Michelle Goldberg debunks a few choice myths about domestic violence from Hanna Rosin’s new book, The End of Men.
Rosin argues that women are poised to surpass men economically, by dint of superior educational attainment and earning power. She claims that today’s new breed of socially prominent, highly educated women are more likely to be domestic abusers and less likely to be victims of domestic violence.
The fear that expanding women’s rights will sap essential feminine virtues is as anti-feminism. Anti-suffragists warned that giving women the vote would make them “like men.”
Rosin worries that women like husband-murderer Larisa Schuler “raise the broader unsettling possibility that, with the turnover in modern gender roles, the escalation from competitiveness to aggression to violence that we are used to in men has started showing up in women as well.” She notes that in some jurisdictions, women now account for half of all domestic violence arrests.
Goldberg is unimpressed:
Yet a bit of research shows that while the number of women killed by their partners fell between 1976 and 2005, killings of men by wives and girlfriends declined much more. “[T]he number of black males killed by intimates dropped by 83 percent, white males by 61 percent, black females by 52 percent, and white females by 6 percent,” according to the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. It may be that women are now less likely to kill their partners because female empowerment has made it easier for them to get out of abusive relationships without resorting to homicide. Still, these numbers do not suggest that Schuster represents much of anything except a ghoulishly interesting anomaly.
Women account for a growing share of domestic violence arrests because of new laws that require police to arrest both parties in a domestic dispute if they can’t figure out who instigated the fight. Men commit over 90% of “systematic, injurious, and persistent” domestic violence according to the National Institute of Justice.
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