A Post for Dreamers and Idealists

In 1968, just a day after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy gave a speech in Cleveland, Ohio. The speech was entitled, The Mindless Menace of Violence and the full text of the speech can be found at the link below. It is worth a read.

https://www.commondreams.org/further/2011/01/12-4

We want to suggest a principle as an ideal to work towards. We suggest that the best thing would be for every person to be free from violent attack. Any principle will need some exceptions. For example, it is reasonable to engage in violence as an act of self-defense to protect oneself from injury or worse. Of course we’d agree, but also would suggest that efforts at self-defense should be sensibly related to the severity of the attack that one faces. If a small person comes at a much stronger person with fists-a-flying, that doesn’t give the stronger person justification to use their full force against a weaker attacker. We can quibble about the details, but the main goal should be for people who don’t want to participate in violence to never be on the receiving end of it. As a general rule, it just seems right.

We suspect that most people will basically agree with this approach to human interactions. We’ve lived in Manitoba for 10 years now and are fully convinced that, for the most part, the residents of this Province are sweethearts who would barely want to hurt a fly (mosquitoes are a whole other story). Still, it is a fact that violence against innocent people happens in Manitoba as it does everywhere. Whenever groups of humans have lived amongst one another, violence has been a feature of their (our) interactions. It has always been that way and it is likely that it always will be.

That’s not a good reason to throw our hands up and quit. There is some reason to be optimistic. Dr. Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard University, has presented a convincing argument that humans are getting a lot better at living peacefully with one another. Those who want some reassurance of this trend should read his recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011). In many parts of the world, such as Canada, we are alive during one of the safest times for humans that the planet has ever seen. Even more impressive is that we are achieving a generally peaceful coexistence with one another, even though there are more humans than ever living on the planet.

All of that good news does not mean we have cause to relax. It just means that things are moving, gradually, in the right direction. It is still a fact that, the world over, men, women, and children are not safe from violence. Our focus has been on Intimate Partner Violence, which is a worldwide problem. There is evidence that Manitoba, in particular, has a great deal of work to do on this front. To illustrate, here is a recent article in The Manitoban, with references to new statistics on domestic violence in Canada.

http://www.themanitoban.com/2013/03/violence-against-women-high-in-manitoba/14665/

Here is another article from the Manitoba Association of Women’s Shelters that seeks to dispel a number of myths that taint discussions of domestic violence in Manitoba and elsewhere:

http://www.maws.mb.ca/domestic_violence.htm

Acknowledging a problem and coming to some understanding about the nature and causes of the problem is the first step in resolving it. On this dimension, there has been a decent amount of progress. We have attempted to summarize the outcome of those efforts with our other posts about IPV. There are other important steps. There ought to be help and protection for those who have experienced domestic violence. There should be aggressive efforts to modify the behaviour of those who physically assault their intimate partner(s).

Resources for Helping IPV Victims and Dealing with Perpetrators

Women’s shelters represent one of the major agencies of protection and recovery for victims of intimate partner violence and their children. Unfortunately, there is often more demand for services provided by women’s shelters than they have the resources to handle and such shelters often face challenges with overcrowding. Women’s shelters are an essential service and they deserve more resources to enable them to meet the needs of victims of IPV. However, they should not be considered a solution to the problem of IPV. Approximately 50% of women who seek protection from women’s shelters later return to their abusive partner, for reasons that we listed in the blog post previous to this one. Also, only a small minority of women who experience the “intimate terrorism” variant of IPV that we described before ever seek help from a women’s shelter. Finally, although there is often a lack of availability of protective shelter for women victims of domestic violence, resources are often non-existent for male victims of intimate terrorism (Frieze, 2005).

In addition to women’s shelters, counseling programs do exist and focus on building the self-esteem of abuse victims and encouraging them to overcome the belief that they are dependent on their abuser and are unable to function without them.  This form of counseling falls under the category of Cognitive Therapy, which is described in this final unit of our course. The goal is to change the client’s thought processes to enable them to make decisions that will improve their circumstances in the long run. In particular, the goal is to encourage them that they are capable of having a much better life if they leave their abusive partner. It is a sensible approach, since abusers tend to discourage their partner from leaving them by attacking their partner’s self-esteem and fostering feelings of dependency in them.  

