# Very Intimate Violence > A book analyzing domestic violence from a feminist perspective. It sees violence against wives as a question of power that the patriarchal family structure permits and conceals in the name of gender roles and intimacy, rather than individual deviance or marital conflict. It argues for centering abused women's experiences and human rights, rather than preserving the family. A book analyzing domestic violence from a [feminist](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Feminism.txt) perspective. It sees violence against wives as a question of power that the permits and conceals in the name of gender roles and intimacy, rather than individual deviance or marital conflict. It argues for centering abused women's experiences and , rather than preserving the family. ## Preface. Where everything begins: Gender roles, family, violence > Men's gender roles coincide with their , but women's gender roles do not coincide with their rights as human beings. > Is [feminism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Feminism.txt) women's studies, the women's movement, or a feminist ideology? Some, women and men alike, even said my writing was not theory, knowledge, or scholarship but reportage, a casebook, "like a women's magazine article." I was particularly sensitive to "Isn't that an exaggeration?"—it made me angry and despairing. Their reactions are products of ignorance, of course, but as someone wanting to study violence and suffering, this is a challenge I must confront throughout my life. > > was tormented all his life by the gulf between the 'experiencing self' and the 'speaking self.' The consideration and tolerance a victim must extend to those with the 'privilege' of never having experienced that tragedy. I cannot bear this injustice. I believe it is why suffering, violence, and grief are difficult to study in our society. Suffering is unavoidable. But only when suffering is put into words can we be comforted. Only recognizing that our suffering is a product of history offers solace. ## Chapter 1. 'Violence against wives': Patriarchy in miniature > Domestic violence does not cause a crisis of the family. It is simply one aspect of the present family structure. It may therefore be a 'norm' of patriarchal society rather than a deviant event. ### How is 'violence against wives' sustained and reproduced? > My fundamental concern about 'violence against wives' is that [Korean](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Republic%20of%20Korea.txt) society discusses responses overwhelmingly from the standpoint of protecting the existing (patriarchal) family, rather than human rights and gender equality. > As familiar expressions such as "husband and wife are one body" and "family suicide" show, the notion that a family is a single unit is so powerful that it has become common sense in Korea. Yet this discourse conceals power relations among family members based on gender and age, and in practice sustains domestic violence by obstructing outside intervention. > In any case, these studies have regarded 'violence against wives' as 'deviant' (abnormal) behavior and focused mainly on the demographic characteristics of violent households. They examine causes influencing violence, usually citing the abusive husband's morbid jealousy, stress, alcohol, inferiority complex, financial incapacity, anger, and so on. But these are more appropriately seen as violence itself than as its causes. Meanwhile, studies focusing on abused wives' psychology explain the consequences of prolonged violence—their helplessness, fear of retaliation, loss of self-awareness, impaired judgment, contradictory coping strategies, and so on—as though they were its causes. > In Korea, or family violence is understood not in its original sense of violence *in* the family, but as violence *against* the family. … I am skeptical that a family-preserving approach can address 'violence against wives.' > > - First, it still regards women as central to preserving the family. > - Second, it cannot challenge the male-centered power structure that defines women's family roles solely as motherhood and as their husbands' [sexual objects](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Sexual%20objectification.txt). > - Third, it continually reduces women's identities to 'domestic' beings rather than social citizens. ### 'Violence against wives' is a shared human experience > If there is a history shared by humanity across eras, regions, religions, races, classes, educational levels, monogamy, and polygamy, it is probably 'violence against wives.' … The chapter on marriage in Volume 2 of *Naehun*, a conduct manual for women in , states: "Serve your husband as your father; even if you are beaten for remonstrating against wrongdoing, you must feel neither anger nor any resentment." In the West, too, 'violence against wives' has continued from ancient Babylon to modern industrial capitalism. > Until the , 'violence against wives' was not legally regulated; with the development of legal institutions in the early modern period, it began to be restricted(?) within the law. … English common law developed the 'rule of thumb': beating a wife was legitimate provided the stick was no thicker than her husband's thumb. The English expression 'rule of thumb,' meaning a rough estimate, supposedly derives from this. (This quotation reportedly contains misinformation.