Editorial

Family Violence: What's in a name?

Lawrie Moloney
Senior Research Fellow, Australian Institute of Family Studies, Melbourne; Adjunct Professor, School of Public Health, La Trobe University, Melbourne VIC

PP: 157 - 159

Article Text

For many years, I thought of my childhood as one that was effectively shielded from the experience of serious violence. Interestingly though, I failed to recognise a form of institutionalised violence that was an everyday experience from late primary to mid-secondary school. The Christian Brothers, my teachers during this time, belonged to a religious order that had suffered much in the pursuit of providing education to boys in Ireland in the nineteenth century. They came to Australia, determined to provide education to a largely working class Catholic population. One might think that their experience of repression in their home environment would lead them in the direction of tolerance and generosity of spirit. Instead, however, they exported to Australia a fear-induced educational system dominated by the strap - a thick piece of leather that when used on the hand and sometimes on the backside, caused such intense pain that it was difficult to focus on anything else for at least fifteen minutes after 'the cuts' had been administered.

I learned to conjugate Latin verbs with the 'aid' of that instrument. Only later did I discover that learning a language could in fact be enjoyable. Was I traumatised by this aspect of my education? It may be tempting to answer in the affirmative, but in truth such an answer would not do justice to the word. Besides, my memories of school are generally good ones - even though scarcely a day would pass without several boys in the class being strapped. Were the students diminished as human beings by the use of such 'discipline'? I strongly suspect that the answer has to be yes. Would I, like Tucci, Goddard and Mitchell (2003), refer to such 'discipline' as a form of violence and as unacceptable? The answer is clearly contextual. At the time, the question would have made little sense and the answer would probably have been 'No'. Should I have expected my parents to object to such behaviour? Again, the correct contemporary answer is 'Yes'. But in the context of the times, I can recall no parent raising such an objection and no child believing that a parent should. At some level, we had been socialised into believing that we got what we deserved.

One of the many difficulties in researching and responding to family violence is that its causes, its context and its impacts are rarely easy to define. Most of the articles in this Special Edition of JFS focus on men as clearly defined perpetrators and women and children as clearly defined victims. That is perhaps as it should be. Men inflict considerably more damage on women than vice versa, though at the same time they inflict even more damage on each other. As Bala's historical review points out, the traditional feminist critique of violence grew out of an appreciation by pioneer researchers such as Walker (1979) - and her counterparts like Pizzey (1973) in the UK and Scutt (1983) in Australia - that many of the women seeking refuge from violent situations were indeed victims whose partners or husbands were motivated by a need to keep them 'under control'. Thus since the 1970s much of the theorising about violence has been about men's sense of entitlement, driven in turn by an essentially patriarchal culture.

This theorising remains an important part of the picture. But a growing body of research based on population studies rather than clinical samples, has pointed to the existence of widespread female-initiated violence, as well as widespread reciprocal violence between men and women. Reconciling the clinical data with the population studies has proved to be a difficult task both scientifically and politically. Perhaps the best attempt to date has been the series of papers arising out of the multidisciplinary Wingspread Conference in North America and published in Issue 3, Volume 46 of the Family Court Review (see in particular the overview provided by VerSteegh and Dalton [2008])[1].

My aim in raising this issue is not to enter formally into these debates - and certainly not to somehow diminish the lived experience of the victims of violence and abuse. It is extremely important that we both hear the stories of victims and hear their understanding of the causes and impact of violence. That is in essence what the first set of articles in this special issue sets out to achieve. Nor do I wish to question research that seeks to gain insights and understanding in tandem with providing a therapeutic response - the sort of work reported upon in the final four articles. Good therapeutic interventions begin with taking client experiences seriously and then working towards both inward and outward change from that point. Good research in this field constantly monitors client progress against our understanding of their particular experiences.

I am struck, however, by the fact that half the articles in this Special Edition in one way or another address institutional or systemic failures to respond adequately to family violence and child abuse. It is as if the rhetoric over many years has not yet convinced institutions and workers with sufficient force that there is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. Some articles in this section focus in the end on the need for more resources, or put their faith in better legislation, more informed judicial responses or better integration of services. Some note that when considered from the perspective of where we have come from, at least some progress has been made. Some point to how the truth of violence continues to be obfuscated in a variety of ways.

All of these articles make important contributions and deserve close attention. At the same time, however, I continue to be bothered by whether or not most researchers, practitioners and policy makers remain locked in to too narrow a view of the nature of family violence and abuse. Does our failure to recognise the complexity of the problem paradoxically contribute to a sort of institutional or even personal malaise? How, for example, does each of us respond to the observation of a prosecutor in a Toronto domestic violence court, who observed with respect to family violence that:

... it's a crime. But you can't tell me a stranger hitting you is the same as your husband hitting you. There are just not as many factors involved. A stranger doesn't pay the mortgage; he isn't the father of your children and he's sure not someone, rightly or wrongly, that you love. (Bala, Jaffe & Crooks 2007: 22).

Terms such as 'family violence' or 'domestic violence' are inevitably problematic. Some argue that once a definition of violence is agreed upon, the definition should hold regardless of the nature of the relationship between the individuals concerned. But one challenge for those who work in this field in whatever capacity is how it can be that love, dependency and violence can sometimes co-exist. Ask this of any police officer who has been called to a 'domestic' only to be angrily told by both parties not to interfere.

In my own area of particular interest, that of family law, it has been found by a number of researchers that violence is 'core business' at the litigation end of the spectrum and not at all uncommon among those who opt to mediate their dispute. But a puzzling finding from recent Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) research (Moloney et al 2007) is that while the majority of those who file applications allege quite serious violence, few provide significant details. This in turn was associated with judicial orders concerning post-separation parenting arrangements in cases of alleged violence being indistinguishable from those cases in which no allegations had been made.

Does the AIFS research suggest a level of ambivalence on the part of applicants and respondents who allege violence in the family court system? More generally, is there something about family violence that causes many individuals who are prepared to name what has been happening to nonetheless send out a sort of double message - something like: 'I want this to stop but I don't want my partner to be punished?' And if this is the case, even some of the time, do workers, researchers and judges struggle with a form of intermittent reinforcement that suggests that family violence may be somehow less serious than other forms of violence, even though, as those working in women's shelters know, injuries from 'domestics' can be horrific.

We need to keep researching family violence and its origins. We need to keep hearing from those affected by family violence, to help them (and ourselves) to make sense of it and to provide programs that can heal at least some of the wounds. We also need to continue to challenge institutions and bureaucracies when they fail adult and child victims of violence and abuse.

At the same time, we need to carefully and continually examine our own attitudes and assumptions in this difficult field. Violence is unacceptable, whether it is perpetrated in pursuit of wealth, on the sporting field, in the schoolyard or inside the family. But not all violence is the same, and as Gourevitch and Morris (2008) compellingly argued with respect to the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, not all violence is as it seems. This special edition of JFS (Innovative Approaches to Family Violence; ISBN 978-1-921348-05-1) gives the reader much food for thought. I am extremely grateful to the two guest editors, Professor Margot Schofield and Associate Professor Rae Walker, for assembling such an impressive range of articles. My hope is that Innovative Approaches to Family Violence will become a valuable resource for many years to come.

[1] Some of these papers in Family Court Review 46(3) (2008) are referred to in Moloney (2008), published in this special issue. Unfortunately, this particular edition of the Family Court Review was published too late for JFS to include the articles in the Abstracts section.

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