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Excusing Violence

Chally

A new survey on violence against women in Australia has just been released. “National Community Attitudes towards Violence against Women Survey 2009” was coordinated by an organisation called VicHealth, which was appointed by the Minister for Health in the state of Victoria. You can access the findings here.

There was an article about the survey from the Australian Associated Press yesterday called Violence against women ‘still a problem’. Which I think we pretty much all knew was the case, but we ‘tend to’ express it ‘without gratutious’ quotation marks which ‘make it look’ like ‘it might be’ someone’s ‘opinion’ rather than ‘a’ real thing. Anyhow, let’s move to the substance of the article.

Australia still has a long way to go to abolish violence against women, a new survey reveals.

One in four people think women falsify or exaggerate claims of rape and domestic violence, according to the federally funded survey of more than 10,000 Australians.

And one in five think domestic violence is excusable if the attacker regrets what they have done.

From page 48 of the summary of findings (PDF), to be specific, that’s 27% of men respondents and 18% of women respondents agreeing with that last statement out of the 13 000 people surveyed. There are lots of disturbing findings in this survey: 38% of men and 30% of women said that ‘rape results from men being unable to control their need for sex’ and 80% of respondents agreed that ‘it is hard to understand why women stay in violent relationships,’ up from 77 percent in 1995, for a start. There are lots of important things that should be spoken about. Today, I want to talk about the notion that domestic violence – any violence – is excusable.

First, there’s one big question: who is doing the excusing? I find the notion that anyone other than the person subject to a crime can do any excusing – or forgiving or anything along those lines – to be deeply wrong. It is of course not specified in the survey question who is doing the excusing, which tends to suggest that there’s some kind of objective decision-making power to be accessed: here, let we the public determine whether the violence committed against you was the okay sort or not, and what response is in order! Look, have your opinions all you like about a particular act against someone else, but at point of it, the acts of violence have only been committed against the people they’ve been committed again; they’re the only ones who can rightly excuse anything. The impact on them doesn’t diminish because outsiders have decided it’s all okay, and it’s only this one person who can truly know the effects, as it’s solely their experience. Legal punishments and such are up to the state, but forgiveness? The emotions around the events? All that stuff? Not up to not the state, not members of the public, but just those who have been harmed.

The statement in the survey that respondents were asked to agree or disagree with was ‘Domestic violence can be excused if, afterwards, the violent person genuinely regrets what they have done’. Why should the regret weigh more than the impact on the person to whom they were violent? Violence doesn’t become any less real or harmful because the perpetrator regrets it. And they certainly don’t get a clean slate because of remorse.

I don’t doubt that a lot of respondents would have thought it perfectly acceptable to not excuse someone who’d committed, say, fraud from their crime. It’s crimes like this, crimes committed widely against socially vulnerable groups like women, children, queer people, disabled people and more, crimes around which the thinking is ‘well, maybe zie deserved it anyway,’ ‘it couldn’t be as bad as that,’ that are excusable.

Attitudes like these serve to disenfranchise survivors of violence all the more: the weight of that which has been done to them is diminished, too, and they are invisibilised by outsiders wanting to exercise the moral power, to hand down right and wrong, to determine the “bad kind” of violence and the “excusable kind”. There are no excusable kinds of violence, and violence is certainly not able to be excused by people who were not subjected to it. And forgiveness isn’t something to be accessed at will.

Further reading: Cara’s also covered this survey over at The Curvature, and she’s examined many aspects I haven’t.

10 thoughts on Excusing Violence

  1. This saddens and mystifies me.

    That said I am not surprised the numbers aren’t higher. I believe that they ARE higher but people won’t admit to it. I’ve seen so many people, even equalist-minded ones, who sometimes slip into victim blaming.

    Though while we are on this thread if someone wiser or more knowledgeable than me has any links to resources to help a friend I would be grateful. She just left an abusive boyfriend; he used money to control her (he’d hired her when she got laid off 6 months into their relationship and threatened to fire her with no reference if she left him) then after months of emotional abuse to boot, twisted her arms and sexually assaulted her – she called the cops DURING the assault, that left her covered in bruises, and they said they didn’t care and couldn’t do anything. And she says she is still in love with him and wants things to be how they were. She cleverly got some incontrovertible proof of something else he did that he doesn’t want his family and friends to know about (hooray!) so it is unlikely he will come after her. But I fear she may go back anyway and want to help her move forward instead. Are there any resources any Feministers can post to help her? Or help me to help her? Thank you!

  2. I comment hesitantly because I’m only very much a trainee feminist, not to mention the fact that I’m also a man; but I’m also a lawyer, which means I have a particular perspective – not the only or the best one, but one that may be interesting. Please forgive / correct me if I seem to be missing the point or mansplaining.

    You say, ‘I find the notion that anyone other than the person subject to a crime can do any excusing – or forgiving or anything along those lines – to be deeply wrong.’

