Citation

Grandin E, Lupri E. J. Fam. Violence 1997; 12(4): 417-443.

Affiliation

Department of Sociology, The University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, T2N 1N4

Copyright

(Copyright © 1997, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1023/A:1021935610051

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Using data from the 1985 U.S. National Family Violence Resurvey and the 1986 Canadian National Family Life Survey, this paper compares incidence of intimate violence or common couple violence (Johnson, 1995) in both countries. As expected, gender symmetry characterizes common couple violence, which is a product of the privatized setting of many American and Canadian households. Although the United States exhibits significantly higher rates of societal violent crime than Canada, Canadian women and men were more likely than their American counterparts to use severe intimate violence and to inflict it, as well as minor violence, more often, which is contrary to the culture of violence theory that guided the study. Similarly, the higher rates of wife-to-husband severe violence across the life course in both countries are inconsistent with the theory. Several ad hoc explanations are presented to account for these unexpected findings.