More Harm Than Good: A Summary
Of Scientific Research On The
Intended And Unintended Effects
Of Corporal Punishment On
Children
Elizabeth T. Gershoff
INTRODUCTION
The use of corporal punishment to discipline children remains one of the last holdouts of old-fashioned childrearing in the United States. Gone are the days of administering cod-liver oil to prevent rickets, spreading alcohol on babies’ gums to dull teething pain, or even putting children to sleep on their stomachs to prevent choking on fluids—practices that have been repeated by generations of dutiful parents across centuries. The modern age of child-rearing experts has ushered in a new set of parenting techniques thought to promote optimal child development, including teaching children to use signs from American Sign Language to communicate before they are able to verbalize words, protecting children in fancy (and expensive) car seats that were unheard of even twenty years ago, and using time-out as a preferred means of discipline.
Yet corporal punishment of children persists—roughly fifty percent of the parents of toddlers 1 and sixty-five to sixty-eight percent of the parents of preschoolers 2 in the United States use corporal punishment as a regular method of disciplining their children. By the time American children reach middle and high school, eighty-five percent have been physically punished by their parents.3 These high prevalence rates are in stark contrast to the growing consensus within the social and medical sciences that the risks for substantial harm from corporal punishment outweigh any benefit of immediate child compliance. 4
Why, then, do parents continue to spank or hit their children in the name of discipline? One reason is its long tradition—the corporal punishment of children has occurred throughout the entirety of recorded history.5 For centuries in this country and in countries around the world, corporal punishment of children occurred in a context in which such punishment was also acceptable as a means of punishing adults for infractions, often in the form of public floggings.6 But courts throughout the United States are no longer allowed to sentence criminals to corporal punishment, short of capital punishment. 7 In contrast, corporal punishment of children by parents remains legal and accepted; in most states parents continue to have a legal defense against assault if their intention in hitting their children was to discipline them. 8
As a result of this long history, corporal punishment has a strong intergenerational tradition in the United States. Parents, after all, learn most of their lessons about how to be a parent from their own parents. It is thus not surprising that adults’ support for corporal punishment is significantly related to whether they believe their own parents were supportive of the practice 9 and whether they themselves were physically punished as children.10 Indeed, children and adolescents who are spanked themselves tend to be more supportive of corporal punishment than children who have not been spanked. 11 Complete article
Wednesday, October 31, 2018
Legitimate Violence Spillover Theory
LEGITIMATE VIOLENCE AND CRIMINAL VIOLENCE:
A MULTI-NATION TEST OF THE SPILLOVER THEORY*
Abstract
This article reintroduces the debate and research into the Legitimate Violence Spillover (LVS) theory of violent crime and provides empirical tests of the theory. The LVS theory asserts that the prevalence of socially legitimate violence ranging from corporal punishment of children to executions is part of the explanation for the prevalence of criminal violence. The theory was tested at both the individual and national level with scales to measure level of LV. Results at both the micro- and macro-levels found the hypothesized link between LV and criminal violence. The results suggest that reducing LV can make an important contribution to reducing criminal violence.
Key Words: legitimate and criminal violence, spillover theory, gender, cross-national
Norbert Elias (1978), Manuel Eisner (2003) and Steven Pinker (2011) argue that there has been a centuries long "civilizing process" which has resulted in a major reduction in interpersonal violence since the late middle ages (see also Clark (2012)). This article is about one aspect of the civilizing process, which we suggest is implicit in the analyses just cited, but not given sufficient attention: what we call the Legitimate Violence Spillover (LVS) theory of criminal violence. The LVS theory argues that the prevalence of socially legitimate violence ranging from spanking children to executing murderers is part of the explanation for criminal violence. The LVS was originally introduced to as part of the explanation for the large differences between the states of the USA in rape and homicide rates (Baron and Straus 1988). These studies found that the higher the score of a state on an index to measure the prevalence of LV, the higher the rates of rape and homicide.
The underlying idea of spillover from legitimate and culturally approved violence to criminal violence is present in theories of violence such as the Southern Culture of Violence theory and the Brutalization effects of the death penalty theory. Despite a prominent place of these theories in criminology in the 1980s and 1990s, the number of studies examining the relation of legitimate violence to criminal violence has been minimal in recent decades. We hope that results of this study and instruments it makes available will reinvigorate debate and research into LVS theory. It presents tests of LVS theory at cross-national and individual personal levels. However, both the individual-level and the macro level data are cross sectional. Tests of a theory using cross-sectional data cannot prove the theory but if the hypothesized relationships are not found, the results would raise serious questions about the validity of the theory and suggest a need for either abandoning or further developing theory. On the other hand, if our tests of the theory using cross-sectional analyses are consistent with the LVS theory, it suggests the value of investing resources in more definitive research.
Legitimate Violence
Legitimate Violence (LV) consists of acts of physical violence carried out to secure or maintain socially approved ends. Examples of government-level LV include violence by police to maintain social order, corporal punishment to punish criminals and to maintain discipline in the armed forces, and of course, war as seen by each side. For individuals LV includes what Black (1983) characterizes as self-help justice such as feuds between families, and apprehension and killing of criminals, and of course, duels to settle insults. Within the family, there was the common-law right of husbands to “physically chastise an errant wife,” and the right, indeed in most societies the obligation, to use corporal punishment to correct persistent misbehavior. Many forms of LV have been decreasing. Corporal punishment in the armed forces and the right of husbands to use corporal punishment on wives ended in Europe in the late 19th century, and the process is continuing in other nations (Pierotti 2013). The most severe LV in child rearing has been declining for a long time (DeMause 1984). In respect to the less severe form of violent child-rearing called “smacking” and “spanking,” the European Union and the United Nations have requested all member countries to ban corporal punishment by parents, and 46 nations have done so in 2015 (Zolotor and Puzia 2010). A recent and still ongoing reduction in LV is the prohibition of capital punishment in most Western nations. This decrease in LV might be part of the explanation for the decrease in violent crime that has occurred in Europe and North America in recent years (LaFree et al. 2015).
The Legitimate Violence Spillover Theory
One of the roots of our focus on spillover from LV to criminal violence originated in analytical traditions based on the principle that society constitutes a social system in which each part of the system tends to influence the other parts, including general systems theory (Buckley 1967). The applicability of systems theory to understanding violence in the family was suggested by (Straus) (1973). Spillover in cultural norms and beliefs concerning violence is an important aspect of LVS theory. Specifically the more a society tends to endorse the use of physical force to attain socially approved ends (such as order in the schools, crime control, and international dominance), the greater the likelihood that this legitimization of force will be generalized to other spheres of life where force is less socially approved, such as the family and relations between the sexes (Baron and Straus 1989: 147).
Empirical Research on LV and Criminal Violence
Domestic Violence. Using Human Relations Area File data for 90 societies, Levinson investigated the relation found that women were more likely to be beaten, permanently injured, scarred, or killed by their husbands in societies in which military glory was a source of male pride, criminals were subjected to physical punishments, animals were treated cruelly, and enemy captives were tortured. He concluded that that wife beating was a part of a broader culture pattern of violence (Levinson 1989: 45). A study of incarcerated men and women (Robertson and Murachver 2007) found that the incarcerated group had greater acceptance of legitimate violence than the comparison group, and that this was associated with whether they had assaulted a partner. Cauffman et al. (2000) found that approval of violence to redress perceived inequity, for conformity to peers, and for self-defense, were related to self-reported aggressive behavior toward peers by men but not by women. For women the same time, these aspects of LV were associated with self-reported date violence.
Rape and Sexual Coercion. Two cross-cultural studies found that rape was more common in societies in which pubescent boys were subjected to the legitimate violence of genital mutilations such as circumcision (Minturn et al. 1969) and in societies waging war (Sanday 1981). Baron and Straus investigated differences between US states in rates of rape (Baron and Straus 1988; Baron and Straus 1989; Baron and Straus 1987). They found that the higher the score of a state on a LV Index, the higher the rate of rape. A study of approval of socially LV by university students used a scale consisting of agreement with questions such as “All states should incorporate the death penalty into their judicial systems” and “Military force is often a useful tool in achieving foreign policy goals” (Hogben et al. 2001). It found that the higher the score on this index, the higher the score on a measure of coercive sexual behavior by men, although not by women.
Homicide. Several cross-national studies of war have found results that are consistent with the LVS theory by showing that war was associated with an increase in the homicide rate (Archer and Gartner 1984). The authors suggested that wars tend to legitimate the general use of violence in domestic society via a message that killing another human being was, under certain circumstances, acceptable in the eyes of the nation’s leaders. Another cross-national study of nineteen nations provided evidence that variations in attitudes justifying killing (i.e., in defense of property, if someone kills a person who has raped their child, and the death penalty) are related to differences in national homicide rates (McAlister 2006). The acceptance of killing varied significantly among national/regional groups. Together the attitude toward killing and social inequality (GINI) explained 65% of the variance in homicide rates.
Youth Crime. Durrant (2000) studied trends in the wellbeing of Swedish youth since the passage of the 1979 act banning corporal punishment by parents. The subsequent trend in selfreported violence and young people suspected of homicide remained relatively steady between 1976 and 1994. This is contrary to the reduction predicted by LVS, and also contrary to the increase predicted by opponents of the law who believed that forbidding corporal punishment would result in an increase in crime by youth. However, consistent with LVS theory, rates of youth involvement in rape and other crime decreased since corporal punishment was banned in Sweden.
Corporal Punishment by Parents. Spanking or smacking by parents may be the most prevalent and culturally legitimate type of violence. The meta analysis of 88 studies found 93% agreement of the link between spanking, social and psychological problems, including delinquency as a child, and crime as an adult (Gershoff 2008). Among these are studies which have found that corporal punishment is associated with an increased probability of antisocial behavior as a child (Straus et al. 1997), serious adult crime (McCord 1991), physically abusing children (Straus, 2001), and assaulting non-family members (Straus et al., 2014) as well as marital partners (Straus 2001). A systematic review of longitudinal studies (Ferguson 2013) found small but generally significant relationship between corporal punishment and long-term negative outcomes, such as externalizing and internalizing symptoms and cognitive performance of a child. At the macro-level, a study of 186 societies found that frequent corporal punishment was related to higher prevalence of violence and endorsement of violence (Lansford and Dodge 2008). Many processes are involved in producing this linkage, three of which were tested in a large multi-nation study: reduced opportunity to learn non-violent methods of resolving conflict with parents, depression from being the victim of physical assault by parents, and social learning (Straus and Yodanis, 2014). Given the number and consistency of these studies, and the empirically demonstrated intervening processes, it is reasonable to conclude that smacking children is associated with an increased probability of crime.
Hypotheses
Hypothesis 1 was tested the LVS theory at the individual-level. Ho 1. The higher the score of students on a scale to measure their belief in LV, the higher the probability of having perpetrated acts of criminal violence.
Hypotheses 2 and 3 tested the LVS theory at the nation-level. Ho 2: The higher the average LV score of students in each of the 32 nations, the higher the level of criminal violence of the nation from which the student sample was drawn. Ho 3. The higher the level of LV as measured by published national statistic, the higher the level of criminal violence of the nation from which the student sample was drawn. Complete Article
Abstract
This article reintroduces the debate and research into the Legitimate Violence Spillover (LVS) theory of violent crime and provides empirical tests of the theory. The LVS theory asserts that the prevalence of socially legitimate violence ranging from corporal punishment of children to executions is part of the explanation for the prevalence of criminal violence. The theory was tested at both the individual and national level with scales to measure level of LV. Results at both the micro- and macro-levels found the hypothesized link between LV and criminal violence. The results suggest that reducing LV can make an important contribution to reducing criminal violence.
Key Words: legitimate and criminal violence, spillover theory, gender, cross-national
Norbert Elias (1978), Manuel Eisner (2003) and Steven Pinker (2011) argue that there has been a centuries long "civilizing process" which has resulted in a major reduction in interpersonal violence since the late middle ages (see also Clark (2012)). This article is about one aspect of the civilizing process, which we suggest is implicit in the analyses just cited, but not given sufficient attention: what we call the Legitimate Violence Spillover (LVS) theory of criminal violence. The LVS theory argues that the prevalence of socially legitimate violence ranging from spanking children to executing murderers is part of the explanation for criminal violence. The LVS was originally introduced to as part of the explanation for the large differences between the states of the USA in rape and homicide rates (Baron and Straus 1988). These studies found that the higher the score of a state on an index to measure the prevalence of LV, the higher the rates of rape and homicide.
