Battered Woman Syndrome Research Paper

Domestic violence is has always been a prevalent part of society, but has increased over the years at an alarming rate. A study by the American Medical Association has found that between 8 and 12 million women alone in the United States are at risk of being abused by their current or former partners, either physically, mentally or sexually, causing a residual affect onto their families (4). Battered men exist as well, but are often ignored and treated as skepticism because of the tropes applied to men because women are seen as being naturally weaker than them due to sex roles. The children of these battered families, whether witnesses of the abuse or unwilling victims, seemingly suffer the worst fate as they struggle to prosper in an environment …show more content…
I hypothesized that men aren’t brought up on the issue of domestic violence and battery is because they would experience it far less than women. There is also the stigma of being a man in that he can never express his true feelings or experiences, and that it makes him a man to simply bottle them up and never discuss them, thinking it that would represent him as being strong to never let anything affect him. During my research, I was proven right about my prediction, as many instances of woman on man abuse are mocked and joked about, such as in comic strip newspapers and satirical articles, which I know would be called egregious if a woman was a victim in the exact same setting. There is a historical record of men being ridiculed for “letting” their wives beat them; in 18th century France, a battered husband was forced to wear an embarrassing outfit and ride backwards around his village on a donkey (Steinmetz 499). I also found that the reason researchers and people in charge of these types of studies do not investigate husband abuse is because of the general consensus that it was only a rare occurrence. Through police reports filed for domestic violence, it was found that 7 percent of wives and 0.6 percent of males would be victims of severe physical abuse by their spouse (Steinmetz 501). A survey of husbands concluded that the stigma I recognized of a man “being a man” factored into whether a man would file a report on his wife or even confide in someone outside the relationship. Other reasons are based on institutionalized stereotypes, such as women expecting to be more verbal and men, and men more prone to use physical force to assert their dominance. This goes hand in hand of men generally being physically