Abused and Battered

Social and Legal Responses to Family Violence

Dean Knudsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351534185
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Social Sciences

That family violence injures and kills its victims both physically and psychologically was established over two decades ago by early researchers in this field. Abused and Battered heralds the second generation of domestic abuse research: it examines the implications of the legal and social responses to both victims and offenders by systematically addressing the intended and unintended consequences of programs and procedures designed to ameliorate the effects of spousal and child abuse. Contributors to this multidisciplinary volume represent the leading perspectives in public health, law and criminal justice, psychology, and sociology. They provide new and sophisticated insights regarding the etiology of the multiple forms of family abuse and they suggest innovative strategies for mitigating the anguish resulting from physical and emotional violence against adults and children within households. The results of this research will be of interest to students and practitioners in sociology, public health, psychology and family studies, and to clinicians and therapists who treat victims or offenders.

Part I

Conceptualization and Empirical Study

The contributors to Part I address methodological and theoretical issues that are critical for the investigation and understanding of all aspects of family violence.

JoAnn L. Miller, in "Family Violence Research: Some Basic and Applied Questions," shows that the study of family violence is partly a consequence of U.S. social reform and population change characteristics of the 1960s and the 1970s. She examines how family violence research methods originated within, and are affected by, the established research traditions of the social sciences. She also discusses three issues that are distinctive to family violence inquiry: the visibility paradox, the difficulty of designing impact analyses, and the blurring of distinctions between basic and applied research. The essay concludes with a discussion of research ethics.

Murray A. Straus familiarizes the reader with the focal problems of family violence in contemporary U.S. society. His sociological studies, perhaps more than any other researcher's, are scrutinized thoroughly by academics and social-policy makers alike who need to estimate accurately the extent of the family violence problem in modern U.S. society.

Straus asks the fundamental question: "What do we know?" He takes us first to his 1975 nationwide survey and then to his 1985 study in order to summarize changes over time. He examines six measures of intra- familial violence and concludes that American society has experienced a decrease in spouse battery and child abuse within the past ten years. We can currently observe, through Straus's most recent research, a 6.3% annual incidence rate for households experiencing at least one severe assault directed at an adult. Further, 2.3% of our nation's children are severely assaulted each year.

Straus considers several common features of U.S. families in his empirically-driven, theoretically-oriented explanation of the pervasive nature of intrafamilial violence. He maintains that the family is a primary source of affection and the principal arena for interpersonal conflict. Straus explains the normative nature of family violence, and he explains how it is learned through family interaction and maintained by gender inequalities.

Jacquelyn C. Campbell, a professor of nursing in the College of Medicine at Wayne State University in Detroit, brings us into the world of public health so that we may gain needed insights for approaching prevention and potential remedies for victims of family violence. She urges the helping professions to consider the importance of preventing the emergence of brutality within the family. She explains how the individual and family effects of violence entail physical, emotional, and behavioral responses. Campbell discusses the imperative of examining the often disparate bodies of knowledge pertaining to all forms of family violence. Finally, to check some of the myths regarding select forms of family violence, Campbell brings to the reader's attention some of the major findings from her own longitudinal research on battered women.

Stephen W. Webster approaches the difficult task of measuring characteristics of definitions for family abuse. He argues that community definitions of mistreatment are critically important to basic researchers who study the social construction of deviance, and to practitioners who face the problems of underreporting and overreporting incidents of abuse and neglect.

Most research on family abuse focuses primarily on professional definitions or clinical definitions of child abuse or spouse abuse. Webster's research uses a modified factorial survey design to discern the general population's conception of abuse, and its perceptions of reporting practices. A random sample of respondents judged vignettes describing family mistreatment for four victim types: child, elderly parent, husband, and wife. They rated the scenarios on scales measuring the seriousness and appropriateness of the behavior, the intent to harm, the extent of physical or psychological harm, and the likelihood of reporting the incident to authorities. Webster analyzes these factors and discusses the implications for the processes of recognition, reporting, substantiation, and treatment of family violence victims in this innovative research.

