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"We are a
society of people living in a state of post-traumatic shock."
-Aurora Levins Morales1 One of the striking - though not
surprising - features of the public response to September 11 is how little
discourse we have had about traumatization and its
political relevance. There has been
fleeting mention in the media of a heightened level of psychological
stress. The word terrorism is on everyone's lips; but, at least in the public arena,
hardly anyone is talking openly about feeling terrified. We have seen rage displayed in all kinds of
ways, from support for war to attacks against Muslims, but there has been
virtually no conscious reflection about rage as a traumatic response to
violation. Least of all has there been
discourse about how trauma, in addition to causing intense personal distress,
is a significant factor that shapes political behavior. My central thesis in this book is that
trauma plays a crucial role in the politics of oppression, domination, and
violence. There is a strong tendency for
traumatized people to internalize the experience of powerlessness, and then at
critical moments to engage in desperate efforts at self-protection that are
driven from that place of subjective powerlessness. This is a psychological and political place
from which we are incisively aware of the ways in which we have been acted
upon, victimized and harmed, but from which it can be difficult or impossible
to gauge the impact of our enraged behavior upon others, or even to maintain
our awareness of the core humanity of those defined as Other. I
attempt to describe and understand this phenomenon through the concept of power-under. Power-under plays itself out in acts of
violence ranging from the physical and sexual abuse of children to male
battering, and in political stances ranging from racism to homophobia, from
xenophobia to support for war. It is
particularly relevant to a post-September 11 world in which many Americans
perceive themselves as innocent victims, acted upon by forces of evil. In the state of heightened vulnerability
caused so prominently by the terrorist attacks, the psychological need for
self-protection cannot be overstated.
The ways that we attempt to defend ourselves psychologically against
trauma can easily conspire to equate retaliation with self-protection. These include the demonization
of the perceived perpetrator, our subjective immersion in powerlessness and
lack of agency, the tendency for victimization to make us unaware of our own
access to power and dominance, and the overwhelming need to give expression to
unbearable feelings of rage. From the
perspective of traumatized victims, we have been threatened with annihilation
by inhuman monsters, and any actions "we" take against "them" (no matter how
broadly the Others are defined) are readily justified
as acts of self-defense rather than acts of aggression. When "they" kill it is terrorism; when "we"
kill it is self-protection. At its core, this book is about breaking
cycles of violence and domination. In Starhawk's novel The
Fifth Sacred Thing, the wise old woman Maya says, "The ends don't justify
the means….The means shape the ends."2 Consistency between means and ends is
the essence of nonviolence, and that is the value system from which I am
writing. Political violence, whether in
the hands of individuals who blow up planes and buildings or of governments
that bomb countries, always rests on the belief that the ends justify the
means. In a world that is literally
rocking with violence and counter-violence, the need for new political forces
rooted in the principles and practices of nonviolence has never been more
urgent. In order to promote the practice of nonviolence, we need
as many people as possible to critically reflect on
their experiences of traumatic powerlessness and rage. This is true not only in relation to the
trauma of September 11, but also in relation to the extraordinary breadth and
depth of traumatization in a society that is
saturated with domination and brutality, at both the personal and institutional
levels. It is not a new idea that
brutality begets brutality. The question
that needs much more conscious attention and investigation is exactly how this happens, both psychologically
and politically. My contention in this
book is that the internalization of powerlessness is a central link in cycles
of violence. Becoming conscious of how
our own subjective powerlessness can lead us to dehumanize and violate others
is one of the keys to breaking these cycles. As I have completed the final revisions on
this work, a new peace movement has blossomed to oppose the Bush
Administration's proposed war with Trauma is one piece of a much larger
puzzle that includes factors from childrearing practices to the institutional
arrangements of economic and political power that shape political values which
legitimize violence and domination. But
I believe that trauma is a critically important factor that is largely ignored
from left to right on the political spectrum.
My goal in this book is to raise awareness of trauma as a political
issue and, above all, to stimulate dialogue about trauma and nonviolence. Far more than "expert" pronouncements or
instructions, we need people critically reflecting on and talking to each other
about our experiences of powerlessness, violation, suffering, terror and
rage. I write this book as a political observer
and a mental health worker - but also as a trauma survivor. While this is not a memoir, later in this
chapter I will describe my experience of childhood trauma; and the analysis I
develop is at all times informed by the sensibility of someone conscious of
having experienced severe emotional trauma. Though this book is strikingly relevant to
the political response to terrorist attacks in the Trauma
is both an effect and a cause of brutality and domination. If ours were a society that valued people
over the accumulation of wealth, that raised its children nonviolently, that
lived in harmony with the earth, that recognized the intrinsic worth of each
life, the terrorist attacks in all likelihood would not have happened; and if
they had, our response would have been far different. In a society organized around inequality,
systemic oppression, and the legitimization of many forms of domination and
violence, it is inevitable that people will experience the powerlessness,
violation, and intense suffering associated with trauma on a massive
scale. While a specific event such as
the hijacking of a plane or the bombing of a building is not inevitable or
predictable, patterns of violence which feed on the internalization of
powerlessness are all too predictable. The horror of September 11 resonates with
and builds upon this deep underlay of traumatic powerlessness in people's
lives; and the trauma related to this one event is the tip of an iceberg. It is the iceberg that I aim to address. Creating a Radically Humane Society
The most important goal of this book is to
contribute to our capacity to achieve a more just and humane society. A core contention is that if trauma were more
widely understood and explored as a political issue, we would be better able to
build effective movements working toward peace and social justice. I will outline the reasons why trauma is
related to social change efforts shortly.
