I've talked many times in the past about why and how the way we talk about domestic violence is ineffective and biased. In particular, about how the type of violence traditionally imagined when you consider domestic violence is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men and self-defensive violence is overwhelmingly perpetrated by women. About the issues with the commonly used and widely criticized conflict tactics scale and how current self-defense laws are biased against women. (Posts: one, two, three.)
I also want to address the common MRA talking point, that if women "want equality" then "men should get to hit women". Even ignoring the intensely patriarchal perspective that violence is something we should strive for rather than abolish, this belief is predicated on misunderstandings (or misrepresentations) of self-defense law and the physical differences between men and women.
To start with, we should have to understand what aspects make violence self-defensive.
To use my previous explanation:
Many systems will only categorize something as self-defense if the threat is immediate and the response proportional. This makes sense when you have two similar individuals. For example, consider the situation where two men get in an argument at a bar. The first man punches the other, who punches back and accidentally kills the first (head injuries are unpredictable!). This would be considered self-defense because the threat was immediate (present physical violence) and the response proportional (a punch in response to a punch). In contrast, if the second man had used a broken bottle to stab the first man (disproportionate response due to use of a weapon) or waited for later and attacked the first man as he left the bar (non-immediate threat), the act would no longer be considered self-defense.
In other words, if you can walk away from the situation without needing to employ violence, then that isn't self-defense – it's retaliatory violence. If you escalate the situation and use more force than necessary (e.g., a weapon), then that also isn't considered self-defense.
In general these standards are reasonable (e.g., it would be unreasonable and ill-advised to allow for continual escalation). Unfortunately, the way these requirements are implemented is discriminatory against women in at least two ways.
This discrimination is the result of one essential fact, women and men have substantially different physical capabilities. This necessarily means that, on average, a "fair" fight between a man and a woman is not truly fair. Women, on average, are smaller and have less physical strength than men. A woman who hits a man is unlikely to cause injury, a man who hits a women is unlikely to not cause injury. This difference is illustrated in the vastly different injury rates and severity for women and men as a result of domestic violence (see linked posts).
And men understand this difference. It's why they divide their combat sports into weight classes, because they know perfectly well that a fight between two people with a fifty-plus pound weight difference is not fair. It's only when they start advocating for their "right" to hit women that they seem to "forget".
The first issue with "equality of violence" is that female victims of domestic violence are unable to defend themselves in an immediate and proportional manner. A woman who is beaten by her husband cannot defend herself using only her hands, any more than an 100-pound average-strength man could defend himself from a 200-pound weight-lifter.
Women’s self-defense is often “disproportionate” (e.g., her husband has a history of severely beating her and is about to do so again, she takes a knife from the kitchen and stabs him) or in response to a “non-immediate threat” (e.g., a women has tried leaving her abusive husband but has received no help from family or the authorities, realizing she cannot escape him while he’s alive, she shoots her husband while he sleeps). In both these cases, the woman has killed her abuser, but this may not be considered self-defense by the legal system or research studies.
Failing to consider women's differing physical capacities in legal self-defense cases is a form of legal discrimination against women. These women are responding to an immediate threat, it just that this immediate threat has been ongoing for years (or more). And they are using a proportional degree of force, it's just that in order to achieve this proportionality they must employ some sort weapons/equalizer.
This applies even to less extreme cases. Take the following example: A women and her husband are in an argument, it has not turned physical yet but has in the past. The woman tries to leave the conversation by walking away, but her husband follows her to continue the argument. He blocks the doorway to the room so she can't leave and crowds her personal space to intimidate her. In response, she shoves him away from her and tries to leave the house.
This situation, had it been reported to the police, would have recorded the woman as the primary aggressor, because she was the one to "make it physical". These sorts of conceptualizations ignore threats of implied violence and previous violent history, and inflate women's "perpetration" statistics. In reality, the woman was responding to an implied threat of violence in the last way available to her.
This example, leads into the second issue with "equality of violence". Many men's rights activists argue they should be "allowed" to shove the woman back (or to punch a woman after she hits him). Aside from the aforementioned misrepresentation of the woman's violence as aggressive rather than defensive, this also ignores the fact that the husband shoving his wife would have been retaliatory, not defensive. In particular, there is no immediate threat to the man (i.e., he could leave the situation without any risk to his/someone else's personal safety), therefore his violence cannot be considered defensive.
This often applies even in situations where a woman may be considered the first aggressor. For example, consider this example: A man and his girlfriend are in an argument, which is getting increasingly heated and caustic. After a remark from the man, the girlfriend slaps him, which, given her average level of strength, upsets but does not injure him. He slaps her back, which, given his average level of strength, results in minor injury (e.g., a black eye/split lip).
In this situation, despite the fact that the woman hit first, the man's violence was still not defensive. Why? First, because he was in no immediate danger. He could have walked away with no threat of danger; his decision to hit her back was motivated by a desire to "get even" not a need to protect himself or anyone else. In addition, despite using the same "type" of force (e.g., bare hand, similar action) which would likely be considered legally proportionate, his response was not truly proportionate because he is capable of employing substantially greater force – and causing greater injury – than his girlfriend.
And please note, I'm not suggesting that it was "okay" for the woman to hit her boyfriend. When possible, walking away from a situation and/or deescalating it is the wiser, safer, and (usually) more ethical decision.
I am suggesting that our legal and social conception of self defense desperately needs to take this sort of physical disparity into account. This isn’t even purely a male-female issue. The same physical differences that place women at a disadvantage in physical confrontations with men also apply to children (against adults), some disabled men (against non-disabled men), some disabled women (against non-disabled women), and others. Failing to consider these differentials is a form of legal discrimination against the vulnerable.
In conclusion, I often see the first issue (i.e., the fact that women's defensive violence is often not considered as such by the legal system) brought up in feminist spaces, but, surprisingly to me, I rarely see the second issue (i.e., the fact that an "equal" level of violence from a man is often not truly defensive) mentioned.
In summary, the legal definitions of "proportionate" and "immediate" in the conception of self defense is discriminatory against women because:
Women are, on average, not capable of applying the same degree of force with the same means as men. This means that, in order to protect themselves from male violence, they may be forced to (legally speaking) escalate the situation so as to escape or avoid threats to themselves.
Correspondingly, men are, on average, capable of employing a much greater degree of force (and causing injury) while still being legally considered proportional. As a result, "proportional" violence from men is often much greater and more dangerous than the violence employed by women.
The requirement for an "immediate" threat is often used to illegitimatize women's escapes from long term abusers, and simultaneously justify men's use of violence in situations that don't actually require them to employ violence to leave.
All in all, these factors legitimize men's retaliatory violence against women as "defensive", and rejects women's defensive violence against their male abusers as "preemptive".
