April 15, 2004April 15, 2004 FAMILY VIOLENCE Read: Read: Goodrum, Umberson, Anderson: The Batterer’s View of the Self and Others in Domestic Violence. Hutter 325-340 Johnson and Ferraro: Research on Domestic Violence in the 1990s: Making Distinctions. Skolnick 493-517. Straus: Ten Myths that Perpetuate Corporal Punishment. Hutter 341-350. I. In the 1960s and 1970s there was an awakening of concern in child abuse, wife abuse, and incest A. Why? 1. In the last 25 years people came to speak of a “crisis” in the family 2. The family became more permissive and child-centered, probably with less toleration of parental abuse of authority, especially father’s 3. The women’s movement had a slogan: “the personal is political” a. Family began to be examined as a structure of domination 4. This period is also characterized by more self-exposure: commercial, personal, artistic 5. Decline in religiously based moralism B. Omissions that were left out of these concerns: 1. Other kinds of violence in partnered relationships a. Debate about gendered rates of violence discussed in the Johnson reading b. Violence in gay and lesbian relationships c. Began to be addressed in the 1980s and 1990s 2. Sibling violence 3. Violence against the elderly2 4. Child neglect a. Poverty, inadequate care, inadequate educational institutions, etc. C. Problems with many of the early studies of violence in the family 1. No attention to the history of family violence in Western civilization 2. A weak understanding of: a. Family—its structure, dynamics b. Gender c. Power d. Attention to language 1) Exercise: define “violence” a) Unwanted physical injury perpetrated by another person b) But a child does not want what the dentist does to her: is this violence? c) We have to qualify: injury that causes harm d) Executing men and women causes serious harm; is this violence? 2) Point: authorized violence is usually not defined as violence a) And who gets to say what is authorized and what is not has the power to define violence b) These definitions vary over time, cross-culturally, and within a given culture at a given time c) Readings show that men and women don’t always see eye to eye; people don’t agree about “violence” with respect to children (Straus)3 e. Remember: violence isn’t “natural”; it’s a social fact, created by society 1) I am not saying that bodies don’t get mutilated, tortured, killed 2) But that who suffers, and when it’s seen as unnecessary, illegal, immoral suffering—and when it’s seen as necessary, moral and legal—is determined within a cultural and social context D. Let’s look at power 1. All violence must be seen in terms of power relations 2. Families are by their very nature characterized by gender and generational inequities 3. We have a gendered society in which male power dominates a. We are also democratic and egalitarian in ideology b. This creates contradictions, sometimes conflicts 1) As we saw in the men Arendell interviewed when talking about their divorce and post-divorce lives 2) And in the men described by Goodrum et al. and Johnson and Ferraro 4. Yet violence occurs in intimate relationships that’s only indirectly linked to asymmetrical heterosexual power ideologies a. So, as Johnson and Ferraro point out, we need to look at meanings, motives, etc., in other kinds of relationships II. Child Abuse A. Earlier reports of it were done by charity workers, professional social workers 1. SPCA (Society for the Protection and Care of Animals) was founded earlier; first case to be won of child abuse punishment was reported to the SPCA4 a. Tells us about the strength of patriarchal authority at the time b. Father-husbands could punish children, could physically punish wives: as Straus says, common law gave the right to the husband to “physically chastise an errant wife” 2. Physicians got into the act in early 1960s a. Henry Kempe, a physician, in 1962 described the “battered child syndrome” 1) Offered a narrow definition—not surprisingly 2) Prior to this, physicians had been reluctant to admit there were such patterns B. Psychological explanations of child abuse and critiques of them: 1. These are very popular a. Abusive parents are sometimes seen as pathological, deviant, neurotic, psychotic 1) Fits with our tendency to dismiss any kind of pathological behavior by working hard to define perpetrators as “not like us” b. Variation on this theme: they are immature individuals who want the child to behave like a grownup 1) Idea is that these individuals interpret the child’s inability to control himself as willful, hostile, excessively demanding c. Another variation: role reversal: parents’ desire for love and approval from the child, as though child were the parent d. Cycle-of-abuse hypothesis: the generations repeat 1) Parents who were deprived of nurturing go on to repeat the behavior 2) Very popular: read the critique in Johnson and Ferraro5 C. Societal explanations offered in the literature 1. Sweeping political/social ones: a. The argument that child abuse cannot be eliminated unless our inegalitarian, competitive, irrational, hierarchical society is changed into an egalitarian, cooperative, rational, humane one b. That we live in a violent society that teaches: 1) It’s OK to hit those we love 2) It’s OK for more powerful people to hit less powerful ones 3) It’s OK to use hitting to achieve some end 4) It’s OK to hit as an end in itself 2. Themes in this type of societal explanations: a. Rejection of uniquely psychological explanations b. Challenge the notion that home and family are havens of tranquility 1) The family is not always a peaceful haven (a romantic notion), but in fact sometimes a “cradle of violence” a) Hardly the harmonious institution we idealize it as 2) It can be a place in which violence and hate are felt, expressed, and learned as
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