Strasbourg, 5 April 2000 EG/SEM/VIO (99) 21

SEMINAR

MEN AND VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

Palais de l'Europe
Strasbourg

7-8 October 1999

PROCEEDINGS
 2

THE COUNCIL OF EUROPE

Founded in 1949, the Council of Europe is an international organisation with a

European vocation, which at present has 41 European member States, all of which are
pluralist parliamentary democracies1 (this figure includes the 15 member States of the
European Union). It is the European continent's largest intergovernmental and
parliamentary forum. Its seat is in Strasbourg (France).

The objectives of the Council of Europe are:

- to work for the closer union of the more than 800 million women and men of
Europe;
- to safeguard and develop democracy and human rights;
- to undertake co-operation in the broadest sense between the member States in the
fields of human rights (including the media), education, culture, social questions,
health, youth, local and regional authorities, environment and legal affairs.

The consideration of equality between women and men, seen as a fundamental

human rights, is the responsibility of the Steering Committee for Equality between
Women and Men (CDEG). The experts who form the Committee are entrusted with the
task of stimulating action at the national level, as well as within the Council of Europe, to
achieve effective equality between women and men. To this end, the CDEG carries out
analyses, studies and evaluations, defines strategies and political measures, and, where
necessary, frames the appropriate legal instruments.

1
Albania, Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia,
Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein,
Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russian
Federation, San Marino, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, "The Former
Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia", Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom
 3

Contents
Introduction ........................................................................................................................5

Opening address by Mr Pierre-Henri IMBERT, Director of Human Rights...................................6

Introduction by Ms Caroline MECHIN (France), Chair of the Steering Committee for Equality
between Women and Men (CDEG) .................................................................................................9

"METHODOLOGICAL AND ETHICAL ISSUES"

Comparing methodologies used to study violence against women

by Ms Sylvia WALBY, University of Leeds, United Kingdom....................................................11

Representations of intimate male violence in the United States and Poland

by Ms Renate, University of Maine, USA and
Ms Anna KWIATKOWSKA, University of Bialystok, Poland ....................................................23

Gendering research on men's violence to known women

by Ms Jalna HANMER, Leeds Metropolitan University, United Kingdom and Mr Jeff HEARN,
Tampere University, Finland and Manchester University, United Kingdom................................32

"VIOLENCE IN THE FORMATION OF GENDERED MALE IDENTITIES"

Explaining the inclination to use violence

by Ms Carol HAGEMANN-WHITE and Ms Christiane MICUS, University of Osnabrück,
Germany..........................................................................................................................................41

Explanations for male violence, psychoanalysis, feminist theory and the new men's
movement
by Ms Ursula MÜLLER, University of Bielefeld, Germany................................................... 54

Growing up in the proximity of violence: Teenagers' stories of violence in the home

by Ms Katarina WEINEHALL, University of Umeå, Sweden ................................................ 64

Teenage boys as violent actors in today's Romanian communities

by Ms Anca DUMITRESCU and Ms Elena PENTELEICIUC, University of Bucharest,
Romania ................................................................................................................................... 73

Socio-Economic Roots for Cases of Male Violence against Women in Russia

by Ms Vera GRACHEVA, Russian Federation ....................................................................... 77

"TRANSITIONS IN ADULTHOOD AND MEN'S VIOLENCE"

The contribution of the military and military discourse to the construction of

masculinity in society
by Ms Uta KLEIN, University of Münster, Germany.............................................................. 81

Men's violence against women and children in situations of armed conflict

by Ms Dubrovka KOCIJAN HERCIGONJA, Zagreb, Croatia ............................................... 89
 4

The approach of the World Health Organisation Regional Office for Europe to the issue
of gender-based violence (abstract)
by Ms Kirsten Staehr JOHANSEN, WHO-EURO, Denmark ............................................... 101

Older men and elder abuse

by Ms Bridget PENHALE, University of Hull, United Kingdom ......................................... 103

"CROSS-CUTTING THEMES: MEDIA DEBATES, COSTS OF VIOLENCE,

IMPLEMENTATION"

Male violence: the economic costs

by Mr Alberto GODENZI and Ms Carrie YODANIS, University of Fribourg, Switzerland 117

But where are the men? Central State public policies to combat violence against women
in post-authoritarian Spain (1975-1999)
by Ms Celia VALIENTE, University of Madrid, Spain ........................................................ 129

Police methods to counteract violence against women

by Ms Helene GÖRTZEN, Stockholm County Police Authority, Sweden ........................... 142

Assumptions and implications: Notes on Greenlander men "in transition"

by Mr Bo WAGNER SØRENSEN, University of Copenhagen, Denmark ........................... 145

Conclusions of the Seminar presented by the General Rapporteur

Ms Renate KLEIN, University of Maine, USA ..................................................................... 153

Recommendations of the Seminar.......................................................................................... 159

Appendix I: Programme ................................................................................................... 163

Appendix II: List of participants........................................................................................ 167

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Introduction
For some years now, when it comes to analysing and combating violence against women,
the focus has been increasingly placed on the abuser, the violent man. As a result of this, centres
providing treatment or therapy for violent men have been set up in some countries. This policy
has, in turn, led to a reflection on the causes and mechanisms of male violence – what leads some
men to exercise violence, whereas others never use violence in their relations with women.

However, research on male violence is still in its early stages, and those who work on
this issue have few opportunities to exchange views in a European setting. It is, however,
extremely important, in order to develop appropriate policy and intervention responses, that the
results of any such research are made known to practitioners and that researchers can compare
experiences and build networks. The direct and indirect consequences of male violence both in
terms of health problems and in terms of cost to society have been ignored for too long. Just as
violence against women and children has gradually ceased to be a taboo and become part of a
public discussion, the searchlight should now be turned on male violence as a social and cultural
problem, and not an issue of a special and deviant group of men.

The Council of Europe has, for many years, worked towards the protection of women
and girls against violence. A Plan of Action for combating this violence has been prepared, and
the Steering Committee for Equality between Women and Men (CDEG) is currently preparing a
draft recommendation on this issue.

The Committee already initiated reflection on the question of male violence during the
Seminar "Promoting Equality: a common issue for men and women" (Strasbourg, 17-18 June
1997). At the 4th European Ministerial Conference on Equality between Women and Men
(Istanbul, 13-14 November 1997), the Ministers adopted a Declaration on equality between
women and men as a fundamental criterion of democracy. In the strategies appended to the
Declaration, the Ministers invite Governments to “promote research on relationships between
men and on the ways in which they perceive their masculine identity” and “reduce and aim to
eliminate men's violence against women by initiating education ensuring respect of the other
person and as concerns violent men, by supporting practical and therapeutic initiatives.”

The Seminar on men's violence against women was intended as a further step towards the
implementation of the Istanbul Declaration and a further attempt at combating violence against
women which is one of the main obstacles to the achievement of equality between women and
men.

In view of recent events in Europe at the time of the Seminar, special attention was
given to the question of men's violence against women and children in situations of armed
conflict.
 6

Opening speech

by Pierre-Henri IMBERT, Director of Human Rights

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a particular pleasure for me to welcome you to this seminar. You are here to
discuss a very important theme, that of violence against women and children. Such violence
is a huge impediment to equality between women and men. It is both an outcome and a sign
of inequality, while at the same time perpetuating it.

You will ask who commits violence, a question which is still too rarely addressed.
Some months ago, at a Forum held in Bucharest by the Steering Committee for Equality
between Women and Men, I remember saying that, as one of the priority measures aimed at
eradicating such violence, I considered it essential to examine the reasons for it, to study its
context and analyse its mechanisms - not only to talk about the symptoms of violence, but to
give no less consideration to its causes. That is exactly what you will be doing here. The
results of your work will, I am sure, prove extremely useful to the Steering Committee for
Equality and to the whole of the Directorate of Human Rights.

This seminar is part of the activities to combat violence against women that we have
been pursuing for over ten years; Mrs Caroline Méchin, who chairs the Steering Committee
for Equality between Women and Men, will tell you about those activities later on. To ensure
that we pursue our policy in a clear-sighted, effective manner, we need the knowledge and
experience of researchers and also of those who have to deal with the perpetrators and victims
of violence in their day-to-day work. That is why we wished to bring you together at this
seminar, which is intended as a forum for the exchange of ideas and for dialogue, in keeping
with the spirit of the Council of Europe.

Who commits violence? This question was broached two years ago at another seminar
here at the Council of Europe, which some of you attended. Today and tomorrow you will
delve more deeply into the subject. You are going to discuss research methodology, the
formation of male identities, the different ways in which males construct and preserve their
masculinity, and violence against women in armed conflicts. You will study the links
between masculinity and violence against women, which is - we have to admit - an enduring
characteristic of our societies. This seminar is part of the Council of Europe's efforts to bring
violence "out of the private sphere and cease to regard it as one of the inevitables of the
female condition", as a Swiss study on dominance and violence within couples so aptly says.

Before you settle down to work, may I give you some of my own thoughts on the
theme which brings us together today and on its links with the protection and promotion of
human rights. One of the cornerstones of human rights is the fundamental idea that all human
beings, women and men, are of equal worth and enjoy equal dignity. It is this idea which
must shape the approach to the problem you are about to discuss.

Slowly - very slowly - belief that men and women are equal, that they have the same
fundamental rights, is gaining ground, and this growing awareness is essential to the
eradication of violence. Stereotypes whereby women are perceived as different, inferior
beings are deeply entrenched in our collective unconscious, and it is those stereotypes which
 7

made it possible to justify the use of violence in the past, and are still used to do so today. For
thousands of years, in the discourse of researchers, thinkers, medical practitioners and
psychologists, men have been telling women what they must do, giving them instructions,
assigning them a place and duties, as if they were not really persons who also have rights. At
the end of the 18th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave the following definition of women's
duties in "Emile":

"Pleasing (men), being useful to them, making themselves loved and honoured by
them, raising them when they are children, taking care of them when they are adults, advising
and consoling them, making their life pleasant and agreeable - these have been women's
duties at all times, duties which they must be taught from childhood."

To make women conform to this image, it was necessary to exercise very strict control
over them, both inside and outside the family. Men have in fact always been afraid that
women might deviate from this prescribed norm, that women might adopt a conduct which
undermined men's honour, their virility, in short what is still too often regarded as the only
real male identity. The "stronger sex" does indeed fear the "weaker sex" because men know
that their strength - which is purely physical - is merely an illusion.

This explains why "control" of women so often takes violent forms, first and foremost
in the private sphere. Contrary to a widespread public belief, a woman or a teenage girl is at
greater risk of suffering violence in her home than in the street. The statistics cited at our
Forum in Bucharest last year are overwhelming: a recent survey in Italy showed that, of a
sample of 50,000 people, 80% had been the victims of violent behaviour by friends or family
members; in Spain 91 women were killed in 1998 as a result of domestic violence; the
Russian Ministry of the Interior's statistics show that some 14,000 women a year die at the
hands of their husband or another member of their family. Recent surveys in Switzerland and
Finland have shown that one out of every five women suffers gender-based violence in the
course of her life. Sometimes even women themselves are caught up in the spiral of violence,
inflicting it on their children, as recent events in France have shown. Lately, in an opinion on
a report by the Parliamentary Assembly, it was noted that before the outbreak of the conflict
in Kosovo, 68% of women and children in the region were prey to violence. In 70% of cases
that violence was perpetrated by husbands and fathers, and in 30% of cases by the police.
You can easily imagine the extent of the violence once the conflict had begun. We will no
doubt never know exactly what happened in Kosovo - nor in Bosnia and Herzegovina -
because, due to the pressure of tradition, the women victims have often preferred to remain
silent.

Women also suffer violence in the public sphere. You are aware of the form and
content of this violence. Moreover, women's safety and sometimes also their survival are
under threat from fundamentalist attitudes of all kinds and from alarming phenomena, such as
traffic in women for the purpose of their sexual exploitation. Tradition and custom serve as
excuses for barbarous practices such as genital mutilation. Women and children also suffer
the full force of violence in armed conflicts, although they are rarely involved in the
settlement of those conflicts or given any role in the peace negotiations. Systematic rape is
used as a weapon and, fortunately, is now recognised as a war crime. Another horror to be
added to this list, and perhaps the most dreadful of all, is the honour killings which still take
place in some member States of the Council of Europe. Such murders, which are sometimes
perpetrated by children as they cannot be prosecuted, are a negation of the most sacred of
human rights - the right to life - the first to be mentioned in the Convention on Human Rights.
 8

In such cases a woman's life is subordinate to the vanity of a man who fears for his honour
and his "virility". We really cannot tolerate this unbearable practice any longer.

***

As I said earlier, we are slowly seeing an increase in recognition of the problem. A

recent Eurobarometer survey concerning the European public's attitude to violence against
women and children, conducted in the European Union member States, shows that the vast
majority of respondents are aware of the problem and condemn violence, in particular sexual
violence. However, the survey also shows that this issue is still surrounded by many taboos.
It is hardly ever raised in family discussions, and few people acknowledge that they know
someone who has suffered violence. The idea that violence is mainly committed by persons
unknown to the victims is still prevalent. Furthermore, alcohol, drug abuse and
unemployment take pride of place among the factors cited as causes of violent behaviour, as if
it were yet possible to find excuses for the perpetrators, as if this form of violence differed
from other crimes. Some social circumstances may doubtless create a breeding ground for
violence, but they can never justify it.

A seminar such as this should allow progress to be made, help to eliminate the taboos,
to lift the veil of silence which has so often been drawn over violence against women, and,
lastly, ensure that such violence is classified as a serious offence and that the perpetrators are
punished.

The Group of Specialists currently working under the authority of the Steering
Committee on Equality between women and men with the aim of preparing a
recommendation from the Committee of Ministers to the member States on the protection of
women and girls against violence will no doubt be able to draw inspiration from your work.
It is essential to devise legal standards, to set limits and establish prohibitions.

For - and this brings me to my conclusion - all this violence leads to endless physical
and moral suffering by women and children, and also by certain men. It hampers our progress
towards a society in which the rights of all human beings are at last respected. We have come
a long way. Let us not forget that it was only in 1993, at the United Nations Conference on
Human Rights, that the international community expressly recognised that women's rights
were an integral part of human rights. At the Beijing Conference this was the very crux of the
entire debate on the word "equity"; some people maintained that women were not entitled to
half of "heaven" although, in the words of Mao Zedong much quoted at the time, they hold up
half of that very heaven. Women were considered to be entitled only to an "equitable" share
of rights.

It is now essential to look at things from a different angle, to deconstruct the

construction of society that made such thinking possible. And in my opinion we must do so
by means of genuine dialogue between women and men. We might conclude by subscribing
to what Tzvetan Todorov had to say about the discovery of America, the encounter between
the Spanish and the native Americans and lack of recognition of the Other: "It is by speaking
to others (not by giving them orders but by engaging in dialogue with them) that we recognise
them as persons similar to ourselves. If understanding does not go hand in hand with full
recognition of the Other as a person, that understanding is at risk of being used for the
purposes of exploitation, of taking something away; knowledge will be subordinate to power."
 9

Opening address by Ms Caroline MECHIN

Chair of the Steering Committee for Equality between Women and Men of the
Council of Europe

Ladies and gentlemen,

May I, in turn, welcome you to this Seminar. I should like to give a brief
presentation of the activities of the Steering Committee for Equality between Women and
Men (CDEG), of which I am Chair, in the field of combating violence against women.

These activities are based on the recognition of the fact that violence against women
constitutes a violation of human rights.

The Declaration on strategies for the elimination of violence against women in

society, adopted by the 3rd European Ministerial Conference on equality between women and
men in Rome in October 1993, states that "violence against women constitutes an
infringement of the right to life, security, liberty, dignity and integrity of the victim and,
consequently, a hindrance to the functioning of a democratic society, based on the rule of
law".

This Declaration was the starting point for the activities which are currently
underway in the Council of Europe.

These activities take two forms: on the one hand, there is a need to promote research,
and to exchange information and experience on the issue. On the other hand, there is a need
to draw up policies and legal instruments to put these principles into action.

***

The Rome Declaration envisaged a number of strategies to eliminate violence,

through the use of research, studies, prevention and education. Thanks to the work of a
Group of Specialists working under the authority of the CDEG, these strategies were
developed in a Plan of Action, published in 1997. This is not a legal text, but a real platform
which the European States can use to elaborate strategies to combat violence. The Plan of
Action is preceded by a chapter describing the context, notions, definitions and the breadth of
the problem, as well as current difficulties and problems. The Plan itself contains chapters on
research, legislation, legal procedure and practice, social assistance, the workplace, education,
health and the media. The Plan has been greatly appreciated, particularly by associations and
professionals who confront the issue of violence against women, and has been widely
distributed. I should like to thank the members of the Group, some of whom are present
today, for their excellent work.

The CDEG is also preparing a publication, which will come out in the near future,
describing legislation on this subject in the member States of the Council of Europe. Given
the diversity in this field in the member States, as well as the fact that a number of countries
have recently revised their legislation - Austria and Sweden, to name just two - this
publication should prove useful for information and reference.
 10

Exchange of information and experience is essential. This is why the Council of

Europe has organised conferences, seminars and fora on the subject of violence against
women. It is at these seminars and conferences that strategies can be discussed and
formulated. The Forum organised in Bucharest in November 1998 on domestic violence
confirmed the absolute priority which should be given to protecting, assisting and supporting
victims of violence.

In the same vein, a Seminar held in 1997 in Strasbourg examined the need to involve
men in the fight against violence against women, and underlined that men must take
responsibility for their actions. In Bucharest, at the Forum mentioned by Mr Imbert, we
continued this discussion, and the Seminar beginning today will take this very important issue
further.

Reinforcement of legislation

The Bucharest Forum, the conclusions of which are available here, stressed the need
to reinforce national legislation and consider violent acts as serious crimes. In particular, it
underlined that measures should be taken to allow the victim - rather than the violent person -
to remain in the family home. Finally, the Council of Europe was asked to prepare a draft
legal instrument on protection women and young girls against violence.

Indeed, it is in the perspective of the reinforcement of legislation, but also in that of

setting up multi-dimensional and global policies to combat violence that the Steering
Committee has begun to prepare a draft recommendation to member States on the protection
of women and girls against violence. This draft should establish a set of legal norms which
could constitute a basis for legislation and national practice in the member States, not only as
regards domestic violence, but also as regards other human rights violations, such as female
genital mutilation, trafficking in human beings for purposes of sexual exploitation, sex
tourism, honour killings and forced sterilisation.

This text, in keeping with the mission of the Council of Europe, will be founded on
the principle of the right to freedom and security, while reaffirming the existing rights laid
down in the European Convention on Human Rights, namely the right to life and the right not
to be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. In addition to
penal sanctions, preventive measures such as information and education campaigns, advisory
and treatment services both for victims and violent persons, as well as research and evaluation
measures could be put in place. I am sure that this Seminar will be very useful for our work.
 11

Comparing methodologies used to study violence against women

Ms Sylvia WALBY, University of Leeds, United Kingdom

Introduction

Surveys constitute an essential element in the methodology of researching violence

against women. They are essential in providing information about the prevalence, incidence
and patterning of violence against women. They have weaknesses, obviously, not least in the
restricted range of terms which are used to describe the violence and its impact, and cannot be
the only method. But they are an essential component of a research programme on violence
against women.

This paper will analyse four generations of national surveys of violence against
women as they have developed over the last 20 years. The purpose of this analysis is to
further the development of the best methodology for future surveys. Thus the paper will be
critical even of the Statistics Canada survey, which is widely regarded as the state of the art,
in order to develop a methodology more appropriate for a European context, and one which
has learnt the lessons from recent research.

The goal is to develop a survey instrument for the comparative analysis of violence
against women in Europe.

Four generations of national surveys of violence against women and domestic violence

National crime surveys were initially developed in order to measure the crime
against people that was not reported to the police and not processed by the courts. There have
been four generations of surveys, each usually revealing a higher rate of domestic violence
and violence against women than the previous generation.

Four Generations of Surveys

Country/Agency Title Year

First generation
US Bureau of Justice US National Crime Victimization Survey annual
UK Home Office British Crime Survey biannual
Australian Bureau of Statistics Crime and Safety annual

Second generation
US Bureau of Justice US National Crime Victimization Survey from 1992
UK Home Office: British Crime Survey 1996
 12

Third generation
US Straus and Gelles US National Family Violence Survey 1975
US Straus and Gelles US National Family Violence Resurvey 1985
Netherlands - Romkens National survey of wife abuse 1986

Fourth generation
Canada - Statistics Canada Violence Against Women Survey 1993
Australian Bureau of Statistics Women's Safety 1996
Iceland, Ministry of Justice Violence Against Women in Iceland 1996
US, Tjaden National Violence Against Women Survey 1996
Finland, Statistics Finland Men's Violence Against Women 1997

1 Generic national crime survey

Generic crime surveys are now carried out in many countries (for example, UK
British Crime Survey, the US National Crime Victimization Survey, the Australian National
Crime and Safety Survey).

2 Revised crime surveys with special attention to violence against women

The second generation of crime survey revised the wording of its enquiries, so as to
try to ensure that more assaults against women would be reported to the survey's interviewers,
and contained more detailed questions on areas of concern (Bachman and Taylor, 1994).

3 Dedicated domestic violence surveys

The third generation surveys were dedicated exclusively to the issue of domestic
violence. This freed the interview from the constraining context of a crime survey and gave
time for detailed questioning and probing on domestic violence alone. There were two main
examples of this survey in the US, the 1975 and 1985 US National Family Violence Surveys
(Straus and Gelles, 1990); and one in the Netherlands (Romkens, 1997).

4 Violence against women surveys

The fourth and most recent generation of surveys have considered the range of
violence against women in specialised surveys which are dedicated to this issue. They
investigate the range of violence against women including rape and other forms of sexual
assault, stalking and other forms of harassment. This wave of surveys originated in Canada in
the Statistics Canada Violence Against Women Survey (Johnson, 1996; Johnson and Sacco,
1995; Statistics Canada, 1993), and has proved a model for surveys in several other countries,
with varying degrees of modification, including Australia, Finland, Iceland, and the US, and
is under development in Sweden.

However, there are limitations even with the most recent generation of survey.

Small and Local surveys

In addition to these national surveys there are a number of studies which are smaller
in scope or use less sophisticated sampling methods (e.g. Russell, 1982; Hall, 1985; Hanmer
and Saunders, 1984; Mooney, 1994; Painter, 1991), which have been important in developing
innovative ways of asking relevant questions about the nature of violence against women.
 13

State of the art methodology

The issues to consider in the determination of the state of the art methodology
include:

· the context of the survey - whether it is within a generic crime survey or dedicated to the
issue;
· confidential interviewing;
· the training and matching of the characteristics of the interviewer and interviewee;
· sampling frame;
· mode of enquiry (postal/face-to-face/telephone);
· operationalising the definitions;
· situating the event in relation to others.

Generic or dedicated survey?

Questioning about violence against women which is part of a general crime survey
produces low estimates. This is partly because:

this restricts the amount of the time which can be spent in asking nuanced questions
about the nature of the violence and its ramifications;

the methodology prioritises the needs of the general survey rather than that which is
necessary to make victims of violence sufficiently at ease to disclose personal and
potentially distressing events;

a survey which is framed by the concept of 'crime' is likely to under-record those acts
of violence whose legality may be considered by respondents as ambiguous.

Dedicated surveys have uncovered higher rates of violence than generic ones. This
can be seen by comparing two generations of surveys in Australia. The Australian Bureau of
Statistics Women's Safety Survey, which was dedicated to the issue of violence against
women, found more than three times as much physical assault against women as did the
generic Australian Crime and Safety Survey, 5.9% as compared with 1.8% of women reported
physical violence in the previous 12 month period (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1994,
1996: 3).

Interviewing

The presence of a violent partner/husband in the room where the woman is being
interviewed may be expected to reduce the reporting of violence. The fourth generation
dedicated surveys, such as Statistics Canada, usually go to some trouble to ensure that the
respondent is alone at the time of the interview, but this is not the case for the generic crime
surveys.

For instance, in 35% of cases of women answering the British Crime Survey special
module on domestic violence there was someone else present in the room. When the partner
of women aged 30-59 was involved in the completion of the questionnaire the rate of
reporting of life-time domestic violence dropped to less than half the rate reported when no
one else was present, that is 10% instead of 23%.
 14

Dedicated surveys, such as that of Statistics Canada, spent extra time selecting and
training the interviewers. The use of female interviewers is especially important in relation to
disclosure of sexual abuse which can be especially sensitive. Sorenson et al (1987) found that
those interviewed about sexual assault were 1.27 times more likely to reveal a sexual assault
if they were interviewed by a woman than by a man.

Sampling Frame

All the surveys considered here suffer from limitations of the sampling frame. The
limitation is a result of the use of sampling frames which include only those living
permanently in a domestic residence. This excludes those in temporary accommodation or in
hostels or who are homeless. This matters because this group potentially includes those
women who have fled to refuges, to temporary residence with friends and kin, to emergency
bed and breakfast or hostel accommodation, or who are homeless. It is precisely women who
are in the immediate aftermath of a domestic assault who are more likely than the average
woman to be living in such temporary accommodation. This methodological issue can have
major implications for theoretical understanding if the most abused and most recently abused
group of women are significantly under-represented in the national surveys. Samples based
on women who have gone to refuges and shelters have consistently shown much higher rates
of frequency of abuse than those from national surveys (Dobash and Dobash, 1979; Okun,
1986; Straus, 1990). This is a very significant omission for the measurement of domestic
violence in the last 12 months, although it may have less impact on the life-time rate of
domestic violence since some women may now be living in settled violence free homes. This
means that the 12 month rate is likely to underestimate those who are subject to the most
severe and frequent domestic violence.

The different profiles of the abused population derived from sample surveys and
from surveys of refuge samples have given rise to much debate, leading some to suggest that
there do indeed exist two quite distinct patterns of violence, one 'common couple violence'
where there is low level mutual combat, the other 'patriarchal terrorism' where men terrorise
their battered wives (Johnson, 1995). However, this perceived bifurcation may well be non-
existent, and be merely a methodological artefact of the undercounting of the most abused
women in the sample surveys as a consequence of their lesser likelihood to be living at their
permanent home. A more adequate sampling frame would help to test this thesis.

Thus all existing surveys, even Statistics Canada, may well be an undercount as a
result of the restriction of their sampling frame to permanent residents in domestic residences.
There are ways of supplementing the sampling frame to include these populations, but it has
not yet been done in these surveys.

Mode of enquiry: postal, phone, face-to-face, self-completion

Surveys have been carried out using: postal questionnaires, telephone, face-to-face
interviewing, and by self-completion on a computer. There is an unresolved debate as to
whether face-to-face interviewing is better because it can build up more rapport, or whether
the confidentiality engendered by strategies such as self-completion by computer or by
questionnaire increases the likelihood of divulging sensitive information.

However, perhaps of greater significance are the implications of each of these for the
sampling frame and the response rate.
 15

Postal questionnaires usually have the lowest response rate of all methods, so are
usually considered inappropriate for those surveys where this is important. However,
Statistics Finland used a postal questionnaire and obtained a surprisingly high response rate of
70% (Heiskanaen and Piipsa, 1998). This might be explained in terms of the unique features
of Nordic society.

Statistics Canada used the telephone to make contact with respondents. They suggest
that since almost all Canadians have a phone, this gives good coverage. However, this may
well be country specific, since not all countries have such wide phone coverage. Telephone
ownership rates in private households in Britain are not as high as in Canada, and are
particularly low among poor female heads of households who are likely to include
disproportionate numbers of women who have fled a violent home. General Household
Survey results on phone ownership show that in 1994 about 91% of households had a private
telephone (compared with 96-98% in the US and Canada). In 1989, when the household rate
of phone ownership was around 87% overall, dramatically lower rates were found in
households which were renting their home and had no car. Within this group the rate was
only 38% among those where the household reference person was aged 16-29, 55% where the
HRP was aged 30-59 and 71% where the HRP was aged 60 or over (Thomas, 1991). Thus the
use of phones is probably inappropriate in the UK since the poorest are most vulnerable are
likely to be most excluded. Further, the technical information for random digit dialling is not
as available in the UK as in North America.

While the different methods may have implications for the survey, we do not know
what differences might result. Probably of greater importance is the response rate, and it
appears that the method of enquiry might have country specific implications here, especially
since few European countries match the near universal Canadian pattern of telephone use.

Operationalising the definitions of the violence

Perhaps the most difficult and most contentious issue in surveys in this area is the
operationalisation of the definition of violence. The issue is especially problematic because
there is no commonly available unstigmatised vocabulary, let alone one which maps easily
onto legal categories of crime.

There has been very considerable controversy over the terms and concepts used to
capture domestic violence in the various generations of surveys. There are three main terms
here: 'violence', 'force', and 'conflict tactics'. 'Conflict tactics' was used by Straus in the third
generation US Family Violence Surveys; 'violence' in Statistics Canada and its followers;
'force' by the BCS. Straus developed an elaborate scale, the Conflict Tactics Scale, which
listed a series of methods of dealing with conflict ranging from verbal reasoning to serious
violence. The scale has been widely used in recognition of its usefulness in distinguishing
between different kinds and levels of violence. However, it has been widely criticised
because of its focus on the act rather than the impact of the act; and because data on acts
makes little sense outside of an understanding of its meaning and context (Brush, 1990;
Dobash, et al, 1992; Smith, 1994).

The Straus survey found, controversially, that men were as likely to be the victim of
domestic violence as were women; a finding replicated by the BCS. However, this statistic
can be misleading because the impact of this violence on women is much greater than that on
men (e.g. Dobash et al 1992); men are much more likely to injure women than vice versa
(Schwartz, 1987); women are much more likely to be frightened and stay frightened than men
 16

(Mirrlees-Black, 1999); and women who hit men are likely to be responding in self-defence
or retaliation rather than initiating violence (Saunders, 1988; Nazroo, 1995).

Since this controversy, subsequent surveys have routinely included questions on the
impact of the violence and on the context of meaning in which it took place, even while they
have continued to use part of Straus' ranking scale of violence. Such scales have the
advantage of allowing the opportunity for respondents to be asked many times whether there
have been varying degrees of violence, removing the need for a one-off 'gate' or 'screening'
question which might contain a word that the respondent does not wish to identify with.

Statistics Canada introduces the questions on domestic violence as questions about

violence, rather than about tactics used in domestic conflict. The survey itself is introduced as
being about women's safety and the questions on domestic violence follow a series of
questions about the possible controlling nature of a partner's behaviour. This is considered a
more suitable framing for the questions.

However, despite the well rehearsed problems with Straus' survey, it is worth noting
that more domestic violence against women in a 12 month period was reported in the Straus
survey using the conflict tactics scale and a lead in-via the notion of conflict resolution in
families than was found by Statistics Canada, using the concept of violence and a framing in
terms of women's safety.

The use of the term 'violence' is problematic because it is a stigmatised word which
some respondents may not wish to embrace. Mooney (1994) in her North London study
found a reluctance to name actions as domestic violence. While 92% of her respondents were
prepared to label as domestic violence physical violence that results in actual bodily harm
such as bruising, black eyes and broken bones, only 76% were prepared to so label physical
violence of the form of grabbing, pushing and shaking, and only 68% when it referred only to
threatened force. This also varied by age - among women aged 55-64 only 60% were
prepared to name as domestic violence that which resulted in actual bodily harm, and 51%
that which involved grabbing, pushing and shaking.

The issue of definition for sexual attack is, if anything, even more contentious than
that for domestic violence. Most of the terms for the more severe forms of violence are
highly stigmatised and even when people appear prepared to accept behavioural descriptions
as fitting what happened to them they are reluctant to embrace such terms, especially that of
rape. The legal issue in most countries is whether women gave or did not give their consent
to various forms of sexual contact. In practice, many other moral and social issues emerge to
interfere with such a judgment.

Koss (1988) found that only 25% of a group of US undergraduates described

themselves as raped even though they described being subjected to actions which fitted such a
concept. In the UK, Painter (1991) found that only 60% of married women who were forced
to have sex through the use of violence were prepared to say they were raped at the time; of
those who were forced to have sex by threat of violence the figure dropped to 51% at the
time; while among those who had clearly indicated that they did not consent, but against
whom violence was not used, only 43% were prepared to label it as rape at the time.

This is perhaps not surprising given the popular imagery of rape as represented in the
newspapers, where it typically involves strangers, madmen, multiple attacks and reckless
women, some of whom brought it on themselves (Soothill and Walby, 1991). It would be
 17

hard for a woman who has been raped to identify with the images presented to her in popular
culture as representing rape.

In this context of lack of social agreement on the terms to use as shorthand for
diverse forms of violence, the advice is that surveys must describe the specific forms of
behaviour, and not rely upon shorthand (Koss, 1993; Smith, 1994). Shorthands simply do not
communicate that which survey designers intend. The procedure is then to utilise multiple
probes, not single questions; a series of descriptions of acts rather than a single screening
question leading to detailed questions only for those who pass through this gate.

There are different kinds of sexual assault which require a range of terms to describe
them. The fourth generation of survey makes an attempt to separate the different kinds of
assault. Statistics Canada and its successors introduce questions around sexual harassment;
sexual threats and attacks by strangers, dates and others; sexual assault in marriage.
However, there are places where further improvement could take place. The questions are a
little vague, for instance, it is not possible to identify a sub-category of coerced intercourse or
rape; the degrees of force or the nature of the pressure utilised are not particularly clearly
distinguished. The nuances of rape in marriage are unlikely to be obtained by a single
question located after the most extreme forms of physical violence. Stalking is not included
in Statistics Canada, but modifications of this survey, such as that in Australia, do usefully
distinguish stalking as a separate category. The questions about injuries need to be modified
so that rape victims are not asked whether or not they have any injuries, but rather a more
appropriate list of harms is included.

We need an enhanced listing of categories through which to collect data on sexual

assault for the next generation of surveys.

The location of the violent incident among others

Most crime surveys are oriented to discrete events, but domestic violence and sexual
violence within a partnership is more frequently characterised by a series of events rather than
a one-off event. For instance, the Straus survey is also inherently limited since it only
enquires about domestic violence which has taken place over the last 12 months.

However, even the fourth generation surveys are insufficiently developed in this
regard. It is hard to ascertain from Statistics Canada surveys for how long domestic violence
has occurred and with what frequency, even though there are some questions on this matter. A
question as to when the first event was and when the most recent, and a frequency count in
which the top is 'more than ten' is not sufficient to capture adequately the typical history of
domestic violence which is uncovered in some of the refuge based samples.

Indeed, if there is to be any analysis of desistance of domestic violence, then there

needs to be data on the starting and stopping of a series of events. This is not yet collected,
even in the Statistics Canada led series of surveys. The same applies to sexual violence,
which may also be part of a pattern of repeats, especially if it is from a known man or partner.
 18

Explaining Violence

There are a number of theories which enhanced survey data could help to assess.
They include questions as to the nature, if any, of links with poverty and social exclusion;
with gender inequality; the possible efficacy of the criminal justice system; the impact of
other social agencies. In order to do this, data on correlates of violence would need to be
collected more extensively. This would include the following:

Separate data on the income and socio-economic position of the man and woman in a
household, not only that of the 'head of household' or household as a whole in order to assess
different possible causal pathways linking poverty and social exclusion to domestic violence.
While for the purposes of the BCS as a generic crime survey primarily interested in property
theft, treating the household as a single economic unit makes some sense, it is most unhelpful
when it comes to analysing intra-household power and violence. We need to be able to
separately analyse any correlation between the possible economic stressing of a perpetrator
from that of the economic dependency and entrapment of a victim. Are poor households at
greater risk of domestic violence because men do not have the economic resources to perform
masculinity to their satisfaction, or because women lack the economic resources and social
networks to leave? To what extent is the US finding on the protective effect of women's
income (Farmer and Tiefenthaler, 1997) replicable in the UK? To what extent would
increases in women's employment and other changes in women's position in society (Walby,
1997) reduce domestic violence, as is argued in Iceland (Gislason, 1997)? To what extent is
the US finding that marital equality protects against domestic violence even in conflictual
situations (Coleman and Straus, 1986) replicable in the UK?

What produces desistance (cf. Farrall and Bowling, 1999)? Is the intervention of a
range of outside agencies as central to desistance in the UK as in the US (Horton and Johnson,
1993) or is the range of support services and the nature of the criminal justice system too
different to support such an analysis? Is desistance due to the integration of deviant men back
into the mainstream of society, or to their exclusion from the home?

There are many theories which could be explored if reliable data on the distribution
of violence against women were known (cf. Walby and Myhill, 1999; Walby and Myhill,
2000).

Future Surveys

Surveys have proved an indispensable tool for the analysis of violence against
women and domestic violence, despite the hesitation of some (Brush, 1990). There have been
wave after wave of new survey designs in recent years. We now need the next generation,
building on the innovations of those which have gone before.

The fourth generation of surveys, as led by Statistics Canada, provide a much

improved vehicle for the collection of data on the range of violence against women. The
improvements by, for instance, Australia in the inclusion of explicit questions on stalking
constitute a further welcome development.

However, even this generation of surveys can be still further developed in several
ways. First, the sampling frame needs to be enhanced so as to include the marginalised
population who do not currently occupy permanent domestic residences, especially since this
is likely to include disproportionate numbers of women who have fled violent homes to seek
 19

sanctuary in a refuge, with friends or relatives, or in hostel or homeless accommodation.

Second, there needs to be development of a longer and broader standard list for recording
more of the different types of sexual attack in recognition of the complexities and variations
in experience and definitions here and the addition of further probes in relation to these.
Third, a more systematic and comprehensive way of recording the various impacts of
violence, especially that of sexual violence, so as to capture the range of these in meaningful
ways. Fourth, a better way of recording series of events over time, so as to capture their
escalation and, perhaps, their desistance, and to do so in tandem with other social information
so as to begin to provide an evidential basis for understanding desistance. Fifth, the collection
of disagregated socio-economic data on women and the perpetrator, so that the woman is not
hidden in the household, and so that theories as to the role of poverty and social exclusion for
both victim and perpetrator can each be addressed. Sixth, it should be asked whether the man
has a criminal history, so as to help assess whether theories of criminal career are relevant in
this area.

***

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 22

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 23

Representations of intimate male violence

in the United States and Poland

Renate KLEIN, University of Maine, USA and

Anna KWIATKOWSKA, University of Bialystok, Poland

I. Introduction: Gender and Culture in Representations of Men's Violence

In this presentation we report on research pertinent to gendered representations of

men's violence in intimate relationships. The findings come from a study on the role of
gender and culture in representations of violence and non-violence in heterosexual
relationships. This research is still ongoing and our conclusions can only be tentative. In light
of the seminar's thematic emphasis and international scope we focus on selected findings
regarding men's intimate violence and raise several issues relevant to trans-cultural research.

We are using the term “representations” to refer to the meaning women and men
construct around men's violence. Representations of men's violence reflect beliefs about
gender, and about gendered violence, some of which may be similar across different societies,
while others may be rather specific to particular societies. For example, Kwiatkowska (1998)
examined how cultural beliefs in Poland infuse Polish women and men's representations of
violence in intimate relationships.

We use the term culture broadly, recognising that groups characterised by systems of
“shared beliefs, values, symbols, and performance styles” (Jones & Gerard, 1967) usually are
more diverse than they seem from the outside, and that categorising people into different
cultures overemphasises coherence and homogeneity, while minimising particularity and
contradiction (Abu-Lughod, 1991). Nevertheless, there are features such as different
languages that set groups of individuals apart, even when those features themselves are
heterogeneous and subject to change. Our references to Polish and U.S. culture may serve as
proxies to denote out participants' different linguistic backgrounds, but otherwise do not
adequately describe our samples nor do justice to each country's cultural diversity. By intra-
cultural research we mean studies that do not question culture, whereas by trans-cultural
research we refer to studies that employ culture as an analytic concept as well as a group
variable (Hanmer & Hearn, 1999).

Many authors have analysed individual and interpersonal outcomes of men's violence
in order to understand the meaning of such violence in the experience of both the victim and
the perpetrator, as well as for the quality of their relationship. Analyses of male violence that
draw on the experiences of battered women or on feminist critiques of gender relations in a
patriarchal society emphasise that the purpose of men's violence lies in establishing and
maintaining power and control over a female partner or in punishing her for challenging male
authority and privilege (Dobash & Dobash, 1984; Ptacek, 1997; Hearn, 1998). In contrast,
women who use violence against a male partner do so more often out of self-defence, and to
prevent or end their husbands' or boyfriends' emotional or physical attacks (Cascardi &
Vivian, 1995; Dobash & Dobash, 1994; Saunders, 1986).

Of completely different academic ancestry and largely ignoring the role of gender,
notions of aggression as instrumental activity or more recent notions of coercion as goal-
directed behaviour emphasise the expected outcomes of violence as central motivational
 24

features that help understand the purpose and meaning of violent acts (Riggs & Caulfield,
1997; Tedeschi & Felson, 1994). While the debate about the meaning and underlying motives
of gender violence is still ongoing (Johnson, 1995), representations of outcome, purpose or
consequence seem important for understanding how women and men construct meaning
around intimate violence.

II. Studying Gendered Representations of Men's Intimate Violence

In our present research, we analyse the outcomes that respondents spontaneously

generate for specific acts of intimate violence. We asked women and men in the U.S. and
Poland to generate outcomes for a series of acts that were attributed to either a man or a
woman and were situated in the context of intimate heterosexual relationships. The acts were
presented as open-ended prompts2. After each prompt, an open space is provided in which
participants respond to the prompt.

Example:

“What might a man get out of THROWING INSULTS AND DIGS?”

Respondents generated the outcomes in their own words. These words provide
glimpses into respondents' personal “lexica” (Marecek, Fine & Kidder, 1997; Morawski,
1997) of concepts and ideas associated with men's violence that are at the centre of the present
analysis and that we use to identify and delineate gendered and culture-specific notions of
men's violence. Using a blend of interpretative and content coding approaches (Denzin &
Lincoln, 1998; Strauss & Corbin, 1997; Weber, 1990), we aim to preserve nuances in
respondents' choice of words and develop analyses that treat gender and culture as analytic
categories as well as intergroup variables.

As this study is still in progress, and moving into relatively uncharted territory, we do
not wish to make general claims about what “women” and “men” in their respective countries
think about “men's violence”. It is much too early to draw such conclusions because the
samples are small and selective, the method is still in its infancy, and the underlying theory is
sketchy at best. Alternatively, the time may never come to draw general conclusions because
the meaning of violence may be so context-dependent that it becomes increasingly difficult to
formulate conclusions that do justice to real-life contextual complexity. Instead, we shall use
a few examples from this study to illustrate layers of gendered and cultural meanings around
men's intimate violence and their implications for trans-cultural research in this field.

2
The examples of violent acts are taken literally from the Revised Conflict Tactics Scales (Straus,
Hamby, Boney-McCoy & Sugarman, 1996) and the Conflict Resolution Inventory (Kurdek, 1994)
because part of our research concerns cognitive processes in survey responding and the role of gendered
representations of violence in respondents' answers to typical survey items.
 25

III. Gender and Culture in Representations of Men's Violence: Selected Observations

1. Three Observations

Tables 1 to 3 present examples of outcomes that U.S. and Polish women and men
generated for men's violence followed by our brief commentary. The sample items are
“throwing insults and digs”, “twisting partner's arm or hair”, and “choking partner”. Each
paragraph line in a cell refers to outcomes generated by one respondent (e.g., the upper left
cell of Table 1 contains data from six U.S. men).

2. Commentary

a. Power

In these examples, all four groups generated power and dominance outcomes for
men's intimate violence. The men in the U.S. sample emerge from among the four groups as
those who are most direct and decisive in constructing the meaning of men's violence in
reference to gaining control over a female partner, and interpreting violent acts as threats
meant to intimidate, and power moves aimed at gaining the upper hand.

Notions of multiple, hierarchically ordered power relations were invoked by some of

the Polish women who generated outcomes for men's violence where the violent offender
would meet his match, if not in his partner then in another male occupying a more powerful
social position such as a police officer or judge.

Table 1 What would a man get out of “throwing insults and digs”?

U.S. Respondents Polish Respondents

Men Feel superior and in control Nothing

Able to put her in her place Relationship may worsen; chaos may
occur
Feel more powerful or that he has the
upper hand Nothing; situation becomes
embarrassing; this is very stupid
Submission; getting his partner to be
quiet Feeling of dominance

Satisfaction; power; some amount of Nothing

control; yelled at; hit; weaken his
spouse; vent; more frustrated; He gets nothing
ashamed; laughed at; loss of respect
from partner Loss of trust; problems with renewing
contact
Sense of control over his partner; way
of keeping her quiet and belittling Nothing
her; way of staying “one up' on his
partner Nothing
 26

Women Boost to his opinion of himself; Lack of respect for him

feeling of power over his partner;
insults and digs in return Nothing good

Release of tension; feeling power Nothing; reluctance from woman

over partner; feeling of control;
getting back at her for past wrongs Rejection by his partner; new
controversy; new conflict
Power
Proving his superiority and rightness
Feel superior by putting her down
Nothing; it would be against him and
Feel that he was even with his never forgotten
partner; that she deserved it because
she did something to upset him so he Nothing; may lose respect from
wants her to be upset also woman

Nothing

Loss of trust

b. Revenge versus Nothing Good

U.S. women invoked notions of revenge that were infrequent if not absent in the
accounts of the other three groups. Unfortunately, the idea that men are violent because they
are avenging their partners' previous behaviour inadvertently feeds into the controversial
notion of “mutual combat”, the scholarly debate of which is lively in the U.S., but that is
perhaps more widespread in popular U.S. discourse as well. What is most telling in this
example is that U.S. women rather than men invoked notions of revenge, while the men
focused on power and dominance.

