Investigating the Relationship between Approval, and Experiences of Physical Violence and Controlling Behaviours in Heterosexual Intimate Relationships

<p>Popular theory understands intimate partner violence (IPV) as gendered, and stresses the integral role of a patriarchal society and approval of male to female aggression in the aetiology of men’s IPV to women. This thesis set out to explore this hypothesis using a gender inclusive methodology, and examines the relationship between participants’ approval of men’s and women’s use of controlling behaviours and physical violence in heterosexual intimate relationships. Undergraduate university students (N = 515) completed an online questionnaire about their use and experience of aggression and controlling behaviours, and their beliefs about dating violence. Bivariate analyses found that conflict tactics and controlling behaviours were perpetrated and experienced at equal rates by the sexes. ANOVA found that male and female participants approved of female to male violence significantly more than male to female violence when the aggressor was provoked via infidelity or physical violence, indicating a collective chivalrous belief pattern. Violent students also approved of male and female violence significantly more than non-violent students. Applying Johnson's (1999) typological approach, latent profile analysis found that 77.7% of violent relationships could be classed as Situational Couple Violence (SCV), 10.4% as Coercive Controlling Violence (CCV), 2.1% as Violent Resistant (VR), and 9.8% as Mutual Violent Control (MVC). Bivariate analysis revealed a greater frequency of women than men in the SCV group (n = 92, 61%) with a small effect; no other significant differences were found between the groups. ANOVA also found that the typology groups approved of female to male violence significantly more than male to female violence with CCV men endorsing the highest approval of male and female violence. Further research is required to determine why this group hold high approval in general compared to other groups. The need for interventions to address the approval of a person’s own violence and approval of their partner’s violence is discussed in addition to implications for theory, practice, and policy.</p>

Investigating the Relationship between Approval, and Experiences of Physical Violence and Controlling Behaviours in Heterosexual Intimate Relationships

<p>Popular theory understands intimate partner violence (IPV) as gendered, and stresses the integral role of a patriarchal society and approval of male to female aggression in the aetiology of men’s IPV to women. This thesis set out to explore this hypothesis using a gender inclusive methodology, and examines the relationship between participants’ approval of men’s and women’s use of controlling behaviours and physical violence in heterosexual intimate relationships. Undergraduate university students (N = 515) completed an online questionnaire about their use and experience of aggression and controlling behaviours, and their beliefs about dating violence. Bivariate analyses found that conflict tactics and controlling behaviours were perpetrated and experienced at equal rates by the sexes. ANOVA found that male and female participants approved of female to male violence significantly more than male to female violence when the aggressor was provoked via infidelity or physical violence, indicating a collective chivalrous belief pattern. Violent students also approved of male and female violence significantly more than non-violent students. Applying Johnson's (1999) typological approach, latent profile analysis found that 77.7% of violent relationships could be classed as Situational Couple Violence (SCV), 10.4% as Coercive Controlling Violence (CCV), 2.1% as Violent Resistant (VR), and 9.8% as Mutual Violent Control (MVC). Bivariate analysis revealed a greater frequency of women than men in the SCV group (n = 92, 61%) with a small effect; no other significant differences were found between the groups. ANOVA also found that the typology groups approved of female to male violence significantly more than male to female violence with CCV men endorsing the highest approval of male and female violence. Further research is required to determine why this group hold high approval in general compared to other groups. The need for interventions to address the approval of a person’s own violence and approval of their partner’s violence is discussed in addition to implications for theory, practice, and policy.</p>

Portrayal of Female Violence in the Bible: the Stories of Jael and Judith

This article offers an analysis of the biblical stories about two heroines: Jael and Judith who save their people by killing the foreign generals. Both stories narrate critical historical situations, namely Jael’s story in Judges 4–5 dates to the XII–X cc. B.C.E. and reflects the ongoing conflict between the twelve tribes of Israel with their neighbors in the land of Canaan, Judith’s story dates to the II c. B.C.E. and reflects the conflict between the Jews and the Seleucid rulers who oppressed the Jewish populace, forced them to practice Hellenistic rituals and abandon the Jewish law and religious practices. Jael invites Sisera, a commander of the Canaanite army of king Jabin, to her tent, gives him milk to drink, and when the man falls asleep, she kills him with a hammer and а tent peg. Judith, a widow from the town of Bethulia, uses her beauty and charm to kill Holofernes, an Assyrian general. First, she gains his trust. Then, when Holofernes drunken falls asleep, she decapitates him in his tent. These texts explicitly show the collapse of the male power and demonstrate the ability of women to step in to save the people. Both heroines are praised by the narrators for their heroism. It is also demonstrated that Jael’s and Judith’s stories have an aim to teach how one may think out of the box. Due to the lack of male capability to solve the problem or, in other words, to protect the people as it is expected according to the patriarchal norms, social roles are shifted, and perception of masculinity and femininity is reеvaluated. The heroic stories of Jael and Judith represent the idea that women can be subjects of history, violence as а means to protect people is not limited to the male domain, and women can save people in critical situations. The violence performed by the women is perceived as an extraordinary act yet necessary and not deviant in the situation.

Female violence victims` anxiety and styles of communication

The article presents an analysis of the types of anxiety specific to women victims of violence. To highlight the peculiarities of anxiety, a statistical comparison is made with the results obtained by another group of women, who were not subjected to violence. Likewise, the communication skills characteristic of victimized women and their specific communication styles are presented.

