There is an intersting political argument being constructed at the moment about "domestic violence" in Australia.
Its one of those elegantly simple arguments that no one is allowed to question. There is no possible way that anyone in authority can possibly challenge this argument, because to do so makes one a monster.
However, the argument itself depends on a number of really poor assumptions.
The first is as usual, that men are the perpetrators and solely responsible for all domestic violence. Every so often you will catch one of the speakers append "against women and children" to the definition, which suggests that they are aware that men might sometimes be the victim, but it's outside the scope of what they are really talking about.
The second assumtion is that the definition of domestice violence is clearly and unambiuously understood. However, the definition seems to be ever expanding. It not includes everything from extreeme violence, through to ecconomic abuse, emtional abuse, verbal abuse, controlling behaviour etc. Many of these sub-definitions are also really poorly defined... but generally cook down to "stuff someone does not like'.
So, in summary, the argument is, to paraphrase, stuff men do that women and children don't like'. And since children really don't get a look in except as pawns in the argument, ti simplifies down to "stuff women don't like'.
Sound familiar? Pretty much the same power grab that feminism has been on for years.
So... you can argue the points as much as you like, but its really an argument with feet of clay. (This does not mean its not an argument thats worth exploring, it just means that we have to be realistic about what is driving the argument and be able to examine counter arguments without being beaten with the monster stick for even asking questions).
So lets look at the first issue. Who are the responsible parties? Since there are grown adults in the situation, they are all responsible. It takes two to tango, even if they don't understand their part in the situation or don't want to. Pretending otherwise is just childish. The question of responsiblity is different to the question of who raised the fist vs who got the blcak eye. This is usually the point where the gender issues pick up and the focus goes onto the violence aspect.
The argument is often framed along the lines of one day, out of the blue someone randomly beat their wife or child. I think that at this point, its a matter for the police, not a matter for a political argument. In that case, I hold the man responsible for stepping over a line rather than walking away. But we get into a question of definitions.
The question is, why? How did the situation end up there.
A fair argument could be made for lack of self control. Everyone has a breaking point, but a person who has developed self control can take a lot more stress before they lose their shit and swing a fist. This line of reasoning then diggs into how we are rasing children to practice self control and self-discipline.
An intersting angle that I hear from some quarters is about the different ways that men and women deal with conflict. The physical weapons of men vs the verbal and emotional weapons that women use.
There is going to be a broard range of scenarios and personalitites involved in the situations that are getting rolled into the catchall definition of domestic abuse. I have been close enough to some completely terrible situations and head stories from people about their experiences that were in the worst of the worst category. Like most things, I think that stress, coping mechanims and personalities play a big role in the dynamics that go toxic. However, I would suggest that all of these situations were already toxic, its just that the players involed had not yet realised or resolved the situation in another way. Rub some alcohol or sudden social or ecconomic stress on the situation without any other ways to resolve it and things exceed the players coping capacity and they act out. Its that simple, but with horrifying results. People can adapt to change, but often they cannot adapt quickly enough to sudden change.
So the question is, can the gov magically remove any of the contributing factors before life inevitably puts stress on people and they fail to handle their shit? Is this really something that the government can throw money at and just fix?
Lets be honest, putting money into cleaning up the aftermath of an incident is not a solution, but just dumping all the responsibility at the feet of "men" is also not a solution.
I was raised with the concept that you never hit a girl or a woman. However, I was not raised with any training about how to take verbal abuse from a woman. I just had no concept of how many different ways there are to talk absolute mean shit to someone that you know intimately. I also had no concept in my upbringing for how to deal with an uncooperative or irrational partner. My parents had figured out how to work together and were generally on the same page. I only ever saw them argue to the point where they had to walk away from each other once. I also saw them come back together and cuddle and that was that. There were plenty of things they probably disagreed on, but generally they were on the same page when it came to all the suff I was aware of.
However, later in life, I got into situations that were less than cooperative. Which raises the question, what do you do with uncooperative adults? My solution has been to walk away, but that gets harder as the situation becomes more involved. Once you have co-mingled your lives or have children, then it gets really really complicated.
What do we (Society) do with adults who do not have self control or have challenging personalities? I have participated in a couple of different forms of counselling and therapy but my observation is that its really hard to fix problems that are entrenched in peoples personalities and habits. Adults get less flexible as they get older, so they tend to not adapt unless the environment persistently places pressure on them.