Obviously, Polish respondents more frequently than U.S. respondents stated that
“nothing good” would come of the use of violence, which suggests different ideas about the
instrumentality of violence, but may also reflect U.S. respondents' greater readiness to
“comply” with questionnaire instructions. Nuances in representations of instrumentality also
are suggested by the reference to “false” power by one of the Polish men, a qualifier of
“power” that we have not yet found in the responses of U.S. participants.

Table 2 What would a man get out of “twisting his partner's arm or hair”?

U.S. Respondents Polish Respondents

Men He gets his way; gets arrested Nothing; only the mentally ill act in
(probably not); hit; yelled at; thought such a way
of as a terrible person; listened to
Fear
Would show his partner who has
ultimate strength and control Nothing

May get the woman to stop a Sense of dominance and control

 27

behaviour he feels she has no right to

show End of relationship

Dominance over this partner; subdue False power over his partner
her
Physical/psychological supremacy
Feeling of being in control over her; selfish satisfaction from
winning
Sense of control over her and the
situation they are in Nothing good

Sadistic; it's no good

Women Sense of control; teaching a lesson; Anger of his partner; break-up of
keep from getting attacked relationship

Control; power; return of past hurts; Encounter with police

ability to inflict pain; macho thing
Loss of relationship and respect
Control over her, physically and
emotionally Sense of power and dominance

Her fear Showing that he is always a winner, if

not by intelligence or diplomacy, then
Some control over her; a powerful by force
feeling
Conflict

Woman's fear

Risk of police, or partner leaving him

Partner may lose respect for him

Table 3 What would a man get out of “choking his partner?”

U.S. Respondents Polish Respondents

Men May feel in control and powerful, Strangling her to death and nothing
taking her power and control away good as a consequence

Make his partner fear him Nothing; only his partner will fear
and obey him
Relief of pent up anger
Criminal trial
Release of stress or rage; satisfaction
of physical control and domination Sense of dominance and control

Agreement; lose control; injury to If first offence, then punishment on

partner; hurt her; make her agree; parole
scare her; get hit back; yelled at; lose
respect from her Nothing
 28

This is an ultimate violent threat Death

Nothing good

Divorce

Women Control; make her life dependent on Anger of partner; break-up of

his action relationship

Power; control; release; obedient wife Trial in court; meeting someone more
powerful
Release of anger; control through
partner's fear I can't imagine such a situation

Fear and submission Obedience; his superiority

Might feel strong, powerful, in He may regret this later

control; he wants her to be scared,
and if she is then she knows he means Break-up
business
She will leave him

Partner's hate

Nothing; may lose his partner

c. Release of Tension versus Loss

The notion of violent acts as means to release tension is more widespread in the U.S.
sample than in the Polish sample, whereas both Polish men and women far more often than
U.S. respondents invoked notions of loss as a consequence of men's violence, such as loss of
respect, loss of partner, or loss of relationship.

d. Outcome as Distributed Experience

Finally, a different aspect of these representations concerns the ways in which

respondents conceptualise the distribution of experiences that follow violent acts. While in
some cases respondents listed outcomes with no further qualifier such as “fear”, or
“humiliation”, in other cases respondents mentioned “her fear”, or “his superiority”
suggesting gendered patterns of bearing a particular experience. For example, a man might be
seen as generating fear in his partner through an act of violence, while she is seen as bearing
that fear. For violent acts with multiple outcomes the perpetrator may experience one of the
outcomes (e.g., feelings of superiority) while his partner is seen as experiencing the other
(e.g., feelings of inferiority).

IV. Implications for Trans-cultural Research

Trans-cultural research raises many practical problems. Yet, on some level, trans-
cultural research seems to differ from intra-cultural research primarily in that it highlights
 29

problems that are present, but not equally salient, in all research such as problems of context,
meaning, and the relationship between researchers and participants.

1. Gender and Culture as Analytic Categories or Variables

When the focus shifts from intra-cultural to cross-cultural research, gender is often
“forgotten” or implicitly discounted as secondary to culture, and comparative research
becomes “un-gendered”, possibly because much, if not most, cross-cultural research treats
culture and gender as variables and assigns higher priority to the variable “culture” (Berry,
Poortinga & Pandey, 1997; van de Vijver & Leung, 1997). Instead, gender and culture are
central analytic categories as well as experiential realities that constitute each other and are
difficult to separate. Nevertheless, for certain purposes it may be meaningful to treat gender
and culture as variables and examine similarities or differences between women and men in
different cultures. Intra-cultural and trans-cultural studies can inspire each other when the
analysis of culture draws attention to issues that may be overlooked where the focus is on
gender, and the analysis of gender draws attention to issues that may be overlooked where the
focus is on culture.

2. Translation and Culturally Situated Meaning

While translation and back translation often are considered merely steps in the
adaptation of questionnaires for cross-cultural analysis, engagement with the different
language can serve as an entry point for a more in-depth cultural analysis. For example, when
Anna Kwiatkowska translated the questionnaire that we are using in our present research and
that (white, and mostly male) U.S. scholars developed for U.S. respondents, she noted that the
item “calling partner fat and ugly” in literal Polish translation may have connotations that
might render it less insulting than its U.S. counterpart. Rather than being merely a problem of
back-translation, this highlights the cultural context of item construction and use, and thus the
cultural context of measurement.

In the contemporary U.S. context the “fat and ugly” item is meant to be an instance of
“verbal aggression” or “psychological violence” and draws its insulting and hurtful quality in
part from the “local” U.S. obsession with thinness, and with women's thinness in particular.
Due to gendered notions of body image and self-esteem the item is likely to reach a deeper
level of shame about one's own body when launched against a woman than a man. Thus, the
item operates in a cultural context where men more easily than women can assume a
privileged position of using the “fat and ugly” insult effectively, so to speak. While it is too
simplistic to speak of a “U.S. context” as though that was a homogeneous entity, it is worth
considering that a white, middle class context is not only where the item originated, but also
where it may be most insulting.

In principle, this type of analysis does not require trans-cultural research, but in
practice trans-cultural engagement is apt to encourage such analyses that may be fruitfully
combined with empirical techniques such as the analysis of respondent-interviewer interaction
and retrospective protocols in survey responding (Sudman, Bradburn & Schwarz, 1996).
 30

3. Identifying and Locating Discourse

Trans-cultural research has the potential to generate more systematic analyses of

“discourses” and their location within geographic space and social relations. In our present
research, U.S. women frequently used the terms “power and control”, which seems to reflect,
and at the same time constitute, what could be considered a prominent contemporary
discourse on violence whose origin probably can be traced in part to the community education
programmes by the very active, local battered women's project.

Similarly, the “nothing good” references among Polish respondents seem to reflect a
different discourse in which violence is seen as something that does not results in any positive
outcomes (even if the perpetrator uses violence to his advantage). Perhaps even more
reflective of discourse are references to the “mentally ill” who use violence.

4. Questioning Measurement

Trans-cultural empirical projects bring to the fore basic questions of measurement, and
the conceptualisation of indicators, phenomena and their interrelations. Our study of
representations of men's intimate violence raises questions about the enactment of men's
intimate violence. This, in turn, raises the question of how to measure enactment independent
of representations - the indicators most likely are informed by representations (e.g., use of
survey items, or interview questions).

5. Production of Transnational Research

The production of research, and questions of agency and purpose, is infused with the
distribution of resources such as tenured positions, project funding, and networking
capability. This intricate system of academic privilege can shift in manifold ways when
scholars from different “cultures” embark on trans-cultural research. For example, such
projects may shift the local balance of power between established, and often male, and
marginalised, and often female, colleagues; and collaboration with scholars from “rich”
countries may be a double-edged sword, promising interesting research opportunities on the
one hand, and intra-departmental suspicion on the other (Goodwin, 1998).

Last but not least: the Internet. Based on our personal experience, the Internet has
considerable potential for advancing research among marginalised scholars who have Internet
access. The Internet enables and facilitates the exchange of ideas, methods, data, analyses,
and manuscripts, and does so to some extent outside established intra-departmental channels
of influence. To some extent, the Internet has the potential to redistribute access to
information and provide alternative research resources.
 31

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 32

Gendering research on men's violence to known women

Jalna HANMER, Leeds Metropolitan University, United Kingdom3 and

Jeff HEARN, University of Manchester, United Kingdom and University of
Tampere, Finland4

1. Introduction: Making Gender Visible

While it is now clearly recognised that violence is gendered, the gendering of research
on violence is discussed less often. Our focus in this presentation is on the ways in which
research on gendered violence, specifically men's violence to women, is gendered. In order to
set this in context, we first consider the ways in which social research can address questions
of gender, more or less explicitly. We outline here three forms of research engagement with
gender: gender-absent; gender-neutral; and gender-present (Hanmer and Hearn, 1999). We
then discuss why research on men's violence has to be gender present and our experiences of
doing gendered research on men's violence. This is followed by the implications for future
research on men's violence.

2. Three research approaches to gender

The three research approaches to gender are: gender absent, gender neutral and gender
present.

First, with gender-absent research, the category of gender is neither explicit nor
visible. This can apply to the topic of the research, to the form of analysis, and to the conduct
of the research itself. Gender-absence in research means one or more of the following:

· Not noticing the ways in which gender operates in a situation;

· Not seeing gender as a fundamental feature which interacts with, and modifies, other
social divisions and social experiences;
· Making specifically gendered and taken-for-granted assumptions in observation or
analysis, for example, seeing all paid workers as he, or all carers as mothers;
· Trivialising gender.

Gender-absence may be understood as a problem of the observer's position and

relation of the observer and the observed, in particular prioritising the male position (see
Hearn, 1998c).

Second, some research approaches are presented as gender-neutral. These are more
explicit in arguing one or more of the following:

· That their methodology does not need to deal with gender;

· That their methodology can be applied to any situation, regardless of its gendering;
· That gender is noticed but is a minor factor or variable relative to the major themes or
explanatory frameworks of the study.

3
Professor and Director of The Research Centre on Violence, Abuse and Gender Relations, Leeds
Metropolitan University, UK
4
Professorial Research Fellow, University of Manchester, UK, and Visiting Professor, University of
Oslo; Swedish School of Economics, Helsinki; and Tampere University.
 33

The preference for gender-neutral approaches and accounts is illustrated in the way in
which methodology, particularly non-gendered methodology, is valued over theory, especially
gendered theory (see Davies and Roche, 1980; Williams, 1999). A major characteristic of
non-gendered approaches is the false separation of experience, methodology and theory.

Third, there is now a very considerable amount of work, particularly from within
feminist scholarship, which has been devoted to making women more visible, to redressing
that invisibility and to reconceptualising gender in more thoroughgoing ways. There are
clearly many ways of thinking about gender; these include: as biologically-determined; as the
social construction of biological differences; as psychological differences; as social roles; as
fundamentally rooted in power and power analysis; as a form of categorical thinking; as
discourse; as social practice; as social consolidations of sexuality and violence. Most
interesting are those views that see gender and sexuality as social construction, not just as the
social construction of sex and sex differences.

One of the crucial issues that distinguishes different approaches to gender is whether
gender is seen as one of several fundamental social divisions underpinning social life,
individual experiences, and the operation of other social divisions (such as age, class, 'race',
ethnicity, religion), on the one hand, or as just one of a string of social factors defining an
individual's response to a situation, on the other. Studies that simply refer to women or
women's experiences do not necessarily constitute a fully gendered approach. They may, for
example, treat women (or gender) simply as a variable, rather than as constitutive of, or
located in, some social structural formation. And moreover they may not analyse men as just
as gendered as women. A fully gendered, that is gender-present, approach needs to attend to
these questions.

Accordingly, in our view a more adequately gendered approach would include at least
the following features:

· Attention to the variety of feminist approaches and literatures; these provide the
methodology and theory to develop a gendered account;
· Recognition of gender differences as both an analytic category and experiential reality;
· Attention to sexualities and sexual dynamics in research and the research process; this
includes the deconstruction of taken-for-granted heterosexuality, particularly in the study
of families, communities, agencies and organisations;
· Attention to the social construction of men and masculinities, as well as women and
femininities, and including understanding masculinities in terms of relations between men,
as well as relations with women and children;
· An understanding of gender through its interrelations with other oppressions and other
identities, including those of age, class, disability, 'race', ethnicity, religion;
· Acceptance of gender conflict as permanent, and as equally as normal as its opposite, as
well as examining resistance to this view;
· Understanding that gender and sexuality and their relationship are historically and
culturally acquired and defined;
· Understanding that the close monitoring of gender and sexuality by the state (the official
biography of individuals) is not accidental, but fulfils the purposes of particular social
groupings.
 34

3. Why Research on Men's Violence has to be Gender-Present

Violence has been particularly relevant in developing fully gendered approaches to

research and theory. There are several reasons for this, beginning with the centrality of gender
in the differential distribution of offenders and victims in crime statistics. Violence is a
sensitive subject and, as with all data collection on topics involving shame, fear, public
disapproval, criminality and so forth, collecting these data requires careful planning and
approaches. Research on violence against women began with a questioning of traditional
methodologies and methods, deeply influenced by feminist academic challenges to
mainstream understanding of subjectivity and objectivity. The reanalysis began with a
questioning of the concept of objectivity in mainstream research theory, that is the possibility
of the researcher being outside social relations. If this is impossible, then those most affected
by violence are the most knowledgeable and a fully gendered research process must follow.
Gendering the study of violence by recognising differences led to an analysis of violence as
the expression of power and control by gendered individuals and groups.

To present violence scientifically as gender absent or gender neutral would require that
it be random in its doing and receiving in relation to women and men. This does not apply to
any form of violence, including same-sex violence where for example, violence between men
is far greater than violence between women. Violence takes many forms and all are gendered,
including the abuse of children. It includes physical and sexual violence from and to those
known and unknown, emotional and sexual degradation, sexual trafficking, homicide and
some suicide to name the most obvious. The extent of violence can be relatively minimal or
extensive and life threatening, one-off or persistent, emotionally more or less damaging.
Attacks by men on women and children can be random or highly organised.

While the focus of research on violence began with the inter-personal, and this
dominates the field of study, research on gendered violence can be extended to larger groups,
such as organisations, networks (for example paedophile rings, parastates, nation states and
their joint organisation and actions). There are many different possible structures of (men's)
organised violence (ref Hanmer et al., 1994; Hearn, 1994), for example:

· The army and other forces as state mandated social units;

· Military policy-makers as separate from the those who "follow orders" and do the
violence directly;
· Gangs, more or less organised, with more or less clear leadership, hierarchy, armed and
unarmed;

However, not all men in armies/gangs do violence; there are those who resist and who
for their own safety wish to keep this quiet.

A major factor correlated with increasing violence against women and children is
social instability. While there can be various causes of this, social instability is noted for
increased violence by men as individuals and within organisational groupings. The most
extreme manifestation is overt organisation for war. While war can be conducted by nations
with or without the direct disruption of the relative stability of their civil societies, the
organisation for, and the conduct of, war alters social relations between women and men
within states that wage war. This is a result of the gendered organisation necessary to wage
war and the actions of violence during war, even though these occur in other nation states. For
those countries directly experiencing war, social instability and violence in civil society may
involve living with threats and acts of violence, and sometimes enforced migration and
 35

refugee movements. Women and children can be directly targeted for sexual and other
violence.

After inter-nation and some internal wars, there is the movement to what appears to be
peacetime. But this aftermath is itself as gendered as was the previous war, as the peacetime
state exists through the activities of gendered war and gendered state formation. After war,
and after refugees return to their pre-war lands, their cultural and social location is not the
same. The end of war does not bring an automatic end to social instability; societies do not
return to the same position. The society and gendered social order is fundamentally affected.
The frequency and types of individual inter-personal violence increase after civil and other
wars; for example, domestically located violence with women as victims and men as
perpetrators.

During periods of relative social stability responding to violence requires policy,

organisation, state (and sometimes parastate) responses. Gender remains important as
organised statutory and voluntary agency responses are themselves gendered. They are also
various, with uneven policies and delivery of social, welfare, legal and justice services. This is
partly a social and cultural problem of defining "excessive" violence. Whether in war or in
families this is not straightforward. For example, in the latest wars in Europe, who are the war
criminals? What constitutes a crime against women and children during these wars? In
families what is 'excessive' physical or other punishment? How does being defined as a
"respectable" father affect definitions and decisions? If definitions can be agreed and become
part of policies and procedures problems of implementation remain. The are major gaps
between the policies and practices of statutory agencies of the state and voluntary agencies of
civil society in the delivery of services and responses to those who victimise and those who
are victimised.

4. Experiences of Doing Gendered Research on Men's Violence

There are many ways in which research on gendered violence, specifically men's
violence to known women, is itself gendered. These genderings have been found to be
important in our own research; this includes research collaborative research between us
involving women researching women's experiences and men researching men's experiences
(projects 1 and 2) (Hanmer, 1996, 1998, Hearn, 1995a, 1996, 1998a, 1998b, 1998d); action
research feedback to agencies and their policy development (project 3) (Hanmer, 1995;
Hanmer et al., 1995; Hearn, 1995b); and evaluation research on a new operational model for
policing domestic violence repeat victimisation (project 4) (Hanmer et al., 1999).

The particular issues include: broad matters of epistemology and methodology; the
question of who does research on the problem and why; whether the focus is on women's
experiences of violence from men or men's experiences of being violent; gendered issues in
research access, for example, to agencies; how research can contribute to successful outcomes
for new operational procedures and activities undertaken by agencies responsible for social,
welfare, legal and criminal justice services; whether research methods are gendered, for
example, different issues in doing qualitative interviews; issues of ethics, confidentiality and
safety; and the organisation of research projects and research units on gendered violence. For
reasons of space, only some of these are examined here.

Issues of gendered power and politics have permeated these research processes – in
terms of the subject matter of the research (men's violence to known women); the disciplinary
location of the research work; and the relations of the research to existing paradigms in social
 36

policy research. Gendered power relations are thus basic and explicit in this research.
Violence and abuse are recognised as directly connected to gender relations, not outside of
gender relations. These gendered matters have been central in the development of research
over many years. Time and time again, gender relations have been found to be the key
determining social relation in understanding violence. An important step was our
establishment of a co-convened research unit at Bradford University in 1990 under the
explicit title of The Research Unit on Violence, Abuse and Gender Relations. This explicitly
institutionalised the presence of not just gender (as, say, a variable) but gender relations, as
central to future research development. Within this institutional context, a number of research
projects have been instigated. Jeff Hearn moved to Manchester University in 1995, and in
1996 the research unit moved to Leeds Metropolitan University under the direction of
Jalna Hanmer to become the Research Centre on Violence, Abuse and Gender Relations.

The research design of projects 1 and 2 involved a replication of a US study of 60

women in a battered women's shelter and their patterns of stress-coping in relation to social
support (Mitchell and Hodson, 1983). These projects were part of a UK national research
programme on welfare research. (Further information on the whole research programme on
The Management of Personal Welfare is given in Popay et al., 1998, Williams et al., 1998).
Our study was in part (project 1) a replication of this US research in a British context and in
part an extension by applying the same pre-coded questionnaire with a minimum necessary
adjustment also to men who had been violent to known women (project 2). Project 1 had two
subsamples: one of 30 Asian women living in UK, the other of 30 mainly white women. The
sample was also structured longitudinally. As violence against women in their homes
produces different needs and responses over time, the project 1 included two further
subsamples: one of women living in the community, the other of women living in refuges.
The sample of men in project 2 was not stratified into subgroups, although there were
variations to be explored between men interviewed from different agencies sources. Men, too,
were at different points in time and places in relation to their violence, for example, in men's
programmes, on probation, and in prison.

A combination of research methods were used – unstructured and semi-structured

interviews, precoded interviews, and interviews and case records analysis with agency staff.
Very different issues were experienced in gaining access to the men and the women. While
access to about half the women was through refuges, the access to the men was often
especially difficult and involved much greater time and effort in securing contact and making
suitable arrangements. On the other hand, the interviews with the women were often longer,
were in some cases in Asian languages, and produced far more agency contacts to be followed
up.

The qualitative process in the interviews was also very different. Men interviewers
interviewed men; women interviewers interviewed women. The men interviewers had to
develop an appropriate stance that was polite and respectful but that did not collude with the
man in terms of the justification of his violence. Different methodological and ethical issues
were present for the women interviewers. Another issue which distinguished the two
interview situations was the question of safety, which was accorded a high priority in project,
not least because it was not always known who the interviewee was. It was decided to
produce extended working guidelines for the conduct of the research on interviewing men
(Hearn, 1993).

This research design attempted to examine both women's experiences of receiving

violence and men's experiences of being violent, and to do so in a clearly gendered way. It
 37

sought to obtain data on women, men and the agencies with which they had contact, that
could then be compared on a number of dimensions relating to personal experience and social
context. These include the very different experiences of women and men, and the responses of
others to them; issues such as the impact on women and men of violence in relation to
income, housing etc.; the relationship between the gendered intervention of agencies, the
structuring of help seeking and giving, and the social location of women and men. There were
numerous differences in the research material obtained from the women and the men. One of
the most basic was different approaches to what was meant by violence in the first place.
Women tended to speak of their inability to control the initiation of violent, harassing and
threatening behaviours and the subsequent interactions (also see Hanmer and Saunders,
1984). Men focused overwhelmingly on physical violence. Although some men did refer to
emotional, verbal and psychological violence, even these references were often constructed in
relation to the threat of physical violence or were constructed as if they were physical
violence in their reduction to "incidents". For men, violence to known women was generally
constructed as:

· Physical violence that is more than a push – holding, restraint, use of weight/bulk,
blocking, throwing (both things and the woman) are often excluded;
· Actual convictions for physical violence;
· Physical violence that causes or is likely to cause damage that is visible or considered
to the man to be physically lasting;
· Physical violence that is not seen as specifically sexual; sexual violence is seen as
separate.

The research design also made its gendered presence felt in the day-to-day
organisation of work in the Research Unit, including the social dynamics at work,
organisation of office space, the arrangement of a variety of types of regular and gendered
research meetings, and the need for gendered practices on confidentiality.

Project 3 focused on policy development with agency managers, policy-makers and

practitioners. This raised other gendered questions around the gender structuring and
gendering of agencies, and the way that many agencies could be characterised as "women's
organisations" or "men's organisations", in the latter case especially so in state bureaucracies
and the criminal justice system. Formal "men's" agencies often used men's definitions, which
in this context meant men's definitions of violence and understandings of violence.
Alternative definitions, policies and practices have been developed through women's
voluntary organisations in relation to violence against women. Such contested definitions and
meanings of violence, implicit and explicit, apply not only to agencies and their policy
development but also to academia and social theory.

Project 4 focused on men as providers of services and men as perpetrators of violence

in home-based settings. The new model of interventions required a largely male police force
to pro-active police men and to ensure the safety of women. The data required on the three
tiered model with its progressively increasing interventions was identical for the police and
the research evaluators. Close working relationships were established around data collection
and the researchers gave regular feedback on policing progress. These features improved data
collection and policing progress. A major aim, to institutionalise new ways of responding by
all officers, was gradually achieved, along with a reduction in repeat victimisation of women
by men in the home.
 38

These kinds of researches raise many questions for social theory. These include the
reformulation of historical and cultural definitions and the meaning of individual action,
organisations and social structure; the place of experience in the creation of knowledge; the
rethinking of power; and the deconstruction of the self. Violence is not usually understood as
a characteristic form of interpersonal or structural relations. In contrast, the most usual model
is of the "rational individual", with a unified self, who conducts his or her affairs in a liberal
and reasonably tolerant way. In this view, violence is portrayed as relatively isolated
exceptions to "normal" social life. Violence is not usually seen as integral or embedded or
imminent in social relations, and social relations are not usually understood as characterised
by violence, actual or potential. These features are almost exactly paralleled in men's accounts
of their own violence and in men's social theory. Violence is seen as occurring as "incidents";
it is literally incidental. It is understood as exceptions within non-violent ordinary, normal
life. This is comparable to views on national, international and inter-ethnic violence on a mass
scale that may occur after many years of living "peacefully" as "good neighbours".

5. Conclusion: Implications for Future Research on Men's Violence

While research on violence has made a major contribution to a gender visible

approach, further research on men's violence needs to be placed within much broader,
gendered contexts. It requires the explicit gendering of men as individuals and in social
organisations and processes, including wars, militarism, civil unrest, refugees, etc. It requires
the explicit gendering of women and children, how they become involved, respond and are
affected. Researching men's violence requires a re-examination of ungendered historical
accounts and the writing of history around gendered violence. This is necessary in order to
create a more complete social understanding of violence as an integral part of social relations
at both inter-personal and institutional levels. In order to reduce and manage violence, it is
essential that it be more fully understood as a gendered social process, with various types and
aspects sometimes seen as undesirable and to be eliminated, sometimes tolerated or accepted
as "natural" or "desirable".

We are at an early stage in researching violence as gendered, although some progress

has been made, particularly in recording family based physical and sexual violence to women
and children in some European and other Western countries. In our view an effective research
agenda should start from the premise that violence is always gendered and a characteristic
form of inter-personal and structured social relations. Gendering men in the study of violence
opens a much larger theoretical and research agenda. Gendering men raises questions on the
how, what and why of the organisation of violence, the social purposes it serves, the
transformation of social relations, the integration of violence into modern Western life, and its
reduction, management and control.

***

Bibliography
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Harris', Sociological Review, Vol. 28(3), pp. 641-656.

Hanmer, Jalna (1995) Patterns of Agency Contacts with Women who Have Experienced
Violence from Known Men, Research Unit on Violence, Abuse and Gender Relations,
Research Paper No.12, University of Bradford. Available from The Research Centre on
Violence, Abuse and Gender Relations, Leeds Metropolitan University.
 39

Hanmer, Jalna (1996) 'Women and violence: commonalities and diversities' in Barbara
Fawcett, Brid Featherstone, Jeff Hearn and Christine Toft (eds.) Violence and Gender
Relations: Theories and Interventions, Sage, London, pp. 7-21.

Hanmer, Jalna (1998) 'Out of control: men, violence and family life' in Jennie Popay, Jeff
Hearn and Jeanette Edwards (eds.) Men, Gender Divisions and Welfare, Routledge, London.

Hanmer, Jalna and Saunders, Sheila (1984) Well-founded Fear, Hutchinson, London.

Hanmer, Jalna, Hearn, Jeff, Maynard, Mary and Morgan, David (1994) 'Violence by
organizations, violence in organizations, and organizational responses to violence', in Jalna
Hanmer and Jeff Hearn (eds.), compiled with 16 others, Violence, Abuse and Gender
Relations Research Strategy Report to the ESRC, Violence, Abuse and Gender Relations
Unit, Research Paper No.11, University of Bradford, pp. 76-84. Available from The Research
Centre on Violence, Abuse and Gender Relations, Leeds Metropolitan University.

Hanmer, Jalna, Hearn, Jeff, Dillon, Cath, Kayani, Tiara and Todd, Pam (1995) Violence to
Women From Known Men: Policy Development, Interagency Approaches and Good Practice,
Research Unit on Violence, Abuse and Gender Relations, Research Paper No.14, University
of Bradford. Available from The Research Centre on Violence, Abuse and Gender Relations,
Leeds Metropolitan University.

Hanmer, Jalna, Griffiths, Sue and Jerwood, David (1999) Arresting Evidence: Domestic
Violence and Repeat Victimisation, Police Research Series Paper 104, Home Office, London.

Hanmer, Jalna and Hearn, Jeff (1999) 'Gender and welfare research', in Fiona Williams,
Jennie Popay and Ann Oakley (eds.) Welfare Research: A Critical Review, UCL Press,
London, pp. 106-130.

Hearn, Jeff (ed.) (1993) Researching Men and Researching Men's Violences, Violence, Abuse
and Gender Relations Research Unit Research Paper No. 4, University of Bradford. Available
from The Research Centre on Violence, Abuse and Gender Relations, Leeds Metropolitan
University.

Hearn, Jeff (1994) 'The organisation(s) of violence: men, gender divisions, organisations and
violence', Human Relations, Vol. 47(6), pp. 731-754.

Hearn, Jeff (1995a) "It Just Happened" - a Research and Policy Report on Men's Violence to
Known Women, Violence, Abuse and Gender Relations Research Unit, Research paper No.6,
University of Bradford. Available from The Research Centre on Violence, Abuse and Gender
Relations, Leeds Metropolitan University.

Hearn, Jeff (1995b) Patterns of Agency Contacts with Men Who Have Been Violent To Known
Women, Research Unit on Violence, Abuse and Gender Relations, Research Paper No.13,
University of Bradford. Available from The Research Centre on Violence, Abuse and Gender
Relations, Leeds Metropolitan University.

Hearn, Jeff (1996) 'Men's violence to known women: men's accounts and men's policy
development' in, Barbara Fawcett, Brid Featherstone, Jeff Hearn and Christine Toft (eds.)
Violence and Gender Relations: Theories and Interventions, Sage, London, pp. 99-114.
 40

Hearn, Jeff (1998a) 'Context, culture and violence' in Ralf Kauranen, Elina Oinas, Susan
Sundback and Östen Wahlbeck (eds.) Sociologer om Sociologi och Metod: Festskrift till
Kirsti Suolinna, Åbo, Meddleanden Från Ekonomisk-Statsvetenkapliga Fakulteten Vid Åbo
Akademi, Socialpolitiska institutionen Ser., pp. 1-22.

Hearn, Jeff (1998b) 'Men will be men: the ambiguity of men's support for men who have been
violent to known women' in Jennie Popay, Jeff Hearn and Jeanette Edwards (eds.) Men,
Gender Divisions and Welfare, Routledge, London, pp. 147-180.

Hearn, Jeff (1998c) 'Theorizing men and men's theorizing : men's discursive practices in
theorizing men', Theory and Society, Vol. 27(6), 1998, pp. 781-816.

Hearn, Jeff (1998d) The Violences of Men. How Men Talk About and How Agencies Respond
to Men's Violence to Women, Sage, London.

Mitchell, Richard and Hodson, Christine (1983) 'Coping with domestic violence: social
support and psychological health among women', American Journal of Community
Psychology, 11(6), pp. 629-654.

Popay, Jennie, Hearn, Jeff and Edwards, Jeanette (eds.) (1998) Men, Gender Divisions and
Welfare, Routledge, London.

Williams, Fiona (1999) 'Exploring links between old and new paradigm: a critical review' in
Fiona Williams, Jennie Popay and Ann Oakley (eds.) Welfare Research: A Critical Review,
UCL Press, London, pp. 18-42.
 41

Explaining the inclination to use violence against women

Carol HAGEMANN-WHITE and Christiane MICUS,

Department of Education, University of Osnabrück, Germany

Introduction: What needs to be explained?

Any attempt to survey theories that claim to explain violence against women,
sexualised violence or, in particular, men's violence towards known women will encounter
confusion. A great many ideas about why men do horrible things turn up, and they are often
the subject of acrimonious controversy, but on close inspection, one finds that the
explanandum varies with the theory being used to explain it, so that differing theories are
often not addressing the same phenomenon. Furthermore, there is often considerable slippage
between the phenomenon and the theory put forth to explain it. For example, there are a
number of authors who prefer an evolutionary approach to explain what they take to be a
universal inclination in men to be violent, drawing on what is called "parental investment
theory" or the concept of the "selfish gene": the genes' drive to reproduce causes men to act in
a way that will guarantee paternity of a maximum of offspring, causing the male of the
species to evolve with a tendency towards sexual jealousy and possessiveness. Not having
universal data on men's feelings or interactions, some authors have collected data on the
relative frequency of homicides, pointing out that many more men kill women than the
reverse. Killing women is, however, neither a successful reproductive strategy nor an
effective way to ensure certainty of paternity. Putting aside all other possible objections, we
see a neatly constructed theory and an interesting collection of facts, but the theory has to be
stretched and strained beyond logic to make it seem useful or relevant to the phenomenon that
it is supposed to explain.

Theories of a more psychological bent, looking for roots of violence within the
emotional and social development of (some) men, the dynamics within their personalities, or
the motives behind their actions often share a striking similarity with the explanations that
abused women themselves often put forward when trying to make sense of "why he does it".
It is the assumption that anyone's actions can be understood by simple empathy, if only one
tries hard enough. Thus, in a battering relationship, the man acts in ways that are abusive,
contemptuous, and physically violent, sometimes from the beginning of the relationship
onwards, sometimes beginning with her pregnancy or other events. The woman - the social
worker, the psychologist - looks for reasons in the man's history that might make it possible to
understand him, if she put himself in his place; that is, she seeks to identify in his life history
some kinds of pressures, deprivation or other events and circumstances which might cause her
to become similarly violent, if she were in his place. In doing so, she ignores or denies the
obvious facts that (a) he is using violence almost every day, and she is not, certainly not
violence of the same kinds and with the same objectives, and (b) he is not a woman or a wife,
and she never has been and never will be a husband or a man. Empathy is not enough, the
explanation has to begin by recognising the reality of the other person as different from one's
own.

Our paper has proposed to look at explanations for how an inclination to use violence
(against women or what appears feminine) can enter into the formation of masculine gender
identity in childhood and adolescence. In view of the widespread confusion and indeed
 42

carelessness in the literature about what it is that favoured theories are actually explaining, we
begin by clarifying this for our own discussion.

To be of use for the question at hand, theories must explain both aspects of the use of
violence in interaction with known individuals:

1 the subjective experience of being driven, or threatened, by feelings that push a man
to choose violence, specifically violence towards women;
2 the pleasure that can be discovered in exercising violence successfully over another
person, and in particular over a woman.

Since both feelings of being threatened or driven, for example by rage, impatience,
fear of losing control or "losing face" are experienced by all humans, and since all humans are
likely to discover at some point the pleasure potential of using violence at least in small ways,
a further more specific question must be addressed:

3 What are the inhibiting forces that motivate many women and some men to refrain
from interpersonal violence, and how are these submerged or lost in the formation of
masculine identities?

The literature on violent men (e.g. Gilligan 1997, Hearn 1998, Jukes 1999) suggests
that those who have become habitually or regularly violent towards women personally known
to them, sexually or physically or both, exhibit certain traits to a high degree:

At the moment of violence, they are convinced that the behaviour of the woman is
"causing" them to use violence, and they tend to insist on the primary validity of this
perception even if they learn to present other accounts as well. She "makes him do it" by
threatening his masculinity or the power and control which he assumes are indispensable to
being a man. Any thing a woman does or says or even shows in her expression can "trigger"
violence in this way, when it conveys to a man that she is a human being with desires,
thoughts or wishes of her own. Note that this does not depend on what she thinks or does, but
upon what he notices and construes it to mean.

The dominant construction of heterosexuality as "active on passive" invites men to

learn a specifically sexualised pleasure in overcoming resistance, taking, doing to or doing
upon a woman something that excites him or relieves some need. It is also possible for a man
to believe, in the course of growing up, that this is the only socially or morally acceptable way
for him to achieve sexual satisfaction, or even the only way possible to him. He must be
active and penetrate for "it" to happen, and "it" cannot happen at all unless she submits to
him.

Men violent towards known women have little or no capacity for empathy, for seeing
anything from the point of view of someone else, or even realising that there is another point
of view. They have blocked off sensitivity to others' feelings or others' pain; Adam Jukes
(1999) describes them as being like small children in a sulk. This limitation may, however,
apply only to their interaction with women or in certain types of relationships.

The inclination to use violence against known women can thus be operationally defined as

1 having a concept of "being a man" that requires dominance and specific kinds of
recognition and respect, such that it is open to being threatened or potentially lost,
 43

2 cathecting violation: discovering and becoming accustomed to finding pleasure or

satisfaction in "doing to" as opposed to "doing with",
3 loss of the capacity for empathy.

We would like to present and discuss some theories that have tried to explain some or
all of this "violent masculinity syndrome" in the context of the development of masculine
gender identities. We should note at this point that there are no solid data or even convincing
reasoning to support the view that such a syndrome cannot equally well emerge later in life.
There is no firm basis for asserting that even the majority of violent men, much less all or
most of them, have had some kind of traumatic or damaging childhood experiences or a
specifically deprived early background. Most of them are perfectly competent, as much as
most adults, at dealing with frustration without becoming violent in other fields of life. And
many of them may have been "seduced" into this syndrome by the ease with which they could
get satisfaction through violence when it seemed to elude them in other ways. We are not
explaining why there exist violent men, but examining one possible path leading there: that an
inclination to use violence, especially against women, becomes established in close
connection with the formation of gender identity.

Explaining male violence from psychoanalytic feminist theory

Early theoretical work of Hagemann-White, Dinnerstein and Chodorow proceeded

from two assumptions derived from classical psychoanalytic theory:

· that the infant begins life in a state of primary symbiosis, fully at one with the world
and unable to recognise separate objects or human beings, from which state a process
of painful differentiation and separation has to follow, and
· that primary care of infants is still carried out by mothers to the exclusion of fathers,
leading to the identification of the first Other, from whom the child must separate
(psychologically) to become a self at all, with the female sex and then with the
feminine.

The asymmetric starting point in life for girls and boys - that both have to separate
their primary self from a female parent - means, according to these theories, that boys use
gender difference to support their independent selfness, and that any return to a state of
empathetic one-ness or any emotional identification with women threatens both their male
identity and their sense of self: the two come to seem the same. They grow up feeling that
they have to prove their masculinity constantly in order not to lose it, and that they have to do
so most especially by proving they are not feminine. Girls, on the other hand, find their
gendered selves within the sense of being one with the primary parent, and decisive or
aggressive separation from her, becoming too emphatically an independent self, threatens
them with limitless horror, since all the aggression they direct against the mother is felt to
rebound and come back to them within the continuing identification (if I want to hurt her, to
leave her, to show her I don't need her, she will do the same to me, with ten times the power!).

Much has been written about the consequences of this primary asymmetry for the
psychological orientations of men and women. However, in recent years Jessica Benjamin
(1985, 1988, 1996) has challenged the premises of these theories and suggested a more
differentiated view proceeding from the accumulated knowledge of modern research on
infancy, which has led to the recognition that even new-born children are not living in a world
of an oceanic total self, but are engaged in interaction with mutual recognition (Stern 1985).
The notion of the inner-psychic development from totality to differentiation must be replaced
 44

or at least complemented by a conception of the primary intersubjectivity of human

development from birth or even before.

According to Benjamin, the structure of domination and submission between the sexes
can be traced from the relationship between mother5 and new-born child into adult eroticism.
Central concepts with which Benjamin describes her inter-subjective theory are the "ideal of
mutual recognition" (Benjamin 1988: 23), the necessity of recognising as well as being
recognised by the other, and the "simultaneous presence of two living subjects" (16), which
implies that the mother serves not just as an object for the child's needs, but is able to
recognise the child only because she herself has an independent identity. Benjamin describes
the relationship between mother and infant – following Winnicott – as a "transitional realm",
in which fury, wishes for annihilation and destruction fantasies are also possible, because they
do not really destroy the other person. The experience that others survive both destruction
fantasies and real aggressions (which are still innocent according to Winnicott) enables the
infant to experience and to accept the existence of others as an external reality. However, if
the infant is left feeling that its actions do not influence the mother at all, it feels powerless. If,
on the other hand, the infant overpowers her completely with its attacks, her existence –
which could recognise the infant – is destroyed. The maternal survival of these attacks as
well as elementary care and protective emotionality are therefore inseparably linked to the
process of becoming a subject.

For the development of the individual in and through relationships, self-assertion and
recognition are the two fundamental poles. Following Hegel, Benjamin describes the conflicts
between self-assertion and the need for the other as a "paradox of recognition" (31). Even as
we try to gain our (complete) independence – Hegel talks about a claim to absolute right – we
still remain dependent on confirmation through mutual recognition. No-one can be really free
from dependency, because a self needs the recognition of an other; thus, in order to be
recognised myself, I have to recognise the other as being like myself and existing
independently of me.

For Benjamin the ideal resolution of this paradox is to keep it in "constant tension"
(36), i.e. in a balance6. She describes impressively how a breakdown in the fundamental
tension between the recognition of the other and the assertion of the self becomes "the best
point of entry to understanding the psychology of domination" (49) and can lead to forms of
erotic dominance and submission. The early differentiation of the sexes then results in a
complementary relationship between male domination and female submission.

Like Irene Fast (1991), Benjamin assumes a primary gender-crossing phase for boys
and girls in which the small child, while knowing itself to be a girl or a boy, does not yet
categorise its experiences and possibilities as sex-related, and sees it own potential as in no
way limited by its sex. It is characteristic for this originally fluid identity that girls and boys
initially identify with both sexes, they "keep both parents available as objects of attachment
and recognition" (112) and are able to integrate male as well as female aspects. In contrast to
Fast, Benjamin denies that it is necessary to give up this original, bisexual narcissism and

5
Certainly this can also be the father or other primary persons to whom the infant relates very closely.
Since it is in our culture mostly 'the mother' who does the main care, this term is used in the texts and
here.
6
For Hegel, only a breakdown of the tension is possible. "Every tension between two oppositional
elements carries the seeds of its own destruction and transcendence into another form (...). Without this
process of contradiction and dissolution, there would be no movement, change, or history" (Benjamin
1988: 32).
 45

insists that the cross-sex identification and behaviour can remain available. Yet she describes
that in reality this rather fascinating changing and exceeding of gender identification becomes
restricted at the moment when desire becomes an issue – with approximately one and a half
years. When the realisation of gender difference begins to take hold in the psyche "each
parent may represent one side of the mental conflict between dependence and independence"
(102).

During early childhood, the gender division of labour is most often organised so that
the father is the "representative of the external world", the little girl and the little boy
experience him as representing what is exciting and different. "Now, as the child begins to
feel the wish and the excitement as his or her own inner desire, she or he looks for recognition
from this exciting other" (105). This wish to be similar to the father and to be recognised by
him as similar is the basis for a new kind of love, identificatory love. Previously, care,
security and satisfaction of needs were characteristic for the love to the primary motherly
person. Identificatory love for the figure that represents contact to the outside world and to all
that is new and different there strengthens the little child in its striving for autonomy, freedom
and separation.

However, the attempt of the little girl to bestow identificatory love on the father is
typically ignored or rejected by him. It threatens the defence structure of his own male
identity to recognise his daughter as "just like" to him, as he readily does with his son.
Instead, the father sexualises the little girl's attempt to identify with him, sees her "as a sweet
adorable thing" (109) and is not available for the strengthening of her autonomy efforts.
Handed over thus to the mother, the little girl turns her aspirations for independence as well as
her anger at non-recognition by the father inward. The "missing father" (107) in female
development thus makes it difficult for her to discover her own desire and prepares her to
idealise a kind of love in which she puts her own wishes and needs aside (Benjamin 1985).

The struggle for recognition is repeated in the dynamics of the submission process in
which male and female emerge as opposing poles of the hierarchical gender relations.
Masochism can be regarded as an attempt to achieve the recognition of the self – to be known
and recognised as oneself – by the powerful, idealised other who alone is able to give the
recognition. This other represents the unsatisfied desire for omnipotence, strength and control
which is not owned by the woman herself and whose satisfaction is now achieved vicariously
by granting him satisfaction. Her search for recognition is still alienated, since she does not
give herself voluntarily but must be forced to it. The great fear of being abandoned and
separated which results from the strong – although certainly not ambivalence-free –
identification with the mother promotes this masochist position.

The attempt of the boy to approximate the father with identificatory love – "I am being
Daddy" – is not ignored, but meets with fatherly recognition and identification. Just as the boy
recognises himself in the father, the father recognises himself in the boy. The boy can use his
love for the father, for father-substitutes or for other idealised men to strengthen his efforts for
autonomy and separation from the mother. The possibility of identificatory love for the
mother remains hidden (since she does not represent the new and different so important for
the next stage of development), and then is cut off entirely7. Distancing himself from the
primary motherly person seems a decisive step in order to feel really affiliated to the fatherly,
male side. The little boy experiences his gender and his identity as a radical breaking off and
delimitation from the person to whom he has felt most closely connected. In order to feel
7
Benjamin remarks that this is changed when it is the woman who disappears into the exciting outside
world to do important and interesting things and then returns, while the man is a familiar home figure.
 46

independent and masculine – the boy can hardly distinguish between those two – he must say
to himself: "I am nothing like she who cares for me" (76).

