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Research needs on partner violence in the military
Catherine Lutz, Professor of Anthropology
Brown University

Research on domestic violence in the military is woefully inadequate. We do have a very basic sense of the terrible incidence of violence against women in these families, however. By one report, the rate is 3.1 incidents of domestic violence per 1,000 people in the civilian population in 2001 compared to 16.5 per thousand in the military population. (Both figures, of course, are much lower than the number of incidents that actually occur.)

After each major episode of a string of murders by soldiers of their partners, as after five murders near Fort Campbell , Kentucky in 1998 and five murders committed near Fort Bragg , NC in 2002, the Department of Defense has publicly committed itself to combating the problem through research and policy changes. After the Fort Campbell murders, it created the Defense Task Force on Domestic Violence. That task force has recommended, as have many researchers and service providers in the past, that the military conduct an investigation of each individual report of domestic violence, and develop a comprehensive database of batterers for the military as a whole. In 1988, Congress ordered the Pentagon to report crimes by service members to the FBI. Sixteen years later, the military claims to still be working on a computer system to comply with this mandate. It became a matter of law (US Code 10.A.2.80) that a database must be established of all incidents reported to military or civilian authorities. Despite the obvious and longstanding need for the military to keep as close track of batterers as of drug users, and closer track of this than of gays and lesbians in the service, there is still no working database. Moreover, repeat offenders continue to evade accountability, even receiving promotions despite their commanders’ knowledge of their abusive behavior. When one of those soldiers, Damian Franchesci, raped and kidnapped his wife, his commanding officer had full knowledge of the charges and did nothing; Franchesci went on the next year to murder her. Less than 7 percent of spouse abuse cases receive trial by court-marital, and 75 to 84 percent of soldiers accused of abuse have been honorably discharged.

The military does not adequately use existing research on domestic violence. Instead, it continues to use antiquated and inaccurate paradigms for understanding domestic violence (for example, as a problem of marital communication or as the outcome of stress on the job) to understand the problem and to guide policy. It has also often failed to count intimate partners as victims of soldiers’ abuse, unlike in the civilian world, leaving a severe undercount of the problem. In terms of areas of importance in understanding why domestic violence rates are high in the military, research has been especially deficient in the important area of understanding norms and cultures of violence.

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