Sharon D. Herzberger and Noreen L. Channels, in "Criminal Justice Processing of Violent and Nonviolent Offenders: The Effects of Familial Relationship to the Victim," present a study that tracks violent and nonviolent criminal defendants through the early phases of the criminal justice process in Connecticut. They designed their research to examine empirically the effect of victim-offender relationship on pretrial detention and bail decisions.

Herzberger and Channels make a strong case for studying family violence in the context of the larger criminal-justice process. They argue that the extent to which existing criminal-justice policy is appropriate for family violence cases can only be ascertained through research that compares the treatment of family violence cases to the treatment of other violent (and nonviolent) cases.

Generally, Herzberger and Channels find that criminal defendants charged with violent crimes against victims to whom they are related are treated more leniently than others at the bail-setting stage of the criminal-justice process. They question the ethics, the legality, and the constitutionality of bail and other pretrial release decisions that reflect victim-offender relationship.

The reader will see, when considering the numerous conceptual and methodological issues raised by these authors, the difficulty and complexity associated with the study of family violence. Further, the reader will observe advances in theory and research over the past ten years that make future family violence studies capable of informing those likely to develop programs and social policy designed to alleviate some of the injury and trauma of family abuse.

Chapter 1

Family Violence Research: Some Basic and Applied Questions

L. Miller Jo Ann

I. Introduction

About the time family violence research began, a passionate plea for objective social science research with a moral purpose was made: "The rationalism which is the driving force behind social study, whether we admit it or not, is the faith that institutions can be improved and strengthened.… [T]o find the practical formulas for this never ending reconstruction of society is the supreme task of social science" (Myrdal 1962:1024).

The family violence field includes research designed to describe, predict, or explain the intentional use of force to inflict pain (Finkelhor et al. 1987:19) on a family member, whether the family member is a child, sibling, spouse, parent, or some other intimate living within the household. Studies on abused or neglected children were the first to reach audiences through professional journal publications, followed by studies on child sexual abuse, marital rape, and elder neglect and abuse.

II. Emergence of Research Topics

The appearance of most if not all of the particular family violence research topics in the professional journals can be traced explicitly to either a social-reform movement, or to a shift in the sociodemographic composition of the general population. The extraordinarily influential paper on the "battered child syndrome" (Kempe et al. 1962) appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association. During an era of child welfare reform in the United States, the American Medical Association ostensibly took the lead in disclosing and distributing information on what was, until then, a secretly held shame.

The women's movement (Ferree and Hess 1985) helped proliferate a research literature on violence against wives. As one writer summarizes:

Before the reemergence of the women's movement in the late 1960s, the social science literature was largely oblivious to the possibility that women were being assaulted in familial relations with men. It was generally assumed that marriage, especially middle-class marriage, was a "companionate," egalitarian, peaceful affair in which violence played no part. (Wardell et al. 1983)

Marital rape, a criminal offense in only a minority of states, was a subject for the popular press in the mid-1970s (Finkelhor and Yllo 1983) and for social-science research by 1980 (Straus et al. 1980; Russell 1980).

Elder abuse studies, achieving recognition with Burston's 1975 article on "granny bashing," are still primarily limited to exploratory, descriptive reports (Pillemer and Wolf 1986). To date, we have no comprehensive understanding of the etiology of elder neglect and abuse, a social problem that clearly corresponds to a relatively recent sociodemographic change, i.e., the aging of the U.S. population.

Family violence research topics are indeed disparate, covering victims ranging from infants to the elderly, and covering injury that ranges from scratches or scars—physical or emotional—to death. Changes in the U.S. population as well as the emergence of social-reform movements are also disparate factors. Nonetheless, what all family violence research topics share is their connection to social forces that summon or mandate inquiry.

III. Building from Established Research Traditions

The study of family violence developed within the academic disciplines of sociology, psychology, medicine, nursing, and the law. In addition, interdisciplinary programs, especially public-health, child development, and family studies, generated query. Drawing upon established research traditions (established methods and conventions for designing research, collecting and analyzing data), the study of family violence matured methodologically at a rapid pace. Partly as a result of its sophisticated methodologies, the field of family violence:

has some impressive research accomplishments to boast for its short tenure. In three areas, quite a bit of research has been done: (1) A great deal is known about the prevalence of various types of family violence; (2) there is a fair bit of evidence about risk factors that are associated with family violence; and (3) a substantial body of knowledge exists concerning the effects of family violence on its victims. (Finkelhor et al. 1987:13)

Currently, the social-science approach to family violence research shares at least five features with the research traditions from which it was generated. The work in this volume shows clear examples of each.

