Abstract
“Why do they stay?” Most scholars working in the field of intimate partner violence in heterosexual relationships have come up against this fraught question. The question is most notable in North American psychologist Lenore Walker’s 1970s and ’80s work on “battered woman syndrome”, which drew on the concept of learned helplessness as an explanation for why women do not simply leave abusive relationships with men. Globally, many feminists have angrily critiqued Walker’s theories for pathologizing abused women and representing them as powerless and passive non-agents. In my early work as a feminist scholar, my disdain for the question “why do they stay?” grew as I engaged more deeply with such feminist voices. Yet, reading Nicolson’s book made me rethink and critically reflect on my deeply embedded (feminist) reactions to this question.
Domestic Violence and Psychology: Critical Perspectives on Intimate Partner Violence and Abuse is a book that urges thinking beyond the confines of the academic repertoires of individual disciplines. Nicolson’s new volume provides a detailed view of women’s stories of living with and leaving abusive male partners, drawing on data from the DASH (Domestic abuse: women seeking help) study, which includes in-depth interviews and surveys with UK women who had left abusive male partners and the health care and social workers who support these women. This second edition of her 2010 book, first published as part of the Routledge Women and Psychology series, presents a re-analysis of the DASH data that attends to changed discourses since the first edition. This includes greater attention to understanding and preventing intimate partner violence and abuse (IPVA) and supporting women who have survived such violence.
As a feminist psychologist, Nicolson has long been interested in the application of feminist ideas and theories to the psychology of gendered relationships in her work, deconstructing dominant narratives which convey harmful accounts of women. With this book, Nicolson aims to shift the thinking of contemporary research and practice from one-dimensional perspectives and theoretical silos towards a multi-factorial and holistic understanding, drawing on a diverse array of theoretical resources and combining psychological approaches with feminist understandings. She weaves women’s real-life stories together, grounding them in relevant theory and analysing these in relation to the backdrop of “everyday” discourses and public narratives that she details. Theoretically, Nicolson argues for a multi-layered perspective with three levels of “evidence” that should be considered for understanding IPVA, viz., the material, discursive, and intrapsychic/emotional dimensions. The book is arranged into three parts according to these three dimensions.
In Part 1, Nicolson details the material context and prevalence of IPVA, drawing on changing definitions and key debates between the sociological feminist approach versus psychology. She outlines both statistical evidence and detail of women’s attacks at the hands of their male partners, using rich excerpts from fictional and media texts from various contexts, including India and Eastern Europe. Yet, Nicolson’s own position as an author from a relatively privileged context is, for the most part, invisible. In this vein, greater attention should have been paid to the context of the DASH study, contrasting this with the picture of IPVA in the developing “post-conflict” contexts documented in the book through a tapestry of statistical, anecdotal, and media evidence.
Part 2 focuses on discursive constructions and practices surrounding male violence against women. Nicolson meaningfully weaves in her participants’ voices to illustrate the regulatory function of discourse. One story in particular stands out: the story of Maggie, who told how no one, not even social workers, took her emotional abuse seriously because she did not have any bruises on her body as proof of abuse. In Chapter 4, Nicolson further explores the politics of disciplining agendas, focusing on the importance of attending to vulnerable women from minority religious, cultural, and national groups. In Chapter 5 she moves to explore public awareness, perceptions, and everyday explanations of IPVA based on research conducted in North America, Europe, and the United Kingdom. Here she draws attention to the different moralities implicit in perceptions of perpetrators and survivors.
Part 3 focuses on (re)turning to intrapsychic psychology. In Chapter 6, Nicolson explores women’s experiences of IPVA and draws together an array of theoretical perspectives on attachment and couple relationships, including unconscious processes, memory, and narrative theories of self. The chosen narratives powerfully “bring to life” the relational dimension of IPVA. In Chapter 7, Nicolson examines the impact and legacies of intergenerational experiences of living with abuse and neglect. She draws on work in psychoanalysis (Erikson, Bowlby, Winnicott and Klein) to explore three women’s stories in-depth and thereby illustrate the importance of a psychological material-discursive intrapsychic perspective. The impact of family background and parental relations on women’s current sense-making about their “selves” and the abuse they suffer is made evident. Nicolson links these insights with an examination of patriarchal power relations and their role in shaping the gendered self-in-relation. To me, this analysis was the best part of the book. In the final chapter (Chapter 8), Nicolson considers how the abusive relationship as object becomes intwined in storied memories in which a heterosexual couple performs a violent relationship. Then she turns to an exploration of the observers of this performance: health care and social workers, exploring dilemmas of care and blame in their accounts and unpacking their perspectives on the predicaments facing abused women.
