ISSUE: Domestic violence

OUR VIEW: Male victims, female victims, no winners

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Around the state and nation, officials will proclaim the need for real awareness of the violence that increasingly accounts for killings and injuries.

In May 2007, the Centers for Disease Control published its latest study, which found almost a fourth of relationships have violence. No wonder police are kept so busy with calls to residences where violence is the order of the day or night.

Citizens by and large deduce that women are the primary victims -- and that remains true. But in solving the problem of domestic violence, there must be realism about its nature.

The same CDC study concludes that in about half of the cases, the violence is reciprocal between a man and woman. That's not hard to believe in examining police incident reports, where woman most times do the reporting as a victim but in which men frequently state they were attacked during the incident as well.

What surprised CDC researchers even more was that "in non-reciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70 percent of the cases," and men incurred significant injuries.

The CDC's Web site also cites data showing: "In the United States every year, about 1.5 million women and more than 800,000 men are raped or physically assaulted by an intimate partner," and 24 percent of intimate partner homicide victims were male.

Experts have expressed concern that male victims have been unfairly ignored because of gender-driven politics and that this contributes to the intergenerational cycle of domestic violence. When male victims are ignored or just "take it," their children suffer long-term damage by the exposure and are more likely to commit the violence as adults.

Some blame the media for ignoring violence against males and the reciprocal nature of violence in relationships. Domestic violence is framed as "battered women" or as primarily a male crime. The media say "men and women" when covering soldiers or firefighters; should it not do the same for male domestic violence victims?

As Dear Abby said, "Domestic violence is a human problem, not a gender problem."

A human problem indeed -- and one that needs addressing consistently by a society that has made home too violent a place. Beyond statistics, it seems logical that both men and women are guilty in many instances. That is not to undersell the reality, however, of the majority of cases involving women being battered.

It's not a pretty picture either way, nor when the violence is reciprocal. Everyone loses.

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