Violence, Gender and Affect: Interpersonal, Institutional and Ideological Practices 9783030569297, 9783030569303

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN VICTIMS AND VICTIMOLOGY

Violence, Gender and Affect Interpersonal, Institutional and Ideological Practices Edited by Marita Husso · Sanna Karkulehto Tuija Saresma · Aarno Laitila Jari Eilola · Heli Siltala

Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology

Series Editors Matthew Hall University of Lincoln Lincoln, UK Pamela Davies Department of Social Sciences Northumbria University Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

In recent decades, a growing emphasis on meeting the needs and rights of victims of crime in criminal justice policy and practice has fuelled the development of research, theory, policy and practice outcomes stretching across the globe. This growth of interest in the victim of crime has seen victimology move from being a distinct subset of criminology in academia to a specialist area of study and research in its own right. Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology showcases the work of contemporary scholars of victimological research and publishes some of the highest-quality research in the field. The series reflects the range and depth of research and scholarship in this burgeoning area, combining contributions from both established scholars who have helped to shape the field and more recent entrants. It also reflects both the global nature of many of the issues surrounding justice for victims of crime and social harm and the international span of scholarship researching and writing about them. Editorial Board Antony Pemberton, Tilburg University, Netherlands Jo-Anne Wemmers, Montreal University, Canada Joanna Shapland, Sheffield University, UK Jonathan Doak, Durham University, UK

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14571

Marita Husso · Sanna Karkulehto · Tuija Saresma · Aarno Laitila · Jari Eilola · Heli Siltala Editors

Violence, Gender and Affect Interpersonal, Institutional and Ideological Practices

Editors Marita Husso Faculty of Social Sciences Tampere University Tampere, Finland

Sanna Karkulehto Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies University of Jyväskylä Jyväskylä, Finland

Tuija Saresma Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies University of Jyväskylä Jyväskylä, Finland

Aarno Laitila Department of Psychology University of Jyväskylä Jyväskylä, Finland

Jari Eilola Department of History and Ethnology University of Jyväskylä Jyväskylä, Finland

Heli Siltala Department of Psychology University of Jyväskylä Jyväskylä, Finland

Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology ISBN 978-3-030-56929-7 ISBN 978-3-030-56930-3 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56930-3

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Barry Mason/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

The book presents new conceptual and theoretical approaches to studies of violence, gender and affect. As the first research anthology to examine violating interpersonal, institutional and ideological practices as gendered and affective processes, it raises novel questions and offers insights for understanding and resolving social and cultural problems related to violence and its prevention. The book offers multidisciplinary perspectives on various forms and intersections of interpersonal, institutional and ideological violence and violating practices. The research ranges from early modernity to the present in the European, U.S., African and Australian contexts, representing disciplines such as gender studies, history, literature, linguistics, media and cultural studies, psychology, social psychology, social work, social policy, sociology and environmental humanities. With its integrative approach, the book proposes new ideas and tools for academics

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and practitioners to improve their theoretical and practical understandings of these phenomena as a source of multidimensional inequality in a globalised world. Tampere, Finland Jyväskylä, Finland Jyväskylä, Finland Jyväskylä, Finland Jyväskylä, Finland Jyväskylä, Finland

Marita Husso Sanna Karkulehto Tuija Saresma Aarno Laitila Jari Eilola Heli Siltala

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of many valuable conversations in various academic and non-academic contexts and networks. We are grateful to our colleagues, departments and universities for their support. We would also like to thank our adversaries for challenging us to clarify our message and the need to take seriously the intersection between violence, gender and affect. We would like to warmly thank the many people who assisted in completing this project. We are especially grateful to our research assistant Anu Karhinen-Soppi for her skilful, competent and invaluable work with the book, and our research assistant Tanja Laitinen for her priceless assistance in finalising the book. We are also thankful to the staff at Palgrave for all their patience and help. This book would not have been possible without them. We also thank Palgrave Macmillan for publishing this book. Editing books always take more time than expected and involves long days and sleepless nights. Our families have been a great source of continuous love and support. They kept us going. We want to express our deepest gratitude to them for giving us strength and support, without which this book would probably not exist. vii

Contents

Part I 1

Ideological, Institutional and Affective Practices of Interpersonal Violence Marita Husso, Sanna Karkulehto, Tuija Saresma, Jari Eilola, Heli Siltala, and Aarno Laitila

Part II 2

3

Introduction 3

Interpersonal Violence

Familial Control, Collectivity and Gendered Shame: Past and Present Vulnerabilities Satu Lidman

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Domestic Homicide and Emotions from the Late Nineteenth Century to the 1920s Anna Kantanen and Jari Eilola

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Contents

Gendering Violence: Theorising the Links Between Men, Masculinities and Violence Bob Pease

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Serious Emotions: On Some Emotions in Working on Men’s Violences and Violences to Women Jeff Hearn

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Part III 6

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Institutional and Affective Practices of Domestic Violence Interventions in Social Work: Malignant Positioning of Victims Sisko Piippo, Marita Husso, Pasi Hirvonen, Marianne Notko, and Kateˇrina Glumbíková Reporting, Reflecting and Recognising Emotions in Therapeutic Work with Domestic Violence Perpetrators: Experiences of the Jyväskylä Group Model Heli Siltala, Helena Päivinen, and Aarno Laitila (In)visibility of Good and Bad Care Practices in Nursing Homes: A Vicious Circle Ana Paula Gil The Slow Violence of Deportability Karina Horsti and Päivi Pirkkalainen

Part IV 10

Institutional Violence

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157 181

Ideological Violence

Humiliation and Violence in Kenyan History Brett L. Shadle

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Gendered Violence Online: Hate Speech as an Intersection of Misogyny and Racism Tuija Saresma, Sanna Karkulehto, and Piia Varis

12 Violence and Harm in the Context of Brexit: Gender, Class and the Migrant ‘Other’ Marianne Hester 13

Environmental Violence and Postnatural Oceans: Low-Trophic Theory in the Registers of Feminist Posthumanities Cecilia Åsberg and Marietta Radomska

Index

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Notes on Contributors

Cecilia Åsberg, Ph.D. is Guest Professor of STS, Gender and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm, and Professor of Gender, Nature, Culture at Linköping University; Founding Director of the Posthumanities Hub, and the Seed Box: An Environmental Humanities Collaboratory; and Fellow of the Rachel Carson Centre at Ludvig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany. Recent publications include: “A Sea Change in the Environmental Humanities” (Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities, 2020); “Planetary Speculation: Cultivating More-Than-Human Arts” (Cosmological Arrows 2019); “Toxic Embodiment ” (Environmental Humanities 2019, edited with Olga Cielemecka) and the Springer publication A Feminist Companion to the Posthumanities (2018, edited with Rosi Braidotti). Jari Eilola, Ph.D. is a Senior Researcher at the Department of History and Ethnology, University of the Jyväskylä, Finland. He has worked as an Academy Research Fellow on the project “Shameful Disharmony of Family Life: Domestic Violence in Finland, 1890–1930” (2013– 2018). He led in 2011–2014 the research project “Chastisement or

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Violence? Attitudes towards the Misuse of Patriarchal Power in Modernizing Finland 1750–1890”, funded by the Academy of Finland. Eilola is also a specialist on history of early modern period who has published articles in Finnish and English, for instance, on witchcraft, concepts of madness, rumours in small communities and domestic power relations. Ana Paula Gil has a Ph.D. in Sociology—Development and Social change. She is Auxiliary Professor at Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas—NOVA FCSH. She was the coordinator researcher of the study “Ageing and Violence” (2011–2014) and the study “Ageing in an Institution: An Interactionist Perspective of care” (2016–2018), funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). Her academic interests include ageing, long-term care and family care, elder abuse and neglect. Kateˇrina Glumbíková is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Social Studies, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic. Her research is focused on the issue of reflexivity in social work with vulnerable children and their families. Her research interests also include evaluation of social housing and homelessness of mothers and women without a shelter. Jeff Hearn is Professor Emeritus, Hanken School of Economics, Finland; Senior Professor, Gender Studies, Örebro University, Sweden; Professor of Sociology, University of Huddersfield, UK; and Professor Extraordinarius, Institute for Social and Health Studies, University of South Africa. His latest book is Age at Work: Ambiguous Boundaries of Organizations, Organizing and Ageing, co-authored with Wendy Parkin, Sage, 2020. Marianne Hester, Ph.D., OBE, FAcSS, Professor, holds the Chair in Gender, Violence and International Policy at the University of Bristol, UK, where she heads the Centre for Gender and Violence Research. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Gender-Based Violence, and has led research on many aspects of violence, abuse and gender relations. Her work has directly influenced health, criminal justice and family policy and practice in the UK, Europe and other countries. She has worked closely with a range of government departments and NGOs,

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e.g. as elected Board Member on the Work With Perpetrators European Network (WWP EN), as expert advisor to the NICE Programme Development Group (PDG) for guidance on Preventing and Reducing Domestic Violence between Intimate Partners, and as Research Director to the Department of Health & National Institute for Mental Health “Victims of Violence and Abuse Prevention Programme”. Pasi Hirvonen, Ph.D. is a Social Psychologist and a University Teacher and a Project Researcher of innovation management in the Business School at the University of Eastern Finland. His research interests include interaction and discourse studies, positioning theory-oriented research, small group dynamics and organisational social psychology. Karina Horsti, Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä. Karina’s interdisciplinary research is situated in the crossroads of media and migration studies. She is the editor of The Politics of Public Memories of Forced Migration and Bordering in Europe (Palgrave Memory Studies, 2019). Marita Husso, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Social Policy at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Tampere University and an Adjunct Professor of Working Life Studies, Violence Studies and Gender Studies at the University of Eastern Finland. She is the PI of the Erase GBV Education and Raising Awareness in Schools to Prevent and Encounter Gender-Based Violence EU-project. Her research focuses on interpersonal violence, welfare services, social theory, care work, embodiment and gendered agency. She is the first editor and author of Interpersonal Violence—Differences and Connections (Routledge, 2017), and has published in Time and Society, Gender, Work and Organization, European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research and Journal of Interpersonal Violence among others. Anna Kantanen, M.A. in Finnish History, is currently a Ph.D. student at the Department of History and Etnology at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland). In her doctoral thesis, Spousal Homicide in Finland , she examines the characteristics and motivations of intimate partner homicides in

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the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her research interests include the history of crime, violence, marriage and family. Sanna Karkulehto, Ph.D. is a Professor of Literature, Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies and School of Resource Wisdom, University of Jyväskylä, Finland; Adjunct Professor of Gender Studies (multidisciplinary study of gender and media culture), University of Lapland, Finland; Adjunct Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies, University of Oulu, Finland. Karkulehto’s most recent publications include an open access anthology Sukupuoli ja väkivalta: lukemisen etiikkaa ja politiikkaa (‘Gender and Violence: Ethics and Politics of Reading’, ed. with Rossi, SKS, 2017) and an anthology Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture (ed. with Koistinen and Varis, Routledge, 2020). Aarno Laitila, Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Jyväskylä. Laitila’s areas of interest include psychotherapeutic expertise, interventions and processes especially of families with children, intimate partner violence and risks of social exclusion in childhood. He has participated in the development of The Jyväskylä Group Model from the very beginning of the program. His research areas are couple and family therapeutic interventions, and intimate partner violence. Satu Lidman, Ph.D. is a Senior Researcher at Erase GBV (Tampere University) and an Adjunct Professor (History of Criminal Law) at the University of Turku. Her research interests include history of gender and crime, especially in the context of domestic and sexual violence, and related topical human rights’ issues. She is the author of Gender, Violence and Attitudes. Lessons from Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 2018). For more information please see www.lidman.fi. Marianne Notko, Ph.D. Adjunct Professor (violence research and family studies, social sciences) has studied power relations, domestic violence and children’s everyday lives in the family context and in educational settings. Her publications include articles in Finnish and English concerning the use of power and domestic violence in women’s family

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relations, ethical issues in family studies, domestic violence interventions in health and social care settings, and conflicts in children’s social relations and teacher perspectives on children’s emotions. She is a coeditor of Interpersonal Violence—Differences and Connections (Routledge, 2017). She has worked in several projects funded by the Academy of Finland, the EU Commission and foundation research grants at the Family Research Centre and the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä. Helena Päivinen, Ph.D. is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Erase GBV project at Tampere University, Finland. She is a Clinical Psychologist and a Psychotherapist, and has worked many years as a Facilitator in The Jyväskylä Group Model for Domestic Violence Perpetrators. Her research has focused in analysing gendered identity work in therapeutic conversations. Bob Pease was until recently Professor of Social Work at the University of Tasmania. He is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Institute for Social Change at the University of Tasmania and an Honorary Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University. He has been involved in profeminist politics with men for many years, was a founding member of Men Against Sexual Assault in Melbourne and continues to be involved in community education and campaigns against men’s violence against women. He has published extensively on masculinity politics and critical social work practice, including five books as single author and fourteen books as co-editor, as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles. He has recently completed Facing Patriarchy: From a Violent Gender Order to a Culture of Peace (Zed, 2019) and is working on a co-edited book titled Post-Anthropocentric Social Work: Critical Posthuman and New Materialist and Perspectives. Sisko Piippo, MSoc.Sc. is a University Teacher and Ph.D. Scholar at the University of Eastern Finland. Her research interests are domestic violence, social work expertise and international social work. She has researched and designed social work education and training for practitioners to enhance their ability to respond to domestic violence. She

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has studied the service system’s response to domestic violence. In addition, she has worked as an independent research scholar in India and has conducted cross-cultural research on domestic violence. Päivi Pirkkalainen, Ph.D. is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä. She is a sociologist specialising in migration and civil society. Currently she is conducting research on activism against deportations. Marietta Radomska, Ph.D. is a Research Fellow in Gender Studies specialised in Environmental Humanities at the Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University, SE. In 2018–20 she was a Guest Researcher at the Department of Cultures, University of Helsinki, FI (The Swedish Research Council International Postdoc Grant). She is the co-director of The Posthumanities Hub; founder of The Eco- and Bioart Research Network, co-founder of Queer Death Studies Network and International Network for ECOcritical and DECOlonial Studies. Her research lays at the intersection of feminist theory, continental philosophy, posthumanities, queer death studies and contemporary art. She is the author of the monograph Uncontainable Life: A Biophilosophy of Bioart (2016), and has published in Australian Feminist Studies, Somatechnics, Angelaki, and Women, Gender & Research, among others. More: www.mariettaradomska.com. Tuija Saresma, Ph.D. is an Adjunct Professor of Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and of Cultural Studies, especially Gender Studies, in the University of Eastern Finland. She works as a senior researcher at the Research Centre for Contemporary Culture in the Department of Music, Art and Culture Research, University of Jyväskylä. Her most recent publications include a co-edited anthology Populism on the Loose (Nykykulttuuri, open access) including her article on Gender Populism, and co-written articles in several journals including European Journal of Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Men and Masculinities and NORA—Nordic Journal of Women’s and Gender Studies. Brett L. Shadle is a Professor of History and core faculty in the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought at Virginia Tech.

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He is the author of two books, “Girl Cases”: Marriage and Colonialism in Gusiiland , Kenya, 1890–1970 (2006) and The Souls of White Folk: White Settlers in Kenya, 1900s–1920s (2015). He has published on the history of corporal punishment and animal cruelty in colonial Kenya, and is currently writing a book on refugees from Ethiopia after the Italian invasion of 1935. Heli Siltala, M.A. is a University Teacher at the Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä. She is a Clinical Psychologist and works as a Facilitator in The Jyväskylä Group Model for domestic violence perpetrators. She is also finalising her dissertation addressing recognition and effects of domestic violence within health care settings. Piia Varis, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor at the Department of Culture Studies and deputy director of Babylon, Centre for the Study of Superdiversity at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. Her research interests include digital culture, and the role of digital media and technologies in knowledge production. She is the author of Digital Culture and Ethnography: A Beginner’s Guide (forthcoming, Routledge).

List of Figures

Fig. 8.1

Fig. 8.2

Long-term care workers per 100 people aged 65 and over, in 2011 and 2016 (Source OECD Health Statistics 2019, p. 235) Typology of factors that influence the quality of care provision

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List of Tables

Table 3.1

Table 6.1

Types of domestic homicides and attempted murders under the jurisdiction of the Turku Court of Appeal from 1891 to 1929 Emotional practices in social work and the positioning of the client

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Part I Introduction

1 Ideological, Institutional and Affective Practices of Interpersonal Violence Marita Husso , Sanna Karkulehto , Tuija Saresma , Jari Eilola , Heli Siltala , and Aarno Laitila

Violence is a multidimensional phenomenon that involves violation, suffering, trauma and loss. It appears to be universal, established and widespread across the world and throughout human history (Besteman M. Husso (B) Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] S. Karkulehto · T. Saresma Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] T. Saresma e-mail: [email protected] J. Eilola Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Husso et al. (eds.), Violence, Gender and Affect, Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56930-3_1

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2002; Krug et al. 2002; De Haan 2009; Ray 2011; Kilby 2013; Dobash and Dobash 2015). The concept of violence includes psychological threat, blame, humiliation and devaluation as well as the actual use of physical force or power, which may result in injury, death, psychological harm or deprivation. Violence is embedded in the social structures of power, inequality, institutions and regimes as well as in the symbolic order (Walby 2012; Walby and Towers 2017; Hearn 2013; Husso et al. 2017c; Hearn et al. 2020). It is manifested in human interaction, institutional and affective practices and ideological structures of cultural discourses and representations. Violence not only reflects social conditions, attitudes and conceptions but also involves a wide range of mental processes intertwined with material, bodily and ‘carnal ways of being’—affects—as well as emotions and feelings (Liljeström and Paasonen 2010). It arouses emotions, produces sensations and bears several kinds of passions and intensities that are considered mostly negative, such as anger, rage, fear and disgust. In witnesses of violence, it also evokes secondary complex emotions and moral sentiments, such as empathy, compassion and care, although secondary social emotions, such as hate, shame, embarrassment, frustration and guilt, may be present as well (Greco and Stenner 2008; Keen 2011; Hemmings 2012; Pedwell and Whitehead 2012; Pinker 2012; Åhäll 2018). Affect and emotion influence the ways in which we think about, act in relation to and experience violence and violation, and they also, in part, frame how we make judgements in everyday life and draw conclusions. Emotion has a cognitive consequence. When it impacts how we think or

H. Siltala · A. Laitila Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] A. Laitila e-mail: [email protected]

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our judgements and, ultimately, the way we act, it also impacts our ideological, institutional and affective practices (see Pedwell and Whitehead 2012; Smith et al. 2018).

At the Intersection of Violence, Gender and Affect The current understanding of violence is based on the development of the modern state. In the early modern period, the growing sphere of central administration gave new meaning to the term ‘violence’, which had the aim of legitimating the governmental monopoly on violence. Physical violence as a medium of social control and conflict resolution was taken under the control of the centralised modern state, which imposed norms through consistent legislation and punishments. The new judicial system had the power to, on one hand, offer people peaceful means of resolving conflicts and, on the other hand, to punish those who did not follow the norms that it enacted (Ylikangas et al. 2000; Dinges 2004; Schwerhoff 2004). Since then, there have been tensions in attempts to define violence. Over the course of time, the negative connotations have strengthened and violence has been associated generally with illegitimate and unlawful behaviour (Sandmo 1999). Violence is a context-dependent phenomenon, and what counts as violence in a certain time or place also varies. Generally, it can be said that there has been a downward trend in male-on-male violence and homicides over time in many so-called Western and Eurocentric countries. Simultaneously, certain patterns of serious violent acts have remained quite static over the centuries (Eisner 2003; Eibach 2016). Disciplining, for example, from a historical perspective, has had legitimacy in patriarchal societies; thus, men’s violence towards their wives and children has lingered in the grey area between legitimate discipline and criminalised violence. The contemporaries who witnessed the violence of men against their wives evaluated it as unacceptable or cruel depending on the personal circumstances or characteristics of the victim. However, the majority of violent acts were understood as a legitimate correction of insubordinate behaviour (Foyster 2005; Lindstedt Cronberg 2009).

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Already in the premodern era, there were attempts to restrict violent behaviour and despotism and to reconcile disunity between spouses. However, these attempts expressed the Lutheran doctrine and patriarchal hierarchy (Roper 1991; Bailey 2003; Fiebranz 2005; Eibach 2016). Patriarchy as a practice, ideology and form of structural violence exemplifies an unequal gender order in which men’s hegemony dominates women and people of non-normative gender and sexuality, as well as other subordinated men in society. In other words, not only women and other marginalised people but also men who are structurally positioned in unequal relations are often violently shown their allegedly lower place in society. Furthermore, for people of, for example, lower class, education and income, for people of colour, bodily or mentally non-normative or disabled people, patriarchal order causes unequal and harmful living conditions. The concept of patriarchy still has currency in understanding ideological, institutional and affective practices of violence. Recently, for example, the multitude of digital and online violence and abuse, online misogyny, decriminalisation of domestic violence against women and criminalisation of abortion in different parts of the world have addressed a new rise of a patriarchal ideology and hierarchical societal order (Saresma 2018a; Pease 2019). Moreover, daily reported violent crimes and increased hate speech especially on digital and social media affect our conceptions and emotions and influence the ways in which we act when encountering violence and violating practices (Saresma 2018b). Emotion, affect and corporeality generate human agency, and gendered differences are produced by the prevailing ideological, institutional and affective practices where people live. Thereby, gender becomes ‘a lived social relation’ rather than a fixed location within societal relations (McNay 2004, 2008; Probyn 2005; Husso 2008; Husso and Hirvonen 2009, 2012; Connell and Pearse 2015; Husso et al. 2017a). In the contemporary scholarly understanding, gender is regarded as a cultural construct. However, it is not articulated only as a structural and societal phenomenon but also as an individual and private phenomenon, internalised in personal psychic and bodily experiences and lived realities. These structural and personal dimensions as well as the context always affect the meaning and understanding of gender. Moreover, gender is constructed in performative repetitions and reiterations that produce the

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cultural understanding and idea of gender, be they repetitions of bodily gestures, expressions, positions or movements, or cultural discourses and representations producing meanings of gender (Butler 1990, 1993, 2004; Karkulehto and Rossi 2017). As structurally bound but also constantly constructed in situated, interactional and institutional conduct, gender differences are reproduced in a way that can be difficult to recognise, and such misrecognition can become a source of social suffering. However, gendered conventions and habits can also be reflected, learnt and negotiated once they are explicated (Husso 2016; Husso et al. 2017a). Thus, to recognise these differences, it is crucial to understand the intersection of violence, gender and affect. Affect has an important role in gendered violent deeds and practices. In justifying violence both at the individual and collective levels, mobilising affect, such as fear or hatred, is vital. It is, however, not only the affective mobilisation of aggressive feelings, such as hate, but also shame and feelings of insufficiency on the part of the perpetrator that may motivate violence. The affect that victims or targets of violence experience can range from shame and humiliation to despair and exhaustion. In addition, those who witness violence—such as family members, proximates, professionals working in institutions or volunteers—experience sensations that are often neglected. On the subject of ethical responses to the grief, loss and pain of others, Ahmed (2004, p. 160; see also Boscacci 2018; Ettinger 2004) proposes the concept of ‘“withness” of intimacy, which involves the process of being affected by others’. Affect as a theoretical approach allows for analysing violence from various perspectives ranging from social and cultural situations to experiences, practices and acts. Affect as a concept facilitates scrutinising the effects of emotions or bodily feelings in meaning-making processes and identifying the factors that direct our actions even without our recognition. On one hand, the concept of affect is tied to our inner sensations even at the unconscious level, and on the other hand, they become manifested in conscious acts and may have cognitive representations (Rinne et al. 2020). Affect can be understood either as separate from cognitive processes or as a part of them (Wetherell 2012). Affect is regarded as a range of precognitive bodily sensations, and emotions are seen as discursively constructed, circulated social and cultural practices (Ahmed 2004).

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This understanding of affect, which Ahmed (2004) and Wetherell (2012) promote, does not separate (unconscious, bodily) affect from (cognitive, rational) emotion. Affect and emotion are not distinct but relational, and they have a special shared function in shaping feelings (Ahmed 2004, pp. 6–9, 44–45; see also Ngai 2005, p. 26; Strange and Cribb 2014, pp. 6–8). This kind of understanding is particularly useful in its emphasis on the interconnectedness of embodied corporeality, representations and cultural and societal contexts. This multi-layered quality is characteristic of affective experiences and practices. An affective practice is an understanding that what we do, how we act and how we bring particular practices into being are emotionally laden (Smith et al. 2018; Piippo et al. in this volume). Affect, then, is present in all forms of violence and violation, from personal experiences and interpersonal encounters to institutional practices and detrimental ideologies. Thus, studying these forms of violence and violation from an interdisciplinary perspective is not only recommended but imperative to capture the linkages of affect to multiple forms of gendered violence.

Continuities of Violence, Violations and Violating Practices In Violence, Gender and Affect, we aim to uncover and analyse the structures of violence and violating practices from interpersonal, institutional and ideological viewpoints. Although suffering is an individual experience, it is produced by the social structures and practices in which it is experienced. We take seriously the claim that suffering is a product of social forces and the incentive to study people’s own experiences, but we nevertheless approach this question, above all, from a structural point of view (Bourdieu 1999). For its part, the analysis of violence and violation also means facing the fact that exposing people to violence, violation and vulnerability, and protecting people from these attributes, is always also socially negotiated. Therefore, it is essential to pay attention to the question of whose experiences of hurting are taken seriously and what kinds of experiences of being hurt we are exposed to and protected against.

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Theoretically, Gherardi’s (2006) advice to start analysis with practices—not with either the individual or the collective actor—is utilised. The concept of practices is fruitful because it enables an analysis of the intersections between individuals, collectives and institutions and the situated contexts in which such connections take specific forms. Practices constitute the terrain on which subjects and objects take shape, language becomes discourse and knowledge is mobilised and maintained. In this way, the field of practices is the context in which the continuities of different forms of violence, concrete activities of encountering and intervening in violence and hidden forms of violating practices become visible and observable. Violence and violating practices create challenges for perception and representation. It is confrontational to see, hear and sense violence without an obvious perpetrator (i.e. that seems to ‘just happen’). Slow violence, for example, has been deemed a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight and ‘a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’ (Nixon 2011, p. 2). As a violating practice, slow violence includes structures, actions, events and experiences which violate or cause violation or are considered violating. An essential feature of slow violence as well as a violating practice is that it is maintained by silence. Therefore, the challenge for research on the topic is to develop conceptual tools for analysing this silent, not easily observable, but fundamental reality of practices (Hearn and Parkin 2001; Husso et al. 2017a). In this book, we consider the consequences of different forms of violence and violating practices for those who have been hurt. As a point of departure, vulnerability means recognising the fragility of human beings. Fragility as such is not a negative attribute. It is one of the central qualities of corporeal, feeling and thinking human beings and is a dimension consisting of sensitivity, flexibility and the ability to feel empathy and intimacy. However, it seems that in our culture, vulnerability has become a source of shame (Näre and Ronkainen 2007; Husso 2008). This manifests in our ways of responding to victims of violence and experiences and representations of weakness in general: when nobody wants

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to be a victim, people would rather focus on protecting their own psyche than on constructing empathy, opposing violence and protecting victims. Although violence takes different forms in different contexts—in different times and places, in different institutions and social structures—and in different relationships and interactions, the continuities and interconnections between different forms of violence are extensive, and interdisciplinary perspectives on violence are required for understanding the intersections of violence, gender and affect (Hamby 2011; Hamby and Grynch 2013). For example, gender-specific, pre-eminently misogynous online hate and hostility (Saresma 2018c) collectively represent a digitally mediated form of violence. This is a relatively new phenomenon as well as an integral part of the chain of violence. As a form of violent practice, such hate and hostility can manifest in the most intimate relationships (Al-Alosi 2017) and as ideological and political violence (Horsti and Saresma 2021). These kinds of practices are not only violent themselves but also pave the way for an ideological readiness to use other types of violence (see Saresma et al. in this volume). The necessity of recognising and acknowledging ideological, institutional and affective practices of violence concerns individuals, communities and societies suffering from violence and their need to deal with its effects. The sharing of experiences of violence is, thus, also a question of both communal and societal relationships and the global political order. Objectifying and oppressive attitudes related to violence, violation and violating practices are also present in other social situations, ways of knowing and attempts to control and manage the world. They hinder the possibilities of forging relationships and inhabiting spaces that are based on reciprocity, where mutual recognition and acknowledgement can exist. At the same time, such attitudes uphold the existence of violence as a logical solution to problems—as a behaviour or practice that is attributable to circumstances or the characteristics of victims (Husso et al. 2017b; Husso et al. 2020). To sum up, Violence, Gender and Affect introduces views and concepts that grasp the continuities of the multi-faceted phenomena of violence and violating practices and the intersection of violence, gender and affect in ways that exceed the limits of categorisation between the individual and the societal, the private and the public, thought and action, body

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and mind, reason and emotion and corporeal and digital. Accordingly, the objective of this interdisciplinary anthology is to analyse and uncover the structures of violence and violating practices from the perspective of vulnerability and social suffering.

Aim of the Book This book is positioned at the intersection of violence, gender and affect. It reflects the historically and culturally specific understandings and theoretical considerations of the three aforementioned multidimensional phenomena that have been under-researched together. It introduces diverse and often ignored and denied affect, feelings and emotions that are inextricably intertwined when working with violence, be it interpersonal, institutional, discursive, representational or ideological. In exploring these issues, the contributors to this book draw on a growing body of research that attends to the physically and emotionally abusive forms of violence and regards these expressions of violence as practices and social problems. The chapters offer multidisciplinary perspectives on various forms of interpersonal, institutional and ideological violence and their affectivity based on recent studies conducted in different parts of the world, including Europe, the United States, Africa and Australia. They present research results from various disciplines, such as cultural studies, environmental humanities, gender studies, history, linguistics, literature, media studies, psychology, social psychology, social policy, social work and sociology. From the perspective of violence studies, our emphasis is on addressing violating interpersonal, institutional and ideological practices as gendered and affective processes in daily life and institutions and in media and culture. In doing so, the book presents empirically and theoretically informed approaches to the intersection of violence, gender and affect and introduces interpersonal violence as a source of social inequality and as an integral part of structured power and social relations. The aim is to challenge conventional explanations, raise new questions and offer insights for understanding and resolving social problems related to violence and its prevention. The book’s interdisciplinary approach calls

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for new conceptual and theoretical approaches to violence, gender and affect. In response, it offers theoretical and conceptual support alongside practical and pragmatic support for people suffering from violating practices, violence and violent affect or affect caused by violence. Further, the analyses and explanations that the chapters provide have value in amplifying the voices of those exposed to violence, those witnessing violence and victims of violence. The book also offers a solid research basis for better violence prevention planning, policy formation and programme development. With its comprehensive and integrative approach, this book is meant to propose new ideas and tools for academics and practitioners to improve their theoretical and practical understandings of these phenomena in a globalised world.

