Pre-publication version Full citation: Allen-Collinson, J (2008) Reading the signs: A personal (forbidden) narrative of intimate partner abuse, in A C Sparkes (ed), Auto/Biography Yearbook 2007, Southampton: Clio Publishing.
Reading the signs: a personal (forbidden) narrative of intimate partner abuse Jacquelyn Allen Collinson
Now at: University of Lincoln, UK Director of Health Advancement Research Team (HART) E:
[email protected]
Abstract A developing body of research focuses on the perpetration of intimate partner abuse and violence by women against male victims, although to-date very little qualitative research has been undertaken in this area.
Such research, it is argued, is needed in order to gain more detailed and accurate
understandings of the complexities and meanings surrounding intimate partner abuse and violence, including gendered elements, and the interactional milieux in which they occur. Using a symbolic interactionist lens and adopting Goffman’s conceptual device of territories of the self and their potential contamination, this chapter focuses on the thematic analysis of a male victim’s narrative of intimate abuse, as recounted in his personal diary written during the final two years of a long-term abusive relationship, and in a series of in-depth interviews undertaken after he left that relationship. Some of the methodological issues involved in undertaking research on a highly sensitive and emotionally-charged topic are also addressed.
Keywords: domestic violence, female violence, male victims, battered men, female perpetrators
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Introduction She gave him a good belting today, because he disputed her accusation that he was completely incompetent at DIY. He has tracked this treatment and she thumps him, kicks him or smashes up his things on average three times a week. Sometimes the wounds are visible – cuts to the face, injured back etc – but more commonly they are not visible – bruising to the body, cuts under clothes. She claims to do this not in anger, but to ‘teach him some manners’. He lives in fear of this kind of treatment and walks around hunched up a lot of the time. The above extract is taken from the personal diary of a white, heterosexual, professional man who charted in diary form for a period of two years the abuse to which he was subjected by his wife; abuse and violence which began over 20 years earlier and subsequently escalated in both frequency and extent to the point at which he was forced to leave the family home, never to return. According to data from the US National Violence Against Women Survey, close to 1 in 4 women and 1 in 13 men report being ‘raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, or date at some time in their lifetime’ (Tjaden & Thoennes, 2000: iii). As Frias & Angel (2007: 1284) note, self-reports of violence probably generate an underestimate of the true prevalence of violence against women due to the stigma and shame associated with family violence, and this is likely to be the case with men’s reporting too. Whilst a small but developing corpus of research focuses on the quantification of female-perpetrated domestic abuse against male victims (e.g. Steinmetz, 1977; George, 1994; Straus, 1997, 2006; Fiebert, 1997), the need for qualitative research in this area has more recently been highlighted. Such research is needed in order to gain more detailed and accurate understandings of the meanings of, and social contexts in which intimate partner abuse (IPA) and intimate partner violence (IPV) occur (see Dobash & Dobash, 2004), and the ways in which the interactional partners, however unevenly ‘matched’, experience and construct the lived reality of such abuse. IPA is a complex, multi-faceted, culturally and historically-shifting phenomenon that is highly situated and ‘locally-produced’ by intimate partners in the domestic milieu. Using a symbolic interactionist lens, this chapter reflects upon the lived body experiences of a male victim as recorded in his personal narrative of abuse and a series of interviews, whilst also considering some of the methodological issues involved in undertaking research on a highly sensitive and emotionallycharged topic.
The principal theoretical framework utilised derives from Goffman’s work on the
‘territories of the self’, found in Relations in Public (1972: 51-87), and the analysis of their violation via
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various contaminative acts, extracted from the mortification processes described in Asylums (1968: 31-40), which appear highly pertinent to the current study of IPA.
Research findings indicating that women are both perpetrators and victims of intimate abuse and violence challenge many previously taken-for-granted conceptualizations and explanations (McHugh & Hanson Frieze, 2006), leading to calls for more in-depth studies into the nature and experiences of IPA and IPV. This chapter seeks to address those calls and in a small way to contribute to the literature, for as Palin-Davies notes, ‘domestic violence is extremely complex, not only in terms of its dynamics but also in terms of how it is presented, who it is presented by and whom it is presented to/for’ (2006: 11). The ethics of presentation (Katz Rothman, 2007) and indeed non-presentation are particularly salient in this context. Relatively little qualitative research has to-date been published recounting the actual experiences of male victims of intimate abuse (Migliaccio, 2002).
As
McCaughey (1997) suggests, we have been so engaged in analyzing women’s victimization by males’ aggression that we have reified male power, and this certainly pertains to the realm of intimate abuse, where the normative construction tends to be of women’s ‘innocence’ (c.f. Pearson, 1997) and men’s ‘guilt’. Writing recently, George notes that: ‘case analysis of battered husbands, by virtue of an almost complete absence of academic qualitative study of assaulted men, is limited to just a few sources, most of which are in unpublished thesis form’ (2003: 40), although there are a few notable 1
exceptions (e.g., Cook, 1997; Migliaccio, 2002) and a fast-growing collection of internet accounts.
