Intimate Terrorism vs. Common Partner Violence

Unit 7 of our course includes topics, such as Developmental Psychology, Personality Psychology, and Health Psychology. This post is meant to relate to this unit, so it seems a reasonably appropriate time to talk about how Intimate Partner Violence can occur and how these situations may develop. People can have more or less adaptive and functional personalities. Similarly, relationships can be functional and healthy for both members or not. Peoples’ genetics, their environment, and their experiences determine whether they develop to be healthy, happy, and productive. Relationships may also develop in ways that benefit each member’s well-being or they may develop in ways that are damaging to one or both members.

The history of research on IPV focused on the obviously tragic cases of one member (usually the female member experiencing multiple violent assaults from the other member (usually the male member). Although it always feels like we could provide more details and go deeper in our analysis, we have discussed this scenario to a reasonable extent in previous blog posts. Researchers refer to this kind of relationship as “intimate terrorism”. It’s clearly an important social problem that should be addressed through criminal justice and mental health efforts to modify the behaviour of the violent offenders. This problem also warrants aggressive efforts to help and protect victims. It’s obvious who the culprit is in this sort of scenario and who the victim is. Most of us can easily agree about who is to blame and who needs fixing versus who is the blameless one who made a very unfortunate choice when selecting a mate.  We’ll start with a discussion of how that sort of intimate partner violence often develops.

In other instances, violence may occur in intimate partner relationships, but deciding who the victim vs. who is the abuser (or whether there even is a victim or abuser) can be much less obvious. Researchers call this scenario “common couple violence”.  In such cases, both members of a couple engage in mild violence toward one another that rarely causes any serious injury. In this posting, we will also briefly discuss how that sort of IPV develops.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF “INTIMATE TERRORISM”

Controlling Behaviour in the Guise of Romance

For the sake of efficiency, we’ll focus on the more common scenario, involving a male partner becoming physically abusive to their female intimate partner. As a couple become involved, emotions and romance is high. The male partner may tend to call a lot and present gifts and wants to constantly get updated on what his female partner is doing and where she is. The female member will often experience all of this attention as evidence for how caring her partner is. Expressions of jealousy by the male member are common precursors to “intimate terrorism”, but tend to be interpreted as further evidence of how much he cares about his partner.

Mild Violence and Passionate Forgiveness

At some point, usually under some form of stress, the male member will slap or hit his female partner. This action will tend not to cause any injury and the male member will express remorse and beg for forgiveness. The female member will then often accept this apology and forgive. They might well have passionate sex as a sort of proof as to the continued strength of their commitment to one another. Perversely, sex following a violent act can serve as a positive reinforcement for that action, increasing the probability that the violence will occur again. Moreover, the arousal from fighting itself can be misinterpreted as sexual arousal, which can also feed sexual passion. This tendency for people to misinterpret the source of their arousal can also help to reinforce these violent acts.

Gradual Escalation in Severity and Frequency

Perhaps some amount of time will pass, but the male member engages in violence again. Gradually, perhaps over months or years, incidents accumulate and the violence becomes more severe, with incidents becoming increasingly frequent. The male members’ remorse for incidents become less intense and pleas for forgiveness become less urgent and energetic. The male member begins blaming the female member for the need to get violent with her. He starts to insult her verbally. It is a fairly common strategy for people to avoid guilty feelings for their actions by blaming their victim and thinking that their victim is somehow deserving of horrible treatment. At this point, rape and other forms of sexual violence are fairly common.

Sadly, the escalation of mild violence, such as slapping and pushing, to severe beating and rape may occur so gradually that neither member may be aware of the emerging pattern until it becomes extreme and even life-threatening. Unfortunately, it is even common for the female member to only think about individual incidents and to blame herself by searching for and generating an explanation for individual incidents without considered the overall pattern of abuse that, when considered together, would clearly reveal that they are being victimized by a sick and abusive partner. Also, out of embarrassment from being regularly abused by her partner, the female member may often hide the abuse she is experiencing and socially isolate herself to avoid others discovering her situation.

The male member in this type of abusive relationship will tend to be very moody and controlling, constantly needing to monitor her behaviour. He will have problems with self-control and may even be prone to cheating, which can partly account for the tendency for such “intimate terrorists” to be very distrustful of their female partner. Thus, the male partner’s seeming romantic behaviour from early in their relationship becomes revealed as what it truly was: efforts at oppression and a jealous guarding of the female partner against the possibility that she might find another man and leave.

Full-Blown Intimate Terrorism

Ultimately, violence by the male member against his female partner becomes commonplace. The male member holds a contradictory disgust for his female partner and a compulsion to control her every action. Violent outbursts occur whenever the male perceives his totality of control to be under threat. If they have children, the male partner’s violence extends to them, as well. Verbal abuse is chronic, both when the couple is alone or around others, and there is devastation to female member’s self-esteem because of the constant verbal insults and physical attacks. In the female member’s mind, the abuse comes to serve as evidence of her own worthlessness, further reinforced by the male partner’s constantly expressing the opinion that she has nowhere else to go and nobody else would ever love her. Efforts to fight back against her stronger male partner will be ineffective and will tend only to worsen the severity of his attacks.