Structure of the Book The book is divided into four parts to present differing but overlapping intersections of violence, gender and affect. After this introduction (Part I), the subsequent sections respectively deal with interpersonal violence (Part II), institutional violence (Part III) and ideological violence (Part IV). Part II, Interpersonal Violence, lays the basis for understanding violence as a contextual, structural and gendered phenomenon by collecting chapters with historical, theoretical and conceptual accounts of gendered interpersonal and domestic violence and their interconnectedness with affect. The focus is on interpersonal violence as a phenomenon intertwined with emotions and affective practices in different historical times, places and relationships. The academic understanding of gender has broadened, whilst performing gender in more ways than just in the frame of a rigid binary gender system has become more culturally acceptable. This notwithstanding, a constant cross-cultural bias in interpersonal violence seems to go on and on; the majority of the perpetrators have historically been and still are male, whereas the majority of the victims of domestic and intimate partner violence have been and still are women. This part addresses the gendered groundwork of interpersonal violence: the conservative gender order and patriarchy as evident constituents of

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familial control, domestic homicides, men’s violence against both women and men and, finally, the emotions of gravity in violence prevention work and research of violence. The theme running through these chapters is that the early modern normative and patriarchal interpretation of gender roles, family and domestic hierarchies has shaped and is still shaping institutional regimes, such as judicial and cultural norms, which continue to emphasise gendered interpretations of the causes of certain acts of violence. At the same time, the tendency to explain violence and criminal behaviour either as a consequence of the victim’s behaviour or as a socially restricted problem has prevented contemporaries from seeing the violating ideological, institutional and affective practices and rendered interventions ineffective. Chapter 2, ‘Familial Control, Collectivity and Gendered Shame: Past and Present Vulnerabilities’ by Satu Lidman, focuses on familial control of women and gendered shame both historically and in contemporary culture. The author demonstrates the link between domestic violence and an understanding of shame and honour as collectively shared and how they are tied to heteronormativity and gendered perceptions of acceptable behaviour. Thus, questions concerning who has the right to use violence and against whom and who has the right to control are at the very heart of this chapter. Lidman argues that domestic violence and honour-related violence are entwined and that it would be unethical to either fully juxtapose them or keep silent about their partial parallels. By analysing the manifestations of honour-related violence both in contemporary and pre-modern Europe, she suggests that religion is not its major driving force, although honour-related violence is often associated with Islam. She highlights that it has been very common also in Christian Europe, as indeed all over the world, for patriarchal systems to dictate women’s position and behaviour as wives, daughters or sisters. The patriarchal gender order is, thus, a more crucial factor behind honour-related violence than religion. Patriarchy is used to justify the use of power by elderly males over other family members, such as wives and daughters, thus tying familial relations with a profoundly gendered honour code. In this patriarchal order, honour and shame are understood as collective rather than individual. In this context, male family members are allowed and obligated to control and punish ‘their’ women if they break the

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strict gendered norms. Lidman maintains that it is necessary to consider whether and in what contexts patriarchal gender roles, which emphasise collectivity, and other social norms may contribute to violence in close relationships. She suggests that in dealing with honour-related violence, shifting the shame from the victims to the perpetrators and describing honour-related violence as abuse will help in preventing it. In Chapter 3, ‘Domestic Homicide and Emotions from the Late 19th Century to the 1920s’, Anna Kantanen and Jari Eilola continue the historical analysis of transformations of violence as a phenomenon and what counts as violence. They study the different forms of lethal domestic violence in Finland between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking as their starting point the observation that there was a qualitative change in homicides and violence in Europe during that time, they enquire into how this ‘fatalistic violence’ (Cottier and Raciti 2013) is described in their archival materials. Fatalistic violence is characterised by strong feelings between the perpetrators and their victims. Perpetrators in 1890–1930 were, as they still are, most often male, and the victims were lovers or spouses, children and other relatives. The authors analyse archival materials from this period and suggest that many violent crimes were not impulsive but planned. Domestic violence cases ranged from killing one’s spouse (most often wives) to stabbing male siblings to murdering or poisoning multiple family members. Affect, such as hate, anger, fear and frustration, was frequently present. The perpetrators often meant to kill the victim and then commit suicide, and there was frequently evidence of their emotional disturbance. Kantanen and Eilola deepen the understanding of historical European domestic homicides by demonstrating that abusive relationships and prolonged violence were major causes of those homicides. They argue that the majority of domestic violence cases exemplify the traditional and persistent forms of family violence, as homicide and severe violence were closely related to questions of household authority or inconsistencies in property disputes. Bob Pease claims in Chapter 4, ‘Gendering Violence: Theorising the Links Between Men, Masculinities and Violence’, that instead of men’s violence against women being substantially different from men’s violence against men, there are actually commonalities between them

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that merit attention. He criticises individualistic approaches to violence and suggests that it should be acknowledged that all violence—including men’s violence against men—is gendered. Pease, thus, emphasises the patriarchal gender relations behind men’s violence against both men and women and the need to analyse patriarchy as structural violence and masculinity as a patriarchy-based ideology instead of analysing masculinities as individual and without a broader structural and ideological context. He states, ‘the ideological beliefs held by men who are violent towards women are the same beliefs informing men’s violence towards men’, including ‘a traditional understanding of manhood and masculinity, achieving status through fighting and a view of women as property’. Moreover, Pease encourages ‘intersectionalising’ men’s violence against men, acknowledging that it is not only women who are oppressed by patriarchy. Men’s power and privileges vary according to their social class, age, race and sexuality, to mention but a few of the intersecting differences. Peace’s examples of men’s violence—school shootings and homophobic and racist hate crimes—are based on the hierarchy of hegemonic masculinities and masculinities inferior to them. In chapter 5, ‘Serious Emotions of Gravity: On Working on Men’s Violences and Violences to Women’, Jeff Hearn scrutinises the many emotional aspects of researching violence. He presents a multidimensional reflection of his vast experience of working with emotions and violence since the late 1970s and brings forward emotions of gravity in various phases of the research process. He invites readers to a retrospective and intimate inspection of the violence prevention work done in the field and the academic research of violence in the past couple of decades. In doing so, he is focusing on the affects and emotions involved and substantiating how interpersonal, institutional and ideological practices are unavoidably intertwined in studying violence and violence prevention. He suggests that violence in itself and researching violence engender emotions, mostly negative, and stresses that awareness of these emotions is a vital part of researching violence. While many of the tasks in the work on violence elicit negative emotions, Hearn also refers to positive aspects, such as the importance of collegiality and togetherness. He discusses the challenges of the gendering of men and connecting feminist research and being male in researching men’s violence in a profeminist way. The

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chapter shows that critical research on men’s violence is urgently needed, although at the same time, there is a pressing ongoing call for both deepening and widening the scope of violence research. This book, for its part, offers some answers to that call, too. ∗ ∗ ∗ Part III, titled Institutional Violence, comprises contributions regarding institutional and affective practices in different contexts of social and health care and the governmental processes of deporting asylum seekers. Whereas the previous sections mainly address gendered interpersonal and domestic violence and their intersections with affect, the four chapters in this part illuminate different forms and consequences of institutional violence: the affective practices of domestic violence interventions in social work as well as reporting, reflecting and recognising emotions in therapeutic work with domestic violence perpetrators; good and bad care and violent institutional practices in nursing homes; and deportations as a form of slow violence from the perspective of anti-deportation protests. All four chapters address the continuities of violence from the perspective of institutional and affective practices and emotions as embodied experiences of judgements. In these chapters, affective practices draw on the idea that emotions influence the ways in which we think and act. Special attention is paid to gendered practices and conceptions and to examining the ideological and institutional practices that affect the kinds of experiences and emotions of being hurt to which people are exposed and protected against. In Chapter 6, ‘Institutional and Affective Practices of Domestic Violence Interventions in Social Work: Malignant Positioning of the Victims’, Sisko Piippo, Marita Husso, Pasi Hirvonen, Marianne Notko and Kateˇrina Glumbíková investigate the institutional and affective practices of domestic violence interventions in social work. The study examines the expressions of Finnish social workers’ emotions related to intervening in domestic violence and how these expressions position the victims. The process of encountering and intervening in domestic violence is often challenging; ideological presumptions, conceptions, gender-neutral discussions and misrecognition of violence influence

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institutional arrangements and practices and the ways in which professionals feel about and respond to the violence. The authors use positioning theory to analyse social workers’ focus group interview data. They consider, first, how emotions expressed by social workers assign positions and moral assumptions to the social workers’ and victims’ rights and duties and, second, how the display of emotions is connected to the social workers’ positioning of the victims. The findings suggest that gender neutrality, as an ideological and institutional practice, can be used to rationalise and justify the rejection of violence as a phenomenon as well as professional inactivity in addressing gendered violence. Therefore, changing institutional and affective practices that enable the malignant positioning of victims of violence requires changing gender-neutral rhetoric in the conceptualisation of violence as well as ideological and institutional practices related to ignorance and the rejection of violence. In Chapter 7, ‘Reporting, Reflecting and Recognising Emotions in Therapeutic Work with Domestic Violence Perpetrators: Experiences of the Jyväskylä Group Model’ by Heli Siltala, Helena Päivinen and Aarno Laitila, the view shifts to situations where domestic violence has been recognised and is being addressed by professionals. The chapter discusses the various ways in which professionals can focus on emotions in working with perpetrators of domestic violence. The analysed data comprise therapeutic group discussions with perpetrators participating in the Jyväskylä model for domestic violence. Theory-oriented content analysis of the data suggests that perpetrators’ self-regulation can be promoted by recognising and addressing primary feelings (vulnerability, fear, jealousy, etc.) that may manifest as anger and aggressive behaviour. Additionally, emotional processing may be utilised in promoting victim empathy and taking responsibility for one’s violent behaviour. The authors argue that long-term change towards non-violence requires understanding and processing emotions at several levels. Such emotion work can be highly beneficial, but it is also challenging for professionals, who must differentiate between accepting emotions and disapproving of violent behaviour. The authors also highlight that violence should not be conceptualised solely as a personal problem, as it is also strongly associated with ideological and institutional practices and factors such as power relations, the gendered orders and societal environment.

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In Chapter 8, ‘(In)visibility of Good and Bad Practices in Nursing Homes: A Vicious Circle’, Ana Paula Gil discusses in more detail the ways in which institutional practices and detrimental working conditions constitute structural and institutional violence. The chapter explores insufficient and inadequate elderly care as forms of abuse and neglect and highlights the interdependence between working conditions and quality of care practices. The chapter is based on interviews with care workers in Portuguese care homes. The data shed light on the differences between good and bad care and show how working conditions interfere in care quality practices in institutional settings. The findings reveal that excessive workloads and harsh working conditions, low qualifications and poor pay and organisational conflict lead to high staff turnover and staff shortages, which are the main factors underlying elder mistreatment in care practices. The poor working conditions affect the emotions and feelings and physical and mental health of care workers and, consequently, those in need of care. Thus, the lack of recognition of care work, poor wages and difficult working conditions of care workers have a direct impact on the quality of care, and these issues need to be addressed more efficiently to avoid institutional violence, abuse and neglect and ensure quality care for the elderly. The chapter addresses care work as a source of tension and inequalities of gender, age, race and immigration status. In Chapter 9, ‘The Slow Violence of Deportability’, Karina Horsti and Päivi Pirkkalainen theorise deportation as an institutional practice and a form of slow violence that hurts not only its main target but also the people nearby. In 2015, European countries received an unprecedented number of asylum seekers. Later, the deportation of those whose requests for asylum had been rejected began. The Finnish Immigration Service significantly tightened its policies, and increasingly strict asylum criteria resulted in deportations at an unprecedented level. Consequently, protests against deportations increased and became publicly salient. While forced removal can be seen as a single, potentially violent act, deportability is a slow process. The violence ‘happens’ rather than ‘is done’ and, therefore, deportability may not be understood as violence. By analysing thematic interviews with people who have contested deportations, the authors examine how citizens who are proximate to deportable migrants ‘withness’ deportability and how they begin to see and feel

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the invisible, slow violence done to others and decide to act. Thus, making visible violence and violating ideological and institutional practices that would otherwise remain unrecognised is crucial in current anti-deportation activism. ∗ ∗ ∗ Part IV, Ideological Violence, discusses violence at a structural, political and belief-systems level. In this part, gendered and violent physical and verbal practices and cultural and political beliefs are explored in the framework of ideological violence. The section introduces three distinct approaches that dismantle the ways in which ideologies work behind or at the intersection of violence, gender and affect: racist verbal and physical humiliation and violence as a means of colonialism and white masculine power, hate speech as a form of verbal digital violence that circulates misogyny and racism, right-wing populist discourse and xenophobic policies as means of structural violence, and environmental slow violence as an example of anthropocentrism. These approaches pay special critical attention to gender and various masculinities and men’s detrimental behaviour, behaviour of men holding hegemonic positions in particular. Alongside men’s direct violence against women and men as manifestations of patriarchy, masculine manifestations of racism, white power, right-wing populist ideology and, on a wider scale, anthropocentrism are explored in a broader political context: colonialism, influential populist politicians’ online communication, Brexit and climate change. In Chapter 10, ‘Humiliation and Violence in Kenyan History’, Brett L. Shadle examines aspects of the history of violence, humiliation and racialised power dynamics in twentieth-century Kenya. In colonial Kenya, it was whites who exercised violence and humiliation using both verbal and physical, often impulsive, violence to protect their status and to enforce a racial hierarchy. African Gikuyu men were powerless. They had to show deference and suffer violence and humiliation. Shadle reads works produced by Gikuyu men, which often mention the humiliation and violence that they experienced. Besides physical humiliation, the authors of these accounts bitterly recall the actions and words that struck their self-image and challenged their self-understanding as full members

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of the community and as mature, responsible, adult men. The emotionally charged moments of violence and humiliation that the Gikuyu men endured were intensely personal and yet, within a larger colonial context, they experienced the attacks as less for their individual failings than for their race. The Gikuyu authors were compelled by humiliation and violence to think not just about themselves and their personal bitterness for being called ‘boy’ or being slapped but also about colonialism and neo-colonialism as ideologies. Whereas violence and humiliation left them deprived of human dignity, it also served as the basis of new understandings of racism and racial solidarity and, thus, of political action. In Chapter 11, ‘Gendered Violence Online: Hate Speech as an Intersection of Misogyny and Racism’, Tuija Saresma, Sanna Karkulehto and Piia Varis continue scrutinising ideological violence by men as intersectional, turning their gaze to violent texts published on social media. They analyse misogynous and racist discourses that right-wing populist leaders Donald Trump in the United States and Jussi Halla-aho in Finland circulate in their tweets and blogs as a part of the contemporary right-wing populist upheaval. The authors argue that this type of gender-specific and racialising online hostility is a new, digitally mediated form of violence. Furthermore, they suggest that despite being a relatively new phenomenon, it is an integral part of the chain of violence. They emphasise that online discussions are not a separate sphere but that the effects of misogynous and racist online hate speech targeted at ‘others’—be they women, immigrants or other marginalised people in society—also affect offline realities, preparing the ground for physical violence against certain kinds of people as enemies. Hate speech often utilises the affective rhetoric and binary logic of populism that constructs ‘us’ and ‘them’ as hierarchic and adversarial groups. The authors apply the concept of stochastic violence to refer to ‘the simultaneously predictable and unpredictable nature of violent speech and its consequences’. Using the concept of stochastic violence, they emphasise that violent, hateinciting speech, specifically as it appears in online environments, works to naturalise ‘others’ and the understanding of them as threats and targets of hostility, aggression and violence. They demonstrate that in justifying violence, inciting and mobilising affect, such as fear and hatred, is vital.

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In Chapter 12, ‘Violence and Harm in the Context of Brexit— Gender, Class and the Migrant “Other”’, Marianne Hester discusses violence in the context of Brexit. She, too, emphasises the right-wing ideological background of present-day currents, arguing that neoliberalism generates increased inequalities which, in turn, generate violence. Hester analyses the processes of lying and xenophobia related to the Brexit campaign as structural violence and focuses on the roles of class, gender, sexuality and the geographical and ‘ethnic’ origins of migrants and citizens in the referendum campaign. She conceptualises the Brexit campaign, the referendum and their consequences as cultural violence using autoethnographically her own experiences as a non-UK EU citizen living in Britain. She brings to the fore questions of gender, race and sexuality in her analysis of Brexit, showing how far-right politics and the creation of a ‘hostile environment for illegal immigrants’ worked in the Brexit campaign by inciting fear and confusion in not only racialised others but also white middle class academic non-UK EU citizens. Hester deals with existential issues of identity and belonging, describing the anxieties that Brexit caused at the individual level while simultaneously reminding us of the big picture: the structural and ideological levels of right-wing nationalist, xenophobic and misogynous violence. Part IV, Ideological violence, closes with ‘Environmental Violence and Postnatural Oceans: Low Trophic Theory in the Registers of Feminist Posthumanities’, in which Marietta Radomska and Cecilia Åsberg take a new stance and discuss the latest and perhaps most invasive form of violence: environmental violence. Radomska and Åsberg enquire into how environmental violence is often hardly seen, as it occurs gradually, out of sight and on a long-term scale as subtle, slow violence. They also point out the gendered background and logic behind environmental violence and the ways in which it affects both the environment and the people. The future does not look promising, and it is justifiable to ask, as they do, ‘What are our ethical obligations to our fellow species and the entire planet to right the violent practices and their consequences, which we have caused?’ Their answer is to engage in an ethics of cohabitation (cf. Karkulehto et al. 2020) and mutual flourishing ‘to confront our past mistakes, our current violences, our voracity, and the unknown harms we may be inflicting’. This kind of ethical approach of responsibility

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and care is indispensable and very much needed also when preventing gendered violence and scrutinising its related affect. The aim of this anthology is to bring this kind of ethics to the essential levels where violence occurs and affects us all: the interpersonal, the institutional and the ideological.

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(Eds.), Sukupuoli ja väkivalta – lukemisen etiikkaa ja politiikkaa (pp. 9–27). Helsinki: SKS. Keen, S. (2011). Introduction: Narrative and the emotions. Poetics Today, 32(1), 1–53. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-1188176. Kilby, J. (2013). Introduction to special issue: Theorizing violence. European Journal of Social Theory, 16 (3), 261–272. Krug, E. G., Mercy, J. A., Dahlberg, L. L., & Zwi, A. B. (2002). The world report on violence and health. The Lancet, 360 (9339), 1083–1088. https:// doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(02)11133-0. Liljeström, M., & Paasonen, S. (2010). Introduction: Feeling differences. In M. Liljeström & S. Paasonen (Eds.), Working with affect in feminist readings: Disturbing differences (pp. 1–7). London: Routledge. Lindstedt Cronberg, M. (2009). Med våldsam hand: Hustrumisshandel I 1800talets Sverige. En studie av rättsliga, kyrkliga och politiska sammanhang. Lund: Lund University (Media-Tryck). McNay, L. (2004). Situated intersubjectivity. In B. Marshall & A. Witz (Eds.), Engendering the social . New York: Open University Press. McNay, L. (2008). Against recognition. Cambridge: Polity Press. Näre, S., & Ronkainen, S. (2007). Paljastettu intiimi - sukupuolistuneen väkivallan dynamiikka. Rovaniemi: Lapin yliopistokustannus. Ngai, S. (2005). Ugly feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pease, B. (2019). Facing Patriarchy. From a Violent Gender Order to a Culture of Peace. London: Zed books Ltd. Pedwell, C., & Whitehead, A. (2012). Affecting feminism: Question of feeling in feminist theory. Feminist Theory, 13(2), 115–129. Pinker, S. (2012). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined . New York: Penguin Books. Probyn, E. (2005). Blush: Faces of shame. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ray, L. (2011). Violence and society. London: Sage. Rinne, J., Kajander, A., & Haanpää, R. (2020). Johdanto: Affektit ja tunteet kulttuurien tutkimuksessa. In J. Rinne, A. Kajander, & R. Haanpää (Eds.), Affektit ja tunteet kulttuurien tutkimuksessa (pp. 6–30). Helsinki: Ethnos. Roper, L. (1991). The holy household: Women and morals in Reformation Augsburg. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sandmo, E. (1999). Voldsamfunnets undergang. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.

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Saresma, T. (2018a). Circulating the origin myth of Western civilization— The racial imagery of ‘men of the north’ as an imaginary heritage in white supremacist blogs. In D. Morse, Z. Réti, & M. Takács (Eds.), (Web)Sites of memory. Cultural heritage in the digital age (pp. 68–81). Debrecen: University of Debrecen. Saresma, T. (2018b). Politics of fear and racialized rape: Intersectional reading of the Kempele rape case. In P. Hervik (Ed.), Racialization, racism and anti-racism in the Nordic countries (pp. 63–91). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Saresma, T. (2018c). Gender populism—Three cases of Finns Party actors’ traditionalist anti-feminism. In U. Kovala, E. Palonen, M. Ruotsalainen, & T. Saresma (Eds.), Populism on the loose (pp. 177–200). Jyväskylä: Nykykulttuuri. http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-39-7401-5. Schwerhoff, G. (2004). Social control of violence, violence as social control: The case of early modern Germany. In H. Roodenburg & P. Spierenburg (Eds.), Social control in Europe: 1500–1800 (Vol. 1, pp. 220–246). Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Smith, L., Wetherell, M., & Campbell, G. (2018). Emotion, affective practices, and the past in the present. New York: Routledge. Strange, C., & Cribb, R. (2014). Historical perspectives on honour, violence and emotion. In C. Strange, R. Cribb, & C. E. Forth (Eds.), Honour, violence and emotions in history (pp. 1–22). London: Bloomsbury Academic. Walby, S. (2012). Violence and society: An introduction to an emerging field of sociology. Current Sociology, 60 (7), 1–17. Walby, S., & Towers, J. (2017). Measuring violence to end violence: Mainstreaming gender. Journal of Gender-Based Violence, 1(1), 11–31. https://doi. org/10.1332/239868017x14913081639155. Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and emotions: A new social understanding. Croydon: Sage. Ylikangas, H., Johansen, J. C. V., Johansson, K., & Næss, H. E. (2000). Family, state, and patterns of criminality: Major tendencies in the work of the courts, 1550–1850. In E. Österberg, & S. B. Sogner (Eds.), People meet the law: Control and conflict-handling in the courts: The Nordic countries in the post-Reformation and pre-industrial period (pp. 57–139). Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.

Part II Interpersonal Violence

2 Familial Control, Collectivity and Gendered Shame: Past and Present Vulnerabilities Satu Lidman

Ideally, familial relationships are the main source of healthy self-esteem, and of confidence in each family member’s right and ability to fulfil their personal potential. However, this can only be true in an environment that fosters both mutual respect and freedom of choice. If the emotional climate and everyday life of the family is built on hierarchies and inequality—inequality related, for example, to status and gender— and, particularly, if shame is used as an instrument of control, familial peace can perhaps be achieved if certain social norms, passed down from above, are followed. But such a status quo must not be confused with happiness. In this article, I investigate forms of domestic violence (DV) that are linked to an understanding of shame and honour as something collective rather than individual, and tied to heteronormativity and gendered S. Lidman (B) Tampere University, Tampere, Finland e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Husso et al. (eds.), Violence, Gender and Affect, Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56930-3_2

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perceptions of acceptable behaviour. These are key elements in comprehending the historical roots of DV in Europe on the one hand, and the topical issue of honour-related violence (HRV) on the other. It would be unethical to fully juxtapose these two phenomena, but equally distorting to keep silent about their partial parallels. The possible connections between cultural conventions and violence must be discussed in a straightforward yet sensitive manner. How do gender roles contribute to DV? What do we need to know about collectivity and social control in order to address HRV? Are there other lessons from the Western history of violence that today’s multicultural societies could draw from?

To Love and Protect—Or to Control? In her autobiographical film What Will People Say (Hva vil folk si) the Norwegian director Iram Haq (2017) describes the vicious circle of HRV. The title of the motion picture, in all its simplicity, encapsulates the core fear present in many patriarchal communities irrespective of time and place. It explains many aspects of familial control linked to conservative gender roles and collective perceptions of shame and honour, and emphasizes the difficulties that various individuals experience, depending on their position in the family hierarchy. In the familial setting, which Haq investigates in relation to Pakistani culture, one daughter’s ‘excessively Western’ behaviour is a serious risk to her safety, because it is seen as a stain on the whole family. Under social pressure from his community, particularly other men, her father struggles with a decision: will sending the teenager back to her parents’ native country to ‘learn manners’ solve the problem, or does the situation require harsher disciplinary action—up to the extreme of taking her life? Rumours spread, forcing him to fight the shame and act: not out of disregard for his daughter but from his love for her. He is simultaneously driven by the need to uphold his own reputation and the well-being of the family unit. The cycle of honour, shame and social control that can potentially escalate into physical violence, as described by Haq, is well-known by HRV researchers and those working in victim services (Härkönen

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2004; Tauro and van Dijken 2009; Grans 2018; Khan 2018; Björktomta 2019). In many ways, the dynamics are akin to that of the perceived ‘natural order’ in European history. Even then it did not mean that the head of the household had unlimited power to chastise other members of the family; on the contrary, excess disciplinary action from the patriarch was only justified under specific circumstances, and usually reasoned by quoting the Bible—quite crucially, the teachings of St. Paul (Lidman 2018, 2019). Despite this well-established evidence from historical research, we do not, as a rule, think of DV as something specifically Christian. Similarly, in contravention of the prevalent understanding, HRV does not derive specifically from Islam—or from any religion, for that matter. It is, rather, the result of a patriarchal gender order that puts collective honour first, relegating individual rights and identities to a secondary status (Darvishpour 2003, p. 89; Husseini 2009, p. 35; Khan 2018). Typically, this order has meant control over female sexuality. Parents have been forced to consider disciplinary measures towards their offspring, and husbands towards their wives. All civilizations have placed limits on such familial control, but where the limits are drawn and who can arbitrate whether they are respected or violated, depends on the historical period and culture. Actions that can seem justified in one context constitute outright violence in another. For centuries, patriarchal systems all over the world have dictated women’s ‘rightful’ places as wives, daughters or sisters. The driving force in upbringing has been to uphold tradition, including heteronormative and binary perceptions of masculinity and femininity, and the related attitudes have been passed down from one generation to the next. Everyday life has historically been built upon a hierarchic inequality that contributes to maintaining the patriarchal gender order and prevents it from being questioned (Darvishpour 2003; Hooks 2004; Lidman 2018, 2019). These historic constructs are globally deep-rooted and have strongly influenced societal structures, as well as family life, on an emotional level. The experience of personal acceptance is entangled with social assumptions: expectations mostly of respectability for men, and of chastity for women. Despite the indisputable continuity of such cultural conventions, history has shown that they are possible to change.

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When familial relations are tied to a gendered honour code, any violation of which is considered to have collective consequences, conflicts may arise. This is especially true when a woman is suspected of having sexual relations out of wedlock. By crossing the boundaries of accepted sexual behaviour, she violates the social norm which, essentially, boils down to premarital abstention. In some cases even much more trivial misdemeanours, such as wearing make-up or dancing, are perceived as a threat to the harmony of the community (Coomaraswamy 2005; Husseini 2009; Grans 2018). To prevent and intervene in HRV, one must understand the dynamics of honour and shame, but also the roles played by gender and collectivity. As the phenomenon is closely linked to the heteronormative worldview, not only women and girls but also homosexual men, among others, are at risk. The conservative family ideology restricts many aspects of sexual and gender identities as well as choices related to them, including reproduction. In premodern Europe and beyond, notions of chastity and obedience as feminine virtues contributed to how the use of violence as a means of control in family conflicts was justified and belittled. Even when there was no actual evidence of immorality, or in cases of rape, the mere suspicion of indecency could be connected to a shame that would harm the whole community. Collective values were emphasized above individuality, and the wish to maintain societal order meant many forms of control. Acting according to the gendered script and norms made life easier for both men and women. Fathers and husbands, in particular, had to consider wielding their disciplinary power in order to prevent or diminish shame. They faced social pressure to do so, as a lack of action could constitute a failure in their manly duties. In many ways, the honour of both men and the community rested on women’s actions. Therefore, women had to be controlled and, if necessary, punished (Lidman 2018). As a result of this constellation, everyone was vulnerable in close relationships: some people tended to be seen as a potential risk, whereas others were expected to actively protect the family’s honour through psychological control or physical harm. Today, due to the traditional ethics of honour prevalent, among others, in the Arab and Kurdish cultures, a woman must always pay attention to the possible consequences of her actions upon the men in her close

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circle, be it her father, brothers, uncles or husband. In other words, the male honour is tied to female behaviour (Härkönen 2004, p. 89; Coomaraswamy 2005; Wikan 2008, p. 54). Nevertheless, as the male physiology does not in and of itself produce aggression or cruelty, in the context of either past or present societies, the focus must not lie on biology. Instead, it must be on the cultural interpretations of dominant, heterosexual masculinity which justify subordination and violence (Fuller 1996; Jokinen 2000; Hooks 2004; Synnott 2009). In a patriarchal environment, the layers of hierarchy and control cannot but affect the ways in which family members express their love for each other. A father, for example, may have to equilibrate between supporting his children’s individual choices and his own gendered duty to police the breaking of social norms. The concept of patriarchy can be both rewarding and challenging. Using it to strengthen assumptions of collective male guilt and women’s universal victimhood does a disservice to feminist approaches (Bennett 2006, p. 152). Rather, one must ask what it means to grow up in a family that requires absolute chastity from girls and lays the burden of guarding it upon boys. How are young people’s identities affected by putting aside their personal visions and wishes and focusing on collective aims? What are the actual options for a grown man in a case of family conflict, when he knows that respect among his peers depends on how well he plays his role as the head of the household? Additionally, it is important to bear in mind that mothers not only take part in honour-related negotiations, but they also hold a key position in bringing up both boys and girls.

Collective Violence in Individualistic Societies For centuries, the shame caused by a family member who was acting against idealized gender roles—an unruly daughter or adulterous wife, say—was thought to threaten the honour of the family unit, as well as the community at large. This construct was woven into secular criminal law right across Europe through the construct of ‘God’s wrath’, by which individual sins can endanger the whole society. It justified patriarchal household rule and, critically, meant that there was an interest

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in settling crises within the family circle (Lidman 2018, 2019). Since the breaking of social norms by an individual had collective consequences, it legitimized control and punishment, both within the family and in the justice system. In modern terms, many acts of abuse were accepted or even encouraged as rightful ways to fight shame. It was only close to and during the twentieth century that perceptions of familial control started to change. On a structural level, chastisement turned into DV and became a societal rather than familial issue. On an emotional level, however, historically and culturally constructed gendered shame continued to colour the experience of victimhood. The pattern of DV prevention and regulation in Europe can to a great extent be summarized as the transition from private to public concern. In terms of government responsibility, the crucial development has mainly taken place only from the 1990s onwards (Kotanen 2013; Grans 2018, pp. 26–27). In spite of these changes, DV victimization is still largely connected with emotions of shame which, among other factors, keep many victims silent. Thus, DV has remained a dark and hidden figure in crime statistics. By discussing the issue more openly and developing services for victims, societies have managed, at least partially, to lift the burden of shame. Recently, the #Metoo movement reinforced the idea that the shame is on the perpetrator, not the victim. Yet for victims of HRV, the pressure to stay silent remains high, as they consider the consequences in the context of collectivity and might not seek help for fear of endangering the reputation of their communities. HRV is in many ways similar to other forms of gendered abuse in close relationships, but it is also useful to conceptualize it specifically by considering the vulnerabilities and risk factors tied to collectivist perceptions of shame and honour (Bredal 2014; Grans 2018; Lidman and Hong 2018). It is not exceptional for women in collectivist cultures to accept or even endorse the abuse and killing of women in the name of honour (Bates 2018; Khan 2018). Collectivity is, essentially, the feature that makes it difficult for today’s Western societies to prevent and intervene in HRV. At the same time, it is often forgotten that collectivity also brings support and safety. It should not be demonized; instead, one should strive to understand how the ideals of human rights and gender

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equality might look in the eyes of those who were not raised according to individualistic principles. Since the 1990s, the phenomena of honour-related violence, abuse and control have gained increasing media attention and raised many concerns (Bredal 2014). Victim services and instruments for prevention are being developed, especially in countries which are mandated to address the issue by the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention. In the Convention, and typically also in national policymaking, HRV is mainly included under the umbrella of violence against women and domestic abuse, and preventive measures and interventions have become state responsibilities (Council of Europe 2011; Grans 2018; Björktomta 2019). During the last thirty years, lessons on various dimensions of HRV have been learnt, but in too many cases through serious losses. The specific characteristics, mechanisms and risks of HRV in all their complexity are still not widely enough known. Dramatic practices such as forced or child marriage, female genital mutilation and homicide make it difficult to discern the actual scope of the phenomenon and the various forms of participation of different individuals and genders in negotiating and committing the abuse. Yet, at their core, the most widespread forms of HRV are a variety of control measures, threats and other types of psychological violence. It is important to mainstream a more comprehensive understanding of HRV, but not even professionals possess adequate know-how on recognizing and reacting to it (Hansen et al. 2016, pp. 15– 18; Bates 2018; Lidman and Hong 2018). The difficulty of encountering HRV and estimating its risks is closely linked to the individualization of society. The ways in which the violence, its victims and perpetrators, and the related government responsibilities are viewed in Western societies have gradually changed. The logic that justifies control and violence towards one’s own family members in the name of collective values and honour can be hard to follow for those not socialized into it (Wikan 2008, pp. 16–18). Proponents of the patriarchal honour code will, for their part, quite likely struggle to understand the perceptions of family and gender that prevail in societies where drastic changes have taken place in this respect. For many men, the advancement of women’s rights may feel like a loss of status and power. The fact that women have gained respect and liberties

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may bring uncertainty, and it can be challenging for men to transform their mindset from breadwinner to equal player (Darvishpour 2003, pp. 61–62). For many immigrant men, internalizing gender equality and human rights can initially spark a crisis. In order to work, a new model of masculinity has to provide both men and women with something better than the conventional system. Also, new content and constructive outlets must be found for the masculine honour code. The cultural shift from a family-centred, collective worldview to one that emphasizes and praises individuality has been relatively thorough, although it is much more recent than some might think. In the 1960s, for example, single mothers could still encounter disdain in many secular and liberal societies, while the status of divorcée was a source of shame even later than that. Even though over the course of the twentiethcentury adultery was decriminalized and many countries’ legislations gradually came to allow women greater social and financial independence, in many ways the culture of conservative gender roles prevailed and continued to have an impact on violence in close relationships (Lidman 2018). Still, in today’s individualistic societies the use of subjugation or violence to solve conflicts does not get much support from extended families: in fact, it is condemned as cruel and unjustified. Herein, at its core, lies the difference between HRV and DV. According to the current understanding, the perpetration of violence in close relationships is associated with transgenerational traumas, an incapacity to deal with negative emotions, and other psychological issues (Schulman 2004; Costa et al. 2015). At the same time, it can be linked to gendered expectations and pressures that individuals may experience due to rigid interpretations of masculinity and femininity (Hooks 2004). Still, the idea that a whole family can be shamed by one member’s behaviour has almost completely dissolved and been forgotten in many societies. As a cultural construct, toxic masculinity remains an issue and DV has not disappeared, but the links between gender and violence are now differently perceived, excused and explained. In collectivist societies where honour norms are emphasized, however, perpetrators may feel that their actions are not only justified, but actually promote justice. They may distance themselves from guilt by linking the act to tradition and culture. From this point of view, the perpetrator

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can be regarded as a victim of circumstance and society—of the ancient and unfair traditions that guide his actions (Husseini 2009, pp. 14– 17). HRV can also be used to disguise the gravity of the crime or to explain actions that are actually otherwise motivated. It is important to try to increase the feminist understanding of violence in different cultural contexts (Chakravarti 2005, pp. 308–309). A man can be both a victim of a culture of violence and a perpetrator of violence, and the former does not diminish his responsibility for the latter. Instead, it alerts us to the need to break down cultural constructs and attitudes that permit people to ignore violence.

