Framing Sexual and Domestic Violence through Language

Renate Klein

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137340085
• eBook ISBN: 9781137340092
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Social Sciences

With examples from throughout Europe and the United States, the contributors to this volume explore how gender violence is framed through language and what this means for research and policy. Language shapes responses to abuse and approaches to perpetrators and interfaces with national debates about gender, violence, and social change.

1

Just Words?

Purpose, Translation, and Metaphor in Framing Sexual and Domestic Violence through Language

Renate Klein, United States/United Kingdom

This book examines how sexual and domestic violence against women is framed through language. The contributors are concerned with the expressions used to name abuse, the meanings suggested by these expressions, and their implications for research, policy, and practice. Language use, for better or worse, shapes the process of perceiving, interpreting, and responding to abuse. From the phrasing of survey questions to news coverage, police reports, policy directives, and everyday day talk, how things are said is not a matter of “just words” but of the right words.

Although language use has been discussed extensively in terms of what somebody means by expressions like violence against women, domestic violence, or honor killing, little terminology is widely agreed (Wilcox 2006). Harmful practices against women also occur outside of intimate or family relationships, but for abuses within these contexts alone a plethora of English terms are in use, such as domestic violence/abuse, sexual violence/abuse, sexualized violence, violence against women, wife abuse, dating violence, battering, sexual assault, intimate partner violence/abuse, honor-based violence, gender-based violence, and gender or gendered violence. As these terms differ in focus, scope, conceptual ancestry, and policy implications, their appropriateness for different purposes is contested (see also Wright and Hearn in this volume). The struggle for properly naming “it” (the nature and quality of harmful practices) continues, and the link between “it” and its many names remains tenuous. One might think that over the course of the past forty years terminology has been agreed and disputes over how to speak about “it” are a thing of the past. This is not so. If anything—as the range, diversity, and complexity of harmful practices against women has become clearer—terminology is increasingly fragmented and language use as challenging as ever.

This challenge may be less obvious where speakers share a common professional background and language. Within certain limits terminology may indeed be agreed and language use unproblematic. However, when looking across niches of shared language use, the multiplicity of names and thus the ambiguity of meanings become more obvious. This, at least, has been the experience of the contributors to this book. They come from different countries and work in different languages, disciplines, and intellectual traditions. This also means that they draw on different empirical evidence and theoretical concepts. It is from this vantage point that the book explores language use within and across cultural contexts. The contributors are not putting themselves forward as experts in linguistics or discourse analysis but as researchers who grapple with language issues in their daily work.

The book is based on an experiment in collaborative working, in which space was deliberately made to register misunderstandings as they arose in the process of discussion and that in turn helped to explore the significant subtleties of language use. Through this dedicated attention to language and languages, three broad themes emerged that form the conceptual background to this book: the purpose of language (language for knowledge, for public awareness, and for institutional change), the significance of translation, and the role of metaphor.

The Study Circle Process and Chapter Overview

The book emerged from a collaborative process among the contributing authors. Its topic and approach grew out of a dedicated process of close discussion that went beyond presenting papers. The contributors formed a study circle with the explicit goal of discussing their respective work through the lens of naming, word choice, and language use. The purpose of this was to dedicate attention to an issue that tends to be pushed to the sidelines of ordinary research activity. The study circle process has been the vehicle for uncovering misunderstandings that arise from naming across contexts. This approach made it possible to notice, and indeed welcome, misunderstandings and accord them proper space in the analytical process. As a collaborative process of discussion and reflection during two intensive workshops, one year apart, the study circle has been an experimental process for all contributors. The book as a whole does not offer better language but examines the challenges associated with language use across academic, cultural, and national contexts.

The contexts examined in this book include the wording of questions and the reporting of findings in French survey research (Condon, Chapter 3); case descriptions of domestic violence homicides in Swiss police reports (Gloor and Meier, Chapter 4); descriptions of domestic violence cases in Polish print magazines and private assertions about hypothetical scenarios of domestic violence (Kwiatkowska, Chapter 5); policy statements by British governmental and nongovernmental agencies and reflections about violence by men who are active in antiviolence work (Wright and Hearn, Chapter 2); public statements about the killings of women in the name of family honor in Denmark (Mogensen, Chapter 7); descriptions of intervention programs for perpetrators of domestic violence in Denmark (Sørensen, Chapter 6); and statements by middle managers at an educational institution in the United States (Klein, Chapter 8).

