Abusive Relationships - They Come

Abusive Relationships - They Come in Many Forms

About twenty to fifty percent of women all over the world suffer from physical, psychological or sexual abuse, according to an article in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence (Parker, et al., 2007). Add to this statistic the fact that many women do not even recognize that they are in an abusive relationship - or they are in denial about it - and often they do not know how to escape an abusive relationship, and one can begin to see the seriousness, and the depth of this horrible social problem. These broad facts show very clearly #1 on Herbert Blumer's five distinctive stages, "The emergence of a social problem." Abusive relationships are a social problem of enormous breadth. This paper will review several kinds of abusive relationship and will integrate the Blumer stages into the narrative as well.

Glennys Parker of the University of Newcastle in Australia, and Christina Lee of the University of Queensland recently conducted a study of 143 women who had been abused in relationships; the results of their work is published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence in September 2007. Their study in effect helps legitimize the problem in terms of its importance in the #2 on Blumer's model ("The Legitimation of the problem"). The researcher found that the threats to the well being of abused women include "physical trauma, gynecological problems, chronic pain" along with "medically unexplained symptoms" like backaches, headaches, and gastrointestinal issues.

Abused women are more likely than healthy women to suffer from depression and anxiety; they also are known to experience feelings of inferiority and low self-esteem. And because they tend to have beliefs that are "self-defeating," the risk of them becoming victims a second, or third time is much greater. What the researchers found in their survey of the 143 women (ages 49 to 53 years) was significant; they discovered that no matter whether a woman had experienced many instances of abuse, or only a few; or if she had been horrifically abused or had less distressing abusive acts against her; whether she had reported "continuing psychological problems, including depression, anxiety, and a belief that the abuse was continuing"; none of these circumstances was predictive of women's psychological health in midlife. Indeed, Parker and Lee report on page 1185 of their journal article, the impact that abuse has on the psychological well being of any given woman depends in large part of that woman's psychological characteristics. In other words, there is no way of predicting how a woman will feel - notwithstanding her ethnicity, her education, her family health background - twenty years after being beaten by a drunken significant other based on the viciousness of the beating, or the kind of relationship she was in, long-term, short-term, or casual, or anything else.

In this article's conclusion, the researchers found in their studies that those abused participants who used well-thought-out emotional coping strategies (Blumer's #3, "The mobilization of action with regard to the problem") had opportunities to move past the trauma no matter how serious or violent the acts of abuse.

One aspect of abuse against women that seems to puzzle healthcare professionals is that so many abused women "continue to feel entrapped in abusive relationships" (Moe 2007). The article in the journal Violence Against Women asserts that women who feel entrapped and don't know how to get out of the situation they have found themselves in are the victims of "a combination of coercive control tactics" by their abusers, and by "social and institutional failures to adequately address battering" (Moe 676).

The abusers are backed by a "patriarchal, racist, classist, and homophobic society," the author explains, and get away with their violent and antisocial behavior because too often community support networks fail the battered women. That community support includes family, neighbors, friends, workplaces, schools and also shelters, hotlines, and advocacy centers. If this is true, that in many cases all these support systems fail to prevent women from being violently and aggressively attacked by their partners, the Blumer's #2 is put in place, and there is a need for Blumer's #3 - mobilizing an action to remedy the situation.

The writer in this piece has drawn information from nineteen women who were living in a domestic violence shelter. The results of this research were presented with reference to Ptacek's social entrapment perspective, and Gondolf and fisher's survivor hypothesis. Social entrapment, Moe explains on page 677, is similar to Gondolf and fisher's "survivor hypothesis." And the survivor hypothesis holds that even though women "continually resist their victimization" through "help-seeking efforts" that turn out to be mostly ineffective because of "institutional failures." This theory is a bit different than other theories about abuse, which contend that women don't try to escape because they feel helplessly trapped.

But Moe insists that many women to seek help in shelters, only to find shelters to be "inconsistent and infantilizing"; this is to say (679) that while shelters do indeed offer financial advice and support, and self-sufficiency as well, there is in many shelters no "...appreciation for the benefits of social support."

And when family members alert child protective services (CPS), and they begin having contact with battered women after being alerted to allegations of violence in the home, the battered woman is in "a precarious position" as she struggles to contend with the retaliation her abuser is likely to dish out. Of the nineteen women surveyed in this research, 18 stated that they had been physically assaulted, 7 had been sexually assaulted, 16 reported psychological and emotional abuse (verbal), and 13 recounted financial or property abuse as well.

Meanwhile, there is a correlation between women who have been physically abused and also verbally abused. Verbal abuse in this article - in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health - is defined as "critical or insulting behavior," which is harassment and a form of belittlement. The writer claims 95% of women who are physically abused are also subjected to verbal abuse (separately, not necessarily in the same incident). And this article claims there are factors that enter into the equation when examining the data on abuse; for example, a woman's employment status, her age at first intercourse - and at the birth of her first child - along with use of contraceptives at the time of her last intercourse "were associated with both types of abuse."

Researchers contributing to this article located participants ages 14 to 26, all of whom had a partner or spouse, were not pregnant (or postpartum) and were not mentally unstable or impaired. Of the 727 women involved in this research (at two clinics), 43% at one clinic and 73% at another (average of 50% of women in the total survey) indicated they had experienced, on average, three episodes of physical aggression and nine incidents of verbal abuse during their present relationship (about half of the women had been in a relationship for more than a year). This certainly qualifies as #1 and #2 on Blumer's Model.

Moreover, 16% of the women in this study reported they had been "severely physically abused" (choked, punched, strangled or threatened with a gun or a knife). Some more data resulted from this survey, which is interesting: on average, women who had been physically attacked were "more likely" than not to be under 19 years of age; they were "less likely" to be white or have at least a high school diploma. They were, in the main, younger at first intercourse, at first birth, and "less likely to have used a condom." The author, T. Lane, writes (and this is #4 on the Blumer model) that violence against women can be predicted to a degree by noting the above-mentioned age and sexual experiences, and that "all women, including adolescents, be screened for both physical and verbal abuse."