There are also counseling services available to men who abuse their intimate partners, which focus on improving their social skills and providing them with nonviolent ways to respond in stressful situations. This approach has both a Cognitive and Behavioural Therapy emphasis that is common to anger management counseling programs. The idea is that changing how such men think might discourage them from physically abusing their intimate partner. For instance, these programs might try to foster empathy, which has to do with appreciating the feelings and experiences of other people in a way that makes it more difficult to act abusively toward them. At the same time, such programs might try to develop life skills that enable such men to control their anger and stress without hurting anyone or to choose ways of resolving conflicts nonviolently. Such programs may also seek to address the alcohol or drug use of abusive men, since those activities may be factors that encourage the choice to engage in abusive behaviours.

Therefore, counseling programs for victims and abusers do exist, but very few people who experience IPV or engage in it ever actually seek help from professional counselors. Moreover, although there is evidence that some IPV perpetrators do benefit from counseling, it is not uncommon for such interventions to fail at eliminating violent behaviour in a sizeable proportion of the people who seek help from them. The same could be said of the victims who seek help from counselors. A significant proportion of victims who seek counseling ultimately remain in the abusive relationship (Frieze, 2005).

Canada also has a criminal justice strategy for dealing with domestic violence in that perpetrators of violence against their intimate partner are viewed as criminals and people get arrested, tried, and convicted for crimes that arise from IPV. Such crimes include, assault, assault causing bodily harm, sexual assault, sexual assault causing bodily harm, sexual assault with a weapon, criminal harassment (i.e., stalking), uttering threats, mischief, intimidation, forcible confinement, attempted murder, and murder. Although the Canadian Criminal Code does not identify domestic violence as illegal, directly, many instances of the crimes listed above are also instances of IPV. Manitoba also has additional laws aimed at specifically promoting the safety of victims of domestic violence. Here is a description of the Manitoba’s Domestic Violence and Stalking Act:

http://www.gov.mb.ca/justice/domestic/chapter10.html#2

From our laws and the activities of our police services, we can infer that the Manitoba and Canadian governments consider domestic violence to be a serious crime. Perpetrators get arrested, convicted, and face legal consequences for such actions on a daily basis. Sometimes, those legal consequences even involve prison sentences. As with counseling, however, although rules are in place to punish domestic violence offenders, the majority of incidents of IPV go unreported to police. That is, the number of IPV incidents reported to police is much lower than the number of IPV incidents reported in survey research that keeps the identity of respondents confidential. In Manitoba, a survey conducted in 2009 revealed that 8.5% of female and 6.5% of male respondents reported experiencing violence at the hands of their intimate partner at least once over the previous five years. However, only 22% of those victims of IPV had any contact with police about the incident. (Yes, there doesn’t seem to be much of a gender gap there, but 35% of the female victims of IPV had experienced at least one severe assault by their intimate partner, whereas only 10% of male victims of IPV had experienced at least one severe assault by their intimate partner. As indicated in an earlier post, incidents of violence tend to reveal that men and women experience IPV at similar rates, but a closer look also reveals that women more commonly experience severe incidents of IPV. In the case of this survey, severe incidents involve sexual assault, being beaten or choked, or being threatened with a gun or a knife.)

See this link for the full summary of results from Statistics Canada:

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-224-x/85-224-x2010000-eng.pdf

To summarize, there are women’s shelters available, but most victims of IPV don’t seek their protection or assistance. There are counseling programs available, but most victims of IPV don’t try to access those services. Finally, by law in Manitoba, police have an obligation to investigate, arrest, and seek to convict perpetrators of IPV and to work to protect IPV victims when they seek to end their relationship with an abusive partner. Yet, only a minority of victims ever report an incidence of domestic violence to police. Consequently, it is rational to suppose that there is some powerful force (or forces) discouraging victims of IPV from seeking the help that is available to them. If that presumption is correct, there are serious limits as to what social workers, mental health practitioners, and law enforcement officials can do, on their own, to fight the problem of IPV.

There are probably many ways that the resources available to victims of IPV, and particularly the intimate terrorism variant of it, could be strengthened. There could be more and bigger women’s shelters. There could be more mental health services made available to victims of IPV and the perpetrators of IPV and, as a discipline, psychology could continue to develop better methods for counseling victims and eliminating violent behaviours in those who engage in violence against their intimate partner. Perhaps sentences could be more severe and maybe more law enforcement officials could be assigned to arresting perpetrators of domestic violence. Enhancing all of those supports would very likely help to promote more safety and less violence within intimate partnerships. Nevertheless, all of those resources are mainly attempts to respond to a disaster that has already occurred. A proper solution to this sort of problem would be to prevent violence from occurring within intimate partnerships in the first place. Although making laws and arrests and sending offenders to probation or prison is meant to discourage others from engaging in domestic violence, no behaviour has ever been eliminated simply by making it illegal to do it.

