The Role of Learning in Intimate Partner Violence

Unit 4 of our PSYC 1200 course covers Principle of Learning and Variations in Consciousness. In this post, we will try to describe how the causes and consequences of IPV arise from known principles of learning, although learning may combine with genetic influences to cause individuals to act violently toward intimate partners. 

(Behavioural Genetics is a scientific field founded on the idea that genetic factors can make a person more or less prone to engage in certain behaviours, such as violent assaults, but that a person's experiences also help to determine whether these genetic tendencies actually lead them to engage in those behaviours and under what circumstances.)

Observational Learning

As far as learning principles go, a significant concern  is that a person's tendency to cause harm to their intimate partner will get passed down from one generation to the next through a process called observational learning (also known as social learning, Bandura, 1989). For example, if children witness incidents of violence engaged in by one of their parents toward the other, what they learn is that violence is a component of intimate adult relationships. The outcome is that there will be a greater likelihood for those children to grow up and either engage in violence toward their romantic partners or expect as a routine part of life that they will be a target of violent assaults by their intimate partner. (This process is called "intergenerational transmission of violence". Some people refer to this transmission as the "cycle of violence", because children who witness violence and experience it within their families bring the violence back around again when they are older.) 

Psychological studies confirm this link between exposure to violence in childhood and a host of negative consequences for those individuals (and the rest of society) as they develop into adulthood.  The tendency for parents to use physical punishment to control the behaviour of children is known to cause a rather lengthy list of short- and long-term problems for children. Children who routinely experience physical punishment by their parents are more physically aggressive, they tend to have lower levels of concern or empathy for others, they are less likely to follow rules and behave pro-socially at home and in school, and they have less affection and respect for their parents (Gershoff, 2002; Graham-Behmann, 2009). In adulthood, people who experienced physical punishment during childhood tend to be more physically aggressive, they are more likely to engage in criminal behaviour, they are more likely to develop mental health problems, and they are more likely to perpetrate violence against their own children and intimate partners. Boys who witness their father engage in domestic violence are more likely to engage in domestic violence as adults. Thus, as a consequence of peoples' tendency to learn through watching others, violence has a tendency of generating yet more violence (Cappel & Heiner, 1990; Corvo & Carpenter, 2000; Dutton, 1995; Hyde-Nolan & Juliao, 2012; Kaufman & Zigler, 1987; Jackson, Thompson, & Christiansen, 1999; Marshall & Rose, 1990).

The Problems with Physical Punishment as a Technique of Behavioural Control

In our lectures on operant conditioning (see also Chapter 6 of the textbook, Weiten & McCann, 2013), we discussed that negative and positive punishments provide fairly effective ways to stop people from engaging in certain behaviours. The whole point of speeding tickets and prison sentences is to discourage people from doing illegal things in the future and there wouldn't be much hope of preventing people from committing those crimes without having those kinds of punishments as a threat. A problem occurs when punishments are more severe than necessary, which physical punishments tend to be, since the surprising truth is that the severity of a punishment often does not increase how successful it is at discouraging people from engaging in whatever behaviour we want them to stop doing. Also, even though physical punishment can discourage people from engaging in undesirable behaviours, the downsides should discourage anyone from relying on it as a method for controlling the behaviour of others. For one thing, anyone who experiences a physical attack will most certainly be cautious about doing whatever it was that set their attacker off, at least as long as that person is nearby. However, doing the right thing out of fear of getting hurt is not quite the same as following the rules because of their inherent value. We want people to refrain from cheating and stealing because they agree that it is unfair and wrong to cheat and steal. That's called doing the right thing for intrinsic motives; because doing the right thing feels good and doing the wrong thing gives people an uncomfortable guilty feeling. If a person's only motive not to cheat or steal is their selfish interest in avoiding physical punishment, there will be no restraint on their cheating and stealing whenever the threat of physical punishment is low. In addition, it's best if children do the right thing because they love and respect their parents and want to be like them. It is very challenging to retain affection for someone who beats you, even if they tell you that they're giving you the beating for your own good. 

