Looking Ahead to Beijing+30: what is challenging our understanding of gendered
violence and what should be the research imperatives in the coming decade?
The banalization of torture
Elizabeth Sheehy
Male violence against women is hidden in plain sight in our culture, our governance,
our legal system and our social welfare programs. It is so much part of the air that
we breathe that we often cannot even name it, let alone devise and pursue effective
policy and legislative responses. My research using transcripts from the murder
trials of battered women who killed abusive male partners exposed me to the
normalization of marital rape recast as “unwanted sex,” near fatal strangulation as
“common assault” and wife torture as “unhappy marriage”. Violence against
Indigenous women is treated so casually that those who have fought their abusers
for their very lives are not recognized as “real battered women.” This research also
exposed me, like countless others, to online misogynistic attack and threat-understood not as hate crime or terrorism but “cyberbullying” at best.
Banalization of male violence is maintained by the silencing and distorting
strategies of men’s rights activists and the complicity of our government’s neoliberal agenda. Canadian activists are challenging normalization by renaming these
crimes both domestically and internationally. They have used international fora to
put the missing and murdered Indigenous women on the national agenda and to
advocate for criminalization of non-state torture. Another campaign aims to include
misogynistic crimes against women within the legal and political understanding of
“hate crime.” New labels are needed to open up and sustain the public conversation
about male violence against women, to redress discriminatory deployment of
concepts like “torture” and “hate crime,” to allow us to identify from women’s words
and lives the research needed to generate responses beyond criminal models, and to
give us a footing to demand that governments invest in women’s security and their
corresponding needs for recovery and redress.
The banalization of torture—do words matter?
I would like to pay my respects to the Traditional Owners of
this Land, and to acknowledge the Elders, past and present.
I would also like to thank the organizers of this conference for
this spectacular event: I have been enriched and inspired by so
many women’s work and am deeply grateful to be included in
your program.
INTRO:
My long-term research into the murder trials of battered
women who killed their abusive male partners culminated last
year in the publication of my book as well as a media blitz.
Defending Battered Women on Trial: Lessons from the
Transcripts,
Both my research and my media experience, buttressed by a
torrent of attacks on me and my work by men’s rights activists,
have shown me how necessary it is that we find and deploy
language that captures women’s specific experience of male
violence and its severity; my research and exposure to the
men’s rights mob as well as our experience of the neo-liberal
state reveal the forces aligned against that objective. At the
same time, I see a fierce and growing feminist insistence that
we engage in a public conversation about men’s violence and
that we do so in unvarnished terms.
The last four months in Canada have seen a shift--an
extraordinary public conversation in all forms of media
focused intently on men’s violence against women. Not since
the Montreal Massacre more than 25 years ago, when Marc
Lepine murdered 14 women because they were women taking
space in a man’s world, have Canadians engaged so deeply and
so persistently with male violence as a serious and urgent
social problem.
[The window was seemingly opened by the very public firing of national media star
Jian Ghomeshi for his brutal attacks upon women he dated—some of which he
filmed; his firing was followed by multiple disclosures by many more victims,
including several well-known women who agreed to be publicly named, which was
followed in turn by criminal charges against Ghomeshi, a man who appears to have
operated for decades with impunity. The initial groundswell of public and media
support for Ghomeshi, and the refusal to credit the words of anonymous women
collapsed under the weight of so many allegations, nearly identical, and the
mounting evidence against him.
Ghomeshi described “sexual practices that are mutually agreed upon, consensual,
and exciting for both partners.” In contrast, the women allege he struck them in the
face and head with a closed fist or open hand; bit them; strangled them until they
almost passed out; covered their nose and mouth so that they had difficulty
breathing; and verbally abused them during and after sex. A fourth woman, who
worked at CBC, said Ghomeshi told her at work: “I want to hate f— you”. Canadians
thus learned a new word for male violence.
Occurring at almost the same time, university after university (St Mary’s, UBC, U
Ottawa, Dalhousie) has been exposed and shamed in national media for the
behavior of their students engaged in racist chants, rape chants, and sexual assault.
Many universities have been forced to convene Task Forces to investigate and
respond to these troubling issues —I sat on my university’s TF and we just filed our
report two weeks ago. These events have been framed by students, activists and
media as evidence of “rape culture” on Canadian campuses—another new word or
concept for much of the Canadian public.]
The opportunity we have at this specific moment to engage in
public debate and reflection on the shape and impact of male
violence prompts me to posit the banalization of men’s
violence against women, extending even to torture, and to
consider an activist strategy aimed at exposing and naming
this crime, with both old and new labels.
[Using the hashtag #beenrapedneverreported, thousands (if not millions) of women
have eschewed the bland legal language of sexual assault, reclaimed their
experience as “rape,” and disrupted widespread denial about the real incidence of
rape.]
