Wife Abuse and Other Forms of Aggression

• NCJ Number: 72988
• Journal: Victimology Volume: 4 Issue: 1 Dated: (1979) Pages: 46-59
• Author(s): W T Masumura
• Date Published: 1979
• Length: 14 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Survey (Cross-Cultural)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Revised version of a paper presented at the 1977 annual meeting of the Southern California Academy of Science in Pomona, California.

Annotation

This cross-cultural survey, employing a worldwide sample of 86 primitive societies, finds physical mistreatment of wives to be significantly correlated with other forms of violence.

Abstract

The following cross-cultural codes (the variables of cross-cultural surveys) dealing with aggression were used: personal crime, the Aggression Index, murder, suicide, feuding, warfare, theft, and wife abuse. Data from the work of various comparativists were used for the first seven variables, although wife abuse was the focus of this research. Marital residence and customary mode of inheritance are additional societal traits considered because of their relevance to wife abuse. Each society in the sample was coded as to whether wife abuse was 'absent,' 'infrequent,' or 'common' in that society. The societies selected were those for which violence-related coding already existed and for which primary ethnographic information relating to wife beating was available through data in the human relations area files. To ensure reliability of study findings, special methods were used to detect cultural diffusion effects and any systematic bias in the ethnographic material. Of the 86 societies in the sample, wife abuse was absent in nine, coded as infrequent in 48, and common in 29. Intercorrelations among the eight aggression codes showed that wife abuse covaries significantly with theft, personal crime, the Aggression Index, homicide, and feuding. A discussion of possible explanations for these correlations rejects the concepts of built-in correlations, of wife abuse as either the cause or the outcome of other forms of aggression, and of wife beating as part of patrilocal residence and patrilineal inheritance traditions. Instead, it is concluded that various types of aggression are separate manifestations of a sociocultural tendency toward violence. A second plausible explanation is that sexual jealousy may be a major cause of disparate types of aggression. Since these two causal models are not mutually exclusive, both violence proneness and sexual jealousy may be important factors affecting societal rates of wife abuse and other aggressive acts. Tabular data and 30 references are provided.