Violence Against Women

Volume 12 Number 11
November 2006 1019-1025
© 2006 Sage Publications
Commentary on Johnson’s 10.1177/1077801206293329
http://vaw.sagepub.com
“Conflict and Control: hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com
Gender Symmetry and
Asymmetry in Domestic Violence”
Evan Stark
Rutgers University & University of Medicine and
Dentistry of New Jersey School of Public Health, Newark

Keywords: domestic violence; gender symmetry

M ichael Johnson (l995, 2000) reframes the debate about whether men and women
are equally abusive by replacing the tenets underlying the controversy, that abuse
should be equated with violence, that abuse can be assessed by a calculus of physical
harms, that a single moral yardstick can be applied to any use of force by family
members, and that, therefore, the issue of parity can be resolved by agreeing which
family members use force, what kinds, and how often. Instead, he argues, because of
the added element of “control,” the “intimate terrorism” that affects women primarily
involves a qualitatively different dynamic (and so different harms) than the “common
couple” or “situational” violence in which surveys show there to be sexual parity.
Johnson separates the question of sexual symmetry in the use of force from the
issue that is critical to intervention, whether the abuse that men and women experience
is qualitatively symmetrical. Johnson’s categories need to be flushed out empirically,
theoretically elaborated, and refined. However, he challenges us to map the tactical
combinations of coercion and control used in relationships, reformulate a theory of
harms accordingly, and link the dynamic and outcomes in these situations to social fac-
tors. Facing this challenge could awaken the field from the stupor in which it has lan-
guished since it adapted the reductionist equation of abuse with violence.
With a few exceptions, our field has been dominated by a definition adapted from
criminology that equates abuse with discrete episodes of force designed or likely to
hurt or injure a partner. One result of the incident-specific violence definition is that
criminal justice intervention has failed to affect the problem. Because the vast major-
ity of domestic violence involves “minor” assaults (e.g., pushes, shoves), when the
law requires police and the courts to view abuse through the prism of discrete acts
of violence, woman battering is downgraded to a second-class misdemeanor. No one
goes to jail. Defining battering as a form of subordination, rather than violence,
yields a very different constellation.

1019
1020 Violence Against Women

The background to this debate is the opposing pictures of violence by women that
emerge when the definition is applied in population surveys, which reveal sexual sym-
metry in violence, and in points of service, where almost all perpetrators are male.
Applications of the violence-based definition have also created quandaries in mea-
surement and explanation. Thirty years of research has failed to produce consensus on
what constitutes a “case” of domestic violence and so to provide useable estimates of
its incidence and/or prevalence, making it impossible to rationally allocate or evaluate
services. Because more than 90% of the cases where battered women call police or
visit an emergency room involve no injury, the greater severity of men’s violence does
not explain these opposing profiles.
The emphasis on discrete acts of violence contrasts markedly with experience-
based accounts where battered women report abuse is “ongoing” (Lischick, l999;
Smith, Earp, & DeVellis, l995; Smith, Tessaro, & Earp, 1995); includes a pattern of
intimidation, isolation, and control as well as assault; and exacts high levels of fear and
entrapment even when violence has stopped (Piispa, 2002). Nor does the paradigm
account for the duration of abusive relationships. A related issue is that the harms
victims identify are more often the cumulative result of ongoing “entrapment” than of
discrete assaults, a fact that makes injury a poor way to assess risk. In our own
research, we identified a health profile of medical, behavioral, and mental health prob-
lems, in addition to injury, that distinguished battered from nonbattered women (Stark
& Flitcraft, l996). No similar profile has been identified among any other population
of assault victims, including female victims of stranger assault or male victims of
same-sex, stranger, or female partner assault. This profile postdates the onset of abuse
and is accompanied by minor rather than severe assault and so cannot be explained by
personality differences or by violence. Thus, even if male and female partners use
force in similar numbers, woman battering is qualitatively different than other forms
of abuse or assault in that it extends over time and through social space and exacts a
significant toll that cannot be explained by injury or violence.

Enter Johnson

In response to the realization that the discrepant pictures of abuse are real and not
the by-product of poor methodology or bias, Johnson provided an explanation that
was obvious once he proposed it, that the parties involved are measuring different
phenomenon. Findings about women’s use of force are only problematic if we share
the view that any force in families is repugnant. From the perspective of the battered
women’s movement, the weakness of the family violence approach lies less in its
methods or empirical claims than in its focus on a reality that is only marginally
related to our aim, to end the entrapment of women in personal life. The key question
here is not who uses violence, but which tactics are deployed to oppress women in
personal life. There is little overlap between the couples identified as “violent” by the
National Family Violence Surveys (NFVS) and those who seek outside assistance.
 Stark / Reply to Johnson's Conflict and Control 1021

Johnson argues convincingly that population surveys assess the use of force in con-
flicts and so mainly record “common couple” or “situational” violence, whereas criminal
justice and service research tap “patriarchal” or “intimate” terrorism, where violence is
“embedded in the context of general power and control.” Men and women engage
equally in situational violence; however, intimate terrorism is committed mainly by men.
This explains why surveys and service-related research reach diametrically opposed con-
clusions about gender symmetry. Johnson has added violent resistance, where one part-
ner, almost always the woman, uses violence in response to coercive control, and mutual
violent control, where both partners are equally violent and controlling. However, his
major contribution is to reframe the discussion to emphasize the parameters, dynamics,
consequences, and meaning of women’s entrapment in personal life.