    In English law (and so probably in other common-law jurisdictions like Australia) ‘excuse’ and ‘justification’ are technical terms. Roughly speaking, an excuse is something that prompts the reaction, ‘That act was wrong, but you did it for an understandable reason to the extent that the law chooses not to hold you responsible’, and a justification prompts the reaction, ‘That act was the kind of act that would often be wrong but in those circumstances was actually right’. For example, if you knock somebody unconscious because that person was attacking you with a baseball bat then you’re defending yourself, which is a justification; if you knock somebody unconscious because some other people have your children and will kill them if you don’t, you’re acting under duress, which is an excuse. In that legal sense, ‘excusing’ is something that can be done by a quasi-objective third party (a law-court) rather than by the victim, in that the third party can decide whether your reason for doing something that’s normally wrong is… well, not necessarily a good reason, but a reason that people in general should accept as an excuse because humans are sometimes put in very difficult situations. And in that sense it isn’t the same as forgiveness (which can only be given by the person or people who have suffered harm), it’s just a sort of letting-off-the-hook on the part of society.

    I bring that up really because you’ve specifically addressed the legal aspect of the issue and how ‘excusing’ relates to crime and punishment. But having said all that, I don’t suggest that this survey was using ‘excuse’ as a legal term. In fact it clearly wasn’t, because in law (and in, well, common sense, as you point out) it would be completely absurd to suggest that something that happens *after* the act (such as regret) can excuse the act itself. More importantly, I find it very hard to see how domestic violence could ever realistically have an ‘excuse’ even in this particular legal sense (though one example might be the where one partner is repeatedly abused and victimized by the other until eventually snapping and inflicting violence in a form of delayed self-defence). So I don’t want to in any sense support those respondents who think ‘domestic violence can be excused if, afterwards, the violent person genuinely regrets what they have done’, especially not if, as the language implies, ‘can be excused’ in this context means something like ‘should be forgiven’: that, as you say, is up to the victim, and I’ve seen enough domestic violence prosecutions collapse to know that encouraging victims to forgive their abusers is about the last thing anyone should be doing.

  3. ‘I bring that up really because you’ve specifically addressed the legal aspect of the issue and how ‘excusing’ relates to crime and punishment. But having said all that, I don’t suggest that this survey was using ‘excuse’ as a legal term.’

    I don’t think the survey was using ‘excuse’ as a legal term, either, and this post was specifically *not* addressing legal aspects, but social ones. Thanks for the legal explanation! 🙂

  4. Quote: “Which I think we pretty much all knew was the case, but we ‘tend to’ express it ‘without gratutious’ quotation marks which ‘make it look’ like ‘it might be’ someone’s ‘opinion’ rather than ‘a’ real thing. ”

    Spit out my drink laughing… oh bitter, bitter laughter. I love how what, you know, we ladies “say happened” is, like, “our opinion” on the “facts” of the case.

  5. Also, facilitate me if it’s a derail, but your portions on “excusing” and excusability in general in society made me think that it would be really nice if there was more discussion on the difference between “excusing” sexual violence and getting to a point, as a survivor, where you can forgive. Personally, I can say that forgiving was deeply healing to me (it also took a damn long time), but what made it different from excusing was something along the lines of:

    (a) I was not expected to do it,

    (b) I did it 100% of my own free will with no coercion, and on my time line,

    (c) I, the survivor, did it, not anyone else, not anyone for me,

    (d) I had already had my time to be angry and vengeful and experience all the feelings I needed to experience to get to this point.

    (e) I did it primarily for my own health… which is also why I stayed angry for so long.

    That’s probably an incomplete list.

    I guess, as a feminist, I always find myself having to defend myself and other survivors from having “excuses” made for the perpetrator, or being re-victimized in some ways. And because of that constant bombardment and need for defense, it feels like there’s never, ever space to talk about what forgiving has done for me (and others), what it has freed me from, and why I couldn’t do it right away. And I think if someone had had space and time to share that with me sooner, it would have helped, a lot.

  6. It’s very frustrating to see that people still use the old excuse of uncontrollable male lust for rapists.

    They manage to control it until there aren’t any witnesses around.
    Doesn’t sound uncontrollable to me. Sounds premeditated.

    Same with domestic violence. It’s mostly done behind closed doors. So how could anyone make the claim that it was an ‘act of passion’?
    They fail the subjective logic test.

  7. 80% of respondents agreed that ‘it is hard to understand why women stay in violent relationships,’ up from 77 percent in 1995

    This, I thought, could be good or bad, depending on the reasoning. Is it “hard[er] to understand” now than it used to be because more people are victim-blaming, or because more people agree that violent relationships are terrible* and ideally should be ended if possible? I’m hoping the latter; it would be nice if it’s just sloppy wording that’s making it sound judgmental — I’ve certainly used phrasing like that to express my opinion of something as less-than-ideal even when I technically do “understand” the situation.

    *as opposed to normal or proper

  8. Cha-Cha @5: That is not a derail at all, I think it’s a vital component to the discussion :). One which I couldn’t quite articulate when I wrote this, but, as I was discussing with Lauredhel from Hoyden About Town while I was drafting this, actually, is of great importance.

  9. I wish places that report about these things would include some links to victim support or something. It is bad enough to report that so many people still view this kind of thing as “deserved” or “excusable” without reinforcing that it in fact is not OK by offering proof of society actively acting to stop it.

  10. ‘… and this post was specifically *not* addressing legal aspects…’

    Sorry, yes, ‘specifically addressed’ was entirely the wrong thing for me to say there! I should have said something like ‘touched on’ or ‘mentioned’.

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