Counting slaps equally obscures coercive-control contexts in domestic violence

Evidence

The most sustained and technically sophisticated critique came from feminist researchers in the domestic violence field — specifically from Liz Kelly, Mildred Pagelow, and later Michael Johnson at Penn State — who argued that the CTS’s behavioral-count approach undercounted the severity and context of domestic violence against women. Counting the number of times a husband hit his wife and the number of times a wife hit her husband and comparing the counts, the critics argued, obscured the fundamentally different contexts of the violence: the husband’s hitting occurs in a context of ongoing coercive control; the wife’s hitting is typically defensive or retaliatory. — , The Rod and the Child, 9780

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the feminist critique that measurement shapes what is seen, and Johnson’s typology of intimate partner violence. — connects to: Being struck by a parent binds multiple threat cues into one amygdala fear memory — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 6108; Procedural regulation of birching normalized rather than mitigated its violence — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 9128