Reddit reviews Physical Violence in American Families: Risk Factors and Adaptations to Violence in 8,145 Families
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The "40% of cops get reported for beating their wives" is not an accurate representation of the data.
The (often cited) 40% figure comes from the Neidig 1991 study, where survey results indicated that 40% of officers reported marital conflicts involving physical aggression during the past year. This was not limited to 'reported' instances in any official sense - it's 'reported' on a survey, not 'reported' to law enforcement.
In general population studies, the rate of couple violence ranges from (p. 104) 121/1000 to 510/1000 couples, i.e. 12-51%.
So do cops assault their spouses more often than the general population? It's not an easy question. That 1990 study showed (p111) that survey results on assault rates between spouses in the general population were 70 times higher than the rates reported in crime victimization surveys. The data are soft, and small variations in how the question is asked can produce very different estimates of the rate of spousal abuse.
To compare police officer spousal abuse to the rates in the general population, you pretty much need to have the same survey, with questions asked in the same way, administered to police officers and a control group.
tldr: We don't know if police officers commit domestic abuse more often than the general population.
Ugh, not anxious to re-hash it just now personally but we had a long debate about that last week in this thread. MRAs trot out Murray Straus and CTS surveys, we trot out crime stats and Kimmel/Johnson, we all yell at each other for a while and no one convinces anyone of anything. Same shit every time.
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Edit: Since OP has edited their post to add this:
>the purpose of this thread is not to prove that women are evil or that men are evil. It is to objectively look at the data on DV, and what can be done to stop it. Studies on this topic often make subtle points. A lot of difference factors need to be considered, and study methodology can have a big effect.
I'm going to go ahead and re-post the work I did in that other thread, in the hopes of generating a calmer debate this time around. Please note, though, I'm not interested in arguing with someone who is going to dismiss this entire comment by saying that "these are just feminist researchers expressing their sexist beliefs trying to support their theories through "research." I am happy to try and have a calm, intelligent discussion where we take each others views and evidence seriously. But let's all please stop thinking that we can "win" this debate by posting one link to one study (or to a list of studies) which we think backs up our point of view.
Here's my original post:
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What we're talking about here is whether men and women are "equal" when it comes to domestic violence, both as victims and as perpetrators, and whether or not there is a concerted effort to "hide" or ignore domestic violence that is perpetrated by women, and male victims.
The key thing to recognize right off the bat is that there are studies which show gender symmetry, and there are studies that show gender asymmetry in Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). There are multiple studies in both of these camps that have been published in reputable, peer-reviewed journals, and have been based on solid research. In other words, both sides are going to be able to pull examples of research that "proves" their point. This has been causing a lot of consternation lately, both in academia and in less well-informed forums like this.
Lets look at what the two major "camps" are. On one hand, we have scholars like Straus and Stets, Straus and Gelles, and Steinmetz, who opened this debate in the 80s, using surveys like the National Family Violence Surveys to suggest that - as Steinmetz put it in 1977 - that men and women were "identical" in rates of IPV, and that the violence of women might even "exceed" that of men. Steinmetz was roundly criticised in academia for this, with people like Pleck and McNeely stating that Steinmetz's use of data was selective and incorrect. But in 1990, Straus and Stets did a second round of NVS surveys and reported a finding that "women assault their partners at about the same rate as men." Note, though, that Strauss and Stets found in the same study that women are more likely to get seriously injured by IPV, and are less likely to use violence that is "severe" than men.
From there, the focus shifted - I think reasonably - to look at exactly what Strauss and Stets are counting, and how. It has shifted, in other words, to the methodology that scholars like Strauss and Steinmetz were using to suggest the existence of parity in IPV. The central issue here is the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) - a methodology that Straus and Gelles developed in the 70s for their IPV research. The scale is designed to measure the use of various "conflict tactics" in a relationship, by asking questions about how conflict and anger situations were handled by both partners over the 12 months preceding the moment where the subject takes the survey.
Straus et al depend on the CTS (which has been repeatedly updated/modified over the years) to show that men and women are equally likely to perpetrate IPV. But the CTS itself has been roundly criticized by other scholars. People like Mahoney, Dobash and Dobash, Straton,, Sanders, Currie,, Melton and Belknap, Kimmell,, and Saunders have all pointed out major issues with the CTS methodology. Some of their major/most important criticisms include:
So the more recent round of studies that show symmetry in IPV have been attacked by a wide range of people. Michael Kimmel, for example, has reviewed the methodology used in the studies that Fiebert and Archer used to support their view of IPV as symmetrical, and found that Fiebert's bibliography, in particular, was "far more of an ideological polemic than a serious scholarly undertaking." People like Kimmel, Saunders, and Melton and Belknap have pointed out that Straus and Fiebert's conclusions do not jive at all with a second data source, the US Crime Victimization studies, which show massive gender asymmetry in rates (ranging from 3:1 to 5:1) of IPV. Other scholars like Hamberger and Swan have shown that if you look at IPV qualitatively instead of quantitatively, far more men use IPV to "dominate and control their partners" than women, while women are far more likely to be using it defensively. Dobash and Dobash, and Hester found the same thing in 2004 and 2009, respectively. People like Currie, meanwhile, have shown that men are empirically less likely to be honest about IPV when given a CTS questionnaire - that they "upgrade" women's violent behavior while downgrading their own, while women tend to "downgrade" the significance of men's violence. The take-away there being that the CTS is itself not reliable.
[Post was too long, cont. below)