[^1]) > Before the twentieth century, 'violence against wives' twice became a matter of public concern in the West. Britain's Frances Power Cobbe recorded annual casualties among Liverpool working women killed or disabled by their husbands' kicks. Her paper *Wife Torture in England* (1878), based on those records, is known as the first attempt to frame wife abuse as a feminist issue. It subsequently contributed substantially to reform of Britain's Matrimonial Causes Act, which allowed wives to separate if their husbands were convicted of beating them. > > Thereafter 'violence against wives' received little attention through the 1920s, resurfacing with feminism in the late 1960s, particularly in the West. In the intervening years, it received less attention than animal abuse. From its founding in 1939 through the late 1960s, the American *Journal of Marriage and Family* published not a single paper on 'violence against wives'; even within domestic violence, it tended to be treated as secondary. When child abuse became a social issue in the US in 1962, domestic violence became publicly visible and wife beating began receiving attention. Feminism brought violence against women "out into the world," helping make 'violence against wives' a serious subject of academic research from the 1970s onward. > About 42% of women murdered in the US are killed by former or current partners. The figure approaches 50% in Bangladesh, Brazil, Kenya, and Thailand. In , the influence of purdah—a traditional culture of women's oppression involving veils covering face and body—means roughly 80% of women are abused by husbands. Bolivia's government reported about 100,000 acts of violence against women annually, 95% unpunished. In the US, wife beating causes more injuries than rape, car accidents, and robbery combined and is regarded as the most common cause of injury to women. Surveys of experiences of 'violence against wives' (1986–1993) reported rates of 60% in Chile/Ecuador/Sri Lanka/Tanzania, 59% in Japan, 49% in Guatemala, 46% in Uganda, 42% in Kenya, 41% in Belgium, 40% in Zambia, 39% in Malaysia, 27–36% in Canada, 28% in the US, 25% in Norway, and 21% in the Netherlands. > > Richard Gelles's research found that the number of women killed through 'violence against wives' in the US over five years was comparable to the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War. The March of Dimes reported that husbands' beatings during pregnancy were a major cause of birth defects and infant mortality. A Japanese government survey found that 5% of married women reported fearing for their lives because of 'violence against wives.' ### Domestic violence, or violence against wives? See [Violence against wives](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/%EC%95%84%EB%82%B4%20%ED%8F%AD%EB%A0%A5.txt). Why the author puts [violence against wives](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/%EC%95%84%EB%82%B4%20%ED%8F%AD%EB%A0%A5.txt) in single quotation marks: > In this work, I seek both to analyze the reality that women suffer violence because they are considered merely wives rather than human beings, and to argue that women's identities must no longer be confined to wifehood. The term violence against wives cannot encompass both positions. It contradicts this study's position that such violence should be framed as violence against humans rather than wives, and fails to contain the alternative values feminist politics offers. I therefore write **'violence against wives,' rather than violence against wives**, to indicate this limitation. ## Chapter 2. A person concerned: Myself as researcher, victim, and activist > When 'battered' wives express their pain, they threaten the efficient functioning of the patriarchal family system sustained by that pain. When they begin speaking, the myths of family as sanctuary and man as protector collapse. > My position in Korean society as a woman and as an 'ajumma,' a married woman, is clearly marginal. But I learned that clearly recognizing my own marginality and otherness puts me in a stronger position as a producer of knowledge. > I originally planned this work around three dimensions of '[violence against wives](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/%EC%95%84%EB%82%B4%20%ED%8F%AD%EB%A0%A5.txt)': why it occurs, how it is interpreted, and how people respond. But distinguishing causes from interpretations was possible only from my perspective, accustomed to causal reasoning; the witnesses did not make that distinction. … > > The longstanding concealment of '[violence against wives](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/%EC%95%84%EB%82%B4%20%ED%8F%AD%EB%A0%A5.txt)' showed feminist intellectuals that theorizing women's experience must begin with "How do we know, and who decides what is known?" These are also questions about the power relations between researcher and researched, between researchers and their knowledge communities, and with society as a whole—relations involved in knowledge's 'objectivity,' 'truth,' authority, evaluation, and political influence. > > This work contains the stories of three subjects—abused women, abusive husbands, and myself (the researcher)—whose political positions and feelings toward one another differ. Various social relationships therefore enter my interpretation of the witnesses' stories. > I use "witness" rather than "research subject" here. Since the researcher herself is among those studied, the distinction between researcher and researched is blurred. I also consider "research participant" inappropriate. I interpret abused women's stories from my own perspective as researcher, so