Male Violence towards Women

Advances in understanding male violence towards women will be welcomed by psychohistorians. Male wishes to control and punish women, for reasons generally unknown to themselves, need elucidating before larger questions about marital and social disorder can be accurately posed. While perhaps only three to four percent of males do enough violence to their wives and partners to come before the legal system, the problem is on such a broad scale that study of any segment of it is important. Donald Dutton’s study is of abusers he calls “cyclical,” that is, they batter repeatedly after intervals of contrition and making up. They are not men usually associated with violence, and indeed their assaults seem out of character.