Prof. Dr. Dr. Michael Bock in Windisch

In the fall of 2003, the VeV invited the well-known German men's researcher Prof. Dr.
Dr. Michael Bock gave a lecture at the Windisch University of Applied Sciences. Here is his text at the time. Click here to watch the lecture as a film

The function of numbers in the political discussion about domestic violence

2. The numbers say: Domestic violence is not just men's violence against women and children

3. A dispute about numbers is always a dispute about factual and practical problems

4. Feedback loops between numbers and reality

5. Counterproductive effects of a violence protection policy aimed only at female victims

6. Summary and conclusions for the current legislative process 

1.    The function of numbers in the political discussion about domestic violence

Ladies and gentlemen,

The days when it was thought that family disputes were private matters and did not concern the public or law enforcement agencies are over. This is undoubtedly a credit to the women's movement. Austria was a pioneer with legal regulations on protection against violence and expulsion from housing. In Germany, the enactment of the so-called Violence Protection Act was the peak in this development. The police laws of the states are constantly being adapted to the new spirit. And this is now also the case in the canton of Aargau. This is the reason for this lecture.

What all of these legislative procedures have in common is that they are embedded in a political accompaniment of announcements and confessions, of action plans and projects, of official brochures and flyers, which are both polyphonic and monotonous, in which numbers always play a dominant role. Figures about domestic violence are the skeleton of the same dramaturgy, which then seemingly automatically leads to a demand for stricter laws against men and expanded support for women.

Let me jump straight into the discussion here, which also follows this pattern. I have a document that has significantly determined the current legislative process and which contains a very typical argumentative arrangement in which, as usual, the seemingly irresistible magic of numbers plays the decisive role.

Slide 1 – Aargau intervention project

First of all, a horror figure of violence against women is used to establish a connection to archaic emotions. Every fifth woman! This is simply unimaginable, the situation must be correspondingly dramatic and the need for new measures to be remedied must be just as urgent. But be careful, severe and frequent domestic violence only exists as violence against women. For men there is only one theoretical possibility. That's why you use the subjunctive. , contrary to expectations, it should should be taken immediately. Actually, ca n't be the case, because the definition of domestic violence says that it can only be carried out by men Of course, this not only in the variants of physical and sexual violence, but also in the even more perfidious, because invisible forms of psychological and structural violence, i.e. actually always when a man and a woman are together in a patriarchal society. Is it any wonder that vulnerabilities are only seen in the protection of female victims and the control of male perpetrators and that appropriate remedies are demanded?

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the political accompaniment I mean. It is the basis of the German federal government's justification for the Violence Protection Act [1] as the many tightening of the state police laws that affect expulsion. And precisely because, as we have seen, numbers play the central role here, we must first deal with numbers in detail below.

2.    The numbers say: Domestic violence is not just male violence against women and children

Violence in relationships has been comparatively well researched. [2] However, as always in science, the findings depend on the terms and methods used. “Violence” is not an empirical term, but rather a normative, evaluative term. He assigns a judgment of unworthiness to certain types of behavior and it depends on the viewer whether a) he shares this judgment of unworthiness at all and b) whether he subsumes the relevant life situation under this term. The same applies to “crime” or “criminal”. Labeling a behavior as criminal implies an evaluation that, in turn, depends on the perspective with which someone views that behavior. Both the actor himself and his interaction partners can come to different results and draw different consequences. Of course, these connections also have considerable consequences for scientific research.

The vast majority of empirical research can be assigned to two methodological directions. On the one hand, there are studies in the so-called bright field, which are referred to as “clinical” studies or “crime studies”. In these studies - as in the official crime statistics - significantly higher rates of men as perpetrators and women as victims of domestic violence are regularly reported, despite the relatively small number of cases overall. [3] However, what is measured in these studies is a very “late” result of various assessment and assessment processes. A "victim" must have subjectively assessed the behavior of a "perpetrator" as "violence", perhaps also as "crime" and, after carefully anticipating the advantages and disadvantages, he must have decided to contact his social environment, an aid organization or even the to inform law enforcement authorities of the incident or to ask for help.

The other type of empirical investigation operates with the earliest measurement point that is possible for empirical research in this area. The behavior in question is measured here a) regardless of whether it is viewed (by the victim or the perpetrator) as “violence” or as “criminal,” and b) also regardless of whether the victim relates to his or her victim experience the social environment, support organizations or the law enforcement authorities. These studies, which are available in large numbers internationally, are so-called dark field surveys in which, strictly speaking, it is not “violence” that is measured, but rather aggressive behavior.

