Ultimate Betrayals: The Crisis of Violence Against Women

By James Burns

Ultimate Betrayals: The Crisis of Violence Against Women examines multiple narratives and social constructs that continue to fuel patriarchy, misogyny, and violence against women. The United States remains a leading perpetrator of violence against women, and the prevalence of these crimes continue at historical levels. Ultimate Betrayals describes multiple origins, causes, and lingering effects of violence against women to understand and interpret the metaphors and symbols of the con

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781640961883

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Problem

Shattered Dreams

Christmas Day 2016 in Aiken County, South Carolina, was beautiful, warm, and sunny. Families gathered to celebrate religious beliefs, share gifts, and renew bonds with loved ones. Wide-eyed children opened their presents with excitement and a continued belief in the magic of Christmas. The following day, that peace and magic of Christmas was shattered by a 911 call in which young children were heard screaming, Please stop! Just stop, Daddy. Just stop.

The screams were coming from the children of South Carolina’s eighty-fourth district representative, Chris Corley. He was beating his wife after she had confronted him about an illicit extramarital affair. Corley, thirty-six, stopped the beating only when he heard his children screaming and saw blood coming from his wife’s head wound.

While the screams caused Corley to stop the beating, he subsequently retrieved a Smith & Wesson SD9VE 9mm pistol, pointing it first at his wife and then threatening to kill himself. Corley was arrested the following day and charged in January 2017 with criminal domestic violence of a high and aggravated nature based on pointing a firearm at his wife in front of their two- and eight-year-old children, a crime that carries an enhanced ten- to twenty-year prison term.

However, in August 2017, Chris Corley was sentenced to five years’ probation following a guilty plea to a lesser domestic violence charge. Corley’s wife pleaded with prosecutors for a lesser charge as she sought to save her family and allow her husband to continue practicing law. Chris Corley lived a privileged life as an educated attorney and member of an Augusta, Georgia, law firm. In his first term in office in the South Carolina House of Representatives, Corley had even voted to pass the enhanced penalties of the South Carolina Domestic Violence Reform Act of 2015.

Corley’s domestic violence conviction is but a single example of nearly five million women in the United States who are victims of violence every year perpetrated by men regardless of ethnicity, religion, geography, income, and education. Daily reports of sexual, physical, and psychological acts of violence against women are so common that we have become numb to the devastating consequences for the victims and their families. Violence against women remains a major American legal and public health problem.

Betrayal of Trust and Hope

Trust and hope are essential elements of human existence. We trust that those with whom we interact will treat us in ways that conform to the accepted social norms and in ways we would like to be treated. For those with whom we have more recurring interactions, such as acquaintances, classmates, or colleagues, or those with whom we have more personal relationships, such as spouses, significant others, family, or friends, the expectations increase.

Higher levels of relationships, including intimate relationships, bring about increased expectations for trust and feelings of beneficial hope from the relationships. When these higher levels of trust are shattered by acts of interpersonal violence, the results can be disastrous and erode the very foundations of a hopeful future and human flourishing.

Coercion, sexual violence, and battery—brutal and abusive acts meant to control women physically and psychologically—have adverse moral consequences. These are crimes that can damage the hope and trust that are so vital to human flourishing. In a society that values self-agency, crimes of control and violence take away women’s confidence, self-respect, and belief in others—all of which are required to establish and maintain trustful relationships—the very core of our humanity.

Social Patterns of Violence Against Women

In exploring the effects of patriarchy and misogyny, it was important to understand the societal significance of violence against women, the macho underpinnings and narratives that reinforce men’s violence, and the social patterns that continue to condone violence against women. Epidemiological studies confirm that violence against women in the United States continues at unimaginable levels despite legal actions, with millions of women victimized by multiple categories of gender-based violence. Intimate partner and nonpartner violence against women remain at lifetime rates of more than 35 percent, while psychological aggression from an intimate partner continues at 47 percent lifetime rates. Over 70 percent of sexual assaults against women and 90 percent of sexual assaults against juveniles are committed by nonstrangers.

