What about when MOM is the abuser?

I wanted to post some excerpts from a recent study that looked at female same-sex intimate partner violence. This is another one of those topics that is often not talked about or overlooked by many in the domestic violence sector. The study is:







Much if not all of what is said in the following excerpts apply not to just female same-sex but to female - male offenses as well:


The belief that women are innately nonviolent influenced women’s experiences in two important ways. First, it made it difficult for them to recognize IPV in their own intimate relationships with women, and second, it made it difficult for them to find domestic violence services in their communities that met their needs.

Naming the problem. Traditional gender role stereotyping of women as being nonviolent influenced participants’ perceptions of their experiences in relationships. One participant noted,

I think a lot of people are so convinced that girls don’t hit other girls. Basically that women are supposed to be nurturing, and caring, and emotional. And you know, have the whole maternal instinct. And you know, not everybody has that.

Although women were aware that they were having “relationships problems,” the strongly held belief that girls don’t hit other girls interfered with their ability to recognize that their relationships were abusive. The following exemplar from a social worker shows the strong influence that gender role stereotyping had on women’s perceptions:

Participant: Well, I mean, I’ve worked in domestic violence. I worked in a domestic violence shelter for two summers, when I was in college. And so—and I’m a social worker now, so I know that I know intellectually and everything what I’m supposed to know. But at the time I don’t think it would have made a difference. It just didn’t seem like—girls didn’t have domestic violence issues with each other.

Interviewer: You had seen and heard a lot about it, but because you were in a same-sex relationship, it didn’t fit?

Participant: It wasn’t domestic violence to me.


Similar to what occurs in some heterosexual abusive relationships, some women blamed themselves for their relationship problems. The tendency toward self-blame may have contributed to women’s difficulty in viewing their partners as abusive:

When I was with her, I didn’t think of her—I didn’t think it was domestic violence, even when she hit me. I thought it was my fault, and I know that that’s how . . . it is very similar in heterosexual couples where you feel like it is your fault. But I just didn’t think that girls committed domestic violence against each other.

As the above exemplar demonstrates, difficulty identifying FSSIPV occurred even in instances where physical violence occurred. The following exemplar illustrates how gender role stereotyping also influenced women’s perceptions of sexual abuse:

Interviewer: So your boundaries, sexually, were really pushed, with what you were comfortable with?
Participant: Yeah.
Interviewer: Did you ever try to have that conversation with her?
Participant: No—I thought, well, I just thought that it was fine because we were girls, like, and girls don’t hurt each other like that. So I just thought that it was the way it was supposed to be.


FSSIPV challenges dominant gender-based discourses of IPV.

Consistent with findings reported in other studies of FSSIPV, our findings revealed that the hegemony of gender-based analysis of IPV was a barrier to help seeking for many women in our study. One woman noted,

Even the domestic violence community . . . I’ve been through lots of training through work, and it’s always that “Well, it is usually men, it’s usually men” and I even went to one where . . . a domestic violence provider who taught the class said, “Women are not violent.” . . . And so there is the whole domestic violence community saying, “We need to change the men,” . . . and then we pop in and say, “but women are abusing us,” and it’s like, well, that is messing up everything. It’s almost like they don’t want to hear it; they might have to deal with it.


According to this view, two women cannot really hurt one another (Elliot, 1999; Merrill, 1999), in part because violence goes against the grain of women’s nature and in part because women are not big or strong enough to inflict serious harm (McLaughlin & Rozee, 2001). The term cat fight, which surfaced in our interviews more than once, seems to capture the view that women’s violence is somehow less serious than men’s and that women by their very nature are not dangerous:

I think I did start out thinking, “This is a woman, this is like a cat fight, this isn’t abuse” . . . that this couldn’t be two women fighting, couldn’t be scary. . . . In the back of my mind I’m thinking, “A couple of women, how bad could it be?”

Women also reported that when friends witnessed the violence, in some instances they did not take it seriously:

The last time that it happened we were at a bar and it was in public. So people kind of saw what happened and walked by. And that is when I kind of decided that I’d had it. But, um, [her friends] thought it was funny. They were like, “That’s not a big deal, you were just fighting.” . . . They didn’t think it was serious.

