It doesn’t seem all that surprising to me – first, there are tons of households where the father isn’t even present and thus cannot abuse the kids. Then, on a per minute basis, women, on average, spend much more time with the kids and so would have much more opportunities to abuse. The fact that it’s even that close (in the 2004 stats) is pretty shocking. If you did abuse per minute present, I imagine men would “win” by a long shot.
I was physically, verbally, mentally and sexually abused by my father back in the early to mid 70’s, but if I tried to present stats from that period as if they were authoritative because they just happened to coincide with my personal experiences I would certainly hope that those stats were challenged.
I’m not surprised they are roughly equivalent. People tend to abuse those who are less powerful. I view any disparity as more an issue of opportunity than inherent characteristics to men or women.
OK, this is from 2022. Women, 214k, men 200k.
In the United States, more perpetrators of child abuse were women than men. In 2022, about 213,876 perpetrators of child abuse were women, compared to 199,617 male perpetrators.
Right, but women have (I imagine, I’m not searching) far more hours with children, more opportunities, than men do, and are certainly more powerful than small children.
Much better, and along with this broader link the whole story can be told: Child abuse in the U.S - statistics & facts | Statista
Yes, it makes sense that if women are the primary caregiver they would be more likely to abuse. However in recent years, we’re seeing data that indicates men are spending a lot more time with kids than they used to. My husband does roughly half (maybe 40%) of all caregiving and that seems consistent with others in my peer group.
Anecdotally, I know a lot of people with abusive mothers. We all become writers, apparently.
(Also not entirely clear why we’re excluding sexual abuse from the discussion. Reminds me of a critique of Better Angels of our Nature where the author claims the world is overwhelmingly less violent than it used to be… if you exclude the Holocaust.)
I expect that the rate of male abusers will rise as the number of stay-at-home fathers rise, but that is yet to be seen.
But wouldn’t we expect that to be reflected in the 2022 data?
That data was published in 2022, but when was it collected?
That’d help, too. And would probably also decrease violence. When society says that men are supposed to be violent, is it any surprise when some men turn violent? I mean, it’d still happen some even without societal norms, but surely less.
Possibly, but I suspect that the kind of man who becomes a stay-at-home father is overall less violent than “traditional” men.
From your cite:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/254893/child-abuse-in-the-us-by-perpetrator-relationship/
189,000 mothers
125,000 fathers
Of course there are other caregiver relationships to consider, such as nonparent/stepfather, or both parents together.
I want to see all this disaggregated by abuse type.
I wasn’t referring to stay-at-home-fathers, though, just employed men who do more caregiving than they did in the past.
Not at all. If that’s your only social paradigm, that’s probably going to be your go-to when you’re struggling to cope.
I’d like to adjust what I said upthread. Women aren’t the only targets of the patriarchy. It’s also men who don’t conform to traditional gender norms, who have less earning power, less status, pretty much the patriarchy seeks to exploit whomever it can. It is only intended to benefit a privileged few. I suspect that’s why a lot of men get frustrated when the conversation is limited to women.
In some cases, sure. But the solution to helping underprivileged men is the same as the solution to helping women: Weaken the patriarchy. I suspect that most of the time, when men get frustrated at the conversation being limited to women, it’s because they are the patriarchy, and don’t want to see their power threatened.
I was in an abusive relationship once. I had a girlfriend who was pretty violent. Once she got annoyed with me and pushed me backward over a couch out of nowhere, I didn’t even see her coming, and it wrenched my back and was responsible for the first time I ever had to be absent from my first job (I was young and never got sick enough to call in).
She also threw a shoe at my face from a couple of feet away, HARD, threw a full-size phonebook that hit my neck (thank goodness that it mostly grazed me), and used to try to get into physical fights with me. On those occasions I restrained her until she stopped trying to attack me, as I was bigger and stronger than her and had martial arts training. The only advantage she had over me was that I wasn’t willing to use violence back at her (beyond holding her arms until she promised to stop trying to hit or claw me).
In retrospect it was really stupid for me to stay in that relationship, but I was very young (only 20) and also very inexperienced. And I was raised to think that men were stronger than women so had nothing to fear from them, and violence against a man from a woman was a ridiculous concept.
I wised up though. Later on, early in my relationship with my first (now ex-) wife, we were shopping at a store and she was annoyed at me. She slammed the shopping cart into the back of my legs, hitting my hamstrings so hard I fell to the ground and couldn’t get up for a bit. I told her flat-out, I have a zero tolerance policy for violence, and if you ever use violence against me again we are done, and I don’t care what else is going on. I will not put up with it. To her credit, she never did, and we later got married and stayed married for 7 years. Even when the marriage was bad and falling apart she never got violent again.