Crimes against women include abusive or threatening behavior by men to take advantage of women physically or emotionally; gain or maintain power over them; and control their freedom, activities, or well-being. A woman is assaulted or battered every nine seconds in the United States, yet only 25 percent of physical assaults are reported to police annually. The closer the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim, the less likely the crime will be reported to the police. Approximately 65 to 75 percent of rapes, attempted rapes, and sexual assaults are not reported, usually for reasons relating to the crime either as a matter of privacy, out of fear of reprisal, or to protect the perpetrator.

The following chapter discusses how patterns of violence against women vary by ethnicity, cultural norms, age at the onset of violence, and type of perpetrator. It also covers how men gain access to victims, the extent of intimate-partner violence, and the problems associated with perpetrator accountability. In describing patterns of violence, I have focused particular attention on battery and coercive control, since the number of battery and nonviolent psychological abuse cases have increased substantially during the past decade. These are crimes of persistent psychological control and threats, which like sexual and physical violence, can destroy a woman’s foundation of trust and hope for the future.

The harmful effects of psychological assaults are further compounded by their classification as misdemeanors because most acts of violence against women are adjudicated on an incident-by-incident basis and evaluated each time by the level of harm incurred. According to Evan Stark, author of Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life, somewhere between 85 and 97 percent of all abuse … [is] missed and/or turned into a second-class misdemeanor.

Society continues to ignore, tolerate, or provide passive approval of violent acts against women by ignoring the problem, trivializing the extent of violence against women, dismissing acts as domestic quarrels committed in private, and in many cases, blaming women for the violence perpetrated on them by men. The result is a major fundamental human rights failure.

Patriarchal Narratives from Religion, Art, and Politics

Religious, social, and cultural sources of negative Western attitudes toward women that have led to second-class treatment, patriarchal attitudes, oppression, subtle or outright misogyny, and actual acts of physical or coercive violence against women. In chapters 3 and 4, we explore three aspects of Western culture that have influenced evolving societal views of women. These include

negative religious attitudes and teachings concerning women;

art and literature over centuries reflecting men’s belittling views of women and their roles in society; and

political discourse, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that culminated in the suffrage movement before and at the beginning of the twentieth century.

For nearly three millennia, women have been viewed with contempt in the writings and teachings of Greek philosophers, Christian theologians, artists, nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary authors, signers of the US Constitution, antisuffragists, and modern religious denominations. The Greeks held a misogynistic view of women dating back to the eighth century BC. Plato and Aristotle described women as inferior to the male standard, subordinating women to a male-dominated family and relegating women’s roles to procreation, raising children, and performing domestic chores. Patristic writers from early Christianity into the sixth century emphasized the need to keep women submissive, insisted that virginity was preferred over marriage, castigated women for their seductive tendencies, and expressed contempt for women’s mental or moral frailty.

Overt hostility toward women occurred during the Middle Ages, the Restoration, and into the twentieth century. Antisuffragists declared that women were mentally unqualified to vote, lacking any sense of justice, physically and mentally inferior to men, closer to lower animals, and incapacitated by menstruation and childbearing. Subtle, indirect belittling of women was used to reinforce their proper place in a family, submissive to a husband, needing moral guidance and financial support. Rather than supporting equality, education, and independence, men actively maintained women’s obedience to law and orthodox religion.

The art world was a comparably closed forum controlled by men and the symbolisms they created to reinforce how women were and should be viewed. Art was a visual record of men’s achievements, their worldviews, and their musings about religion, conquests, society, myths, and women. Men’s assumptions about women and their need to control women have been expressed in the art they created, commissioned, or purchased. Throughout history, men steered the visual representation of women in art and literature, essentially controlling the full gender-class discourse.

Men’s portrayal of objectified women was particularly common during the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century paintings, in particular, spoke to men’s everyday view of power, authority, and ownership of women. Objectified women were often portrayed as passive, sexually available, helpless, vulnerable, and powerless. In the mid- to late-nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century, both men and women used art and literature to affect social change.

