Interesting article today in the Times about sibling-on-sibling violence. It’s seen as a normal part of growing up, and dismissed as “boys will be boys” or a phase, but sibling relationships — particularly among closely-spaced brothers in large families — are the most violent, on a blow-per-blow basis, of all domestic relationships.
In a study published last year in the journal Child Maltreatment, a group of sociologists found that 35 percent of children had been “hit or attacked” by a sibling in the previous year. The study was based on phone interviews with a representative national sample of 2,030 children or those who take care of them.
Although some of the attacks may have been fleeting and harmless, more than a third were troubling on their face.
According to a preliminary analysis of unpublished data from the study, 14 percent of the children were repeatedly attacked by a sibling; 4.55 percent were hit hard enough to sustain injuries like bruises, cuts, chipped teeth and an occasional broken bone; and 2 percent were hit by brothers or sisters wielding rocks, toys, broom handles, shovels and even knives.
Children ages 2 to 9 who were repeatedly attacked were twice as likely as others their age to show severe symptoms of trauma, anxiety and depression, like sleeplessness, crying spells, thoughts of suicide and fears of the dark, further unpublished data from the same study suggest.
“There are very serious forms of, and reactions to, sibling victimization,” said David Finkelhor, a sociologist at the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, the study’s lead author, who suggests it is often minimized.
“If I were to hit my wife, no one would have trouble seeing that as an assault or a criminal act,” Dr. Finkelhor said. “When a child does the same thing to a sibling, the exact same act will be construed as a squabble, a fight or an altercation.”
Reading this piece, I started to realize how much I had internalized this idea that sibling violence is not really violence. I come from a large Irish family, with six kids (four boys, two girls) within 8 years. I never considered myself to have been physically abused; that was something your parents did to you. But while I never really took serious beatings from any of my siblings, there was plenty of sibling-on-sibling violence. It’s what we’re supposed to do, after all, being a large Irish family.
For instance, my sister and I got into some knock-down drag-outs with biting, scratching and hair-pulling (the one time we tried to punch each other, we wound up driving our fists together, which hurt like hell). When my younger twin brothers got stronger and bigger than me, they started to pin me down and use physical force in our disputes. The youngest worked out his jealousy issues with me for a couple of years by throwing things at me every time he saw me — one time, he hit me square in the back with a huge candle — and by hitting me with various things, including a snow brush to the mouth that chipped a tooth. I also gave him a nosebleed once when he was annoying me by grabbing my leg while I was trying to walk by — though, true to my socialization, I got panicky when I saw the blood and fled the scene. I’ve thrown plenty of stuff in my time (I even badly bruised my elbow when I was trying to throw something and chase someone at the same time, and ran into a wall).
The boys in my family, being so close in age, definitely had a more violent relationship with each other than they did with my sister and I or than the girls had with each other. The oldest set himself up as the family enforcer, and we used to call him “the Disciplinarian.” The twins were at each other from infancy — my mother had to put them in separate playpens because they would bite and scratch each other, and even after they were separated, they tried to grab each other through the bars. The twins beat the youngest on a regular basis.
And this shit didn’t stop in adulthood, at least among the boys (they left the girls alone after a while, and my sister and I haven’t fought physically in 20-odd years). When my oldest brother got married 10 years ago in Washington State, we all repaired to our hotel rooms after what was probably the most boring reception ever, congratulating ourselves on how much less dysfunctional we were than the bride’s family. But within minutes, the twins were in a fight, and the one who started it got mad that he lost it and called the cops. When the cops came, they found out that the complainant was also the instigator, so they *both* got arrested, under Washington’s zero-tolerance domestic violence policy.
And the rest of us stood around and thought, domestic violence? It was just a fight! Then we tried to figure out who was going to bail them out the next day, since most of us had flights to catch, and how we were going to keep our aunts, who had rooms on the other side of the hotel, from finding out about our little White Trash Theater episode.
And even three years ago, when our mother was dying, the oldest, at age 37 and a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, was doing his Disciplinarian thing, beating up one of the twins in his own house for smoking pot. I got on him for that, yelling at him that he couldn’t do that anymore, that he certainly would get court-martialed if he tried to discipline one of his airmen like that — and smacking him in the head while asking how he liked that. (And then he really freaked me out by taking me outside to discuss further and breaking into tears.)
God, writing that made me realize that the both of us were excusing our violent acts as just a family thing — but the kind of family thing neither of us would tolerate from a spouse or parent, and certainly nothing we would do to a spouse or to a child or to a stranger. And I also realized that everyone else at the table — mostly our siblings, but some spouses — excused it as well (except for it being done in public).
There’s a reason, in other words, that I sometimes joke that I was raised by wolves.