But first, here is a brief description of the kind of society that I
believe in - the values and vision that I hope this book can help to
promote. In a radically humane society: ·
The basic, intrinsic value of all life is recognized
and affirmed. There is a core ethos of equality, based on each
person's inherent worth rather than on ability, accomplishment, or such
arbitrary tokens of value as race, gender, nationality, and so on. ·
People are valued more than the accumulation of
wealth, status, or power. Promoting the well-being of each person
individually, and of people collectively, is recognized and practiced as the
greatest personal, social, and political accomplishment. Cooperation is valued over competition; mutual
aid over "winning." Individual accomplishment
is not at the expense of others. ·
Wealth is democratically limited and shared. The ideal of
getting as rich as possible is replaced by the ideal of self-chosen limits on
wealth at levels which are consistent with everyone having enough to meet their
basic needs, and at levels which are consistent with ecological health. ·
Diversity is valued and celebrated along lines of
race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and ability. There is
recognition of the richness of multiple cultures. Individual diversities based on the
incredible range of human aptitude, personality, interests, and creativity are
affirmed and nourished. ·
We live in harmony with the earth. The paradigm
of exploiting the earth's resources for human benefit is replaced by the
paradigm of interconnectedness between the health of the earth and the health
of human life. ·
Power is shared through participatory institutions and
practices. The democratic ideals that our current
society preaches are actually put into practice in ways that give ordinary
people shared control over their workplaces,3 communities, and homes through a proliferation
of participatory institutions in which people learn and practice the skills of
democratic self-management. ·
There is a revitalization of community life. As human
interconnectedness becomes a primary societal value, and mutual aid becomes a
social and cultural norm, community life flourishes.4
·
Society's key institutions are organized on a
decentralized, human scale. In place of gigantic, centralized,
bureaucratic economic and political institutions, economic and political life
is decentralized through democratically managed small businesses and
neighborhood councils. Federations of
decentralized economic and political institutions coordinate and manage issues
that must be dealt with on a larger scale. ·
Nonviolence pervades social, economic, and political
relations. New norms emerge at every level of human
existence which take violence off the map as an
acceptable option for solving problems or resolving conflicts. From child rearing and gender relations to
international relations, peaceful "win-win" conflict resolution methods are
developed and practiced as routine aspects of daily life.5 To the extent that pockets and remnants of
oppression and violent behavior persist, they are resisted through nonviolent
means of struggle that respect the core humanity of those identified as
oppressors. Of course, I recognize that we
are light years away from a radically humane society at present, and I have no
illusions about the obstacles that have to be overcome and the degree of
struggle entailed in moving toward such a society. At
the same time, it's important to also recognize that every one of the values I
have described has actually been put into practice to some degree, either
historically or currently. Ruth Benedict
and Riane Eisler have
written about "primitive"6 and historical7 societies which were organized around the
alignment of self-interest with the common good. Even within our present society, in the face
of a prevailing ethos that legitimizes greed and domination, there are large
numbers of people who do not seek limitless wealth, who genuinely value human
life and diversity, who try to share power and to live in harmony with the
earth, and so on. These are ideals in
the sense that they are not prevailing norms - but they are squarely within the
range of human capacities. It
is especially important to hold these positive possibilities in view in the
context of a book that delves into the politics of trauma. The study of trauma brings us face to face
with human capacities for gross brutality and malevolence at levels which are
extraordinarily difficult to take in and come to terms with. What may be even more daunting, particularly
from a political perspective, is the extent to which the experience of traumatization itself can lay the groundwork for further
acts of violation and dehumanization. Immersed in this kind of analysis, it is
critical not to lose sight of the full range of human potentials - including
our ability to resist the experience of violation and oppression in ways that
move us toward the affirmation of life and the creation of humane social
conditions.8 Trauma and Progressive Social Change
How can the study of trauma help us to move toward a more humane
society of the sort that I have described?
I believe that trauma is relevant both to mounting a critique of the
existing society and to our efforts to build effective social change
movements. A more broadly shared
understanding of trauma as a political issue can help us to articulate and
expose critical ways in which oppression harms people; it can also clarify key
aspects of how oppression is socially reproduced and perpetuated. In addition, I will argue that trauma is
critically relevant to overcoming divisions between social change
constituencies and movements, and relevant to the central task of mobilizing
progressive activism. Understanding
trauma can help us to articulate what is deeply wrong with the current society. Personal
suffering is the most basic reason for social change. Trauma offers a conceptual framework for
describing our most profound suffering9 - and for showing how oppressive social
conditions degrade human experience and cause wide ranges of personal
dysfunction. It is the fact that
oppression wounds people so deeply that creates its magnitude as a social
wrong.10 The study of trauma can help us to make those
wounds visible and to show how pervasively, how systematically, and how deeply
our society injures people. Sandra Bloom and Michael Reichert, in
their recent book Bearing Witness,
call the Racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and
economic brutality all routinely violate people's integrity and repeatedly
render people powerless in the face of overwhelming personal and institutional
forces. The social experience of people
of color, gay people, women, workers, poor people, children, and disabled
people is saturated with abuse, humiliation, violence, and negation of personal
worth. As Aurora Levins
Morales argues, "abuse is the local eruption of systemic oppression, and
oppression the accumulation of millions of small systematic abuses."13 Trauma belies myths that people are immune
to destructive social environments, that anyone can emerge unscathed and
through hard work succeed, and conversely that those who don't succeed are to
blame for their own failures. The study
of trauma can teach us that ours is a sickening
society — a society in which toxic
social conditions create
psychological and physical illness by routinely traumatizing people. It teaches that a society organized around
domination is bankrupt not only because it spawns enormous material inequality,
violence, and oppressive power relations, but also because it degrades the
quality of individual lives on a massive scale through the mechanism of
trauma. Understanding
trauma can help us to analyze the persistence of oppression and the popular
appeal of the right. In order to develop effective social change
strategies, we need to understand the forces that sustain the existing social
and political order. Left analysis has
understandably focused on systems of power-over
- institutions and structures built around class, patriarchy, and race that
concentrate power and wealth in the hands of elites that are overwhelmingly
white and male. As a foundation for
effective social action, this kind of analysis is crucial. But in my view it is also incomplete. The politics of powerlessness can add
significantly to our understanding of why and how many people enact dominance
personally, and can also help us to explain the popular appeal of the
right. I will argue that it is common
for traumatized people to occupy dominant positions - as parents, as men, as
white people, as heterosexuals, as bosses, as Americans, and so on. When internalized powerlessness is paired
with objective dominance, it creates a lethal dynamic in which we unwittingly
respond to our own victimization by oppressing others. In Chapter Two I describe how power-under
combines with objective dominance in examples that range from Holocaust survivors
to male batterers. Along exactly the same lines, right wing
populism consistently appeals to ordinary people's sense of victimization and
mobilizes traumatic rage toward the demonization of
politically scapegoated groups (the welfare poor,
gays and lesbians, women exercising reproductive rights, immigrants, and so
on),14 as I try to show in Chapter Four. As Aurora Levins
Morales notes, "If trauma distorts the ability of the subjugated to direct
their desire to empower themselves and in fact tends to drive them toward
assuming perpetrator roles, and if people in objectively dominant positions
often perceive themselves as victimized and defending themselves as a result of
unresolved trauma, then understanding how trauma works and how to undo its
effects is one of the most critical issues we face."15 This kind of understanding is
critical particularly because it can inform how we try to effect change among
people identified as oppressors. If we
view the oppressor as an inhuman Other - no matter how
understandable this view is from the perspective of the victim and the
oppressed - we rule out all possibilities for the kinds of dialogues that can
win hearts and minds. If we view the
oppressor as invariably acting from a place of subjective dominance, I believe
that we will completely miss the deep and typically hidden suffering, the
complex histories of violation and trauma, and the subjective experience of
profound powerlessness that often go hand in hand with the cruelty and
malevolence enacted by oppressors. Conversely, if we are willing to recognize
that "the oppressor" is not fundamentally different from us,
and that the dominant behavior of oppressors is often embedded in personal pain
and internalized powerlessness, it may help us to have the kinds of
human-to-human dialogues that can reach
people's hearts and minds. In Chapter
Three I try to develop this kind of understanding specifically regarding
gender-based oppression. Understanding
trauma can help us to overcome divisions that chronically plague progressive
social change movements. The left has been repeatedly weakened by
internal divisions and fragmentation,16 both in the form of in-fighting within social
change organizations and through the inability of different oppressed constituencies
to form robust and sustainable coalitions.
