Narratives of Those Who “Love” Violently: Identity Issues and Construction of Meaning of the Batterers

Participants

The present study is part of a larger research project that aims to identify the cultural narratives as a meaningful context for love and intimate relationships (with people who had violent and nonviolent experiences). Participants in this study have a history of perpetration of violence in intimate relationships, which was disclosed by them or notified by the legal system.

Specifying, six participants were drawn from the potentially “normative” group (without a history of violence) using the snowball sampling to make informal contact with a future participant. However, the previously participants during the interview reported having perpetrated violence in their love story. The other six were recruited from the forensic psychological assessment service, referred by the legal system for evaluation of the crime of domestic violence.

All participants received information about the study and possible harms/benefits that they might experience as a result of their participation (e.g., emotional activation, possibility of being referred for further intervention if this need is identified during the interview), guaranteeing the participant’s anonymity. It was also clarified the breach of confidentiality within the limits provided in the ethics code of psychologists (risk of physical integrity of the individual’s or others). Participants then signed an informed consent ensuring that they were fully aware of the previous information that will be separately filled from the interviews.

In addition, any event or aspect that appears in the interview that potentially leads to the identification of the participant was withdrawn.

As shown in Table 1, the group consists of 12 men, whose ages range between 16 and 57 years. To obtain a theoretically relevant sample, we selected individuals, whose relational history was marked by recurring conflict, including physical violence. However, severity and frequency of violence varies among the participants and none has been charged with threats or attempts of murder.

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Table 1.

Participants.

Cases	Qualifications	Social status	Marital status	Age	Sex	In the violent relationship
1	9th grade	Low	Living together	21	Male	Yes
2	PhD	Medium-high	Living together	31	Male	No
3	4th grade	Medium	Married	52	Male	Yes
4	9th grade	Low	Divorced	46	Male	No
5	4th grade	Low	Married	46	Male	Ambiguous
6	4th grade	Low	Married	34	Male	Yes
7	4th grade	Medium	Divorced	33	Male	Ambiguous
8	Graduate	Medium	Living together	45	Male	Ambiguous
9	4th grade	Medium	Married	43	Male	Ambiguous
10	12th grade	Medium-high	Divorced	57	Male	No
11	8th grade	Low	Single	16	Male	No
12	12th grade	Low	Single	17	Male	No

The participants were not diagnosed as suffering from psychopathology or mental disabilities and they did not undergo psychotherapeutic interventions. To make sure of this, a medical statement was requested indicating the absence of psychopathology.

It is possible that some of the participants had never been examined by a mental health professional or might have been lying about their mental health status. However, it was important to verify during the interview, the participants’ mental state was not altered in any way that could interfere with their reports. In two cases, during the interview, the researcher (psychologist) verified that the participant’s report was clearly disorganized therefore excluded from this study.

Despite sharing a history of violence, we tried to achieve variety regarding the subjects’ current involvement in the violent relationship. Thus, the abusive relationship has ended for five of the subjects (they were left by the victim), three are still in it (not considering the possibility of ending the relationship), and four are in an ambiguous situation (leaving and returning to the relationship, while accepting both the possibility of reconciliation or permanent separation). Two of these subjects are temporarily apart from their partners by court order, while the other two, although temporarily not living with their partners, maintain close contacts with them. In all cases, at the time of data collection, physical violence had ceased (due to the end of the relationship, efforts of reconciliation, or social scrutiny).

It should be noted that the informed consent included a topic in which the participants stated having ceased violence and that there no current act of violence against the partner/ex-wife was occurring; they were also made aware that, if any episode should occur, this would represent a breach of confidentiality implying a formal complaint. Thus, provisions of American Psychological Association Ethical Code (American Psychological Association, 2017) and Portuguese Psychological Association Ethical Code (Ordem dos Psicológos Portugues, 2016) were safeguarded, however, confidentiality in the contexts of intervention or investigation can be violated when one’s physical integrity is in danger. Moreover, in Portugal, violence in intimacy is part of the crime of domestic violence that is considered a Public Crime (Garcia & Castela-Rio, 2014). In the case of a public crime, it means that it is in the public interest and that there is an obligation to report it to the proper authorities. It is a criminal offense for which judicial or police authorities just need to be noticed or a voluntary complaint presented by anyone (not exclusively the victim). It should be noted that, with this clause in the informed consent, none of the potential participant dropped up or identified any current situation of violence.

