Whitehorn’s world Violence can be ‘addictive’

Press, 25 November 1982, Page 16

Whitehorn’s world Violence can be ‘addictive’

; Erin Pizzey was one of the first women in the world to start a refuge for battered wives, now recognised as a worldwide phenomenon. In London, where she first started, however, she’s recently been booed and jeered by the very women who are running the refuges — all because of her new book, “Prone to Violence.”

In it, she gives a lot of evidence — and plenty of horrific interviews to back it up — that suggests that not all the women who are beaten up by their mates are appalled and sickened by it all.

She thinks that people brought up violently can get addicted, as it were, to their own adrenalin, and come to need the violence like a drug. Even children, she thinks, can begin to take pain for pleasure. She tells' of a baby that tears its own stomach while it suckles, of a small boy whose mother had stopped maltreating him — but they noticed burns on his wrists: “I burn myself with Mum’s

fag when she isn’t looking,” he smiled. She describes another child wriggling with excitement as he remembered how a man beat his mother till the blood ran down her face.

What makes this so tricky an issue is that there are plenty of people, as it is, who want to write off the whole battered women bit as “they like it” or “they’ve asked for it."

Men who are hostile to women, and women who want to feel it could never happen to them if they don’t provoke it, are happy to blame the women (though I don’t quite see how they get round the children). But only some of the women are on this adrenalin “high” of excitement; most are genuinely hurt and bewildered victims.

Erin Pizzey knows this; when a violent man came roaring round to the refuge, most of the women hid and the children cried. But there were some children excited at the prospect of a fight,some women who crowded round with shining eyes, like tricoteuses at the guillotine. What I suspect the protesters cannot face is the idea that the enjoyment of cruelty, the bloodlust of fighting and rage, is not confined to “them,” however you define “them” — men, Nazis, terrorists, the enemy.

At school we were taught to be amazed that Dante thought the blessed would enjoy looking down at the agony of the damned. Yet people in the Middle Ages did enjoy watching people flayed alive or burned at the stake.

We, of course, only watch simulated events — though it may not make quite as much difference as we think: the battered women all knew that they were in for if there

was a violent film on television. The real message of the Beirut massacre is that noone is unalterably a Good Guy — not even the Jews, who have suffered so much, or those who share the name of Christian with Pastor Nemueller and Mother Theresa. And the Conquistadores. What I do not mean is anything resembling the breast-beating cry of “we are all guilty.” That simply blurs the distinctions between those people, families, or systems that are good at holding the devil at bay, and those that are not. “I’m arguing that we have

to recognise that fighting and blood and violence fiare exciting; the problem is not just “to bring out the good in us all” but to give no opportunity to the bad. If we better, recognised our dark side, I believe, we could more effectively control it than we do now. We would never, for example, think it safe to let one set of human beings have total control over another, whether warders or mental nurses or corporals or parents. We might be able to figure out a way of getting some of the violence off our screens, big and little, without, by censorship, opening the door

to State tyranny. It is even possible we would work out a way of. , getting children away from violent parents, without subjecting them to a different ■ ■ sort of violence in institutions, where they sit, as Erin * Pizzey puts it, “like little time-bombs ready to explode on to the streets in 10 years , time.”-'

Know your enemy; you can ■. do more for goodness, I believe, if you admit the » attractions of evil; And if you " doubt them, reading this ' book might change your ~ mind. The most appaling thing about it is that it’s *: exciting. Copyright “Ob- 7 server” Syndicate Service.