Physical punishments have these potential downsides  even when parents apply them rationally and consistently and only when their children do something bad. The situation becomes a great deal worse when parents physically punish their child for bad behaviour sometimes, but then fail to react at all when the child does the same thing at other times. For example, suppose that a parent spanks their child for drawing on the wall on one day, but then ignores the same behaviour on the next day. Moreover, suppose that a parent physically punishes their child for no particular reason at all, sometimes, because they are under stress at work or for whatever reason that has nothing to do with the child's behaviour. These kinds of inconsistencies are a disaster for a child's development because it makes the child's behaviour and the consequences of that behaviour unpredictable. It can lead to two unpleasant outcomes. First, the child may stop doing anything at all, since they have no way to know what actions will provoke a physical punishment and what actions will not. Second, the child will have no motive to act in appropriate ways, since behaving badly may or may not result in a physical punishment and not behaving badly may result in the same painful consequence.

All of these comments are to establish that physical attacks are both wrong, to the extent that they cause pain and physical harm, and they are a horribly stupid way to maintain a long-term relationship with a loved one. An abusive spouse may succeed in controlling their partner's behaviour, but they may well lose their partner in the process. This outcome can occur quite literally, as we've indicated before. Physical violence can cause permanent damage or even result in death for women (and, less commonly, men) who find themselves in an abusive relationship. In other cases, victims of domestic violence will make the very understandable choice of abandoning their abusive partner in the search of a safer and less painful existence without them. Yet, even if an abused partner lives and stays, experiencing physical abuse can only harm the bond that intimate partners are meant to share and suppress the aspects of a person that originally made them attractive as a partner in the first place. Children can and will lose affection for a parent who beats them, so adults are all the more likely to experience a persistent disgust for a physically abusive partner. 

Now, we can introduce the role of Pavolovian Classical Conditioning into considerations of IPV. Experiencing positive reactions to an object (or a person) depends on the history of associations between that thing (or person) and one's own thoughts and physiological  responses. People will tend to love other people to the extent that they have a history of experiencing many more positive emotions than negative emotions during events involving that person. Once a person becomes a source of pain and danger, it is impossible for an intimate partner to feel the same affection for them. Through learning, the abusive individual will necessarily come to generate negative emotional reactions from that point onward. A victim of domestic violence might be strongly motivated to keep their partner happy, but it won't be out of an authentic love for that person. It will be out of fear for their own safety. The take-home message is: Once someone cares about your happiness because they are afraid of you, they are no longer actually your partner or your loved one. You have made them your slave. Quite appropriately, slavery is illegal in Canada. 

The idea of these kind of conditioned responses to a stimulus originated with famous studies by Ivan Pavlov in which he paired a bell ringing with presenting food to dogs again and again and measured their salivation. After establishing that association, he removed the food and presented only the sound of the bell ringing. The dogs salivated in response to the bell, even in the absence of the food. This basic (and unconscious) learning process has been used to explain many psychological phenomena, ranging from severe phobias to sexual fetishes. The expectation that experiencing physical harm from a loved one will tend to make that person less of a loved one and more of an aversive, fear-inducing stimulus is a fairly straightforward implication of classical conditioning principles.

References

(These are just for giving credit to researchers. 

We would never generate test questions based on this kind of thing.)

Bandura, A. (1989). Social cognitive theory. In R. Vasta. (Ed.), Annals of Child Development. Greenwich, CT: JAI.

Cappell, C., & Heiner, R. B. (1990). The intergenerational transmission of family aggression. Journal of Family Violence, 5, 135-152.

Corvo, K., & Carpenter, E. (2000). Effects of parental substance abuse on current levels of domestic violence: A possible elaboration of intergenerational transmission processes. Journal of Family Violence, 15, 123-137.

Dutton, D. G. (1995). Male abusiveness in intimate relationships. Clinical Psychology Review, 15, 567-581.

Gershoff, E. T. (2002). Corporal punishment by parents and associated child behaviours and experiences: A meta-analytic and theoretical review. Psychological Bulletin, 128, 539-579.