Recognizing that the efforts that have been made to combat IPV have not succeeded in solving the problem, it is becoming apparent to many people that reducing the occurrence of violence within intimate partnerships requires much more than helping victims to leave and/or working to change the violent habits of individual perpetrators. For them (and we also tend to agree), a true solution to the problem of IPV depends on our making changes to the broader social context and culture in which such violence occurs. From this perspective, there is something about the ways that we all (or at least many of us) think that 1) discourages victims of IPV from seeking any help and 2) increases the chances that IPV will occur in the first place.

Obstacles to Help-Seeking: Social Psychological Factors

There are a number of common human reactions to people who have experienced traumatic life events or who are in distress that discourages people who find themselves in abusive relationships from seeking help. We’ve listed a few of these below. Altering these tendencies is all of our responsibility. As a culture, if we make a commitment to change these tendencies, the outcome will be to make it easier for people who need help to find the courage to go out and find it. It will also help to ensure that people who seek help will succeed in finding it when they go looking for it.

1. Stigma. People who are victimized in one way or another often feel ashamed for finding themselves in that situation. Our view is that all of the shame and disgrace generated by incidents of IPV should go to the abuser, but this is not necessarily a universally-held view. In part, people may feel ashamed for being in an abusive relationship because of a tendency for many people within our culture to view people who have experienced trauma as beyond repair. You might have experienced someone refer to another person as “damaged goods”. The assumption underlying that phrase is that a person is forever destroyed when they have gone through a traumatic experience, if they admit how profoundly a traumatic experience has affected them, or if they show any vulnerability or weakness as a result of a traumatic experience. This is not an uncommon attitude for people to have if they haven’t gone through particularly difficult times themselves. For victims of IPV that seek help, such attitudes can be responsible for unhelpful reactions. It can also discourage victims of IPV from seeking help in the first place, to avoid others considering them weak or permanently damaged in a way that would cause them to lose friends or the affection of family members.

2. Victim Blaming. Humans typically have strong empathy mechanisms. We tend to feel bad when we encounter other people in pain or psychological distress. Frequently, these empathetic reactions promote helping behaviours. Sadly, when encountering someone who is in pain or distress, it is also common for people to invoke strategies to avoid uncomfortable feelings of empathy, rather than thinking of ways they might show support and compassion to the victim of a traumatic event. In those cases, people will search for reasons that allow them to feel less empathy for victims of trauma. In the case of IPV, a person might reduce feelings of empathy by conjuring up an argument as to why an IPV victim might have “brought it all upon themselves”. Focusing on the clothes someone was wearing when they were raped is a classic example of the sort of victim-blaming that can occur. This sort of reasoning tends to be ignorant nonsense that functions only to either allow people to feel less negative emotions about a horrible event or to allow people to feel as though they are safer and that the horrible event that occurred is not something that could ever possibly happen to them.

In part, victim blaming emerges in our culture because of a commonly- held “just-world hypothesis”. According to this hypothesis, people tend to get what they deserve in this world. If a bad thing happens to a person, they must have done something to deserve that horrible experience. Conversely, if good things happen to a person, they must have done nothing but good things to deserve all of that good fortune. This hypothesis is mainly ridiculous. The world over, horrible things happen to innocent people all of the time and terrific things happen to horrible people all of the time. Nevertheless, it is a common view that people get what they deserve and it affects people’s reactions to learning about horrible experiences that happen to others.  It causes some number of people to view victims of violent crime as partly or largely to blame for what happened to them. Interestingly, that tends to be the same logic that criminals use to excuse themselves for the crimes they commit against other people (i.e., “it was their own fault for leaving their door unlocked”). People who experience IPV may be reluctant to seek help because of the realistic view that many people will be unsympathetic and will assign them blame for finding themselves in an abusive relationship. Victims of IPV may, themselves, hold a just-world hypothesis that leads them to consider their situation as mainly their fault. As a result, the embarrassment they feel might make it very difficult for them to seek help that would deliver them out of the dangerous situation that they find themselves in.

3. Bystander Apathy. One would think that people in need of help would generally receive it from people who are aware of their troubles. Unfortunately, it is fairly common for bystanders to fail to act when they encounter a person in obvious danger and in need of help. As an extreme example, we discussed the case of Kitty Genovese, who was stabbed to death in New York City in the 1960s while a dozen people or so watched from their apartment windows. Nobody even called the police. The Kitty Genovese incident is not the only one like it before her murder or since. It appears to be a common human tendency not to spontaneously get involved in helping other people who are in obvious danger. This tendency can be further enhanced by cultural attitudes, such as the idea that conflicts occurring between members of a household are private and outsiders should stay out of it. IPV victims might not receive help from people who are aware of the violence they are experiencing for the same reason that nobody helped Kitty Genovese or because people tend to consider involvement between romantic partners to be off-limits to outsiders.