As a rule, these studies use a scale called the “conflict tactics scale (CTS)”.

Slide – CTS

This scale contains a list of aggressive behaviors that respondents are presented with to answer. It includes all levels of intensity in ascending order, from verbal abuse and insults (which are omitted here) to mild physical aggression such as pushing or slapping to severe forms of physical aggression such as scalding, beating and the use of weapons. This is very important. The fact that, strictly speaking, aggressive behavior and not violence or crime is measured does not mean that these are only harmless incidents, family disputes or inconsequential everyday disputes, but rather, at the higher end, also behavior that would not be subject to criminal prosecution if reported would further be subsumed as serious bodily harm. The scale itself and the studies were enriched over time with additional questions, for example about the consequences of injuries, about motives or about who started the aggressive behavior [4].

There are now condensed accounts of this line of research [5] as well as a rightly widely cited empirical meta-analysis by the British criminologist John Archer. [6] According to this, women and men display the aggressive behaviors operationalized in the CTS almost equally often, women even slightly more, and this applies to all levels of intensity, including the severe forms of aggressive behavior. Variations in the research design of the 82 studies included in the analysis resulted in only comparatively small deviations from this overall finding. [7] There is a predominance of women in perceived injuries (62% of reported cases were women). [8] Another important finding was that in most cases the violence is carried out mutually by both partners. [9]

The two types of studies measure “violence” at different points in time. So it is not surprising that there are gender-specific differences in the proportion of perpetrators and victims.

Slide – Male victim rates by recording modalities

This overview shows that the rates of male victims continue to decline the more their own gender-specific perceptions and the selective perception of support and control bodies can interfere. The question of whether something should be viewed as an injury requiring treatment depends on gender-specific assessments - Indians do not know pain - as does the question of whether a certain behavior is "violence" or whether one should really be afraid because of threats from one's partner or not. Because of their understanding of roles, women and men perceive objectively the same behavior differently and evaluate it differently. It is therefore obvious and plausible to attribute the different rates of male victims in the two types of investigations to internal and external hurdles on the way from the dark field to the bright field.

Slide – From dark field to bright field

It is true that it is not easy for most female victims to enter communication and the public eye. Shame about the failure of a relationship and fear of an uncertain future also prevent many women from taking this step. However, if they overcome themselves (or if they consider it opportune for strategic reasons), “coming out” for women often means an improvement in their material, psychological, social and legal situation. That's why they choose the path to the public, to the "experts", to the police and to the courts more often than men.

For men, everything looks completely different. For most male victims, their gender role identity alone prevents them from seeing themselves as victims of “violence” from (their) woman, because this is incompatible with a respectable male identity. But even if they overcome this hurdle, they find neither communicative resonance nor social or legal support. They are not believed, they are laughed at, in their social circles, by experts of both sexes and in court, because the idea that domestic violence is male violence is widespread there. Male victims do not find understanding; on the contrary, they are suspected of having become victims through their own fault, of having “deserved it”, whereby they have to choose between the roles of “nasty” and “idiot”. Men fear this type of secondary victimization and the loss of a respectable masculine identity for themselves and their significant others.

3.    A dispute about numbers is always a dispute about factual and practical problems

Ladies and gentlemen,

My report on the status of research would be incomplete if I wanted to ignore the fact that massive concerns have been raised, particularly about the dark field studies I mentioned. This is not surprising, as these shake the empirical and moral basis of a violence protection policy that focuses purely on female victims and male perpetrators. The criticism was primarily directed at the measuring instrument used, the CTS. [10]

Slide – CTS – repeat

Older criticisms that women only used aggressive behavior to defend themselves, but that the CTS did not take this into account or the extent of the injuries caused, have now been dispelled. They were unfounded.

However, there is another and much deeper level of criticism. The CTS only measures aggressive acts, not violence. Only the subjective interpretation and attribution of aggressive acts as violence turns purely physical and therefore trivial incidents into violence. However, only women would give this interpretation to their victim experiences and therefore only women are actually suitable victims of violence [11] . It can be seen very quickly that this argument is not suitable for neutralizing or trivializing the CTS findings. Because even if men do not describe and evaluate the corresponding “incidents” as “violence” or “crimes”, that does not mean that a) men do not interpret these incidents at all and b) that they do not nevertheless see these incidents as massive physical injuries feel spiritual integrity .

