Private Violence and Public Policy

The needs of battered women and the response of the public services

Jan Pahl

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317203346
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

First published in 1985, this is the first published study of violence in the family to be aimed directly at people whose professions bring them into contact with domestic abuse victims, as well as those training for those professions. It documents the problems faced by women with violent husbands and discusses how the needs of these women and of their children can best be met.

The first part of the book reports the results of original research carried out by the editor. The second part of the book is concerned with the response of the law, the police, social services, housing departments and health services. The third part draws on the conference at which this research was presented, and offers recommendations for the future, in terms if better practice and of broad social and economic changes.

This book will be of interest to students of social work, health care, medicine and law, as well as those studying social policy, sociology and women's studies.

Chapter one

Introduction

This book had its origins in a conference which was funded by the Department of Health and Social Security and which took place at the University of Kent at Canterbury in September 1981. The conference brought together several very different groups of people: researchers who had been investigating different aspects of wife abuse, practitioners who met battered women in the course of their work, and policy makers with responsibility for a wide range of welfare services. The practitioners included social workers, housing managers, doctors, nurses, health visitors, solicitors, policemen and policewomen, marriage guidance counsellors and workers in refuges and in advice centres. The participants also included a number of women who had had personal experience of being battered. The conference was such a success that it seemed important that the knowledge and understanding which it generated should be made available to a wider audience. This book is the result. It is aimed not only at those working in the professions mentioned above, but also at people training for those professions, at students in the relevant social science disciplines, and at all those who have an interest in the changing nature of family life.

The book falls into three parts. The aim of the first part is to give readers a better understanding of the problem of wife abuse, by looking in some detail at the experiences of one group of women. This part of the book is based on the editor’s own study, which was carried out at a women’s refuge in the south-east of England. This study followed the lives of forty-two women and their 124 children over a period of three years in the late 1970s. All but one of the women had husbands who had been violent towards them, and all had left home with their children to find shelter in a women’s refuge. The women were interviewed at the refuge and then re-interviewed about two years later after they had left it. This was a unique study in that it investigated marital breakdown, not retrospectively and after it had ended in divorce or separation, but as it was experienced by a group of women during the time when they were considering whether the breakdown should be permanent or temporary.

The second part of the book draws together a number of papers which were presented at the conference. Most of these papers presented the findings of specific research projects. The work covered in these projects ranged far more widely than the material presented at the conference (see Binney, Harkell and Nixon, 1980a and 1981; Borkowski, Murch and Walker, 1983; Dawson and Faragher, 1977; Delamont and Ellis, 1979; Dobash and Dobash, 1979 and 1980; Evason, 1982; Frankenberg et al., 1980; Leonard and McLeod, 1980; Murch, 1981; Pahl, 1978 and 1981). However, for the purposes of the conference speakers were asked to direct their papers to the question of how practitioners might give more effective and appropriate help to battered women. The hope was that the conference would foster better practice in a field of work which is often seen as posing great difficulties.

The third part of the book represents the contribution of those who participated in the conference, not as researchers but as people whose work brings them into contact with family violence. The design of the conference reflected the hope that it would not be a one-way event, in which researchers addressed a passive audience, but that it would encourage a two-way flow of ideas between researchers and practitioners. To this end a substantial amount of time was given to small discussion groups, each of which reported back to the conference as a whole at the end of the three days. Part III of this book draws on the reports of the discussion groups: it aims to offer some constructive recommendations for the future, both in terms of better practice and in terms of broader social and economic policy changes.

In many ways, then, this is a very practical book, presenting the results of a series of studies which were focused on a particular problem in family life. Those who are familiar with this topic may assume that a book about wife abuse is concerned with a marginal and insignificant, if horrific, aspect of family life. However, closer consideration of the problem of wife abuse shows that the problem raises fundamental theoretical issues about the nature of family life which have a very broad relevance.

