Women, Violence and Social Change

R. Emerson Dobash, Russell P. Dobash

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134959457
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

Women, Violence and Social Change demonstrates how refuges and shelters stand as the core of the battered women's movement, providing a basis for pragmatic support, political action and radical renewal. From this base movements in Britain and the United States have challenged the police, courts and social services to provide greater assistance to women. The book provides important evidence on the way social movements can successfully challenge institutions of the State as well as salutatory lessons on the nature of diverted and thwarted struggle.
Throughout the book the Dobashes' years of researching violence against women is illustrated in the depth of their analysis. They maintain the tradition established in their first book, Violence Against Wives, which was widely accalimed.

1
Violence against women

For the women who have been physically abused in the home by the men with whom they live, the past two decades have seen both radical change and no change at all. The lives of some have been touched by an ever expanding, worldwide movement to support women who have been battered and to challenge male violence. Some legal and social institutions have begun to respond, while others remain in a nexus of traditional tolerance of male violence and indifference to those who suffer from such violence. This is a time marked by social change and resistance to change, by innovation and reassertion of tradition. Both the new and the old responses are used, challenged and defended by those with differing views about the nature of this problem and how best to confront it. The arena of change and challenge is alive with ideas and activity.

Increasingly, women who have been abused come forward for support in directly challenging the violence or organizing their escape from it. Although relatively few violent men are being confronted with the unacceptability of their violence and their responsibility for its elimination, the numbers are growing. The fact that this occurs at all is due almost solely to the efforts of the battered-women’s movement in bringing the issue to public attention and organizing a pragmatic response to assisting women based on a wider philosophy of feminist inspired change. The story of the development of these innovative changes covers individual terror and personal triumph as well as institutional action and reaction. It is a story of one of the important social movements of our time. It is about deeply held cultural beliefs, entrenched patterns of response and the struggle to move away from supporting male violence and towards its rejection. It is a story that is at once personal and institutional, local and international, depressing and inspirational.

In many countries it is now well known that violence in the home is commonplace, that women are its usual victims and men its usual perpetrators.¹ It is also known that the family is filled with many different forms of violence and oppression, including physical, sexual and emotional, and that violence is perpetrated on young and old alike. It is the battered-women’s movement, with the support of the media, who have put the issues of the physical and sexual abuse of women and girls firmly on the social agenda. The now familiar stories of personal pain and degradation fill out the statistics with human dimensions and make the social facts comprehensible. For some, familiarity with accounts of violence breeds indifference and inaction; for others they bring indignation and a call for action.

Although the stories may now be familiar, they still remain both painful and powerful. For women who have been attacked, there is a litany of abuses from repeated assaults to rape and murder. In the 1970s the stories at once described what were then unfamiliar accounts of abuse, and informed a disbelieving public of its widespread nature. Women’s accounts revealed the nature of men’s violence and the sources of conflict leading to attacks. They also described women’s emotions and reactions as well as the inaction of social and legal institutions. The words of only a few of the millions of women who have been abused describe the nature of the violence ranging from slapping and shoving to brutal assaults and sometimes murder:

I have had glasses thrown at me. I have been kicked in the abdomen when I was visibly pregnant. I have been kicked off the bed and hit while lying on the floor—again, while I was pregnant. I have been whipped, kicked and thrown, picked up again and thrown down again. I have been punched and kicked in the head, chest, face, and abdomen more times than I can count. ² (American woman)

It was punching, banging my head on walls. Kicking everything. ³ (Northern Irish woman)

He tried to strangle me last night. I was terrified. I did manage to get out of the house but I had to go back the next morning. You see it was Easter weekend and my two children were afraid the Easter Bunny wouldn’t come if mummy and daddy were fighting. ⁴ (Canadian woman)

He once used a stick, he hit me once with a big fibreglass fishing pole, six foot long. And he just went woosh, he gave me such a wallop with that. I had a mark…right down my back. I thought my back had broke. ⁵ (Scottish woman)

He’d kick me or hit me on the back of the head (so it wouldn’t show). He raped me once, then smashed me in the face. ⁶ (Northern Irish woman)

He used to bang my head against the wall or the floor. I finally left him when I thought he was trying to kill me. ⁷ (English woman)

The injuries inflicted during these attacks range from cuts and bruises to broken bones, miscarriages and permanent damage. Again, women from numerous countries recount similar incidents and report a full range of injuries:

I wasn’t badly hurt. My ear was bruised and my hair was pulled out.⁸

Punching, I had my nose broken, ribs broken, two black eyes—he dragged me out of bed by the hair and pulled me along the ground. He smashed the door of my parent’s house down when I was there.⁹

Each one got harder and harder…one time he hit me so hard on the back of the head he broke his own hand.¹⁰

The elbow was all lying open, the top of my legs was lying open… gashes all over.¹¹

I had treatment for a fractured skull and I lost a child in a miscarriage due to violence.¹²

The effect upon women’s physical and emotional state is frequently recorded:

[The worst aspects of the experience of battering are]: Feeling so ill and tired after the beatings, and so useless, I couldn’t face people with the marks on my body.¹³

I was always terrified. My nerves were getting the better of me He knew this and I think he loved this.¹⁴

The fear of not knowing what he would do—I feared for my life. ¹⁵

I remember the tension of becoming aware that I had to notice what I was saying all the time, to make sure I didn’t offend him. I had become afraid of him. ¹⁶

Was he going to scare me all my life? Was he going to punch me in the head and knock me out and I’d die? ¹⁷

The sources of conflict leading to violent events reveal a great deal about the nature of relations between men and women, demands and expectations of wives, the prerogatives and power of husbands, and cultural beliefs that support individual attitudes of marital inequality:

I realized I was under terrible strain the whole time… I’d go into a blind panic about what side the spoon had to be on. It was that sort of detail everyday. ¹⁸

There was too much grease on his breakfast plate and he threw his plateatme. ¹⁹

I had a poker thrown at me—just because his tea was too weak—he just takes it for granted, if you’re married you’ll have to accept it. It’s part of being a wife. ²⁰

And then he had his belt and I was whipped over the shoulders everywhere, on my face and everything. And this was to teach me not to argue with him. ²¹ He would stay out all night and become violent when questioned. ²²

The four main sources of conflict leading to violent attacks are men’s possessiveness and jealousy, men’s expectations concerning women’s domestic work, men’s sense of the right to punish ‘their’ women for perceived wrongdoing, and the importance to men of maintaining or exercising their position of authority. ²³ For many women, a sense of shame and responsibility, along with fear of reprisals, keeps them silent, sometimes for years. The US National Crime survey of domestic violence cases from 1978 to 1982 found that 48 per cent were not reported to the police (because it was viewed as a private matter or because of fear of reprisal). ²⁴ An Irish woman who went to a refuge after twenty years of violence, explains her silence:

I hid what was happening to me from everyone. I made excuses for my bruises and marks. I thought I should put up with it… accept my lot as being part of marriage… I wanted to keep it hidden. ²⁵

It should be noted that in the same US survey 52 per cent of women did report the violence to the police because they hoped this would prevent further incidents. ²⁶ The problem of women’s reluctance to report men’s violence is often exacerbated by social, medical and legal institutions whose actions reveal a powerful legacy of policies and practices that explicitly or implicitly accept or ignore male violence and/or blame the victim and make her responsible for its solution and elimination. ²⁷

By the late 1980s, public accounts had chipped away at persistent images of the violence as a problem confined to the working class, ethnic groups or the poor. The United States was rocked by revelations that John Fedders, one of President Reagan’s high ranking legal officials, had beaten his wife for eighteen years. ²⁸ The image of the perfect marriage of a member of the Washington establishment was crushed in the account of a daily life of repeated attacks. Insult and further injustice were added to injury when the courts awarded him a percentage of the royalties from the book she wrote about the relationship on the grounds that she could not have written the book had he not made it possible by abusing her. ²⁹

Equally as sensational and as destructive of myths of middle-class immunity was the trial of a wealthy, Jewish, New York lawyer for the murder of his adopted daughter in what has been described as a vast inventory of abuse and intimidation also directed at his female partner, a well educated, Jewish editor of children’s books:

The 6th Precinct officers were so shocked by Hedda’s condition that they videotaped her, lumps of hair missing, clusters of small scabs on the bare scalp—were they cigarette burns? Deep ulcers on gangrenous legs. A bruise on the buttock the size of a football. Bruises on her back. A pulverised nose. Jaw broken in two places. Nine broken ribs, a cauliflower ear, a split lip…a ruptured spleen, removed in hospital, a broken knee, a bruised neck and innumerable black eyes—10 in one year—and after her arrest doctors discovered minor brain damage. ³⁰

The case became sensational not so much because of the violence itself but because it took place in an affluent home. Controversy increased when he was found guilty of manslaughter rather than murder because the use of cocaine may have meant he was not completely aware of his actions. There was even more controversy about the responsibility of a seriously abused woman for stopping her abuser from also abusing their child. ³¹ The case fuelled a new wave of interest in domestic violence in the United States, added some new dilemmas and brought a new twist to victim blaming.

With repeated male violence, death sometimes occurs. In one case, a retired vicar from the affluent south of England ‘bludgeoned his wife to death’ over two hours when he had trouble with radio reception. At the end, his son, who lived in an adjoining house, heard him shout ‘Are you dead yet?’. It was reported that the 74 year old vicar ‘was “arrogant and self-centred with an explosive temper” and had previously beaten his 85 year old wife during their forty-six year marriage’. ³² The claim of diminished responsibility was used to reduce the charge from murder to manslau...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1: Violence against women
• 2: The rise of the movement: Orientations and issues
• 3: Refuges and housing
• 4: The state, public policy and social change
• 5: Challenging the justice system
• 6: New laws and new reactions
• 7: The therapeutic society constructs battered women and violent men
• 8: Knowledge and social change
• 9: Innovation and social change
• Notes
• Selected references