This fatherly recognition implies on the one hand a defence aspect – the boy can deny
his helplessness and dependence -, on the other hand it urges him to "solve" the conflict
between his need of loving care and independence in a one-sided way: with the help of a
"split" (104), by assigning the contradictory strivings to different parents. "Separation-
individuation thus becomes a gender issue, and recognition and independence are now
organised within the frame of gender" (104). The intersubjective dimension, with its tension
between the two poles self-assertion and recognition, breaks down and gender identity
becomes increasingly polarised. "The need for mutual recognition must be satisfied with mere
identification of likeness" (170). "Identification no longer functions as a bridge to the
experience of an other; now it can only confirm likeness" (171).

The intersubjective interaction of infancy, in which mutual recognition and proud

assertion could still coexist, is replaced by an objectifying attitude. The woman is regarded as
the opposite of the man; she is not only different, "but simply the other (de Beauvoir). This
other can be owned as an object, but cannot be recognised" (Benjamin 1996: 14). This
development of male identity transforms the differentiation process into domination and is the
basis for the phenomenon that Benjamin (1985) has described as "rational violence".
Rational violence is a way of seeking recognition without giving recognition. It is driven by
the need for intimacy, but denies this need and all feelings that relate to it.

The moment of control is characteristic for this "rational violence": it is not a struggle
between equals, not a conflict which could end in a mutual recognition, but a calculated
transgression in which the will of the object is denied, the recognition of the self is forced and
the end point is determined only by the subject. In time, the object, not entitled to an
independent existence, loses the ability to recognise him. Therefore, the fight has to be carried
out again and again. The border-crossing violation - which, breaking the law, at the same
time confirms it – grants rationality and control to one partner, while the other gives up her
borders. "The assertion of one individual (the master) is transformed into domination; the
other's (the slave's) recognition becomes submission. Thus, the basic tension of forces within
the individual becomes a dynamic between individuals" (62).

When the dilemma between individualisation and belonging to a greater unity is

resolved in favour of total emphasis on separation, the boy projects empathy and emotional
fusion onto the feminine, and must in consequence avoid or deny need and dependence in
himself. Devaluation of female qualities is often connected to this denial.

According to Benjamin (1985) the repeated attempt to separate and delimit from the
mother and from the motherly supply as well as the denial of mutuality, care and empathy is
revealed in violence. The insistence on force, control and omnipotence is often the only way
to approach the feminine without feeling immediately threatened. "Rationality allows no
simultaneous experience of contradictory moments in the ambivalence or in the paradox"
(Benjamin 1985: 22); it results in a general splitting.

The sense of self is also undermined by this male defence attitude, which breaks the
tension that appears in the differentiation process. Following Winnicott, it can also be
assumed that one resorts to "rational violence" in order to feel oneself, to increase the feeling
for the self and the feeling for reality. In this way, "rational violence" is explained not only by
the need to exclude, denigrate and control the feminine, but also by the inability of the parents
 47

to recognise the boy in spite of his attacks and to survive his destructive wishes. "Rational
violence" can therefore also be understood as domination over a "surviving" other, while the
search already implies the scars of an earlier failure. "If the parent does not set bounds – 'does
not survive' – the child must carry on trying to destroy and to attack in order finally to feel a
hold against its reactive anger" (Benjamin 1985: 27). Therefore, one root of "rational
violence" can also be seen in the failure of the struggle for recognition, either having totally
destroyed the other, or having been unable to reach her. In both cases neither the effectiveness
of actions nor the independent existence of the other is experienced.

It should be noted here that the subjective feeling of powerlessness is not at all the
same as a real lack of power. Indeed, the early experience of a primary parent who does not
"survive" the anger of the child, or cannot be reached by him, is more than likely to result
when the mother is herself powerless, battered or subjected to abuse. The adult man who
exerts rational violence has found a substitute for his original need: he may be profoundly
determined never to feel powerless again, and he may aim to structure all his relationships so
that this possibility can never arise. Thus, the problem is not that the violent man "is"
powerless but that he cannot tolerate this normal and necessary part of being human.

While Chodorow and Dinnerstein described male domination and female subjection as
resulting from the primary gender division of labour and thus as a very general phenomenon,
Benjamin's theory allows at least for a possible differentiation. The masculine position which
fears proximity to anything feminine is a product of the breakdown of what is, for both sexes,
a primary experience of intersubjectivity. And rational violence, in particular, arises when the
primary parent is unable to accept and contain the child's aggression. The combination of the
two - a defensive masculine identity and rational violence - would add up to an adult man
who is controlling and abusive towards women. At the same time, Benjamin is so very
focused on explaining the general existence of patriarchal male dominance that she writes as
if the breakdown of the paradox of recognition (and with it masculine contempt for women)
were almost inevitable.

Ulrike Schmauch (1985, 1987), critical of Chodorow's idealisation of the autonomous

boy child, shifts the emphasis of her analysis to looking at how the needs, feelings and
relationships of the adult parents are involved in gender socialisation. Schmauch, who worked
for three years – from 1977 to 1980 – as a child-minder in a playgroup (for children ages 1 to
4) set up by parents, and gathered records during this time, concentrates on unconscious
interactions between mother, father and daughter or son. She reveals on the one hand the
power of life situations that "have an effect on the child through the daily routine and
unconscious of the parents" (Schmauch 1985: 103); on the other hand she also considers the
influence of the child, "how the female as well as the male child assail with their little and
instinctive bodies the parents and their repressed feelings" (104) and the strong conscious, but
often unconscious reactions of the parents that they evoke.

Schmauch (1985) wondered, in the course of her work with the play-group, why girls
seemed to become "more girl-like" and boys "more boy-like" than their parents or she herself
would have thought possible and desirable at the beginning. She finds part of the answer in
typical idealisations of the boys by the parents. Mothers and fathers love and idealise in little
boys "often their passive-infantile parts, but at the same time their grandiose, aggressive
acting; a difficult paradox for the boy" (105). According to Schmauch, especially the mother-
son relation is characterised by a strong ambivalence. "On the one hand they want to push
him away, absorbed by their adult feelings, on the other hand they draw him close when they
are feeling low and give him the function of the only faithful, comforting little man" (108).
 48

Boys at this stage show a tendency to act out whenever they are uneasy, tired, or distressed.
They often cover over feelings that are difficult for them to handle by making noise, charging
about, showing off loudly, or fighting. This acting out and putting themselves in the spotlight
is not recognised as signalising needs, but is seen as natural boy's behaviour, and is often
encouraged or admired. At the same time, boys are coddled and allowed to act dependent in
the private space of the home or with their mothers. Thus, the split between the boy's assertive
and autonomous public self and his tender and needy private self seems to meet needs of the
parents.

The relation between mother and daughter seems to be very intimate and harmonious
in the first years of life. In this early stage, the little girl gives the mother the opportunity to
love and cherish an extension of her own self; the daughter, affectionate and close, offers her
mother a very special satisfaction and affirmation "be it as her mother's possession, as an
expression and expansion of her oral, supplying "power", be it by augmenting and completing
the mother because of their own 'perfection'" (115). Dependency and independence of the girl
appear equally appreciated by her mother and can develop in balance.

The third year of life, in which boys and girls grow to be more independent and much
more sexual, is described by Schmauch (1985) as a year full of crises, as it confronts the
adults to an increasing degree and beyond their conscious expectations with their own
problems and fears, e.g. the fear of rivalry, of isolation and of their own aggressions. During
this third year, some fathers exhibited an "abrupt pushing away" (113) of the son into a
"forced manliness" (113). However, Schmauch also notes - as a striking aspect of analysing
her own notes and records - that she in fact had very little observational data on fathers'
involvement with their children, although this was a parents' initiative with egalitarian values.

The relationship between mother and daughter, which has been very close and
intimate, also goes through a transition in the third year. At this stage in their own lives,
mothers often look for new autonomous possibilities to act and feel the need for further
development and a life of their own. These increasing efforts towards autonomy and
distancing on the part of the mother trigger strong fears of loss in the little girl, who relates
these changes in the mother to herself. In this way, unconscious apprehensions in the mother,
who is wishing, but also hesitating to cross the bridge involving separation and new
beginnings, are delegated to the little girl; and this happens at a moment when the daughter
reveals herself able to be independent, to use her aggressions more self-confidently and to
express her emotions in a sexual and competitive way. Feeling her mother's impatience, her
desire to break away and her ambivalence and fear of actually doing so, the girl tries to hold
on to her. "Now it is the child who is afraid, who experiences its sexual, aggressive and
autonomous strivings as dangerous and guilty, because they are separating. The child again
clings to the mother in open dependency" (107). According to Schmauch, it is this moment at
which the little girl begins to repress aggressive feelings. She parallels Benjamin's observation
that the little girl is handed back to the mother and shows "depressive reactions" (Benjamin
1988: 109) after the father has not recognised her identificatory love. In consequence, the girl
becomes vulnerable to boys' acting out; she presents an object that signifies the feminine, but
is unable to retaliate against aggression. The practice-fields of school playgrounds are shaped
by these dynamics.
 49

The dynamics of adolescence

Traditionally, psychoanalytically oriented theory has been strongly inclined to locate

the sources of all later problems in early childhood. In recent years, however, adolescence
has received more attention as an important stage in life that permits genuine new
developments. As a consequence, we can ask what dynamic developments in adolescence
might give rise to, reinforce, decrease or help overcome an inclination to use violence. Mario
Erdheim has taken the view that, with respect to personality structure and the dynamics of
identity, adolescence is not just a simple repetition or extension of early childhood, but should
be understood a second chance and a second individuation process. The adolescent process is
described as "liquidifying" the inner structures of the young person, with completely new
dynamics. One could conclude that the "fluid" sex identity of early childhood is or can be
revived, a reorganisation of feelings, desires and fears is possible.

Several authors have suggested that adolescence can be a chance for re-structuring,
new orientation and re-organisation of experiences on the individual as well as on the social
level. Erikson (1993) described adolescence as a "psycho-social moratorium", in whose
framework different possibilities and life models can be tested playfully. Benjamin recognises
the chance of the new adolescent dynamics as well, since the rigid complementarity of the
oedipal conflict can be re-created in a more differentiated and flexible way, and in the best
case, it can be given up in the course of adolescence when the capacity for post-conventional
thinking develops.

Along with the chance of adolescence, this life phase also contains many crisis-like
aspects. Hurrelmann et al. (1985) describe different modal tasks for the adolescence which
range from finding a gender role and a value and norm system to qualifying for a place in the
world of work. He describes "social bonding" to peers of the own and of the other sex as an
important task. In our society, this is often linked to a strong pressure to achieve at least the
appearance of successful heterosexuality. The bodily changes and the related latent messages,
social assessments, restrictions, insecurities as well as the emotions full of relish, wishes and
fantasies have to be integrated into the personality of the adolescent.

A crucial adolescent conflict according to Erdheim (a psychoanalytic ethnologist) is

the antagonism between family and culture. He understands "family" as the familiar, that
which has always been there, continuity with childhood, with dimensions of feeling safe or at
least able to count on the expected, to have an unreflected belonging to a social context.
"Culture" is Erdheim's term for the human capacity to assimilate what is strange, foreign and
new and to relate it successfully to one's own needs and wishes, the ability to create a
relationship of what was at first unknown and threateningly different, thus transforming it into
the known. (This echoes Benjamin's paradox of recognition.) Antagonism means the equality
and the interdependence of these two principles which cannot be transformed into one another
or be derived from one another. The human being will always be thrown back and forth
between them and need the ability to tolerate and integrate the conflict they represent.

Adolescents not only have to loosen their ties to the family and its values and attitudes,
to orient themselves in the system of the culture still foreign to them and to define it anew, but
they also have to search for new perspectives while at the same time preserving continuity.
This transition from family to culture can be seen as a challenge to one's own innovative
powers. However, it is equally possible for it to be experienced (individually and/or
collectively) as an immense insecurity in which any innovation is felt as 'destruction'.
 50

Erdheim describes how societies often exert repression when confronted with the innovative
power of youth.

The constitution of the antagonism is a "crisis-like process" (Erdheim 1995). Erdheim

describes several avoidance strategies. We are mainly interested in only one of them, namely
the 'seduction' to shift the antagonism to the gender relation. After this shift, not culture and
family are in an antagonistic relationship any more, but the sexes to one another. This results
in the well-known stereotyped ascription of gender characteristics: the woman is assigned to
the family, the man to culture. The antagonism between family and culture, whose recognition
would lead to emancipation and maturity of the individual, becomes invisible by being shifted
to gender relations (Erdheim 1998). The temptation to avoid progressive developments and to
adhere rather to regressive and polarising patterns not only prevents maturity, but leads to a
polarisation of the gender characteristics to which also other authors refer (Flaake 1990). In
this case, a constructed masculinity can serve as a 'crutch' to avoid any conflict with which the
adolescent has not yet come to terms, and to adjust to cultural ideas of what a man is and to
what a man is entitled. It would certainly mean 'extra energy' in this situation to seize a
masculinity which does not quite correspond to the cultural ideal (Connell 1995).

Anne Campbell (1990, 1995) shows with her violence and aggression research studies8
that the seizing of a counter-gender model is possible, but certainly connected to the ability to
'want something more strongly'. She refers to a decisive gender difference in perceptions of
aggression as well as in coping with aggression. For both sexes there is a close connection
between aggression and control, but aggression means for women a failure of self-control,
while it means for men to force their own control onto others.

Women see aggression primarily as an expressive means to release pent-up fury or

long accumulated frustrations. Men see aggression primarily as an instrumental means to
decide competitions, conflicts and doubts of their male authority quickly and efficiently in
their favour – with or without emotions. According to Campbell (1995), this leads naturally to
different styles of aggressive behaviour. Women react to everyday frustrations and
provocation at first not with anger or calculated opposition. Their initial reserve is often
misinterpreted as approval or acceptance. Since women hold back their anger for a longer
time than men and often lose their temper at a later moment, their aggression tends to emerge
in explosive or expressive forms.

In retrospective, most women tend to criticise their own behaviour, apologise for it
and regard it as inappropriate, not feminine and as a failure of self-discipline. Their critical
estimation of themselves as well as the expressive quality of their aggression is unfortunately
often not only ineffective for the elimination of the source of frustration, but also – when the
events accumulate for a long time – too late and not well enough aimed. Male instrumental
aggression deals not so much with the reduction of tensions, with "signalling indignation or
with letting off steam" (107), but rather with controlling the behaviour of another person or a
situation in general.

It is the male instrumental understanding of aggression that dominates society and

science. Campbell reveals in the practice-oriented application of her thesis how the female
understanding of aggression can clash with the male dominating system of criminal justice.
When a woman kills her husband in his sleep after being abused for many years, the legal

8
Campbell's research studies are very wide-ranging: girl gangs in the USA (participant observation, case
studies, interviews), female and male criminal offenders as well as family aggressions of female and
male persons from middle class (biographical interviews, group interviews).
 51

framing of aggression is her undoing, because it mitigates killing only in a spontaneous heat
of passion as manslaughter, second-degree murder or self-defence (cf. Jones 1980). Women's
reactions are not regarded as self-defence because of the "difference in time between the last
thrashing and the killing" (Campbell 1995: 204), because of the fact that women 'govern' their
anger and despair for a long time before getting out of 'control'. When female opposition takes
place in secret or at a later point of time – which is certainly in part understandable given her
poor chances in an open physical attack – it is legally not regarded as an act committed in the
heat of passion, but "the charge is murder" (203). In fact, Dagmar Oberlies has shown from
court case analysis in Germany that women who kill male partners are charged with and
convicted of murder and actually serve out life sentences, whereas men who kill their wives
or (former) girlfriends can always name something that made them furious at the time; they
are charged with manslaughter and sentenced mildly, even if they have told various people in
advance of their plan to kill the woman (Oberlies 1995).

Summary

Male violence has different causes; there is not the one and only explanation. We have
tried to show with Jessica Benjamin that under certain circumstances violence can be 'helpful'
to avert a threat. Aspects of "rational violence" include an excessive need to separate the self
from the feminine, related to deep fears, and the loss of primary empathy for the feelings of
others. The subject keeps in control, especially needing to control closeness and distance, and
can 'touch' the others only with a violence that draws them near, but at the same time keeps
them at a distance and denigrates them.

When the tension between self-assertion and recognition is no longer tolerated within
the self, but only distributed between the sexes, when male self-assertion results in power and
female recognition results in submission, another dimension of violence enters in. The
pleasure gain of "rational violence" for the man is then to relish the submission of the woman
and to feel, test and enjoy his own power. There is no reliance on the perception of mutual
recognition, but male interests and male power dominate completely.

Ulrike Schmauch looks at the development of gender identity in early childhood from
another perspective. She describes the often unconscious parental ambivalence between
pushing back dominance and aggression and the simultaneous temptation of male aggressive
behaviour.

Winnicott adds another facet of violence – the significance of "feeling oneself".

Violence can serve to increase self-esteem and the sense of reality. This feeling oneself can
also become an addiction and go together with a habitualisation of violent behaviour. Insights
from learning theory would be important in this context.

Beyond these experiences from early childhood, the life phase of the adolescence is
important, not to be understood as an extension or confirmation of the dynamics from early
childhood. Furthermore, adolescence as a psychodynamic second chance as well as a crisis
process may also be seen as representative for other critical life events and upheavals. The
ability to tolerate contradictions, ambivalence and insecurity seems to be very important. In
the study of adolescence we have seen how tempting it can be to shift very elementary human
conflicts, such as the antagonism between family and culture, onto the two sexes and to settle
them there in a polarising way. Constructed masculinity can thus serve regarding oneself as
no longer exposed to threat or insecurities. Violence becomes a compensatory mechanism, a
way of re-establishing the masculine equilibrium.
 52

Afterword

In closing, let us call attention to the construction of gender polarisation within the
theories themselves. A common trait of all of the explanations discussed is their inclination to
set up a logical chain leading from being born as a male or female child (having parents of
two sexes), to gaining a masculine or feminine identity, to taking a certain position with
regard to aggression or violence.

Christiane Micus has just completed an empirical study of women's and men's
aggressive behaviour and their fantasies of aggression; the subjects were sixteen females and
sixteen males. The study employed three research instruments: the Bem Sex-Role Inventory,
a TAT (thematic-apperception-test) especially developed for the study, and qualitative
interviews. The Bem Sex-Role-Inventory treats masculinity and femininity as two
independent dimensions, thereby making it possible to characterise a person as masculine,
feminine, androgynous or undifferentiated. As a result of statistical analysis of the data,
psychological gender emerged as very significant in regard to the extent of aggressive
behaviour, much more so than sex category. The psychological gender is an interesting and
important alternative to the biological concept of two sexes. In this study, the group of
masculine (psychological gender) men proved to be the most aggressive. They showed high
values in destructive, injurious and critical thoughts and actions directed to others. It seems
that this group of masculine men has to seize a manliness which corresponds to the cultural
idea of masculinity as domination.

But alongside this group I also found men who are androgynous, feminine or
undifferentiated, without being noticeably different from other men in other ways. Thus, there
is not only one masculinity. Empirically, the male gender identity of androgynous, feminine
or undifferentiated men is not so strongly connected with violence. These men seem to have
more possibilities to choose a masculinity which does not quite correspond to cultural ideas of
what a man is and what men's entitlements are. Although there is no space to discuss this
study here, it does suggest that gender identities are more varied than many theoretical
explanations seem to assume. Perhaps more attention should be directed to the specific
processes by which masculinity becomes linked to dominance and violence.
 53

References

Benjamin, Jessica, 1985: Die Fesseln der Liebe: Zur Bedeutung der Unterwerfung in
erotischen Beziehungen. In: Feministische Studien, 4, 2, 10-33
Benjamin, Jessica, 1988: The Bonds of Love. Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of
Domination. New York
Benjamin, Jessica, 1996: Phantasie und Geschlecht: psychoanalytische Studien über
Idealisierung, Anerkennung und Differenz. Frankfurt/Main
Campbell, Anne, 1990: The girls in the gang. Oxford
Campbell, Anne, 1995: Zornige Frauen - wütende Männer. Wie das Geschlecht unser
Aggressionsverhalten beeinflußt. Frankfurt
Chodorow, Nancy, 1985: Das Erbe der Mütter. Psychoanalyse und Soziologie der
Geschlechter. München
Connell, Robert W., 1995: Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press
Erdheim, Mario, 1995: Aggression und Wachstum. Von der Chance im Übergang von der
Familie zur Kultur. In: Finger-Trescher, Urte; Trescher, Hans-Georg (Hg.): Aggression und
Wachstum. Theorie, Konzepte und Erfahrungen aus der Arbeit mit Kindern, Jugendlichen und
jungen Erwachsenen. Mainz, 23-37
Erdheim, Mario, 1998: Adolezentenkrise und institutionelle Systeme. Kulturtheoretische
Überlegungen. In: Apsel, Roland; Rost, Wolf-Detlef (Hg.): Ethnopsychoanalyse. 5. Jugend
und Kulturwandel. Frankfurt/Main, 9-30
Erikson, Erik H., 131993: Identität und Lebenszyklus. Frankfurt/Main (Originalausgabe: 1959)
Fast, Irene, 1991: Von der Einheit zur Differenz. Psychoanalyse der Geschlechtsidentität.
Berlin/Heidelberg/New York u.a.
Gilligan, James, 1997: Violence. Reflections on a National Epidemic. New York
Hagemann-White, Carol, 1979; Frauenbewegung und Psychoanalyse. Frankfurt/Main
Hearn, Jeff, 1998: The Violences of Men. How Men Talk About and How Agencies Respond
to Men's Violence to Women. London u.a.
Hurrelmann, Klaus; Rosewitz, Bernd; Wolf, Hartmut K., 1985: Lebensphase Jugend. Eine
Einführung in die sozialwissenschaftliche Jugendforschung. Weinheim/München
Jones, Ann, 1980: Women who kill.
Jukes, Adam Edward, 1999: Men Who Batter Women. London/New York
Oberlies, Dagmar 1995. Tötungsdelikte zwischen Männern und Frauen. Pfaffenweiler:
Centaurus.
Schmauch, Ulrike, 1985: Frühe Kindheit und Geschlecht. Anmerkungen zur frühkindlichen
Sozialisation von Mädchen und Jungen. In: Anselm, Sigrun (Hg.): Theorien weiblicher
Subjektivität. Frankfurt/Main, 92-117
Schmauch, Ulrike, 1987: Anatomie und Schicksal. Zur Psychoanalyse der frühen
Geschlechtersozialisation. Frankfurt/Main
Stern, Daniel, 1985: The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and
Developmental Psychology. New York
 54

Socio and Psychogenetic Attempts to Explain the Male

Inclination towards Violence Against Women
Ursula MÜLLER, University of Bielefeld, Germany and Angela MINSSEN

In this paper, I give a partial insight into an extended secondary analysis I undertook
together with Angela Minssen.9 The co-operation between me, as a sociologist, and Angela
Minssen, as a psychoanalyst, led us through a huge amount of diverse literature, but,
strikingly enough, we came to confront patterns of explaining the male inclination for
violence against women that resembled each other more than was to be expected.

1. Changes and continuities

Looking at male violence towards known women (Hearn 1998) today, we see a
double feature: while we can see impressive changes on the political side (and this conference
is an impressive example of this), we are also still confronted by oppressive continuities in the
basic traits of scholarly explanations on the other. Major successes in overcoming the taboos
about discussing the male inclination for violence against women in the general public and on
different political levels run up against a very stable pattern of argumentation in the basic
assumptions about its causes that we find rather shocking. Theory and practice on the "male
inclination for using violence against women" seem to be drifting apart, and each is going
through its own autonomous development. At present, they only relate in a few points, and
some of them may be fatal, as I want to point out at the end of my paper.

While examining the literature we were initially surprised, and later very irritated, to
see how thoroughly the blame for this male violence is cast upon mothers or women. This is
an aspect where the new "men's movement literature" and traditional psychoanalytical
concepts are in surprising harmony.

Psycho- and sociogenetic explanations offer what we consider to be the problematic

possibility of allowing men to appear as victims rather than offenders. On the societal level,
this perspective makes them prisoners of their "male role"; on the level of individual
psychology, they appear as victims of a devalued but simultaneously omnipotent mother.

According to this victim postulate on the sociological level, the "male role" is
changing as a result of progressive modernisation. Its traditional contents have become
obsolete without binding and reliable new proposals becoming available to replace them. Part
of the literature engages in explicit or implicit attributions of blame: The emancipation of
women has generated uncertainty. Because women have left the place assigned to them by
tradition, men can no longer find their own place. In light of such a "difficulty", male violence
is apparently a regrettable but basically comprehensible consequence.

On the psychological level, the victim status of the man has already developed a
"tradition". The boy who is bound and held in symbiosis by his mother has only one way of
escaping this maternal pressure: He dissociates himself from everything feminine, and the
most permanent and secure way of doing this is through devaluation. From this perspective,
misogyny as a precondition of the male inclination for violence against women emerges as an

9
Angela Minssen/Ursula Mueller, Attraktion und Gewalt (Attraction and Violence. Psychogenetic and
sociogenetic explanations for male violence against women, forthcoming).
 55

inevitable outcome of the exclusive female mothering that society simultaneously demands
and supports as a desirable good.

2. The bourgeois model of gender characters and its impact on today's gender relations

One basic sociological idea behind this paper is the privatisation of social problems
at the expense of women. For a long time, feminist theory has used the concept of the "gender-
specific" or "gender-hierarchical" division of labour to describe this idea. As Karin Hausen
and others have shown, how the separation between housework and gainful employment that
asserted itself during the 19th century corresponded, on a sociocultural level, with a social,
cultural and emotional polarisation of the "gender characters" that undertook a division of
"properties, abilities, and emotional as well as psychosexual characteristics according to
gender" (Hausen 1978) on the basis of a complementary model. This bourgeois concept views
women and men as two opposite poles having almost nothing in common. They differ not
only in the work they are able to do, but also in intellectual, emotional and other
characteristics of their "being". Nobody is allowed to be both male and female at the same
time. The basic model of bourgeois relations between the genders is a meeting of two
incomplete persons who can only attain completion through the help of an appropriate
opposite. The mutual dependency that is basically inherent in this model is de facto turning
into male supremacy. 10

When psychogenesis is taken as a level of analysis, this model only permits

identification within one's own gender group. Daughters cannot identify with their fathers; nor
sons with their mothers. Analogue to the situation on the sociogenetic level in which nobody
may possess masculine and feminine characteristics at the same time, the psychogenetic level,
perceives ambivalence as disruptive and disconcerting and as something to be avoided at all
costs. This leads to a strong control interest when dealing with the environment and the
demands and uncertainties that arise from it.

For masculinity, this traditional model links the loss of masculinity closely with a
psychological regression towards symbiosis. It is as if to say that a loss of gender is feared.
Analogue to this on the sociogenetic level, it is feared that a non-controlling approach towards
women will lead to a loss of status. In the traditional gender model, it is far more the case that
the man has to dissociate himself from the woman, who is defined as being opposite, and
constantly control this "definedness".

Because real women do not comply with these definitions, they pose a permanent
threat that leads to the development of fears in the man that then have to be suppressed
permanently. Hence, the attitude towards woman is characterised by an underlying fear that
places the man in an actually inferior position in his own eyes. This psychological position
broadly, if not completely, denies the aspect of the societal power of men.

10
Of course, this is a shortcut of a complex ideology; the pattern of "complementarity" (and not
reciprocity) between women and men existed before the rise of the bourgeoisie, but in the 19th century
it changed its quality and became densified into gender characters, legitimising division of labour,
exclusion of women from education, power and politics, and so on. In political philosophy and in the
philosophy of science, gender characterology was used to prove women's incapability to succeed in
these areas, and to legitimise that men were the only gender present, representing the "whole" in those
fields. See, for instance, Benhabib on Hegel, Women, and Irony.
 56

3. Gender ambivalence and men's loss of control

In modern society, experiences of ambivalence are on the increase for men (see, for
instance, Connell's concept of "gender vertigo" 1995; and the first empirical signs among
German men Metz-Goeckel/Mueller 1986). However, they find themselves in the role of
latecomers compared with women who had already articulated their perception of
discrepancies between norms and needs in the early women's movements at the end of the
19th century and have continued this quite insistently in the new women's movement since the
1960s.

Men's experiences of ambivalence take a different form to those of women. Mostly,

it seems, they do not perceive it as an extension and further development of their agency, but
process it as a threat. This feeling of being threatened contributes to the desire to revive the
"old" conditions when men were still men and women knew their place.

Basically, today's men have two possible ways of reacting to women's successful
processing of perceived ambivalence that expresses itself as an acquisition of new rights or
their consolidation, a shaking of the basic premises of patriarchal structures, an expansion of
the sociosymbolic representation of the feminine, a politicisation of the asymmetry between
the genders in society and so forth. First, they can acknowledge it voluntarily or reluctantly as
a potential, and exploratively or enthusiastically engage in attempts to exploit such a potential
for themselves. Second, they can give way to their feeling of being threatened and reject the
new potential through destructive devaluation. The majority of men are probably located on a
continuum between these two poles; it may well be that a process perspective is also
appropriate for most of them. We shall try to explain this with an example.11

The generation of men aged 35-55 years who have now achieved success in their
careers may initially have welcomed the emancipation of women strongly because it relieved
the pressure on their uncertain masculinity. However, with increasing occupational and social
success, they do not develop an extended self-consciousness based on gender awareness and
symmetry; instead, a consolidation of traditional masculinity occurs accompanied by a desire
to fend off the continual demands for masculinity to change—both their own and that of
others. Men who have attained power seem to lose the ability to accept ambivalence, and
many of them are no longer willing to co-operate with women who want to establish gender
symmetry.

The male belief, found in various forms, that women are less suitable than men for
public office (an inheritance from bourgeois political philosophy) conceals the fear that
women might perform just as well if not better than men. This makes it necessary to devalue
feminine potency by attributing it with irrationality. This addresses the other side of the belief
that women are less suitable for public office than men: It invokes the man's fear of losing
control to the woman (see above).

However, when women have attained higher posts, the illusion is maintained that
they can only manage so well through the invisible support of powerful men who make their
own potency available to them. This enables the controlling man to remain in contact with the
object of control and retain the fiction of control. If this fiction can no longer be maintained,
an attempt is made to "destroy" the object through massive attack. Another way of
overcoming the threat of the publicly potent woman would be to give up control and
11
There are some members of the still rather new red-green German government we may have in mind
here, but it is not a specifically German phenomenon.
 57

recognise the woman. However, for many men this still seems to be unthinkable. This is a
way of retaining something that Virginia Woolf recognised long ago: Women cannot mirror
themselves in men. Only a few, it would seem, have managed to attain this privileged position
so far.

For the present analysis, we were very surprised to realise that most of the diverse
literature we went through revealed the pattern that we have just tried to sketch above in
general terms. Only a few transcendental trends can be found in psychoanalysis, in the "new
men's movement literature", in the criticism and further development of feminist analysis, in
sociological and educational literature on masculinity and so forth.12 The idea that there may
be men who are secure in their masculinity, who do not consider their masculinity to be
threatened by feminine power, is still not very widespread13, as we shall see in the following
sections.

3.1 Feminist psychoanalysis on "becoming male"

A series of more recent studies that tend to be oriented towards psychoanalytical

concepts address the relation between particular forms of mothering and the emergence of
masculine misogyny from various perspectives (see, in particular, Johnson, 1988; Rohde-
Dachser, 1991; Schuch-Minssen, 1992). These talk about, among others, the "overpowering",
"devouring", or "omnipotent" mother from whom the small boy urgently has to liberate
himself. He perceives femininity as an overpowering experience to which he is exposed
helplessly because of his developmental dependency (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1974, 1988;
Chodorow, 1985; Olivier, 1988). On the one hand, the mother is perceived positively, because
she guarantees satisfaction of needs; on the other hand, her all-encompassing power leads to a
narcissistic wound, namely, being powerless oneself, and this is interpreted as the basis for
hostility towards mothers (see, above all, Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1988). This mother who is
perceived as all-powerful not only inflicts narcissistic wounds, but her usurpatory,
overwhelming, and devouring quality is also perceived as an impairment and constraint that
the boy wishes to escape from. However, these desires for liberation are not just restricted to
childhood. According to the concepts cited above, the man continues to be involved in this
striving towards independence throughout his life. This simultaneously consolidates his
dependence on his early mother. However, this dependence is not based on solidarity, but on
having to ensure that one never enters the dependency of a symbiotic relationship. It seems
that the man's life with a woman is a continuous defence against being pressurised and being
caught up in a relationship that simply takes a different form. Hence, adulthood proves to be a
repeat of the efforts to gain independence from the mother and to maintain this independence
through, above all, devaluation.

The deficit in this approach is that it is limited to mother-child dyads as a sort of

space that is removed from society. The claims regarding an all-powerful mother in her
relationship with the child are generally contextualised through a lack of power in society or
at least a disadvantaged position for both mothers and women (Schütze, 1986; Krüger et al.,
1987; Müller, 1989). This societal tension is expressed even in the intimate relationship
12
The few authors who go beyond this basic pattern include Jessica Benjamin, Carel Hagemann-White,
Margrit Brückner, Eva Paluda-Korte, Edda Uhlmann, Ruth Großmaß, Bob Connell, the members of this
meeting (of course), and ourselves. Aspects that pass beyond gender polarisation can be found in Irene
Faust and in Christa Rohde-Dachser, although the latter also retains conventional definitions.
13
Therefore a secondary topic is the question regarding the circumstances under which "giving men" can
develop who do not "fall over" immediately when they have conceded power and do not feel threatened
by women who confront them with equal power or publicly strive towards this. We cannot elaborate on
this here, but will retain it as a horizon of critique, and return to it in our concluding remarks.
 58

between mother and child. Then, depending on how strongly the mother is dependent on
coercing the child because of the lack of alternative ways of shaping her life, separation from
the mother can take the form of a hostile disassociation from her or curiosity towards the
environment (Benjamin, 1990).

The available literature, however, only seems to attach significance to the boy's
rather hostile desires to dissociate himself from his mother. Recent psychoanalytical
approaches propose that the gender difference between boys and their mothers leads to a
particular form of separation and dissociation.

One way of looking at this focuses on the "narcissistic wound" (Chasseguet-Smirgel,

1988) as the outcome of primary helplessness and defencelessness. One can free oneself from
the overpowering strength of the maternal imago or learn to control it by devaluing the all-
powerful mother through something that she does not possess: a penis. For the boy, this
supposedly means that despite submission to the all-powerful mother, he now realises that he
possesses an organ that his mother does not have. The satisfaction gained through this is
unstable and needs to be repeated continuously. The outcome, and this makes the aspect of
devaluating femininity a founder of male identity, is a triumphant devaluation of the other
gender. Viewing the feminine as castrated, powerless, and inferior then represents the long-
desired triumph and the long-desired power over the seemingly omnipotent mother.

The other variant of separation - which has also been adopted without question by
feminist authors (see, above all, Chodorow, 1985) - is that boys fundamentally have to
distance themselves from identification with their mothers. Apparently, none of their primary
identification with her may be retained without threatening their masculine identity. The
development of masculine gender identity seems - and Greenson (1968) views this as a
necessity - to continue to require "de-identification" from the mother. The acquisition and
maintenance of masculine gender identity has to be achieved through the strong, defensive
differentiation from the primary (identification) object of the mother (see, in particular,
Stoller, 1968; Tyson, 1991).

Regardless of whether masculinity is a vehicle for independence, that is, it emerges

through necessity, or whether independence is the driving force behind the development of
masculinity, the quality of masculinity still remains undefined. With the consolidation of the
gender difference, it already seems that "masculinity" means only one thing: "not being
female". However, if masculine is defined only negatively as not feminine, all parts of the self
that are experienced as having negative connotations such as weakness, fear, dependence, the
need for fusion, powerlessness, passivity, and so forth are projected on to the woman in whom
they are supposedly controlled and kept at a distance. Woman becomes the "container" for
these inherently intolerable conscious or unconscious stirrings (see, in particular, Rohde-
Dachser, 1991).

The process of distancing from the feminine has, at first hand, no connection to
"real" women; in this view, masculinity is not promoted through a process of interaction with
a concrete "other", but with an imaginary, interior "reality". Traditional masculinity distances
itself from an interior image of femininity that has been handcrafted, so to speak, by the man
himself. Distancing oneself from an imaginary femininity leads to the stabilisation of a male
identity that is precarious through its dependence on this specific form of disassociation from
and definition of imagined femininity. In other words, it is crucial for one's own identity to
defend the view of femininity as weak, fearful, and the like. Everything that is feminine but
does not correspond to the imago described, just like everything masculine that presents an
 59

aspect of this imago becomes a threat and has to be devalued or opposed and from this,
indeed, may derive some inclination to violence.

3.2 The "new men's literature" on masculinity

The "new men's literature" addressing the topic of the "masculine inclination for
violence" - including authors such as Bly, Bornemann, Keen, Schissler, Hollstein, Gottschalch
or Schnack/Neutzling - discusses the masculine inclination to use violence against women
almost exclusively as a reaction of the boy or the man to something that women - particularly
mothers - possess or do. Impressively deterministic formulations suggest that the inclination
for violence against women should be understood as something that will remain inevitable
until a change should occur - where this change should come from remains unclear. From this
discussion, we give some examples.

The hypothesis that men are envious of the woman's ability to give birth to children
was originally proposed by Karin Horney in "Die Angst vor der Frau" published in 1932 to
counteract Freud's concept of penis envy. She assumed that it is the boy's envy of
childbearing, in other words, his envy of something that girls possess rather than the fear of a
loss that they have suffered, that is responsible for certain fears and wounds that the boy
suffers during the phallic phase. She had already assumed that the overemphasis on the penis -
among children; in the theory formulation of male analysts, and, we would add, in the men's
movement literature - basically represents only a desperate attempt to deny the frightening
female genitals.

Mostly unaffected by the complex arguments of Horney, but also from the
differentiation of a Bruno Bettelheim whom he endorses verbally, Gottschalch associates
hatred of women with the self-hate of men. He assumes that men are envious of women
because they are more powerful. In men's minds, women can give and take; the small child is
completely and utterly at the mercy of the mother, and fears of being abandoned remain the
deepest fears for adults as well. Gottschalch believes that men have defeated women "only"
on the social level but not on the psychological one. On the psychological level, they continue
to be dependent on women, and as long as this is not recognised and, moreover, it is not
acknowledged that this dependency is mutual, it can develop into men hating women and vice
versa. A further reason for male envy of women is their inexhaustible sexual potency, which
Gottschalch formulates very simply in terms of biological determinism: Through her physical
constitution, a women is always able to engage in the sexual act; but this is not the case for
men. At the same time, a man can never be sure about what a women is experiencing during
the sexual act, which can increase his own sexual anxieties and suggests a devaluation and
suppression of the sexuality of the other as an antidote.

Hermann (1989) also argues in the same direction, commencing with the fear that
men have of women, that this generates an inclination for violence, and that the cause of this
fear is once more envy of the ability to give birth.

These statements completely neglect the possibility that the boy's envy of
childbearing could also become integrated into his personality in a way that does not lead to a
devaluation of woman but to an interest in her and to curiosity, to an exchange on a level of
equal rights. Their arguments concentrate on the phallic defence organisation whose
consequence is then the devaluation of the woman.
 60

There is a similar situation which attempts to explain the inclination for violence as
an effort to recreate the illusion of one's own grandiosity and omnipotence. Bornemann
(1987) and Gottschalch (1984, 1991), but many other authors as well, discuss how men are
experiencing a loss of confidence through the weakening of gender roles and the loss of
traditional masculine identity - all evoked by the emancipation of women. In this context,
Hollstein (1992, 1993) talks about the "social castration" of the male because contraceptives
have given women power over birth control, as well as the impact of female employment that
has countered male hegemony in the occupational domain. As with the supporters of
childbearing envy, it is once more the man who is the victim. Holstein, for example, accuses
American women of wanting not only the sensitive and understanding man but also the
conqueror, the seducer, and the successful careerist.

Goldberg (1986) also sees only the threats to the man arising from both the maternal
and the self-aware woman. Whereas the former keeps the man dependent, the latter suddenly
leaves him to cope by himself without preparation. The man always loses out, because he can
never foresee in which way women will develop. Unpredicted changes have paralysed him,
they have made it impossible for him to make demands and, instead, he responds with
helpless anger or silent resignation.

In summary, these authors believe that the narcissistic wounding that the man is
"forced" to process through violence and an inclination for violence against women is
composed of three elements: first, the inability to retain the role of the patriarch, the powerful
man; second, the fact that there are women who are stronger or at least as strong as the man;
and third, that there is a prevailing idea of not being able to satisfy the woman's sexual
demands.

The focus is on separation and disassociation from the usurping, occupying,

pestering and threatening mother; and the question of blame has already been decided against
the mothers/women. The different types of mother compiled by Schnack and Neutzling
(1990,1993) - both the controlling and the battling, the defenceless and the "mother as
companion", the "compulsive cleaner" (a further variant of the devalued mother) as well as
the lonely mother who replaces her marriage with her relationship to the son, but does not
really give him this primary status in her life - all make it impossible for their sons to attain
happiness as autonomous persons.

Publications of this sort have been very powerful in influencing the public discourses
on masculinity and male inclination to violence, whereas the serious scholarly literature that
affords more tolerance towards uncertainty, varieties, and differentiation among men, and
does not participate into the misogyny underpinning of the "new men's literature" (for
instance the works of Morgan, Hearn, Connell, Seidler) in my opinion still has to make its
way to challenge the successful discourse on men as women's victims.
 61

4. Delegating responsibility, creating gender asymmetry in adolescence and beyond

From a sociological perspective, the findings reported above indicate one central
mode of attributing responsibility: Women - and particularly, but not just, mothers - are
assigned responsibility for the internal processes of men. This process seems to be a not yet
well regarded part of the "hidden curricula"; the message is not just boys or men being more
important, as feminist researchers, for instance Dale Spender and numerous others have
demonstrated, but girls or women being responsible for the boys' or men's behaviour. This has
been shown in some German research on male and female teachers professional self-concepts.

Karin Flaake has shown (though within a theoretical concept of difference) that
female teachers often band together with the girls in forging a sort of regressive pact; in other
words, they join them in slipping into the role of being the victims of male dominance in the
classroom. This is accompanied by the clear message that "The boys are terrible enough as it
is, so at least you may behave". However, the implicit message is also that it does not lie
within the power of women to change men; they can only try to contain them somehow or
other. The best way to do this is to offer curricula that are mainly interesting for boys, and to
appeal to the girls to show understanding for this. Their interests at school need to take second
place to motivating boys to participate in the class. The finding that boys, on average, are
given more opportunity to express themselves actively (findings resumed in Kreienbaum
1992; pioneering: Dale Spender) is also part of this process. The girls' motivation, in contrast,
is left to them. They have to learn to take responsibility for their own internal processes14 they
have nobody to whom to delegate this.

Delegating responsibility for men's internal processes, for their emotional

development, their emotional satisfaction, and their appeasement, to women does work
because women shoulder also this responsibility within the framework of the traditional
model of gender relationships described above. But it does not work without the development
of an equivalent self-concept in women: a feeling of inner superiority, a distanced, as if to
say, "moral" omnipotence (cf. the works of Margrit Brueckner 1983: 1993; 1998).
Frequently, such traditional arrangements are still emphasised and consolidated in processes
found in schools, even though this is not a conscious strategy on the part of the actors.

This shows how the traditional division of labour is also an asymmetric division of
emotional structures and moral responsibility. We postulate that allocating responsibilities
according to gender in line with the traditional model is inherently extremely violent. It
creates large-scale asymmetries.

These asymmetries also impact on private male violence against women. Hagemann-
White talks about the "societal lack of compulsive empathy" in men. This promises them -
perhaps no longer necessarily so culturally valued as before, though still accepted
sympathetically - a far-reaching freedom from sanctions when they claim they have no longer
been able to control themselves or to understand what their partner was saying. An impressive
example has most recently provided in Hearn (1998) and in the eighties by Godenzi (1987).

It is the culturally dominant pattern for emotional commitments and happiness -

normative heterosexuality and traditional marriage - that keeps an asymmetric type of gender

14
The lack of feeling for one's own responsibility is also very common among violent men, as Hearn
(1998) has shown impressively: talking to 60 men having been arrested for violence towards known
women showed that almost all of them presented themselves as "really not violent"; their violence has
been an "exception" , they had to be "really provoked".
 62

relationship alive, together with the male inclination to violence against women. The reactions
of men to an imaginary femininity continue to be widely accepted as valid. In their private
sphere, these men are surrounded by women who compensate their powerlessness in society
through an imagined omnipotence in private life - both in their own imagination and in the
imagination of their male "partners".

