Response Based Approaches to the Study of Interpersonal Violence

Margareta Hydén, Allan Wade, David Gadd, Margareta Hydén, Allan Wade, David Gadd

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137409539
• eBook ISBN: 9781137409546
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Interpersonal violence has been the focus of research within the social sciences for some considerable time. Yet inquiries about the causes of interpersonal violence and the effects on the victims have dominated the field of research and clinical practice. Central to the contributions in this volume is the idea that interpersonal violence is a social action embedded in responses from various actors. These include actions, words and behaviour from friends and family, ordinary citizens, social workers and criminal justice professionals. These responses, as the contributors to this volume all show, make a difference in terms of how violence is understood, resisted and come to terms with in its immediate aftermath and over the longer term.
Bringing togetheran international network of scholars and practitioners from a range of disciplines and fields of practice, this book maps and expands research on interpersonal violence. In doing so, it opens an important new terrain on which social responses to violence can be fully interrogated in terms of their intentions, meanings and outcomes.

1

Introduction to Response Based Approaches to the Study of Interpersonal Violence

Margareta Hydén, David Gadd and Allan Wade

The twentieth century will be remembered as a century marked by violence. It burdens us with its legacy of mass destruction, of violence inflicted on a scale never seen and never possible before in human history.

Less visible, but even more widespread, is the legacy of day-to-day, individual suffering. It is the pain of children who are abused by people who should protect them, women injured or humiliated by violent partners, elderly persons maltreated by their caregivers, youths who are bullied by other youths, and people of all ages who inflict violence on themselves. This suffering – and there are many more examples that I could give – is a legacy that reproduces itself, as new generations learn from the violence of generations past, as victims learn from victimizers, and as the social conditions that nurture violence are allowed to continue. No country, no city, no community is immune. But neither are we powerless against it.

(Mandela, 2002, p. ix)

Research on the responses to interpersonal violence: The missing link

This volume concerns the ‘day-to-day individual suffering of interpersonal violence’, as Mandela so vividly expresses it, in the quote that opened the chapter. Throughout the volume, interpersonal violence will be defined as ‘the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation’ (WHO, 1996, p. 5).

Interpersonal violence has been the focus of research within the social sciences for some considerable time. Hitherto, inquiries about the causes of interpersonal violence and the effects for victims have dominated the field of research. The authors of this volume share a common interest in expanding the research field to include what we have called responses to interpersonal violence. Central to our interest is one of the basic characteristics of interpersonal violence, namely that it is a social action embedded in a social context and in responses from various actors, sometimes over a prolonged period of time, even across generations. The embeddedness of responses to violence is self-evident in common reactions towards victims of intimate partner violence.

Responses to violence show how others interpret it, including their constructions of the perpetrator and victim. They can dramatically influence, or fail to influence, the social and material conditions facing the offender and victim. The victim will assess how best they can respond and the offender will decide to continue, escalate or desist their violent actions in the context of, and in response to, these responses. As the epigraph at the beginning of the chapter says, ‘violence is a legacy that reproduces itself, as new generations learn from the violence of generations past, as victims learn from victimizers, and as the social conditions that nurture violence are allowed to continue. No country, no city, no community is immune. But neither are we powerless against it’ (Mandela, 2002, p. ix). As all contributors to this volume will show, social responses have an impact on violent actions, on how they are interpreted and whether violence continues, escalates or begins to cease.

Demanding that violence ceases is often what politicians do when violence breaks out in public spaces. They insist that halting the violence is the responsible thing to do, that it is the morally righteous thing to do, what any law-abiding citizen would do. But those who deem their violence a form of resistance to structural oppression – as Nelson Mandela and those who joined with him to oppose apartheid were to discover – would insist that violence is sometimes the only responsible reaction to ongoing injustice, oppression and intimidation. Somebody has to stand up for the victimized in order for his or her torment to stop. They might also argue that it is also the most ‘responsive’ thing to do. This is because violent resistance – like the actions of those protesting in Ferguson, Missouri, following the dropping of charges against the white police officer, who shot the unarmed Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man – can be a means of articulating the anger, rage and grief felt by families whose loved ones have been harmed or killed, by those in positions of responsibility.

More commonly, however, we are accustomed to expecting ‘responsive’ responses to be ones that take the heat out of a grievance, cool things down and hence avoid cycles of retribution. But what counts as a ‘responsive response’ can often be a matter of perspective and varies widely with the circumstances. For some of those working in therapy, for example, responsitivity is very much about understanding the perspective of the other, a challenge that is complicated when multiple others approach a conflict from different perspectives. Being responsive to victims, for example, by recognizing their needs for safety and demands for justice, may well mean taking what appears to be an ‘unresponsive’ position regarding perpetrators who, in most cases, want to give some context to their actions so that others can see that they are non-redeemable human beings or are entirely to blame.

