Family Violence in America: Part 5

Physical Violence

Many scholars focus on types of physical violence when they study domestic or family violence. Markowitz finds three indicators for violence against children and spouses in his study which include shouting or screaming, pushing, shoving, or slapping and hitting with a fist or object. He also includes measures of “severe verbal aggression” but gives no further definition of those (Markowitz 210). According to Teichman and Teichman, violence is an expression of anger and frustration, mostly by the male spouse toward his wife and children (134). The authors do not define these violent behaviors any further, nor do they describe violent situations as such. In the study by Straus et al., consisting of 2,143 families, the authors distinguish between “normal violence” and “abusive violence” (20-21). Normal violence is defined as the intention of causing physical pain or injury to another person, ranging from slapping to murdering. This intent to hurt may be a form of disciplining the child, e.g. slapping a child after it crossed a red light and ran into the street to show this is unacceptable behavior. Abusive violence includes forms of beating up a person, e.g. punching, kicking, hitting, stabbing, shooting or trying to shoot another person – all acts that have a high potential for injuring a person. This form of violence does not take into consideration what happened to the person. (Straus, Gelles and Steinmetz 21-22).

Her sister, who was just going to the bathroom, falsely accused her of pulling a knife on her, because she was cleaning the silverware and had a knife in her hand. She went toward her sister, asking her what she was talking about and at that moment, her father came into bathroom and used his belt to beat her.

These categorizations of physical violence are not sufficient enough to describe abusive behavior as this chapter will show. This paper does not measure or group physical violence into categories. This is due to the small sample but also to the nature of the interviews which do not provide any kinds of definitions on physical violence beforehand. It is nonetheless useful to distinguish between physical and verbal or emotional violence for two reasons. The interviewees describe certain instances specifically as physical violence and other others as verbal and emotional violence and it further shows the different levels on which family violence occurs. Two interviewees describe physical violent acts occurring when they were adults involving their boyfriends at the time. One interviewee mentions that there was physical abuse by her former husband but talks more about the abuse by her parents while she was a child and teenager during the interview. Slaps, punches and kicks between family members, what Straus et al. consider normal violence, occurred on a weekly basis in her home. The “actual beatings,” which were mostly directed toward her and one of her sisters, began when she was eight years old. She remembers that first beating and describes that she and her sister, who also fell victim to the beatings multiple times, were cleaning up the kitchen while their parents were playing cards with friends in the living room next door. Her sister, who was just going to the bathroom, falsely accused her of pulling a knife on her, because she was cleaning the silverware and had a knife in her hand. She went toward her sister, asking her what she was talking about and at that moment, her father came into bathroom and used his belt to beat her. The interviewee also states that she believes her father must have been embarrassed in front of his friends by how his children were acting out. From her perspective, the slaps must have been audible because the living room was not far away. Still, none of the adults, including her mother, provided help, talked to her afterwards or paid any kind of attention to the situation. After crying for a little while, she went back to doing the dishes and concludes in the interview: “Isn't that odd?” She describes another beating when she was 14 years old and had received notice about a bad grade from her midterms in the mail. She describes a situation with her mother, who asked her about the letter, eventually leading to the violence by her father.

I was kinda snippy with her and she raised her hand to hit me and I put my hand up to block my face and she said "don't you ever hit me!" I was trying to explain "I wasn't trying to hit you I was trying to block you from hitting me" and she goes "you just wait until your father gets home," she said "you stay here."

Her mother used her father as a threat to her and he used violence to punish her for seemingly using violence against her mother. When her father arrived home, her mother told him she was trying to hit her and he came into to her room, she did not say anything to him and her father “came charging at [her]” and he said “don't you ever hit your mother” and then started beating her: “he took me by my hair uhm and beat my head against the wall.” After this, she fainted and only woke up a few hours later, laying on her bed and being alone in her room. Neither of her parents checked on her for the rest of the night and the next day she went to school as always. In Straus’ et al. terms this is incident can be categorized as abusive violence. The father had seriously injured his daughter and she had been unconscious for a few hours. It could also be considered normal violence and as a form of discipline not to raise her hand to her mother again. This incident shows that categories of physical violence are not sufficient to describe violent situations as it is unclear which category is applicable here. Throughout the interview, she describes that in violent situations like these where help was not provided, especially by her mother, and how this makes her immensely sad and angry.

