12.7.1: The Dark Side of Family Life:
Battering, Child Abuse, Marital Rape, and Incest The dark side of family life involves events that people would rather keep in the dark. We will look at spouse battering, child abuse, rape, and incest. Spouse Battering This might surprise you, but based on a national sample, in one of four cases of domestic violence it is the man who is the victim (Truman and Morgan 2014). From his own research, sociologist Murray Straus (2011) concludes that wives attack their husbands as often as husbands attack their wives. With most men bigger and stronger than most women, however, women are more likely to be injured. That women initiate domestic violence as often as men do blows away stereotypes. It also has serious implications: If we want to curb violence, we should not concentrate on men but, instead, on both men and women. The basic sociological question, then, is how to socialize both males and females to handle frustration and disagreements without resorting to violence. We do not yet have this answer.
Wives and husbands are equally as likely to initiate violence, but unlike this photo, wives are more likely to be injured. Credit: RubberBall/Superstock
Wives and husbands are equally as likely to initiate violence, but unlike this photo, wives are more likely to be injured. Credit: RubberBall/Superstock Child Abuse I answered an ad about a lakeside house in a middle-class neighborhood that was for sale by owner. As the woman showed me through her immaculate home, I was surprised to see a plywood box in the youngest child’s bedroom. About 3 feet high, 3 feet wide, and 6 feet long, the box was perforated with holes and had a little door with a padlock. Curious, I asked what it was. The woman replied matter-of-factly that her son had a behavior problem, and this was where they locked him for “time out.” She added that sometimes they would tie him to a float, attach a line to the dock, and put him in the lake. I left as soon as I could. With thoughts of a terrorized child filling my head, I called the state child abuse hotline. As you can tell, what I saw upset me. Most of us are bothered by child abuse—helpless children being victimized by their parents and other adults who are supposed to love, protect, and nurture them. The most gruesome of these cases make the evening news: The 4-year-old girl who was beaten and raped by her mother’s boyfriend, passed into a coma, and three days later passed out of this life; the 6- to 10-year-old children whose stepfather videotaped them engaging in sex acts. Unlike these cases, which made headlines in my area, most child abuse is never brought to our attention: the children who live in filth, who are neglected—left alone for hours or even days at a time—or who are beaten with extension cords—and cases like the little boy I learned about when I went house hunting. 411 Child abuse is extensive. Each year, U.S. authorities receive about 2 million reports of children being abused or neglected. More than 4 million children are involved in these reports. After investigating, authorities find that about 700,000 of the children have been abused or neglected (Children’s Bureau 2019). The excuses that parents make are incredible. Of those I have read, the most fantastic is what a mother said to a Manhattan judge: “I slipped in a moment of anger, and my hands accidentally wrapped around my daughter’s windpipe” (LeDuff 2003).
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Marital and Intimacy Rape Marital rape seems to be more common than is usually supposed (National Intimate Partner… 2017). Sociologist Diana Russell (1990) used a sampling technique that allows generalization, but only to San Francisco. Fourteen percent of married women told her that their husbands had raped them. In interviews with a representative sample of Boston women, 10 percent reported that their husbands had used physical force to compel them to have sex (Finkelhor and Yllo 1985, 1989). Compared with victims of rape by strangers or acquaintances, victims of marital rape are less likely to report the rape (Mahoney 1999). With the huge numbers of couples who are cohabiting, we need a term that includes sexual assault in intimate but nonmarital relationships. Let’s use the term intimate partner rape. This term will apply to both heterosexual and homosexual relationships. Sociologist Lori Girshick (2002) interviewed women who had been sexually assaulted by their female partners. Girshick points out that if the pronoun “he” were substituted for “she” in her interviews, a reader would believe that the events were told by women who had been raped by male partners. Just as in heterosexual rape, these victims suffered from shock, depression, and self-blame. Incest Sexual relations between certain relatives (for example, between brothers and sisters or between parents and children) constitute incest. Incest is most likely to occur in families that are socially isolated (Smith 1992). Sociologist Diana Russell (n.d.) found that incest victims who experience the greatest trauma are those who were victimized the most often, whose assaults occurred over longer periods of time, and whose incest was “more intrusive”—for example, sexual intercourse as opposed to sexual touching. Incest can occur between any family members, but apparently the most common form is sex between children. An analysis of 13,000 cases of sibling incest showed that three-fourths of the incest was initiated by a brother who was 5 years older than his sister (Krienert and Walsh 2011). In one-fourth of the cases, the victim was a younger brother, and in 13 percent of the cases, the offender was an older sister. Most offenders are between the ages of 13 and 15, and most victims are age 12 or younger. Most parents treat incest as a family matter to be dealt with privately.
What is unusual about this German couple is not that they have four children but that they are brother and sister. The European Court ruled against their challenge to Germany’s incest laws. They insist they have done nothing wrong and they are in love. What do you think? Credit: Leipzig Germa/Newscom
