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| CONFRONTING VIOLENCE AT HOME |
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| 23-Jan-2009 | ||||
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In this paper I will present the first outcomes of a research based on life histories of women, on their experiences and subjectivities, on the ways they cope with difficult situations in their lives, such as violence against them or against children. Moving from paradigms who theorized women as victims, we intend to analyze the changing social conditions, both internationally and in our country, around the concept "violence against women" (Hageman-White 1998). In this sense, we also want to question the traditional ways to approach violence at home and outside home and to take into account the ways men and women make sense of their relations and about the violence itself (Dobash et al. 2000).
CONFRONTING VIOLENCE AT HOME
Maria José Magalhães – CIIE-FPCEUP
VIIIº Congrèss de l’ AIFREF, Toronto, Canada, 2001
Abstract:
In this paper I will present the first outcomes of a research based on life histories of women, on their experiences and subjectivities, on the ways they cope with difficult situations in their lives, such as violence against them or against children. Moving from paradigms who theorized women as victims, we intend to analyze the changing social conditions, both internationally and in our country, around the concept "violence against women" (Hageman-White 1998). In this sense, we also want to question the traditional ways to approach violence at home and outside home and to take into account the ways men and women make sense of their relations and about the violence itself (Dobash et al. 2000).
In the Portuguese political context, violence against women at home is on the public agenda since it passed a law classifying it as public crime. Until now, Portuguese women are very much unprotected. In first place, the law allowed the aggressors to pressure on victims. Secondly, there were not (and are still a very few) institutional support for battered women.
However, the political, cultural and legal conditions for women have changed, on one hand, since the 1974 April revolution, where democracy provided women with some resources to confront and challenge patriarchal power also in their homes, on the other hand, domestic violence is now a public crime, after 2000.
This research intents to know women's experiences and subjectivities that can help us to understand why most women stay even if the relationship is violent (see also LaViolette e Barnett 2000) and we try to debate education in family and in schools to empowering girls and women to built a new relations in society.
Key – words: violence against women, feminism, women’s life stories.
Violence against women at home
In my research — which is about the main changes in women’s lives in Portugal in the last twenty five years, through their life histories, their own experiences and subjectivities, in their own terms — I found my self with many episodes of violence against women. I knew that Portuguese families, in the private world of our society, violence against women and children were a commonplace, unfortunately. But my surprise came when, instead of simple stories about violence I found also stories about the way women confronted the violence of their own husband and they stopped beating them.
As a qualitative researching, I am not seeking for generalizing knowledge but the life stories these women began to tell me more about Portuguese society in respect to women life conditions.
As I am concerned with family education, it is relevant to think how and what children learn in these contexts. The research already available have shown that family is a powerful cultural transmitter of behavior, both positive and negative. That family members might learn unhealthy ways of coping, such as suppressing anger and other emotions (LaViolette and Barnett 2000: 26), and that children tend to accept family standards, whatever they are, as normal, and they often go on to practice them, regardless of their later usefulness (LaViolette and Barnett 2000: 26). However, the family socialization is not a deterministic one. Other authors have argued that in person lives there are space for resilience either family or individual resilience (Hawley and DeHaan 1996; Walsh 1996).
In this paper I only discuss material from working class women. It is not because middle class women are not victimized or they do not confront the violence in their homes. Rather I don’t have the class issue solved in my research relating with women’s lives in our country, so I decided to elicit only one group of women. Therefore, the short testimonies presented here are from working class women (peasant or employees) from a little town in the countryside.
It was only last year that in Portugal violence against women at home became a public crime (2000). That is, the intervention of the law or the police doesn’t need, now, the complaining of the victimized woman, the wife. Although our legislation according to the equality between men and women is said to be one of the more advanced, the fact is that feminist consciousness has not been pervasive in Portuguese society and so, many of the feminist issues are on the public agenda. Violence against women at home is one of them.
As we are focusing on violence against women, it is important to begin to consider the semantic and conceptual scope of the term. Dobash, Dobash, Cavanagh and Lewis put the question of what is violence within a relationship:
“While many couples may have had an exchange of slaps or minor blows at some time, and this is unfortunate and regrettable, this does not necessarily constitute a pattern of systematic and sustained violence meant to harm, intimidate, terrorize, and brutalize. It is the latter and not the former that constitutes a violent relationship; it is the latter and not the former that inflicts high costs on victims and witnesses including children; it is the latter and not the former in which the intent is that of intimidation, injury, and harm; it is the latter and not the former in which the consequences are likely to necessitate a host of interventions aimed at assisting the victim and dependent children; it is the latter and not the former that necessitates effective interventions aimed at stopping the perpetrator from repeated and escalating episodes of violence. While any and all conflicts between partners are regrettable, not all escalate to the type and level of violent relationships necessitating public or private concern or active intervention. The focus of attention here is on those relationships characterized by systematic or severe violence, by injuries, by fear, by intimidation, and by various forms of intervention.” (Dobash et al. 2000: 4)
Also, Carol Hageman-White discusses the concept of violence against women stressing the relevance of distinguish from other concepts more ‘neutral’:
“The concept ‘violence against women’ stood for the view that rape and battering are not caused by individual personality or behavior patterns, but are rooted in a patriarchal society. Their violence negates the individuality of the victim and reduces her to the fact of being female and as such violable: it is this that hurts all women in attacking one. Violence against women does not arise on the dark edges of a largely civilized society, but in its center; it does not controvert the norm so much as extend it to its logical consequence.” (Hageman-White 1998: 178).