Stéphanie Condon (Chapter 3) focuses on the first French national survey on violence against women, which estimated the prevalence of a wide range of harmful practices, and the survey’s reception by the French press and commentators. Condon is concerned with language use in methodology—in the writing of survey questions and in the description of results. She shows how her research team had to make numerous deliberate decisions about wording at multiple stages in the research process and how the findings were reported initially in the French press and then debated in public. She situates this discussion in the context of French notions of citizenship and equality and illuminates how these notions have inflected public reception of evidence of violence against women in France.

Daniela Gloor and Hanna Meier (Chapter 4) analyze official police reports on cases of domestic violence homicides in the Swiss Canton Aargau. Gloor and Meier examine how, in final case reports, police render the context of the murders in metaphorical language and thus fail to engage with the history of abuse that preceded the killings. In a British study of police files, Marianne Hester (2012) had analyzed how police represent female domestic violence perpetrators, including cases where only the woman was violent and cases where the woman and the man were violent. Analytically, Gloor and Meier focus on the use of metaphorical language in the report, which, they argue, serves as a strategy to avoid naming the abuse that occurred before the murders took place and thus obscures the gendered personal and societal contexts of the killings. In contrast, Hester (2012) had explored whether the pattern of what Michael Johnson (2008) named “intimate terrorism” fit the actions of the female perpetrators in her sample, and she concluded that it did not fit.

Anna Kwiatkowska (Chapter 5), too, focuses on domestic violence but also on sexual harassment of women by male superiors. Her empirical material includes reports in the print media and data generated in laboratory experiments. Working in Poland, her evidence concerns Polish print media and Polish attitudes toward domestic violence. Analytically, her focus is on the relationship between language use and stereotyping, which she explores in particular regarding the implications of abstract language. Within this analytical framework she shows how the use of abstract language supports stereotypical, and possibly self-serving, portrayals of victims and perpetrators.

Carole Wright and Jeff Hearn (Chapter 2) examine violence discourses in the United Kingdom. They trace definitions and uses of the word violence through British policy debates and discuss the implications of these uses, in particular for understanding domestic violence, in the context of wider issues of feminism, gender neutrality, and resistance against violence. Wright and Hearn then focus on the use of terms such as gender neutrality and domestic violence in the language of men who participated, either as professionals or as activists, in antiviolence efforts.

Also focusing on domestic violence and gender-neutral language, Bo Wagner Sørensen (Chapter 6) examines the naming in Denmark of interventions in perpetration. He critiques the use for perpetrator programs of the word treatment and its medical connotations and situates this discussion within current Danish discourses on gender equality, violence, and the state’s duty to care for its citizens. In these discourses, he argues, the practice of using gender-neutral terms (such as removing references to male perpetrators) is lauded as a reflection of gender equality, although it glosses over the reality of gender-specific patterns and problems.

Also in Denmark but focusing on different patterns of abuse, Britta Mogensen (Chapter 7) examines how Danish authorities have struggled to understand and address so-called honor killings in Denmark (and Sweden), mostly of young women. Her analysis illustrates confusion among authorities over the meaning of terms such as arranged marriage, forced marriage, and honor, and a profound lack of understanding of the interpersonal dynamics in families who adhere to honor-based precepts. Citing from the published literature and her own research notes, Mogensen illuminates naïveté regarding these matters among Danish (and Swedish) authorities and the grave implications of such naïveté for young women and men whose families turn against them. Both Mogensen and Gloor and Meier, although analyzing different evidence in different countries, show how even when criminal acts against women are spoken and written about, the seriousness of these crimes and their societal significance can be downplayed or ignored.

Renate Klein (Chapter 8) takes up the distinction made previously between language for knowledge, awareness, and institutional change. Focusing on higher education in the United States, she examines language use and institutional efforts to address sexual and domestic violence on campus. Using a case example, Klein argues that language, if it is to initiate critical institutional change, needs to move beyond slogans and pledges. While positive visions are important, changes to institutional policies and workforce development require mundane procedural language issued by university management about routine institutional practice so that sexual and domestic violence is not merely implored about but addressed as systematically as environmental health and safety.