There are many reasons for these divisions that have nothing to do with
trauma. These range from principled
ideological differences to unprincipled power struggles; from the complex ways
in which multiple oppressions create divisions in our society to the
divide-and-conquer strategies utilized by forces aligned with the status quo in
the face of unrest and social change activism. When trauma is unnamed and unrecognized,
its presence - at once palpable and invisible - can cause an enormous amount of
damage. We need to develop shared
understandings of the politics of trauma that bring awareness of trauma into the room in the same way that
feminism has brought awareness of power relations involving domination into the
room. By this I mean an
awareness that people may carry the effects of trauma - victimization,
subjective powerlessness, traumatic rage, and so on - into any situation: any meeting, any organizing effort, any
coalition-building project, any conflict.
It is only through the emergence of
consciousness and a common language to describe the politics of powerlessness
that we can create possibilities to interrupt and counteract the damaging
effects of trauma within our social change organizations and movements. Developing language and a conceptual
framework along these lines is the work of Chapter Two. Understanding
trauma can help us to mobilize rage in the service of nonviolent social change. As Allan Wade
eloquently writes, "Whenever persons are badly treated, they resist."17 But how we resist oppression has decisive implications for achieving progressive
social change. There are many inspiring
examples of people who, individually and collectively, have responded to
traumatizing conditions through acts of constructive resistance, including the
mobilization of movements seeking to overcome and transform racism, patriarchy,
homophobia, capitalist exploitation, war, and so on. In Chapter Five I discuss the civil rights
movement in particular as an extraordinary example of the capacity of
traumatized people to resist oppression through sustained commitment to
nonviolent struggle. But in the same breath, there is an
equally wide range of examples which show how the psychological effects of
trauma can profoundly obstruct social change.
In the context of a society organized around domination, our resistance
to victimization and trauma can readily be expressed destructively by being
directed downward at others over whom
we hold some modicum of power rather than upward
at the sources of our own oppression. We see this dynamic played out politically
in the racism and homophobia of whites and heterosexuals who themselves are
oppressed in significant ways; in class contempt directed toward working class
and poor people; in the xenophobia which fuels anti-immigrant politics and
popular support for U.S. policies of exploitation and aggression toward Third
World countries; and in many other incarnations of right wing populism. We likewise see dominance fueled by traumatization in virtually every domain of personal
politics, ranging from male battering18 and sexual
violence to the abusive parenting practices of both women and men.19 When we view trauma from a political perspective, two truths emerge
which stand in stark tension with each other:
that trauma can psychologically debilitate people in ways that help to
perpetuate domination and oppression; and that trauma can help to spark
personal and political resistance to domination and oppression. I believe that it is critical to develop our
understanding of both sides of this tension.
It is in the push and pull between the ways that traumatized people are
damaged and defeated by oppression and the ways that traumatized people stand
up to oppression that our prospects for mobilizing effective social change
movements rise or fall. Traumatic
rage is one of the keys to this
tension and how it is resolved. On the
one hand, people's rage in response to oppression is a driving force behind the
mobilization of movements for social change.
On the other hand, as I try to show in Chapter Two, when trauma takes
the form of powerless rage, it
readily slides into all kinds of destructive behavior. One of the central challenges of progressive
social change efforts is to learn how to mobilize traumatic rage toward
constructive ends through the use of nonviolent and humanizing means. Addressing that challenge is the central
focus of Chapter Five. Breaking Cycles of Violence
One
of the keys to breaking cycles of violence is our willingness to acknowledge
and come to terms with complexity. I am
thinking specifically of the complex ways in which each of us can at once be both oppressed and oppressor,
both victim and perpetrator.20
This complexity is hard to take in. We all have an understandable tendency to
be incisively aware of our own victimization and to deny our own capacities to
cause harm.21 As
a result, we tend to describe neat divisions between victims and perpetrators,
between oppressors and the oppressed.
But we do so at the expense of an accurate description of political and
personal realities; and our perceptions of ourselves as pure victims, and of
oppressors as inhuman Others, can set the stage for
continued cycles of violence. Conversely,
if we can take hold of more complex versions of reality, in which we are
willing to describe ourselves and others as both
victims and perpetrators, both oppressed and oppressors, it can be a path
toward the kind of awareness and compassion that we need to break cycles of
violence. Let me offer my own trauma
story as an illustration. I experienced trauma as a child at the
hands of my mother and my older brother, and also from my parents' treatment of
each other. One of my vivid memories from early
childhood is of my mother's ritual of sitting me on her lap, telling me
adoringly that I had her face, and then specifying each feature on my face and
telling me that it was hers. Part of the
clarity of this memory is the deep pleasure that my mother took in owning my
face as hers. This dynamic repeated
itself in countless other ways: my role
in my mother's life was to be a vehicle to her pleasure. While this never took the form of overt
sexual contact or stimulation, it had the emotional quality of a lover
relationship. I have a photo of my mother and me when I was
seven which captures the essence of our relationship, at least as I experienced
it, in stark detail. In the picture I'm
with my mother on a couch. My mother has
her arms around me, her left hand cupped over my left hand. She leans toward me at a 45 degree angle,
kissing me at the corner of my mouth, and looking straight into the
camera. She's beaming. It's as if she is so full of joy she's
bursting with it. I am leaning away from
my mother at that same 45 degree angle.
My legs are stretched out behind me on the couch, almost perpendicular
to my torso, my body impossibly contorted.
My mouth is turned from my mother, my lips avoiding hers as much as they
can. I'm looking away from my mother,
away from the camera, off into space. My expression in the photo is unspeakably
sad. There clearly is a cold, silent
anger there too. I'm trapped in her
loving embrace, and every ounce of my body is straining to get away from
her. My mother doesn't notice; she's too
captivated by her love for me to notice my unmistakable body language, and by
extension to have any sense of who I am.
In response, in order to survive, by age seven I have learned to go off
into space, to hide within myself - what I now understand to be the classic
traumatic response of dissociation. My mother treated me as an extension of
herself rather than as a separate person.