Coercive Control

Johnson joins a line of analysis that has remained marginal to the violence para-
digm. Intimate terrorism is identical to coercive control (CC), a term adapted from the
literature on brainwashing, applied to battering by cognitive psychologists in the l970s,
and flushed out conceptually by Okun (l986). Okun compared woman battering to tor-
ture and used the term conjugal terrorism to depict the threats and the larger pattern of
control by which batterers constricted the victims’ decision-making powers. Although
the aim of domestic violence is widely understood as “power and control” (as in the
“power and control wheel”), in this reformulation control tactics are also the primary
means of subordinating female partners. Moreover, this approach emphasizes the sys-
temic and structural roots of CC in exploitation and deprivation as well as its links to
“psychological abuse.” If most battered women experience CC rather than domestic
violence, this would explain why “abuse” continues even when couples separate, why
“minor” violence can have significant consequences, why battered women are
entrapped and develop a unique problem profile, and why the incident-specific defin-
ition has failed to elicit effective interventions. Other major accounts of how “control”
combines with violence in battering were made by Susan Schechter (l982), David
Adams (l988), Ann Jones (l994), and Lundy Bancroft (2002). Jones and Schechter
(l992) offered a detailed repertoire of control tactics. Johnson should relate his own
thinking to this work.
Like other “capture” and course of conduct crimes, CC involves a pattern that
includes violence, intimidation, isolation, and control, what Schneider (2000) called its
“generality.” Its “particularity” reflects three dimensions—the link of control tactics to
sexual inequalities, the privileged access of perpetrators to victims, and the extension
of control through social space. It is unclear whether the violence in CC is typically as
severe as Johnson contends or consists of routine, low-level threats and assaults, as I
believe. One challenge is to map the tactics used in control and how they are combined.
My casework indicates that critical elements of control are the isolation of victims
from support systems (e.g., friends, family, workmates, and helping professionals) and
1022 Violence Against Women

the exploitation and microregulation of their everyday lives in areas that extend from
such survival resources as food or money to everyday routines linked to sex roles, such
as how women dress, clean, or cook. If CC is a response to women’s equality, women
are “available” for this regulatory regime only because sex discrimination persists and
because they remain default homemakers and caretakers, the focus of microregulation.
The fact that CC builds on normative stereotypes makes it hard to distinguish where
sexist constraints end and personal regulation of domestic routines begins. The lack of
sexual symmetry in CC reflects its origins in sexual inequality: Because men cannot
be unequal to women at the same time and in the same way that women are unequal
to them, there is no counterpart to this type of coercive microregulation in men’s lives,
another cause of its invisibility.
In addition to giving perpetrators privileged access to victims, the presumption
of intimacy supports men’s claim to exclusive possession or “property” rights;
obstructs intervention by outsiders; invites the collusion of friends, family, and help-
ing professionals in the abuse; and affords a level of personal knowledge that allows
them to target a partner’s movements, resources, habits, and vulnerabilities. Batterers
in my caseload commonly inspect their partner’s underclothes or body parts for signs
of disloyalty, exploit fears instilled by childhood trauma, take their paychecks, and
go through their diaries and phone calls. Imagine the outrage such behavior would
excite if committed against men. Or how readily we would acknowledge a man’s
right to liberate himself from what amounts to domestic slavery.
CC also has a unique spatial dimension that gives victims the feeling that perpe-
trators are omnipresent and omnipotent, rendering separation even less effective as
an antidote than it is against domestic assault. Perpetrators commonly spy on or stalk
partners even when they are living together and control their access to and means of
transportation, monitor them at work, and use beepers, cell phones, or human prox-
ies to monitor their activities. Thus, it is men who “stay.” Taken together, these
dimensions of CC allow perpetrators to affect a level of subjugation that is more dev-
astating than physical assault and accounts for battered women’s unique health and
help-seeking profile.
There is increasing empirical support for the CC paradigm. Control tactics, such as
prohibitions against going to work or school are 8 times more common in battering than
nonabusive relationships (l6% to 2%, respectively; Allard, Albelda, Colten, & Cosenza,
l997). Moreover, a structural dimension of “dominance and/or isolation” that includes
imposing rigid sex-role expectations can be distinguished from “verbal and emotional”
abuse (Tolman, l989; Tolman & Bennett,l990) and other forms of psychological manip-
ulation or adaptation (Kasian & Painter, l992). Among men arrested for domestic vio-
lence in Quincy, Massachusetts, 38.l% admitted they had prevented their partners from
freely coming and going in their daily routine, 58.5% said they denied their partners
access to money and other resources, and almost one half reported restricting their part-
ners in three or more additional ways (Buzawa, Hotaling, Klein, & Byrne, 1999). A
multicity study that compared 224 abuse cases where women were killed to similar
cases where no death occurred found that whether an abuser was “highly controlling”
 Stark / Reply to Johnson's Conflict and Control 1023

