WHAT IS FAMILY VIOLENCE?
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Koori Information
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It is not easy to explain what is
meant by Family Violence. As a rule though, it usually means abusive
behaviour towards other members of a family, including de-facto
relationships, marriage, blood ties, step families or relationships of a
comparable type. Ordinarily, the parties are now or have been
residing together, however, this does not always have to be the case.
Most people in an intimate
relationship will encounter family quarrels and other forms of conflict
from time to time. Family violence occurs when family quarrels and
other conflicts are replaced by threatening behaviour, harassment, and/or
physical abuse and when one person is in a position of superior power and
they use that power to control another.
Whilst Family Violence is most
commonly understood in the terms of physical or sexual abuse, power can
also be exerted by the use of social, financial, emotional, psychological,
verbal abuse or stalking. These forms of abuse may happen alone and
without physical or sexual abuse being present, although often they occur
with one or the other. Singly or combined with another form of
abuse, they can maintain a situation from which the victim of the abuse
finds it difficult to escape.
If
there is to be any common understanding of what interventions are to be made
in cases of spouse abuse, we must have a clear definition of what we mean by
that term.
In this workshop we will be
referring to four (4) basic forms of abuse:-
The most
obvious form of violence is physical abuse. On a continuum, this
begins with lack of consideration for a physical comfort or needs of others.
It escalates to actions like shaking, punching, bruising, twisting the
limbs, breaking bones, denying sleep and nutrition, denying needed medical
care, causing internal injuries, using household objects as weapons, causing
permanent injury and finally murder.
A part of physical abuse is
sexual abuse. On a continuum this begins with the objectification of
a victim through jokes, humiliating or degrading comments or unwanted
touching. It escalates to demands for sex or punishment by rejection of
them as a sexual partner, degrading them while having sex, forcing sex,
forcing sex after a beating or under threat of a beating, using penetrating
household objects in sex, causing injury during sex.
This consists
of the “putting down” of the victim. It is an attempt to demean and
de-power the victim to become dependent on the perpetrator. It ranges
from snide, joking comments such as “I should have married the bloody
freezer”, or “You can’t even boil an egg properly”, through to fearsome
haranguing “You’re a stupid, mindless, no hoper”. “You’re a slut, a
whore”. “You great ugly ape………”. The purpose is to humiliate,
degrade, demean and subjugate. Threats of killing all the pets,
suicide, turning the kids against you, murder, child abuse are all means to
this end.
Two (2) very common forms are
encountered. One is when the perpetrator hands over money (whether large
amounts or small) and demands that you do the impossible. “I give you $80.00 a week!!!”. “Why can’t you feed and clothe us on that?” (Including
four children). Or, “What’s this final notice?”. “I gave you the $500.00
to finish paying off the car!”. (There was $1,800.00 owing). The other
form is when you do paid work and they insist on controlling the money.
There are three (3) main
manifestations of this. First there is the verbal abuse of the victim in
company. They are laughed at, set up, put down - maybe in a joking way,
maybe with cool purpose. The victim is thus humiliated in front of friends,
relatives or strangers.
Second, there is the sometimes
socially accepted “smothering” of the victim. They take you to work, rings
you twice during the morning, takes you to lunch, rings you twice in the
afternoon, picks you up, takes you home, drives you to the gym at night and
sits in the car and waits to take you home. They even get you to change
firms (for your sake of course) when one of the (opposite sex) supervisors
comments on your attractiveness.
Third, there is social abuse
through isolation. The victim is not allowed to see their friends.
(“they’re troublemakers”) relatives (“they fill your head with stupid
ideas”) nor is the victim allowed to go out, (“there’s plenty to do at
home”) thus the perpetrator effectively isolates the victim from all other
reference points, making themself the only reference point the victim has.
Using these means, the
perpetrator is able to convince the victim that the victim is responsible
for the perpetrator’s violence or abuse.
In talking about spouse abuse
and violence we are dealing with the de-powering of a person. We are not
talking about a heated domestic argument. To differentiate between the two,
let us put the domestic argument at the low end of the violence continuum
and spouse abuse at the high end.
| Domestic Argument |
Spouse Abuse |
Violence
At the low end there is no
identifiable victim. As we move to the right, a victim is increasingly easy
to identify and less likely to provoke the incident or inflict harm
on the other person.
If we add the dimension of
power to our diagram, the differences become more obvious.
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Power
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Domestic Argument
VIOLENCE
Spouse Abuse |
