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A Local Perspective
of Domestic Violence
From a Radio 104 programme Talking Gender,
Featuring
Psychologist and Family Counsellor, Dr. Alison Gibbons-Barnes
Donald Berment, Secretary of MAVAW (Men Against Violence Against
Women)
This programme was inspired by an incident earlier in the year
where a man killed his wife in front of their three children and
then killed himself.
Speaking on the state of relationships and domestic violence as
related to Trinidad and Tobago, Dr. Allison Gibbons-Barnes reported
that there are many types of violence not only physical attacks like
slapping, grabbing, poking, verbal attacks, sexual violence. We also
have indirect violence like imprisonment or preventing someone from
going about their normal activities.
Generally, we tend to look at domestic violence as wife battering
but it also includes husband battering, child abuse and the abuse of
the elderly by their children or grandchildren. However cases of
domestic violence that tend to make the news are those involving
child or spousal abuse or murder.
It is an erroneous assumption to believe that family violence
only happens among the lower socio-economic groups. Family violence
is no respecter of family status. It happens across all race, gender
and socio-economic levels. Even wealthy men who have no problems
about where the next meal is coming from are also batterers. Also
contrary to common opinion, it is not only women who are submissive
and compliant that are battered. According to Dr. Barnes, “Women of
all descriptions are on the receiving end of violence. We have
relationships where men and women go head to head each reacting with
violence and trying to win at all cost. We have women who walk out
and leave the relationship, but the man pursues her. She shows a
little bit of courage by leaving the abusive relationship and at the
end she looses out by losing her life.”
According to Dr. Barnes “We have many contributors to domestic
violence, particularly that of battering or violence between
spouses”. These include:
- Tension over sex roles particularly with the changing roles
of men and women in today’s society.
- Constant authority issues of control and power – who is in
control and who is controlling whom. There is the gender
antipathy of men being uncomfortable with how women do things
and vice versa. So when there is a struggle for power or space
it can result in violence.
- Financial conflict,
- General stresses and frustrations of life,
- Alcohol and drug abuse.
- Intergenerational transmission or patterning - people who
only know that method of solving problems. They may have grown
up in family where they were abused as children or saw their
parents abusing each other. Family background and patterning
have a lot to do with it.
- Social values generally - the patterns in society,
- Media promotion of violence as a means of solving problems.
E.g. televisions programmes and movies.
- Provocation is not an excuse
Other important contributing factors are:
Belief Systems
At the core of many domestic violence disputes lie power or
control issues. Dr Barnes said: “We find that when a woman
challenges that power or control we have the worse kind of
reaction.” Of course frustrations of life can trigger a man to
violent behaviour, but he has options of how to handle his
frustrations without abuse. The abuse comes from the belief system
that he can control her physically.
Socialization
- It is true that when we look at gender, men are socialized
to carry authority and to feel that they can own a woman and
direct her movements and that she cannot direct his.
- Men have not been brought up to value and respect the power
of women or their own power. Ironically, social and
psychological research in the Caribbean repeatedly shows that
Caribbean men all respect their mothers. If there is one woman
in the world they respect it’s their mother, but somehow they
can’t seem to transfer that type of respect to their wives and
girlfriends.
- Men have not been taught to care for themselves on the most
basic physical things like domestic tasks and so they go into
relationships dependent on women to care for them.
- For centuries women have contributed to their own
subjugation, giving in very easily and we think these things
will go away. Society gives these messages that women have to
subjugate themselves.
- There is a lot of pressure from families and society on the
woman as being responsible for making the marriage work. So the
woman after walking away turns back thinking let me try again.
Maybe it is because of the children or parents and friends may
be pressuring her to try again. While women need to know how to
quit but sometimes help comes too late.
Misunderstanding of relationship dynamics.
