Female-On-Male Violence: Medical Responses and Popular Imagination

Abstract

In June 2006, the Sunday Times featured an article entitled ‘“Ladette” Scots take it out on their men’ (Macaskill, 2006). The thrust of this article was that female Scottish students were particularly prone to assaulting their boyfriends, which the author attributed to ‘rising alcohol and drug use as well as the growth of the “ladette” culture’. Drawing upon research conducted with university students worldwide, the article drew the conclusion that female-on-male violence was as common as male-on-female violence and that feminist researchers had been wrong in pointing out the prevalence of men hitting women. As I will show below, the article quite glaringly misconstrues the Tacts’ it presents in order to profit from the controversies surrounding intimate partner violence by further dividing opinions and thus gaining topicality. What this article and also others like it do, however, is to invest issues such as intimate partner violence with symbolic meaning for society at large and offer the discursive space in and through which such meaning can be inscribed in ‘popular imagination’; that is ‘shared (awareness of) concepts and phenomena in particular populations’ (Petterson, 2002, p. 34). The ramifications of such practices are as huge as they are damaging since people’s knowledge about partner violence is distorted and false stereotypes are reinforced. In order to show how this may also affect the attitudes of people who professionally have to deal with domestic abuse, I complement my discussion of the Sunday Times article with an analysis of an interview narrative from my sample of 20 interviews with general practitioners conducted in Aberdeen in 2000 (Mildorf, 2007). The narrative, admittedly one of the more extreme examples from my corpus because it is biased, depicts a doctor’s personal story of a friend’s experience with violence perpetrated on him by his wife.