Women's naming of their partner's abusive ...

Paper:

‘I don’t feel like I’m in an abusive relationship’: Women’s naming of their partner’s abusive behaviours and how this may be affected by institutional definitions Carol Rivas There is consensus that partner abuse (domestic violence) has significant physical and mental health consequences, but less agreement on the way it should be labelled and defined. This paper explores differences in defining and naming abuse, comparing a sample of women’s descriptions and naming of their abusive experiences with their conceptualisations of abuse when asked to define it, and with published institutional definitions. The data from abused women come from qualitative semi-structured interviews with 20 Caribbean, African and white British women recruited in community contexts, all currently experiencing psychological partner abuse; not all had sought help with, or acknowledged, the abuse. These women shared a common understanding of partner abuse that diverged from judicial and health care definitions, but not public health and feminist definitions that emphasised the intent of the abuser and acknowledged the impact of abuse as a form of coercive control. In describing their own experiences the women focused on impact. They often framed their experiences as non-abusive, although not desirable, despite evidently understanding the concept of abuse. Findings should help professionals understand how abused women’s descriptions of their experiences are affected not only by their impact but also by the definitions in use in their wider social interactions and institutional settings. If judiciary and health care definitions of partner abuse are reviewed to reflect public health and feminist perspectives, and therefore abused women’s, more abused women might seek and receive appropriate help and support.

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VER THE PAST 40 years, abuse of one intimate partner by another has come to be seen as a human rights issue with profound mental and physical health consequences (Fourth World Conference on Women, 1995). Nonetheless, there is no consensus as to what partner abuse actually entails. This has particular significance at the intersection of the public and personal domains with the institutional, for example, the judiciary, health care and community support services. Labels such as domestic violence, battered woman, spouse/wife abuse or (intimate) partner abuse are used sometimes interchangeably and sometimes to mark difference and disagreement. Defi2

nitions have similarly proliferated that reflect various institutional perspectives (Ashcraft, 2000; Dell & Korotana, 2000; Kilpatrick, 2004). Rather than questioning these perspectives, my interest in this paper is in how these definitions make meaning (Hall, 1982) and are informed by, and affect, the experiences of the abused. Specifically, I consider how the definitions match descriptions of partner abuse provided by a sample of abused women in heterosexual relationships. For pragmatic reasons, published descriptions of the lived experiences of abused women derive mainly from qualitative studies of white women from the US and

Psychology of Women Section Review – Vol. 12 No. 2 – Autumn 2010 © The British Psychological Society ISSN 1466–3724

‘I don’t feel like I’m in an abusive relationship’

the UK, recruited from domestic violence shelters, who have experienced physical abuse and have left the abusive relationship. There is a need for greater consideration of women from diverse cultural groups, who are psychologically rather than physically abused and who continue to experience the abuse within a sustained relationship. Psychological abuse is more prevalent than physical abuse and is reported by most physically abused women (Loring, 1994; O’Leary, 2001) – it can precede, accompany and follow physical abuse (Loring, 1994) – so it should be adequately characterised within definitions. Definitions also need to incorporate the experiences of women who may not recognise, or who resist, existing labels and definitions. This paper begins to fill gaps in knowledge by drawing on data from a community sample of 11 white British, five Caribbean and four African women living in inner London. Some did not label themselves as abused and some were not physically abused but all were currently psychologically abused according to their answers on the Composite Abuse Scale (CAS; Hegarty, 2005) and Tolman’s Psychological Maltreatment of Women Inventory (PMWI; Tolman, 1999). This paper considers how these women characterised abuse as a concept and as a lived experience and contrasts this with institutional definitions of partner abuse drawn from the judiciary, health care, public health, politics and domestic violence service providers.

