The Women’s Movement of the 1970’s succeeded in making male violence against women a visible political issue, showing how men employ violence to maintain and justify male domination over all women. It is not necessary for all men to commit violence against women because the incessant threat of male violence supported by men’s institutions and structures is sufficient in itself to maintain male domination over all women. Feminists during the 1970’s revealed how individual violent men are accorded impunity to inflict violence upon women and how male controlled institutions such as the law and male controlled political systems operate to justify, excuse and deny systemic male violence against women and girls. Radical feminists during the 1970’s created rape crisis centers and women’s refuges to support women who had been subjected to male violence. These rape crisis centers and refuges were not merely “service centers”;   rather they were grass roots organisations enabling women collectively to campaign against male violence against women and demand real political and social changes to curb men’s socio-economic power over women.

As a result new laws and social practices were introduced by governments which were designed to prevent male violence against women and provide justice for the female victims of male violence. However, these laws and social practices have all to commonly been ineffective and instead are used to blame the female victims and mitigate male violence against women.

The male backlash against feminist demands for an end to male violence against women was swiftly enacted. Forty years after the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970’s, currently we are in a situation where men’s rights activists are using myriad ways to maintain men’s fiction that male violence against women is not a political method of maintaining and justifying male supremacy over women on a global scale. Whilst it is now acceptable for society to openly recognise that (male) violence against women exists, there is the corollary that each report is portrayed as just another isolated incident and/or the male perpetrators were in thrall to uncontrollable emotions. Lethal intimate male partner violence against women is reported by mainstream media as “a family tragedy” because the male perpetrator was “a family man driven to despair by outside influences such as debt, unemployment and/or marital disputes”. The term “marital dispute” implies that the female victim was partially responsible for causing her own death because she had a dispute with her male/ex male partner. Such claims mitigate and erase men’s choice and men’s agency to take lethal revenge against their female/ex female partner and/or her children.

Mainstream media ensures there is  no “connecting the dots” by asking why do not these men leave and move on with their lives? Or why do they make the choice to murder their female/ex female partners and/or her children prior to committing suicide? Given these men are supposedly “devoted family men” why do they make the choice to murder children they have fathered and supposedly love? These questions must not be asked because it would mean focusing on male ownership of women and their children.

All these men believe and enact male supremacist ideology that once a male has entered into a sexual relationship with a woman she and any resulting children are the man’s private property. Only the man has the right of ending the sexual relationship, not the woman;  so when a woman dares to end her relationship with the man she must be punished and all too commonly her children, too. The issue is about male ownership of women and children. Mainstream media is male owned and male dominated and hence is an effective male propaganda tool. The mainstream media maintains the fiction that men are now the oppressed group because of supposedly feminist, man-hating initiated laws and social policies denying men their lawful right of male control/male ownership over women and children.

But it is not just mainstream media which depoliticises pandemic male violence against women.

Innumerable documents and policies produced by international bodies such as the United Nations and national governments all enact the same hiding strategies. These policies, documents, and reports all reference “violence against women” and/or the latest euphemistic term “gender based violence against women”! The term “gender based violence against women” does not inform the reader who is responsible for committing violence against women. “Gender” is a descriptive term, not a human entity. “Gender” cannot commit violence against women so who is being protected by not being named? Perhaps it is women because “gender” is commonly perceived as attributable to women since men have always claimed male as the default generic human and hence no need to name men/males as men/males. Yet obviously the entities being protected are men because naming men/males as the perpetrators will immediately instigate a male backlash of claims “you are demonising men” or “not all men are violent”. Because men are the dominant class they accord themselves the right to define when and if men will be named. Instructively, men appear only when the issue concerns male/female equality such as “treating men and women equally”. When men are held accountable they always disappear: men are the absent male presence.

Jennifer Drew (c) November 2014

Continued as Parts 2 and 3 …

References

Phillips D. and Henderson, D. 1999: ‘A Discourse Analysis of male violence against women’. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 69, 1:116-21.

Strauss, M.A. 1990: Physical Violence In American Families: Risk Factors and Adaptations to Violence in 8,154 families, ed. M.A. Strauss and R.J. Gelles, pp. 75-91, New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction Publishers.

Kaye, M. and Tolmie, J. 1998: ‘The Rhetorical Devices of Fathers’ Rights Groups’, Melbourne University Law Review 22: 162-94.

Johnson, A.G. The Gender Knot: Unravelling Our Patriarchal Legacy, Rev. ed. Philadelphia, Temple University Press.

Thank you to Dr Lynette J. Dumble for permission to reprint this article from GSN (Global Sisterhood Network) and to ‘Rain and Thunder’ for the original publication of the article by Jennifer Drew.

“UNRELENTING BACKLASH – How Male Violence Against Women Continues To Be Depoliticised” at: http://www.global-sisterhood-network.org/content/view/2940/59/ ~~~~~~~~ http://www.rainandthunder.org/ Rain and Thunder: Issue 60 (Fall/Winter 2014): Themed Issue on Violence Against Women: Strategizing a Radical Response for the 21st Century