The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Violence

Nancy Lombard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781472483515
• eBook ISBN: 9781317043355
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Violence provides both a comprehensive and authoritative state-of-the-art overview of the latest research in the field of gender and violence. Each of the 23 specially commissioned chapters develops and summarises their key issue or debate including rape, stalking, online harassment, domestic abuse, FGM, trafficking and prostitution in relation to gender and violence. They study violence against women, but also look at male victims and perpetrators as well as gay, lesbian and transgender violence.

The interdisciplinary nature of the subject area is highlighted, with authors spanning criminology, social policy, sociology, geography, health, media and law, alongside activists and members of statutory and third sector organisations. The diversity of perspectives all highlight that gendered violence is both an age-old and continuing social problem.

By drawing together leading scholars this handbook provides an up-to-the-minute snapshot of current scholarship as well as signposting several fruitful avenues for future research. This book is both an invaluable resource for scholars and an indispensable teaching tool for use in the classroom and will be of interest to students, academics, social workers and other professionals working to end gender-based violence.

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Part I

Theoretical discussions of gender and violence

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1

Coercive control as a framework for responding to male partner abuse in the UK

Opportunities and challenges

Evan Stark

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to contextualize a ‘new definition’ of domestic violence as ‘coercive control’ adopted by the British Home Office in 2012 and the creation by Westminster in 2015 of an offence of ‘coercive and controlling behaviour’ (s.76) covering England, Wales and Gibraltar. England is the main focus of the analysis, though I touch on developments in Wales, Scotland and elsewhere in Europe. Three contextual factors are described: the growing international consensus that ‘gender violence’ be defined broadly and as a violation of human rights; the limited utility of an assault model as a way to understand and/or manage partner abuse; and the emergence of coercive control as a credible alternative framework. The conclusion identifies challenges posed by an approach based on coercive control.

Background

With the opening of its first refuges in the early l970s, England became a pioneer in a burgeoning international movement to ‘protect’ women from ‘violence’ by their partners. Within a decade, it had also determined to hold abusive men ‘accountable’ by extending the reach of criminal laws originally drawn to protect strangers from assaults to ‘domestic’ violence. Accompanying these changes was the less formal propensity for practitioners to ration the scarce resources available for protection and accountability according to the level of violence and/or injury reported. Supporting this approach were a grassroots movement of women; growing moral sentiment that women’s ‘safety’ in relationships was a significant public concern; and a substantial scientific literature documenting the nature, extent, distribution, dynamics and consequences of ‘domestic violence’ by men (Dobash and Dobash, 1992; Stark and Flitcraft, 1988).

Starting in the mid-1990s, serious deficiencies in the prevailing approach were exposed by two bodies of literature: empirical research showing that abusive violence typically followed a pattern that was not anticipated by its equation with discreet injurious assaults; and an experience-based popular literature in which victimized women identified concurrent non-violent tactics of ‘control’ as more oppressive than violence (Stark and Flitcraft, 1996; Jones and Schechter, 1992). Meanwhile, feminist-oriented NGOs pressured the UN and other international organizations to broaden definitions of gender violence to include the multiple forms of oppression in women’s personal lives and identify it as a violation of human rights. These strands were gradually woven into a conceptualization in which partner abuse was variously labelled ‘psychological maltreatment’ (Tolman, 1989), ‘gender violence’ (Wales), ‘violence against women’ (Scotland), ‘patriarchal violence’ (Spain), ‘psychological abuse’ (France), ‘intimate terrorism’ (Johnson, 2008) and ‘coercive control’ (Stark, 2007).

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In September 2012, England became the first country to explicitly identify ‘coercive control’ as the framework for its response to partner abuse. In contrast to previous definitions that emphasized physical violence only, the ‘new definition’ by the Home Office defined coercive control to include ‘Any incident or pattern of incidents of controlling, coercive or threatening behaviour, violence or abuse between those aged 16 or over who are or have been intimate partners or family members regardless of gender or sexuality’. Coercion encompassed psychological, physical, sexual, financial and emotional abuse, while controlling behaviour was defined as ‘making a person subordinate and/or dependent by isolating them from sources of support, exploiting their resources and capacities for personal gain, depriving them of the means needed for independence, resistance and escape and regulating their everyday lives’ (Gov.UK, 2013). The new definition implied that the significance of violence derived from its contribution to fear-based subordination and associated male privileges rather than from its physical valence.