Language and Meaning: Purpose, Translation, Metaphor

While the contributions to this book reflect different research approaches, they all address the relationship between language and meaning. This relationship will be considered here from three different perspectives: purpose, translation, and metaphor. First, the notion of “purpose” of language is used to explore what is to be achieved by phrasing things a certain way. Three purposes are distinguished here: Language for knowledge refers to how language shapes insight into the nature of sexual and domestic abuse. Language for awareness refers to the role of language in creating public awareness of abuse as a widespread and serious social problem. Language for institutional change refers to what leadership and management need to say to initiate critical changes such as training the workforce in early intervention. Second, the notion of translation is used to explore practices in which language is rendered for different linguistic and cultural contexts as in translation and interpretation. All chapters in this book are in English, but not all the research represented here was generated in English. The original language contexts are Danish, English, French, German, and Polish. While each chapter focuses on language use within a particular linguistic and cultural context, the book as a whole also represents an exercise in translation and adaptation across such contexts. Hence issues of cross-context language use, and the processes in which ideas are rendered for other contexts, need to be acknowledged. Third, the use of metaphorical language is most obvious in the chapter by Gloor and Meier, but metaphoralso appears in Sørensen (treatment, borrowed from the health field). Hence the old argument is revisited that metaphors structure human thought and action (Lakoff and Johnson 2003), and implications of this argument for framing sexual and domestic violence are suggested. In the remainder of this introduction these themes are sketched out briefly.

Purpose: Language for Knowledge, Awareness, and Institutional Change

Even though knowledge and awareness may be used interchangeably, it is argued here that the two words denote different concepts. Awareness that something is a problem does not automatically imply insight into its nature or knowledge of solutions. Many people probably are aware of numerous social and political problems around the globe without necessarily having deeper insight into the particulars of these problems or what to do about them. Furthermore, language particularly suited for one of the three purposes may not be suited for any of the others. Instead, different kinds of language may be needed so that each may “speak” most suitably to the task at hand: language for articulating what exactly it is about abusive dynamics that makes them so harmful and difficult to deal with; language for alerting the wider public to the seriousness and pervasiveness of sexual and domestic violence; and language for identifying, initiating, and implementing changes to institutional policies and practices that transform institutions into settings in which perpetration of abuse becomes less likely and support for victims more forthcoming.

Language for knowledge has been a cornerstone in the development of the field. The naming of rape and domestic violence emerged as a topic of debate in the 1970s, when feminist scholars and activists began to protest the use of euphemisms such as domestic disturbance and conjugal rights (Donat and D’Emilio 1992; Kelly 1988). The key emphasis of feminist arguments has been that sexual and domestic violence by men against women is possible and more likely if severe structural power imbalances exist (by virtue of tradition, ideology, law, religious teaching, organizational hierarchy, economic inequality, or other factors) that enable men to take advantage of, exploit, and ill-treat the women in their families and intimate relationships. Ill treatment needs to be named as such and not glossed over with arcane legal terms or evasive metaphors. Catherine Kirkwood (1993), among others, emphasized the “need for a language of abuse,” because abused women felt at a loss for the right words to explain to others how and why their relationships were abusive and not just going through a “normal” rough patch that every relationship experiences. Since then, notions of power and control have become almost commonplace in the field (Pence and Paymar 1993). They also have been refined considerably in terms of intersecting societal power inequalities (Sokoloff and Pratt 2005; Thiara, Condon, and Schröttle 2011) and gendered power in intimate relationships (Stark 2007; Johnson 2008). Although language for knowledge has been refined considerably, it remains a work in progress. In many societies, sexual and domestic violence are debated in public and moved higher on policy agendas. However, glossing over the seriousness of abuse continues—for instance, when harmful practices are excused in the name of culture.

Language for awareness, as understood here, has focused on alerting the public (and the authorities) to the fact that sexual and domestic violence are serious, widespread, and in need of societal attention. Public awareness campaigns also let victims know that their plight is recognized and that they are not alone, and campaign materials may publicize resources such as the phone numbers of help lines. For these reasons awareness campaigns are critically important. Two well-respected and long-running examples are Zero Tolerance, the key slogan and name of a Scottish charity1 (Hanmer and Itzin 2000), and There’s No Excuse for Domestic Violence, a campaign produced by Futures without Violence, formerly the Family Violence Prevention Fund in the United Stat...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• 1. Just Words? Purpose, Translation, and Metaphor in Framing Sexual and Domestic Violence through Language
• 2. Neutralizing Gendered Violence: Subsuming Men’s Violence against Women into Gender-Neutral Language
• 3. Communicating Prevalence Survey Results
• 4. “Clouds Darkening the Blue Marital Sky”: How Language in Police Reports (Re)Constructs Intimate Partner Homicides
• 5. Talking about Violence: How People Convey Stereotypical Messages about Perpetrator and Victim through the Use of Biased Language
• 6. A Matter of Mental Health? Treatment of Perpetrators of Domestic Violence in Denmark and the Underlying Perception of Violence
• 7. Dangerous Words: How Euphemisms May Imperil Women’s Lives
• 8. Language for Institutional Change: Notes from US Higher Education
• Notes on Contributors