I now want to move to a psychological theorist whose work reveals the depth of the social construction of gender and the harm it creates. Adam Jukes, a psychoanalyst and group psychotherapist who has studied and treated battering men for ten years, wrote two books. The first, written in 1992, Why Men Hate Women as well as the current work Men Who Batter Women weave together sociological and psychological theories to arrive at certain conclusions about the social construction of gender. I regard his book Men Who Batter Women as an important resource for many reasons—in part because it is written by a man. Jukes can see the part of his mind that finds traditional male attitudes towards women desirable and comforting. His thesis moves from the particular to the general, and this synopsis shows his progression of thought.

Sulking as a Weapon
Jukes states that the most common weapon the abuser uses is sulking. Often the man is actually unaware of his destructive or ambivalent feelings toward his partner. The abuser believes that the woman fails to see that if she would only refrain from complaining, exhibiting anxiety, or becoming depressed that everything would be perfect. The abuser experiences his partner’s divergence of viewpoint as reproach. A woman cannot possibly agree with the man all the time so she lives in a psychological prison in which she cannot express who she really is. A person in a sulk rejects attempts by the "offender" to improve the situation. Jukes states that a high proportion, perhaps a majority of abusers sulk frequently or persistently for a large proportion of their adult lives (Jukes 1999:70,71).

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The concept of the sulk leads into Jukes’ idea of encapsulated psychosis, or "the bubble," his shorthand term. He cites Michael Balint’s description of primary love and the reaction of a baby who is denied what Balint calls the opportunity to love in peace.

In my view, all these processes happen within a very primitive and peculiar object relationship, fundamentally different from those commonly observed between adults. It is definitely a two-person relationship in which, however, only one of the partners matter; his wishes and needs are the only ones that count and must be attended to; the other partner, though felt to be immensely powerful, matters only insofar as he is willing to gratify the first partner’s needs and desires or decides to frustrate them; beyond this his personal interests, needs, desires, wishes, etc. simply do not exist.

[I]f any hitch, or disharmony between subject and object occurs, the reaction to it consists of loud and vehement symptoms suggesting processes [h]ighly aggressive and destructive in [n]ature. [O]n the other hand, if the harmony is allowed to persist without much disturbance from outside, the reaction amounts to a feeling of tranquil, quiet well-being which is rather inconspicuous and difficult to observe. (Jukes 1998:107-108 from Balint)

Balint’s description of the object—the mother or the analyst—is revealing and instructive. She is not to have any needs, desires, or wishes of her own. Anyone who wished to talk to women who have been abused will soon discover that this is an all too common observation about their abusers. Indeed many women would say that this is all too common amongst men who do not physically abuse-that it may be one of the defining characteristics of heterosexual men. (Emphasis mine) (Jukes 1998:108).

A second aspect of the "bubble" features the abuser’s view of a woman as "part object." I will explain with an everyday example. A man who sees a woman and silently admires a nice body part—breast, legs, bottom—is relating to a part object. He is oblivious to her whole-person status. Part relating is at the heart of domestic abuse. As earlier noted, the time and money invested by women in an attempt to be more attractive to men enhances the desirability of the parts and feeds the "bubble" mentality. Mythologized aspects of female sexuality lend themselves to popular media and advertisement to great effect.

Let us get closer to the heart of the matter. When a man is abusing or when the harmony Balint described is disrupted, he sees only an object whose sole desire is to cause him pain by frustrating his desire. This is perceived as willful and sadistic. [S]he needs to be punished or destroyed or controlled in order to prevent the catastrophe which the man perceives… His relation to the part object is what holds the whole system of beliefs, attitudes and abusive behavior together (Jukes 1998:108).

The abuser perceives himself as spending most of his time protecting the part object against his own rage. Thus, when the part object refuses to perform in the ideated manner, the abuser can be triggered by simple incidents into the grossest forms of abuse. He indicates to his victim that an incident may be imminent by using variations on the theme— "don’t start." Many men blame their partners for triggering abuse— i.e. she must want "it" because she knows what "winds me up".

The following passages from Jukes illuminate the mental state of a typical abuser.

As the abuser acts on the perceived threat, escalating the controlling abuse to physical means, he experiences a fracture of ego resulting from his failure to integrate the good and bad objects and the fixation as the failure to come to terms with the fundamental anxiety that the object he loves and needs to survive is also the one whom he hates and wants to destroy because she is sadistically, homicidally frustrating him. Once he is confronted with the bad part object he is convinced (because he is in a split off part of his own ego—the bubble—which is incapable of construing any other way) that the part is the whole. She is all bad, all dangerous, all sadistic. He is not the perpetrator, he is the victim. The crisis is a life-threatening one (in the mind of the abuser) and calls for extreme measures (Jukes 1999:109).