When I was little she insisted that I promise to "always stay
good," which meant adhering to her wishes without any room for maneuver or
exploration of my own potentials (for example, I had no permission to be messy,
rambunctious, express anger, or make mistakes that I might learn from) -
explorations which might cause her discomfort or might confront her with my
reality as a separate self. I lived in
constant fear of my mother yelling at me or calling me bad, which I saw her do
on a daily basis to my brother. As a
result, I learned to hide my real self.
I learned to stay small and quiet, to numb out my feelings -
particularly feelings of anger - and to live in a constricted world in which I
was able to survive but at enormous psychological cost. Meanwhile my brother, who was four years
older, abused me physically. For a
period of about six years, for me spanning from age There were also times my brother abused me
when my parents were home and within earshot, when I would call for help and my
father would come and take my brother off of me. Despite my parents' awareness that this
happened, my brother and I were repeatedly allowed to be alone together;
despite the times when my father did take my brother off of me, there were
innumerable other times - I believe hundreds of times - when I was physically
and emotionally overwhelmed by my brother and no one was there to stop him. My brother would go on to become an adult molester of
boys. When he was finally arrested and
convicted of child molesting at age 55, the police found 1,200 audio and video
tapes and pictures in his apartment depicting his sexual encounters with boys,
as well as bags of boys' underwear, according to press accounts. While my brother never sexually abused me,
the driving force, the persistence, and the intense violation I experienced in
his physical assaults were all consistent with his later sexual behavior as an
adult. Finally,
spanning my entire childhood it was commonplace for my parents to scream at
each other. Though they were not
physically violent toward each other, they were as piercing and verbally
abusive as I can imagine two adults being.
They yelled at each other in front of me and my brother and with no
apparent regard for our presence. This
was a terrifying event for me, and one which made me feel invisible and totally
powerless. From a very young age I
learned to shut off all feelings when my parents had their screaming arguments
- to go emotionally numb, which again as an adult I have learned to name as a
form of dissociation, but which at the time was an unarticulated and desperate
mechanism for emotional survival. When I was 17 I left home for college, hundreds
of miles and several states away, and for a long time I believed that I had
emerged from childhood and from my family relatively unharmed. Meanwhile, I developed political
understandings that led me to view myself as someone with a great deal of access
to privilege and power. As a white
middle class man, as someone who is highly educated, as a heterosexual, as a
program director at work, and eventually as a parent, I have occupied many
positions of dominance, and many forms of institutional power are conferred on
me whether I want them or not. I have
defined an important part of my politics around awareness of privilege and
commitment to struggle against it; I've reacted against privilege along the
lines of class, race, gender, sexual orientation and age. For a long time I viewed myself as someone
with too much power, not as someone who was oppressed or powerless, and in many
ways I still hold to that view. It was not until I reached my forties that
I named my childhood experiences as trauma.
I was led to do so by a depth and intensity of emotional pain which
forced me to face and to understand my childhood in ways which enabled me to
make sense of my experience and what had become glaring areas of emotional
dysfunction. I began to acknowledge and
to feel the full force of the ways
that I was abused as a child - and I began to recognize myself as a victim. My childhood trauma has stayed with me for
the three decades of my adult life. For
many years I blocked and numbed it out, as I learned to be a competent and
functional person; but I was walking around with unhealed and festering
wounds. When I reached the place in my
life where I could no longer deny or minimize the depth and intensity of my
suffering, I came face to face with the truth that I am an oppressed person -
that I was dominated and abused as a child in ways that I was powerless to
prevent, with effects that I have carried ever since and that can still render
me powerless. Standing alongside all of
the privilege and power in my life, there is a depth of powerlessness and
victimization that at moments can debilitate me and can trigger an enormous
amount of rage. Standing
alongside is the key. My oppression does not negate or in any way diminish my access to
privilege and dominance. The two
co-exist, and no matter how powerless and victimized I feel in the moments when
my traumatic experience is triggered, the truth is that in those moments I
continue to exercise power as a parent, to occupy a position of authority at
work, to hold institutional privilege and power based on my class, gender and
race, and so on. By the same token, my
access to privilege and dominance do not negate or diminish the truth of my
experience of powerlessness and its basis in the historical reality of my childhood
trauma. I am at once an oppressed person
and someone with multiple opportunities to act as an oppressor; and at the
times when I experience profound powerlessness, I continue to hold power over
others. The greatest challenge that I face to
break a cycle of violence is in my role as a parent, where the complexity of my
position as both oppressed and oppressor is poignant and, at critical moments,
overwhelming. Parenting persistently
evokes my experience of victimization; and, for me, it can trigger incredibly
intense feelings of helplessness, worthlessness, and rage. At one stage, this could happen when my son
would wriggle when I would try to dress him in the morning; at another stage,
when he would startle me by running up from behind me and jumping on my back;
at another (current) stage when he talks to me in ways that I feel to be
disrespectful. (These are three out of
many, many examples.) No matter how much
I know that the intensity of my feelings in these moments is rooted in my
childhood trauma, I experience the feelings in
the present; they are vivid and often overwhelming; they make me feel
victimized and powerless; and they can lead me to lash out at my son - unless I
can find a way to break the cycle. At the moments when I am most triggered
and feel the most powerless as a parent, what is truly poisonous is that I can
lose all sight of the power that I actually hold over my child. In fact, there is no greater power imbalance
in our society than that between parent and child. It is true that a parent's power over the
child is not absolute. Child abuse laws
mandate state intervention in cases of severe physical mistreatment and
assault. And there are all sorts of
mundane ways that we often can't make our kids do what we want them to do - can't
make them go to sleep, can't make them stop crying, can't make them obey us or
respect us - and these are often the very things that make parents feel
powerless. But parents have an enormous range and
magnitude of power over our kids that we simply take for granted. We can physically assault our kids by
spanking, slapping, and various other forms of corporal punishment that fall
short of the threshold for what is considered child abuse - and do so with
legal and cultural impunity. We hold
absolute control over our kids' food, clothing, and living conditions. We control the minute details of our kids'
daily lives - what and when they will eat, whether they can go out to play,
when and how often they have to bathe, when they go to bed, and so on. We exercise an incredible amount of power by
the giving and withholding of praise, blame, acceptance and rejection. Even when we are not able to get our kids to
do what we want, we have the power to wreak devastating harm through acts of
physical or emotional aggression against children who are legally, culturally,
physically, and emotionally at our mercy. Because of the strength of my belief in
nonviolence, I have never physically attacked my son. But there have been many times that I have
responded to my own feelings of powerlessness and traumatic rage by attacking
and hurting him emotionally. Sometimes I
do this by lashing out at him verbally, blaming him for something that is as
much my fault as his, not listening to or valuing his side of the story, and
not acknowledging or validating his feelings.
At other times I withdraw from him in a cold fury, for as much as a few
hours at a stretch, leaving him completely stranded emotionally, my rage
silently but palpably directed at him.
