We feel that it is important to differentiate between sporadic "battering" which can be regarded as part of a normal marriage, particularly in certain cultural groups, and more persistent beating.
The Family Service Unit, from whose journal (Winter. 1973) this comment is taken, was set up over thirty years ago. to deal with the “problem family". During that time, the nuclear family has remained the most predominant home unit in society, but has come under increasing strain. The rise of capitalism has tended historically to break up pieces of stability, to fragment life into smaller and smaller atoms. The common lands were broken up under the Enclosures and the extended family was dislocated with the arrival of the factory system. Now the divorce rate has shot up, and there is an increasing number of single parent families and even of single people without children, often living in bedsits. There is a disturbing feeling of isolation, of alienation, especially in the rapidly growing cities where population is concentrated. as the profit machine grinds on its “labour unit costs” like grain in a mill:
Just a cast away, an island lost at sea. . .I hope that someone gets my message in a bottle. . .Walked out this morning. I don't believewhat I saw,A hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore. (Sting, 1979)
The problem of domestic violence is impossible to quantify because it takes place behind closed doors. For the same reason, its tragedies are numerous and very rarely charted. Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear by Erin Pizzey was published in 1974 and documented the incidence of wife-beating in London, where she had founded Chiswick Women's Aid in 1971 as a charitable refuge for the victims of violent attacks in the home. She described in horrible detail the cruel treatment suffered by the women who came to her for help. Violence was said often to arise out of arguments over money or some petty jealousy. The pathetic frustration of a worker, bullied at work and taking it out on the women and children he lived with, was shown to be the most common case, with Sunday nights having the highest rate of violence, presumably because of the prospect of starting work Monday morning. The NSPCC deal with tens of thousands of cases of child-abuse each year, and their reports have recently shown an increase in the rate of child-battering, which they ascribe to the recession. Apart from the increased feelings of frustration arising from unemployment, there are now more children being left all day on their own as two people have to work to earn the equivalent of what had once been brought home by one.
Erin Pizzey has now published a further book on this subject, Prone to Violence (co-written with Jeff Shapiro, Hamlyn, £1.75) which develops a theory of violence which was only hinted at in her earlier work. The 1974 book had concentrated on the problems faced by women who tried to get away from men who had been beating them up. She cited many obstacles which they faced, including the difficulty of getting somewhere to stay with children, and the worry of having to leave children with a man who might be violent towards them. She looked at the weak legal position of women in such cases, especially those who were co-habitees rather than wives, and concluded that
For generations the established charities and more recently the State social welfare services have been picking up the pieces after each individual family crisis. They've not asked or looked for the cause of the troubles or done anything to eradicate them (1974, page 90)
so that the end product of the nuclear family is sometimes a periodically crying wreck, defused by ECT at the hands of the “mental health" practitioners, when the antiseptic, family-planned, two-point-five- child model has not stultified as smoothly as it should.
In the new book, on the other hand, a number of particularly violent relationships are documented, and the suggestion is made that there are a number of people who have been conditioned from early childhood to seek violence as their sole means of gaining attention and feeling secure. This difference in analysis lies behind the two separate sets of refuges for battered wives which now exist. The National Federation of Women's Aids was formed by various feminist groups who saw domestic violence as being a problem of violent men attacking women, who wanted to get away as far and as quick as possible from those men. Erin Pizzey’s Women's Aid, now known more appropriately as Family Rescue, sees the problem in broader terms as consisting of the relationships existing between men and women, particularly of the violent kind. In Prone to Violence she has made her clearest statement yet of why she thinks many women go back to men who have beaten them up. A feminist review of the book in the Socialist Workers’ Party Socialist Review has predictably rejected Pizzey’s line of argument, suggesting instead that women went back to their previous assailants because of their weak economic and legal position, or even to get away from Pizzey herself!
Pizzey may seem the more reactionary partner to this dispute, in that she argues that some of the people involved in these relationships do in some way seek violence as a way of establishing themselves, rather than simply being put upon as helpless victims. In fact, however, apart from some reservations mentioned below, hers is potentially the more revolutionary position, since the solution to the problem expressed in this way would involve a total transformation of human relationships. The same irony exists in relation to the Left as a whole. It is often considered very militant to state that the working class is about to overthrow capitalism, if only one reformist leader were not standing in the way. The fact that most workers still accept capitalism and leaders, and that this is what stands in the way of revolution, holds greater potential for change, even if it seems a more bleak outlook.
Out of the seemingly endless conveyor belt of casualties of cramped working-class stress, Erin Pizzey came to the conclusion that the problem ran deeper than one simply of once-off attacker and victim. Often the people being beaten up came from disturbed family backgrounds. She asked why whole families were not taken into care:
By asking such questions, you are shaking the very foundations of a society that has never questioned its basic assumption that the privileged few should control the lives of everyone else. The class structure and social fabric of our society are so organised that any failure to comply with this assumption is met by a rigid and unyielding bureaucratic offensive . . . violent people are very frightened people. (Prone to Violence, pages 51,57).
She suggests that where a new born child is treated violently rather than gently (for example by parents who are themselves violent) it develops a relationship to its own body chemicals which is unbalanced, becoming “addicted” to feeding off its own adrenalin or cortisone (which has the opposite effect of adrenalin, inhibiting the blood flow). She analyses violent relationships as being based on such imbalances, and believes that the chemical manifestations of this can be inherited directly. This medical theory has not been proved or disproved, and at times appears bizarre, even sinister:
We hope to see pharmaceutical companies working to find a whole new spectrum of drugs that could be used to aid the internal work with the emotionally disabled. (Ibid. page 181)
However, much of the social commentary surrounding this is very perceptive. The need is clearly stated for human relationships to be based on a freshly harmonious footing, free from the frustrations and repression of ties of violence. Only in capitalist society, where even human beings have a price on their heads, is the arrival of a new person seen inevitably as an additional financial burden to bear. Two people or, increasingly, one person becomes responsible for the upbringing of that child. It is part of the obscene atomisation of capitalist society that this responsibility is exclusive to one or two people, rather than being social and shared. The stress and violence which often results from financial and emotional limitation, and the role of the closest protectors of the child as providers of its social conditioning, lead to unbalanced character development. This is a social problem of capitalism and the nuclear family, whether or not it manifests itself in the chemical way suggested by Pizzey and Shapiro. In any case, all such social phenomena must have some bodily or chemical manifestation even if Pizzey's theories of adrenalin and cortizone are fallacious.
These books do not have any solution to the problems they document, but by exposing the weaknesses of many claimed “solutions” they suggest a way out of relationships of torment and agony, through the conscious and free organisation of society. Even if some women and men seem to have a tendency to be attracted towards violence because it is the only way they know of asserting themselves, this is not the same as the crude and callous suggestion that someone who has been beaten up wanted it to happen. Nobody wants to suffer the tortures documented in these books. What people want is security and the chance to assert ourselves creatively. In a jungle society of competition and separation this can rarely be achieved directly, and so people resort to desperate means. The result is untold human misery, all of it unnecessary. The answer is for us to organise society rather than letting it organise us.
Clifford Slapper
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