5. Structural asymmetries and state politics

Viewing the preservation of the family, the maintenance of the partnership, and the
continued presence of the father as an indubitable good for the welfare of the child is a
refinement of the ideology of motherhood that restricts the action scope of women, even
though these have expanded in principle. This is reinforced by the fact that it is not just the
individual woman but also the institutions of the state that frequently view the preservation of
the family as the target of their measures, and consider the presence of the father to be
essential for both economic and normative reasons. The "gender contract" that is implicitly or
explicitly underpinning politics against violence as well as therapeutic measures has to be
revealed, but some areas of research, for instance in family sociology, prefer until today to
investigate new forms of living together as deviant.15

In numerous policies on violence, the ideology of motherhood calls for family

solidarity and the presence of the father as an indispensable basis for the child's welfare. This
places constraints on female action scope that has otherwise expanded objectively in recent
decades. Government institutions support these constraints by focusing their activities, as (not
only) conservative - liberal governments do, by preserving the bourgeois nuclear family. It
would seem to be very apparent that the continuation of the traditional model of the family -
not in reality, but on the level of ideas, of imagination - provides the conditions that enable
the continuation of traditional masculinity.

An important precondition for stemming private male violence against women is the
woman's social and economic independence (a feminist claim with a long tradition: see the
summary argument in Godenzi 1993). Indeed, a US-American pilot programme shows that
providing battered women with independent housing, education, and income, drastically
reduces the risk of becoming a victim of violence again.

However, studies by Benard and Schlaffer have shown that even when they are
economically independent, women may stop themselves from engaging in adequate
confrontations with their partners. The power of normativity is frequently still decisive, even
when the economic and legal preconditions for independence have been met. This shows how
partnership ideology frequently functions as a relationship trap: Studies on partnership
conflicts have shown how, during the course of their relationships, women abandon the
integration of love and equality that they had originally held so dear, and no longer compare
their non-egalitarian partner with themselves but with other men (see Hochschild, 1989;
Müller, 1997), and definite losses of chances, property and perspectives, may be evaluated as
internal growth (see Hagemann-White and research group on migrating couples).

15
As an example, was been some German research in 1996 to investigate the impact of mothers' gainful
employment on schoolchildren's inclination to violent behaviour in the schoolyard, or in 1999 some
research assuming that East German mothers' high labour market participation is more or less directly
the reason for adolescent right wing radicalism, including racist violent behaviour.
 63

We can conclude that a gender-egalitarian division of labour and power would also
impact on the constraints of the prevailing structures of emotional commitment, at least in the
long term. The area of emotional commitment, however, is also a battlefield of its own.

6. Concluding remarks: Some visionary aspects of gender symmetry

We have argued, providing some examples, that large parts of the literature that
provides direct or indirect arguments to discuss the male inclination to use violence against
women, reveal an inherent determinism. Explanations are very often aiming at closed types of
argument, that leave male violence as a more or less inevitable consequence.16 In many
psychoanalytical concepts - as well as, by the way, in anthropological studies - the
development of masculinity is imagined as a difficult and risky process with insecure results,
that starts with the dissociation from the feminine, by means of devaluation. The basic and
non-contested assumption is often that male children have to dis-identify thoroughly from the
feminine, and can only build up a masculine identity by orientating towards males. In our
view, this is an unnecessary short-cutting on the theoretical level. Benjamin and others have
supposed that children do not identify with males or females, but with qualities of relations,
and Irene Fast has stated that the concept of decisive "losses" (of feminine traits, for instance
being able to give birth) is only talking about the loss of abilities and capacities that have
never been owned in reality, but in fantasy. Therefore, a theoretical possibility to open up
masculine development on the level of psychology would be to postulate that elements of the
early fantasies of completeness, of disposing of male and female capacities and abilities at the
same time, may not be devalued by means of an imaginary feminine. Rather, they could be
maintained, narcissistically appreciated, and disposed of in fantasy, in order to enjoy them in
reality on the side of a partner, instead of fighting them.

On the sociological level, masculinity and femininity have been revealed as societal
constructions in some areas of feminist, pro-feminist and anti-sexist discourse; indeed, the
variations of masculinity and femininity that are culturally accepted have multiplied. We tried
to point out, however, the intertwining of some levels of gender relations in order to achieve
some criteria for continuity and change. Gendered division of work has not become obsolete
for explaining male violence, but still remains central, as it provides economic and emotional
dependencies and asymmetrical gender relations.

To understand the difference between women and men as an interesting and

therefore erotically attractive differentness in which each other person is viewed as complete
rather than in terms of a reciprocal attribution of deficits, is to propose an alternative model
that is certainly still utopian. However, as our arguments progressed, this model has always
provided a "critical horizon" that can serve as a background when examining the literature on
the male inclination for violence. This is a model of a reciprocal conception of gender in
which "gender" is not used to define one's social "place", difference is not construed through
devaluation, and the male inclination for violence is not viewed as the "normal case" in
society, but as a developmental failure, a failure that, nonetheless, is still proposed and
protected by society.

16
We have left out here some research that refers to social deprivation in the same "automatic" way of
thinking.
 64

Growing up in the proximity of violence

Teenagers' Stories of Violence in the Home
Dr Katarina WEINEHALL, University of Umeå, Sweden

This study brings into focus the experiences of teenagers (13-19 years) subjected to
violence in the home. The purpose of my study was to gain knowledge regarding the
conditions related to socialisation in the proximity of violence through listening to,
interpreting and attempting to understand the teenagers' narratives about life when violence is
an everyday occurrence.

Primarily, I wanted to obtain a picture of the conditions under which these girls and
boys grew up as they themselves described them. My questions are primarily concerned with
the teenagers' experiences of violence in the home, the strategies they used to cope with a
violent home environment and finally with their self-images. Secondarily, my intention was to
analyse and interpret the picture that emerged in an attempt to understand the meaning of
socialisation in the proximity of violence, primarily based upon theories of sexualised
violence (aspects of power and gender), coping, resilience, and the social heritage of violence-
related behaviour (the inter-generational transmission of violent behaviour). My purpose was
also to relate the descriptions and analysis of domestic violence, and the associated conditions
under which these young people grew up, to previous research within the field of family
violence.

The research is grounded in feminist theory which views the gender and power
relationships between women and men as a determining principle of social organisation. Men
as a group dominate and actively oppress women as a group. The negative effects of the
unequal allocation of power between the sexes at the societal level correspond to male
dominance and wife battering at the individual level.

I associate this with the established Scandinavian concept of "sexualised violence,"

used to describe forms of abuse and sexual exploitation such as rape, incest and other sexual
assaults, pornography, the sex trade and sexual harassment.

By concentrating upon in-depth studies of a few individuals, I wanted to capture both

the universal and the unique by working inductively and empathetically. A narrative approach
was chosen in order to allow interaction and to ease the process of disclosure for the
informants. The premise was that each of the young people would relate his or her own truth,
i.e. describe a picture of life as he or she has lived it.

Establishing contact with the teenagers was an arduous and extremely time-consuming
process of several steps. After an introductory, unsuccessful poster campaign, the procedural
method followed a funnel-shaped model: at first wide and open as meetings were held with
approximately 3,800 teenagers and 700 adults in conjunction with lectures and visits to
schools, recreation centres, sports associations and similar in a large number of communities.
I spoke with approximately 450 young people during the first years, most of them girls.
During the first four years when the project telephone line was open, I spoke with 178
teenagers more than twice each and met 59 of them personally. Fifteen of these became the
study's informants (ten girls and five boys). They were interviewed from six to ten times each
over four years. The interviews were conducted in the greatest possible secrecy and far-
reaching security measures were applied.
 65

The interviews progressed in steps from background information to the most private
and sensitive questions about the violence which had taken place in the home. The number of
interviews was determined case by case; the interviews were concluded when no or few new
aspects emerged. The processing of the texts led to the construction of six overweening
themes, each with a number of subcategories: daily life in the family, relationships, everyday
coping strategies, the processing of feelings, violence as a condition and self-image.

The informants and the families

Ten of the young people included in the study are girls and five are boys. All of them
were 15 or 16 years old when the interviews began and 18 or 19 at their conclusion. The
conditions under which they grew up include both similarities and wide dissimilarities. Barely
half of the young people grew up in a nuclear family with their biological parents. Ten of
them lived with their biological mothers up to their teen years. Sometimes the biological
father also lived with them, at times another man and not the same man every year. Three of
the teenagers have no siblings, two have one sibling each and ten have more than one sibling.
In the ten families with more than two children, seven of the informants are the eldest or
second eldest child in the family. Most of the informants are accustomed to regular
disruptions caused by separations and household moves. Only two of the teenagers spent all
of their primary school years within the same school district. According to the teenagers
themselves, only two of the families are affluent. Six families belong to a median category.
The financial circumstances of seven of the families are such that they often require public
assistance.

Large quantities of alcohol have been part of the equation in eleven of the fifteen
families. In seven of the families, only the man has abused alcohol/drugs. In four of the
families, the woman has also abused alcohol/drugs, but in no case was the woman the only
adult substance abuser in the family.

All of the informants witnessed violence in the family. Thirteen of them have also
been subjected to physical violence and are thus both witnesses and victims. In fourteen cases,
the primary perpetrator of violence in the family is the biological father. In half of the
families, another man associated with the family has also perpetrated violence. In eight cases
the biological father alone was the perpetrator. In four cases the father and stepfather or other
men perpetrated violence. In three families, the woman was also violent.

Five of the girls, but none of the boys, were victims of sexual assault. In eight of the
families, the mothers have been sexually assaulted; in two of these families, the girl was also
sexually assaulted. The girl and the boy who were not personally subjected to physical
violence are part of the group of four teenagers from families in which sexual assault has not
occurred to their knowledge.

The proximity of violence and intimate relationships

There are many areas of commonality within the teenagers' stories about daily family
life. These included their descriptions of what they believed to be normal family life while
they were growing up. For them, this was a family with a drunken and belligerent father who
battered the mother and sometimes the children as well. They describe a home environment
lacking in structure and fixed points of reference such as established mealtimes, bedtimes, etc.
Nearly all of the teenagers have often had to change their living environments. In those cases
 66

where the biological father was no longer a part of the family, other males have been
associated with the family for shorter or longer periods.

The family rules were dictated by the father and were difficult to abide by as many of
them were unexpressed and often changed at random. The environment was experienced as
wholly unpredictable. For example, they never knew when or why a violent situation would
arise. A constant state of preparedness prevailed within the family prior to the violent incident
and nearly total silence reigned afterward. The family members adjusted their behaviour
according to the man's rules in order to avoid further violence, if possible.

The teenagers experienced violence in highly divergent ways. Most of them consider
the psychological violence to be the absolute worst. The combination of psychological and
physical violence is the most difficult, particularly for the five girls who have been victims of
sexual assault by their fathers and/or their mothers' cohabitants. The boys have been spared
sexual assault but were often forced to listen as their fathers raped their mothers without being
able to intervene in her defence.

When the teenagers describe their own feelings and their relationships to their parents,
they relate both positive and negative judgments, more positive towards their mothers than
their fathers. All of the girls use the expressions care for or love to describe their feelings
towards their mothers. "Mom has let me down, but she is my mother and she has protected
me, I love her," say most of the girls. The girls say that their relationships with their fathers
shut down when he was violent. When not violent, he was a normal dad with both good and
bad sides. None of the boys use the expressions care for or love about their fathers. They all
speak negatively of their fathers, though a couple of them report feeling a certain sympathy.
All of the boys except for one express positive feelings for their mothers.

All of the young people are very negative towards the authority figures (social
workers, school psychologists, counsellors, child psychologists, etc.) with whom they have
come into contact. Their prejudice against professionals they deem inadequate is unmitigated.
The youths are most negative towards public officials from the social services department
("pimples on the ass" who "deserve to have a price on their heads"), followed by personnel
from Children's and Youth Psychiatric Services. The police are accorded predominantly
positive judgments. Most of the teenagers feel that one should not confide in teachers and
some of them have negative experiences of having done so.

For many of the girls, their relationships with boyfriends are so important that their
self-esteem is jeopardised. Half of them have been subjected to physical violence by their
boyfriends, in several cases the violence was life-threatening. The boys also talk about "a
good relationship." The boys say that they don't want their relationships to their girlfriends to
be as stormy as those of their parents, nor for the relationships to include as much drinking.
This notwithstanding, the boys have on occasion been drunk and have hit their girlfriends.

Coping with events and emotions

The young people cope with these violent events by using different strategies at
different ages. When they were younger, passive strategies were frequently necessary as the
children were too weak to act and intervene in violent events. The older youths have had
access to a wider range of coping strategies and possible actions. They have been able to act
either by keeping away from home or by staying home to monitor events. They have also
 67

been able to choose to run away from the entire situation. Making their choices in each
situation has brought about great inner turmoil.

When the teenagers made no concrete intervention into a violent situation, they were
still able to cope with their situations, though in a less conspicuous manner. For example, they
chose to keep their thoughts to themselves rather than to talk about what was going on. They
tried to forgive their fathers for their violent actions or to keep their feelings in check by
refusing to reveal them. All of these teenagers try to create their own realities through poetry,
song, music, dance, theatre, painting or sculpture. Remaining silent, keeping a tight rein over
their emotions and the situation while simultaneously seeking out alternative forms of
expression from their locked positions were action strategies employed by all of them.
Denying reality by fantasising about it, dreaming up a new reality or lying about the situation
were strategies used rather frequently by most of the teenagers. However, directly harmful
strategies such as intoxicating themselves with alcohol and drugs or attempting suicide have
also been practised.

The youths express a broad register of emotions. Fear is common to all. All are and
have been afraid of their fathers, not always because of what they might do to them
personally, but rather for what they might do to their mothers and siblings. All of the young
people say that they are burdened with feelings of shame, guilt, betrayal and distrust. All of
them express deep and intense feelings of loneliness and of being left out. Nearly all of them
have been victims of bullying.

Feelings of powerlessness, anxiety, worry, responsibility and fatigue become more

apparent when the youths place themselves in relation to the violence. The girls usually feel
more threatened than do the boys. All of the young people say that they have not been able to
rely upon any other human being and that they did not feel they had any influence over the
violence in their homes, which intensified their feelings of vulnerability.

Most of the teenagers hate their fathers. This hatred is often associated with a wish for,
and plans for, revenge. Two thirds of the teenagers (ten individuals) have upon occasion
nourished a wish that their fathers would die or have felt that they wanted to kill their fathers.

Longing, wishes, hope and love are usually directed away from the time and place in
which the youths find themselves and towards another time, anywhere else but here.

I was shaped by the violence in my home

An assertion common to all of the young people's narratives is that physical violence
hurts but psychological violence is worse. They are agreed on that violence should not be part
of a relationship but equally agreed on that it is difficult to avoid.

According to the teenagers, the causes of violence are to be found in alcohol and
drugs. In addition, there is something "sick" about their fathers, there is something wrong with
them mentally. The young people, who themselves were often beaten but never understood
why, believe that their fathers' violent behaviour may be ingrained in their personalities, that
they may be burdened by their own difficult childhood experiences. The memories insist upon
admittance; what happened cannot be explained and excused, it has left its mark, they say.
"Perhaps the meaning of it all is that we are supposed to learn from the hard things, but my
father's violence has made me think badly of myself and be suspicious of other people. The
violence and the fear has made me provoke violence," say some of the girls.
 68

All but one girl are convinced that their fathers are capable of killing them and the rest
of the family. All have experienced threats as concrete and practicable. Thirteen of the fifteen
youths believe that they are alive today because their mothers were able to protect them from
the violence of their fathers/other men. Eleven of the fifteen state that they will not be able to
feel good as long as their fathers are alive.

A good relationship with a partner is a means of acquiring security and is something

the girls strive for but have not achieved. Several of them have been physically abused and
have lost their self-esteem in their relationships with boyfriends. All five boys have on some
occasion perpetrated violence upon their girlfriends, but resist seeing themselves as batterers.

Growing up in the proximity of violence

The abuse of alcohol has had a negative effect on familial interaction. Violence is also
more brutal in those families where the man is gravely addicted and in families where both
adults are substance abusers.

The fathers have dictated over the families by isolating them. They have shown
contempt and derision, have humiliated their families, withdrawn evidence of love and
perpetrated violence upon them to the point of torture. The children have not been given the
opportunity to react. Silence has been demanded from the other family members. The
teenagers in this study have been strongly affected by having been taught as children to keep
silent. Their fathers' control and exercise of power has been so strong that in the end, they did
not necessarily have to perpetrate physical violence to enforce their wills. For the young
people, particularly the girls, psychological violence was often enough. A constantly present
threat has made the young people vigilant and suspicious. The total dominance by their
fathers has taken from these young people the possibility of forming good and trustful
relationships. They have been unable to make peer contact and develop peer relationships,
which has had a negative impact on the development of their social skills.

The conditions under which they grew up have given this study's informants frames of
reference that differ from those of their peers. The distrust of the world around them created
by their childhood has functioned as a protective device to shield them from further harm and
betrayal. The girls in particular have become masters at "reading people and situations." The
teenagers occupy a place apart among their peers, they are regarded as deviant and are teased,
beaten and bullied. The pattern has recurred even when they have moved and changed
schools. It is clear that these children are doubly victimised. The violence perpetrated by the
father in the home is mirrored at school. The teenagers do not seem to have strategies for
coping with this further victimisation. The "inherited vulnerability" has left them with fewer
resources for avoiding violence and victimisation in situations outside of the home.

A change occurs during the course of the study. The teenagers perception of the
violence that occurred during their childhood has clearly changed; today, the teenagers have a
different concept of what it means to live a "normal life."

The boys do not want to become like their fathers and the girls are determined not to
accept situations like those of their mothers. Despite these statements, the boys have on
occasion hit their girlfriends and believed that the girls deserved to be hit and the girls have
remained with their boyfriends even after having been humiliated and abused by them. This
indicates that the reproduction of violence has functioned largely according to the theory of
 69

transmission. The boys explain their use of violence by saying that the girls goaded them into
it, which excepts them from responsibility. The girls who have been battered by their
boyfriends most often find an explanation that relieves their boyfriends from guilt in their
eyes, such as alcohol or drugs. The girls blame themselves.

A socially inherited tendency towards violence could be intimated with regard to the
boys while the girls are found once again in the position of victim. The teenagers do not want
to assume the patterns of their parents, yet their social heritage still seems to catch up with
them. It is difficult for them to shake off and be rid of the childhood experiences which have
been carved into them. They cannot identify the core, they do not know why the violence has
occurred, therefore, they also do not know what they should be running from or casting away.

If there is no support to be found in their surroundings, whether at home, school or

within the community, the support must be created within the teenager himself or herself and
this is precisely what has occurred. The teenagers have made changes within the given frames
of reference, they have developed "help towards self-help." They have been able to bypass the
demand for silence without betraying the family. They have shaped their thoughts into words
through poems, diaries, fables, short stories, plays, lyrics and all else they could devise. They
no longer allow the culture of silence to dominate them fully. They have spoken out through
the written word, the directed word from a stage or through music.

Surviving the proximity of violence

It takes both strength and courage to survive difficult childhood conditions as these
informants are doing. The teenagers strive to make the invalid valid by writing about it,
studying facts about violence and substance abuse and attempting to retain their reason. "He
cannot get into my mind. He can't control my thoughts!" They try to make the invisible visible
by running away, going to the police and asking for help, starving themselves or bingeing,
attempting suicide and, by various means, attracting attention that will lead to change. "I
thought about doing the usual, running away from home and being searched for by the police
and all that…but I just couldn't handle it one more time. I could go to the police myself, after
all." They try to make the evil disappear; they pray, they forgive and they attempt to create a
state of peace and quiet in the home through denial. "I start drinking. Right away."
Nevertheless, the teenagers may despite these attempts lose their fight for the right to talk
about their lives and thus interpret their own reality. Once the fight seems decided so that
preferential rights to interpretation seem always to fall to the father, the teenagers are prepared
to give up. "I thought I had nothing left then ... so I picked up the razor blade and cut."

The picture communicated by the teenagers is that the violence is sporadic,

incalculable, constant and frightening. Sexual assault and events when the mother and siblings
have hovered in mortal danger are described as the worst that could happen; the psychological
violence is experienced most strongly in such situations. There have been witnesses to the
event, but seldom has anyone intervened. Silence has prevailed after a violent episode. The
events were significant because they have meant that the teenagers have had life experiences
vastly different from those of their peers.

In the home, the outer conditions are characterised by the proximity of sexualised
violence. The man's dominance and violent actions create a threatening atmosphere, and his
demands for silence in solidarity are driven forward using dictatorial techniques. The family
members live under constant oppression and the woman is kept in place in accordance with
the relatively covert subordination. The definition with which I introduced the study, that the
 70

proximity of violence in the home consists of wife battering, no longer applies when
presenting the experiences of youth. In thirteen of the fifteen families, the mother is not the
only one abused. Almost all family members are victims of violence by a male perpetrator
and several girls and mothers are subjected to sexual assault. The informants in this study are
not only witnesses, close enough to observe the violence; they are also physically subjected to
violence. The teenagers are thus much closer to the violence than "in the proximity," which is
what the proximity of violence originally stood for. The teenagers in this study cannot only
observe what is happening; they are pulled into what is occurring to the fullest extent.
Violence surrounds them. Everyday life for these teenage children is characterised to the
greatest possible extent by the presence of violence.

The symptoms and effects visited upon the children by violence are usually not
connected to the sexualised violence practised in the home. The taboo against speaking out
and gaining acknowledgment of one's own experiences impedes confirmation of the
teenager's inner and outer reality. The silence and consignment to invisibility leads to
isolation and a thorough and total feeling of being powerless and alone. The inner
experiences lead to individual attempts to overcome both the problems and the feelings. The
children's attempts to overcome their living conditions make it clear that the problem-focused
strategies are seldom possible; all that then remains are the emotion-focused strategies in
order to overcome the feeling. Having no real opportunities for action, the children perceive
themselves to be powerless and these circumstances seem also to lead to an inner
vulnerability that aches without cease. In order to avoid the pain of the open wound, the
children find strategies to conceal their lack of a skin. The children create a protective
carapace through strategies that seem to ease the pain.

The significance of the negative effect of violence upon the teenagers' well-being is
reinforced when they are in arenas outside the home, at school and in the community in a
wider sense. The presence of violence is the actual reality that is reflected in their souls and
constitutes the frame of reference for possible thoughts and actions. When the children are not
in the home, the demand to keep secrets rests constantly upon them. Of necessity, this leads
them to keep a distance between themselves and the people they encounter outside the home.
The children perceive themselves as being more mature and are perceived as different by their
peers. In school, this difference may be perceived as a threat to the other children and it is
possible that this is the root of the bullying these children endure. The fact that the child is
subjected to insult by his or her peers and is neglected by the adults at the school reinforces
feelings of alienation and contributes to his or her feelings of being unwanted and worthless.
The inner experience tells them that they do not count. The inner feeling of distrust of the
adult world that is created in the home is reinforced and becomes a double victimisation, due
to their being let down by the adults at school as well. The fact that the adults at school
discount the events is perceived more as a confirmation of the child's meaninglessness than as
a betrayal.

With the passage of time, a situation arises that may differ according to the individual
and lead to a variety of strategies and solutions. At times, the child may become exhausted
due to the energy expended in maintaining the balance between the actual outer world and the
invisible inner world.

In some cases, this leads the child to compromise with his or her inner world and go
outside the family to seek help. The outer conditions in the societal arena then emerge in
perfect clarity. The professional actors collaborate to make the problem invisible, to keep the
crimes hidden and to allow the child to be forgotten. The actions of adults mean that society's
 71

planned helping measures remain unusable. When the children encounter this complete
betrayal from the adult world, hopelessness settles in and the perception of being totally
abandoned invades the child.

The escape routes that seem possible to the child are either to wait for the day that
papa no longer lives, since life cannot begin until papa is dead, or to give up his or her place
in life. The child's strategies to overcome become either to quite simply try to bear the
situation or to attempt to end his or her life with suicidal actions. The outer conditions limit
opportunities to handle the inner reality in another way. The presence of violence is a matter
of life and death.

That which could also happen is that life takes a different turn with support found in
various protecting factors within and surrounding the child. The silenced child may find
strategies that allow his or her interior to be heard and seen. Through creating text, pictures,
music and movements, the child processes the traumas of childhood. If the outside world
confirms these creations, the child in turn is confirmed and his or her inner world is
acknowledged.

If the child who breaks the taboo of silence encounters insightful listeners, the spiral of
validation can begin. If the child who seeks support from another individual finds a true friend
or partner, the loneliness lessens. If the child who seeks help encounters adults and
professionals who dare to let go of the fear and see the child's reality, the child is granted
worth in himself or herself and in the world. His or her powers of resistance can be mobilised,
inner strength confirmed and the path towards a positive self image opens.

The teenagers become survivors who, despite their feelings of shame, guilt, betrayal
and sadness, can overcome their situations using their own resources of creative powers,
strength and self-worth. An intractable will can keep the spark of life burning within these
teenagers. In the presence of violence, life becomes question not of living, but of surviving.

The teenagers also call themselves "survivors." Developing the courage to say no and
to set boundaries based upon their own convictions are examples of powers of survival.
Another is to use one's imagination and dreams to set a goal to live up to and to hold fast to
the belief that the goal will be realised. To alleviate the pain by forgiving or by giving up
one's plans to change anyone other than oneself, to put one's energies into creative forms of
expression instead of dwelling on the situation and becoming bitter are further expressions of
the capacity to survive.

The fact that the teenagers are survivors should mean that they have developed the
qualities necessary for resilient function. The fantasies and hopes, and even the search for
explanation and understanding, are there. That which is missing, however, are other
significant positive relationships outside the family, the access to sources other than those
parents have been able to offer, such as a secret ally. One aspect that differentiates survivors
from other victims of violence within the family is an adult contact with good intentions. In
my study, such a contact can be said to have been available to only two of the teenagers and
then to a limited extent.

Another distinguishing characteristic of survivors is their greater assumption of

responsibility for younger siblings and household pets. This assumption of responsibility can
absolutely be said to apply to these fifteen teenagers. All demonstrate awareness of
responsibility and a caring rationality. Has the teenagers' capacity to recover blossomed by
 72

virtue of strong feelings of responsibility and caring for others? Could it be that taking
responsibility for mother and siblings gives the teenagers a sense of being needed, of being
meaningful? To be needed can be a reason to exist, to keep on living. It may even be the
satisfaction of being needed and getting a positive response, being allowed to experience a
good and positive relationship. It may also be that the teenagers, through taking responsibility
for others, keep "the evil" at bay. They can become wholly caught up in caring for others and
thus temporarily avoid seeing their own situations. They feel responsible for the survival of
others and, consequently, survive themselves.
 73

Teenage boys as violent actors in today's Romanian Communities

Ms Anca DUMITRESCU and Ms Elena PENTELEICIUC, Romania
International Children's Day, traditionally celebrated in Romania by formal declarations
from the state authorities, also has hidden connotations; connotations which are not all rosy
for the politicians, and not at all comfortable for those responsible for the health and future of
the children of Romania. These bleak issues were revealed by a non-governmental
organisation which promoted an incisive campaign to let civil society know about the drama
of children in Romania. The "Save the Children" organisation (SCO) troubled, for a few
days, the ignorance of most of us. SCO launched, in 1999, a really national campaign for
uncovering infringements of children's rights, so that their voices should be heard and
respected in Romania.

The President of "Save the Children", Mr Gh Mazalu, presented the 1998 activity report
to civil society dealing with an event which was likely to pass quite unnoticed in Romania:
"1999 has a special meaning to us - the celebration of a decade since the adoption of the
Convention of Children's Rights by the General Assembly of the United Nations, a document
that has the value of a universal law". Indeed, on 20 November 1989, the UN proposed the
entire world this kind of convention. Romania was among the first countries in the world to
sign it, on 28 September 1990. Then, over 190 countries of the world became potential
beneficiaries of this Convention's promises.

The 1998-1999 SCO report reveals "the social pictures" that outline the image of the
Romanian child in the post-communist society, in the eyes of international organisations.
"The situation of children and families with children in Romania has suffered a process of
erosion. Against the background of the growth in the poverty rate, children represent an
extremely vulnerable social category. The number of abandoned children has risen, many
families cannot afford to send their children to school; tuberculosis, anaemia and hepatitis
affect children more and more frequently and juvenile delinquency is on the increase".

According to this report by the newspaper "Adevarul Economic" from June 1999, ten
percent of today's delinquents in our country are children and teenagers. A worrying aspect,
indeed, with causes deeply rooted in the family context and the socio-economic factors of the
transition underway. In this respect, we consider it relevant to point out the fact that among
the basic models of family education (Becker, W. C, 1964), the following models can bring
about deviated, violent reactions in children's behaviour, especially when they undergo the
teenage changes at the levels of physical, emotional and inter-human relations.

THE MODEL OF LIBERAL EDUCATION

The parents advocating this educative model stimulate their child's autonomy, and
independence, assuring the possibility of his/her self-achievement, without moulding the child
in the spirit of following educational requirements. Such a child becomes self-centered,
willing to be a leader; but his self-control is rather weak and he longs for success and
popularity at all cost, possibly breaking rules of behaviour.
 74

THE MODEL OF AUTHORITATIVE EDUCATION

This educational type is autocratic. In most cases, the parents frighten their children
rather than motivate them. Such a manner of motivation cannot be accepted, because in this
behaviour the values are not built up as a synthesis of the cognitive-affective motivational
dimensions, but on the contrary, by excluding them. Therefore, teenagers who have been
brought up with this educational background become aggressive.

THE MODEL OF EDUCATION LACKING HARMONY

This is a style of cold, closed education, lacking many motivational dimensions. These
parents are, in fact, deviated personalities, with a low emotional, intellectual and moral level.
They are neurotic, brutalising the child, humiliating him/her, without stimulating personality
development. Thus, the child or teenager living in such families becomes neurotic, ego-
centered, aggressive. Instead of self-control, only pathological forms of hatred occur, often
degenerating into violence.

The increasing number of teenage boys involved in violent acts, some of which are
made known by the mass media, originate from such educational backgrounds or from broken
families. Many are parentless. The SCO report has mentioned that there are approximately
2000 homeless children (61% in Bucharest, 17% in Constanta and the rest spread in other
towns).

Poverty, mental depression, the lack of basic living resources and social protection push
the young boys to committing offences. They can act individually or in groups. They can be
the initiators of violent acts, or the tool manipulated by adult evil-doers.

According to the surveys of the General Police Inspectorate and the Institute for
Criminal Investigations and Prevention, in the last few years there has been an increasing
incidence of robbery and violent assaults on elderly people, especially single women in towns
and villages. The Penal Code specifies the educative measures taken against these under-age
criminals:

· Reprimand;
· Watched liberty;
· Confinement in re-education centres;
· Confinement in a medical-educative institute.

Now we would like to make some references to the Special School of Re-Education
with Detention in Gaiesti (Arges County). It was established by the Ministry of Domestic
Affairs for correcting the behaviour of the young boys committing various types of offences,
ranging from food theft to rape and other violent assaults.

This is a close-circuit school, where together with the 14-18 year old teenagers who
represent the majority of pupils, there are also younger boys of 8-14 who have run away from
their poor, broken families, children's homes or protective NGOs, who have lived in the
streets stealing, becoming more and more aggressive until being caught red-handed. Within
this re-educative centre, the boys can have a very modest life style, due to the lack of funds,
and some school training too, in groups of 15 pupils helped by a pedagogue, who
accompanies them also in the few outside activities. It is the pedagogue's task to write regular
reports about each boy's behavioural improvement. The psycho-therapy and correction results
 75

are rather poor in this school which has low financial means, too few educators and the bad
influence of teenage boys on the smaller boys they live with.

We also have to point out the fact that this year, the first research project on "Distance
Education for the Young People in Romanian Penitentiaries" has been appreciated in Caracas
Competition on high risk areas worldwide. This complex project has initially been focused
on 2 lots of 50 convicts: the first being made up of 50 young men from Rahova Prison
(Bucharest); the second involves 50 young women from the 100 year-old prison for women in
Targsor (Ploiesti), which has been partially modernised lately.

These convicts' instructions include 3 modules (vocational training, civic education,

sanitary education), lasting 3 months. The certificate of achievement given at the end can
help the prisoners find a new job, when leaving detention.
 76

APPENDIX

Five times more juvenile delinquents in 1998 compared to 1990

Statistics produced by the psychologists of the Institute of Forensic Medicine say that
we have five times more juvenile delinquents in 1998 than in 1990. The following numbers,
dry and cold, are meant to help us understand better what makes children become criminals.

Sixty-eight percent of juvenile delinquents are 14-16 years old, the period estimated as
the most critical in the socialisation process. Sixty-four percent do not go to school, either
because they have dropped out, or because they didn't want to continue after they graduated
four or eight grades. The overwhelming majority of the delinquents have lost one or both
parents, or come from broken homes. To this, adjustment problems are added, because most
of the criminals in Bucarest came here when they were teenagers, from villages and
communes close to the city (11%) or from other parts of the country (54%). Equally the
families they come from have a low education level (5.5% of the fathers and 9.9% of the
mothers have never attended school, and 50.5% of the fathers and 64% of the mothers have
fourth to eighth grade education. In 75% of cases, the parents are workers. In any case, 75%
of the fathers and 68% of the mothers consume alcohol frequently. The result is easy to
foresee, more than half of the minors who commit crimes have been beaten by one of their
parents.

In their turn, living conditions are far from ideal. More than half of the juvenile
delinquents have lived in an apartment block, occupied by over 1.5 persons per room. The
incomes are, in 60% of cases, under $50 per family member, and 8% have no income at all.
The interesting thing is that 10% of the minors who commit crimes come from families with
above-average incomes, based on the principle that "abundance of things engenders
disdainfulness". And, because crimes can only be committed in one's own time, it is
important to mention that over 70% of the minors are not supervised at all or are only
supervised for between three and six hours a day.

One of the prejudices that makes the law in this field is that most criminals are gypsies.
This could be easy to prove, just by watching a rehabilitation school. But things are totally
different: of those studied by the Forensic Medicine Institute (IML), almost 70% were
Romanian. Fifteen percent stated they were Romanianised gypsies, and only 14% were
Romany. As far as their "ways" are concerned, 5% regularly use drugs, 35% drink alcohol
frequently and over 80% are smokers. Their crimes, although thefts for the most part, include
violent aspects too: in groups of 3-4 persons (an organisation known as the "street corner
society", the minors have committed murder, attempted murder or bodily injury (3.5% of the
total number of crimes), rape, attempted rape and robbery (10.8% of the total). Of the total
number of juvenile delinquents, 81% have a low level of intelligence, a very low level of
intelligence, or minimal intellect. Specialised studies also reveal other important
psychological dimensions: acute lack of tenderness, need for revenge, intolerance, tendency to
lie, fear of punishment, the desire to put up a show, feelings of abandonment, renunciation or
loneliness. To these are to be added acute depression, frustrations caused by poverty, the fear
of parents, etc.
 77

Socio-economic roots for cases of male violence

against women in Russia
Vera GRACHEVA, Russian Federation

It is an honour and a privilege for me to be invited to this Council of Europe seminar

and to present an intervention on this burning issue of male violence.

I am not a newcomer to such fora, having been a participant of several conferences

and workshops organised by the Council of Europe and other international organisations.
Being abroad, nearly every time I have felt a kind of disappointment due to the tremendous
gap between the level of advanced measures proposed to combat violence (for instance, a
wider usage of internet facilities for the education of women in the sphere of equality) and an
almost zero option for women in Russia to use such measures.

Not taking into consideration the high level of Russian experts, the complete
ignorance regarding gender issues - both terminology and philosophy - is spread not only in
far-flung areas but also in the capital of Russia.

My guess was that the participants of those fora might have certain illusions
concerning the scale of problems we are facing in Russia. In my country, we do appreciate
the sincere desire of the Council of Europe to co-operate with the state bodies and non-
governmental institutions, to achieve better understanding, to help us to reach European
standards in dealing with this acute problem. But if we want to achieve results, we have to
speak a common language. My intervention stressing the cohesion between the socio-
economic situation and the high level of hostility and male aggressiveness might help our co-
operation to proceed in the right direction.

First of all, violence is determined by our experts as a deep-rooted social phenomenon

which is reflected in different forms: physical, sexual, psychological, economic; in the form
of cruel behaviour towards children; in the form of forcing women and girls to use alcohol,
drugs, to earn money by prostitution and other criminal activities. This social phenomenon
occurs in every fourth Russian family.

On the other hand, violence itself as a criminal act is provoked by society and living
conditions.

Criminal statistics in Russia show negative social turbulence starting from the
beginning of the 20th century. This becomes more than vivid in the 90s. It would not be a
mistake to say that perestroika and the economic reform of our society opened a Pandora's
box of social conflict.

The stagnating Russian society still desperately needs to be reformed. But the method
chosen proved to be absolutely destructive. From the very beginning, the process was
dominated by criminal and shadow-economy interest and lacked the legal protection of new
co-operative forms of economic development. The State suddenly gave up governing the
economy and industry, rejected the state monopoly on foreign trade and on production of
alcohol and appeared helpless in front of criminal privatisation.
 78

The results were dramatic. In 1992, the number of people whose income had fallen
lower than the estimated living minimum reached 50 million (more than one third of the
population). For 80% of the population, income was cut to 25-40%. The gap between the
incomes of the poorest 10% and the richest 10% increased from 11 to 50 times in 1997.
Seventeen percent of the active population became jobless (12% registered, plus 5% in certain
hidden forms). At the same time, social welfare payments for the jobless became so small
that they lost their meaning for the victims of the crisis.

Since 1992, the level of consumer activity has dropped to the level of the late 60s.
Thirty to forty percent of the population found themselves below the verge of poverty. It is
hard to believe, but the minimum salary became equal to only 15% of the estimated "survival
minimum". More than 14 million Russians had a salary which could not provide their own
living, to say nothing of that of their family members.

The side effect of speedy economic reform led to an absolute and relative poverty for
millions of people, sharp differentiation of the population in terms of incomes, deepening
social conflict, criminalisation of society, growth of "drunken crimes", etc. Loss of jobs, part-
time occupation and irregularity in payment of salaries resulted in the creation of a strongly
hostile social climate.

A small but vivid example of deep psychological stress: the number of murders
committed in a state of affect increased by 10 times within 3 years. The total number of
criminal acts doubled. Needless to say, after a short and relatively stable period, the well-
known crisis of 1998 again left 40 million people below the level of survival. The average
income became two times lower than in the 80s. More than one million employees lost their
jobs. Four million became part-time employed. Psychologists know well enough that a
jobless person, if he or she does not regain occupation and continues to stay in that forced
situation, is endangered by a process of mental and psychiatric degradation - even if his or her
financial resources permit a satisfactory standard of living.

Society was facing the direct aftermath of the crisis: the considerable increase of
alcohol addiction, violence in different forms, depression, negligence, frustration. Alcohol
addiction became widely spread among women who felt that they were victims of
"feminisation of poverty" (among those who lost jobs due to the crisis, women "gained" 80%,
leaving 20% to men). A lot of them shared the fate of male marginals - homeless, jobless,
begging money in the streets and subways.

Some experts qualified the moral situation in society as a pandemia of spiritual

intoxication which resulted in a distorted attitude towards women, the growth of cynicism in
interrelations between sexes, orientation towards violence as a means of conflict resolution.

Alcohol addiction can be estimated as one of the most harmful social problems
stimulating crimes of different kinds. We have figures saying that the criminal activity of
drunkards is 100 times higher than of those who do not use alcoholic drinks regularly.
Storming uncontrolled growth of alcohol production resulted in increasing numbers of women
being killed by their male relatives in the course of domestic quarrels and conflicts. Such
murders keep the leading position on the list of grave non-sexual violent acts against the life
and health of women (20% of all killings). All are committed by husbands or intimate
"friends" under the influence of alcohol. Fifty-eight percent of victims were drunk
themselves. Eighty percent of all those who were killed by men drank alcohol just before the
tragedy occurred. In each second case, the conflict regarding drinks appeared to be the only
 79

motive for the murder. Seventy-five percent of rapes were also committed by men in a state
of alcoholic intoxication.

The burden of the problem of families of drunkards is so hard that it causes another
type of crime - killings of "home debauchers" by their relatives (the proportion is the
following: every fourth killer gets killed himself by sons or brothers of the victim. Sometimes
women commit such crimes, seeing no alternative).

Such a situation is an example of criminal self-regulation of a social body, a society

itself, when criminal behaviour within a small social group of the population is stopped by
another criminal act.

Another type of violence against women, the increasing number of rape cases (50,000
per year), also has its roots in the escalation of social conflict. Seventy-seven percent of rapes
are committed by men having no definite source of income (jobless, migrant, etc). Many of
them have psychiatric problems or different sexual disorders.

It is impossible to give exact numbers of cases of rape or other acts of violence against
women due to the reluctance of victims to start any legal proceedings. For instance, in
St Petersburg, out of 785 women who asked for assistance from the city's Centre for victims
of sexual violence, only 37 registered their cases with the police (the picture is the same
regarding cases of slight body injuries - the number of cases reported to the police does not
reflect the reality, being 13-16 times less than the actual number).

Speaking about the social roots of violence in Russia, we have to take into account the
tragic aftermath of Afghanistan and Chechnya - not only as a side-effect of violence in its
extreme form leaving its trace in minds and souls of all the combatants. An outstanding
hypothesis was suggested by Russian psychiatrists and biologists. It demonstrated changes
which occur on a molecular and genetic code level if a combatant or a civilian has been
wounded or received a sudden trauma in the course of armed clashes. These changes, as they
claim, cause addiction to violence which is seen in the behaviour of children in the families of
former soldiers and officers. The research of Russian scientists was founded on a huge
database which had been initiated by unusually numerous requests from parents (former
wounded combatants and civilians) complaining about the aggressive behaviour of their
children. The results of this research, if proved by further investigation, may explain the
nature of male violence over many generations.

Domestic violence creates a vicious circle leaving its evil impact on teenagers and
minors - actually future husbands and parents themselves. Domestic violence reproduces
itself in geometric progression, kicking children out of family life into the street or state
institutions which cannot provide them with decent care and attention. 160,000 children are
being brought up in such institutions - orphanages, children's homes, etc. Ninety percent of
them do have parents who either ignore their parental obligations or are deprived of their
rights by court decisions (or kept under arrest). Still, the number of cruel acts towards
children is increasing. Seventy percent of all children's traumas are caused in the family.
Violence against children occurs in every fourth family.

Every year, 30,000 minors and teenagers seek refuge in the street from cruelty in their
families, 6,000 run away from state institutions and 2,000 commit suicide. 27,000 become
victims of various criminal acts, including sexual ones. From childhood, they get involved in
 80

alcohol addiction, drugs, robbery, begging, prostitution (12-15% of prostitutes are under 16
years of age). There can be no illusions regarding their future style of family relations.

There should be no doubt: our intention to give a true picture of the socio-economic
situation and roots of violence has nothing in common with feelings of sorrow for the former
regime and the former economic system. But we have to admit that the speedy reform of
society in Russia has destroyed social guarantees which permitted those with the lowest
incomes, the elderly and disabled, orphans and women to survive. These guarantees have not
been replaced by other effective measures.

A short analysis of the situation having its direct impact and actually causing domestic
violence just demonstrates the scale of the problems we have to solve, including legal
protection, restructuring of the budget that has to be socially oriented, creating a net of crisis
centres for women and children, combining the efforts of physicians, teachers, lawyers,
psychologists, social workers, economists and many others dealing every day with the
problem of male violence.

It is absolutely clear that, even taking into account the European experience of
combating domestic violence, we will not achieve much until we combat socio-economic
roots of hostility and aggressiveness in our own society, until we make the personal interests
of each member of our society a priority for the state and authorities of every level, until we
find a golden connection between human rights - a philosophy and practice - and socio-
economic reform of our country.
 81

The contribution of the military and military discourse to the

construction of masculinity in society
Uta KLEIN, University of Münster, Germany

The violent development in former Yugoslavia revealed gender-related aspects of

nationalism, of conflict and of war. Whereas women usually remain invisible in situations of
armed conflict and military policy-making, recent years have proved that thorough analysis
has to go beyond the "old" formula, that war is "men's business". Serious facts are troubling
those who are interested in peaceful societies: sexual attacks and mass rapes of women and
girls in wartime; control of women's sexuality and reproduction; wartime prostitution; the
increase of domestic violence in wartime; the uncontrolled influx of weapons in society; the
impact of combat experience on men; the loss of family members; the cultural acceptance of
violence in society and the dominance of military discourse.

In the following, I'm going to deal with militarisation of a society as a gendered

process. The example of Israel shows how in a region of conflict (ethnic or/and political
conflict):

· A gender dichotomy develops which sees defence and fight as the national duty of
men, and reproduction (in a biological as well as in a cultural way) as the national duty
of women

· Military socialisation can be understood as a rite of passage to male adulthood

· The dominance of military discourse leads to gender inequality in society at large

Israel serves as an interesting case study because military service is compulsory for
Jewish men and women. Nevertheless - as we will see later on - this national duty is highly
gendered. The military turns out to be the main agent of society in shaping gender roles,
constructing masculinity as a military masculinity, and thus serving as the main source of
gender inequality in society. In spite of the participation of women in the military, Israel
shows that ideologies of manhood and the dominant position of the military in society are
deeply interconnected.