The underlying idea of spillover from legitimate and culturally approved violence to criminal violence is present in theories of violence such as the Southern Culture of Violence theory and the Brutalization effects of the death penalty theory. Despite a prominent place of these theories in criminology in the 1980s and 1990s, the number of studies examining the relation of legitimate violence to criminal violence has been minimal in recent decades. We hope that results of this study and instruments it makes available will reinvigorate debate and research into LVS theory. It presents tests of LVS theory at cross-national and individual personal levels. However, both the individual-level and the macro level data are cross sectional. Tests of a theory using cross-sectional data cannot prove the theory but if the hypothesized relationships are not found, the results would raise serious questions about the validity of the theory and suggest a need for either abandoning or further developing theory. On the other hand, if our tests of the theory using cross-sectional analyses are consistent with the LVS theory, it suggests the value of investing resources in more definitive research.
Legitimate Violence
Legitimate Violence (LV) consists of acts of physical violence carried out to secure or maintain socially approved ends. Examples of government-level LV include violence by police to maintain social order, corporal punishment to punish criminals and to maintain discipline in the armed forces, and of course, war as seen by each side. For individuals LV includes what Black (1983) characterizes as self-help justice such as feuds between families, and apprehension and killing of criminals, and of course, duels to settle insults. Within the family, there was the common-law right of husbands to “physically chastise an errant wife,” and the right, indeed in most societies the obligation, to use corporal punishment to correct persistent misbehavior. Many forms of LV have been decreasing. Corporal punishment in the armed forces and the right of husbands to use corporal punishment on wives ended in Europe in the late 19th century, and the process is continuing in other nations (Pierotti 2013). The most severe LV in child rearing has been declining for a long time (DeMause 1984). In respect to the less severe form of violent child-rearing called “smacking” and “spanking,” the European Union and the United Nations have requested all member countries to ban corporal punishment by parents, and 46 nations have done so in 2015 (Zolotor and Puzia 2010). A recent and still ongoing reduction in LV is the prohibition of capital punishment in most Western nations. This decrease in LV might be part of the explanation for the decrease in violent crime that has occurred in Europe and North America in recent years (LaFree et al. 2015).
The Legitimate Violence Spillover Theory
One of the roots of our focus on spillover from LV to criminal violence originated in analytical traditions based on the principle that society constitutes a social system in which each part of the system tends to influence the other parts, including general systems theory (Buckley 1967). The applicability of systems theory to understanding violence in the family was suggested by (Straus) (1973). Spillover in cultural norms and beliefs concerning violence is an important aspect of LVS theory. Specifically the more a society tends to endorse the use of physical force to attain socially approved ends (such as order in the schools, crime control, and international dominance), the greater the likelihood that this legitimization of force will be generalized to other spheres of life where force is less socially approved, such as the family and relations between the sexes (Baron and Straus 1989: 147).
Empirical Research on LV and Criminal Violence
Domestic Violence. Using Human Relations Area File data for 90 societies, Levinson investigated the relation found that women were more likely to be beaten, permanently injured, scarred, or killed by their husbands in societies in which military glory was a source of male pride, criminals were subjected to physical punishments, animals were treated cruelly, and enemy captives were tortured. He concluded that that wife beating was a part of a broader culture pattern of violence (Levinson 1989: 45). A study of incarcerated men and women (Robertson and Murachver 2007) found that the incarcerated group had greater acceptance of legitimate violence than the comparison group, and that this was associated with whether they had assaulted a partner. Cauffman et al. (2000) found that approval of violence to redress perceived inequity, for conformity to peers, and for self-defense, were related to self-reported aggressive behavior toward peers by men but not by women. For women the same time, these aspects of LV were associated with self-reported date violence.
Rape and Sexual Coercion. Two cross-cultural studies found that rape was more common in societies in which pubescent boys were subjected to the legitimate violence of genital mutilations such as circumcision (Minturn et al. 1969) and in societies waging war (Sanday 1981). Baron and Straus investigated differences between US states in rates of rape (Baron and Straus 1988; Baron and Straus 1989; Baron and Straus 1987). They found that the higher the score of a state on a LV Index, the higher the rate of rape. A study of approval of socially LV by university students used a scale consisting of agreement with questions such as “All states should incorporate the death penalty into their judicial systems” and “Military force is often a useful tool in achieving foreign policy goals” (Hogben et al. 2001). It found that the higher the score on this index, the higher the score on a measure of coercive sexual behavior by men, although not by women.
Homicide. Several cross-national studies of war have found results that are consistent with the LVS theory by showing that war was associated with an increase in the homicide rate (Archer and Gartner 1984). The authors suggested that wars tend to legitimate the general use of violence in domestic society via a message that killing another human being was, under certain circumstances, acceptable in the eyes of the nation’s leaders. Another cross-national study of nineteen nations provided evidence that variations in attitudes justifying killing (i.e., in defense of property, if someone kills a person who has raped their child, and the death penalty) are related to differences in national homicide rates (McAlister 2006). The acceptance of killing varied significantly among national/regional groups. Together the attitude toward killing and social inequality (GINI) explained 65% of the variance in homicide rates.
Youth Crime. Durrant (2000) studied trends in the wellbeing of Swedish youth since the passage of the 1979 act banning corporal punishment by parents. The subsequent trend in selfreported violence and young people suspected of homicide remained relatively steady between 1976 and 1994. This is contrary to the reduction predicted by LVS, and also contrary to the increase predicted by opponents of the law who believed that forbidding corporal punishment would result in an increase in crime by youth. However, consistent with LVS theory, rates of youth involvement in rape and other crime decreased since corporal punishment was banned in Sweden.
Corporal Punishment by Parents. Spanking or smacking by parents may be the most prevalent and culturally legitimate type of violence. The meta analysis of 88 studies found 93% agreement of the link between spanking, social and psychological problems, including delinquency as a child, and crime as an adult (Gershoff 2008). Among these are studies which have found that corporal punishment is associated with an increased probability of antisocial behavior as a child (Straus et al. 1997), serious adult crime (McCord 1991), physically abusing children (Straus, 2001), and assaulting non-family members (Straus et al., 2014) as well as marital partners (Straus 2001). A systematic review of longitudinal studies (Ferguson 2013) found small but generally significant relationship between corporal punishment and long-term negative outcomes, such as externalizing and internalizing symptoms and cognitive performance of a child. At the macro-level, a study of 186 societies found that frequent corporal punishment was related to higher prevalence of violence and endorsement of violence (Lansford and Dodge 2008). Many processes are involved in producing this linkage, three of which were tested in a large multi-nation study: reduced opportunity to learn non-violent methods of resolving conflict with parents, depression from being the victim of physical assault by parents, and social learning (Straus and Yodanis, 2014). Given the number and consistency of these studies, and the empirically demonstrated intervening processes, it is reasonable to conclude that smacking children is associated with an increased probability of crime.
Hypotheses
Hypothesis 1 was tested the LVS theory at the individual-level. Ho 1. The higher the score of students on a scale to measure their belief in LV, the higher the probability of having perpetrated acts of criminal violence.
Hypotheses 2 and 3 tested the LVS theory at the nation-level. Ho 2: The higher the average LV score of students in each of the 32 nations, the higher the level of criminal violence of the nation from which the student sample was drawn. Ho 3. The higher the level of LV as measured by published national statistic, the higher the level of criminal violence of the nation from which the student sample was drawn. Complete Article
The Primordial Violence
Why do parents hit those they love? What effect does it have on children? What can be done to end this pattern? These are some of the questions explored in The Primordial Violence. Featuring data from over 7,000 U.S. families as well as results from a 32-nation study, the book presents the latest research on the extent to which spanking is used in different cultures and the subsequent effects of its use on children and on society. It presents longitudinal data showing that spanking is associated with subsequent slowing of cognitive development and increase in antisocial and criminal behavior. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies are explored in an accessible fashion. An abundance of high quality research has produced findings that are highly consistent from study to study, which show that spanking is a risk factor for aggressive behavior and other social and psychological problems. Because of these findings, the authors argue for policy changes and recommend never spanking. Policy and practical implications are explored in most chapters.
The Primordial Violence highlights:
The benefits of avoiding spanking such as the development of better interpersonal skills and higher academic achievement;
The link between spanking and behavioral problems and crime;
The extent to which spanking is declining and why, despite the unusually high level of agreement between numerous studies that found harmful effects from spanking, most parents continue to spank.
This book is clearly written. Technical material is in an appendix. It is readable by a general audience and suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses in child development, parenting, child abuse, family violence, juvenile delinquency, criminal behavior, social development, sociology of the family, family relations, human development, family studies, education, social work, and social policy.
Murray A. Straus is Professor of Sociology and founder and Co-Director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire.
Emily M. Douglas is an Associate Professor of Social Work at Bridgewater State University.
Rose Anne Medeiros is Quantitative Methodologist in the Department of Sociology at Rice University.
......
Preface
Being spanked for misbehavior is part of growing up for almost all children, in all but a few nations of the world. What explains parents hitting those they love, what effects does it have on children, what can be done to end this millennia long pattern of violent child rearing? Those are the questions addressed by The Primordial Violence. Part I documents the worldwide use of spanking and presents research showing that misbehavior by the child is only one of many reasons parents spank. The chapters in the next three parts give the findings from our research on the effects of having been spanked: child behavior problems in Part II, mental ability and academic achievement in Part III, and crime as an adult in Part IV. The chapters in the concluding section, Part V, examine trends in spanking, with the emphasis on the social factors that have triggered the movement away from spanking and also the social factors that have obstructed the trend. The concluding chapter argues that changing just this one aspect of parenting is likely to have profound benefits, not only for the children and families specifically involved, but for the society as a whole. A nation without spanking is likely to have less crime and violence and, as the saying goes, be "healthier, wealthier, and wiser."
What Stands in the Way?
If bringing up children without spanking has benefits for children, for their parents, and for society as a whole, what stands in the way? Some of the many obstacles are discussed in Chapter 20 and in a few other places such as Chapter 18. In that chapter we describe what seem to be contradictory opinions about whether to spank. Although there are no clear survey results, we believe that, in the United States, most parents and most professionals who provide information and services for parents have come to believe spanking should be avoided if possible. However, for the reasons explained in that chapter, they also believe that spanking is sometimes necessary. These are not contradictions because toddlers are notorious recidivists. After several instances of "No" and other corrections, a parent is likely to conclude that this is an instance when it is not possible to avoid spanking, and a parent who "doesn't believe in spanking," spanks. Our solution to this dilemma is presented in Chapter 18.
Another obstacle is touched on in Chapter 2. Textbooks in courses on child development, criminology, pediatrics, social work, etc. present almost nothing on spanking and the results of the large body of research showing that the less spanking the better off the child. We hope that The Primordial Violence contributes to changing that by providing the results of 15 years of empirical research conducted at the Family Research Laboratory of the University of New Hampshire on spanking.
It is even possible that the evidence presented will help lead to public policy to ban spanking children. We dare to entertain this hope because the information in The Primordial Violence is both comprehensive and scientifically sound. Of course, not everything that needs to be known is covered, but the following seems to be a good start.
• Why parents spank. It is much more than whether the child misbehaves. It is also determined, for example, by the cultural norms and beliefs of the society and the social and psychological characteristics of the parents. Evidence from national and international surveys is presented showing the relation of these social and psychological characteristics to whether parents spank and how much they do it.
• The link between spanking, and child and adult problems, and crime. Three of the five parts of the book provide evidence on this crucial issue. As mentioned previously, we present empirical evidence showing the relation of spanking to 15 problem behaviors on the part of children and adults.
• Longitudinal evidence. Over 90% of the studies that investigated the effects of spanking have found that children who were spanked have more problems, both as children and as adults. This is an unusually high degree of agreement between studies. However, most of the studies used a cross-sectional design, and that type of study cannot determine if the problem behavior was caused by the child being hit, or whether the problem behavior caused the parents to hit, or whether it works both ways. Most of the studies in The Primordial Violence are cross-sectional and, therefore, subject to that important limitation. However, the chapters on the relation of spanking to antisocial behavior (Chapter 6), to IQ (Chapter 10), and to crime as a young adult (Chapter 15) are longitudinal. The chapter on child antisocial behavior, for example, shows that spanking is associated with a subsequent increase, not a decrease, in antisocial behavior. In addition to those three longitudinal studies, Chapter 19 summarizes results of 16 additional studies by others. Twelve longitudinal studies found that spanking is associated with a subsequent increase rather than decrease in the probability of antisocial and aggressive behavior. Four longitudinal studies of adult crime are summarized, and all four found that the more spanking, the greater the probability of the child later in life perpetrating a crime.