The irony is that at the moments when I feel most powerless and
overwhelmed, my behavior is most overpowering and overwhelming in its effects
on my child. This is an example of the
phenomenon that I call power-under. When I am
able to break this cycle - to cope with my own traumatic experience in ways
that do not harm my child - it's because, in the first place, I'm able to
recognize that I am still in a position of objective dominance even when I am
internally powerless. It's because I'm
able to recognize, to really believe in and honor the full humanity of my son,
to really believe that his feelings matter as much as mine and that he still
deserves to be treated with respect and kindness and concern, no matter how
overwhelmed I am, no matter how victimized and enraged I feel. It's because I'm able to maintain an attitude
of compassion toward myself as someone who is still suffering the effects of
childhood abuse, and at the same time
maintain an attitude of compassion toward my son as someone who deserves not to
suffer childhood abuse. And it's because
I have specific tools for managing and containing my feelings of victimization
and rage. For years I have carried a piece of paper
in my wallet that lists "what to do when Steve loses it with Eric." It gives me simple, graspable options such as
taking an adult time out, reminding myself that I expected this could happen,
apologizing to my son for blowing up at him, telling him that when I over-react
to what he does it's my problem and not his fault, offering him a hug, and attending
to my own needs. More recently I have
been using the "mindful breathing" practice described by Thich
Nhat Hahn in his book Anger,22 which is also a very simple technique that I
find extremely powerful and effective. The very
hard work is to actually mobilize myself to use these tools in the heat of the
triggered moment. Sometimes I succeed
and sometimes I don't. But I do have a
framework and a strategy that allow me to make headway, to gauge my successes,
and to keep working at it. I have used my story as an illustration
because I think it captures something common about cycles of violence and how
we might think about breaking them. In
order to view my experience as not simply personal but also political in a
broader sense, we need to be willing to stretch it out in two directions. First, I believe that it is fundamental to
the organization of our society that most people occupy oppressor and oppressed
roles simultaneously. This is what
Aurora Levins Morales has called the
"interpenetration" of oppressions.23
While the form that this takes in my story is limited to the
realm of parenting, the oppressor/oppressed dynamic plays itself out in a maze
of intersections and interactions of oppressions based on class, race, gender,
sexual orientation, age, and ability.
This theme is central to every chapter of this book, and will be
illustrated with a wide range of examples at each step of my analysis. The second stretch is from the personal
and private actions of a struggling parent to organized political action that
seeks to break cycles of violence. While
there are obvious differences of scope and scale, I believe that the essentials
of (in my case) a personal strategy to manage internalized powerlessness without
acting abusively carry over to strategies and actions on a larger scale. They are: ·
A basic belief in
nonviolence and commitment to nonviolent action. ·
Recognition of
simultaneous oppressor/ oppressed roles. ·
Willingness to
humanize the Other. ·
Compassion for
self and other. ·
Clear
understandings of power relations that enable us to distinguish between
internalized powerlessness, shared power, and dominance, and enable us to
constrain the exercise of objective dominance. Developing
these strategic points, and applying them to possibilities for large scale
political action, is the work of Chapter Five. The Prevalence of Trauma
If
trauma were a rare event, it would probably not deserve much attention as a
political issue, regardless of the power dynamics involved. In fact, there is good reason to believe that
trauma is occurring at epidemic levels. Sexual
violence against girls and against women is probably the issue most commonly
associated with trauma, and for good reason.
A study published in 1986 by Diana Russell found that of a random sample
of 930 women, 16% reported sexual abuse by a family member before the age of
18, and 19% reported incestuous abuse at some time in their lives; 31% of the
women reported sexual abuse by a non-family member. Altogether 38% of the women in Russell's
survey reported having been sexually abused by either a family or non-family
member before the age of 18. When the
criteria for sexual abuse were broadened to include exposure of genitals,
unwanted nongenital touching or kissing, and sexual
advances not acted upon, 54% of the women reported at least one instance of
sexual abuse within or outside of the family before age 18.24 A 1985 national random sample of 1,374
women contacted by telephone found that 27% of women reported sexual abuse
during childhood.25 The somewhat lower abuse rate found in this
survey (compared to Russell's results) is probably attributable to the
methodology: telephone interviews are
less likely to elicit personal revelations than the in-person, in-depth
interviews used by Russell.26 Another
survey found that approximately 1 in 4 college women reported having been
victims of rape or attempted rape.27 Both of these studies corroborate the
essential point that sexual violence against girls and young women takes place
at epidemic levels. Violence
against women all too obviously does not end with childhood or college years. Regarding
physical violence against women, Neil Jacobson and John Gottman
cite research finding that "each year at least 1.6 million wives in the
U.S. are severely assaulted by their husbands"28 and that violence is reported by 36-50% of
newlywed couples.29 Jacobson and Gottman
conclude, "The domestic assault of women in the United States is a problem
of epidemic proportions."30 While
I am not aware of research which has attempted to comprehensively assess sexual
and physical violence against women at any time in their lives, it seems
reasonable to estimate that as many as 50% or more of all women have been
victims of sexual assault at some time - a figure which is reached for
childhood sexual abuse alone using Diana Russell's broad criteria for sexual
abuse - and that the number of women who have experienced either sexual abuse
or battering considerably exceeds 50%. A
survey reported by CNN in the mid-eighties underscores the prevalence of sexual
violence against women and children.
Male respondents were asked whether they would commit rape if they could
be sure that they could do so with impunity; 30% said there was some likelihood
that they would. The respondents were
then asked if they would force a woman to have sex if they could be sure of no
legal consequences (this repeated the first question, but without using the
word "rape"); 50% reported some likelihood. Finally, the respondents were asked if they
had actually molested a child, and 10% answered that they had. Even though the first two questions were
posed hypothetically, the responses provide a staggering view of widespread
male attitudes and values about sexual violence against women - namely, that
the only reason not to do it is fear of arrest and punishment. Given the plethora of opportunities for men
to commit sexual assaults with no witnesses, and the extremely low rates of
convictions for rape and other acts of sexual violence, there is every reason
to believe that the attitudes revealed in the survey translate into action in
many cases. There is also reason to
believe that the self-reports by 10% of the men in the survey that they had
molested children is an under-representation, given that it is common for
offenders to deny their offenses and also that, even if anonymity is guaranteed
to respondents, there would be a tendency to deny actions that are both
criminal and socially unacceptable. Even
if the 10% figure were accurate, it would probably be consistent with a sexual
abuse rate upward of 20 or 30% for all children, given that a single offender
may commit multiple acts affecting multiple children. While
sexual violence is widely perceived as an issue affecting girls and women, it
also affects boys to a significant degree.
