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PART I
Book Context and Critiques of O’Neil and Harway’s Multivariate Model Explaining Men’s Violence Against Women
Introduction
Part I provides an overall orientation to the book’s goals and includes four chapters. Chapter 1 gives a brief history of the controversial issues related to men’s violence against women. We present a theoretical rationale for the book and describe our collegial process of dialogue in preparing the book. The overall organization of the book is described, as well as the different sections and chapters.
In Chapter 2, we present the preliminary multivariate model that describes the factors that explain men’s violence against women (O’Neil & Harway, 1997). Four content areas or factors are defined, including macrosocietal, biological, gender-role socialization, and relational. Thirteen hypotheses are also specified about the causes of men’s violence against women. This multivariate model provides a common set of ideas for critique by the chapter authors and a structure for them to make their own hypotheses about the causes of men’s violence against women.
Amy Marin and Nancy Felipe Russo consider the important contributions of feminist writers and theorists in explaining men’s violence against women in Chapter 3. As Marin and Russo point out, feminists emphasize gender, power, and structural dimensions of violence. Marin and Russo are most interested in the role of the contributions of societal institutions to male violence. They consider men’s violence against women to be a form of social control and they emphasize the social construction of male violence. Like many other feminists, they view various forms of male violence against women (battering, rape, sexual harassment) as related phenomena, all resulting, at least in part, from male power and privilege. These notions are explored in detail in Chapter 3, and a feminist lens is used to critique the four content areas of the O’Neil and Harway model.
In Chapter 4, Richard Gelles critiques two prevailing theories about men’s violence: the feminist and the sociological models. He notes that neither of these models focuses on the perpetrators of the violence against women. Gelles describes limitations of the existing research to explain battering. This research includes clinical data, official report data, and surveys conducted by social scientists. He then critically reviews data on known risk and protective factors related to men’s violence against women. He concludes his chapter with an analysis of the hypotheses found in the O’Neil and Harway multivariate model.
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| 1 | |
| | What Causes Men to Be Violent Against Women? |
| | The Unanswered and Controversial Question |
| | MICHELE HARWAY
JAMES M. O’NEIL |
“If the leading newspapers were to announce tomorrow a new disease that, over the past year, had afflicted from 3 to 4 million citizens, few would fail to appreciate the seriousness of the illness. Yet, when it comes to the 3 to 4 million women who are victimized by violence each year, the alarms ring softly. . . . We live in a nation where crimes against women are still perceived as anything but crime—as a family problem, as a private matter, as ‘sexual miscommunication’.” So said Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (Biden, 1993, p. 1059), the chief architect of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), in describing societal reactions to relationship violence. The legislation he has championed will affect the millions of women who are victims of violence in their own home and in other settings. The Violence Against Women Act treats violence motivated by gender as a violation of civil rights, changes existing family violence laws, increases funding for services to victims, and encourages states to respond to domestic violence as a crime, not as a private matter (see U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, 1990, 1991).
Senator Joseph Biden’s legislation has made violence against women a national priority and one where social scientists can make a significant difference. Social scientists with their research knowledge and theories are best suited to create prevention programs, provide services for victims and their families, and conduct research on critical questions related to violence against women.
The primary goal of this book is to address one critical question: “Why do men commit acts of violence against women?” The previous literature has focused primarily on why women stay in battering relationships and the development of typologies of batterers. Both of these topics are important, but they do not address the causes of men’s violence or explain the risk factors for men who use violence as a relational tool. Full multivariate models that explain the cause of men’s violence against women have been slow to develop over the last three decades. Our primary rationale for focusing on the single question, “Why do men batter?” is that answers to this question could decrease the amount of violence against women significantly. Furthermore, we need to answer this question to create comprehensive prevention programs for boys and girls, and men and women of all ages.
In this first chapter, we review recent history related to understanding men’s violence against women. Second, we provide a theoretical rationale for the book and discuss the professional process of writing the book. Finally, the book’s organization is discussed to orient readers to the different sections and chapters.
PAST CONTROVERSIES RELATED TO EXPLAINING MEN’S VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
In the United States, historically, relationship violence or battering was not considered a serious problem and was judged to be a private matter. However, since the late 1970s, research clearly documents that battering exists across all age, class, race, and socioeconomic levels and that it usually has dangerous outcomes (Okun, 1986). Even with hard data on the existence of battering and the damage that results from it, the larger society in the 1970s and 1980s was mainly in denial about battering. For the most part, the public hoped that violence toward women was an aberration that affected only seriously pathological families. Several notorious domestic violence cases have helped the American public accept battering as a significant societal problem.
