NCJ Number
154216
Journal
Journal of Family Violence Volume: 10 Issue: 1 Dated: (March 1995) Pages: 55-71
Date Published
1995
Length
17 pages
Annotation
The association between verbal aggression and woman battering in marriage was examined using narrative accounts from 20 couples in which the woman was the victim and the man was the perpetrator of assault or aggravated assault.
Abstract
Interviews aimed at understanding the social-psychological process of the violent act from several perspectives: male perpetrator, female victim, and the marriage environment. Specific study objectives were to describe the marital act of woman battering and to understand how the involved individuals made sense of this act. In 18 of the 20 cases, informants described the prehistory of violence as a verbal fight, the basic message of which was to communicate worthlessness. Men said they used violence to stop the verbal fight or employed violence as part of the verbal fight to communicate worthlessness. The clear and chronologically close relationship between verbal aggression and physical violence was lacking in two cases. In these two cases, men used violence to revenge themselves for injustices they suffered earlier at the hands of the women in the marriage. The analysis did not support the general notion that battering men had difficulty in expressing themselves verbally and therefore started hitting when the words stopped coming. Male use of physical violence toward the wife placed the marriage in danger. Women who extricated themselves from violent relationships did so slowly over a protracted period of time. During the course of the study, eight of the women left their husbands, one of them after 17 years of abuse. 20 references