Young People’s Temporal and Spatial Accounts of Gendered Violence

Childhood: A Temporal Phenomenon

Childhood theorists have emphasised the importance of understanding childhood as a social construction and, as such, a concept that is temporal – it encompasses the social aspects and processes of time (see Adam, 1995: 22). Here, the work of Adam is mapped onto the concept of childhood bringing together young people’s own lived experiences ‘in’ and ‘of’ childhood (James and Prout, 1997[1990]); exploring childhood as both a phenomenon and also as a temporal lens through which to contextualise young people’s own trajectories of their past, present and future selves.

Time is not only a temporal dimension but also a means to convey distance and proximity within the life course of individuals. Introducing the framework of temporality challenges the idea of a scheduled progression (Griffin, 1993) from childhood to adulthood, further endorsing the concept of ‘transitions’. This is a critical framework to help understand the intersections of time, space and gender in young people’s accounts. Time has been used to understand violence but linearly, that is in terms of the distance of time to help frame events as violence (see Kelly, 1988). It has not been appropriated using temporality as a means to overlay the different timescapes (in and of childhood, adulthood) to conceive of what is violent and how time impacts on that construction.

It is important to note the difference between transition and transitory. Thus the proposition that childhood is a period of transition into adulthood is not being endorsed; rather, in recognising childhood as ‘transitory’, the impact that the ‘anticipation’ or ‘expectation’ of adulthood has on the young people themselves is incorporated into the definition. Indeed, by theorising childhood as transitional, the ‘timescape’ of childhood (in bringing together the past, present and future) is significant in understanding how young people construct and understand men’s violence against women.

Defining ‘Real’  Violence

How the young people defined violence followed a prescribed linear model or sequence. It involved two or more men, fighting physically in a public space. The violence would result in physical injury, intervention by authority and consequence.

Young people constructed ‘real’ violence as a temporally distant phenomenon, in that it occurred in adulthood. It was judged to be spatially distant in terms of happening in public (in view of others) and it was located away from them personally. ‘Real’ violence was also distant from them in relation to gender, in that young people (initially) described it as taking place between adult men. Adult forms of gender, in particular masculinity, were constructed as ‘fixed’. Therefore such violence was ‘abstract’ because of its physical and emotional distance from them. The ‘actors’ were unknown to each other and, crucially, to the young people. The young people’s adherence to this limited model of ‘real’ violence perpetuates the skewed perceptions of the perils of ‘stranger danger’ and the potential threat (and fear) of public space, both of which are perpetuated in the media but not always reflected in lived experience (Kitzinger, 2002; Scott, 2003).

Further, there was an emphasis on ‘real’ violence being ‘physical’ violence. This perception again endorses the physicality of adult men and the physical embodiment of power, as well as reinforcing the likelihood of physical, visible injuries, which was another indicator for the young people that the violence was ‘real’. It was as a reaction to the focus on physical violence and also the graded scale of impact and injury used within agencies of the criminal justice system that Radford (1987) suggested the ‘circular spiral of violence’ and Kelly (1988) devised her ‘continuum’. Whilst both authors have been at pains to suggest the non-linear construction of their frameworks, criticisms of each have further emphasised them. The understandings of the young people significantly demonstrate an adherence to a linear model of violence, with a graduating scale of harm based on physical violence and resultant injuries.

People in authority are given the ‘power of naming’ (Foucault, 1980) and consequently are positioned to define the issue for others. Bacchi (1999: 165) argues that it is not only the ‘definition’ or ‘definer’ that is of most relevance, but how these labels function in contextualising the issue further and are therefore complicit in the ‘problem representation’. Thus, we can see how the issue of power pervades not only violence and its perpetration, but also its conceptualisation. Much of men’s violence against women fails to be validated by others (neighbours, the police, the criminal justice system) and this is further replicated here, by what young people judge to be real – those actions where a figure of authority intervenes and condemns it. It was validation by an adult that designated an action ‘real’ violence. Indeed, an adult intervening, chastising or providing a consequence was highly significant.

When asked about violence that had already been defined as such – domestic violence and domestic abuse – many of the young people had heard of, and understood the terms, but did not always know exactly what they meant. However, the young people still used their linear model of violence to make sense of the terminology. For example, domestic violence was more often viewed as a one-off physical action resulting from provocation and (because of the physicality) was aligned with men. Abuse was labelled as verbal and emotional, relating more specifically to women as perpetrators. Therefore, young people’s understanding of violence makes a cautious link between men and violence, and the physicality of the action relating to a provocation. Both were seen as ‘real’ when the police intervened to stop and label the actions of the perpetrator as violence. Countless research, however, has detailed and critiqued the infrequency at which this occurs (Charles, 1995; Dobash and Dobash, 1979, 1998).

