Emotions and Crime

Towards a Criminology of Emotions

Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Sandra Walklate, Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Sandra Walklate

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138497887
• eBook ISBN: 9781351017619
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

In spite of the fact that crime is an emotive topic, the question of emotion has been largely overlooked in criminological research, which has tended instead to examine criminal conduct in terms of structural background variables or rational decision-making. Building on research into emotions within sociology, this book seeks to show how criminologists can in fact take emotions seriously and why criminology needs to begin considering emotions as a central element of its theoretical, conceptual and methodological apparatus. Thematically organised and presenting both empirical and theoretical studies, Emotions and Crime pays attention to the different emotional dimensions of crime, victimhood, the criminal justice system, the practice of criminological research and the discipline of criminology. Bringing together the work of an international team of authors and discussing research into violence, punishment, gender, imprisonment and mass atrocity, this volume shows how crime and emotions are inextricably connected, and illustrates both the hidden and pervasive role of emotions in criminological work.

Part I

Crime and emotions

1 Male violence against women in intimate relationships

The contribution of stress and male peer support

Walter S. DeKeseredy

Introduction

Many men who abuse their current or former female partners are angry, insecure, and jealous (DeKeseredy, Dragiewicz and Schwartz 2017; Dobash and Dobash 2015; Ptacek 2016). Why do they experience these emotions? One of the most common answers is that these men must be ‘sick’ or mentally disturbed. How could a ‘normal’ person punch, kick, stab, rape, or shoot someone he deeply loves and depends on? The media, too, contribute to the widespread belief that men who assault or kill female intimates are pathological. Consider how a Morgantown, West Virginia newspaper covered a mass murder committed by Jody Lee Hunt. On December 1, 2014, he murdered his former girlfriend Sharon Kay Berkshire, two of her lovers (Michael Frum and Jody Taylor), and Doug Brady, a business competitor, before killing himself. These were not Hunt’s first violent acts nor his first act of violence against women. He had committed a number of the acts that many researchers claim are risk factors associated with intimate femicide, which is the killing of females by male partners with whom they have, have had, or want to have, a sexual and/or emotional relationship (Ellis and DeKeseredy 1997). Yet, the local newspaper portrayed Hunt as basically a good man who suddenly ‘lost it’. For instance, one of Hunt’s friends was quoted in the local newspaper as saying, ‘Our Jody wasn’t that man’ (cited in DPost.com 2014: 1). Certainly, the media’s frequent use of quotations such as ‘we don’t know what happened’ typically ‘makes the cause of death appear inexplicable or the result of a man suddenly having “snapped”’ (Myers 1997: 110).

The reality is that male ‘abusiveness turns out to be far less mysterious than it appears at first’ (Bancroft 2002: 2), and most men who victimize women are not disturbed. Rather, they are ‘disturbingly normal’ (Katz 2006). Indeed, an alarmingly high number of men abuse women in a variety of ways. Contemplate the results of Walter S. DeKeseredy, Amanda Hall-Sanchez and James Nolan’s (2018) representative sample survey of close to 6,000 students enrolled at a large residential university in the South Atlantic region of the United States. Thirty-four percent (n = 995) of the women experienced at least one of five types of sexual assault. As well, a recent spate of similar surveys conducted in U.S. show that approximately one out of every four undergraduate student women is victimized by some form of sexual assault (DeKeseredy 2018). If only a handful of female students were sexually assaulted, it would be easy to accept the argument that most perpetrators suffer from mental disorders. Of course, some killers, rapists, and batterers do have some serious mental health problems, but the truth is that most men who engage in lethal and nonlethal violence against women are ‘less pathological than expected’ (Gondolf 1999: 1).

It is estimated that only about 10 percent of male-to-female violence incidents are spawned by mental illness (DeKeseredy 2011); thus, psychological perspectives cannot explain the other 90 percent (Brownridge 2009; Gelles and Straus 1988). Moreover, widely read and cited data derived from 840 male batterers in four cities who participated in intake sessions prior to program counselling show that less than half of these men showed signs of personality disorders and only 25 percent showed signs of severe mental disorder (Gondolf 2003; 2012). The author of this study accurately concluded that ‘there is little evidence for a prevailing ‘abusive personality’ typified by borderline personality tendencies’ (Gondolf 1999: 13).