Battering remains a difficult topic for men and women to discuss. On a personal level, dialogues between the sexes on the causes of violence against women have been limited and fraught with conflict and controversy. Many men have avoided discussing the epidemic of battering in America because it has activated shame, guilt, fear, and defensiveness in them. Similarly, women may have wanted to discuss this serious problem with men, but may have feared men’s reactions. These interpersonal dynamics explain the dearth of productive inter-gender dialogue on men’s violence against women. This topic has been an easy one for men and women to avoid.
Threat and defensiveness when discussing inter-gender violence is an important dilemma to acknowledge and remediate. For us, discussing and writing about it brought up our own periodic discomfort. We hope that addressing this issue directly does not add to the problem. Likewise, the reader also may be uncomfortable with our views about why men and women have had difficulty dialoguing on the causes of men’s violence against women.
Within the academic community, the issue of relationship violence also has been controversial. Academics have had difficulty dialoguing on this topic (Avis, 1994; Barnett, Miller-Perrin, & Perrin, 1997; Bograd, 1992; Dutton, 1994; Gelles, 1993c; Gelles & Loseke, 1993; Hamberger & Renzetti, 1996; Hansen, 1993; Johnson, 1995; Moltz, 1992). Part of the problem has been that the academic controversies in several disciplines never have been resolved. Typical of this were the initial debates about the appropriateness of working with batterers in couples’ therapy (Bograd, 1988b; Goldner, 1985b; Hare-Mustin, 1978; Pressman, 1989). This debate resulted in a great deal of emotionality, but little agreement. There was limited theory and research to inform these debates constructively, and many exchanges were highly personal and political. Discussions about whether men are battered as often as women (Steinmetz, 1977) and whether instruments such as the Conflict Tactic Scale (Straus, 1990; Straus & Hamby, 1997) are appropriate brought some violence researchers into direct confrontation with each other.
Another controversy relates to consideration of the role of other factors in men’s violence against women. For example, biology, genetics, and evolution have received limited attention by researchers. For some, consideration of these factors was construed as exonerating men of their responsibility for the violence. Consideration of how partner interactions contribute to violence sometimes has been considered “off limits” because it was thought to be “blaming the victim” (Stevens, 1994). However, it is very difficult to understand how individuals are predisposed to violence and how violence is actually triggered without vigorously studying the interactional and communication patterns of couples.
In some situations, researchers, clinicians, and theoreticians have been divided along sex lines. For example, when discussing the causes of men’s violence, male researchers were sometimes accused of “explaining away” or excusing men from the violence. Some men denied the violence or actually tried to justify it. This only reinforced some women’s ardent views that men are unable to understand how patriarchy, sexism, and violence are all interrelated. Men’s rational discussions about violence were sometimes perceived as an attempt to deflate women’s anger and rage, thereby diminishing the importance of this serious problem. This only increased the polarization between some men and women and delayed the needed inter-gender dialogue that could have advanced our understanding of men’s battering.
Another area of controversy concerned the use of terminology such as domestic violence, family violence, spousal abuse, battering, violent couples, relationship violence, and marital violence. For some, the use of a particular term was overly restrictive. For example, marital violence suggests that such violence occurs only within the context of traditional heterosexual marriages. In fact, statistics indicate that violence occurs in cohabiting and dating relationships just as it does within the confines of a legally “sanctioned” relationship. Violence also exists in same-sex relationships. Some argued that domestic violence includes not only violence from one relational partner to another, but also should include violence directed toward children or elderly relatives. Others objected to the term violent couples, which suggests that violence is bi-directional, with both partners at times being perpetrators.
We struggled with the decision whether we should, as editors, require uniform terminology across chapters, but decided that because this book was intended to be generative rather than restrictive, we would be ill-served by dictating the terminology used by the authors. In our own chapters, we generally will use the following terms: relationship violence, domestic violence, or battering.
Men’s violence, by whatever name, is certainly an emotionally charged area, one that has generated strong feelings and much denial on a societal level. With the greater societal acknowledgment of the epidemic of battering in America, new legislation to fund victims’ services, and the education of the public (Biden, 1993), there is a renewed willingness to consider even the most difficult of these emotionally charged topics.