On the Challenges of Including ‘Culture’ in Gender and Violence Discourse All cultures have gendered structures that shape the relationships between men and women and continuously determine and channel the use of cultural meanings (Korhonen 2001, p. 137; Bennett 2006). Despite positive developments in gender equality and legal systems, DV remains substantially gendered (Niemi-Kiesiläinen 2004, p. 62; Nousiainen 2016; Björktomta 2019). From the point of view of HRV, it is crucial to understand gendered structures, but they are easy to misinterpret—unintentionally or intentionally. In societal discussion, one is well advised to avoid the heated topic of religion, as the violence phenomenon at hand is not religion-based. Despite good intentions, spotlighting cultural structures that produce violence can also be problematic due to the risk of stigmatization. In combating HRV silence is not an option, but how can it be done without labelling minorities or fuelling populist and racist agendas? The topic of HRV forces us to take cultural issues into account within the context of gender and violence. Yet in the Western world ‘culture’ ends up being mostly connected to specific immigrant communities. Consequently, public debates in the West have not remained unaffected by anti-immigration campaigns aiming at deliberately othering ‘foreigners’ who are often already marginalized (Virkki 2019). Even in attempts to tackle the issue neutrally, there seems to be a tendency

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to isolate violence from the mainstream society and place it elsewhere (Hong 2014). In this way, DV among the mainstream population can easily end up ignored, even though there is unquestionable evidence of its prevalence (Nousiainen 2016; Lidman 2018). Even the formulations of the Istanbul Convention have been criticized for framing certain forms of violence primarily as problems pertaining to some ‘cultures’ (Peroni 2016). All around the world, women are struggling with issues related to equality and violence, but it may be particularly difficult for those with an immigrant background. On the one hand, adopting Western values may expose them to honour-related conflicts in their community; on the other, living up to the conventional honour code hinders integration into the mainstream society (Hong 2014, p. 6). Combining the concepts of culture and violence can be misleading, as especially violence against immigrant women is a highly politicized topic (Wikan 2008, pp. 13– 14; Keskinen 2009, p. 17; Lemercier et al. 2012, p. 38). Non-Western women are easily dismissed as victims with less, if any, agency, abjectly oppressed by their ‘cultures’ (Peroni 2016). Whenever there is an opportunity in populists debates for othering and blaming minorities, it is often seized as an easy explanation for complex issues such as HRV. Focusing exclusively on certain cultural factors and obscuring social and historical aspects may lead to violence being culturized, as evinced by the case of Fadime S¸ ahindal in Sweden. The young woman of Kurdish origin was shot by her father in 2002. After her death, the discussion became polarized and images of two opposing cultures were presented: a supposedly egalitarian Swedish lifestyle juxtaposed with Kurdish patriarchalism (Keskinen 2009, pp. 17–19; Hong 2014). This is an example of how the ‘them vs. us’ mentality is often reinforced by media discourse and various online forums (Ahmed 2014; Virkki 2019). Such episodes may even contribute to the concealment of violence, as victims keep silent for the sake of their community’s reputation. Underlining inequality as a characteristic of minority cultures exposes them to marginalization and othering. If gender equality is designated as a condition for belonging to a nation, this creates a false illusion of unity among the hegemonic population (Ahmed 2014, pp. 42–44; Hong 2014, p. 8). Meanwhile, it can be forgotten that not all violence

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in immigrant communities is honour-related, and not all representatives of a particular culture are violent (Hansen et al. 2016). We tend to ignore ‘culture’ as a potential explanation for violence that takes place in the mainstream context. In turn, violence that is connected to cultural conventions, and therefore associated with certain minorities, raises complex affects among the public—not excluding professionals. People may feel very uncomfortable discussing the topic, out of fear of stigmatizing or ending up accused of racism. Violence is always a human rights violation and as such it must be taken seriously. However, it is important to acknowledge that different types of violence require different forms of prevention, intervention and support (Lidman and Hong 2018; Björktomta 2019). Sometimes even the sincerest aspirations of equality and non-discrimination can lead to difficulties in drawing the line between the unacceptable and the next best options. In Sweden, for example, social services faced a dilemma related to teenage girls and young women asking for false testimonies concerning their virginity. They were afraid of the consequences of their sexual activity being revealed to their parents. Writing a testimony like that would be untruthful, but it might also prevent violence. At the same time, it would reinforce cultural conventions related to sexuality that are no longer accepted in Swedish society (Ungdomsstyrelsen 2009, p. 21). Finally, cultural discourse also involves the risk of cultural relativism. Well-meaning people may adopt an uncritical line of thinking that dictates that all cultural practices should be equally respected. Excessive caution may lead them to excuse or even defend conventions that uphold certain forms of violence (Niemi-Kiesiläinen 2004, p. 57; Coomaraswamy 2005). It is therefore important to learn to differentiate between harmful practices and positive cultural elements, even if the latter seems incomprehensible to a stranger. The first must be rooted out, while the latter should be cherished, or at least respected. ‘Culture’ means and includes many things, but it must never excuse human rights violations.

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Cultural Sensitivity Does not Rule Out Criminal Liability Some features of collectivity and perceptions of gender roles appear to be risk factors for honour-related control and violence. However, they are not necessarily accepted by all members of a community or family. Also, just as all cultures change, neither are the conventions upholding HRV fixed (Wikan 2008, p. 67; Lemercier et al. 2012, p. 39). No community is as unanimous as HRV-related debates might imply, but addressing the issue is a balancing act. A perpetrator’s accountability is not negotiable based on cultural reasons, and yet understanding the motivations and influencing factors is not irrelevant—quite the opposite. Balancing is also needed between identifying risk groups and avoiding their stigmatization. It is important to nurture open dialogue on everybody’s right to live without fear and violence, both within the communities in which HRV is an issue and in the society at large. In all its complexity, violence is influenced by many intersecting factors. Thus, violence must never be explained in relation to any culture as a whole (Lidman 2018). Views on the justifiability of familial control and on what is shameful and what isn’t vary even within communities and between individuals who seemingly share a ‘cultural background.’ Neither ethnic origin nor gender can be taken as evidence of an individual’s attitudes. However, we need to identify the circumstances in which the likelihood of human rights violations increases. Combating HRV requires ongoing, careful consideration of the possible effects of gender, honour and collectivity. The most efficient interventions include a cultural sensitivity approach that promotes attitudinal change and, in some cases, helps the parties to a conflict to constructively resolve the challenging situation (Tauro and van Dijken 2009). The cultural sensitivity approach also recognizes the fact that perpetrators of HRV may have multiple personal experiences of violence. They may come from a country in which police and other authorities do not shy away from harsh methods, or they may have been exposed to violence, even torture, on the streets or in a war (Nyqvist and Hyvärinen 2012, p. 145). These kinds of traumas will quite likely influence the ways in which familial conflicts are solved.

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According to the Istanbul Convention, culture, custom, religion, tradition or honour shall not be considered as justification for violence under any circumstances, nor may they mitigate criminal liability (Council of Europe 2011, Art. 12 & 42). This is not in contradiction to the principles of cultural sensitivity, as the latter does not demand acceptance of violent behaviour in the name of respecting someone else’s culture. Instead, it means that attempts to prevent and intervene in violence can benefit from a constructive and honest attempt to understand the significance of people’s backgrounds and experiences. We should speak more about the connections between gender, culture and violence, but only when it is relevant in the given context. Neither gender nor cultural practices should be associated with violence in an ungrounded manner or for purposes of labelling. It may not be easy to work with victims and perpetrators from different cultures, but usually encountering people face to face and talking to them on an equal footing without prejudice will relieve tensions (Lemercier et al. 2012, pp. 31–34). Cultural sensitivity must not be confused with cultural relativism. The former is a valuable tool for anti-violence work that can broaden our understanding of how each person is simultaneously a product of their culture and an individual. Cultural conventions that we have been socialized into in childhood are meaningful, but they do not inevitably dictate our actions, values or emotions. Further, they do not diminish criminal responsibility.

Epilogue: What Can Be Done? At the end of her film, Haq gives the audience some hope by refraining from fulfilling the darkest scenario. In real life, though, similar conflicts have led to serious incidents, including so-called honour killings in numerous countries. Sometimes, as in the S¸ ahindal case in 2002, they have become wake-up calls for developing preventive initiatives. Indisputably, perpetrators of crime must take legal responsibility for their actions, but in terms of prevention it is necessary to understand what drives them and to learn to identify the cultural structures that can be linked to a risk of violence. Social pressure on the men of the family

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guides their actions and demonstrates how patriarchy contributes to transgenerational continuation of HRV. For a young person it is difficult to make choices in life if it can mean being rejected by the near and dear ones or being exposed to the risk of physical violence. The thought of remaining alone with the guilt of having torn apart the family and tarnished its honour can be unbearable. Many parallels could seemingly be drawn between the history of DV in Europe and the limited opportunities for resistance and for promoting attitudinal changes in collective settings, as illustrated by Haq in relation to HRV. However, the concept of the ideal husband or father has hardly ever involved the image of a raging tyrant. Even when, historically, disciplinary methods such as beating, whipping and isolating were accepted as part of familial control, they were ideally seen as the last resort. The code of conduct was primarily to discuss, teach and even negotiate, and to progress to harsher methods only when necessary (Lidman 2018, 2019). This spectrum of possibilities also exists in the context HRV. Unarguably, the patriarchal right to subjugate family members using control or violence does not fit with a human rights-based worldview. However, it is meaningful to try to understand parents whose roles as educators are influenced by a fear of shame and related social control. In considering the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, as well as how to react to it as a parent, they draw upon their own upbringing, experiences and beliefs of what is right and best for the family. The community’s expectations may create a perceived pressure to set aside one’s emotions. But how, then, can these types of control mechanisms and violence be tackled in practice? There can be no quick fixes for matters as deep-rooted in cultural conventions as HRV, but the most favourable approach for accelerating change is two-pronged. Firstly, societies must mainstream cultural sensitivity and build dialogue in all forums, offering professionals sufficient education on HRV and investing in better structures for prevention and intervention. Secondly, they must support community-based antiviolence work that aims at eliminating threats and increasing safety at the grassroots level, uprooting harmful practices and disseminating equality, while also respecting the constructive elements of different cultures.

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In practice, the second tactic often involves NGOs that specialize in HRV-related matters. Furthermore, it is important that professionals in the legal, educational, social and health sectors learn to distinguish HRV from other forms of DV. They must be educated in the specific characteristics of HRV from the perspectives not only of the victims, but also of the perpetrators and other members of the community who might be involved in the complex cases as bystanders or witnesses. They need to cooperate and be able to apply clear guidelines to dealing with risks and actual HRV incidents (Hansen et al. 2016; Lidman and Hong 2018). From the victim’s point of view, the threat of violence does not necessarily disappear after a legal conviction. The community may have transnational control over its members. Modern technology has proven efficient in rapidly spreading information about individuals’ whereabouts and activities (Hansen et al. 2016). This control also applies to those who are expected to resolve an honour conflict. All prevention of violence starts with recognition of the issue. For those who work with people at risk or deal with incidents that have already taken place, it is crucial to have opportunities to reflect their emotions and to identify their perceptions on issues such as shame, sexuality, gender roles and aggression (similar findings in Virkki et al. 2020). To prevent the escalation of HRV, special attention must be paid to early signs, such as changes in young people’s behaviour. Eradicating violence that is based on collective values requires a profound attitudinal change within the whole community. It is virtually impossible, and can be life-threatening, for individuals to promote changes by themselves. The surrounding society must support the shift, which should take place gently but firmly, without compromising human rights or, conversely, demonizing minorities. It must be understood that collectivity may be a risk factor in some contexts, but in others it includes elements of solidarity that bring people together and increase quality of life. Enhancing equality in the family context does not mean that parents should give up their roles as educators and become their children’s peers. What it does mean is that parental authority cannot suppress the right

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of children to explore and express themselves or to engage in relationships, nor can it compromise their integrity. Similarly, gender equality does not demand gender neutrality or a fading-out of differences between individuals. On the contrary, the various perceptions, performances and experiences of gender remain crucial elements of identity formation. The history of DV has shown that unequal power relations and the patriarchal gender order do not automatically lead to subordination and control, but they certainly lower the threshold for it. Shifting the shame from the victims onto the abuse and violence themselves will benefit societies at large. Therefore, the most critical steps for violence prevention are to focus on gender equality and sensitive but forthright sex education, while promoting human rights also in the family context. Finally, on the matter of HRV, societies must find the courage to discuss the possible connections between gender, violence and culture whenever this is relevant, and develop interventions accordingly.

References Ahmed, S. (2014 [2004]). The cultural politics of emotions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bates, L. (2018). Females perpetrating honour-based abuse: Controllers, collaborators or coerced? Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research. https:// doi.org/10.1108/JACPR-01-2018-0341. Bennett, J. M. (2006). History matters: Patriarchy and the challenge of feminism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Björktomta, S. (2019). Honor-based violence in Sweden—Norms of honor and chastity. Journal of Family Violence, 34, 449–460 (2019). https://doi.org/10. 1007/s10896-019-00039-1. Bredal, A. (2014). Ordinary v. other violence? Conceptualising honour-based violence in Scandinavian public policies. In A. K. Gill, C. Strange, & K. Roberts (Eds.), ‘Honour’ killing and violence. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137289568_7. Chakravarti, U. (2005). From fathers to husbands: Of love, death and marriage in North India. In L. Welchman & S. Hossain (Eds.), “Honour”: Crimes,

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paradigms and violence against women (pp. 308–331). London and New York: Zed Books Publishers. Coomaraswamy, R. (2005). Preface: Violence against women and “crimes of honour”. In L. Welchman & S. Hossain (Eds.), “Honour”: Crimes, paradigms and violence against women (Preface). London and New York: Zed Books Publishers. Costa, B. M., Kaestle, C. E., Walker, A., Curtis, A., Day, A., Toumbourou, J. W., et al. (2015). Longitudinal predictors of domestic violence perpetration and victimization. A systematic review. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 24, 261–272. Council of Europe. (2011). The Council of Europe convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. https://www.coe.int/ en/web/istanbul-convention. Accessed 19 April 2020. Darvishpour, M. (2003). Invandrarkvinnor som bryter mönstret. Hur maktförskjutningen inom iranska familjer i Sverige påverkar relationen. Stockholm University: Akademitryck. Fuller, P. (1996). Masculinity, emotion and sexual violence. In L. Morris & E. S. Lidon (Eds.), Gender relations in public and private: New research perspectives (pp. 226–243). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Grans, L. (2018). Prevention of honour-related violence through the lens of the right to physical and psychological integrity. Turku: Åbo Akademi University Press. Hansen, S., Sams, A., Jäppinen, M., & Latvala, J. (2016). Kunniakäsitykset ja väkivalta – selvitys kunniaan liittyvästä väkivallasta ja siihen puuttumisesta Suomessa. Helsinki: Ihmisoikeusliitto (The Finnish League for Human Rights). Haq, I. (2017). Hva vil folk si (motion picture). Härkönen, K. (2004). Kunniallisen naisen taakka. Raportti seksuaalisesta väkivallasta Turkissa. Helsinki: Otava. Hong, T. (2014). Discourses on honour-related violence in Finnish policy documents. Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 1–16 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2014.964648. Hooks, B. (2004). The will to change. Men, masculinity and love. New York: Atria Books. Husseini, R. (2009). Murder in the name of honour. The true story of one woman’s heroic fight against an unbelievable crime. Oxford: Oneworld. Jokinen, A. (2000). Panssaroitu maskuliinisuus. Mies, väkivalta ja kulttuuri. Tampere: Vastapaino.

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Keskinen, S. (2009). ”Me” ja ”muut”? Kunniaan liittyvä väkivalta median kuvauksissa. In T. Tauro & M. van Dijken (Eds.), Kunnia konfliktina. Näkökulmia ilmiön tunnistamiseen ja ennaltaehkäisyyn (pp. 16–29). Helsinki: Mannerheimin lastensuojeluliitto (Mannerheim League for Child Welfare). Khan, R. (2018). Attitudes towards ‘honor’ violence and killings in collectivist cultures: Gender differences in Middle Eastern, North African, South Asian (MENASA) and Turkish populations. In J. L. Ireland, P. Birch, & C. A. Ireland (Eds.), International handbook in aggression: Current issues and perspectives (pp. 216–226). London: Routledge. Korhonen, A. (2001). Äkäpussin kesytys. Uuden ajan alun väkivaltaviihde sukupuolidiskurssina. In A. Lahtinen (Ed.), Tanssiva mies, pakinoiva nainen. Sukupuolten historiaa (pp. 137–167). Turku: Turun Historiallinen Yhdistys. Kotanen, R. (2013). Näkymättömästä näkökulmaksi: Parisuhdeväkivallan uhrit ja oikeudellisen sääntelyn muutos Suomessa. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Lemercier, J., Hyvärinen S., & Hautamäki J. (2012). Kotouttaminen ja monikulttuurinen väkivallan ehkäisytyö Espoossa. In L. Nyqvist & S. Hyvärinen (Eds.), Dusti – Luottamusta Miehen Linjalla. Maahanmuuttajamiehet ja ennaltaehkäisevä väkivaltatyö (pp. 26–58). Espoo: Lyömätön Linja. Lidman, S. (2018). Gender, violence and attitudes. Lessons from early modern Europe. London: Routledge. Lidman, S. (2019). How to raise good children? Disciplinary correction in Early Modern advice books. In U. Aatsinki, J. Annola, & M. Kaarninen (Eds.), Families, values, and the transfer of knowledge in Northern Societies, 1500–2000 (pp. 23–39). London: Routledge. Lidman, S., & Hong, T. (2018). Collective violence and honour in Finland: A survey for professionals. Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research. https://doi.org/10.1108/JACPR-09-2017-0319. Niemi-Kiesiläinen, J. (2004). Rikosprosessi ja parisuhdeväkivalta. Helsinki: WSOY. Nousiainen, K. (2016). The Istanbul Convention and the EU: Converging standards on violence against women? European Equality Law Review, 1/2016, 11–21. Brussels: European Commission. Nyqvist, L., & Hyvärinen, S. (Eds.). (2012). Dusti – Luottamusta Miehen Linjalla. Maahanmuuttajmiehet ja ennaltaehkäisevä väkivaltatyö. Espoo: Lyömätön Linja. Peroni, L. (2016). Violence against migrant women: The Istanbul Convention through a postcolonial feminist lens. Feminist Legal Studies, 2016 (24), 49– 67 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-016-9316-x.

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Schulman, G. (2004). Väkivalta ja sietämättömien tunteiden kierrätys. Suomen Lääkärilehti, 59 (3), 149–155. Synnott, V. A. (2009). Re-thinking men. Heroes, villains and victims. Burlington: Ashgate. Tauro, T., & van Dijken, M. (Eds.). (2009). Kunnia konfliktina. Näkökulmia ilmiön tunnistamiseen ja ennaltaehkäisyyn. Helsinki: Mannerheimin lastensuojeluliitto (Mannerheim League for Child Welfare). Ungdomsstyrelsen. (2009). Gift mot sin vilja. Ungdomsstyrelsens skrifter 5. Stockholm: Ungdomsstyrelsen (Swedish Agency for Youth and Civil Society). Virkki, T. (2019). Moraalisen ekskluusion mekanismit maahanmuuttajamiesten väkivaltaa koskevassa kansalaiskeskustelussa. Sosiologia, 1(2019), 24–41. Virkki, T., Lidman, S., & Venäläinen, S. (2020). Research report of social inequalities and discourses of violence. Current controversies in Finnish online forums and discussions among welfare state professionals. http://vakivaltaistavat.blogspot.com/2020/05/vakivalta-ennakk oluulot-ja-auttamistyo.html. Accessed 25 May 2020. Wikan, U. (2008). In honor of Fadime: Murder and shame. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

3 Domestic Homicide and Emotions from the Late Nineteenth Century to the 1920s Anna Kantanen

and Jari Eilola

The aim of our chapter is to investigate the nature and characteristics of domestic homicides in Finland and examine how interpersonal violence was represented in the records of the Turku Court of Appeal and in contemporary newspapers between 1890 and 1930. This chapter traces lethal domestic violence cases and disaggregates them to uncover how offenders committed crimes and how they appealed to their emotions as an explanation. By addressing these questions, we ought to deepen our understanding of historical European domestic homicides. Some studies have suggested that there was a crucial qualitative change in homicides and violence in Europe between the late nineteenth and A. Kantanen (B) · J. Eilola Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] J. Eilola e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Husso et al. (eds.), Violence, Gender and Affect, Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56930-3_3

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early twentieth century (Roth 2009; Ferguson 2010; Cottier and Raciti 2013). The new type of violence that emerged, fatalistic violence (Cottier and Raciti 2013), was characterised by strong feelings between perpetrators and their victims. Most of these victims were spouses, lovers, children, and other relatives. These violent acts were planned, and they often had a relatively long prehistory involving threats of homicide. On the other hand, no quarrelling occurred before the murder. The perpetrators intended to kill, and many aimed to commit a suicide after the crime. Their narratives were strongly subjective and emphasised emotional disturbance and inner life. There are several reasons for studying domestic violence, and particularly in Finland, an agriculture-based society located in Northern Europe, at the turn of the twentieth century. Firstly, important changes were made in the legislation concerning domestic violence during this time. Although Finland had become an autonomous grand duchy of the Russian Empire in 1809 (and it remained as such until the 1917 declaration of independence), the shared Swedish legal and social systems’ influence persisted. The Swedish Code of the Realm of 1734 was still in effect until 1894, when the Penal Code of 1889 came into effect in Finland. Although the Code of 1734 had restricted the use of physical chastisement (used by husband and master of the household towards wives and other adult members of the household), the new Penal Code criminalised it and such chastisement was defined as a complainant offence. In contrast, the right to chastise children continued for decades. (Pylkkänen 2009, 38–40, 183; Lindstedt Cronberg 2009, 29–30, 43–49) Another reason for studying Finland is the exceptional development of lethal violence. During the period of industrialisation, while the homicide rate decreased in most western European countries, they begun to increase in Finland. At the turn of the century Finland experienced several waves of increasing homicides. Firstly, the newly established forest industrial rural communities generated many of these homicides. These towns lacked infrastructure to control their population. The forest industry was male-dominated and sensitive to economic fluctuations. Violence was also associated with heavy drinking. The second one was

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connected to the political turmoil surrounding the First Russian Revolution (1905) and its Finnish counterpart, the Great Strike. The third wave shook the new republic after the Civil War (1918) until the end of the Great Depression. Although homicide remained a problem of working-class men, the rise in homicide rate was also caused by the rural population, specifically young men from land-owning farmer families. The high level of lethal violent crime in Finland was the result of interaction of several coinciding factors. (Lehti 2001, 51–58) The first historical studies concerning domestic violence in Western countries were published in the 1980s (e.g. Pleck 1987; Gordon 1988). These pioneering works reflected ongoing feminist and social discussion of domestic violence and wife beating, which had been recognised in the 1970s as a serious social problem (Bala 2008, 273–274). The first studies were published over a decade later in the Nordic countries (e.g. Lövkrona 2001). Since then, family violence and gender-based violence have rapidly emerged as areas of historical research, and scholars, focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth century, have studied for instance, spousal violence (Lindstedt Cronberg 2009; Eriksson 2010), violence against children (e.g. Koskivirta 2017a, 2017b), parricide (Toivo 2018), and infanticide (e.g. Bergenlöv 2009; Rautelin 2017). However, gaps remain in our knowledge of the characteristics of domestic homicides in Northern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth century.

Court of Appeal Records and Newspapers as Mirrors of Domestic Homicides in History The main source of this study concerns homicide cases from the Court of Appeal at Turku, which was a mid-level judicial institution. One of its functions was to confirm the sentences of the lower courts concerning severe crimes and to supervise their legality (Toivo 2016, 256). In the Court of Appeal, criminal cases were handled in a written proceeding. The decisions of the Court are archived in series of a judgement records, which forms our main source. They include the basic information of the parties (name, social status, affinity), synopses of the circumstances

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(where, when), modus operandi, outcomes of forensic medicine, and mental state examination reports, and, the legal basis of the judgement. Our chapter covers a roughly 40-year span of time, from 1891 to 1929. Due to the vast spectrum and number of the crimes dealt with by the Court of Appeal, we have used a sample survey for this study to unravel the overall picture of domestic homicides. The years of analysis (1891–1898, 1901–1908, 1911–1912, 1915, 1918, 1920–1922, 1925, 1929) have been selected from the beginning of the period studied, which provide an annual representation of the lethal domestic violence cases; for the end of the period, we have sampling units from various years. This study encompasses domestic homicides, murders, attempted manslaughters, and fatal assaults. It focuses on close relatives such as spouses, parents, children (excluding infanticides), and siblings as well step-relatives and other relatives, if the relation was explicitly expressed in the court documents. In our analysis, we have also included homicides involving members of the same household or domestic servants who were accused or victims of the crime. The judgement records do not always include information concerning the motives behind homicide. Therefore, we have employed newspaper reports as our secondary source (see also Ramsey 2006, 108). We have used the digital newspaper collection of the National Library. The number of Finnish newspapers grew rapidly, and their circulation expanded during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The newspapers were sensationalist in the sense that they purveyed emotionally charged content, such as detailed reports of criminal cases and homicides (Valtonen 2003, 312–313; Wiltenburg 2004). Newspapers also reported local rumours. Consequently, news items could be contradictory and contain false information, such as that concerning the social position or age of the parties. However, we can safely assume that newspaper accounts reflected collectively shared attitudes towards domestic violence (see also Wilkinson 2020, 209). Our approach in defining domestic violence is based on historical research. In many ways, historical sources might be more silent on mild domestic violence since some form of chastisement towards women and children was long acceptable and tolerable (Koskivirta 2017b, 46– 48, 56–63; Pylkkänen 2009, 40; Bergenlöv 2009). To trace domestic

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violence from the past, we concentrate on homicides, which are generally considered a relatively reliable form of violence, since in most cases they are revealed just after the crime or later (Daly and Wilson 2014, 11–12). This is noticeable in our source material as well, since a fraction of the domestic homicides were not treated as homicides at first but rather as accidents, suicides, or cases of missing person. However, when employing historical statistics on homicides, scholars face some methodological challenges (Mc Mahon et al. 2013, 8–11; Smith 2014, 140). In the historical analysis presented here, we refer to domestic violence as intentional physical harm towards another family member or deliberate neglect against another person.

Domestic Violence: Spousal Killings, Generational Quarrels, and Fraternal Confrontations We have traced 104 severe domestic violence cases from the higher court records (see Table 3.1), which constitute our data. These cases have been classified into eight main categories. The accused also include those who were accused of complicity, such as those who had participated in one way or another in the crime or had incited the perpetrator. The crimes represent all domestic violence cases dealt with by the Court of Appeal, and they depict cases that might have resulted in a sentence or ensued as an acquittal, typically due to inadequate evidence. In the cases handled in the Court of Appeal, men committed the majority of domestic homicides, although women were sometimes perpetrators as well. In terms of victims, women had a more prominent role, although male victims encompassed the larger share of lethal domestic violence cases. The largest category of domestic violence were marital homicides in which a husband killed his wife. The second largest type was parricide by a victim’s son or stepson. Killing one’s own brother was the third largest category of domestic homicide. These intra-family homicide cases not only represent the main types of family murders but also provide insight

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Table 3.1 Types of domestic homicides and attempted murders under the jurisdiction of the Turku Court of Appeal from 1891 to 1929 Type

Number (%)

Accused M

F

M

F

Marital violence

37 (35,6) 19 (18,3) 6 (5,7) 13 (12,5) 5 (4,8) 9 (8,7)

30

14

12

25

20

2

15

4

4

4 13

Violence towards parents Violence towards one’s own children Violence between siblings Violence against parents-in-laws Violence against other household members Multiple victim homicide and assault Others Total

10 (9,6) 5 (4,8) 104 (100)

3 13

–

Victims

2 –

5 9

1 3

3 8

2 1

7 8 95

3 1 28

14 4 73

13 1 48

Sources: The National Archives of Finland, Turku. The Turku Court of Appeal, judgement records 1891–1898, 1901–1908, 1911–1912, 1915, 1918, 1920–1922, 1925, 1929

regarding emotional factors and illustrating affections within a household. A common theme in many domestic violence cases was prolonged violence or threats of violence within the households. A close analysis of court dossiers uncovers domestic disturbances, which in many cases involved a long prehistory of discord and which were sparked by an individual quarrel or alcohol consumption. Both the perpetrators and the victims had previously announced death threats against family members. Most of the family homicides occurred in the domestic sphere, such as in the homes of the victim and the offender or a relative’s residence or surroundings nearby. Forests and public roads also became scenes of crimes. Neighbours and other household members witnessed quarrels within the family. They had heard uproar before the violent act, and after the crime they testified that there had been discordance between family members (NA 1929,div.I,n:o26; NL Uusi Suomi 13 February 1929). Neighbourly intervention took place at times when they came to check on the situation after they had heard a cry for help, although they were too late to prevent death (NA 1929,div.VI,n:o60; NL Aamulehti 24 July

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1929). Killing an escaping spouse illustrates a strong sense of determination by the offender. At gunpoint, the victim had fled from a window, hurting herself, and some neighbours had then carried her back inside where her husband shot her to death (NA 1925,div.IV,n:o26; NL KeskiUusimaa 1 April 1925). Neighbours’ activity proves that communities were constituted through the self-regulation of members’ behaviour (Ferguson 2010, 94, 108–111). Furthermore, local rumours which were attributed to relatives, neighbours, and other members of the community were a relevant matter in crimes being revealed after a death in suspicious circumstances. Domestic homicides were also committed in front of other family members (NA 1929,div.IV,n:o26; NL Satakunnan Kansa 19 February 1929). Consequently, other family members or servants were not only aware of violent acts in families; they could also participate in them. In one case, a housemaid had helped her mistress to poison the master (NA PL 40/1894), and in another, a wife had negotiated with her husband before poisoning her own mother (NA HL 29/1901). At times, there was a need for an official presence of some kind in quarrelsome family encounters. For example, in a dispute over a matter of inheritance, a police officer was present to accompany a man when he was fetching a cow from his stepson. However, this did not prevent violence from occurring, since the stepson shot his stepfather (NA 1929,div.I,n:o79; NL Aamulehti 18 July 1929). This also illustrated another feature of family homicides. Firearms were applied more often in domestic homicides from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards (see also Lehti 2001, 62–63), than in the beginning of our study in the nineteenth century. Rather than killing a family member by oneself, domestic murders could be carried out by a hired killer as well (NA PL 17/1901; NA 1915,div.III,n:o8). In another case, it was suggested that the perpetrator had initially attempted to recruit ‘some laddies’ to kill his father-inlaw, yet he had to conduct the crime himself (NA 1922,div.I,n:o22; NL Satakunnan Kansa 16 April 1922).

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Marital Violence In our data, marital lethal violence was the most significant form of domestic homicides, which was eminently gendered crime. Husband poisonings (On Sweden see Nilsson 2015), which comprised a prominent type of homicide carried out by women at the turn of the century, diminished in our material when entering the last decades of this study. A teacher’s murder in 1892 is an illustrative example of such a case. It was revealed that the perpetrator had poisoned her husband because she had secretly borrowed his money and even forged his signature on financial obligations. She was described in newspapers as a superficial person whose aim was to find ‘childish amusements’. Although her husband had been generous towards her, she had lied and stolen from him. She was also stigmatised as delicti de nato, ‘a natural born criminal’, because she had previously been expelled from school as a pilferer and a liar (NA HL 49/1892; NL Uusi Suomi 9 April 1892; NL Lappeenrannan Uutiset 26 October 1892). Some female offenders had economic motivations. They had sought an older man with property, married him, and then shortly after the weddings (NA TL 30/1902; NL Åbo Tidning 16 August, 23 August, 2 October 1902) or after changes in testament (NA PL 40/1894), killed him. The economic motives behind these crimes seem to be undeniable, but in newspapers, they also served as narratives that maintained and confirmed certain cultural hierarchies and stereotypes. The household was a nexus for the conversion of economic capital into material goods. Its survival depended on maintaining a careful balance between contributions and the interests of its members. On the other hand, middle-class women, such as the teacher’s wife above, withdrew from active roles in their family businesses and transitioned into domestic roles of homemaking and charity work (Ferguson 2010, 56–59, 66–67). The focus on economic motives in the news emphasised female selfishness and women’s desire for merchandise and money. It also illustrated what might happen when this desire collided with the control of the master of the household. At the same time, a man who had married a wealthy older woman was described as comical and unmanly (NL Westra Finland 2 July 1892).