Responses to violence invariably send messages to people who commit violence, indicating what kind of action is acceptable or not in particular circumstances. These messages can sometimes indicate who that person is or should become. To say, ‘you shouldn’t do that’ is to say, ‘you should not be that person’, or even stronger, ‘you are not that person’ or ‘you are better than that kind of person’ – and therefore should act differently. This was illustrated starkly in the UK during the summer riots of 2011 when Tariq Jahan, a man who had just lost his son through the action of rioters, appealed to those looking for retribution as parents and children, and most specifically as fathers and sons, to just ‘go home’. This was arguably both a responsible response – for it sought to de-escalate the conflict – and a responsive one for it sought to acknowledge the pain, anger and desire for retribution many people felt. It succeeded, at least to some extent, because it evoked identification – as fathers and sons – in a way that offered the potential to forge new solidarities and identities around being the ‘bigger men’; men who did not react unthinkingly and in kind to one family’s tragedy by meeting violence with violence.

But messages are not always received how they are intended. The primary rationale for sentencing the perpetrators of hate crimes more seriously is to convey to the wider community an intolerance of violence and intimidation motivated by prejudice (Iganski, 1999). But research with those involved in perpetrating racially motivated crimes has found that not everyone gets the message. Some young white men, for example, read the stiffer penalties meted out against hate crime offenders as evidence that the law discriminates against the white majority in favour of ethnic minority groups (Gadd and Dixon, 2010). Campaigns discouraging domestic violence are also prone to such misreadings and are sometimes exploited as a pretext to mounting a backlash against women (e.g. ‘feminists’ and ‘feminism’) or the principle of gender equality, by men who argue they are subject to unfair criticism (Gadd et al., 2014).

For these reasons we think it is important to open up a terrain on which responses to violence can be fully interrogated in terms of their intentions, meanings and outcomes. Responses to violence cover a wide terrain of practices, such as actions from friends and family, or social workers and criminal justice professionals involved in specific cases. They include the words, written and spoken, and behaviour – whether confrontational, passive or merely a casual look – of ordinary citizens, as well as the practices of the state that involve social policies, law creation and enforcement. In democracies, social policies tend to be the outcome of a miscellany of responses – the political attempt to appease one group of people over another through establishing who deserves what, to engineer solidarity along particular lines, to respond to an evidence base about what works, or to address some form of crisis, whether financial or moral, and to prevent its recurrence. In this sense, responses to violence have always to be understood in social-historical contexts – to be located in time and place – for what counts as a responsive response, in one place at one moment, may convey misunderstanding or inflict harm in another context, even though borrowing from one jurisdiction to another is typically how crime policy travels (Newburn and Jones, 2007).

Research on the causes of interpersonal violence

The study of the causes of interpersonal violence – domestic, gender-based, peer-based or hate-motivated – is surrounded by multiple controversies. Rarely, however, have such studies captured the full significance of responses to issues of aetiology. One debate that cuts across all fields has to do with causation, and specifically whether individual pathology or social structures are mostly to blame. The second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s put men’s violence towards women on the political and research agenda (Friedan, 1981). The problem was only addressed very occasionally and in a cursory manner in academic journals before then. One of the earliest articles on the subject was ‘The Wife Assaulter’ written by the British probation officer L. G. Schultz (1960). Schultz explored the causes of woman battering by analysing the characteristics of violent men. Four men, all convicted for attempting to murder their wives, were described. Dominating, rejecting mothers, who were largely aggressive towards them, characterized the perpetrators’ upbringings. The initial reaction of the men to their mothers was apparently submissiveness followed by aggressiveness towards partners. The social response of academics, exemplified in Schulz’s writing, was an uncritical one: it was to blame the failings of older women (i.e. mothers) for the victimization of younger women by male partners.

Four years after Schultz published his study, three forensic psychiatrists, Snell, Rosenwald and Robey (1964), wrote an article titled ‘The Wifebeater’s Wife’. They were among the first to describe the battered woman from an individual psychology perspective. Based on a study of 12 couples, they presented a dismal view of battered women, who they described as aggressive, efficient, masculine and sexually frigid, controlling towards men and yet dependent on them. The men were described as passive, indecisive, impotent and alcoholized. Snell et al. (1964) found the origin of woman battering in the combination passive man/aggressive woman, the ‘symbiotic pair’ that Walker (1984) would later reverse as passive woman/aggressive man. Similarly, the British psychiatrist Gayford (1979), on the basis of on his clinical experiences, proffered a typology of abused women as ‘inadequate’, ‘provocative’ or ‘highly competent’ and argued that men’s violent behaviour is a reaction to the ‘inadequate’, ‘provocative’ or ‘highly competent’ women’s behaviour. Snell et al. (1964) and Gayford (1979) made women responsible for men’s brutality against them and their analyses were wholly unresponsive to the abject circumstances those women faced.