In addition, certain phenomena of the exercise of power, such as the “psychological” or “structural” violence included in the definition in the document cited at the beginning, undoubtedly escape the CTS measuring instrument, but are by no means clearly distributed to the detriment of women. No one will deny women the ability to restrict food, communication or sexuality, to prevent contact, to damage the reputation of their partner, to strike at the core of their identity, to humiliate them, to degrade them, to alienate their children. After all, it is precisely women and only they who have the threats of the police and the courts at their disposal and thus weapons that aim at the center of social and material existence without harming a single hair. However, systematic empirical studies of these phenomena are not known [12].

The methodological problem that we know little about the way in which men process their experiences of victimization [13] or how they deal with the particular scenarios of psychological or structural violence from their partners is part of the social problem itself. Because for Men lack not only the institutional support facilities, but also the linguistic reassurance in a public discourse in which one can anchor one's experiences socially and thus record, name, understand and process them for oneself. Men do not find a sounding board within which their suffering can be transferred into language and communication.

In a somewhat cruder version of the trivialization of male victim experiences, it is claimed that the severe and chronic abuse of women who have to go to women's shelters should be classified in a completely different category. The CTS measures slightly more temperamental partner conflicts of a temporary and harmless nature, as they occasionally occur in the proverbial best families. However, only the severe and chronic abuse of women is domestic violence and a serious social problem. [14]

I cannot follow this argument either. What the CTS measures at the top is a) anything but harmless and b) some studies have also examined the frequency of severe physical aggression. Above all, c) it cannot be concluded from the fact that there are no women's shelter examinations for men that there are no men with comparably long and terrible martyrs. It may be that the CTS becomes less informative at the very top. But why should this only apply to female victims? I have already outlined the hopeless threat scenarios with the material and social destruction of existence as the sword of Damocles, and it would be difficult to find a concept of psychological and structural violence that does not include these phenomena - which, by the way, are widely reported in the fathers' movement.

Conversely, it can of course be said that a single victimization in the area of ​​severe forms of CTS is easily enough to be admitted to a women's shelter. We don't know how many residents of women's shelters suffer "more" than what is undoubtedly and undisputedly equally distributed between women and men according to the CTS, so the construction of a two-class society of victims must be questioned from both sides.

And one last point regarding the burden of proof and significance of the CTS should be mentioned. It is only possible, if at all, with CTS studies to estimate the prevalence of “violence” with any degree of reliability, because this scale also measures verbal and mild physical aggression, which of course occurs many times more frequently than severe physical aggression . However, if the known large numbers are used in announcements, one would honestly have to admit that these everyday and mass aggressions at the bottom of the CTS are a) undoubtedly and not disputed by anyone and are equally distributed between the genders and that b) feminist researchers in particular and researchers, when criticizing the CTS, never tire of emphasizing that they are trivial, mean nothing and are precisely not what is meant when one speaks of domestic violence. The “crack in the best families” is trivial enough to deny men victim status, but on the other hand it is apparently bad enough to create apocalyptic threat scenarios for women. This is a particularly good example of irresponsible use of social science findings, or, whoever prefers it, a particularly blatant case of bigotry.

Slide – Male Victim Rates – repeat

No matter how you twist it and whichever reputable sources you use, the number arrangement mentioned at the beginning cannot be maintained. I don't find the objections to the CTS to be at all convincing. But in the end that's not what matters. Because even renowned feminist researchers [15] [16] instead of the CTS studies , express themselves on the state of research in a much more differentiated and moderate manner than is regularly heard in the political accompaniment . They fundamentally recognize that male victims have been forgotten and that they deserve protection, help and compassion just as much as female victims. [17] And even if one uses the Brightfield figures from police intervention projects, one can see that men are victims of domestic violence to a relevant extent and that a complete institutional ignoring of this phenomenon cannot be justified either empirically or morally. Whether you start from 50% or 20% is less important for the practical questions.

4.    Feedback loops between numbers and reality

Ladies and gentlemen,

To better understand the numbers, I would also like to briefly put them in a larger criminological context, because then they start to speak in a different way. As with other areas of crime, in domestic violence the deviant actions of individuals and the social reproduction of normative expectations are linked in self-reinforcing feedback loops [18].