Hyde-Nolan, M., & Juliao, T. (2012). Theoretical basis for family violence. In R. S. Fife & S. B. Schrager (Eds.), Family violence: What health care providers need to know. Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Jackson, S., Thompson, R. A., Christiansen, E. H., et al. (1999). Predicting abuse-prone parental attitudes and discipline practices in a nationally representative sample. Child Abuse & Neglect, 23, 15-29.

Kaufman, J., & Zigler, E. (1987). Do abused children become abusive parents? American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 57, 186-192.

Marshal, L. L., & Rose, P. (1990). Premarital violence: The impact of family of origin on violence, stress, and reciprocity. Violence Victims, 5, 51-64.

Weiten, W., & McCann, D. (2013). Psychology: Themes and Variations, Third Canadian Edition. Nelson Education, Ltd: Toronto, ON.

Memory, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Intimate Partner Violence

In continuing our commentary on Intimate Partner Violence, we should motivate your interest and concern as much as possible by highlighting some evidence as to why this form of violence really is a key social problem that hurts everyone. Now, if you dug into the research literature, everybody, you might well find some studies indicating that both women and men are capable of violent assault. Of course, that’s true. However, if you only looked at the overall incidents of domestic violence that occurs out there, then you might walk away with the conclusion that tendencies to be physically abusive are not too different for male and female intimate partners. If you decided to think that way, you wouldn’t be thinking about things hard enough (this is a common problem). A more thorough review of the research would clearly reveal that the scope and severity of physical assaults within intimate relationships is MUCH greater when considering incidents of male assaults on their female partners than the reverse. That’s true in terms of the likelihood that a victim of IPV will be significantly or permanently injured and the probability that an incident of IPV will result in death. Having made that very important qualifying point, physical assault is still wrong, damaging, and costly for Canada and every other country in the world, and it is something that some PEOPLE do, even though the results tend to be worse when males do it.

Here’s some local statistics for you:

1. Manitoba and Saskatchewan claim the highest rates of IPV incidents in Canada.

2. Violence amongst family members represents 25% of all violent crimes reported in Canada and about half of those crimes are instances of IPV (in this case, spousal assault). In the other half of these cases, the victims are other family members, such as violence against children by parents, between siblings, and parents by their children.

3. Women are 2X as likely to become a victim of police-reported family violence.

4. 52% of spousal abuse victims report their children as having witnessed them being assaulted by their partner, which is an important component of that “cycle of violence” we’ve made reference to before.

5. Girls are more frequently victims of violence committed by partners and family members than are boys, with the difference increasing as they age, mainly as a result of a much higher risk of experiencing sexual assault.

6. In Winnipeg, 40% of reports made to police in 2010 (around 17,000 incidents) were cases of domestic disturbance, most typically involving some form of conflict between intimate partners. These incidents resulted in more than 2,000 charges in which 80% of those charged were men over 18.

7. Year by year, about 20% of the murders in this city, the city with the highest per capita murder rate in Canada, involves the death of a woman killed by her intimate partner.

(Turner, 2012)

Hey, students of PSYC 1200, you should know that we separate our course based on traditional boundaries within psychology. So, we talk about psychology disorders separate from memory and emotion and we talk about social psychology separate from neurological issues and principles of learning. You must understand and constantly remind yourself that these boundaries are artificial. In a real person, does it make sense to separate what they remember about their life and their learning experiences from their having or not having a mental disorder? Does it make sense to think about human cognition – i.e., the way a person thinks, forms judgments, and makes decisions – separate from their culture or from their social status or from their learning history. Obviously not, and that is super obvious whenever you direct your mind toward understanding something as complicated as IPV.

At this point in the course, the relevant topics that you will want to understand in preparation for the next exam are Memory, Cognitive Processes, Intelligence, and Emotion. A person could quite easily teach an entire course just on one of those topics, and both Dr. Leboe-McGowans actually have done that in the case of Memory and Cognitive Processes. We want to use this opportunity to describe how IPV might relate to these four topics, but let’s not fall into the trap of thinking about these four topics as though they can actually be separated from one another and other aspects of psychology. To keep things brief, here we will discuss a link between Memory and IPV. Maybe that will stimulate your cognitive processes to think of other ways in which IPV might relate to these topics.