IPV has long constituted a core feminist issue, and female-perpetrated violence is certainly worthy of detailed and rigorous feminist analysis. A lack of empirical research upon, and theoretical analysis of women’s violence against men limits greatly our understanding of the nature and processes of violence and victimisation in general, including violence against women. Indeed, it has been argued by de Welde (2003: 250) that: ‘hegemonic discourses of women’s powerlessness are not equipped to deal with power from women, because acts of resistance from them violate the expected patterns of behavior’; even less are such discourses equipped to deal with physical abuse perpetrated by women upon their intimate partners, it could be argued, especially if such abuse is not an act of resistance but is unilaterally generated, and ‘unprovoked’.
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In terms of theoretical analysis, symbolic interactionism offers a powerful lens through which to focus on IPA, refracted both via the perpetrator (e.g. Goodrum et al, 2001) and via the victim (e.g. Lempert, 1994). As Goodrum et al (2001: 222) indicate, the symbolic interactionist tradition acknowledges both the free will of the actor, and the interpersonal and social forces shaping and constraining her/his action, so that social behaviour is indeed both structurally constrained and actively constructed (Allen Collinson & Hockey, 2007). From this theoretical standpoint, Denzin (1984) has analysed domestic violence and negative symbolic interaction: those interactional structures that give rise to negative structures of experience.
His critical phenomenology (1984: 487) assumes, centrally, that the
phenomenon of violence must be examined from within. For whilst structural processes, including the ideological, influence and shape interpersonal violence, their meanings are filtered and woven through the lives of the interactional partners.
The narratives of participants (however unwilling) in
violent and abusive encounters can therefore provide us with a window on to the phenomena of IPA and IPV. Role-taking/making, a key interactionist concept, permits us to enter, theoretically speaking, into a violent or abusive encounter, in order to analyse the perspectives and situational definitions of the interactional participants. Goffman’s work on the ‘territories of the self’ (1972: 51-87) and their potential violation via specific forms of contamination is particularly apposite, I would argue, and is applied here to the analysis of abusive, intimate interactional encounters.
Narratives of abuse As Lempert (1994) notes in relation to the narratives of abused women, via the analysis of a person’s experiences, we can make existential sense of violence from an intimate partner and thus generate understandings that may be extended more widely to connect with others. This chapter explores some of the key themes emergent from the narrative of a white, middle-class, physically-strong, highly-educated, articulate, professionally successful, family man who was in a relationship for over 20 years, which incorporated first psychological and then increasingly violent abuse by an intimate partner. In order to widen the analysis, similarities and differences between themes identified in the published narratives of abused women and men will also will be incorporated at various points for, as Migliaccio notes: ‘The expression of commonalties that are shared between abused males and 3
females can assist researchers in bettering their understanding of the abusive experience’ (2002: 31). This, it should be emphasized, in no way minimizes or deflects attention from the appalling incidence of violence against women, nor does it seek to ‘degender’ the problem of domestic violence (Berns, 2001), but rather to subject to analysis some of its complexities.
Before proceeding to examine the personal narrative of abuse and the principal themes that emerged, the research methods are first described, and some of the ethical issues raised by undertaking research of a sensitive nature are considered. For the purposes of this chapter, intimate partner abuse (IPA) refers to any abusive act deemed to have the intention, or perceived intention, of generating fear, causing physical injury, intimidation, denigration or emotional pain to the intimate partner; intimate partner violence (IPV) is used to refer to any act deemed to have the intention or perceived intention of causing physical injury, whether the results are visibly discernible upon the abused or not. Although I use the term ‘victim’ at various junctures, where relevant, many recipients or survivors of IPA and IPV actively reject this categorization; as one of the young women in Blackman’s study argued: Yeah, that’s it. It’s wrong Jenny, we’re not victims of domestic violence. That’s what they [social workers] call us; I hate being called a victim. But it’s not, it’s wrong. We’re bloody survivors of it. (2007: 703) My informant himself hardly ever used the term in the interviews and it does not appear once in his diary.
When I questioned him about this, after analytic reflection, he rejected the label firmly,
indicating that in no way did he see himself as ‘a victim’, despite the fact that abuse, including serious physical abuse had been perpetrated upon him.
For an interesting discussion of the gender
dimensions of reframing victimization, see de Welde (2003); as she argues: ‘A “victim” self-narrative is often rejected because it forces people to see themselves negatively, implying a loss of control, a loss of value, and a loss of status…’ (2003: 257). For my informant, his narrated self-definition clearly did not include that of victim.
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Methods The life history or critical life story is particularly well-suited to an in-depth examination of the nexus of social structures and personal experiences, particularly those of a sensitive and emotionally-charged nature. In this case, it is perhaps more accurate to define this as a ‘limited topical life history’ (Ward, 1999), given the focus on a specific period in the life history of an abusive relationship. As Plummer (2001) highlights, the life history approach is a sine qua non in its ability to reveal the subjective, inner realm of experience. This was one of the primary aims of the study, which sought to explore, chart and understand the lived-body experiences of a male victim, via his own personal narrative of abuse, and to analyse how he experienced, understood and came to make sense of his partner’s abusive behaviour, particularly the perpetration of physical violence upon his body. For, as Katz Rothman (2007) reminds us: ‘To narrate is to make sense of, to order, by controlling the telling of events and experiences’; indeed in many cases narratives ‘serve as vehicles for rendering ourselves intelligible’ (Gergen, 1994: 186) both to others and, importantly within the symbolic interactionist framework, to ourselves.