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During the latter part of our research period, cases in marital violence category were mainly acts wherein husbands killed or attempted to kill their wives, while women less frequently killed their wedded husbands. This is consistent with findings from other countries (e.g. Adler 2003; Roth 2014, 183–185; Wilkinson 2020, 215). At times, female spousal killers had accomplices, or when they killed (or tried to kill) their husbands, they murdered their children as well. Male offenders also killed their wives in situations in which marital violence escalated to homicide; further, they committed spousal murders as premeditated acts. Court documents and newspaper articles capture the tendencies of troubled marriages that escalated into violent conflicts. It appears that women did not kill their husbands in self-defence or for revenge for continued marital violence; rather, men killed their wives after the prolonged violence or threat of it (NA UL 44/1906; NA 1918,div.I,n:o11; NL Björneborgs Tidning 13 November 1917; NA 1929,div.I,n:o84; NL Aamulehti 12 October 1928). Many of these crimes involved excessive alcohol consumption by the perpetrator, and in many cases, the shared family life was burdened by regular drunkenness. Before lethal violent events, wives had in some cases already moved out to other residences or were living temporarily (or regularly) with relatives (NA 1912,div.VI,n:o23; NL Turun Sanomat 4 August 1912; NA 1929,div.II,n:o 69; NA 1918,Div.I,n:o11; NL Björneborgs Tidning 13 November 1917). In some cases, wives had asked another person to stay with them to ensure that the presence of others would strain the husband from killing her. For example, one married couple had habitually consumed high volumes of alcohol and after hard drinking, they often argued with each other. The wife, who had subverted socially accepted gender norms through her alleged unfaithfulness and by living a hard-drinking life, had been afraid of her husband and asked an acquaintance to stay home with her (NA 1911,div.I,n:o58; NL Uusi Suometar 8 July 1911). A salient type of marital homicides were homicides which occurred when the wife had expressed her wish for a divorce or after the wife had already left the family home (e.g. NA 1918,div.I,n:o11; NL Työmies 13 November 1917; see also Ferguson 2010, 99, 106–108; Roth 2014, 184). In these kinds of cases, the threat of violence was not restricted

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to the wife but was also directed towards her close relatives, especially if they were female or if they were active participants in domestic conflicts, as they often were (Ferguson 2010, 101–102).

Violence Against Parents and Parents-in-Law Lethal violence against parents were primarily crimes committed by young men in their 20s, or boys verging on adulthood, towards their fathers. Mothers were rarely victims of such homicides, although sons sometimes committed or attempted manslaughters and murders against them (NA 1912,div.V,n:o11; NA 1921,div.I,n:o54). It was common in cases of patricide, as for male-on-male violence in general, that the perpetrator was provoked because of the aggressive behaviour of the victim (NA 1911,div.I,n:o45; NL Uusi Suometar 25 May 1911; Cottier and Raciti 2013, 108). Some cases reveal a lifelong series of violent abuse. In 1892, a crofter’s adult son who had recently killed his father stated that he had never really loved his father and stepmother, neither hated them. He described his stepmother as a tough woman who also instigated the father against his son. Harsh words and spanking became daily occurrences. As a grown-up man, he still feared his father’s anger and aggressiveness (NA PL 11/1893). The newspapers described the victim as a toll, strong man, ‘decent in every sense’. The perpetrator was his opposite: a short, pale, feeble man, ‘weak in physical and mental sense’. The strict upbringing was noticed, and although one newspaper even admitted that it might have caused the perpetrator’s weakness, there was no empathy for the patricide (NL Tampereen Uutiset 7 October, 19 November 1892). These statements reflect a patriarchal understanding of the household hierarchy, which emphasised the father’s power. They also reflect contemporary medicalmoralistic opinions regarding the healthy mind living in a strong athletic body. Patricides also stemmed from broader conflicts between several family members, as is suggested in one case where the offender had come to a culminated household argument prior to killing his father (NA 1911,div.I,n:o45). It appears obvious that in the case above (NA PL

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11/1893), patricide was a consequence of fear and a violent upbringing, but there were also other motives. The perpetrator had found a young woman and begun to think that it was his father’s time to step aside. However, the old master made no such attempts. Instead, he was getting married for the third time (NA PL 11/1893). Such questions of authority and the transfer of generations did not cause tensions merely between fathers and sons, but also between sons- and fathers-in-law, especially if the former had moved to his wife’s home. In one such case (NA HL 38&51/1891; NL Hämäläinen 9 May 1891), the old master was not satisfied with his son-in-law but frequently called him, for instance, a thief. Relations between men worsened irreversibly. One day, the sonin-law heard that strange men allegedly gossiped about him as a thief. Bitterness and anger filled him. He went to his father-in-law, asking ‘why have you lied and publicly called me a thief?’, overwhelming him in anger and thereby causing the old master’s accidental death. In some cases, the motivational factor was based on economic disputes (NA1929,div.I,n:o79.). In the case of the crofter’s son (NA PL 11/1893) mentioned above, the father’s attempt to remarry once again caused the perpetrator to worry about his inheritance, which increased tensions between the generations. These kinds of economic questions seem to have been important sources of conflicts that evoked strong feelings in domestic violence cases. Economic factors proved to be important components in homicides related to the system of retirement contracts, as well as in cases where there were no biological family ties (NA 1915,div.III,n:o8). In some cases, killing one’s own father was regarded as to some degree justifiable by the press as well as contemporaries. When a father had robbed the family’s property to finance his drinking with deplorable people, a son shot his father, who was again appropriating property from the croft, after shooting several warning gunshots (NA 1911,div.VI,n:o7; NL Turun Sanomat 20 December 1910). In this case, the victim failed to fulfil the society’s expectations as a father, a husband, and a master of the household. Drinking, wasting money, alienating friends and relatives, and losing his good name were all factors that could produce male violence towards wives and children (Roth 2009, 258–260). On the other hand, they were also factors that made it easier, if not to accept,

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then at least to understand the mitigation behind an otherwise strictly sanctioned violent act. Mothers and mothers-in-law faced violence only occasionally in our sources. A factory worker had returned to her mother shortly after she had married (NA HL 91/1893). Her husband visited his mother-in-law occasionally to see his wife. During one such visit, the mother-in-law criticised him for his disregard towards his wife and for neglecting his marital responsibilities. Both the mother and daughter stated that at this moment, something changed in his being and behaviour. Since then, they both feared that he might return to harm them.

Sibling Homicides: Fatal Quarrels Between Brothers Killing one’s own brother or stepbrother was one of the most common types of lethal violence within the family. Both parties were typically young adults or boys who were reaching adulthood in the near future. Occasionally, victims and offenders were middle-aged men (NA 1929,div.I,n:o6). In many cases, an ordinary argument between brothers escalated into a death of another brother. The court records and newspaper articles tend to not reveal significant reasons for brothers fighting, yet the lethal altercation could be characterised more in terms of quarrels about common matters. Three cases of fratricide illustrate this factor. For example, a game of cards between adult brothers had become heated when another brother had refused to pay after gambling (NA 1929,div.VII,n:o1; NL Helsingin Sanomat 08 October 1928). In another case, an argument over a younger brother coming along for a celebration had escalated into a violent fight between brothers (NA 1911,div.V,n:o17; NL Helsingin Sanomat 27 June 1911). Additionally, deaths occurred when one brother entered into a quarrel between his brother and his fiancée to calm the overheated brother (NA 1929,div.II,n:o27; NL Helsingin Sanomat 25 September 1928). Aggressive reactions against aggressive behaviour, explained as a response to provocation, self-defence, or an attempt to protect those present, are common for male-on-male violence (Cottier and Raciti 2013, 108). In this sense, the forms and motives of violent acts between

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brothers seem to resemble those between men in general, as physical and verbal provocation as well as self-defence were underlying features in homicides between brothers (NA 1925,div.IV,n:o53; NA 1925,div.VI,n:o13). Alcohol was also an important stimulus in these homicides. In at least half of cases of homicide against one’s own brother, either the victim or the perpetrator was intoxicated during the crime. There was an upward trend, since most lethal violent conflicts between brothers occurred in the latter half of the 1920s. Our material includes a case wherein the motives and behaviours of the perpetrator differed from that in the cases above. In 1904, a young woman attempted to poison her younger siblings. The older one, who was 13 years old, noticed the bitter taste in time and survived. Newspapers explained, based on the survived brother’s accounts that the perpetrator had tried to eliminate her younger siblings to receive a larger share of forthcoming inheritance (NA HL 2/1904). However, the behaviour of the perpetrator indicates that she had not fully understood what she was doing. She made several attempts to escape, first shortly after her act and second on the morning of the first court session.

Lethal Violence Against Children, Other Relatives, and Members of the Household Although violence and chastisement against children has been common in the past (Bergenlöv 2009; Koskivirta 2017b), lethal violence against one’s own children was not among the most frequent types of violence in our source material. Anu Koskivirta (2017a, 102) explains the low numbers of filicides by the fact that they were easy to conceal by presenting them as accidents or illnesses. The local pastor and the district police chief who decided whether a forensic post-mortem examination was needed did not suspect this if there were not visible signs of violence on the corpse or if there were no rumours of child homicide because infant and child mortality were high. Therefore, lethal violence against children (excluding infanticides) was not frequently addressed as a crime in the Turku Court of Appeal.

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The records of the Court of Appeal include homicides wherein mainly small children were the victims. The perpetrator was, in most cases, the parent but sometimes another family member such as an uncle. Occasionally, both parents were together accused of murdering their child (NA 1925,div.IV,n:o34). Continued violence against children formed one type of lethal violence in families. In one case, the father had systematically abused his small daughter several years before the child died at the age of five after severe abuse (NA 1922,div.VI,n:o12.). Another form of child mistreatment was multi-victim child homicides that had different kinds of emotional elements, while mothers were tried for poisoning several of their children or when fathers aimed to kill the whole family. Children were also victims of severe lethal neglect (NA 1912,div.I,n:o55). Another portion of domestic homicides were committed by other relatives and household members, which illuminates how manifold social ties accompanied by living situations and care relations sometimes sparked strong emotions such as displease, anger, or frustration. For example, a belligerent brother-in-law faced a lethal attack when he was picking a fight with some relatives. The drunken victim had come to pick his young child from his relative’s home, while an argument escalated into a fatal fight between brothers-in-law (NA 1915,div.III,n:o26). Altogether, some domestic homicides occurred between non-relatives within the household. A middle-aged woman was accused along with her companion of killing a man she was working for as a housekeeper in his croft. It was alleged that the motivation for the homicide stemmed from the fact that the croft occupant had not allowed her to bring the man she was seeing to his household (NA 1920,div.VI,n:o12).

Fatalistic Violence, Affect, and Gender As has been noted, it appears that at least certain characters of fatalistic violence defined by Maurice Cottier and Silvio Raciti (2013, 114–118) were noticeable in our material at the turn of the century. Fatal violence was conceptualised as a part of the modern habitus, which was based on the individualistic experience of life and subjectivity. The underlying

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features of fatalistic violence were the strong and often contradictory feelings of the perpetrator towards the victim, who often was a close family member. The criminal act had a relatively long prehistory, which involved menace and death threats, and the offender often aimed to commit suicide after the murder. Acts of fatal violence were premediated, and there were no quarrels immediately before the murder, albeit the perpetrator might have been overwrought. The above-mentioned features prevailed in our cases as well to some extent. A prehistory with threats of killing was a significant feature preceding lethal domestic violence. Offenders announced their intentions to kill their victims prior to the acts (e.g. NA UL 44/1906; NA 1929,div.II,n:o69; NL Suomen Sosiaalidemokraatti 31 December 1928; NA 1918,div.II,n:o18; NL Työ 30 November 1917). So was the case when a young man attempted to kill his mother with an axe. It was stated in the press that when he was drunk, he was quarrelsome, and he had previously threatened to kill her (NA 1912,div.V,n:o11; NL Uusi Suometar 13 January 1912). In another case, a man shot his wife in 1908 (NA HL 27/1908; NL Lahti 31 March, 2 April 1908). The local ministers had given him a statutory warning already in 1906. When men have felt that they were not able to meet society’s expectations or fulfil their own hopes, they often turned on their wives. For men who were not succeeding in a society that appreciated wealth, the pressure to be sober and successful intensified their sense of themselves as failures, increasing the likelihood that they would be unable to leave off drinking or other malign manners, which devastated their marriage and family (Roth 2009, 259–261; Cottier and Raciti 2013). The increasingly expanding press, which published news of bankrupts and other economic adversities, strengthened these feelings. These were also understandable reasons for the male suicides, although the growing number of suicides was otherwise seen as a reprehensible phenomenon. On the other hand, the new publicity offered by the press allowed better opportunities for the wives to restrict the malpractice of their husbands (Valtonen 2003; Eriksson 2010, 22). Suicide attempts and domestic homicides were interrelated to some extent with each other, as offenders attempted suicides after acts of violence, especially in the twentieth century (NA UL 29/1906; NA

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1925,div.V,n:o24; NA 1925,div.VI,n:o14; NA 1929,div.I,n:o84; see also Adler 2003). Some perpetrators survived due to hospital treatment. In other cases, the accused confessed that they had suicidal thoughts after the crime but were convinced not to conduct it. One significant form of domestic homicide was cases, which involved multiple victims within the family. Both male and female offenders did commit such crimes, and the victims consisted of various members of the household, such as children, spouses, parents, siblings, and relatives of spouses. Hence, this category represents the dissimilarity of such crimes and provides insight into the complexity of troubled family relations. A man in his 20s killed his 17-year-old brother in his sleep while his mother was working on a night shift. After the deed, the perpetrator waited until his mother arrived and attacked her. The case was addressed in the press as ‘a beastly brutal act ’ (NA 1918,div.II,n:o18; NL Uusi Päivä 5 December 1917). Although the sex distribution of homicide has varied in previous centuries, and while there are temporal and regional variations, this was not fundamentally different compared to modern patterns. Homicide has been a crime mainly involving males, since males have predominated among offenders as well as victims. (Eisner 2003, 108–111; Smith 2014, 142–143) Our findings represent a similar tendency. Most offenders and victims were male, although women did occasionally commit homicides. A husband or her child were the most common victims of female offenders, albeit they also killed or tried to kill their parents-in-law and other household members (see also Muurling et al. 2020, 10). Female offenders did not commit homicides due to self-defence in confrontational situations. Nor does our data suggest that the most common type of homicide by female killers was initiated in revenge for sustained marital violence. Homicides committed by women in our material could be characterised as premediated crimes. Female perpetrators were circumspect in their violent acts, and they executed reasoned crimes, which involved at least some form of planning. This was most self-evident in the cases where the victim was poisoned (Nilsson 2015, 103). One can presume that rat poison or phenol were commonly available in households, but the use of such poisons as strychnine, which were available only by

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prescription in pharmacies, required planning and the acquisition of poison beforehand. For example, in 1892, the teacher’s wife had told her doctor that they needed one strychnine capsule because an old dog had to be put down. On the following evening, she mixed it in her husband’s tea (NA HL 49/1892). Women who murdered their family members were not viewed sympathetically, but rather with disapproval. Some women were also accused of killing more than one victim within the family (NA 1921,div.I,n:o40; NA 1921,div.IV,n:o43). Female perpetrators also selected victims who suffered from an illness or were disabled (NA 1912,div.I,n:o55; NA 1921,div.IV,n:o43; NA 1925,div.IV,n:o24). Some of these murders were cruel and calculated. When a woman was poisoning her stepson and an elderly man in the household, concerned villagers had urged them to seek a doctor. On the way to visit the doctor, the woman left the child somewhere along the journey and went by herself to the doctor. The woman had used caustic soda, which had burned the child’s mouth and throat so severely that he was not able to eat. Describing the gruesome murders, newspapers characterised the female murderer as ‘beastly’ and stated that she had kept things under such a strict rule that even the master of the house had feared her (NA 1921,div.IV,n:o43; NL Uusi Aika 21 September 1921).

Conclusion Finnish society witnessed many changes from the latter half of the nineteenth century onwards, when the pre-modern agrarian society, which had been based on the power and authority of the household master over his children, wife, and servants, was gradually shifting towards modernity (Pylkkänen 2009, 37, 40). These changes were intertwined in a much wider manner with household relations and changing conceptions of patriarchal hierarchy and welfare in families (Lindstedt Cronberg 2009; Eriksson 2010). Our analysis of the Court of Appeal documents as well as newspaper reports has highlighted that domestic homicides constituted a broad range of violent acts, although killing one’s spouse, killing one’s

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father, and killing one’s own brother were the most prevalent homicides within families. Motivations and circumstances leading to domestic homicides encompassed a varied range of factors. Abusive relationships and prolonged violence were major underlying causes of domestic homicides. This was the case mainly in marital violence but also in some cases with other family members. Heated domestic quarrels were one of the main characteristics of domestic male-on-male homicides, which also applied to marital violence committed by husbands. Conversely, female offenders mainly committed crimes that were premeditated and were directed towards children, husbands, and persons in vulnerable positions. Alcohol-related violence was notable in many crimes, such as in fraternal confrontations and to a degree in marital homicides committed by husbands, though it did not constitute a catalyst in all crime types, such as in crimes committed by female killers or in homicides towards children. Altogether, the experiences and emotions connected to violence did vary, along with the differing types of domestic violence. Intricate family problems involved different forms of conflict, prolonged quarrels, domestic violence, and alcohol problems. Social and economic bonds between family members were strong, which led to lethal quarrels and homicides over material issues. These problems made such emotions as hatred, anger, fear, and frustration visible. Most of the cases analysed exemplify that the traditional forms of domestic violence, such as homicides and battering, were closely related to questions of authority and patriarchal hierarchy or questions of property. Modernisation not only intensified these problems; it also created new individualised expectations and pressures that could erupt into fatalistic violence in close relations or into suicidal acts (Cottier and Raciti 2013; Roth 2014, 183–184). Newspapers also recognised and emphasised these motives.

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References Archival sources The National Archives of Finland (NA), Turku. The Turku Court of Appeal. Judgement records 1891–1898, 1901–1908, 1911–1912, 1915, 1918, 1920–1922, 1925, 1929. The National Library of Finland (NL), Helsinki. The Newspaper Collection of the National Collection. https://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/etusivu?set_langua ge=en. Accessed 6 February 2020.

Literature Adler, J. S. (2003). “We’ve got a right to fight: We’re married”: Domestic homicide in Chicago, 1875–1920. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 34 (1), 27–48. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/43146. Bala, N. (2008). A historical perspective on family violence and child abuse. Journal of Family Studies, 14, 271–278. https://doi.org/10.5172/jfs.327.14. 2-3.271. Bergenlöv, E. (2009). Drabbade barn: Aga och barnmisshandel i Sverige från reformationen till nutid . Lund: Nordic Academic Press. Cottier, M., & Raciti, S. (2013). From honour to subjectivity: Interpersonal violence in Basel 1750–1868 and Berne 1861–1944. Crime, Histoire & Sociétés/Crime, History & Societies, 17 (2), 101–124. Daly, M., & Wilson, M. (2014). Homicide. New Brunswick and London: Aldine Transaction. Eisner, M. (2003). Long-term historical trends in violent crime. Crime and Justice, 30, 83–142. https://doi.org/10.1086/652229. Eriksson, M. (2010). Makar emellan: Äktenskaplig oenighet och våld på kyrkliga och politiska arenor, 1810–1880 (PhD dissertation). Växjö: Linnaeus University Press. http://lnu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:356 163/FULLTEXT01.pdf. Accessed 6 February 2020. Ferguson, E. E. (2010). Gender and justice: Violence, intimacy, and community in fin-de-siècle Paris. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Gordon, L. (1988). Heroes of their own lives: The politics and history of family violence, Boston 1880–1960. New York: Viking.

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Koskivirta, A. (2017a). Crimes of desperation: Poverty-related filicides in 1810–1860. Journal of Finnish Studies, 20 (1), 97–131. Koskivirta, A. (2017b). Lethal chastisement of children in pre-industrial Finland (c. 1700–1860): Reasons, practices and control. In M. Husso, T. Virkki, M. Notko, H. Hirvonen, & J. Eilola (Eds.), Interpersonal violence: Differences and connections (pp. 46–66). London and New York: Routledge. Lehti, M. (2001). Homicide trends in Finland and Estonia in 1880–1940: Consequences of the demography, social and political effects of industrialization. Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention, 2(1), 50–71. Lindstedt Cronberg, M. (2009). Med våldsam hand. Hustrumisshandel i 1800talets Sverige. En studie av rättsliga, kyrkliga och politiska sammanhang. Lund: Lunds universitet (Media-Tryck). https://portal.research.lu.se/portal/ files/5952983/1692594.pdf. Accessed 6 February 2020. Lövkrona, I. (2001). Mord, misshandel och sexuella övergrepp: Historiska och kulturella perspektiv på kön och våld . Lund: Nordic Academic Press. Mc Mahon, R., Eibach, J., & Roth, R. (2013). Making sense of violence? Reflections on the history of interpersonal violence in Europe. Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies, 17 (2), 5–26. Muurling, S., Pluskota, M., & van der Heijden, M. (2020). Introduction: Women and crime in history. In M. van der Heijden, M. Pluskota, & S. Muurling (Eds.), Women’s criminality in Europe (pp. 1600–1914). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nilsson, R. (2015). ‘Arsenic of the size of a pea’: Women and poisoning in the 19th-century Sweden. Scandinavian Journal of History, 40 (1), 97–118. Pleck, E. (1987). Domestic tyranny: The making of social policy against family violence from colonial era the present. New York: Oxford University Press. Pylkkänen, A. (2009). Trapped in equality: Women as legal persons in modernisation of Finnish law. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Ramsey, C. B. (2006). Intimate homicide: Gender and crime control, 1880– 1920. University of Colorado Law Review, 77, 101–191. Rautelin, M. (2017). Offences of the flesh? Infanticide as a consequence of cryptic pregnancy in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Finland. In M. Husso, T. Virkki, M. Notko, H. Hirvonen, & J. Eilola (Eds.), Interpersonal violence: Differences and connections (pp. 33–45). London & New York: Routledge. Roth, R. (2009). American homicide. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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Roth, R. (2014). Gender, sex and intimate-partner violence in historical perspective. In R. Gartner & B. McCarthy (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of gender, sex and crime. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, G. T. (2014). Long-term trends in female and male involvement in crime. In R. Gartner & B. McCarthy (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of gender, sex and crime. New York: Oxford University Press. Toivo, R. M. (2016). Abuse of parents in early modern Finland: Structures and emotions. Journal of Family History, 41(3), 255–270. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0363199016644588. Toivo, R. M. (2018). Parricide in nineteenth-century Finland: Cultures of violence and a crisis of authority. In M. Muravyeva & R. M. Toivo (Eds.), Parricide and violence against parents throughout history: (De)constructing family and authority? (pp. 191–212). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Valtonen, H. (2003). Itsemurha ja sosiaaliset rajat 1800-luvun lopun ja 1900luvun alun suomalaisen sivistyneistön lehdistöpuheessa. In J. Eilola (Ed.), Sietämättömät ja täydellinen maailma: Kirjoituksia suvaitsemattomuudesta (pp. 311–346). Jyväskylä: Kopijyvä. Wilkinson, C. (2020). Gender and Dutch newspaper reports of intimate violence, 1880–1910. In M. van der Heijden, M. Pluskota, & S. Muurling (Eds.), Women’s criminality in Europe, 1600–1914 (pp. 206–225). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiltenburg, J. (2004). True crime: The origins of modern sensationalism. American Historical Review, 109 (5), 1377–1404. https://doi.org/10.1086/ 530930.

4 Gendering Violence: Theorising the Links Between Men, Masculinities and Violence Bob Pease

What does it mean to frame violence as gendered or gender-based? To understand the links between gender and violence, we need to understand what gender is. The concept of gender was originally adopted by feminists to distinguish between the biological features of sex and the culturally constructed characteristics of masculinity and femininity (Dragiewicz 2008). Thus, gender is often defined as men’s and women’s socialised identities in contrast to the biological differences of sex that distinguishes males from females. The terms gender and sex are often used interchangeably and they are often conflated (Dragiewicz 2008). Many of the references to gender in An earlier version of some sections of this chapter were published as part of the book titled Facing Patriarchy: From a Violent Gender Order to a Culture of Peace (Zed Books, London, 2019).

B. Pease (B) Deakin University, Waurn Ponds, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Husso et al. (eds.), Violence, Gender and Affect, Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56930-3_4

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writing about violence against women are actually referring to sex differences, as in the case of who hits who most often in domestic violence situations. Fathers’ rights advocates use this notion of gender as part of their claim that violence in the home is not a gender issue. Htun (2005) notes that most people think that gender simply refers to women (and in some cases men). In other words, it is understood as an identity or an attribute of individuals rather than a set of practices involved in the reproduction of institutions and an attribute of social structures. Connell (2010) also notes that gender is often understood simply as the categories men and women occupy in terms of sex roles or gender roles. Anderson (2005), drawing upon Risman (1998) usefully identifies three different approaches to gender: individualist, interactionist and structural. From an individualist perspective, masculinity and femininity are learned characteristics that men and women internalise into their identities. Restricting the definition of gender to social attributes of persons has allowed critiques of feminist analyses of violence as a gender issue to gain greater traction. If gender is only an attribute of individuals, there is a less persuasive case that violence against women is primarily a gender issue. For example, the gender symmetry arguments propagated by anti-feminist researchers rest upon an individualist conception of gender. Interactionist approaches regard gender as a consequence of social interaction and enactment, whereby gender is an accomplishment. In this view, violence is one of the ways in which men construct their masculinity. This explains in part, why men might resort to physical violence when their masculinity is challenged. Such a challenge could arise from unemployment or low paid work in comparison with higher paid work by female partners. Men who have access to greater economic resources may not have to resort to physical violence to control their partners. This understanding of gender as enacted by men can also explain men’s violence against other men as well as violence against women (Anderson 2005). Thus, one of the key insights of critical gender theory is that gender is something that is enacted or done rather than a state of being (Fenstermaker and West 2002). This enactment of gender must be

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located in the context of larger structures and social arrangements. The focus of concern is how this doing of gender reproduces these wider structures (Pease 2010). This notion captures the idea of gender as a process rather than as a category whereby gender reproduces unequal gender outcomes in policies and structures. Structuralist approaches focus on the structural dimensions of gender, whereby gender is understood as a form of social structure within which men and women are embedded. Htun and Weldon (2010, pp. 5–6) define gender as ‘a constellation of institutions. It is constituted by rules, norms and practices. Gender is a feature of social structures and institutions more than human identity. It positions men and women in unequal relations of power, often intersecting (or combatting) with other institutions to uphold patterns of status hierarchy and economic inequality’. In this view, men and women are located in structurally unequal gender relations that shape and constitute the experience of violence beyond who hits who how often. Anderson (2005) maintained fifteen years ago that the vast majority of studies on gender and violence at that time relied upon an individualistic approach to gender. I would argue that this is still the case. In a review of the use of the concept of gender in health promotion literature, Gelb et al. (2011) found that the relational complexity of gender and its intersections with other social divisions was rarely addressed. We have to move beyond individualistic approaches to gender if we want to understand the complexity of the links between gender and men’s violence against women. In terms of this wider definition of gender, it may be more appropriate to use the term ‘gender order’ rather than gender. Given that gender does not just include presentation of self, but also entails laws, cultural beliefs and collective practices, this term captures the wider institutional dimensions of gender. Flood (2007a, p. 235) drawing upon Connell (1987) defines a gender order as ‘the patterning of gender at the level of an entire society’. This is differentiated from gender regimes which refer to ‘the patterning of gender in given institutions’ such as schools, workplaces or the state. Kelly (2005) notes that the language of gender orders or gender regimes have replaced the language of patriarchy in response to criticisms of the concept. However, the concept of patriarchy is an example of an

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unequal gender order where men dominate women and other men, and this concept still has currency in understanding men’s violence (Pease 2019).

Critical Gender Theory and Masculinity From the early days of masculinity studies, many feminists expressed concerns about the potential of research into masculinities becoming more focused on men’s interests than feminist agendas. While the focus on masculinity within critical masculinity studies has been on how it legitimates patriarchy, some commentators have expressed concern about the dangers in shifting the analysis from patriarchy to masculinity (McMahon 1999; Macleod 2007; Hearn 2012). It has certainly contributed to a decline in the language of patriarchy in gender studies more generally and masculinity studies in particular. Masculinity is ultimately seen to be located within individual men and it is often used to refer to male sex role characteristics of men. Such a framing draws predominantly from psychology and social psychology (Robertson et al. 2016). Often, when linked to men’s abusive practices, it is attributed with causal power in that it is masculinity that is seen as the primary cause of men’s dominance and violent practices in the world. It can thus be used to explain and excuse men’s behaviour. When we frame masculinity as a cause of men’s violence, we take responsibility away from the men who perpetrate it. This can lead to a focus on changing masculinity at the expense of men changing their behaviour. Given the focus in critical masculinity studies on masculinity as a range of practices, some critical gender theorists shift the focus to the acts men perform to reproduce gender inequality. Schrock and Schwalbe (2009) suggest that one of the consequences of focusing on masculinities, as noted earlier, is that masculinity is used to explain men’s behaviour. Masculinity in this context is disconnected from men’s agency. Rather than focusing on masculinities, Schrock and Schwalbe emphasise the importance of examining how men’s practices, what they refer to as ‘manhood acts’, reproduce gender inequality.

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Hearn (2016) proposes a political and conceptual move from hegemonic masculinity to the hegemony of men, arguing that the focus on masculinity is too narrow. Consequently, the gaze needs to shift to the individual and collective practices of men in explaining men’s power rather than the concept of masculinity or masculinities. The problem with the notion of masculinity is that its origins in sex role theory and psychology leads to a psychologisation of gender politics (McMahon 1999). Addis et al. (2010) also note that the concept of masculinity has generally promoted essentialist understandings about gender. They ponder whether it may be at odds with a commitment to eliminating gender inequality. You can change masculinities without transforming men’s privileged and dominant position. If the socially constructed notions of masculinity and femininity are framed as inherently unequal, it is hard to imagine how they can be reformed towards gender equality. Furthermore, if hegemonic masculinity is seen as the root cause of men’s dominance and violence, then the problem is seen as men practising a bad version of masculinity (Schwalbe 2014). If the gender binary is structured as being unequal, it suggests that rather than reconstructing masculinity (one side of the binary), we may need to end the binary of gender altogether.

Framing ‘Gendered Violence’ and ‘Gender-Based Violence’ Returning to the framing of violence as gendered or gender-based, how are these terms understood? When gender analyses are used in government violence prevention policies, the focus is primarily upon women as victims, sometimes with an acknowledgement that most of the perpetrators are men. Violence is frequently considered to be gendered on the basis that it is ‘violence against women’ (Jakobsen 2014) and the terms ‘gender-based violence’ and ‘violence against women’ are often used interchangeably. Some feminist and profeminist commentators propose avoiding the language of gender-based violence to ensure that the emphasis in violence

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prevention is focused on violence against women (Flood 2018), or alternatively others argue for the importance of restricting ‘gender-based violence’ to violence against women (Ward 2016). In response to backlash criticisms by anti-feminist commentators, who ask: ‘what about the men?’, violence prevention organisations often maintain that violence against women is substantially different to violence against men. They do so on the basis that most violence against women occurs in the home, while most violence against men occurs in public settings. They also suggest that while the patterns and dynamics of violence against women are gendered, they imply that violence against men is not gendered. These explanations are used to legitimate a focus on addressing men’s violence against women to the exclusion of men’s violence against men. However, the premise of this chapter is that there are commonalities in the violence that men enact towards women and the violence they enact towards other men (Fleming et al. 2015; Heilman and Barker 2018).