We began our work together in the context of these personal and professional controversies. We hope that men and women now can pursue together all questions that may explain the complexity of inter-gender violence. Alliances between men and women on how violence occurs will yield more understanding than polarized positions that are based on unnecessary fear, limited scientific evidence, and outdated political agendas. Dialogues about men’s violence against women need to be balanced by facts and sound reasoning from the head and compassionate emotional understanding from the heart.
LIMITATIONS OF PREVIOUS THEORIES EXPLAINING MEN’S VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
It is beyond the scope of this book to extensively review the many theories proposed to explain men’s violence against women. The interested reader is referred to a partial listing of the many books and articles on theories about men’s violence against women (APA, 1996; Barnett, Miller-Perrin, & Perrin, 1997; Carden, 1994; Coleman, 1996; Crowell & Burgess, 1996; Dutton, 1985, 1988, 1995; Edleson & Tolman, 1992; Gelles, 1979, 1985, 1993c; Gelles & Cornell, 1985; Gelles & Straus, 1979; Giles-Sims, 1983; Hamberger & Renzetti, 1996; Kantor & Jasinski, 1997; Koss et al., 1994; Levinson, 1989a, 1989b; McCall & Shields, 1986; Okun, 1986; Steinmetz, 1987; Stordeur & Stille, 1989; Straus, 1973, 1980; Straus, Gelles, & Steinmetz, 1980; Thome-Finch, 1992). Our preliminary review yielded dozens of separate sources that summarized theories of violence against women. Over 30 different conceptual labels were used to describe the causes of men’s violence. Some of these labels overlapped, because the authors described similar concepts but renamed them. Our review convinced us, as Gelles (1993c) indicated, that theory development in this area is primitive and that specific theories on violence against women are in the very early stages of development.
The theoretical literature in this area is fragmented and confusing for a number of reasons. First, many of the theoretical analyses are limited by a specific discipline’s theoretical approach. These theories have failed to capture fully the interdisciplinary and multifactored nature of violence against women. Second, individual theories of violence have been developed in reaction to the dominant paradigms of the time. The first decade of theorizing about causes of family violence was dominated by biological explanations. In reaction to single-factor biological explanations, sociocultural explanations that linked social structures to family violence were created. In reaction to these theories, feminist and sociopolitical theories emerged. Psychological theories about men’s violence against women are just beginning to be created. As a result of each of these shifts in theory development, much emotion has been generated and controversies have occurred about the causes of men’s violence. Coherent, interdisciplinary, and unified theories have been difficult to develop given the personal and political issues involved. Third, many of the theories are single-factor theories, limited to a single discipline, rather than more complex ones that hypothesize multiple factors explaining violence across disciplines. Furthermore, the different disciplines have used different terminology to explain men’s violence against women, thereby sometimes discouraging discussion across disciplines.
From our perspective, the complexity of explaining the causes and risk factors of men’s violence against women requires multidisciplinary explanations. This position is supported by Miller (1996), who indicated, “multiple levels of explanations are necessary to link developmental and biological characteristics, personalities, sub-cultural variations, and economics, social, political, and community dimensions in our model of relationship aggression. Increasingly, social science has supported the development of integrated models of human behavior that identify individual factors (such as personality) as well as socio-cultural factors” (pp. 208–209).
Based on the previously mentioned rationale, we made an early decision to explore the multiplicity of factors that contribute to violence against women and to develop a model that would consider their rather complicated interface. This book is the result of that decision.
THE PROCESS OF WRITING THE BOOK AND ITS ORGANIZATION
This book was conceived of as a dialogue between the two editors and a scholarly exchange with the chapter authors. We asked the chapter authors to read and critique our earlier manuscript that proposed 4 content areas and 13 hypotheses explaining men’s violence against women (see Chapter 2 and O’Neil & Harway, 1997). We asked the authors to review the state of knowledge in one or more of the content areas. We also asked them to critique specific hypotheses we had generated in one or more of the content areas. Two of the authors were given a broader charge: to critique all 13 hypotheses across the content areas (see Marin & Russo, Chapter 3, and Gelles, Chapter 4). Each chapter represents the outcome of these critiques and new ideas generated by the authors. We believe that the resulting chapters represent a new scholarship. Some of the chapters are controversial and all of them contribute to the ongoing dialogue we started back in 1993 on the fundamental question, “What causes men’s violence against women?”
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