in Violence Against Women, (2002)

This substantial article examines the issues of men who are victimized by domestic violence in heterosexual relationships. Over the past several years, there has increasing attention to the issues of men who are victimized by heterosexual domestic violence, most of which is based on research done that is based on the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) developed by Murray Straus and Richard Gelles. In this current paper, Kimmel addresses the research that suggests men are victimized as often as women from both substantive and methodological perspectives. Through the process, Kimmel also addresses the CTS and raises substantive issues with the continued use of this tool to examine domestic violence. Kimmel notes that the language (both media and in much of the specialized literature and theory) describing domestic violence has increasingly come to be that of gender symmetry. Review of the research (Fierbert, 1997, Archer, 2000) found that between 79 and 82 empirical and 16 review articles that demonstrated gender symmetry. As Kimmel notes, these studies “raise troubling questions ” about what has come to be accepted as relatively common knowledge about domestic violence – that it is something men do to women, that it is one of the leading causes of serious injury to women, and that it is one of the world’s most widespread public health issues. Beyond this, however, the research suggesting gender symmetry raises far more questions than it supposed answers. These questions largely revolv