Domestic Violence

Michael Freeman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754626442
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351965477
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Domestic violence - domestic hooliganism it has been called - is one of the cancers of our age. This volume offers a challenging selection of materials as a picture of a multi-faceted problem. The issues embraced range from criminal and civil law responses and the value of mediation, to the impact on children, and to the cultural context. The materials are derived from a variety of sources and from different disciplines to offer the reader an understanding of the problem not easily culled from standard library resources.

Part I
Definition

[1]
Definitional Issues in
Violence Against Women

Surveillance and Research From
a Violence Research Perspective

MALCOLM GORDON

National Insitute of Mental Health

Issues relevant to defining violence against women include the importance of severity of aggressive behavior in partner relationships, relationships among types of abusive behavior, and adequacy of explanatory models of partner violence. Severity of aggression is important for describing and understanding partner violence. Different types of abusive behavior should be assessed to account for variation in partner abuse. Constructs drawn from multiple domains are needed to adequately explain partner aggression across the range of severity of partner abuse. Standardized structured interviews to assess partner violence in high-risk surveillance would complement checklists for general population surveillance.

Definitional issues are significant in describing the epidemiology of violence against women and in planning surveillance systems for monitoring its occurrence. Current conceptions of violence against women have developed from the confluence of two traditions: advocacy movements for victims of sexual assault and domestic violence and social and behavioral research on sexual assault and family violence. Advocacy movements promoted greater societal recognition of the prevalence and detrimental effects of sexual assault and domestic violence, criminalization of and sanctions against domestic violence and partner and acquaintance rape, and increased treatment and services for rape victims and victims of domestic violence. Research studies extended criminological studies of violence against women to sociological and psychological perspectives, including such landmark studies as surveys on physical and psychological violence in families by Straus and Gelles (1990; Straus, Gelles, & Steinmetz, 1980), on the experiences of battered women by Walker (1979), on rape and sexual assault among college students by Koss (Koss, Gidycz, & Wisniewski, 1987), and in community samples by Russell and Wyatt (Russell, 1982; Wyatt, Newcomb, & Riederle, 1993). These studies, in contrast to prior studies with small and unrepresentative samples, paid careful attention to measurement and sampling issues to obtain generalizable results on domestic violence and sexual assault.

Although women experience violence perpetrated by strangers, acquaintances, dating partners, various family members, and intimate partners, much violence outside the family has epidemiological characteristics of other types of violence and can be subsumed under the general rubric of the epidemiology of violent or criminal behavior. This review will focus on domestic violence, especially heterosexual partner violence. Despite commonality of determinants of different types of aggressive behavior, there are significant differences between partner violence and other types of violent behavior, including (a) most violence outside the family involves individuals with limited personal contact; partner aggression involves individuals who have an intense, continuing interpersonal relationship and thus can lead to repetitive violence; and (b) the interpersonal relationship of individuals involved in partner violence usually includes an emotional relationship of attachment, emotional and sexual intimacy, or dependency between partners such that the physical and sexual violence occurs within an intimate relationship context. The relationship context includes a history of prior relationship behavior and expectations and goals for the relationship.

Many advocates and scholars conceptualized domestic violence as an array of physical, psychological, and verbal acts used to achieve domination and control over an intimate partner and argue that the proper referent for domestic violence directed at women should not be episodes of specific acts of physical, psychological, and sexual violence but, rather, a pattern of behavior and experiences of violence and abuse within a relationship. Moreover, the violence and abuse should be considered within the more broad context of societal expectation and attitudes toward gender roles and behavior, unequal gender-based power in relationships, and antecedent behaviors (such as prior threats or abuse) and consequences (such as injuries) (DeKeseredy, 2000 [this issue]; Dobash, Dobash, Cavanagh, & Lewis, 1998). Thus, Pence (Pence & Paymar, 1993), from her experience in interviewing and providing services to battered women in Duluth, conceptualized the abuse these women received as a pattern of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse; coercion; and violence with the intent to dominate and control the woman: “Violence is used to control people’s behavior… the intention of batterers [is] to gain control over their partner’s actions, thoughts and feelings… violence is part of a pattern of behaviors rather than isolated incidences of abuse or cyclical explosions of pent-up anger, frustration, or painful feelings” (Pence & Paymar, 1993, pp. 1-2).

In contrast, many violence researchers have traditionally focused on acts of perpetrators and operationalized violent behavior as specific behavioral acts that can cause physical injury or harm. Thus, Straus and Gelles (1990) define violence as “an act carried out with the intention, or perceived intention, of causing physical pain or injury to another person” (p. 76). In fact, much violence research identifies an even narrower range of physical aggression in the term violence, including only physically aggressive behaviors that are likely to lead to significant harm or injury. The term aggressive behavior is often used to refer to a more broad class of behaviors involving physical force or threats of force that may or may not lead to significant physical harm (e.g., much pushing, shoving, slapping, wrestling, or grabbing objects away from another person). Lists of specific behavioral acts (e.g., such as hit; push, grab, shove; beat up) have been used in family violence assessment instruments such as the widely used Conflict Tactics Scales and its revised form, the Conflict Tactics Scales-2 (Straus, 1995; Straus, Hamby, Boney-McCoy, & Sugarman, 1996). In addition, many researchers and practitioners use the term abuse to refer to broad classes of physical, verbal, and psychological acts intended to physically or psychologically harm or control another person in an interpersonal relationship and operationalize these other dimensions of abusive behavior in sets of scales of psychological and verbal abuse (e.g., such items as “insulted or swore at partner” and “did something to spite partner” in the Psychological Aggression Scale of the Conflict Tactics Scales).

