Understanding Violence

Forms of violence

What counts as violence?

Categorizing and naming forms of violence can help us to talk about and understand the complex ways that violence can impact our lives. However, dividing up the problem and defining it too precisely does little to help us understand the ways in which violence is pervasive, endemic, systemic, and situated deep within lived experience.

One frame for analyzing violence is based on where it happens, in both the private and public realms. Another important lens through which to view violence is based on who experiences it, and where they are socially located. Violence happens in private spaces such as the home, and public spaces such as the street, school, workplace, community and nation. People from all backgrounds and lifestyles experience violence, but those who are marginalized by systemic forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, classism, ableism, ageism and heterosexism are disproportionately affected. Violence in the current context may be compounded by histories of violence such as war, slavery, colonization or genocide. Systemic, institutional and historical oppressions are in themselves forms of violence.

To learn more about current research on violence, how violence affects different groups of people, and models for preventing violence go to the Centre for the Study and Prevention of Violence website.

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In the home

Click to view the online book
"My Name is Rose"
by Rose Doiron

Childhood violence

The violence that children experience, usually at the hands of adults, is a painful illustration of the fact that children are the most powerless members of society. Children never choose violence but are often subjected to it, and often survive with resilience despite it.

What is childhood violence? The Canadian Centre for Justice Studies says that:

Examining the nature and extent of child abuse or maltreatment of children and youth is a complex issue covering a variety of negative experiences and conditions, such as physical assault, sexual assault, emotional/psychological abuse, neglect and witnessing violence.¹

The sexually violent patriarchal structure is firmly held in place within the Canadian family: girls represent 80% of family-related sexual assaults.² The terror in which young girls and women live in both public and private spaces, and the normalization of this experience, is evident in statistics that show that 54% of girls under the age of 16 have experienced some form of unwanted sexual attention. Almost one in four (24%) of these have experienced sexual assault, and 17% have experienced incest.³ In Canada, parents represent 70% of perpetrators of physical assault and 40% of perpetrators of sexual assault against children and youth.⁴

The betrayal and trauma experienced by children survivors of abuse is extremely complex and has impacts on the individual that long outlast childhood. Inherent in this type of abuse are secrecy, boundary violations and abuse of power that cause these children to experience feelings of complicity, guilt and fear. These feelings affect their core beliefs about themselves. One survivor remembers her confusion about adult relationships and her own rights and boundaries:

He was a very distant relative, and he was very old. I remember clearly when he was at our house. At first, I liked him. I wasn't very old, and he always had chocolate or other things, and I liked to sit on his lap. But later, I realized that he was acting differently. He "squeezed" me, but I couldn't understand what it meant. But even since I've grown up, I still feel badly when I think about it. I don't really know why I couldn't tell my parents about it. Perhaps because I didn't know what his behaviour meant. Maybe they wouldn't have believed it. He was their friend, and they wouldn't be able to imagine that he did that kind of thing to their daughter. And maybe they would think it was my imagination.⁵

Children also respond to being exposed to violence in their home, such as violence towards their mother, siblings, other family members or pets. They may internalize the anger and violence through anxiety or depression or externalize it by being violent themselves. They may suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. How children are affected by witnessing abuse depends on whether they experience abuse and neglect, and whether the abusers were substance abusers or addicts, or had a mental illness. Children who witness violence are witnessing domestic violence, intimate partner abuse and woman abuse. These forms of violence are part of the interconnected power structures of sexism, racism, heterosexism, ableism and ageism. These connections demonstrate how violence works in systemic ways through individual lives.

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Intimate partner abuse

Click the thumbnail above to view an excerpt from Rosalind B. Penfold's book Dragonslippers.	Click the thumbnail above to view The Warning Signs of Abuse by artist Rosalind B. Penfold.

While we are taught to be most afraid of assault by a stranger, violence most often happens within relationships. In fact, 80% of sexual assaults occur at home.⁶ Internationally, 20% to 50% of women report having experienced violence at some point in their lives. They are at most risk from people they know, in particular from their male intimate partners.⁷ This issue links with the issues of domestic or family violence, woman abuse, and violence within same-sex partnerships.

While both men and women reported violence in their intimate relationships in Canada in 2004, women were much more likely to report more serious forms of violence, such as being choked, or threatened with a hand gun or knife. Women were more than twice as likely to report that they had been the targets of more than ten violent incidents, that they feared for their lives, and that they had been injured as a result. Also, between 1974 and 2003 the number of women killed by their partners has been 4 to 5 times higher than that of men killed by their partners.⁸

In intimate relationships, violence can take the form of physical, emotional, sexual and psychological abuse or economic control. Examples include physical injury and rape or threat of such acts, damage to property or pets, acts of intimidation, denial of food and money, isolation, coercion, and using children as a means of control.