Memory

Memory preserves the experiences we have. All of that learning that fascinated the behaviourists needs a place and that place is our brain connections. Memory boils down to the brain connections that get created when we have experiences in our life. Every exciting, scary, tragic, boring, nonsensical, inspiring, or surprising thing that happens to us changes our brain and contributes to the contents of our memory. To a psychologist like me, the contents of memory (or the ever-changing structure of our brains, if you prefer) define who we are at any moment and, in collaboration with what’s going on around us, those contents determine what we do and the ideas we come up with and our attitudes and feelings about everything.

If someone is a victim of IPV, they have experienced a quite possibly terrifying and injurious physical assault by someone who they were probably hoping to be able to trust. In other words, being assaulted by an intimate partner qualifies as an extremely traumatic experience and such experiences are known to cause a psychological disorder that is aptly named, “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” (PTSD). As a person’s physical injuries heal from a physical assault, it is the psychological ones that remain in PTSD. The process arises from a fundamental human reaction to being threatened. People experience heightened arousal from identifying a threat and that will tend to be experienced as anxiety (or fear) when the person decides that the threat is a danger. This arousal is meant to prepare us to respond to a threatening situation. It’s meant to allow us to survive by fighting or fleeing. That system is pretty useful when someone encounters a bear or when you want to survive a nearby volcanic eruption. Unique problems arise when the source of the threat is something that is difficult to escape and fighting back is not something that a person is willing or strong enough to do. It is that situation that characterizes many people who experience an assault by their intimate partners. It is also the situation for other people who are frequently in life-threatening danger, but they can’t escape it or they won’t because the danger is all wrapped up in their career. Soldiers or police officers are an example of professions in which there is an elevated risk for experiencing an episode of PTSD.

A victim of IPV may well find it difficult to escape the source of their fear. They may be in love, which is an emotion that one person can have for another, as frustrating as it can be for outside observers, even when their partner abuses and assaults them. There are other reasons why a person might not be able to escape a dangerous relationship, such as financial concerns or a willingness to sacrifice safety and mental health to keep a family together. Whatever the reason is, maintaining oneself in a state of fear is psychologically damaging when the source of that fear is something that persists and is known to be a real threat, which is the case when a person finds themselves with an abusive intimate partner. This situation can lead to chronic hyper-vigilance and hypersensitivity to potential threats, in which a person’s body may react to even very slight threats with a panic response or a complete suppression of emotion and behaviour. In other words, chronic anxiety and/or bouts of severe depression are common psychological outcomes for victims of IPV, which emerge from our natural human stress response to perceiving danger.

Note: In the above paragraph, every area of psychology is at play. It all has to do with peoples’ brains, reactions to threat depend on our learning history and the way we form cognitive judgments about the information we have available to us, the learning history is preserved in memory, identifying a threat is an act of perception, hyper-vigilance is partly a cognitive process that relies on attention and draws power from the emotion of fear, these reactions emerge within the social context of an intimate relationship, how people behave in relationships has much to do with how their lifespan development has gone, and the psychological consequence for many victims of IPV is squarely within the domain of clinical/abnormal psychology.)

PTSD wouldn’t occur if people didn’t have anywhere to store their traumatic experiences. The disorder can arise in people who directly experience a violent assault or in someone who only witnesses one. The primary feature of the disorder is a persistent reliving of the traumatic event, which can include recurrent images, thoughts, nightmares, and flashbacks. Another symptom is dissociative reactions, in which the person becomes emotionally numb and unmotivated, as though they are detached from the world and/or the world has lost all of its colour and charm. That second symptom relates somewhat to symptoms of depression. Another symptom is that features associated with the trauma will be avoided. A victim of IPV may not be able to fully remove their abusive partner from their life, but they may physically avoid them as much as possible or they may psychologically avoid them by keeping themselves detached and unemotional in their interactions with their abuser. It is a common reaction of the individuals with PTSD to socially withdraw from other people and their surroundings. Symptoms must persist in a person for longer than four months to qualify as an instance of PTSD (Shekhar, 2012).