- Women tend to taunt verbally. Women need to understand the
power of the spoken word. There are few women who over use it in
putting down the man. Girls are better at using language than
boys are, and in arguments you find a woman is better with
language skill than the man is and he becomes a victim of his
own frustration and his anger. Having patterned violence as a
response he has a trigger there.
- There are cases where the first lash is fired by the female.
I have had cases where, when I track it down, I find the woman
hit the man first. Her attitude is that as a girl she learned
that a boy should never hit back a girl, so she figured he would
not hit her back or would not hit her as hard. Or she may throw
something at him - and women do tend to throw things more than
men do. Women are also more quick to damage property so she will
damage his computer, his car, throw away something he owns, cut
up his clothing. It becomes a chicken and egg situation as to
who started it first.
- People have to look for signs very early on in relationships
and be willing to walk away even during courtship. If you, as a
young girl, are going out with a boy and he expresses a belief
system where if someone does him something he is going to
respond with violence, or you may hear him condoning someone
else’s violent behaviour. It is in his belief system that
violence is the way to respond to slights or betrayal. That
should tell you that you should not be in a relationship with
that person. You don’t have to wait until he does it to you.
- I see people continue in those relationships, end up
marrying those very people and then they act surprised that he
was abusive to them. By that time it’s already too late to fix
it. If you do not correct it at the very first sign. The very
first sign isn’t the first time he hits you but the first time
he looks as if he would hit you. Or talked as if he might do it.
- I’ve seen women walk into a marriage with a man who they
know was abusive to his former girlfriend. If he was abusive to
his former girlfriend, why would you want to marry him? But they
think he wouldn’t do it to him. We need to think about these
things. There are some unpredictable behaviours especially from
men. If you spend a lot of time talking to people during the
courtship, getting to know each other, then you will find out
where this person’s head is.
How important is the issue of Horning?
Many calypsos this year (2001) alluded to the issue of horning.
And horning not just by men but horning by women. As a psychologist
doing relationship counselling, I have seen that pattern more so
than in the past, of women being just as unfaithful in their
relationships as men have been in the past. By socialization, way
back in the past, women took it for granted that men would go out in
other relationships and they were taught to accept it and just press
on with life. These days when the shoe is on the other foot and many
women are involved in unfaithful relationships and venturing out in
sexual affairs, you find that men have never been schooled in how to
deal with that. They already can’t handle conflict, they already
think that they own and control the woman this is a blow to their
ego and therefore you find this retaliation. Women deal with
infidelity of their men in an easier way than men deal with
infidelity of their women.
We are not bringing up children to be emotionally mature.
Particularly boys - who find that their peer groups (teenage or
adult) heckle them, making feel badly as men, that their girlfriend
“horned” them. They don’t want to live anymore. And we have this
phenomenon now of the man killing the woman and then killing himself
(contributing to that is, or course, the death penalty). The whole
idea of the self-destruction shows you that he already felt
destroyed by the thought of his girlfriend or wife venturing out.
Emotional maturity helps us to cope with situations like this.
Emotional maturity teaches us that none of us owns another person,
that we have options. If you are in a relationship where the other
person in unfaithful then you can turn your back on that
relationship or find some other way to work it out, as we do through
counselling, because it is not the end of the world.
Marriage, relationships and the workplace
Couples need to work to get their relationships on the right
footing so there is reason to resist the temptation to be
unfaithful. The temptation is always there. Infidelity is a becoming
a big factor between couples today. Women are out in the workplace,
men are always there. The respect for marriage that used to exist is
no longer there. People encourage one another to engage in lax
behaviour. Single girls feel free to invite out a married man
without any respect for the fact that the man is married. Many
companies now organize social functions late at night where there is
dancing and tell employees they cannot bring their partners. It is
disrespect for stable relationships and marriage.
With that out there the temptation is all around and, yes, we are
having more and more horning behaviour. People need to know how to
control themselves in a relationship and how to deal an issue like
that, and be able to walk away from it and deal with the pain rather
than think you have to attack the person.