Click the thumbnail above to view a relevant excerpt from Rosalind B. Penfold's book Dragonslippers.

Emotional and psychological abuse is a common weapon that the abusive partner uses to control and degrade.

The Public Health Agency of Canada defines emotional abuse as including:

• insulting or ridiculing someone or subjecting that person to other forms of verbal humiliation;
• threatening to use physical violence or murder;
• throwing, smashing, kicking or destroying the property of others;
• stalking and monitoring another's activities;
• displaying jealousy or possessiveness; and
• sexist, racist and homophobic verbal abuse.⁹

This type of abuse can go on for years. Its effects are devastating but largely invisible.

Intimate partner abuse affects marginalized, racialized and aboriginal communities disproportionately because of the compounding nature of systemic oppressions. Sexual stereotypes about lesbians, women of colour, women with disabilities, women living in poverty and aboriginal women cause these women to have less access to justice in the criminal justice system, while a lack of access to resources causes them to be more exposed to violence.

Homophobia in society discounts lesbian and gay men's relationships. It also obscures the reality that power, control and abuse can exist within them, so responses to these situations are inadequate. See ‘Liz’s Survivor Story’ about violence in a same-sex intimate relationship.

Click to view the online book
"One Woman's Courage "

Older adults, and particularly older women, are vulnerable to abuse and neglect by their partners, caregivers and adult children. At the same time, public and official reaction is mediated by society’s devaluation of elderly people.

Physical injury and possibly death are not the only outcomes of intimate partner abuse. This type of abuse can cause people to feel a lack of control over their life, depression and anxiety. It can lead to substance use, problems in other relationships and suicide.

Here are some useful materials from Springtide Resources.

• What is woman abuse?
• Signs of abuse
• Friends and Family: How To Help An Assaulted Woman
• How Do I Respond to a Woman Who is Being Abused?
• Guide for assessing emotional abuse
• An annotated bibliography and a literature review of Emotional Abuse of Women by their intimate partners
• Some guiding principles for people working against men's violence against women

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In Public Space

In the Streets

Women, and some men, in our society, feel afraid in public spaces. They do not feel an ownership of public space, or that they can freely participate in public spaces. Even though the vast majority of sexual assaults happen in the home, and almost half in broad daylight¹⁰, our access to public space is controlled by fear and through the threat and the reality of assault in public spaces.

As always, violence in this context has a disproportionate impact on women. Violence that women experience in the streets or community can take the form of rape, physical assault or criminal harassment. Criminal harassment, or stalking, can be defined as:

Repeated conduct that is carried out over a period of time that causes victims to reasonably fear for their safety…these contacts are repeated on numerous occasions and in general serve no legitimate purpose but to cause the recipient to fear for their own safety or for the safety of someone known to them.¹¹

The element of control involved in this type of behaviour is evident in the statistic that more than one third of Canadian women who experienced stalking chose not to go out alone, while 15% of them chose to change their residence.¹²

Violence also occurs in public institutions such as hospitals, mental health institutions, homes for the elderly and prisons. Individuals in these institutions are already considered by society to be weak, unwell, criminal and otherwise devalued. Practices such as forced prostitution, trafficking of women and children for the sex trade, and sex tourism take place in our streets, within our borders, and through public media such as the Internet.

Violent assaults take place daily on our city streets. Sex workers, gays and lesbians, queer, transgender and transsexual people, Muslim people, people of colour, immigrants, women, homeless people and many others are all subject to random hate-based attacks and the constant fear of these attacks.

Whether in the public or private realms, the reality of violence and oppression requires national and international political measures. One example is the Centre for Women's Global Leadership.

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In the Workplace

An environment of sexual harassment in the workplace can be caused by sexual assault in the form of unwanted touching, rape, pressure to have sex, or a poisoned environment due to sexual jokes or sexist comments. This form of behaviour, as with all forms of sexual discrimination, affects women more than men, and is about power and control more than sex.

Canada has federal, provincial and territorial laws against sexual harassment, and many unions, corporations and companies have their own harassment policies. However, because of the power dynamics of the workplace, the economic inequality of women in society, and ineffective reporting and complaints procedures in many workplaces, only 4 of every 10 Canadian women who suffer sexual harassment at work take any formal action. Only one out of every two women believe that a complaint would be taken seriously in their workplace.¹³

The effects of sexual harassment in the workplace and the risks involved in reporting are multiplied for women who experience other forms of oppression based on race, language, ethnicity, class, disability, sexuality or age, or who have a personal history of violence and abuse.