Even if they escape their abusive partner and seek to begin a new life, someone who has experienced IPV may well exhibit PTSD symptoms long after the threat from there former partner is gone. Thanks to how our memory functions, the most frightening and painful events in our life tend to affect us the most, so nightmares and waking flashbacks of abuse may continue for many years after someone ends their relationship with an abusive partner. Thanks to processes of learning and memory, people who experience violent trauma also tend to generalize beyond the specific source of their trauma. As a result, the same mechanism that would cause a person to avoid and withdraw from an abusive partner may present a challenge for them to put their trust in other potential mates. It is important to appreciate that, thanks to memory, one or a few incidents of violence can have multiple tragic long-term outcomes.

Reference: 

Shekhar, A. (2012). Psychological problems associated with family violence. In R. S. Fife & S. B. Schrager (Eds.), Family violence: What health care providers need to know. Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning (pp. 125-131).

Turner, J. (2012). Top crime happens at home. Winnipeg Sun, Wednesday, July 18, 2012.

Intimate Terrorism vs. Common Partner Violence

Unit 7 of our course includes topics, such as Developmental Psychology, Personality Psychology, and Health Psychology. This post is meant to relate to this unit, so it seems a reasonably appropriate time to talk about how Intimate Partner Violence can occur and how these situations may develop. People can have more or less adaptive and functional personalities. Similarly, relationships can be functional and healthy for both members or not. Peoples’ genetics, their environment, and their experiences determine whether they develop to be healthy, happy, and productive. Relationships may also develop in ways that benefit each member’s well-being or they may develop in ways that are damaging to one or both members.

The history of research on IPV focused on the obviously tragic cases of one member (usually the female member experiencing multiple violent assaults from the other member (usually the male member). Although it always feels like we could provide more details and go deeper in our analysis, we have discussed this scenario to a reasonable extent in previous blog posts. Researchers refer to this kind of relationship as “intimate terrorism”. It’s clearly an important social problem that should be addressed through criminal justice and mental health efforts to modify the behaviour of the violent offenders. This problem also warrants aggressive efforts to help and protect victims. It’s obvious who the culprit is in this sort of scenario and who the victim is. Most of us can easily agree about who is to blame and who needs fixing versus who is the blameless one who made a very unfortunate choice when selecting a mate.  We’ll start with a discussion of how that sort of intimate partner violence often develops.

In other instances, violence may occur in intimate partner relationships, but deciding who the victim vs. who is the abuser (or whether there even is a victim or abuser) can be much less obvious. Researchers call this scenario “common couple violence”.  In such cases, both members of a couple engage in mild violence toward one another that rarely causes any serious injury. In this posting, we will also briefly discuss how that sort of IPV develops.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF “INTIMATE TERRORISM”

Controlling Behaviour in the Guise of Romance

For the sake of efficiency, we’ll focus on the more common scenario, involving a male partner becoming physically abusive to their female intimate partner. As a couple become involved, emotions and romance is high. The male partner may tend to call a lot and present gifts and wants to constantly get updated on what his female partner is doing and where she is. The female member will often experience all of this attention as evidence for how caring her partner is. Expressions of jealousy by the male member are common precursors to “intimate terrorism”, but tend to be interpreted as further evidence of how much he cares about his partner.

Mild Violence and Passionate Forgiveness

At some point, usually under some form of stress, the male member will slap or hit his female partner. This action will tend not to cause any injury and the male member will express remorse and beg for forgiveness. The female member will then often accept this apology and forgive. They might well have passionate sex as a sort of proof as to the continued strength of their commitment to one another. Perversely, sex following a violent act can serve as a positive reinforcement for that action, increasing the probability that the violence will occur again. Moreover, the arousal from fighting itself can be misinterpreted as sexual arousal, which can also feed sexual passion. This tendency for people to misinterpret the source of their arousal can also help to reinforce these violent acts.

Gradual Escalation in Severity and Frequency

Perhaps some amount of time will pass, but the male member engages in violence again. Gradually, perhaps over months or years, incidents accumulate and the violence becomes more severe, with incidents becoming increasingly frequent. The male members’ remorse for incidents become less intense and pleas for forgiveness become less urgent and energetic. The male member begins blaming the female member for the need to get violent with her. He starts to insult her verbally. It is a fairly common strategy for people to avoid guilty feelings for their actions by blaming their victim and thinking that their victim is somehow deserving of horrible treatment. At this point, rape and other forms of sexual violence are fairly common.