The new definition superseded alternative definitions in other government departments, but had no legal standing. On 29 December 2015, 800 years after the Magna Carta promised the British peoples swift and equal justice for all, parliament made ‘coercive and controlling behaviour in an intimate or family relationship’ a criminal offence (s.76) in England and Wales, carrying a sentence of up to five years in prison.

Broadening the definition of partner abuse

Gender violence as a violation of human rights

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and various treaties passed by the UN General Assembly included the right to liberty and security; the right to live free of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; freedom of thought, conscience and religion; and freedom of association. These were initially treated only as ‘negative rights’ designed to counter state interference, but were gradually given an affirmative interpretation, first to establish state responsibility where its agents committed rape or other instances of violence against women (e.g. during wars) and then to assert women’s right to state protection from abusive men where the ‘failure to protect’ could be traced to discrimination. The most recent iterations of human rights theory adapt a notion of gender violence that includes economic violence, isolation, limitations on autonomy and liberty, and other prominent features which were identified in the new definition as facets of coercive control.

An early as 1989, a literature review on Violence against Women in the Family by the UN Commission on the Status of Women in Vienna noted that family violence involved ‘direct violations of [women’s] . . . physical and mental autonomy’ and denied them ‘liberty and dignity’, themes that are echoed in subsequent literature on coercive control (UN Report, 1989, cited in Beasley and Thomas, 1993: 329). Another important step was the adaption of General Recommendation No. 19 by the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1992. The CEDAW definition of gender violence as a violation of human rights became the international standard applied to woman abuse. CEDAW linked gender equality and the elimination of violence against women by recognizing that rape and domestic violence are causes of women’s subordination rather than simply its consequences and that, therefore, gender violence is a form of discrimination that ‘seriously inhibits women’s ability to enjoy rights and freedoms on a basis of equality with men’ (CEDAW, 1992: n.p.). These views were formalized by the UN in 1993, when the General Assembly (GA) adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women that explicitly rooted abuse in unequal power, highlighted its role in reproducing male domination and female subordination, included ‘psychological violence’ and intimidation in community settings such as work or school alongside the traditional forms of physical violence against women, and emphasized ‘arbitrary restrictions on liberty’, a phrase that captures the essence of coercive control and is incorporated in the 2011 Istanbul Convention (see below). The GA Declaration also cited government inaction to protect women from these forms of violence as a human rights abuse. The World Congress on Human Rights in Vienna added further status to CEDAW’s position by declaring gender-based violence a human rights abuse, a position that was reiterated by the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (PFA). In 1999, the World Organization against Torture, an international coalition of NGOs, drew an extended analogy between the isolation, detention and interrogation of torture victims and the predicament of battered women (Beasley and Thomas, 1993).

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In 2000, Scotland adopted the CEDAW definition as the basis for a national strategy, the only country in the UK to do so. In 2001, following the lead of London Mayor Ken Livingstone (and his domestic violence advisor, Davina James-Hanman), more than 80 local authorities across England and Wales adopted a similar, gender-based definition as a guide to local programming.

The Istanbul Convention

Hoping to standardize laws and best practices throughout Europe based on the broadened conception of partner abuse, the 47-member Council of Europe adopted the Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (CETS No. 210) in 2011,¹ referred to as ‘The Istanbul Convention’ (IC). The IC defined violence against women to mean ‘all acts of gender-based violence that result in . . . physical, psychological or economic harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty’ (UN Women, 2015). The IC proceeded from this definition to mandate state action in ‘prevention’, ‘protection’ and ‘prosecution’; the development of ‘integrated policies’ at all levels of society; and the creation of a two-level ‘monitoring’ mechanism to evaluate compliance.

The IC has significant weaknesses. Apart from recommending prevention strategies that address masculinity and gender equality, it offers little specific guidance about how to address the more elusive elements of abuse identified in its broad definition, such as sexual coercion, economic violence or ‘psychological abuse’. Indeed, the protocols it outlines for Prosecution and Protection are restricted solely to physical violence and ‘safety’ concerns. Thus, despite the intent conveyed by the broad definition, in its programmatic mandates the IC replicates the normative gap it set out to eliminate between the narrow state focus on violence and women’s experience of abuse as a broad pattern of domination.