The essential quality of the bubble is that the man has a private mental life that he never shares with others. We all live in a bubble to some degree, however, "the abuser’s bubble contains values, attitudes and beliefs which are perfectionistic, prideful, arrogant, contemptuous, frustrating, mistrustful and objectifying of others. It covers a perception of a hostile world, fairly red in tooth and claw, where survival, destructiveness, and competitiveness reign. All in all there is a feeling of knowing exactly what is right and exactly what is wrong. Within this space, the man is convinced that he is self-sufficient, even self-created. (Emphasis mine.) In fact, the bubble is an island. From within it the man can abuse and believe that he is helping the victim, because "everyone wants to be perfect, don’t they?" Within the bubble he is a black hole of rage, frustration and emptiness (Jukes 1999:111).

The Healthy, Individualist Batterer

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This self-created individual embodies the capitalist paradigm. As Jay Feinman, Distinguished Professor of Law at Rutgers University, and Peter Gabel, President and professor of law at the New College of California posit in Contract Law as Ideology, changes in society propelled by the split into capital-owning and non-owning classes caused the dissolution of many bonds among people that had characterized the social relations of earlier periods (Gabel, J. and P. Feinman 1998). They echo Zinn’s theory that capitalistic competition and individual self-interest reordered the universe—weakening the bonds in a community. These bonds are further attenuated by modern mobility, often leaving individuals with no extended family nearby as a support group or to act as a check on antisocial behavior (Gabel et al 1998). Japan’s low crime figures attest to the importance of informal community sanctions on criminal behavior. The comments of a Japanese high school student explain this hegemonic structure:

The Japanese have a kind of consciousness of the shame of committing a crime. If it is proved you commit a crime, you and even your family would never be involved in your community. As most of the Japanese are afraid of that, they even hesitate to confront or argue with other people. It means that it is important for them to be a part of their communities.

Laura Nader, a legal anthropologist from UC Berkeley, studied the Zapotec in Mexico, the inhabitants of a small mountain village. In her film, Little Injustices: Laura Nader Looks at the Law (1981), she contrasted the ineffectiveness of our abstract legal environment in redressing consumer grievances to the face-to-face method of conflict resolution used by these "primitive" mountain people. She points out that these people have a large stake in maintaining harmonious relationships as they live side by side for most of their lives. A corporation that produces an inferior product has no human relationship with an unhappy American consumer, so the level of concern evidenced by the Zapotec for injustice does not seem to operate in our system. The Zapotec use simple methods to facilitate conflict resolution that are effective and inexpensive, as well as reflecting the local values of justice. This is one feature of the operation of a customary justice system. The Zapotec system features a local person, without formal legal training, appointed as judge, who rotates out of the assignment every two years. This insures an even higher response to community values. (Nader 1981)

We have been cut loose from our customary legal environment by the monetary, political, and social forces made mandatory by our current economic system. Constraints upon male abuse in a home in which multiple generations lived, or in a matrilocal community, are weakened in the nuclear family. Gabel and Feinman note the loss of communal values in the change to a capitalistically modulated society.

Within a short stretch of historical time, people experienced and were forced to adapt to the appearance of the factory, the rise of the industrial city, and a violent rupture of group life and feeling that crushed traditional forms of moral and community identity. While part of this transformation was an attempt to overturn the repressive aspects of a traditional, hierarchical society, it also created that blend of aggression, paranoia and profound emotional isolation and anguish that is known romantically as the rugged individual (emphasis mine) (Gabel et al 1998:501).

This description of the normative (male) individual in a capitalist society eerily and frighteningly mirrors that of the abuser in his encapsulated psychosis, or "bubble." It also appears as the model of the best-selling Louis L’amour characters described earlier, or the stereotype of the astute businessman. If we agree with the previous assertion that behavior patterns of normal males include woman battering, then it is difficult to discount the notion that male abuse of female partners is endemic in modern social reproduction. If we add the concept of "the bubble" to Jukes’ belief that the resolution of the Oedipus complex in men results in what he calls "normal contempt" that all "healthy" men will develop toward women, the attitudinal entrenchment becomes that much more difficult to weaken (Jukes 1999:98).

