Abusive women focus of awareness seminar

Psychology professor explains that females are equally as violent

Women who abuse men was the subject of a Wednesday seminar on domestic abuse at Cal State Long Beach.

The seminar, entitled "Spouse Abuse: Violent Women, Battered Men," was presented in LA2-109 and was sponsored by the University Scholars Program.

CSULB psychology Professor Martin Fiebert presented studies and surveys that suggest women can be just as violent in domestic relationships as men.

"The media has seeped into our culture a viewpoint that women are primarily the victims and men are the perpetrators," Fiebert said. "Women have co-opted the victim status in most violent domestic situations. There is not a permitted balance for men to be the victim, due to societal views that men are stronger than women."

Fiebert used soap operas as an example of how the industry portrays women as victims. Soaps often show a woman slapping a man, he said, which is more socially acceptable than a man slapping a woman.

Associate Professor Patricia Rozee of psychology disagreed with Fiebert's viewpoint that women are equally as violent as men. "There is absolutely no evidence to show that women initiate violence at an equal rate as men do," Rozee said.

Rozee said that battered men represent a small number of the overall cases of domestic violence between couples. The outcomes are very different when a man hits a woman, than when a woman hits a man, she said.

"There is no data that there are large numbers of battered men," Rozee said.

For every study Fiebert cited, Rozee said, there are dozens of studies that show the opposite.

The studies cited by Fiebert were conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health in 1975 and 1985, which found that women are similar to men in using violence in domestic relationships, but there are also studies that suggest women initiate violence at a slightly lower percentage than men.