SOC314 - March 27th
ViolenceAgainst Children and Women
- kids experience a sense of absence (a sense of loss & missing)
- most researchers would stop at that - if you talk to children & look at what they are doing; learn-
ing smart ways to handle that problem
- kids are quite perceptive*
- they argue that looking @ what these kids say - not only do kids care about their parents, but they
also care for them (diplomatic in solving problems, interfaced, etc)
- go on to make bigger claims - divorce forces kids to think differently about families
- the kids are very involved in the relationships w/ their parents & their families
- interesting argument
1. ViolenceAgainst Children
- violence against children was a concern in the late 19th century
- in the middle of 1980s; the issue was raised
- when she raised the issue; there was laughter (1986) - disgusting!
- before that; seen as something that was irrelevant
- Duffy - argument they make; the causes are not just about individuals
- if the causes are individual (sick people, or individual pathology) you would see violence ran-
domly scattered across different types of household
- NOT randomly scattered; clear patterns*
- types of people who are more likely to be violence (social class, gender, etc)
- good discussions about patriarchal cultures; violence against women is not seen as problematic
and is in fact apart of the culture
A. A Canadian estimate: over 1 in 100 (Trocme)
(1) 40% involved neglect (failure to protect, failure to supervise, failure to feed properly, failure to
enroll in school, putting them at risk of danger)
(2) 31% involved physical abuse (clear evidence usually by looking @ the body of child, mandato-
ry to report evidence of abuse {the law})
(3) 19% involved emotional abuse (hardest to find evidence of - involves maltreatment, exposure
to drugs)
(4) 11% involved sexual abuse (ranges exhibitionism, unwanted touch)
- estimating the incidence is difficult
- a fraction of what actually happens
- for every 1 case that came to their attention, there were 10 more (sense of what actually come
clear)
- estimates come from people who self-report (“i was a victim”)
- self-reporting; we don’t know how good the data is
- Duffy talks about national study done in 2001
- random sample of child welfare service agencies
- this data is based on formal investigations of cases reported to them that they’ve investigated
- this is the best data we have* - in 45 percent of those investigations; the suspicions were correct
- conclude that in about 1 in every 100 children is experiencing some kind of abuse or violence
Who are the perpetrators?
- neglect = mothers more likely to be seen as the perpetrator
- not surprising - mothers are the ones who take care of children
- in the case of physical abuse - biological mothers and father equally - finding is interesting b/c
men spend much less time with their children
- stepfathers are more likely than stepmothers to physically abuse their kids
- emotional abuse - mothers and fathers equally (stepfathers more than stepmothers)
- the case of sexual abuse - much more likely to be someone who is not a parent (if it’s a parent, its
almost never the mother)
- sexual abuse = a neighbor or someone the child knows/trusts
B. Children in lone-parent families more likely to suffer some kind of violence
(causes: alcohol, lack of social supports, mental-health problems)
C. Men as perpetrators
(1) no history of caregiving, lack of empathy
- men don’t do daily care of their children
- what is most interesting about this (in caring for a child) you develop everything
- literally learn empathy by taking care of a small child
- with father - if they don’t care of their children, they may not create that empathy
(2) the discourse of rights
- started to think of kids as rights
(3) the stresses of occupation failure
- the role of a father: to support your family financially
- a guy’s children might represent his failure
- also the role of occupational failure; economy that is producing lots of unemployment
D. Women as perpetrators
(1) The weight of private responsibility for children, and lack of social supports
- her children was her life
- difficult to stay home full-time with children
- we put women in a situation that is very stressful - do not provide them with much support
- single mothers have added pressures
- the private responsibility for kids is something we need to think about
- contextual things that affect people
- in the end; a lot of people have stress and don’t hurt their kids
- what is the added factor to the situation that does it????
E. The effects of childhood abuse (for women & men, Alice Miller) - people who are violent are much more likely than anybody else to have been abused themselves
or grown up in families where violence was present
- another piece to the puzzle
- arguing that in all their childhoods; found authoritarian, psychological parents
- if children are absolutely suppressed - that leaves psychic damage
- argues that without therapy; that child will grow up to be violent
- people have said without a loving parent (horribly abusive father + a loving mother) that child
may be OK as an adult
F. A violent culture
- can argue that we live in a violent culture
- Canadians are much different thanAmerican
- 47% of us condone spanking as a form of discipline
- 70% of us were opposed to a law refraining parents from spanking kids
- spanking is dangerous*
G. Sexual Abuse (Judith Herman, Father-Daughter Incest)
- premeditated abuse
- sexual abuse is premeditated
- as I said, almost never women
- one study by Herman
- study called Father-Daughter Incest
- study a large group of cases that she can get details on*
- finds a pattern across the different cases (40 cases)
- the patterns were the same across all the families she was looking at
- the man is clearly the authority in the family - often he was a good provider
- fulfilled his role very well - BUT very controlling; kind of man who felt entitled to have his needs
met
- when she looked at the details of the family situation - found a mother, wife who somehow was
not able to fulfill her duties as a wife*
- not available for sex, chronically sick, busy w/ children - common pattern: not available!
- a daughter stepped in to help out (cooking, laundry) fill in for mom now that she is in capacity
- the daughter - do the things that her mother did - INCLUDES SEX!
- distorted sense of entitlement - clear a lack of empathy & understanding
- forgets this is a child, someone he is supposed to protect
2. Adults
A. A “gendered” crime - about men hurting women - more frequently occurring
in the home, & often due to factors common to heterosexual relationships
- violence against adults
- different kinds of summaries about what is going on
- when you separate only serious violence - it is men who do it, very rarely women - look @ serious violence
- true that women are as likely to start a fight than the man
- the serious violence - almost exclusively done by men
- gendered social phenomenon
(1) Homicide: Rosemary Gartner et al., on “femicide” 1974-1994: between 63%
and 76% were by intimate partners or ex-partners
- she has done a very careful and long study but she looks @ homicides
- 1974 - 1994 in Ontario
- started out with the easy stuff - the records from the court case
- for permission to look at the police records - not accessible to most people + coroner’s records as
well
- 1st statistic = 87% of homicides in that period of time were done by men
- who is committing the homicides?
- with that additional evidence; able to estimate who likely did it
- what she finds is that the official stats - 46 & 50% of those
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