Men as fighters, women as reproducers

The ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia is the most recent, cruel reminder of the
importance of investigating the construction of masculinity through nationalism and of
unveiling nationalist politics as a major venue for accomplishing masculinity.

Nationalism, according to Benedict Anderson, is a set of cultural constructions. Its

goal, nation-building, involves imagining a national past or present (Anderson, 1991),
inventing traditions (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983) and symbolically constructing a
community (Gellner, 1983). Nationalism favours a homosocial form of male bonding. George
Mosse described modern masculinity as a centrepiece of all varieties of nationalist
movements (1997). The representation of the homeland as a female body has often been used.
The "geobody of the nation" is a gendered entity.
 82

Gender roles and images are interwoven in national or ethnic conflicts. Narratives
define the national duties of men and women in a dichotomous way.17

This process can be observed clearly in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Central to the
Zionist movement, as a latecomer among the European nationalist movements during the last
century, was the notion of masculinity. In the highly negative image of Exile, the Jew of the
Diaspora was perceived as passive, fearful, weak and feminine or better effeminate. The
Zionist ideal of manliness served as an antithesis. Physical strength and readiness to defend
his honour by fighting were the desired characteristics of the "new Jew", a man of action
rather than a man of words (ill.1).18

The Zionist movement imagined the "return" of the Jews to their "motherland" as the
return to the bride Zion. Sometimes the land was depicted as the lover to be conquered and
fertilised; at other times it became the mother giving birth to a new "masculine" people.

In any case, imaging Zion or Palestine as female or vice versa turned its defenders into
real men (see also Katz, 1996). The Palestinian Arabs regarded the Zionist invasion of
Palestine as a rape of the land, as is often done in a colonialist struggle.19

In various nationalist discourses women are constructed as "bearers of the collective"

(Yuval-Davis, 1997), they are perceived as representatives of the collectivity. This usually
means they are not only attributed responsibility for the biological reproduction and transition
of culture, but also represent the honour of the nation and mark its boundaries (see Yuval-
Davis and Anthias, 1989).

To some extent, the Israeli-Palestinian political struggle has taken place in women's
bodies: Nira Yuval-Davis talks about a "demographic race" between the Jewish and the
Palestinian population in Israel (1989). This is often the case in societies in which national
conflict exists between two national groups competing for the same territory. In Israeli society
security and reproduction are viewed as being the two major necessities for the survival of the
Israeli state. Motherhood is emphasised as the national duty or task. The Jewish Israeli birth-
rate is discussed widely in the media and those parts of the country which have Palestinian
Israeli majority are still a cause for concern for politicians.

For the Palestinian population in the occupied territories after 1967, a high birth rate
became a political weapon against the occupation. If you go through the statistics, you will
see that the fertility rate in West Bank and Gaza increased steadily from the beginning of the
Intifada (1988) until 1992. It grew from 6.84 as the average number to 7.37 after it had
declined during the beginning of the eighties until 1987 (Courbage, 1997).

Bodies and sexualities are of crucial importance as territories and markers of the
narratives of nations. In a culturalised discourse, gender is embedded in cultural constructions
of social identities and also in most cultural conflicts. Cultural differences are used to

17
When I talk about narratives I do not intend to speak only about a 'textual' concern. Narratives are
spoken or written but they are - and this is important in our context - acted out as well.
18
Around the turn of the century, we recognise a resurgent preoccupation with masculine ideals of
physique and behaviour. Examples for the institutionalisation into organisations are the men's lodges
and fraternal organisations (boy scouts of America, founded in 1910) or the Olympic movement, which
began in 1896. "Modern" Masculinity however emerged as an effort to find new answers to challenges
to men's roles in a changing industrial economy.
19
A man was supposed to defend his ard and his 'ird, his land and his women's sexual integrity (Katz,
1996).
 83

emphasise 'otherness'. Mostly, women symbolise the spirit of the collectivity, they often are
constructed as the symbolic bearers of the collectivities' identity and honour, personally and
collectively - they carry the "burden of representation" (a term used by Kubena Mercer,
1990). Women's behaviour thus marks the boundaries of the collective. While traditionalist
men may be defenders of the family and the nation, women are thought to embody family and
national honour: women's shame is the family's shame, the nation's shame, the man's shame.

Again, here I would like to give an example connected to the Israeli-Palestinian

conflict. During the Intifada, in Palestinian society women were murdered as so-called
collaborators. A report of a human rights organisation mentions over 100 murdered women
during six years because of suspected collaboration (B'tselem 1994). There are no exact
figures for today. One report (of the Women's Empowerment Project) mentions 20 honour
killings in Westbank and Gaza in 1996. Representatives believe there are far more. If you
study the cases you'll find that what was usually called collaboration has in reality been
behaviour which was regarded by the families of the murdered women (mostly male relatives)
as bringing "shame" on their community and violating honour.

It seems to me that these gendered nationalist narratives apply to other regional

conflicts also. In a study about the Croatian media, Dubravka Zarkov (1997) shows how
Croatia was depicted as a mother who has to be defended by her sons against the Serbian
aggression. The message was that sons have to die to rescue the mother, soldiers were needed
to defend the vulnerability of the newly established Croatian state.

Military socialisation as a rite of passage to male adulthood

In Israeli society the heroic fighter has always been male in spite of the presence of
Jewish female soldiers. This is not the place to elaborate on women in the Israeli Defence
Forces. Very briefly: the conscription of Israeli women does not lead, as one might think, to a
deconstruction of the dichotomy between men and women. Women are not conscripted not
only as soon as they give birth to a child but as soon as they get married (!), showing that the
raison d'être of marriage is reproduction. Women are not allowed to have combat roles, so
that in Israel as in other defence forces around the world, men are identified in society as the
protectors and women as the protected (Stiehm, 1982). Furthermore, only men are called to
reserve duty regularly until the age of at least 52.

Although the Israeli army is still perceived as the main mechanism of building a
national identity,20 it has become particularly the basis of a male self-image and a source for
male social mobility in society (Klein 1999).21

For Israeli Jewish males, military service is an inherent part of maturity, a rite of
passage to male adulthood. Military service is seen as essential to a boy's right to belong to
the inner circle of adult males. It fulfils typically male adolescent desires like intense thrills,
adventure and peril, it "provides the specific cultural context for the Israeli transition to
adulthood" (Lieblich, Amia and Meir Perlow 1988, 45). That's why army service is described
20
I should add that because of the exclusion of most of the Palestinian citizens of Israel the military
becomes an ethnic border marker.
21
The constitutive force of military service and war regarding gender is best expressed in a quotation from
Ben Gurion: "Any Jewish woman who, as far as it depends on her, does not bring into the world at least
four healthy children, is comparable to a soldier, who evades military service" (in Sharoni, 1995: 96).
During the last few years we can recognise an erosion of the national consensus, which has to do with
the Intifada on the one hand and the peace process on the other hand (Klein 1997). Fewer women are
willing to fulfil the model of a proud mother of the soldier son.
 84

and perceived by war veterans as an opportunity for fulfilment of masculinity (see Edna
Lomsky-Feder 1992).

Already in school, Israeli Jewish youths are prepared to join the military forces.
Lectures are delivered by members of the Defence Forces to give information and
impressions of life in the Israeli army. Some youths volunteer for special units or undergo
pre-induction courses. Nearly every Jewish Israeli pupil takes part in the yearly "Jom
Hakheilot“, a one-day seminar, which is held in co-operation between school and the army.

The example of this "Jom Hakheilot" shows that military service for males is a bodily
experience. Boys and girls are separated. Films showing soldiers in action and the exciting
military life are presented to the boys. The young men are being told that physical exercises
are most important to prepare for military service. Girls, however, do not see films about
women in action. Physical necessities are hardly mentioned. The main emphasis of lectures
and talks lies in emotional questions of military service like separation from the parents. Also,
preparatory books contain suggestions for fitness-training only for young men.

Military service itself then is a bodily experience. The construction of military

masculinity is a physical, a bodily exercise (ill.2). For the huge part of male youths, the
soldier doing duty in a fighting unit is the ideal. The motivation to serve in fighting units is
still high. To be a hero means to be capable of feelings of anxiety. To confess "I'm afraid" is
an admission most Israeli soldiers learn to deny during their training, Yaron Ezrachi observes
(1998: 138). Those positions requiring a maximum of self-control show the highest status
(parachuters f.i.). A good soldier is the soldier who is able to control anxiety.

All in all, in spite of the presence of women, the unit is perceived as a male peer
group, as a place of male comradeship, as a place of brotherhood, as a community of warriors.

No wonder that in the public consciousness the soldier as a defender is male. Houses
for Commemoration are called Yad banim (translated: House of the sons) and war memorials
show women separating from son or husband going to war (for example the memorial at
Balfuria from Mordechai Kafri) or nursing wounded soldiers (at Nitzanim from Moshe
Ziffer).22

The question is however, how these experiences have an impact on behaviour and
attitudes of male adults.

Whereas entrance into the society of men is possible only through a test of strength,
force and power (participation in the military), women are defined through their relation to
the male members of society. Their task, being either wives or mothers or sisters of soldiers is
the female role in a process of initiation.

It seems that military training cultivates young men's ability to become skills-oriented
"doers", more than reflective individuals, an orientation, which finds its sociolinguistic
expression in the prevalence of the typical "dugri" speech style (Katriel and Nesher 1986).
The experience of war enhances that orientation and every war reinforces the traditional male-
female stereotypes. For Israel, we should keep in mind that today's entire active father
generation experienced the traumatic Yom-Kippur War of 1973. A huge part of the ten years

22
One exception is the memorial at Hulda from Batya Lishanski. Three portraits are carved in Jerusalem
stone: one of an anonymous soldier, the other of Efraim Chizhik, leader of the Jewish forces in the 1929
battle of Hulda, the other of his sister Sarah Chizhik, who fell at Tel Hai 1921.
 85

younger age cohort experienced the Lebanon war. All of them are still in the reserve duty.
Their experiences include fear of death, the death of friends, being wounded oneself resulting
in the often described "pseudo-strength", a facade of toughness, of blunt, aggressive
behaviour.

The Gulf war gives us some impression about what happens when men cannot fulfil
their roles as protectors. As Israel didn't join the war, Israeli men for the first time were spared
the stress of participating in combat. On the other hand, they were deprived of defending and
forced to "passivity". They had to stay at home with their women and children in sealed
rooms, which undermined the male identity. Reports show that the number of sexual offences
and domestic violence against women increased during the Gulf War.23

Sophisticated research about the connections between the military orientation of

society and domestic violence in Israel is still missing. Numbers of murders of women by
their partners or male relatives are high, taking into account the size and number of population
in the state of Israel: statistics speak of between 73 (counting only husbands or spouses) and
127 (counting male partners or other male relatives) murders of women in the years 1990 to
1995.24 In 1991, the year of the Gulf war, 35 women were killed by their partners. Looking
through the reports in the newspapers, I found that a quarter of them were murdered with
firearms, sometimes firearms owned by the Defence Forces. There are some cases, where a
connection between violence during service in the occupied territories and domestic violence
is obvious. In one case, a soldier, who shot and killed a Palestinian girl who sat reading at the
entrance of her home in 1989, two years later, in 1991 shot his Israeli girlfriend, who had
decided to leave him. I don't want to be misunderstood: in general, men in Israel, as they carry
out the military operations, are those who are wounded and killed. But it is women who
become targets of beatings from men of their own society because of the heightened
aggression.

Men talking about their army experiences often relate to themselves as somehow
becoming another person in the army. Reports of soldiers serving in the occupied territories
especially during the Intifada show the brutalisation these young men run through.

The dominance of military discourse leads to gender inequality in society at large

Among the impacts of the centrality of the defence forces on gender in the public
sphere let me mention only two: the impact on the labour sphere and on politics.

Those who do the most dangerous jobs gain from it not only in the military sphere but
also in the civilian sphere. Because of the centrality of the military in Israeli society, service is
crucial for a civilian career. Service in the higher echelons of the army is a pathway towards
positions inheriting importance and influence in public life. The Israeli Defence Forces are a
stepping stone for most of the senior officers for a civilian career. This automatically means
discrimination for those groups not incorporated in it, which are first of all Moslem Arab
Israelis of both sexes. Jewish Israeli men gain from their military service by accumulating
social capital, establishing contacts for their professional careers (networking) and achieving

23
See f.i. the Israeli National Report to the Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing 1995, p. 46.
24
73 murders of women between 1990 and 1995 by their "husbands or spouses" are mentioned in the
CEDAW Report (State of Israel) 1997. 104 murders between 1990 and 1994 by "partners or
boyfriends" are mentioned in the report "The Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders in
Israel", State of Israel 1995. The Israeli Women's Network counts 127 murders by "husbands, partners
or other relatives" in the years 1990 to 1995 (Women in Israel. Information and Analysis, 1996).
 86

material and symbolic benefits. The capital Jewish women accumulate is not valued very
much on the civilian labour-market.

Men convert their military rank into ranks of political parties. Military background is
regarded as a necessary precondition for public office. The percentage of women in the
Knesset since the establishment of the Israeli state has never exceeded 10%, which is lower
than the percentage of female representatives in any European democracy!25

In the election campaign this year, several women's organisations addressed in a

public appeal the fixation on male leaders with military backgrounds (ill. 3). Former generals
established new parties, politicians adorned themselves with the support of high-ranking
military men.

In the newly formed government in a projected cabinet of 33 ministers one single

woman, Dalia Itzik, was appointed as minister. After some months, in August, the prime
minister appointed five additional new ministers, among them the second woman, Yael
Tamir. The preoccupation with military background you find also in the homepages of the
Knesset members in the Internet: the military rank is, after education and profession, the next
information given about male members.

Women's representation in local authorities also has been extremely limited. During
the state's existence only six women have served as heads of local councils, none of them in a
city with a population over 10,000. Currently there are only two women head of a local
council. The political sphere is predominated by men, who during the last ten or fifteen years
have, in their 40s, retired as generals and transferred into business or into the political realm.

It seems that this process relates to both sides of a regional conflict: if you observe the
Palestinian state formation, you'll find a highly preferential treatment of those men who
fought in the liberation movement and who had been imprisoned during the Intifada or earlier.

Conclusion

What is a militarised society?

According to Betty Reardon's classic "Sexism and the War System" militarism is a
belief system that is "based on the assumption that military values and politics are conductive
to a secure and orderly society" (1985, 14). Militarism, she continues, "manifests the excesses
of those characteristics generally referred to as machismo, a term that originally connoted the
strength, bravery and responsibility necessary to fulfil male social functions" (15). Whether or
not a society is in a state of conflict is not the only factor to describe a society as a militaristic
one. One also needs to consider, as David Morgan states, the extent to which military training
is seen as necessary feature of the training of all male citizens, the extent to which political
leaders have military backgrounds, the extent to which military uniforms are a persistent
feature of public sphere and the economic variables: which proportion of national resources
are being devoted to military expenditure (1994).

I hope to have shown that I consider military and military discourse as the main agent
in shaping gender relations in Israeli society.

25
The ethnic and national division is obvious. Of the 52 female representatives (until the 1992 Knesset)
only 5 were born in Arab speaking countries and not a single Palestinian Israeli woman has ever been a
member.
 87

The following indicators deriving from that example should be investigated in order to
judge the influence of the military on the construction of masculinity in societies:

► Is the military the main agent to sharpen male identity?

· compulsory military service/all volunteer force

· option of alternative service (scope & length of alt.ser.)
· numbers of age-cohort deciding for military service
· is conscientious objection accepted in society?

► Elements of military training/ socialisation

· military language
· devaluation of what is regarded as being female
· male bonding
· drilling
· rituals of subjugation
· presence of female recruits

► Predominance of military in

· private sphere,
· political realm
· public life

► Degree of defence expenditure

 88

References
Anderson, Benedict (1991). Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of
nationalisms. London: Verso [1983].
B'tselem (1994). Collaborators in the occupied territories: Human rights abuses and violations.
Jerusalem.
Courbage, Y. (1997). La Fécondité Palestinienne des Lendemains d'Intifada. In: Population 52,
January.
Gellner, Ernest (1983). Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. and Terence Ranger (ed.) (1983). The invention of tradition. Cambridge:
Cambridge University.
Katriel, Tamar and P. Nesher (1986). Gibush: The rhetoric of cohesion in Israeli school culture. In:
Comparative Education Review 30, 2, pp. 216-232.
Katz, Sheila Hannah (1996). Adam and Adama, 'Ird and Ard: En-gendering political conflict and
identity in early Jewish and Palestinian Nationalisms. In: Deniz Kandiyoti (ed.)(1996). Gendering the
Middle East. Emerging Perspectives. London/New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers.
Klein, Uta (1997). The gendering of national discourses and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In:
European Journal of Women's studies, Vol.4, 3, pp. 341 - 351.
Klein, Uta (1999). 'Our best boys' - The gendered nature of civil-military relations in Israel. In: Men
and Masculinities, Vol.2, 1, pp. 47-65.
Lieblich, Amia and Meir Perlow (1988). Transition to adulthood during military service. In: The
Jerusalem Quarterly, 47, pp. 40-76.
Lomsky-Feder, Edna (1992). Youth in the shadow of war - war in the light of youth: Life-stories of
Israeli veterans. In: K. Hurrelmann a.o. (ed.). Adolescence, careers, and culture. Berlin.
Morgan, David H.J. (1994). Theater of War. Combat, the Military, and Masculinities. In: Harry Brod,
Michael Kaufman (ed.). Theorizing Masculinities. California et al.
Mosse, George Lachmann (1997). Das Bild des Mannes. Zur Konstruktion der modernen Männ-
lichkeit. Frankfurt a.M.
Reardon, Betty (1985). Sexism and the War System. New York: Teachers College Press.
Stiehm, Hicks (1992). The Protected, the Protector, the Defender. In: Women's studies international
Forum, 5, 3/4, pp. 367-376.
Yuval-Davis, Nira (1989). National Reproduction and the 'Demographic Race' in Israel. In:
Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias.
Yuval-Davis, Nira (1997). Gender and Nation. London et al.: Sage Publications.
Yuval-Davis, Nira and Floya Anthias (1989). Women, nation, state. Houndsmills, Basingstoke: The
macmillan press ltd.
Zarkov, Dubravka (1997). Pictures of the Wall of Love: Motherhood, Womanhood and Nationhood in
Croatian Media. In: The European Journal of Women's Studies, Vol.4, 3, pp. 305-330.
 89

Men's violence against women and children in

situations of armed conflict

Dubrovka KOCIJAN HERCIGONJA, Croatia

Violence of one person against another is the result of many factors, but basically it is
the result of the personality structure of the bully, which is the product of bio-psycho-social
factors that influenced this person during his/her developmental stages. However, violence is
different in war and in peace, although there are some people who are violent in both
situations.

In peace, individuals or groups, due to many psychological, biological and social

factors, develop psychopathological deviations. As a result, aggression develops in order to
satisfy some of these pathological deviations and needs. In war, bullies act as they would in
peace, but now their actions are often unpunished and sometimes even rewarded. But, some
people who act violently in war would never be violent in peacetime. So, what is it that
makes an average normal man become aggressive, especially towards women and children?
If we analyse wars through history, we will notice that violence against women and children
has been a basic characteristic of some wars, and such violence was used as a means to hurt
the opponent. In the main role it is not the woman and child, but a man, an opponent, who
needs to be hurt and defeated; women and children are just used as a means to this end. Over
the last 100 years, wars have been like this, and my opinion is that this was the case especially
in very patriarchal countries where women have no rights, but it is a man's duty to protect the
woman and guard her honour. In such surroundings, a women is just a wife and a mother and
not a person, so in such wars it is not a woman who is being punished, but her husband who
was not able to save her and their children. In countries where women are emancipated, the
aggressor aims at women as people, but this has other dimensions.

In the war in the region of former Yugoslavia, my opinion is that there are some
elements of aggression towards women and children as a way of fighting against men, but
also as a way of fighting against the whole country. I would like to present a few cases later.

By way of an introduction, I should like to present the results of research that I

conducted in 1989, before the war. I worked in a Military hospital in Zagreb, capital of
Croatia, in the department of psychiatry. In this department, we would mostly see young
soldiers in crisis, those who were not able to accept the army, its structure and separation from
their families. I have analysed the differences in clinical pictures based on nationality. In
Yugoslavia, there was a law stating that young men cannot serve the army in their country. I
have analysed only soldiers from other republics: Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, "the
Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia", Serbia and Kosovo. The study took a sample of
men aged 18-19, who had finished or partially finished high school. They all found
themselves in a foreign republic, in a strange town, but in almost identical military
organisations. The reactions of those who were not able to accept the structure, demands and
separation were different, depending on their nationality, and the analysis showed that their
reactions had the characteristics of the history of their republics. Some sorts of behaviour had
statistically significant connections with nationality. The most common behaviour was
aggression, alcoholism, depression and suicide attempts. After two years, the war started, and
some of the characteristics of my sample proved to be massive characteristics of all people of
that republic in war. I emphasise this fact to make it more understandable why some things
happened in war, and why war was so aggressive in certain areas in former Yugoslavia.
 90

Case 1

A 36 year old Muslim woman from a village with a mixed population in Central
Bosnia came to therapy after she escaped with her two children, a son of 10 and a daughter of
7 years of age. Her physician referred her to me because of depressive symptomatology.

From anamnesis I found out that, before the war, her neighbours were both Muslims
and Serbs who were friends and raised their children together. Then the war divided Serbs
from Muslims. Muslim men had to escape their villages so they would not be killed, and their
women and children stayed. My patient was taken with her children to a cottage in the
mountains where a group of Serbian soldiers camped, led by her first neighbour. She was
raped daily for three months, mostly by her neighbour. Her children were forced to watch.
The rapes were especially brutal and aggressive when the soldiers returned from actions in
which many of them were killed or wounded. When she asked their leader, her neighbour,
why he was doing this to her when earlier she was like a sister to him, he said: “…that was
before, now you are an “ustaska” whore. Now your husband is fighting for Tudjman, but let
us see how he will feel when we tell him what we did to his wife”.

In therapy this woman made almost no progress, she was deeply depressive and
suicidal. During therapy she told me: “Don't bother with me, I don't want to live because I
can't look into my son's eyes because of the shame I caused him”. Later she moved to
Sweden and I do not know what happened to her after that.

Depression and suicidal thoughts are reactions to the shame that she caused her son
because she was raped. It proves that aggression towards women, against women themselves,
represents an attack on men and not on themselves. There are numerous examples where
women were kept in concentration camps and raped daily. When they got pregnant, men
would keep them in camps until they were almost due to give birth and then they were sent to
Croatia to show themselves to their husbands and sons with messages: “now your husband
will have to feed a little Serb child.” or “your husband will never be able to sleep peacefully
after he sees you like that”. Some of these women tried to kill themselves after coming to
Croatia, and some gave their children away after giving birth, not wanting even to see them.

Case 2

Two sisters from Vukovar, a destroyed Croatian town, were kept in a concentration
Camp in Vukovar. One was 17 years old and had a baby of a few months old, and the other
sister was 7 years old. The husband of the older sister was a Croatian soldier. She was raped
daily in camp in front of her younger sister who had to hold her baby and keep her from
crying because “if she (baby) cried, they would kill her”. The rapists kept sending messages
about what they were doing to her to the front to her husband. Later they raped the younger
sister as well.

I have presented these cases to try to explain the process of violence where the goal is
to hurt the opponent where he is most vulnerable. Some women have told me that there were
Serbian soldiers who refused to rape women, but then they would be threatened with death.
So, the politics of war was to destroy the opponent, hurt his wife and children, destroy
churches, all roots, cemeteries, destroy the future.
 91

Conclusion

The question we want to hear the answer to is still unanswered:

Where does this aggression of men over women and children in war come from?

My opinion is that causes are in:

1. Politics and manipulation of people by politicians who use socio-cultural factors and
psychological characteristics
2. Fear
3. Influence of alcohol and drugs
4. Psychologically deviant personalities of people who are pushed into war by politicians
who often reward their deviant way of behaviour.
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 101

The approach of the World Health Organisation Regional

Office for Europe to the issue of gender-based violence

Ms Kirsten Staehr JOHANSEN, WHO-EURO, Denmark

Abstract of the report

Research on violence against pregnant women and its effect on perinatal outcomes has
primarily been conducted in North America. Until recently, only one study existed on this
subject in Europe (1988, Norway, Dr Berit Shei, WHO/EURO consultant on women's health).
At present, there are in the European region several projects on this subject that are connected
directly or indirectly to the WHO/EURO programmes.

A Swedish study (Lena Widding Hedin, Göteborg University) as well as a study in the
United Kingdom (Lauren Bacchus) have been completed this year. Both are prevalence
studies focusing on obstetrical outcomes, and important in terms of implications for clinical
practice.

WHO/EURO currently maintains a number of projects related to this issue which have
been incorporated into several overall programme workplans; the most relevant to this context
are:

A national survey in Tajikistan conducted by the Mother and Child Health Programme.

Data collection, analysis and feedback on violence during pregnancy as part of the
OBSQID project (quality management and development in perinatal care) under the
Quality of Care and Technologies Programme.

Additionally, the Mental Health Programme also addresses this issue.

These projects comprise work with violent as well as non-violent males.

1. National survey in Tajikistan:

This is a national survey on violence in situations of armed conflict. It focuses on

women's experience of violence, but also deals with gender roles and men's perception of
violence.

2. Violence during pregnancy, risk factors, prevention and intervention:

An integral part of the OBSQID project, it addresses directly the violence and
pregnancy issue. In 1997, questions on violence was included among the 50 indicators and
variables of the OBSQID Basic Information Sheet (BIS), a perinatal case-based data form.
Also inserted into this form was a question on paternal wellbeing.

The objective of this comparative pilot study is to identify people at risk of domestic
violence in different cultural and regional settings. Since this is primarily a prevalence study
comprising various European countries (Belgium, Denmark, Israel, Malta, Albania, Poland,
 102

Slovakia, Estonia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Russia), it will elucidate the magnitude of the
problem in relation to violence during pregnancy cross-culturally.

The qualitative part of this study includes interviews with women that were conducted
mostly in women's shelters in Copenhagen (1997-1998), and interviews with violent and non-
violent men (in Denmark). Focus is on the male experience of their partner's pregnancy. Here,
the so-called Couvade syndrome (the phenomenon where the expectant father experiences
somatic or psychosomatic symptoms during the woman's pregnancy) has been demonstrated.
Another important aspect of the interviews with men aims to examine how the experience of
abuse, or of witnessing abuse, in the home during childhood can affect male behavior in a
partnership and specifically during the pregnancy of his partner. Also addressed is the
influence of abuse on planning pregnancy. When does violence begin? What are the triggers -
were there any changes during their partners' pregnancies? How do these men justify their
actions, and, in general, how do they themselves explain them?

Being different in population samples, objectives and study methods, all these studies
show that violence does not stop during pregnancy, although its pattern may change.
 103

Elder abuse and older men: towards an understanding

Ms Bridget PENHALE and Mr Jonathan PARKER,

University of Hull, United Kingdom

Introduction
The main points that this paper addresses are as follows:

· Elder abuse is a comparative newcomer to studies concerning violence

· Much early research was gender absent/gender neutral
· The problem is hidden; it is a taboo topic
· "Naming" is important
· The forms that the violence takes may be slightly different from violence affecting other
groups; there are a number of additional factors involved in elder abuse.

The growth of elder abuse

Interest in elder abuse, and recognition of it as a social problem in need of attention, has
developed in many countries in recent years. This has, however, been predominantly in the
context of existing recognition of domestic violence and child abuse. This growth of interest
in elder abuse shares a number of common features with these other areas of violence - slow
recognition and acceptance; difficulties with definitions and concepts; an emphasis perhaps
on stress and pathology as opposed to gender/power and male violence.

Other forms of violence had been identified as problems at earlier points in time (for
example, in the UK, child abuse was recognised from the late 1960s onwards and violence
towards women from the early 1970s). Furthermore, whereas child abuse and elder abuse
were initially identified through professional concern, violence against younger women was
identified through the women's movement at a level of social action. This difference in social
problem orientation may affect the development of responses and policies towards the various
types of abuse. Elder abuse is, however, a comparative newcomer to the field of studies
concerning violence, although it is not less important than other areas of concern.

An absence of gender
The early research studies that considered elder abuse were not particularly concerned
with gender and, following the classification developed by Hanmer and Hearn (1999), could
be described as either 'gender absent' or 'gender neutral'. Initially, studies were 'gender absent'
in that there was a failure even to consider gender as a factor of relevance within situations of
elder abuse. The situation then developed to a point where gender was considered, and
included within research studies, but was viewed as a factor among several others that
warranted attention. It is this type that is referred to as 'gender neutral', as the potential effects
of gender appear to be diluted within research and theoretical considerations.

As an example of this, it is interesting to note that Pillemer and Suitor (1992) included
the gender of the caregiver as an additional possible predictive variable in elder abuse. No
hypotheses were made regarding gender in the research however and, whilst spousal violence
was found to be more likely than in other relationships, no comments concerning gender were
made in their subsequent discussion. This ungendered; gender neutral approach held sway
until relatively recently (Whittaker, 1995, 1996).
 104

Whittaker (1995) argues that research and theory construction occurs in a socio-political
climate which privileges definition and prevalence studies above the gender debate. The main
'gender neutral' approaches she identifies include situational stress (focus on victims and is
underpinned by stereotypical notions of ageing and dependency); pathology of abusers
(considers a range of predisposing factors), and family violence (which reflects the intention
to safeguard 'normal' family relationships). Accordingly, she states:

'There appears to be no attempt to include the victim's subjective experience of

abuse as part of the definitional debate and very little attention is paid to issues of
inequality of power between victim and perpetrator other than to stress that old
women are not children and that dependency exists as a two-way process within
relationships and between them and their abusers." (Whittaker, 1996, p. 149)

Biggs, Phillipson and Kingston (1995) promoted a domestic violence approach to elder
abuse that emphasised power imbalances and highlighted the position of victimised groups in
society. However, maintaining a clear distinction between victim and perpetrator is not
always possible using this approach. This is seen in the Conflict Tactics Approach (Gelles and
Straus, 1979; Gelles, 1993) which views conflict as constructed and maintained by both
parties. The domestic violence approach to elder abuse focuses on violence as the central
theme. This may lead to a reduced recognition of other forms of abuse and neglect (Biggs,
Phillipson and Kingston, 1995). A corrective to this approach is seen in the 'domination'
model of domestic violence, which focuses on the power of male aggressors (Yllo, 1993).

The family violence model was developed further in Bennett, Kingston, and Penhale,
(1997). Family violence can be understood as violence which occurs in families and is
perpetrated against the powerless and vulnerable. It is an aggressive act by a more powerful
individual, group or institution against someone with less power. The perception of the power
imbalance may not necessarily be at a conscious level. It develops from the patterns of
interaction between individuals from which relative positions in terms of power are secured
(see Hughes 1995). In these ways, the family violence approach fits with the personal,
cultural and structural model of oppression (Thompson, 1997, 1998). However, neither model
can be viewed as wholly 'gender present' (Hanmer and Hearn, 1999), and as we shall see, it is
only comparatively recently that there has been a shift towards an inclusion of analysis in
terms of gender considerations.

Aitken and Griffin (1996), writing from a feminist perspective, suggest that elder abuse
should be included as a category in domestic violence, but should emphasise a gender-power
analysis:

'.. the relationship between elder abuse and care and between elder abuse
and family violence needs to be revisited. Neither care nor family violence by
itself offers a sufficient explanation for elder abuse; a more over-reaching way of
thinking about elder abuse which would also allow an appropriate integration of
gender issues would be in terms of power and dependency.' (p. 139)

In situations of elder abuse there is likely to be a combination of complex sociological

and psychological factors operating at and between structural, organisational, family and
individual levels. Feminist perspectives focus on the role of gender and power within
domestic violence. Social, political and economic processes are seen to support patriarchy in
the subjugation of women. Violence represents the means men use to maintain positions of
power at the societal, family and interpersonal levels. A range of causal factors must be
 105

brought to bear and individual differences and diversity recognised. The additional variable of
age must be considered when discussing elder abuse.

A taboo topic
As suggested earlier, elder abuse is the most recent form of interpersonal violence to
have been recognised as a problem in need of attention. It is also, however, an area that has
been hidden from public concern and has been regarded as a 'taboo topic'. Much of the abuse
that occurs takes place behind closed doors and is not open to public scrutiny, as discussed
elsewhere (Bennett et al, 1997). Making what happens in private a matter for public concern
is not an easy task, in part due to the resistance experienced from proponents of familial rights
to privacy and freedom from state intervention. In addition, this is not a pleasant area to focus
on, in particular as it challenges some of the myths and deeply held beliefs that have been
constructed over time within and about society. Examples of such attitudes are that families
provide warm, nurturing environments for individuals or that institutions are safe places for
older people to live in.

It has not been easy to challenge this taboo and such beliefs, nor to encourage people to
discuss situations, let alone to disclose them. The sexual abuse of older women is an area that
has proved extremely problematic to consider, largely due to the difficulty that many people
have in conceptualising older people as sexual beings. It was difficult enough to raise issues
concerning child sexual abuse in the early 1980s, for example, so to consider an older woman
as the subject of sexual violence may prove very difficult. Throughout the 1990s, issues
concerning violence towards older people have been raised and the silence wrought by the
taboo has been challenged and gradually eroded.

The importance of 'naming'

Within the context of the hidden nature of the problem, the silencing that has occurred
is understandable. Abusive situations that occur in private are not spoken about, and often not
even recognised. Abusive situations that occur within institutions may, arguably, be less
hidden but are equally likely to go unnamed. It is important, therefore, that within the process
of breaking the taboo, naming of the situation as abusive happens. Furthermore, that the
situation should not be objectified but needs to be personalised, in order that the experiences
of individuals can be properly attended to.

The power of language is important in this regard. Aitken and Griffin (1996) and
Whittaker (1996) see degenderisation in elder abuse through the changes in terminology over
a period of a decade, 1984-1994 from 'granny bashing' (Baker, 1977) to elder abuse (Bennett
and Kingston, 1993), which masks the gender specificity of abuse. This type of change cannot
simply be construed as a development away from stigmatising and patronising language, as it
also has the effect of neutralising the fact that more older women experience abuse than men.

There is also recognition of a tendency towards an homogenisation of older people in

research into elder abuse, which takes no account of individual differences and treats all older
people as part of the same undifferentiated group. At the same time, such approaches
obviously lack any appropriate consideration of gender differences. It is also necessary to
consider what is being named and who is involved in the naming, so that situations are
recognised and dealt with by the individuals who are involved by them, if at all possible. The
meanings ascribed to situations by individuals and the construction of their understandings
about situations and the processes involved are also necessary components of this, although
research into this type of area is comparatively rare. The fact that elder abuse was first
identified by professionals is of note here, as unlike the situation regarding violence towards
 106

young women, older people are notable by their absence from any discussion or debate
concerning abuse and abusive situations unless cast in the role of 'victim', 'abuser' or
concerned witness.

Differing forms of abuse

Although there is an absence of agreed or standard definitions of abuse, commented on
by McCreadie (1996) and others, most people concerned with the issue agree on the different
types of abuse that can happen. These are physical abuse; sexual abuse; neglect; financial
abuse (also referring to exploitation and misappropriation of an individual's property and
possessions); psychological and emotional abuse. To these may be added such categories as
abandonment, enforced isolation and deprivation of necessary items for daily living (warmth,
food or other aspects, such as teeth). Some of these types appear to be reasonably distinctive
to older people: for example, neglect or financial abuse may occur in ways that are not
commonly seen in situations concerning children or young women. although abuse of
younger disabled women may share similar features to that experienced by older people.

Questions of numbers
Throughout the past decade, the literature on elder abuse has developed and burgeoned.
Notwithstanding this, it is generally understood that males are more likely to abuse than
women and that women are more likely to be abused than men within situations of elder
abuse. At times, this knowledge may lead to an inference that categorises and labels men as
abusers/perpetrators and women as abused/victim. In a strict consideration of numerical terms
this is clear, but there is a need for abuse to be understood from a wider perspective, viewed,
perhaps, through a slightly different lens. This would demand attention to the context of abuse
and abusive power relations in an unequal society including a consideration of women as
abusers and men as abused.

It is perhaps timely to include within the understanding of abuse material of relevance

from the theoretical frameworks of social psychology and labelling (Scheff, 1974). Within
society, older men are generally associated with belligerence, perversion and the fears of
ageing and decline. In this context the media and social organisation of welfare sets a
discourse in which abuse is understood as behaviour which can be explained, if not condoned.
By examining the construction of this discourse it is possible to throw new light on our
understanding of abuse and its gendered directions.

Figures from research studies from all countries consistently suggest that women are
more likely to be victims and men more likely to be abusers, but Wolf (1994) indicates that
figure is only marginally higher than would be expected on the basis of female elders in the
general population. McCreadie and Quigley (1999), from a UK perspective concerning an
analysis of case records, indicate an increasing number of men who are abused in very old age
(80+ years). If Straus' (1993) suggestion that violence by women to men is greatly under-
reported, the link between gender and elder abuse may be less strong, but caution needs to be
exercised here in order to consider a range of different, but inter-related factors.

Barnett, Miller-Perrin and Perrin (1997) review research concerning the characteristics
of those who abuse and those who are abused. Results regarding gender are somewhat
contradictory. Adult Protective Service figures from the USA reveal that most victims are
female (68%) (Tatara, 1993). In the earlier Boston survey, the majority of victims were male
(52%) (Pillemer and Finkelhor, 1988) whilst 65% of respondents were female. The
victimisation rate for men at 5.1% is double that for women (2.5%) and the elderly population
is disproportionately female.
 107

It must be remembered, however, that women tend to sustain more serious abuse and
injuries than men, which may mean that women are more likely to require treatment for their
injuries and thus come to the attention of authorities. Also, males are more likely to be violent
and to commit more serious violence than females. Miller and Dodder (1989) suggest that
research indicates that males are more likely to use physical violence whilst females are more
likely to engage in neglectful acts that are more passive in nature.

Men are more likely to live with someone else, which may make abuse more likely as
one of the risk factors for elder abuse concerns living with others (Barnett et al, 1997). This
corresponds with research into the characteristics and profiles of abusers: frequently a
relative, and who has lived with victim for a long time; usually adult children, spouses,
grandchildren, siblings then other relatives (Tatara, 1993). Pillemer and Finkelhor, (1988)
found that abuse by non-family members was rare: abuse was mainly between partners in
later life (see also Halicka, 1995; Johns and Hydle, 1995).

Historically, elder abuse in domestic settings has been constructed as a problem

between a female abuser and older parents - often a mother - within a caring context. Aitken's
Northamptonshire study found, however, that male sons rather than husbands abused older
women (Aitken and Griffin, 1996). Women were physically abused, men were
psychologically abused. This perhaps reflects gendered behaviour, echoing the perpetuation
of patriarchy in society. The literature abounds with references to 'dysfunctional families'.
Whittaker (1996) believes that this perspective creates the view that elder abuse represents a
symptom within a poorly functioning family, which therefore avoids introducing gender
issues into the debate.

Interestingly, Kosberg (1998) cites evidence for the idea of a 'pay back' for previous
abuses of power, so that a woman, or children who have been abused by a man at an earlier
point in the family's history, may exact some form of revenge on the man in later life.
Swedish researchers Grafstrom, Norberg and Wimblad (1992) found some evidence for this
type of dynamic in their study of caregivers in Sweden. Jack (1994) however places female to
female and female to male abuse within the context of exchange relationships within a
dysfunctioning and oppressive society.

In the contemporary social situation, we see increasingly higher numbers of women at

the top end of the age scale. Women tend to be poorer, which affects their life choices. The
health needs of older women are not considered in public policies and poverty and ill-health
foster dependency and the potential to exploit. Added to this is the fact that many women live
alone and social services departments target single people rather than couples. Also, it is not
only those who receive care who are marginalised. Middle-aged women undertake the bulk of
informal care. Many of these people have just relinquished the responsibility for caring for
children and will be employed too.

Elder abuse, however, cannot be seen solely in the context of families and interpersonal
relationships, as Jack (1994) points out. The fluid nature of power and the continuing
prevalence of patriarchal assumptions are linked to abuse within the context of health and
social care (Glendenning and Kingston, 1999). It is acknowledged that the social and health
care agencies accountable for 'protective responsibility' may overtly or inadvertently abuse
(Stevenson and Parsloe, 1993). In addition, Jack (1994) indicates that dependence, power and
violation represent the currency of relationships within these agencies, and that mutual (albeit
 108

unequal) dependency, powerlessness and violation leads to, and maintains abuse by, formal
carers.

Social care - between the public and the private

Social and health care practitioners both support and control, thus wielding power in the
private world of families from their position as agents of the State (Parker and Penhale, 1998).
Working to protect others demands, in fact, the legitimate exercise of power in human
situations. It is crucial to the professional development of practitioners that they command an
understanding of power in order to work with their 'protective responsibilities' (Stevenson and
Parsloe, 1993). It is clear that a large degree of power, whether felt by individual practitioners
or not, derives from the legislative base to their work.

Additionally, practitioners may also be likely to have personal power in the eyes of
those with whom they work: often the dispossessed, disenfranchised and vulnerable; those
who are most marginalised and excluded from and by society. However, not only do
practitioners exercise power: they too are bounded by and subject to power - of agency, state
and legislation. It is also necessary to recognise, moreover, that service users may exercise
power in their interactions with practitioners. They choose and refuse services; they challenge
and resist, and at times they may act and react in ways that are abusive. The dual direction of
abuse in old age has been acknowledged elsewhere (McCreadie, 1992)

The function of caring has been professionalised in health and welfare settings and is
generally conceptualised as women's work (Jack, 1994). Illich (1977) used the term 'social
iatrogenesis' to refer to the ways in which the organisation of care practices could lead to ill
health by increasing stress and bureaucratising care. The social organisation of social and
health care continues this process. Older people receive care rather than treatment. They are
perceived and treated as passive recipients of care rather than active participants, centrally
involved in an enterprise premised on partnership. This can be seen as potentially doubly
stigmatising because a positive outcome is generally denied by such approaches. The
emphasis is on the outcome and content rather than the process.

'The recognition of the powerlessness shared by old women and their female
carers as a result of the combination of ageism and sexism within the
professionalisation of welfare, leads to new perspectives on abuse by formal
carers, perceiving abuser and abused as powerless socially, organisationally and
personally, locked together in a relationship of mutual, enforced dependency. The
medium through which this socially-constructed powerlessness becomes the
individual and collective abuse of elderly people takes place is the 'exchange
relationship' of formal care.' (Jack, 1994, p. 79)'

Exchange theory suggests that individuals act according to real and perceived benefits
and costs of continuing a relationship (Frude, 1990). The most dependent is the least
powerful. However, the least powerless may also seek to maximise gains and minimise
contributions to be made to a relationship. The person cared for may be seen as an
inconvenience and a subculture of abuse may arise in formal care-giving situations (see also
Aitken and Griffin, 1996).

Jack (1994) uses Seligman's (1975) work on 'learned helplessness' to show that ageist
stereotypes of dependence and increasing incompetence lead to the erosion of personal
control in the context of formal care. Perceived powerlessness and dependency has been
implicated in abusers in formal and informal settings.
 109

Women carers predominate in the workforce and the work is subsequently devalued.
Women who are cared for are also discriminated against. Jack (1994, p.89) states:

'...in order to ensure her dependency-needs are met, the old woman is compelled
to surrender her claim to adult status to the female carer, whose limited status
within the organisation depends on her complete possession of the caring role.'

The search for pathology has neglected formal carers and offered little in the way of
theoretical understanding.

'...powerlessness among carers and cared for is the lock confining them within a
relationship of dependency and violation...their mutual empowerment is the key
to interdependency without subordination.' (Jack, 1994, p. 90)

It is possible that the Foucauldian metaphor of the 'panopticon' may be useful in

connection with such considerations (Foucault, 1979). The panopticon was taken from an idea
for prison design originated by Jeremy Bentham. All levels of the prison could be seen at all
times and prisoners would not know whether or not they were being watched at any given
time. Foucault suggests that social surveillance techniques operate in a similar way.

Such a perspective would also suggest that surveillance of social and health care
agencies and institutions has developed in recent years. The recent development in the UK of
continual assessment for service users and for staff development may engender feelings for
both older recipients of care and of formal care staff of continued surveillance, of not being
able to escape or resist effectively.

This would therefore set the scene for the creation and maintenance of dependence and
marginalisation by encouraging learned helplessness and submission to the power of
surveillance. Disciplinary practices in use within health and social care agencies contribute to
the operation of power through techniques of visibility. Additionally, designs aimed at
maximum surveillance are used, and the processing, filing, creation and maintenance of
individual cases perpetuates the situation. Divisions are created by binary distinctions such as
practitioner and client, old and young, healthy and unhealthy, abuser and abused, male and
female and the subject begins to watch over and monitor the self (Fawcett, 1996).