Sadly, the escalation of mild violence, such as slapping and pushing, to severe beating and rape may occur so gradually that neither member may be aware of the emerging pattern until it becomes extreme and even life-threatening. Unfortunately, it is even common for the female member to only think about individual incidents and to blame herself by searching for and generating an explanation for individual incidents without considered the overall pattern of abuse that, when considered together, would clearly reveal that they are being victimized by a sick and abusive partner. Also, out of embarrassment from being regularly abused by her partner, the female member may often hide the abuse she is experiencing and socially isolate herself to avoid others discovering her situation.

The male member in this type of abusive relationship will tend to be very moody and controlling, constantly needing to monitor her behaviour. He will have problems with self-control and may even be prone to cheating, which can partly account for the tendency for such “intimate terrorists” to be very distrustful of their female partner. Thus, the male partner’s seeming romantic behaviour from early in their relationship becomes revealed as what it truly was: efforts at oppression and a jealous guarding of the female partner against the possibility that she might find another man and leave.

Full-Blown Intimate Terrorism

Ultimately, violence by the male member against his female partner becomes commonplace. The male member holds a contradictory disgust for his female partner and a compulsion to control her every action. Violent outbursts occur whenever the male perceives his totality of control to be under threat. If they have children, the male partner’s violence extends to them, as well. Verbal abuse is chronic, both when the couple is alone or around others, and there is devastation to female member’s self-esteem because of the constant verbal insults and physical attacks. In the female member’s mind, the abuse comes to serve as evidence of her own worthlessness, further reinforced by the male partner’s constantly expressing the opinion that she has nowhere else to go and nobody else would ever love her. Efforts to fight back against her stronger male partner will be ineffective and will tend only to worsen the severity of his attacks.

When their relationship becomes this bad, women may seek help from police or protection from a women’s shelter out of understandable fear for their own life or for the safety of their children. However, even when women victims of such intimate terrorism seek help, they frequently return to their abusive partner. Sometimes this decision to return occurs out of love for her abusive male partner and an honest desire to try to help and change him. In other cases, it is a response to the male partner’s threats to cause harm to people the woman loves, such as her children or other family members, if she does not return.

WHY DO THESE TERRORIZED WOMEN STAY?

1. LOVE for their partner, despite the violence.

2. LONELINESS and a belief that they won’t be able find someone else.

3. A FEAR OF TRYING TO GO IT ALONE and being unable to survive on one's own because of low self-esteem or lack of money.

4. A FEAR OF THE VIOLENCE GETTING WORSE for herself or other loved ones if she does not stay in the relationship.

5. A PESSIMISTIC BELIEF that a different partner will be as likely to be abusive as their current abusive partner. (This belief is perhaps common amongst women who have experienced abuse from their parents during childhood. If violence is a theme in one’s life, is there any reason to expect less violence when picking a different romantic partner? The answer is, obviously, YES (!), but it is understandable why someone’s sad history would make them pessimistic.)

WHAT ABOUT WHEN THESE WOMEN LEAVE?

Many women do leave their abusive partners and that tends to be the only way to stop the violence they experience at the hands of their intimate partners. That is, once violence is an established feature of an intimate relationship, it tends to persist as long as the relationship continues. Leaving tends to require the woman’s belief that her prospects will be better leaving than staying. Note that it is belief that is critical in this decision, not reality. People can believe that they are better off in any number of ways by staying with an abusive partner, but that belief doesn’t need to have any basis in truth and often doesn’t for women who have lowered self-esteem from the abuse they’ve experienced and who feel ashamed and blame themselves for ending up with an abusive partner. Sadly, the violence itself can provide other reasons for the woman to believe that her prospects are not better outside of the relationship, as the male member uses it to make it difficult for the female member to acquire skills through education or to prevent them from finding or keeping a job.