The means to spur change occurred through a multidisciplinary linkage of art, literature, social conditions, education, religion, politics, and philosophical views that could temper or open the debate about women’s equality with men. Women used visual art, particularly commercial art, to portray their subjugation and their aspirations. Proceeds from photographs, posters, flyers, and art exhibitions were used to support the suffrage movement and counter views of women’s weakness and inability to defend themselves.

Western democracies, including those of the United States, were built on the assumption that white male property owners were superior to women and slaves, thus, skewing the concept of liberty for all from the very beginning. As a result, this excluded the vast majority of the population from participation in the American democracy. Gender and racial discrimination had their roots in patriarchal societies and were made explicit in Christian writings and theology, and ultimately found their way into our secular justice system. This happened so completely in many ways as to appear normal. An unbroken chain of men’s biases against women throughout Western history has, in both direct and subtle ways, become embedded in the attitudes and behavior of modern society.

Contemporary Manifestations of Patriarchy and Privilege

In chapter 5, we will focus on modern behaviors that continue to promote patriarchy and misogyny. Despite becoming a more interconnected society over the past century, environments that reinforce the exploitation, belittling, and devaluing of women continue throughout society—in medicine, business, government, academia, religion, science, entertainment, politics, and most other careers. Seemingly dramatic changes in women’s broader participation in society are still limited by the advantages of men’s patriarchal privilege.

Many men benefit from access and privilege by virtue of birth and societal biases on gender. Successive male privilege has become society’s norm, a pattern of thinking, behaving, and experiencing solely around a male frame of reference. Men replicate the conditions of their privilege in ways that encourage, as Allan Johnson, author of Privilege, Power, and Difference, says, the use of difference to include or exclude, credit or discredit, elevate or oppress, value or devalue. In the same way that men have historically defined women through religious texts, secular literatures, paintings, and sculptures, so too have men defined and limited women’s participation at the highest levels of scientific, academic, technological, political, and other professional levels of achievement.

Gender disparity in medicine, life science, engineering, physics research, information technology, finance, economics, and performing arts continues to accentuate gendered personality traits among employees. Women are assumed to be empathetic, emotionally vulnerable, and good communicators versus men, who are good negotiators and decision-makers. These are cultural images and strictures that keep women from pursuing careers in computer science, engineering, and mathematics. The lack of women in these fields is at odds with women’s educational demographics and their scores on aptitude tests. In a different professional context, that of movies, fashion, entertainment, and media, women continue to be affected by preconceived notions on appearance and behavior—pressure to look, act, and present themselves in ways acceptable to a male view of the world and women’s role in it.

Miseducation and Reinforcement of Power and Control

Patriarchal attitudes continue to be reinforced in the twenty-first century within men’s clubs, social organizations, sports, and other gatherings. In chapter 6, I describe contemporary male social constructs that reinforce patriarchy, misogyny, and even more virulent acts of violence against women. These are social contexts in which boys learn the lessons of masculinity and aggression from early ages at home, at school, and through friends—lessons that get bolstered by boys’ gender-oriented games and rituals, video games, sports, visual, and other media that portray men’s power and women’s vulnerability and availability. Boys learn aggression and lack of sensitivity in a culture of cruelty based on societal stereotypes, with ways of acting and thinking that are scripted by peer groups.

Boys become men in a series of male interactions and struggles that give emphasis to contests where toughness and winning are valued and where feminine traits of tenderness, empathy, compassion, and emotional vulnerability are devalued. Emotions are considered antimasculine, the opposite of power and control. The socialization of boys to power has been described as emotional miseducation. Rather than suffer or admit to feelings of emotional need or isolation, fear of failure, shame, or sadness, boys’ emotions often get masked under patinas of brashness.

Masculinity is essentially a ritual in which men parade the markers of manhood for the scrutiny of other men to raise their status in the eyes of other men. This can happen through exclusion, trivializing treatment, innuendo, objectifying behavior, physical and sexual violence, or verbal abuse. Sports, in particular, form a bond between men through a common language codifying the essentials of manhood—strength, control, belonging, and competition.