Naming ‘Unreal’  Violence

The concepts of time, space and gender can also be drawn from young people’s accounts to explain ‘unreal’ violence. This was behaviour that did not fit into their linear model of violence in terms of the actors, spaces and intervention. ‘Unreal’ violence signifies the proximity of the young people to the violence. That is, behaviour that was close to them in terms of temporality (it happened among young people, peers and siblings), spatially (in locations close to them), but not always between the same gender. Violence that was labelled ‘unreal’ represented the actions that the young people were most likely to normalise. They called this ‘dummy fighting’, ‘pretend’ and ‘unreal’.

All of these actions took place among their peers and siblings in their own spaces: playgrounds, homes and community streets. Crucially, these actions were not labelled or condemned by adults or those in authority as ‘violence’. This lack of validation resulted in young people accepting and minimising their own roles of perpetration and victimisation.

I had a mark on my arm for a week where he [her brother] bit me … but that was just when we were playing at fighting on holiday. My mum never said anything. (Karina)

Interestingly, there was a disparity between how the boys and girls defined and named violence. Initially, both boys and girls located violence using age and gender – men’s involvement defined an action as violent. All of the discussions identified violence (in its perpetration and victimisation) as being an activity defined by the participation of adult men. In this way, violence is located as being in the ‘future’, temporally distant from their own lives as young people. However, for girls, violence and violent identities had more to do with gender than age. They described violence as being perpetrated by both men and boys. Boys excluded themselves from this model, because they assured those in authority that their violence was not ‘real’, thereby distancing their actions from condemnation by authority.

Like boys always say to the teacher it’s a ‘kid on’, but they are doing it for real. (Hayley)

Time: Using Temporality to Naturalise ‘Real’ Violence

Naturalisation describes the process whereby the young people conceived violence as a biological (and therefore natural) difference between men and women. Young people’s definitions of ‘real violence’ were naturalised through temporality (adulthood) and gender (masculinity), both of which were representative of physical strength, prowess and power. This differs from existing research that has located young people’s understandings of violence within normative gender constructions, but not necessarily adulthood (Burman and Cartmel, 2006; McCarry, 2010). In this research, young people naturalised violence by explaining it as an aspect of adult male identity and activity, subscribing to both gendered and generational power. Young people looked to the body as providing a representation of the co-existence of power and gender, manifesting itself in physicality.

The associations made by boys and girls, aligning men with strength and power, were done at an abstract level to represent their constructed anticipation of physical power, which then fed into the ideological paradigm of men as powerful. Rather than violent forms of masculinity being seen as gendered performances (Connell, 2000; Frosh et al., 2002; Swain, 2003, 2004), they were mostly judged by the young people to be biological attributes of adult men and therefore as fixed and unchangeable.

For many of the young people, there was a ‘natural’ linear progression from boys turning into men and becoming potentially violent. As such, violence was naturalised through the appropriation of particular identities: gender and age. Violence was naturalised through the abstract binaries of gender identity; for example, the physical embodiment of strength (and weakness) and also through the anticipation of certain (acceptable) displays of masculinity, such as anger or showing off. Secondly, violence was naturalised by age, whereby the young people aligned adulthood with the potential for violence. In short, the age (adult) and gender (male) of a person were prerequisites to violent behaviour being naturalised.

Violence was conceptualised as a means by which to indicate gender difference through the physical embodiment of (male) power. Although, at times, violence was judged to be a performance through which to illustrate and validate power, it was naturalised by its link to adult male bodies that were deemed naturally stronger and therefore more able to ‘give’ and ‘take’ violence. This naturalisation of gender endorsed the view that men and boys were more violent and that (for girls) being a boy was synonymous with this kind of behaviour. It also further validated the model of ‘real’ violence adhered to by the young people.

Grace mentions the notion of ‘naturalness’ and aligns violence with the essence of what it is to be a man. By making this link with such action being ‘natural’, it is deemed irrevocable. In this sense, the perpetration of violence is not questioned, rather its presence in the construction of masculinities is validated.

