Violence in the home and on the street: one cannot be curbed without the other

Press, 22 April 1986, Page 21

Violence in the home and on the street: one cannot be curbed without the other

This comment on the current concern about violence was written by JOHN CHURCH (left), senior lecturer in education at the University of Canterbury. Dr Church is the author of “Violence Against Wives: Its Causes and Effects” and the coauthor with Doris Church of “How To Get Out of Your Marriage Alive,” a handbook of advice for battered women.

Everyone wants to feel safe when they walk down the street. People who no longer feel safe want something done about the current level of violence in the community. But what should we do? Read the Bible? Remove violence from television? Ban alcohol? Introduce harsher penalties for violent offenders? Arm the police? Or what? Before we can solve a problem, we need to identify its causes. Before we can reduce the present level of violence, we have to work out why we have as much violence as we do. It is not until we have identified the causes of violence that we can even begin to attack those causes.

The first thing we must be quite clear about is that New Zealand is actually a much more violent place than the newspapers would have us believe. Over 100 people are assaulted in Christchurch every day but only a handful of these assaults come to the attention of the police and only one or two of these are reported in the paper. This is because there is much more violence inside the home than there is out on the street. For 3000 Christchurch women and an equal number of children, it is actually much more dangerous being at home than it is being out on the street.

Far more women are assaulted or raped each day by the men they are living with than are ever assaulted or raped by strangers. Far more children are brutalised each day by their parents than are ever brutalised by strangers. But the only attacks we get to read about in the paper are the cases where someone has been attacked by a stranger. Knowing this is most important. It means that if we want to control violence by imposing harsher penalties, for example,

then we must be prepared to apply these harsher penalties not only to the unemployed 22-year-old thug who injures someone on the street, but also to the well-off 44-year-old businessman who injures his wife or his children. It is a shortcoming in the way in which the violent offender was raised by his (or her) parents which causes certain, New Zealanders to grow into violent offenders. Violent offences are committed by adults who have failed to learn that it is important to take other people’s feelings into account, who have failed to learn non-violent ways of handling hassles and frustrations, and who have failed to learn that you get more out of life if you keep your hands in your pockets than if you run around frightening the hell out of people.

Violent offending is a disease which is transmitted from parents to children. Men who have been brought up by violent fathers are 10 times more likely to go on to beat up their own wives than men who have been brought up by non-violent fathers.

But the parents do not have to be violent in order for the children to be violent. All that is needed to raise a violent offender is for the parents to allow violent behaviour in their children. This nearly always happens in families where one of the

parents is violent. But it can also happen in families where the parents are always fighting, in families where the parents neglect their children, and in families where the parents spoil their children. ® Violent offending is not caused by violence on television. Only children from violent or neglecting backgrounds emulate the violence on television. ® Violence is not caused by pornography. Only rapists commit further rapes following exposure to pornography. © Violence is not caused by drink. Thousands of New Zealanders go drinking on Saturday nights but only a tiny fraction of these go on to pillage and rape. © And violence is not caused by economic hardship. There are thousands of women living below the poverty line who are not violent, and thousands of men with very substantial incomes who are. Now that we know why it is that some New Zealanders grow up to become violent offenders, we can see what must be done if we are to reduce the number of violent offenders. In order to reduce violence in our community we must attack the problem of violence on three fronts. First, we have to rescue the children who are at present being raised to be the next

generation of violent offenders. This is essential, otherwise we will always have violence no matter what we do to the current generation of violent offenders. Second, the community must change its attitude towards violence so that every violent act (and -not just the stranger-to-stranger violence) results in community disapproval and community action. This, too, is essential. Harsher penalties for violent acts will not deter violence unless the penalties are applied to EVERYONE who is violent. Third, we must change the penalties which we apply when

someone assaults someone else, either in public or in private. We must make the penalties for violence so unpleasant that every violent offender is faced with only two choices: either learn to control their violent tendencies, or else be removed from the community permanently. How do we prevent the children of the present generation from growing up to be our next generation of violent offenders? One very cheap thing that we can do is to make it as easy as possible for non-violent parents (and their children) to separate in cases where the other parent

is violent. The law at present allows this. So the only additional thing we need to do is to encourage the development of a nation-wide network of support groups for the victims of home violence (like our Battered Women’s Support Group). These groups are needed in every community so that women who are being abused by their husbands can get in touch with and get support from other women who have already separated from violent partners. The recently established Battered Women’s Trust has this as its goal.

Violence in the family