When their relationship becomes this bad, women may seek help from police or protection from a women’s shelter out of understandable fear for their own life or for the safety of their children. However, even when women victims of such intimate terrorism seek help, they frequently return to their abusive partner. Sometimes this decision to return occurs out of love for her abusive male partner and an honest desire to try to help and change him. In other cases, it is a response to the male partner’s threats to cause harm to people the woman loves, such as her children or other family members, if she does not return.

WHY DO THESE TERRORIZED WOMEN STAY?

1. LOVE for their partner, despite the violence.

2. LONELINESS and a belief that they won’t be able find someone else.

3. A FEAR OF TRYING TO GO IT ALONE and being unable to survive on one's own because of low self-esteem or lack of money.

4. A FEAR OF THE VIOLENCE GETTING WORSE for herself or other loved ones if she does not stay in the relationship.

5. A PESSIMISTIC BELIEF that a different partner will be as likely to be abusive as their current abusive partner. (This belief is perhaps common amongst women who have experienced abuse from their parents during childhood. If violence is a theme in one’s life, is there any reason to expect less violence when picking a different romantic partner? The answer is, obviously, YES (!), but it is understandable why someone’s sad history would make them pessimistic.)

WHAT ABOUT WHEN THESE WOMEN LEAVE?

Many women do leave their abusive partners and that tends to be the only way to stop the violence they experience at the hands of their intimate partners. That is, once violence is an established feature of an intimate relationship, it tends to persist as long as the relationship continues. Leaving tends to require the woman’s belief that her prospects will be better leaving than staying. Note that it is belief that is critical in this decision, not reality. People can believe that they are better off in any number of ways by staying with an abusive partner, but that belief doesn’t need to have any basis in truth and often doesn’t for women who have lowered self-esteem from the abuse they’ve experienced and who feel ashamed and blame themselves for ending up with an abusive partner. Sadly, the violence itself can provide other reasons for the woman to believe that her prospects are not better outside of the relationship, as the male member uses it to make it difficult for the female member to acquire skills through education or to prevent them from finding or keeping a job.

The reality of this “intimate terrorism” is all very upsetting to write about, people, and it’s probably not all that pleasant to read about. What it amounts to is a sort of slavery that destroys both members of a partnership. One member finds themselves in the role of slave, with all of the feelings of worthlessness, constant state of fear, and mental and physical health problems that goes along with being someone’s slave. The other member finds themselves a slave-owner, who succeeds in gaining almost total control over the individual they started out deeply in love with. Ironically, their success in achieving total control destroys all aspects of their partner that was the source of their initial passion for them, in the first place. Their natural tendency to seek justification for their own brutality also requires an active development of disgust and loathing for the person that they insist on controlling through violence, threats, and verbal abuse. In making their partner into a slave, they only have two options. The abuser must view himself as a worthless monster or must consider his partner worthless and undeserving of personal safety or freedom. In the end, he has made both himself and his female partner wretchedly miserable and, in almost all cases, the only cure for either of them is to end the relationship.

COMMON PARTNER VIOLENCE

As research on IPV has developed, it has become clear that, sometimes, women can also be violent members of intimate partnerships and not simply in reaction to violent assaults by their male partners.

By the 1980s, research on violence within intimate relationships made it necessary to recognize that sometimes violence is mutual and about equal severity within intimate partnerships. For example, a study by Straus, Gelles, and Steinmetz (1980) revealed that 27% of men report experiencing violence at the hands of their female partners, whereas only 24% of women report experiencing violence from their male partners. Anderson (2002) reported that 10% of couples reported violence occurring within their relationship during the previous year. In 2% of couples, only the woman was violent, in 1% of the couples only the man was violent, and in 7% of couples, both were violent. Frieze (2005) found that 18% of couples report violence within their relationship (4% claimed that both sides were severely violent toward one another and 5% reported that both sides were violent with one another at a low level. More men than women reported that their partner was the only violent one and more women than men reported that they were the only violent one.)

We urge some caution in interpreting these results, since violence appears to be more equal for men and women when surveys inquire about violence, in general. Surveys that orient people to criminal-level violence tend to focus them on more severe forms of assault. Those kinds of surveys reveal male intimate partners to be more prone to violent attacks than female ones. For example, with a survey focusing more on criminal behaviour, including questions about sexual assault, stalking, as well as physical assault, Tjaden and Thoennes (1998) found that 22% of women reported being assaulted by their male intimate partner at least once, whereas only 7% of men reported being assaulted by their female intimate partner at least once. Moreover, a careful analysis of violence occurring within intimate partnerships consistently reveals that, when it does occur, violence by males against their female partner is more severe and more likely to result in injury and death than violence by females against males. To illustrate, Archer (2000) did find more acts of physical aggression by women against their male partners than the reverse, but also reported that women received more injuries than men.