A. Quantitative and Qualitative Methods

First, we find a substantial body of what are conventionally called "quantitative" and "qualitative" research designs being applied to the study of all types of violence within families. The prototypical quantitative study (see, e.g., Straus et al. 1980; Straus and Gelles 1990) administers the survey questionnaire to a probability sample of respondents representing the general population or a specified clinical population. The exemplary qualitative study (see, e.g., Greenblat 1983) uses intensive, face-to-face interviews to ascertain the meaning and effects of abuse.

The majority of work in this volume is quantitative, either only in the data collection method used or also in the data analysis method used. Some studies are based on the straightforward counting of events, while others provide multivariate analyses of nominal and interval-level-de- pendent variables. Caputo's work (in Part IV), for example, counts police calls and how they are classified to calculate a referral ratio for domestic-disturbance calls. The Herzberger and Channels study (in Part I) of bail decisions in Connecticut examines the nominal-level bail vs. detention decision, as well as the interval level amount of bail decision, with a multivariate analytical model.

Gurley's research (in Part II) on social support, and the study of Connecticut's Family Violence Prevention and Response Act of 1986 by Lyon and Mace (in Part IV), are qualitative studies that depend upon the face- to-face, in-depth interview for gathering the information needed to draw inferences regarding the consequences of intentions. Lyon and Mace let the voices of those who carry out the spirit of the law critique its implementation. Gurley examines how intimates can harm and help adult women recovering from the trauma of child abuse.

B. Definitions and Conceptualizations

Second, similar to the debates characterizing the application of social- science methods to most types of research problems, we find scholars disagreeing upon the definitions and conceptualizations of what constitutes family violence. Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control, for example, argue that persons related by "emotional intimacy" should be included in the operationalization of "family" in all family violence studies. Restricting "family" members to those who fit the legal definition in any epidemiologic study will result in a substantial and biased underestimate of the problem (Saltzman et al. 1990).

These types of disagreements, over defining "family" or deciding whether spanking a child is a form of child abuse or appropriate parenting behavior, influence the research design as well as the scope of the data collected (Finkelhor et al. 1986). Straus (in Part I) illustrates this issue clearly in his discussion of the extremely different incidence estimates of child abuse that are derived from two measures—the Child Abuse 1 Measure, which includes "hitting with an object," and the Child Abuse 2 Measure, which does not include it. Are 1.5 million children physically abused each year in the United States? Or is the true annual incidence rate closer to 6.9 million? It depends on which behaviors are included and excluded in the definition of what constitutes abuse.

Variation in the conceptualization of abuse is not a problem affecting research and researchers alone. Persons working in the helping professions and those making criminal-justice system decisions need shared definitions and conceptualizations of abuse. Kromsky and Cutler (in Part II) show the necessity of communicating a definition, and the manifestation of an abstract concept, i.e., the "battered-woman syndrome," to those who must make judgments about its effects. Campbell (Part I) maintains "a beaten child should suggest to us a possible incest victim, a battered mother, and abused siblings and grandparents." An exclusively medical response to the beaten child can only be unduly inadequate, according to Campbell, because it cannot approach the whole problem. Reconceptualizing child abuse and spouse abuse is a prerequisite for the appropriate social and public-health response to the nightmare shared secretly by millions of American families.

C. Methodological Advances

Third, the study of family violence, similar to any other social-science field of study, benefits from methodological or technological advances at the data collection stage....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Some Fundamental Issues
• PART I. CONCEPTUALIZATION AND EMPIRICAL STUDY
• PART II. EFFECTS OF VICTIMIZATION
• PART III. SOCIAL RESPONSES TO FAMILY VIOLENCE: BATTERERS AND THEIR VICTIMS
• PART IV. LEGAL RESPONSES TO FAMILY VIOLENCE
• References
• Index