The social miseducation of boys and adolescents has led to debilitating consequences for women, played out through a substantial increase in sexual assaults, rapes, and attempted rapes on college and university campuses. Melvin Konner, author of Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy, writes, Rape and other violence against women … are part of the structural violence women face throughout the world, with the United States reporting among the highest population-adjusted rapes in the world.

Men who commit sex crimes in the United States, for the most part, are men whose violence is directed specifically at women. Perpetrators of violence against women emulate abusive behavior and are justified by other like-minded men, male attachments, and peer-support resources found in a broad array of settings, including bars, sports arenas, rural gatherings, public housing, fraternities, military bases, college campuses, internet websites, and cyber pornography. Extensive research has also shown that certain all-male peer groups encourage, justify, and support the abuse of women by their members and that male peer support is responsible for a substantial portion of violence against women in North America.

Many acts of violence against women involve psychological or emotional abuse, in which men use various measures to micromanage women’s activities, restrict access to friends and family, employ constant criticism, threaten harm to children, and limit freedom. Coercive acts of violence can have lasting traumatic effects, are three to five times more prevalent than violent physical attacks, and account for more than 50 percent of women seeking help for domestic abuse. Whether acts of physical or psychological violence, these are the acts of men who perpetuate misogynistic views and are responsible for continuing high levels of violence against women.

The Importance of Trust and Hope

Given the extent of intimate-partner violence (IPV) in the United States, we cannot fully comprehend the consequences of these violent acts without exploring the significance of trust and hope in our significant personal relationships. In chapter 7, we will delve into the nature of trust, the benefits and obligations of trusting, our expectations for trust with others, the obligations for trust in close relationships, and the relationship between trust and hope. Trust matters because it is the core from which all transactions, shared knowledge, and personal relationships evolve. Trust is essential to being human, to developing a meaningful existence, and a critical factor in relationships at all levels of society.

Our daily interactions tend to be routine and follow acceptable norms. Our more relational lives involve the added trust and confidence we place in friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. Higher levels of interpersonal trust show progressively more acknowledgment of our connection with and interdependence on others. Our closest relationships involve trusting and being trusted by the object of our trust. These relationships capture the expectations of reciprocity and the highest assumptions about trustworthiness.

Trust is a progression that flows from self-trust and reliance on the goodwill and behavior of others to interactions of increasing care, commitment, and reciprocity within our closest interpersonal relationships. Viewing trust as a progression, which I describe as circles of trust and trustworthiness, provides a means to understanding the importance of trust at multiple levels of human interaction. The circles encompass increasing levels of trust that build from an inner core comprised of self-trust, familial trust, and societal trust, which are the trusts we learn as children, cultivate through family interactions and reinforce through local customs. The outer rings comprise situational trust, interpersonal trust, and intimate trust, which represent higher levels of personal interactions in work environments, community participation, social activities, acquaintances, close friendships, and intimate-partner relationships.

Empathy, reciprocity, and goodwill are key attributes that foster increasing levels of trustworthiness in interpersonal and intimate relationships. Intimate relationships typically engender the highest level of trust. These are relationships that should be the most dynamic, interactive, supportive, and life-reaffirming. Honesty, harmony, acceptance, loyalty, and moral decency are essential for building and maintaining intimate relationships. When accompanied by kindness, acceptance, empathy, care, generosity, and fidelity, these relationships achieve the highest level of human trust and trustworthiness.

As I will argue, hope is an integral component of trust. Trust engenders hope, and hope leads to a future full of possibilities. Lenore Walker, author of The Battered Woman Syndrome, describes hope as a state of mind … [involving] perceptions, feelings, and dispositions to feel, think, and act in some ways that move the one who hopes in the direction of having what is hoped for come about.

Hope speaks of future possibilities—family, health, friends, job, peace, security, welfare—the elements of life that summon us to seek those possibilities or to improve upon less favorable circumstances. The benefit of hope is that it renews the human spirit. It gives us purpose. It points the way to future possibilities or a future that has value. When we trust and that trust is returned, hopeful behavior is reinforced, our expectations are enhanced, and we are more open to future possibilities. When hope is diminished or betrayed, it is difficult to imagine a future outcome.

