Abstract
Interpersonal Violence: Differences and Connections is a journey across cultural and temporal manifestations of violence. This unique and easy-to-read collection of essays brings together topics that are not often discussed within the discourse on violence. The authors explore subjects as diverse as eighteenth century legitimized violent punishment of children in Finland (Chapter 3) to modern day elder abuse in Portugal (Chapter 11). In combination, the reader is exposed to an array of interpretations of how violence is constructed in everyday life, which can benefit both seasoned experts in the field and novices to the theme.
Each essay presents a different thought-provoking angle of violence. I was left thinking about how divisive it can be when older women, who themselves experience gendered oppression, parrot the dynamic with younger women and perpetuate violent social norms in Opoku’s essay (Chapter 5) on women-to-women violence. In Brommer’s (Chapter 13) exploration of violence against women in music videos, I was asked uncomfortably to acknowledge the conflation of “power with love and violence with passion” within abusive relationships and in mainstream societal norms. These themes are quite timely. Indeed, the dominant rhetoric in the field of gender-based violence has tended to simplify complex social relationships into “men” as perpetrators of violence against women and “perpetrators” as a fixed identity. The reality however is less clear. Men may be victims of violence, women may commit violent acts against other women and women who have suffered from abuse may both love their abuser and hate the abuse. Interpersonal Violence presents these complexities without losing sight of the epidemiological evidence that men are responsible for the highest proportion of violent acts against women in heterosexual relationships or disregarding a rights-based approach, which centres the needs of the affected. Rather, the essays ask important framing questions: where is violence learned? How are both individual men and women embedded in a wider social fabric that perpetuates violent relationships?
In this manner, Husso, Virkki, Notko, Hirvonen and Eilola (Introduction and Conclusion) follow a long tradition of social theorists who attempt to understand the complex interplay between individuals and a violent society. Applying Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence, they theorize that people may be complicit in violence but that it is also replicated in daily life and becomes unconsciously adopted at the individual level. The individual is always embedded within a system of violence, which influences individual choices. So-called habitus then is simply a reflection of gendered cultural practices stored in the body. The process is dynamic, and we can shift between states of acting out, rejecting or allowing violence. It is signified in the individual body, but it is not simply the sum of individual acts; it is a structuring of physical, structural and symbolic forms of power inequalities. As Lidman’s essay (Chapter 1) on class inequality in trying and sentencing of early court cases of rape or Kralj and Žakelj’s (Chapter 10) work on inter-ethnic discrimination in Slovenian schools illustrate, violence is a socio-cultural system of inequality manifested on the individual level.
While centring manifestations of violence within a European and, more specifically, Finnish context, Interpersonal Violence usefully includes non-Western milieus as well. Sarkamo, Eshareturi, Koç and Miettinen (Chapter 4) compare honour killings in Namibia and Turkey to the European tradition of duelling. The combination destabilizes Western narratives that distance themselves from “the Other” and creates a continuity between hegemonic masculinity across different socio-cultural and historic contexts. Unlike many essay collections that utilize the lens of their discipline to analyse a theme, the essay collection incorporates authors from diverse epistemological traditions. Some essays, such as The murder of women by Dobash and Dobash (Chapter 8), dissects evidence from the Murder in Britain Study, using a criminological approach. In contrast, Jäntti (Chapter 14) examines violence in a literary tradition, presenting a psychoanalytic reading of gendered and colonial violence in Bessie Head’s novel, A Question of Power. Other texts employ lenses that could fall with the fields of history or law (Chapter 2 and Chapter 6), social work (Chapter 7 and Chapter 12) and public health (Chapter 9). Few academics have achieved such a diverse connection between different theories.
Interpersonal Violence is a welcome addition to the canon of social science.