Home Truths About Domestic Violence

Feminist Influences on Policy and Practice - A Reader

Jalna Hanmer, Catherine Itzin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136371042
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

While men's violence to women is an everyday culturally supported activity, this reader demonstrates: that men's violence can be curtailed and that women and children can be assisted effectively; that state policies and provision can be improved; and that women can actively participate in the resolution of their difficulties. Bringing together new work and key papers Home Truths About Domestic Violence provides a comprehensive overview and up-to-date account of the progress so far, and identifies what still needs to be done. Areas covered include:
* womens experience of violence
* childrens experience of violence
* personal experiences of the justice system
* state policies on violence in the US and UK
* educational programmes and initiatives.
This substantial Reader makes a significant contribution to the understanding of domestic violence from both a policy and a practice perspective. Together with its companion volume Home Truths About Child Sexual Abuse it provides an in-depth resource for a wide range of teachers, students and professionals, highlighting the diverse and complex dimensions of the problem of domestic violence.

Part I

Women’s experiences of violence from known men in the home

1	Domestic violence and gender relations
	Contexts and connections^1
	Jalna Hanmer

Violence against women is not diminishing in frequency or intensity, even though violence from men to women began to be recognized as a major social problem over 20 years ago (Parliamentary Select Committee 1975). The experiences of women, the frequency of abusive behaviour from men, and the responses of professionals are drawn upon to provide frameworks for policy and interventions (Dobash and Dobash 1980; see also Chapter 11; Hanmer and Saunders 1984; 1993; Mooney 1993 (see Chapter 2); Mirlees-Black et al. 1996). Over the past two decades considerable effort has gone into providing women and their children with effective assistance, although this remains, for the most part, patchy and partial.² Resistance to identifying violence against women as crime, as serious, as worthy of agency intervention, has been examined in health, housing, social services and policing services (Binney et al. 1981; Borkowski et al. 1983; Maynard 1985; Edwards 1989; Hague and Malos 1993; Hanmer and Saunders 1993; Hanmer 1995; Hague et al. 1995). Resistance by informal contacts, and the actions taken by the women and men involved, has received less attention.³

This chapter examines social processes that sustain violence against women. The focus is on the different responses women and men experience from the many others who are part of the social context in which violence against women takes place. The analysis is derived from interviews held with 60 women living in refuges and in the community, with first languages of English, Punjabi and Urdu, and from agency personnel with whom they had contact.⁴ Half of the women interviewed have personal or family origins from the Asian subcontinent, primarily Pakistan, but also Bangladesh and India. The remaining 30 women are not completely homogenous in terms of personal and family origins, but almost all are white and see their origins as within the area of interview.

Women’s accounts of their lives provide information on how hierarchy and privilege is structured within families, how cultural boundaries apply to men and women, how individual women negotiate within and move beyond culturally and socially prescribed limits on their behaviour, and how individual men maintain their socially superior position without altering their behaviour. The analysis focuses on the areas of struggle between women, men, families and others, how these develop over time, and the strategies women and men adopt in order to achieve their desired outcomes. In these interviews women describe their partner’s relationships with members of his family of origin, with her and the children, with his and her friends, with work colleagues, and with other women. As with women, men’s strategies involve relationships with his family, her family, his, her and their children, his friends, her friends, other women and other men. Families, friends and acquaintances may actively or passively support, even encourage, or restrain men in their violence. Agencies too, participate in these processes.

Whatever their ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’ or ‘culture’, women experiencing violence have in common devastating relationships with men (see Chapter 3). All the women interviewed live in a web of relationships bound by family and culture in which expectations of correct behaviour for women and men differ substantially. When confronted with repeated violence, women describe how family members and others intervene in women’s lives and how women attempt to use networks of family and friends to mitigate, if not resolve, problems with their men.⁵ Women’s accounts demonstrate that men from varied cultural and ethnic groups have in common cultural and family advantages that come from being male, from being sons, husbands and fathers.

These dynamics raise a number of key questions around difference and commonality and, when considering violence, call into question the use of ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’ and their associated ‘cultures’ as dominant markers of sameness and variation in experience. There are many differences between the women interviewed in this study, but these cannot be placed neatly into the categories ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’ or even ‘culture’, when focusing on violence and the responses of women, men, the larger family and other informal relationships and groups. Differences often thought of as major, such as the type of marriage entered into by women and men, do not produce fundamentally different gendered experiences of violence.

Amongst the 60 women interviewed there are three types of marriage characterized by two factors: who arranged the marriage, and kinship. Marriages arranged by families may be between those related by kinship, in particular first cousins, or between those who are not kin; or marriage may be arranged by the individual marriage partners. These differences are important to the lives of men and women, but domination, control and violence towards women and children occur whatever the preferred form of marriage and, whatever the preferred form of marriage, families and others attempt to mediate relationships characterized by violence. The pattern of marriage within white British society, which is seen as freely entered into by both parties and based solely on personal choice, seems no more likely to produce marriages free of violence than those arranged between either family members or strangers. Women and men who live together without marriage may also have relationships characterized by violence.