Biopsychosocial and Moral Consequences of Betrayal

In chapter 8, I discuss the risks and vulnerabilities that are involved in trusting relationships, together with the biopsychosocial and moral conditions that result from the outrageous betrayals of sexual, physical, and psychological violence against women. When we trust others, we accept a certain degree of vulnerability, and we hope that those we trust will respond accordingly. However, we know through instinct and experience that we are vulnerable when we trust others. We perceive that our casual, routine, and more impersonal interactions involve lower levels of trust and, therefore, may require higher levels of vigilance and correspondingly higher levels of vulnerability.

The need for vigilance should decline as our relationships become more recurring, trusting, and reciprocal. Our closest relationships, characterized by an increasingly larger reservoir of attention, care, loyalty, and reciprocity, engender the highest expectations for trust and feelings of beneficial hope from the relationships. These are the relationships where we perceive the minimal need for vigilance and the minimum likelihood for betrayal.

At this level of trust, crimes of violence against women perpetrated by acquaintances, friends, and intimate partners are the most appalling betrayals of trust. Violent crimes against women smother the very essence of women’s humanity—the feeling of a hopeful existence, hope in future possibilities, and trust in the decency of others. Interpersonal and intimate relationships suffer the most devastating consequences from physical and psychological violence against women. These are the situations in which women have the highest expectations for trust, hopeful futures, and reciprocity, are willing to accept higher levels of vulnerability and lower levels of vigilance, and where they should be able to expect justice and societal support. Trust can be destroyed by violence, leaving little or no reason to hope.

Complete disregard for human respect, trust, autonomy, and the extinguishing of hope constitute serious moral lapses against human dignity. Victims of sexual, physical, and psychological violence are degraded by diminishing trust, hope, and feelings of being less than human. Traumas from these crimes create mental and moral rifts that limit victims’ abilities to flourish as confident, self-fulfilled women. The lives of sexual, physical, and psychological abuse survivors are marked with the destruction of the tenets upon which our civilization is based—basic trust in human worth, self-confidence, and a hopeful future.

Victims of sexual, physical, and psychological violence often experience severe traumatic, near- and long-term mental and physical symptoms. Violence against women is a major risk factor for depression, anxiety, substance abuse, suicidal ideation, and other mental disorders. Depression, extreme anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder are common reactions to horrific traumas from rape or sexual assault. Between 50 and 70 percent of women who are raped or sexually assaulted develop symptoms of PTSD. While women are nearly twice as likely as men to develop PTSD, the disparity is related to sexual victimization of women rather than basic gender differences.

Crimes of sexual and domestic violence cut at the very essence of acceptable human behavior. When the most fundamental principles of human behavior are intentionally violated in women’s most trusted relationships, these violations constitute both legal and moral battery. Victims often lose their sense of trust in others, and self-trust is severely or permanently compromised. Dignity is put at risk because women are deliberately humiliated and dehumanized. Under these circumstances, the very moral foundations of humanity are shaken, if not destroyed.

Integrating Care Ethics and Social Justice

The focus throughout this book is on women and the historical perceptions, assumptions, narratives, and behaviors that contribute to a continuing crisis of misogyny and violence against women. I fully recognize that other socially repressed groups, such as the elderly, gays, lesbians, disabled, and ethnic minorities continue to experience injustices that overlap with my focused discussion of women’s repression. While multiple groups have experienced repression, hopefully my gender-focused discussion will resonate and aid the understanding of common problems and possible solutions.

Despite intentions and language, formal equal protection under the law has not remedied structural injustices of society. The National Institute of Justice reports that the threshold for equal protection scrutiny [merely] perpetuates social inequality. Limitations of our formal justice system continue to limit women’s equal access, freedom, and full participation in society. To overcome biases and to fill the void still left by traditional means of justice, I will discuss a more relational form of social justice, building on the approach proposed by Iris Marion Young, which extends current approaches of traditional justice to an expanded concept of justice that focuses on self-respect, opportunity, and empowerment through broader decision-making procedures, a socially-oriented distribution of tasks, and greater focus on cultural messaging.