One such broad theoretical issue concerns the relationship between the public and the private. As we shall see, this issue has exercised the minds of philosophers over the centuries, but it is perhaps of greater significance now than at any time in the past. The growth of the welfare state and the increased intervention of the state into family life have been paralleled by a growth in concern for the privacy of the home and for the rights of the private individual. This issue is raised in a particularly acute form in the problem of wife abuse. We shall argue in this book that the violence which husbands inflict on their wives is different from other sorts of violence in that it normally takes place in a particular location and within a particular set of social relations. It follows that it is impossible to understand the nature of wife abuse without taking account of the fact, firstly, that it most often occurs within private homes, and secondly, that it occurs between two people who are bound together by marriage or a marriage-like relationship.

Wife abuse is an emotive topic, not just because the injuries which women receive provoke feelings of shock and pity, but also because it takes place in a setting which we perceive as being a safe haven in a heartless world and within a relationship which for many people is a source of happiness and security. We are shocked at the injuries, but we are also shocked that such things could occur in a domestic setting, between two people who have promised to love and cherish each other. The discrepancy between the violence and the setting within which it takes place both makes it harder to understand the problem and also makes it harder to help those who are the victims. We shall return to the question of helping wives who are the victims of violence in Part II of this book. However, before discussing the more theoretical issue of the distinction between the public and the private, let us first consider, in very broad factual terms, what is known about the problem of wife abuse.

What do we mean by violence against wives?

It is important to recognise that violence can take many forms and that it includes both physical and mental assault. The evidence from many studies is that the violence experienced by wives is both prolonged and severe. In my own study 62 per cent of the women had been subjected to violence for three or more years, and the injuries which they had suffered ranged from cuts and bruises, through broken bones and damaged eyesight, to a ruptured spleen, stab wounds and a fractured skull. The findings of this small study are confirmed by the results of a much larger study, undertaken at the same time in all the refuges of England and Wales, by Binney, Harkell and Nixon. This larger study found that 73 per cent of women in refuges had put up with violence for three or more years. Thirty per cent of the women who were interviewed in this study had suffered life-threatening attacks or had been hospitalised for serious injuries such as having bones broken. The rest of the sample had experienced assaults which included being kicked, pushed into fires or through glass, being thrown against walls or down stairs, being punched and having hair pulled out. Sixty-eight per cent said that mental cruelty was one of the reasons why they left home (Binney, Harkell and Nixon, 1981). Dobash and Dobash found that the women they interviewed in Scottish refuges had experienced a variety of different forms of violence. This violence ranged from a single slap, usually experienced early in the marriage, to an attack involving kicking, punching and choking; on occasions the men would use belts, bottles or weapons. The most typical attack involved punches to the face and/or body, and kicks (Dobash and Dobash, 1980, 106). One definition of the problem is that ‘a battered wife is a wife or cohabitee who has suffered persistent or serious physical assault at the hands of her partner’ (Marsden, 1978); however, to this definition must be added the comment of many women, that ‘the mental battering was worse than the physical battering’.

There is some dispute about whether we should use the words ‘battered women’ or ‘battered wives’. The former term is a reminder that women can be battered by their co-habitees and ex-husbands as well as by their spouse. The latter term is a reminder that, whatever the legal status of the couple, the violence takes place in a marriage-like situation. That is to say that the couple have children in common, that they share a home or have shared a home, and that the woman is likely to be financially dependent on the man.

What is more significant is that we use the term ‘battered wives’ rather than ‘violent husbands’. It is rather as though the problem of international terrorists hijacking aeroplanes was described as ‘the problem of hostages’! The effect of this renaming of the problem is to shift attention from the instigators of the violence to its victims, and the shift tends to make it easy to blame the victim for the problem and to encourage a search for solutions among the victims rather than among the violent partners. This misnaming is probably no accident. A great many people hold to the view that battered women are somehow responsible for what has happened to them, and this view is expressed in such statements as ‘the woman must have done something to deserve it’ or ‘women must enjoy it really, otherwise surely they would leave’. The tragedy is that battered women themselves share the popularly held assumption that they are to blame for what is happening; they continue to blame themselves and to feel guilty about the violence, and this is one reason why they do not leave but continue to endure the violence.

The evidence from my own study is that, of the women who remarried between the two interviews, not one was being abused in her new relationship. On the other hand, every refuge has stories about individual men, each one of whom, when one woman has finally obtained a divorce from him on the grounds of cruelty, marries again and starts to batter yet another woman. It is the men who are violence-prone and not the women. When we are considering short-term help for battered women, in the form of legislative changes, better services or more refuges, then it makes sense to talk of the problem of battered women. But when we consider more long-term fundamental solutions we should remember that the problem is more accurately described as the problem of violent husbands.