Instrument and Data Collection

A semistructured interview (“Your life’s love story”), adapted from McAdams (2008) “The Life Story Interview,” was carried out with each participant. We asked subjects to identify and tell their lives’ love story, focusing all themes of the script (summary and chapters, important moments, challenges, possible futures, personal values, and beliefs). Despite this structure, questions were formulated in a way that allowed the narrative to flow according to the interests of the participants. The main researcher conducted all interviews and their length ranged from 45 minutes to 2 hours. The interviews were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim, including hesitations, laughter, inflections, and so on. Before the interview, the participants completed a small sociodemographic questionnaire (social class, age, education, marital status/relationship status, etc.), with a specific code matching the one of the interview.

Method of Analysis

The identification and analysis of interpretative repertoires was the methodological tool chosen to conduct the discursive analysis of the interviews. Potter and Wetherell (1987) describe interpretative repertoires as “building blocks speakers use for constructing versions of actions, cognitive processes, and other phenomena ( . . . ) basically a lexicon or register of terms and metaphors drawn upon to characterise and evaluate actions and events” (p. 138). In this line, the process analysis was made following some steps:

Another aspect that is important to mention is the validation of the results, and it is not appropriate, in the present study, of a qualitative nature, to adopt the traditional criteria of quantitative investigations (fidelity and validity). Therefore, we have taken extra care to ensure the reliability and credibility of our results, highlighting, in particular, two procedures: (a) the “dense description” of the meanings identified, with a detailed presentation and their textual illustration (as we will see in the description of the results) and (b) two researchers did the codification together, reaching the categories and repertoires by discussion, negotiation and agreement. A third investigator was used for cases of lack of agreement or doubt.

The Ways Offenders Make Meaning About Love and Intimate Relationships

To describe and give meaning to their experiences, subjects used five main repertoires: “companion love” (40.18% ¹ of participants’ discourses refer to this repertoire), “romantic love” (35.9%), “passionate love” (13.1%), “pragmatic love” (8.97%), and “game-playing love” (1.84%).

The Way Offenders Speak About Love and Violence Legitimization—How They Do It

Companion and passionate love repertoires are those who most legitimate violence in intimate relationships, because the majority of references that justify violence belong to these two specific repertoires.

In companion love, participants consider quarrels normal, as a part of the process of mutual understanding and conflict resolution. So, in this context, they devaluate the verbal abuse that discussions frequently bring about, and physical violence is undervalued or reinterpreted.

C9: There was a time when we quarreled, which was normal; C6: I admit that often, given her issues, I was a bit aggressive! Physically . . . I lost control. Well, I never harmed her a lot too . . . And it was just once or twice.

Another discursive strategy that minimizes violence is its description as a response to the partner’s provocations. In a society where women are understood as passive, nonaggressive caretakers, a discourse that describes women differently may contribute to a less asymmetric image of the violent situation, where participants can describe themselves as “disciplinarians,” and not as “batterers.”

C4: She raised her voice and I hit her immediately. She wanted to hit me, and I hit her even more. She does not have education and she needed to learn.

Furthermore, when partners leave (or try to leave) the relationship, adult participants describe this as a form of entrapment, revenge or retaliation, once again a betrayal of the values held by the companion love repertoire. This idea allows participants to place themselves as victims, describing the partners as manipulative villains, and to minimize the severity of violence when compared with their partners’ “manipulation.”

C10: I started to notice something was different. But she never said anything; I waited to see what was coming. And this is it! Because everything was a trap made by her.

The concepts of equality and sharing that are fundamental to the companion love repertoire are also used to create an image of symmetry and parity in the relationship. This image allows, once again, to minimize violence (because there is no power imbalance) and to strengthen the narrative of partners’ ingratitude. The emphasis on ingratitude arises through the comparison of the participant’s and other men’s behavior

C3: My wife has always been free to do anything! Believe me, this is true; I never hid my money from my wife . . . I have colleagues who do that. I always tried to be the best possible husband.

In contrast to those notions of provocation and ingratitude, participants convey an image of effort and investment in the relationship, as prescribed by the companion love repertoire:

C6: I made everything for her. I help her. She does not understand that I was tired. She attempted to run and to complain when I had beat her one night.

Finally, when participants are faced with the impossibility of denying violence any longer, they try to demonstrate some insight on the issue, conveying self-criticism, change, and regret

C3: If I could go back, I’d change a lot of what happened, but there’s no chance. But I’ve learned from mistakes, a lot. And maybe before I didn’t even realize.

Passionate love is mostly used to excuse man for their violent behavior, legitimating violence through the emotional intensity of love (passion and impulsiveness).

C2: Love was too much, feelings are so intense that you can’t control them, and you became physically aggressive. I lost control and I beat her.

