Wife Beating the Husband: True, or Just a Subject of Jokes?

Wives beating their husbands with frying pans, rolling pins, and brooms — these images have given us a good laugh. A friend asked whether such images were confined to Indian culture. I believed otherwise — and sure enough, they're found in many cultures.

Looking through them, I realized cartoons are inspired by real life. Is it true that husbands get thumped too? While wife-beating is shunned, reported (though not enough), and discussed, husband-abuse is merely chuckled at.

It is physical violence when one person throws things at the other, pushes, pulls, kicks, slaps — and, in extreme cases, uses a weapon. All the cartoons use one or another of these methods, yet husband-beating isn't treated as a grave crime — unless the wife kills the husband.

From the LA Times:

Partner violence by women is one of the most contentious subjects in social science. The first large-scale study of domestic abuse, the 1975 National Family Violence Survey conducted by the late University of New Hampshire sociologist Murray Straus and his colleague Richard Gelles, found that similar numbers of women and men admitted to assaulting a spouse or partner in the previous 12 months... Later surveys showed that in mutually violent relationships, women were as likely as men to be the aggressors. These findings have been confirmed in more than 200 studies.

Husband-beating may not be as rampant as wife-beating — and I think one reason men stay silent is that they want to appear powerful and masculine. Men are afraid that if they speak out, they'll be seen as weak, and they swear by the phrase "mard ko dard nahi hota" (a man feels no pain).

Research from Norway confirms that men do get beaten — and that many are afraid to report it, because they believe they are the only one.

Don't suffer alone. Find your tribe, take action. Violence is violence, and abuse of any kind needs to be stopped.

Originally published May 2020.