however much the women contributed, they cannot share responsibility for the research. They are therefore witnesses to experience and suffering, rather than research subjects or participants. ### The witnesses' pain, the researcher's pain > '[Violence against wives](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/%EC%95%84%EB%82%B4%20%ED%8F%AD%EB%A0%A5.txt)' occurs in what are regarded as the most intimate, personal realms—sexuality and family life. Both researcher and witness therefore struggle to face these stories without overcoming discomfort. … Hearing the following exchange, I could not avoid questioning how my own behavior differed from . > > "Why didn't you leave when your husband did that (raped your daughter)?" / "Please don't ask about that. I don't want to remember it. Trying to talk makes my intestines feel twisted … (crying, placing a hand on her chest) My stomach hurts so much. It feels like something will happen to my chest. It hurts so much." > Telling them to "forget the unfortunate event" merely demands an impossible cure. Healing comes not from trying to forget violence, but from reinterpreting one's experiences through a feminist perspective. Then victims become survivors. > > Not every victim of violence against women automatically becomes a survivor. Such violence is clearly political, but also personal experience. Turning a (personal) wound into a (political) event requires political struggle. Suffering does not make everyone wise; becoming a survivor requires fierce, painful self-transformation, in some ways an intensely personal undertaking. Feminist research may find its meaning in the researcher's joining this process and empowering her to interpret her experience on her own terms. > > But if overcoming violence hurts more than enduring it, people will remain where they are. Watching abused women's 'pain of speaking (having to speak),' I came partly to agree with conservatives who want society left as it is. Could the effort to 'expose,' study, and improve the dark problems (evils) of human life itself be evil, or spread evil? Studying violence inevitably means becoming involved in and coming into contact with it as a researcher, exposing myself to injustice. > > Since witnesses' suffering lies outside listeners' experience, researchers and activists handling others' suffering easily other it. This is precisely evil. > A listener cannot define a speaker's pain. Pain is an intensely subjective sensation within an individual body, making empathy with another's pain and its linguistic expression/communication fundamentally impossible. Language describing others' pain is therefore figurative: similes ("as if") or metaphors. One's own pain feels certain; hearing of another's pain is open to doubt. > > The listener's inability to believe the speaker is magnified when the speaker is socially othered or the pain politically taboo. Within Korea's social structure, abused wives' pain must be denied. 'Battered' wives expressing pain threaten the efficient functioning of the patriarchal family system sustained by it. When they speak, the myths of family as sanctuary and man as protector collapse. > > Human experiences of suffering are thus unequal. > Abused women asked, "Who would believe such stories?", describing the pain of being doubted as no less than that of speaking. I worried whether people would believe these stories if I wrote them. … When speakers, listeners, third parties, or society refuse to acknowledge women's experiences, this results from a power structure in which those experiences cannot secure 'objectivity' or 'truth' on their own terms. … > > Feeling, expressing, recognizing, and empathizing with suffering are not free of society's power relations. … Existing studies' emphasis on severity to establish '[violence against wives](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/%EC%95%84%EB%82%B4%20%ED%8F%AD%EB%A0%A5.txt)' as a social problem follows the same logic. Violence against women at home is considered 'personal,' so to become 'social,' its damage must be horrific and severe. This is the politics of suffering. ### 'Joining the witnesses in their pain' ### 'Objectivity' is political > During research, I happened to interview both spouses. (Neither knows I interviewed the other.) As in the commonplace insistence on hearing both sides of a 'marital dispute,' their voices differed radically. Taking the husband's story at face value, no violence occurred, and his wife was such a "clueless, ill-mannered woman" that even I wondered whether so 'deviant' a housewife could exist. > Whether a wife's alleged 'bad behavior' necessarily warrants violence depends on the researcher's (subjective) judgment. 'Objectivity' is secured when I recognize my social relationships with subjects occupying opposing positions—perpetrator and victim—and judge, analyze, and conceptualize their statements with that awareness. Merely seeing 'violence against wives' as violence rather than marital conflict, as a major political event oppressing half of humanity rather than a domestic matter, already involves my values. This understanding is social, learned and formed within Korean society, just like men's belief that their values are 'neutral and objective.' Knowledge lacking an understanding of the knower's social position cannot achieve 'objectivity.' > Seeing something also means not seeing something else. Defining knowledge's value involves choices based on value judgments as well as 'objective' circumstances, and power relations operate in those choices. Thus 'violence against wives' increases as the women's movement becomes more active and social responses develop. Unlike ordinary social phenomena, stronger efforts to solve it make the problem 'appear' more serious. It did not previously fail to exist; it went unreported. An active women's movement gives abused women the perspective and courage to disclose their experiences. 