Foil – self-truth of the myth

The supposedly confirmed figures that only women are affected are the ones that are politically exploited by experts, the media and various multipliers from prevention councils and academies to football clubs. Through them, above all, the theme connects to archaic emotions of anger, indignation and revenge. Then there are the appropriate images and cases. Tears and black eyes, distraught children, male criminal visages, gallant police officers and concerned presenters create an archaic myth in which good and evil are clearly defined and clearly distributed. Bad men beat and terrorize good women.

This automatically creates political pressure and a need for action, because scandalous conditions have to go. Laws must be made or tightened, intervention projects must be initiated, action plans must be formulated and implemented, the curricula of social professions and police instructions must be upgraded accordingly so that the content of the myth can really take root in the minds and hearts of those who who ultimately decide on the alternatives of shrugging the shoulders or investigating, dismissing or indicting, acquitting or convicting. After all, you have to know where to look for evil and what it looks like in order to bring it to justice. And what is crucial for the efficiency of this mechanism is the fact that these are not things about which one can have one opinion or another, but rather that emotions that are deeply anchored in the psychological apparatus and in gender roles are at play.

So in the end it is no wonder that the male victims sometimes cannot admit to themselves that they have become victims of female violence (internal hurdles), but sometimes they also anticipate the lack of communicative, social and legal resonance that any statements might make their victim experiences would come to nothing or even fall back on them (external hurdles). On the way into the bright field, they are filtered out at one point or another, so that we once again get a gender-specific bright field, and the result is the perpetual motion machine in which numbers and a myth about men and women drive each other.

5.    Counterproductive effects of a violence protection policy aimed only at female victims

The current violence protection policy is not only selective in the sense that it ignores male victims and female perpetrators, but its effects are also highly counterproductive where it actually works. This is especially true if you are looking for sustainable effects. Crisis intervention measures are certainly not sufficient here or often have precisely these counterproductive effects, because they intervene with great intensity and usually with destructive consequences in a complicated psychosocial event that usually has a long history. The problem, which ultimately escalates into severe forms of physical aggression or oppressive scenarios of psychological or structural violence, is rooted in

·        psychological characteristics (e.g.: low self-esteem, need for control, “negative emotionality” [19] ), in

·        Behavioral patterns (e.g.: destructive communication styles, learned patterns of violence) usually of both parties involved , in

·        situational stress factors (“life events”, alcohol) as well as in

·        Lack of constructive coping strategies,

which cannot be addressed with isolated repressive measures such as evictions or criminal prosecution. The only way to make lasting changes to the problematic behavior patterns of women and men is to work through the shared “history” of a conflict-ridden relationship together. The fact that this will not be possible in many cases is one thing, it is another matter whether strategies are pursued that systematically prevent this.

In any case, all efforts at prevention and all forms of “systemic” therapy or mediation will be nipped in the bud or completely impossible from the outset if a one-sided distribution of roles between a bad male perpetrator and a good female victim is considered a foregone conclusion by the “experts” involved , and they only see it as their job to make this legally and socially binding. Although the existing aid and advisory institutions show considerable pluralism according to regions and intervention concepts, the official “line” of policy in this area is still quite doctrinaire and ideologically one-sided towards the exclusion and punishment of men, while a Women's preventative needs are generally not even considered from afar. Once again, the document quoted at the beginning speaks clear and devastating language.

The consequences are foreseeable. If the two partners enter into new partnerships, the same mechanisms repeat themselves because the current measures to protect against violence only produce winners and losers, but not partners who have grown through learning processes.

6.    Summary and conclusions for the current legislative process

Men are victims of aggressive behavior on the part of their partners to a much greater extent than is generally assumed and is also assumed in the practice of violence protection policy. On the one hand, they do not see themselves as victims and remain silent out of fear of stigmatization and exposure, but on the other hand, there are no adequate support facilities. Experts in social institutions and law enforcement agencies do not expect male victims and therefore do not see any or even blame them for their fate. This results in a disastrous cycle: Because even fewer men than women find their way into communication, social institutions and the justice system, the statistics of these institutions always show almost only female victims, with the result that the stereotypes are once again fixed , due to which male victims prefer to remain silent rather than face the risk of “secondary victimization”.