4. Us vs. Them Thinking. We all consider ourselves as members of one group or another, whether based on gender, age, profession, race, religion, family, or whatever. Once we consider ourselves members of a group, it also makes for tons of people who are not in the same “club” as we are. The consequence is that we will tend to feel more empathy for people who we consider to be a member of one or more of our groups than for people who we don’t. It would be nice if victims of crime could expect the same amount of compassion and assistance, regardless as to which of these groups they might belong to, but they often do not. That means that the level of help and empathy crime victims can expect will often relate to the extent that the person they seek help from is similar to them. Even worse, there are instances in which members of the abuser’s group will take sides against the victim of a crime who is a member of some other group. It is essentially the same process involved when hockey fans interpret the actions of members of their team versus the actions of members of an opposing team. Consider a huge Jets fan witnessing one of their players hit and injure a member of the Calgary Flames. It wouldn’t be surprising for that fan to feel less empathy for the Flames player than they would for a Jets player that gets equally clobbered by a member of the Flames.

The implication is that victims of IPV may not seek help or may not expect to receive much help if there is no one like them who is able to provide them with assistance and support. This situation is especially problematic for immigrant and minority victims of IPV. Members of a different racial group may often provide what resources are available to those victims of IPV. Also, the culture may express different levels of concern for the well-being of members of groups that have greater numbers or more power within the society. For instance, if it appears that Canadian culture is more concerned with the well-being of white citizens than non-white citizens, concerns over discriminatory attitudes held by white Canadians might discourage minority IPV victims from seeking the help that they need. Similarly, since it isn’t unheard of for people to rally around members of their own social group, women may be discouraged from seeking help out of fear of being bullied by men who rally in support of “one of their own”.

Here is a link to an article that illustrates this rather disgusting tendency for people to ignore the pain of crime victims in defense of criminal members from their own social group:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hayley-rose-horzepa/victim-blaming_b_847310.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/soraya-chemaly/steubenville-50-cases-of-_b_2876606.html

There are also convincing cases to be made that aspects of our culture serve to increase IPV and the related social problem of violence against women and minorities. Here is an example of this perspective:

http://now.org/issues/media/031413sexistracistculture.html

The four influences we’ve identified, and there may well be others, result in a crueler and less compassionate world for people who are already victims of violent crime. It is within each one of our capacities to change these tendencies, but we need to do it deliberately.

Doing so requires that we all:

1) commit ourselves to the idea that nobody deserves to be at the receiving end of a violent physical or sexual assault,  under any circumstances,

2) appreciate that people are extraordinarily resilient and that they can overcome their painful experiences, as long as they have compassionate people around to support and value them (there is absolutely no reason, whatsoever, to consider victims of violent crime as lost causes, unless we wish to guarantee that whatever horrible thing happened to them should translate into a life sentence),

3) develop the strength to process other people’s traumatic experiences without blaming them or ignoring their trauma as a way to make ourselves feel happier and safer,

4) be chronically ready to help someone in distress, rather than grasping on to the flimsiest excuse not to rush to someone’s aid when we encounter someone who needs our help, and

5) think of ourselves primarily as members of just one group, the human residents of planet Earth, who each deserve the same amount of compassion, regardless of our gender, race, age, religion, whether it’s someone we know or don’t know, or any other basis that people use to categorize people as one of us vs. one of them.

In other words, we can all be part of the solution to eliminating violent crime in Manitoba and beyond. No, the statement should be stronger than that. We probably can’t expect the worst aspects of our society to improve at all unless we all commit to the view that criminal assaults are simply unacceptable and inexcusable and that every available resource should be devoted to helping victims of violent crime recover from the experience. Unsympathetic voices should expect only ridicule and distain for victim blaming. Unsympathetic reactions to victims of crime based on the social group they belong to should bring only disgrace to the people who express them and should motivate all of us to loudly raise our voices in defense of the attacked and against the attacker. Failure to help others in need, as illustrated by the recent sexual abuse scandal at Penn State University (see this link for more details - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/12/penn-state-scandal-sandusky_n_1090203.html), should bring more shame than whatever pride one might expect from protecting the reputation of a powerful person, like a legendary football coach, or a respected institution, such as a beloved football team.