Research methods The recruitment process used has been described in full elsewhere (Feder et al., 2005). I adhered to published safety recommendations for partner abuse research (Dutton et al., 2003; Social Research Association, 2005), used written safety protocols and convened a multidisciplinary project advisory team every three months to discuss the conduct of the study and issues arising during data analysis. The group comprised representatives from a domestic violence agency, primary care, social services, mater-

nity services, local government, and academia. The study was approved by the East London and the City local research ethics committee. Unaccompanied women sitting in selected general practice and community group reception areas were invited to participate in a survey on women’s health. Those who agreed were taken to a private room, where the details of the study were explained. Each woman who consented to continue was asked to fill in the CAS and PMWI abuse screening questionnaires and demographic questionnaires, enabling me to select a purposive sample of white British, Caribbean and African currently abused women to take part in semi-structured interviews about their relationship experiences. Women were given £15 in vouchers after interview, as compensation for their time and expenses. Full confidentiality was maintained throughout and pseudonyms used for all women. At the interviews I bracketed out questionnaire answers and remained open to individual perspectives on relationships. The interview topic guide covered responses to, experiences of and understanding of abuse. New issues raised in an interview were incorporated into amended topic guides for subsequent interviews. All interviews were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim but with all details removed that might compromise confidentiality. In this paper, extracts are identified using pseudonyms, the woman’s broad ethnic group, and the paragraph number(s) in the full transcript where the extract may be found. Each woman was given leaflets at recruitment and interview that contained contact details of a mixture of domestic violence and community organisations, and I checked they had recourse to support if needed. I undertook a thematic content analysis of the interview data for the current paper (Brown & Lloyd, 2007). My two supervisors and I read the first three interview transcripts several times, then separately coded them line by line and wrote memos on emer-

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gent themes and categories. We met to compare and discuss results, following which I developed and operationalised a working coding frame. This was entered onto MaxQDA (Marburg, Germany: Verbi Software. www.maxqda.com) but was modified as new interviews were coded, with 20 per cent of the coding cross-checked by one of my supervisors to ensure reliability. Themes (that is, categories formed from groups of related codes) were iteratively changed, developed and validated through meetings with the project advisory group and my supervisors. This was done through constant comparison of all the bits of data within a theme with each other and all the themes with each other (Charmaz, 2002), until I was satisfied that all the data within a theme provided examples of the same thing, that each theme was distinct from any other (although themes could be related) and that negative instances had been accommodated by amendments to the themes. An inductive approach was used throughout, so that themes were grounded in and emerged from the data. In this paper I take the view that ‘reality’ is socially constructed and, therefore, subjective, dynamic and fluid, and existing in multiple versions both within and across different contextual dimensions. My approach is underpinned by symbolic inter-

actionism (Blumer, 1969), which says that humans as ‘actors’ use language, which is a symbolic representation of meaning, to reflect on and adjust their behaviour relative to the actions of other actors (or objects). The process is one of bi-directional feedback, that is, social interactions shape our understanding of actions and our understanding shapes our reflections and therefore our future social interactions.

What the women said about partner abuse as a concept and an experience Every woman asked to define abuse as a concept characterised it as multidimensional (mostly as physical and psychological) and differentiated it from other types of conflict between intimate partners by reference to an abusive partner’s repeated controlling behaviours (Box 1). This was despite several referring to the restrictive nature of prevailing public discourses in the UK that emphasise physical abuse. Half the women had not come into contact with domestic violence or associated services or health care for the abuse, so influence from specific professionals does not explain their definitions. The multidimensionality appears drawn from their own experiences which sometimes resulted in a revision of their understanding of partner abuse. For example, Onaedo stated:

Box 1: Two typical responses to the question ‘How do you define abuse?’ S: One: beating. Two: once a month I’ll speak to you, there’s no love – forget it! (….) Int: What about if a man calls a woman names and she doesn’t deserve it? S: Well … (pause) I just think he’s just had a bad day, but if he continued, that means he’s being abusive to you so you should put him in his place. (Sela, African, 202) It’s psychological definitely, because that’s the whole mental thing of, the type of torture, people can have you under, but you maybe don’t know. There’s the physical where they’re hitting you and doing these things, making scars or doing bruises, or whatever. Then you’ve got the emotional, which … is to do with what people say to you. It’s to do with your psyche as well, like your psychological, but it’s what people say to you, but it’s also how you feel about yourself. It’s the emotions that come out of you: are you strong enough? Are you upset? Are you happy, or whatever? (Kalisa, Caribbean, 282)