'Violence against wives' is recognized as 'fact' only through a particular gender perspective. > > As in all feminist research, but especially research on 'violence against wives,' establishing 'objectivity' and 'facts' is strongly affected by gender politics. 'Objectivity' is therefore a political question. > The researcher's circumstances affect research, consciously or not. Without knowing which parts of subjects' stories one responds to, securing 'objectivity' is difficult. Self-knowledge allows researchers to distinguish whether their relationship with subjects involves projection, enlightenment, consciousness-raising, transference, or leading questions. ### Rereading previous research through encounters with abused women > Reviewing previous Korean research raised several concerns. Despite hundreds of studies since domestic violence became a social issue, their virtually identical structure and content puzzled me. Specifically: > > - First, studies either do not ground themselves in abused women's experiences, or interpret them through frameworks that fail to center women, yielding 'commonsense' conclusions that barely criticize patriarchal assumptions. > - Second, questions about quoting and organizing material, concerning the ethics and politics of research. > - Third, the othering and victimization of research subjects. > > All three converge on whose perspective we use to view 'violence against wives.' … > > Apart from a few exceptions, most studies say abused wives must escape violence while simultaneously preserving the family. They fail to connect the present family structure to violence because researchers do not make the family system they themselves inhabit an object of study. ## Chapter 3. 'Violence against wives' through women's eyes > Understanding violence against women as human power behavior and political action, rather than individual character, makes violence a central realm of male domination. ### Where does the power to beat a wife come from? > Early classics did not consider violence a major realm of male domination. , Shulamith Firestone, Juliet Mitchell, Kate Millett, and Sheila Rowbotham thought that, in modern Western society where men already monopolized military force, science and technology, political power, and economic resources, they need not use physical violence as a means of control. … But power perpetuates itself through use. The gender system (patriarchy), a power relationship, is not fixed once established; it is continually enacted. … Genocide and gynocide, characteristics of modern society, were further results of male-centered rationalism and reason. In other words, violence does not simply occur unavoidably when power is threatened: it is itself purposeful human activity and planned practice. > , commonly seen as sexual violence, and wife beating, perceived as physical violence, are not different kinds of violence. Most abused women experience both, or violence merely changes form from rape before marriage to beating afterward (since marital rape is not recognized). Moreover, the patriarchal gaze at women's bodies is itself sexualized, making violence against those bodies a matter of sexuality and a product of the system of gender discrimination/differentiation. > As part of gendered power relations, violence against women takes different forms across eras and cultures, but shares the essence of patriarchy's universal control of women. '[Violence against wives](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/%EC%95%84%EB%82%B4%20%ED%8F%AD%EB%A0%A5.txt)' is thus less a subtype of domestic violence than one form of violence against women, alongside rape, prostitution, pornography, obscene calls, genital exposure, sexual harassment, incest, witch hunts, bride burning, wives following husbands into death, clitoral cutting, and foot binding. > In the <1980s>, Western critics began calling 's position on violence against women ',' ignoring differences among women and their agency. Their central point concerned women's differences: class, race, region, ethnicity, culture, sexual identity, disability, and age shape resources and wealth, and thus different experiences of violence. … These objections are entirely valid. Yet framing violence against women as gendered power and control reinterpreted conventional politics and power, and especially transformed understandings of '[violence against wives](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/%EC%95%84%EB%82%B4%20%ED%8F%AD%EB%A0%A5.txt),' so long considered a 'domestic, personal matter.' > The universality of '[violence against wives](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/%EC%95%84%EB%82%B4%20%ED%8F%AD%EB%A0%A5.txt)' across times and places does not make it human nature. Violence against women is universal, but also historical. > Although '[violence against wives](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/%EC%95%84%EB%82%B4%20%ED%8F%AD%EB%A0%A5.txt)' is clearly gendered, gender is most easily overlooked. The domestic-violence approach cannot explain why the person beating is always 'male' and the person beaten 'female.' If stress causes