Different conceptions of violent behavior directed toward women raise crucial definitional issues to address in formulating research and surveillance in this field. Given differing referents for the imprecise term violence used by researchers and their differing theoretical perspectives, one could argue, as has Weis (1989), that researchers can differ in the range of behaviors and experiences they include in the term violence provided they are explicit about their operationalization of this term in reporting results of empirical and theoretical studies and in interpreting such studies. Thus, some researchers may adopt a broad definition including many types of abusive, coercive, and controlling behaviors and others can restrict the term violence to physical aggression or to serious physical aggression in relationships. However, they should be explicit about their operational definitions and describe characteristics of their samples so that sample characteristics can be compared across studies. Differences in definitions of violence against women, however, have implications for describing the nature of violence against women, formulating explanatory conceptualizations for violence against women, and prescribing what type of data indicative of violence against women should be collected in surveillance systems and how it should be collected.

This article will discuss several issues pertaining to defining violence against women that are relevant to surveillance and research and will advocate situating intimate partner violence into an overall framework of understanding violence from an empirical scientific perspective. This perspective views aggression between intimate partners as a type of abusive behavior that shares much in common with other types of interpersonal aggression, but also has some unique features. The framework of empirical scientific research involves careful description of the phenomenon; attention to issues of measurement and generalizability through research design, sampling, and data collection; and formulation of empirically testable hypotheses and generalizable explanatory conceptual models (see, for example, the compendi- ums of research on violence by Reiss and Roth [1993-1994] and Stoff, Breiling, and Maser [1997]). Currently, the field of research on violence against women has relatively few researchers and a thin empirical base compared to other areas of violence research (e.g., compare the long list of longitudinal studies on adolescent violence in Loeber and Farrington [1997] with the relatively few longitudinal studies of partner violence). Often, domestic violence researchers make generalizations about partner violence based on one or a few studies of small nonrepresentative samples; generalizations about partner aggression need to be supported by a strong base of empirical studies.

I will argue that to provide an adequate description of partner violence, surveillance and research (a) must ascertain and describe the severity of aggressive behavior in partner relationships, (b) must assess and report different types of abusive behavior rather than combining types of abusive behavior, and (c) although gender-based power and dominance is an important aspect of many abusive relationships, other dynamics are also important and gender-based power and control explanatory constructs should not solely define the occurrence and nature of violence between intimate partners.

AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR IN INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS

DISTRIBUTIONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR

In many areas of research on violence, the severity of violent behavior is a most important characteristic in explaining the nature and occurrence of violence. Severity of aggressive behavior is usually conceptualized on dimensions of seriousness of the aggressive acts and temporal characteristics, such as frequency, chronicity, and duration of aggressive acts. Seriousness is usually judged as the relative probability that an act of aggression will result in significant injury or harm. Thus, minor acts of physical aggression, such as slapping and shoving, have a lower probability of resulting in serious physical injury than hitting forcefully with a fist or forcefully choking. This is a probabilistic conception, in that there is less than a perfect correlation between seriousness of an act and an actual injury. On one hand, a shove can sometimes lead to a serious injury from a resultant fall, and, on the other hand, a person who tries to strike another individual with a closed fist may miss or hit only a glancing blow. Nevertheless, shoving and hitting with a closed fist have different probabilistic potentials for resulting in significant physical injury or harm. Temporal characteristics of violent behavior can be described in various ways, including frequency of episodes, chronicity, duration of individual episodes, and contingency to prior aggressive acts or other aspects of situations (e.g., immediately reactive to provocation or delayed).

Figure 1: Distribution of Aggressive Behavior

Two generalizations supported by research on the epidemiology of aggressive interpersonal behavior are that (a) a relatively high proportion of individuals in the general population engage in infrequent acts of physical aggression of relatively minor severity, and (b) a relatively small proportion of the population is responsible for serious and frequent aggressive behavior. Figure 1 displays a distributional plot typically seen in studies of aggressive behavior in general populations. This reversed-J distribution also is commonly seen with other types of deviant behavior. Typically, a substantial percentage of the population report no or few minor acts of physical aggression. A relatively small percentage of the population is responsible for a large majority of more severely violent acts and engages in frequent aggressive acts. Seriousness and frequency of aggressive acts are related in that in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• PART I DEFINITION
• PART II RESEARCH AND VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
• PART III THE JUSTICE RESPONSE
• PART IV THE CRIMINAL LAW
• PART V A HUMAN RIGHTS QUESTION
• PART VI COPING, STAYING, LEAVING
• PART VII MEDIATION AND OTHER FORMS OF ALTERNATIVE DISPUTE RESOLUTION1
• PART VIII AND CHILDREN
• PART IX ETHNIC MINORITY VICTIMS
• Index