In any case, the point is that women can also be violent in their relationships and, when violence is a component of intimate partnerships, it is frequently mutually engaged in by both members. In general, people do tend to value reciprocity, meaning that a great predictor as to whether one member of a partnership will act violently toward another is whether their partner has acted violently toward them. It is the case that the intimate terrorism form of IPV described above is less common than often less severe, more mutual forms of IPV that fall under the heading of “Common Partner Violence”. The most common forms of this kind of IPV involve a tendency for each member of the couple to slap, hit, or throw things at one another. These sorts of violent altercations result in injuries relatively rarely and, when injuries do occur, they tend to be accidental. It isn’t exactly pretty. These are dramatic and passionate fights in which both members behave aggressively. However, neither member possesses any serious objective to cause their partner permanent harm. Nevertheless, average differences size and strength between men and women mean that women are more likely to get injured when these incidents occur. Consumption of alcohol is a very typical factor in stimulating these sorts of fights between lovers.

WHY DO COUPLES TRY TO HURT ONE ANOTHER?

1. STRESS and ALCOHOL use make people less able to inhibit their violent tendencies, so they respond more aggressively to things about their partner that offend or irritate them. Researchers have observed that couples with more children (which results in more financial and other forms of stress) and who regularly consume more alcohol are more likely to be violently aggressive with one another.

2. Mutual violence often reflects a part of a broader competition by members of a couple to try to gain CONTROL over one another. It’s all part of a power struggle that tends to occur within couples who are unskilled at expressing themselves in other ways, such as verbally.

3. When both members of a couple value their PERSONAL FREEDOM, there is a greater chance of each member engaging in violence toward the other. Two independent-minded people in a relationship will tend to fight more and that fighting will be more likely to become violent. 

4. JEALOUSY is a common motive for mutual violence within couples, such as when one member flirts with someone.

5. Some people have ATTITUDES ABOUT PHYSICAL AGGRESSION that cause them to be more willing to engage in violent acts. In particular, they may have the idea that such acts provide proof of a passionate love for their partner. Although the attitude may seem strange to us and to many of our readers, couples may slap each other and throw things at one another as a sort of evidence of their strong feelings for one another. Such differences in, let’s say, cultural attitudes toward violence plays a role in determining whether milder forms of mutual violence will occur within couples. Also, in surveys, people tend to consider violence by women toward men as more acceptable than the reverse (Slep, Cascardi, Avery-Leaf, & O’Leary, 2001). Such attitudes may account for why, when considering all forms of violence, regardless as to the severity or whether the violence resulted in injury, both men and women report that more violent acts are committed by women against their male partners than the reverse.

6. When members of a couple FEEL THAT THEIR PARTNER HAS A LOW OPINION OF THEM, they are more likely to engage in violence toward their partner, particularly when their partner expresses moodiness or irritability.

7. Some people are more naturally PRONE TO VIOLENCE than others. For example, women who are violent generally are also more likely to be violent within their intimate relationships (White & Humphrey, 1994)

8. Men and women who VIEW GENDER ROLES AS ADVERSARIAL (e.g., perceiving men and women as forming separate groups that are in opposition to one another) tend to be more violent in their intimate relationships.

9. YOUNGER COUPLES tend to be more violent than older couples.

10. Some members of couples report engaging in low-level, mutual violence because it is SEXUALLY EXCITING. The results of some studies suggest that couples involved in these milder, mutually violent relationships have sex more often than those in relationships with no violence at all (DeMaris, 1997). Other research observed no difference in relationship satisfaction between marriages with low levels of violence and marriages with no violence (Lawrence & Bradbury, 2001).  

REFERENCES

We are grateful for this outstanding resource:

Frieze, I. H. (2005). Hurting the one you love: Violence in Relationships. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

We have relied heavily on this book when putting together this blog post. We highly recommend this book for anyone interested learning more about IPV, specifically, or the causes and consequences of violence, more generally.

Archer, J. (2000). Sex differences in aggression between heterosexual partners: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 651-680.

DeMaris, A. (1997). Elevated sexual activity in violent marriages: Hypersexuality or sexual extortion? Journal of Sex Research, 34, 361-373.

Lawrence, E., & Bradbury, T. N. (2001). Physical aggression and marital dysfunction: A longitudinal analysis. Journal of Family Psychology, 15, 135-154.

Slep, A. M. S., Cascardi, M., Avery-Leaf, S., & O’Leary, K. D. (2001). Two new measures of attitudes about the acceptability of teen dating aggression. Psychological Assessment, 13, 306-318.

Straus, M. A., Gelles, R. J., & Steinmetz, S. K. (1980). Behind closed doors: Violence in the American Family. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Tjaden, P., & Thoennes, N. (1998). Prevalence, incidence, and consequences of violence against women: Findings from the National Violence Against Women survey. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice.

White, J. W., & Humphrey, J. A. (1994). Women’s aggression in heterosexual conflicts. Aggressive Behaviour, 20, 105-202.