The benefits of being interviewed and encouraged to tell one’s life story have been
documented by many, including Miller (1996: 113) who highlights that interviewing gives people an opportunity to explore themselves, increase awareness, find meaning, and be understood. Similarly, Atkinson (1998: 7) contends that ‘a life story narrative can be as valuable an experience for the person telling the story as it is a successful research endeavour for the one gathering the data’. It did indeed prove to be a valuable, but also very emotionally-charged experience for both interviewee and interviewer, as discussed below.
The research data derive from two principal sources: a series of confidential, in-depth, unstructured interviews, which took place subsequent to the participant’s having left the abusive relationship, together with a copy of a life document (Plummer, 2001): his own personal diary, kept over a period of 2 years towards the end of the relationship, and during which period the abuse was actually taking place.
Delamont (1992) notes the symbolic significance of the choice of pseudonym, and the
participant/narrator, NH, chose his own pseudonym; he opted for initials. It was in fact his own, unsolicited offer to discuss his own experiences of IPA and IPV and to make available his personal diary, that provided the stimulus for the research project. NH lived in a relationship, which became 5
increasingly abusive and violent, for over 20 years, and included marriage and the birth of children, before finally after much soul-searching and trepidation, deciding to leave the relationship only at a point when he felt in danger of permanent injury from his wife’s violence and had assured himself as far as possible that she would not abuse the children.
In his diary, a prologue recounts several
salient events before the ‘real-time’ entries begin, and an epilogue details some of the principal events occurring immediately after his departure from the family home. In the last year of the diary the text is supplemented by photos taken by NH with his home webcam, which record photographically some of the injuries to his body and face. As Gubrium and Holstein portray: ‘In a life story interview the interviewee is a story teller and the interviewer is a guide, or director in this process. The two together are collaborators, composing and constructing a story’ (2001: 126). Very little ‘directing’ was required of me as interviewer in this instance. Both NH’s personal diary and the interview transcripts were read and re-read as part of a lengthy and continuing process of ‘indwelling’ (Polanyi, 1966 Maykut & Morehouse, 1994). Using thematic content analysis, the principal emergent themes were identified and interrogated, compared and contrasted with those encountered in the research literature on domestic violence and IPA, including accounts of both female- and maleperpetrated abuse.
In response to my curiosity, NH explained that he had initially composed the diary entries in the third person, finding it too difficult, emotionally-charged and embarrassing to write in the first. In the same vein, at various points in the diary he also uses the definite article in relation to himself, his wife and their children. Throughout the diary, a relatively restrained, understated and matter-of-fact style is used, apart from odd instances where heart-felt emotions splinter through the prose. Subsequently NH came to consider that the relative ‘neutrality’ afforded by these techniques also enabled him to bring to bear some analytic distance on a very stressful and disempowering situation (c.f. Enosh & Buchbinder, 2005). Along with other dissociational techniques, these might be construed as a form of emotion work and a survival tactic, which involve active resistance in the interactionist sense of victims actively seeking to (re)define their situation. NH first started recording entries in the diary in order to document the abuse and violence to which he was subject, for cathartic purposes, and also as a means of enabling him temporarily to bracket the experiences so that he could ‘get on with the 6
rest of his life’, and not be completely overwhelmed, as he explained in an interview. Cautiously, at various junctures he even showed sections of the diary to his wife in what proved to be a futile attempt to make her understand the pain and distress he was feeling. Her response was to inform him that he was ‘off his head’ and that the diary was ‘a complete fantasy’, fabricated by him due to his ‘mental instability’. This denial of legitimation, it transpired from the interviews, formed a regular tactic in a long-standing campaign to undermine NH’s self-confidence and belief in his own definition of the situation. In retrospect, he indicated, he was relieved to have kept the diary as a factual record of what happened.
As a reviewer of this chapter pointed out, seeking any form of researcher
‘triangulation’ in this study would in itself be bordering on, if not entirely, unethical practice.
Ethics and emotions As Langford poignantly illustrates, the ethical issues involved in researching IPA are particularly acute: The trailer for the 10’oclock news tonight reported that a woman from the area had been killed by her ex-husband who had been stalking her. My heart started pounding and I got sweaty. The first thing that came to mind was the woman from my first interview group who was running away from her stalking husband… (Excerpt taken from research diary, Langford, 2000: 133) Not the least of my ethical concerns was the need to protect informant anonymity. Initially, I was extremely concerned about potential retribution from NH’s ex-wife, who, judging by analogous previous instances would have punished him severely and violently for the disclosure of ‘private troubles’ to any outsider. On two occasions NH had sought outside help from a marriage guidance counsellor, and on the second visit persuaded his wife to accompany him. As a diary extract reveals, however: At this meeting, she [his wife] told the counsellor to mind her own business and was violent towards him in the car on the way home for saying the things that he had at the meeting. Although NH had left his wife prior to the interview process, as Pagelow (1985: 184) found, violence within relationships tends to escalate over time in intensity and frequency and this may continue after the relationship has been severed. In order to protect NH’s anonymity, I did suggest early in the project that it would be possible to keep his gender undisclosed. He was, however, adamant that this
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was not necessary or desirable. I remain immensely grateful for the courage and openness with which NH spoke, and his willingness to discuss so fully and in such an articulate and thoughtful manner highly personal and sensitive issues. Indeed, as Owens reminds us: ‘Resisting abuse, even years after the fact by speaking it aloud, is an act of bravery for a person who has been forcibly taught to surrender authority’ (2006: 1171), although it became clear that NH, as with many abuse survivors, never completely surrendered authority. I am very mindful of the trust placed in me as a researcher to be allowed access to such emotionally-charged narratives. I also must confess to feelings of intense guilt at times, for as Owens (2006: 1174) notes: ‘…stories of abuse may be threatening or painful to recount. Telling, in itself, may represent trauma’. Others have discussed the emotional dimension of undertaking research and the production of knowledge, together with the emotion work demanded by particular forms of qualitative research (see Holland, 2007), reminding us that interviewees may experience emotional suffering and nightmares for some time post-interviewing (Brznzy et al, 1997). This was brought home forcibly when on one occasion NH recounted a nightmare about being chased, attacked, and viciously punched by his wife. The nightmare followed a long discussion between us about the specifics of the abuse. Whilst clearly not possible to attribute the nightmare purely to our conversation (NH had regular nightmares about being attacked by his wife), the likelihood seemed so overwhelming that I, not for the first time, seriously questioned whether it was justifiable to continue with the research. Encouragingly, Langford (2000: 138) notes that interviewees also report advantages to participating in research, including catharsis, healing, being given a voice, and gaining a sense of purpose. NH indicated that these latter two factors were of particular salience to him, and that the potential for something constructive to emerge from what had been such a highly destructive experience engendered hope that his account would be of benefit to other sufferers of abuse.