Finally, I discuss an approach to morality that links an ethics of care with social justice in order to bring women’s voices more fully into men’s traditional views of justice and duty. Over thirty years ago, Carol Gilligan identified gendered patterns that describe men’s lives as bound up in self-awareness and achievement, while women’s lives focus on generativity, a process emphasizing responsibility for growth, leadership, and well-being of others. Balancing men’s fixation on control, objects, power, and achievement with women’s tendency toward caring, empathy, compassion, relationships, and nonviolence has the potential to contribute significantly to improved gender equality.

An increasing acceptance of the benefits of an ethics of care with its focus on responsibility and relationships is a step that could build upon trust and mutual caring. Care is a fundamental building block of trust, whether within a family or a community. Caring, trust, and their application to relationships foster hope rather than tolerance, and imagination rather than skepticism.

We need to have confidence that the trust we have in others is built on a caring, mutual concern. A caring society requires a shift from a rational justice construct that focuses on individuality to a relational moral construct that focuses on social well-being. When people connect with others, their concern for the well-being of the group will, in turn, fuel their own personal moral development.

A combined care and social justice morality links women’s views of life’s essential values and forms the basis for a more encompassing moral philosophy centered on care and broadly implemented social justice. The ethics of social justice incorporate women’s socially connected and caring tendencies and include additional virtues such as self-respect, sincerity, generosity, and trustworthiness. Combining an ethic of care with an ethic of social justice goes beyond the similarly situated standard of traditional justice and recognizes the equal worth of all persons. Linking an ethic of care with social justice brings women into full participation in the community of humanity—essentially a fusion of social justice and care ethics.

Women’s increased emphasis on care has the potential to create a moral change that incorporates women’s socially connected and caring mind-sets and includes additional virtues such as self-respect, sincerity, generosity, and trustworthiness. The result would hopefully be an approach to justice and duty that is more compassionate and relational in its application.

Women’s voices are beginning to be heard. Their voices speak of caring, empathy, relationships, interconnectedness, and concern for others. Most women view morality through a life lens of inclusion and connection. The incorporation of women’s voices calling for care and social justice with men’s messages of power and control would be transformational. Women’s expressions and positive examples of care, empathy, and inclusion need visibility to demonstrate they are critical components of human flourishing. Narratives and counterstories about women by women can and should be used to bring women’s unique contribution more clearly into focus.

Chapter 2

Reality behind the Crisis of Violence Against Women

Gender Subordination and Violence

Women have been subjected to physical and mental abuse by men throughout history, systematically subjugated and oppressed for men’s control, pleasure, and political purposes. Men have collectively viewed as their right the ability to control women, both physically and mentally. Catharine MacKinnon, a legal scholar on violence against women issues and author of Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws, states that women are seen as needing to be subdued and controlled … [they] must be kept powerless; if not locked up, kept down and in place. Women have been marginalized or subjected to physical violence as a dominated class, either directly or indirectly. In its 2005 report on domestic violence against women, the World Health Organization (WHO) pointed out that violence against women is both a consequence and cause of gender inequality.

The history of women is replete with the reality of rape, torture, battery, terror, humiliation, and killing. Many women know women who have been victimized, and they are reminded daily by media reports of widespread sexual harassment, sexual assault, sexual coercion, and violence against women. They understand that crimes of violence against women are perpetrated overwhelmingly by men, and they generally have an inherent physical disadvantage against men who would commit sexual or other violent crimes. This was a difficult chapter to research and write, yet the facts presented make other chapters more understandable.

Defining Violence Against Women

Crimes of violence against women, also referred to as gender-based violence (GBV), encompass sexual, physical, and psychological violence. In essence, violence against women constitutes abusive or threatening behavior at any time or in any level of relationship that is used against women to take advantage of them physically or emotionally; to gain or maintain