In addition to contributing to individual and societal failures to take FSSIPV seriously, the notion of a cat fight appeared to reveal other gender-stereotyped meanings:

Interviewer: Do you think that violence between women is taken seriously?
Participant: Uh, I think that they see it as two women fighting and no big deal. It’s like that real stereotypical “look at those two lesbians going at it, they’re hysterical, can’t control themselves, it’s a cat fight.”

This exemplar illustrates that not only may women’s violence be viewed as being less serious and less deadly than that perpetrated by men but also that traditional stereotypical views of women as being emotional and hysterical are part of the nuanced meanings associated with FSSIPV. The view that FFSIPV is a reflection of women’s hysteria and lack of emotional control no doubt contributes to the tendency to minimize the seriousness of women’s use of violence. Thus, discourses about women fighting women, as captured in the word cat fight, are laced with gender stereotyped conceptions of women’s use of violence as being harmless and, in some cases, funny and entertaining.


What we found in this study is that perpetrators of FSSIPV are aware of the potential for confusion and in many instances, use this to their advantage by playing victim.

The tendency to play victim was particularly pronounced in instances where law enforcement had been called to the scene. Playing victim was an extremely effective technique used by perpetrators to avoid arrest. Knowing the system and knowing “how to play” law enforcement officers were tools that perpetrators used when playing victim:

She knew the system, and you know, the first time I called the police, it was the cast-iron-skillet thing. And I tried at least three times, and she broke three different phones—two of them on me and one she just broke. And when the police got there, she’d been smoking pot and taking something else . . . and she comes back and goes, “Your little friends are here.” But as soon as she heard them say that there was a pot pipe out there, she started freaking out, saying, “Get out of my house, she tried to kill me.” And it’s like her whole tone—she was sobbing and she was saying, “You are going to give my dad a heart attack he just got out of the hospital,” and they are all telling her to calm down. And it is like she worked them. And I said, “You guys have been played.” I figured it out on my way to jail.

In this exemplar, the perpetrator used gender role stereotypes of women as being hysterical and emotional to manipulate the police and avoid arrest. The next exemplar shows how self-defense, an act that is inconsistent with the traditional gender stereotyped view of women as passive recipients of violence, influenced the decision making of law enforcement officials:

Interviewer: This is the woman that stabbed you?
Participant: Yeah, if I didn’t have a comforter on me, I’d have had a million holes in my back, you know, the only place where the cops could put me was in jail.
Interviewer: So she stabbed you, but you got arrested?
Participant: Yeah, well, see, the cops—they got to the scene and they see her; it is her residence, and she has just trashed the place. She has taken my bicycle you know . . . and just banged on the damn tires until it bent, you know? And so she told the cops what she told the cops, and they came over to me and they go, they says, “I don’t know what happened here, but you are under arrest.” And you could see there was blood, you know. And she’s not bleeding, I’m the one that’s fucking bleeding. And uh, they goes, “You need medical.” And all I did to defend myself was, I found an aerosol can of Windex, and I sprayed her in the face. And [crying] she played the role of the fucking victim. Just like that. She was just fucking playing ’em.

In addition to looking for gender role–stereotyped behavior such as hysteria and passivity, law enforcement relied on noticeable differences in size between partners as a means of identifying perpetrators.

As the following exemplars illustrate, when the perpetrator was smaller than the victim, manipulating law enforcement by playing victim became even easier:

[Law enforcement] won’t take it that this is serious stuff; a lesbian is being beat up—especially a lesbian as big and handsome as me [stands up]. I mean, I look like the perpetrator. My girlfriend is really good at—she’s sharp at putting it all back on me by the time the police show up.

I’m a big woman and she’s little, but she can knock me clear across the room. When it came down to it in terms of the legal system, . . . she said, “They are going to take one look at you and they are going to haul your fat ass in the back of that police car.” I didn’t believe her at the time, but she was right.