In the group below, the girls are demonstrating how their constructions of gender impact on their understanding of violence. They position boys and girls as opposites, those for whom violence is ‘natural’ and those for whom it is offensive:

For the young people, violence was unequivocally associated with masculine behaviour, but not always judged to be a negative attribute. This conclusion is challenged through Fatima’s assertion that some of the boys are more aggressive than the girls, which by implication means that some are not. However, absent by implication is that some of the girls may be aggressive too, but this assumption does not fit into the framework of gender binaries.

Much was made of the connection between being a boy and being ‘tough’, a description that alluded to physical strength and a willingness to fight. Although the generic label of ‘tough’ was associated with boys, not one individual boy within any of the groups was labelled in this way during the sessions. Therefore, the label represented a construct rather than a lived description of one’s actions. Yet the generated abstract identity was a powerful aspiration and an attempt to achieve it was necessary:

For the group above, toughness was an undisputed prerequisite of being male. Being unable to demonstrate this construction of masculinity aligned you with the feminine and, more significantly with ‘being gay’, the antithesis of all things boy-like. The construction of a masculine identity operates here simultaneously on two levels, defining what you are in terms of what you are not (a girl or gay), and the disjuncture between the constructed reality (toughness) and the lived experience of being a boy.

Several of the girls saw this propensity for violence in a positive light, and talked in terms of wanting to be a boy so they could be physically stronger and more able to defend themselves. For boys, this association with strength and toughness was identified as potentially disabling. They recoiled from the assumption that because you were a boy you had to be violent. This uneasiness could explain why boys ‘put off’ this expectation until adulthood.

One of the things I don’t like about being a boy is like well men they get a reputation from a few people and you don’t hear of many women doing it but you hear of a lot of men (…) after that, like people think that almost every single boy could be like that so that’s how they get their name for it. (Paul)

The expectation to be violent was associated with not being weak. One boy describes how his dad expects him to be able to put up with physical violence from his sister, explicitly because she is smaller, a year younger, and importantly because she is a girl:

Me and my sister fight sometimes, right erm and because I’m bigger, she, like my dad expects me to be able to kinda take it and he says like, you’re bigger, you should, it shouldn’t affect you. (Stewart)

Many of the boys involved in this research were grappling with both the implications and realities of hegemonic masculinity identities. When girls talked of violence they talked of ‘boys’ as well as ‘men’. Boys were much more likely to only refer to ‘men’, deliberately redefining the boundaries of violence to intimate ‘the other’ and to exclude themselves from it.

Although in the example above the boys talk about the gendered nature of the expectation of violence, what they actually refer to is the size of the individual as being indicative of their propensity to commit violent acts. So, although individually they challenged stereotypes (in not wanting to be associated with an expectation to be violent), they were still aligning violence with size and physical strength, and thus hegemonic masculinity.

There were several contradictions in what the young people said. Many were eager to equate men as naturally violent. Young people’s models of ‘real’ violence were only able to explain men’s use of violence as a ‘natural’ phenomenon rooted in their physical prowess and power – men use violence because it is ‘innate’ in their biology. Young people used the dualisms, and the stereotypes invested in them, as evidence of gender difference. For example, all of the young people discussed (female) pain in one form or another (periods, pregnancy, childbirth), yet proceeded to juxtapose this with the assertion that a gender difference between men and women was that men and boys were stronger, tougher and can endure more pain. The young people interpret the physical pain some women may experience as a heavily gendered form of pain, which they naturalise and accept as women’s ‘lot’. The physical demands on a woman’s body were ascribed as ‘natural’ and a contributory factor to their inherent weakness. They would then, however, contradict such assumptions, sometimes unknowingly and other times consciously, with their own experience and knowledge, utilising these to provide evidence to the contrary.

These quotes illustrate a disjuncture between their abstract reasoning – that ‘real’ violence involves men, who are naturally stronger and more powerful – and their lived reality – that the girls and (boys) they know do not all fit this description. In the first example, the boys are talking about a specific girl in their class who does not conform to the attributes of ‘femininity’, and therefore they can use this embodied example of Stacey to contradict the stereotype. In the second example, the boy questions the myth of ‘weakness’ but seeks my reassurance when doing so, as it is an attribute so deeply embedded within acceptable femininity that to argue against it appears perplexing, even though his own knowledge supports his belief. Young people found it hard to move past the physicality of the (adult) body. This was less so with regard to muscles and hair, which could be changed. However, genitalia and biology were understood as fixed and stable indicators of difference, linking gender immutably with sex and the role of women to have and care for children. The symbolism of gendered power was ingrained and therefore much more difficult for the young people to challenge directly. Yet when constructions of gender and power were destabilised by their own experiential knowledge, it became easier for them to do so. This illustrated the disjuncture between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ and ‘common sense’ and ‘experiential’.

