International Women’s Day 2013

Why does violence against women happen?

There have been some headlines recently about a rise in Intimate Partner Violence (IPV), linking this to the effects of economic recession. Any statistics on crime need to be treated with caution as sometimes cause and effect are not always clear.

Cuts in support services, benefits cuts and a housing shortage are likely to force more women to remain in violent relationships when they otherwise may leave. Money worries, the loss of a job and the status that goes with it can increase pressures in any relationship.

However, the idea that unemployment, poverty and bad housing in themselves cause domestic violence is not true. There is ample evidence to show that perpetrators and survivors come from many different economic backgrounds.

Perpetrators of domestic violence give lots of reasons for their abusive behaviour; financial difficulties, jealousy, alcohol, ‘nagging’, pressure of work. Any of these or something else could be a ‘trigger’ but fundamentally the purpose of the violence or threats is to exert power over a partner and control what they do.

The feeling that such power is legitimate is rooted in ideas about men being at the head of the family, and reinforced by material inequality.

Most of us think of our family in terms of personal relationships, our loved ones. For the capitalist system, however, the family is first and foremost an economic unit.

Big business shareholders and their apologists in government maximise profits by keeping wages low. But they also keep to a minimum the ‘social wage’ – the costs of feeding, clothing, housing and educating a new generation of workers, caring for those too young, old or sick to work, by offloading this from the state onto individual families.

The family is also used as a means of social control – reinforcing the hierarchy in society. This is much more blatant in societies with semi-feudal social relations such as Pakistan, India and some Middle Eastern and African countries where men’s authority often has the full weight of the law and religious authorities behind it. This helps to explain the horrifying levels of rape and violence against women in much of the ex-colonial world.

Tory and New Labour governments alike have upheld the traditional idea that a key role of the family is to teach discipline, blaming ‘family breakdown’ for social problems such as crime or rioting.

In Britain we are generally free to choose our partners and to end relationships. Women can no longer be imprisoned for adultery. However, it was only just over 20 years ago that law lords finally ruled that marital rape was illegal.  The idea of ‘conjugal rights’ can still give many men a sense of entitlement to sex – hence the level of rape by partners or ex-partners (around one third of attacks).  So-called ‘date rape’ is still often posed as less serious than stranger rape – scandalously, even by former Tory justice secretary Ken Clarke.

The legal right of husbands to beat their wives was removed 150 years ago, but domestic violence continued to be downplayed by the police as a private matter. Some organisations claiming to represent father’s rights have argued that IPV is no longer a gender-based crime and that men are now ‘equal victims’.

This argument is based on some discredited statistics and is refuted by many others which show that women make up by far the majority of those suffering more serious assaults, choking, strangling, and repeated violence.

This is not to say that men do not get abused by their partners, male or female, and when this happens they should have access to appropriate support.

Human nature?

The fact that sexual coercion and violence against women is still so widespread in countries which outlaw such behaviour, has led to a pessimistic view that it must be ‘natural’ rather than socially constructed – a kind of ‘universal male behaviour’.

Violence and rape are the most extreme and deeply rooted expressions of women’s oppression, but there is nothing ‘natural’ about them, any more than there is about war and inequality.

Some evolutionary biologists speculate that rape is a ‘by-product’ of early man’s primeval need to procreate – they argue that aggressive and sexually promiscuous males passed more of their genes on.

Rape, they say, is a ‘side effect’ of an evolutionary advantage. If this is the case, why is it that anthropologists studying early human societies which existed for tens of thousands of years and surviving hunter gatherer societies, find very little, if any, evidence of aggression, still less sexual coercion?

In fact, it was much later ‘civilisation’ (class society) founded on exploitative relations outside and inside the home that, over time, imposed severe restrictions on women’s sexuality, and removed them from their previously vital public role in tribal societies.

Scope for change

As socialists we are optimistic about the potential for developing a society which does not rely on exploitation of one class by another and allows us the opportunity to develop personal relationships free from the pressures not just of poverty and overwork but of gender inequality.