Until 2017, the UK was one of a number of signatories of the IC that had not formally agreed to implement its requirements, almost certainly because doing so would have meant officially endorsing the link of gender violence to discrimination and human rights and accepting periodic audits by an international body of the government’s compliance with its protocols. Even as the Home Secretary (Teresa May) resisted pressure to adapt a gendered definition of partner abuse, her decision to embrace ‘coercive control’ as the framework of reform was consistent with the initiatives in Scotland and London in other respects, tacitly acknowledging the European consensus favouring a broad understanding and reflecting the IC recommendation that policy be guided by a single ‘cross-governmental’ definition. Both the new definition and s.76 echo previous initiatives in three other important respects: they recognize the historical and multi-faceted nature of male partner abuse, including the role of ‘regulating . . . daily lives’; emphasize experiential and socio-political outcomes (‘fear/distress’ and ‘domination/subordination’); and acknowledge that abusers derive ‘personal gain’ from abuse, what feminists more aptly identify as ‘male privilege’.

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The failure of the assault model

If external developments ‘pulled’ the Home Secretary towards the formulation of the new definition, a major ‘push’ to do so was the failure of the criminological model of assault to support effective intervention. S.76 is the UK’s first specific domestic violence offence. But in other respects, its policies mirrored the responses in the United States and many other countries, including the provision of Restraining Orders, a preference for arrest over diversion, support for emergency housing, the development of a specialized criminal justice response and the promotion of local collaboration through a ‘coordinated community response’. As reports of partner abuse escalated, police throughout Britain attempted to manage caseloads by adapting the Domestic Abuse, Stalking, Harassment and Honour Based Violence Risk Identification Checklist (DASH), a formal mechanism that separates ‘high risk’ women who require a caseworker or ‘IDVA’ (Independent Domestic Violence Advisor) and a ‘coordinated safety plan’ honed at monthly Multi-agency Risk Assessment Conferences (MARACs) from the ‘moderate’ or ‘standard/low-risk’ cases who do not get these supports. While the DASH is weighted towards past physical/sexual assaults, it also considers isolating and controlling behaviours.²

Ironically, the core assumptions underlying the ‘coordinated community response’ contradict the conceit that partner abuse is best managed as assault. These interrelated assumptions are that victim ‘safety’ remains an ongoing problem after police intervention; that ‘safety’ is best achieved by a victim’s decision to ‘leave’ rather than by interdiction; and that ‘risk’ is a function of historical rather than situational factors, such as the level of violence observed.

Limits of the assault model

There has been incontrovertible evidence since the mid-1980s that the hallmarks of male partner violence are its frequency, generally low-level, duration and cumulative effects on particular victims rather than isolated, injurious assaults (Stark and Flitcraft, l988). In both the United States and Britain, violence is repeated in >75% of cases, is ‘frequent’ in a majority and involves ‘serial abuse’ in as many as 40% of cases, where assaults occur several times a week or more (Stark and Flitcraft, 1988; 1996). Abusive relationships last an average of 5.5 years (Campbell and Soeken, 1999). Frequent violence extended for this duration means that a large proportion of abused women have been assaulted dozens, even hundreds, of times. First noted in the UK by Mooney’s (1993) survey of London women, this reality was most clearly documented for the United States by findings from a 2010 survey by the Centers of Disease Control that 38% of abused women in the general population had been ‘beaten up’ between 11 and 50 times (22%) or more than 50 times (16%) and had been strangled, kicked, hit with objects and slapped with similar frequencies (Black et al., 2011). Walby et al. (2016) reported a similar finding by analysing the data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW). Although the CSEW (formerly called the British Crime Survey) purports to measure the amount of crime in England and Wales by questioning a panel of around 50,000 people about their victimization, it caps individual reports at five incidents. By counting all assaults reported by women, the researchers found that overall violence had increased in recent years, contrary to the government’s claims. This increase was explained by the growing proportion of women reporting multiple assaults, not by any change in the number of abused women. The gendered nature of this pattern is also evident in police reports. Fifty-three per cent of the men arrested for domestic violence in England had been previously reported to police for three or more offences compared to only 3% of women arrested (Hester and Westmarland, 2006)...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Violence
• Praise
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to Gender and Violence
• Part I Theoretical Discussions of Gender and Violence
• Part II Specific Forms, Representations Of, and Responses To, Gendered Violence
• Part III Conducting Research on Gendered Violence
• Index