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Intimate Violence and Manly Men
Review products
A review of Ending the Silence[:] The Origins and Treatment of Male Violence Against Women by Thorne-FinchRon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992) xviii + 394 pp.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2014
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- Type
- Review Essay/Notes critique
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Law and Society / La Revue Canadienne Droit et Société , Volume 9 , Issue 01: Law, Feminism and Sexuality/Droit, féminisme et sexualité , Spring/printemps 1994 , pp. 233 - 245
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Law and Society Association 1994
References
1. With the exception of a briefly blooming public interest in battering and sexual assault toward the close of the last century. See, e.g. Valverde, M., The Age of Light, Soap and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1855-1926 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991)Google Scholar and Gordon, L., Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston 1880-1960 (New York: Viking, 1988)Google Scholar.
2. Unless otherwise cited, the figures given in this part are taken from Finn, G., “Taking Gender Into Account in the ‘Theatre of Terror’: Violence, Media, and the Maintenance of Male Dominance” (1989–1990) 3 C.J.W.L. 375Google Scholar, a discussion of “the political significance of the media's constant and persistent re-presentation and incitement of ‘domestic terrorism’”. Finn's thesis of media collusion “which contains, conceals,mystifies, and ‘naturalizes’” domestic violence is supported and more broadly explored in Faludi's, S. investigation of sociopolitical violence against women, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Crown, 1991)Google Scholar. Faludi argues that women's recent gains, and indeed feminism itself, have been consistently under-mined by popular media and “pop” gurus. Mutually reinforcing public backlash campaigns support intimate violence against women and their degradation in the workplace (and in the courts, as numerous studies of violence victims, custody disputes and child welfare management suggest).
3. Males are increasingly reporting childhood assaults. See Vanderbilt, H., “Incest” Lear's Magazine (February 1992)Google Scholar for anecdotal information and references to clinical studies.
4. See McGillivray, A., “R. v. K.(M.): Legitimating Brutality” (1993), 16 C.R. (4th) 125Google Scholar and works cited, infra note 16.
5. Infra note 17.
6. R. v. McCraw (1991), 7 C.R.(4th) 314Google Scholar, 66 C.C.C. (3d) 517 (S.C.C.). The accused McCraw sent five Ottawa Roughrider cheerleaders letters detailing sexual acts he intended to perform, including anal intercourse, adding: “I am going to fuck you even if I have to rape you. Have a nice day.” He was charged with uttering threats of serious bodily harm. The trial judge characterized the letters as “adoring fantasies” and ruled that a threat to rape did not involve bodily harm, as rape is merely intercourse without consent. The Supreme Court ruled in 1991 that “serious bodily harm” means any hurt or injury, physical or psychological, that interferes with the integrity, health or well-being. The words within the context in which they were expressed would, to a reasonable person, convey a threat of serious bodily harm.
7. See Finn, supra note 2. This early study did not include marital rape, criminalized in 1982. If only five to ten per cent of sexual assaults are reported to police, as suggested by population studies, accurate estimates are difficult.
8. Battering runs the gamut from assault to murder but the dynamics remain remarkably consistent. For an excellent analysis of murder and assault in a marital context which draws on Canadian statistics, see Daly, & Wilson, , Homicide (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1988) at c. 9Google Scholar.
9. Fear of continued violence is clearly established as a primary factor in female violence against males. In the Lavallée case, the Supreme Court of Canada interpreted the self defence excuse requirement of reasonable grounds for apprehension of death or serious bodily harm within the parameters of the grounds of belief established by the battering relationship. In evaluating the belief of the accused that killing her batterer was the only way to avoid death or serious bodily harm, the court is now entitled to consider expert evidence on the nature of the relationship and of the belief structure induced by the batterer. The issue raised in the case is central to understanding the multiple dimensions of male violence. Although Ending the Silence was published in 1992, and the Manitoba Court of Appeal had overturned the Court of Queen's Bench decision favouring Lavallée in a controversial 1988 decision, I found no mention of the case in the book.
10. In 12 years of international terrorism, 7474 people were injured and 3688 were killed. See Finn, supra note 2 at 376. If violence directed at women and children is viewed as political, then women and children are entitled to special refugee status and, indeed, the politics of violence is beginning to gain recognition in Canadian refugee designation with the admission of battered women. The use of rape as a deliberate tool of terrorism in the warfare of the 1990s has made its political nature unmistakeably clear.