Older people and especially children who become victims of female “violence” are not adequately taken into account. Due to time constraints, they were not specifically mentioned in this lecture, but the relevant findings complete the picture that overall, a gender-specific, one-sided violence protection policy prevails, in which male victims and female perpetrators are systematically ignored. [20] The gender-specific view, which only perceives men as perpetrators, has disastrous consequences, especially for the children who are abused by their mothers, because neither they nor their fathers have any significant chance of having their needs heard against the relevant bias of the responsible authorities to find. Incidentally, every police officer knows how difficult it is to remove a woman with children from traffic, because this can easily result in a rat tail from youth welfare and child protection, for which one does not feel equipped or responsible. If in doubt, taking the man with you saves time and effort on justification and hassle with superiors and lawyers. In this respect, it is also noteworthy that the German Violence Protection Act as well as the Aargau and other intervention projects have deliberately left out the abused children, so that the atrocities of “domestic” violence are a maximum of excitement and concern is talked about and remedial measures are demanded, but in reality only women are meant as victims, children and other people who live in the “house” in exactly the same way, but not at the moment.

In view of all these circumstances, the draft of Section 31 and especially Paragraph 2 of the new Police Act are cast in a completely different light. It cannot be said that the wording of the draft discriminates against men. No, the language is gender-neutral and therefore not objectionable. However, as with all comparable legal regulations, the devil is in the application of the regulation. The main issue here is the legal protection of the accused and the possibility of abuse.

The very general and vague concept of “threat” formulates a soft prerequisite for police access, which must raise concerns above all because the political demands, as we have seen, also cover phenomena involving psychological and structural violence which largely elude objective determination. In addition, there is no explicit statement that the accused will be heard before such a drastic measure as being expelled from the home for 20 days and, if necessary, police custody in accordance with Section 36 can be taken without much fuss.

Of course, practice will depend to a large extent on whether the police officers on site act with a sense of proportion and a sense of reality. This can generally be assumed. There is no reason to place the police under general suspicion of being anti-male. But after the experiences from the Federal Republic of Germany, I have to say that the police are partly under considerable political pressure to act against male violence as rigorously as possible, but partly also out of premature obedience and a misunderstood chivalry of their own runs the risk of losing the correct and otherwise usual level of police law when it actually or only allegedly involves violence against women. The police are also under the spell of the myth of bad men and good women. In any case, for image reasons, she avoids anything that could even remotely give rise to the appearance of secret complicity in violence against women and is therefore a prisoner of every demand, no matter how absurd, in the fight against male violence once she is out in the world. So it must be worrying that the Ministry of the Interior of Baden/Württemberg awarded the Prevention Prize of the Year 2001 to the municipality that had the most “red cards” (read: expulsions) against violent men in a nationwide municipal prevention project. With the current wording of Section 31 Paragraph 2, the canton of Aargau could play a good role in similar competitions in the future.

Furthermore, the 20 days in paragraph 3 are of course also a deadline that does not arise from objective necessity, but only from the slowness of the courts, which are supposed to decide on further protective measures. But as a result, a measure of averting danger and crisis intervention coldly becomes a real sanction, a kind of “suspicious punishment”, the prerequisites of which, as I said, are completely flimsy and the determination of which does not satisfy the principles of the rule of law, especially with regard to what is easily possible at any time Consequence of police custody in accordance with Section 36 to enforce the measure.

The second danger, the potential for abuse, arises from the first. At the time, an expert described the Violence Protection Act as a “first strike weapon” during the hearing before the Legal Affairs Committee of the German Bundestag. One cannot imagine a more appropriate formulation and it also applies to the stricter regulations on expulsions. Once an expulsion has been issued, even if the allegations turn out to be unfounded in later proceedings and even if no further protective orders are issued by the courts, this will have an indicative effect on all family court and civil court proceedings that may already be pending or standing in the room. Questions of custody and access rights, questions of maintenance and the disposal of the apartment, all of these existentially crucial questions are brought into an “aura” by an expulsion and/or a possible criminal complaint, in which the vague legal terms present there - as before especially that of the “best interests of the child” – can be interpreted in such a way that the accused man no longer has a chance of getting justice.

This indicative long-distance effect of first-strike weapons is already known from simple reports of bodily harm, which are always taken very seriously when a woman files them against a man, with the result, for example, that the children are initially with their mother, and even if so If the proceedings are stopped after a long time, the father's long absence creates facts that the family courts then use accordingly.