Then why do abusive men experience the emotions listed at the start of this chapter? The sociological work on stress and male peer support provides some important answers to this question. The main objective of this chapter is to contribute to the social scientific study of the emotional dimensions of crime and criminality by examining the relationship between these two determinants and violence against women. Implications for future theoretical and empirical work are also briefly discussed.

Definition of violence against women

My conceptualization of violence against women is heavily informed by definitions provided by women who have been abused by men or are still being abused, as well as by feminist practitioners (e.g., battered women’s shelter staff). My definition is also informed by Liz Kelly’s (1987; 1988) concept of the continuum of sexual violence, which a growing number of scholars are revisiting (e.g., DeKeseredy, Nolan, Schwartz and Hall-Sanchez 2018; DeKeseredy and Rennison 2019; Ptacek 2016). The continuum ranges from nonphysical acts to physical ones like rape. Although the idea of the continuum is often used to portray moving from least serious to most serious, to scholars like Kelly (1988: 76) and to many adult female survivors of abuse, all these behaviours are serious and have a ‘basic common character’. They are all means of ‘abuse, intimidation, intrusion, threat and force’ used mainly to control women (Kelly 1988: 76). No behaviour on the continuum is automatically considered more harmful than another and, as Kelly (1988: 48) states, women’s experiences ‘shade into and out of a given category such as sexual harassment, which includes looks, gestures and remarks as well as acts which may be defined as assault or rape’.

There are sound theoretical reasons for following in Kelly’s footsteps. First, again, the continuum highlights the similarities between seemingly distinct abusive male behaviours (McGlynn, Rackley and Houghton 2017). What is more, creating a hierarchy of abuse based on seriousness, one that prioritizes physical types of abuse over non-physical ones, obscures the fact that behaviours such as psychological abuse are often seen by many women as more terrifying than what the law defines as assault (DeKeseredy, Dragiewicz and Schwartz 2017; Ptacek 2016). Furthermore, non-physical forms of abuse, especially coercive control, are much more common in women’s lives than are physically violent acts committed by current or former male intimate partners (Kelly 2012). Coercive control creates ‘invisible chains’ and involves behaviours that are often subtle, are hard to detect and prove, and seem more forgivable to people unfamiliar with the dynamics of violence against women (Fontes 2015). The primary objective of coercive control is to restrict a woman’s liberties (Tanha et al. 2010). Common examples are stalking, threatening looks, criticism, and ‘microregulating a partner’s behaviour’ (Kernsmith 2008; Stark 2007: 229).

In sum, using a variant of Kelly’s (1987; 1988) continuum enables researchers to identify and name a broad range of interrelated behaviours that thousands of women experience daily, many of which are exempt from the purview of criminal law and that are trivialized or minimized by criminal justice officials, the general public, and the mainstream media (McGlynn, Rackley and Houghton 2017). Numerous researchers may analyse rape, beatings, coercive control and other harms separately, but for countless numbers of women, these forms of abuse ‘seep into one another’ (Ptacek 2016: 128).

From a feminist standpoint, conceptualizations like Kelly’s also prioritize women’s experiential knowledge. This is essential because such knowledge:

• challenges the usual tendency of social scientists to theorize about other people, rather than with them;
• gives voice to at least some women who have been abused;
• opens the door to self-help and peer support programs in which women can share their experiences; and
• helps those responding to violence against women to identify the need for change as different women with different experiences challenges what is accepted as ‘fact’ or ‘truth’ about woman abuse.

(DeKeseredy and MacLeod 1997)

For the above reasons, violence against women is defined here as the misuse of power by a current or former intimate male partner against a woman, resulting in a loss of dignity, control, and safety as well as a feeling of powerlessness and entrapment experienced by the woman who is the direct victim of ongoing or repeated physical, technological, psychological, economic, sexual, verbal, and/or spiritual abuse. Additionally, violence against women includes persistent threats or forcing women to witness violence against their children, other relatives, friends, pets, and/or cherished possessions by their current or ex-partners (DeKeseredy and Hall-Sanchez 2018; DeKeseredy and MacLeod 1997).

Stress, male peer support and violence against women

Regardless of its shape or form, violence against women is associated with many risk factors. Risk factors are usually defined in the social scientific woman abuse literature as attributes of a couple, victim, or perpetrator that are associated with an increased probability of victimization (Hotaling and Sugarman 1986). They may be causes, co-occurrences, or consequences of abuse (Smith 1990). Two of the most important risk factors are stress and male peer support (DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2013). Stress arises when a person ‘appraises a situation as threatening or otherwise demanding and does not have an appropriate coping response’ (Cohen and Wills 1985: 312). The sources of stress examined in this chapter are sexual rejection and other kinds of threats to the kinds of authority that a patriarchal culture has led men to expect to be their rights by virtue of being male (Schwartz and DeKeseredy 1997).

