important to keep in mind that my recommendation to assume intimate terrorism until proven otherwise is directed to assessors who have the safety of individual children in their hands. My purpose is to discourage hasty judgments in any particular case that the intimate partner violence may not pose a threat to the children, and as I pointed out above I intend this advice to apply to both men’s and women’s violence. This would not, of course, be my advice to assessors who are social scientists investigating the general question of the nature and prevalence of the various types of intimate partner violence. I thought my advice to them was equally clear: “…the differences will remain unknown until research is conducted that makes distinctions among types of intimate partner violence and investigates their links to child abuse” (Johnson, p. 7).