The way Section 31 Paragraph 2 is formulated in the draft, it can be seen as an invitation to use a first-strike weapon with ease. Who would want to decide whether a woman is threatened with psychological or structural violence if she says so in tears and on record, because she doesn't need “proof”, for example in the form of a medical certificate. The consequences of psychological and structural violence cannot be seen. From a feminist perspective, every woman lives in a state of structural violence under the conditions of patriarchy. And if in doubt, there are of course doctors who will certify everything the patient wants. Incidentally, it should also be borne in mind that psychological and structural violence does not pose an immediate "danger" in the same way as physical violence - for example from a rowdy drunk with a weapon - i.e. in such cases it is far more proportionate and it is reasonable to wait for an expedited judicial review and a corresponding court order.

For these reasons, it seems very questionable whether a regulation like Section 31 Paragraph 2 does more harm than good. Paragraph 1 is completely sufficient for crisis intervention, especially if it is interpreted in the light of increasing police awareness of the public interest in domestic violence. The expulsion and keeping away is appropriate and sufficiently linked to the serious and immediate danger to other people and this of course also applies in cases of domestic violence. If a special provision such as paragraph 2 is deemed necessary at all, it is in any case urgently necessary to change the provision in the following way: [21]

·        The definition of violence in the regulation must be clearly and unambiguously limited to physical violence

·        A simple threat may not be sufficient; rather, within the meaning of Section 31 Paragraph 1, a “serious and immediate” threat of physical violence must be made credible, usually through traces or clear evidence from previous cases

·        The accused must be expressly guaranteed a fair hearing

·        The general authorization “…and take the measures necessary to enforce the ban” must be deleted without replacement

·        the period of 20 days in paragraph 3 must be reduced to 24 hours

In the medium and long term, it is of course necessary to reduce the structural one-sidedness at the expense of male victims in both law enforcement and aid institutions and at the same time to initiate awareness processes that affect all those involved in the prevention and repression of domestic violence to raise awareness that domestic violence is not a male phenomenon but a human phenomenon and that victims of domestic violence are not only women and men, but above all children. But that won't be easy.

 

---

[1] See Michael Bock : Report on the draft of a law to improve civil court protection in the event of acts of violence and stalking as well as to facilitate the transfer of the marital home in the event of separation. Prepared on the occasion of the public hearing in the Legal Affairs Committee of the German Bundestag on Wednesday, June 20, 2001

[2] While the German federal government hardly took any notice of this (cf. the report cited in FN 1, p. 5), an official research report was published in Austria in which the international state of research was taken into account. Cizek , B. et al .: Violence against men. Part III of the Austrian Violence Protection Report from 1998, published by the Federal Ministry for Social Security, Generations and Consumer Protection, Vienna 2002

[3] Instead of many other documents, see Schweikert, B .: Violence is not fate. Initial conditions, practice and options for legal intervention in cases of domestic violence against women, with particular attention to police and civil law powers; Baden-Baden: Nomos 2000

[4] Research continues. Additional confirmation of the previous findings comes from Barbara Krahé: Aggression of men and women in partnerships: differences and parallels, in: Siegfried Lamnek/Manuela Boatcă (eds.): Gender - Violence - Society, Opladen 2003, pp. 369-383 . In addition, more differentiated survey instruments are being developed ( Fals-Stewart, W./Birchler, Gary R./Kelley, L .: The Timeline Followback Spousal Violence Interview to Assess Physical Aggression Between Intimate Partners: Reliability an Validity, in: Journal of Family Violence 2003, pp. 131-141) as well as different types of partner violence (Ridley, Carl A./Feldman, Clyde M.: Female Domestic Violence Toward Male Partners: Exploring Conflict Responses and Outcomes, in: Journal of Family Violence 2003, p . 157-169).