• International in scope. Most research on spanking has been done in the United States. How broadly applicable are the results? On the issues of the' high percent of parents who spank, the relation of spanking to physically assaulting a romantic partner later in life and forcing sex on a partner (Chapters 3, 13, and 16) found remarkable similarity in 32 nations.
• Controls for 32 confounding variables. The results of correlational studies, including longitudinal studies, can be "spurious" if there are variables that result in both spanking and problematic behavior. For example, parents with low-education and living in poverty have repeatedly been found to do more spanking, and their children have repeatedly been shown to have higher crime rates. It might be dire life circumstances, not the spanking per se, which produces the relation of spanking to crime. Fortunately, modem statistics let us take that into account. This was done in one chapter or another for 32 such sources of a spurious correlation, yet the link of spanking to problematic behavior remained.
• Trends in spanking and what stands in the way of further decline. The Primordial Violence pays particular attention to the paradox that, in the United States, more and more parents and professionals think spanking should be avoided, but the decrease in the percent who spank has been extremely small for preschool-age children-the age when spanking is most likely to occur.
• Policy and practice implications. This is part of most chapters, and the main focus of two chapters.
• Understandable. Although complex statistical methods were used in the research, we tried to present the results in a way we hope is understandable by any college educated person. One of the devices to achieve this was to put the necessary technical documentation of statistical procedures and results in the appendix.
Influence of Social Science on Public Policy
Will the evidence on the harmful effects of spanking lead to change in public policy and what parents do? Some understanding of whether this is likely can be gleaned by putting the issue in historical context and comparing the history of legislation and policy statements about spanking with that on corporal punishment by teachers.
Medical research has frequently led to new public policies. Research from psychology, sociology, anthropology, and social work (the disciplines most concerned with spanking by parents), however, has seldom been the basis for new public policy. These disciplines have nevertheless made important contributions to public policy. Weiss and Bucuvalas's historical analysis showed that the contribution of social science has mainly been to justify, revise, and sometimes correct policies that had been previously initiated in response to changes in social circumstances, including changes in cultural norms and values.
A specific example is the effort by feminists starting in the mid 1970s to change police treatment of domestic violence. The change was happening, but slowly. However, the pace quickened dramatically after publication of the results of an experiment comparing three modes of police action: separating and calming down the parties, referral to services, and arrest of the offender. The study found that those arrested were less likely to reoffend. This experiment is unlikely to have been done, and the results are unlikely to have been the subject of an information brief sent to all police departments in the United States, were it not for changes in public tolerance for what came to be called domestic violence, brought about by the women's movement.
Policies to end corporal punishment in the armed services and in schools occurred because of a change in values and beliefs, not because of research evidence. Similarly, the Swedish no-spanking law of 1979 was enacted primarily on the basis of moral principles. In the United States, about half the states and almost all large school districts prohibit spanking by teachers. This change began long before there was empirical research, and even now, the quality of research showing harmful effects of spanking in schools is minimal.
The sequence of events for policy on spanking by parents in the United States has been almost the opposite. There has been a large amount of research, much of it of high quality. It has produced findings that are highly consistent from study to study showing that spanking is a risk factor for aggressive behavior and many social and psychological problems. Despite that, this research has largely beet). ignored. We suggest that this will continue until there is what Gusfield (1963, 1981) calls a "moral passage" that brings about policy changes and with it receptivity to the empirical evidence to justify and improve the policy. Such a moral passage is starting to occur in respect to spanking, but in the United States it is minimal and has extremely strong opposition. But perhaps, if the research on spanking continues to grow in quantity and scientific quality, and if it continues to consistently find harmful side effects, together with the increasing demand for evidence-based interventions and policies, spanking will be one of the few examples of research resulting in a new social policy.
Intended Audience
This book is intended for a general audience of readers who are interested in child development and parenting, and for courses in child abuse, family violence, juvenile delinquency, criminal behavior, social development, sociology of the family, or parenting and family relations taught in psychology, human development, family studies, criminology, education, social work, sociology, and social policy.
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About the Authors
Murray A. Straus is professor emeritus of sociology and founder and codirector of the Family Research Laboratory at the University ofNew Hampshire. He has been president of the National Council on Family Relations, the Society For the Study of Social Problems, and the Eastern Sociological Society. He is the author or coauthor of over 200 articles on the family, research methods, and South Asia and 17 books, including Corporal Punishment by Parents in Theoretical Perspective (Yale,.2006), Beating the Devil Out of Them: Corporal Punishment in American Families (Transaction, 2001), Physical Violence in American Families: Risk Factors and Adaptations to Violence in 8,145 Families (Transaction, 1990), Four Theories of Rape in American Society (Yale, 1989), and Stress, Culture, and Aggression (Yale, 1995). He is widely recognized for his research on partner violence and on spanking and other legal forms of corporal punishment and for efforts to reduce corporal punishment as part of primary prevention of child physical abuse and partner violence.
Emily M. Douglas is an associate professor of social work at Bridgewater State University. Her research focuses on child and family well-being with strong implications for programmatic and policy interventions. Her areas of expertise include corporal punishment, fatal child maltreatment, male victims of partner violence, and divorced families. She is the author of 30 articles and two books: Mending Broken Families: Social Policies for Divorced Families (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) and Innovations in Family Policy (Lexington Books, 201 0). Her degrees are in psychology and public policy, and she is the founder and director of the National Research Conference on Child & Family Programs & Policy.
RoseAnne Medeiros received her PhD in 2010 in sociology from the University of New Hampshire. Dr. Medeiros is interested in a variety of statistical topics, including latent variable modeling (including SEM) and handling of missing data. Dr. Medeiros' substantive work has included research on partner assault, corporal punishment of children, and the parent-child relationships of LGBT young adults. Her research on partner assault focused on the role of gender in partner assault, with a special interest in partner assault in same-sex couples.
Part I
Prevalence and Social Causes of Spanking
1 The Social and Scientific Context of Research on Spanking
Spanking and other forms of legal corporal punishment by parents is the primordial violence in two senses. First, as shown in the next chapter, over 90% ofU.S. parents spank or slap toddlers. Of this 90%, at least one third of parents start hitting their children when they are less than a year old. Thus, for almost everyone in the United States and most other nations, the first experience of being the victim of a deliberate physical attack is in the form of being slapped or spanked by parents who wish to correct what they perceive as misbehavior.
The second way in which spanking is the primordial violence became evident when this book was being considered for publication. Some reviewers objected to the title The Primordial Violence because, as one put it, primordial has connotations of the beginnings of the earth and the primordial soup. But, for better or worse, that is exactly the connotation we intended. We believe that spanking is the primordial violence, not only because it is usually a child's first experience with violence, but even more because research shows that it is one of the bases out of which almost all other violence grows. Ironically, this is because parents spank for the morally correct and socially important purpose of correcting misbehavior and preparing a child to be a law-abiding citizen. Thus, spanking teaches the morality of violence. Chapter 5, for example, shows that approval and use of spanking is correlated with approval of other types of violence, even including torture. All five chapters in Part IV and the longitudinal studies summarized in Chapter 19 show that the more a child was spanked, the greater the probability that he or she will approve of or engage in violence and other crime later in life.
What Is Spanking?
We define corporal punishment as the use of physical force with the intention of causing a child to experience pain, but not injury, for the purpose of correction or control ofthe child's behavior. This definition is discussed in more detail in Straus (2001a).
What to Call It?
In the United States and Canada spank and spanking are sometimes used to refer to slapping a child on the buttocks and also to slapping a child on other parts of the body. In Great Britain and other English-language nations, the equivalent terms: are smack and smacking. Although these are the most common terms, there are many others such as thrash, beat, belt, paddle, warm his butt, whipping, and whupping. Even U.S. President Barack Obama, who is on record as not spanking, used one of those terms in a speech at the centennial convention of the National Asso, ciation for the Advancement of Colored People on July17, 2009. He said, "And by the way, we need to be there for our neighbor's sons and daughters. We need to go back to the time, back to the day when we parents saw somebody, saw some kid fooling around and-it wasn't your child, but they'll whup you anyway."
When Obama and others use terms like whup him or beat him, they usually mean hitting on the buttocks or slapping a child, not the severe attacks that they would signify for relationships between adults. They refer to forms of spanking that are legal in every state in the United States and in most other nations. In the United States, legal spanking includes hitting with traditionally accepted objects such as a hairbrush or belt, provided that no serious injury results. Chapter 2, which is on the prevalence of spanking in the United States, shows that 28% of parents of children age 5 to 12 had hit their child with one of these traditionally approved objects in the previous 12 months.
Hit is a synonym for spank that we use from time to time. Those who believe spanking is appropriate and necessary may object to hit because, as Rosemond (1994b) says in his widely read book To Spank or Not To Spank, "calling spanking hitting is nothing more than misleading propaganda. Even people who are not on one side or the other of the spanking debate may object on the basis of biased terminology because hit has a negative connotation." Our view is that hit is no more biased than spank. The difference is in the direction of the bias. Spank and smack describes hitting a child, but with the connotation of a socially and legally approved act. When an adult physically punishes another adult for some misbehavior such as flirting with his wife, it is called assault. However, the assault laws of all U.S. states and most other nations contain a specific exemption for hitting a child to correct misbehavior. It is only in the case of children that we search for neutral words or euphemisms. We do not think there is a neutral word in everyday English that describes using spanking against a child. In this book, we use spank most of the time because that word is in the questions asked parents or children to obtain the data analyzed. In addition, as previously noted, parents use spank and smack to mean hitting in general (as defined above) not just hitting on the buttocks.
Outside the academic world, almost no parent uses corporal punishment to describe what they do to correct misbehavior. We have found that when we talk about corporal punishment, some parents don't realize we are talking about spanking or slapping a child's buttocks or hand. This was illustrated when one of us was interviewing the mother of a four-year-old. The child repeatedly interrupted the mother despite the mother's pleas. Finally, she slapped the child on the shoulder. Then, somewhat embarrassed, she explained "There are times when nothing except spanking will get a child to mind" (emphasis added). It is also illustrated by a book for parents that says that at about 18 to 24 months, "spanking means a brief swat on the fingers or leg at the instant of infraction" (Guarendi & Eich, 1990).
Spanking, Violence, and Child Abuse
Is Spanking Violence?
Some parents we have talked to say they don't hit their kids, even though they have just told us about spanking the child when necessary. Few Americans think of an occasional slap on the hand or butt to correct a child's misbehavior as a physical attack or violence, although they would think of an occasional slap of another adult as a physical attack or violence. This is because violence refers to culturally disapproved uses of physical force. People who favor the death penalty do not think of executions as violence, but people who are opposed to the death penalty do. Similarly, the three quarters of Americans shown in Chapter 18 who believe that a good hard spanking is sometimes necessary, dismiss the idea that spanking is a form of violence. Before the largely feminist-based effort to end violence against women, if a husband occasionally slapped his wife, it was considered a family fight, not family violence. Before the 20th century, slapping a wife was often legally identified as physically chastising. Until the 1870s in the United States, husbands had the legal right to physically chastise their wives (Calvert, 1974); that is, they were permitted to use corporal punishment, just as parents still have this right with children. For most of the 20th century, police, in some jurisdictions, followed an informal "stitch rule." This directed them to avoid making an arrest in family disturbance cases unless there was an injury that required stitches or other immediate medical attention (Straus, 1976). In economically developed nations today, very few still believe that an occasional slap by a husband to correct misbehavior by his wife is harmless, but many believe that an occasional slap by a parent to correct misbehavior by a child is morally correct and harmless.
To understand the reasoning behind identifying spanking as a form of violence, it is necessary to start with the definition of violence:
Violence is "an act carried out with the intention of, or perceived as having the intention of physically hurting another person." (Gelles & Straus, 1979,p.553)
The physical hurt can range from slight pain, as in a slap, to murder. The basis for intent to hurt may range from a concern with a child's safety (as when a child is spanked for going into the street) to hostility so intense that the death of the other is desired (Gelles & Straus, 1979, p. 554). Now compare the definition of violence with the definition of spanking given in the previous section: "The use of physical force with the intention of causing a child to experience pain, but not injury, for the purpose of correction or control of the child's behavior."
