Emotional rescue: has a focus on physical abuse hurt the battered women's movement?

Evan Stark began writing about the demise of the battered women's movement in 1995, the year after Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act. That same year, President Bill Clinton, who signed the act into law, addressed a group of prominent women's advocates at the White House; Stark was among them. It was a time of unprecedented national recognition for the movement, but as he applauded the president's speech, Stark caught the apprehensive eye of a colleague. "We had come a long way" he remembers thinking. "Perhaps too far."

Last March, Stark published Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life, the book he started 12 years ago. In it, he reaffirms his hunch from the heady days of VAWA: that in its quest for political and popular support, the battered women's movement lost its way. So much so, he says, it's currently stuck. He points to evidence that women are as likely to be killed by their partners today as they were 30 years ago, and that abusive men are almost as unlikely as they were back then to ever land before a judge, let alone behind bars. And he makes the counterintuitive argument that one of the biggest wrong turns the battered women's movement took was focusing too much on physical violence.

Stark describes the early battered women's movement, born in the mid-'70s, as a radical uprising, steadfast in its insistence that domestic violence comes from societal, not individual pathology; in a word, patriarchy. This idea was highly unpopular, he says, because it implied any man could be abusive and any woman abused. So the movement existed on the fringe, initially, estranged even from mainstream feminists. But as shelters spread-growing in numbers from 24 in 1976, to 163 in 1977, to 1,200 by the late '80s--the movement needed help, and started compromising its ideals. It had better luck getting money from governments and charities by present; ing black eyes and broken bones than by kicking up a fuss about gender inequality.

Meanwhile, says Stark, men were still abusing women, only not as obviously. Physical violence became just one of many ways men exerted what Stark calls "coercive control." He gives countless other examples: one man refuses to let his wife's family visit their home; another accuses her of infidelity if she goes out with friends. One man requires his wife to record how she spends every penny in a daily logbook; another won't speak to her when she doesn't launder his socks the way he likes. In one scenario, a man covers his sleeping wife's mouth just long enough to wake her up, gasping for air, and then pretends he is asleep. Applied systematically, Stark says, these are tactics that isolate, intimidate and degrade women to the point that they question their own "personhood" And this, he says, "can be more devastating than injurious assault."

Stark recounts testimony by women that back up this claim, and many domestic violence experts say women tell them the same thing--the violence wasn't the worst part. Stark is also among many experts who say a woman can be at just as much risk from a man who seldom lifts a finger against her as from one who frequently does. Angelique Jenney, director of family violence services at Toronto's Child Development Institute, worked with a woman whose husband was only ever charged once, with uttering threats. At his bail hearing, he was given 48 hours to surrender his firearms to the police, and 12 hours later, he killed his wife. Jenney frequently sees courts deny women protection orders against their partners, because "the abuse is too subtle."

To some extent, Jenney shares Stark's concern about the state of the battered women's movement. "I think we aren't pushing as hard" says Jenney. "I often joke at Woman Abuse Council meetings and say, we actually need to say no to the crap funding opportunities we get, instead of selling our souls to get them." But some experts disagree with Stark that focusing on violence was a wrong turn, or that the movement is stuck. "We had to start somewhere, and the physical was the most obvious" says Ramona Alaggia, social work professor at the University of Toronto. "And I still think the most dangerous."

Stark credits Sharon Rice Vaughan, whom he met while protesting the war in Vietnam, as one of the people who influenced his thinking about domestic violence. Vaughan co-founded North America's first women's shelter in 1975 in St. Patti, Minn., and is considered a mother of the battered women's movement. Though she lauds Stark's book as an encyclopedia of research on domestic violence, she disagrees that the battered women's movement is stuck. "In order to really move forward, we have to do it organically, and of course this means forwards and backwards and flipping around," says Vaughan.

She sees Stark as trying to go too far too fast. At the end of his book, Stark argues that coercive control--meaning all acts of oppression men submit women to, physical or otherwise--should be criminalized. "What Evan wants, what he's expecting, is that all these men are going to say, 'Oh my goodness, I'm abusing her personhood, I don't have the fight to do that,'" she says. "It kind of makes you gasp," she suggests, that Stark would argue for this in a male-dominated justice system, and in a society where many women still answer to men, not vice versa. "But" she quickly adds, with a nod to her radical roots, "that doesn't mean he shouldn't be saying it."

References:
Izenberg, Dafna. "Emotional rescue: has a focus on physical abuse hurt the battered women's movement?(HEALTH)." Maclean's 120.40 (Oct 15, 2007): 84(1).

Named Works:
Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life (Book)