She Didn't "Pick Wrong". Society Failed By Creating Millions of Abusive Men.
The scale of the risk means we need to stop blaming women for "ignoring red flags" when men turn out to be controlling and abusive partners
Dr Emma Katz is widely regarded as one the world’s foremost academic experts in her area of research — how coercive control impacts on children and young people.
Emma specializes in the harms caused by father-perpetrated coercive control, as well as children’s and mothers’ resistance and recovery. Read more in her book Coercive Control in Mothers’ and Children’s Lives, published by Oxford University Press.
There is no end to the horrible victim-blaming things that people say about how domestic abuse victims-survivors should have “seen the signs” and “got out sooner”:
“She should have seen red flags earlier”
“She should have left at the first sign”
“She should have chosen better”
As someone who has researched domestic abuse for many years as a university academic, I don’t believe these ways of thinking are correct or helpful.
In fact, I wish we could dump them all and never think of any of them again.
In this post, I’m going to explain what’s wrong with these kinds of responses and what we should be saying instead. This post is free to read, so share it far and wide.
Domestic abuse perpetrators — the numbers are massive, the scale is vast
Most of the ways that societies encourage people to think about domestic violence and abuse come from the wrong perspective.
People are encouraged to scrutinise and blame individual victims, rather than looking at how our societies are set up in ways that are creating far too many perpetrators.
As you might be able to tell, I’m a sociologist by training. This is really useful to me (and hopefully to you too), because it enables me to break out of looking at what individual victims-survivors did or didn’t do, and to instead explore the social problems that are fuelling domestic abuse and shaping the options that people have available to them.
Our societies create vast amounts of people (the large majority of them men) who want to coercively control and domestically abuse their partners and families in ways that are incredibly harmful.
So, how many perpetrators are out there?
Our societies typically don’t like to collect data on the numbers of coercive control or domestic violence and abuse perpetrators within populations. Statistics are almost always victim-focused. We know that around 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 women are subjected to domestic abuse in their lifetimes. That’s a huge number of victims-survivors. This tells us that domestic abuse is incredibly common.
What we don’t usually know – because we don’t make an effort to find out – is how many men are perpetrating all of this domestic abuse against women. (Though the large majority of perpetrators are men, women can also experience intimate partner domestic abuse from other women, and from people of diverse gender identities.)
In fact, when I recently Googled “how many male perpetrators of domestic abuse are there?”, most of the search results that came back were about the numbers of male victims of domestic abuse, not male perpetrators.
However, rare bits of research do provide some clues.