Men’s Violence Against Men as Gendered Violence Men are not only the vast majority of perpetrators of violence, they are also more likely than women to be victims of men’s violence (Polk 1994; Barker 2005; Fleming et al. 2015; Heilman and Barker 2018). This applies to homicide and lethal violence, as Polk (1994) demonstrated over twenty-five years ago, and which continues to be the case (Flynn et al. 2016; Heilman and Barker 2018). With the exception of domestic violence, men are also more likely than women to be victims of non-fatal violence by other men (Fleming et al. 2015). There is often silence about men as victims of men’s violence. A number of commentators have noted that male-on-male violence is not considered a form of gendered violence (Tomsen 2008; Seymour 2012; Fleming et al. 2015). In a study conducted by Seymour (2010), while participants regarded ‘domestic violence’ as a form of violence by some men that was unacceptable, men’s violence towards other men was perceived as normal and something that virtually all men were involved

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in. Where domestic violence was understood as men abusing gendered power over women, violence between men was not considered to be a gender issue. Gender and gender power were only seen to be significant when women were the victims of men’s violence. Men’s violence against women is increasingly publicly condemned by governments, while much of men’s violence against men continues to be accepted and normalised in most cultures (Seymour 2018). It is understandable that there would be concerns in shifting the focus from women as the primary victims of men’s violence due to the fear that this may lead to a degendering of violence and may undo the prioritising of women and girls in violence prevention programs (Ward 2016). Also, some of the arguments that include men as victims of ‘gender-based’ violence are based upon criticisms of feminist framings (Dolan 2014). However, when the focus is only on female victims of men’s violence, the gaze is shifted away from the practices of men who do violence both to women and to other men. This shift takes attention away from the links between men’s violence against women and girls, and men’s violence against men and boys. Furthermore, it limits our understanding of gendered power and how such power is enacted and constituted through policies of the state (Nayak and Suchland 2006).

Linking Men’s Violence against Women and Men’s Violence against Men Over thirty years ago, Morgan (1987) explored the links between different forms and levels of violence, from men’s interpersonal violence in the home to men’s collective levels of violence in gangs and warfare. He also noted that some forms of violence by men are legitimated and normalised in society through an acceptance of an aggressive, competitive and hierarchical culture. Such legitimated violence between men takes many forms including fighting and violence between young men in groups, men’s violence on the sporting field and violence between men in war.1 One could also add institutional rituals in university fraternities, the military, sporting clubs and workplaces that promote male-to-male violence.

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Kaufman (1987) also situated men’s violence against other men within what he called a ‘triad of men’s violence’, where the other forms of men’s violence are directed towards women and at men themselves in terms of self harm. More recently, Heilman and Barker (2018) identified the connections between patriarchal masculine norms and eight forms of men’s violent behaviour: intimate partner violence, physical violence against children, child sexual abuse and exploitation, bullying, homicide and other violent crime, non-partner sexual violence, suicide and war. They argue that focusing only on one form of violence in violence prevention neglects the links between the causes of perpetration. Consequently, strategies to address one form of men’s violence are likely to fail if they ignore the other forms of violence by men. Archer (1994a) observes that the structural power that legitimates men’s violence against women and the power struggles between men are interrelated. It is important to note that while some forms of violence between men are largely conceptualised in terms of mutual combat between equals, others forms of men’s violence perpetrated against men take place in the context of hierarchial power relations between men which are similar to those between men and women. Such conflicts are often shaped by power struggles between different forms of masculinity, including marginalised, subordinate and hegemonic forms (Tomsen and Crofts 2012). There is also considerable empirical evidence that men who enact violence towards women also commit violence towards other men outside the home (Archer 1994b; Jones 2013; Pain 2014). Thus, men’s violence against women in the home is associated with the use of violence by men more widely. Similar patriarchal gender norms shape men’s violence against men as those that influence men’s violence against women (Fleming et al. 2015). However, almost all engagement with violent men is focused on the perpetration of violence against female partners. The ideological beliefs held by men who are violent towards women are the same beliefs informing men’s violence towards men. Such beliefs include a traditional understanding of manhood and masculinity, achieving and maintaining status through risk taking and fighting and a view of women as property. Such values promote interpersonal conflict

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between men and men’s control of women, both of which support violence to achieve these ends (Archer 1994a). Part of the resistance to seeing men as victims of men’s violence is that the image of men as vulnerable does not correspond to the hegemonic view of men as powerful and dominant. Thus, to see men as experiencing harm challenges the traditional hegemonic view of men which itself is at the heart of men’s violence (Wojnicka 2015). When men are victimised by other men, their framing of victimisation as being weak and helpless leads them to experience shame and isolates them from support and help (Stanko and Hobdell 1993). Supporting such men, and engaging them in prevention against men’s violence, is an important strategy in overcoming a patriarchal gender order. While some commentators have made the case for the gendered character of men’s subjection to violence (Barker 2005; Flood 2007b; Dolan 2014), little consideration has been given to the gendered nature of men’s perpetration of violence against other men. Thus, the focus is on men as victims of such violence rather than the gendered nature of men’s perpetration of violence against other men.

Theorising Men’s Violence Against Other Men Patriarchy is not only a gender order that involves men’s domination over women, it also involves hierarchies among men whereby some groups of men dominate other groups of men. In this context, violence is both a mechanism for imposing power over men and men resisting such power. While masculinity is most often discussed in the context of men’s relations with women, men demonstrate their manhood more in relations with other men. Men use violence in policing other men (Whitehead 2005). Barker (2005), for example, notes that young men and boys in Africa are socialised into forms of masculinity that involve violence and abuse of other men. Men’s violence against other men is connected to the importance among many men of maintaining status within all male groups and as a vehicle for proving one’s masculinity. A number of writers point out that masculinity is primarily performed for an audience of other men (Kimmel 1994; Polk 1994; Tomsen 2005).

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Tomsen (2005) is one of the few masculinity scholars to explore the gendered basis of men’s violence against men. Many men interviewed by Tomsen talked about how they used violence against other men to impress women and enhance their masculine status by punishing other men who failed to conform to traditional masculinity. Whitehead (2005) identifies two ways in which men affirm their masculinity through violence against other men: displaying courage against a rival man and by humiliating another man by negating his masculinity. Many incidents of violence between men are related to conflict over honour and the risk taking involved in crimes. Men’s violence against men involves a range of situations including friends, acquaintances and strangers (Polk 1994). Much of the violence between men escalates from relatively minor altercations arising from jostling and insults. Men are quick to respond to any challenge to their honour. Thus, in most forms of male-on-male violence, there is some form of perceived challenge to the perpetrator’s masculinity (Connell 2014).

Intersectionalising Men’s Violence Against Men It is now widely recognised that an intersectional analysis is important in understanding and addressing men’s violence against women (Murdolo and Quazon 2016; Beringola 2017). Such an analysis has important implications for men’s violence against men. All men under patriarchy have power and privilege in relation to women. The hierarchy of power between men, however, also means that some men are dominated by other men, as is the case with immigrant men, Aboriginal men, young and old men, disabled men, gay men, men of colour and working-class men. Men who are members of privileged groups are more likely to be perpetrators of violence against other men, while men who are marginalised by class, race, ethnicity, religion or able-bodiedness are more likely to be victims of men’s violence (Wojnicka 2015). Men who do not conform to the dominant conception of heterosexual masculinity,

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such as gay, bisexual and queer men as well as transsexual and transgendered people, are also more vulnerable to men’s violence. Heterosexual men who are not members of the dominant white Anglo male group, such as asylum seekers, refugees, Aboriginal men or men who are members of minority religions, are more likely to become victims of men’s violence. Furthermore, disabled men, homeless men, men in shelters or prisons are also more likely to experience men’s violence. Finally, older men and younger men are more vulnerable to violence than middle-aged men and are also more likely to be living in institutional care settings where they are vulnerable to violence by male staff members (Wojnicka 2015). This is not to deny that marginalised men can also enact violence against privileged men, just as women can enact violence towards men. The concepts of hegemonic, subordinated and marginalised masculinities illustrate the ways that men are structurally positioned in unequal relations, whereby some men have power over other men (Messerschmidt 1998). Marginalised men have limited opportunities to attain traditional forms of masculinity (Whitehead 2005). Thus, men who are subordinated by class and race and who are excluded from traditional forms of male power, may enact physical violence as a way of affirming their masculinity in the face of their structural erosion of power. Such men may not be able to obtain paid employment that affords many men with status and power. For them, physical violence may be one of the few means to achieve some form of masculinity within the particular context of their lives (Fleming et al. 2015). Kimmel (2013) refers to these men as experiencing ‘aggrieved entitlement’. These men are angry because they have either lost or not been able to attain status and resources to which they feel entitled. Montoys (cited in Greig 2000) argues that men are most prone to violence when they feel least powerful. Most mass killings are carried out by men who experience themselves as having lost out in the system (Barker 2016). Experiences of marginalisation and disadvantage foster anger and hostility towards others who are scapegoated and blamed for white men’s loss of privilege (Treadwell and Garland 2011). These arguments highlight the complexities of gendered power relations. Men’s structural and collective advantages do not always translate

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smoothly to the lives of individual men. Moving beyond individual incidents of male-on-male violence to an understanding of social divisions between men reflected in different locations in hierarchies of power and different and competing masculinities, enables us to see clearly the everyday violences in relations between men.

Public Violence by Men Violence in the private realm of the family is separated out from violence in the public realm. Most forms of public violence are perpetrated by men and boys but this is rarely acknowledged as such. So-called kinghit violence, perpetrated by men, most often against other men, is a matter of concern in Australia (Connell 2014). What is notable in much commentary about one-punch assaults in Australia is that these are framed as the ‘coward punch’ and are regarded as unfair so as to differentiate them from other forms of male violence which are acceptable or even honourable (Seymour 2018). Men’s sense of their masculinity is connected to their use of violence. Physical violence between men in public spaces often occurs in the aftermath of insults and verbal threats (Archer 1994b). Men are expected to be able to defend themselves against threats to themselves, their possessions and ‘their women’. Thus, even minor insults can often escalate into physical violence, as men have to find a way of saving face and not being seen to back down. It is often the case when men’s status or power is threatened that they use violence to exercise power and reestablish their position among other men. Sometimes seemingly trivial events like spilling a beer or being perceived as flirting with another man’s partner may be sufficient to evoke male-on-male violence (Carrington et al. 2010).

Youth Violence or Young Men’s Violence? Youth violence is another field where there is little acknowledgement that most of the violence is perpetrated by young men against other young

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men. Thus, although young men are significantly over-represented in all forms of youth violence, analyses and interventions rarely acknowledge masculinities and unequal gender relations (Fleming et al. 2015). Similarly, the literature on school violence often fails to consider why it is only boys who perpetrate violence on their classmates. Kantola et al. (2011) point out that in Finland and the United States, media reporting of school shootings neglected gender analyses. Terms like ‘gang violence’, ‘youth violence’ and ‘teen violence’ lack a gendered analysis of who is perpetrating the violence (Kimmel and Mahler 2003). Boys are more likely than girls to experience bullying in schools and such bullying reproduces hegemonic masculinity. These boys who are most likely to be subjected to bullying are those that do not conform to traditional masculinity. Boys will often engage in hyper masculine behaviours to reinforce their own often fragile sense of masculinity (Vojdik 2014). Tonso (2009) draws parallels between the Montreal massacre and the Columbine school shooting as two forms of public violence by men where male perpetrators used violence to re-establish their position within social hierarchies which they believed had reduced their privilege. In both cases, internalised male supremacy that was unfulfilled was the catalyst for the sense of entitlement that enabled the perpetrators to enact deadly violence. All perpetrators felt a sense of injustice because their privileged positioning was usurped by others. The supremacist belief that some should have rights over others and the legitimacy of violence as a means to reassert privilege combined to justify the violence. Just as men’s great propensity to commit violence is related to them trying to live up to a traditional model of manhood, so is men’s greater vulnerability to such violence, as they involve themselves in dangerous situations. They are, in Barker’s (2005) words ‘dying to be men’. Most homicides among young men are gang related. Men are far more likely than women to be involved in gangs and such gangs often promote codes of behaviour that emphasise violence, hostility towards women and an exaggerated sense of male honour (Barker 2005). Hagedorn (1998) commented over twenty years ago that most of the sociological research at that time on male gangs had neglected gender. With few exceptions

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(Treadwell and Garland 2011; Armstrong and Rosbrook-Thompson 2017), this is still the case.

Hate Crimes by Men Most hate crimes involving racist and homophobic attacks are further forms of men’s violence. While all men are presented as being invulnerable, gay men and non-white men both have to carefully negotiate their vulnerability in racist and homophobic societies (Stanko and Hobdell 1993). In the United States, black men are most likely to be victims of police violence (Barker 2016). Messerschmidt (1998) documents how lynching of African American men was a response by white men to the erosion of their dominance. Lynching was a mechanism of these men doing a form of white supremacist masculinity in an attempt to restore their dominant status. Violence against gay men is another form of gender-based hate violence. Research in Australia on anti-gay homicides reveals that almost all of the killings are by male perpetrators (Tomsen 2013). Gay identified men and women have been on the receiving end of homophobic violence largely by men for many years. Anti-homosexual homicides are often defended on the basis of allegations of a homosexual advance, where such an advance is experienced by some men as such an affront to their masculinity that violence is argued as a justified response (Tomsen and Crofts 2012). Homophobic violence is premised upon a hierarchy of masculinities. Normative heterosexuality is a central characteristic of a patriarchal gender order (Greig 2002). Men who commit violence against those men who are perceived to be gay are often endeavouring to prove their heterosexuality and their masculinity (Flood 2007b). Kantola et al. (2011) argue that gay bashing is less to do with prejudice against nonheterosexual sexual identities and more to do with the perceived failure to conform to hegemonic masculinity. Just as inequalities between men and women facilitate men’s violence, so do power hierarchies among men. If men do not prove themselves to be powerful and strong, they will

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be victimised by other men, as is the case of gay men and others who do not conform to traditional norms of masculinity. Men are encouraged to prove themselves to be ‘real men’ by showing contempt for non-heterosexual men. In this sense, men’s violence is as much about hierarchies among men as it is about dominance over women (Fleming et al. 2015).

Conclusion The main argument of this chapter is that men’s violence against women can best be understood in the context of men’s other violences, including men’s gendered violence against other men. The implication of the interrelatedness of different forms of men’s violence is that strategies to address one form of men’s violence need to address other forms of men’s violence. Consequently, we cannot eliminate men’s violence against women without also understanding and addressing the other violences of men in patriarchy.

Note 1. For an extension of the analysis here, to include the gendering of men’s involvement in militaristic, terrorist, state and inter-state violence, see Pease (2019).

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5 Serious Emotions: On Some Emotions in Working on Men’s Violences and Violences to Women Jeff Hearn

It is hard to talk about researching violence without considering the question of emotions. Violence, and researching violence, are emotional, for all concerned, typically, if not always, engendering negative emotions. Being aware of emotions, and attending to that, as both embodied experience and focus, are part and parcel of researching violence. If you are not aware of such emotions, then maybe there is something J. Hearn (B) Management and Organisation, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] Gender Studies, Örebro University, Örebro, Sweden Sociology, University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK Institute for Social and Health Studies, University of South Africa, Pretoria, Republic of South Africa © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Husso et al. (eds.), Violence, Gender and Affect, Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56930-3_5

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wrong. To make emotions invisible is to denigrate certain kinds of experience, actually be less scientific. Emotions are, to repeat the obvious, embodied. What could be more simultaneously material and discursive than violence?—hence the need for material–discursive approaches in researching violence. Indeed, taking emotions seriously is part of the project of bridging and transcending instrumentality and emotionality, and other binaries, as foregrounded in feminist and other critical engagements. Before going any further into these issues, some words are necessary on the concepts, the words: emotion and affect. Some people seem to use affect as the overarching concept, as inciting of Affect Studies, thus presumably including emotions within it as part of that field; while others wish to make a distinction, sometimes a clear distinction between affect and emotions—sometimes on the basis that affects are some kind of excess, that happens to the body through direct affect(s) of other bodies, phenomena or events, what is sensed, even pre-consciously, while emotions refer to that which affects the person in a more identifiable way, more clearly and consciously, and is known. It has been widely argued that this distinction is unsustainable (see Wetherell 2012, 2013). Because of these differences, perhaps confusions, here I use the term, emotion; the study of emotion is far from new in sociology and social science, but rather a long-established tradition, as in the work of Simmel (1950; Gerhards 1986) or more recently Hochschild (1983). In terms of further definition, emotion can refer to some disjunction, most usually between expectation and experienced reality (Hearn 1993). But even severe disjunctions can become normalised, as with some experiences of both doing violence and receiving violence. Emotion is often constructed as reactive to that which specifically happens to the person at certain point in time, and as significantly negative or positive, sometimes in apparently extreme forms. But emotion can also work in a more muted, longer-term way, with less extreme responses and experiences. Both the more immediate, more reactive and the longer-term forms of emotion are highly relevant to researching on violence, with the first linking with specific disturbing events and experiences, for example, threat or worries for safety. These latter longer-term emotions can be linked with, first, the very practice of doing direct research

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on violence itself, as well as, second, certain other kinds of less immediate, more distanced violence or the use of more distanced research methods on violence, and, third, a variety of managerial, administrative and educational tasks on and around violence. I will return to these forms in terms of what I call the emotions of gravity. Emotions are serious business. Once one starts interrogating the whole question of emotions in working on violence in general or men’s violences to women, it is easy to see there are (so) very many aspects and angles. One way is to explore different emotions, for example, anxiety or sadness or pride. However, that approach may segment and separate different emotions from each other, whereas in reality contradictory emotions can accompany each other. As an alternative, two main kinds of aspect seem important: temporal and object aspects or relations. Temporal relations concern: a. emotions before researching violence; b. emotions in doing research on violence; c. emotions after researching on violence, as in analysis and writing and presenting on violence; d. emotions in other necessary tasks, for example, supervising others’ research, applying for funding and managing research on violence. Second, emotions can be directed towards and be affected by different objects: i. the doer(s) or potential doer(s) of violence, including their own emotions; ii. the violent moment(s), act(s), structure(s) and process(es), and the emotions present; iii. the receiver(s) or potential receiver(s) of violence, including their own emotions; iv. the research itself; v. the researchers, including the individual researcher themselves, and their own emotions. This combination makes for a matrix of emotions in terms of relations to time and objects. Furthermore, different kinds of violence—physical,

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sexual, emotional, online, war, armed conflict, and many other forms— are likely to engender different emotions.

Emotions in Organising Research on Violence I have worked on violences of various kinds since the late 1970s, initially sexual harassment, then child abuse, and in the late 1980s histories of law reform. A turning point, personally, politically and theoretically, and emotionally, in grappling with violence more directly was in 1989 when Jalna Hanmer and I sat down one day and decided to work together. Though Jalna and I had neighbouring offices in the university, we had been researching separately over many years different violences: for her, violence to women and children, and reproductive rights; for me, the forms noted above. Apart from Jalna’s own work (Hanmer and Saunders 1984, 1993), I was strongly influenced by the writing of Catharine MacKinnon (1982), Liz Kelly (1988), and Amina Mama (1989), amongst many other feminist texts. Both Jalna and I were involved in activism: Jalna in Women’s Aid Federation of England (WAFE) and feminist reproductive politics, and me in anti-sexism/profeminism. The meeting brought us together, spanning activism, policy and academia: an emotional brew in itself. We resolved to do this formally, institutionally, ‘properly’, and so set up a formal research unit, the Violence, Abuse and Gender Relations Research Unit at the University of Bradford, UK, with listed colleagues as internal and external members. This was part of what might be called feminist academic community-building. Jalna and I were fortunate in gaining research grants from the UK research council, the ESRC, and elsewhere, involving much field research. The research that was possible depended on much previous political and policy work by Jalna and colleagues within and outside the state, notably West Yorkshire Police, and WAFE. We worked very closely on organisational policy development, with key policymakers, managers, specialists, professionals and activists, especially with the police, criminal justice agencies, housing agencies, health agencies, social services and the third sector. Jalna was a constant support and inspiration, which I was moved by, then and now. We worked together closely as a small and

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determined team. The gendered practicalities and the gendered emotions of doing research had a physical spatial and homosocial equivalent, with a room for the women researchers researching women’s experiences of violence, a room for the men researchers men’s experiences of doing violence, and a joint room occupied by the Unit Administrator, where Jalna and I often talked. I only recall going into the women’s room on one occasion when we needed somewhere to talk to a visiting researcher, and that room was vacant.

Emotions in the Field When beginning to do empirical research in interview and policy studies on men’s violence to known women in the early 1990s, this focus was far from accepted as central within (critical) studies on men and masculinities. By the late 1980s, mainstream research was mostly on ‘captive’ populations, such as men in prison, and men involved with mental health services, sometimes for depression or alcoholism, or mental health institutions. Such research was dominated, in many ways still is, by psychologists and criminologists. Few studies researched men living in the community who had been or were being violent to women, outside the clinic or prison. It was unclear where to turn for models from previous research for doing the research. This produced, for me at least, a lot of anxiety, that was only partly ameliorated by much thorough and collective preparation for interviewing, for the other researchers and myself. In this research, in the 1990s, I was fully ‘in the field’—everything was the field. Seventy-five men were interviewed and about 130 followup consented contacts with agencies where the men had had contact. This meant engaging with men across all classes, from very powerful, respectable and privileged men at the top of state organisations, the police and prosecution services, and men who were not powerful, respectable nor privileged structurally, even if they exerted power at the bodily level. At the start of one interview, the interviewee announced he was ‘not a violent man’, then proceeded to describe at least 30 occasions when he had been violent, using major physical violence and severe

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verbal and emotional violence. Then think about those judges who have downplayed the impact of physical and sexual assaults. Class-gender and further intersections were pervasive. At one moment, we were negotiating with high-level lawyers and prosecutors, the next interviewing men who had created crises for women and children and whose own lives were in a mess. A dramatic, emotional class-gender moment I recall being totally thrown when, whilst chairing a meeting of police and Criminal Justice System people, the County Chief Constable walked into the meeting unannounced. That changed the atmosphere of the meeting instantly on his entry, as it did to my own stomach and the posture of the police officers. I was speechless, frankly intimidated, not by direct or imagined violence, as with some of the men being interviewed, but by the violence of the state personified, even if his person was consciously polite.

Emotions in Interviewing Men on Violence For men to research men about their own violence in a profeminist way is not so easy, methodologically, emotionally, politically. Feminist research has highlighted the significance of intersectional gender power relations throughout the research process, all of its aspects and ‘stages’. These include questions of epistemology, location, ethics, reflexivity and emotions in research. Such methodological issues apply to research on men, masculinities and men’s violence (Hearn 1998c; Pini and Pease 2013). Feminist research has also often pointed to reducing power relations between researcher and researched, in seeking to empower the researched. This model did not work so clearly in this context; put simply, the researchers were not seeking to empower the men who had used violence, at least not in any immediate way. Methods and methodologies in researching men and masculinities needed to be re-theorised and repracticed. This gendering of men applied in definite ways that could not be read about in textbooks on research methodology, feminist or nonfeminist, when beginning this work in the early 1990s. This led to the decision to do very thorough preparation for different kinds of interview

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(e.g. avoidant, depressed, garrulous, hostile) and any likely eventuality in the interviews, through training and role plays, and, importantly, attending to the emotions involved in possible scenarios. This fed into writing our own ‘Working Guidelines: Men Interviewing Men’ on many issues and aspects of interviewing men who have used violence (Hearn et al. 1993). These questions can be placed into the broader frame of interviewing the powerful or relatively powerful, even whilst some of the men were not powerful in societal structural terms. For men to interview other men also raised issues of the appropriate form of men–men relations. This is especially so when it is men interviewing men with relative power, whether by resources, status, hierarchy or in this case violence. This raised some complex and emotional issues. In this work, I had to use my own gender resources, my own self as a method, to be a somewhat different kind of man in different times and places, to secure research access, often at several organisational levels. At times, this meant dealing with respectable, middle class, lawyerly or sexist masculinities that may both affect and construct violence; it meant talking with men who were, for example, long-term unemployed, with addictions, or mental health challenges. In interviewing itself, there were questions of how to be polite and respectful to a man who you knew had beaten up his wife, without colluding with him. The first (cultural) thing was to shake hands in a friendly, open way. At some points, it was important to use the resources of professional power and expert authority, in negotiating access, and in keeping interviews focused on violence. Other key issues in interviewing men about their violence include: paying close attention to how to begin the interview; polite persistence in accessing interviewees; being relaxed in asking difficult, perhaps embarrassing, questions; preparing the end of the interview, including written information. These are all methodological, theoretical and emotional questions, including around the very construction of knowledge, an intersectional gendered social process. However emotional the interviews felt, relaxing where possible within them, through knowing that preparation for interviewing had been thorough, was needed. Preparation assisted becoming confident enough when dealing with scary issues. Even so, fear was part of at least some interviews and interviewing. I recall one

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interviewee saying halfway through an interview: ‘I have a gun’. I was not at all sure at first if he meant he had one on him!

Emotions of Interviewees Not surprisingly, emotion figured in a wide variety of ways in the interviews with men. First, the motivation and agreement to be interviewed could, in itself, often be emotional. Second, there were occasions when emotions were clearly and visibly shown, for example, crying, laughing hilariously, shaking. Third, there were times when the man tells of his own emotions or of the need for him to become emotional in order to change himself. Fourth, there may be times when he talks of his general emotionality or lack thereof. Some men had a somewhat reflective selfanalysis that their own problem with violence was linked to their poor emotional development, and that their lack of regular emotional expression then ‘boils up’ inside and ‘breaks out’ in anger and violence. Typical statements of such internally located violence are: I seem to explode. It all boils up like a volcano, it’s waiting. It’s like somebody else what’s inside me controlling me to do them things, and it hurts, you know. And I keep saying no, and I keep pressing it down, saying, “no, I don’t want it to come out in me.” Or, “leave me alone”. You know, like as though they were bad dreams and that, and I still think about a lot to do with my childhood. You know, it’s like haunting me and I can’t get rid of it. Some of it I dump in the dustbin, I still sort of put my mother on a pedestal. I’ve made her larger than life, you know. Same with my father, great man. It was just like something came over me. It’s hard to explain. All the emotions and all the anger just came out. Anyway I beated [woman’s name] up pretty bad … …and it just came up again, that kind of anger, you know. I hit her anywhere, as long as I just get my temper out of me.

One man spoke of violence as something that built up and then suddenly burst. Violence was for him set in contrast to placidity:

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I think it’s my temper. Ad yet I’m rather placid. It takes a lot for me to really….

Fifth, he may use emotional language, with or without actually showing emotion. These possibilities can mix with each other. For example, talking about violence can intermingle with both talking about emotion and being emotional: And when I met [woman’s name], she always said how laid back I were, because I never let things get to me. Excuse me if I get emotional, because I do get emotional… then it passes. [crying]

And moreover, emotions are embodied, just as when halfway through an interview one interviewee left the room to be sick, as faithfully recorded on tape. However, one should not overstate the emotionality of the interviews and the interviewees. What was interesting, and in some ways surprising, was how easily most men talked about their violence to women in a matter of fact way, and without that much apparent emotion. Denial, and indeed also shame, can be important aspects for those doing and then talking about violence. Expressing emotion is not necessarily good in itself (see de Boise and Hearn 2017), even whilst emotional inexpressiveness is sometimes seen to explain violence. Perhaps, to say the obvious, the expression of anger is not an emotion that many men shy away from. Moreover, it has long been recognised the shortcomings and even danger of reframing men’s violence as a problem of anger and anger management (Gondolf and Russell 1986). Having said this, it was marked that men were clearly emotional was when they directed attention to their own experience of their own earlier violation—from fathers, mothers, teachers, as boys, and young men. That was when they showed their emotion, and sometimes described experiences, such as their own abuse as a child, for the first time.

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Emotions of Researchers Dealing with the emotions of the men interviewed also meant and had implications for researchers’ own emotions. Concerns for the well-being of the researchers had to be taken very seriously, not least as we did not always know the identity of the interviewees, apart from a (maybe fictitious) first name. A linked issue was support for and between the researchers within the research team. So, the external professional, expert “front” of the research had to be coupled with a very caring, mutually caring, set of relations between the men researchers. All the men who did interviewing of men who had been violent to women had some experience in men’s personal development work, men’s anti-sexist politics and/or critical academic studies of men and masculinities. This assisted in being upfront about the anxiety and other emotions in doing this kind of research. Still, there was a lot of stress and tension to be dealt with and a need to discuss whatever came up from the interviews, especially around the relationship of sex, sexuality and violence. Often in the course of doing this interview and field research, I got upset. One, perhaps slightly unusual, occasion, early on in the process, was after I had had a particularly successful phone call, that I had made from home, that meant that I would be able to make contact with some more men. I cried, because of what felt at the time as a form of privilege of being allowed to do what I was doing, albeit very indirectly, in connection with the pain of the women who had experienced the violence of the men concerned. Violence is also a powerful topic to research because it connects with other powerful experiences in researchers’ own lives—men’s, and in earlier lives as boys’, own violence, men’s experience of being violent and being violated, men’s relations with women, feelings of love and hate, and so on. I especially recall one interview in which the interviewee used the image or maybe metaphor of an orgasm in describing the moment of his own violence. This was certainly disturbing, and especially upset one of the research team a lot; accordingly, afterwards in the debriefing, we together went through what can be called the emotions of disgust. This researching of violence was thus set in the tensions between

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the routine business of men doing research, and the disruptive, and occasional coincidental, elements of the researching of violence. There was a palpable sense of relief on finishing all the interviews. I realised when these projects were completed that I had been under a medium level of stress for several years, fearing the worst—for example, one of the interviewees attacking or killing a woman shortly after the interview or one of the researchers being attacked in the interview. We had a fixed system of telephoning in just before each interview and also just after the completion of the interview. One day, in fact it was early evening as I recall, one of the research team forgot to phone in after the interview. A very tense few hours were spent until a late-night call came. He had forgotten, probably as the interview was outside the usual working day, and was fine.

Emotions Between Men In arranging access to interviewees, in the interviewing, and in the relations between researchers, there were a lot of men–men interactions. The Criminal Justice System is a system not just dominated by men, but dominated by particular kinds of masculinities, in the shape of police, lawyers, prosecution, prison, probation, men’s programmes and so on. Such officials themselves can be directly non-violent or violent, and moreover can subvert or collude with interpersonal violence in terms of responses to violence, lack of responses or patriarchal responses: violence occurs in, through and around organizations (Hearn and Parkin 2001). An apparently innocent (but not) question by, say, a police officer to a victim/survivor such as, ‘And what did you do to provoke him?’ can not only blame the victim, but bring double violation. Men may ‘meet’ each other through similarity rand degrees of difference, including regarding relations to violence and violence against women. Men, whether as co-researchers, interviewers or interviewees, may find some form of intimacy through talking about the non-intimacy of violence. Moreover, to do this kind of research can mean breaking some taboos—even whilst it is available for reincorporation into male hegemony—through:

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• therapeutic clinicism, that is, treating the men interviewed as clinical cases to be understood and perhaps ‘cured’ by therapeutic or similar means; • scientism, the scientistic narrative; • heroism, the heroic narrative; and/or • redemption, individual or collective. Men’s talking to men about men’s violence to known women can always be liable to be collusive, heroic, a means of bonding, a show of bravado. Such talk may also carry with it the fantasy of violence then and there in the interview. At the same time, with men researching on violence, and indeed for men doing anti-violence work more generally, there can be issues of possible dissociation and distancing from ‘other men’, men’s violence and patriarchy (Burrell 2020; also see Mercer and Julien 1988; Hearn 1998b). Men who use violence can (easily) be subjected to othering, just as the self can be self-othered. These perspectives link with Bob Pease’s (2008, 2020) work on how anti-violence intervention can be directed to non-violent men, not only men using violence; to put this another way, the silence of non-violent men partly maintains men’s violence. Likewise, a promising strand of analysis and policy development was to see men’s violence to women, perhaps counter-intuitively, in part through (‘fratriarchal’) peer relations between men (Hearn 1998a, DeKeseredy 1990; Hearn and Whitehead 2006; Sanday 2007). Violence can be a currency in and through which men are often defined, constituted, and women can be the object or means of that currency.

Emotions in Analysis and Writing Emotions, specifically distress, figured strongly in listening to tapes, analysing and then writing up. For example, reading through transcripts I sometimes found I had to stop and weep at what I was reading or listening to, particularly when the violence was described as being very deliberately. In this kind of experience, the tape and the transcript can have a disconcerting life of their own—a lure, an appeal, a curio, an ‘authentic voice’, ‘simple’ data and text, along with the seduction of the

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tape and the text as real life. The emotions engendered in doing this kind of research and analysis appeared to increase with: • ‘amount’ and severity of violence reported; • perception of uniqueness, and at times bizarreness, of the violence and the violent situation or episode; • lesser predictability of the violence; • greater tension and feelings of threat in the interview; • individual interviewee’s unclear relation to violence; and • positive lessening of male hegemony. This in turn prompted further attention to the relations of men’s talk (in the present, and about violence) and men’s (past) actions/violences/body—highlighting the importance of the materialdiscursive in analysing and opposing violence. Towards the end of the project I came to realise more fully that I had been under mild or moderate stress for a long time, and that I did not wish to work full-time on violence; I felt, emotionally, it was not good for my long-term well-being. More analytically, it was also that I did not want to separate work on (anti-)violence from other parts of life. There seemed to be an isomorphism between the difficulty of separating violence from social life in men’s interview accounts, and the difficulty of doing so in research. I saw it was important to ‘bring violence’ into all, almost all, other areas of work, for example, studies on work, organisations and management, rather than seeing violence as some aberrant activity. I also decided that I wanted to change universities (before it was too late). Indeed, it was not so many years after that that I moved to Finland, and directed my work on violence more to supervising others and policy development work—not least as I thought that qualitative empirical work on violence needed to be conducted in people’s first language. This leads onto the less discussed question of what might be apparently low-level, but no less important, emotions around researching violence.

