Lecture - April 9, 2003 - Domestic Violence
Recent factors in raising public concern about domestic violence.
Well-know personalities committing domestic violence
Increased political power of feminist movement
Increased cultural emphasis on individualism in marriage and family life.
Twentieth century approach to domestic violence evolved into 2 major modes of thinking
Political model - emphasizes relationship of power and authority between men and women. The political model implies that domestic violence is deeply rooted in laws and customs that reinforce male dominance and is unlikely to be ended without political action by women's groups and their allies.
Medical model - domestic violence seen as an illness and source of injuries. Began in the 1960s, with C. Henry Kempe, a pediatrician who identified "The Battered Child Syndrome" with the help of x-rays.
Specific measures growing out of public concern. There were legal advances throug laws and funding. However, President Regan closed the Office of Domestic Violence. The date over how the government should help souses an children cope with domestic violence continues to this day.
What constitutes domestic violence in the United States?
Continual expansion of the concept to include the broader concept of "intimate partners" or boyfriends and girlfriends, gay couples as well.
Intimate partner violence -
Prevalence - Taken the National Crime Victimization Survey of 1999 Women report that 20 percent of the rapes, robberies, and assaults they had experienced were committed by an intimate partner, whereas among men, intimates had committed just 3 percent. Moreover women who had been victimized by intimates were more likely to have been injured than were men who were victimized. 10% of women vs. 5% of men.
Almost 8 percent of women reported being raped or experiencing an attempted rape by an intimate partner. Only 18% of them reported the incident.
Gelles’ article “Domestic Violence Not an Even Playing Field”
We know that there are approximately two million women are battered in the US each year. At least half these women fight back and defend themselves, and about 700 times last year, women killed their husbands or partners. Approximately 1,400 women die each year. Women are 7 to 10 times more likely to be injured in acts of intimate violence than are men.
Research shows that nearly 90% of battering victims are women and only about ten percent are men. Men who bet their wives, who use emotional abuse and blackmail to control their wives, and are then hit or even harmed, cannot be considered battered men. A batter man is one who is physically injured by a wife or partner and has not physically struck or psychologically provoked her. Gelles estimates that there are about 100,000 battered men in the US each year.
Marital status - Married women had a 57% lower risk of experiencing violence than women who were cohabiting. - This could be a selection effect.
Class differences - Although domestic violence affects all social classes, several studies report substantially higher rates of domestic violence among low-income couples than among higher-income couples. William Goode suggested than men with more income and education have additional resources besides force that they can use to control the behavior of their wives.
Studies show that unemployed men have rates of assault on their wives that are nearly double the rates for men who are employed.
Kathleen Ferraro -
"Why do battered women stay?" is misinformed and misdirected. Most women not only eventually leave their abusive partners, but they are more likely to be battered in the process of leaving or after hey the leave than wile living with an abusive partner.
After 2.5 years, 43 percent of battered women had left their abusers and 2/3s of the women were living in nonviolent situations.
The more relevant questions are "why do men batter" and "why do they stay when women tell them to go?"
Battering is not a simple phenomenon, but a complex experience involving individual, relational, institutional and cultural contexts.
Stages of Engagement and disengagement with the intimate relationship in which battered women participate.
States of Engagement:
Ardor Intimacy neither begins nor ends instantaneously, but follows an emotional career. The early stages of courtships are characterized by physical and emotional attractions that overshadow negative characteristics and forewarnings of danger. The first stage of a battering relationship often involves increasing isolation of the woman from her friends and family.
At the relational level, the intense physical attraction and emotional involvement that usually are part of new intimate relationships build ardor. Initial violence is perceived as a profound violation of trust and intimacy, but rarely as a justification for the outright rejection of the violent man, who, until then, represented her soul mate.
Accommodation -
The first act of physical violence marks the beginning of the transition from ardor to the next stage of engagement. It is extremely unusual for a woman to leave an abusive man after the first incidence of violence. Physical violence is so inconsistent with expectations of an intimate partner that most women perceive the first instance as an exceptional aberration.