husbands to beat wives, why not bosses or passersby? If alcohol causes it, why do wives not beat husbands when drinking? If poor anger management causes it, why express anger only 'at home'? If violence is used because rewards (venting anger, controlling others) exceed losses (criminal penalties, divorce), why do women not use it? If marital disagreements over religion or personality cause it, why do men beat ex-wives after divorce? > The question about '[violence against wives](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/%EC%95%84%EB%82%B4%20%ED%8F%AD%EB%A0%A5.txt)' should shift from "Why does he beat her (when he could refrain)?" to "Where does his power to beat his wife come from?" ### The home: A 'private' space beyond legal protection > 's conception of authority as arising from individuals was crucial to the modern nation-state. Yet modern human rights—the equality of all humans—could not coexist with . Separating public and private spheres usefully resolved the contradiction between elevating women to individuals and maintaining patriarchy. Excluding the family from society and making it private allowed the male household head to represent family interests in society. The familiar Korean expression "women's entry into society" presupposes that the family women inhabit is not society. … Gendered divisions of labor at work and home express gendered power: not an equal division but an arrangement of women around men. The female secretary is an office wife; the wife is a worker employed at home. (Bard & Morgan 1993, p230) > In patriarchal society, a woman gains normality and more resources as 'someone's wife' rather than as an individual. ### Marriage: A license for violence > The family is patriarchy's most basic social instrument: binding women to heterosexual and reconstructing their sexuality as masochistic, suited to satisfying male desire. > As subjects in society, women and men seek to maintain socially bestowed identities by fulfilling family gender roles, deriving power from them too (though not equally). Because gendered divisions of labor make women's family status their social status, abused women seldom abandon wife/mother roles even before life-threatening violence. '[Violence against wives](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/%EC%95%84%EB%82%B4%20%ED%8F%AD%EB%A0%A5.txt)' does not arise because wives provoke it; it persists through their devotion and attachment to gender roles. Sharing patriarchy's basic character, it joins prostitution as a final bastion of the patriarchal project. ## Chapter 4. How abusive husbands understand violence against wives > Men believe the home is a place of rest where they may vent anger freely, and wives must accept it unconditionally. A wife's expression of her own feelings without considering her husband's mood is sufficient reason for violence. > Marital sexuality, women's care work and housework, men's paid work, and the male household head as family representative: these family roles spread throughout society ("the family is society's basic unit"), defining gender relations as a whole. Marriage and family are thus central institutions firmly assigning , like a gender factory (Lorber 1994, p196). > Here I examine how the normative roles of wife and husband within the family system produce and sustain the cultural premise that "some behavior deserves a beating." ### The 'right and duty' to teach a wife through beating > Since modernity, the image of family as a symbol of intimacy upheld by society has been hard to reconcile with '[violence against wives](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/%EC%95%84%EB%82%B4%20%ED%8F%AD%EB%A0%A5.txt).' It has therefore been considered the family's dark side. Assuming it occurs only in abnormal marriages encourages viewing abusive husbands as 'sick' (mentally ill) or 'bad' (character-disordered). Or, if neither sick nor bad, their beating is understood as a natural act of male physiology ("an eruption of aggressive instinct"), bypassing will, management, restraint, or control. Such discourse has excessively excused husbands' violence while excessively condemning wives' responses. > Abusive husbands are 'normal' people. Wives say responding is harder because their husbands are respected, well-regarded people who appear unproblematic. They described them as "high-IQ, quick-thinking, meticulous, thorough, logical, as quick and perceptive in action and judgment as a detective, geniuses at cunning, full of pride and self-control, calm and thoughtful, tenacious elites, intellectual, circumspect, humane and gentle, systematic and painstaking in everything." This entirely contradicts existing research describing abusive husbands as impatient, impulsive, lacking self-control, and poor at stress management. Those studies portray them as abnormal because they organize evidence according to preexisting assumptions. > Through violence, husbands affirm and strengthen their gender identity in the family. This understanding arises from their conception of family. "I believe a man's authority should count for something. A household head can have authority. Equality mustn't make authority disappear. If a child does wrong, you can't just let it pass. A house needs a foundation for its pillars to stand. Someone must take responsibility for the household. It needs a representative, a spokesperson. Ships have captains; cars need drivers to move. (Abusive husband, 48, university graduate, unemployed)" > An abusive husband's excessive devotion to his sense