The difference between the two definitions is that the definition of spanking is restricted to attacks that are not intended to cause injury and to attacks that are for purposes of correction and control. This makes spanking an example of instrumental violence (Gelles & Straus, 1979), that is, violence perpetrated to achieve some end other than pain or injury as an end in itself, such as hitting a, wife or husband just because of anger and fury. The latter is called expressive violence. When parents are angry at the child for repeated misbehavior, it is often also an act of expressive violence. Another example of violence that is both instrumental and expressive is someone hitting a neighbor who dumps trash on their property. However, unlike hitting a child who misbehaves, which is legal and socially legitimate in most of the world, hitting the repeatedly misbehaving neighbor is an example of illegal violence. Empirical data on the theory that spanking is part of a pattern of violence in other spheres life are presented in the chapter on spanking and the approval of violence (Chapter 5).
The Line between Spanking and Physical Abuse
It is important to keep in mind that this book is about socially acceptable and legal corporal punishment, not physical abuse of children as that term is used in. law, social work, and social science. Legal definitions of physical abuse vary, and there is tremendous ambiguity concerning the line between physical punishment and physical abuse, discussed in Gelles and Straus (1988) and Straus (1990b ). However, in practice the de facto definition is almost always an attack on a child that results in an injury. According to the law in most U.S. states, parents can be charged with physical abuse if it exceeds the frequency and severity of violence allowed by cultural norms for disciplining children. In fact, that rarely happens, because child protective services seldom have the resources to attend to such cases. This largely happens because the norms are not clear and because numerous court decisions in many states have not accepted as abuse cases where the child is not injured or does not show bruises (Associated Press, 1995; Olson, 2008). In addition; the laws exempting parents from prosecution for assault do not provide a clear guideline because they permit parents to use reasonable force but fail to specify what acts are and are not reasonable. At one extreme, the attorney general of Texas told a reporter that corporal punishment becomes abusive "only if observable and material impairment occurs as a result" (Work, 2011).
Why Focus on Just One Narrow Aspect of Discipline?
Spanking is just one of many methods of discipline. The Dimensions of Discipline Inventory (Straus & Fauchier, 2011 ), for example, measures four punitive and five non-punitive methods of correction. Only one of these nine is spanking. However, as shown in Chapter 2, over 90% of U.S. parents spank toddlers. Any parental behavior that is that close to being universal needs to be examined and understood, it is part of the socialization experience of nearly all children in the United States and in most of the world's societies. A second reason for focusing on spanking is the extensive body of research that found harmful side effects, many of which are presented in this book. The combination of something that is nearly universal and engenders a risk of harm to children and to society needs to be understood to provide a basis for protecting children and lowering the level of violence in society.
Harsh Discipline
Many child researchers prefer to study the more general concept of harsh discipline. They usually believe that spanking is just one aspect of harsh discipline and that a better understanding of the effects of discipline on children can be obtained by investigating the broader concept of harsh discipline, for example by also studying verbal attacks on the child. We believe that both harsh discipline in general and the spanking component of harsh discipline need to be understood. They overlap, but are not the same. Many parents who spank do not use other modes of harsh parenting. Moreover, using a composite harsh parenting index seems to assume that spanking is best viewed as one manifestation or symptom of inadequate parenting. This is not likely to be true. Consider the fact that more than 90% of U.S. parents spank. No one knows the percent of parents that are inadequate, but over 90% is not plausible. So there must be a sizable number of good parents who spank. Another reason for not treating spanking only as part of a more general pattern of harsh parenting is that it ignores an extremely important question: Does spanking by good parents, who do not use other methods of harsh discipline, have harmful side effects? A large part of this book is devoted to that question.
Public Attitudes and Beliefs about Spanking
Whether to spank or not has always been a question that interests parents and professionals concerned with children and families. The interest dates to biblical times, and no doubt long before. In the last decade both public interest and research on spanking has substantially increased.
The high level of interest by parents and Americans in general was shown dramatically by the reaction to a Time magazine article in April 2010, The Long Term Effects of Spanking. It described the results of a large-scale study using a gold-standard longitudinal design. The study found that spanking had the long-term effect of increasing the probability of aggressive and antisocial behavior. The day after publication, over 1,000 comments were posted in response to a copy of the article on Yahoo! News. Six days after publication, there were over 10,000. One of us read the first 30 and then a few in each of the next few days. At least 95% of the individuals who commented doubted the validity of the study or condemned the study.
This is just one bit of evidence showing that spanking is a controversial issue. It is very likely that this book will be controversial, and that the results will be denied, condemned, or ignored. This has been the fate of much of the other. 1 research on spanking, as shown by the response to the study described in Time ' and as shown by the virtual absence of spanking in child development and child psychiatry textbooks described below.
A major obstacle to accepting research showing that spanking has harmful side effects occurs because the research contradicts deeply embedded cultural beliefs in many societies. The 2006 General Social Survey found that three quarters of the U.S. population believe that spanking is sometimes necessary. Many parents are very strongly committed to spanking as necessary for the well-being of their children, and their right to do so is protected in many state statutes, as we show in Chapter 17. Several have put it to us as necessary to keep their children from being delinquent and jailed as an adult. During a 20/20 segment on spanking in which one of us discussed spanking with parents, two parents said, that they needed to use spanking to make sure their children do not end up in the electric chair. This book is testimony to the irony of those beliefs. Spanking does usually work in the immediate situation, but as shown by the studies in Part II (Spanking and Child Behavior Problems), Part IV (Spanking and Crime), and in Chapter 19 (on spanking and crime), spanking increases the probability of antisocial behavior, delinquency, and crime later in 'life. Probability is emphasized in the previous sentence to indicate that the link between spanking and antisocial behavior is not in the form of a one-to-one relationship. Rather, as explained later in this chapter, it is in the form of a risk-factor relationship.
Part of the relationship between spanking and crime probably occurs because spanking is part of a culture of violence. For example, in Chapter 5, which addresses spanking and crime, Chart 5.6 shows that the U.S. states with a population that has the strongest commitment to spanking are also the states with the highest homicide rate. Spanking does not directly cause murder, but it provides the behavioral model that characterizes almost three quarters of murders in the United States-use of physical attacks to correct or punish the person attacked. The chapters in Part IV give the results of studies that have found direct links between corporal punishment and adult violence and other crime, including a longitudinal study that followed up children to find whether spanking resulted in less or more crime years later when they were young adults.
The national surveys we analyze in Chapter 17 show that the percent of the U.S. population who believe that spanking is sometimes necessary has dropped from 94% in 1968 to about 70% in 2010. Seventy percent is still a lot. But, the culture is changing. Most Americans now probably also think spanking is something to be avoided when possible. Fewer are spanking older children and teenagers. The 70% who think it is sometimes necessary are probably thinking about toddlers, which is why the next chapter shows over 90% of parents continue to spank toddlers, even though somewhat less often than previously.
The research in this book and the other research found that even in the short run spanking does not work better than nonviolent modes of correction, and in the long run spanking makes the child's behavior worse more often than it makes it better. We believe that this research is one of the causes of the decrease in spanking described in Part V. However, the concluding chapter suggests that the main driving forces for the decrease in spanking are, and will continue to be, changes in the organization of society and changes in values that are not directly about corporal punishment. This includes the century's long expansion of the scope of human rights to include not only people of all races and ethnicities, social classes, and women, but also children. The Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNICEF, 1997), which has been ratified by all United Nations members except Somalia and the United States, is one manifestation of that change. Our concluding chapter discusses the change in human rights explanations of the decrease in spanking, and it is analyzed in more detail by Smith and Durrant (2011) and Newell (2011).
We believe that even though the shift away from corporal punishment is mainly the result of social evolution, research has made an important contribution. The results presented in this book from the past 15 years of research by members of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire concerning spanking provide part of the needed scientific evidence. This research, along with research by others, found that, on average, children whose parents correct their behavior without spanking are better behaved, have better relations with their parents, and are smarter and less likely to be delinquent. As adults, they are less likely to suffer from mental health and family problems and are less likely to commit crime.
The Scientific Climate
The opinions of professionals concerned with child development such as pediatricians, developmental psychologists, family life/parenting educators, and social workers generally parallel the views of the general public, even though some professional organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the National Association of Social Workers have taken a stand against spanking. There is both a growing belief that spanking has harmful side effects and should be avoided and, at the same time, a continuing belief that spanking is sometimes necessary. We suggest these contradictory beliefs coexist because the United States and many other nations are in a period of cultural change in respect to spanking. This paradoxical contradiction is part of the explanation offered in Chapter 18 on why nearly everyone resorts to spanking and for the continued high rate of hitting toddlers as compared with the large decreases in the percent of parents who hit school-age children and teenagers.
The commitment to the folk beliefs that spanking is sometimes necessary and is harmless if done in moderation shows up in surveys of child development by child abuse professionals and in the content of child development and child psychiatry textbooks. A study of 237 clinical child psychologists (Schenck, Lyman, & Bodin, 2000) found that, although they were generally opposed to corporal punishment, two thirds considered it ethical to advise using corporal punishment under some circumstances. A study of 380 lawyers and physicians, who were members of a national professional listserv concerned with child abuse, found that 90% of the lawyers and 70% of the physicians believed there are occasions when it is OK to spank a 6- to 1 0-year-old child (Burgess, Block, & Runyan, 2010). A study by Knox and Brouwer (2008) of 98 medical professionals, residents, mental health professionals, child development specialists, 1 and early childhood service coordinators may seem to contradict the Schenck · and Burgess studies. Knox and Brouwer found that approximately one third had recommended spanking at least once in the past year to parents of children age 5 years or younger. This is far from the two thirds and 70% found by the Schenck et al. (2000) and the Burgess et al. (2010) studies. However, it does not necessarily contradict the studies showing much higher rates of approval of spanking by human service professionals because those who had not advised spanking in the past year may not have encountered a situation for which they felt the misbehavior was persistent enough to advise spanking. In addition, they were not asked if they believed that spanking was sometimes necessary. If they had been asked that, we believe that most of those who had not advised spanking would have agreed it is sometimes necessary. Moreover, that one third of child care professionals had actually advised spanking is itself important.
Another indication that U.S. professionals concerned with children continue to oelieve that spanking is sometimes necessary and harmless when done by loving parents is the minimal, and sometimes zero, coverage of spanking in child development textbooks. At the 2009 conference of the Society for Research in Child Development, one of us examined the child development textbooks with a 2009 or 2010 copyright at the first five publisher's booths. There were 10 such books. The number of pages on spanking in these 10 books ranged from 0 to 2.5, with a mean of 1.5 pages. This is remarkably little coverage for something which, as shown in Chapter 2 is experienced by over 90% of children in the United States and many other nations. In addition, none even mentioned the meta-analysis by Gershoff (2002) that analyzed 88 studies of the effects of spanking and found 93% agreement with spanking showing harmful side effects. None advised readers to never spank. Nevertheless, even the tiny average of 1.5 pages on spanking is more than triple the mean number of pages in child development textbooks published in previous decades (Straus & Stewart, 1999).
The risks associated with spanking are also given little attention or ignored in child psychiatry textbooks (Douglas and Straus, 2007) and in discussions of of steps to prevent physical abuse of children. Special-topic issues of the two leading journals on child abuse do not mention the research showing that at least two thirds of cases of physical abuse confirmed by child protective services began as spanking and then escalated into physical abuse (Straus, 2000; Straus, 2008a). The two-volume compendium on Violence against Women and Children edited by White, Koss, and Kazdin (2011) has nothing on spanking as a risk factor for child abuse or anything else.
An important indicator of the continuing belief that spanking is sometimes necessary comes from a careful reading of the policy statement of the American Academy of Pediatrics published in 1998 and reaffirmed in 2004 (American Academy of Pediatrics, 1998). The policy statement defines spanking as "striking a child with an open hand on the buttocks or extremities." It reviews the evidence on the effects of spanking and concludes that "Corporal punishment is of limited effectiveness and has potentially deleterious side effects. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that parents be encouraged and assisted in the development of methods other than spanking for managing undesired behavior." However, it then says that "other forms of physical punishment than spanking ... are unacceptable ... and ... should never be used." This is, in effect a denial of the previous statement because the only thing that should never be used is other forms of corporal punishment. Thus, it permits "striking a child with an open hand on the buttocks or extremities" in the very document that says it is of limited effectiveness and has potentially deleterious side effects.