Some of the key themes emergent from NH’s narrative of abuse will now be analysed in relation to two primary dimensions: spatio-temporal invasion and contamination. First, however, in order to contextualise these elements, there follows a section on the normalization of intimate abuse, and the kinds of strategies that NH adopted in order to cope with the negative symbolic interaction endemic
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within a long-term abusive relationship; strategies reflected in the literature relating to both women’s and men’s narratives of abuse.
The normalization of abuse - coping strategies Research often indicates a patterning in the perpetration of violence upon an intimate partner. Walker (1985), for example, proposed a cycle of violence (relating to abused women) comprising three distinct phases, varying in time and intensity: tension building, acute battering and then ‘loving’, contrite behaviour or the ‘honeymoon phase’. This cycle of escalating violence was clearly evident to NH whose diary describes a common pattern in his marital relationship: He records a common pattern. Bed. Woken by his wife. She complains about something (today it was that he had not sorted out their son’s school clothing properly). She questions (why?) but does not entertain answers, comments, insults. Physical action in parallel: poking, prodding and then hitting. The predictability of his wife’s violent behaviour emerges at various points in the diary, where it is clear that NH has come to recognise only too well ‘the signs’ of her own particular cycle of violence, as indicated in a diary entry that follows the description of an early morning, violent attack on NH in the bathroom: “Get out of the house” is her intended final gesture for the beginning of his day. He explains that he has agreed to take their daughter to school, and she is not yet ready to go. “Then wait in the car” she concludes, throwing his briefcase out of the front door. He tries to explain that he feels it is unfair that he should have to wait in the car just because she wants him out of the house. He does live there too after all. She hits him around the head twice before thumping him in the stomach, winding him. The pattern is established. From her first overture in the bathroom, he knew that he was going to be hit by her before he left the house. Indeed the routinization and normalization of IPA&V by victims and perpetrators is a salient feature of many accounts. Smartt and Kury (2007: 1264) reported that a UK survey in 1998 found that one in five young men and one I in 10 young women (aged 13-19) thought violence against women was acceptable. In relation to the non-reporting of ‘domestic’ incidents, Kury et al.’s (2000) international cross-comparative analysis found that victims mostly cited as a rationale for non-reporting that the incident was not really ‘that bad’. Worryingly, Stanko indicates (in relation to battered women) that abuse is often characterised by victims as the ‘”normal’ interaction of intimate couples’ (1985: 48). Analogously, abused husbands in Migliaccio’s (2002) study described the normalization of violence
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from their partners, and one interviewee, a martial arts expert, explained how he failed to acknowledge that the violence was wrong: ‘I never really considered it abuse. I believed it was just a part of life. When it is daily, you don’t consider it abuse. I just got really used to it’; whilst another husband evidenced similar acceptance and resignation, saying: ‘I didn’t think it was wrong. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t know there was anything wrong’ (2002: 36). The abuser too may rationalize their actions, downplay their seriousness or deny the violent intent of actions, redefining the situation, and disparaging the pain, injury and distress caused. NH’s wife, for example, would explain her behaviour to their two children saying: ‘Mummy only hits daddy because he argues with her’, or would chide him with: ‘it’s only a scratch’, or ‘it’s just playful’, for example: She now has him in the corner and is scratching his head on both sides with her nails. “Playful tickling” she calls it. It stings, oh how it stings. His anger with this treatment makes him feel physically sick. She insists that she is not hurting him: this is only affection. In Walker’s (1985) tension building stage, ‘minor’ battering incidents occur, which the victim learns to control by various techniques, including anticipation of the partner’s whims, staying out of the way, and not allowing oneself to feel or show anger towards the abuser.