The previously cited 1985 national telephone survey also contacted 1,145
males and found that 16% of the men reported sexual abuse during childhood.31 This is a
stunning figure, particularly given that public attention to the issue of
sexual abuse of boys is virtually confined to sensational cases involving
priests or day care providers - cases which make up a fraction of the total
indicated by this survey. A 1998 review
of 166 studies concludes that "sexual abuse of boys is common, underreported, underrecognized, and undertreated."32 Underreporting is likely because men would
tend to deny having been sexual objects and having been victimized in ways
associated with helpless girls and women.33
Sexual violence against boys remains a vast uncharted territory. There
is another way that boys are traumatized, unrelated to sexual abuse, having to
do with the crushing of boys' emotional capacities in the course of their
socialization to male gender roles.34 This is a complex and, I believe, crucially
important process in which the very means by which boys are taught to assume
dominant roles also massively expose them to experiences of humiliation, shame,
powerlessness, and profound trauma. I
develop this analysis of male socialization and trauma at length in Chapter
Three. Yet
another type of sexual abuse of children is what Judith Herman calls
"covert incest."35
She defines this as "behavior that [is] clearly sexually
motivated, but which [does] not involve physical contact or a requirement for
secrecy."36 Herman
cites examples including fathers telling daughters about their sexual
activities, "ceaselessly interrogating" their daughters about the
daughters' sexual activities, exhibiting themselves to their daughters,
watching their daughters undress, and buying their daughters sexy
underwear. Alice Miller in her classic The Drama of the Gifted Child more
broadly describes parents who seek to meet their own deep emotional needs
through their children, and who therefore use their children as a means to
their own pleasure.37 In
a later work, Miller observes that adults who "experience their…child as a
part of themselves…cannot imagine that what gives them pleasure could have a
different effect upon the child."38 I believe that this is the dynamic
that goes to the heart of a sexually abusive parent-child relationship, whether
or not the sexual dimension is overt.
While Herman confines her focus to father-daughter relationships,
Miller's broader formulation can apply to parents and children of either
gender, in whatever configuration the abuse actually happens. There is probably no way to know how
commonly covert sexual abuse occurs. It is not readily observed or commonly
reported, cannot be verified by physical examination, and may not be perceived
or identified as abuse by parent or child, either when it happens or in
retrospect. But that does not
necessarily mean that this type of abuse is rare. Nor does it mean that the damage caused by
covert sexual abuse is insignificant (as my own experience indicates). Herman, based on interviews with groups of
women who reported overt and covert sexual abuse by their fathers during
childhood, concludes that while overt abuse is more damaging, covert abuse causes
lasting harm: "[t]he pathological
effects of overt and covert incest were similar in nature and differed mainly
in degree."39 Miller
describes lasting effects which include depression, "a sense of inner
emptiness,"40 self-alienation, narcissistic disturbance and
rage. Physical (non-sexual) violence by adults
against children - spanking, slapping, hitting, strapping,
whipping and so on - is another vast source of traumatic experience. A 1995 nationwide Gallup survey asked parents
if they had spanked, slapped, pinched, or hit their children one or more times
in the last year. The vast majority
responded that they did. Rates of
parental violence varied for children of different ages, peaking at 94% among parents of four- and five-year
olds. For every age between one and
eight, a minimum of 65% of parents reported using some form of corporal
punishment, with the rate dropping below 50% only from age 13 on.41 These statistics are consistent with
findings from previous national surveys of family violence which lead Murray
Straus to conclude that "almost all American children have been hit by their
parents - usually for many years. For at
least one out of five, and probably closer to half of all children, hitting
begins when they are infants and does not end until they leave home."42 Subsumed within these statistics is a huge
range of parental acts of abuse, in terms of both severity and frequency, from
occasional spankings to repeated beatings.
Neil Jacobson and John Gottman estimate that
20-25% of children in the From the point of view of the child, being
hit by an adult means being physically and psychologically overwhelmed by
someone who, at least in the moment of the attack, holds total power over you
by virtue of superior size and strength.
If it is your parent who attacks you, this is the person you rely on for
your physical and emotional survival. Consider the experience of a one year-old (an
age at which the corporal punishment rate reaches almost 70%) or a two year-old
(where corporal punishment passes 80%).
Your parents are literally giants who hold total control over every
significant aspect of your life - food, shelter, attention, activity, comfort,
and love. Imagine the first time one of
these giants strikes you. To begin with
the blow causes physical pain which - even if "minor" in the eyes of
adults - is likely to be overwhelming for a child of this size and level of
development. But what immeasurably
compounds the effect is that you have been betrayed by the parent you are
bonded to: that your parent would
intentionally inflict pain on you and expose you to what Alice Miller describes
as contempt.48 This occurs at a stage at which the child
not only is completely at the mercy of adults physically, but also has no psychological capacity for any kind of
constructive self-defense. It is a
moment of staggering destructive significance, despite the cultural normalcy of
hitting children. As Straus argues,
"Corporal punishment is deeply traumatic
for young children.…For
a child who can barely walk or talk (the age at which children are most likely
to be hit), it can be truly traumatic if the most loved and trusted figure in
the child's life suddenly carries out a painful attack. The consequence can be a post-traumatic
stress syndrome that creates deep, lifelong psychological problems.…"49 The cultural normalcy of violence against
children means that childhood trauma is a
normal event. By ages four and five,
at which corporal punishment is a virtually universal practice in the There is a long and imposing list of other
events which can traumatize children and adults. For children, this includes abuse by older
siblings and unrelated older children; being yelled at and verbally demeaned by
parents; verbal and physical abuse by teachers; witnessing violence; and
witnessing verbal abuse. Adults experience
trauma in the military (both through abusive treatment by superiors and through
combat experience); in workplaces when they are treated abusively by bosses;
through violent and/or violating crime; and through incarceration. In addition, and critically, systemic
oppression is in itself traumatizing. To be a member of a disenfranchised race
or ethnic group or gender or class or sexual orientation, or to be a child
confronted at every turn with an overwhelming system of adult power, is to be
bombarded on a daily basis with messages that who you are as a person does not
matter in the larger scheme of things; that you are not as good, not as smart,
not as powerful, not as valid in the core of your being as the enfranchised
others. Those messages are conveyed through acts of violence and gross
brutality, such as sexual violence and gay bashing; they are manifested in
material conditions such as severe poverty; and they are also encoded in
countless mundane events which are invisible to the dominant group. The totality of these messages can be
chronically traumatizing to the extent that they repeatedly create experiences
of violation and powerlessness among oppressed people. Linda Stout offers a compelling account of
the traumatic effects of poverty.