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Because the whole domestic violence thing I did not … (slight pause) … I had this set … view of what it was. I thought it would be a man beating on his wife all the time. I never thought that phone calls, threats, all those little things that can be said are forms of domestic violence; I did not know that at all. (Onaedo, white British. 280) Several women, like Kalisa, considered the impact of abuse on the abused in their definition, but most defined it rather in terms of the abuser’s actions and goals. None mentioned the gendering of abuse and indeed several used the neutral term ‘people’ throughout. Each woman’s descriptions of her own relationship accorded with her generic definition of abuse, but often there was more emphasis on the impact on self. The women all gave examples of the omnipresence of the abuse and the way this amplified the effect of the man’s behaviours, leading to coercive control of the women: … If the phone rings the wrong number, he accused me of having a man! And that went on for weeks and weeks and weeks … [As a result, Naomi was careful to only socialise with her sister] (Naomi, Caribbean, 100). So I’m listening … to him saying that my family are terrible and my friends are no good, and believing it! [Onaedo responded by cutting herself off from family and friends] (Onaedo, white British, 65). I had my opinions on certain things, but he intimidated my opinions, so if I wanted to go my friend’s house at, say, 3 o’clock and I didn’t have no responsibility (…) he would say, “Well, you need to be back at such and such. You best be in the house, and you’d best have something nice, to be wearing something nice. And you’d best have my dinner cooked!” You know, that kind of intimidation. [Abriella responded first by limiting her social activities, then by abusing drugs] (Abriella, Caribbean, 29).

Even so, only eight women explicitly called their current relationship abusive, including all seven of those currently physically abused. Most said they were not abused, but experiencing problems in their relationship that led to what Ursula called ‘that soft end of unhappiness’ (Ursula, white British, 72) or otherwise minimised the abuse. A few said their partner was not abusive now although he had been infrequently in the past, but their narrative revealed the abuse was continuing: … I suppose I’d say abusive is … a bit one-way. (pause) I don’t feel like … I’m in an abusive relationship. I think we’re in a rather negative relationship, that we’re not working together, but I don’t think one side is being particularly abusive to the other side. … I’m not perfect… I can be hard to live with, he’s hard to live with, but I don’t think it’s being abusive. He can be abusive (little laugh) (...) … that particular situation he … was in a place where he was struggling with what he was doing personally and couldn’t cope with it, and took it out on me and that was abusive to me, at that point. But it’s … that doesn’t happen very much and it’s not … you know? (Dinah, white British, 375) Often, the women were able to recognise past relationships as abusive but redefined similar patterns in their current relationship as not so. This sometimes led them to speak more about past partners than their current one, considering them more germane to the research.

Professional definitions and labels So how do institutional definitions compare with these findings? In this section I concentrate on the UK, since this is where the above data were collected. In 2005, the UK Home Office published the following ‘core’ definition of domestic violence, adopted by judicial and healthcare services (British Medical Association, 2007; Crown Prosecution Service, 2006):


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Any incident of threatening behaviour, violence or abuse (psychological, physical, sexual, financial or emotional) between adults who are or have been intimate partners or family members, regardless of gender or sexuality (Taket, 2004, p.32). Domestic violence (including abuse between intimate partners) is here conceptualised as multidimensional, which accords with the women’s definitions and experiences. But it contrasts with these in the way it talks of discrete acts, single ‘incidents’. Aiming for functionality within an institutional setting, this definition does not fit the lived reality for abused women. Doctors have traditionally been trained to deal primarily with the physical (Warshaw, 1996, p.51), which includes mental health but not emotional well-being. For example, when Patience went to her general practitioner (GP) and told her about the abuse, the GP focused on its measurable effects: I went to [the doctor]. I told them I’m going through a lot of stress, all my hair start losing it, I was looking really haggard I went there and told them this is what I’m going through (…) I was going through a lot of stress, problems, every day, getting sick, they asked me to go for blood check-up, they don’t know what to do with me (Patience, African, 51). In similar vein, prosecutions can only be made for specific provable offences, as made explicit in the UK Crown Prosecution Service definition of domestic violence (my underlining): Any criminal offence arising out of physical, sexual, psychological, emotional or financial abuse by one person against a current or former partner in a close relationship, or against a current or former family member (Crown Prosecution Service, 2006). This backgrounds coercive control through psychological abuse. As the women’s narratives made clear, the impact of coercive control is often more significant than the behaviours it depends on (Stark, 2007), 6