What proportion of all violence takes the form of violence against wives? There are considerable difficulties in answering this question since so much violence, both inside and outside the home, goes unrecorded. The best sources of evidence are police records, but even these pose problems, especially in the case of private crimes such as wife assault and rape, where the victims are often reluctant to report the crime because of feelings of guilt, shame and loyalty. There is considerable ‘shrinkage’: crimes may occur but may not be reported to the police; they may be reported but not recorded. And then, of course, more ‘shrinkage’ occurs between the crime being recorded and the case coming to court.

However, there does seem to be agreement between a number of different sources which suggest that assault of wives by their husbands is by far the most common form of family violence. Important evidence comes from the study of Dobash and Dobash, who analysed the police records of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Their findings are presented in Table 1.1. This table shows that the most common form of violence is that which takes place between unrelated males, which makes up 37 per cent of all recorded violent incidents. The second most common form of violence is wife assault, which makes up 25 per cent of all recorded violent crime. By comparison, the other forms of violence between family members, such as assault on husbands, on children, elderly parents and siblings, are relatively insignificant. When one thinks of the attention which is directed towards street violence, concern with assault on wives seems long overdue. What we are discussing in this book represents one-quarter of all violent crime. (See also McClintock, 1963; Chester and Streather, 1972).

Table 1.1: Offences involving violence reported to selected police departments in Edinburgh and Glasgow in 1974

Offence	Total number of offences	Percentage of offences
Violent: Family
Wife assault	776	24.14
Alleged wife assault	32	1.00
Husband assault	13	0.40
Child assault	110	3.42
Parent assault	70	2.18
Sibling assault	50	1.56
	(1051)	(32.70)
Violent: Non-family
Male against male	1196	37.20
Male against female	292	9.08
Male against police	452	14.06
Female against female	142	4.42
Female against male	53	1.65
Female against police	29	0.90
	(2164)	(67.31)
Total	3215	100.00

Source: Dobash and Dobash (1980)

We must remember, however, the differential rates of both the reporting and the recording of crimes of violence. It is unlikely that assault on a policeman will go unrecorded, and so we can consider the recorded total of these offences as a reasonably accurate reflection of the occurrence of assaults. On the other hand, assaults on wives and on children are very much less likely to end up as entries in police records and so the recorded totals must be seen as under estimates of the true extent of these problems. After careful and detailed interviews with large numbers of abused wives, the Dobashes concluded that only about 2 per cent of all such assaults are ever reported to the police (Dobash and Dobash, 1980, 164).

One important measure of the extent of wife abuse is the dramatic proliferation of refuges in Britain over the past few years. From the setting up of the first refuge for battered women in Chiswick in 1971, the number has grown so that by 1981 there were about 200 refuges scattered across the country. The majority of these refuges are affiliated to the Women’s Aid Federations of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. They provide safe accommodation for women and their children, advice of whatever sort the woman requires and support for as long as she needs it. The fact that most refuges are usually extremely overcrowded suggests that the women who go to them represent the desperate tip of a very large iceberg. The Women’s Aid Federation calculate that in any one year about 12,000 women and 21,000 children will use refuge accommodation, and that at any one time about 1,000 women and 1,700 children will be living in refuges (Women’s Aid Federation, 1980a). However, provision of refuges is still very far from the level recommended by the Select Committee on Violence in Marriage which proposed that ‘One family place per 10,000 of the population should be the initial target’ (Select Committee Report, 1975, xxvi).

Another question concerns the extent of violence in family life and within marriage. A difficulty here is that so little is known about the extent of violence in ordinary families. Most of our knowledge about wife abuse comes from the accounts of wives who have gone to refuges, or from studies of divorcing couples. In both instances it seems likely that a greater proportion of middle-class, as opposed to working-class violence, goes unreported.

T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Haft Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editor’s acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• PartI: Violent husbands and abused wives: a longitudinal study
• Part II: Helping the abused woman and her children
• Part III: Conclusion
• Notes on contributors
• Bibliography
• Index