Young men who see women as objects are more likely to be violent towards their partners: new research

Intimate partner violence is a global scourge. One in four Australian women have experienced physical or sexual violence at the hands of an intimate partner. The perpetrators are overwhelmingly heterosexual men.

Many factors contribute to this form of violence. Persistent gender inequality is a fundamental systemic cause, but researchers have identified additional risk factors. These include alcohol and drug use, past experience of family violence, financial stress and sexist attitudes.

One psychological factor that may be implicated in intimate partner violence is objectification. Feminist thinkers such as Cambridge scholar Rae Langton and American philosopher Martha Nussbaum have proposed men who treat their partners as “object-like” are disposed to harm them because they fail to see them as fully human.

Objectification can involve men judging their partner’s value in her physical appearance, seeing her as a possession, or denying her agency and autonomy. The common thread is a subtle or not-so-subtle form of dehumanisation.

Recent psychological research has tried to test these ideas, with intriguing results.

Our new research

Past research found young men who sexually objectify women are especially likely to perpetrate sexual violence. It also showed that men who unconsciously associate women with objects have a relatively high propensity for sexual harassment.

In our recently published work, we moved from considering violence towards women in general to violence towards men’s intimate partners. You might expect men would be less likely to objectify those they claim to love. The appalling statistics on intimate partner violence suggest otherwise.

Our new article presents findings from three studies on the role of objectification in intimate partner violence. Each study sampled American men aged 18 to 35 who were in a committed romantic relationship of at least one year’s duration.

In our first study, men completed a computer-based task – the Implicit Association Test – commonly used to measure unconscious bias. We adapted the task to assess how much they automatically associated women with inanimate objects or animals.

The group also responded to questionnaires measuring how often they engaged in a range of abusive and sexually coercive behaviours towards their current partners. Although based on self-reporting, and therefore open to distortion, these measures are valid predictors of violent behaviour.

As expected, men with relatively strong tendencies to associate women with objects reported higher rates of violent and coercive behaviour. This effect did not occur because these men held more hostile sexist attitudes toward women.

Objectification and sexism were distinct predictors of intimate partner violence, suggesting that objectification independently contributes to this form of violence.

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Voodoo dolls

Our second study extended the first in two ways. First, we adapted the association test to examine how much men automatically associated their partner with objects, rather than women in general.

Second, we added a more behavioural test of violence. The Voodoo Doll Task allows participants to use “pins” to stab a doll, presented on a computer screen, that shares their partner’s name.

Each participant has an opportunity to use as many pins as he wishes after vividly imagining a provocative scenario. He is at a bar with his partner when she starts flirting with another man and expressing discontent with her current relationship.

Stabbing a virtual doll with digital pins is not the same as inflicting actual violence, of course. However, people who use more pins are more prone to real-world violence. Their inhibitions against acting violently are likely weaker.

In our study, men who tended to associate their partners with inanimate objects reported higher rates of violence, as in the first study. They also stabbed the voodoo doll with more pins if they were highly upset by the provocative scenario.