Imagining Woman Battering: Social Knowledge, Social Therapy, and Patriarchal Benevolence (From Women at Risk: Domestic Violence and Women's Health, P 43-69, 1996, Evan Stark and Anne Flitcraft -- See NCJ-161219)

• NCJ Number: 161221
• Author(s): E Stark; A Flitcraft
• Date Published: 1996
• Length: 27 pages
• Sale Source: Sage Publications, Inc
• Publication Type: Research (Theoretical)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

Using Frances Cobbe's perspective on the dynamics of official responses ("patriarchal benevolence") to wife beating in the 1870's, this chapter considers whether the official responses to wife-beating in contemporary Britain and America may also mask the perpetuation of a patriarchal structure that assumes the continuation of male dominance and control.

Abstract

Cobbe traced the causes of wife-beating to the embedded cultural view that wives are the property of their husbands to use and abuse in any way they see fit. Although Cobbe campaigned for reforms that ranged from a 6-month prison term for assailants to state-guaranteed alimony while the batterer was in jail, she worried that the enforcement of such laws might prove to be a mixed blessing. She feared that court intervention would implicitly set a standard of toleration for "normal" wife- beating, thereby increasing the average level of women's misery that was to be officially permitted, particularly in those classes where intimidation rather than persistent brutality was the primary means of control. Through its actions, the court was defining wife beating solely in terms of severe assault, again rationalizing rather than challenging (nonviolent) male domination in the middle classes. To this extent, the law managed the problem of wife-beating by giving it official notice and definition, but it did not resolve it. This chapter shows how the responses of social knowledge, social therapy, and patriarchal benevolence to wife-beating in Great Britain and the United States have followed the pattern that Cobbe predicted and feared. Cultural conditioning for male dominance and female submission have been largely ignored in analyses and responses to the abuse of women in favor of a focus on the individual pathology of the abuser, and laws and official responses have focused on the severe cases of physical abuse. Meanwhile, the core of the problem, i.e., a patriarchal culture, goes largely unchallenged in scholarly analysis and policymaking.