At the heart of this book is Nicolson’s interrogation of the standoff between feminist and psychological understandings of IPVA. She explains that the feminist position, focusing on socio-political factors, posits patriarchy’s unequal gender power dynamics as the sole explanatory factor for intimate partner violence. Conversely, the psychological position is that individual biographies are important in terms of how individuals/couples face difficulties within the context of a relationship. Many feminist academics view attempts to explain IPVA through the psychological factors of the individual men and women concerned as shifting the blame away from men and away from patriarchy and so condoning men’s behaviour. Nicolson herself has been vilified at conferences for asserting the importance of a psychological understanding of IPVA in her presentation of her DASH findings. Her argument that some women are more vulnerable to living with abuse than others because of their background has been critiqued as flying in the face of feminist ideas that “anyone can become a victim of domestic violence and abuse” (p. 31). Nicolson argues, however, that the feminism versus psychology divide hinders thinking on providing effective ways of supporting women.
A sole focus on patriarchy, according to Nicolson, ignores the full impact of women’s trauma of living with abuse over time. Her work addresses this gap, focusing on intergenerational transmission of vulnerabilities evident in women’s narratives of self-in-relationship (Chapter 7). She asks questions that have not usually been embraced by pro-feminist perspectives (such as, “What about women who are ambivalent about their relationships?”; “What about women who have been so oppressed that they seek out men who abuse them because they think they have no other choice?”). To this end, she explores psychological and emotional causes and consequences of women’s relational involvement with abusive men. Employing relevant literature, she argues that girls whose early lives were characterised by negative attachments and witnessing violent abuse are at risk of later living with an abusive male partner. Importantly, she maintains that taking an individual, psychological perspective does not necessarily mean ignoring social factors and gendered power relations; rather, it adds value in addressing IPVA. She urges readers to draw on both feminism and psychology to provide a holistic understanding that encompasses individual histories, changing emotional dynamics, psychology, culture, the material context, and gendered power relations.
Another central thread of the book is Nicolson’s thoughtful engagement with the concept of agency as it has been constructed in feminist scholarship. She argues that much feminist discourse is not compatible with women’s actual experiences. This is not a novel argument and Nicolson would have done well to consider the growing body of work on decolonial feminism that focuses on individual histories, subjectivities, and vulnerabilities, and critiques traditional feminist ideas that all men are beneficiaries of patriarchy and all women are static victims (see e.g., van Niekerk & Boonzaier, 2018).
Nicolson contends that women’s experiences of currently living with abusive male partners is a neglected research area – perhaps, she correctly states, because leaving abuse is most often considered the final goal and as “true agency”. Nicolson rightly problematises this idea. However, it was surprising that the DASH study participants were all women who had left abusive relationships. What about the narratives of women currently in abusive relationships? This is a ripe area for further research, and it would have been valuable to hear Nicolson’s thoughts on ethically reaching this group of women and on tailoring research questions to address women who have remained in abusive partnerships.
The discussion of agency is richly connected to the ethics around ideas and representations of women who share their stories with researchers. Discourses of “true agency” regulate “appropriate” responses to abuse. Nicolson powerfully states that, ethically, feminist scholars should be careful not to reproduce such regulatory power by simplifying complex experiences of violence. Importantly, she argues that the failure to take women’s individual accounts of violence seriously does women an injustice by denying their agency. Women’s own meaning-making is replaced by (dominant) feminist assumptions of what agency looks like, leaving unheard the multiple ways women may negotiate agency in abusive relationships, even by choosing to stay.
Nicolson explains that she uses “victim” or “survivor” depending on the material circumstances from which women speak – “victim” to describe women currently suffering abuse and “survivor” to describe those who have left such relationships and have “emotionally and physically lived to tell the tale” (p. 52). This logic, however, seems antithetical to what she wishes to achieve in this book: to examine the complexity of abusive relationships. This ought to include acknowledgement of the agency of women who may, for myriad reasons, remain with their abusers. Moreover, factors such as lack of social support and material resources mean that women who have left are not always safe to the extent that they identify as a “survivor”. (See Lamb et al.’s, 1999, challenge of the uncritical labelling of “victim” and Gavey’s, 1999, discussion of the feminist ethics of labelling women as “victims”.) As Gavey (1999, p. 67) argues, rather than labelling we should engage in critique of the broader “realm of heterosexual possibility” that enables hurtful and harmful male acts towards women. My point is that new language is still needed, and Nicolson could have moved further in entering “the contested space” (Lamb, 1999, p. 4) with a more critical examination of the terms “victim” and “survivor”, especially because she already challenges readers to examine women’s complex and multi-layered agency.
In closing, what sets this book apart is its development of a rich psychological account of IPVA that considers the individual complexities within gender-relations and how patriarchy shapes the psychology of being a woman. The book offers a useful resource for scholars working in the field to re-think and re-situate their theoretical approach and also offers useful conceptual scaffolding for practitioners. Whether one embraces Nicolson’s multi-theoretical stance or not, her offering helps strengthen our arguments and views vis-à-vis the psychology versus feminism debate. Nicolson opens space for reconsidering the question “Why do they stay?” and compels us to listen more carefully to women’s answers.