Gender and Space: Normalising ‘Unreal’  Violence

Childhood theorists have long argued that young people use their experiential knowledge to make sense of their lives (Brannen, 2005) and, in this way, models of temporality are also pertinent in understanding how girls make sense of violence. That is, their own past and present experiences of how boys act towards them and the discursive reasoning they apply work together to enable them to make sense of this ‘unreal’ violence. Yet the girls often found that their own experiences of violent (male) peers was invalidated by the lack of adult recognition (and definition) of the actions. So, because of this, girls were likely to also define ‘real’ violence as distant from them, in terms of the temporal and spatial phenomenon of adulthood, whilst finding their own ‘named’ experiences as ignored and minimised (Kelly, 1988; Radford and Kelly, 1996) by those with the authority to do so.

The above example gives three different constructions of violence that is named by teachers (those in authority), the boys (as the perpetrators) and the girls (as the victims). Although the boys pretend the fighting is not real, there is a question whether this is so or if this is a tactic to placate the teachers. The girls experience the fighting as real and name it as such. They do not like it, are hurt by it and actively try to stop it, either individually or collectively. These violences are physical as well as threatening behaviours. Here, as in much of the other discussions, the focus is on physical behaviours, with less emphasis (although present) on emotional abuses. ² Yet although the girls name these actions as violence, it is portrayed as less serious, or not violent at all, by boys and by some of the teachers.

As a result, it becomes difficult for young girls in particular to explicitly name these actions as violence – especially when it is not validated as such by others and/or adults. Implicit within this is the danger of creating chasms between the locations of such violent behaviour; for example, where one space is deemed okay (the schoolyard) and another (the street) is not. For this reason it is necessary to theorise space (and the meaning of that space) alongside violence. Otherwise girls, as highlighted here, are doubly silenced, by their gender and also by their age. This replicates Valentine’s work (2007) on how the implications associated with space can determine the meaning. These spaces were associated with children and young people and were not highlighted in their model of violence as being conducive to ‘violence’. Thus, where violence is commonplace or thought to be so (outside and in public) it is spatially acceptable and recognised as common (which we can link back to the shortcomings of Kelly’s continuum). Yet when violent behaviour is commonplace, but occurring within invisible spaces such as the home or within intimate, peer or sibling relationships, it is rendered invisible because it is normalised.

(Real) violence was used by men to maintain power over women that were judged as unequal, whilst the resistance of the girls to the actions of boys (in seeing themselves as equal) generated what the young people ³ all termed ‘unreal’ violence. The narratives relayed by the girls illustrate examples of boys demonstrating their power to the girls’ resistance (see Connell, 2002).

There were countless examples of girls experiencing ‘routine’ behaviour that they and their friends described as abusive or harassment but which failed to be recognised as such by teachers, resulting in an invalidation of their experiences. This leads to their minimisation of such actions and an acceptance that it formed part of their everyday lives. This finding endorses the earlier work of Renold (2005: 115), who found that the girls she asked about this daily experience of sexual harassment from their male peers concluded, ‘we are used to it’. A positive aspect of the discussions, for girls in single sex groups, was their sharing of their individualised incidents, and this recognition of the collectivistic nature of their experiences was empowering. Yet there is a need for boys to hear this too (Lombard, 2012). For girls, their understanding of violence was located within their past and present experiential understanding, which also served to inform their anticipations of the future. This replicates Kelly’s work (1988), which incorporates the temporal and spatial characteristics of men’s violence, in that the violence may occur over time, is located a long time in the past, or can impinge upon present and future lives. The experience and/or naming of violence is thus not always an immediate or present one, rather it can be ‘experienced by the woman or girl at the time or later, as a threat, invasion or assault’ (1988: 23). This is relevant in enabling young people themselves to have a role in the naming of behaviour that they may understand as problematic or not recognised by others, particularly those in authority.

Boys were not unaware of girls’ reactions, but their silence colluded in this inequity by distancing themselves from their own actions, or in maintaining that part of being a girl was to ‘react’ against this injustice (exclusion and abuse). It was seen by many of the boys that the solution lay in girls fighting against the injustice, rather than the injustice itself being prevented. This replicates Connell’s (2005[1995]) own theorisation of the patriarchal dividend and men’s (and boys’) own vested interest in the gender regime staying the same.