Donald Berment Secretary of MAVAW
We must place the problem of domestic violence within a gender
landscape. Gender awareness, gender consciousness, gender equality,
gender equity. Any other methodology is going to fail, because there
are important differences between men and women. We have been
socialized in different ways and we have to put solutions in place
against a background of gender landscape.
We (MAVAW) have been trying to get men to realize that women are
equal but they are different. By that we mean equal in intelligence,
in emotional strength and capable of the same level of destruction
men are and we have seen it. There is the example, the woman who
recently slowly poisoned the two children over a period of a week,
when the man was at work. There are examples worldwide of the
capability of the woman to be very destructive. So when we talk
equality we say: “Man hold your horses just because they have been
socialized to be passive that does not mean that they can not
retaliate. If we don’t stop our behaviour, change our patterns, try
to give equality in our power management systems to the woman, which
is her just desserts, we are going to be bawling further down the
road.”
A Man’s view of Domestic Violence
From men’s developmental perspective, emotional, physical and
spiritual they will identify the other partner as the main
contributor to their violent behaviour. What we are actually dealing
with (in the case of the perpetrator) is someone’s inherent
belief system deficit and behaviour skill deficit. A deficit in
the belief system that makes you feel you are superior, a deficit in
behaviour skills ability that does not allow you to manage conflict,
does not allow you to be able to deal with anger. There is and
inadequacy in communication skills.
From my personal research over the last twenty-four years, I have
put it down to one cause - an immaturity in the personal
development of the human being. In every single case I have
dealt with, I have identified the immaturity in the condition of the
person that is leading, and has led, to the dysfunction in the
relationship. Immaturity is no respecter of age; people over 50 are
quite capable of immature behaviour, as are the teenagers who also
use violence as a means of dealing with unfaithfulness in
relationships.
The contribution of Religion
Too many of us still talk about God in the male gender; too many
of us still feel that man is the only head of the home, that woman
committed the first sin. There are too many doctrines that have been
interpreted by mankind, past and present that have put woman in
second and inferior positions. No one knows the gender of God so
nobody is qualified to give God a gender. If we take that element
out of our discourse, we put woman on an equal playing field.
I do not want denigrate religions, but in Hinduism if a woman is
menstruating she is not allowed to participate in prayers. In my
mind if you are saying woman is next to God and God gave her the
ability to procreate and part of procreating is preparation, you
have no right to stigmatize that as something unclean.
A lot of sins have been done in the name of religion. They
promote the man over the woman in the way they present God as a man
and therefore all rules come from men. Sometimes those religious
teachings have interfered with gender relationship and promoted
authority and power over the woman.
According to Dr. Barnes: Many women who have been in distress
about family violence have not been able to get redress through
their denomination because the belief there is that the man is
greater and the woman is supposed to be obedient. So there is a lot
of conflict there in terms of women’s development where religion is
concerned. Some of the teachings of religion have been responsible
for subjugating women and making men feel that they own women. I
have some clients who are religious, they go to church and they are
violent in their relationships and see nothing wrong with it. They
play major roles in the church an they go home and batter their
wives and children in the name of being in charge. Religion
continues to play an important role in how men perceive women.
(In some religions women cannot walk beside men, they cannot
perform religious ceremonies.)
Recommendations:
- Make space in the school curriculum, for family life or
parenting education programmes including and especially general
relationship skills. There are three ways we can react to
situations. We can be active aggressive, - very violent. We can
be passive aggressive and damage ourselves, or we can be
assertive. People need to be taught the difference between
passive and assertive.
- Seek help in the early stages don’t wait until its too late.
- We have to put real efforts into planning continuing
programmes for men and women non-stop. So that both people bring
some more maturity to their decisions to be in a relationship
and their choices of partners. We cannot ignore one gender in
favour of another and say it’s time to deal with men.
Edited by Barbara King |
