The Foreign and the Domestic

This week a friend sparked a bit of a debate when she expressed criticism of the term “domestic violence.” Violence is violence, she said, and should be recognized as such. The word “domestic,” she argued, tends to minimize the awful things that sometimes happen in families or relationships, as if the violence was protected in some way.

It has often been protected by a tradition of silence, and the notion that family affairs should remain in the family and that they are nobody else’s business. There are religious traditions about wives being subservient to husbands, or social notions about a man’s home being his castle.

Making the headlines this week were the video of Baltimore Ravens running back – or should we say ex-Ravens running back Ray Rice -- beating up his girlfriend in an elevator, and South African “blade runner” Oscar Pistorius skating clear of a murder charge in the shooting death of his girlfriend. And today, as it happens, is the 20^th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act.

Personally, I don’t quite understand any man physically abusing a woman, especially in what started out as a love relationship. I just don’t think I was shipped with that software. I tend to swing the other way, more in the direction of worship of women, which has its own set of issues. But does it all make me a good guy, or am I just lucky? Conversely, I don’t understand why some women tolerate an abusive domestic relationship, and even defend a husband or boyfriend when criticism comes from the outside.

My friend is right. There are no special circumstances or settings that make physical abuse OK, and it needs to be punished. But we also have to understand the dynamics of these things on a deeper level. The man who abuses a woman tries to rule by fear, because he is ruled by it himself: the fear of loss of a precious or needed thing. The fear that if absolute control isn’t exercised, a static situation may change – the woman may leave, or simply want to breathe, to have joy in her life that he is not the agent of. Are we allowed to have compassion for a man driven by such feelings or explore where they come from? Compassion in these situations is difficult, because seeking to understand is construed as seeking excuses for awful behavior. There are no excuses for it.

But do we have to at least talk about it? Absolutely. It’s about literacy. We hear often about financial literacy. But there is also relationship literacy. It means being able to discuss things it just isn’t nice or easy to discuss, turning over the rug under which things have been hidden for a long time, challenging the models some of us were raised with or have embedded in us for some other reason.

There is a notion of TMI – sharing unnecessary details about intimate things with others. But I have always had a suspicion that a bigger problem these days is TLI – too LITTLE information, about things we desperately need to talk about.