Whilst NH had employed all of
these techniques, staying out of the way of his wife (indeed being forcibly ejected from the marital home), was one of the principal means of confrontation avoidance. In interactionist terms, synesic role-taking (Scully, 1988: 201) involves the imaginative construction of another person’s feelings, attitudes, and anticipation of their behaviour. Thus, Goodrum et al (2001: 224) note how abused women develop keen role-taking skills in order to anticipate, prevent, and minimize their partners’ physical violence. NH described how he had become adept at identifying his wife’s moods, and anticipating the likelihood of violence as a sequitur to verbal abuse. Diary entries provide instances of many avoidance tactics, including one Christmas Eve when NH exiled himself to his car for hours in the freezing cold because his wife ordered him out of the house: He brings home the turkey but gets into trouble because there is not the right stuffing at the butcher’s. Once home, she tells him to “get out of the house” until 17:30, when her parents are coming round… He sits in the car on the common for three hours, getting more cold and more tired. What a way to spend Christmas Eve, he thinks. Such banishment incidents occur throughout the diary, for example: He comes in quietly to watch TV. His wife and daughter are also in the room. The wife starts goading him from nothing. He was selfish, incompetent, etc, etc. He does not respond at all – sitting quietly – which makes matters worse. She starts telling him to get out of the room 10
repeatedly, because he has no right to be there. This aggravates the daughter: “For God’s sake shut up, Mum”. She ignores this and carries on. He leaves the room to read the paper in the kitchen over a beer. She is in there presently with much of the same abuse. He goes to bed. Such attempts at avoiding or controlling the cycle of violence may have the unfortunate, unintended consequence of escalating the attack. A male victim in Migliaccio’s study, for example, learned that whilst he could restrain his wife in an attempt to halt the violence, this ultimately proved counterproductive because: ‘the result was … she escalated’ (2002: 34). Over the years, NH had evolved various techniques of managing his own fear and distress, including Buddhist meditation classes where he developed greater emotion management.
His very attempts at self-calming, however,
appeared to enrage his wife who then meted out further punishment, leading him to ironic reflection in the diary: When she is attacking him, he often (usually reflexively) tries to calm himself with Buddhist meditation techniques that he is learning. This entails clasping the hands as if in prayer. This infuriates her as she claims that he is being facetious, praying at her. Universally this leads to his being belted again. It is unfortunate that it is reflexive with him because he is belted before he can stop it. In NH’s case, there was little evidence of the ‘loving’ contrition phrase, proposed by Walker (1985), and in an interview he could recall only one instance when his former wife acknowledged that anything untoward had happened during their relationship: There was never any sense of that, or remorse, whatsoever, except, probably 3 months after I had left, when she rang to tell me to come home and she said that she had, she admitted that she’d may be got one or two things wrong. She didn’t apologise for that, but that was the only statement I ever recall her saying that might acknowledge she’d done anything at all out of the ordinary. Spatio-temporal invasion and contaminative acts Symbolic interactonism has amongst other elements provided a powerful lens through which to analyse the micro-spatial elements of interactional encounters. Utilising some of its key principles, Goffman’s study of ‘territories of the self’ (1972: 51-87) provides a detailed portrayal of eight such micro-spatial exemplars, culturally and situationally-contingent, two of which are of particular relevance to the present analysis: 1) ‘personal space’ and 2) ‘possessional territory’. These territories can be subject to violation via specific forms of contamination graphically portrayed by Goffman in relation to total institutions such as mental hospitals and prisons, but also I would contend, highly
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pertinent to the interactional realm of IPA. Goffman’s notion of physical contamination is of particular salience and will also be addressed. First the analysis focuses on notions of personal space and possessional territory and how relate to the interactional milieu of IPA, as portrayed in both NH’s and other narratives of abuse.
Personal space For Goffman, personal space is: ‘The space surrounding an individual, anywhere within which an entering other causes the individual to feel encroached upon’ (1972: 52). Czarnowski further defines it as ‘a kind of spatial envelope surrounding an individual, and it implicates the required distance to other people, whether strangers or intimates alike’ (1978: 209, quoted in Toiskallio, 2002:171). The actual amount of space ‘required’ by an individual is socially and situationally contingent upon an array of variables, such as cultural norms, and the degree of intimacy of the co-participants. Contestation and invasion of personal space feature strongly in many accounts of IPA&V, and figured prominently in NH’s diary. This extract, for example, follows his description of a particularly savage bout of physical aggression from his wife: Then, when he is distressed by the aggression, she turns 180 degrees to feign comfort – attempts at stroking and cuddling … which are really only another form of aggression, invading his space when he needs it to recover. Along with this, dogged insistence on her part - “I won’t leave you alone until I have had a cuddle”- this can go on for about two hours until he is emotionally drained and unable to sleep because of the invasive behaviour. The distaste surrounding ‘attempts at stroking and cuddling’ is palpable, and as NH identifies, these attempts constitute yet another spatio-invasive tactic. Not only was NH subject to invasion of his personal space within the domestic environment, but the diary also reveals multiple instances of work space violation. The extract below follows a telephone conversation with his increasingly angry wife, when he had eventually hung up the phone in exasperation at the continued interruption of his work time in a shared office where he had no privacy: Within ten minutes, he has a message from her on his mobile ‘phone. “Right”, it says “I’m coming in to your office to sort your rudeness out”. He has asked her on several occasions not to come to his office, particularly as he is sharing it at present. She is threatening abject provocation. And she duly arrives. He gets to her in the car park and asks her not to invade his office space – the last space he feels he has left. No chance really. She is in there making polite conversation with his room sharer – both he and his room sharer have a lot to do. He is getting more and more tense as she just carries on.