As one can verify, the report regarding violence are linked either to companion love repertoire or to passionate love. Curiously, violence is not directly addressed in romantic love repertoire—probably because his violent behavior against partner does not match with the “romantic” hero ideal and does not fit in with “romantic” expectations and norms about men. However, the disenchantment of the participants’ romantic ideals about their partner and relationship is used to justify conflicts.

Pragmatic love is the one where violence does not have location in offender’s discourse. In contrast, this repertoire is used to recognize the disturbance and disadvantages in the violent relationship and helps offenders achieve some emotional detachment from their partner and accept the to give an end to relationship.

What Are the Discursive Tools That Offenders Use to Make Sense or Integrate Their Violent Experiences in the Self, and How These Tools Constrain or Promote Their Actions

We found that, in the context of their interpretative repertoires, participants concentrate on a range of love notions and specific themes that helps them structure and give coherence to their violent experiences.

Conflict emerges as the predominant discursive theme on the participant’s discourse, showing their necessity to integrate violence in their history and their efforts to preserve a positive image of themselves and to the world. Therefore, conflict is described as something bad but as something that participants could not avoid, given the partners’ faults and their disillusionment with companion and romantic love ideals. In particular, infidelity is addressed as the utmost attack to romantic and companion love ideals and jealousy, described as the main reason for conflict, being justified by romantic notions of fusion and belonging or as the consequence of the intensity of passion.

Given this, separation is also a pervasive theme in the participants’ discourse, being described as a rupture of romantic ideals (romantic love repertoire), an experience of intense pain (passionate love). Separation is address both to those participants who have been abandoned and to those that somehow the relationship. While the firsts try to explain the reasons for separation in order to exonerate their fault and makes effort to reconceptualize it as something positive through a pragmatic love repertoire, those who remain in the relationship or that are in an ambiguous situation, describe it as something to keep on avoiding and emphasize their efforts in this sense, mainly using a companion love discourse on commitment.

While articulating repertoires and discursive themes, subjects create and recreate their identities and construct their (and others) positions in the relational world (Gergen, 1997). This means that participants define themselves as husbands, partners, and lovers, often by comparison with others. The main others used in this process sometimes are other male batterers, but most of the times men define themselves in contrast with their wives (both the “real” woman “discovered” after the conflict and the “ideal” woman they desired).

When participants characterize themselves in comparison with other men, they invoke the image of what they describe as “bad” men, those who do not fulfill their duties and that (unlike themselves) abuse women without reason. This is easily observed when we look into the strategies of comparison and minimization of violence used in the companion love repertoire. These are “bad” partners not only because they do not meet the social expectations on their role as husbands, but also because their wives are “good,” according to this repertoire: understanding, tolerant, helpful, honest, and faithful. What’s more, these other men are “bad” because (also unlike the participants) they have not faced circumstances in life that frustrated their romantic dreams (romantic love repertoire).

The comparison with these “bad” partners, together with the negative characterization of their own wives or girlfriends, are the main discursive strategies used by the participants to justify their violent behavior (companion love repertoire) or the decline of the relationship (the disappointment with the romantic love ideal), while preserving a positive identity.

This discourse arises from the cultural context that constructs what means “to be a man” and “to be a woman,” influencing men’s actions and attitudes in their intimate relationship. As we saw, the repertoires carry on different expectations about man and woman, revealing the gendered nature and the asymmetry in intimate relationships, and making easy the association between love and violence.

So, repertoires about love and their articulation with the specific themes (that carry on gendered expectations and norms) constitute discursive tools that they use to make sense of their intimacy experiences—which endorse their actions and could constrain some relational behaviors and promote others. The explanations described above show how some love meanings (e.g., intense emotion, true and one love, exclusivity, understanding) associated to specific issues (e.g., infidelity, life difficulties, disagreement) could promote and reinforce violent behaviors.

Making a transversal analysis, we conclude that participants discursively recognize violent behaviors under shared social and cultural meanings that “prescribe” or “allowed” conflict and violence in some situations:

Romantic Love Is Most Prevalent but Companionate Love Is the Repertoire That Supports Violence More

We noticed that the romantic love repertoire is strongly shared by all participants, confirming the power and pervasiveness of romantic meanings, specifically in the beginning of the relationships and in the projection for future (happy ending). However, it appears that companion love assumes more relevance to justify the maintenance of violence, as well to justify staying or trying to recover the relationship. The following quotations clearly illustrate speech associations, exemplifying how the notion of dialogue, mutual help, and comprehension may be used to maintain or recover the relationship.

C5: The problem was we both thought differently. And for her to understand me, sometimes I was “rough” . . . let’s say . . . violent. But if she can think as I do, through my head, it may still be that we can understand each other. We just need to dialogue so that everything can be resolved, to understand each other. Above all, fellowship and mutual help.

