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