Racism, homophobia and heterosexism, abelism, and ageism are all forms of violence experienced within the workplace as well.

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In Schools

Schools have been historically, and continue to be, the sites of abuse against children, whether at the hands of teachers, administrators or other students. The institutional power embodied by schools, and the churches and municipalities that run them, towers over the powerlessness of a child.

Bullying can take the form of physical abuse, verbal abuse or emotional abuse. A new tactic of bullying is through web-based methods like email and mobile phones. Usually bullying is when one child discriminates against another based on race, class or socio-economic status, sexuality, gender, ability, size or looks. This is an example of how the powerless participate in maintaining larger structures of power and inequality. See some resources and information for parents, kids and professionals.

Institutional violence is perpetrated by schools through racist and other oppressive policies. An example is the ‘safe schools act’ in Ontario. Because of racist perceptions of young black men as violent, this act targets racialized youth, further disadvantaging them in a racist school system. Schools and school systems also provide abusive teachers with power and access to students.

These institutions are also often the tools used by the ongoing projects of colonialism and cultural genocide. A Canadian example is the history and violent legacy of residential schools on aboriginal communities. The intersection of race and gender in these projects are evident in this description and analysis by Marlene Starr, a survivor of the residential school system:

My memories of life in residential school are sporadic, as are my memories of my life as a child in general. I remember two incidents of severe child abuse; one in which I experienced abuse, the other in which a classmate was the victim. She was an adolescent girl who was humiliated in the worst possible fashion. Sister Theresa, a formidable woman, forced her to stand in full view of the rest of us girls for hours with her blood stained panties over her head. While she stood there, we treated her as if she were invisible. We saw it as a way of maintaining the dignity of the victim, whereas in truth we were validating the unjust treatment by simply accepting it. I would dearly love to have memories of abuse blotted from my mind, but they remain there, firmly etched.¹⁴

Violence experienced within or perpetrated by a school can cause children to associate learning with violence. Survivors of school-based violence, as well as other types of violence, may experience difficulty learning.

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Exploring School-Induced Shame: Research and Innovative Practice. By Leslie Shelton, California, U.S.A, adapted from her research: The Heart of Literacy: Transforming School-Induced Shame and Recovering the Competent Self. (Cincinnati, OH: Union Institute and University unpublished doctoral dissertation, 2001) and her practice “Journey to Wholeness Class.”

1. Transforming the Shame of Early School Difficulties
2. School-Induced Shame: Research Overview
3. Unmasking School Shame: the Impact on Sense of Self
4. Coping Behaviors and Defending Behaviors

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In the nation

Sexual violence is often used within war and political oppression is used to coerce, humiliate, torture and control. Women and children are disproportionately affected by these tactics, as in this account by a female refugee from Disa Masalit village in West Darfur:

I was sleeping when the attack on Disa started. I was taken away by the attackers, they were all in uniforms. They took dozens of other girls and made us walk for three hours. During the day we were beaten and they were telling us: "You, the black women, we will exterminate you, you have no god." At night we were raped several times. The Arabs(1) guarded us with arms and we were not given food for three days.¹⁵

A Human Rights Watch document, Rape as a Weapon of War and a Tool of Political Repression, describes the hidden public and gendered nature of this crime:

Despite its pervasiveness, rape has often been a hidden element of strife, whether political or military, a fact that is inextricably linked to its largely gender-specific character. That this abuse is committed by men against women has contributed to its being narrowly portrayed as sexual or personal in nature, a characterization that depoliticizes sexual abuse in conflict and results in its being ignored as a crime.¹⁶

State-sanctioned violence also takes the form of political legislation and government actions that discriminate against and expose certain populations to violence. A Canadian example is the violent legacy of residential schools within Canada’s aboriginal communities. Here is how Marlene Starr describes their impact:

In traditional Aboriginal societies, women had a role equal to that of men; this role was destroyed by colonialism and especially the Indian Act. In residential schools we were carefully tutored, through both direct teaching and role modeling, to accept inequality of the sexes as just and right. The ‘might makes right’ philosophy of the residential schools has done immeasurable harm to our communities, and it will take years of resocialization for us to regain our equilibrium. Progress is being made in the political realm, which is almost exclusively the right of male Aboriginals. However, more than control of political structures is needed in order to restore a culture.¹⁶

Lack of funding can also expose people to violence of various forms. For example lack of resources may make it hard for women to leave violent partners.

"Conference Notes" excerpt from Canadian Woman Studies

Legacies of state sanctioned violence can contribute to many different forms of violence:

Click to view the online book "Raised Up Down South" by Lee Sheridan

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