of entitlement elevates violence against his wife into a duty. The husband below blames himself for neglecting that duty (violence). > > "They took me to hospital by ambulance, and my sister-in-law and husband came and said, 'You were wrong too, brother. A lot of this is your fault.' My husband agreed: 'Yes, I did do wrong. I gave her too much freedom.' (Woman, 36, high-school graduate, homemaker)" > > His remorse is not for injuring his wife so severely she needed thirty-five stitches, but for allowing her out and failing his duty of 'surveillance and confinement.' > The Korean word *sonboda* means to correct or fix something, and also to inflict violence. Pointing out a wife's faults means 'fixing' her—using violence. This husband's educational role (violence) extends across family life: housework, his wife's sexual services, control of the household, and more. The wife who is negligent as a domestic worker: > Because domestic labor must be performed by women, men doing similar work at home or in the workplace are seen as shaming and damaging their masculinity. One of men's most practical reasons for marrying is to acquire someone to do housework. > "That day he came home very drunk and went to the kitchen. Drinking makes you thirsty, right? He drank water, then slowly poured what remained in the glass onto the floor. When I didn't wipe it up immediately, he started beating me mercilessly. I was going to wipe it up. Really. But when he's hitting you, how can you collect yourself enough to do it? (Woman, forties, university graduate, self-employed)" > > … The husband turns the wife's domestic role into a double-bind message through which violence proceeds. Such reasons seem absurd to outsiders but persuade both husband and wife. All the women in these cases strive to comply immediately, while husbands are so confident in their behavior that they say, "Ask anyone on the street who's right." > When husbands fail their roles in maintaining the household—by not earning money, for example—wives neither beat them nor interpret their behavior as resistance. Instead, wives are expected to comfort them, as in campaigns urging women to "boost their husbands' morale." The wife's sexuality as the husband's property: > For most wives, husbands' violence and sexual intercourse are barely distinguishable. Among 1,500 Seoul residents, 92.7% considered it natural for a wife to engage in 'sexual acts' according to her husband's mood. Of married women, 25.2% had experienced marital rape; 8.7% of these had been beaten immediately before it. (Korean Institute of Criminology 1998, p22) The wife who challenges the household head's managerial authority: > Domestic labor and domestic governance (ruling the household) are different. Housework is the wife's task, but running and managing the household concerns authority and belongs to the husband. … A 'true family' contains a man and is ordered by him. Abusive husbands regard the family as their own business, to which the wife merely belongs. A wife's asserting property rights or "showing an interest in money" therefore frightens them to the point of 'chills.' ### Violence binding wife and husband together > Male violence's long history has made it a component of men's identity and personality. Violence against wives, performed as a husband's role, expresses his functions, attitudes, actions, and character within the family. Because his gender role arises from his relationship with his wife, violence as a gender role becomes both the means and substance of relating to her. … Since for these men the family is maintained only through violence, the , which prohibits it, is a 'Family Destruction Act.' > Gender-role divisions operate in everything from 'minor' violence to extreme violence identifiable as crime. 'Marital disputes' and patriarchal terrorism ultimately arise from the same social structure and logic. '[Violence against wives](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/%EC%95%84%EB%82%B4%20%ED%8F%AD%EB%A0%A5.txt)' is thus not an extreme, exceptional, deviant event in marriage, but an everyday 'normal' rule sustaining it. … Within the present family system, "behavior deserving a beating" arises from gender-role norms themselves. ## Chapter 5. The psychology of wives who accept violence > Believing violence cannot occur because home is a place of love conceals it; conversely, imagining violent households contain only conflict and hatred, no love, makes the women remaining there difficult to understand. > society has produced cultural structures preventing violence against women from being recognized as violence itself. It has normalized, rationalized, and incorporated such violence into everyday culture as religious ritual, ethnic culture, tradition, play, and so on. These structures conceal it and delay solutions. '[Violence against wives](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/%EC%95%84%EB%82%B4%20%ED%8F%AD%EB%A0%A5.txt),' occurring within families, was especially not considered violence for thousands of years. ### Why she cannot resist her husband's exploitation > The exchange view of 'violence against wives' resembles feminism in seeing men as gaining something through violence. But it has been criticized as gender-neutral for failing to explain why women do not use violence. Men use it simply "because they can." Ultimately violence becomes a means of exchange only for men. Since exchange presupposes equality and reciprocity, violence as coercive control is better understood as exploitation than