Violence against women in intimate relations: A contrast of five theories
| Author | Ana Safranoff,Jorge Rodríguez-Menés |
| Published date | 01 November 2012 |
| Date | 01 November 2012 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1477370812453410 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Journal of Criminology
9(6) 584 –602
© The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/1477370812453410
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Violence against women in
intimate relations: A contrast
of five theories
Jorge Rodríguez-Menés and Ana Safranoff
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Abstract
This paper explores the correlates of violence against women in intimate relations. Using data
from a large victimization survey, we assess five theoretical explanations based on patterns of
association between violence and key attitudinal and socio-demographic variables: sexism, family
violence, dependency, exchange and status inconsistency. We conclude that status inconsistency,
understood as a complex multidimensional theory of patriarchy that integrates core elements
of other theories, offers the best explanation. Women’s odds of suffering violence are higher
if they have sexist partners, are disempowered or have higher statuses than their partners.
Disempowered women have fewer resources to oppose the sexist culture on which violence
breeds. Women with elevated statuses defy men’s dominance. Violence is intrinsic to a patriarchal
system of power that fosters sexism and manifests violently when women are vulnerable or
challenge men’s statuses.
Keywords
Violence against women, sexism, family violence, patriarchy, status inconsistency, Multiple
Correspondence Analysis, logistic regression
Introduction
We aim to explore the correlates of physically threatening abuse, or violence, on women
in intimate relations. We assess the validity of five theories that explain it: sexism, family
violence, dependency, exchange and status inconsistency. The five theories cannot be
found in pure form anywhere, for they overlap, making it difficult to contrast them
directly. However, by identifying their core elements and assumptions, we raise several
Corresponding author:
Jorge Rodríguez-Menés, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Department of Political and Social Sciences, Jaume I Bldg
Ramon Trias Fargas 25-27, Barcelona, 08005, Spain.
Email: jorge.rodriguez@upf.edu
453410EUC9610.1177/1477370812453410European Journal of CriminologyRodríguez-Menés and Safranoff
2012
Article
Rodríguez-Menés and Safranoff 585
testable hypotheses that facilitate the comparison. We test them with data from a large
victimization survey and logistic regression analysis, using several indicators developed
to operationalize the concepts of violence and its correlates. The results give more cre-
dence to status inconsistency, understood as a complex theory of patriarchy, than to other
theories, providing a coherent model of the risk factors associated with violence against
women in intimate relations.
Five theoretical approaches to explaining violence on
women in intimate relations
There are five main theoretical streams on intimate partners’ violence against women.
Three of them, sexism, family violence and dependency theories, identify absolute fea-
tures pertaining to couples’ members or their family units as predictors of violence, while
the other two, exchange and status inconsistency theories, concentrate on relational
aspects of the couple. Whereas sexism is fundamentally a ‘cultural’ approach, family
violence is closer to the ‘economic’ pole. Dependency, exchange and status inconsist-
ency theories include both cultural and economic elements. Along with sexism, the three
emphasize the role of patriarchy in fostering violence against women, although each
conceptualizes it differently. All five theories are probabilistic: the factors identified as
being associated with violence are treated as risk factors increasing the probability of
observing it. Women’s lives are too complex to be completely explained by any theoreti-
cal model. The assumption is that any omitted factors would cancel each other, having no
systematic effect on violence.
The sexism perspective can be traced back to Dobash and Dobash’s (1979) early femi-
nist work on wife beating. Like other feminists, sexism scholars contend that the ultimate
reason explaining women’s violence in intimate relations is asymmetric relations of
power between men and women within patriarchal societies (Dobash and Dobash, 1979;
Yllo, 1993). Violence is the most extreme expression of patriarchy, understood in this
approach as a sexist cultural system of domination subjugating women to men: directly,
through cultural norms of deference and obedience backed if necessary by the use of
force; or indirectly, by shaping women’s opportunities and constraints in basic institu-
tions such as the family and work that reinforce women’s subordination (Kim and Sung,
2000). The key variable is sexism, portrayed as a ‘quasi-necessary’,1 if possibly non-
sufficient, condition to observe violence. By quasi-necessary, we mean that sexism is
seen as an exogenous causal factor in a predictive and probabilistic model that does not
in any sense imply inevitability in social life. By non-sufficient, we mean that there may
be other endogenous factors – women’s socio-economic dependence, family’s stressful
conditions, partner’s substance abuse, etc. – that specify the conditions leading to an
intimate partner’s violence, but that require sexism to operate exogenously. As Anderson
(1997) states, this has led non-feminist researchers to claim that ‘feminist scholars
employ single variable analyses that concentrate on patriarchy and ignore the impact of
factors such as income, unemployment and age’. For these critics, feminists’ emphasis
on patriarchy is one-dimensional and simplistic (Dutton, 2006; Gelles, 1985). Others
regard the criticism as unfair, for it does not recognize that feminist scholars have moved
away from treating sexism as the only relevant exogenous variable towards integrating it
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