Such stress is, in part, a function of a social psychological process in which males develop what Lee H. Bowker (1983) refers to as standards of gratification that dictate they dominate women and children. According to Bowker, these standards are developed through childhood exposure to their mothers being dominated by their fathers and by the men themselves being dominated in their family of orientation. In other words, they learn that both women and children are subordinate to the male head of the household. When these men find that their patterns of domination are threatened, or even get the impression that there is a challenge to such domination, then they suffer from psychological stress. They react to this stress with a contrived rage, designed to re-establish domination patterns that meet their standards of gratification. This is exemplified by an abusive husband, who told Susan Schechter (1982: 219) why he physically coerced his wife to remain at a social gathering: ‘I felt that she didn’t have the right to make the decision to leave. Her decision to leave was not as important as mine to have her stay’. When all else fails, violence is the way to keep control and maintain your identity’.

We live in a patriarchal society that promotes male proprietariness, which is ‘the tendency [of men] to think of women as sexual and reproductive “property” they can own and exchange’ (Wilson and Daly 1992: 85). For instance, one survivor of wife rape interviewed by Raquel Kennedy Bergen (1996: 20) was frequently told by her abusive partner: ‘That’s my body – my ass, my tits, my body. You gave that to me when you married me and that belongs to me’. Similarly, one of DeKeseredy and Schwartz’s (2009: 38) respondents was repeatedly sexually assaulted because, she explained, ‘it was his way of letting me know that I was his’. And another interviewee was often reminded, ‘You’re my wife. You’re my property’.

Proprietariness refers to ‘not just the emotional force of [the male’s] own feelings of entitlement but to a more pervasive attitude [of ownership and control] toward social relationships [with intimate female partners]’ (Wilson and Daly 1992: 95). Indeed, many male threats to kill women are tactics the men use to terrorize their wives or cohabiters and to ‘keep them in line’ (DeKeseredy, Dragiewicz and Schwartz 2017; Dobash and Dobash 2015), signified by the horrifying words: ‘If I can’t have her, no one can’ (Serran and Firestone 2004: 3).

Often men combine such threats with violence, which is a form of informal social control (Black 1983; DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2009; Ellis and DeKeseredy 1997). The use of violence as a means of social control escalates when female partners leave or attempt to leave a relationship, because exiting is an extreme public challenge to male partners who believe they own their wives or cohabiting partners and they have the right to control them (Block 2003; DeKeseredy, Rogness and Schwartz 2004). Even if relatively few women are actually killed by their ex-partners, most of them who receive death threats or who are victimized by nonlethal violence ‘live with the legacies of terror for the remainder of their lives’ (Stanko 1997: 632). As one of DeKeseredy and Schwartz’s (2009: 39) interviewees put it: ‘I wasn’t safe anywhere’.

Sometimes victims of male proprietariness are not only the women seeking freedom, but also the women’s prized possessions or people they deeply...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART 1: Crime and emotions
• 1. Male violence against women in intimate relationships: The contribution of stress and male peer support
• 2. The role of emotions for female co-offenders
• 3. American self-radicalising terrorists and conversions to radical action: Emotional factors and the allure of ‘jihadi cool/chic’
• 4. ‘Violence is difficult, not easy’: The emotion dynamics of mass atrocities
• PART 2: Punishment and emotions
• 5. ‘Forty-five colour photographs’: Images, emotions and the victim of domestic violence
• 6. Punitiveness and the emotions of punishment: Between solidarity and hostility
• 7. Capital punishment and the emotional public sphere in mid-twentieth century Britain
• PART 3: Doing criminology as emotion work
• 8. Prison life as ‘emotion culture’: Reflections on some of the emotional challenges of conducting prison ethnography
• 9. Witnessing, responsibility and spectatorship in the aftermath of violence: Reflections from Srebrenica
• 10. Death justice: Navigating contested death in the digital age
• 11. ‘Feeling criminology’: Learning from emotions in criminological research
• Postscript Concluding thoughts: Some lessons from being ‘liminal’
• Index