Marital Separation and Lethal Domestic Violence

Desmond Ellis, Noreen Stuckless, Carrie Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317522126
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Law

This book is the first to investigate the effects of participation in separation or divorce proceedings on femicide (murder of a female), femicide-suicide, homicide, and suicide. Because separation is one of the most significant predictors of domestic violence, this book is exclusively devoted to theorizing, researching, and preventing lethal domestic violence or other assaults triggered by marital separation. The authors provide evidence supporting the use of an estrangement-specific risk assessment and estrangement-focused public education to prevent murders and assaults. This information is needed not only by instructors in criminal justice and sociology programs, but by researchers theorizing about or investigating domestic violence. In the world of practitioners, family court judges, divorce mediators, family lawyers, prosecutors involved in bail hearings, shelter staff, and family counselors urgently need this resource. Ellis et al. include discussion questions and chapter objectives to support learners in the classroom or in community-based settings, and instructor support material includes PowerPoint lecture slides, additional teaching and research resources, and a test bank. This text advocates convincingly for prevention of domestic violence, and gives academics and practitioners the tools they need. This text advocates convincingly for prevention of domestic violence, and gives academics and practitioners the tools they need.

	CHAPTER
Marital Separation: Definition and Process	1

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Readers who achieve the learning objectives set for this chapter will be able to demonstrate:

• Awareness of the complexities associated with presenting a valid and useful definition of marital separation

• The ability to critically evaluate metaphors used to describe the process of “his” and “her” separations

• The ability to specify the conditions under which separation is likely to be associated with intimate partner violence

MARITAL SEPARATION

Epidemiological studies of violent deaths are routinely conducted by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) researchers with the objectives of controlling and preventing them. The “circumstances” present at the time of death are regarded as information that is essential to the achievement of both CDC objectives (Barker, 2006). The circumstances referred to by Barker include the marital status of perpetrators and victims. If this information were available to CDC researchers using National Violent Death Reporting System data, perpetrators and victims would be located in one of the following marital status categories: never married, married, widowed, divorced, or separated. Three of these categories—widowed, divorced, and separated—involve the dissolution of intimate partner relationships. The proportion of intimate partner relationships dissolved by death, divorce, and separation varies across Western societies in the same historical period and in the same society during different historical periods.

A review of findings reported by Cherlin (2009) yielded the following conclusion: To a greater degree than at any time in its history, separated has replaced widowed and divorced as the major cause of the dissolution of intimate partner relationships in the United States. Understanding how American families experience this change may be facilitated by the use of a metaphor.

In their book Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) refer to a metaphor as a device used to “help us understand and experience one kind of thing in terms of another” (p. 5). Cherlin uses the metaphor of a spinning carousel with people jumping on and off to help us understand and experience separation in the United States. Preserving the metaphor, Weiss (1979) reported that the separated/divorced men and women he interviewed found jumping to separation disrupted the “structure of their social and emotional lives” far more than when they divorced some time later (p. 4). Researchers Bloom, White, and Asher (1979), Holmes and Rahe (1967), Kruk (1993), and Schwartz and Kaslow (1997) include the experience of stress, ambivalence, and emotional distress even by couples who voluntarily jump off together; greater stress, emotional distress, despair, and anger by those who are pushed off by the unilateral decisions of their partners; and hostility between the pushers and the pushed.

Holmes and Rahe (1967) administered their Social Adjustment Rating Scale to a large number of Americans and asked them to assign points from 1 to 100 to life events that required the greatest amount of adjustment. The death of a spouse was ranked the most stressful life event—greatest number of points assigned—and divorce OR marital separation was ranked as the second most stressful life event. These findings are based on perceptions. Weiss (1979) actually interviewed a nonrandom sample of 150 divorced men and women attending his Seminars for the Separated. He found that it was “separation, not divorce that disrupted the structure of the individual’s social and emotional life” (p. 4).

The emotional distress and other feelings associated with separation may be experienced by individuals who are jumping on and off the marriage-go-round carousel in all Western societies, but compared with family members in societies such as Germany (former West Germany), France, Italy, Norway, Spain, and Sweden, family life in the United States, American family members are likely to experience “frequent [marital status] transitions [and] shorter marriage and cohabiting relationships occur more often” (p. 5). Over a five-year period, almost one-quarter (23%) of all marriages and more than half (55%) of all cohabiting relationships in the United States will be disrupted by separation (Charts 3 and 4, p. 206). Findings reported by Cherlin were based on the analysis of data from a variety of sources, including life tables from Fertility and Family Survey data on selected Western societies (p. 201).

DEFINITION

Marital separation is defined legally and socially. The U.S. Divorce Law Center defines a legal separation as “a court ordered right to live apart, with the rights and obligations of divorced persons, but without divorce” (2009). The rights referred to in this definition include the right to petition for the same outcomes divorcing couples may petition for, including child custody, child support, spousal support, and division of property. Until they obtain a divorce, separated couples cannot legally remarry. For couples who have no intention of ever remarrying and/or who object to divorce on religious grounds or other grounds, legal separations offer an alternative to divorce.

