Explaining Symmetry Across Sex in Intimate Partner Violence: Evolution, Gender Roles, and the Will to Harm

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is regarded by key stakeholders involved in shaping arrest and intervention policies as a gendered problem. The prevailing assumptions guiding these policies, centered on patriarchal social structures and men's motivation to dominate their female partners, have collectively been called the gender paradigm. When states started to enact laws against domestic violence in the late 1970s, it was due to the efforts of battered women and their allies, including second wave feminists fighting for the political, social, and economic advancement of women. The focus was on life-threatening forms of abuse in which women represented, and continue to represent, the much larger share of victims. Since then, IPV has been found to be a more complex problem than originally framed, perpetrated by women as well as men, driven by an assortment of motives, and associated with distal and proximate risk factors that have little to do with gender. Nonetheless, the gender paradigm persists, with public policy lagging behind the empirical evidence. The author suggests some reasons why this is so, among them the much higher rates of violent crimes committed by men, media influence and cognitive biases, political factors, and perpetuation of the very sex-role stereotypes that feminists have sought to extinguish in every other social domain. He then critically reviews two theories used in support of the paradigm, sexual selection theory and social role theory, and explores how empirically driven policies would more effectively lower IPV rates in our communities, while advancing core feminist principles.