was one of two risk factors that increased a victim’s risk of fatality ninefold (Campbell,
Sharps, & Glass, 2000). When Lischick (l999) compared competing models, she found
that a measure of CC differentiated the experience of being battered from the experi-
ence of being “hurt” or being in a “bad” relationship better than measures of violence,
such as the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS). She also identified a significant subset of
women who exhibited the profile of being battered in the absence of assault.
From a feminist standpoint, women’s entrapment in personal life because of male
oppression is the appropriate target for justice interventions. The relative importance
of coercion and control in this strategy is best addressed through empirical and eco-
logical research. Domestic violence retains its importance in traditional and immi-
grant cultures where law and custom constrain women’s self-activity to the domestic
sphere and women have no alternative to dependence on the significant men in their
lives. However, where women have the rights and resources to reject “bad bargains”
in relationships, men intent on maintaining traditional sexual hierarchies must
increasingly do so directly, by “personalizing the patriarchy” at the level of each
relationship, the function of CC.
Unfortunately, Johnson finesses the political differences between a feminist and
mainstream paradigm by resorting to behaviorism. Instead of conceptualizing con-
trol as a political structure and consequence infused with social power and meaning,
he pictures it as an “act” that can be catalogued alongside violence. Even if this
comes closer to what battered women experience than remedial formulations such as
“psychological abuse,” abstracting control from its political context in discrimina-
tory systems makes it appear a by-product of individual volition or dysfunction and
to affect its purposes in a wholly individualized way, reflecting the myth of male
omnipotence.
Correcting Johnson’s behaviorism starts with his typology. When we reframe the
tactics used in relationships according to their relative contribution to subordination
and inequality, the critical distinction is between those that effect these ends through
CC or assaults and “fights.” In “fights,” force is used in ways that are widely viewed
as legitimate to settle differences, express feelings, overcome inequity and justice, or
to preserve human dignity and freedom. This “political” categorization privileges the
view of injustice held by oppressed minorities, such as women. CC is “wrong” because
it suppresses autonomy, liberty, and equality, not because violence is involved; it is
wrong less because of what men do to women than because of what it keeps women
from doing for themselves.
Behaviorism leads Johnson to miss the distinction between “fights” and “assaults.”
In the first, force is situationally bound, occurs in a normative context where both
parties usually accept “getting physical” as a way to advance their purposes, and
rarely prompts calls for outside assistance. Women and men engage in this pattern
equally and with the same motives. Common couple violence diminishes over time and
may lead to more rather than less marital stability (Jouriles & O’Leary, l986; O’Leary,
l988). Community-based programs that emphasize compensation or mediation are
probably more appropriate in these cases than criminal justice intervention. Partner
1024 Violence Against Women

assault differs from fights because of its motives, dynamics, and consequences. Here,
one or both parties use force to hurt, punish, subjugate, exploit, or control a partner
rather than to resolve differences. Domestic assaults are initiated to suppress rather
than resolve conflict and are viewed as illegitimate by its victims; they prompt from
20% to 40% of women’s help seeking (Gayford, 1975). Assaults are repeated over
time and often escalate, leading to marked asymmetry in injuries and other out-
comes. Although their typical involvement is retaliatory, women also initiate
assaults. Although assaults may be noninjurious and community-based solutions
appropriate in some cases, the threats they pose merit continuing to classify domes-
tic violence as a crime.
Johnson identifies “mutual violent control” in 3 of 97 cases. Although women
often use force to control partners (Folingstad, Brennan, Hause, Polek, & Rutledge,
l991), they typically lack the social facility to impose comprehensive levels of depri-
vation, exploitation, and dominance found in CC. I have never encountered a case of
CC with a female perpetrator and male victim.
Johnson addresses the gap that separates what battered women experience and
how this experience is understood and managed. It is time to recognize that the
entrapment of women in personal life is not primarily “domestic,” in that it is rooted
in sexual politics, nor mainly about “violence.” CC involves the violation of rights
that are so basic to the conduct of our everyday lives, so critical to our capacity to
imagine ourselves as autonomous and free, that it is difficult to conceive of person-
hood or citizenship apart from them. Because men take the rights infringed in CC
for granted, their systematic violation has gone largely unnoticed. It is this situation
that Johnson, following a radical tradition of advocacy research, invites us to redress.

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Evan Stark, MSW, PhD, teaches at the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University,
Newark, and holds a joint appointment in women’s studies and social work at Rutgers University, New
Brunswick. He directs the MPH Program on the Newark Campus and is chair of the Department of Urban
Health Administration at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of the New Jersey School of Public
Heath. A founder of one of the nation’s first shelters and an award-winning researcher primarily in the areas
of health and law, he is a forensic social worker who has served as an expert in more than 100 criminal and
civil cases. He recently testified for the plaintiffs in a successful federal class action suit brought by battered
women in New York City to prevent removal of children solely because their mother was a domestic vio-
lence victim. His most recent book, Coercive Control: The Entrapment of Women in Personal Life, will be
published in the fall of 2006.