These are ideals that we think it is worth striving for and a careful read of this post and the others will reveal to you the nature of our dream. As mentioned at the beginning, it seems as though humanity is trending, albeit slowly, in the right direction. We think that there is reason to be optimistic that our dream will come true, although it is possible that none of us will live long enough to see that happen. That doesn’t matter, because we should all start thinking more about what future generations will think of us, anyway. There are developments that give us reason to hope that violence will continue to decline over time, such as the initiatives described in the links below:

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/Program-to-stop-violence-against-women-gets-nearly-200K-197845821.html

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/patrick-stewart-million-men-violence-women-011042478.html

On a final note, a couple of people have commented, in a polite way, that our course has some content that they perceive as overly political. Maybe that’s not a common reaction to our content, but it is worth addressing. Let’s start by stating that, if people had a negative reaction to some of the content of our course for political reasons, our response is that they should not expect us to change this aspect of the content of our course any time soon. In a way, we very much hope to provoke strong reactions in our students, even if those reactions are negative. It gets people thinking and it inspires them to debate issues with their friends and family. That makes offending a few people with what we say or write totally worth it. Whether you love what we say or write or you hate it, those strong feelings a terrific fuel for the brain. Whether you come to agree with us or not, if you had strong reactions to issues discussed in this course, those feelings are emotional expressions of learning. Angry learning is just as effective (and maybe even more so) than blissful learning.

Regardless, human psychology can be disturbing topic, which often makes a discussion seem political, but it isn’t exactly fair to blame the messengers. In the times that we now live, assertions of truth have become political statements. The mere mention of Charles Darwin bitterly divides people. The basic assumptions of neuroscientists offend anyone who believes that there is something more to us than our biology. Discussions of dinosaurs can get people’s backs up. The choice to drive a massive pick-up truck has negative political implications for some and earns a thumbs-up from others. There is virtually nothing interesting left that a person can do or say that doesn’t have political implications. Science itself has become political. Do you believe in global warming and that humans are causing it? No? Well, 97% of climate scientists do. Therefore, believing in science has become a point of political contention. It is also worth adding that anyone who doesn’t want to have any of their beliefs challenged or contradicted should probably maintain a considerable distance between themselves and a secular university, like the University of Manitoba.  

In the case of the politics of IPV, yes males are victimized, too, and we wish there were more compassion and support for those victims. At the same time, stating something like “women are frequently victims of crime at the hands of their male partners” is merely true (and is actually an extreme understatement if one wishes to consider the treatment of women and girls from a global perspective). Even so, the statement will seem political if a person thinks exposure to harsh realities is political. It will seem political if a person thinks that focusing on a problem that affects members of one group more than members of some other group is a politically motivated decision. (By the current, extremely broad, definition as to what counts as “political”, maybe it is, but that’s the sort of privilege you get when you earn a PhD and get placed in charge of a university course having to do with human behaviour.)

Our choice to focus on IPV may also seem political for anyone who has some desire that messages about violence against women doesn’t get out, if you have some discriminatory view that women shouldn’t have the same opportunities as men, or if you think that the proper place of women in a society is to be in a position of inferiority or submission. We suspect that the huge majority of people who take our course don’t hold these sorts of views. For us, these are views that we could never endorse or agree with and it is inconceivable for us to modify the content of our course just to please a few people who believe that the historical worldwide discrimination against women is something that ought to continue. (This is just an example and not related to any particular criticism that we’ve received, so there isn’t any need to take these comments personally, readers.)

Psychology is the science of behaviour and mental processes, with a primary focus on our species. The topics that fall under this broad heading make it inevitable that statements we make in our course will slam uncomfortably up against people’s pre-existing ideas about what’s true about people. That means, to varying degrees, many of the issues that we would need to discuss in this course will seem political to someone. In the end, you all get to take the knowledge and ideas that we’ve tried to communicate with you or you can leave them. After taking this course, some of you might actually want to join us in our efforts as psychological scientists and you are very welcome to try. (Students at the U of M can obtain major degrees in Psychology either through the Faculty of Arts or the Faculty of Science.) 

Soon, you’ll all be putting PSYC 1200 behind you forever. Hopefully, we’ve met our main goal, which was just to give you some insights about yourself and other people and to modify the connections in your brains a bit. We want to wish you all the best in your continued studies.

Good luck on Exam 6 and, then, sayonara!

The Drs. Leboe-McGowan

(We would like to dedicate our series of blog posts about IPV to Lara Logan, Malala Yousafzai, Homer Plessy, and Farida Nekzad.)