Her father “came charging at [her]” and he said “don't you ever hit your mother” and then started beating her: “he took me by my hair uhm and beat my head against the wall.” After this, she fainted and only woke up a few hours later, laying on her bed and being alone in her room. Neither of her parents checked on her for the rest of the night and the next day she went to school as always.

Interviewee 1 describes a physically violent situation towards the end of the relationship with her former boyfriend. While staying in another city together with friends, they went out for dinner and she randomly met an old high school friend and started chatting with him. Her boyfriend did not agree with this and told her to come back to the hotel with him. Throughout the interview, she describes her boyfriend’s jealousy and multiple instances when he tried and often succeeded to control who she talks to and when. The following chapter examines this “controlling behavior,” as she describes it, further. On that night, she decided to stay with her friend even though her boyfriend did not agree, thinking that it was very brave of herself, but also knowing it would lead to a fight afterwards. Later that night, her high school friend dropped her off at the hotel where she stayed with her boyfriend and waited in the car until she got into her room. After realizing that the door was locked and that no one opened up, she felt embarrassed and did not want to admit that her “boyfriend was a complete jerk” and told her friend she will be okay and that he can leave. She describes that she got very angry and started shouting at her boyfriend who was still not opening the door. When he finally did, she called him names and called her sister on her cell phone to come pick her up. Her boyfriend got out of bed and “grabbed the cell phone and threw it against the wall and broke it. I remember just standing there and staring at him and I felt like this flame of anger burst in me and I knew everything had escalated.” After she pushed him and hit his chest, she describes how the situation escalated:

He turned to me and grabbed me and threw me on the ground and started punching me in the back and I was like screaming and his friends were in the room next to us and they stayed in that room. They didn't come over to see why I was screaming, they didn't come over to see what was going on, I just remember them staying over there.

After her boyfriend stopped hitting her, she went next door to the room where his friends stayed and spent the night. She says that there were no confrontations or consequences between these friends and her boyfriend, even though she told them about the incident. “The next day they literally acted like nothing happened.” On their way back home, he started crying in the car and apologized which made her feel sorry for him. This is the only time her boyfriend got physically violent towards her. She did not immediately end the relationship after that event and says it was never the same again and it did not last much longer. The third interviewee describes her former boyfriend as being “sexually abusive” and that he was raping her which he was doing “as a power thing.” She describes a separate instance where he got “physically violent” towards her, seemingly differentiating between the two categories of violence. She describes being upstairs in her apartment doing laundry, while her boyfriend was downstairs watching football. Her boyfriend suddenly came upstairs, which surprised her, and “before [she] could really react, he had thrown [her] down onto the bed, like in the laundry [she] was sorting out” and holding her down, which made her think he wanted to have sex with her. She says that he was keen of doing bondage during sex but that she did not like it that much. She also mentions that he was drinking and usually the rapes happened when he had been under the influence of alcohol. But this time was different, as she describes:

But after a while he kept pushing my head into the pillows, suffocating me and that's when I realized that’s not really what this was and I got scared and so I tried to struggle away from him and the more I struggled that's when he took his belt off and tied my hands behind my back with that and used his other hand just to like beat me up and hit me.

She describes that she was unable to breathe and was afraid to die. After a few minutes, she started kicking him and trying to break free which had no effect on her boyfriend. Only when she gave up he finally stopped hitting her and went back downstairs. She cried afterwards and then carried on with the rest of the day. She did not mention this instance to anyone at the time. She says this physical violence only happened once and that she left him soon afterwards but assumes he would have continued to beat her had she stayed in the relationship. Categories of physical violence, such as normal and abusive violence, are not applicable to the situations described above. This paper can also not determine the intention of the perpetrator when using violence as a means so resolve the conflict or to discipline a child. It rather shows that the dynamics of the violent acts and the victims reactions to it. All of the interviewees have not talked to anyone about the physical violence initially and carried on with their day afterwards. All of them describe feelings of sadness and anger, but also being embarrassed about it. For two interviewees the physical violence in their relationships was only a small fraction of the abuse and has led them to leave their boyfriends shortly after it had occurred.This piece is part of a series. To start from the beginning, please read the first part here.