These men fail to understand that women have an interior life separate from the socially inculcated duty to service a man. Thus, male behaviors are not pathological. That is, they are the acts of "normal" people. The reasons to address these range far beyond the fair and compassionate treatment of females. The humdrum daily reports of road rage, random murder in high school and workplace, street violence, rape, and war the world over that we tend to accept as the way of the world takes an immense toll on society. The resources we use to deal with the products of male rage could better be used to improve living standards and provide humane and empowering services. These topics exceed the scope of this paper but we must keep them in mind when considering the damage done to women as a gender by this dominant paradigm. Men abuse women to keep them in a position where the male desire to receive caretaking will be most readily served. Jukes presents a list of abusive behaviors for his patients to avoid in their intimate relationships. Some behaviors on this list might take one by surprise as they are thought of as normal. However, taken as a group, these behaviors are used by a man in a concerted effort to subjugate a woman. For some women, they represent the substance of a male-female intimate relationship. For too many women, physical, emotional and verbal abuse by partners is the norm. In resource after resource, similar statistics are presented regarding domestic violence and homicide, which some call femicide. (Currie, E. 1999, Kelly, L. and J. Radford 1999). For instance, Jukes notes the following (Jukes 1999:18):

·         Domestic violence against women accounts for a quarter of all reported crime.

·         Almost half of all homicides of women are killings by a partner or ex-partner.

·         Eighty-five percent of rapists are men known to the victims.

·         The acquittal rate in rape trials is 78%. I have addressed reasons for this in my earlier review of Catharine MacKinnon’s work.

Neil Websdale, who performed an in-depth analysis of domestic homicides in the state of Florida in 1994, offers more statistics:

·         A man is almost four times as likely to kill his wife as to be killed by her; among estranged couples, he was more than nine times as likely to kill her as she him (Websdale 1999:21).

·         In single killings of women (as opposed to multiple homicide committed by the same person), eighty-eight percent were perpetrated by male intimate partners (Websdale 1999:79).

·         The multiagency case files for multiple and single killings of female domestic partners reveal that in roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of cases the parties were either separated, estranged, or divorced at the time of the fatality (Websdale 1999:206).

Surveys taken by Jukes and other social scientists indicate that 25% (Leibrich 1995) to 40% (Jukes 1999) of men are willing to use violence to "correct" a domestic partner. If this is true, then the following two statements may also be true. First, Jukes maintains that the high percentage of men who are willing to use physical violence means that the male batterer does not possess a mental pathology that makes him use violence against an intimate partner. To revisit an earlier important point, batterers are "normal" men (Jukes 1999). Second, it follows that the same percentage of women, in order to find a partner, must choose a potential abuser. The social construct that "there is someone for everyone" takes on a more utilitarian meaning in light of these figures. Even men who abuse and batter will still have an excellent chance of acquiring a spouse or female partner. The alternative, women choosing to remain single, would wreak havoc on birth rates and thus deplete the supply of labor, so is also undesirable in the eyes of a capital logic. It is no small wonder that the greater number of single women choosing to compete in the workforce and not have children is attracting so much media attention.

The Patch—The Violence Against Women Act of 1994

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The United States took a legislative stand against woman abuse in 1994 with the most important law passed to date regarding woman abuse, that I will review next. Some facts will help orient the reader in assessing the political motivation for the creation and passage of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 ("VAWA").

            The first battered women’s shelter opened in Chiswick, England in 1972. Thousands of such shelters in England and other European countries opened soon thereafter. The reasons for battering behavior were unexamined then, but nevertheless as the decade wore on shelters throughout the U.S., Canada, and England were overwhelmed by people requiring assistance.

The fragmented nature of government in the U.S., that is, each state enacting its own laws regarding domestic abuse, allowed delays and inconsistencies that did not occur in more unified governments. For example, offenders in one state often escaped prosecution by crossing a state line. The efficacy of the new VAWA law was illustrated by one horrifying example. A man beat his wife until she became unconscious. He then put her in the trunk of the car and drove through several states for five days. When he finally took her to the hospital, she had sustained massive brain damage and remains in a permanent vegetative state. Pre-VAWA, he could not have been prosecuted in the state where he finally stopped (Jasper 1996). One further point: this crime does not appear in homicide indices.

