From The Ticker:

Studies show rise in male victims of dating violence

As dating violence has increased in recent years, the number of male victims is also rising. Though some women fit the typical profile of a battered partner, newer research is pointing to the shrouded fact that men are also experiencing some blows. According to ScienceDaily, a website that provides the latest science news, even researchers tend to approach dating violence in a biased way, perceiving the men as perpetrators and women as victims.

However, according to Sandra Stith, a professor at Kansas State University who studies intimate partner violence, when conducting research on college students, she found that men and women played the role of offender.

“In our growing-up years, we teach boys not to hit their sister, but we don’t teach girls not to hit their brother,” she told ScienceDaily.

According to the site, Stith and her research team are trying to look at the ways in which male victims of violence are impacted versus female victims in heterosexual relationships.

While women are found to have high levels of depression and anxiety after being victimized, it is unclear how it affects men. Her research has found that violence in relationships is not always sparked without reason. In fact, when observing male and female college students, she found a big factor to be reaction. Male and female college students seem to use violence if the partner was violent to them.

“It’s a dramatically more important factor than anything else,” she told ScienceDaily. This reactive factor became part of the national conversation after the notorious Chris Brown and Rihanna incident. The Huffington Post reported that some young adults insinuated that Rihanna “must have done something to ‘deserve’ the attack.”

Though the causes of violence in a relationship are arguable, a staggering statistic from menweb.org, a website that provides help for battered men, shows that 835,000 men are victims of dating violence every year. Although that number doesn’t outweigh the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence’s estimate of 1.3 million women falling victim to violence each year, menweb.org reported a study from the year 2000 that showed men fell victim to violence approximately 38 to 50 percent of the time.

Stith stressed that female violence needs to be addressed. A 1997 poll conducted by researchers at California State University found that out of 978 college women, 29 percent admitted to initiating some kind of physical aggression toward their male partners over a five-year period. The researchers also noted that younger women in their 20s were significantly more likely to initiate physical aggression than women 30 and above.

A 2007 study from Stony Brook University found that approximately 32 percent of women in college admitted to engaging in physical aggression toward male partners. The study also noted, “They engaged in acts of physical aggression more often than their male partners engaged in aggression against them.”

Stith noted that binge drinking could also play a part in dating violence, as well as immaturity. She remains headstrong, however, saying, “Society needs to work toward ending all violence, not just male violence.”