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The note of desperation is clear as NH tries in vain to keep safe ‘the last space he has left’. The temporal dimension of invasion is also prominent, often operating in tandem with the spatial, so that regions normally shared within a house, for example, may be deemed out of bounds at particular times. For instance, parents may institute proscribed norms in relation to children entering their bedroom during the temporal frame of ‘night time’, unless an emergency arises, whilst teenage children may attempt to institute analogous norms but without temporal restriction! The frequency of spatio-temporal invasion of his personal space is alluded to regularly in NH’s diary, for example: She will often come into his bedroom after he has gone to bed (sometimes after he has gone to sleep) for “a chat”. This is often acrimonious and intrusive and sometimes lasts until gone 2:00 in the morning. His tiredness makes work the next day difficult. He finds this all extremely disorientating… As Williams (2007: 148) notes, depriving someone of sleep is a way in which power relations are re/constituted in and through the control of sleep, rendering the sleep-deprived highly vulnerable. Indeed, the systematic use of sleep deprivation may constitute one component of the ‘intimate terrorism pattern of abuse’ (Johnson & Ferraro, 2000), actively used to exhaust, disorientate, and disempower one’s partner. Insisting on sleeping together in the same bed, as NH’s wife sometimes did against his wishes, constitutes a powerful form of spatio-temporal violation and control, and an unhappy reversal of the usual connotation of ‘sleeping together’ as symbolic of love, intimacy and trust. In the following extract, the combined effects of deliberate sleep deprivation and physical abuse emerge clearly: She allows him to bed at 12:30, insisting that she sleep in the same bed. She wakes him twice in the night by prodding him, and she is awake by 5:30. He has had five hours broken sleep and he is exhausted. He complains to her about this and she hits him full on the face again. She also tries to suffocate him with a pillow. He goes to the bathroom. He has a sore jaw, a black eye and a large bruise on his leg. On the motorway, he feels himself nodding. He pulls into a service station and dozes. He wakes an hour and a half later. He has missed the start of the meeting, but he is too tired to contribute anyway. He just can’t cope with this pattern to his life. Possessional territory The second of Goffman’s territories of the self to be considered is that of ‘possessional territory’, which Goffman (1972: 62) defines as: ‘Any set of objects that can be identified with the self and arrayed around the body wherever it is’. Victims of IPA often report having their possessional territory 13
violated by an abuser, potentially highly threatening for, as Stephens et al (2005: 40-41) theorise, a person’s possessions may be viewed as a part of self-identity, constituting the ‘extended self’. If someone deliberately conceals, damages, or defiles another’s belongings s/he is in some ways attempting not only to diminish the other’s sense of self, but may also be communicating a threat of harm to the owner. A stark diary entry records the items that NH’s wife had destroyed or seriously damaged within a period of several months immediately prior to the entry: Radio Alarm Clock Shaver Mobile ‘phone (22.05.03) Calculator Mail (07.02.03) Studio Mixer (12.03.02) Six shirts (11.06.03), His glasses (several times) An abuser may also seek to control a partner and curtail her/his agency in the occupational and public spheres as well as the domestic, via the destruction or concealment of important items such as official documentation. An informant in the Stephens et al (2005) study indicated that her partner either destroyed or concealed her birth certificate and Social Security card, documents essential as proof of identity, thus ‘getting rid of proof of her agency and showing her that there is no part of her or her life he cannot control’ (2005: 49). NH’s diary entries recount a whole series of attempts to challenge and constrain his autonomy, agency and self-determination, including the ‘vanishing’ of his passport, which was required on a regular basis for business purposes: Whilst on holiday [in the UK], he checks [for] his passport. He always keeps it in his briefcase (because he often has to travel abroad on business) but his wife has always said that she should keep it with the other family passports. It is missing from his briefcase when he goes to look. He asks his wife if she has seen it. She does not say yes or no (as usual) but becomes agitated that he has accused her of stealing it (which he has not done). [My additions in square parentheses.] In addition to the destruction or concealment of such objects signifying adult status and agency, more personal, cherished possessions may also constitute the target of a perpetrator’s attack; it being particularly poignant when possessions of sentimental value are treated disrespectfully by an abuser. In this diary entry, a note of hurt is discernible when NH records finding that a favourite piece of clothing had been summarily thrown out by his wife:
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He found his favourite DIY shirt in a plastic bag in the bin. It originally had been given to him as a gift by the students at the University of A… where he had externally examined. It had some sentimental value, but it had been binned without consultation. Possessions can also represent talents, hobbies or interests central to a person’s self-identity and autonomy (Stephens et al, 2005). If these are actually created by the person, not only may they be of great sentimental value, but they are also unique and irreplaceable, standing as potent testimony to the individual’s autonomy, creativity and skill.