The reality of this “intimate terrorism” is all very upsetting to write about, people, and it’s probably not all that pleasant to read about. What it amounts to is a sort of slavery that destroys both members of a partnership. One member finds themselves in the role of slave, with all of the feelings of worthlessness, constant state of fear, and mental and physical health problems that goes along with being someone’s slave. The other member finds themselves a slave-owner, who succeeds in gaining almost total control over the individual they started out deeply in love with. Ironically, their success in achieving total control destroys all aspects of their partner that was the source of their initial passion for them, in the first place. Their natural tendency to seek justification for their own brutality also requires an active development of disgust and loathing for the person that they insist on controlling through violence, threats, and verbal abuse. In making their partner into a slave, they only have two options. The abuser must view himself as a worthless monster or must consider his partner worthless and undeserving of personal safety or freedom. In the end, he has made both himself and his female partner wretchedly miserable and, in almost all cases, the only cure for either of them is to end the relationship.

COMMON PARTNER VIOLENCE

As research on IPV has developed, it has become clear that, sometimes, women can also be violent members of intimate partnerships and not simply in reaction to violent assaults by their male partners.

By the 1980s, research on violence within intimate relationships made it necessary to recognize that sometimes violence is mutual and about equal severity within intimate partnerships. For example, a study by Straus, Gelles, and Steinmetz (1980) revealed that 27% of men report experiencing violence at the hands of their female partners, whereas only 24% of women report experiencing violence from their male partners. Anderson (2002) reported that 10% of couples reported violence occurring within their relationship during the previous year. In 2% of couples, only the woman was violent, in 1% of the couples only the man was violent, and in 7% of couples, both were violent. Frieze (2005) found that 18% of couples report violence within their relationship (4% claimed that both sides were severely violent toward one another and 5% reported that both sides were violent with one another at a low level. More men than women reported that their partner was the only violent one and more women than men reported that they were the only violent one.)

We urge some caution in interpreting these results, since violence appears to be more equal for men and women when surveys inquire about violence, in general. Surveys that orient people to criminal-level violence tend to focus them on more severe forms of assault. Those kinds of surveys reveal male intimate partners to be more prone to violent attacks than female ones. For example, with a survey focusing more on criminal behaviour, including questions about sexual assault, stalking, as well as physical assault, Tjaden and Thoennes (1998) found that 22% of women reported being assaulted by their male intimate partner at least once, whereas only 7% of men reported being assaulted by their female intimate partner at least once. Moreover, a careful analysis of violence occurring within intimate partnerships consistently reveals that, when it does occur, violence by males against their female partner is more severe and more likely to result in injury and death than violence by females against males. To illustrate, Archer (2000) did find more acts of physical aggression by women against their male partners than the reverse, but also reported that women received more injuries than men.

In any case, the point is that women can also be violent in their relationships and, when violence is a component of intimate partnerships, it is frequently mutually engaged in by both members. In general, people do tend to value reciprocity, meaning that a great predictor as to whether one member of a partnership will act violently toward another is whether their partner has acted violently toward them. It is the case that the intimate terrorism form of IPV described above is less common than often less severe, more mutual forms of IPV that fall under the heading of “Common Partner Violence”. The most common forms of this kind of IPV involve a tendency for each member of the couple to slap, hit, or throw things at one another. These sorts of violent altercations result in injuries relatively rarely and, when injuries do occur, they tend to be accidental. It isn’t exactly pretty. These are dramatic and passionate fights in which both members behave aggressively. However, neither member possesses any serious objective to cause their partner permanent harm. Nevertheless, average differences size and strength between men and women mean that women are more likely to get injured when these incidents occur. Consumption of alcohol is a very typical factor in stimulating these sorts of fights between lovers.

WHY DO COUPLES TRY TO HURT ONE ANOTHER?

1. STRESS and ALCOHOL use make people less able to inhibit their violent tendencies, so they respond more aggressively to things about their partner that offend or irritate them. Researchers have observed that couples with more children (which results in more financial and other forms of stress) and who regularly consume more alcohol are more likely to be violently aggressive with one another.