exchange. > The abusive husbands in these cases feel no need to achieve social success or earn money to be masculine. In this study's fifty cases involving forty-nine husbands, nineteen—about 40%—were unemployed. Even among those working, wives usually did all the work when couples were self-employed together. … When violence, the husband's means of livelihood, moves beyond exploitation to threatening the victim's life, wives flee. Only then do husbands begin to work. … These wives are not trapped because they lack economic resources; conversely, their economic resources bind them to their husbands. Under the discourse of "protecting women through preserving families," they are left in violence and exploitation. ### Making violence trivial > To endure life-threatening violence without leaving the family, a wife must continually relativize and trivialize it through comparison with others. ### Violence as love, illness, or shame Passionate romance: > In society, heterosexual love and violence are not disconnected, mutually exclusive concepts but opposite ends of a continuum. Love between women and men includes violence; violence includes elements of love. In a sense, violence makes heterosexual love more dramatic. This does not justify violence in love's name: it means that unequal power blurs the boundary between love and violence. Illness: > Viewing husbands' violence as illness is widespread. Society labels violence at home 'abnormal,' avoiding scrutiny of the family itself. Many scholars have attributed '[violence against wives](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/%EC%95%84%EB%82%B4%20%ED%8F%AD%EB%A0%A5.txt)' not merely to obsessive neurosis or paranoia but to brain disease. Some neurologists still study brain disorders and violence. Most people think it should be treated as illness rather than punished as crime, a therapeutic perspective substantially reflected in the current Domestic Violence Prevention Act. Viewing violence as illness gives abused wives grounds for enduring it. Alternatively, they call it illness because its "bizarre, perverse" character seems beyond human reason: it could not happen in an ordinary family. The former medicalizes violence rather than treating it as power, encouraging "hope of recovery because illness can be cured." The latter seems born of despair that violence, as a 'natural' bodily phenomenon, is beyond human control (the wife's efforts). Either way, the illness wives perceive is generally 'mental illness' in the sense of "madness." Shame for the husband and family: > Violence against women was long regarded as a crime between men, rather than against women. Harming a woman attacked the man, family, community, or nation to which she belonged (by whom she was owned), violating men's 'property rights.' A wife's adultery or rape damaged her husband's honor, so his killing her was considered a defense of honor. > > (This resembles the "indirect duty" view of [animals](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Animal.txt): abusing them is not a crime against animals but a violation of the 'owner's' property rights. See [Animal rights, human wrongs: An introduction to moral philosophy](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Animal%20rights,%20human%20wrongs%20-%20An%20introduction%20to%20moral%20philosophy.txt).) The result of 'deserving a beating' > Believing "I was beaten because I did wrong" gives abused women the most plausible reason to endure pain. If the cause lies in herself, she can remove it, making her believe she can control her husband's violence. [The cycle theory of violence](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/The%20cycle%20theory%20of%20violence.txt) ## Chapter 6. Wifehood and family politics > Women saying they must endure violence for their children even if beaten themselves show how difficult it is for woman as 'human being' and woman as 'mother' to coexist. Everyone has at least the right to live without being beaten, but once a woman becomes a 'mother,' that right is routinely suspended and relinquished. ### The structure of violence reproduced through the wife role Becoming the perfect wife > Women's and men's family roles are not reciprocal, and are therefore unequal, because individuals cannot readily exchange or replace them by choice. The more faithfully an abused woman performs her wife role, the more her resources flow unilaterally to her husband: her loss of power is his gain. It is fundamentally a . Guilt over imperfectly fulfilling her role makes it easier for her husband to exercise power later. Responsible for changing the husband: From victim to fixer > Abused wives exhaust every effort to change their husbands' violence, seeking intervention from women's organizations only after losing health, confidence, and support networks. They reach this point because they believe that, as those responsible for domestic life, they must solve every household event, including violence. > > Discourses such as "a husband is what his wife makes him" or "men rule the world, women rule those men" convey that "a woman's work is to make a man." Men (masculinity) can form only through women's submission and care. As women breastfeed children, they must nurture men's egos and soothe their wounds and anger. This work of making men is emotional labor and care work. Women can castrate masculinity through criticism, wounding pride, or indifference, or conversely make men strong. Thus all responsibility for events between women and men rests on women. Regulating