C6: I think we understand each other . . . We had those fights, sometimes violent ones, but we always end making up. We are companions. Even with discussions, we have to try to understand each other, to understand, to accept. Because love is this. Even when one is more violent, if the other understands, if there is dialogue, things will be resolved.

We think that this is related to the culturally shared construction that the continuity of relationships is achieved through the prescriptions of companion love (understanding, comprehension, persist in relationships until achieve “agreement”). Thus, our findings show that companion love seems to be the repertoire that best facilitates subjects’ reasoning to justify/minimize violence, followed by passionate love (high emotional intensity) and romantic love (disappointment).

From our analysis, we also find that none of the participants use game-playing love and pragmatic love to give meaning to conflict/violence. We believe that game-playing is not used because it is considered as almost nonlove, and participants express the cultural belief that there is no room for violence in contexts without affection. For other hand, pragmatic love conveys a more calculated and rational perspective of the relationship, appearing to be more incompatible with the perpetration of violence (violence has been conceptualized in the participants’ discourses as being beyond their responsibility, resulting from other factors).

So, pragmatic love repertoire seems to be the repertoire where love and violence are less combined and could constitute an alternative meaning making tool that do not equate love with violence—and, if worked and reinforced, could restrict violence and could promote that offenders leave or change the experience of “loving violently.” It is mainly used to conceptualize the separation, facilitating the recognition that it is better not to have a partner than being in an unsatisfactory relationship. Beyond this use, this repertoire may bring important resources for the conceptualization of other dimensions of the relationship, as it conveys more flexible meanings about love and incorporates personal satisfaction as a vital dimension to attend. The further development of this repertoire—namely through psychological interventions—may be relevant for batterers (and also for victims).

Hegemonic Construction of Male Identity and the Need to Rebuild an Alternative Self

The cultural constructions about what it means “to be a man” cannot be neglected, because they have some influence in the constructions of love and intimacy. We cannot ignore the gendered nature (Fraser, 2005) of the identified repertoires, which represent intimate relationships as naturally asymmetric, therefore reinforcing and legitimizing the association between love and violence (Jackson, 2001). Similar to what the research reveals about female victims, the batterers’ narratives incorporate traditional gender discourses prescribing dominance and aggression in their intimate relationships, especially when they feel their “masculinity” threatened—when are unable to assure economic stability, when they are betrayed, or when their authority is in danger.

In the hegemonic masculinity of heterosexual intimate relationships, is traditionally the man who hold more economic power and authority, is the man who betrays, is the man who ends the relationship, and not otherwise. When the love relationship is in danger or they fear its loss, this is experienced as having failed as men, putting their “masculine” self and social image in question. Violence is the way that helps them maintain their masculine identity, the ideal of manhood.

In this context, we consider essential to intervene with batterers and, at a preventive level, to culturally deconstruct this hegemonic representation of masculinity, conveying alternative identity constructions (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005; Hearn, 2004). Hegemonic masculinity prescribes an ideal of masculinity, but this ideal is cultural and socially constructed (Peralta, Tuttle, & Steele, 2010), and it is not inside the person. Those aspects of masculine construction could be identified, deconstructed and rebuilt. Increasing individuals’ awareness to the constraints imposed by traditional discourses about what it means “to be a man” in an intimate relationship would encourage them to take a critical perspective, making relational change possible (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005; Wetherell & Edley, 1999). In a humanistic manner, the main goal in psychotherapy is encouraging personal growth: The psychotherapy must support self-exploration, create conditions to rebuild meanings, and create new meanings in order to develop new behaviors and new strategies to solve problems and conflicts (Raban-Motounu, 2014).

There is a multiplicity of cultural resources available to make sense of love and intimacy, and their association with violence legitimization is more complex than the literature usually assumes. Research on women has emphasized the role of romantic and passionate love on the combination love/violence (Fraser, 2005; Jackson, 2001). However, as we saw, in male discourses, companion love (and its “corruption”) is most often used to legitimize violence, contributing for men to maintain (or try to keep) abusive relationships. So, it is important to deconstruct “companion” meanings in intervention (more than romantic).

Finally, it is important in intervention with offenders going beyond the therapeutic cognitive-behavioral traditional models and not just a change in beliefs and behaviors. It is essential to promote the personal growth and the self-actualization: explore their love narratives to identify the gender roles prescribed by the hegemonic model of masculine identity and deconstructed how these gender roles and hegemonic model constrain and oppress their relationships and life. Adapting Adame’s (2014) words about mental illness, as well as with regard to offenders, it is necessary not to stigmatize or see them as different or “sick”—they reveal the models prescribed by our society and culture, and it is necessary to give voice to alternative identity constructions.