That policy statement was more than a decade ago. Have things changed? We believe they have changed but not enough to put never-spanking very high on the agenda of pediatricians. This is illustrated by the American Academy of Pediatrics, Committee on Early Childhood, Adoption, and Dependent Care, and Section on Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics. Neither the policy statement on "Early Childhood Adversity, Toxic Stress, and the Role of the Pediatrician: Translating Developmental Science into Lifelong Health" (Gamer et al., 2012) nor the technical report on which it was based (Shonkoff et al., 20 12) mention spanking, despite the research showing that spanking adversely affects brain development and IQ (see Chapter 10) and increases the probability of antisocial behavior and many other child behavior problems, as shown by the studies in this book and the meta-analysis by Gershoff (2002).
Despite the continuing belief among parents and professionals in the United States concerned with children in the necessity of sometimes spanking, as noted previously, there is also a growing concern with the harmful side effects of spanking and a growing amount of research on spanking. Chart 1.1, which we created on the basis of a search of studies in the Social Science Citation Index, shows that the annual number of journal articles on corporal punishment is growing rapidly. We tabulated articles on spanking, corporal punishment, etc. in the Social Science Citation Index from 1900 to 2010. Chart 1.1 shows that almost nothing was published in the period 1900 to 1929, slightly more in the period 1930 to 1969, and an exponential growth since 1970. Just over 100 articles were published in 2010.
Another indication of the growing recognition of the harmful side effects of spanking is the Report on Physical Punishment in the United States: What Research Tells Us about Its Effects on Children (Gershoff, 2008). It documents the harmful side effects of spanking and it has been endorsed by over 70 organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Nevertheless, the American Psychological Association has not endorsed the statement. On the other hand, a similar Canadian report (Dhrrant, Ensom, & Coalition on Physical Punishment of Children and Youth, 2004) has been adopted by the Canadian Psychological Association and adopted the conclusions of the Canadian Joint Statement as its official position statement, and more than 400 Canadian organizations have endorsed the statement.
Chart 1.1 Exponential Growth in Articles on Spanking (Chart shows dramatic growth from 1975 to 1990 that increases even more until 2010
In the final months of his life Professor Straus handed out free copies of this book and took other actions to indicate that he wanted to make it available, presumably because he recognized that his work could help teach how to reduce violence if made available freely. Therefore I'm posting the rest of the book in four parts. This copy does not include the charts, for now, but the description in the text is as informative, if not more informative than the actual charts.
The Primordial Violence 2014-1
The Primordial Violence 2014-2
The Primordial Violence 2014-3
The Primordial Violence 2014-4
The social causes of husband-wife violence
Forward
Despite the lip service ritualistically paid to the need to integrate sociological theory and empirical research, too often research on the causes and consequences of social problems lacks theoretical guidance. Much theorizing in such areas, on the other hand. proceeds in blissful ignorance of scientific data. The virtue of this book is that it avoids these pitfalls. It presents research findings within a firmly held theoretical framework, at the same time that some of the empirical findings refine existing theories. These findings, to borrow Robert K. Merton's formulation, help to initiate, reformulate, deflect, and clarify theories, rather than simply testing them; and thus contribute not only to empirical knowledge but also to the consolidation of the theoretical propositions in the area of family relationships and in the general field of social conflict and violence.
what I like particularly in the approach of Murray Straus and his associates is their commitment to an ironic perspective. They have a fine sense of the incongruities between the public image of an institution, :n this case the family, and the underlying reality. Just as medical research has shown that hospitals, which are supposed to make people well, may make them sick and produce iatrogenic diseases, so the authors show that family living, supposedly predicated on consensus, integration. and harmony, may lead to forms of conflict and violence rarely found outside the family context. The very features of family life that contribute to intimacy, it turns out, also facilitate high degrees of violence between spouses.
Murray Straus and his associates are finely attuned to the need to attend to the unanticipated as well as the anticipated consequences or social actions. They are aware that although evil intents may lead to desirable consequences, good intentions may lead to undesirable ones. we learn here, for example, that more egalitarian relations between husbands and wives may have the ironic consequence or increasing rather than decreasing conflict between them, at least in the short run. The authors' orientation to the ironic perspective on human affairs yields significant insights that could probably could not have been reached without this stance.
Throughout this book, the authors eschew what Georg Siamel once called the "fallacy cf separateness." That is, they never succumb to the temptation to reg+rd family conflicts in terms of the personalities cf husbands and wives. They are successful at conveying the idea that family conflicts, as all types of interactions within the family, cannot be understood without the realization that they tend to derive from social structures and cultural norms. The high incidence of conflict and violence in contemporary families, they argue persuasively, must be understood in terms of fundamental contradictions built into the foundations of family life. They argue, for example, that when the resources of a spouse are low--when that spouse has, for example. a low status position in the occupational world--the chances are higher that he or she will resort to violence in marital quarrels. They draw attention to the inter-familial consequences of the deprivation of valued status position with attendant losses of ego identity and symbolic reinforcement of self-worth. Hence, the Ironic finding that working-class husbands, who tend to cling to an ideology of male dominance more determinedly than middle class husbands, in fact possess fewer resources for exercising power in the family and thus resort to violence more frequently to compensate.
An ironic perspective, alert to the ambivalence of human relationships, especially in intimate settings, has borne considerable fruit in this work. Aware that (to borrow from Bronislaw Malinowski) aggression like charity begins at home, they have documented with instructive thoroughness that, contrary to the prevailing image, family relations are the breeding ground of both love and hostility, of selfless devotion and of destructive violence. what is more, they have shown that to decrease the level of violence in family settings involves more than counseling and therapy. It involves no less than a restructuring of relations between men and women, which, in its turn, is largely dependent on a fundamental restructuring of the allocation of power and status in the society at large. I hope that their seminal contribution will find an echo among scholarly investigators and social practitioners alike.
Stony Brook. N.I. Lewis A. Coser
Chapter 1
Culture, Social Organization, and Irony in the Study of Family Violence
Gerald T. Hotaling and Murray A. Straus
That acts of physical violence are common--even typical--of American marriages has been well established (see Chapter 2 and Straus, Gelles, and Sreinnetz, 1979). What is not known is why violence occurs, or what to do about it. The perspective of this book is simple: that physical violence between husbands and wives is socially patterned. *1
The chapters are deliberately diverse. but all share the perspective that violence grows out of the nature of social arrangements. In part. the diversity is inevitable because the authors are different. The major differences, however, are built into the plan of the book--to present major differences in viewpoint. Most of the chapters present theories to explain the prevalence of violence in the family. Since the social causes of husband-wife violence are diverse and complex, the different chapters seek to show how different sets of these factors might operate to produce violence.
The chapters also differ because. no matter how cogent the theory, it must be supported by empirical evidence. Consequently, five of the chapters report such data. Here also deliberate diversity exists. illustrating such different methods as case studies, content analysis of popular literature, brief questionnaire studies, and a survey of a nationally representative sample of couples. Each of these theories, and each of these methods, has limitations and advantages. Together, they help unravel the paradox of marital violence. Complete Book
Intimate violence
Preface
"People are not for hitting." We began our research on intimate violence more than fifteen years ago with this deep conviction. Our research began in the 1970s when feelings about the Vietnam War were still running high. The country had been rocked by race riots and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. We paid much too high a price for violence fifty-five thousand young men in Vietnam, dreams of a bright and prosperous future snuffed out by the deaths of political and social leaders, and the suffering of countless victims of violent crime in the streets.
While others attended to public acts of violence, we were drawn to the more private acts. We thought that it was private violence that was at the root of public violence. At first we were frustrated. So little had been written on child abuse and wife abuse that the entire literature could be read at one sitting. Worse, much of what we read was flawed, biased, and unsound. Everything we read and all the advice of colleagues and friends suggested that we were looking up a blind alley; there just wasn't much family violence out there, we were told. We persisted. That it had not appeared in print did not mean it did not exist. We would find newspaper reports on child abuse or family homicide each day. Something was out there.
Initially our involvement was purely scientific. Determining how to study child abuse and wife abuse represented a scientific puzzle to solve. Our job, we assumed, was to conduct sound scientific research so that others (clinicians and policy makers) could act to prevent and treat violence and abuse.
For a while we were able to keep our distance. We handed out surveys to college students. Later we ventured out into the community to interview people in their homes. Still, we were insulated by the scientific approach and the numbers. Always the numbers enabled us to remain detached.
But the distance could not be maintained. What started out as a short-term program of research has become life's work. Plans for other research were never realized. Family violence has taken hold of our lives just as it has the lives of most of the people who try to study, understand, and help the victims.
Slowly we came closer to the problem. Our seemingly dispassionate scholarly books and articles produced a few letters and some telephone calls from other researchers, clinicians, policy makers, and then finally, victims themselves. Friends and relatives began to take us aside and tell us about acts of family violence they had observed or committed. Speaking engagements produced more contacts, more firsthand experience, more sorrow from which we could no longer hide behind numbers. We lost some of our distance. We were forced to acknowledge our personal involvement. "How can this be?" we first asked. "What can we do?" we now ask.
To conduct research on intimate violence is to balance on a thin edge of emotion. On the one hand is the safety and security of scientific detachment. On the other hand is the agony of watching a baby, skull crushed from being thrown against a wall, wheeled into an emergency room. There is the near-total frustration of talking with a battered wife who wants help, while also knowing that there is practically no place she can go to escape the cycle of violence in which she finds herself. And there is anger-anger toward men who beat their wives, rage toward a parent who holds a child down in a scalding-hot bathtub, anger toward a political system whose budget for family violence is no more than the amount of a rounding error at the Pentagon, anger at clinicians who are too quick to take children away from parents, and equal anger at clinicians who wait too long.
Anger can become cynicism quickly. It is easy (and somewhat accurate) to conclude that family violence has always existed and that there is no evidence to suggest it will end or even diminish greatly in our lifetime. Cynicism, like scientific detachment, is a way of coping with the horror and tragedy of intimate abuse. Yet, even with some detachment and some cynicism, we are hopeful. We conduct our research, write our books and articles, and travel around the world to speak on this topic because we believe that human beings are basically nonviolent. We believe that parents and partners are not naturally mean and violent, but rather that violence arises our of social and psychological conditions that can change or be changed. We can choose to be nonviolent. We can raise a generation of nonviolent children who will never perceive violence as a legitimate means of self-expression or problem solving.
It was with these beliefs in mind that we began our research fifteen years ago; it was with these hopes in mind that we commenced the research that produced much of the information we report in this book. And it was with these ideals and aspirations that this book was written. Knowledge can make a difference. People can too.
Complete Book PDF
The sociologist Dair Gillespie points out that before the Civil War, American wives had many duties and few rights. Wives were not permitted to own property, even if they had inherited it. Husbands could collect and use their wives' wages, choose the education and religion of their children, and punish their wives if they displeased them. Husbands could even will children (born or unborn) to other guardians. If a divorce was granted, it was the husband who would decide who would have custody of the children. Husbands, according to Gillespie were their wives' companions, superiors, and masters. p.32
We mentioned thar the poor are overrepresented in official statistics on child abuse. In part, this is due to their greater likelihood of heing violent. However, it is also due to the fact that the poor run the greatest risk of heing accurately and inaccurately labeled "abusers." An injured child with poor parents is more likely to be labeled "abused" than a middle-class child with the same injuries. The sociologists Patrick Turbett and Richard O'Toole conducted an experiment with physicians and nurses. Each group was divided in half. One-half received a medical file that described a child, the child's injuries, and facts about the parents. Unbeknownst to the participants in the experiment, the files were systematically varied. For onehalf of the subjects, the child's father was described as heing a teacher, while the other half read that the father was a janitor. Even though the injury to the child was identical, the son of the janitor was more likely to be described as a victim of abuse than the son of the teacher. Turhett and O'Toole next kept the occupation and injury the same but varied the race of the child. Half of the subjects read that the child was black, while the other half had a file that described the child as white. The black children were more likely to be labeled as "abused."
Here again we see evidence that people want to see abuse as occurring in families "other than theirs." Seeing abuse as confined to poor or black families is yet another way people construct the acts of others as deviant and their own behavior as normal. p.43-4
Reviews of the different forms of drugs and their possible impact on violent behavior have found some consistent evidence. Opiates, such as heroin, are rarely associated with violence. Marijuana produces a euphoric effect. Contrary to the view of the U.S. commissioner of narcotics in 1937, Marijuana may actually reduce, not produce, violent behavior. Research on LSD also finds that the physiological effects of this drug are antithetical with violence. Amphetamine use, however, is quite another story. This is a drug that raises excitability and muscle tension. This may lead to impulsive behavior. The behavior that follows from amphetamine use is related to both the dosage and the pre-use personality of the user. High-dosage users who already have aggressive personalities are likely to become more aggressive when using this drug.
