No, I don’t listen to The Archers, but I respect the devotion of friends who do. Devotee or not, you’d have had to be abroad without internet access last week to have missed the rustic soap’s dramatic plotline in which long-suffering Helen Titchener stabbed her abusive husband, Rob.
Part of the controversy it aroused was that some devotees expected Helen to be the victim of the near-fatal climax to this story of domestic violence. As the newspapers report, at least two women are killed by current or former partners in England and Wales every week, many more are injured, often after years of profoundly controlling and coercive behaviour.
If we didn’t grasp that in the “good old days” – when victims of abuse, sexual as well as brutality, at school and in the scout hut as well as in the home – we certainly do now. Here’s one horrific story from Friday’s Mail Online, here’s another from its Australian edition.
But it’s not the whole picture of violent relationships, is it? Today’s papers also report the sentences imposed on two 15-year-old girls who brutally murdered Angela Wrightson, a vulnerable alcoholic they knew, and then photographed the crime scene. They were both in care with badly damaged lives. Their savagery prompted memories of other child killers – the boys who murdered Jamie Bulger, or Mary Bell, who was convicted at the age of 11 of killing two pre-school boys.
It serves to remind us that women and girls are capable of the depravity and violence more usually associated with men and boys. Such cases are much rarer, I realise. Last month, Sharon Edwards was jailed for life at Manchester crown court for stabbing to death her new husband. No Helen Titchner provocation for Edwards; she was the abusive partner in the marriage and had put him in hospital on previous occasions with “accidental” injuries, black eyes, bite marks. She also had form from previous relationships.
Not typical either is this case, currently under way in Mallorca, which makes for particularly grim reading, especially if you like dogs.
Where is all this taking us? To a much less murderous proposition: that domestic abuse of one kind or another is not as overwhelmingly a gender issue – men against women – as you may be forgiven for assuming.
Some research suggests both partners in an abusive relationship are violent, that women may more often be the initiators, though – often being weaker – more likely to end up badly hurt if retaliation ensues. True? False? Both? It’s something we might usefully talk about more frankly.
It’s there in the data if you look carefully. Here’s a sober introduction from the House of Commons library, an excellent research base for MPs which is now publicly available online. and And here is the Crown Prosecution Service’s report (pdf) on violence against women and girls, which reflects the Cameron government’s prudent focus on the gender dimension, as advocated, understandably enough, by feminists. It’s a pity then, that the government is cutting the budget for women and children’s refuges.
The Refuge campaign naturally focuses on women and kids, the main victims when things go seriously wrong in Britain and around the world, especially in those parts where wife beating and honour killings claim spurious religious sanction.
But dry lists of wider findings and links to academic studies paint a more complex picture, though I should add a health warning. Martin Sewell, the man who compiled the list above is an academic provocateur at Cambridge, who has clashed with the student body. That doesn’t automatically make him wrong. Certainly the Lancashire professor John Archer, who has done research in this sensitive field, gets a kinder reception.
We often find it hard to stray from dominant narratives, liberal as well as conservative. It’s a bit like the persistent failure of white working-class children (especially boys) to do as well in school as ambitious immigrants or the way in which groups of Pakistani British men in some cities have targeted young white girls for sexual exploitation, a bit embarrassing for progressives. So let’s look the other way, as some Germans did after the New Year assaults in Cologne.
But crime survey data that suggests men are likely to be the victims in 40% of domestic violence incidents should raise more eyebrows than it appears to do. After all, around 30 British blokes a year die from it too, it’s not all a patriarchal power play.
Nor should it be surprising that when women are finally gaining more confidence and more economic and other power in society that some of them abuse it. That’s human nature. Getting noisily pissed in public is only one manifestation, and as unattractive as noisily pissed young men. When Lea Seydoux, aka Daniel Craig’s co-star in Spectre, Dr Madeleine Swann, is seen being as violent as the boys, why not? Isn’t she a “role model” too?
This controversy has been waged at least since the 1975 US national family violence survey made waves and it won’t go away. But we ought to discuss issues which are sometimes as awkward or controversial for us as it was for our grandparents to talk about sex or empire. Here’s an interesting starting point.
