VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IN
THE HOME: KALEIDOSCOPES
ON A COLLISION COURSE?*
PATRICIA EASTEAL
**
We look at the world around us – including gender, violence and the law - through
assumptions about ‘reality’. I use the concept of a ‘kaleidoscope’ to illustrate this idea:
that when we conceptualise something, say violence against women in the home, our
perception is the outcome of a multitude of filters that twist and turn according to our
own individual experiences and knowledge to create a picture at the end of the
kaleidoscope cylinder.
Given our historical antecedents and the current domination of Australian society by
Anglo-Saxon males and a view of culture as holistic (parts inter-related), it is my
contention that the images permeating the principal social structures and organisations,
tend to be focused by the perspectives of the dominants. I label this as the
dominocentric reality. As a community and criminal justice system, we thus tend to use
a masculine model of violence - a comparator based on the public and male dominated
sphere. Consequently when we think about domestic violence, a singular physical
assault, without much if any contextual background, may be what many of us see at the
end of the kaleidoscope.
However, domestic violence is not about a single strike; such a perspective is noninclusive of the victims’ experiences. (I use victims to include the witnesses.)1
Frequently the ‘incident’ that results in intervention by the criminal justice system is in
actuality just a small part of a complex pattern of control and cannot be adequately
understood nor its gravity measured in isolation from that background.
The following paper first looks at the victims’ experiences and then gives examples of
how, either through its ‘black letter’ or implementation, that civil, criminal, family,
*
**
1
Much of the data and concepts (and Figure 1) appear in or are expanded from my book, Less Than
Equal – Women and the Australian Legal System (Butterworths, 2001). I would also like to thank
the anonymous referee for recognising some lack of annotation and for providing the titles of some
excellent Queensland research.
Dr Easteal is currently Adjunct Professor in Law at the University of Canberra. She arrived in
Australia 15 years ago armed with a BA, MA, and PhD in legal and criminological related fields.
M Johnson, ‘Conflict and Control: Images of Symmetry and Asymmetry in Domestic Violence,’ in
A Booth, A Crouter, and M Clements (eds), Couples in Conflict (L Erlbaum Associates, 2001)
identifies five types of violent behaviour in the home: mutual violent control, violent resistance,
common couple violence and patriarchal terrorism. The type of violence described in this article is
the last. His data support the hypothesis that ‘terrorism’ is almost exclusively perpetrated by males
in heterosexual relationships. Most female violence is found in ‘common couple violence’ and
community survey data cited by men’s rights groups often confuse the two.
1
EASTEAL
(2003)
social security and immigration law obscure and distort the victims’ reality through the
dominocentric kaleidoscope.
I
GETTING THE ‘POWER’ PICTURE INTO FOCUS
Figure 1 depicts the victims’ kaleidoscope picture of violence.
Figure 1: The Victims’ Kaleidoscope Picture of Violence
Emotional
Denigration
Emotional
Jealousy
Isolation
Sexual
CONTROL
Physical
Threats
Financial
Using kids, pets,
property
There are many manifestations of violence aside from the more apparent and harder to
hide broken bones and bruises. These less visible acts, just like slaps and shoves, are
about a need to exert power and are enacted through emotional abuses, rape, financial
exploitation, damaging property, injuring pets, harming the children and death threats.
The different masks of control are on-going, generally gets more serious and may be
joined by a variety of other physical expressions of power. Overall, the abusive
behaviours tend to escalate over time but it is a slow, insidious and isolating process
punctuated by periods of remorse.
Leaving the relationship does not necessarily mean the violence will stop. In the ABS
Women’s Safety Survey, of those who had experienced violence by a previous partner,
for more than one third (35.1%) the violence continued after separation.2 For some, it
begins at that time. One only has to look at the frequency of breaches to domestic
2
Australian Bureau of Statistics (‘ABS’), Women’s Safety Survey (1996). Synopsis of results of
4128.0
<http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/
[email protected]/0/B62DEB3AC52A2574CA2568A900139340?Open>
at 15 October 2002.
2
Vol 3 No 2 (QUTLJJ)
Violence Against Women in the Home:
Kaleidoscopes on a Collision Course
violence orders or restraining orders to know that not even legal intervention may deter
the desire for control. Almost half of spousal homicides committed by men targeted the
killing of women who had left them, or were attempting to leave them.3
In addition, the violent partner may try to continue – often very effectively - to exert
control in non-physically violent ways through on-going questioning of parental
responsibilities and decision-making.
A
Emotional Expressions
The mental, psychological and spiritual abuses, generally precede other types of
violence. They may start with almost trifling incidents that frequently involve jealousy
- denigrating her clothing, make up, hair, how she talks or how she doesn’t talk enough,
her behaviour, her basic being. The persistent debasement can erode one’s soul and
spirit to a state far easier to take captive. It is often difficult for the victim to define what
is happening as abuse until out of the relationship. Coupled with her downward sense of
self-esteem, these behaviours become almost normalised through repetition.
As one survivor writes:4
At the same time I see the helplessness in the situation where, by all accounts, I got off
comparatively lightly yet still struggle to recover from the impact of the marriage almost
a decade later.
I have great difficulty using the term violence because it is too firmly established as
‘beatings’ and that really wasn’t the issue for me. Approximately four years after my
marriage ended I had the good fortune to speak to a guy who worked at a women’s shelter
and, at that point I worked out my marriage had consisted of 5 kinds of abuse: financial,
emotional, psychological, physical, and sexual. Unfortunately, I was the perpetrator of
the physical violence when I couldn’t cope any more and, on two occasions lashed out
and hit him. In these instances he stood still, arms by his side and just let me hit him on
the torso. He was bigger than I was, I was unable to bruise him and he laughed it off
which I now realise simply compounded my feelings of helplessness and inadequacy. It
was a power and manipulation game, which used guilt etc to make me feel responsible,
inadequate, and incapable. If he had hit me I would have had a better chance of
understanding that the marriage w (...truncated)