It is clearly difficult to establish a direct causal link between drug use and violence in the home. Type of drug, dosage, previous personality or character disorders, social setting, and social expectations all play a role in influencing the behavior of a substance user. Because of the ethical considerations that are involved in conducting research on drugs and violence, it is almost impossible to design a study that would disentangle all the possible factors that relate to drug use and violence.
Studies of nonhuman primates may help us understand the effect of certain drugs. The primatologists Neil Smith and Larry Byrd, of the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia, have studied the behavior of what they refer to as "captive groupliving monkeys." The monkeys (stump-tailed macaques) were given a protocol of d-amphetamine and then observed. Those monkeys receiving the drug did increase in their aggressive behavior. Most remarkable, in terms of our concern with family violence, was that the aggression was more likely to be directed at kin-related monkeys than non-kin-related. More importantly it was the youngest kin monkeys who were the targets of the aggression. Smith and Byrd have applied their findings from nonhuman primate research to the human condition and estimate that perhaps as much as 5 percent of instances of physical child abuse are related to amphetamine use and abuse. p.47-8
Simply stated, the more normal hitting is perceived to be, the more the people doing the hitting and being hit view the act as legitimate, normal, and useful, the less likely those persons are to define the behavior as "violent." The public shares the view that so-called normal hitting is not violent. We found that it is difficult to arouse an indifferent public to viewing acts other than the most sensational and outrageous as violent. In our own research, we have always viewed violence as a continuum, beginning with slaps, grabs, and spankings, and extending up to murder. Yet, we are frequently criticized that such a broad definition dilutes our message and the possible impact of our research and recommendations. For our part, we think s~ich criticisms are not only incorrect, but potentially harmful. Claiming that only outrageous and unusual acts represent violence serves to license the more normal slaps, spankings, and pushes. As we have said again and again, violence is possible if we fail to define it as wrong or improper. And, as we have found, permitting the socalled "normal" acts of violence sets the stage for a possible escalation to the more harmful and dangerous behaviors. p.53-4
Twenty years of discussion, debate, and action have led us to conclude that there will never be an accepted or acceptable definition of abuse, because abuse is not a scientific or clinical term. Rather, it is a political concept. Abuse is essentially any act that is considered deviant or harmful by a group large enough or with sufficient political power to enforce the definition. Abuse is a useful term for journalists who want to capture the attention of their readers or viewers. It is a useful political term because it carries such a strong pejorative connotation that it captures public attention. Unfortunately, there is no one set of objective acts that can be characterized as abusive. What is defined as abuse depends on a process of political negotiation. What is now considered child abuse and wife abuse is the product of a twenty-year effort to educate clinicians, policy makers, and the public about what acts and actions are harmful to women, children, and other family members. p.57-8
Parent Victims. One the other side of the coin of adolescent abuse are those parents of teenage children who are beaten and abused by their children. Most people assume that because mothers and fathers are typically larger than their children and command most, if not all, of the family's social and economic resources, they are immune to violence at the hands of their children. Such, however, is not the case. Clinicians have identified some severe and grievous injuries caused by children. The physician Henry Harbin and his colleague Dennis Madden report an instance in which an eleven-year-old boy became violent after being spanked by his mother. The child pushed his mother down, broke her coccyx, and then kicked her in the face while she was on the floor. The sociologist Carol Warren studied fifteen adolescents who were admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Although some of the children, as young as twelve years old, lacked physical strength, they more than compensated in speed and choice of weapons. One twelve-year-old poured gasoline in the bathroom while his mother was in there, threw down a match, and shut the door. p.61
The great dilemma in applying the term neglect to acts of omission or commission by parents is determining whether the parents neglected their children by choice, or simply did not have the financial or material resources to do better. It is certainly one thing to deliberately starve a child or fail to provide adequate clothing. However, many children suffer malnutrition because their parents simply do not have the resources to purchase food. It is not uncommon for families to fall through the cracks of the social service system and for their children to pay the price. In these cases society, not parents, is responsible for the harm done.
Again, as with emotional abuse, there are few adequate statistics that can be used to estimate how common neglect is. Our own best guess is that child neglect is about twice as frequent as are acts of physical abuse. This means that perhaps one in eleven children, or about four to five million children each year, suffers from some form of child neglect. p.69
Sometimes investigators agree on specific characteristics that are believed to be associated with violence; other times the findings are contradictory. There is one thing that researchers agree on-there are a multitude of factors associated with violence in the home. Despite public clamor for a single-factor explanation, no one factor -not mental illness, not experience with violence, not poverty, not stress, and not alcohol or drugs-explains all or most acts of intimate violence. p.84
Economic adversity and worries about money pervade the typical violent home. Alicia, the thirty-four-year-old wife of an assemblylme worker, has beaten, kicked, and punched both her children. So has her husband Fred. She spoke about the economic problems that hung over their heads:
He worries about what kind of a job he's going to get, or if he's going to get a job at all. He always worries about supporting the family. 1 think 1 worry about it more than he does. . . . It gets him angry and frustrated. He gets angry a lot. I think he gets angry at himself lor not providing what he feels we need. He has to take it out on someone, and the kids and me are the most available ones.
We witnessed a more graphic example of the impact of economic stress during one of our in-home interviews with a violent couple. When we entered the living room to begin the interview we could not help but notice the holes in the living room walls. During the course of the interview, Jane, the twenty-four-year-old mother of three children, told us that her husband had been laid off from his job at a local shipyard and had come home, taken out his shotgun, and shot up the living room. Violence had not yet been directed at the children, but as we left and considered the family, we could not help but worry about the future targets of violent outbursts. p.85
Violent parents are likely to have experienced or been exposed to violence as children. Although this does not predetermine that they will he violent (and likewise, some abusive parents grew up in nonviolent homes), there is the heightened risk that a violent past will lead to a violent future.
One of the more surprising outcomes of our first national survey of family violence was that there was no difference between blacks and whites in the rates of abusive violence toward children. This should not have been the case. First, most official reports of child abuse indicate that blacks are overrepresented in the reports. Also, blacks in the United States have higher rates of unemployment than whites and lower annual incomes-two factors that we know lead to higher risk of abuse. That blacks and whites had the same rate of abusive violence was one of the great mysteries of the survey. A careful examination of the data collected unraveled the apparent mystery. While blacks did indeed encounter economic problems and life stresses at greater rates than whites, they also were more involved in family and community activities than white families. Blacks reported more contact with their relatives and more use of their relatives for financial support and child care. It was apparent that the extensive social networks that black families develop and maintain insulate them from the severe economic stresses they also experience, and thus reduce what otherwise would have been a higher rate of parental violence. p.86
Dale, wife of a Fortune 500 executive, wrote us so that we would know that wife beating is not confined to only poor households. Her husband beats her regularly. He has hurled dishes at her, thrown her down stairs, and blackened her eyes. When her husband drinks, she often spends the night huddled in the backseat of their Lincoln Continental. Marion lives so far on the other side of the tracks, she might as well be on another planet. She and her husband live five stories up in a run-down tenement. Heat is a luxury that they often cannot afford, and when they can afford it, the heat rarely works. Marion's husband has broken her jaw and ribs, and has shot at her on two occasions. The range of homes where wife beating occurs seems to defy categorization. One can pick up a newspaper and read of wife beating in a lower-class neighborhood and then turn the page and read that the wife of a famous rock musician has filed for divorce claiming she was beaten. p.88
The latter lesson ties in well with our finding that stress also leads to an increased risk of violence in the home. One theory holds that people learn to use violence to cope with stress. If this is correct, then stress would be a necessary, but not sufficient, precondition for family violence. In other words, stress alone does not cause violence unless the family members have learned that being violent is both appropriate and also will not meet with negative sanctions. Another theory is that learning to be violent and stress are two independent contributors to intimate violence and abuse. p.91
Lurking beneath the surface of all intimate violence are confrontations and controversies over power. Our statistical evidence shows that the risk of intimate violence is the greatest when all the decision making in a home is concentrated in the hands of one of the partners. Couples who report the most sharing of decisions report the lowest rates of violence. Our evidence goes beyond the statistics. Over and over again, case after case, interview after interview, we hear batterers and victims discuss how power and control were at the core of the events that led up to the use of violence. Violent husbands report that they "need to" hit their wives to show them who is in charge. Some of the victimized wives struggle against domination and precipitate further violence. Other wives tell us that they will actually provoke their husband to violence because they want him to he more dominant. This is not so much a case of the wife being a masochist as it is another example of the conflicts and struggles that occur as couples confront the traditional cultural expectation that the male should be the dominant person in the household. Some couples fight against this prescription, while others fight to preserve it. p.92
Common sense would argue that weekends are the most violent time of the week for families. Common sense would not lead one to assume that the most violent times of the year are Christmas and Easter. When we looked at which day of the week violence was most likely to occur, we found that the empirical evidence was in full support of common sense. Weekends are when families spent the most time together and when the potential for conflicts and conflicts of interest is greatest. Not surprisingly, seven out of ten violenr episodes we talked about with family members took place on either Saturday or Sunday. Weekends after a payday can be especially violent. Janice, the mother of an infant daughter, told us about the typical weekend fight:
It starts over money. He gets paid on Friday. So he comes home on Fridays and I ask him for money. I am usually at the stove cooking when he comes home. And, I have no money left. So I asks. This last Friday he said he didn't have no money. I got real mad. I mean, its payday and he has no money? He said he borrowed money and had to pay it hack. I said he just must be lyin'. He spends it on booze or gambles it. Other times we fights because he gives me only fifty dollars. I can't feed him and the baby with just fifty dollars. So I got mad and started to yell.
Thus, the days of the week that are the most violent are those that combine the most conflict and violence-producing structural components of family life-time together, privacy, and stress.
Common sense would not suggest that violence is most likely to erupt at times of the year when families celebrate holidays and the spirit of family togetherness. Yet, contrary to common sense, it is the time from Thanksgiving to New Year's Day and again at Easter that violence in the home peaks.
As we conducted our interviews with members of violent homes we heard again and again about violence that occurred around the Christmas tree. Even the Christmas tree became a weapon in some homes:
I remember one particularly violent time. When we were first married. He was out drinking and he came home stinking drunk. I suppose I must have said something. Well, he took a fit. He started putting his fist threw the walls. Finally, he just picked up the Christmas tree and threw it at me.
Another woman recalled her most violent experience:
He hit me just before New Year's Day. I don't really recall what went on. We argue a lot. This time it might have been about money, or maybe the kids. Anyway, he got fierce. He punched me again and again. 1 was bleeding real had. He had to take me to the hospital. It was the worst time of the year I ever had.
Perhaps people have a clearer memory of a violent event if it happens around a holiday. While this is a plausible explanation for our findings, it is not the complete answer. We have examined weekly reports of hospital admissions for child abuse and neglect, and found that the peak times of year for admissions were the period from Christmas to New Year's Day, and again in the spring around Easter Sunday. p.94-5
A number of factors may contribute to the likelihood of domestic violence and abuse during the Christmas season. This is a time when families can assume tremendous financial burdens. Purchasing Christmas gifts can either take a toll on a family's resources or plunge a family into debt. Stress can also come from not buying gifts and presents. If a family cannot afford gifts expected by children, loved ones, and others, this can be extremely frustrating. The holiday season offers a stark contrast between what is expected and what a family can afford.
Holidays also create nonfinancial stress. Christmas and Easter holidays project images of family harmony, love, and togetherness. Songs, advertisements, and television specials all play up the image of the caring, loving, and even affluent family. A family with deep conflict and trouble may see these images in sad and frustrating contrast wirh their own lives. We know that prison riots are more likely to occur during holiday seasons, as prisoners apparently become stressed about being separated from family and friends during times of the year when such closeness is expected. Clearly, being with family and friends, but having unmet expectations for love and warmth, can also be extremely frustrating.
Time of day and time of year analysis supports the notion that privacy and stress are important structural contributors to domestic violence. Conflict frequently erupts over a stressful event, during a stressful time of the day, or around a stressful time of year. If the eruption takes place in a private setting, and at a time and place where it is difficult to flee or back down, the conflict can escalate into violence. The more privacy, the greater the power difference, and the fewer options the victim has in terms of getting help or finding protection, the more the violence can escalate.
The saddest and most frustrating aspect of our analysis of the structural, personal, familial, temporal, and spatial dynamics of intimate violence is that our results seem to say that violence in the home is inevitable. Lessons learned as a child set the stage for using violence as an adult. The structural makeup of the modern family is like a pressure cooker containing and escalating stress and conflict. If violence breaks out late at night, on a weekend, or a holiday, victims often have no place too run, no place to hide.
