An Explorative Integration of Factors Causing Men’s Violence against Women

Abstract

The United Nations [1] estimates that one in three women has been beaten or sexually abused in their lifetime and that this violence against women (VAW) is present in both highly developed and less developed countries. While men's VAW is one of our greatest social problems, research on VAW is generally polarized. Psychological research tends to explain violence at the individual level and, therefore, does not explain the social contexts that make violence acceptable to some groups. Meanwhile, feminist-oriented masculinity, based on patriarchal theory and structural relationships, theory can, in some forms, explain the power-relations that induce men to act violently. Yet, without a psychological perspective, we cannot explain why only some men are violent. Within feminist research, the sociological tradition has often emphasized socialization processes that make violence acceptable. Again, without a psychological perspective, however, we cannot explain why some men are violent and others are not; and without a power perspective from masculinity studies, we cannot explain how the underlying mechanisms make such socialization possible. Consequently, Brownridge [2] concludes that despite extensive research, there is currently no single theory that can explain men's VAW. According to Dutton [3,4], the lack of integration between approaches may be due to the fact that feminist scholars-while acknowledging that their research is not monolithic-have mainly studied power and macro-structures and as such have tended to delineate themselves from psychological research that examines offenders suffering from psychological disorders, attachment disorders and shame sensitivity. According to Jordan (2009), those few attempts at integrating research traditions suffer from the fact that they remain disconnected from one other when conducting empirical research. This in turn makes it difficult to unite the different perspectives. Many scholars believe, therefore, that despite great progress in individual disciplines, men's VAW remains as an intractable social problem that requires new approaches that can bridge the lack of integration between disciplines and achieve greater progress in reducing men's VAW. This theoretical work aims to develop new knowledge about how to unite the psychological research (that studies violent men's childhood, the sociological perspective (that studies socialization experiences) with the feminist-oriented masculinity research (that studies how VAW contributes to the reproduction of patriarchal and hegemonic masculinity power structures). This work only study factors that are possible to influence by social interventions and prevention. Genetic, neurochemical and bio-psychiatric factors are therefore excluded. VAW comprises in this paper, only emotional/reactive violence and violence influenced by patriarchal gender constructs. The typologies used here are abstractions and are used as a heuristic device to generate hypotheses that are intended to become concrete in a later research application. Abstr...

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