In the contemporary arena of social and health care, numerous strategies have been
developed to regulate the imposition of power. These include judicial review, the
development of law centres and advice bureaux (Trotter, 1999). Competition and inspection
in public sector services has demanded a shift from casework to practice that is measurable
and verifiable. This kind of regulation sets up its own discourse and is, itself, a form of power.

Control over resources is an important dynamic of power when considering the

allocation of social and health care. Service users are often faced with stark perceived choices
when the practitioner or agency is assumed able to offer and withdraw services at will. The
potential of the institution and agency to abuse directly and the replication of an abusive
system are now being given serious consideration (Goffman, 1968; Stanley, Manthorpe and
Penhale, 1999).
 110

Multiple forms of disadvantage

Recent perspectives explicitly incorporate the role of gender, race and class in
influencing power dynamics. Ragin and Sunstrom (1989) suggest that sex-role socialisation
leads to the adoption and expectation of stereotypical roles, which lead women to be
perceived as lacking in power at organisational, sociocultural and interpersonal levels.
Rosspenda, Richman, and Nawyn (1998) add race and class issues to gender in traditional
models of sexual harassment as a consequence of power differentials based on location or
status differences between men and women. Their research found the confluence of race, class
and gender to be especially important where the target of the harassment has greater
organisational power than the perpetrator.

Kukli and Breli (1997) employ a social exchange theory perspective to make the
valuable point that prospective dependency may change marital power relationships in later
life. Askham (1995) suggests, however, that gender-power differences continue in later life
marriages. These analyses are much akin to Thompson's (1997, 1998) Personal, Cultural and
Structural (PCS) model for theorising discrimination and oppression. The influences of
personal prejudice with organisational culture and social structures are linked together by
Thompson in a complex and continually changing way, resulting, he suggests, in oppressive
practices.

Power is, of course, central to issues of gender. Mullender (1997) states that it is
impossible to understand the personal and social world without taking a gendered perspective.
Gender represents a social construction (Berger and Luckman, 1966). That is, gender relates
to the roles, tasks, positions and assumptions associated with male and female within a
particular social context. These roles and assumptions are internalised by those brought up
within that society. Acting according to the ways a society prescribes inhibits resistance to
oppression and recreates the social construction of gender.

Sexism does not refer solely to the prejudice expressed by individual males. It results
also from the social structures developed to perpetuate a gendered ordering of society and the
ways in which agencies and organisations reflect this order and instil normative roles and
expectations into members. Sexism and the unequal distribution of power and roles in society
can be linked with other forms of oppression leading to the necessity of a gender power
analysis, which places gender within a wider socio-political context. For instance, child care
is seen as the role of women as are care in the community and low paid care jobs in
residential homes.

It is not only race, class and gender that interact, however. The social construction of
ageing as negative and stigmatising is important (Bytheway, 1994). Aitken and Griffin (1996)
remind us that there are proportionately more women than men in the general population the
older that population becomes. Older women are marginalised in society on the grounds of
gender and age. The negative connotations of ageism and ideas of dependency and
impairment aggregate in the negotiations of power within society. Ageism, sexism and
structural divisions combine to create power imbalances that are predicated on the notion of
women as of inferior status. This facilitates the conditions in which abuse flourishes and
militates against easy or quick resolution.

Ageism may be of further importance within such considerations as a 'master' category

(Bytheway, 1994). Such multiple forms of disadvantage are of significance too, since they
may not assist in any movement towards resolution of the problem, or, indeed, prevention. In
addition, we can see that older women may face several distinct but overlapping areas of risk
 111

and disadvantage, perhaps even of jeopardy (Penhale and Kingston, 1995) and that these may
be either singular or cumulative in their effect.

Towards a gendered analysis

Feminist theories of elder abuse move beyond the health and welfare debates to a theory
in which age and gender and the relationships between them and other social divisions are
given equal importance. The potential for violence and abuse is fundamental to gender and
power in all social relationships.

'A feminist analysis of elder abuse, whilst recognising the gendered nature of
inequality, would have to acknowledge women's capacity for violence and
recognise that the issue of power is more problematic and less fixed than
previously imagined. The connections between relations of age, gender and
power would be central categories of analysis and the notion of power would
require a different treatment.

'This means treating power like age and gender relations as something fluid,
rather than fixed and monolithic, as something which varies according to what it
is in relation to or with.' (Whittaker, 1996, p. 152)

There is generally a lack of such a feminist critique of elder abuse although gender
relations have been seen as central to examinations of child physical abuse (Featherstone,
1997). The concept of domination rather than power has been employed to demonstrate its
significance. Research concerning domestic violence and the development of interagency
working places necessary emphasis on domestic violence towards adult women and children.
Older women are generally not included within such considerations, although the research
does not explicitly exclude them (Hague and Malos, 1998). There is, however, a
marginalisation of older people and an uncritical reinforcement of hierarchies of concern that
reflects sociocultural power relations. Whittaker (1996) advocates a methodology of inclusion
in participative research about elder abuse, which, she states, cannot be divorced from its
social context and the patriarchal rather than pathological family. It is crucial, of course, that
older people themselves are fully included as central actors within such developments.

Feminist analyses start with gender. The marginalisation of older people and, in
particular, older women in society is taken into account. The patriarchal context sees men as
having access to greater power over the more vulnerable and less powerful and being
protected by societal norms. Whittaker (1996) therefore reframes the allegedly controlling
characteristics and behaviours of non-compliant dependent victims as a struggle and
resistance against oppression and male control. This moves away from explanations based on
caregiver stress that have developed within the field of elder abuse and neglect and that
absolve the perpetrator of responsibility.

Gelles (1993) suggests that feminist theory presents an analysis of only one type of
violence and victimisation. It does not, in his view, account for child abuse, sibling abuse,
violence by women or the abuse of older people. Featherstone (1997) disagrees with Gelles'
analysis and suggests that in fact great differences and divergences now characterise
feminisms. What the critiques by Gelles and Straus appear to fail to take into account are
considerations of the interactions between different factors within feminist analyses.

When gender is seen as a constructed sociocultural process rather than biologically

determined as 'sex', it is no longer enough to consider that males are violent, and women are
 112

peaceful and nurturing. Appropriate use of the former approach highlights diversity and
rejects the attempt to define one sole cause of women's oppression.

Featherstone (1997, p. 431) argues for:

'...an engagement with some of the perspectives... characterised by an

appreciation that gendered positions are significant explanatory tools in exploring
violence but that these positions are neither fixed nor inevitable. They are subject
to constant struggle and redefinition.'

At first sight, it may seem obvious and uncontroversial that gender and power issues are
central to elder abuse. However, they relate and interrelate in extremely complex ways. For
instance, we cannot blame one single aspect of gender or power relations for the development
of violence and aggression between humans. It is not enough to say that elder abuse is
perpetrated by damaged, sick or stressed individuals - namely men - or that attitudes that
allow the continuation of elder abuse simply result from personal prejudice. We must now
consider the complex interplay of structural power relations throughout society as setting the
context for abuse to be minimised, condoned, exacerbated or even perpetrated.

However, this wider social explanation is also, in itself, insufficient. It is necessary to

examine the organisational, agency and cultural factors reflecting the social structures, which
encourage maintenance of the status quo in respect of gender divided roles, work and status.
The socialisation of individuals in families is created by the wider social structures and
cultural factors and, in turn, recreates them by subscribing to the gender and power games
advanced. All these interact to produce individual experiences and behaviours some of which
are fundamentally abusive and proscribed by society, some of which are neither condoned nor
proscribed and some of which are perpetuated within the existing social fabric. This is often
internalised by individuals who then add to the maintenance and development of a gendered
and unequal society.

It is the social organisation of gender that allocates roles and meaning and which
contributes to the marginalisation of elder abuse at a social, agency and personal level. As
Thompson (1997) states in respect of anti-discriminatory practice, those who are not actively
seeking to change this state of affairs are part of the problem. It is the responsibility of us all,
therefore, as practitioners or simply as citizens, to acknowledge our own assumptions and
gendered positions. We must work with agencies and organisations and the wider society to
develop an approach that recognises the importance of gender and power relations and seek to
influence those who set the terms of the argument at policy-making and political levels. As
Kaufman (1994, p. 146) indicated, 'we all experience power in diverse ways, some that
celebrate life and diversity and others that hinge on control and domination'. A gender-power
analysis can be usefully employed to develop approaches that celebrate life and diversity in
our attempts to deal with elder abuse.
 113

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 117

Male Violence: The Economic Costs A Methodological Review

Carrie L. YODANIS and Alberto GODENZI26

University of Fribourg, Switzerland27
During the second wave of the women's movement, attention was drawn to male
violence against women through presentation of the brutality, the loss of life and freedom, and
the fear that many women experience in their lives (Brownmiller, 1975; Pizzey, 1977;
Russell, 1982). Based on these profoundly negative consequences, advocates argued that
something must be done to assist battered women.

Arguments in the fight against male violence against women have come from a
variety of perspectives. The most common argument defines violence against women as a
legal, equal rights issue. This argument has taken different forms. Some argue that victims of
male violence have a right to equal protection from the criminal justice system. Therefore,
laws need to be in place to ensure that violence against women is defined as a crime and that
perpetrators are arrested, tried, and punished (Stanko, 1985). Others argue that women have a
civil right to be protected from violent men through government funded counselling and
refuge (Dobash & Dobash, 1992). Still others, most notably at the United Nations' 4th World
Conference for Women in Beijing, call for an end to violence against women throughout the
world in all its diverse forms, because violence is a violation of women's human rights.
Therefore, male violence must be condemned and stopped regardless of cultural traditions and
beliefs.

A different perspective views violence against women as a health issue. In 1994, the
World Bank published a report, “Violence Against Women: The Hidden Health Burden”,
which examined how male violence contributes to poor health and early death for women
throughout the world (Heise, 1994). Such evidence has been used to strengthen laws and
policies protecting victims. For example, the concept of the battered woman syndrome, based
on the argument that abuse results in psychological trauma and dysfunction, was used to fight
for a legal defence for women who kill their abusive partners (Walker, 1984; Dobash &
Dobash, 1992).

During the late 1980s and 1990s, another perspective on violence against women
emerged. This perspective views violence against women as an economic issue. This
perspective does not disagree with earlier perspectives. Rather, it provides another, quite
powerful, angle from which to view the legal, health, and other consequences resulting from
male violence and to argue for social policies to improve the services and protection for
victims of male violence. In another paper co-authored with Elizabeth Stanko, we evaluate
the benefits of an economic argument and consider the potential for this perspective to affect
policy (Yodanis, Godenzi, & Stanko, forthcoming). In this paper, we review the cost of
violence studies and discuss their common methodological approaches. We consider both the
weaknesses associated with this methodology, and how these studies are important for
improving the availability of data on violence against women – a step which is vital for
increasing assistance to women.

26
with contributions by Elizabeth A. Stanko
27
Department of Social Work and Social Policy, Rte des Bonnesfontaines 11, CH-1700 Fribourg,
Switzerland, Tel: +41 26 322 7815 or 7795; Fax: +41 26 322 9715; Email: Carrie.Yodanis@unifr.ch
Alberto.Godenzi@unifr.ch
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STUDIES OF THE ECONOMIC COSTS OF MALE VIOLENCE

In 1986, Straus sought to measure the costs of medical care relating to intrafamily
assault and homicide. By compiling statistics about the prevalence of injuries and medical
attention resulting from spouse and child assaults, he estimated that homicide within families
may account for roughly 24% (or about $1.73 billion) of the total costs of homicide as
estimated by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress in 1976. Yet, he also stressed that
this figure omits many of the medical costs that are incurred prior to death. He outlines the
types and frequencies of possible costs which need to be included if we think of homicide as
the final outcome of the disease of violence, but he leaves the “translation of the injury and
medical care dollar costs to those more familiar with medical economics” (p. 557). The next
year, Straus and Gelles (1987) in “The Costs of Family Violence” used data from a nationally
representative study to expand on this idea and outline the prevalence of additional costly
outcomes of violence in the family, including drug and alcohol use, crime and vandalism,
missed work and daily activities, and psychological distress. While they list the numerous
possible sources of costs, they do not estimate cost figures. That same year, Friedman and
Couper (1987) published the report, The costs of domestic violence: A preliminary
investigation of the financial costs of domestic violence.

During the 1990s, costs studies and estimates became even more ambitious.
Researchers began to combine prevalence rates of violence and various outcomes of violence
with estimates of related costs in order to develop a total figure which measures the costs of
male violence against women. Such studies have been completed in Canada (Day, 1995;
Greaves et al., 1995), British Columbia (Kerr & McLean, 1996), the Netherlands (Korf et al.,
1997), New South Wales (NSW Women's Coordination Unit, 1991), New Zealand (Snively,
1994), Northern Territory (Office of Women's Policy, 1996), Queensland (Blumel et al.,
1993), Switzerland (Godenzi & Yodanis, 1998) and the United Kingdom (Stanko et al.,
1998). Key information about each study is summarised in Table 1.

Throughout this paper, we will use our study as an example. Our study builds on and
adapts the methods used in the previous cost studies. It focuses on the costs of male violence
against women in Switzerland and is being conducted in three phases. In 1998 (German
version) and 1999 (English version), we published the results from the first phase of our
project, which focused on state-related costs resulting from male violence against women. By
compiling data from representative surveys, government publications and reports, social
service agency records and other sources, we estimated an annual state cost of $290 million.
We discuss our calculations in greater detail throughout this paper. For the second phase of
the project, we are currently studying the costs of male violence to business. And in the third
phase, we will focus on the costs to individuals, including victims, family, friends, volunteers
and service providers, and tax payers.

THE METHODOLOGY OF COST STUDIES

In their US report, Laurence and Spalter-Roth (1996) offer a basic equation for
determining the costs of domestic violence as follows,

“We need to know how many people are affected, how many are using services as a
result of domestic violence, how much of these services they are using, and the costs
of these services” (p. 14).
 119

Although applying the above seems straightforward, accurately computing it is not.

In nearly all countries, we do not know how many women are affected by male violence, and
we do not know how many and how often women use various services as a result of violence.
For years, advocates, activists and others have argued that most violence against women
remains hidden from official view. Indeed, crime surveys, when compared to surveys of
women, show that most violence never becomes part of the official statistics. This is true not
only in criminal justice institutions but also in health care and social service institutions and
workplaces. Accurate information on the prevalence and impact of male violence is lacking
in all parts of society. On one hand, this limits the possibility of cost studies to provide
accurate cost estimates and useful information to service providers and policy makers. On the
other hand, cost studies bring to light and can reduce this lack of knowledge in parts of
society where individuals usually do not consider themselves impacted by violence.

Conducting cost studies with missing data

The majority of cost of violence studies rely predominantly on existing data

previously gathered by government agencies or research institutes. For example, Greaves et
al. (1995) compiled their estimate for Canada based on information from approximately 30
surveys, reports, and studies, including the Statistics Canada Survey on Violence Against
Women. Laurence and Spalter-Roth's (1996) review of US material provides an extensive list
of empirical studies, organisations, and government offices, which can provide information
relating to various dimensions of the costs of violence against women. In our study, we used
data from numerous sources including the National Survey of Violence Against Women,
Swiss Statistical Yearbook, Police Criminal Statistics, and Office of Federal Statistics reports
on Costs of Public Health and Public Finances in Switzerland.

This data can be an important starting point for estimating the costs of violence. Yet,
relying too heavily on the existing data creates problems, not due to inadequate researchers,
but because of inadequate data. Since the existing data is always incomplete, the cost
estimates based on this data, likewise, suffer from shortcomings, which limit their usefulness.
As a result of using existing data, cost estimates are weakened by methodological problems
related to operationalisation and measurement of economic costs, units of analysis, time
frames and population inferences.

Operationalisation and measurement

When measuring a concept, it is necessary first to have a clear definition. Then, one
needs to outline the various dimensions, or facets, of the concept. Finally, data is gathered on
particular indicators which measure the various dimensions of the concept. When using
existing data, however, it is not always possible to include the full range of dimensions or
indicators required for adequate measurement of a desired concept. Often the data simply are
not available. This is a consistent problem in cost of violence studies. Concepts are often
operationalised according to the availability of information rather than the requirements for
valid and reliable measurement. This is true for our study. Most obviously, while we plan to
include additional phases in our study, we first selected state-related costs, because the most
information was available about these costs.

The limitations of existing data result in a number of measurement problems. First,

there is often inconsistency between conceptualisation and operationalisation in studies. For
example, in our study, we define violence as "physical, sexual, and psychological abuse
which is perpetrated by men on women or girls as a result of their gender". Yet, when we
 120

calculate the costs, we are often not able to include the costs associated with these various
forms of violence. For example, in our estimate of health costs, we do not include
information on women under 20 years of age, because that information is not available.

Similarly, the measures often do not include dimensions and indicators which other
studies have shown to be likely costs of violence. There is substantial evidence to show that
women who experience abuse, including women in Switzerland, are more likely to engage in
self-destructive behaviour, such as alcohol and drug abuse and report worse mental health
(Stark & Flitcraft, 1996; Gilloz et al., 1997; Kavemann, 1997). Nevertheless, we are unable
to include abuse-related costs for drug and alcohol treatment or other psychiatric treatment in
our cost figure, because information on the rate of these services sought by women as a result
of violence is not available in Switzerland.

Third, weaknesses in measurement occur, because due to the lack of data, informed
assumptions have to be made. From the national study of violence against women in
Switzerland, we know that approximately 10,000 women a year sought help from a social
worker as a result of experiencing violence. Yet, we do not know the reasons behind their
help seeking. Backed with additional information regarding the financial stresses of women
leaving abusive relationships, we make the assumption that about half of these women sought
some form of financial assistance.

In other cases, data that is available are used as merely proxies for missing
information. For example, there is no data recorded on the number of court cases which are
related to crimes of male physical violence against women in Switzerland. However, we do
have information from a national study on the number of women who contacted lawyers and
sought divorces, separations, or protection orders as a result of violence from partners. We
use these figures, adjusted to account for the often high percentage of the women who will
drop charges before trial, to estimate the number of court cases each year which occur as a
result of physical violence against women.

These problems of operationalisation, omitted dimensions and indicators,

assumptions and estimates, which are found in most cost studies, weaken the validity and
reliability of measures of the cost of violence against women. One cannot be sure if the
studies are accurately measuring the economic costs and if that same figure would be
reproduced if recalculated at a later point in time. However, it would be extremely difficult, if
not impossible, to calculate the precise costs of violence against women. Cost figures must
be, to some extent, merely estimations. Given this, the problems of operationalisation and
measurement may at first appear to be an insignificant problem. If additional costs indicators
or more precise data were added to the estimates, the total figures would only be higher.
Therefore, omission of additional costs seems to ensure that the estimates are more
conservative and less refutable.

These problems of measurement, however, extend beyond the ability to compile an

accepted figure for the costs of violence. When researchers omit some costs completely or
include guesses and proxies rather than empirical data, the study does not provide solid,
practically applicable information about the problem of violence against women. Yet, the
very fact that data is not available indicates the lack of information available to individuals,
who are in key positions to support and assist women if they realise the need.
 121

Unit of analysis

Other methodological problems facing cost estimate studies are related to the units of
analysis. The unit of analysis in cost estimate studies is usually women. Equations are based
on the prevalence of service usage as reported by a sample of women. Cost figures are then
applied to this prevalence rate to calculate an estimate for the costs of male violence. Relying
on women as the unit of analysis is very important for establishing differences between
abused and non-abused women in costly conditions such as physical and mental health status
(Stark & Flitcraft, 1996; Gillioz et al., 1997), alcohol use and illegal drug use (Kavemann,
1997), work income and job turnover (Hyman, 1993; Lloyd, 1997; Morrison & Orlando,
1999), and welfare usage (Allard et al., 1997; Raphael & Tolman, 1997).

Yet, weaknesses result when individuals are the unit of analysis in costs of violence
studies. Under these circumstances, estimates are not based on data from particular agencies,
organisations or businesses. Rather, they are calculated based on women's use of unspecified
service agencies and experiences in unspecified work places. For example, we estimate from
the national study of violence against women that approximately 4,000 women require
hospital care as a result of experiencing violence. We also know that the average hospital stay
for a patient in a Swiss hospital costs approximately SFR. 10,000 and that the federal, state
and local governments are responsible for paying 75 percent of the expenses. We compute a
fairly convincing cost estimate based on these figures.

Nevertheless, the resulting estimate will likely have limited meaning for and effect
on doctors, nurses, and other service providers in individual Swiss hospitals. Such figures
may not be viewed as applicable to their organisation and cannot provide advice for how to
alter daily operations and services to better meet the needs of women experiencing violence.

Time frames

A problem related to the unit of analysis is the issue of time frames. Researchers
primarily aim to estimate the annual cost of violence. Ideally, costs could be calculated for
every year and changes could be observed over time. However, when using infrequently and
sporadically gathered data, researchers must compromise by gathering data from the various
years in which figures are available and computing a cost estimate for an “average” year. For
example, within our study, some cost figures are based on 1993 data while others are based on
1996. In another example, when calculating the cost of research, we knew the amount of
research grants that were awarded in 1996 by the largest national granting agency to study
violence against women. The funding amounts were unusually large for that year as a result
of a one- time research programme on violence against women. Few grants to study violence
against women have been awarded before or after this programme. In order to estimate the
expenditures on research over time, we assumed that grants of this amount would be given
every 20 years and divided the total amount of research funding by twenty to get an annual
cost.

While the best given the circumstances, this solution is not optimal. Not only is it
impossible to observe changes in costs across years, but it also omits many costs. The U.S.
National Institute of Justice measures costs as “the total losses imposed by crimes that occur
in a given year - regardless of when the losses actually occur” (Travis, 1996). Laurence and
Spalter-Roth (1996) explain the need for a prevalence-based approach measuring all service
usage, both new and recurring, which occur in a given time period. In their outline of an ideal
study, they suggest a five year period. Both of these specified time frames are able to capture
 122

the full extent of costs occurring from violence. Yet, most current cost estimates are unable to
use these defined time frames and thus, cannot know the long term costs of violence.
Recurring use of services as a result of violence are likely to be the most expensive costs.
Knowing how long and how many times women use particular services is also essential for
understanding the role of the services in assisting victims and evaluating the cost
effectiveness of a programme.

Population inferences

A final methodological problem in cost of violence studies is the inability to make

accurate inferences to the desired study population. Often, data is available from only one
organisation or region and does not allow accurate extrapolation to a whole country or state.
For example, we use figures on the costs of public assistance from one state to estimate a
national figure in this area. When researchers use the available data to make inferences to the
entire country, estimates gain substantially more error.

In sum, use of existing data to calculate cost estimates is not optimal. Yet, cost
studies, relying on existing data, can be and often are used to highlight and correct this lack of
information. Bringing this lack of information to light is one of the primary benefits of cost of
violence studies.

Increasing awareness and data with cost studies

All researchers using existing data in cost studies, including us, recognise the
problem of unavailable and partial data and have stressed the need for better systems of
gathering data on the effects of violence on the workplace, service agencies, and
organisations. In their estimates of the economic costs of violence against women in Canada,
Greaves et al. (1995) write, “The main difficulties in establishing full cost estimates of
violence against women in Canada are the lack of data and inconsistent data collection
systems particularly at the federal and provincial levels” (p.1). After their review of the
existing data in the United States, Laurence and Spalter-Roth (1996) conclude, “We found
considerable gaps in the research literature in all of the areas studied, suggesting that
considerable research is needed before reliable cost figures can be determined” (p. 4).

Fortunately, cost of male violence studies can be designed to improve the very
problems from which they suffer. They can increase the availability of data in two ways.
First, cost studies, by their very design, suggest the many areas within a society which are
impacted by male violence against women. As Crisp and Stanko (forthcoming) recently
observed, “The lessons of the costs study point to the multiple intervention sites where it is
possible to disrupt the serial patterns of domestic violence.” They can capture the attention
and increase the awareness of police officers, judges, lawyers, social workers, employers,
doctors, nurses, and political leaders – individuals and organisations who previously did not
consider themselves affected by violence against women. As a result, violence will no longer
be an unknown cause of health, financial, and workplace problems, and victims will no longer
remain “hidden” in the social institutions.

In addition to creating awareness, cost studies can also be designed to increase data
and thus, knowledge about the extent and effects of violence within these social institutions.
Some researchers have taken steps in this direction. Blumel et al. (1993) and the Office of
Women's Policy (1996) conducted interviews with abuse survivors and asked for detailed
information regarding their service use. Stanko (1997) gathered data about experiences with
 123

abuse from patients in a medical office waiting room. We compiled and recorded data about
violence against women from hundreds of separate files in a victims' assistance service
department. In the future, researchers can continue to play an important role by working with
police departments, courts, prison systems, public assistance offices, hospitals, and physician
offices to develop accurate and on-going systems of gathering data on experiences of abuse
among their clients.

In the second phase of our costs of violence against women study, we are conducting
a study of the costs of violence to business. The workplace is possibly the setting in which
male violence is most hidden. Afraid of losing their jobs, women hide bruises, call in sick
and sit in fear instead of doing work, all without the knowledge of co-workers and managers.

Yet, there is some evidence that many companies may be willing to assist women
who experience violence if they are aware of the need. As was posted on the list-serve for the
European Network on Conflict, Gender, and Violence on October 1, 1998, the Family
Violence Prevention Fund sponsored the third annual Work to End Domestic Violence Day in
which hundreds of American businesses, public agencies and organisations participated. On
this day, Bell Atlantic Mobile introduced a toll-free link to the National Domestic Violence
Hotline. They also continue to provide awareness cards to employees and customers and
work with police and social service agencies to provide wireless phone and voicemail boxes
to victims of domestic violence. At Limited, Inc., human resource and security managers
have attended domestic violence education and response training courses led by a women's
shelter director. In addition, associates receive information on violence against women and
have access to an internal company domestic violence hotline number. Numerous other
companies, including Liz Claiborne, Inc., Levi Strauss, Blue Shield of California, Gap
Foundation, Marshalls, Wells Fargo, Polaroid and Time Warner, sponsored the programme,
have taken measures to educate managers about violence against women, and provide support
for employees who experience abuse. By aiming to continue or expand such efforts,
economic cost of violence studies are likely to contribute to creating policies in the workplace
which will support rather than punish women who experience violence (NOW Legal Defense
and Education Fund, 1996).

Therefore, we are conducting a study that will both generate information regarding
the impact of male violence on the workplace and estimate a cost figure, which is useful for
convincing businesses to implement helpful policies. The study will focus on violence against
women which occurs outside the workplace, including physical, sexual, and psychological
violence in and outside of intimate relationships, as well as violence which occurs in the
workplace, such as sexual harassment. We seek to estimate lost employee days, productivity,
profits and additional expenses resulting from the actions of perpetrators and needs of victims.
Examples include a male employee missing work as a result of court appearances related to an
arrest for assaulting a female partner and a female employee missing work as a result of
abuse-related injuries. Data for the study will be gathered through the distribution of a survey
to women and men in a sample of work settings. Key managers will also be interviewed to
determine the measures which are taken to create a safe work environment and the costs of
such measures and their knowledge of the effects of male violence on business.

Yet data gathering can, and ideally should not be, a one time occurrence. Rather, on-
going data gathering systems can be institutionalised to become part of the daily operations of
the organisation. These systems do not need to be time consuming or cumbersome. Often the
information is currently being collected from clients but is recorded in separate files and on
inconsistent forms rather than in ways that make it readily accessible and analysable. Many
 124

organisations merely need assistance in order to make the relatively minor adjustments
needed to establish ongoing data collection systems.

There are examples of such successful efforts. In the London Borough of Hackney,
the Metropolitan Police have established a Crime Report Information System (CRIS). As
described by Stanko et al. (1997), this system records all incidents reported to the police and
highlights any incident or crime which is domestic in nature. These would include offences
of violence, sexual offences, offences against property, public order offences, breach of an
injunction where there is a power of arrest, and incidents which are not later recorded as crime
but where the police have been contacted.

As in the Hackney examples, we also believe that studies should begin to consider a
new unit of analysis, the organisation, in order to improve estimates, as well as the usefulness
of the data to service providers and employers. Collecting data at the institutional level will
improve estimates of the costs of violence. By gathering data from all individuals who seek
services from a particular organisation, it is possible to have accurate knowledge of the
portion of service usage which occurs as a result of violence against women. By knowing
which services were used, more exact cost figures can be used in the calculations. For
example, when data is gathered from a hospital emergency room, we will know the number of
cases which were related to domestic violence, the medical treatment that was given, and have
a better estimate of the cost of the services.

Following from this, we believe that less attention can be spent on trying to compute
precise national figures. By focusing instead on gathering data at the institutional level,
organisations, agencies and businesses will have access to data on an ongoing basis to observe
changes over time in the relationship between violence and service needs. The need for
additional support services, the quality, and cost effectiveness of existing programmes can be
evaluated.

Yet such systems must be developed with caution. The need for more and more
accurate data should never override the rights of women who experience violence. Any
system of data gathering needs to include a guarantee of confidentiality, voluntary
participation, and security that the information will be used for the benefit, not harm, of
women.

In the end, the cost estimate will not just be a large number, but directly meaningful
for developing effective services to assist victims and reducing all costs of violence –
monetary and non-monetary.

CONCLUSION

In this paper, we present studies on the economic costs of male violence against
women and discuss their methodological approaches and weaknesses. But why study costs?
In this paper, we present one benefit of these studies. By raising questions regarding where
the costs fall, the studies bring to light the many diverse social institutions and organisations
which are impacted by male violence against women. With adjustments in methodological
approach, cost studies can be used to increase the availability of data and knowledge
regarding the pervasiveness of male violence throughout societies. The elimination of
ignorance and blinkers is the essential first step in reducing male violence.
 125

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 128

TABLE 1. Summary of Studies of the Economic Costs of Violence Against Women in the 1990s

Country/ Region Total Cost Year Type of Violence Types of Costs included in
Author(s) Estimate (USD) Estimate
New South $1,000,000,000 1991 Domestic violence against Individual, Government, Employer
Wales, women at various stages of and Third Party – Health care,
Australia acknowledgment and service Legal, Criminal justice, Social
usage. welfare, Employment, Child care,
NSW Women's (A$ 1,525,000,000) and Housing
Co-ordination
Unit

Queensland, $407,000,000 1993 Physical, sexual, Victims, Public/community, and

Australia psychological, and social Other individuals – Housing and
domestic violence, rape, Refuge, Social Security, Health
D. Blumel, G. L. sexual assault of women care, Counseling, Police and
Gibb, B. Innis, D. (A$ 620,000,000) Criminal justice, Legal Services,
Justo, D. Wilson Emergency relief
New Zealand $625,000,000 – 1994 Family violence, including Individual, Government, Third
2,750,000,000 threats of violence, on party, and Employer – Medical
S. Snively women, children, and men. care, Social welfare and assistance,
(NZ$ 1.2 – 5.3 bn - Legal and Criminal Justice, and
9 figures given) Employment
Canada $1,050,000,000 1995 Physical and sexual abuse of Health costs – Medical, Dental, and
women Psychiatric care, Paid and Unpaid
T. Day (C$1,540,000,000) Work, Housing and refuge, Long
term costs
Canada $2,800,000,000 1995 Physical violence, sexual Individual, Government, and Third
assault, rape, incest, child party - Social services & education,
L. Greaves, sexual abuse Criminal justice, Labor & work,
O. Hankivsky, & (C$4,225,000,000) Health & medical
J. Kingston-
Riechers
British Columbia $260,000,000 1996 Physical and sexual assault, Police and justice, Victim and
homicide of women Public Assistance, Counseling,
R. Kerr & J. (C$ 385,000,000) Mental health care, Substance
McLean abuse treatment, Refuge, Work,
Aboriginal programmes
Northern $5,800,000 1996 Physical, sexual, Individual, Community and Other
Territory psychological, and social Direct costs – Crisis/support
domestic violence – effects services, Police, Housing,
Office of (A$ 8,860,000) on women and children Financial, Medical, Legal services.
Women's Policy Indirect costs calculated per case.
Netherlands $160,000,000 1997 Physical, sexual, and Police and justice, Medical,
psychological domestic Psychosocial care, Labor and social
D.J. Korf, H. violence against women security
Meulenbeek, E. (f 332,600,000)
Mot, & T. van
den Brandt
Hackney, UK $8,300,000 1997 Physical, sexual, and Police, Civil justice, Housing,
psychological abuse of Refuge, Social services, and Health
E. A. Stanko, women and children care
D. Crisp, C. Hale, (£ 5,000,000)
& H. Lucraft
Switzerland $290,000,000 1998 Physical, sexual, and State costs - Medical treatment,
psychological Police and justice, Victim-related
A. Godenzi & (Sfr. 409,000,000) abuse of women and girls support, Support and counselling,
C. Yodanis Research
 129

BUT WHERE ARE THE MEN? CENTRAL-STATE PUBLIC POLICIES

TO COMBAT VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IN POST-
AUTHORITARIAN SPAIN (1975-1999)

Celia VALIENTE, University Carlos III, Madrid, Spain

In post-authoritarian Spain (1975-1999), policies against violence against women
(referred to hereafter as AVAW policies) have been similar to AVAW policies elaborated in
other European Union (EU) member states in recent decades.28 Such measures have mainly
been of two types: legal reforms, in order to declare violent actions against women unlawful
acts which are punishable; and social services for victims of violence, for instance, refuges for
battered women. In Spain, AVAW policies have reached only partial achievements because
of the implementation deficit which exists in this policy area. Measures are formulated but
weakly implemented. In this paper, I identify an additional problem (of lesser importance
than the implementation deficit) regarding Spanish AVAW policies. Most policies are
directed at victims, that is, women, but not at male perpetrators of violence, who are the cause
of the problem.

The first (and longest) section of this paper describes the main AVAW policies in
Spain since 1975. The second section explains that policies address mainly women, and to a
much lesser extent, men. The third section presents the incomplete implementation of
AVAW policies.29

CENTRAL-STATE POLICIES TO COMBAT VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IN

SPAIN30

A broad definition of the phenomenon of violence against women "includes any act of
verbal or physical force, coercion or life-threatening deprivation, directed at an individual
woman or girl, that causes physical or psychological harm, humiliation or arbitrary
deprivation of liberty and that perpetuates female subordination" (Heise et al., 1994:1165).
Nevertheless, for reasons of economy of space, time and research resources, this paper
focuses on the study of policies directed at the following violent behaviour against adult
women: rape and any other form of sexual attack, and domestic violence, that is, violence

28
In this paper, the words "policies", "measures" and "programmes" are used as synonymous.
29
This paper is largely based on an analysis of secondary literature, legislation, press files, published
and unpublished political documents and seventeen in-depth personal interviews with social and
political actors active in the policy area of violence against women: four members of feminist
associations; a judge; a police agent; three civil guards (police agents mainly for the rural areas); a
social worker; two members of the personnel who work in a battered women's refuge; a female
victim of violence (rape); a forensic surgeon; a physician specialist in the examination of female
victims of violence; and two lawyers specialist in AVAW legal measures. All interviews were
conducted in the city of Madrid in March 1995. In order to maintain the anonymity of those
interviewed, their names do not appear in this paper. The presentation of policies is an updated and
revised version of the description contained in Valiente (1996).
30
I will concentrate on the central-state policies considered most relevant, that is, those which affect a
large number of women, and/or are financed with a significant amount of public resources, and/or
are specially innovative. The description of the programmes made here is by no means exhaustive.
 130

perpetrated in the family sphere. Other violent behaviour, such as forced prostitution, sexual
harassment at work, genital mutilation and abuse of female children is not considered here.

As noted above, the main AVAW policies in Spain are chiefly of two types: legal
reforms; and support services for female victims of violence. AVAW policies have been
formulated and implemented with some delay in Spain in comparison with other Western
countries. This delay was due in part to the fact that since the mid-1930s to 1975 Spain was
governed by a right-wing authoritarian regime, which was notably anti-feminist.

Legal Reforms

With regard to legal reforms, these are the most important AVAW policies in Spain.
The Spanish legal system is a codified system. In common law systems (for instance, those of
the United Kingdom and the United States) judges build case law, and the importance is
placed on precedent. In contrast, in code law systems, judges are supposed to apply the
principles of the code and laws in each particular case. The source of law is therefore not the
precedent but what is written in the code and other pieces of legislation. This is why it was so
important in Spain to reform the law, particularly the penal code. It defines the most
reprehensible behaviour in a modern society, such as killing, raping or stealing and assigns
them punishments.

In the Penal Code, the different violent acts perpetrated against women are defined as
either misdemeanours (faltas) or offences (delitos),31 and each of them is assigned a
punishment (pena), which is lower for misdemeanours than for offences. From 1975 to 1989,
sexual attacks against women were still listed under the title "offences against purity" (delitos
contra la honestidad). Specifically, most sexual attacks against adult women different from
rape were still called "indecent abuses" (abusos deshonestos). This terminology reflected the
fact that policy-makers considered that perpetrators committed such attacks against the purity,
decency or chastity of women, and not against women's freedom to decide whether to engage
or not in sexual relations.32 Besides, rape was defined in a very restricted way, because it
referred only to heterosexual vaginal coitus, and not to anal or oral coitus, and because it was
established that only men could rape women. Furthermore, in all cases of sexual attacks
against women (including rape), if the victim "forgave" the perpetrator, no prosecution could
take place.

It is important to note that divorce was established in Spain in 1981 (Act Number 30
of July 7).33 This meant that if the executor of violent acts against a woman was her husband,
until 1981 she could not obtain a divorce, remaining therefore legally married (although
perhaps de facto separated) to the violent husband.

31
"Offences" and "crimes" are used in this paper as synonymous.
32
This type of terminology also enjoyed certain currency in other countries with codified legal
systems. For instance, in Italy, sexual violence was listed in the penal code under title "crimes
against public morality and right living" (Addis, 1989:2). In France, sexual assaults were
prosecuted according to an article of the penal code which dealt with "assaults on morals" (Stetson,
1987:163).
33
Divorce also existed during the democratic regime of the Second Republic (1931-1936), but it was
abolished by the subsequent right-wing authoritarian regime.
 131

A relevant reform of the Penal Code took place in 1983 (organic34 Act Number 8 of
June 25), which established that when victims of rape (not of other types of sexual attacks)
forgave the perpetrators, the latter should still be punished according to the law.

It should be noted that, until 1985, abortion was a crime in Spain in all circumstances,
penalised in most cases with a period of imprisonment which ranged from six months to six
years, plus the prohibition of health professionals from performing their profession in private
and public centres. Therefore, if a woman had been raped and became pregnant, according to
the Penal Code, she had to give birth to the baby. Organic Act Number 9 of 5 July 1985,
however, allows abortion in three circumstances: when the woman has been raped, when
pregnancy seriously endangers the life of the mother, and when the foetus has malformations.

An important reform of the Penal Code regarding violence against women took place
in 1989 (organic Act Number 3 of June 21), which instituted changes that had already taken
place in other countries. Sexual attacks were no longer called "offences against purity" but
"offences against sexual freedom" (delitos contra la libertad sexual). By the same token,
some sexual attacks other than rape were no longer called "indecent abuses" but sexual
aggressions (agresiones sexuales). Besides this, the concept of rape was expanded, to include
not only vaginal, but also anal and oral coitus. Nevertheless, penetration with the penis was
required in order to legally define an assault as rape. Two consequences followed
immediately from this requirement: a sexual assault with penetration of foreign objects was
not considered a rape; and men could rape women and men, but women could only rape men
(Bustos, 1991:115; Cabo, 1993:261). From 1989 to the next reform (1995), rape, like
homicide, was punished in Spain with a period of imprisonment which ranged from twelve to
twenty years, and sexual aggression with a period of imprisonment which ranged from six
months to twelve years. In both cases the perpetrator had to compensate the victim
financially. Another point should also be remembered: rape and other sexual aggressions
were offences defined in the laws independently from the marital or professional status of
victims, for instance, irrespective of whether the perpetrator was the husband of the victim, or
whether she worked as a prostitute (Bustos, 1991:115). Finally, the "forgiveness" of the
victims of any offence against sexual freedom (and not only in the case of rape, as established
in 1983), did not cancel the punishment of such behaviour.

The 1989 reformed article 425 of the Penal Code classified repeated physical domestic
violence against women perpetrated by husbands or cohabiting partners as an offence, and not
as a misdemeanour, as it had been legally defined in the past. "Repeated" (habitual) here
meant violence which had been perpetrated at least three times (Bustos, 1991:65; Cabo,
1993:229). The offence of repeated physical domestic violence was punished with a period of
imprisonment which ranged from one to six months.

Finally, since the 1989 reform, state officials (for instance, prison guards) who take
advantage of the power and influence over their clients that their jobs confer to ask for sexual
favours of their clients or their relatives, are punished more severely than before (López,
1992:317-323).

34
According to article 81 of the 1978 Constitution, an organic Act (Ley orgánica) regulates, among
other matters, fundamental rights and public liberties. An absolute majority of the Low Chamber,
in a final vote of the whole project, is necessary for the approval, modification or derogation of an
organic Act. For an ordinary - not organic - Act, only a simple majority is required.
 132

Another important legal reform regarding violence against women took place in 1995
(Act 10 of 23 November), with the establishment of the new penal code (the existing code
was a modified version of that instituted in 1848). The word "rape" disappeared from the
Penal Code. The former rape and sexual aggressions have been known as "sexual
aggressions" since 1995. The definition of the formerly named "rape" was again expanded, to
include penetration with objects. The attack formerly named "rape" is now punished with a
lower maximum number of years of prison (twelve instead of twenty). Group sexual
aggressions are explicitly defined by the Penal Code as acts committed by three or more
people, and are punished with a higher number of years of prison. The punishment of the
offence of repeated physical domestic violence was increased (from a period of imprisonment
which ranged from 1 to 6 months to a period which ranges from 6 months to 3 years). In
addition, the 1995 penal code establishes that a legal process regarding sexual aggression,
sexual abuse or sexual harassment could be initiated with an action of the prosecutor (before
1995, a complaint by the victim was required).

On 30 April 1998, the Council of Ministers approved an Action Plan Against

Domestic Violence (Instituto de la Mujer, 1998), which was formulated under the direction of
the main feminist institution of the central state, the Women's Institute (Instituto de la
Mujer).35 It contains propositions for measures to combat violence against women regarding
prevention, education, support services for victims, health, legal reforms, and research.

Legal reforms followed the Action Plan Against Domestic Violence. On 9 June 1999
(Organic Act 14) the 1995 Penal Code and the Act of criminal indictment (Ley de
enjuiciamiento criminal) were modified regarding domestic violence. The offence of repeated
psychological violence in the domestic place was defined (up till then, the Penal Code only
defined physical violence). New punishments for aggressors were established: the prohibition
to approach the victim, to communicate with her, or to live close to her, in order to avoid a
repetition of violent behaviour. This is one of the rare instances in which the state attempts to
prevent the perpetration of violence, rather than to intervene after violent attacks had already
taken place.

On June 1999, it was also stipulated that judges do not impose fines on violent males
if this economic punishment also hurts economically the victim or her family. It should be
borne in mind that the most common marital property regime in Spain is community property.
Under this regime, each spouse is the owner of half of common properties, that is, of all
properties and income obtained by any of the two spouses after they marry. When, in this
situation, a violent husband has a fine imposed on him, he normally pays it with common
properties, half of which belong to his wife. Therefore, this fine damages the financial
position of his spouse, who might herself have been the victim of violence. Finally, since
1999, in some cases of potential misdemeanours (for instance, threats), prosecutors do not
need the complaint filed by the victim in order to initiate a case (before, they needed the
complaint).

A paramount policy established in parallel with legal reforms has been the collection
of statistics of reported cases of violent attacks on women. Statistics of this type, for instance,
in the case of domestic violence, hardly existed in Spain until 1983. Feminists and state

Since the 1960s, institutions with the concrete purpose of promoting gender equality have been set
35

up, developed (and sometimes even dismantled) in most industrial countries. In social science
literature such institutions have been called "state feminist" institutions or bureaucracies. The
people who work in them are described as "state feminists" (Stetson and Mazur, 1995).
 133

feminists have urged the police and civil guard (police who work chiefly in rural areas) to
collect data of reported cases of aggression in which victims have been women (Gutiérrez,
1990:129). However, it is necessary to bear in mind that the Spanish statistics on this issue,
as is the case with the statistics of many other countries, only deal with reported cases.36 In
Spain, as in many other countries (Kornblit, 1994:1181), underreporting is a common
phenomenon, in such a way that estimates of the real number of cases are only tentative.
Nevertheless, the judiciary was urged to collect data about court decisions (sentencias)
regarding cases of violence against women (Gutiérrez, 1989:9), and the same happened to the
personnel who work in social services, such as refuges for battered women (Spanish Senate,
1989:12185-12187). It should be noted that even in the late 1990s all these statistics are
usually incomplete and hardly comparable (Defensor del Pueblo, 1998).