Our profile of violent families is not quite as bleak as it might seem. First, no one structural factor, personal experience, or situation predetermines that all or any family will be violent. Second, families do not live in a vacuum. Family members and people outside of the home can intervene to turn down the heat under the pressure cooker. We have found that friends, relatives, and neighbors can successfully intervene and reduce the pressure that could lead to violence. We will have more to say about this in part 2 when we examine the aftermath of intimate violence and the methods that can be used to reduce or prevent violence. p.95-7
The computer spewed out the first printout of our data in the winter of 1977. We hurriedly flipped through the tables with mixed reactions. When we saw the statistics we were more than satisfied. There were enough cases of violence to allow for analysis. Indeed, the incidence was quite a bit higher than we had expected. We had not, after all, wasted a quarter of a million dollars of the taxpayers' money. Finding enough cases to conduct a proper statistical analysis was small compensation for discovering so much human pain and suffering. We were saddened to find the suffering so pervasive, and embarrassed that its existence was necessary to justify our own research. p.102
Unlike most debates among scholars, this one spilled over into the public media. United Press International headlined a wire service report on Steinmetz's article: STUDY BACKS UP SUSPICIONS HUSBAND IS MORE BATTERED SPOUSE. An Ann Landers column on husband abuse included a letter from Susan Schechter, then director of women's services at the Chicago Loop Center, YMCA. Schechter attacked the validity of the Steinmetz article. She said that Steinmetz's data on husbands as the most likely victims of abuse were being used against women's groups seeiiing funding for shelters. Steinmetz debated the meaning and interpretation of her data with journalists Roger Langley and Richard Levy on "The Today Show." Time magazine devoted a full-page story to husband abuse in March 1978. Dr. Joyce Brothers mentioned the husband abuse data in her newspaper column. With each telling of the story, the estimates of abused men were inflated. Our survey found that about two million men were victims of violence that could cause injury. When journalist Langley wrote an article for the New York Daily News, he pushed the figure up to twelve million men. Woozles, it seems, tend to multiply in direct proportion to the degree of controversy associated with a story.
There was no resolution to the public debate over battered husbands. The debate was fought over numbers-how many husbands were hit or abused-and it missed the mark. The real issues are initiation of violence, outcomes, and consequences. The same study that found fortysix men in one thousand being hit also found that the vast majority of these men were hit because they had initiated the violence and abuse. By and large, women used violence to protect themselves. Victimized women are literally between the proverbial rock and the hard place. If they leave, they stand a good chance of joining the millions of other women who have feminized poverty in America. If they stay, they are either beaten again or forced to use extreme physical violence to protect themselves. p.105
Perhaps the most unfortunate outcome of the wrangle over battered men is that since the debate in the late 1970s, there has been virtually no additional research carried out on the topic. The furor among social scientists and in the public media has contaminated the entire topic. Consequently, we have refused every request for an interview or to appear on any talk show on this topic for fear of yet again being misquoted, miscast, or misrepresented. Other social scientists who witnessed the abuse heaped on our research groupespecially on Suzanne Steinmetz-have given the topic of battered men a wide berth. p.105-6
IS FAMILY VIOLENCE INCREASING?
Ten years ago only one in ten Americans thought rhat child abuse was a serious social problem. By 1982, nine out of ten people surveyed by Louis Harris and Associates thought that child abuse was a serious problem. Has the problem increased ninefold, or have Americans just become more 3ware of the dimensions of intimate violence?
To listen to the talk shows and to read the popular magazines one would be convinced that we are in the midst of an epidemic of domestic assault. Those who believe that there has been an explosion of domestic disturbance in America have ample evidence to support their claim. They point correctly to greater stress in our society, unemployment, economic problems, and the rising numbers of single parent households. They point incorrectly to the supposed rise in the divorce rate-actually the divorce rate increased consistentiy from 1965 to 1979, but has remained stable since 1979.
Lost among the clamor about the deterioration and near collapse of the family and the daily reports of new and more chilling cases of child or wife abuse is the fact that violence between intimates is not new. Harming those you love and are related to goes back to Cain killing Abel in Genesis. The historical record is full of evidence of the killing, maiming, and beating of children by parents and wives by husbands. Lloyd DeMause examined the history of childhood and graphically noted that in 1526 the latrines of Rome were said to "resound with the cries of children who had been plunged into them." Women, Russell and Rebecca Dobash note, have traditionally been the "appropriate victims" of family violence.
The available historical and cross-cultural evidence might support the claim the violence in the home today is no worse than it has been in the past. Perhaps the chances of violencc occurring in the home today arc less than chances decades or centuries ago. Current population data could be used to argue that today's families are actually less likely to be violent than families ten or twenty years ago. Couples in the 1980s are marrying later, having fewer children, and are having fewer unwanted children. These factors are a11 related to reduced chances of violence occurring in the home. In point of fact, these data can also he used to argue that the family is not dcteriorating hut remaining a strong, viable institution, despite the preachings of conservative politicians and religious zealots. p.106-7
Quite frankly, even before we designed the Second National Family Violence Survey and applied to the National Institute of Mental Health for the more than $600,000 we needed to conduct the study, we expected to find no change in the rates of domestic violence. Our first survey found the rates of abuse to be around 4 percent. For there to be a statistically significant decrease or increase, we would have had to find a change of plus or minus nearly one or two percentage points. This would represent a change of between 20 and 50 percent. Such a massive change seemed highly unlikely.
We were surprised in 1976 when our computers and calculators told us that the rates of family abuse were as high as they were. We were shocked in 1985 to find that, contrary to our expectations, the rates of abusive violence toward children and women had declined far more than we could have ever expected (see fig. 1, 2, and 3 in Appendix C.) p.108
Reactions to our report were swift, emotional, and contradictory. Although a New York Times editorial called the findings "good news," others were a good deal more skeptical. The Christian Science Monitor reported that an unnamed Reagan administration official had "serious doubts" about the accuracy of the surveys. Dr. Frederick Green, vice president of Children's Hospital National Medical Center in DC, disputed the findings, noting that his caseload of child abuse had not declined, but had risen. The sociologist Richard Rerk summed up the skeptics when he was interviewed by the Christian Science Monitor and said, "Given all we know about the pattern of crime statistics, a 47 percent drop is so unprecedented as to be unbelievable. Never before has there been a drop of that magnitude, that rapidly."
The strongest argument against the claim that family violence has decreased is that the changes we found may have been artificialdue to what researchers refer to as rnethodological artifacts. One methodological artifact is that we used different methods to collect our data. We collected the dara in '1975 using in-person interviews. The interviews in 1985 were conducted over the telephone. Perhaps the difference in dara collection produced the changed rates of violence. Rigorous research methodologists objected to our changing data collection techniques. They pointed out that by choosing to coliect data for the second survey by telephone, we were unable to interview families who do not have phones. This amounts to about 5 percent of households. More importantly, these are likely to be low-income households who are at high risk of being violent and abusive.
A second plausible explanation for the decline in the rates of reported child and wife beating is that respondents may have been more reluctant to report severe violence in 1985 than in 1975. There has been a massive amount of public and media attention paid to child and wife abuse in the last decade. There have been numerous national media campaigns, new child abuse and neglect laws have been passed, hot lines for reporting have been instituted, and there has been almost daily media attention paid to the problems of intimate violence. The decrease in reporting may be due to what the sociologist Joseph Gusfield calls a "moral passage." As family violence becomes less acceptable, fewer parents and husbands become willing to admit participating in violence.
Richard Berk claims that a 47 percent decline in the rate of child abuse is unprecedented and nearly unbelievable. Yet, had Berk consulted the Uniform Crime Reports tabulation of homicide rates he would have found that the rate increased by 100 percent between 1963 and 1973, and then dropped by 29 percent between 1980 and 1984. If the same rate of declinc is maintained for six more years, the ten-year decline would be greater than our 47 percent change. Thus, there is precedent for our findings. The homicide statistics parallel our own findings. p.109-10
The belief that battered and abused children grow up to become abusive parents is widely shared and accepted by professionals and the general public. Yet, among students of child maltreatment there is heated controversy over the validity of the claim that abuse leads to abuse. On the one side of the debate are those who see childhood experiences with abuse as a major and direct cause of later violent behavior. Henry Kempe and Barton Schmitt claimed that "untreated abused children frequently grow up to be delinquents, murderers, a~nd barterers of the next generation of children." On the other side is the child development expert Edward Zigler of Yale University who, after a review of the major research studies on the link between abuse experienced as a child and abusive behavior as an adult, concluded that "the majority of ahused children do not become abusive parents" and ". . . the time has come for the intergenerational myth to be placed aside."
The most careful review of research on the intergenerational link finds that between 18 and 70 percent of those individuals who grew up in violence will re-create that behavior as adults. Zigler and his colleague Joan Kaufman believe that the most accurate estimate within this wide range is thar the rate of intergenerational transmission is about 30 percent. They conclude that this means that the link between being maltreated and becoming abusive is far from inevitable; thus they advocate abandoning the notion of abused children growing up to be abusive. p.121
The researchers Rosemary Hunter and Nancy Kilstrom reported that the parents who did not repeat the cycle of abuse shared a number of characteristics. These nonabusive parents had more extensive social supports and fewer ambivalent feelings about their pregnancies. Their babies were healthier. The parents also displayed more open anger about their own abusive experiences and were able to describe these traumas more freely. If they had been abused, it was by one parent, while the other parent served as a supportive life raft in a sea of trouble and pain. p.122
Among the most obvious personality traits of children from violent homes is aggressiveness. It has been our experience, and the experience of many clinicians, that children from violent homes are not only aggressive and oppositional, they are also extremely wary. A social worker who treats battered children described a first session with a battering victim.
We did not exactly start off on the proper foot. I was just finishing my lunch when 1 took the elevator up to the outpatient clinic where I was to meet the family. My cotherapist had already introduced herself to the state welfare worker and the child. I walked up to all three of them. 1 had a doughnut on a plate that was to be my dessert. The child (a ten-year-old boy) grahbed the doughnut off my plate and stuffed it into his mouth. Things went downhill from here. I did manage to get him to come with me to the office where we were to meet for therapy. Once in the office he was all over the place. He moved sporadically from one chair to the next, from one toy to another. He would glance or glare at me from rime to time, but never directly respcnded to my attempts to start a conversation. Nor was he interested in any nonverbal interaction-such as a game or playing with a toy. After about fifteen minutes of frenetic behavior, he discovered the window and the fact that we were on the tenth floor. He jumped up onto the inside windowsill and stood flush against the window-first facing me, then facing out. The window was sealed, the building is air-conditioned, but it did not give me a secure feeling to see him pressed against the window staring down. When our fifryminute session was over I was hungry, exhausted, and frustrated. I had failed to make any real contact with him at all.
Researchers and clinicians lisr several characteristics that have been found among abused children, including symptoms such as bed-wetting, poor self-concept, a tendency to withdraw and become isolated, and a pattern of hyperactivity and tantrums. E. Milling Kinard reviewed much of the literature on the psychological consequences of abuse and found other traits such as an inability to trust others, difficulties relating to both peers and adults, and a generalized unhappiness. The psychiatrist Brandt Steele notes that many abused children see themselves as ugly, stupid, inept, clumsy, or somehow defective. p.124-5
Walker's theory of learned helplessness has its roots in the research of the experimental psychologist, Martin Seligman. Seligman and his associates placed dogs in cages and administered electrical shocks at random and varied intervals. The dogs learned quickly that no matter how they responded, they could not control the shocks. At the beginning, the dogs tried to escape. When they found that they could not stop the shocks, they stopped searching for an escape and became passive and submissive. At this point the researchers altered the experiment. They first tried to teach the dogs to cross to the other side of the cage and escape. The dogs remained passive. The researchers then left the cage doors open and showed the dogs the way out. The dogs were still passive, made no attempt to get out, and made no attempt to avoid the shocks. Only by repeated attempts to physically drag the dogs out of the cage were the dogs motivated to overcome their learned helplessness and attempt to escape. Seligman's group and other experimental psychologists have repeated these experiments with cats, fish, rats, birds, primates, and even humans with the same results. p.142
... When we asked this particular woman whether she called the police, she responded quietly and politely, "Honey, in this town my husband is the police." p.149
Indifference also occurs when the observer, a physician, social worker, police officer, or judge, actually approves of the use of violence toward a victim. In one case a presiding judge refused to sentence an alleged sexual abuser to jail because he believed that the sixyear-old victim had acted provocatively and enticed the abuser into having sex with her. Those who think that sparing the rod spoils the child are often reluctant to intervene in cases of physical abuse unless grievous damage is inflicted upon the child. Feminists have argued for years that police and court oificers fail to protect victims of battering because they condone women being hit. Two judges in Massachusetts have recently volunteered to stop hearing domestic violence cases because their actions and comments on the bench persuaded the state chief justice that the judges were biased in their handling of domestic violence cases-a polite way of saying that the judges were far too approving of the violence inflicted on women. p.163
Lately, however, prosecution has become an increasingly prevalent form of intervention in cases of child abuse, and the criminal justice system has begun to play a larger role in prevention and treatment of maltreatment. Eli Newberger, a leading voice iri the field of child abuse treatment and prevention, has criticized the more aggressive role now played by the criminal justice system, and notes that prosecution itself is an increasingly prevalent form of abuse. For example:
A 12-year-old girl in California became the subject of a mandated child abuse case report when she, her mother, and her stepfather sought help from a therapist for a problem in the family. The details of the reporr have not been made public, but there apparently was concern on the part of the therapist that the child might be a victim of sexual abuse. The agency receiving the reporr made the district attorney aware of the complaint. A criminal charge was brought against the stepfather, bur at trial the child refused to divulge what may have happened between her stepfather and her. The prosecutor asked the court to find her in contempt if she continued to refuse to testify. The judge ordered her held in solitary confinement until she agreed to tell the court the facts. She was held in solitary for nine days until she was freed by a higher court.
