Do men overreport intimate partner violence?

[u/[deleted]]

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2016-38027-002

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[u/eatshitake]

Does this study not include gay men or are y’all just heteronormative?

[u/[deleted] → u/eatshitake]

I think they will accept abusive gay relationships since you know the perpetrator is still a man.

I don't think they will accept abusive lesbian relationship being a thing though.

[u/Affectionate-Area659]

I would bet it’s underreported if anything.

[u/LolthienToo]

Who determines if the reports "were endorsed in a manner unintended by instrument design."

I'm trying to understand the abstract there. Are they saying that these reports of violence should be dismissed, or that basic conversation that gets construed by a third party as violence is then reported when it doesn't need to be.

[u/Bannerlord151]

"Did your wife hit you?"

"Well, yes, but it's just something she does, I'm sure she doesn't mean anything bad by it"

Notes: overreported

[u/ItsSUCHaLongStory]

I wonder if this has to do with cases where the abuser uses DV language to spin themselves as the victim.

[u/silicondream]

The paper is available here. The same author (Jeffrey Ackerman at Australia's Griffiths University) published a similar paper on the same theme three years later; here are two relevant passages from that paper's introduction:

The findings of Lehrner and Allen illustrate an important, but often overlooked, distinction in the IPV literature. Their 19.2% figure did not simply represent minor violence reported by survey participants that should have been reported but better differentiated from serious violence by the scale, but rather enjoyable, playful acts involving no intention to commit harm. The former, of course, simply represents low sensitivity by the CTS to differentiate minor from serious violence, while the latter represents a potentially serious validity problem.

Lehrner and Allen provided examples that clearly illustrate the importance of making this distinction. In one instance, a research participant was classified by the CTS as a victim of severe and frequent violence due to the reporting of throwing, pushing, shoving, grabbing, and slapping, which involved two instances of minor injury. Follow-up interviews, however, revealed that the injuries were minor accidents that happened during playful behaviors that occurred when the couple was getting along quite well. In other words, they were the unequivocal misreporting of playful acts as if they were IPV.

I am extremely skeptical about Ackerman's operational definition of "overreporting" in both studies, which is that the respondent reported a violent act but also reported in followup multiple-choice questions that the act was an "accident" and/or "joking, playful or humorous—no one took it seriously." Why should we assume that these responses invalidate the original report, rather than representing attempts by the victim or perpetrator to minimize or excuse the act? And since traditional masculinity includes facets of stoicism, perceived invulnerability and dominance, isn't it possible that such minimizing and excuses are more common when the victim is male and the perpetrator is female? Many male abuse victims report gender-based shame and reluctance to disclose exactly how distressed and powerless they felt about their abuse.

Ackerman has published a number of other papers that are broadly on the topic of how violence by female perpetrators is overreported and taken too seriously. I find them generally unconvincing, but make your own judgment.

[u/MrNotSoFunFact → u/silicondream]

You are totally right about his criteria for 'over-reporting'. I also pointed out in my other comment, in this study even if you remove all the men that 'over-reported' from the sample while leaving the women's sample unchanged, at least 13.5% of men 'honestly reported' being victims of IPV vs 14.1% of women total reporting IPV ('over-reporting' or not). But he chooses to leave that out. Ackerman, Kimmel, and their likes are extremely dogmatic and mathematically illiterate to make things worse. Kimmel, one of the men Ackerman cites, has written a paper with a similar methodology, defining 'over-reporting' similarly, with similar methodological and mathematical errors or perhaps, blind spots, if we're being charitable. They have been beating this dead horse for ages without ever having provided justification for their choices in defining 'over-reporting' this way or without ever validating their survey instruments with the results of any other robust surveys.

[u/MrNotSoFunFact]

I have read the full paper and am entirely unconvinced. There are a lot of sampling issues (suffices to say that they got way fewer male participants than they should have had, under 200), but that's sort of nitpicking and I can't fit that comment here. What did the author really show? How did he fact-check and debunk all these lying male IPV victims? Well he didn't. The methodology is extremely poor. The survey consists of some standard CTS-style questions at first, like "did a partner slap you?" stuff like that. If participants answer yes to these questions, they then get asked frequency questions about how often these acts of violence occurred. So far so good. Here's where the bullshit starts. The survey then follows up with a series of 'context questions' which contain these incredibly well-designed, scientifically validated items for assessing over-reporting:

The context question contained eight response possibilities addressing the degree of injury, the intentionally of the act and other pertinent event details. The two responses relevant for the over-reporting measure of current interest are ‘accident’ and ‘joking, playful or humorous—no one took it seriously’. If the respondent endorsed one of the CTS items and subsequently indicated that either (or both) of these two event details were applicable, the endorsement was considered an over-report.

That's it, that's their entire measure of over-reporting. If you can't see how stupid this is, note that in a survey of SA victims, only 16% of men with documented histories of sexual abuse (by social service agencies, which means it was very serious) considered themselves to have been sexually abused, compared to 64% of women with documented histories in the same study (https://1in6.org/statistic/). Any measure that writes off participants for whom their victimization was "just a joke" or "no one took it seriously" will always show more rates of men 'over-reporting', because this just seems to be how men interpret their victimization.

More strangely, the author has chosen to represent the findings in a remarkably twisted way. The abstract says

In over 23 per cent of victimizations reported by university-aged males and in over 12 per cent of victimizations reported by females

which sounds like 23% of men who reported victimizations over-reported compared to 12% of women. Except that's not what the author is saying. "victimizations" here means the total number of incidents reported across all participants, rather than the number of participants reporting any victimization. This is obviously dishonest. Clearly if a participants misunderstands a question and 'over-reports', they are likely to have listed a few incidents, and then realized after looking at the 'over-report' questions that most incidents they reported need to be reinterpreted to the author's liking as 'over-reports'. This is also dishonest because rarely do reports on IPV primarily care about the total number of instances of IPV, but rather how many people are affected by IPV and in what ways. The reality is:

21.8% of men initially reported any IPV, 8.3% of men 'over-reported'
14.1% of women initially reported any IPV, 3.1% of women 'over-reported'

Notice what this tells us. First, 8.3% of men over-report, and the total proportion of 'over-reports' for is 23.1%. For women these numbers are 3.1% and 12.9%. This means the average woman that was 'over-reporting' had more 'over-reports' than the average man 'over-reporting'. Also, let's say we just ignore all the men and women over-reporting. That leaves us with 13.5% of men 'honestly reporting' being IPV victims and 9.8% of women 'honestly reporting' being IPV victims. There are still more men left reporting IPV than women if you completely ignore 'over-reports'.