The mainstreaming of what had seemed an inherently oppositional concept accentuates what has been, in many countries of the West world, a gender division of discourse. And indeed the publication of private violence has done much to raise the collective political consciousness of women as a group (see Hageman-White 1998: 178).
What we can find in Portugal concerning institutions and professionals (police, law, social services, psychological services, sociological researchers, policy makers) working with this issue is that without a feminist consciousness, violence against women at home is subsumed in a big group of deviant behavior, so the exactly point of the issue is missed. As Hageman-White put it:
“It is not strictly true that gender-related and sexual violence were non-existent for social services, the law, psychology, or sociology. It is rather that violent acts were perceived as part of a problem with another name and melted into that background. Thus, when men beat them, this was but one example of marital conflict, or perhaps one aspect of family breakdown, alongside alcoholism, child neglect, and divorce; and indeed the term ‘violent couple’ could suppress entirely the question of who beats whom. Rape turned up as a particularly piquant form of aberrant sexuality, or as a special case of deviant or criminal behavior, inviting comparison between different types of criminals. Sexual abuse of children lurked under the surface if discussions of incest, whose traditional concern seems to have been what keeps adolescent sons from possessing their mothers, with a — not incidental — tendency to ignore both issues of age and issues of consent all together.” (Hageman-White 1998: 180)
In the lives of women, with a gender hierarchy already unbalanced for women, the violence reinforces their / our subjugation.
And quoting a testimony of a woman’s narrative:
“He was happy because he had everything done!”
This testimony shows very clearly that what was at stake was the work she could perform until that moment. So, the violence was purposeful in the sense that the husband wants her to work the same regardless her health and physical conditions. As Dobash and colleagues could found in their research about violent men, “violence is functional and purposeful”:
“While many men claim a lack of knowledge and control with respect to their use of violence — it is a mystery; it just happens — some do articulate what the want to obtain through its use and reflect on whether they have been successful in achieving that end. In this sense, violence is functional even when those who perpetrate it may not be aware of what they hope to achieve through its use. While often successful in achieving short-term aims, violence may also be costly in ways that are less likely to be contemplated in advance. Thus, violence may work to specific, immediate purposes, yet it may also fail as partners and children become alienated from the abuser and may eventually leave him.” (Dobash et al. 2000: 35)
Quoting the same woman:
“He push me and I stayed there on the hill”
Coping with or confronting violence at home
In this life story of a peasant woman I have just cited, battered for a long time, one day she decided to defend a son who was being physically abused by her husband. She confronted him with a stone and then went to her mother's house. Later, the husband re-approached her for almost 6 months. Without telling all the story and although she and us fear the situation go back, today they are together again, without domestic violence (until now), for some four years.
It was the feminist movement that put on the public agenda the issue “personal is political”, and it were also the feminists who kept an emancipatory look to the notion on the ‘individual’. In this issue of violence against women at home, feminists researchers and professionals have wonder for almost twenty years why and how women stayed in violent relationships and supported oppressed live conditions (not only at home) but also when and why they decide and come to terms to fight this violence or their bad life conditions. That is, they seek for a comprehensive theory that takes into account the role of the subject and the articulation between the subject and social structure. As Barbara Marshall puts it:
“Any theory of social reproduction must include explanation at the level of the subject — thus accepting the Weberian insight that ‘structures’, no matter how compelling, ‘act’ only through individual subjectivities” (1994: 95)
The same author, examining some of the debates around the ‘subject’ — specifically the subject of feminist theory but also, in a broader way, the subject of social theory, asserts:
“The word ‘subject’, of course, has a dual meaning — as the signifier of the individual who has a subjectivity, and as the signifier of one who is under the authority of another. (…) The notion of ‘gendered subjectivity’, in both these senses, had garnered considerable interest in feminist theory, and is central to an understanding of the way in which gender becomes embedded in both subject and structure, and their relationship” (1994: 94).
This is this notion of ‘gendered subjectivity’ I am looking for in lifestories of the women I have been interviewing, seeking for an understanding when and why they fight back, resist or accept their life circumstances.
Citing part of another woman’s life story:
“We can be a very good person, but it comes a time a woman gets tired!”
With this episode, we can see how the woman is uncomfortable for having used force against her husband: “I’ve lost the respect”. LaViolette and Barnett, quoting Lois Wyse write: “Men are taught to apologize for their weaknesses, women for their strengths” (2000: 15).
A final note about
violence against women at home and family education
Making acquaintance with stories of violence is stressing for the researcher, the activist or the victim. But confronting it can be a way of healing. As Hageman-White puts it: “Both for the feminists activists, with their high risk of burnout and for women facing years of violence with their high risk of resignation and return, it seems vital to experience some signs of hope that an end of the violence is conceivable and the hurt and damage may heal. Healing, wholeness, is not really an individual process.” (1998: 187-8). Implied in feminist project is the vision of a community of women and men in which violence is to be neither expected nor tolerated.
Finally, I would like to argue that it is possible, even if it is difficult, to conceive a nonviolent and nonsexist society. The remaining violence against women even after decades of political, feminist, legal and therapeutic interventions, it is, we can argue according to Hageman-white, profoundly related to the cultural construction of the female as inferior, since women have carried the burden of community and morality in the most difficult times, while being ridiculed for doing so. There could be no more appropriate issue than violence against women to reverse these values, but perhaps for this very reason or continues to be difficult.” (Hageman-White 1998: 189).
References:
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