Two brothers, 7 and 12 years old, were ordered a week ago to remain in the custody of a father accused of sexually abusing the younger child. To quote yesterday's article in the Chicago Sun-Times: "The boys wanted to be with their mother, bur the judge said she could take custody only if she came up with a cash bond she couldn't raise.. . "
Newberger, an ardent supporter of the compassionate approach to child maltreatment, notes with concern that the current punitive approach to deviance in our society has led to a reckless abandonment of social welfare approaches to giving support to families and children under stress. Prosecution of abusers, he notes, serves a number of functions-some helpful, some harmful, and some futile. Prosecution, according to Newberger, can:
1. Punish offenders-its first and most appropriate function
2. Provide public entertainment
3. Provide excellent opportunities for district attorneys to further their political ambitions
4. Provide work and income for defense lawyers
5. Justify the abandonment of social welfare approaches to human troubles
6. Serve as a smokescreen to hide the real causes of abuse (and thus continue to support the myth of abusers as aliens and victims as innocents)
7. Punish the victim p.167-9
Mediation, in one form or another, was the typical form of intervention used by police officers. The most common form of intervention used by the police when they were called by a woman was to try to calm everyone down (see fig. 14 in Appendix C). Other frequent interventions included taking time to listen to the woman's story, taking information and filing a report, issuing a warning, and breaking up the fight if it was still going on. Stronger steps were somewhat less common. Four out of ten women said that the police ordered the man out of the house. As we noted earlier, arrest (and even its threat) is the least common form of police intervention. Only four women said that the police arrested their husbands or male partners, while one woman was herself arrested. Two women said that the police did nothing. Asked whether they thought the police should have been easier or tougher, most women said that the police officers' response was about right. Overall, the women we talked to seemed satisfied with the actions taken by the police.
Police intervention when called by men is similar to intervention when the caller is female. Mediation is still the most common intervention. Police were most likely to try to calm everyone down, take time to listen to the story, take information, and file a report. Two of the men who called the police were themselves arrested, while the police never arrested the wife or female partner of the man who called. The range of actions and interventions used by the police was much narrower when they were called by men; neither the man or his partner was ordered out of the house, no threats of arrest were made, and there was no hitting or pushing of the parties involved in the marital violence. Two men said thar the police did nothing. p.170-1
There is no typical shelter with typical services. Although the goal of each shelter is to protect women from violent men, the rules, regulations, and organizational structure of shelters vary considerably. Some are in secret locations. Women who call for help are told they will be met and brought to the shelter. Many shelters prohibit men, including workmen or the police, from entering. Male children are accepted into these shelters, but older male adolescents are not allowed to stay with their battered mothers. Virtually all shelters have rules that prohibit the spanking of children. There are limits on how long women can remain, and limits as to how many times women can return to the shelter after going back to their violent partners. p.175
BABY DIES UNDER CARE OF PROTECTIVE SERVICES, the newspaper headlines read. An investigation of the Department of Social Services was initiated. The director resigned, and a new director was appointed. The standard practice for dealing with battered children changed from, "Keep the family together," to "at all costs, protect the child." This mollified the public, and it also restored calm to relations among the police, social services, and the hospital child abuse team-all of whom blamed each other for Diane's death. Eighteen months later, the protective service system experienced another tragedy that swung the pendulum back to the principle of keeping families together.
Case 2: "Protecting" the Victim
Some months after Diane's death, an investigation revealed that a one-year-old child was being neglected by his mother. The mother was a teenage, single parent, who seemed both uninterested and unable to care for the needs of her son. The Department of Social Services chose to remove the young boy from his mother and to place him in a foster home. Within six months the boy was dead, beaten to death by his foster father. Again there were newspaper headlines. Again an investigation was begun-this time it revealed rhat the overworked Department of Social Services had not carefully investigated the foster family. The foster father, it seems, had previously been reported for physical and sexual abuse. Again the agency director was replaced. Again the medical, social service, and criminal justice agencies pointed hostile fingers of blame at one another. The pendulum swung again. The standard practice of intervention became, "above all, keep the family together."
The complexity of the problem of child abuse and family violence, coupled with the strong feeling aroused by individual cases, invite a search for an orderly world and attract those involved in providing services to simple solutions like moths ro a flame. p.186
National social work guidelines recommend rhat protective service workers be assigned between twenty and twenty-five cases. The protective worker who was following Diane and Tim shared his desk with two other workers in his office. He had no telephone. His training consisted of a master of social work degree and a fourteenday training course in protective service work. His salary at the time was less than that of a kindergarten teacher, less than an assembly line worker, less than a unionized trash collector in the same city. Under these conditions, he was charged with the responsibiiity of protecting the lives and welfare of more than thirty children who were deemed to be at the highest risk of harm.
The most obvious constraint against effective intervention and prevention of family violence is insufficient funding to provide adequate services for all victims and fanlilies involved in domestic violence. The amount of money allocated to prevent and treat private violence and abuse is so small that it would be considered a rounding error in the Defense Department. Worse, over the past six years even this small amount of funding has been slashed. Within xveeks of Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, the federal Office of Don~estic Violence was eliminated. The h~idget of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect was cut, and most of the experienced staff in the office had their positions eliminated in a federal "reduction in force" effort. The budget for research on family violence was also severely pared. The burden of providing treatment and prevention serviccs was shifted from federal government to state governments and the private sector. p.186-7
Unfortunately, the scarcity of resources has not led to agencies and institutions banding together to lobby and demand more resources for the prevention and treatment of family violence. Instead, as is often the case when the need is great and the resources are small, there has been fierce competition for the limited resources that are available.
We have spent the better part of our professional careers watching those concerned with child abuse compete against those who wanted to provide services for spouse abuse and vice versa. An example of this kind of competition is the radical feminist argument thar there is no such thing as a battered husband. That concept flies in the face of logic and empirical data. Yet, radical feminists believe that if we acknowledge the existence of battered husbands, then the funding designated for programs to assist battered women will be cut further because monies will be directed at programs for battered men. Thus, many radical feminists have fought for years to keep battered husbands closeted so that the small amount of money that was available for wife abuse would not be jeopardized. Battered men have been kept closeted, but the funding has been cut nonetheless.
We have listened to very intelligent physicians claim that spouse abuse is not a major problem, and that the real problem is child abuse. On the other hand, those concerned with wife abuse maintain that wife abuse is the real problem and that if it could be prevented we would not need to spend money on child abuse. The rationale (such as it is) behind these arguments is that the resource pie for domestic violence is only so big, and "we need all of it that we can get." p.188
The sociologist Kai Erikson once said thar our systems of preventing deviance operate so poorly that one has to wonder if the systems are organized to encourage and maintain deviance rather than to control and prevent it. There are many government policies that not only fail to help victims of family violence, but actually exacerbate the problem. One example is government policy eliminating funding of abortion services for women receiving welfare. Child abuse researchers are convinced that if an unwanted baby is born to a household with low resources, that child is at the highest risk of being abused. I was called to testify before the U.S. Senate on the reauthorization of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1978. When asked, "What can we [the government] do to stop child abuse," my answer was, "With all due respect, what the government ought to do is stop passing laws that encourage people to abuse their children. Then we can begin to talk about what you can do to stop it." The senator who posed the question asked what I meant. I replied, "When the government cuts off abortion funds for women who are on welfare, it guarantees an increase in child abuse in this society. When the government fails to enact gun control legislation, it guarantees the maintenance of a certain level of family violence. And, when politicians say they are going to fight inflation and recession by allowing eleven pcrccnt or seven percent of the population to remain unemployed, and we know that unemployment is highly correlated with child abuse, do not ask what you can do-you are part of the problem." Government policies that endorse the use of violence to solve problems, and government action and inaction that increase family stress in certain strata of the society serve to encourage and not to prevent family violence. p.188-9
The impact of the constraints is often tragic. Fewer than one out of three abused children are reported to the proper agency. The deaths of women and children at the hands of partners and parents are preventable-nine out of ten women and children who die have already come to public attention before their deaths. We know many of the victims who need services, and yet we have not organized ourselves in such a way as to help. p.189
Public awareness campaigns ought to educate the public that family violence is a public matter requiring informal as well as formal intervention. At the informal level, the public ought to serve as an agent of social control, as is the case in Sweden. Sweden enacted legislation prohibiting parents from using corporal punishment on their children. We observed a parent swat a child at a bus stop in Stockholm. We then watched a passerby calmly and gently approach the parent and say, "Hitting your child is not permissible in Sweden." At the formal level, the public needs to learn how and to whom to report instances of abuse and neglect that require legal or criminal interventions. p.191
How do we develop internal control? We develop a cultural ethic that hitting children is inappropriate. As a country, Sweden represents a pibneer in the Western world in attempting to develop such a cultural norm. Sweden has taken a strong stand against the use of violence as a means of punishment. Capital punishment has long been banned. In 1952 the corporal punishment of children in schools was outlawed. Legislation prohibiting spanking was enacted in 1979, and has since been adopted by all other Scandinavian countries. Sweden has gone beyond simply legislating against using state, school, or parental violence in its effort to develop a nonviolent moral climate. Firearm ownership is rigorously controlled. While at least half of all American households contain guns, mostly handguns, gun ownership in Sweden is controlled, and gun ownership is limited mostly to weapons used for hunting. Television violence offers another important contrast. Violent programming in Sweden is severely restricted. Actually, Swedish television is barely on the air as many hours as the average American child watches television each week. The level of concern for media programming for children can be seen in the decision in Sweden to limit the popular American movie, ET to audiences over eleven years of age.
The difference between attitudes and national posture in the United States and that in Sweden can best be illustrated by American reactions to the Swedish antispanking law. The first reaction is typical: The Swedes are going to raise wild and spoiled kids. The second reaction is even more intriguing. When told that Sweden has a law prohibiting spanking, most Americans ask what the punishment is for breaking the law. in point of fact, Sweden changed only its criminal code. The penal code was not changed; thus, there is no punishment for spanking a child (other than disapproval from observers or bystanders). Americans take for granted that a violation requires a formal punishment. Few Americans can begin even to imagine that an antispanking law would be aimed at merely establishing a moral objection to spanking or that this law would be enforced only by informal and internal social controls. The third reaction is that the law is absurd because children should be spanked, and spankings "work." After all, parents tell us, "When I spank my children, they stop doing what it was that I wanted them to stop." p.195
Parents and partners will develop internal systems of control only if the belief that people are not for hitting is shared and supported by other social institutions. Individual internal controls will never be developed if police officers fail to respond to instances of domestic violence in the same manner that violence between strangers is dealt with. We cannot expect husbands to develop internal controls as long as judges and prosecutors see intimate violence as a private matter that does not belong on the public agenda or in the public courtrooms. Internal controls will never be applied while family members hear a member of the United States Senate quip, "If you outlaw wife beating, you take all the fun out of marriage," or a state legislator remark, "If you can't rape your wife, who can you rape?" p.199
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