Writing from her own experience, she observes, "I often define poverty
as a lack of options…Middle class people…don't understand that it is a
privilege to have options, and that a lot of people don't have that
privilege. They also cannot understand
the intense pain and shame of not having those options available to you, and as
a result, the sense of being a failure that it instills in you."50 bell hooks makes similar points about the impact of racism
and about the interlocking impacts of race, gender, and class. She writes, Many black people see themselves solely as victims
with no capacity to shape and determine their own destiny.51…Life-threatening
stress has become the normal psychological state for many black women (and
black men). Much of the stress black
people experience is directly related to the way in which systems of
domination-racism, sexism, and capitalism, in particular—disrupt
our capacities to fully exercise self-determination.52
hooks poignantly describes the effects of oppression in the
lives of black women. For example, [B]lack female students would come to my office…and
confess the truth of their lives—that they were terrorized psychologically by
low self-esteem; that they were the victims of rape, incest, and domestic
violence; that they lived in fear of being unmasked as the inferiors of their
white peers; that stress was making their hair fall out; that every other month
one of them was attempting suicide; that they were anorexic, bulemic, or drug addicted…53 While neither Stout nor hooks uses the language of trauma, both
describe how oppression renders people subjectively powerless - the experience
of being without options, with no capacity for self-determination. Subjective powerlessness stands at the heart
of traumatization, as I discuss at length in Chapter
Two. At the end of this long list of social conditions that cause widespread
emotional trauma comes September 11. This was an event of such magnitude,
creating the vivid experience of annihilation on a mass scale, that the
terrorist attacks can by themselves by cited as a
source of pervasive trauma. But
September 11 occurred in the context of a society in which many of us had
already experienced multiple traumas in our lives - through childhood abuse,
through other experiences of sexual and non-sexual violence, and through the
many manifestations of oppression; and that underlay of traumatization
has made us far more vulnerable to the psychological effects of terrorism. Objections
to the banality of trauma may come from three directions. The first, which has attracted considerable
public attention, is to question the reliability of accounts of sexual abuse -
including claims of "false accusations" by children54 and "false memories" by women.55 While there may be isolated cases in which
sexual abuse is reported when none actually occurred, in my view it is
blatantly preposterous to suppose that sexual violence is really a minimal
problem which has been grossly exaggerated by false reports - a contention
particularly advanced by fathers accused of raping their children.56 Historically, sexual violence has been
encased in denial and silence.57
There are persistent social forces which inhibit victims of
sexual abuse from reporting it and prevent them from being believed. There are also significant psychological forces
which lead victims to deny and repress memories of trauma. Given both factors, it is almost certain that
any false reports of sexual violence are outnumbered by unreported incidents. It may also be objected that rates of
childhood sexual abuse are declining.
David Finkelhor, who was one of the key
researchers of sexual abuse during the eighties, more recently has reported
that during the nineties there was a drop of as much as 40 percent in the
number of child sexual abuse cases reported nationally.58 However,
Finkelhor notes that this could reflect changes in
reporting practices rather than an actual reduction in incidence. In addition, child sexual abuse is only one
of many pervasive causes of trauma; and previous sexual abuse rates were so
high that, even if there has been a 40 percent reduction (which is by no means
certain), it remains an epidemic problem.
Finally, and critically, women and men who were sexually abused as
children prior to the last ten years are likely to carry the traumatic effects
of those experiences throughout their adult lives, as I will try to show in
Chapter Two. Even if child sexual abuse
were completely eliminated, which we are very far from achieving, the trauma
associated with previous occurrences would remain a pervasive social problem
for many years. The other objection that may be raised is
that acts of abuse do not necessarily cause trauma. This is an empirical question, incident by
incident, and one that in many cases is not easily resolved. Abuse is an observable act; trauma is an
internal psychological effect - one that does not always manifest itself
immediately in observable symptoms, or which may have symptoms (such as
depression, substance abuse, or physical illness) that have many possible
causes. Moreover, emotional trauma often
is not consciously recognized or identified by those who experience it. While it is relatively straightforward to
conduct surveys asking adults if they were sexually abused as children, or asking
parents if they hit their kids, it is far more complicated to try to determine
whether and to what extent the victims of these acts of abuse have been
traumatized by them. Common sense suggests that the intensity
of psychological damage is likely to vary with the intensity and duration of someone's
exposure to abuse.59 Other things being
equal, a child raped once by a stranger is not likely to be as traumatized as a
child raped repeatedly over a period of years by her or his father. As previously suggested, kids who are
occasionally slapped or spanked predictably suffer a lot less harm than kids
who are routinely beaten. It is more
useful to think of trauma as encompassing a continuum of psychological harm,
with a range of both severity and types of disturbances, than it is to argue
over how much someone has to suffer in order to qualify as traumatized. It
remains theoretically possible, and perhaps empirically the case, that there
are people who have enough internal strength and social support to weather
abuse and emerge psychologically unscathed.
For purposes of this book, it is enough to conclude that this is not the
norm. Given the breadth of the types of
abuse which I have noted, and particularly given the staggering rates of sexual
and physical abuse affecting children - who are least likely to emerge unharmed
- the conclusion seems inescapable that traumatic experience is
widespread. Sandra Bloom and Michael
Reichert draw the same conclusion, writing that "our society has become
organized around unresolved, multigenerational traumatic experience."60 If, as I have contended, trauma has political
implications, then the prevalence of trauma offers yet another important reason
to pursue an understanding of this as a political issue. Notes
to Chapter One
1.
Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of
Integrity (Cambridge, MA: South End
Press, 1998), p. 13. 2.
Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing (New York:
Bantam Books, 1993), p. 164. 3.
See for example Michael Albert, "What Are We For?" Z Magazine 14:9 (September 2001), pp.
51-56. 4.
See Steven Wineman, The
Politics of Human Services (Boston:
South End Press, 1984) for proposals for revitalizing communities around
principles of mutual aid, and proposals for political and economic
decentralization. 5.
Regarding win-win conflict resolution, see Roger Fisher
and William Ury, Getting
to Yes: Negotiating
Agreement Without Giving In (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1981) and Roger Fisher and Scott Brown, Getting Together: Building Relationships as We Negotiate (New
York: Penguin Books, 1989). 6.
Ruth Benedict, "Synergy—Patterns of the Good Culture," Psychology Today, 4:1 (1970), pp. 53-77. 7.
Riane Eisler,
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our
Future (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco,
1995). 8.
C.f. Allan Wade, "Small Acts of Living: Everyday Resistance to Violence and Other
Forms of Oppression," Contemporary Family
Therapy 19:1 (March 1997), pp. 23-39. 9.