making it hard to successfully prosecute (Stark, 1995) or treat. The following extract from the Council for Europe Campaign, ‘Stop Domestic Violence’ (2006) suggests this can affect abused women’s considerations of their experiences: ‘I filed a complaint against him but I didn’t have any proof. I wasn’t as “lucky” as other victims – he didn’t beat me’ (Council for Europe, 2006). Current recommendations for health care professionals engaging with abused women emphasise their listening role (Department of Health, 2005). But the guidance fails to emphasise that repeated abusive behaviours constitute more than the sum of a set of discrete acts. The word coercion or variants thereof do not appear in the document and the word control appears once in a phrase suggesting an abuser may control the abused through drug misuse (Department of Health, 2005, p.118). Health care providers still officially use the restrictive Home Office definition (British Medical Association, 2007; Department of Health, 2005) for what is merely relabelled as ‘domestic abuse’, and still often fail to understand the chronicity of partner abuse and associated social and psychological issues (Feder et al., 2006). Older medical discourses continue to influence public understandings and could put women off seeking help for psychological abuse. Several of the women I interviewed avoided going to their GP for support because they expected the outcome to be a prescription for antidepressants, which they did not want. As Linda, a white British woman, explained to me in 2006 (see also Feder et al., 2006): … I think the doctor’s role is to treat the sick, not to deal with people’s psychological problems. I think there’s enough people out there that have got physical ailments that need addressing … I don’t think the GP should have any particular role in sorting out the situation; I don’t think they’re resourced to do that. I don’t think it’s what most doctors go in for, either, is it, really, to sit down and listen to women’s problems (Linda, white British, 219).



Compared with the Home Office definition of domestic violence, the international World Health Organisation (WHO) public health definition of ‘intimate partner violence’ more closely reflects the women’s descriptions. It refers to ‘behaviours’ that include ‘sexual coercion, (and) various controlling behaviours such as isolating a person from their family and friends, monitoring their movements, and restricting their access to information or assistance’ (Heise & Garcia Moreno, 2002, p.89). Women’s Aid, the main, feminist, UK national charity providing services for and working to end domestic violence, also talks of coercive control in its definition of ‘domestic violence’: … physical, psychological, sexual or financial violence that takes place within an intimate or family-type relationship and forms a pattern of coercive and controlling behaviour (Women’s Aid, 2007). The United Nations includes ‘coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty’ in its conceptualisation but, unlike any of the definitions considered thus far, states that partner abuse is ‘gender-based’, and, therefore, a subset of ‘Violence against Women’ (VAW) (United Nations, 1993). The Hackney Domestic Violence Forum (covering the community from which many of the women I interviewed were recruited) says domestic violence ‘is an abuse of power most commonly perpetrated by men against their female partners and ex-partners’ (Hackney Domestic Violence Forum, 2006). This, less polarised than the United Nations definition, still successfully highlights the greater impact of violence by men against women, However, violence by men against women has a similar prevalence to violence by women against men; its significance is greater because it is more repetitive, more severe, and has more severe effects (Johnson & Ferraro, 2000; Romans et al., 2007). Partner abuse is widely held to be sustained by traditional patriarchal discourses that prevail in society (Dobash & Dobash, 1979).

Heterosexual women who hold traditional, gendered beliefs about relationships are more likely to remain in an abusive relationship, justify the abuse and be controlled by it (Follingstad et al., 1990). Seven of the women I interviewed expressed traditional views and half egalitarian views about the division of labour within and outside the house (Hochschild, 1989). Significantly, none considered the gendering of partner abuse explicitly, yet even the egalitarian women ‘did gender’ when responding to the abuse, resorting to ‘benevolent sexism’ (Expòsito et al., 2010) that subsumed their beliefs to their partner’s more traditional ideology, as Cavanagh (2003) also noted for a different sample of abused women.