Others do act to restrain a husband and/or other family members who may be abusing an individual woman. While these interventions may work for some women, these interviews are with women for whom individual and family modes of intervention are not effective. These ineffectual interventions suggest that, for men, other cultural values can take precedence. The most basic factor constituting the cultural framework that either fully or partially legitimates home-based violence by men against women is that the boundaries specifying correct behaviour for women are not those that bind men to society and cultures, however diverse cultures may be in other ways. Men stand outside community and family accountability as understood by and applied to women.

These differential values and boundaries are the subject of this chapter. The accounts of women expose the advantages men experience as males in the roles of sons, husbands and fathers. The chapter describes women’s perceptions of the feelings men express about women and children, how this affects women’s feelings about themselves and the relationship, and their subsequent responses. The intangible and tangible benefits men gain from the abuse of women are described. Women’s experiences of the responses of others to the violence, to women, children and men then follows. The acceptability of violence has shifting boundaries and men vary their strategies when women begin to leave. Leaving is a process that can occur over a brief to a very long time period.

Advantages men experience as males, sons, husbands and fathers

Men gain many advantages as males, sons, husbands/cohabitees and fathers, and these advantages are interrelated. A man’s status as son is an aspect of his behaviour as husband and father. His status as husband is an aspect of his behaviour as father, and all three statuses are predicated on being male. Men’s statuses are cumulative from son to husband to father. This is seen more clearly with men living in extended families, as they have daily interaction with parents, siblings and other family members, than with men living in nuclear families where contact with the wider family is less frequent. The general principle of status interrelatedness, however, still applies. The cumulative statuses of men are reinforced by public policy and its implementation. For example, men retain considerable authority over women and children upon divorce or relationship break-up, through residence and contact orders and their threat, and through non-intervention by the criminal justice system in their continued violence to and harassment of women.

The advantages men gain from violence have been known for some time, with both service provision to women and research demonstrating certain key elements (Hearn 1995). However, these elements are usually described as forms of women’s oppression, rather than personal and social benefits to men. In order to develop an analysis that incorporates the actions of others, it is necessary to bring the man on to centre stage. He is both a primary force in the construction of social life characterized by degradation, humiliation and personal harm, and the upholder of deeply held cultural values which make it very difficult to effectively intervene in his violence. Women describe major benefits gained by men through the use of violence.

Violence and the expression of feelings

Men express many feelings through violence and their feelings may determine their actions. Men may enjoy inflicting violence. ‘The more violence he did to me, the more happy he would be.’ ‘After he had hit me, he would say, “Sit here in front of me, if I see any tears in your eyes then see what happens.” Then he would say, “Laugh and talk to me”.’ This form of behaviour may also involve children (see Chapters 5 and 6). In a long session of violence, ‘he slapped her [the child] and she became unconscious. He said [to the wife/mother], “You hit her; if you hit her you’ll save yourself.”’ And he continued to abuse her until she did. Knowledge of this type of personal behaviour is well documented in the study of war and political regimes in which torture and genocide are part of the social process, but it has yet to be incorporated into family studies.

A more frequently met pattern of emotional response is to hold women responsible for the men’s feelings. ‘If I were to say to him like a couple of days after he’d hit me, my head’s still hurting me, he’d say, “It will fucking hurt in a minute. What have I told you, don’t keep starting. You always start me off. You’re the one who fucking always winds me up. It’s all your fault.”’ Women may respond by accepting responsibility for his feelings: ‘And in the end I got to believing it was my fault.’ Once in a domestic situation of recurring violence, women seek explanations for the abuse they suffer and self-blame is a widespread initial, if not long-term, way of understanding his behaviour.

A further development is to re-interpret his violence as caring for her. One form this takes is to re-create the man as a baby. His ‘baby self’ becomes the love object:

He is happy with me; he does love me; he doesn’t want no one else to get my feelings. He is like a baby to me because I’ve seen him upset and I know the way he feels and he’s come to me for help. I know he does need me and he’s nobody else to turn to.

Another way to interpret violence as caring is to perceive threats and fear of death as proof of the strength of the man’s positive feelings.

He is so jealous I’ve even been accused of knocking about with his own dad! That’s how jealous he is, but he’s really caring with it as well. There is no way on earth he wants anyone else to have me, no way. That’s because he cares. If I ever left him he’d literally kill me.

When women interpret violence in this way, then leaving him can feel like a betrayal: ‘Now I feel as though I’ve let him down.’ Emotional conflict may delay or inhibit women leaving. Women may leave temporarily as the conflict of feelings generated by leaving becomes too intense for them to remain away. Women can experience deep conflict; for example, one woman did not want to lose her highly controlling husband. He rarely allowed her to leave the house, but now that her eldest child had reached the mandatory school age he had to be taken to school, otherwise she feared the children would be taken from her by social services. Women who permanently leave violent men move beyond taking responsibility for the feelings of men. Women who permanently leave recognize the feelings of men in relation to violence as negative. It may take women some...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Prevention, provision and protection
• Part I Women's experiences of violence from known men in the home
• Part II Children's experiences of violence in the home
• Part III Women who fight back Experiences and outcomes
• Part IV Influencing state policies on violence against women from known men
• Part V Partnership approaches by statutory and voluntary agencies
• Part VI Decreasing the violence of men
• Appendix 1 Families without fear: Women's Aid agenda for action on domestic violence
• Appendix 2 The Duluth domestic abuse intervention project power and control wheel
• Index