To my knowledge, there are as yet no prevalence studies on violence against women

in Spain available to the general public. Nevertheless, there are fragmentary data which show
that violence against women is a widespread phenomenon. For instance, in 1990, almost
three out of ten (29 percent) adult Spaniards of both sexes knew cases of domestic violence
against women (Cruz and Cobo, 1991:107-108).

Services for Victims of Violence

As for services for female victims of violence, these consist mainly of the diffusion of
information about women's rights and of measures to protect victims. Diffusion of
information is important because only when they are aware of their legal rights (that nobody
has the prerogative to treat them violently, amongst others) can women efficiently defend
themselves against assaults. It is also useful for women to know which social services and
other resources are available for them if they become victims of violence. In this regard, the
main state feminist institution of the central state, the Women's Institute (Instituto de la
Mujer) created in 1983, has set up and administered women's rights information centres in
some cities, where citizens can obtain information about women's rights in general (and not
only in situations of violence), through an enquiry made in person, by phone or by mail.37
Also, a free women's rights information phone line was set up in 1991, with the main purpose
of reaching women who do not live in cities.

In addition to general information services, the Women's Institute has organised

several information campaigns related to the specific issue of violence against women
(Gutiérrez, 1990: 125; Threlfall, 1985:63). Two of the most recent information and
awareness-raising campaigns were put into practice in Spring and Fall 1998 respectively. The
former contained dramatic pictures of women who had been assaulted. The latter was
promoted by the Spanish Confederation of Neighbours (Confederación Española de Vecinos

36
The number of reported rapes in Spain was: 1,723 in 1989; 1,789 in 1990; 1,1936 in 1991; and
1,599 in 1992. The number of reported sexual aggressions was: 2,502 in 1989; 2,277 in 1990;
2,282 in 1991; and 2,335 in 1992. Finally, the number of reported cases of domestic violence
against women was: 13,705 in 1984; 15,681 in 1986; 15,230 in 1987; 13,644 in 1988; 17,738 in
1989; 15,654 in 1990; 15,462 in 1991; 15,184 in 1992; 15.908 in 1993; 16.284 in 1994; 16.062 in
1995; and 16.378 in 1996 (Instituto de la Mujer, 1994:92-93; 1997).
37
These information centres were not an original creation of the Women's Institute, because the
former Subdirección General de la Mujer dependent on the Ministry of Culture, had already set up
three centres, which the Women's Institute inherited. The number of centres increased steadily. In
1984 there were only three centres. In 1987, there were eleven centres.
 134

del Estado Español), the Women's Institute, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Ministry of
Labour and Social Affairs. The main slogan was "If he beats you, he does not love you. Love
yourself! File a complaint against him! (Si te pega no te quiere. Quiérete tú. Denúnciale) (El
País 14 October 1998:31).

Generally speaking, support services for female victims of violence have been set up
later and are currently less comprehensive in Spain than in other countries, as happens with
social services in general. If legal reforms are (on paper) fairly complete in Spain, support
services for victims are still clearly insufficient (Defensor del Pueblo, 1998). The state does
not always provide directly all these services for victims of violence. In many cases, the state
subsidises non-governmental non-profit women's organisations which provide services for
victims.

The best known service for victims are battered women's refuges (casas de acogida de
mujeres maltratadas) (Instituto de la Mujer, 1986:22; Scanlon, 1990:99). The first refuges
were set up in 1984, and in 1997, 129 refuges existed in Spain (Instituto de la Mujer,
1997:117).38 In the late 1990s, there was a refuge for every 302,000 inhabitants in Spain.
This proportion is still lower than the proportion recommended by a Resolution of the
European Parliament in 1997: a shelter for every 100,000 inhabitants. The supply of Spanish
refuges is geographically uneven, and only one region (Castilla y León) has the appropriate
number of shelters according to its population (Defensor del Pueblo, 1998). Refuges are
administered by the central state, local and regional governments, and organisations of civil
society. As in other countries, refuges provide mainly temporary safe accommodation for
female victims of violence and their children. In addition, they provide other services which
range from legal advice to psychological support and vocational training, with the aim of
helping them to initiate a new type of life away from perpetrators of violence.

The central state also gives subsidies to nationally based women's groups for them to
develop projects for women regarding many topics, including violence. Generally speaking,
in Spain the issue of violence against women had not been a priority for activists in the
women's movement up to the late 1970s or early 1980s, when certain feminists "discovered"
the problem of violence against women, in some cases accidentally (Threlfall, 1985:62-63).
For instance, feminists from the Separated and Divorced Women's Association (Asociación
de Mujeres Separadas y Divorciadas) who provided counselling and legal advice to women
who wanted to initiate separation and/or divorce proceedings, found that the main purpose of
many of their clients was to escape from a situation of high levels of domestic violence. In
1982, a group of women who provided direct assistance to victims of violence constituted the
Commission to Investigate the Ill-treatment of Women (Comisión para la Investigación de los
Malos Tratos a las Mujeres). This commission was composed mainly of social workers,
psychologists and lawyers, and they started to pressurise policy makers with regard to the
formulation of more AVAW measures, and to the implementation of those which already
existed. Other feminist organisations which specialised in the issue of violence against
women were created mainly from the mid-1980s, including the Association of Assistance to
Raped Women (Asociación de Asistencia a Mujeres Violadas) or the Anti-Aggression
Commission (Comisión Anti-Agresiones), but also others.

38
The first battered women's refuge was set up in 1971 in Great Britain (Connors, 1989:34) and in
1974 in the USA (Stout, 1992:134).
 135

Since its establishment, one of the priorities of the Women's Institute has been the
issue of violence against women (Gutiérrez, 1990:124). Approximately 10-15 per cent of the
budget of the Women's Institute has been devoted to subsidising women's organisations
(active in all areas and not only in violence).39 Feminist organisations have administered
refuges and other programmes and services such as emergency phone lines for rape victims,
psychological support for victims of violence or training workshops for the police on violence
against women. It is important to note that these very useful actions have been undertaken in
some parts of the country (where women's organisations specialised in the area of violence
exist), but not in others, and in some years but not in others.

Other services for women include police stations or departments within them to treat
female victims of violence. Since 1988, a police station dedicated exclusively to cases of
violence against women, staffed only by policewomen, exists in Barcelona. Units specialised
in such cases, where some policewomen work, but which are not police stations but
departments within them, have also been set up. These units are called Services to Attend
Women (Servicios de Atención a la Mujer). In 1998 these services existed in sixteen cities,
and it was expected that at the end of that year new services would be set up in nine additional
cities. Similar services also existed in Civil Guard Stations in fifteen provinces in 1998, and
are called Teams for Women and Minors (Equipos de Mujeres y Menores) (El País 16 March
1998:31).

In sum, in Spain since 1975, the main policies to combat violence against women have
consisted of legal reforms and to a lesser extent of support services for women. The former
defined attacks against women as misdemeanours or crimes and assigned them the
corresponding punishment. The latter try to support and protect victims.

MEN AND POLICIES TO COMBAT VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

In Spain, one of the problems (but not the main problem) of most AVAW measures is
the fact that measures are in practice directed towards battered or sexually assaulted women.
In contrast, most AVAW programmes handle violent males only at the very end of the
process of implementation of policies (if at all). Let me use the case of battered women to
substantiate this point. Policies against domestic violence are elaborated in a way that
assumes that a battered woman has to be the active part in the solution of "her" problem. In
all EU member states, she is the person who has to file a complaint, let a doctor examine her
to certify injuries, go to court, and leave her home in order to protect herself from the violent
batterer. The state has established a full battery of AVAW measures around her. The state
has put in motion campaigns directed at her and other victims to encourage them to stop
putting up with domestic attacks and dare to file a complaint; has established procedures to
handle complaints; has trained doctors to certify injuries; has arranged legal processes for
crimes or misdemeanours to be judged; and has set up refuges. Only at the very end of a legal
process (if such a legal process ever takes place) the state deals with the violent partner. This
happens when his actions are judged in court, although in most cases male batterers are
absolved.

I am not arguing that policies directed at victims are unnecessary and should be
abolished. On the contrary, many women are still unprotected by the state. For instance,

39
The policy of the Women's Institute of subsidising the women's movement is described in Valiente
(1995).
 136

feminists have continuously complained about the insufficient protection given by the police
and civil guard on some occasions to female victims especially in the case of domestic
violence. Sometimes the police or the civil guard have come too late when called, precisely
because violent acts being perpetrated were against women (Cova and Arozena, 1985:36).
Moreover, police and civil guards have not guaranteed the safety of women who have
repeatedly been victims of violent attacks. Many of these women have finally died or become
severely injured. According to the 1998 report on domestic violence made by the
Ombudsman (Defensor del Pueblo, 1998), 89 out of the 91 women killed by their partners in
1997 had filed complaints of domestic violence against their aggressors. The Spanish state
failed to safeguard them from the violent males who killed them (Asociación de Mujeres
Juristas Themis, 1999). The point which I am making now is that in order to combat
violence, policies of two types are needed: First, programmes to support and protect victims;
second, measures to eradicate violent behaviour of male perpetrators. In the absence of the
latter, the former is clearly insufficient.

Statistics are another example to illustrate that AVAW policies mainly deal with
female victims, but hardly at all with male perpetrators of violence. Statistics chiefly reflect
women suffering from violence (but not men perpetrating violence). For instance, regarding
domestic violence, statistics count the number of complaints made by battered women, the
number of years on average that women withstand violent attacks before daring to file a
complaint, the number of women who seek refuge in a shelter, and the average number of
days that they stay in refuges. Statistics usually contain much less information on violent
males. For example, statistics do not tell us basic things such as how many violent males
there are, or when they started behaving violently towards women.

Information and awareness-raising campaigns are another case which illustrates the
point that AVAW policies are mainly directed to women (to victims). Most campaigns
promoted by the Spanish state are chiefly directed to female victims of violence. All
campaigns try to encourage victims to denounce aggressors. Campaigns are hardly ever
directed at men, encouraging them not to behave violently against women (for instance,
proclaiming that attacking women is shameful, reprehensible and intolerable behaviour).

In Spain, very few programmes for male perpetrators of violence against women exist.
Some treatment for rapists and sex offenders (but hardly any for batterers) is available in
some prisons. These are very few pilot experiments, and have not been generalised to all
prisons. These programmes are voluntary. The inadequacy of the design and the scarce
supply of programmes for violent males have been denounced by the mass media and by
many people, including professionals who at some point work with violent males, for
instance, psychologists who elaborate reports on the mental health of presumed criminals to
be used in court (El País 30 March 1998:Madrid 4). The denunciation by the mass media was
particularly visible in 1998 with the case of the so-called "Rapist of the urban expansion area"
(El violador del Ensanche), after the name of the area in the city of Barcelona where he
committed the 140 sexual attacks to which he confessed. According to a legally correct
decision, he was released in 1998 after 15 years of prison. The judge thought that he was still
dangerous. While in prison, he had systematically refused to undertake any psychological
programme for violent males (El País 18 October 1998:17).

Generally speaking, and with some exceptions, the state does not intend to prevent the
perpetration of violent acts against women, but to intervene only after violence has taken
place. This is one of the reasons why state actions usually centre around the victim,
encouraging her to file a complaint and initiate a legal process. If the state intended to
 137

prevent the perpetration of violence, it would establish more measures directed at men, who
after all are the aggressors in most cases, and are the potential aggressors.40 For instance, the
state would set up extensive programmes at schools to teach minors to solve conflicts
resorting on negotiation rather than imposition and violence. The state would put in practice
rehabilitation programmes for violent males and would do this in various settings and not only
in prisons. The state would also be much more active in the area of mass media
communications, developing actions jointly with the media regarding the prevention of
violence. There are only pilot research projects of this type of measures directed to men and
all of these have a voluntary, exploratory, and pilot character. For instance, in 1998 the
government started to talk about prevention of violence with the mass media, especially with
television (El País 15 October 1998:28).

To conclude, it is argued in this paper that the fact that AVAW measures are mainly
directed at women impedes the effectiveness of policies to combat violence against women,
since men (not women) are the root of the problem.

THE IMPLEMENTATION DEFICIT OF POLICIES TO COMBAT VIOLENCE

AGAINST WOMEN

As it has already been pointed out (Asociación de Mujeres Juristas Themis, 1999;
Defensor del Pueblo, 1998; Valiente, 1996), the main problem regarding the relatively weak
efficiency of AVAW policies in Spain is the deficit of implementation. Let me illustrate the
weak implementation of AVAW policies in the case of the functioning of the judicial system.
It has been identified as the biggest obstacle for the successful implementation of measures
against perpetrators of violent attacks against women (Asociación de Mujeres Juristas
Themis, 1999; Gutiérrez, 1989:42-43; Threlfall, 1985:61). Women's advocates have
insistently complained about the (illegal) slowness and superficiality which have
characterised the examination of victims by some forensic surgeons (Asociación Española de
Mujeres Separadas y Divorciadas, 1985:23; Gutiérrez, 1989:25-26). In addition, feminists
have objected to the relevant number of complaints of violent attacks against women
(specially in the case of domestic violence) which are classified by judges of the lower courts
as misdemeanours instead of offences, and have therefore been punished accordingly in the
subsequent trial.41 In addition, feminists have insistently complained about the proportion of
cases in which violent males are not punished: for instance, 82 percent of men who had been
denounced for domestic violence in the region of Madrid between 1992 and 1996 (Asociación
de Mujeres Juristas Themis, 1999:43-44).

Feminists have also denounced several (illegal) practices that regularly occur in trials,
practices which hinder the explicit aim of the laws of effectively protecting the victims and
punishing the perpetrators of violence. First of all, as has been explained by Allison and
Wrightsman (1993:171-194) for rape trials in the USA context, and by Sue Lees (1992) for
murder trials in Great Britain, on many occasions a trial of violent acts against women
becomes a trial of the victims. They frequently have to answer questions related to their style
of living or to their past sexual activities, under the suspicion that some women (for instance,
those who go out alone at night, or who frequent bars, or who do not have a permanent

40
According to a study of the complaints of domestic violence filed in the region of Madrid between
1992 and 1996, aggressors were men in 90 percent of the cases (Asociación de Mujeres Juristas
Themis, 1993:13).
41
As explained above, the punishment of misdemeanours is lower than that of offences.
 138

domicile or a stable partner, or wear certain types of clothes, or are conceptualised as

promiscuous) put themselves in danger of being treated violently, since they might indirectly
induce men to behave in such way. Feminists have demanded with vehemence that judges,
prosecutors and lawyers do not investigate the private life of the victims unless it is strictly
necessary, since what is judged in a trial of this type is the violent behaviour of the presumed
perpetrator, and not the intimate life of the victim (Instituto de la Mujer, 1985:71-72). A
decision of the Supreme Court of Justice (Tribunal Supremo), that is, the highest judicial unit
in all matters except those related to constitutional guarantees, in 1990, corroborated
feminists' arguments, declaring that the sexual life of a victim of rape before rape takes place
is irrelevant to the trial (El País 5 November 1990:29). Nevertheless, even now some judges,
prosecutors and lawyers make investigations into the previous sexual life of the victim,
investigations which are not at all necessary for the elucidation of the cases. In these cases,
state actions to combat violence against women focus on women, even in the moment when
violent actions of male perpetrators are being judged in court.

The feminist movement has also complained that prosecutors very often are not active
enough in the investigation of violent acts against women before the trial takes place, and do
not subsequently maintain charges against presumed perpetrators of violence (Asociación de
Mujeres Juristas Themis, 1999; Baiges, 1985:11; Cova and Arozena, 1985:36). This alleged
deficit in maintaining charges by prosecutors is very important, because when judges write
court decisions they punish perpetrators of violence with a punishment equal or lower than the
punishment demanded by prosecutors. This lack of action by prosecutors has happened in
spite of repeated instructions from the attorney general of the state (Fiscal General del Estado)
to be active in the prosecution of violent crimes against women - for instance, in October
1998 (El País 17 October 1998).

Another battlefront of feminists' struggles has been the investigation during the trial of
the reactions of female victims of violence, specially in cases of rape. The penal code does
not say anything about this matter, but in Spain, as in many other countries, it has been a
widespread requirement in trials that rape victims prove that they had very actively resisted
their aggressors. This de facto requirement is paradoxical, since victims of other offences or
misdemeanours, for instance, robbery, did not have to prove that they had resisted the thieves.
After numerous decisions by the Supreme Court of Justice which made reference to the high
degree of resistance of rape victims, the Supreme Court of Justice affirmed in a decision of
1987 that rape victims do not have to prove that they have "heroically" resisted rapists, and
that it was enough to show that they have been intimidated or threatened, for instance, with a
knife (El País 8 October 1987:29). While the matter seemed theoretically to have been
settled, feminists have complained that in many trials victims are still asked to prove that their
degree of resistance to rapists was high. As a consequence of this, and the investigation of the
degree of the resistance, victims have had to answer humiliating and embarrassing questions.
For instance, in 1989, in a rape trial, the presumed victim was asked if the day of the rape she
wore underpants. According to the president of the court, the question was necessary in order
to calibrate how the alleged rapist had acted (and the victim resisted), bearing in mind that he
had a knife in one hand, and with the other he had to take some clothes off the victim, a task
which would have been harder or easier depending on her resistance (El País 27 June
1989:24; 28 June 1989:31).

CONCLUSION

This paper has described the main policies against violence against women established
in Spain after 1975. AVAW policies have mainly been of two types: legal reforms, which
 139

define attacks against women as misdemeanours or crimes; and services to support and
protect the victims. With some minor exceptions, legal reforms are, on paper, mainly
complete. In contrast, services for victims are comparatively speaking scarce and could be
developed considerably. The chief problem in the policy area is the deficit of implementation
of the AVAW measures already formulated. A problem of secondary, but not negligible,
importance is the fact that most policies are directed at women, who are in most cases the
victims of violence, but not at men, who are the perpetrators of attacks. The equivalent of
fighting against violence against women with measures directed to women would be to
combat anti-semitism with policies to protect Jews (rather than preventing Anti-Semites from
attacking Jews), or to eradicate robbery with measures protecting the whole population
against thieves (rather than making the lives of thieves really hard).

If the diagnoses of the factors that explain the limited effectiveness of AVAW policies
identified in this paper are correct, the recommended future direction of policies is clear.
State action in this policy area will be more efficient only when programmes which are
elaborated are also put into practice. In addition, the state should undertake more measures
which try to prevent violence (and therefore which are directed at men).

Two or three decades ago, feminists realised in all countries that women live in a
violent world. An increasing number of activists have subsequently thought that effective
resistance to the phenomenon of violence against women across countries should involve not
only the women's movement but also the state (Heise et al., 1994:1174). If the description of
the characteristics and dynamics of this policy area made in this paper is accurate, it might be
concluded that feminists' provision of direct help to the victims of violence is still going to be
useful and irreplaceable in the future. This has been, in fact, the strategy pursued by women's
advocates in Spain in the last three decades. It is not only that the supply of direct assistance
to victims (and programmes for the population in general) has never been abandoned, but also
that such programmes have flourished in recent years. It is also encouraging to bear in mind
that the issue of violence against women, together with abortion, are still unifying motives for
the different branches of the Spanish feminist movement to engage in joint activities, even
though the movement, in relation to other issues, has usually been very fragmented.

Programmes directed towards men (the aggressors or the potential aggressors) may or
may not develop in Spain in the near future. This type of programme is a thorny issue for the
Spanish feminist movement. As in other countries, many strands of the movement think that
the establishment of measures for men would detract from the already scarce resources for
programmes for victims (mainly women). While feminists have acquired expertise
denouncing violent attacks against women and administering services for victims, other
people or professionals (for instance, male psychologists, or members of men's movements)
may also claim expertise in the treatment of violent males. If such is the case, a material and
symbolic battle around expertise in the policy area of violence against women will probably
be seen in the years to come, together with other less predictable developments which will
call our attention as researchers and citizens.

***
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 142

Police methods to counteract violence against women

Ms Helene GÖRTZEN
Stockholm County Police Authority, Sweden
In 1864, wife-beating was made a criminal offence under Swedish law.
Unfortunately, the violence is still with us, 130 years on. In 1999, women still live in fear of
mental, physical and sexual abuse, and how is one to explain the fact that men are still beating
up women in our modern, democratic society?

Alice, Najma, Irma and Lena - along with so many others, our mothers, daughters,
sisters and friends, were murdered by their partner or ex-partner last year. How can we as, for
instance, police officers, help and protect the women and children whose living rooms have
become torture chambers rather than the warm and safe place we all call home?

I am Helene Görtzen, and I work as a police officer in the Stockholm County Police
Force. I graduated from the Police Academy in 1982 and since November 1996 I have been
co-ordinating a joint venture called Operation Kvinnofrid - that means roughly "Peace for
Women". Today, the steering committee consists of twelve regional and national authorities
joined in the struggle against men's violence against women and consists of the heads of each
of the authorities. Operation Kvinnofrid is a long-term project and the authorities involved
have drawn up policy documents and action plans stating the goals and methods for
counteracting violence against women. We seek to increase public knowledge and
understanding of the issue by encouraging people to intervene whenever they become aware
of violence being committed. We also hope to persuade politicians, public figures and
journalists to focus on the problem - men's violence against women.

In 1998, a new offence was introduced into the Penal Code in Sweden: Gross
violation of a woman's integrity. Its purpose is to deal with repeated, punishable acts directed
by men against women having a close relationship with the perpetrator, but it also covers
children and other closely related persons: Gross violation of integrity. In short, if a man
commits certain criminal acts such as assault, unlawful threat or coercion, sexual or other
molestation, sexual exploitation, etc against a woman to whom he is or has been married or
with whom he is or has been cohabiting, he shall be sentenced for gross violation of the
woman's integrity, instead of for the crime that each of the acts comprises. A necessary
condition for sentencing for the new offence is that the acts were part of a repeated violation
of the woman's integrity and were likely to damage seriously her self confidence. The
punishment is imprisonment for at least six months, and at most six years.

Public campaigns, legislation, technical support and action plans are all fine, but
what it comes down to is the individual police officer's attitudes towards the violence, and
what kind of support he or she gets from the supervisor. I strongly believe that, first of all,
what we need is the authority to work with these issues on a long-term basis and to be able to
get that authority we need to wake up the boss (if he's not already up). Tell him the story of
Alice, Najma, Irma and Lena. Tell him the life of their children and how they lost their
mother. If that doesn't work, show him the statistics. In Stockholm County alone, we have
approximately 4000 reported crimes of wife-beating every year. Add to that the percentage of
crimes unknown to the police, which scientists estimate at about 70 or 80. Add to that the
 143

number of rapes and threats committed every day by doctors, postmen, carpenters and police
officers and then ask him: would your daughter like to live in your precinct?

Fortunately, I didn't have to do all that. My boss does not ask what we have done to
satisfy the Department of Justice today. He asks what we have done to help and support the
women in Stockholm today. It is my responsibility as a police officer to know what questions
to ask when called to the scene of a crime or faced with a woman coming into the police
station, and what questions not to ask, and most important to dare to listen to her answers and
to know what to do next. It is the responsibility of the police officer to inform the woman
about where she and her children can get professional help, such as counselling, financial aid,
shelter, etc. and it is the responsibility of the police officer to co-operate with other authorities
and NGOs in order to minimise the risk of the woman falling between chairs. Alone, we
cannot make changes. The chain of supporters has to be strong and well-educated, and to
work with authority.

Therefore, extensive training programmes have been drawn up, not only for police
officers but also for social workers, the health service and school personnel, among others,
both on an individual and on a mutual basis. Since 1992, we have set up 20 multi-agency
groups in the County of Stockholm. These groups come together to exchange knowledge and
experience. They come together for seminars and training and they also convey their
knowledge to their colleagues on returning to their work place. Police officers often serve as
motors and initiators in these multi-agency groups. So, with the support of our heads on the
one hand, the work of the multi-agency groups on the other, training and the responsibility of
the individual police officer, we CAN make a difference and we CAN fight men's violence
against women. And for as long as we know of one police officer making degrading marks
directly to the woman or about the woman in question, we need to go on fighting. I know that
knowledge, support and co-operation will eventually lead to a change in attitudes.

We also need technical support to be able to help and protect. In 1991, every police
station in Sweden was equipped with so-called alarm kits which can be given to threatened
women free of charge. These kits consist of, for example, alarm systems for the home,
acoustic alarms and mobile phones. We can also, in very severe cases and for a limited
period of time, assign a close protection officer to the woman.

And yet, with all these measures, taken, why do we still read about women like Alice
and Najma every day?

As long as there is a considerable imbalance in the power relations between women

and men in society, there will be violence. As long as we consider men's violence against
women and equal opportunities between men and women a women's issue, there will be
violence. Men, in general, need to stand up and join the struggle against men's violence
against women. Men need to show other men the way to a more equal, balanced society.
And I am glad to say that more and more men ARE joining.

I would like to close by telling you the true story of a four year-old boy. This is an
example of co-operation, in this case between a woman's shelter and the police in Stockholm.
Ben and his mother live in a shelter because Ben's father has mentally, physically and
sexually abused Ben's mother. The boy has on numerous occasions witnessed the abuse. But
Ben still loves his father, and from time to time he is allowed to call him from the shelter. He
does so on a speaker phone, and under the supervision of a social worker.
 144

Ben's dream is to become the chief of police and he has often met police officers,
together with his mother, and the police often visit the shelter just to make sure everything is
OK.

One day, Ben is on the phone with his dad, and the social worker not far away (we
don't want Ben to reveal the location of the shelter). She hears him tell his father about what
they had for dinner, what colour he has chosen for his new T-shirt, and things that are
important for a four year-old. All of a sudden, Ben's father says "That's nice, Ben, but where
do you and mum live?". A moment of silence follows, and before the social worker can
intervene she hears Ben's voice loud and clear: "You won't believe this dad, but we live in a
big, beautiful house full of police officers".

Ben and his mother now live in an apartment by themselves. She is working and
earning a living on her own, and Ben appears to be happy in kindergarten. They look like any
other mother and child when we meet in a café in the centre of Stockholm. But we all know,
though, that the worst scars are on the inside.
 145

"Men in Transition": The representation of Men's Violence

against Women in the Arctic

Bo Wagner SØRENSEN, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

My professional interest in male violence against women dates back to 1988 when I
began my ethnographic fieldwork in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. The town has a
population of 13,000 people, which is about one fourth of the total population of Greenland.
My main focus has been on discourses on violence against women - that is, how local people
and regional specialists talk about, write about, contextualise, represent and explain this
phenomenon in Greenland and the Arctic in general (Sørensen 1990, 1994, 1998). The
dominant public discourse revolves around rapid and extensive social and cultural change as
the key explanation. The Inuit are thus represented as a population "in transition," caught
between their traditional world and the modern world and suffering from "acculturative
stress" (Bjerregaard & Young 1998) or "the loss of a sense of identity and self-worth"
(Griffiths 1996:12). Bjerregaard and Young try to assess the general mental health and well-
being of the Inuit, stating that: "The Inuit are subject to immense psychosocial stress as their
communities undergo profound social and cultural changes. In most Inuit communities, the
last 40 years, which represent little more than one generation, have been a period when the
traditional lifestyle irrevocably gave way to western life styles" (Bjerregaard & Young
1998:149). According to this epidemiological perspective, high rates of violence and other
social problems are symptoms of an underlying socio-cultural alienation. In short, violence
against women is seen as one of many "social diseases" that ultimately spring from conflict-
ridden societies out of balance (cf. Sorensen 1999a). The gendered nature of violence is often
not reflected upon. I find this regional emphasis on socio-cultural change and its
preoccupation with historical causation both interesting and disturbing, and it seems there is a
certain potential in trying to look into the relationship between expert and local
representations, but also to compare regional traditions of representing male violence against
women. Do different regional representations spring directly from diverse empirical realities?
If not, how can they be explained? What are the implications of a "Greenlander men in
transition" approach?

Local representations

Domination by nation-states, including "enforced," rapid modernisation and its impact

on indigenous peoples, is part of a master narrative which is not only used by specialists, but
also sometimes invoked by local people. However, people in Nuuk seem to make use of two
main explanatory approaches depending on context (cf. Sørensen 1998:164).

When they comment on actual local cases of wife beating (I use this term as a
shorthand for men's violence to known women), they never put the case in a larger theoretical
or (gender) political perspective, whereas the personality and drinking behaviour of both
parties usually come up. Some cases are generally construed as "wife beating," which is a
term that entails notions of illegitimacy and reproach. Other cases are met with indifference
and "dismissal" on the grounds that "this is their way." Phrases such as "they fight" and "it
takes two" are also common. The overall picture is that people in Nuuk do not take sharp
issue with men's use of physical "force" in intimate relationships. Interestingly, women and
men do not differ in this regard. In any case, people focus on individual agency when dealing
with known cases of so-called "domestic violence."
 146

On the other hand, when people try to reflect on and explain violence against women
in Greenland in general, they often turn to the master narrative as a main explanatory
framework, invoking the rapid development, the unbalanced society and the loss of the
Greenlander soul. Some proceed along more gendered lines of thinking, arguing that women
have been more able to cope with modernisation, among others because they are raised to be
more flexible than men.

The gender-oriented versions, however, are usually just as much an excuse for men's
abuse and violence as the seemingly gender neutral epidemiological perspective. It is often
argued that the Greenlander man has been more directly confronted with Danish dominance
and competition in workplaces, politics, etc., in the course of history. His traditional authority
as a "proud hunter" and a breadwinner has been undermined and he is left humiliated and
bereaved of identity and status (Petersen 1994). The dominant discourse on gender and gender
relations in today's Greenland revolves around female winners and male losers (cf. Sørensen
1998b). In her article, "Superwoman and the troubled man", a Greenlander woman concludes:
"It is understandable that the Greenlander man feels inferior, powerless, and even ridiculous.
He has no way to deal with his anger and his pain! He feels no one takes him seriously. So,
inevitably, all these powerful and overwhelming feelings are taken out on the Greenlander
woman. In short, that is why she is the victim of violence and murder in Greenlander society
today" (Petersen 1994:140).

Such sweeping and emotional generalisations which make use of accumulated

historical pain in order to explain today's violence against women could easily be
deconstructed and repudiated, but this is not the place. It is of interest that the positioned
argument has a clear political address even though Greenland has had Home Rule since 1979,
which secures a high degree of self-government. It is also of interest that a gender-oriented
perspective in the Greenlander setting is usually not equivalent to a feminist perspective. It
serves instead as an historically deep-seated excuse for male violence. The responsibility for
violence is externalised. Violent Greenlander men just act out the anger and pain accumulated
through generations.

Both local people and experts/scientists, who are often, but not exclusively, non-
locals, can thus be seen to share an understanding of violence as a symptomatic reaction to
circumstances beyond control. However, historical injuries and sufferings are never brought
up in everyday discourse on violence where personality, behaviour, attitude, drinking pattern,
and family background are keys to third parties' evaluations of the situation. Family ties and
friendship with either the man or the woman are, of course, also important in this connection.
Anyway, the everyday discursive practice is a far cry away from the master narrative. This
does not mean that violent men are not often excused on the grounds of being drunk, being
jealous, etc., or because of their wives' "unseemly" behaviour. On the whole, however, violent
men are not totally relieved from personal responsibility.

Regional traditions

Greenland tends to be represented as "our" cultural other. Depicted as a strange and

exotic field, it seems to both attract and call for special treatment. Before I went to Greenland
for the first time, I had no reason to question the emphasis on historical change in the regional
literature. I also had no reason to question the assumptions, which were more often than not
presented as facts, about how the rapid change had affected people. However, living in
Greenland for four years has made me increasingly sceptical of the idea that social
phenomena or problems in Greenland are so unique that they call for special explanations (cf.
 147

Sørensen 1999b on alcohol use and abuse). I therefore argue in favour of some sort of
common ground approach that can make use of insights gained from other parts of the world,
and not just other indigenous peoples in the Arctic and elsewhere.

The problem with regional traditions is that they tend to be self-centred and self-
referential. Writing about the development of anthropological ideas, Ardener states that
"anthropology at the creative stage consists of the transmuting of a certain kind of experience
into a certain kind of text. For a time, only the actual or a similar experience can produce such
texts. Later, however, people become skilled in imitating the texts themselves. What was once
life becomes simply genre. (...) Within a genre texts generate texts" (Ardener 1985:52). The
process from life to genre is endemic in all kinds of textual production. However, it seems
likely that a numerically small regional field like eskimology will be more prone to reproduce
the regional genre which is reflected in the so-called master narrative.

Societies under stress

In a recent article, McWilliams (1998) writes about violence against women in

"societies under stress", emphasising that the term itself requires some clarification. She
mentions that it could include societies that are undergoing a process of modernisation; those
experiencing the effects of colonisation; or those in which civil disorder, terrorism, or war has
occurred. Her main focus is Northern Ireland, but she refers to a wide range of cross-cultural
studies. McWilliams (1998:138) concludes that in societies under stress, there are fewer
options for women and fewer controls on men. Women are exposed to "extra" abuses.

McWilliams' article is reflective and her points well argumented. On the face of it, her
article could be a case in point as regards Greenland, which is a former Danish colony (since
1721) whose colonial status was abolished in 1953 when Greenland became an integral part
of the Kingdom of Denmark, thus giving Greenlanders equal status to Danes. When
Greenland Home Rule was established in 1979, the Greenlander population achieved a high
degree of self-government. Today's Greenland may thus be characterised as a micro state.
Anyway, Greenland has been colonised, and the population has experienced the process of
modernisation during the 1950s and 1960s, especially, with local variations. If we take
seriously the possibility of "extra" abuses in Greenland, how do we go about it? The term
"extra" seems to imply comparison; either between two moments in the historical span of
Greenland, or between Greenland and other cultures and societies.

***

The first option shows in much literature on Greenland which operate within a
traditional/modern or before/after framework. These studies, of course, reflect socio-cultural
changes, but at the same time they have not been able to explain or substantiate the exact
relationship between social change and specific social problems. One is left with the general
impression that social change is inherently stressful to Greenlanders. The second option is less
common, and mostly implicit in the regional literature. I will look at both options in turn.

History and modernisation

Part of the problem with the representation of Greenlanders and Inuit as populations in
transition, caught between two worlds, and marked by stress and loss of sense of identity and
self-worth, has to do with under-theorised concepts of history and culture.
 148

In a comment on history and social change, Ortner problematises the conventional

historiographic approach: "To answer (...) questions with the word "history" is to avoid them,
if by history is meant largely a chain of external events to which people react. History is not
simply something that happens to people, but something they make - within, of course, the
very powerful constraints of the system within which they are operating" (Ortner 1994:403).
Hastrup remarks in the same vein: "No people is simply a victim of history, even though
many peoples may have been victimised by particularly forceful notions of history" (Hastrup
1992:10-11).

Ortner makes a useful distinction between action and re-action which can be applied to
the two main approaches to men's violence against women: the actor-oriented and the
symptom-oriented approach. While the former focuses on social actors engaged in motivated
social practice, the latter focuses on how individuals and/or groups re-act to the (assumed)
effects of external forces.

Another related problem is that it is often taken for granted that "traditional society" is
squarely the true Inuit society, whereas "modern society" is introduced from outside and
therefore not fully compatible with Inuit cultural values. Cultural essentialism is evident. As
an analytic tool, the traditional/modern dichotomy tends to freeze difference into stereotypes.
It should also be mentioned that change has not come overnight, and that different generations
of Greenlanders have been raised under different conditions. To speak of the Greenlander
man, for example, therefore represents a gross simplification. It is also a fact that wage work
among Greenlanders is not an exclusively "modern" or recent phenomenon. As early as in
1860, about 12,5 per cent of the West Greenlander population were dependent on income
from employment in the Royal Greenland Trade Department (Marquardt 1993:97-98).

Cohen directs a harsh critique against the early predictions of the effects of
"modernisation" and "development": "They both assume that people can have their culture
stripped away, leaving them quite void, then to be refilled by some imported superstructure.
They assume, in other words, that people are somehow passive in relation to culture: they
receive it, transmit is, express it, but do not create it" (Cohen 1985:36). Now as always,
people appropriate foreign goods, knowledge, ideas, forms and institutions; the foreign is
domesticated and infused with local meanings. We therefore cannot assume that we know
what social change means to local people. Some historical anthropologists therefore
distinguish between happenings and events, according to which events are those happenings
that have been experienced and registered locally as socially significant.

Cross-cultural comparison

Nuuk and the other Greenlander towns and settlements that I am familiar with can
hardly be described as communities under stress if this implies a lack of cultural continuity
and norms. I would characterise Nuuk as a highly moral community in many respects, and I
believe that most local people would agree, but at the same time, people do not always live up
to their own moral standards in their everyday life. However, if one has an epidemiological
approach, each deviation from a Danish or West European standard tends to be read as a
symptom of a society out of balance. When statistics show that the Greenlander population
consume more alcohol and have higher crime rates than the Danes, they add implicitly to
conventional thinking about "children's diseases" in a society in transition.

As exotic as the Greenlander/Arctic scenery may be, it seems to me that studies of

social problems within this region would profit from engaging the general theoretical
 149

literature. The regional symptom-oriented approach is geared towards historical causation

which, ironically, seems to imply a strategy of essentialising emotions, and introspection (cf.
Abu-Lughod & Lutz 1990). Perpetrators of violence are thus believed to be in despair. Acts of
violence, in turn, are perceived as the result/outlet of bottled-up feelings of frustration and
anger.

Such an idea of emotions is based on the model of "heat of emotional fluid in a bodily
container," which seems to have a basis in bodily experience (Lakoff & Kovecses 1987). This
does not mean, however, that we should take this popular model at face value. Instead, we
should look at the role of emotional discourses in social action (Lutz & Abu-Lughod 1990).
This would imply asking, for instance, who feels entitled to express anger when and towards
whom. Power and control, which are key concepts in the general literature on violence against
women, are conspicuously absent in most writings about violence in the Arctic.

If women in Greenland are exposed to "extra" abuses, which there is reason to believe
- at least if we compare Greenland with Denmark - it is largely due to the fact that violence is
tolerated and condoned to a large degree. It has to do with local social practice at all levels.

The problem revisited

Men's violence against women in Greenland is basically not different from men's
violence elsewhere. Some people may give explanations that are culture specific in the sense
that they refer to local, positioned perspectives on the phenomenon. And ideas about
causation are also based on social experience which means that they are not free-flowing, but
tied to a certain cultural space. Local discourses may thus offer important insights as they are
tied up with social practice and have material implications.

The empirical data on violence against women in Greenland seem to suggest that the
phenomenon is simultaneously seen as a problem and minimised. According to the so-called
master narrative, men's use of violence is excused and externalised; according to the
discursive practice of everyday life, men are held responsible, but only partly so because of
many locally perceived mitigating circumstances. The same ambivalence is reflected in the
practice of local authorities. "Domestic violence" tends to be trivialised; it is a way of life.
The split between public and private violence means that local authorities fail to protect
women in their own homes. Instead, violence is protected by privacy. All in all, the
ambivalent stance towards men's violence against women seems to make fertile ground for
(the continuation of) a practice of violence.

The same ambivalence on the part of both ordinary people, experts and authorities
seems characteristic of Denmark and many other countries. The difference may be in degree
rather than in kind. Most of the talk and reflections on violence I heard in Nuuk also had a
familiar ring. The conflicts of interest between husbands and wives which Dobash and
Dobash (1998) present on the basis of studies in the UK make perfect sense in a Greenlander
context as well, and so does their statement: "The right to punish wrongdoings, like the
exercise of authority and power, is vested in husbands and not wives, thus allowing men to be
violent simply because of their position" (Dobash & Dobash 1998:145).

Eroticised violence (cf. Lundgren 1995, 1998) is also part of the Greenlander practice
even if, at first glance, men's violence seems to concentrate on gender boundary maintenance,
control and discipline. However, these endeavours are likely to have a component of passion
and eroticism. Fantasies of power are fantasies of identity, and according to Moore, "sexuality
 150

is intimately connected with power in such a way that power and force are themselves
sexualised, that is they are inscribed with gender difference and gender hierarchy" (Moore
1994:149).

There are also clear parallels to be drawn between gendered and ethnic violence. Both
have to do with the process of "othering." Jenkins, who has dealt with ethnic conflict in
Northern Ireland, suggests that: "Verbal abuse and violence are concerned with the beating of
ethnic boundaries through the enforcement of definitions of what the ethnic "other" is or must
do. Power is at the heart of the matter. (...) Violence and its threat (...) have been somewhat
underestimated as a routine mechanism of control and a strategy for achieving goals. Violence
to others, up to and including killing, may - in addition to all of its other dimensions - be the
ultimate form of categorisation“ (Jenkins 1997:65). According to Jenkins, violence really is
"putting them in their place" (Jenkins 1997:106). I believe that Lundgren (1995, 1998) is
working along the same lines of thinking when she shows how men in a fundamentalist
Christian setting in Norway undertake the task of constructing or moulding their wives by
means of violence according to their ideas of true femininity. During the process, the women's
own definitions of - and space for - femininity are gradually reduced until they are erased and
"killed" as individual women.

Once again, there are clear parallels to Greenland, where violent men are preoccupied
with trying to correct and mould their wives according to their models of an ideal wife and
woman. Ironically, they try to "kill" the very same personality that may have attracted them in
the first place.

When it comes to everyday rationalisations and motives for using violence,

Greenlander men also do not seem to differ radically from men elsewhere (cf. Dobash &
Dobash 1998). A man in his thirties expressed no doubt whatsoever that he had to silence his
wife - if necessary with violent means - if she kept on pushing and nagging. By stepping out
of line and not respecting his "case closed" attitude, she asked for it. She was responsible for
the violent outcome. When I (naively) argued that the situation seen from her perspective
might appear somewhat differently, thereby questioning his authority and right to punish, I
was ignored and silenced as well. In his self-representation, he was the reasonable arbiter of
right and wrong.

This man's way of rationalising is just one example out of many which all point to the
fact that many men in Greenland - and elsewhere - think that they are entitled to set the scene,
set certain standards and rules and make sure they are kept. If a woman should happen to
thwart or challenge her husband's tactical pre-emptions (cf. Riches 1986), he will put her in
her place, and she will be held responsible according to the well-known logic of blaming the
victim.

My interviews with battered Greenlander women showed that their men often turned
to violence in order to shut them up and putting them in their place. One of the women
summed up her husband's violent attacks in simple words: "He is obsessed with being right
always." Another woman said that her husband had disapproved of her being too clever,
outspoken and eager to discuss all kinds of matters. He had felt threatened and provoked by
her disposition. Another female interviewee said that many men, perhaps most men, beat to
show the woman that they are stronger than she is, without any other particular motive. Men's
efforts to silence, control, intimidate and discipline their wives in every way were recurrent in
the interviews.
 151

Conclusion

I have tried to question a certain regional tradition and representation, according to

which men beat their wives because they are in a transitional, stressful phase between
traditional and modern society. According to this epidemiological perspective, poor mental
health among the Greenlanders and the Inuit accounts for violence against women and other
social "diseases." My intention is not just to problematise the dominant representation of
violence in Greenland and the Arctic, but to contribute to a more general discussion of the
relationship between social change and violence.

It is telling that men's violence in the Arctic is usually expected to call for a special
explanatory framework. On the face of it, this would seem to indicate an empirically
grounded approach. However, this is not the case, as people in general are not accorded
agency. Consequently, the perpetrators of violence are not seen as motivated social actors, but
rather as victims of externally inflicted change. A grounded approach must ask the questions:
What do men (in specific socio-cultural settings) gain from using violence, intentionally and
unintentionally? How is violence possible in the first place?

People who speak and write within the Arctic regional genre seem to be on the look-
out for factors that may explain violence and "trouble" in general, and precisely because they
are informed by structural-functionalist thinking they have to come up with very good - or
"deep" - reasons as to why such "anti-social" and "irrational" behaviour takes place. Instead,
they might have treated violence as values acted out. Interestingly, such a perspective seems
closer to the discursive practice of everyday life among people in Nuuk.

***

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 153

Conclusions by the General Rapporteur

Dr. Renate KLEIN, University of Maine, USA

Mesdames et Messieurs, Ladies and Gentlemen,

The seminar on men and violence against women provided an unusual opportunity to
bring together over one hundred researchers, practitioners and policy makers to discuss a wide
range of topics related to men's violence against women. In the course of two days we
addressed exceedingly complex issues, explored layers of meaning around men's violence,
and raised many more questions for future meetings of this kind.

I applaud and sincerely thank the Council of Europe, and in particular the Steering
Committee for Equality between Women and Men, and Ms. Ólöf Ólafsdóttir and her
formidable team for making this meeting possible and providing a forum for the necessary
interdisciplinary and international debate that needs to happen around men's violence against
women. Because the details of the reports presented at the seminar are available in print, I
shall focus my conclusion on recurring themes and contested understandings.