Most women protect their commitment to their loved one through techniques of rationalization. These techniques draw on cultural scripts, excuses by abusers, and reactions of acquaintances and institutional actors to provide these women with accounts of the battering that preserve the image of intimacy between the partners.
Salvation ethic
Denials of injury'
Denials of victimization - The batter rejects
Denials of who the victimizer is
Denials that there are options
Appeals to higher loyalties.
The strategies of denial become intertwined with the women’s diminishing sense of self worth. They try to understand how they can control a batterer’s violence with their own behavior, yet simultaneously see that accusations against them are not justified.
Two forms of self-blame: behavioral and characterological. Behavior blame focuses on “specific controllable actions that led to the occurred of the negative events” while characterological blame “is the identification of an enduring quality or trait that cause the hurtful events.”
Behavioral blame allows for a sense of internal locus of control. Characterological blame represents an internalization of the batterer’s denigration of the woman’s core sense of self. Characterological blame is debilitating, and it leads to depression because there is nothing a woman can do to change.
At the relational level, women try to control their own behavior based on their historical knowledge of their partners’ violence.
In accommodating violence, or trying to do what is “easier” because it might diminish the violence, women relinquish both autonomy and support. They often isolate themselves from others.
The relational strategies that women develop for controlling male violence are also accompanied by institutional and cultural components. At the institutional level, responses by law enforcement agencies, courts, social service agencies, and religious institutions all cooperate with our undermine techniques of rationalization.
Examples – temporary restraining orders appear to be effective only in certain types of battering relationships. Those men who are less likely to be influenced by alcohol or drugs are more likely to be deterred from harassment or stalking behavior by a court order.
The best-trained criminal justice personnel and most sensitive legal policies depend on women who are convinced that invoking external parties is the best course of action for their families. The current cultural context is not conducive to such a decision.
Ambivalence –
Despite the weight of forces colluding to support women’s accommodation to violence, behaviors that challenge commitment may lead to the stage of ambivalence.
Sudden increases in the severity of violence may break through a woman’s prior efforts at minimization and may shock a woman into realizing the potential lethality of her partner’s action.
In the stage of ambivalence, prior efforts to control behavior may give way to strategies of controlling the violence that focus less on self-blame and more on protection.
Strategy of selective fighting back.
Another strategy is to leave the relationship. The first attempt does not usually result in permanent separation. Women return for a variety of reasons, including fear, continuing emotional involvement, desire to keep the family together, and lack of viable alternatives. Women usually make between five and seven attempts before they leave for good.
It is a particularly dangerous time since, more women are battered after they leave a relationship than during it.
A significant factor in determining a woman’s ability to leave is her economic independence.
Also there are concerns relationally and culturally. They do not want to leave their children but sometimes husbands have he means to challenge maternal custody.
Terror - At the terror stage, women perceive their abusers as possessing superhuman power to control and destroy them. Some men terrorize women and convince them that it is more dangerous leaving than staying.
Homicide – Most homicides committed by battered women occur in the context of an immediate confrontation. These confrontations often do not meet the legal criteria for self-defense, but they exceed the battered woman’s definition of ”imminent danger” based on her past experiences.
Successful Survival Strategies
Factors that facilitate survival depend on the available resources, the current context of the relationship and the women’s stage of engagement. Ferraro says that it is especially important that agency representatives, such as law enforcement officers and social workers, respect the ability of women to interpret their situation and make choices that are best for them.
Women need daycare, health care, transportation, housing, clothing, food, utility assistance, job training, and employment. They need advocacy, information and support. They may therapy to deal with depression and PTSD, but Ferraro says we need to recognize material assistance is foremost.
Child abuse and neglect
Prevalence
Definition and types of abuse – Serious physical harm (trauma, sexual abuse with injury or will malnutrition) of a child by an adult with intent to injure.
Neglect represents 54% of the substantiated cases of child abuse and neglect, combined with 6% of medical neglect. Physical abuse – 23%, emotional abuse 6% and sexual abuse, 12%
2.8 million cases – 800,000 substantiated cases – 640,000 when repeat reports are eliminated.