violence through sexualized care work > For abusive husbands, wives after beating them means "making up after a marital dispute." Through sexuality, they turn violence into a normal part of married life. … > > "He says, 'I didn't hit you because I hate you,' and thinks doing that (sex) means we've reconciled. He forces it to get quietly past the moment and show the children we weren't fighting. I endure it (rape after beating) because, when their father hits their mother in front of them, I worry they will think, 'How badly must Mom have behaved to deserve a beating?' (Woman, 40, elementary-school graduate, self-employed)" ### Why return to violence? Human rights become maternal duties > Children are an important variable when wives seek change. Husbands may beat children too, or begin abusing them as hostages after wives leave, forcing their return. Even when wives escape successfully with children, school-aged children may have to abandon school temporarily because husbands trace them through it. … These complicated childcare circumstances force women to remain in violent households. > > (According to [Understanding animal abuse: A sociological analysis](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Understanding%20animal%20abuse%20-%20A%20sociological%20analysis.txt), companion animals play a similar role.) The husband's affair threatens the wife's status > A husband's violence does not break up a family as long as the wife endures it, but an affair can. In a society dividing labor by gender, a husband's affair threatens the wife's survival, causing greater shock and hurt than violence. It means his love, resources, and the family itself moving to another woman. … Violence threatens the wife's status. Wife as occupation: Refusal and deprivation of economic agency > The more women cling to wifehood, the harder it is to become social citizens as economic agents. In societies with strongly enforced gendered divisions of labor, woman as worker and woman as wife cannot coexist. ### Family politics of fear and resistance Fear embodied in the wife's body > Abused wives' fear is more accurately termed , but here I use the everyday word "fear." PTSD describes symptoms in people exposed to extreme stress beyond ordinary human experience, such as war, torture, natural disasters, or accidents. Unlike fear, its cause lies in an event, not the person. > > Abused wives experience double fear. Since '[violence against wives](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/%EC%95%84%EB%82%B4%20%ED%8F%AD%EB%A0%A5.txt)' repeats, they can vividly imagine future violence; since all violence is arbitrary, its unpredictability also terrifies them. Fear is the greatest obstacle to resistance. Gendered norms permitting violence: The wife becomes 'perpetrator' > Wives respond to husbands' violence in many ways: unconditional pleading, fleeing, screaming, or 'feminine' resistance such as pinching and scratching. Yet their defense is often interpreted as 'attack.' This connects with discourse about 'battered husbands,' invariably accompanying 'violence against wives' when it becomes a public issue. > > (A similar pattern appears in . In [Endangered/endangering: Schematic racism and white paranoia](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Endangered-endangering%20-%20Schematic%20racism%20and%20white%20paranoia.txt), analyzes how footage of being beaten **by** police was interpreted in court as his violence **against** them.) Gendered responsibility for preserving the family: The wife becomes 'homewrecker' > As discussed, calling '[violence against wives](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/%EC%95%84%EB%82%B4%20%ED%8F%AD%EB%A0%A5.txt)' a norm ('normal') rather than deviance means the husband's violence does not violate the norm; the wife's resistance does. From his standpoint, her resistance—especially leaving to escape violence or seeking outside help—is absolutely unacceptable. Violence privatized within the 'sanctuary' > Predominantly male public institutions such as the police resent 'interfering' (punishing) in 'domestic matters' ([violence against wives](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/%EC%95%84%EB%82%B4%20%ED%8F%AD%EB%A0%A5.txt)). Their representative arguments—"privacy must not be violated," "protect the family from law"—mean "we cannot violate the husband's privacy," "we will protect his violence." … > > "I reported it many times. The officer said, 'Well, ma'am, you're being unreasonable. A man can get a little noisy after drinking. If people reported that, no man in Korea would avoid arrest.' When I looked dumbfounded, he said, 'Then come back after another beating. Come when you're being taken to hospital with blood pouring from your eyes.' … (Woman, 30, high-school graduate, self-employed)" ## Chapter 7. From family-centered perspectives to women's human rights > are considered positive, progressive values in the abstract in Korea. But when disadvantaged people's rights, such as women's, compete with familism, a mainstream Korean value, they become trivial and secondary. > Rather than offering causes and specific measures for '[violence against wives](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/%EC%95%84%EB%82%B4%20%ED%8F%AD%EB%A0%A5.txt),' I have approached it through by questioning abused wives' gender identity within the family. I hope this work's significance lies in attempting a new approach in Korean society. ## Footnotes [^1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thumb#Folk_etymology