BANALIZATION
Feminist activists, linguists, sociologists and criminologists, as
well as media critics and legal scholars have documented how
language conventions—in terminology but also grammar and
syntax—conceal male violence against women by minimizing
or understating it. These language conventions normalize
men’s violence through vague or innocuous words and
euphemisms; hide the agency and responsibility of violent men
through nominalization and the passive voice; and re-assign
blame to women themselves. Not surprisingly, the language of
batterers mirrors these linguistic conventions and, as Molly
Dragiewicz has demonstrated, men’s rights activists adopt
these same language strategies in their defence of patriarchal
authority.
The banalization of men’s violence against women occurs in
many ways—through the language by police, prosecutors and
defence lawyers, psychiatrists and judges, who persistently
reconstruct often brutal and terrifying male violence in benign
ways. My transcripts contained many such examples
Kondejewski; Getkate]
R v Stafford: the testimony of 46 witnesses who described Billy
Stafford’s campaign of terror and escalating violence against
Jane Stafford summarized by NSCA in one terse yet vague
sentence that referred to “striking” “slapping” and
“administering beatings from time to time”
R v Kondejewski: after testifying to John Kondejewski’s having
kicked, raped, and punched her, having “dry-fired” a gun at her
head on several occasions, and having brain-washed her into
attempting suicide 3X “for the sake of the family”, her
prosecutor asked her “when did you stop trying to make your
marriage work?” After describing being forced to participate in
making pornography, which John traded with other men and
then being forced to have sexual intercourse with one of those
men, the prosecutor asked her to tell him the details of this
“wife-swapping”
Lilian Getkate’s description of Maury Getkate’s violence was
portrayed by the Crown’s expert psychiatrist as a “difficult
relationship” that involved “a little bit of pushing and shoving”
His sexual violence was cast by the Crown as “tension in their
sexual relationship” & “marital discord”
Racism plays a significant role in banalization: my transcripts
demonstrated that over and over Aboriginal women are
characterized by prosecutors and judges as not “real” battered
women—their victimization is obscured by their social and
legal construction as themselves dangerous and criminal—
even though Aboriginal women experience the most
catastrophic forms of male violence and are at 8 times the risk
of intimate femicide.
Rick Falardeau, Gladys Heavenfire’s deceased partner, was
described as the “battered spouse” in that relationship
Denise Robin Rain was said by her prosecutor as “ready to
participate in this climate of violence—she isn’t a retiring,
passive person”
This casual approach to the brutalization of Aboriginal women
is evidenced further in Canada’s national disgrace—our failure
to investigate, punish and prevent the murder of hundreds if
not thousands of Aboriginal women.
[There is no widespread social understanding or consensus of what constitutes
“abuse,” “violence” or “battering”. Nor is there widespread acceptance of women’s
right to kill their husbands to save their own lives or those whom they love. This
ambiguity and ambivalence is reflected in our legal system’s response to battered
women’s dilemmas. For example…]
Banalization also occurs through the formal legal naming of
violent crimes against women. The legal terms are neutral—
“assault”, “manslaughter”, “murder” and were never designed
to target male violence against women in its specificity. Thus
we know that the legal concepts of “assault” and “assault
causing bodily harm” utterly fail to describe the harm of wife
battering as a “slow, homicidal process”, whereby men’s
exercise of coercive control means that even so-called minor
assaults form part of a cumulative pattern and ongoing
experience of threat and intimidation. Strangulation—an
extremely dangerous form of wife battering that is also a
significant risk factor for intimate femicide—is not, in most
jurisdictions, recognized as a specific crime but is instead left
to the discretion of police and prosecutors to capture using
some other generic offence.
Thus in one transcript I studied, the man’s nearly fatal
strangulation of the woman was not charged as attempted
murder or even aggravated assault, but rather as assault
causing bodily harm, which then became “common assault” in
a plea agreement, and was resolved by a 21-day sentence.
In my transcript research I found disturbing patterns of men’s
verbal, racist, sexualized and psychological abuse of their
female partners. So many batterers follow almost ritualized
scripts for the denigration and destruction of women’s very
selves. My research took me to John Locke, who understood
men’s attempts to exert total power over another man as a
threat to their very lives: why don’t we understand men’s use
of coercive control as a “design upon women’s lives”?
But it was Margaret Malott’s murder trial that both broke my
heart and allowed me to “see” “wife torture.” Paul Malott’s
planned and deliberate destruction of MM’s self, using
interrogation, sleep deprivation, brain-washing, isolation-even
from her children, and psychological, physical and sexual
torture, allowed me to make the connection in her case.
Margaret’s counsel did not invoke the language of torture in
her defence, and she was in fact convicted of 2d degree murder
and sentenced to life imprisonment. But her counsel did try to
convey to her jury the consequence of torture when he argued,
“She was defending not only herself, but her psychological
self.”