I do think that’s another facet of our society that needs to change. While physically, on average, men are bigger, stronger, and sturdier than women (just a fact of biology), violence can still occur against men, and men need to know that they don’t have to put up with it. Don’t retaliate, of course (that should apply to any situation, not just in a relationship, fighting is bad) but don’t just accept it because as a man you are supposed to be strong enough to ignore it. Women can hurt and kill men and can abuse them, and it’s not shameful or unmanly to tell them to stop, leave if they won’t, and it’s okay to seek help if you need to.
I saw what you did there.
Very deft (and a little bit heartbreaking).
100%.
Also I’m not sure if I am pulling this completely out of my ass, but it seems to me violence from a woman against a man is more often going to involve a weapon of some kind, due to the disparity in physical strength. I’m guessing that’s why women killing their partners is almost as common as the reverse.
Women are also going to have to learn hard on the emotional abuse tactic because coercive control is going to be logistically more difficult, as men are traditionally breadwinners, or at least working. So the stereotypical example where a woman is not allowed to work, has no control of the finances, and has to stay home taking care of the children is less likely to be a scenario for men. So really the biggest tactic women have, aside from outright weaponry, is completely fucking a man’s mind into believing he deserves whatever abuse he’s getting.
(I’m not an expert on how a dynamic would differ with men, just spitballing, though I can attest that emergency shelters for survivors of domestic violence are vastly disproportionately used by women, even when available to men. This could be due to men having more financial resources/autonomy, or men having more social pressure or internalized shame about reaching out, or both. Or something else entirely. This is a very under-studied subject!)
I had a service provider training last year by the state coalition for domestic and sexual violence, and I was that many years old when I realized my mother was a perpetrator of domestic violence. I always knew she was violent toward her partner, but in this field, that’s generally considered a separate issue from a coercive pattern of power and control, and as they went into perpetrator psychology I realized, no, it’s not just violence, it’s all there, right down to cutting him off from his friends.
I had that happen with a boy I was dating (not the exact thing, just an act of violence) and I said the same thing, and when he did it again, I left. I credit that one to my Aunt who modeled not putting up with abusive shit. It gets much more complicated to leave an abusive situation when someone has control over multiple domains of your life, but he had no control beyond the physical control he was trying to exert, so I bounced. I think of him a lot still, and whatever poor woman ended up with him. He was textbook at the tender age of sixteen and his family rationalized his behavior 100%.
Good for you, and good for your aunt. I’m glad you had her in your life and could learn by her example. I never had anything like that as an example. Now that I think of it, and in all sincerity this is literally the first time this ever occurred to me, but I was physically abused by my dad growing up, and that might have conditioned me to accept it. Of course, I didn’t know it was abuse at the time, and I never saw myself as a victim of abuse until relatively recently. I only realized it when I was telling my (current) wife about stuff my dad would do and she pointed out that it was child abuse. It wasn’t being a strict parent, it was abuse to hit a kid with a belt. Or slam a kid’s head into a wall (denting the drywall). Or force a kid to stand for hours without using the bathroom or be able to sit down. Especially the times when I actually hadn’t even done anything wrong and was so confused about why I was being punished.
So that might have drilled into my head that people in your life close to you will physically hurt you and that’s how life is. Intellectually I knew that wasn’t true, but I might not have believed it emotionally. Huh. I’ve never thought about it like that.
I’m just glad that one thing I got out of my upbringing is that hurting people is bad. I never hit someone in a relationship (at least not on purpose) and never hit any of my kids because I didn’t ever want to be like my dad. He was a great role model of what kind of person not to be (in multiple ways).
My dad mellowed out a lot as I got older and we have a decent relationship now, but there’s always that specter of the past hanging around. (And my dad knows he was a monster and has apologized countless times.)
I suspect that that’s true of a lot of victims of abuse.
This is what I was thinking. Who’s around the kids the most, and the most likely to be aggravated by their behavior and snap?
My dad worked swing shift for a long stretch of my childhood, and I only really saw him maybe once a week.
Yeah, male victims of female abusers get a really shitty deal all round. They aren’t supported, because men are supposed to be able to “handle” aggression by women (which in turn reinforces patterns of male-on-female violence, since “handling” is expected to take the form of physical control snd retaliation rather than appeals to law enforcement).
A core tenet of patriarchy is that women are subservient and men have the power and control. Patriarchal systems are really vicious toward men who undermine that assumption, either by voluntarily letting women control them or by involuntarily being abused by women.
The patriarchy is bad for everyone. It’s just bad.
It’s almost like equality and fairness are good concepts or something.