There is a solid chunk of the population who could be described as having had shit parenting. However, no one can agree on what shit parenting is... there are obvious cases, but as you move more toward the median, there are still plenty of people who are very poorly equiped for the situations they find themselves in and often do not have any reserves of wisdom or resource to help them work through challenging situations they encounter. My observation is that given time and repetition, people can adapt to an environment and will slowly change, but adults tend to fnd all sorts of ways to not adapt quickly or gracefully. Denial is much less energy intensive, so its easier and chaeper in the short term to simply avoid the reality of the sitaution than to rapidly adapt to a novel situation.
But back to my train of through.
Within a given situation, say a shared domestic living situation, where the participants need to cooperate to get benefit from the division of labour etc, then a lot of the basic functions of co-habiting that our grandparents understood was based on the idea that both parties were fairly well adapted to the challenges of their life. The normal variability still resulted in plenty of people encountering challenges they were not able to overcome... but as the environment was not changing quickly, there was a bit less pressure to adapt.
The other thing was that the family structures put a head of household who also was the disciplinarian. Most children were raised with discipline and authority, in general that mean that most people were conditioned to the structures and values that were familiar to most of the society.
Contrast that with the post-modern situation we have in our urban environments. There is a very large range of values and approches to discipline and authority in society. This means that there is a higher proportion of basic conflict between adults before they even spend time together under the pressures of a couple living in a fast paced world. Trying to reconcile fundamental values and experiences about how life and learning happens introduces another suprise in stressful moments.
So, we have a situation where people have a lot of challenges in their relationships that are going to involve change. Learning involves change by one or both parties in a conflict. However, we are talking about very deeply held understandings about how the world works that people learn very early in their formative years and cannont even concously examine. So how do we deal with adults who need to re-learn life lessons so they can cooperate?
There are two outcomes. Either they make the change or they do not? If they cannot make the change and cannot reach a point where they can cooperate... does the relationship fail? If so, they fall back to being single and stuggling in society and eventually become a burden on the state or some other support service.
In the event they are able to learn or adapt, does this come without cost? Have they really adapted or are they just "trying really hard"? if they have not actually adapted but are just supressing their thoughts and feelings, thats going to unwind at some point.
We still end up with a proportion who are just not adapting because they have not learned the lessons that they need to cooperate either during their childhood or teen years... and end up struggling or failing within cooperative relationships. this proportion end up dependant on the state for some or all of their social and ecconomic needs.
So this raises the question, cen the state "fix" this situation? Can the state or individuals help people to adapt and learn skills later in life that will increase their ability to cooperate during stressful and challenging moments?
The theory would suggest that everyone can learn. The question is what tools are abailible and can be deployed.
Neo-libralism is very poorly defined, but generally argues that non-violent methods are the only ethical means... there are still plenty of people who are struggling under this ideology, so its not going to be the solution for everyone. This system can be practiced by individuals but takes a bit of education and training to get a consistent result. This system tends to fail at scale when the state attempts to apply it to adults who do not choose to cooperate. Its also quite fragile and depends a great deal on the ideal of everyone cooperating ... because they all understand that their individual and mutual interests are aligned. This idea is still waiting for hard evidence.... and tends to devolve to the violence mechanisms when it doesn't work quickly enough.
The conservative ideology would argue that violence in moderation can get a result. But the concepts of moderation and result are often difficult to define, especially when emotions are involved. So, less than a perfect proposal. However, this is a system that is availible to individuals and is pretty simple to explain and can be refined with relativly little education. This idea has been practiced at scale by states since states were invented. Proportional violence is still the established solution to social conflict. Very clearly this involves a great deal of harm and loss of life, as it usually involves the partial or complete elimination of one or the other conflicted parties from the environment. Not ideal.
So where does that leave us? We have an environment in which conflict is still happening, and the tools that people have to try to resolve the conflicts have not really evolved. But we have an ideology that tries to argue that there is a better way than violence, but the result is that a lot of relationships are still failing and the state is picking up the costs.
Its also interesting just how many ways neo-libralism has found to be violent and violate individuals intregrity. The big shift however has been the change in perspective from the family unit solving the problem and bearing the responsibilty, to now the state is asked to solve the problem and carry the indirect costs.
Not an easy problem to solve.
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