1. Methodology and the Evaluation of Research

Several experts addressed the need for quantitative surveys in order to obtain data on
the extent of violence against women. Ideally, such data would be reliable, valid, and
comparable across different regional and national contexts. Although there has been a
development in surveys from an early focus on crime in general to a recent, more specific
focus on violence against women, survey design and use are far from perfect. As a minimum,
a good survey needs to pay careful attention to the wording of its questions and incorporate
language that makes sense to the women who respond to it. Terminology and language are
extremely important. One example for this is the differential estimates of sexual assault when
women are asked if they have experienced 'rape' or 'coerced sex'. Other important issues in
survey research include the matching and training of interviewers, the use of various response
formats including closed and open questions, sampling frames, and access strategies that do
not exclude those women who are marginalised and particularly at risk of being attacked or
assaulted (e.g. elderly women, women belonging to ethnic minorities, immigrants, or the
disabled).

The meaning of violence can vary considerably within individual respondents who
reflect on different experiences with violence. It can vary within countries and across
countries and, last but not least, between men and women. While there are some examples of
strategies to address the meaning of violence in the context of survey research, there are also
many examples of surveys that do not address such variability of meaning but presuppose that
violence means the same to women and men. Therefore, caution needs to be exercised in the
uncritical design of surveys, and in the uncritical interpretation of their findings.

This note of caution needs to be extended to the evaluation of research in general.

No research produces facts that speak for themselves. Data, whether quantitative or
qualitative, need to be interpreted and organised within frames of reference. Therefore, it is
also important to interrogate those frames of reference and ask to what extent they contribute
to gender equality and the dignity of women. This is particularly important with regard to
statistical data, because most of us are used to thinking of numbers as something 'objective',
 154

and considering the privileged position of the notion of 'objectivity' in contemporary science,
numbers can be powerful tools of influencing the decision making of scholars, practitioners,
or policy makers. It is also necessary to weigh the need for more data on women's
victimisation against the need of those women for safety, and to be careful not to 'plunder'
women's experiences with violence in the name of science.

2. Gender as a Fundamental Social Division

Several experts noted that research on violence as well as research on the
development, maintenance, and change of feminine and masculine identities needed to be
gendered in a way that recognises gender as a fundamental social division. This includes
recognising that thinking in relatively rigid dichotomies of male and female difference may
itself obscure our understanding of how gender identity develops, is solidified, or can be
reconceptualised. It also includes recognising that adding women to masculine social
contexts does not automatically deconstruct rigid notions of gender difference, as the example
of women in the Israeli military shows.

3. Focus on the 'Imaginary'

Another recurring theme concerns the inclination to interpret men's violence against
constructions of imaginary femininity or masculinity as compared to what women and men
actually do or experience. For example, traditional psychoanalytic theory as well as some
strands in recent men's literature seem focused on imaginary notions of women, in which
women and in particular mothers are constructed as overpowering, omnipotent beings. Such
notions of female power are at odds both with the lack of power women in abusive
relationships experience and with the perception of teenagers who grew up with violence in
the home and who, even under considerable adversity, can have very positive images of their
mothers that acknowledge the real-life dilemmas of mothers living with violent husbands or
partners.

A second example is the rhetoric of men as the protectors of women during warfare,
which is at odds with the reports of men leaving women (as well as children and elderly men)
behind in villages where they are attacked and/or sexually assaulted by male soldiers from the
enemy camp. No doubt, individual men seriously wish to protect their families from harm.
And yet, it is painful to witness how often women find themselves unarmed in war, and
vulnerable in peace.

4. Four Perspectives on Explanations for Men's Violence

The experts presented many complex explanations and social theories to explain
men's violence that can be highlighted from at least four different perspectives: explanations
focusing on internal processes of the integration of violence into masculine identities,
explanations focusing on external circumstances presumed to encourage male violence, the
risk factor approach, and explanations focusing on the deliberate social construction of
institutions that foster those masculine identities in which violence takes a central place.
 155

a. Internal Processes: Gender Identity Development and Social Learning

At this meeting we have addressed explanations that detail internal processes

underlying violent behaviour and that draw on psychoanalytic theory, socialisation theory,
and to some extent learning theory. Psychoanalytic concepts tend to focus on early
childhood experiences around the differentiation of Self and Other that lead to complex
patterns of the construction of Self and Other. More recent psychoanalytic work includes
experiences during adolescence in the formation of gender identity and posits the possibility
that, during this period of life, gender identities may in fact be revised.

Similarly, notions of social learning tend to focus on early childhood experiences,

although social learning continues into adulthood and indeed happens everyday throughout
our lives. In fact, we usually do not enter some settings for social learning, such as the
workplace or volunteer organisations, until we are adults and other settings, such as the
family, may stay with us throughout our lives.

If socialisation experiences and the construction of Self and Other do indeed

contribute to the formation of violence-identified masculinities and men's violence against
women, we need to be open to the possibility that such processes continue throughout life,
and likely in settings that are crucial for other purposes as well such as earning a living, or
being integrated into the community. That is, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the
'normal' institutions of daily life and social organisation from the formation of masculine
identities, including those identities that are ingrained with violence. What this means is that
throughout life there is considerable opportunity both for reinforcing violence-identified
masculinities and for revising them.

b. External Circumstances: Rapid Social Change, Instability, and War

The experts also addressed explanations that relate men's violence implicitly or
explicitly to social circumstances, in particular to notions of rapid social change and social
instability, as well as to warfare and its societal aftermath. It is important to acknowledge the
hardship that warfare and social upheaval create for those who have to live through it, and to
investigate the potential role of international inequality in creating or perpetuating localised
instability or war, and to understand the toxic effects on civic society 'at home' of wars waged
in neighbouring territory. It is also important to explore how social change and war influence
people differently and to examine who benefits from such changes and who becomes more
vulnerable.

A largely unexplored area concerns the transitions from periods of relative stability to
relative instability and on to relative stability. For example, how do we come to terms with
reports that individual men who appeared to be 'peaceful' before war seem to turn into violent
women haters during the war? The experts debated whether violence against women during
armed conflict was primarily a matter of permission to be violent and access to vulnerable
victims, or whether there are other things going on in terms of gender relations and the
construction of Self and Other, friend or foe. Such explanations are probably not mutually
exclusive. Brutalisation of men in the context of armed conflict may be a multifaceted
process that may include permission to be violent as well as training to be violent and training
to dehumanise and objectify those who, by official propaganda or the memories of deep-
seated humiliation, become the designated enemy.
 156

In this context, the experts discussed the role of shame, and the silence around shame,
which may continue across generations. As mass rapes of women during warfare have
happened throughout history and continue to happen to the present day, women have been
carrying a suffocating burden of shame that manifests itself in deep depression and is cloaked
in silence. It is necessary to create conditions in which we learn to listen to those who learned
to live with their shame in silence.

It is unclear how women's experiences of shame compare to the shame that they bring
onto their families and countries in those contexts where family honour is defined through
women's chastity. While the connections between the shame of individual women and the
shame attached to notions of idealised femininity are not well understood, we noticed that the
shame of individual women seems to contribute to their isolation and being outcasts of
society, and is related to loss of control, whereas men in such contexts seem to have the
option to clear their families' names of shame through the honour killing of women and thus
remain a respected member of their communities. That is not to say that individual men in
such contexts are not conflicted over the issue of honour killings. It was also noted that
sexual violence against women in situations of armed conflict involves attacks that may be
tools to shame their husbands, fathers, and brothers, but are still attacks on the women
themselves and their sexual and national identities.

c. Risk Factors

The concept of risk factors derives largely from research on public health. When
applied to men's violence against women, we need to distinguish between risk factors for
being violent (such as believing that women are subordinate to men) and risk factors for being
victimised (such as separating from a violent man). Our discussion of stress as a risk factor
showed that the relationship between men's experience of stress and their violence against
women is controversial. In part, this controversy seems to result from the different
perspectives different experts take on stress, the wide range of men's stress experiences in
different settings such as family, work, the military, or combat as well as the frequent
observations of those who work with violent men that violent men do not seek out such
programmes until they are experiencing sufficient stress. To advance this fruitful debate, it
seems necessary to distinguish between different forms of stress (e.g., career-related stress
versus the fear of losing one's wife) and to analyse the relationship between stress and
violence for different groups, not just for men, but for women as well.

With all risk factors we need to pay attention not only to the correlation between risk
factor and men's violence, but to the patterning of that violence and thus to the targets of
potentially stress-induced violence. To illustrate the importance of attending to the patterning
of violence, so-called random sprees of violence by individual violent men often turn out to
be directed rather systematically against individuals who may not have had any personal
relationship with the aggressor but happen to belong to groups that the aggressor defined as
worthy of being attacked or killed.

d. Explanations Focusing on Deliberate Social Enterprises

Finally, the military is an example of an institution that deliberately and systematically

constructs masculine identities in which violence plays a crucial role. A gendered analysis of
the military also makes clear that, at least in the case of Israel, men's successful participation
in the military, and thus their likely adoption of a violence-identified masculinity, is rewarded
with considerable perks in civil society such as access to prestigious jobs and political
 157

influence. Mentioned only cursorily was the role of organised religion in the construction of
gender identities and gender hierarchies, and the relative acceptance of violence against
women.

We heard more of efforts to reform deliberate social enterprises such as the police
and the legal system with the goal to reduce violence against women. Police training by
battered women's advocates has been instrumental in beginning to change the police response
to violence against women, at least as far as violence in the home is concerned. Similarly,
there have been many impressive, if recent, efforts towards changing laws and legislation so
as to acknowledge more fully women's right to safety, dignity, and integrity.

However, there is an important difference between the examples of the military, the
police, and the legal system. Legal reforms and reforms of police response for the most part
are directed at the punishment of the perpetrator. In contrast, we saw how the military is
instrumental in the construction, and subsequent reward, of violence-identified masculine
identity, and thus in the production of potential perpetrators. So far, there has been no
comparably developed, defined, and resourceful social enterprise instrumental in the
construction of non-violence-identified masculinity.

Considering the frequent references to societal turmoil and warfare during this
meeting we may note that the deliberateness of the construction of violence-identified
masculinity may become invisible over time, and that such violence-identified masculinity in
due time may appear to be an 'inevitable' response to social change.

5. Role of Community
Several experts spoke of the role of community in either encouraging or discouraging
men's violence against women. Communities include real people and the messages they send
about men's violence against women. Community includes family members and pre-school
teachers, social workers, police officers or those who run intervention programmes for violent
men. Community also includes the media and the imagery of men's violence against women
that is perpetuated by the media such as notions of stranger rape. Community also includes
supranational organisations such as the Council of Europe, and the messages that come from
such prestigious international communities.

Community provides, or withholds, support structures. We discussed which support

structures communities provide for women and men, respectively, and to what extent
communities encourage or discourage men's violence and non-violence. Several experts
argued that such structures change as communities move from periods of relative stability to
periods of upheaval or war, and may not revert entirely to the original levels of stability after
periods of crises. What happens to women and men's support networks during such changes?
For example, to what extent does the formation of armed militias or guerillas erode social
support from men for men's non-violence? Occasional reports suggest that there are
individual soldiers who try not to participate in organised rape, and who implore the women
they encounter to pretend they had been raped so as to protect the soldier from being killed by
his male peers for not raping.

From a different angle, the role of community support becomes chillingly clear in the
lives of children and teenagers who have none. We heard about children who grew up in
violent homes or in complete societal neglect. Too many find themselves with no support
network, alone with their legacy of violence, shame, and confusion, and without a trustworthy
 158

adult role model who might be able to help them with the transition from fantasising a life of
respect and harmony to actually living it.

Finally, communities bear some of the societal costs of violence against women.
While cost estimates are fraught with methodological and ethical problems, putting monetary
values on individual suffering may convince reluctant policy makers to invest more money in
the prevention of violence against women.

6. Non-Violence and Non-Violent Masculinities

We need to know more about the creation of non-violence and the conditions under
which non-violent masculinities flourish, just as we need to conceive of different trajectories
towards violent masculinities. Not all men are violent, and not all men rape, even if they
could. Why not? As research and practical work with violent men is just beginning, we also
need to pay attention to non-violent men, their experiences, and their strategies of non-
violence.

With regard to the individual or psychological level, recent psychoanalytical work

highlights the creative potential of the tension between the assertion of the Self and the
mutual recognition of the Other. While this tension may arise for the first time in infancy, it
likely will continue throughout life. Some experts suggested that men's ability to tolerate
such tension might be related to their non-violence, whereas the 'resolution' of that tension
through the construction of rigid gender or ethnic identities may encourage violence. With
more fluid approaches to gender identity boys may be able to identify with mothers and
feminine role models without ridicule, and girls may be able to identify with fathers and
masculine role models without rejection.

On a societal level, creative potential may arise from sustaining the tension between
privilege and equality. Often, this tension is resolved in the form of hierarchies and pecking
orders, which leave some men relatively privileged and protected, and most women, as well
as many men, relatively vulnerable. Most of us have lived within hierarchical social
institutions for our entire lives, from the family, through formal schooling, to the workforce.
That makes it difficult to conceive of less hierarchical social organisations. Nevertheless the
efforts seems worthwhile so that “knowledge will not be subordinate to power".

The promise of sustaining the tension between self-assertion and mutual recognition
is also to fully realise one's human potential. But why be fully realised if you can be partially
realised and be president of a large corporation and drive an expensive car? The answer is,
once you have tasted this creative tension, everything else is bland.

I thank the Council of Europe for organising this meeting, and I thank all participants
for coming together and sharing their invaluable knowledge and insights.
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RECOMMENDATIONS
Violence against women is one of the major obstacles to the achievement of real
equality between women and men. The phenomenon has its roots in the very structure of
European societies, based on patriarchal values and principles. Although male violence can
also be directed against other men and incidents concerning violent women are reported, the
vast majority of victims of violence in the Council of Europe's member States are women and
children.

Most European societies remain tolerant towards violence against women, considering
it acceptable according to tradition. They continue, directly or indirectly, to lay the blame on
the victims by suggesting that they would not have been assaulted if they had or had not acted
in a certain way. Men are often excused by saying that they are subject to stress from
overwork or unemployment, under the influence of alcohol or drugs, sick and so on.

Women suffer from violence resulting in physical, sexual or psychological harm or

suffering, both in private and public life. Violence can take different forms, such as sexual
assault, violence within the family or in the domestic unit, sexual harassment and intimidation
(in education, at work, in institutions or in any other place), denial of reproductive rights,
genital mutilation, trafficking in human beings for the purposes of sexual exploitation and sex
tourism, rape or assaults in (armed) conflict situations, honour killings and forced marriages.

Being conscious of the above, the participants at the Seminar on “Men and violence
against women”, organised by the Council of Europe in Strasbourg on 7 and 8 October 1999,
agreed on the following recommendations.

Recommendations to Member States of the Council of Europe

Research and in particular surveys are essential because there is still denial of the
phenomenon of violence against women: they can be used as tools to convince the decision
makers of the real extent of violence against women. In order to have a better understanding
of the prevalence of violence, standardised instruments are necessary in order to obtain valid,
reliable, comparable data as well as results which are representative of the reality. This
effort should be pursued at the local, regional, national and international level and in this
perspective Governments should:

§ Encourage and support national and transnational research projects and surveys on
different forms of violence against women taking into account the following
parameters which, if neglected, may alterate the results of the research:

- the gender perspective including the element of gender conflict which is present in all
European societies;
- the variability of meanings and of the perception of concepts in different contexts
determined by various factors (such as differences in social classes, as well as in
regional, cultural and linguistic backgrounds): different groups or persons may have
different understanding of the same notion, such as violence;
- the stigmatisation of concepts (such as rape), encouraged notably by the mass media;
- the developments and changes in cultural values;
- the changes in society especially where instability has arisen (be it due to socio-
economic reasons or to a conflict): even if the source of instability disappears, the
level of violence does not decrease;
 160

§ Encourage the standardisation of research methodologies by using, among others, the

following elements:

- a representative sample of the population (1,000 respondents minimum);

- a scale with very detailed descriptions of acts of violence;
- input from battered women and victims of violence (also to design questionnaires);
- training for interviewers and researchers which should include information on how to
take into account cultural, ethnic, social and economic differences, as well as on how
to have access to isolated or marginalised groups;
- precautions in order to prevent the dangers that the respondents of surveys or of case
studies could encounter;
- for research conducted at European level, recourse to language specialists in order to
avoid translation problems;

§ Encourage and support national and transnational research into the following aspects:

- what prevents a person from becoming violent;

- ways to reach violent men and how to bring them into education programmes;
- the prevailing polarisation in the construction of gender identities, with a view to
promoting a more open perception of feminities and masculinities;
- to what extent and in what way do social instability and social change affect gender
relations and violence against women;
- the consequences violence in the home has on children and adolescents and how it
affects their socialisation and their future integration into work, as well as their
relations with peers and partners;
- ways to prevent elder abuse and violence among elderly people;
- the financial costs of violence;

§ Improve interactions between the scientific community, the NGOs in the field, political
decision-makers and legislative bodies in order to design co-ordinated actions against
violence;

§ Encourage the diffusion of all relevant information (results of studies and research,
statistical data, etc.) on violence against women at all levels and across the life course;

§ Ensure that statutory agencies which respond to men's violence convey clearly to the men
that their behaviour is unacceptable and develop further strategies for repeat offenders,
including multi-agency approaches at the community level;

§ Making use of the gender mainstreaming strategy, involve all the relevant actors normally
involved in policy-making, in order to fight violence against women, even if they are not
currently working on the issue;

§ Reinforce national legislations and measures aiming at fighting violence against women,
also by introducing innovative approaches based on experiences conducted in other
European countries: the pooling of experiences is essential to progress on this issue;

§ Adopt or reinforce social protection measures so that injuries caused to women and
children by violent acts are provided for under social protection schemes;
 161

§ Promote training of those involved with young people, as well as health personnel, to
identify children and adolescents growing up in violent homes and to take the necessary
measures to help and assist them;

§ Ensure training of medical personnel to enable them to identify victims of violence;

§ Promote the participation of women in politics and decision-making: a higher number of

women in politics is important in order to adopt an increased number of measures to
combat violence against women;

§ Promote human rights education, and especially education on equality between women
and men, in all member States of the Council of Europe, especially where there is social
instability;

§ Create a more proactive police response to violence against women;

§ Promote training for the judiciary regarding violence against women;

§ Enhance research on, and take all possible measures to prevent, development of gender
dichotomy and inequality as well as male aggressiveness in the army and all military
contexts (especially during military service), including armed conflicts;

§ Condemn all forms of violence against women and children in situations of conflict;

§ Condemn systematic rape, sexual slavery, enforced pregnancy of women and young girls
and all forms of violence against women and children, as these, as shown in recent
conflicts, tend to be used as a weapon of war;

§ In post-conflict regions, promote a public debate and disseminate information concerning

abuses of women and children in order to prevent repetition of violence.

Recommendations to the Council of Europe

The participants emphasised that the international community – especially international
organisations such as the Council of Europe – have a major ethical role to play in promoting
zero tolerance towards violence against women. By condemning this violence, they can give
an important political signal to governments and to policy-makers.

The participants noted that the continuous work achieved by the Council of Europe, and in
particular by its Steering Committee on Equality between women and men (CDEG), to
combat violence against women have substantially assisted in increasing the visibility of the
problem. The Action Plan published in 1997 was considered as an effective platform on
which to formulate national measures.

The Council of Europe should continue to play a key role in the combat against violence. The
need for transnational actions to be undertaken at legislative, policy and research level to
enhance international co-operation can be the basis for the future action of the Council of
Europe.
 162

The following activities could be conducted in the Council of Europe or with its
assistance:

§ Continue and complete, as rapidly as possible, the preparation of the draft

Recommendation on protecting women and young girls against violence, which is being
prepared under the aegis of the Steering Committee for equality between women and men
(CDEG). Once adopted, the Recommendation may serve as a reference for national
policies on actions against violence;

§ Prepare as soon as possible a study on the position as regards legislation in the field of
violence against women in the member States; ensure the translation and diffusion of this
document in member States;

§ Organise, possibly in co-operation with other competent bodies and International

Organisations, regular meetings involving in particular policy-makers, researchers,
practitioners and police, in order to take stock and exchange information on the current
stage of research and practice in the area;

§ Compile country reports, based on research and information collected at national level,
focusing on violence against women and the measures taken to combat it;

§ Following the recent conflicts in South-East Europe, contribute to the efforts undertaken
at European level to foster peace and stability in countries of the region by organising
activities aiming at combating violence against women in all its forms;

§ Foster research on the development of violence against women in its different forms
during and after the conflicts which have recently affected South-East Europe, including
the increase in domestic violence.
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PROGRAMME

Thursday 7 October 1999

8h30 - 9h30 Arrival of participants and registration

9h30 - 10h00 OPENING SESSION

Chair: Ms Violeta NEUBAUER (Slovenia), Vice-Chair of the

Steering Committee for Equality between Women and
Men (CDEG)

Opening address by Mr Pierre-Henri IMBERT, Director of Human Rights

Introduction by Ms Caroline MECHIN (France), Chair of the Steering

Committee for Equality between Women and Men (CDEG)

10h00 – 13h00 WORKING SESSION I

"METHODOLOGICAL AND ETHICAL ISSUES"

Chair: Ms Elizabeth STANKO, Brunel University, United

Kingdom

Moderator: Ms Renée ROMKENS, Utrecht University, Netherlands

Presentation and discussion of the following reports:

Comparing methodologies used to study violence against women

by Ms Sylvia WALBY, University of Leeds, United Kingdom

Representations of intimate male violence in the United States and

Poland
by Ms Renate KLEIN, University of Maine, USA and
Ms Anna KWIATKOWSKA, University of Bialystok, Poland

Gendering research on men's violence to known women

by Ms Jalna HANMER, Leeds Metropolitan University, United Kingdom
and Mr Jeff HEARN, Tampere University, Finland and Manchester
University, United Kingdom

11h30 – 11h45 Coffee break

DISCUSSION

13h00 – 14h30 Lunch break

 164

14h30 – 18h00 WORKING SESSION II

"VIOLENCE IN THE FORMATION OF GENDERED MALE

IDENTITIES"

Chair: Ms Margit EPSTEIN, University of Osnabrück,

Germany

Moderator: Ms Marianne HESTER, University of Sunderland,

United Kingdom

Presentation and discussion of the following reports:

Explaining the inclination to use violence

by Ms Carol HAGEMANN-WHITE and Ms Christiane MICUS,
University of Osnabrück, Germany

Explanations for male violence, psychoanalysis, feminist theory and

the new men's movement
by Ms Ursula MÜLLER, University of Bielefeld, Germany

Growing up in the proximity of violence: Teenagers' stories of

violence in the home
by Ms Katarina WEINEHALL, University of Umeå, Sweden

Teenage boys as violent actors in today's Romanian communities

by Ms Anca DUMITRESCU and Ms Elena PENTELEICIUC, University
of Bucharest, Romania

Socio-Economic Roots for Cases of Male Violence against Women in

Russia
by Ms Vera GRACHEVA, Russian Federation

DISCUSSION

16h00-16h15 Coffee break

DISCUSSION

18h00 Vin d'honneur - Blue Room of the Council of Europe

 165

Friday 8 October 1999

09h30 – 13h00 WORKING SESSION III

"TRANSITIONS IN ADULTHOOD AND MEN'S VIOLENCE"42

Chair: Ms Barbara KAVEMANN, WiBIG, Germany

Moderator: Ms Linda REGAN, University of North London,

United Kingdom

Presentation and discussion of the following reports:

The contribution of the military and military discourse to the

construction of masculinity in society
by Ms Uta KLEIN, University of Münster, Germany

Men's violence against women and children in situations of armed

conflict
by Ms Dubrovka KOCIJAN HERCIGONJA, Zagreb, Croatia

The approach of the World Health Organisation Regional Office for

Europe to the issue of gender-based violence
by Ms Kirsten Staehr JOHANSEN, WHO-EURO, Denmark

Older men and elder abuse

by Ms Bridget PENHALE, University of Hull, United Kingdom

11h15-11h30 Coffee break

DISCUSSION

13h00-14h30 Lunch break

14h30-16h30 WORKING SESSION IV

"CROSS-CUTTING THEMES: MEDIA DEBATES, COSTS OF

VIOLENCE, IMPLEMENTATION"

Chair: Ms Dominique FOUGEYROLLAS, Université de Paris

9, France

Moderator: Ms Liz KELLY, University of North London, United

Kingdom

42
This session will put special focus on violence in military service and violence against women and
children in armed conflicts.
 166

Presentation and discussion of the following reports:

Male violence: the economic costs

by Mr Alberto GODENZI and Ms Carrie YODANIS, University of
Fribourg, Switzerland

But where are the men? Central State public policies to combat
violence against women in post-authoritarian Spain (1975-1999)
by Ms Celia VALIENTE, University of Madrid, Spain

Police methods to counteract violence against women

by Ms Helene GÖRTZEN, Stockholm County Police Authority, Sweden

Assumptions and implications: Notes on Greenlander men "in

transition"
by Mr Bo WAGNER SØRENSEN, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

16h30-17h00 Coffee break

17h00-18h00 CLOSING SESSION

Chair: Ms Caroline MECHIN, Chair of the Steering

Committee for Equality between Women and Men
(CDEG)

Conclusions of the Seminar presented by the General Rapporteur,

Ms Renate KLEIN

Close of the Seminar

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APPENDIX II

LIST OF PARTICIPANTS

ALBANIA/ALBANIE

Ms Eglantina GJERMENI, Women's Centre, PO Box 2418, TIRANA

AUSTRIA/AUTRICHE

Mr Albin DEARING, Ministry of the Interior, Head of the Law Department, Herrengasse 7,
Department IV 11, A-1014 VIENNA

Ms Astrid KECKEIS, Federal Chancellery of Austria - Section for Women's Affairs,

Radetzkystrasse 2, A-1030 VIENNA

BELGIUM/BELGIQUE

[Excusée/apologised: Mme Maiti CHAGNY, 40 rue d'Espagne, B-1060 BRUXELLES]

Mme Afaf HEMAMOU, Attachée du ministre-Président de la Communauté française de

Belgique, Place Surlet de Chokler, 15-17, B-1000 BRUXELLES

M Roland MAYERL, 40 rue d'Espagne, B-1060 BRUXELLES

BULGARIA/BULGARIE

Ms Jivka MARINOVA, Bulgarian Gender Research Foundation, P.O.B. 938, 12 Luben

karavelov Str. Ap. 11, SOFIA 1000

CROATIA/CROATIE

Ms Dubrovka KOCIJAN HERCIGONJA, Rapporteur, National Centre for Psychotrauma,

Clinical Hospital Dubrava, Av G. Suska, HR-10000 ZAGREB

CYPRUS/CHYPRE

Mme Androula BOULARAN, Ministry of Justice and Public Order, CY-NICOSIA

CZECH REPUBLIC/REPUBLIQUE TCHEQUE

DENMARK/DANEMARK

Ms Camilla KVIST, University of Copenhagen, Institute of Anthropology,

Videnskabsbutikken, Landemaerket 9A, ST.TV, 1119 COPENHAGEN K

Ms Britta MOGENSEN, Bülowsvej 32a, st.tv, D-1870 FREDERIKSBERG C

Mr Bo WAGNER SØRENSEN, Rapporteur, University of Copenhagen, Institute of

Anthropology, Frederksholms Kanal 4, D-1220 COPENHAGEN K
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ESTONIA/ESTONIE

FINLAND/FINLANDE

Mr Bert BJARLAND, Sub-Committee on men's issues, Council for equality between women and
men, PO Box 267, FIN 00171 HELSINKI

Ms Jouni KEMPE, Sub-Committee on men's issues, Council for equality between women and
men, PO Box 267, FIN 00171 HELSINKI

Ms Natalia OLLUS, Assistant Research Officer, HEUNI, The European Institute for Crime
Prevention and Control, affiliated to the United Nations, POB 161, FIN 00131 HELSINKI

Ms Irma PAHLMAN, Sub-Committee on men's issues, Council for equality between women and
men, PO Box 267, FIN 00171 HELSINKI

Ms Leena RUUSUVUORI, STAKES, National Research and Development Centre for Welfare
and Health, Finnish Project for the Prevention of Violence against Women, Siltasaarenkatu 18,
PO Box 220, FIN-00531 HELSINKI

Ms Anna-Lisa SÖDERHOLM, Dept. Maxillofacial Surgery, Helsinki University Central

Hospital, POB 263, FIN-00029 HYKS

Mr Petteri SVEINS, STAKES, National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and
Health, Siltasaarenkatu 18, PO Box 220, FIN-00531 HELSINKI

FRANCE

Mme Catherine BERNARD, Solidarité Femmes, 23 rue de Mulhouse, F-90000 BELFORT

M. Pascal CUENOT, Parenthèses à la Violence, 51 rue de Mulhouse, F-90000 BELFORT

Mme Danielle DURAND-POUDRET, Médecin chef du Service médico-psychologique régional,

Maison d'Arrêt de Grenoble, F-38763 VARCES CEDEX

Mme Béatrice FLORENTIN, Chargée de mission lutte contre les violences envers les femmes,
Service des Droits des Femmes, 31 rue le Peletier, F-75009 PARIS

Mme Dominique FOUGEYROLLAS, Chair, IRIS-TS du CNRS, Université de Paris 9 -

Dauphine, B612 Place de Lattre de Tassigny, F-75725 PARIS Cedex 16

Mme Joëlle LEVY-ORTSCHEIDT, Psychanalyste, 2 rue Fischart, F-67000 STRASBOURG

Mme Viviane MONNIER, Fédération Nationale Solidarité Femmes, 32-34 rue des Envierges, F-
75020 PARIS

Mme Claudine PIERRON, 30 Allée de la Robertsau, F-67000 STRASBOURG

Mme Kineret WEIL, 30 Allée de la Robertsau, F-67000 STRASBOURG

 169

GEORGIA/GEORGIE

GERMANY/ALLEMAGNE

Dr Silvia BERKE, Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend, D-53123
BONN

Ms Sabine BOEHM, Rape Crisis Centre, Nürnberg, Bleichstr. 25, D-90429 NÜRNBERG

Mr Thomas DANGERS, MÄNNER GEGEN MÄNNER-GEWALT, Mühlendamm 66, D-

22087 HAMBURG

Dr Uta ENDERS-DRAGÄSSER, Gesellschaft für Sozialwissenschaftliche Frauenforschung e.V.

(GSFe.V.), Oederweg 12, D-60318 FRANKFURT/MAIN

Dr Margit K. EPSTEIN, Chair, Thornerstr. 14, D-26122 OLDENBURG

Ms Astrid FORSCHNER, Lobby for Human Rights, PO Box 1030, D-72541 METZINGEN

Professor Dr Carol HAGEMANN-WHITE, Rapporteur, University of Osnabrück, D-49069

OSNABRÜCK

Professor Dr Barbara Kavemann, Chair, Universität Osnabrück, Projekt WiBIG, Kottbusser

Damm 79, D - 10967 BERLIN

Ms Uta KLEIN, Rapporteur, Institute of Sociology, University of Münster, Scharnhorststrasse

121, D-48151 MÜNSTER

Ms Sabine KLEIN-SCHONNEFELD, University of Bremen -041/GW2, Department Against

Discrimination and Violence in Employment (ADE), Postfach 33 04 40, D-28334 BREMEN

[Excusée/apologised: Ms Christiane MICUS, Rapporteur, University of Osnabrück, Heger-

Tor-Wall 9, D-49069 OSNABRÜCK]

Dr Birgit MEYER, Fachhochschule Esslingen - Hochschule für Sozialwesen - Die

Frauenbeauftragte, Flandernstr. 101, D-73732 ESSLINGEN

Prof Dr Ursula MUELLER, University of Bielefeld, Faculty of Sociology, PF 100131, D-33501

BIELEFELD

Ms Gesa SCHIRRMACHER, Projekt WiBIG, University of Osnabrück, Alte Münze 14-16,

49069 OSNABRÜCK

GREECE/GRECE

Mme Catherine PAPARRIGA-COSTAVARA, Solonos 128, Gr-10681 ATHENES

 170

HUNGARY/HONGRIE

Mme Anna BETLEN, Ministère des Affaires sociales, Secrétariat pour la condition de la femme,
Roosevelt ter 7-8 H-1051 BUDAPEST

Dr Lenke FEHER, Ministry of Social Affairs and Family Matters, Institute for Legal Sciences of
the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Országház Utca 30. 11./35, H-1014 BUDAPEST

ICELAND/ISLANDE

IRELAND/IRLANDE

Ms Georgette MULHEIR, Centre for Peace and Development Studies, University of

Limerick, LIMERICK

ITALY/ITALIE

Ms Clara COLLARILE, Chef du service pour les Politiques communautaires et Affaires

internationales, Presidenza Consiglio Ministri, Dép. Egalité des Chances, Via del Giardino
Theodoli 66, 00186 ROME

Ms Paola SCONZO, Corso Genova 7, I-20123 MILAN

LATVIA/LETTONIE

LIECHTENSTEIN

LITHUANIA/LITUANIE

Ms Ausrine BURNEIKIENE, Equal Opportunities Ombudsperson, Gedimino pr 11, LT-2039

VILNIUS

LUXEMBOURG

Mme Joëlle SCHRANCK, Femmes en Détresse, ASBL-Boîte Postale 1024, L-1010

LUXEMBOURG

Mme Isabelle THOSS-KLEIN, Ministère de la Promotion Féminine, 33 bd Prince Henri, L-

2921, LUXEMBOURG

MALTA/MALTE

Ms Anna-Maria MANGION, Social Welfare Development programme, SWDP, 4th floor,

Gattard House, National Road, BLATA L-BAJDA HMR O2

MOLDOVA

NETHERLANDS/PAYS-BAS

Ms Hedzerika KOK, Stichting Toeluchtsoord, Martinikerhof 11, NL-9712 JG-GRONINGEN

 171

Mr Kees KOMDUUR, Politie Regio Utrecht, Marco Pololaan 6, NL-3503 UTRECHT

Ms Renée RÖMKENS, Moderator, Dept. of Communication and Welfare, Utrecht University,

Heidelberglaan 2, 3584 CS UTRECHT

Mr Bernard VAN DEN HOEVEN, Politie Regio Utrecht, Baden Powellweg 4, NL-3523 CA
UTRECHT

NORWAY/NORVEGE

Ms Helene AARSETH, Ministry of Children and Family Affairs, Akersgt 59, N-0180 OSLO

Mr Morten Damgaard HANSEN, PST Brøset, PB 1803 LADE, N-7440 TRONDHEIM

Ms Grethemor Skagset HAUGAN, PST Brøset, PB 1803 LADE, N-7440 TRONDHEIM

Mr Stig JARWSON, P.S.T. AVD Brøset, PB 1803 LADE, N-7440 TRONDHEIM

Ms Halldis LEIRA, Oslo College, Pilestre det 52, N-0167 OSLO

Mr Jim Aage NØTTESTAD, PST, Brøset, PB 1803 LADE, N-7440 TRONDHEIM

POLAND/POLOGNE

Ms Anna KWIATKOWSKA, Rapporteur, Department of Psychology, University of

Bialystok, Swierkowa 20, 15 328 BIALYSTOK (European Network on conflict, gender and
violence)

PORTUGAL

Mr José Nuno GRADIM BARROS, Commission for Equality and Women's Rights, LISBON

ROMANIA/ROUMANIE

Prof Dr Anca DUMITRESCU, Rapporteur, Romanian Institute for Educational Sciences, Str
Aviator Th. Iliescu 39, Sector 1, 71238 BUCHAREST

Dr Elena PENTELEICIUC Rapporteur, Str. Doctor Lister N. 38, Sector 5, 76209

BUCHAREST

RUSSIAN FEDERATION/FEDERATION DE RUSSIE

Ms Vera GRACHEVA, Rapporteur, Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Smolenskaya-Sennaya Sq

32-34, MOSCOW

SAN MARINO/SAINT MARIN

SLOVAKIA/SLOVAQUIE

Ms Maria CHALOUPKOVA, Association of Democratic Left Women, Mlynská 1001/5, 90031

STUPAVA
 172

SLOVENIA/SLOVENIE

Ms Klavdija ANICIC, Association against Violence Communication, Ulica Milana Majcna 12,
1000 LJUBLJANA

SPAIN/ESPAGNE

Ms Fatima ARRANZ, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Ciencias Politicas y

Sociologia, Campus de Somosaguas, 28223 MADRID

Ms Celia VALIENTE, Rapporteur, Department of Political Science and Sociology,

University Carlos III of Madrid, Calle Madrid 126, 28903 Getafe, MADRID

SWEDEN/SUEDE

Ms Mona ELIASSON, Uppsala University, Centre for Feminist Research, Drottninggatan 4, S-

753 10 UPPSALA

Mr Per Elis ELIASSON, Manscentrum, Crisis Centre for Males, Götgatan 83D, SE 11662
STOCKHOLM

Ms Helene GÖRTZEN, Rapporteur, Stockholm County Police Authority, Information Unit, S-

10675 STOCKHOLM

Ms Katarina WEINEHALL, Rapporteur, Department of Education, Umea University, S-90187

UMEÅ

Ms Jenny WESTERSTRAND, Department of Sociology, Uppsala University, Box 821, S-75108

UPPSALA

SWITZERLAND/SUISSE

Prof Ass Dr Regina-Maria DACKWEILER, University of Fribourg, Route des Bonnesfontaines

11, CH-1700 FRIBOURG

Ms Daniela GLOOR, Social Insight, Neugasse 6, CH-8005 ZURICH

[Excusé/apologised: Professor Dr Alberto GODENZI, Rapporteur, Department of Social Work

and Social Policy, University of Fribourg, Route des Bonnesfontaines 11, CH-1700 FRIBOURG

Ms Kirsten LODDING, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), 19 Avenue de la

Paix, CH-1202 GENEVA

Ms Hanna MEIER, Social Insight, Neugasse 6, CH-8005 ZURICH

Mme Hélène REY, Consultation interdisciplinaire de médecine et de prévention de la violence,

Dpt de Médecine communautaire, Hôpital cantonal, 24 Micheli-du-Crest, 1211 GENEVE 14

Ms Corinna SEITH, University of Berne, Department of Sociology, Unitobler, Lerchenweg 36,

CH-3000 BERNE 9
 173

Dr Carrie YODANIS, Rapporteur, Department of Social Work and Social Policy, University of
Fribourg, Route des Bonnesfontaines 11, CH-1700 FRIBOURG

"THE FORMER YUGOSLAV REPUBLIC OF MACEDONIA"

TURKEY/TURQUIE

UKRAINE

Ms Valentyna SUKHOMLYN, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, 1 Mykhaylivska Sq,

KYIV 01018

UNITED KINGDOM/ROYAUME-UNI

[Excusée/apologised: Ms Sarah GALVANI, University of Hull, Cottingham Road, GB-HULL

HU6 7RX]

Ms Judith GILLESPIE, Royal Ulster Constabulary, Crime Branch Headquarters, Knocknagoney

House, Knocknagoney Road, BELFAST BT4 2PP

Ms Jalna HANMER, Rapporteur, Research Centre on Violence, Abuse and Gender Relations,
Leeds Metropolitan University, Calverley Street, Leeds LS1 3HE

[Excusé/apologised: Mr Jeff HEARN, Rapporteur, Tampere University, Swedish School of

Economics and Manchester University]

Ms Marianne HESTER, Moderator, School of Humanities & Social Sciences, University of

Sunderland, Priestman Building, Green Terrace, GB-SUNDERLAND SR1 3PZ

Ms Liz KELLY, Moderator, Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit, University of North
London, Ladbroke House, 62-66 Highbury Grove, GB-LONDON N5 2AD

Ms Emma MARSHALL, Policing and Reducing Crime Unit, Room 401, Home Office, Clive
House, Petty France, GB-LONDON SW1H 9HD

Ms Bridget PENHALE, Rapporteur, Social Work Dept., University of Hull, GB-HULL HU6
7RX

Ms Linda REGAN, Moderator, Child and Women Abuse Studies Unit, University of North
London, Ladbroke House, 62-66 Highbury Grove, GB-LONDON N5 2AD

Ms Elizabeth STANKO, Chair, Department of Social and Political Science, Royal Holloway,
University of London, Egham, GB-SURREY TW20 OEX

Ms Sylvia WALBY, Rapporteur, Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of

Leeds, GB-LEEDS LS2 9JT

Mr Gary WHITE, Royal Ulster Constabulary, Community Affairs Department, 42

Montgomery Road, BELFAST BT6 9LD

***
 174

PARLIAMENTARY ASSEMBLY/ASSEMBLEE PARLEMENTAIRE

Mme Tayyibe GÜLEK, Membre de la Délégation turque auprès du Conseil de l'Europe

BUREAU OF THE STEERING COMMITTEE FOR EQUALITY BETWEEN WOMEN AND

MEN (CDEG-BU)/BUREAU DU COMITE DIRECTEUR POUR L'EGALITE ENTRE LES
FEMMES ET LES HOMMES

Mme Iphigénie KATSARIDOU, Member of the Bureau of the CDEG/Membre du Bureau

du CDEG, Hellenic General Secretariat for Equality on the Sexes, Ministry of the Interior,
Public Administration and Decentralisation, 8 Dragatsaniou Str, 105 59 ATHENS

Mme Caroline MECHIN, Chair of the Steering Committee for Equality between Women
and Men (CDEG), Ministère de l'Emploi et de la Solidarité, service des Droits des femmes, 31,
rue Le Peletier, 75009 PARIS

Ms Violeta NEUBAUER, Vice-Chair of the Steering Committee for Equality between

Women and Men (CDEG), Counsellor, Women's Policy Office of the Government, Tomsiceva
4, 1000 LJUBLJANA

Ms Zuzana VRANOVÁ, Member of the Bureau of the CDEG/membre du Bureau du

CDEG, Director, The Bratislava International Centre for Family Studies/Medzinárodné
stredisko pre štúdium rodiny, Drotárska 46, 81 104 BRATISLAVA

STEERING COMMITTEE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS/COMITE DIRECTEUR POUR LES

DROITS DE L'HOMME (CDDH)

GROUP OF SPECIALISTS FOR THE PROTECTION OF WOMEN AND YOUNG GIRLS

AGAINST VIOLENCE/GROUPE DE SPECIALISTES POUR LA PROTECTION DES
FEMMES ET DES FILLETTES CONTRE LA VIOLENCE (EG-S-FV)

Ms Gudrún AGNARSDÓTTIR, The Rape Trauma Service, Reykjavik Hospital, Fossvogur,

108 REYKJAVIK

Mr Valentin WEDL, Federal Chancellery, Radetzkystrasse 2, A-1030 VIENNA

GENERAL RAPPORTEUR/RAPPORTEUR GENERAL

Ms Renate KLEIN, College of Education and Human Development, University of Maine, 30A
Merrill Hall, ORONO ME 04469, USA

OBSERVERS/OBSERVATEURS

EUROPEAN WOMEN'S LOBBY/LOBBY EUROPEEN DES FEMMES

Mme Colette DE TROY, European Women's Lobby, Policy Action Centre on Violence against
Women, 12 rue Hydraulique, B-1210 BRUSSELS
 175

UNITED NATIONS EDUCATIONAL, SCIENTIFIC AND CULTURAL ORGANISATION

(UNESCO)

Ms Eunice SMITH, Women and a Culture of Peace, UNESCO, 7 Place de Fontenoy,

F-75352 PARIS

WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION/ORGANISATION MONDIALE DE LA SANTE

(WHO/OMS)

Ms Kirsten Staehr JOHANSEN, Rapporteur, WHO-EURO, Scherfigsvej 8, DK-2000 F

Ms Claudia GARCIA MORENO, World Health Organisation, CH - 1211 GENEVA 27

SECRETARIAT

M. Pierre-Henri IMBERT, Director of Human Rights/Directeur des Droits de l'Homme

Ms Ólöf ÓLAFSDÓTTIR, Head of the Section Equality between women and men, Secretary to
the CDEG/Chef de la Section égalité entre les femmes et les hommes, Secrétaire du CDEG

Ms Sophie PIQUET, Administrator, Section Equality between women and men/Administratrice,

Section égalité entre les femmes et les hommes

Ms Karen PALISSER, Principal Administrative Assistant, Section Equalty between Women and
Men/Assistante administrative principale, Section égalité entre les femmes et les hommes

Ms Amanda RAIF, Administrative Assistant, Section Equality between Women and Men
Directorate/Assistante Administrative, Section égalité entre les femmes et les hommes Direction
des Droits de l'Homme

Mme Nadine SCHAEFFER, Administrative Assistant, Human Rights Directorate/Assistante

Administrative, Direction des Droits de l'Homme

Ms Sascha MÜLLER, Trainee, Section Equality between Women and Men

Directorate/Stagiaire, Section égalité entre les femmes et les hommes Direction des Droits de
l'Homme

INTERPRETERS/INTERPRETES

Mme Anne du BOUCHER

Mme Helga PRIACEL
Mme Maryline NEUSCHWANDER