Understanding Domestic Violence
Domestic violence or abuse occurs when a family member, partner or ex-partner attempts to physically or psychologically dominate another. Domestic violence often refers to violence between spouses, but can also include cohabitants and non-married intimate partners. The term "intimate partner violence" (IPV) is often used synonymously. Other terms include wife or husband beating, battering, "relationship violence", "domestic abuse", and "spousal abuse". Family violence is a broader definition, often used to include child abuse, elder abuse and other violent acts between family members.
Recent attention to domestic violence began in the women's movement as concern about wives being beaten by their husbands, and has remained a major focus of modern feminism, particularly in terms of "violence against women".
Domestic violence occurs in all cultures; people of all races, ethnicities, religions, and classes can be perpetrators of domestic violence. Domestic violence is perpetrated by, and on, both men and women, and occurs in same-sex and opposite-sex relationships.
Domestic violence has many forms, including physical violence, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, intimidation, economic deprivation or threats of violence. There are a number of dimensions:
- mode - physical, psychological, sexual and/or social
- frequency - on/off, occasional, chronic
- severity – in terms of both psychological or physical harm and the need for treatment – transitory or permanent injury – mild, moderate, severe up to homicide.
Studies of reported domestic violence show women preponderantly as victims and men to be more violent.
Definitions
The U.S. Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) defines domestic violence as a "pattern of abusive behavior in any relationship that is used by one partner to gain or maintain power and control over another intimate partner." Domestic violence can take many forms, including physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional, economic, or and/or psychological abuse.
The Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service in the United Kingdom in its "Domestic Violence Policy" uses domestic violence to refer to a range of violent and abusive behaviours, defining it as:
Patterns of behaviour characterised by the misuse of power and control by one person over another who are or have been in an intimate relationship. It can occur in mixed gender relationships and same gender relationships and has profound consequences for the lives of children, individuals, families and communities. It may be physical, sexual, emotional and/or psychological. The latter may include intimidation, harassment, damage to property, threats and financial abuse.
Types
Domestic violence can take the form of physical violence, including direct physical violence ranging from unwanted physical contact to rape and murder. Indirect physical violence may include destruction of objects, striking or throwing objects near the victim, or harm to pets or children. In addition to physical violence, spousal abuse often includes mental or emotional abuse, including verbal threats of physical violence to the victim, the self, or others including children, ranging from explicit, detailed and impending to implicit and vague as to both content and time frame, and verbal violence, including threats, insults, put-downs, and attacks. Nonverbal threats may include gestures, facial expressions, and body postures. Psychological abuse may also involve economic and/or social control, such as controlling victim's money and other economic resources, preventing victim from seeing friends and relatives, actively sabotaging victim's social relationships and isolating victim from social contacts. Spiritual abuse is another form of abuse that may occur.
Causes
There are many different theories as to the causes of domestic violence. These include psychological theories that consider personality traits and mental characteristics of the offender, as well as social theories which consider external factors in the offender's environment, such as family structure, stress, social learning. As with many phenomena regarding human experience, no single approach appears to cover all cases.
In some relationships, violence arises out of a perceived need for power and control, a form of bullying and social learning of abuse. Abusers' efforts to dominate their partners have been attributed to low self-esteem or feelings of inadequacy, unresolved childhood conflicts, the stress of poverty, hostility and resentment toward women, hostility and resentment toward men, personality disorders, genetic tendencies and sociocultural influences, among other possible causative factors. Most authorities seem to agree that abusive personalities result from a combination of several factors, to varying degrees. Adam Dukes argues that all [domestic] abuse relates to men’s capacity for, and their need to, devalue women and view them in negative ways.
Physical violence
Physical violence is the intentional use of physical force with the potential for causing injury, harm, disability, or death, for example, choking, hitting, shoving, biting, pinching, restraint, kicking, or use of a weapon.
Psychologists have studied certain personality characteristics of individuals who batter their partner. These include:
- Blames others for problems/feelings
- Closed-mindedness
- Cruelty to animals and/or children
- Hypersensitivity
- Isolation of victim
- Jealousy
- Manipulation through guilt
- Minimization of violence
- Objectification of women
- "Playful" use of force during sex
- Quick Involvement
- Rigid sex roles
- Threats of violence
- Tight control of finances
- Unrealistic expectations
- Verbal abuse
Sexual violence and incest
Sexual violence and incest are divided into three categories:
- use of physical force to compel a person to engage in a sexual act against their will, whether or not the act is completed;
- attempted or completed sex act involving a person who is unable to understand the nature or condition of the act, unable to decline participation, or unable to communicate unwillingness to engage in the sexual act, e.g., because of underage immaturity, illness, disability, or the influence of alcohol or other drugs, because of intimidation or pressure, or because of seduction and submission (as in female forms of sexual aggression); and
- abusive sexual contact.