11. Ibid.
12. Lesbian separatists and feminist science fiction writers have long pursued this idea. For examples of the latter, see, e.g., Tepper, S. S., The Gate to Women's Country (Doubleday,1988; Bantam, 1989)Google Scholar, C. Perkins Gilmour's early 20th-century Utopian literary experiments and, generally, Rosinsky, N., Feminist Futures (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan 1984)Google Scholar reviewed by McGillivray, A. (1991) 4 C.J.W.L. 578Google Scholar.
13. And a reference to his most recent book, Children of Battered Women, which she ordered.
14. See, among others, McGillivray, A., “Battered Women: Definition, Models and Prosecutorial Policy” (1987) 6 Can. J. Fam. L. 15Google Scholar.
15. The quotations are taken from Crean, S., In the Name of the Fathers: The Story Behind Child Custody (Toronto: Amanita, 1988)Google Scholar. The observations accord with my own interviews with a representative of one such group, that headed by Ross Virgin in Ontario. When I asked a group member whether any of them had actually committed the offences with which many were charged, he explained that former husbands charged with sexual assault “just wanted a little of what they were used to” and those who physically assaulted partners, although that was “not right”, were just frustrated, lonely and unhappy. Virgin's newsletters are a steady diatribe against women and feminism. Parts of this interview are quoted in McGillivray, A., The Criminalization of Child Abuse (LL.M. Thesis, University of Toronto, 1988)Google Scholar.
16. Profeminist men's groups should be distinguished from the “men's rights” groups discussed here.
17. See, among others, the works of A. Miller and studies undertaken by R. Gelles and Steinmetz on the gendering of childhood violence, witnessed and experienced. See also Athens, L., The Creation of Dangerous Violent Criminals (London, N.Y.: Routledge, 1989)Google Scholar on childhood brutalization and “horrification” and its relationship to the creation of offenders. The childhood experience of horrification—watching (or hearing) your mother being battered and unable to effectively intervene—profoundly influences perpetration of adult violence when combined with the brutalization and violent coaching of the child and successful experiments in violence by the child in adolescence.
18. Citing Gelles, R., Family Violence (London: Sage, 1979)Google ScholarPubMed.
19. One need think only of Mary Wollstonecraft or George Sand or Oscar Wilde or, indeed, of any of the revolutions and revolutionaries of the past two centuries. The narrow hygienism of the MSRI theorists is a political backlash like any other.
20. See, generally, Rose, N., Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar.
21. See Daly & Wilson, supra note 8 for an exploration of the linkages between intimate violence and evolutionary psychology and for an accessible introduction to the field of sociobiology.
22. Forms of control follow not only jurisprudential developments (e.g. “father's rights” in the 1970s, presumptions of joint custody in the 1980s) but also technological developments in transportation and communication. One recent technique emerged from the increased use of injunctions and answering machines: message tapes with meaningless words or noise generated by vacuum cleaners. There is nothing here that can be taken to court, but the message of control is clear.
23. On paternity uncertainty, see Wilson, M., “Impacts of the Uncertainty of Paternity on Family Law” (1987) 54 U.T. Fac. L. Rev. 216Google Scholar. See also McGillivray, supra note 14, on motivation in battering (the whole of which was summed up by one social worker as “control” and victim control of definition in the prosecution process. “Claustration” refers to female seclusion, as in harems. Related practices include vaginal infibulation, clitoridectomy and footbinding and, in a broader sense, the creation of a private sphere for women, the specification of certain types of activities focussed on nurturing and child bearing as suited only to women, and the corresponding exclusion of women from the public sphere of government, the professions and so on. Despite recent changes, the glass ceiling and pink-collar ghetto remain.
24. The index reads “Daigle, Chantal”; the section recalls Barbara Dodd, whose appeal against an abortion injunction succeeded on procedural grounds (a thin victory) and the successful defeat through a tied Parliamentary vote of 43:43 of the new abortion legislation.
25. See also Faludi, supra note 2 on Robert Bly and the development of antifeminism in initially profeminist men's groups of the 1980s; and Crean, supra note 15.
26. To borrow Patricia William's phrase.
27. See, e.g., Boyd, S., “Rethinking the Rethinking of Decisions About Children, Or The Disappearing Feminist”, response to Bala and Miklas, Rethinking Decisions About Children: Is the ‘Best Interests of the Child’ Approach Really in the Best Interests of Children? (Toronto: The Policy Research Centre on Children, Youth and Families, 1993) 168Google Scholar.