The Violence Against Women Act of 1994, enacted as part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, created national, uniform legal standards that created a stronger legal platform with which to rein in abusers. VAWA sets forth "firm law enforcement tactics and includes important safeguards for female victims of domestic violence and sexual assault." (Jasper 1996:1)

            The Violence Against Women Act of 1994 places the rule of law firmly behind the victims of domestic abuse. Over the last ten years, the trend in male sentencing for conviction in the death of a female intimate partner has shown an increase in duration of imprisonment, while incarceration time for females who murder their male abusers has decreased (Jasper 1996). However, a survey of articles in the Los Angeles Times for the months of October and November 1999 produced nine examples of felony domestic abuse including six cases of murder, and give evidence that these instances of carnage occur all too frequently despite legal sanctions. An example:

            Friday, October 1, 1999--Man Kills Self After Shooting Woman, Child

            Mother and toddler cling to life. She had tried to leave the boy’s father and had obtained a court order. [H]er ex-boyfriend, Angel Vega, stepped out of the bushes onto the driveway of her East Los Angeles home. In the past, Vega had tried to choke her. He swore he wouldn’t let her be with another man. He threatened to kill her and himself. This time, he didn’t say anything. He just stood in front of her, raised a gun and fired, shooting her in the head. "Mommy, mommy!" screamed their son, Angel Jr., throwing himself on his mother’s body. Vega headed across the street, turned back and shot the toddler in the head [t]hen he turned the gun on himself. He died at the scene. [Solis’] condition was listed as extremely grave, while her son’s was listed as critical but stable. A restraining order had been issued against Vega [w]ho had been arrested in July on charges of spousal assault.

A View of a Woman’s Trials; Then a View of a Woman’s Trial

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In view of the endemic and pandemic nature of domestic abuse, it is difficult to feel confident that VAWA, although apparently a well-written and effective law, has made the necessary inroads into this costly and destructive behavior. For example, I attended the closing arguments in the case of Gladis Soto, and discovered that inadequacies continue in the legal climate regarding abused women who kill. In February of 1999, Soto was arrested for killing her husband, Pedro Abel, and afterward cutting off his limbs with a radial arm saw because his body was too heavy to move intact. Then she took the remains down to the river bottom and set them afire in an attempt to hide the evidence. She has not disputed that she did these things. Her defense counsel used Battered Woman Syndrome as part of her defense. The news articles in the LA Times, as well as expert testimony, point to activities of both Soto and Abel that are strongly indicative of behaviors that are included in diagnosis of Battered Woman Syndrome (BWS).

Battered Woman Syndrome is listed in the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Disease. It is accepted as well in the medical profession’s Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders as a form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. BWS is described as the victim’s heightened ability to observe, assess and react to her abuser’s violence, the psychological inability of a woman to escape when attacked or to leave the batterer, and patterns of inconsistency. (Brommer 1997:18)

Soto and Abel have five children together. He had often been unfaithful to her. Soto left numerous times, even moving across country and then returning. He objected to her attendance at community college to better herself. Still, she obtained an Associate of Arts degree in early childhood education. Soto’s sister testified that Abel had broken Soto’s leg once by hitting her with their car. Their eldest daughter testified to the cruelty to which her father subjected her mother. Although the couple had divorced, Abel still lived in the home. The night of the killing, he had taken a few Viagra and told her he was going out to see another woman. He later returned home and raped her, then went to sleep. The prosecution in Soto’s case used the fact that Soto had moved across country, then returned, as a signal that the relationship must have been relatively satisfactory or she would not have returned. One of the signs of Battered Woman Syndrome, as earlier implied, is returning to an abusive relationship despite successful physical separations. This may be a result of the heightened awareness of danger from the abuser. Many of these men tell their victims they will find them and kill them. Often, they make good on their threats, so staying could be seen, ironically, as a measure toward self-preservation. As earlier noted, women are nine times more likely to be murdered while in the process of ending an abusive relationship. The Vega-Solis case cited previously is an anecdotal example of this statistical reality.

When attending the closing arguments in the Abel-Soto case, I found that little has changed in the last thirty years concerning the State’s view of women who kill their abusers despite the work of sociologists and psychologists over this time. Legal standards of self-defense based on two roughly equal antagonists continue to be applied to victims of woman abuse who kill.

In the courtroom, the Milwaukee radial arm saw that Soto used to dismember her husband sat on the prosecution’s table, uncleaned, in a Plexiglas box. The prosecution’s case consisted partly of the following points:

o        The assertion of self-defense was not perfect, as Soto was not in immediate danger of losing her life.

o        She did not make a fresh complaint of the rape.

--The idea that rape complaints are more likely to be truthful if filed within a given period of time is a myth discounted by numerous researchers (Estrich 1987).

o        She did not make numerous calls to the police when assaulted.

--Several witnesses testified to observing the results of the beatings she received.

o        She bought the gun four days before she killed Abel.

            --She told her sister that Abel was going to kill her.

o        The fact that Abel has numerous liaisons with other women was used against Soto because the prosecution asserted that she killed Abel due to his alleged "different behavior pattern" in a current affair.

o        Any prior thought of killing was characterized as premeditation by the prosecution. No allowance was made for the idea that Abel committed many acts of potentially lethal violence on Soto.