[5] Jürgen Gemünden: Violence against men in heterosexual intimate partnerships. A comparison with the topic of violence against women based on a critical evaluation of empirical studies; Marburg 1996; Straus, Murray A .: The controversy over domestic violence. A methodological, theoretical, and sociology of scientific analysis; in: Arriaga XB & Oskamp S. (Eds.): Violence in intimate relationships, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage 1999, pp. 17-44; Tjaden, Patricia; Thoennes, Nancy : Full Report of the Prevalence, Incidence and Consequences of Violence Against Women, National Institute of Justice, US Department of Justice 2000; Lenz, H.-J./Meier, C. (Ed.): Male victim experiences. Documentation of a conference of the Tutzing Evangelical Academy from March 1st to 3rd, 2002 in Heilsbronn (Tutzinger Materials No. 88), Tutzing 2002; Sticher-Gil, B .: Violence against men in the domestic sphere – a neglected problem!? Contributions from Department 3 of the University of Applied Sciences for Administration and Justice (Police Enforcement Service), Issue 35, Berlin 2003; various contributions in Siegfried Lamnek/Manuela Boatcă (eds.): Gender – Violence – Society, Opladen 2003

[6] Archer, John : Sex differences in aggression between heterosexual partners: A meta-analytic review; Psychological Bulletin 2000, pp. 651-680

[7] Archer (like FN 6 ), tables 3 and 6 on pp. 657 and 660

[8] Archer (same as FN 6 ), tables 4, 5 and 7 on pp. 658, 659 and 661

[9] Evidence in Archer (like FN 6 ), pp. 653f.

[10] Detailed, also controversial, discussion of these questions and numerous other evidence in the literature specified in FN 5.

[11] Hagemann-White, C .: European Research on the Prevalence of Violence Against Women, in: Violence Against Women 2001, pp. 732-759

[12] However, see the qualitative study by Schenk, S .: Violence against men in heterosexual relationships – patterns of interpretation and processing; Pedagogical diploma thesis at the University of Münster in 2002. Experts are eagerly awaiting the results of the study on violence against men commissioned by the relevant German ministry.

[13] Particular attention should be paid here to the statements made by authors working in therapy, for example in the volume by Lenz, H.-J./Meier, C. (Ed.): Male victim experiences. Documentation of a conference of the Tutzing Evangelical Academy from March 1st to 3rd, 2002 in Heilsbronn (Tutzinger Materials No. 88), Tutzing 2002. See also Heinrich Böll Foundation (ed.): Man or victim? Documentation of a specialist conference on 12/13. October 2001, Berlin 2002.

[14] Kavemann, Barbara: Violence against men – a neglected problem? In: Sticher-Gil (like FN 5 ) p. 42ff.

[15] See FN 14

[16] See FN 5

[17] Similar to Barbara Kavemann (FN), Gloor, Daniela and Meier, Hanna also argue: Men affected by violence - scientific and socio-political insights into a debate, in: Practice of Family Law (FamPra.ch) Issue 3, 2003, p. 526- 547. As far as the political consequences are concerned, the demand remains that the monopoly for financial and other support should be left to women. If anything, additional resources are needed for men, but the facilities for women should under no circumstances be lacking. It is true that comparing the suffering of victims against each other does not lead to anything. This was never my intention, although the two authors unfairly want to push me into this misogynistic corner. Conversely, it remains a morally questionable point of view if you show respect and compassion to male victims, but then essentially say to them that you will only get help if new resources flow, but there is no sharing (p. 546).

[18] H. Hess, S. Scheerer : What is crime? Sketch of a constructivist theory of crime, Criminological Journal 1997, pp. 83-155. The application of this theory to the area of ​​domestic violence brings the labeling approaches back into play, which may have a much greater explanatory potential in the area of ​​gender-specific discrimination than in the area of ​​social or class-specific discrimination, in relation to which they are in-depth but with rather dubious results Success have been empirically verified (cf. Michael Bock: “Of course we take the man with us”. About factual resistance and immunization strategies in domestic violence, in: Siegfried Lamnek, Manuela Boatca (eds.): Gender - Violence - Society, Opladen 2003, pp. 179-194).

[19] According to the well-known New Zealand cohort study, this construct was equally common among men and women as well as among perpetrators and victims of partner violence, see Moffitt, Terrie E./Robins, Richard W./Caspi, A .: A Couples Analysis of Partner Abuse with Implications for Abuse-Prevention Policy, in: Criminology and Public Policy 2001, pp. 5-36

[20] See now Müller, Joachim : Children, women, men - protection from violence without taboos, in: Siegfried Lamnek/Manuela Boatcă (eds.): Gender - Violence - Society, Opladen 2003, pp. 507-532

[21] A new version of § 31 Para. 2 could, at most, if it is not deleted entirely, read: “It can, in particular, be used by persons who are strongly suspected of the repeated use of physical violence against members of the common household or who seriously and directly threaten, physical violence again , to temporarily expel or keep away from the shared premises. The accused person can be heard .”