Legal separations are important because they may mediate or moderate the effect of separation on male partner violence by imposing unequal financial, psychological and social costs that are or are perceived to be unfair by one or both of the parties. In cases in which the parties are parents, the best interest of the child or children as perceived by the judge may trump the interests and legal rights of one parent more than the other, or trump the interests of both parties to an equal degree.

The legal separation rate varies across U.S. states with the rate being extremely low in the majority of states that permit the alternatives of no-fault divorce and separation agreements. Separation agreements facilitated by third parties—family lawyers, arbitrators, and mediators—are obtained far more frequently than court-ordered legal separation orders and less frequently than social separations. Social separations are produced by intimate partners themselves, but not all of them are agreed to by both parties.

In the social definition of marital separation formulated by Weiss (1979), separation is defined as “the suspension of vows or agreements (e.g., ‘till death do us part’)” that “produces the withdrawal of emotional and physical accessibility” (p. 4). Suspension is a subjective term that implies some degree of uncertainty by one or both parties about whether their relationship has truly ended. When at least one of the parties has withdrawn accessibility, moved to a separate residence, and has “no positive plans” to ever live with the other party again, they are, according to Weiss, truly separated. The intimate partners referred to by Weiss are legally married spouses. Spouses may be truly separated even though they have not yet obtained a formal separation agreement. Couples in other intimate relationships who do not want or require a separation agreement may also be truly separated. Consequently, we broaden the definition of intimate partners to include married, common law, cohabiting, and dating couples as well as boy/girlfriends and cheating lovers.

Findings reported by Arendell (1995) do not broaden the Weiss (1975) narrative, but they offer an alternative divorced male partner narrative. Specifically, she reported findings indicating that male partners believe they, and not their wives or third parties such judges and lawyers, are primarily responsible for deciding when they are truly separated or even divorced from the female partners who left them (1995). These findings as well as those reported by the divorced wives studied by Kurz (1995) are reflected in the following modified Weiss definition of social separation: Marital separation is defined as a process characterized by the intentional withdrawal of physical and emotional accessibility by one or both partners that one or both married (legal or common law, de facto) partners perceive as contingent and temporary or noncontingent and permanent.

Marital separation is a subset of intimate partner separation. Intimate partner separation is defined as a process characterized by the intentional withdrawal of physical and emotional accessibility by one or both intimate partners that one or both of them perceive as contingent and temporary or noncontingent and permanent. Two case studies illustrating the process of separation involving a married and an unmarried couple follow.

PROCESS: “UNTYING THE KNOT”

In opposition to those who assumed that marriage had the same meaning for both genders, sociologist Jessie Bernard (1972) claimed that the meaning of marriage was different for men and women. “His” and “her” marriages were described in a segment of her book entitled The Future of Marriage. This frequently cited segment focuses exclusively on gender differences in the meaning of marriage. We attempt to build upon Bernard’s contribution—the meaning of marriage varies with gender—by describing how the meaning/experience of separation varies with the intersection of gender and the decision to separate. The decision to separate can be made unilaterally—he alone, she alone—or jointly. Because female partners unilaterally decide to separate in between two-thirds or three-quarters of cases, the modal case of separation is one in which women unilaterally decide to separate (Ellis, 1994). What follows is appropriate for the modal case. It is not appropriate for the second case of his (Bode) and her (Sarah) separation we describe and compare with the separation of Max and Kate.

Two metaphors describing the process of untying the knot of marriage were identified by Thernstrom (2003). An herb (cilantro) that grows rapidly and dies quickly is one of them. A snowfall that gradually becomes an impassable barrier because of the accumulation of small deposits of snow over time is the second one. The second metaphor describes how Kate, age 32 when she married Max, experienced her separation after 11 years of married life. Preserving the snowfall metaphor, the first dusting of snow fell at lunch on their first date. He thought he was being caring when, after lunch, he insisted that she take the leftover spaghetti with her on the jet she was taking to Chicago. Kate “hated leftovers” and felt she was being controlled rather than cared for by Max. But, she said “Fine,” took the spaghetti, and threw it in the rubbish bin when she landed. It was “the first of 11 years of things she said ‘Fine’ to while thinking something different” (p. 40). Other dustings of snow fell when:

• Max, who earned a relatively low salary performing a “socially responsible” job for a nonprofit organization, criticized and showed contempt for the large financial corporation that paid Kate a salary significantly higher than the one received by Max;

• She experienced recurring reminders by a more sophisticated Max of her plebeian and/or unhealthy tastes in food, television, literature, motor cars, wine, music, and the theater;

• Kate became increasingly aware of the fact that their shared interests in bird-watching, baseball, wine, jazz, and theater were really Max’s interests;

• Kate’s experience of Max’s recurring bad moods when she began pursuing her own interests on her own, such as “seeing a friend and playing tennis”;

• She experienced recurring occasions when she had no time to herself “going from a crowded office, to a crowded subway to a small apartment where Max was always waiting and annoyed at the late hour she was coming home.”