The defense attorney’s closing argument did little to dispel the prosecution’s assertions. Although the experts who testified stated that Soto was battered, the attorney failed to highlight areas of Soto’s behavior that suggested Battered Woman Syndrome. His grasp of the theories behind possible explanations of Soto’s actions was tenuous at best, and he failed to have the reference material he cited at hand so he could quote properly. As I left the courtroom, I felt concern regarding the quality of her defense. However, having followed the case closely, I was still shocked when the jury returned a verdict of guilty to murder in the first degree because it seemed that the defense had demonstrated a clear pattern of abuse.

Conclusion

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Stronger measures must be taken to insure the safety of women and children against male domestic abuse. It seems obvious that the hegemonic nature of male domination resists substantive efforts to reduce woman abuse, in Anglo-American culture, or other cultures. From the statistics showing the decrease in (reported) deaths due to domestic violence over the last twenty years, we can see that interventions such as shelters for battered women and children are saving lives as well as keeping women out of prison and orphaning children. However, the death rate for women has declined significantly less than that of men. In 1976, 1,357 men met their fate at the hands of a female intimate partner, while 1,600 women similarly died. In 1997, only 430 men died in acts of intimate violence, while 1,174 women died. The percentage of decrease for male deaths was 68%, while the percentage of decrease for females was a mere 26%. The disparity of death percentages in this statistic speaks eloquently for the obdurate nature of the oppression of women in a nation that likes to think it holds the moral high ground over the rest of the world in gender equality. These figures suggest that women are increasingly using the new laws to leave abusive relationships or seek other alternatives but men continue to see murder as one rational answer to the problem of the "thing" misbehaving. We as a society seem unable to acknowledge the concrete connection between our socioeconomic norms and the criminal behavior they foster.

A survey conducted by the Office of Policy and Research at the Department of Justice in New Zealand differs from most other surveys in this area as it focuses solely on men’s views of and participation in "domestic abuse." The researchers chose this term carefully, as they wanted responses concerning psychological abuse as well as physical violence. They view the intimate abuse of women as a continuum from simple verbal put-downs to felony assault and murder. In the outcome of the survey, they were able to examine the links between personal characteristics, attitudes toward abuse, and abusive behavior (Leibrich, J., J. Paulin, R. Ransom 1995:15). This survey found that 25% of the men were willing to use some form of violence in controlling the activities of their female partner (Leibrich et al 1995). This finding sustains a theme recurs throughout the readings, statistics and studies. In the words of the authors of this study, the solution may ultimately lie in redefining what it means to be a man (Leibrich et al 1995). This concept will be considered impractical. It means altering the cultural conditioning of millennia. However, as the men in the Leibrich study indicated, lack of governmental interest and support may exacerbate the problem of domestic abuse and gender discrimination. Our clinicians rightly refuse to allow male batterers to blame anyone else for their actions. Regardless, the norms of society reinforce human behavior for both good and evil. Thus, ongoing attempts to improve the status of all under the law should tend to alter norms for the better. Earlier examples in U.S. history where rights were granted to those in positions of oppression include passage of the Thirteenth Amendment delegitimizing slavery in 1865 and the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 allowing women’s suffrage. In the 1960’s we improved our human rights posture by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to eliminate invidious discrimination. These actions, though seriously overdue, were nevertheless finally undertaken and have allowed us to begin to enjoy the benefit of the intellect and energy previously obscured by prejudice. Social science working in tandem with law has made some progress possible. This new enfranchisement has not resulted in a major modification to the power dynamics of gendered relationships in the United States, however, due to social reproduction of hegemonic paradigms. Thus, in Anglo-American society, this may mean no substantial change will occur in the degree and volume of domestic abuse and violence that affects all classes—along with all of the other attendant ills of the system—until our economic system and societal structure again shifts to accommodate alternative perspectives. Perhaps the passage of an Equal Rights Amendment will begin to change the perception of women in our culture, as a change began in the perception of African Americans with the passage of civil rights legislation. Nevertheless, with the declining sustainability of alternative political ideologies to that of capitalism, it is ever more important to rethink our dominant assumptions and design a system that works for all people, not just a socioeconomic elite.

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Sociological and political analysis of the male batterer personality, and the pandemic male attitudes that lead to battering, by a male psychoanalyst.

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Legal precedents that still influence courts and society today.

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The remarkable alternative history of the United States.

Appendix One

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FBI Supplementary Homicide Reports, 1976-1997