This woman-blaming approach to domestic violence is strongly opposed by the now international women’s movement. According to feminist scholars, violence towards women is not an expression of psychological problems, not in the man or the woman, nor in the family. Rather, the cause of men’s violence against women is to be found in the context of gender-based hierarchical power structures – patriarchy – in which men dominate women physically, emotionally and economically (Dobash and Dobash, 1979; hooks, 1984; Yllo and Bograd, 1988; Boonzaier, 2006). Patriarchy, which for some is written into the very foundations of society, encourages and enables violence by men against women. Therefore, responses to violence should be focussed on rectifying gender-based power inequalities, naming the problem, (socially and legally), empowering women, providing services to women that enhance women’s safety, arresting and prosecuting perpetrators and requiring perpetrators to change.

Such was the social and analytical strength of the early feminist movement that it inspired critical analysis from women of colour and others alive to the specific circumstances of those subjected to violence based on race, sex, gender identity and ability. These conversations incited new responses from activists and academics concerned with the study of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) and, in turn, by those who dismiss ‘intersectionality’ as postmodern ‘identity politics’ (Jacobs, 2002; Jenness, 2002). This, in turn, has generated an interest in what constitutes recognition for victims, though it has sometimes also made it harder in the political sphere to discuss the needs of specific offenders and the multitude of responses that have contributed to their offending behaviours.

Overgeneralizations about offenders have sparked academic interest in individual differences among those who perpetrate violence, but this has tended mostly to be articulated in the form of psychological typologies (Dutton and Golant, 1995; Holtzworth-Munroe et al., 2000; McDevitt et al., 2002; Berk et al., 2003). However, others, like the social epidemiologist Lori L. Heise (1998), have developed integrated, ecological frameworks. Heise’s ecological approach conceptualizes violence as a multifaceted phenomenon grounded in the interplay among personal, situational and sociocultural factors. The World Health Organization has favoured this model (Krug et al., 2002). Such explanatory approaches direct us towards different responses in practice and policy. For the most radical, redressing individual pathology is futile while social inequality persists. For the more pragmatic, change is piecemeal and requires intervention at all levels. For others, directing scarce resources towards root causes or the most dangerous is the best way of maximizing effects.

But there are also bigger questions that need to be asked here about the quality of the responses that can be offered, and particularly when and whether responding is the same as being responsive, i.e. being alive to the needs, vulnerabilities and desires of ‘other’. Some would argue, and most of the contributors to this volume have some sympathy for this view, that only the latter is the responsible thing to do, i.e. without sensitivity to the position of the ‘other’ responding is futile. This raises some difficult questions when the other is also the aggressor, or when those doing the responding are victims who have endured hurts and losses of their own. As Judith Butler (2009, p. 84) puts it:

It is most difficult when in a state of pain to stay responsive to the equal claim of the other for shelter, for conditions of liveability and grievability. And yet, this vexed domain is the site of a necessary struggle.

To engage in this struggle there is no need to conceal or minimize violent action. Some therapists (Todd, Weaver-Dunlop and Ogden, 2014) suggest those who commit violence are already capable of right action and more likely to engage in ‘self-correction’ when treated with dignity.

Research on the effects of interpersonal violence

Traditionally, social scientists have sought to understand the experience of victims by measuring the ‘effects’ or ‘impact’ of violence. Among the most influential in this tradition is the American feminist and psychologist Lenore Walker (1984; 1993). Walker identified specific ‘psychological effects’ that came from being abused by a male partner and argued that the constellation of these psychological effects make up the battered woman syndrome (BWS). ‘Learned helplessness’, borrowed from Seligman’s (1975) research on dogs, is a core symptom of BWS (Walker, 1993). Likewise, the effects of ‘exposure’ or ‘witnessing’ intimate partner violence as a child have been the subject of intense research. Single studies (Jaffe et al., 1990; McGee, 2000; Kerig, 2003; Graham-Bermann and Seng, 2005; Griffing et al., 2006) and meta-analysis (Wolfe et al....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction to Response Based Approaches to the Study of Interpersonal Violence
• Part I: Understanding Interpersonal Violence from Response Based Perspectives
• Part II: Professional Responses
• Index