Paul’s violence against Margaret easily fit the WMA definition
of torture and every criterion used by AI’s definition of
psychological torture. Yet in Canadian law “torture” applies
only to state actors (as is the case in most jurisdictions) and
does not include the torture individual men inflict upon
women.
At the international level, the Convention on Torture
conceptualizes torture as including discrimination-based
torture (women tortured because they are women). The
Committee Against Torture has interpreted the Convention as
applying to all acts of torture where the state knows or
reasonably ought to know it is occurring, and places a due
diligence obligation on the state to prevent torture and protect
victims, specifically mentioning crimes against women of rape
and domestic violence.
Why name torture? As observed as long ago as 1878 by
Frances Power Cobbe, first we name this crime to save
women’s lives. Linda MacDonald and Jeanne Sarson, two
Canadian activists who have worked tirelessly over 20 years to
see non-state torture named and criminalized, argue that
naming also allows victims the recognition that they have
suffered the worst human rights violation short of being killed.
Naming would resolve the substantive inequality and
discrimination against women currently generated by the
narrow definition of torture, who are the vast majority of nonstate torture. Naming may deflect the woman-blaming
narratives that typically shroud male violence against women,
would allow us to study women’s experience of torture, and
would generate affirmative obligations on the state to prevent,
investigate, prosecute and punish individual men who torture
women, and to protect and provide reparations to victims.
On the other hand, as Special Rapporteur Rashida Manjoo
cautioned (echoing that of Frances Cobbe) cautions, naming
the torture of women by batterers certainly risks normalizing
less extreme forms of wife battering and thereby increasing
“women’s misery”. This raises the issue of how we draw the
line for torture, as nearly all of the battered women in my
study experienced at least one form of torture: mock
executions, repeated rape and attempts to destroy women’s
personality and individuality—are all battered women in
captivity necessarily tortured? Further, of course is the
problem of which name to give these crimes—NST suggests a
lesser form of “real” or “classic” torture; “torture” does not
capture women’s specific experience and the structured
inequality that ensures batterers’ impunity. Ought we call wife
torture? Misogynistic torture?
But line drawing and terminology are inherent problems
attached to all efforts to name male violence against women.
Public dialogue on these very issues is both necessary and
carries a significant educative function. We require research in
those few states that have already criminalized and/or
otherwise responded to this form of torture. We need research
with women, counsellors and other health care providers to
assess the forms and consequences of torture experienced by
battered women—in what ways is it similar/different from the
experience of state torture? Kristen Kalla’s research tells us
that women and girls who survive mass atrocities experience
different and more severe consequences than do men and
boys—might the same be true for torture? Without qualitative
work we cannot respond to women’s recovery needs or design
prevention and denunciation strategies, educational and
transformational campaigns. In this regard I draw your
attention to Linda and Jeanne’s website: nonstatetorture.org.
I will conclude by noting that if state resistance is any
indication of the potential paradigm shift that naming the
torture of women would produce, then it may well be a
significant campaign to pursue. For example, even prosecutors
who use “torture” in their construction of their case, have
prohibited victims from naming themselves as victims of
torture in their VIS; and when called to account by the CAT for
failing to legislate on the torture of women, Canada has
responded that “It (CAT) should refrain from asking
questions that fall more squarely within other treaty
bodies’ mandates, such as general issues relating to
violence against women or trafficking in persons.”
Thank you for your attention and, I hope, your interest.
[First, we lose the opportunity to study and analyze these forms of violence as
predictable and thus preventable, as the foundational work of Diana Russell (who
first sued the word “femicide” to refer to the killing of women because they are
women) and Rosemary Gartner, Myrna Dawson and Maria Campbell shows us. Their
feminist research showed us that intimate femicide is distinguished from other
forms of homicide by men’s motivation for the killing (possessiveness and control),
by the method of killing (frequent “over-kill,” multiple methods of killing, and
sexualized violence), by the number of victims involved (children, family members,
friends) and the incidence of suicide by the perpetrator post-homicide (Rosemary
Gartner, Myrna Dawson and Maria Crawford, Woman-Killing: Intimate Femicide in
Ontario 1974-1994). Their work began the process of identifying risk factors for
intimate femicide and supported the establishment in Canada and elsewhere of
DVDR Committees—yet it is a sad irony that with the exception of NZ, none of these
Committees deploy the term “intimate femicide” in their public work. In the UK…]
[Second, the failure to name denies recognition to victims of the enormity of the
harm they have suffered]
[What is to be gained and lost when we struggle to articulate women’s experiences
drawing upon classic paradigms for torture, hate crimes and terrorism? Are new
concepts needed that speak specifically to women’s experience of misogynistic
violence?]