Week Eleven - Domestic Violence Flashcards
Women and DV stats?
1 woman murdered a week
1 in 4 experience PA, EA, SA
3x more likely than men to experience
What is DV?
Use of violent, threatening or coercive behaviour to gain power. Can include PA, SA, EA or financial abuse from current or former partner
Insecure Reactors?
Simple domestic violence
- Use EV or PV to gain power
- In response to conflict
- Associated with sense of entitlement and frustration
- More likely to seek help/realise there is a problem with their behaviour
Coercive Controllers?
Emotionally dependent and Calculating manipulator
Coercion - Hurting and intimidating causing fear in the victim
Control - Isolation and regulation of the victims behaviour
Violence in Coercive Controllers?
There is frequently physical and sexual violence
Rees, Agnew-Davies, & Barkham (2006). Surveyed 500 women seeking refuge in the UK. They found:
- 70% choked or strangled at least once
- 60% forced to have sex against their will
Intimidation in Coercive Controllers?
Designed to keep abuse secret, create dependence and compliance
- threats
- stalking
- degradation
Isolation in Coercive controllers?
Like intimidation, designed to keep abuse secret, and also to deprive the victim of other supports or resources
- Rees et al 86% had been kept from leaving the house (47% said this happened often or all the time)
Deprivation in Coercive Controllers?
Often access to financial resources is removed, money stolen. Often control food/weight/dress, how housework is done, how children are disciplined.
Process of DV
Step 1. Establish Love & Trust Step 2. Isolate Step 3. Monopolise Perception Step 4. Induce Debility & Exhaustion Step 5. Enforce Trivial Demands Step 6. Demonstrate Omnipotence Step 7. Alternate punishments with reward Step 8. Threats Step 9. Degradation
What does Step 1. Establish Love & Trust involve?
Including ‘love bombing’ – showing intense interest and care, showering with gifts, ‘sweeping her off her feet’
Step 2. Isolate
- Geographically – moving to another location
- By driving away friends/family
• Sometime will collude with family where there is existing
difficulties
- Victims can self isolate, or just pretend all is well out of shame/fear
- Hiding car keys, intercepting calls/emails/threatening others
• Again can be under the guise of passion/obsessive love “I just
want you all to myself”
Step 3. Monopolise Perception
• With no external supports, it is easier to lose perspective.
• Redirect attention from perpetrator’s behaviour to
victim’s behaviour – any abuse is due to her faults. After
all, she’s the only one he’s doing this to – he’s a nice guy to everyone else.
• Alternatively, perpetrators can present as needing help –
‘you’re the only one who can make me a better man – I need you to support me, and you can support me by….’
Step 4. Induce Debility & Exhaustion
• Includes things like gaslighting – the perpetrator knowingly and intentionally lies, denies, manipulates situations to make the victim think they are unable to trust their own memory and judgement. And if someone is already isolated…
– Can also stop the victim from getting regular sleep, excessive work etc
Step 5. Enforce Trivial Demands
- Often changing, and can be contradictory
* Leads to hypervigilance to avoid anger/punishment
Step 6. Demonstrate Omnipotence
• Control over life or death – choking, strangulation are
huge warning signs for homicide (Glass et al., 2007) –
those who strangle are 8 time more likely to end up killing
their victim.
• Surveillance, particularly Technology Facilitated Abuse
Step 7. Alternate Punishments with Reward
“Cycle of violence”
- explosion
- remorse
- promises
- false honeymoon
- tension
- threats
- start from start again
Step 8. Threats
- Used to prevent the victim from seeking help
- Threats of finding and punishing the victim
- Threats to harm self
- Risk of harm to children/family/friends/pets
Step 9. Degradation
• Coerced into sexually degrading acts
• Forced to engage in other degrading acts (eg eating dog
food, sleeping on the floor)
• Forced to neglect children (or the perpetrator may harm
them)
Important thing to remember about the Steps of DV
Many perpetrators are not doing these things consciously – some are strategic, others impulsive (and possibly modelled behaviours)
Not all the ‘steps’ might be present
Abuse occurs on a spectrum, and there can be prolonged periods of ‘good’ times
Different patterns for emotionally dependent vs manipulative controllers
Women can also be perpetrators or tacitly support perpetrators
Why don’t DV victims leave?
- Threats, surveillance, and violence can remain and escalate
- Leaving or threatening to leave are one of the most frequently reported reasons for homicide, either of the victim, or one of their family members
- There may be no access to money or shelter - 38% of people requesting assistance from specialist homelessness orgs are escaping domestic/family violence.
- Interactions with police aren’t always ideal
- There is a high chance that even where there are claims of abuse of children the perpetrator will be granted access.
- Trying to get a family violence or restraint order, or other legal
support is costly and risky.
Interactions with Police for DV victims?
Interactions with police are not always ideal
- Lack of empathy and frustration when women call repeatedly/return to the perpetrator
- Failure to provide information/support
- Offences viewed as trivial/not considered in the broader context (in coercive controller situations)
- Victim blaming
- Mis-identification as the perpetrator (or, ‘they’re both as
bad as each other’).
Early perceptions of victims of domestic violence?
- 19th Century – perceived as weak, downtrodden, helpless to act against violent husbands
- 1930-1940’s Women who stayed with abusive husbands were viewed as masochists
- 1970-1980’s Caplan “The myth of women’s masochism”: Argued women were socialised to show servitude
Theory grew that ‘battered women’ actively looked for abusive husbands
(1944) Helene Deutsch “The Psychology of Women”
Claimed there were 3 core traits of femininity:
- Narcissism
- Passivity
- Masochism
Snell, Rosenwald, & Robey (1964) “The wife beaters
wife: A study of family interaction.”
37 perpetrators interviewed. Authors suggested male violence helped the women to assuage the guilt they felt about their own ‘controlling,
castrating behaviour’
The shift away from masochism lead to?
View of women being helpless
Walker (1979) “The Battered Women syndrome”
Based on Seligman’s learned helplessness model.
Victim’s passivity encouraged abuse, and that women ended up being convinced their abuser was right. (i.e. Stockholm Syndrome)
Stockholm Syndrome case?
Kristin Enmark 1973
- Police failed to engage with robbers
- Got angry at police for attacking and potentially causing death
- When released, refused to be stretchered out and was angry
- Berejot claimed Enmark had fallen in love with her captors
Problem with Stockholm Syndrome?
When we have a victim stereotype, we question people who don’t ‘look’
like a victim (white, vulnerable, ‘a good wife’ etc).
So if someone fights back, gets angry e.g., in some other way doesn’t meet ‘the standard’ of a victim, they are less likely to get justice, and may even end up being seen as a perpetrator.
Can also mean they are treated differently in the media, or by those
around them.
Can mean the victims themselves think they provoke abuse and are responsible if they don’t fit the mould.
DV and First Nations Women
First nations women up to 35 times more likely to experience domestic or family violence
- made worse by isolation and small community
- police can be bias
- poverty/literacy challenges
- intergenerational trauma
DV and Disabled People
Nearly half of female domestic violence victims have a disability
- In the 1st 3 months of COVID, 8.6% of women with a disability had been choked or strangled by their partners
- Increased risk of losing children
- Challenges with legal support
- More ability for perps to control
DV and LGBTQ+
Lesbian/Bisexual/Trans people also have unique risks:
- Outing (sexual orientation, gender identity)
- Withholding of hormones