2. Mutual violence often reflects a part of a broader competition by members of a couple to try to gain CONTROL over one another. It’s all part of a power struggle that tends to occur within couples who are unskilled at expressing themselves in other ways, such as verbally.

3. When both members of a couple value their PERSONAL FREEDOM, there is a greater chance of each member engaging in violence toward the other. Two independent-minded people in a relationship will tend to fight more and that fighting will be more likely to become violent. 

4. JEALOUSY is a common motive for mutual violence within couples, such as when one member flirts with someone.

5. Some people have ATTITUDES ABOUT PHYSICAL AGGRESSION that cause them to be more willing to engage in violent acts. In particular, they may have the idea that such acts provide proof of a passionate love for their partner. Although the attitude may seem strange to us and to many of our readers, couples may slap each other and throw things at one another as a sort of evidence of their strong feelings for one another. Such differences in, let’s say, cultural attitudes toward violence plays a role in determining whether milder forms of mutual violence will occur within couples. Also, in surveys, people tend to consider violence by women toward men as more acceptable than the reverse (Slep, Cascardi, Avery-Leaf, & O’Leary, 2001). Such attitudes may account for why, when considering all forms of violence, regardless as to the severity or whether the violence resulted in injury, both men and women report that more violent acts are committed by women against their male partners than the reverse.

6. When members of a couple FEEL THAT THEIR PARTNER HAS A LOW OPINION OF THEM, they are more likely to engage in violence toward their partner, particularly when their partner expresses moodiness or irritability.

7. Some people are more naturally PRONE TO VIOLENCE than others. For example, women who are violent generally are also more likely to be violent within their intimate relationships (White & Humphrey, 1994)

8. Men and women who VIEW GENDER ROLES AS ADVERSARIAL (e.g., perceiving men and women as forming separate groups that are in opposition to one another) tend to be more violent in their intimate relationships.

9. YOUNGER COUPLES tend to be more violent than older couples.

10. Some members of couples report engaging in low-level, mutual violence because it is SEXUALLY EXCITING. The results of some studies suggest that couples involved in these milder, mutually violent relationships have sex more often than those in relationships with no violence at all (DeMaris, 1997). Other research observed no difference in relationship satisfaction between marriages with low levels of violence and marriages with no violence (Lawrence & Bradbury, 2001).  

REFERENCES

We are grateful for this outstanding resource:

Frieze, I. H. (2005). Hurting the one you love: Violence in Relationships. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

We have relied heavily on this book when putting together this blog post. We highly recommend this book for anyone interested learning more about IPV, specifically, or the causes and consequences of violence, more generally.

Archer, J. (2000). Sex differences in aggression between heterosexual partners: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 651-680.

DeMaris, A. (1997). Elevated sexual activity in violent marriages: Hypersexuality or sexual extortion? Journal of Sex Research, 34, 361-373.

Lawrence, E., & Bradbury, T. N. (2001). Physical aggression and marital dysfunction: A longitudinal analysis. Journal of Family Psychology, 15, 135-154.

Slep, A. M. S., Cascardi, M., Avery-Leaf, S., & O’Leary, K. D. (2001). Two new measures of attitudes about the acceptability of teen dating aggression. Psychological Assessment, 13, 306-318.

Straus, M. A., Gelles, R. J., & Steinmetz, S. K. (1980). Behind closed doors: Violence in the American Family. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Tjaden, P., & Thoennes, N. (1998). Prevalence, incidence, and consequences of violence against women: Findings from the National Violence Against Women survey. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice.

White, J. W., & Humphrey, J. A. (1994). Women’s aggression in heterosexual conflicts. Aggressive Behaviour, 20, 105-202.

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.)

Donation to Osborne House, Inc.

A portion of the sales of new textbooks in PSYC 1200 sections led by us (the Drs. Leboe-McGowan), as well as another section led by Ms. Lori Doan, were donated to Osborne House, Inc. In the end, this amounted to a $2000 donation. Osborne House provides shelter and other important services to women and children who have experienced domestic violence. In this image, Barbara Judt (CEO of Osborne House) is at the far left, Launa and Jason Leboe-McGowan are in the middle, and our Nelson Education textbook representative is on the far right.