Types of neglect – More than half of the neglect cases referred to educational neglect. The reminder of the cases of neglect referred to physical neglect (unattended children).
Sexual abuse – social surveys report higher incidence of abuse than Child Protection Services. 17% of women and 12% of men have reported some type of sexual abuse prior to puberty. Among the women, nearly all the touching had been done by men (63%)or adolescent boys (28%). Men however, were most likely to report touching by adolescent girls (45%), followed by 23% men; 15% adolescent boys.
Women who are abused sexually before puberty have earlier and riskier sexual careers.
Douglas Besharov ‘s article – argues that some of the problems that are officially labeled as child abuse are more appropriately viewed as poverty instead. Cherlin notes that this is not to question the seriousness of the child abuse problem; rather it suggests that social policy could be more effective if the different types of cases were handled differently.
In 1997, there were about 3 million reports of suspected child abuse or child neglect were made to the police and child protective agencies. Besharov estimates that a quarter to a half- is more properly considered a symptom of poverty and is more appropriately handled outside the nation’s child protection system.
Families are also weakened by a system that fails to recognize the overlap between what we now label as child maltreatment and the conditions of poverty – especially among families headed by single mothers.
A relatively small proportion of maltreated children suffered battering, sexual abuse, or serious neglect.
He argues for a return to Child Protection Services investigating cases of abuse and dealing with them and the social services addressing the problems that could hand in hand with poverty.
The welfare caseworker saw the family as the client, and was inclined to view poor child rearing as a correlate of poverty requiring aid to the family as a unit. The child protective worker, on the otter hand, rightly sees the child as the client m with poor child rearing as a reason for coercive state intervention.
These families need long-term assistance.
Cherlin – issue of foster care – the removal of children from their parental home and their placement in another home vs. family preservation. Another option “kinship care” option preserves some of the child’s family bonds and seems preferable by care by nonrelatives, but it is not without problems.
Is there a “cycle of abuse?” 30% of persons who were abused as children become abusers when they reach adulthood compared with about 5% among persons who were not abused. Factors that help abused children not to be abusers include” being openly angry about the abuse, being abused by just one parent, and have a supportive relationship with the non-abusing parent.
Elder abuse – The most frequent abusers of the elderly were their spouses.
Sexual aggression outside of marriage -
22% of all adult women (College survey) reported that they had been forced to have sex by a man at least once in their lives. 19% of the 22% reported that it was an acquaintance.
Nationally, 46% of all rapes and sexual assaults reported in the 1999 National Crime Victimization Survey were committed by a friend or acquaintance of the victim.
The younger the rape victim (and the victim is under age 18 in more than half of all rapes), the more likely the rapist is to be a family member.
Studies suggest that young men who commit sexual aggression against acquaintance are more likely to show hostility toward women and to believe that men are supposed to be dominant and women more subordinate.
Explanations for domestic violence – Why does domestic violence occur?
Underlying system of male dominance – Assaults against spouses and partners arise in part from power struggles between men and women. Men have an advantage in the struggles because of their greater physical strength, and because of a social system that often reinforces male dominance. But most men do not hit their partners, so additional explanations are needed.
Social learning perspective – Children from violent homes will learn that violent behavior is an acceptable and often successful means of controlling others; consequently, the will be more likely as adults to use violence against partners and children.
Frustration-aggression perspective – emphasizes that individuals who are blocked from attaining a goal may displace their frustration and anger onto their partners and children.
Social exchange perspective – suggests that people calculate the rewards and costs of violent behavior and the alternatives to it. According to this approach, women who have some economic resources are less likely than others to be victimized, as cross-cultural studies show.
What are the public policy debates concerning domestic violence?
Liberals and conservatives disagree about the desirability of early and extensive state intervention in cases of domestic violence. The fundamental issue is the conflict between preserving the family and helping the victims. Liberals, who tend to emphasize helping the victims, generally favor more equality between men and women. Conservatives, who tend to emphasize preserving the family, generally favor the continued dominance of the male-headed , two-parent family.
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