A perpetrator of IPA may find such evidence of their
victim’s autonomy particularly threatening to attempts to restrict, control, demean and undermine the abused. For example, an interviewee in the Stephens et al study (2005), herself an artist, attested: This is the hardest thing. I paint; I had almost a thousand pieces of artwork. Some are mine, some we collected . . . most of them were mine. He destroyed them. . . . I did a painting that was not one of my better ones. It was a blond woman . . . and I came back one day, and it was slashed and had heel marks. . . (2005: 50) Similarly, as a musician NH had accumulated an extensive back collection of songs, written and recorded over several decades, sometimes with fellow musicians who constituted significant others. A diary entry records the sudden disappearance of over a hundred of his recorded songs and his subsequent questioning as to their whereabouts: He has about 100 songs that he has written over the years, nearly all recorded on tape or cassette. He finds an old tape recorder and records all of them on to CDs so that they will no longer deteriorate. There are four full CDs of his songs (which she has always told him are ‘crap’) dating from the age of 16. He places them in his CD rack in the study. Within four weeks they all have disappeared. He asks her if she has seen them. ‘Are you accusing me of stealing them?’ is her only reply. The topic was reprised in an interview, where NH confirmed that he had never seen the recordings again; they represented some of his most cherished memories and intimate possessional territory.
Physical contamination Closely linked to spatio-temporal invasion is the notion of physical contamination. In Asylums, Goffman portrays a range of mortification practices imposed upon inmates of total institutions, such as prisons, mental asylums and the military, and which encompass contaminative exposure of various kinds. As Goffman (1968: 31-2) notes, on the outside of a total institution an individual can normally choose to hold objects of self-feeling, such as his/her body and possessions, clear of contact with ‘alien’ and contaminating things. Inside total institutions, however, these ‘territories of the 15
self’ become subject to regular and routine violation, and the ‘embodiments of self (are) profaned’. Goffman posits three different forms of contaminative exposure: 1) the violation of informational preserve; 2) physical contamination; and 3) interpersonal contamination.
Although there is not the
space here to address all three, Goffman’s notion of physical contamination is particularly apposite to the analysis.
Physical contamination Goffman portrays as perhaps the most obvious type of contaminative exposure: ‘the besmearing and defiling of the body or of other objects closely identified with the self’ and further, the ‘breakdown of the usual environmental arrangements for insulating oneself from one’s own source of contamination, as in having to empty one’s own slops’ (1968: 33). Under this category, is included enforced corporeal exposure, the indignities and humiliation of which, for example during medical or security examinations, via communal sleeping and showering arrangements, and enforced use of doorless toilets, have been vividly illustrated by Goffman (1968: 32).
The corporeal policing of a partner via their physical exposure emerges strongly from the
literature in a variety of forms, for example insisting that the abused leave open and accessible to the abuser spaces usually reserved for ‘private’ usage (in much modern ‘Western’ housing at least), such as bathrooms, showers and toilets, unless the couple normally share such spaces amicably. A diary entry records an occasion when NH’s wife broke her way in through the bathroom door in order to attack him, and then criticised him for seeking privacy: He goes into the bathroom and puts the catch on the door because their daughter has a 16 year old female fried staying. He does not want any embarrassment when he is in the shower. As he wets his face to shave, his wife is pushing at the door – harder and harder until she manages to sheer the catch completely. She is in. She then proceeds to tell him off for putting the catch on the door. It is apparently his fault. Physical stripping off clothing to leave a person naked, cold and vulnerable, is a punishment portrayed by Goffman in relation to total institutions, but also constitutes a tactic deployed within abusive intimate relationships to increase the vulnerability and malleability of a victim. This entry in the diary underlines the regularity of certain abusive routines, but with the added dimension of NH’s nakedness due to the fact that his wife had, against his wishes, thrown away his dressing gown: She has thrown his dressing gown away (on the basis that it was torn) so that her ‘backing him into a corner and taunting him’ routine is now done with him naked and cold – and in particular, 16
vulnerable. Between the Saturday and the Wednesday morning she has done this taunt each day. She has hit him in the testicles three times. As Pence (1987: 37) notes in relation to female victims of IPV, such physical exposure and sexual abuse may be combined in various ways, as in attacking the breasts and genital region. Male victims too, like NH, report attacks to their sexual organs by female abusers, as recounted by one of the participants in Migliaccio’s study: And she would do whatever. She would pull hair. She would pinch me hard until I bruised. She would kick me in the balls or hit me in the balls… (2002: 34) A highly contaminative form of exposure is of the directly physical kind, where one’s body is forced into contact (including contact of a visual or olfactory nature), with dirty, sullied or defiled objects and substances. Goffman (1968: 33-34) cites ‘extreme’ examples of such defilement such as prisoners in concentration camps being forced to share a bed with a corpse, and Chinese political prisons where inmates, under public scrutiny, were permitted only two minutes, once or twice daily, to squat over a filthy open Chinese latrine. More common, mundane sources of physical contamination abound with institutions such as prisons, hospitals and boarding schools, and include exposure variously to soiled towels, bedding and communal clothing, unhygienic, tainted or badly prepared food, and dirty cutlery and utensils. Indeed, these latter are graphically described by interviewees in Smith’s (2002) study of female prisoners: The kitchens are appalling. We had a sponsored clean of the kitchens so we’re eating this week. Food is kept in bins on the floor, not covered. It’s disgusting. (2002: 202-203) Dirty, soiled and stained sinks, baths, showers and toilets constitute further sources of contamination, horror and disgust in total institutions, including, as recently highlighted within the British press, in hospitals (The Telegraph, 2007). In less ‘total’ institutions too, Fusco (2006) portrays some of the ‘geographies of abjection’ encountered in communal sporting spaces, such as locker rooms, where participants’ anxieties about confronting naked bodies can be compounded by the disconcerting knowledge that these bodies also ‘excrete body fluids from various orifices, drop hair, spit, and shave’ (2006: 7). Forcing a dirty, defiling object – ‘abject’ in Kristeva’s (1982: 2) terms – or substance, particularly human or animal waste, upon another person is therefore not only disgusting for the unwilling recipient, but physically and symbolically a highly contaminative act, demonstrating
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contempt for the other, violating the self-territory along various sensory dimensions. An entry in NH’s diary portrays an act of physical contamination - both visual and olfactory - at the breakfast table: This morning, after she had cleaned up three lots of dog shit from the ironing room, she placed them on the kitchen table in a see through bag as he was finishing breakfast. Still warm, still smelling. He placed it on to the floor to save retching, but she replaced it on the table again suggesting that it was confrontational for him to interfere… A similarly nauseating act is recounted in a later section of the diary when NH’s wife physically contaminates his mouth, one of the most personal of all spaces. Interactionists have noted how the face and ‘private parts’ of the body are usually accorded great concern, the face even more so than the sexual organs in some interactional contexts, such in prostitutes’ proscription of clients’ kissing or handling their face.