Kate was childless, and the catalyst—a very heavy fall of snow that created an impassable barrier—for her irrevocable decision to separate was an affair she had after a failed attempt to become pregnant at a fertility clinic. Kate reframed her adultery as “a gift to herself” because it made her aware of the “profound absence of … intimacy” in her marriage.

The first metaphor describes how Max, also age 32 when he married Kate, experienced the separation. They fell in love quickly and got married after a short courtship. For Max, marriage involved sharing interests, being with and doing things together, and taking care of Kate. During the course of their 11-year marriage, Kate engaged in a number of activities that angered or annoyed Max such as creating a separate bank account; wanting additional diamonds on her wedding ring; buying a car (BMW), favored by “Republican capitalists”; wanting to spend discretionary time on her own doing what she alone wanted to do; intentionally exposing Max to a sound he hated by “leaving the bathroom door open while she dried her hair”; and criticizing him for the untidy condition of their apartment. However, unlike snowfalls that accumulate, these annoyances were perceived as confetti that blew away with the breezes created by expressions of caring, sharing, and the attempt to have a child of their own or adopt one. Three months after they signed up for an adoption workshop, Kate told Max she was leaving him. Max, who perceived the marriage was working well and progressing to the point of having children to share and care for, was sad, stunned, angry, and determined to “get everything he was legally entitled to under New York’s equity sharing laws that required Kate, the higher income earning spouse, to share her income with Max.”

From Max’s perspective, the separation was climactic, unilaterally initiated, and final. From Kate’s perspective, the process of separating was cumulative. Findings reported by a number of researchers indicate that other separating women share Kate’s perspective. For example, Anderson and Saunders (2003, p. 176) cite findings indicating that the process of separating involves emotional and physical withdrawal while females are still living with their male partners (e.g., delaying their return to the home from work, accepting jobs or invitations from relatives and friends that entailed spending less time at home, eating meals alone, watching television in separate rooms, sleeping in separate beds). Temporary separations—moving out—and moving back may follow.

Okun (1986) found that the average number of temporary separations preceding the final permanent separation was 2.4. The average number of separations for separated women who sought safety in women’s shelters was 5.07. These women did not ever return to live with their former partners (p. 198). Walker (1986) reported findings indicating that abused women will initiate between four and five temporary separations—“the halting of cohabitation by the partners for at least one day in the context of a conflict in the relationship” (p. 198)—before divorcing their partners. Similar findings are reported by Ferarro and Johnson (1983), Landenburger (1998), and Wallace (1986).

The penultimate phase—permanent separation—is the high or low point of a cumulative process that is sometimes preceded by a “tipping point incident or event.” How child custody, access, financial support, property division, and collective debt conflicts associated with permanent separation and divorce are settled can increase or decrease the intensity of conflict and consequently the risk of nonlethal and lethal male partner violence during the final post-separation phase (Ellis, 2014).

Max and Kate participated in a collaborative proceeding (mediation) that tends to decrease the intensity of conflict, rather than an adversarial proceeding (litigation), which tends to increase it. In their case, conflict settlement was facilitated by the absence of a zero-sum conflict over child custody—they had no children—and the ability of the mediator to settle the conflict over the amount of money Kate was to pay Max as alimony. Kate perceived the amount of money she paid to Max as “a plundering of her savings.” The mediator reframed the payment as “a supplement given to Max for a specified period of time” to cover basic living expenses such as rent (Thernstrom, 2003, p. 43). Had they taken the case to court—Kate’s lawyer advised her not to, Max’s lawyer advised him to—both of them agreed that “the judge would have [ordered Kate to pay the same amount] and both of them would have felt cheated” (p. 44). Neither Kate nor Max would have chosen the amount of money paid by Kate but both “felt they could live with it, precisely because they did choose it” (p. 44). The risk of intimate partner hostility and violence during the post-separation phase is probably higher for divorcing parties who feel cheated by participating in an adversarial proceeding in which a settlement was imposed on them than it is for those who feel they can live with the mediation agreement they created and signed.

Bode and Sarah

Alpine racing champion Bode Miller, age 36, and ex-Marine firefighter Sara McKenna, age 27, were introduced to each other by an upscale dating website in San Diego. With marriage in mind, they met sometime in April 2012 and dated each other for about six weeks. According to Sarah, Bode wanted a large famil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Online Resources
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 Marital Separation: Definition and Process
• CHAPTER 2 Lethal Domestic Violence: Definitions and Motives
• CHAPTER 3 Separation and Lethal Intimate Partner Violence
• CHAPTER 4 Theorizing Separation and Intimate Partner Homicide
• CHAPTER 5 Separation and Intimate Partner Femicide
• CHAPTER 6 Separation and Intimate Partner Femicide–Suicide
• CHAPTER 7 Separation and Suicide
• CHAPTER 8 Preventing Intimate Partner Homicide and Femicide
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index