Tearing Down the Gender Paradigm in Favour of Families

Despite our preoccupation with ‘stranger danger ’ (e.g., child abductions, stranger-rapes) it is a well-established fact that we are more likely to be assaulted or killed by a family member than by anyone else. Following from their 1975 and 1985 National Family Violence Surveys in the United States, Richard Gelles and Murray Straus concluded, “With the exception of the police and the military, the family is perhaps the most violent social group, and the home the most violent social setting, in our society. A person is more likely to be hit or killed in his or her home by another family member than anywhere else or by anyone else ” (1985, p. 88). In short, abuse in families and intimate relationships is ubiquitous (Mills, 2003). According to Dutton (2006), Canadian and American data reveal similar rates of violence against women: around 1 in 5 women have ever experienced IPV, 2%-4 % of women suffered severe violence in the past year, and 1.5%-2.5 % of women suffered repeated severe violence in the past year. The lifetime incidence rate for any form of domestic violence (including relatively innocuous acts like pushing or shoving) is approximately 19%. The lifetime incidence for severe or injurious domestic violence is about 8%. Owing largely to the success of the women’s movement, national campaigns to educate the public about the burden of domestic violence, as well as the introduction of the topic of family violence in many university courses, the preponderance of abuse perpetrated within families and intimate relationships likely is of little surprise to most readers. As my colleagues and I have discussed elsewhere (Dutton & Nicholls, 2005; Hamel & Nicholls, 2007), what is not widely-recognized is that the most common form of partner abuse is bi-directional; meaning that both partners perpetrate aggression against their partner and also are the victims of their partner’s aggression. To date, evidence from more than 150 empirical studies demonstrate gender symmetry or

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