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The Emotions of Gravity (1): The Very Practice of Doing Direct Research on Violence Most obviously, the emotions concerned with violence are negative emotions: distress, hurt, grief, anxiety, fear, anger and so on. Such emotions can occur in the doing of violence, in researching violence, in acting on and against violence. Less often there are positive emotions around violence—of joy, excitement, pleasure—as, for example, when released from violence, when violence is prosecuted or when contributing in some way to that. In addition, it must be noted some people seem to derive positive pleasure in doing violence, and some also have some forms of positive experience in receiving what could be considered violence, even if defined otherwise, under certain conditions as in some BDSM. However, I now wish to move away from these kinds of examples to draw attention to what I see, and have experienced, as a less explored set of emotions: the emotions of gravity in researching violence. The emotions of gravity are somewhat different to the emotions of grief or distress or joy or pleasure. They are less tied to the particular or, in some cases, the transient. Rather, they invoke emotions of gravity, solidarity, long-term commitment for change, including distant solidarities and commitments. One of the underemphasised aspects of researching violence is not so much the emergencies and the dramatic episodes and emotions, but rather the long-term, ‘slow emotions’ of engagement with violence, that is, the very practice of doing direct research on violence itself, including the intensive research already discussed. Substantively, researching violence, especially on men’s violence to known women, is a very humbling and emotional experience for men, at different levels of experience. Violence is not just another topic for research, to be done ‘in passing’ or lightly. Doing bad (for example, non- or anti-feminist or racist) research can lead to more violence, harm, even fatalities. So, when I see such bad research, like that which blames the victim, I feel anger at the damage that may be doing. These longer-term emotions of gravity, these continuous low emotional rumblings, are especially important in direct fieldwork projects, as already described, but they are also highly pertinent in a variety of further ways where there is or appears to be some greater social

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or geographical distance from violence. I now summarise these under two main headings: in researching different kinds of violence, including less immediate, more distanced violence or using different, more distanced research methods on violence; and managerial, administrative and educational tasks on and around violence, yet at a distance.

The Emotions of Gravity (2): Researching Other Forms of Violence and Other Methods of Researching Violence On moving universities, initially to Manchester University, I set about a project on violence and violation in and around organisations, especially workplaces and other organisations. Originally, this was planned as an empirical project, but, in the event, it largely became an overarching study of various different ways of analysing gender, sexuality, sexual harassment, bullying and physical violence, using a variety of secondary data (Hearn and Parkin 2001), along with further studies of the relation of violence, anti-violence policy and emotion within and around organisations (Hearn and Parkin 2007; Flam et al. 2010). This ushered further studies on other locations of violence. Over the last 25 years or so, I have done rather little direct qualitative empirical work on violence. Instead, I have become involved in a wide range of national and international projects addressing various further aspects of violence: comparative, cross-national secondary analysis of other studies, statistical analysis, policy development, ethical guidelines, media studies, methodological studies, theoretical overviews and so on, mainly working with women. Many of these projects are transnational (e.g. Hagemann-White et al. 2008; Hearn et al. 2013), and coming along with that concern with both the transnationalisation of violence (Hearn 2015) and the transnationalisation of emotions (Hearn 2007) around transnational violence and researching violence. Transnationalised emotions can be less immediately intense, but longer lasting, with more gravity. This adds a further form of distance, geographical distance, but also another layer of intensity and

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gravity. It reinforces the fact that emotions are social, even collective, rather than simply individual, psychological phenomena. I will give just two examples here: digital violence and online violations; and macro-sociological analyses of violence. In working on online violations since the late 1990s, one issue is the sense of emotional revulsion and emotional numbness that can sometimes be experienced and that needs to be processed when the violating material researched is digital, usually geographically distant, and where the violated are unknown, perhaps many in number (Hall and Hearn 2017). With macro-sociological analyses of violence (Hearn et al. 2020), these emotions may seem more remote still; emotional engagement with such tasks can be more muted. While periodically, sometimes frequently, realisation of the enormity of violence occurs, perhaps suddenly, dramatically, at the same time there is a quieter emotional awareness of dealing with the horrors of violence, albeit in summarised, perhaps statistical, form.

The Emotions of Gravity (3): Managing, Administering, Educating, Supervising, Examining Research on Violence Over these last 25 years or so, rather than doing much direct qualitative empirical work on violence, I have instead been doing a lot of related organising work and research on violence. This has entailed a wide variety of tasks around violence: supervising research on violence, supervising, commenting on, and examining PhDs on violence, applying for funding for, taking part in, and managing research projects on violence, large and small. There is a tension between the matter-offactness of some of these tasks and terrible harms of violence. Dealing with violence and violence research in such ways can thus also raise these longer-term emotions of gravity, even whilst sometimes also bringing dire and dramatic experiences. For example, I recall examining a Ph.D. on ritual abuse, later published as a book (Scott 2001); the examining itself was a truly harrowing experience, in part fuelled the imagining of the experiences of and effects on those suffering it.

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On the other hand, doing these kinds of tasks does not mean that the way of doing them has to be doom-laden. I recall co-presenting a halfday session, as part of the Violence Against Children Study Group, with the social work academic and practitioner colleague, Christine Parton, on feminist approaches to child abuse, and at the end of the session one of the course participants commenting that, while the session was good and informative, they were relieved that the atmosphere of the course was not unnecessarily doom- and gloom-ridden. It is quite possible to work on such issues in ways that acknowledge the gravity of the matter, but without letting that dictate the mood. It reminds me of the German sociologist Ursula Müller’s paraphrased statement that working on unpleasant issues does not mean that one has to do so in unpleasant places or unpleasant ways. Perhaps above all, managing and developing projects on violence involves a strange mix of, on one hand, being efficient and effective in dealing with complex administrative research and funding systems and procedures, and, on the other, remembering, never forgetting that subject and realities of violence and those who do violence and those who are violated thereby suffer. This kind of sensibility is exactly the opposite of the obsessive phallologocentrism of some heroic, usually male, academics insistent in mansplaining everything to the uninitiated.

And Finally, There Is Humour … The emotions of gravity, as outlined, have their, perhaps strange, accompaniment, rather than direct counterpoint, in the emotions of humour— in relation to researching violence. When I have tried to discuss this question of humour a few times in public seminars, I have felt what I have been trying to say has been misunderstood by some participants. Humour is very important in researching violence, and not simply as a way of coping with difficult and tragic matters, but much more than that. Working on violence can actually be very funny indeed. The humour I am referring to is at least in part based on the recognition of solidarity with people, other researchers, activists, professionals, whom you trust in trying to stop violence, as a long-term project, not by instant or

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magical solutions. These humorous emotions, as part of the emotions of gravity, are especially evocative when working transnationally for stopping violence and gender-based and sexual violence of all kinds, and in capturing the feminism, fragility and humanity of life, harm and death. Emotions are a serious business. Funding This paper acknowledges ‘Regimes of Violence: Theorising and Explaining Variations in the Production of Violence in Welfare State Regimes’ project, Vetenskapsrådet, 2017-01914.

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Hanmer, J., & Saunders, S. (1993). Women, violence and crime prevention: A West Yorkshire study. Aldershot: Avebury. Hearn, J. (1993). Emotive subjects: Organizational men, organizational masculinities and the deconstruction of emotions. In S. Fineman (Ed.), Emotion in organizations (pp. 148–166). London and Newbury Park: Sage. Hearn, J. (1998a). Men will be men: The ambiguity of men’s support for men who have been violent to known women. In J. Popay, J. Hearn, & J. Edwards (Eds.), Men, gender divisions and welfare (pp. 147–180). London: Routledge. Hearn, J. (1998b). Theorizing men and men’s theorizing: men’s discursive practices in theorizing men. Theory and Society, 27 (6), 781–816. Hearn, J. (1998c). The violences of men: How men talk about and how agencies respond to men’s violence to women. London: Sage. Hearn, J. (2007). Feeling out of place? Towards the transnationalizations of emotions. In S. Fineman (Ed.), The emotional organization: Passion and power (pp. 184–201). Oxford: Blackwell. Hearn, J. (2015). Men of the world: Genders, globalizations, transnational times. London: Sage. Hearn, J., Novikova, I., Pringle, K., Smídová, I., Bjerén, G., Jyrkinen, M., et al. (2013). Studying Men’s Violences in Europe: Towards a research framework (Report Series 25). Örebro: Örebro University CFS. Hearn, J., & Parkin, W. (2001). Gender, sexuality and violence in organizations: The unspoken forces of organization violations. London: Sage. Hearn, J., & Parkin, W. (2007). The emotionality of organization violations: Gender relations in practice. In R. Simpson & P. Lewis (Eds.), Gendering emotions in organizations (pp. 161–182). Houndmills: Palgrave. Hearn, J., Raws, P., & Barford, R. (1993). Working guidelines: Men interviewing men. In J. Hearn (Ed.), Researching men and researching men’s violences (Bradford: Violence, Abuse and Gender Relations Research Unit Research Paper No. 4) (pp. 33–53). Bradford, UK: University of Bradford. Hearn, J., Strid, S., Humbert, A., Balkmar, D., & Delaunay, M. (2020). From gender regimes to violence regimes: Re-thinking the position of violence. Social Politics. https://academic.oup.com/sp/advance-article/doi/ 10.1093/sp/jxaa022/5903067. Hearn, J., & Whitehead, A. (2006). Collateral damage: Men’s ‘domestic’ violence to women seen through men’s relations with men. Probation Journal, 53(1), 55–74. Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: The commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Kelly, L. (1988). Surviving sexual violence. Cambridge: Polity. MacKinnon, C. A. (1982). Feminism, Marxism, method, and the state: An agenda for theory. Signs, 7 (3), 515–544. Mama, A. (1989). The hidden struggle: Statutory and voluntary sector responses to violence against black women in the home. London: London Race and Housing Research Unit. 2nd ed. London: Whiting & Birch, 1996. Mercer, K., & Julien, I. (1988). Race, sexual politics and Black masculinity: A dossier. In R. Chapman & J. Rutherford (Eds.), Male order: Unwrapping masculinity (pp. 97–164). London: Lawrence & Wishart. Pease, B. (2008). Engaging men in men’s violence prevention: Exploring the tensions, dilemmas and possibilities. Canberra: Australian Domestic & Family Violence Clearinghouse, Issues Paper 17. Pease, B. (2020). Facing patriarchy: From a violent gender order to a culture of peace. London: Zed. Pini, B., & Pease, B. (Eds.). (2013). Men, masculinities and methodologies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sanday, P. R. (2007). Fraternity gang rape: Sex, brotherhood, and privilege on campus. New York: New York University Press. Scott, S. (2001). The politics and experience of ritual abuse: Beyond disbelief . Buckingham: Open University Press. Simmel, G. (1950). The sociology of Georg Simmel (Translated, edited, introduced by K. H. Wolff ). Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and emotion: A new social science understanding. London: Sage. Wetherell, M. (2013). Affect and discourse—What’s the problem? From affect as excess to affective/discursive practice. Subjectivity, 6 (4), 349–368.

Part III Institutional Violence

6 Institutional and Affective Practices of Domestic Violence Interventions in Social Work: Malignant Positioning of Victims Sisko Piippo , Marita Husso , Pasi Hirvonen , Marianne Notko , and Katerˇina Glumbíková

This chapter concerns the expression of social workers’ emotions related to intervening in domestic violence (DV) and how these expressions S. Piippo (B) Department of Social Sciences, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland e-mail: [email protected] M. Husso Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland e-mail: [email protected] P. Hirvonen Faculty of Social Sciences and Business Studies, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland e-mail: [email protected] M. Notko Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Husso et al. (eds.), Violence, Gender and Affect, Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56930-3_6

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result in the positioning of clients. We refer to positioning as the social and moral action, that involves assignment of the rights and duty for individuals to act in a certain way (Harré 2015). Intervening in DV is an ethically and emotionally demanding practice, characterised by emotional labour and moral judgement (e.g. Barlow and Hall 2007; Keinemas 2015; Lynch et al. 2019). However, surprisingly little is known about social workers’ emotional responses in DV cases. DV, which reflects gendered and imbalanced power relations in close relationships, is deeply embedded in societies. In Finland, the overall number of occurrences of violence against women is high compared with other European and Nordic countries (European Union Agency of Fundamental Rights 2015). According to Finnish homicide statistics, 60% of adult female victims of homicide from 2010 to 2017 were killed by an intimate partner (Lehti 2018). DV has a significant impact on individuals’ well-being. In addition to causing human suffering and mental and physical illnesses, DV bears significant financial costs for the police and judicial, health care and social welfare systems (e.g. Corradi and Stöckl 2016; European Union Agency of Fundamental Rights 2015). While the Finnish welfare system is advanced in terms of social insurance and health care, responses that include gender perspectives on DV have been available only since the 1990s. This limitation on DV responses has allowed violence to continue (Husso et al. 2020). Transnational pressure has affected policy development in Finland and encouraged the definition of DV in relation to societal and gendered power. However, responses on DV in Finnish society continue to be dominated by apparent gender neutrality and the definition of DV itself in terms of gender-neutral concepts and rhetoric (Clarke 2011; Corradi and Stöckl 2016). Previous research has identified various DV-related ideological presumptions, conceptions and emotions as significant barriers to tackling DV in social and health care (Hester 2011; Husso et al. 2012; K. Glumbíková Faculty of Social Studies, University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic e-mail: [email protected]

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Keeling and Fisher 2015). Even when such meetings occur frequently, encountering victims in social work practice can be ethically and morally demanding, with conceptions and emotions playing an inherent role in professional practice (e.g. Barlow and Hall 2007). In some cases, emotions can be ways of accomplishing certain social acts (Harré 2009). Emotions can be considered embodied experiences of judgements; for instance, a social worker’s anger or frustration while encountering victims is an expression of a judgement that the worker has made. Institutionally accepted ways of and practices for expressing emotions can be derived from a particular institution’s social order, such as the extent to which employees are encouraged to acknowledge emotional burdens and the institution offers counselling services for employees. These institutional and affective practices involve social norms and rules, which may be tacit and taken-for-granted expectations of one’s rights, duties and obligations (Berger and Luckmann 1991). An affective practice implies that the ways we think and act are influenced by emotions, which impacts our judgements and, thus, our practices (Pedwell and Whitehead 2012; Smith et al. 2018). How employees adjust and control their emotional expressions according to prevailing norms is an aspect of emotional labour (Lynch et al. 2019). However, these institutional and affective practices can devolve into bureaucratisation when procedures, habits, rules and regulations redefine and neutralise emotions (Ruch et al. 2018), which in turn propagates unclear, unarticulated rules about how to express emotions in social work. Tabooing social workers’ emotions, which are perceived as unprofessional, results in a lack of means and capability to handle them (Barlow and Hall 2007; Keinemas 2015; Glumbíková et al. 2019). Utilising foundational points of positioning theory (e.g. Harré and Van Langenhove 1999; Harré 2015), our study investigates social workers’ response to DV in social and healthcare institutions. We start from the premise that social work practitioners can hold different positions illustrating their divergent rights, duties and obligations to act (see also Piippo et al. 2020). Positioning theory, which originates from social constructionism, post-structuralist feminist studies and the philosophy of language, can be regarded as ‘the study of local moral orders as evershifting patterns of mutual and contestable rights and obligations of

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speaking and acting’ (Harré and Van Langenhove 1999, p. 1). Similarly, institutional and affective practices in DV interventions can be considered as moral orders that establish expectations and rules of appropriate behaviour (Harré and Moghaddam 2003). In interactions between clients and professionals, positioning acts rely on the local moral order and entail a cluster of rights, duties, obligations (Harré and Moghaddam 2003) and emotions. Expressions of emotions embody a person’s values and moral judgement s based on these moral orders in certain situations (Parrot 2003). The presence of emotions in a given situation thus becomes a moral marker, indicating the need for moral decision-making (Navarez and Lapsley 2005). Some forms of positioning can be ‘malignant’, referring to the negative effects of how people are seen by others. A ‘malignant position’ not only describes how victims are seen by others but can also have a negative effect on how victims come to see themselves (Sabat 2003). Emotions are informative in relation not only to the situation but also to moral beliefs. The role of emotions in the process of judgement and decision-making is thus to reveal values and moral priorities (Banks et al. 2008), leading to a moral decision regarding whether and how to act (Keinemas 2015). By analysing interview data (n = 20) collected from social workers, we explore institutional and affective practices related to encounters with DV victims through the lens of discourses and social positioning concerning emotions. We consider (1) how emotions expressed by social workers assign positions and moral assumptions to social workers’ and victims’ rights and duties and (2) how the display of emotions relates to the positioning of the victims.

Positioning Theory and the Social Construction of Emotions How we perceive, interpret and assign interpersonal rights and duties in everyday conversations forms the core of positioning theory. The theory’s aim is not only to examine the construction of social reality but also how social reality constructs the person or self. In this sense, the concept of the self should not be considered static or predefined but rather as a

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publicly constructed version of oneself and others. Within this context, interpersonal positioning can be understood as “the assignment of fluid ‘parts’ or ‘roles’ to speakers in the discursive construction of personal stories that make a person’s actions intelligible and relatively determinate as social acts” (Van Langenhove and Harré 1999, p. 17). As an analytical tool, positioning theory allows encounters with DV victims to be approached as a social action, where the positions of the professional and victim are interconnected. As positioning often entails an element of evaluation or judgement, emotions and their relation to moral evaluations play a significant role in positioning (e.g. Harré 1986; Parrott 2019). In this chapter, we focus on institutional and affective practices and particularly the social elements of emotional displays by considering them as social acts. Adopting an interpretive perspective from positioning theory ultimately connects these institutional and affective practices to the individual moral appraisals and judgements in which emotions play a central role. According to positioning theory, the social reality should be understood and investigated in terms of three intertwined elements of social life. First, conversations consisting of different speech acts should be examined, as each speech act has or is assigned a specific meaning in conversation, resulting in specific social consequences. Second, speech acts should be considered in relation to storylines that unfold in conversations; these storylines can be considered as both script-like structures of joint behaviour and narrative resources through which individuals and collectives construct and make sense of themselves. Third, the actual positions assigned to or adopted through speech acts in a given storyline should be considered. Through these three elements of social life, the construction and unfolding of rights, duties and responsibilities can be analysed with reference to the local moral orders of each social episode (Harré 2015; Van Langenhove and Harré 1999). Previous studies utilising positioning theory in the context of DV have focused on the self-positioning of social workers (Piippo et al. 2020) or female victims of DV (Jarnkvist and Brännström 2016), or they have illustrated how roles and responsibilities define the positions of clients or patients (Nikupeteri 2017). In this study, positioning theory enables

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us to approach social workers’ emotional response and moral judgement in DV cases and to identify how social workers’ expressions of emotions result social workers’ the positioning of the client. We focus on the emotional expressions and appraisals of social workers as they talk about their clients and professional experiences. We examine how these emotional expressions contribute to speech acts and positioning, resulting in the construction of specific kinds of storylines, and how social workers often tacitly position clients in a malignant fashion in these processes.

Data and Analysis The data of this study were collected from Finnish social workers between May 2017 and February 2018 as part of a large national research and development project titled Enhancing Professional Skills and Raising Awareness on Domestic Violence, Violence against Women and Shelter Services (EPRAS). The project was funded by the European Union (EU) and conducted in cooperation with the University of Jyväskylä, The National Institute of Health and Welfare, Police University College and several municipalities and shelters. Data were collected from 10 focus group interviews with social and healthcare professionals and police officers (n = 57), which lasted between 90 and 105 minutes. The responses of social workers (n = 20) were included in this analysis. All participants were licenced social workers, which in Finland implies that they hold master’s degrees in social work. The average working experience was 13 years. Social workers’ professional positions were in shelter (3), child protection (10) and adult (3) services and family counselling centres (3). The analysis was carried out in two main phases with a focus on the concepts of the positioning triangle: speech acts, storylines and positions (Harré and Van Langenhove 1999). The first phase involved identifying and coding participants’ speech acts, namely expressions of emotions, by reading interview transcriptions several times. Based on our interest in institutional and affective practices, special attention was paid to speech acts containing emotional expressions in relation to encounters with victims.

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In the second phase, expressions of emotions were identified in a cluster-like fashion, and storylines referring to dynamic episodes or patterns created through speech acts were constructed (see Table 6.1). Storylines were understood as the contexts of speech acts and positions (Harré and Slocum 2003), summarising what is to be expected in the episodes and outlining the conventions through which sense is made of the social workers’ discourses (Harré and Moghaddam 2003). They also need to be understood as overlapping. Storylines of uncertainty, rejection, evasion and responsibility illustrate the moral judgement expressed in discourses concerning emotions (Parrot 2003). The analysis revealed the following four victims’ positions associated with the storylines: no one’s client, uncooperative person, voiceless help-seeker and unconvincing victim. These positions were further analysed following Sabat (2003 Table 6.1 Emotional practices in social work and the positioning of the client Malignant position of the client

Storylines

Emotions

No one’s client

Uncertainty

Confusion Insecurity

Uncooperative person

Rejection

Anger Frustration

Voiceless help-seeker

Evasion

Fear Anxiety

Unconvincing victim

Responsibility

Helplessness Powerlessness

Judgement of emotions concerning domestic violence The victim’s service need clashes with unclear divisions of tasks and responsibilities in multiprofessional collaboration The victim fails to fulfil expected appropriate behaviour as a client and a service user The victim’s situation raises concern for the safety of both the victim and professional The victim is determined to be a responsible agent and an active party in the violent incidents

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p. 86), who states that some positioning forms can be ‘malignant’, referring to their negative effect on the way people are seen by others (cf. Leinonen 2019).

Malignant Positioning of Clients No One’s Client Discourses grouped under the first malignant position represent an unstructured institutional practice and moral order, where a storyline of uncertainty unfolds emotions relating to a lack of awareness regarding the social worker’s own professional rights and duties. The extracts below demonstrate the complexity of genuine, multiprofessional decision-making and divisions of tasks when power is balanced between the various professions involved in DV cases. Social workers reflected on situations when clients had reported their experiences of violence. G10P6 : (…) they [girls] usually go to the school nurse or the curator and say they are being beaten. They don’t want to go home. And then they [school officers] call us, like, you solve this problem, it’s four o’clock. The school wants to get home. (Laughs). The girl sits there in the nurse’s room. (Child protection) G9P2: Somehow, as an employee, you think that if you send a person somewhere, that [institution] is where you also start working on the things. That as if those walls don’t make any difference to it. So the employee must have the courage to demand it for those clients, and somehow [convey] the understanding that there is a right to demand it. It’s always a little surprising, you have assumed that things have been worked out, but then, they are not. (Child protection)

The findings illustrate insecurity in divisions of tasks and practices in situations in which social workers must demand services to which their clients are entitled and challenges that occur with multiprofessional cooperation, such as divergent views about conceptual definitions and

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different institutional practices regarding how to approach DV. Participants also discussed the confusion and difficulty of reaching a consensus in responsibilities and tasks with police, such as in situations where police officers expressed their frustration about having to start an investigation. In addition, high-status medical professionals may be pre-positioned to perceive themselves as having the right to dominate interprofessional negotiations. As DV is not typically seen as a medical problem among healthcare professionals (also Spangaro et al. 2011; Husso et al. 2020), it can be neglected when they act according to these pre-positions (Hirvonen 2019). These conflicting perceptions of DV also complicate setting shared goals (Hester 2011), a contradictory situation also referred to as breaking rules without knowing them (Barlow and Hall 2007). In some focus groups, participants even criticised multiprofessional work as giving workers a ‘right’ to ignore their duty to intervene. G6P4: It is like just transferring a client from one authority to another. Like, “I just heard it [experience of violence] here, but go tell it to another unit”. And then just send [her] to the next. We would like to have a bit of a clearer idea of this process. (Shelter)

Confusion about one’s own and others’ roles in DV interventions blurs professional responsibilities, leading to a situation in which both the right and duty to intervene are delegated to another profession. Viewed in conjunction with organisational confidentiality policies that prohibit sharing information, this confusion of responsibilities can be regarded as malignant positioning because the professional responsibility is bypassed and victim’s situation is neglected and not necessarily handled by any professional.

Uncooperative Person The storyline of rejection exemplifies ignoring DV as an individual experience. Uncooperative clients may cause emotions in professionals such as anger and frustration, which can lead to professionals denying the existence of violence and weaken their sense of duty to intervene.

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This storyline concerns a moral order in which social workers adopt a right to define the client’s appropriate social action as a service user. In accordance with previous studies (e.g. Corradi and Stöckl 2016; Nikupeteri 2017; Jarnkvist and Brännström 2016; Saini et al. 2019), our study also demonstrates that victims who fail to fulfil the institutionally shaped expectation for the cooperation also fail to prove that they are worthy of empathy and access to ongoing support. The social worker may perceive that the client has no socially acceptable excuses for failing to change complex living conditions and should resist violence, protect children and actively cooperate with the violent partner and authorities. Reporting abuse, for instance, can be defined as a mother’s dysfunctional behaviour and attempt to alienate a child from the father. G10P6 : There may be anger, different emotions. That somehow, how to find a good solution for that child or that family, if there is domestic violence. Or intimate partner violence. G10P4: It’s such a way of using force. That you blame the other one for violence, which may not even have happened. Because they are aware, especially in these custody disputes, that this is a really good joker to pull from the back pocket. (…) G10P1: And that is a kind of tool for exercising power on both sides. (…) G10P4: You never have the right to beat, but [bold added] it has many dynamics behind it. How can those families be helped to break away from the wrong way of doing things? There are quite a lot of provocative women as well. (Child protection)

The extracts above demonstrate how clients’ personal attributes become the basis of their implicit positioning as the inflaming party for the violence. This positioning also exemplifies professionals’ rejection of violence as clients’ lived experience and a misrecognition of violence as something other than a threat to life.

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The implementation of procedural norms, like impartiality, can lead to belittling the victim’s individual experience of violence (Husso et al. 2017a). G3P3: Asking those ex-spouses to make a deal with each other and the intention is to make a deal, and, of course, it is a good idea to do it for the sake of the child. But that violence is pretty much nothing to them [officers in the child custody negotiations]. That you have to come [at the negotiations] at the same time, no matter how traumatised the victim is. And to me, that is totally unreasonable. I have instructed many clients that you do not need to go there at the same time. You ask for a separate time. But it may not be understood. (…) At worst, the worker allies herself with the perpetrator of violence, making the victim even more victimised. My client has had such a traumatic experience. (Family counselling centre)

A social worker from a child counselling centre used third-order positioning when critically describing the institutional practices of professionals outside the initial discussion (Harré and Van Langenhove 1999, p. 21). The victim’s attempts to obtain an individual appointment in a child custody negotiation went unheard. Instead, the unquestioning observance of rules led to the amoral decision to ignore the request, as institutions offering an ethical framework for particular employees’ conduct ‘exempt them from moral responsibility for their behaviour at the same time’ (Pratchett 2000, p. 123). If a worker does not recognise the dynamic of violence allowing it to continue, professional responsibility to intervene in DV can be obscured, and the victim exposed to DV may be encountered as an uncooperative person who is not worthy of help. The position can be characterised as malignant because it represents a disregard for the victim’s need for services and a reproduction of discriminating power relations in institutional practices.

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Voiceless Help-Seeker Alongside professional and institutional approaches to moral orders, this section also examines the impact of social workers’ personal moral order in emotion expression and victim positioning. An intrapersonal moral order concerning professionals’ right to ensure personal safety was revealed in discourses unfolding along the storyline of evasion, which shaped the worker’s moral concern and evaluation of the situation. In the context of underdeveloped organisational protocols and inadequate supervision in DV cases, emotions such as fear and anxiety can lead to hesitation in judging a client’s life situation and create blind spots that distort or hide priorities in the social workers’ decision-making process (Rustin 2005). A form of evasion may arise from feelings of fear of being assaulted by a client’s violent spouse. G3P3: You have to be afraid of yourself, too, because if the perpetrator knows which employee the victim is visiting. Who, for example, supports [the] victim in getting rid of him. In those situations, I have sometimes thought, “What if he comes here and says straight words in a little harder way”. (Family counselling unit)

In addition, the difficulty of hearing the cruel details of violent acts was characterised by evasive responses in some cases. For example, few participants elaborated on their unwillingness to hear of victim’s cruel experiences of sexual violence. Aware of their professional duty, they emphasised reluctance to listening as an internal experience intended to protect themself rather than as a direct way of acting. Professionals’ fears and anxieties were sometimes related to causing more harm than good, emphasising possible injurious effects, such as the escalation of violence, when carrying out an intervention in the family. Some participants discussed the origins of their emotions as uncertainty about recognising violence and whether to intervene, for instance, in high-conflict child custody disputes (see also Saini et al. 2019). The possible negative consequences of their own actions were considered, but the consequences of non-intervention in the victim’s life were not addressed.

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G10P6 : If you talk about it, what are the consequences? At that moment and what state of mind are those parents in. However, on the other hand, it needs to be addressed. (Child protection)

Fear may stem from unpredictable factors that cause moral stress in workers. For instance, participants reflected on cases where they considered whether the victim would eventually be murdered or at least traumatised by painful memories. This supports previous research findings that equated asking about violence with opening Pandora’s box (Spangaro et al. 2011; Virkki et al. 2015), in which revealing potential violence exposes the victim to something estimated to be more harmful than the violence already experienced. The moral responsibility for resolving the situation is perceived to remain with the social worker, as an opener of the ‘box’, who must balance the bad and even worse outcomes that may follow as consequences of their action. The position can be characterised as malignant because evasive encounters conflict strongly with careful listening, empathy and believing a victim’s story as an essential part of an empowering DV intervention (Keeling and Fisher 2015; Langenderfer-Magruder et al. 2019; Lynch et al. 2019).

Unconvincing Victim Whereas the position of the uncooperative client and the storyline of rejection concern the institutionally shaped expectation of a cooperative service user, the storyline of responsibility concerns victimhood. It illustrates performative positioning and speech acts that assign positions and moral assumptions connected with professionals’ justifications for defining the ‘real’ victim and, in particular, the responsibilities and duties of victims to behave in an expected way. This storyline entails discourses connected to the social workers’ emotions of embarrassment, which can lead to experiences of helplessness and powerlessness that arise when a client fails to perform the duties associated with a ‘real’ and innocent victim’s position. Social workers perceived taking action in cases of child abuse as a law-based duty. By contrast, they described the role of adult victims differently and were ambivalent about the professional responsibility to

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take action. Rather, the results illustrate how clients were determined to be responsible for being exposed to violence. The results further indicate the professionals’ insufficient knowledge of the dynamics of victimisation and characterise their attitudes towards a woman not leaving a violent relationship as her choice (see also Spangaro et al. 2011; Virkki et al. 2015). Traumatised women exposed to violence were seen as capable of making rational choices about their own and their children’s lives. In these discourses, being a target of DV was not seen as affecting the victims’ freedom of choice, and the vulnerability of victimhood was not recognised. G9P2: In cases if there is some kind of poor relationship. Or a bad relationship with some form of mental violence or something like that. Then there is a common understanding of it. I do not know whether it is a feeling of frustration or a moment of giving up on it. So, of course, not if there is a child, (…) children cannot be in it. But then [there are] grey area cases. (Child protection)

In the extract above, the social worker’s speech act expresses resistance to carrying out her duty as a professional obligated to help female victims, as the victim’s innocence could not be proven and she did not express a desire to leave the violent relationship. Findings of this study characterise a moral order in the professional context of child protection as implicit rules of action, which tend to define DV as a symmetric phenomenon between two equal actors (e.g. Langenderfer-Magruder et al. 2019; Thapar-Björkert and Morgan 2010) and a problem of a couple’s interaction (e.g. Saini et al. 2019). Accordingly, in this study, social workers usually positioned themselves as protecting children, but DV was seen to some extent as a separate, inter-parent matter, which the workers found particularly difficult to handle. Social workers in child protection were criticised as having inadequate knowledge of DV, for instance, in cases where the client returns to a violent partner. G6PO2: As for that trauma and that violence as a phenomenon, and then again, it feels like it’s difficult for their municipality [social

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workers] or other employees to see why that person is here again. That she didn’t deserve it [the help] because she messed up again. (Shelter)

A lack of awareness about the DV dynamic may lead to exercising and reproducing institutional and affective practices that belittle victims’ experiences and lead to victim blaming, which may cause an inactive response to DV. Bureaucratically, child protection, as a neutral public sector authority, involves the responsibility of hearing both parties (e.g. Solomon 2010). This obligation also involves determining whose story is the most truthful, which places the burden of evidence on the victim. The traumatised victim’s way of interacting may appear illogical and confusing, while the perpetrator’s often calm and persuasive behaviour may distort roles and hamper the effort to identify the violence and its severity. This issue of credibility was highlighted in situations where the perpetrator had a high and convincing social status. In one of the focus groups, participants discussed the difficulty of talking about the suspicion of violence when the father of the family was, for example, a police officer. This can be interpreted as a form of malignant positioning because institutional practices, including rights, obligations and duties, may deny the client access to the victim position, which hinders the client’s right to assistance (Harré and Van Langenhove 1999).