Discussion This paper suggests operationalisation of the UK Home Office definition of partner abuse, focussing on discrete and unambiguous acts, may contribute to the difficulty women have in seeking or obtaining adequate help for psychological abuse and labelling their experiences as abusive, although other factors are also known to influence this (Zink et al., 2006). Bonomi and colleagues (Bonomi et al., 2006) similarly argue that how abused women interpret their situation depends partly on the definitions of partner abuse used in the setting in which they are doing the interpreting. The Home Office definition, used by the judiciary and health care, does not capture recurring controlling behaviours which the women in this study referred to when defining abuse, or the effect of these behaviours, which the women emphasised when talking about their experiences. These behaviours and their impact were incorporated within the WHO, United Nations and Women’s Aid definitions. The women did not invoke concepts of patriarchy or gendered power differentials in their definitions or when they named their own experiences even though the gendering of abuse is included in the United Nations and Hackney Domestic Violence Forum defi-


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nitions, upheld by extensive research (Connell, 1987; Dobash & Dobash, 1979; Johnson & Ferraro, 2000) and suggested by the women’s own responses to abuse. As a concept, the women considered abuse unacceptable, but often did not reflect this in the way they labelled and downgraded their own experiences. The gap between their conceptualisations of abuse and the labels they gave to their experiences must be narrowed if we wish to increase the number of women acknowledging and ending their abuse. This may be encouraged in the UK if definitions such as those by Women’s Aid and the WHO are adopted by the judiciary and health care. It is unclear whether the inclusion of gendered concepts in such definitions will be helpful. An emphasis on gender brings to the fore issues that pervaded the lives of the women I interviewed. But it runs the risk of downgrading other factors intersecting with gender within an abusive relationship (Damant et al., 2008; Mama, 2000; Morrison, 2006), and the more specific a definition is, the more likely it is to be considered by some abused women as not applying to them. It would also exclude same-sex relationships. Ashcraft (2000) argues for partner abuse service providers to use one definition and abused women a different one, with the two negotiating an individualised meaning that falls somewhere between. It is not clear how this improves on the current situation and it runs the risk of sustaining fragmented identities. Moreover, Ashcraft ignores the influence of institutional and public definitions on abused women, as made explicit in comments around help-seeking and understandings of abuse by Linda and Onaedo in this paper. If institutional definitions diverge too much from real experience, many women will not even get to the negotiating stage. The data reported here are limited; the sample size is small and the sample not generalisable. The paper only considers the abuse of women by men; if gender is kept out of definitions they should also apply to samesex relationships and abuse of men by women but corroborative research would be 8

beneficial. The screening questionnaire, which reflected the United Nations definition, may have selected a particular subgroup of abused women, leading to a circular argument. However, the prevalence rate for partner abuse found in this study was similar to that found in a previous survey of general practices in the same area of London (Richardson, 2001) which used a screening questionnaire more closely allied to the Home Office definition, so this is unlikely. The data do not provide evidence that simply changing definitions will help abused women and even if definitions are revised, some women will continue to deny their abuse to cope with their lives or to ‘save face’ and maintain their reputations as ‘good wives’ and ‘good mothers’ (Cavanagh, 2003; May, 2008). Nonetheless, widespread use of definitions that recognise the coercive nature of abuse and more closely match the lived experiences of the abused open up possibilities for abused women. They may encourage women to name their experiences as abusive and, therefore, to manage them differently and may result in more women seeking and receiving appropriate support. They also have the potential to foster a changed attitude within society more generally.

Acknowledgements Thanks to my supervisors: Professor Gene Feder, University of Bristol, Dr Moira Kelly, Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry. Thanks also to the Psychology of Women Section and the POWS conference committee and delegates for their support and helpful input.

Correspondence Carol Rivas Centre for Health Sciences, Institute of Health Sciences Education, Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Whitechapel, London E1. Tel: +44 20 7 882 8999 Fax: +44 20 7 882 2552 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.ichs.qmul.ac.uk



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