Smith & Davidson (2006: 95) emphasize how the skin is experienced and
conceptualized as the outer boundary of self, so that the touch on bare skin of an object not actually invited can be felt as an intrusion into the most intimate realm of personal space. The gagging reflex makes the intrusion of an object into the mouth particularly odious and gives rise to a sense of abject and enduring violation, exacerbated in this instance by NH’s son witnessing of the act: The next action is a new one – she is forcing her fingers into his mouth. It makes him wretch as he tries to pull them out of his mouth. She pushes in the fingers of her other hand. Their son is watching at the bedroom door, silently. Her nail cuts his tongue and he can feel the blood flowing freely. With her fingers still pulling at his mouth (like you pull apart a chicken when your are trying to stuff an onion up it) he is choking. He is now spitting blood onto the sheets… He is trying to get his breath back. She bites the knuckle of his index finger with great force. Searing pain. She eventually lets him out. His face around his mouth is red raw and there is a blood weal on his lip. His tongue is still bleeding… The pain in his finger, the taste of blood in his mouth and the sensation of her fingers down his throat remain with him all day. Concluding comments Taking an interactionist stance in the thematic analysis of a narrative of intimate abuse, this chapter has sought to portray some of micro-spatial elements of an intimate relationship riven by domestic strife, in which unilateral female-perpetrated abuse and physical violence were routinized and normalized. Goffman’s concepts of ‘territories of the self’, and physical contamination, were found to be highly apposite in the abusive interactional context, where the female partner engaged in regular and frequent violation of her male partner’s personal space and corporeal integrity. Many of the processes of mortification and control so vividly described by NH resonate strongly with those identified by Goffman as standard practices employed within total institutions with the aim of 18
demeaning and thereby controlling inmates. This is far from an exhaustive portrayal and it should be emphasized that the contaminative acts portrayed in the narrative extracts above constitute only part of an ongoing, long-term strategy, which appeared to be directed at achieving heightened control over the victim and systematically wearing down his resistance. Other associated tactics, which emerged clearly from the narratives and reverberated with Goffman’s analysis, included the deliberate isolation from sources of social support, sustained attempts at identity contestation (c.f. Allen Collinson, 2006), and stigmatisation. NH eventually left the abusive relationship only at the point when he acknowledged to himself that the negative symbolic interaction (Denzin, 1984) that had structured his marriage and family life for so long was unlikely ever to change, and that his wife was waging a campaign to alienate his children from him, and to discredit his occupational role performance. He also admitted that he was in grave danger of permanent injury from her frequent violence and that the long-term effects on his children of witnessing their father’s subjection to abuse and violence were highly deleterious.
In terms of narrative visibility/audibility of men’s accounts of female-perpetrated intimate violence, it is suggested that one of the main reasons why the issue of male victimisation is accorded scant academic attention is the threat it poses to masculine self-images and patriarchal authority, including within academia itself. George (1994) argues that this serves to reinforce two social stereotypes - of female vulnerability, and male authority or dominance. Any acknowledgement of male victimisation, it could be argued, would constitute a severe challenge both to hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1995) and the prevailing gender order.
From this perspective, recognition of any degree of gender
symmetry in terms of IPA victimisation might be expected to generate disbelief and hostility, not surprisingly perhaps from certain feminist and women’s advocacy groups, understandably seeking to protect women’s hard-won rights and funding, but also from men.
As George points out: ‘The
admission and recognition of male victimization, in the battered husband, is the antithesis of this acceptable order and an equality between the sexes that has been resisted historically, especially by men’ (1994: 148; emphasis in original). As Thurston (1996: 147) notes, there are those who do not want to raise questions around masculinities and men’s power, and who may prefer to continue to take hegemonic forms of masculinity as the norm, including in social research and social policy. It 19
would seem that the victimised male body, especially when abused by a female perpetrator, constitutes a spectre too threatening of the prevailing gender order, too potentially disruptive and subversive of hegemonic masculinity, to be accorded full acknowledgement, and thus male narratives of intimate abuse remain, in many ways, ‘forbidden narratives’ (c.f. Church, 1996).
End note 1 There now exists a plethora of internet sites furnishing personal accounts of women and men who have been abused by female perpetrators of violence; for men’s accounts, see for example, Fiebert & Gonzalez’s ‘Battered Men’s Stories’ on Menweb (2007).
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