Discussion This research echoes the results of several studies that have emphasised how professionals’ behaviour is affected by the social contexts in which the violence and victimisation are understood and conceptualised and the various attitudes towards it (Morgan 2006; Spangaro et al. 2011; Corradi and Stöckl 2016; Husso et al. 2017a; Saini et al. 2019; Husso et al. 2020). Displays of emotions can be approached as affective practices, in which emotions are interpreted and acted out in the framework of various institutional practices (e.g. Smith et al. 2018). These practices can, in turn, be understood as moral orders involving rules and

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expectations of appropriate behaviour (Harré and Moghaddam 2003; Van Langenhove 2017). The results highlight the importance of recognising the clients as victims in cases where they have been exposed to violence (see also Nikupeteri 2017). Although victimhood is not a permanent state, acknowledging a client’s right to be a seen as a victim may lead to less severe blaming practices when clients are encountered (Thapar-Björkert and Morgan 2010; Husso et al. 2020). The institutional and affective practices presented in this study exemplify the difficulty of combating violence within the current service systems. Insufficient knowledge of DV, the low profile of DV in social work education and limited opportunities for social workers to supplement skills with continuing education are a few issues limiting the structural development of these systems. These issues can be considered malignant both for professionals trying to cope with demanding cases and victims who are not adequately received by the services. It is essential to emphasise that professionals’ inaction is neither a responsibility of individual professionals nor even a profession. Instead, tackling violence requires addressing or changing wider social attitudes to provide permanent safety and genuine empowerment (Morgan 2006; Thapar-Björkert and Morgan 2010; Lynch et al. 2019). Our findings suggest that gender neutrality as a wider social attitude and an ideological and institutional practice can be used to rationalise and justify one’s professional inactivity in tackling violence against women, which is supported by several studies that refer to Finland as a country of ‘genderless gender’ (e.g. Lahelma 2012). Emphasising gender neutrality tends to keep the issue of gender out of public debate. Hence, to change institutional and affective practices that enable malignant positioning requires changing gender-neutral rhetoric in the conceptualisation of DV, as well as ideological practices and a readiness to ignore and reject problems related to violence (Husso et al. 2017b). To conclude, we wish to highlight that positions, even when characterised as malignant, are not static by nature. Instead, they can be rapidly renegotiated, enabling social workers to reposition victims by expecting that they have equal rights. However, this repositioning requires recognition of the institutional and affective practices that can create blind spots

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leading to bias and a misinterpretation of priorities (Ferguson 2018). Together with ideological practices related ignorance and the rejection of violence, malignant positioning practices also define how professionals understand victims’ experiences of violence, all of which shapes the victim’s experience of receiving help. Our findings build on earlier results (Corradi and Stöckl 2016; Husso et al. 2017a, 2020), stating that despite the increasing societal understanding of DV as an issue of gendered power and a violation of human rights, there is a need for more effective DV interventions in social welfare states.

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7 Reporting, Reflecting and Recognising Emotions in Therapeutic Work with Domestic Violence Perpetrators: Experiences of the Jyväskylä Group Model Heli Siltala , Helena Päivinen , and Aarno Laitila

In this chapter we discuss the ways emotions can be displayed and worked through in therapeutic treatment for domestic violence. While violence is often associated with anger or dealing unsuccessfully with aggression, this view is too narrow and stereotypical. Instead, we aim to provide researchers and practitioners with tools enabling a comprehensive understanding of violence and emotions. Our argumentation is based on qualitative analysis of group discussions recorded at the Jyväskylä intervention model. The model is an ongoing group treatment programme for perpetrators of domestic violence that has been studied extensively by the University of Jyväskylä. In this chapter we will discuss how emotions are displayed and worked within H. Siltala (B) · H. Päivinen · A. Laitila Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] H. Päivinen e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Husso et al. (eds.), Violence, Gender and Affect, Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56930-3_7

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the intervention. Based on our data and previous literature, we propose a three-stage model for emotional work with domestic violence perpetrators. We will provide transcribed examples from each stage and discuss how these emotional themes can be addressed in group treatment for domestic violence perpetrators. Here domestic violence is defined as physical, sexual or psychological abuse targeted towards the spouse or child of the perpetrator. We also regard domestic violence as a gendered issue, as violence experienced by women and children often overlaps, predominantly occurs in domestic contexts and is most often perpetrated by men (Krug et al. 2002). It has been suggested that to reduce male-perpetrated domestic violence, gender equality and societal norms should be more prominently addressed in prevention and intervention programmes (Barker et al. 2010). In this chapter, we discuss how gender issues can be explored in an intervention for male domestic violence perpetrators. This chapter focuses on emotional work with perpetrators. We understand ‘affect’ as an automatically aroused response, whereas ‘emotion’ includes subjective recognition and interpretation that combine experiential, behavioural and physiological aspects (Stiles et al. 2004). As our focus is on the subjective experiences of violence perpetrators and how these can be constructed and analysed, we chose ‘emotion’ over ‘affect’. The language used here to describe emotional processing is drawn from the theory of emotion-focused therapy (EFT). However, rather than relying solely on EFT perspectives, we integrate these with cognitive and social elements in discussing emotional work with violence perpetrators. One of the core EFT distinctions utilised here is between primary and secondary emotions. Greenberg (2004) describes primary emotions as core reactions to situations evoking emotional experiences, such as being sad at loss. Secondary emotions, in turn, are defined as responses to primary reactions that can act as defences against primary emotions that are too painful to experience, such as replacing sadness with anger. Accessing primary emotions is seen as a crucial task in promoting more adaptive behaviour and experiences (Greenberg 2004).

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Outlining the Working Model: From Anger Management to Active Emotional Work The group intervention examined in this chapter aims to increase safety within families and to start a therapeutic process during which perpetrators can increase their understanding of violence and its consequences and adopt non-violent ways of acting. All interventions targeted at violence perpetrators share this main goal of changing and stopping violent behaviour. However, we argue that working models focusing solely on behavioural change or ‘anger management’ are not sufficient to promote long-term change in violent behaviour. Thus, we propose an integrative therapeutic model that includes (but is not restricted to) three levels: (1) physical reactions, behaviour and emotions; (2) meanings, cognitions, and personal beliefs; (3) attitudes and social context. Physical reactions, behaviour and emotions refer to the individual’s immediate responses. The second level—meanings, cognitions and personal beliefs—is defined by a self-reflective position that takes a step back from the individual’s immediate behavioural or emotional reactions. The third level—attitudes and social context—requires moving from a subjective experience to the intersubjective and societal level, where the factors associated with violent behaviour, such as gendered roles and social norms, can be explored. Both violent and non-violent events can be examined through these three levels. The level initially worked on depends on the perpetrator’s sense-making of the event but we argue that work is needed on all three levels to induce long-term change in violent behaviour. Adopting new views and broadening understanding of situations by analysing them together is a core feature of the therapeutic model described in this chapter. This view draws on Leiman’s (2012) meta-model of the psychotherapy process, which sees stimulating, structuring and joint reflection on client’s expressions as the core task of therapy. This process enables the client to gradually shift from an object to subject position via the observer position utilised in therapy sessions. Another aspect defining therapeutic work is showing interest in clients and their emotions and experiences. The therapist seeks to understand and support the perpetrator in working towards change without condoning the violent behaviour (Rogers 1957). Therapeutic work also

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includes understanding and working with the perpetrator’s past and possible personal trauma history; however, instead of the perpetrator using the past as an excuse for violence, this retrospective work aims at preventing future violence.

Perpetrator Programmes and Emotions Programmes for domestic violence perpetrators are diverse. Interventions can be conducted with groups, individuals and couples, applying, among others, pro-feminist, cognitive-behavioural and psychodynamic approaches (Eckhardt et al. 2013b; Geldschläger et al. 2014). Due to the wide diversity and overlap in intervention methods and practices (Akoensi et al. 2013; Geldschläger et al. 2014), no evidence-based guidelines exist for perpetrator work. However, recommended practices involve accountability, a victim perspective and relevant networks (Work with Perpetrators European Network 2018). Diversity in interventions also hampers the evaluation of the efficacy of perpetrator programmes. Thus, it might be more fruitful to focus instead on qualitative factors influencing change processes within programmes. Key elements of change identified by McGinn et al. (2020) and Kelly and Westmarland (2015) in their reviews include learning in the group context, masculine identity, motivation, responsibility, reflectivity, emotional processing and empathy. These elements can either facilitate or prevent change and thus present a challenge for perpetrator programmes. The identification of emotional processing as a key element of change (Kelly and Westmarland 2015; McGinn et al. 2020) has extended the history of violence interventions. While the early couple interventions for domestic violence, e.g. psychoanalytic couple therapies, focused on emotions, they were heavily criticised for victim blaming and ignoring safety issues. The more behaviourally oriented perpetrator programmes tried to resolve these issues by focusing on behaviour instead of experiences. The subsequent integrative development of an array of treatment modalities has facilitated active emotional work, from both the victim and perpetrator perspectives.

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Nevertheless, emotional processing in perpetrator work has not been described in detail. While many models applying a cognitive-behavioural or psychoanalytic perspective have described the perpetrator’s need for psychological processing and change, with respect to emotional work they have mostly referred to the most obvious violence-related emotions, such as anger and jealousy (see e.g. Eckhardt et al. 2013a; Mizen 2019). These therapeutically focused interventions might also overlook the social and gendered nature of domestic violence. In turn, in research on the justifications and power dynamics of violence, the role of related emotions, while often implied, is not of interest from the clinical perspective per se (see e.g. Downes et al. 2019). More work is needed on the diversity of emotions related to domestic violence, such as shame, guilt, fear, insecurity and helplessness, and how these might be assessed in interventions. An interesting attempt in this direction has been described by Pascual-Leone et al. (2011), who studied the effectiveness of an EFT-based intervention programme for inmates with a history of domestic violence. The intervention showed promising initial results, even if the decrease detected in violent recidivism was no longer significant after eight months. While the literature offers interesting topics for emotional work with domestic violence perpetrators, specific tools or structures for clinical use have not been described or studied. We argue that effective violence interventions require emotional work. This chapter offers both analytical and clinical tools for emotion work with domestic violence perpetrators.

Intervention: The Jyväskylä Model The intervention started more than 20 years ago as a collaborative project between the University of Jyväskylä and Crisis Centre Mobile in Jyväskylä, Finland. In Mobile, perpetrators start with individual sessions including a lot of motivational techniques. During these, they learn about various forms and consequences of violence and are instructed in basic methods of behavioural control, such as timeout. This happens through self-observation of one’s own violent behaviour. After this short individual phase, perpetrators can continue their work in groups at the

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University of Jyväskylä, although only about 15% do so. Groups meet weekly or bi-weekly for 90 minutes. They are semi-open, meaning that each group comprises people in different treatment phases. Groups are not gender-specific, but most participants are men. New group members agree to a minimum of 15 sessions but are free to stay longer when needed. Statistics from 2010 to 2019 show that 45% of participants drop out before finishing the initial 15 sessions. For those who remain, the mean number of attended sessions is 39 (range 15– 93). Group work is non-manualised and focuses on open discussions of themes raised by participants. Each group has two facilitators, who are trained psychotherapists and/or clinical psychologists. The facilitators help steer the conversations and focus on accountability, safety, gendered perspectives, behavioural choices and factors influencing these, such as cognitions and emotions. Both perpetrators and their (ex-)partners are interviewed pre- and post-intervention. They also fill in a detailed questionnaire (ACBI, Davies, et al. 1995) on different forms of violence and its consequences. Contact with (ex-)partners is crucial to ensure safety and to evaluate the treatment efficacy. Most participants have perpetrated mild to moderate forms of situational physical and psychological violence. Partner data show that 70% of the participating perpetrators benefitted from the intervention and for 75% of these the reported positive outcomes were maintained over the two-year follow-up (Lampi and Wargh 2020). However, it is important to note that the selected nature of the sample and high drop-out rates from follow-up interviews may bias the data towards more successful cases.

Empirical Data and Analysis Starting from April 2017, group facilitators have made short notes on topics discussed after each group meeting. A total of 29 session notes from two groups during 2017 provided a starting point for the present data analysis. First, all direct mentions of emotions or indications of the processing of emotional themes were extracted from the notes. As a result, 38 different emotional themes were identified.

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Next, a theory-oriented content analysis was used to group the emotional themes into more general categories. The theoretical starting points for the content analysis were the two-level emotional processing protocol described by the EFT model (Greenberg 2004) and the distinction between object and subject positions made in the meta-model of psychotherapy process (Leiman 2012). However, the analysis revealed that these binary categorisations did not sufficiently fit the data. Instead, three stages of emotional processing emerged from the session notes: (1) reporting secondary emotions, (2) reflection on primary emotions and (3) recognition of feelings of others as precondition for victim empathy. Of the 38 emotional themes identified, 31 could immediately be categorised under these processing stages. For the remaining seven themes, the brief session notes were insufficiently clear, hence the categorisation was confirmed from the session transcripts. Finally, the first processing stage contained 9 themes, the second 25 and the third 4 themes. In the last phase of analysis, some group discussions were transcribed from the video recordings. Seven thematic segments had already been transcribed to confirm their categorisation and 11 more were chosen to provide a quantitatively and qualitatively representative sample of all three processing stages. For each processing stage we chose segments that best exemplified the emotional themes relevant to change towards non-violence. All the examples are from men’s talk, although the sample also included one woman. The pseudonymised examples are presented next grouped under the relevant processing stage. To save space, we removed parts of transcriptions that emphasised the emotional power of what was said but did not offer substantial new content. Guided by the previously mentioned theoretical models described by Greenberg (2004) and Leiman (2012) we highlight some pertinent aspects of the group discussions under each example. To achieve validation by consensus, two authors conducted the analytic discussion. To further validate their conclusions, all excerpts were reread by the third author. At the end of each section we discuss how these emotional themes can be addressed in group treatment.

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Stage 1: Reporting Secondary Emotions The following excerpts demonstrate how perpetrators can display secondary emotions that have either been aroused earlier (e.g. during a violent situation) or that manifest during the group session: (M1 describes his disappointment that his ex-partner L hasn’t apologised for their breakup. M1 feels that L and her new partner have wronged him.) T1: So there’s a pretty big sadness in the background then… M1: As if this life isn’t already difficult enough and then there’s this, this kind of shit to deal with. Yeah let me tell you, I don’t have any will to live anymore at all. I don’t care what happens. T2: So it’s difficult to find a storyline for one’s own existence then. Many things feel pointless. M1: Yeah, it’s like the guilt it’s just pressing down the whole time. That I have done something wrong. But then, the punishment is the ending of it in this way. L wanted to get her revenge for what I have done to her. I‘ve done what I’ve done and. Evil gets its just desserts. Even though you apologise it doesn’t help. It doesn’t help at all. T2: Life feels somehow merciless. M1: Yeah. Like how many more blows does one have to take to be happy sometime in this life. A cheat and a robber, that’s a couple all right…Don’t have the guts to tell people straight out what they want and then they do something like that behind your back. So that’s it. T2: Is it possible that L was afraid to tell you that? M1: Well, why can’t she say it in spite of it? T2: I mean that maybe she was scared there would be violence. M1: Yeah. Well this doesn’t help here at all, my guilt just keeps growing all the time…And here too just more guilt is poured on me, that she is scared and scared. Well what does that fear help? If I’ve done what I’ve done, there’s no way to undo it anymore…She plays this two-faced game behind my back. It’s like incomprehensible how spineless a person can be. T2: Well I think it’s pretty common when people are afraid. M1: And I’ve had enough of this conversation. I can’t take it anymore. (Leaves the session)

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At the beginning of the section, T1 reflected on M1’s experience and suggested sadness as a primary emotion related to his painful experience after the breakup. T1 was conducting a therapeutic dual task by following and attuning to M1 while simultaneously suggesting changepromoting reflection. However, M1 was unable to accept this reflection. Instead, he stirred up his anger towards L and her new partner, whom he described as ‘a cheat and a robber’ and in an excluded line even states that they should die. By dehumanising L, M1 was able to position himself as the victim of the breakup. When, instead of accepting this, the facilitators tried to promote empathy towards L, M1 left the session. M1 described himself as being blamed, which justified his holding on to his secondary emotion, anger. The reason might be that if he accepted the suggestion of primary sadness caused by loss, he would also have to grieve and regret his own (violent) behaviour. (M2 is in the group for the first time and talks about his violent behaviour.) M2: Yeah it’s like almost impossible to get me angry, like maybe ten times in my life I have been angry so that, it’s like it’s really calm and one can be bullied up to the very last point but when it hits then it goes all at once and then there one goes like unconscious that for example I don’t feel pain at all no…it’s like I shiver and shake…And I didn’t get angry there at all but when these two guys started to harass my mate…so a similar rage arose, I grabbed the guy and I carried him outside and threw him through plate glass window. So there again there’s that that makes me angry, so it’s not that if it’s targeted at me but if it’s targeted at someone else.

Here M2 first described his anger as something completely uncontrollable; anger leads to a dissociative state where M2 himself ends up positioning himself as its object. His words can be seen to reflect two central values related to masculinity: holding back when challenged and defending others. This made M2’s violence seem not only justified but also a virtue that he has control over. Personal agency was also displayed when M2 said ‘then I grabbed the guy’. However, M2’s description was very superficial: he focused on his immediate reaction and did not reflect more deeply on his emotional reactions or what violence means to him.

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Conclusion 1: First Steps Towards Non-violence Many perpetrators seek help for their violence in a situation where they are experiencing strong feelings of guilt and anxiety resulting from a behaviour unacceptable to themselves. However, in many cases the decision to seek help includes external factors, such as one’s partner leaving home or the involvement of child protection services or the police. Involvement of external agencies or people can induce not only shame but also anger, frustration and/or feelings of injustice. To protect themselves from guilt and shame, perpetrators may end up blaming the victim or external factors, such as stress or substance use, for their violence. In this case, the responsibility for one’s guilt is externalised. While motivation and some level of owning up to the problem are needed prior to participation in a group programme, some ambivalence between blaming others and accepting responsibility can be expected at the beginning of treatment. It is common, especially in the first stages of treatment, for perpetrators to report their secondary emotions, such as anger, as something that just happens, like a force of nature or an immutable state. This reflects the object position perpetrators adopt in relation to their emotional experiences. Recognising and validating these emotional experiences is important in building trust and a working alliance, but for the change process to move forward, the group facilitators also actively encourage participants to reflect on their emotional experiences. During an optimal crisis window, perpetrators ask themselves what made them act this way and how they can prevent similar things from happening in the future. This is fertile soil for therapeutic work exploring the various forms of violent behaviour and related situational, cognitive, emotional and social factors. Peer support can also be important in accepting what one has done and working towards change.

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Stage 2: Reflection on Primary Emotions The following excerpts exemplify how perpetrators actively reflect on their emotional experiences and how these can be connected to violent behaviour: (M3 talks about processing his own childhood experiences) M3: When the emotions started coming I noticed that they started pouring out, that first there was this anger and then I noticed like what’s this and tried to push it away. T3: Yeah. M3: But then I have realised that it has come from childhood those things, and what I have all the time left unprocessed, those feelings, that there have been some emotional barriers… T4: Do others notice this, that there are some emotions that one pushes away? M4: …anger was like that, anger and rage were the most common strong emotions, but then when this divorce and meetings at the shelter came and the need for antidepressants and things like that then, yeah then this tearfulness and sadness has like increased…for me it’s terribly important to experience your own emotions.

First, M3 described the different levels and ways he had been processing emotions relating to his childhood. M4 continued the discussion by describing how he had identified his anger as a secondary response to a primary emotion of sadness. Here, both men demonstrated a reflective stance towards their emotions: they were able to feel, recognise and describe their emotions in a constructive way. They were also being proactive and maintaining the reflective stance promoted by the facilitator. It also appears that a common understanding on the importance of emotional processing and recognition of primary emotions had been reached. (M4 describes an incident when he was with his son at a skate park. A group of teenagers were swearing loudly and M4 told them to behave better. The teenagers started arguing with him.)

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M4: But then I was thinking what can I do, that, I’d probably like to grab that skateboard and throw it in the bushes and say…like punk that’s enough and something else like that. (M4 tells how he realized there was nothing (short of using violence) he could do to stop the teenagers so he backed down. The discussion on the event continues.) M4: Of course when I notice that my word has no effect and that’s a big fear. I have wondered for long why that situation is so difficult, why it feels so dangerous to lose the feeling of control. Of course I quickly realised that when we boys were being noisy at home…then what followed was always that my father first started huffing and puffing and then he got irritated with us and then he went for his bottle of booze and started drinking…That why it’s so difficult for me to put up with that own will, that things don’t go the way I want, yeah, those are scary. (The discussion continues later.) M4: I started thinking that…since I was like supervising those young rug rats I have to be a hero in their eyes…admitting defeat, it’s scary somehow. T4: So doesn’t it have something to do like with the view on masculinity and manhood that…if you’re not like the biggest and strongest…then you have failed somehow. That there’s not really a chance for everyone to be equal, but instead someone has to be the king of the hill and if it’s not you then you have lost. Is it something like that? M3: Yeah it’s something like that.

During this long discussion, several reflective stances appeared. First, M4 reflected on his own emotional responses by describing how his anger arises from fear of losing control. M4 also reflected on how these primary and secondary emotions were related to his own childhood experiences; he had understood that it is difficult for him to accept his children’s unruliness as such behaviour was unacceptable in his own childhood. Instead of using this retrospective understanding as a justification for his behaviour, M4 recognised it as an issue he must work if he is to continue being non-violent. This self-empathy enabled him to recognise

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his desire to win, i.e. prove himself strong by putting the teenagers in their place. T4 took this reflection further away from the immediate emotional response (fear) and pondered gendered social expectations, thereby challenging all participants to reflect on their attitudes and gender roles.

Conclusion 2: From Reactivity to Reflectivity One key process of change is to render perpetrators more aware of their own reactions so that instead of acting based on ‘justified anger’, they are able to analyse both the consequences of their behaviour and the underlying emotions, which in turn might reflect disappointment or helplessness. This enables perpetrators to adopt a subject position in relation to their primary emotions that decreases the pain related to these experiences and promotes agency and adaptive behaviour. Perpetrators may then also realise that their violent behaviour does not communicate their underlying emotions and needs, leading them to adopt new ways of communicating and behaving that may significantly improve their well-being. The basic way of promoting a reflective stance is via discussion about violent or potentially risky situations which facilitators seek to steer towards discussion of the cognitive, emotional and social factors associated with violent behaviour. It is also beneficial to reflect on successful situations where participants were able to restrain themselves from violence. Retrospective understanding should also be extended to perpetrators’ personal histories of trauma and violence. The goal of reflective work is to enable perpetrators to accept responsibility and develop agency towards change as opposed positioning themselves as victims of their trauma, emotions or circumstances. It should be noted that reflective work is not linear but advances in a circular fashion. Thus, the same issues and events are often rediscussed in the group but reflected on in significantly different ways. This process is supported by the semi-open structure of the Jyväskylä model, where participants retell their stories every time a new person enters the group. This way perpetrators in different phases of their process can benefit from

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each other. Compared to individual work, sharing stories and experiences in a group further encourages reflection, gives hope and might even generate pressure towards change. However, it is important to ensure peer support does not only provide unconditional support and understanding but also motivates participants towards change.

Stage 3: Recognition of Others’ Feelings as a Precondition for Victim Empathy The following excerpts include both successful and unsuccessful demonstrations of empathy by group members: (The facilitator has initiated a discussion about rebuilding trust and M5 describes a situation where he was watching TV with his partner S. They were lying on top of two mattresses on the floor.) M5: I kind of lost my temper and (the mattresses) are heavy to move so I went against the wall and like in a leg press I pushed the mattress together, so S was alarmed then…I didn’t realise it at the time, only later when, first I denied it for a while, like there was nothing in it, but then I realised…that yeah, of course she was alarmed…That trust I have really tried (to build) now. Yeah, but…that’s what happened then. (Facilitator validates the longevity and effects of victims’ traumatic memories.) M5: But those dreams they are really so intense. I’m also sometimes, if I see bad dreams then I’m totally disturbed then. Some dreams may have effects even for a week, that how can I see dreams that feel so real or. So yeah, I understand well that especially that dream thing also. Or can those dream things open up from some events like that. (Discussion continues later.) M5: So that there is no self-reflection like that. Lots of new. That for one was a reminder for me that. I wasn’t thinking about the other one there then.

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T4: Well but you started thinking after all. So even though the first reaction. M5: Yeah but after that came the denial, that it’s nothing, then, like god dammit there was something. I didn’t know how to. T3: How long did it take then? M5: Well it took, I might have had a cup of coffee and gone for a smoke then for a while we were there as if it was nothing at all and then, well like, I screwed up, sorry.

Here M5 recognised that his angry reaction with the mattresses was excessive, although he was unable (or unwilling) to recognise the primary emotion behind his aggressive reaction. Instead, he focused on reflecting on his partner’s reaction and how this incident might have affected the trust he is trying to rebuild. M5 showed several ways of empathising with S. He was concerned about S’s well-being (nightmares) and understood that recovery from trauma takes time. M5 was also able to reflect on his own behaviour and reactions—how he initially minimised the fear experienced by S but was later able to accept responsibility and apologise to her. Taking responsibility was further encouraged by the group facilitators. (M6 describes his recent trial. His ex-wife T had arrived late at court. The facilitator asks how M6 felt about the trial.) M6 : When my ex told her own version about things then yeah…it was unpleasant to hear it again from her mouth that…she was scared in that situation and everything so it like, it was bad…it didn’t agitate me or anything but I became sad and like anxious… T3: Well did you find out why T almost didn’t make it there? M6 : Ugh, she’s such a sloppy person, that’s why, she was late from the bus. T3: Was it also a tough situation for her that? M6 : She was anxious, I mean really anxious when she got there…It was such a tough situation for T to go there as well. (The discussion moves to adultery.) M6 : When someone cheats on someone then you also hurt that other person, the one who is cheated on just the same way. It

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doesn’t matter if it’s an illegal threat or cheating, for the one you just get charged and fined and for the other you just hold up your arms. But both hurt. And for sure as much, it may be that the one who is cheated on hurts more if there was a way to measure it somehow. (The discussion continues. M6 feels that T has wrong-footed him by not talking about her cheating on him. The facilitator suggests that T might be afraid.) M6 : That’s a pretty good question, that could all the dishonesty that T has displayed towards me possibly be just because she is afraid of something, some reaction. It’s difficult to imagine what it might be then.

A shifting of positions from victim empathy to internalised victim occurred here. At first M6 demonstrated empathy towards T by recognising her anxiety. However, M6 also used distancing language when describing T as careless and unreliable. The empathy subsequently disappeared completely and M6 started to spiral towards positioning himself as a victim and dehumanising T. First, he minimised her fear, then paralleled his violence with her cheating on him, and finally stated that the cheating was much worse. It is possible that his anger was a secondary emotional response to guilt aroused by his trial. In the excluded part between the last two excerpts, M6 further blamed T by describing her as a liar and wrongdoer. The facilitators tried to contest this narrative and encourage further empathy by suggesting that T might not have told M6 everything because she was afraid of his reaction. M6 seemed to accept this as a possibility but did not reflect further on his own behaviour.

Conclusion 3: Building Empathy Towards Others For a long-term change towards non-violence to happen, it is not enough for perpetrators to work on their own emotions and behaviour; instead they must also move outside their subjective experiences and reflect on the feelings of others. This requires meta-cognitive skills such as the

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ability to both recognise and distinguish between one’s inner states and the feelings of others. Building empathy towards (ex-)partners can be difficult. Feelings of hurt or other challenging experiences related to the relationship can manifest as the minimisation of violence and as victim blaming. It is important that group facilitators actively try to promote empathy towards victims and encourage perpetrators to acknowledge the consequences of their violence. One way to accomplish this is by working through perpetrators’ own childhood experiences of violence. By recognising their own feelings of sadness, hurt, fear or insecurity, perpetrators might be more accepting of the consequences of their own violence and be motivated to change their behaviour. Another crucial issue during the change process is to rebuild trust in close relationships affected by violence. Perpetrators may experience ambivalent feelings about constantly proving themselves non-violent. Both excessive feelings of guilt and inflated self-confidence regarding their future behaviour can be counter-effective for the long-term success of perpetrators and thus need to be assessed during treatment. One key element in developing empathy is to accept that it takes victims a long time to feel safe again in the relationship and that they might never forgive the violence they have experienced. Similarly, self-empathy is crucial for perpetrators to accept that while they can’t change their past, they can and should take responsibility for how they act in the future.

Discussion In this chapter, we discussed emotional work in the context of domestic violence perpetrator programmes and provided an empirical analysis on how emotional themes have been addressed in the Jyväskylä group intervention. Both the literature and present empirical data indicate that emotions play a crucial role in violence interventions. Here, three stages of emotional processing were described: (1) reporting secondary emotions, (2) reflection on primary emotions and (3) recognition of feelings of others as precondition for victim empathy. These stages are closely interlinked with the goals of the intervention.

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Through emotional work, perpetrators first learn to recognise and accept a wider range of emotions within themselves. This requires both enhanced self-observation and examination of related intersubjective factors, such as how gender or the specific social environment influences what behaviours and emotional reactions are deemed acceptable. Secondly, emotional reflection enables perpetrators to understand that their behaviour is not dictated by their maladaptive responses. Perpetrators can then adopt more constructive ways of self-regulation and interaction. Finally, emotional work promotes victim empathy, meaning that perpetrators are more able to recognise, acknowledge and sympathise with the feelings of others and accept responsibility for the consequences of their violence. While all professionals engaging in perpetrator work are likely to encounter the emotional themes described in this chapter, they may not necessarily be fully aware of the complexity of emotional work. It is challenging to consider emotional reactions, reflection and empathy and to analyse their associations with perpetrators’ violent behaviour and the choices preceding it. Secondary emotions such as anger, jealousy or victim blaming may be easier for facilitators to identify, but if they encounter these responses without displaying empathy or identifying the underlying primary emotions, the perpetrator may feel blamed and access to core emotions might then be blocked. On the other hand, a therapeutic stance combining empathy with purely intersubjective or relationship-related reflections is likely to ignore relevant socio-structural aspects related to domestic violence. If such issues are not addressed, the intervention might even increase the likelihood of violence, for example by reinforcing stereotypical gender norms, providing excuses for violence or ignoring the consequences of violence for its victim(s). People working with perpetrators must thus possess sufficient knowledge and skills to be able to adopt the various perspectives needed in this work and to respond professionally. Emotional work is psychologically demanding for facilitators, who need to display empathy and help clients reflect on their emotions while simultaneously condemning their violent behaviour. Facilitators also need to be able to feel and reflect on their own emotions during and outside therapy sessions. Due to the demanding nature of perpetrator work, professionals are at risk for burnout and

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secondary traumatisation. To prevent these, facilitators must have sufficient training and organisational support. Working in pairs to share the psychological workload is also highly recommended. In this chapter, we discussed therapeutic tools that can be applied in work with domestic violence. We argued that to stop violent behaviour individuals need to understand and process their emotions on multiple levels. However, violence is not only a personal problem of the perpetrator or victim. Instead, it is in many ways a societal problem and should be addressed as such. This view coheres with the idea of emotional work, since emotions related to violence are strongly affected by gender norms and other societal attitudes. Even if the perpetrator is able to adopt new ways of being, these are not likely to be lasting if unsupported by the surrounding micro-society, such as workplaces and pastimes. To eradicate domestic violence thus requires change and action on many societal levels. Acknowledgment This research is supported by TUBA-GEBIP.

References Akoensi, T. D., Koehler, J. A., Lösel, F., & Humphreys, D. K. (2013). Domestic violence perpetrator programs in Europe, part II: A systematic review of the state of evidence. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 57 (10), 1206–1225 (2013). https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0306624X12468110. Barker, G., Ricardo, C., Nascimento, M., Olukoya, A., & Santos, C. (2010). Questioning gender norms with men to improve health outcomes: Evidence of impact. Global Public Health, 5 (5), 539–553 (2010). https://doi.org/10. 1080/17441690902942464. Davies, L., Holmes, M., Lundy, C., & Urquhart, L. (1995). Re-education for abusive men: The effect on the lives of women partners. Health Canada: Family Violence Prevention Division. Downes, J., Kelly, L., & Westmarland, N. (2019). “It’s a work in progress”: Men’s Accounts of Gender and Change in their Use of Coercive Control.