The Violence of the Cut: Gendering Self-Harm

Taking as a starting point the frequent characterisation of self-harm as “an adolescent thing for girls,” this paper offers a sociologically informed, qualitative exploration of self-harm as a gendered practice. We move beyond statistical constructions of this “reality,” and critically examine how this characterisation comes to be, and some of its effects. Our data are drawn from a pilot study that developed a collaborative arts-based inquiry into meanings of self-harm. The authors worked with two groups: one of practitioners and another of people who had self-harmed, meeting over six sessions to discuss and make art in response to a range of themes relating to the interpretation and explanation of self-harm. Through data generation and analysis, we collaboratively seek to make sense of the gendering of self-harm, focusing on a series of dualistic Cartesian “cuts” between male and female, violence and vulnerability, and inside and outside. In conclusion, we call for more multi- and interdisciplinary explorations of self-harm, and greater use of diverse, arts-based, and qualitative methodologies, in order to further expand and nuance understandings and ethical engagements with self-harm, and those who are affected by it.

‘A Hussy Who Rode on Horseback in Sexy Underwear in Front of the Prisoners’: the Trials of Buchenwald’s Ilse Koch

Ilse Koch’s trials for her role in atrocities at the Nazi Buchenwald concentration camp served as visual spectacles and primed her portrayal in media and public spaces. Koch’s conduct was credibly rumored to be one of frequent affairs, simultaneous lovers, and the sexual humiliation of prisoners. The gendered construction of her sexual identity played a distortive role in her intersections with law and with post-conflict Germany. Koch’s trials revealed two different dynamics. Koch’s actions were refracted through a patriarchal lens which spectacularized female violence and served as an optical space to (re)establish appropriate feminine mores. Feminist critiques of Koch’s trials furthermore also spun problematic narratives of womanly innocence and victimized powerlessness, or at times ignored her as a perpetrator. In the end Koch’s actual story—‘her’ story—becomes lost amid prurience, politics, and burlesque.

Male-to-Female Sexual Violence in Rural Communities: A Sociological Review

The extant sociological literature on male-to-female violence in rural communities reveals that the bulk of the empirical work on this problem focuses mainly on non-lethal physical assaults, such as beatings. Much more research on sexual violence is sorely needed. The main objective of this review is twofold: (1) to describe the current state of international sociological knowledge about male sexual violence against adult women and (2) to suggest new directions in research and theory.

“Catastrophically Romantic”: Radical Inversions of Gilbert and Gubar’s Monstrous Angel in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl

In their landmark text The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteen Century Literary Imagination (1970), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar pose a series of hypotheses concerning women-authored fiction in the nineteenth century, identifying two archetypical female figures in patriarchal literary contexts – the Angel in the House, and the Monstrous (Mad)Woman. Gilbert and Gubar echo a Woolf-ian call to action that women writers must destroy both the angel and the monster in their fiction, and many contemporary women authors have answered that call – examining and complicating Gilbert and Gubar’s original dichotomy to reflect contemporary concerns with female violence and feminism. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012), and in particular the character of Amy Elliott Dunne, explores modern iterations of the Angel v. Monster dynamic in the guise of the “Cool Girl,” thus revising these stereotypes to fit them in a postmodern socio-historical context. The controversy that surrounds the text, as well as its incredible popularity, indicates that the narrative has struck a chord with readers and critics alike. Both Amy and Nick Dunne represent the Angel and the Monster in their marriage, embodying Flynn’s critical feminist commentary on white, upper-middle class, heterosexual psychopathy.

Symbolic Death and Rebirth into Womanhood: An Analysis of Stepdaughter Narratives from Heian and Medieval Japan

Through a comparative reading of several premodern Japanese tales with a focus on Ochikubo monogatari (ca. tenth century) and Hachi-kazuki (ca. fifteenth century), this essay attempts to interpret the common literary trope of mamako ijime—stepmothers’ mistreatment of their stepdaughters—in a new light. Within the pre-existing scholarship, the fictional accounts of mamako ijime seem to have been viewed as a reflection of quasi-universal, self-evident phenomena at best. Consequently, little inquiry has been made regarding the ubiquity or functions of this particular form of female-on-female violence in literary texts. The present study, in turn, attributes the blind acceptance of the universality of mamako ijime to negative stereotypes against middle-aged women, shared by the readers of the past and present, and offers a more critical interpretation thereof. Based on the recurrent patterns found in premodern Japanese tales, mamako ijime can be read as the dead birthmothers’ “tough love” for their daughters. By enduring the abusive (albeit not deadly) deeds of the stepmothers—or the evil surrogates of the late mothers—the heroines mature into resilient, caring, and wise women and ultimately achieve strong marriage, wealth, and prestige, all of which would have been what the birthmothers wished upon their daughters.

Bringing Feminist Sociological Analyses of Patriarchy Back to the Forefront of the Study of Woman Abuse

Regardless of their contributions to some of the most important scientific advances in the field, feminist sociological analyses of various types of male-to-female violence that prioritize the concept of patriarchy have leveled off or declined in the last 12 years, especially in North America. This article describes how mainstream work came to dominate the field and suggests a few strategies for challenging the hegemony of orthodox perspectives on sexual assault, beatings, technology-facilitated abuse, and other forms of woman abuse.