See for example Bessel van der
Kolk and Alexander McFarlane, "The Black Hole of
Trauma," in Bessel van der Kolk,
Alexander McFarlane, and Lars Weisaeth, eds., Traumatic Stress: The Effects of
Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society (New York: Guilford Press, 1996). 10. Margaret Randall observes that "the sexual
invasion of a child's body and the political invasion of a nation's
sovereignty" are "profoundly related." Walking to the Edge: Essays of Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1991), p. 115. 11. Sandra Bloom and Michael Reichert, Bearing Witness: Violence and Collective
Responsibility (Binghamton, N.Y.: The Haworth Maltreatment and Trauma
Press, 1998), pp. 9 ff. 12. See for example Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992). 13. Levins Morales, Medicine Stories, p. 4. 14. See Jean Hardisty, Mobilizing Resentment: Conservative Resurgence from the John Birch
Society to the Promise Keepers (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1999). 15. Personal communication. 16. See for example Linda Stout
, Bridging the Class Divide
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), especially
Chapter 5, "Why Aren't We Winning?" 17. Wade, "Small Acts of Living: Everyday Resistance to Violence and Other
Forms of Oppression," p. 23. 18. Neil Jacobson and John Gottman,
When Men Batter Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), report that vast
majority of male batterers in their study presented histories of childhood
brutalization and trauma. 19. See Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child (New York: Basic Books, 1990), For Your Own Good (New York:
Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984), Thou Shalt Not Be
Aware (New York: Penguin Books
U.S.A., 1986), Banished Knowledge (New
York: Doubleday, 1990), and Breaking Down the Wall of Silence (New York: Penguin Books U.S.A., 1993) regarding the link between traumatization and abusive parenting. See Murray Straus, Beating the Devil out of Them:
Corporal Punishment in American Families (New York: Lexington Books, 1994) regarding the prevalence of physical
violence against children by both mothers and fathers. 20. See for example Levins
Morales, Medicine Stories; Eli Clare,
Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation
(Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999);
Barbara and John Ehrenreich, "The
Professional-Managerial Class," in Pat Walker, ed., Between Labor and Capital (Boston:
South End Press, 1979); Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology
(New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color
Press, 1983); Stout, Bridging the Class
Divide; and Wineman, The Politics of
Human Services, Chapter 5. 1.
C.f. Levins Morales, "Class, Privilege and Loss" in Medicine Stories, pp. 93-95. 2.
Thich Nhat Hahn, Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames ( 3.
Levins Morales, Medicine
Stories, p. 122. 4.
Diana Russell, The Secret Trauma: Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women
(New York: Basic Books, 1986), pp.
60-62. 5.
David Finkelhor, Gerald Hotaling, 6.
See Russell, The Secret Trauma, Chapter
Two for a discussion of her methodology and its advantages relative to
telephone surveys. 7.
Mary Koss, "Hidden Rape:
Sexual Aggression and Victimization in a National Sample of Students in
Higher Education," in A.W. Burgess, ed., Rape
and Sexual Assault II (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1988), cited in Jennifer Freyd,
Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1996). 8.
Jacobson and Gottman, When Men
Batter Women, p.
26, citing Mary Koss et. al., No Safe Haven (Washington, D.C.:
American Psychological Association Press, 1994). 9.
Jacobson and Gottman, When Men
Batter Women, citing unpublished data collected by Gottman
and (separately) by Dr. Thomas Bradbury at UCLA, as well as published studies
by K. Daniel O'Leary, "Physical Aggression Between
Spouses," in V.B. Van Hasselt et. al., eds., Handbook of Family Violence (New
York: Plenum Press, 1988); and by
Kenneth Leonard and Marilyn Senchak, "Prospective
Prediction of Husband Marital Aggression Within Newlywed Couples," Journal of Abnormal Psychology 105:
369-380 (1996). 10. Jacobson and Gottman,
p. 26. 11. Finkelhor, Hotaling, Lewis, and Smith, "Sexual Abuse in a National
Survey of Adult Men and Women:
Prevalence, Characteristics, and Risk Factors." 12. William Holmes and Gail Slap, "Sexual Abuse of
Boys: Definition, Prevalence,
Correlates, Sequelae, and Management," Journal of the American Medical Association,
13. See Lois Shea,
"Fewer Males Will Report Sexual Abuse," 14. See William Pollack, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons
From the Myths of Boyhood (New York:
Random House, 1998) and Dan Kindlon and
Michael Thompson, Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys
(New York: Ballantine
Books, 1999). 15. Judith Herman, Father-Daughter Incest (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). 16. Herman, Father-Daughter
Incest, p. 109. 17. Miller, The Drama of the
Gifted Child (New York: Basic Books,
1990). 18. Miller, Thou
Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child,
p. 6. 19. Herman, Father-Daughter
Incest, p. 125. 20. Miller, The Drama of the
Gifted Child, p. 21. 21. Reported in Barbara Meltz,
"Spanking's Punishing Lessons," 22. Straus,
Beating the Devil out of Them, p. 3. 23. Jacobson and Gottman,
When Men Batter Women, p. 94. The authors do not cite any source and do not
define "violent home." 24. David Gil, Violence
Against Children (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1970) 25. Miller, Banished
Knowledge; Breaking Down the Wall of
Silence. 26. Straus, Beating
the Devil out of Them 27. David Gil, "Holistic Perspective on Child
Abuse and its Prevention," in The Challenge of
Social Equality (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1976) and "Societal Violence and Violence in
Families," in Beyond The Jungle
(Cambridge, MA: Schenkman,
1979). 28. Miller, The Drama of the
Gifted Child, Chapter 3. 29. Straus, Beating
the Devil out of Them, pp. 9-10. 30. Stout, Bridging
the Class Divide, p. 25. 31. bell hooks, Sisters of
the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery (Boston: South End Press, 1993), p. 10. 32. hooks, Sisters of the
Yam, p. 54. 33. hooks, p. 12. 34. See Louise Armstrong, Rocking The Cradle of Sexual Politics:
What Happened When Women Said Incest (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994). 35. See Freyd, Betrayal Trauma. 36. Armstrong, Rocking
The Cradle of Sexual Politics. 37. See Herman, Trauma and Recovery, Chapter 1. 38. David
Finkelhor, "Improving Research, Policy and Practice
to Understand Child Sexual Abuse," Journal
of the American Medical Association, 12/2/98, pp. 1864-1865, citing C. Wang
and D. Daro, Current
Trends in Child Abuse Reporting and Fatalities: The Results of the 1997 Annual
Fifty State Survey (Chicago: Center
on Child Abuse Prevention Research, 1998). 39. Diana Russell's survey of 930 women found a
statistically significant relationship between both the severity and frequency
of incestuous abuse and the degree of trauma reported. See Russell, The Secret Trauma, pp. 142, 145.
Russell reports inconsistent findings in other research regarding the
severity of sexual abuse and the degree of trauma. Russell's own approach to assessing the
degree of trauma is in my view problematic, as she relies on self-reporting
regarding how upset women were by their experiences of sexual abuse and to what
extent it affected their lives. 40. Bloom
and Reichert, Bearing Witness, p. 99. | |