See ‘Spousal Rape’ below.
Psychological abuse
Psychological/emotional abuse can include, humiliating the victim, controlling what the victim can and cannot do, withholding information from the victim, deliberately doing something to make the victim feel diminished or embarrassed, isolating the victim from friends and family, and denying the victim access to money or other basic resources.
Economic abuse is when the abuser has complete control over the victim's money and other economic resources. Usually, this involves putting the victim on a strict 'allowance', withholding money at will and forcing the victim to beg for the money until the abuser gives them some money. It is common for the victim to receive less money as the abuse continues. This also includes (but is not limited to) preventing the victim from finishing education or obtaining employment.
Power and control
A causalist view of domestic violence is that it is a strategy to gain or maintain power and control over the victim. This view is in alignment with Bancroft's "cost-benefit" theory that abuse rewards the perpetrator in ways other than, or in addition to, simply exercising power over his or her target(s). He cites evidence in support of his argument that, in most cases, abusers are quite capable of exercising control over themselves, but choose not to do so for various reasons.
An alternative view is that abuse arises from powerlessness and externalizing/projecting this and attempting to exercise control of the victim. It is an attempt to 'gain or maintain power and control over the victim' but even in achieving this it cannot resolve the powerlessness driving it. Such behaviours have addictive aspects leading to a cycle of abuse or violence. Mutual cycles develop when each party attempts to resolve their own powerlessness in attempting to assert control.
Questions of power and control are integral to the widely accepted Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project. They developed "Power and Control Wheel" to illustrate this: it has power and control at the center, surrounded by spokes (techniques used), the titles of which include:
- Coercion and threats
- Intimidation
- Emotional abuse
- Isolation
- Minimizing, denying and blaming
- Using children
- Economic abuse
- Male privilege
The model attempts to address abuse by one-sidedly challenging the misuse of power by the 'perpetrator'.
http://www.ncdsv.org/images/Power_and_Control_wheel_NCDSV.pdf
Social stress
Stress may be increased when a person is living in a family situation, with increased pressures. Social stresses, due to inadequate finances or other such problems in a family may further increase tensions. Violence is not always caused by stress, but may be one way that some (but not all) people respond to stress.
Dependency
Women are most dependent on the spouse for economic well being. Having children to take care of, should she leave the marriage, increases the financial burden and makes it all the more difficult for women to leave. Dependency means that women have fewer options and few resources to help them cope with or change their spouse's behavior.
Some people claim that spouses have "marital duties" to each other, but if a marriage is supposed to be based on love and trust, a husband must always respect his wife's wishes.
When a woman gets married, she still has rights. One of these rights is to say no and to have her husband respect that. Are not a wife's needs just as important as her husband's? What kind of marriage is based on fear?
Most importantly, spousal rape is usually an act of showing who is in control - another form of domestic violence. Often, a man rapes his wife after “beating” her because if she has sex with him, he feels he is "forgiven" for the abuse.
However, a husband does not necessarily have to use force in order to commit spousal rape. Some withhold money and other necessities or threaten to leave their wife, take away her children, or commit suicide if she does not have sex with them. Whenever a woman has sex with her husband out of fear, even if no physical force is involved, it is spousal rape.
The assumption that spousal rape is not "real rape" is completely ludicrous. Women who are victims of spousal rape often suffer severe and long-term psychological consequences, especially since they usually experience multiple assaults and rape by someone that they once presumably loved and trusted.
We all think of rapists as strangers waiting in a dark alley; the reality is that most rapes occur when the attacker is known to the victim. It’s estimated that about one in seven husbands rape their wives.
Moreover, women are more likely to be assaulted, injured, raped or killed by a partner or ex-partner than all other type of assailants combined. Spousal rape is real. Women experience it every day. To those who are still doubtful, go talk to a woman who has been raped by her husband, and see how her life has been affected.
Is this all fabrication? Are the millions of women around the world claiming ‘rape’ by their husbands all wrong?
Only the victims know how they feel, to deny them credibility is incredibly ignorant; to assume that they somehow deserve it for not living up to their wifely functions is absolute misogyny.
Violence against children
When it comes to domestic violence towards children involving physical abuse, research in the
Girls whose fathers batter their mothers are 6.5 times more likely to be sexually abused by their fathers than are girls from non-violent homes.
Food for thought . . .