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Journal of Gender-Based Violence, 3(3), 267–282 (2019). https://doi.org/10. 1332/239868019X15627570242850. Eckhardt, C. I., Crane, C. A., & Sprunger, J. G. (2013a). CBT for perpetrators of intimate partner violence: The “I3” approach. In Forensic CBT: A handbook for clinical practice, 185–210. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. https://doi.org/10. 1002/9781118589878.ch10. Eckhardt, C., Murphy, C., Whitaker, D., Sprunger, J., Dykstra, R., & Woodard, K. (2013b). The effectiveness of intervention programs for perpetrators and victims of intimate partner violence. Partner Abuse, 4 (2), 196–231 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1891/1946-6560.4.2.196. Geldschläger, H., Ginés, O., Nax, D., & Ponce, A. (2014). Outcome measurement in European perpetrator programmes: A survey. Working paper 1 from the Daphne III project “IMPACT: Evaluation of European perpetrator programmes”. Work with Perpetrators European Network. Greenberg, L. S. (2004). Emotion-focused therapy. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy: An International Journal of Theory & Practice, 11(1), 3–16 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1002/cpp.388. Kelly, L., & Westmarland, N. (2015). Domestic violence perpetrator programmes: Steps towards change. Project Mirabal final report. London and Durham: London Metropolitan University and Durham University. Krug, E. G., Dahlberg, L. L., Mercy, J. A., Zwi, A. B., & Lozano, R. (2002). World report on violence and health. Geneva: World Health Organization. Lampi, V., & Wargh, J. (2020). Batterer related factors in predicting the positive outcome of “Vaihtoehto väkivallalle” group treatment: Change in intimate partner violence and in the quality of relationship (Master’s thesis). University of Jyväskylä. Leiman, M. (2012). Dialogical sequence analysis in studying psychotherapeutic discourse. International Journal for Dialogical Science, 6 (1), 123–147. http:// ijds.lemoyne.edu/journal/6_1/pdf/IJDS.6.1.08.Leiman.pdf. McGinn, T., McColgan, M., & Taylor, B. (2020). Male IPV perpetrator’s perspectives on intervention and change: A systematic synthesis of qualitative studies. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 21(1), 97–112 (2020). https:// doi.org/10.1177/1524838017742167. Mizen, R. (2019). The affective basis of violence. Infant Mental Health Journal, 40 (1), 113–128 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1002/imhj.21755. Pascual-Leone, A., Bierman, R., Arnold, R., & Stasiak, E. (2011). Emotionfocused therapy for incarcerated offenders of intimate partner violence: A 3-year outcome using a new whole-sample matching method. Psychotherapy

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Research, 21(3), 331–347 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1080/10503307.2011. 572092. Rogers, C. R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2), 95–103 (1957). https://doi.org/10.1037/h0045357. Stiles, W. B., Osatuke, K., & Glick, M. J. (2004). Encounters between internal voices generate emotion: An elaboration of the assimilation model. The dialogical self in psychotherapy (pp. 107–123). London: Routledge. Work with Perpetrators European Network. (2018). WWP EN Guidelines to Develop Standards. https://www.work-with-perpetrators.eu/resources/guidel ines. Accessed 18 March 2020.

8 (In)visibility of Good and Bad Care Practices in Nursing Homes: A Vicious Circle Ana Paula Gil

Care is being conceptualised as an emotion and a labour, “largely hidden from the scrutiny of academics and policymakers, seen as both private and feminine” (Rummery and Fine 2012, p. 321), but care is also a source of tensions and inequalities of gender, age, race and immigration status. In care sector, care work is often stratified by factors associated with different experiences and working trajectories, typically gender, class and ethnicity (Yeates 2009; Cangiano and Shutes 2010; Husso and Hirvonen 2012; Hussein et al. 2013). Joan Tronto (2010) has identified four phases of the care process: (1) caring about, i.e. recognising a need for care; (2) taking care of; (3) caring for, i.e. taking responsibility for meeting that need; (4) care giving, i.e. the actual physical work of providing care; and, finally, (5) care receiving, which A. P. Gil (B) Interdisciplinary Centre of Social Sciences (CICS.NOVA), Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas—NOVA FCSH, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Husso et al. (eds.), Violence, Gender and Affect, Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56930-3_8

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implies the collaboration of the recipient in terms of the evaluation of how well the care provided meets the caring needs. For Tronto it is not possible to understand care as an action by care workers alone; rather, care institutions must consider the nature of the caring process as a whole in order to guide their actions. This requirement should focus on the needs of users and also on the needs of care workers. The International Labour Organization (ILO) (2018) declares that the impact of poor job quality for care workers leads to poor quality care. The great majority of the paid long-term care workforce are “direct care workers” who deliver most of the hands-on, personal care and assistance with daily routines in care facilities or in private homes, sometimes as domestic workers. Personal care workers provide direct personal care, including day-to-day activities, such as feeding, bathing and carrying out basic health checks. These workers are particularly prevalent in longterm care provision, both in institutional settings and in home-based and community care. In OECD countries, they represent, on average, “over 60 per cent of the total employment in long-term care. These direct care workers receive little or no training, inadequate employment benefits, low wages and are subject to high turnover” (ILO 2018, p. 208). Poor working conditions can lead to recruitment problems, high turnover, workers leaving the care sector (Cangiano and Shutes 2010), reduced support from managers (Trydegard 2012) and high incidence of work-related poor health, stress and burnout, leading to early retirement (Colombo et al. 2011). Few studies have examined the perspective of the care workers themselves in terms of exploring their daily experiences, professional trajectories (Hayes 2017) and conceptualisations of care work in long-term care. Long-term care involves multiple stages and there is a consensus definition, as a set of services required by individuals with a reduced degree of functional physical or cognitive ability who are dependent on help with basic and/or instrumental activities of daily living (ADL) for an extended period of time (Colombo et al. 2011; Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN) 2018, p. 132). The terms to describe long-term care are diverse, such as nursing homes, residential care facilities or long-term care for older people. In

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Portugal, nursing homes are designed as “residential structures for older people”. “The social responses network includes nursing homes (profit and non-profit), which are more social oriented, distinguished from the National Network for Integrated Continuous Care (mainly convalescence, medium-term and rehabilitation units), with services which are more health oriented” (Gil 2019, p. 140). Despite macro changes in the Portuguese labour market over the last decade, care work, mainly in non-profit organisations, is regulated by specific regulation regarding matters such as the type of contract, working hours, payment, social security contributions. However, women, in particular those with lower educational levels, who have experienced long periods of unemployment, including immigrant workers (Wall and Nunes 2010), are more vulnerable to precarious working conditions. Qualitative research is needed to understand care workers’ perspectives and how their working conditions affect the care they give and exploring different symbologies in the context of care practices. The chapter starts with a theoretical discussion of care, the ambivalent process implicit in institutional contexts and how structural violence can be a reflection of the low public investment in the care system. An overview of the long-term care provision system in Portugal and the lack of public investment over the last decade offers insight into public intervention in the care sector. The qualitative study described in this chapter involved 40 in-depth interviews with care workers in 16 Portuguese nursing homes located in one council in the metropolitan area of Lisbon.

Care, Emotions and Violence in an Institutional Context “Care” has been theoretically conceived from three facets (Rummery and Fine 2012). The first facet of care is a feeling or emotion involving a disposition towards others, such as family, friends or neighbours, while the second facet of care is the work and its demand in terms of time and physical activity. Issues associated with work include workload, physical and mental health and non-recognition of care work. The third facet of

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care is as a social relationship. From this facet, care is intimate, familial and personal but also complex and ambivalent, involving interdependence and power. Overall, care is a global process that involves emotion, work and interpersonal relationships (Rummery and Fine 2012). Care is associated with a generalised consensus of social cohesion, minimising the diversity of experiences and the existence of conflicts, in a process of reciprocity between care worker and the person receiving care. Caring for someone invokes different feelings including physical and relational presence, empathy, continuity, generosity but the act of caring may also involve reflects fear, anger, frustration, effort and conflict (Lüscher 2004). The theoretical perspective of sociological ambivalence constitutes a fruitful approach to explore consensuses and paradoxes in care practices. The perspective allows a conception of the care process with different dimensions of analysis, including personal fulfilment, as well as contradictions in relation to work (e.g. source of tensions and conflicts, desire to give up of the profession). While the emotional dimension of care is invisible, Mac Rae (1998) cited Hochschild’s expression “emotional work” (p. 138), to designate the emotional management that care, as a form of work, involves and noted that the nature of emotions is relational. Bericat (2016) emphasised that “the apparent simplicity of human emotions hides abundant complexities, problems and paradoxes” (p. 493). The interdependence between physical tasks and the emotional component of care depends also on the affective involvement in the relationship between the care worker and the person receiving care. The caring experience is not a uniform and homogenous experience, but a multifaceted experience that includes physical tasks (i.e. care for ) and emotional involvement (i.e. care about ). Care, as a reciprocal process, involves organisational skills and competences, time management, physical tasks and ambivalent emotions and conflict may emerge as a form of violence (Gil 2010). Several researchers (Drennan et al. 2012; Malmedal et al. 2014) have claimed that institutional conditions, staff characteristics and residents’ characteristics (e.g. dementia and mental impairments) are important factors of institutional violence. Banerjee et al. (2012) cited the concept

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of structural violence (Galtung 1969) to raise questions about the role that organisational factors play in setting the context for violence (p. 330). Poor working conditions and inadequate levels of support in care work constitute a form of structural violence. The authors highlighted that working conditions are detrimental to the physical and mental health of care workers, and prevent care workers from providing high-quality care. Drennan et al. (2012) showed that nursing home staff have observed acts of inadequate care and even admitted to committing such acts themselves. The most commonly observed acts were neglect and psychological abuse. Neglect in the nursing home may overlap with concepts of psychological abuse (e.g. social isolation) and disparities in quality care. Drawing on Fulmer’s et al. (2004) conception of the quality of care, Malmedal et al. (2014) proposed an intermediate concept, inadequate care. Inadequate care may lead to loss of dignity and cause individuals to become more vulnerable to the risk of abuse and neglect. Physical restraint and medication overdose, both of which are types of physical abuse (Hantikainen and Käppeli 2000; Melchiorre et al. 2014), reveal the ambiguity of practices which are technically acceptable in an institutional context but may be considered morally reprehensible abusive behaviours, depending on the point of view. Melchiorre et al. (2014) also reinforced that in both domestic and institutional settings, the widespread use of physical restraints (mainly for older people with high levels of physical dependency and cognitive impairment) has emerged as potentially problematic. The use of physical restraints is not always culturally and necessarily considered a form of abuse and may indeed be perceived as more acceptable or justifiable in situations where the older person has a mental health problem and, thus, may be difficult to care for or is at risk of falling (Gil 2018). Therefore, the frontiers of bad care that can be insufficient, deficient or inadequate as a form of abuse and neglect become tenuous in an institutional context. The next section provides an overview of the long-term care context in Portugal.

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Context and Background: The Long-Term Care Context in Portugal Portugal has a mixed system of long-term care composed of a network of services including care centres, home-based services and nursing homes. Since the 1990s, the government has invested in care services for elderly through national programmes set up to develop an integrated network of services. The Programme for the Widening of the Social Facilities Network was launched with the objectives of reinforcing and stimulating the services offered in terms of institutional care (nursing homes), especially in less covered geographical areas, and qualifying the services already existing. The goal was also to increase the availability of home-based care services and nursing homes. Nursing homes offer support through collective accommodation, meals, health care and leisure activities, and these services are provided to the users on a 24-hour basis. Home-based services offer meals-on-wheels, house cleaning, laundry and assistance with personal care (through oneto two-hour visits per day). These services and facilities for older people are mainly provided by non-profit institutions, known as the third sector, which are partly statefunded. These institutions have emerged through the initiative of private individuals or associations, and the Portuguese government considers them “a strategic part of the care system and formally recognised their activity almost 30 years ago” (Santana et al. 2014, p. 2). In, 2001 the proportion of older people living in institutional settings in Portugal was 3.6% (corresponding to 50,607 individuals). In 2011, according to the last census, 71,219 people lived in collective dwellings of social support (4%), and 72% of these were women over 80 with severe care needs including cognitive and physical impairments (Instituto Nacional de Estatística [INE] 2011), a tendency also identified in the social profile of those who live in nursing homes in Portugal (72.5% over 80 years) (Gabinete de Estratégia e Planeamento [GEP] 2017). From 2000 to 2015, there was a 65% increase in the number of nursing homes from 1469 to 2418 and a 69% increase in the number of users from 55,523 to 94,067 (GEP 2017; Gil 2018, p. 554). In 2017,

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occupancy rates in nursing homes, determined by the number of users and the total number of vacancies available, reached 93% (GEP 2018) and this increased demand reflects the accelerated ageing pattern of the Portuguese population. Despite public investments in the long-term care system, in the last decades, and some convergence towards the European Union (EU) in coverage rates for formal care provision, Portugal allocated 0.5% of its Gross domestic product (GDP) to the public provision of long-term care, less than the average across OECD countries (1.7%) in 2015 (OECD 2019). The coverage rates of long-term care workers and human investment alone do not correspond to appropriate coverage. Portugal has the lowest concentration of care workers, reporting “less than 1 worker per 100 people aged over 65” (compared to Scandinavian countries, such as Norway and Sweden, with 12.8 and 12.4 per 100 respectively [see Fig. 8.1 in OECD 2019]), below the reference range for adequate service delivery, which is from 4.1 to 4.5 full-time paid workers per 100 persons aged 65 and over (Scheil-Adlung 2016). In Portugal, the majority of formal long-term care (LTC) workers in institutions are care workers (70%) and 30% are nurses (OECD 2016). Institutional care is provided by care workers with no training (OECD 2013), and the shortage of Portuguese care workers is indicated in the lower worker density. It means 0.8 workers per 100 people (OECD 2019). Lopes (2017) noted that Portugal has been undergoing some convergence towards the EU average in coverage rates for formal care provision, but this does not mean appropriate coverage. The low average still leads to excessive workloads and long working hours, “poor working conditions [that] are coupled with high rotation of staff ” (Lopes 2017, p. 70). Poor working conditions lead to difficulties that result in limitations in the delivery of quality care and failure to attract and retain skilled personnel (Scheil-Adlung 2016; Dubois et al. 2019; ILO 2018). The working conditions in the social care sector are shaped by national workplace policies, education and labour policies. In terms of the care workforce, the lack of public investment in education, qualification,

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working conditions improvement and innovative care practices promotion has resulted in quality of care remaining absent from the public debate on long-term care in Portugal. Therefore, it is important to shed light on how care work is carried out by care workers, sometimes in adverse working conditions, with impacts on the health and wellbeing of users as well as care workers’ physical and mental health, job satisfaction, feelings and emotions.

Methods This paper presents results of a multimethod research project entitled “Ageing in an Institution: An Interactionist Perspective of Care”.1

Participants This study was carried out in one council in the metropolitan area of Lisbon. Of 32 for-profit and not-for-profit nursing homes invited to participate, 16 agreed to participate (12 not-for-profit and 4 forprofit). In the nursing homes surveyed, the number of users varied between 9 and 84, and the majority of users were physically and mentally dependent with 80% having dementia. In total, 40 care workers gave informed consent and were interviewed. Participants were given identifiers (E1–E40) to protect their anonymity. The interviews varied between 30 and 90 minutes. Of the participants, 39 were women and one was a man, and their age varied from 24 to 64 years. The average time working in the profession ranged from 3 months to 25 years, with an average of 10 years. Educational background varied between primary education (1st to 4th grade) and the upper secondary education (12th grade). Most of the participants had performed other jobs in the past, and they reported similar personal trajectories characterised by long-term unemployed and low-skills jobs.

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Out of the 40 participants, 9 began their work in the nursing homes as cleaning staff and after some months, were hired as care workers without training upon switching positions. 31 participants were hired as care workers, out of which only 7 stated they had training upon starting the job. The training provided varied from sessions that lasted only a few hours or addressed specific topics (e.g. first aid) to courses with a theoretical/practical component, lasting from 3 to 6 months.

Data Analysis All interviews were recorded and fully transcribed. The transcription and English translation of the quotations are intended to preserve the original form of the oral language used by participants to share their experiences and trajectories of care work. A three-stage thematic content analysis was employed: (1) coding, the process of assigning categories and subcategories reflecting previously defined themes as well as new ones; (2) storage, the compilation of all excerpts from the text subordinate to the same category in order to permit comparison; and (3) interpretation, through an analytical induction method (Patton 2002; Gil 2018, p. 557). The analysis explored different meaning of care practices (tasks, time, work team, organisational system), emotions and conflicts, and solutions to combat and prevent institutional violence. The analysis focused on those meanings and how they are portrayed throughout care workers’ narratives.

Results Working Conditions in Nursing Homes: The Perspective of Care Workers Care work encompasses a set of tasks that concern the wellbeing and comfort of the users, as well as responding to basic needs: washing,

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cleaning, dressing, grooming, feeding and providing basic health care (e.g. medication, pads). Aside from these tasks, care work in some homes also entails cleaning rooms, hallways and bathrooms as well as assisting in the kitchen and laundry room. While describing their daily life, the participants highlighted the diversity of tasks, the heavy workload and the lack of time. Participants described their work as a “mad rush” (E27), “a hustle and bustle” (E34) and “a race against time” (E9). Furthermore, they noted that the lack of time and inadequate personnel ratios do not allow for extra-activities: simply chatting, walking for exercise or collaborating on occupational activities. Besides these daily activities, some participants also performed the roles of shift coordinator, supervisor and trainer for the newest members. In this process, participants identified the difficulties inherent to care work: dealing with illness and dementia of users, conflicts inside teams, poor working conditions, stressful job experiences and risks to workers’ health and wellbeing. For E2, the worst thing was having to wake up the users every day at 7 a.m. due to institutional rules regarding waking times, sleeping times and eating times. E16 agreed, stating: Sometimes there are 4 people and we have to wake up 40 users, and then there are the medical appointments. Today, for example, we are 7, but there are days when some are absent and call in sick or that their child is sick. We have to wake [users] up at that time, or else they’ll eat breakfast at noon […] and from the 40 only 1 doesn’t need care. (E16)

For E16, the hardest part of care work is “always being in a rush”. The daily rush, due to the lack of staff, leads to care being provided in a hurry, without there being a personalisation of care. E16 explained the difficulties of addressing “hygiene itself ”: Sometimes we don’t even have time to look at them […]. The hardest part is doing everything in a rush […]. I clock-out frustrated that I couldn’t do what I think is important: combing their hair, applying facial cream, putting on perfume. There’s no time for that! (E16)

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The care organisation also has underlying different meanings of time: time to care, time to rest and time to be occupied. The little leisure time care workers enjoy smoking a cigarette or drinking a cup of coffee is subject to censorship and forbidden, often the target of criticism by other care workers who do not smoke and who refuse to continue the care work on their own. These times are seen by the organisations as a “waste of time”. However, some of participants recognised time should be spent in providing care which should be done slowly. Despite the “race against time”, participants noted there are “idle times” that could be used in extra activities such as training, going for a walk in the hallway or in the garden. E29 also identified a need to do more physical exercise but noted the difficulties caused by the lack of human resources: “It’s impossible because there’s no time”. The requirement of pre-established rules is related with the workload and the main problem: the lack of staff. Staff fluctuations caused by high turnover, absences motived by health or family reasons and leaving the sector without prior notice as well as conflicts inside care teams are incompatible with providing individual care for a dependent population that needs round-the-clock assistance. E3 identified the worst problem in the profession as the alternating shifts (morning, afternoon and nights). As shift coordinator, E3 had trouble “managing absences; today, for example, two people are absent and it’s a work overload”. To E13, the lack of staff leads to the shifts being taken over when someone is absent, and the shift gets longer. E13 mused, “there is fewer staff, and I’ve had eight days without rest because of lack of staff ”. These workers pile up work hours and lose out on rest times without any recognition or differentiation. This is one of the main reasons behind conflict in work teams. For example, E2 listed various reasons for early retirement: “It’s a lot of work, it gets very little recognition and there’s always staff shortage”. Lack of care workers, long working hours, work overload, lack of team cooperation, absence of leadership, low wages and alternating shifts make care work an unappealing profession and people eventually leave the sector.

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E17 described the average working conditions by stating on the morning shift there are “seven to eight, rarely nine of us for 68 users” and on the afternoon shift “we are even less, six or seven for the same number of people. At night we are three or two, for three floors”. The lack of staff worsens over holidays or bank holidays; for example, E17 stated, “during holidays we are usually six in the morning shift for 68 users, and when it’s Christmas or Easter, there’s always someone who goes on leave or calls in sick”. Across the board, participants identified turnovers, unjustified absences, rotative shifts (especially at night) and the consequences of the years of care work as some of the problems that affect care workers’ health and lead to issues such as depression, tendinitis and back pain, often due to lifting heavy loads with bad lifting positions. For example, E1 stated, “I have no doubt that, yes, the psychological part is the worst”, while E9 said, “It’s really hard physically and psychologically” (E9). At the time of the interview, E39 was taking medication for depression because “I stopped eating, I wasn’t sleeping, I felt tired and couldn’t hear people, I heard voices in my head and struggled with anguish and anxiety”. E39 felt that this condition was due to repeated years of hard work.

The Tenuous Frontiers of the Concepts “Good and Bad Care” When asked what “quality care” means, participants offered various answers. Good care is associated with care personalisation and respect for the person. E27 specified that “it means being well treated” and added that “we want them all to be well treated, well dressed, well-groomed. We bathe them every day, apply cream every day. If the bedridden users have a little sore – there’s been fewer each time! – we perform treatment”. E35 defined good care this way: “It starts with their intimacy (i.e. hygiene). It’s not doing it and there, done. We have to respect the person”.

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Good care also involves respect for the person’s individuality and the fulfilment of their needs. Additionally, care practices can include a generalised consensus of social cohesion through “attention, comprehension and respect” (E5) but also conflicts. E17 cautioned that care workers might “despite, ignore, be indifferent” to nursing home users. When asked to describe bad care, E15 offered some examples of what workers might say: “I don’t like that one [resident], and I’m not going to lift him up”; “Want to go to the bathroom? Then do it in your pad”. I’ve worked nights, and then when I arrive early in the morning and people are in the same position, they have marks on their bodies from being in the same position and pads aren’t changed; they are full of pee. Sometimes, colleagues wait for the next shift, and people get all soaked and pads or underwear aren’t changed. Or, other times, people may not like meat or fish, and I often hear, “You have to eat that or there will be no dessert for you”. You know, I’ve seen a lot of stuff […].

According to the participants, bad care can include abrupt movements, screaming, ignoring, using the wrong type of language (e.g. childish or slang), inadequate diaper usage, leaving people bedridden for long hours by themselves and without care, using physical containment to prevent falls and work overload. Bad practices are aggravated when the accumulation of tasks coincides with team conflicts and when the care is performed by only one worker. A resident’s weight or unwillingness to cooperate as well as a lack of cooperation between the various team members increase the risks of abruptness and inadequate movements. To E11, that is the worst problem in care work: “the abruptness of movements and gestures”. For E33, “it’s not hitting, it’s the attitudes, the words, the omissions”. E10 summed up: “With these conditions of work, it is humanly impossible to have quality care”. Although it is difficult to recognise mistreatment or neglect situations, some narratives revealed daily care omissions. Participants excused these attitudes by the adversity of the working conditions and justified by a “highly stressful job experience” (E12), “physical and psychological exhaustion” (E6) and “lack of patience” (E21). Omissions of care, the overuse of diapers and physical restraint, in an institutional context, are

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normalised practices that are justified to minimise workloads or in cases of a shortage of care workers. A third factor mentioned by participants to explain omissions of care was the absence of emotional characteristics to provide care. Participants defined “good care worker” as a mix of vocation, personality traits and relational skills. Intuition, sensitivity, a spirit of selflessness, patience, courage, empathy and affection are necessary ingredients for care work and are conceived essentially as feminine characteristics. Lack of qualified staff, adverse working conditions and inadequate levels of support in care work (e.g. work overload, staff ratio deficit, low wages) have consequences on the high incidence of work-related poor health (physical and emotional burnout), early retirement and high turnover of care workers. All these factors explain the organisational conflict and constitute a form of structural violence (Banerjee et al. 2012). This concept is particularly relevant to highlight the role that organisational factors play in setting the context of violence that affects both old people and their care workers in a vicious circle (see Fig. 8.2). The last question posed to participants concerned what solutions should be implemented to combat and prevent institutional violence.

Devising a Strategy to Prevent Institutional Violence Professionalisation would be a way of performing a selection and dignifying the profession. E12 agreed with establishing the requirement of a mandatory professional card through the fulfilment of a specific set of skills. E12 stated, “There really should be one” and justified this statement by explaining such a card would reward good practices and make the profession more attractive to the young. As E12 noted, “There should be incentives for young people to take on this profession”. For E30, “there should be a professional card” which could bestow the profession with “a different social value”. Along the same lines, E36 identified two groups in the profession: the people who are working because they enjoy it and have the right profile for the job and the people who are working for the salary and because of a lack of work alternatives.

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Ageing Populaon and more dependent

Physical and mental burnout

Work overload Staff rao deficit

Lack of qualified staff

Lack of social recognion of profession

high incidence of workrelated poor health; early rerement and high turnover

Delegaon of responsibilies by the person responsible for the shi

Quality of care

Time factor

Informal powers

Types of care

Organisaonal conflict

A close organisaonal culture Lack of arculaon between professionals (health, social)

Lack of internal communicaon Collecvisaon of care Tasks roune

Lack of movaon and group cohesion

Lack of technical supervision

Time pressure

Good pracces of care

• person centred-care

• Aenve care (talk, be with) • Respect for individuality • Occupaon and movement

Bad praces of care Abrupt movements, screaming, ignoring; Type of language used (childish or slang) Diaper usage, leaving bedridden people long hours by themselves and without care; Physical containment to prevent falls and deal with work overload; Excessive weight due to a diet rich in carbohydrates and lack of movement and physical exercise.

The invisibility of abuse and neglect of care

Fig. 8.2 Typology of factors that influence the quality of care provision

However, professionalisation alone is not enough, according to most of the participants. Training and having a caring profile are essential to guarantee quality of care. This profile involves having a vocation, personality traits, relational skills and physical strength as well as enjoying learning, working with an older population and the technical aspects related to health. When asked about mandatory training, E3 asserted it should be mandatory and explained that care workers are sometimes called to perform health-related tasks including positioning users, feeding normal

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food through a nasogastric tube, administering insulin and providing medication and recording it in the resident’s care plan. Performing these tasks entails their delegation from health professionals, particularly from nursing. E39 explained that there is little recognition for the profession and stated, “This profession is under-appreciated”. With no professional career, no performance assessment and no reward for experience or seniority, even the role of trainer or care supervisor is sometimes informally undertaken. This participant explained, “I’ve been here for 25 years and I get 674e, now that I’ve got a raise. A colleague of mine, who just started, earns 20e less than me. Go figure, there is no recognition!” More demanding recruitment processes, an accredited training process, better work conditions and dignity in the care worker profession are measures proposed by participants to prevent institutional violence.

Discussion From the responses of the participants, a typology of factors (see Fig. 8.2) that influence the quality of care provision was created. This typography highlights the interdependence between work conditions and quality of care practices. Facing a progressively more dependent population, care is performed by care workers, sometimes by themselves. With time, health problems (physical and mental) surface and become motive for sick leave, given the state of physical and mental burnout. Absenteeism and early resignation affect the human resources available, which results in not having the ratio established by the Portuguese legislation (1 care worker for every 5 dependent users) and is a breeding ground for work overload for those in active duty. The problem aggravates yearly, and the organisations struggle on a daily basis with the serious problem of a lack of workers interested in the profession. The insufficient human resources that would want to take on a socially unrecognised and unattractive profession is identified across-the-board in every nursing home. The profession involves arduous physical and mental labour as well as difficult working conditions (e.g. poorly paid, long working hours, rotating shifts, few break times). Health problems

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caused by years of hard work and little social protection in terms of occupational health have inevitable effects on care workers and in the ratio of workers to resident. These ratios are inadequate given that they have not followed demographic and epidemiological changes in the institutionalised population. This is a population in a situation of great physical and mental dependence, in which dementia has taken a considerable toll as the main pathology, and with demographic projections estimating the exacerbation of the numbers. According to the OECD (2019), there were more than 20 people with dementia in Portugal per 1000 individuals in 2019, and it is estimated that this figure will increase to 40.5% in 2037, which means that more than one in 25 people will be living with dementia. All these factors combined contribute to a consensual care model among participants, which is characterised by establishing collective needs, standards and task routines. The collectivisation of care which is provided within an institutional context is incompatible with good care and a person-centred model. Researchers have noted that personalisation, humanity, attention, respect for individuality and dignity of care are required to satisfy basic needs but also maintenance of the individual’s capacities and the relational dimensions of care (i.e. the need for communication). Staff shortages and workload pressures are constraints on the development and continuity of care relationships (Cangiano and Shutes 2010). The satisfaction of this set of needs suggests two key phrases: the human factor and the time factor. While the human factor involves improvement and professionalisation, the time factor addresses the long time that is necessary for care to be exercised in an individualised and timely manner. Without these two factors guaranteed, a single organisational context can exhibit both good and bad care practices. Some of these bad care practices are institutionally recognised as inadequate, but are hardly contested in practice because abuse and neglect problems are invisible in an interventive organisational culture under current policies. This problem’s invisibility is attributed and justified by the lack of trained human resources with a skilled profile in an unattractive and socially undignified profession. Lack of care workers, inadequate ratios of care workers to attend to the care needs of dependent people,

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and low public investment in the long-term care system, mainly in the professionalisation of care workers, are factors which promote institutionalised violence. It is not possible to provide good care for old persons with the current resources, which contributes to a vicious cycle and leads to insufficient care. Heightening the existing difficulties, the Covid-19 pandemic has had serious impacts on care practices in Portuguese nursing homes and domiciliary services, structures that already had weaknesses. The social visibility caused by Covid-19 has uncovered several problems in the care sector, including lack of care workers, difficult working conditions, inadequate ratios (staff/users), workload, burnout situations and staff turnover, all of which have serious impacts on elder abuse, mainly neglect and users’ abandonment. The root of the problem stems from the absence of an education and employment policy that clearly defines a skills profile, progression and careers. Johansson and Muhli (2018) point out four main objectives concerning the professionalisation process: (1) to ensure competence levels and to promote skills development; (2) to promote higher status for the care work performed; (3) to ensure future recruitment to care services; and (4) to consolidate a particular area of competence and expertise within at an undergraduate level. Defining a skills profile would be the first step to regulate the work system and integrate qualified human resources, with a professional career that rewards good practices, measures that will inevitably have positive influence on the long-term quality of care provided and in prevention of institutional violence.

Note 1. The aim is to analyse the relationships between the organisation of nursing homes and the interpersonal features of care providers and their relation with the residents’ quality of life, where elder abuse and neglect is one of the areas analysed.

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9 The Slow Violence of Deportability Karina Horsti

and Päivi Pirkkalainen

Violence is usually conceived as an act committed by a perpetrator— an event that has a beginning and an end and is visible, taking place in a specific space. The deportation of a person unlawfully residing in a country can certainly involve such obvious acts of violence. For instance, physical constraint in the moment of detainment or during a deportation flight led to 17 deaths in Europe between 1991 and 2015 (Fekete 2015). Several European countries have begun to monitor deportations in order to prevent the police or contracted agents from crossing the line The names of the authors appear in alphabetical order to indicate equal contribution to the article.

K. Horsti (B) · P. Pirkkalainen Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] P. Pirkkalainen e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Husso et al. (eds.), Violence, Gender and Affect, Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56930-3_9

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of what is conceived to be violent. In Finland, monitors from the Office of the Non-Discrimination Ombudsman have been able to accompany deportees since 2014, and in the case of inhumane treatment, they can complain to the Parliamentary Ombudsman (Niilola 2017). Since 2017, the European border control agency Frontex requires that a monitor accompany every joint deportation flight. In this chapter we argue that this common, limited view of violence in deportation, with monitoring taken up as its solution, does not fully encompass the diverse mechanisms of violence in deportations. We develop our critique by paying attention first to the temporality of violence and second to the extent of people affected by the violence. We understand deportation not as a singular event but as a process that begins with deportability—a condition in which a person might be deported at any time (De Genova 2002; Nyers 2003; Dreby 2010; Drotbohm and Hasselberg 2015; Khosravi 2018). Deportability involves a cruelty that does not appear to be violence in the conventional sense. It is a condition that can last for years, and even if a person is granted residence, deportation may still be possible in the future. In addition, deportation has consequences that persist in time and expand over space. People may be removed to cities or countries where they do not have social ties, resulting in isolation. Often deportation carries a stigma of failure that people bear for the rest of their lives. Deportation also tears apart important relationships (Drotbohm 2012; Plambech 2014; Schuster and Majidi 2015). Deportations affect family members and people who are part of the same community: teachers at school, colleagues at work, neighbors, and friends. We reconceptualize violence in deportation as what Rob Nixon (2011) calls slow violence—“a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon 2011, p. 2). Nixon develops the idea of slow violence by considering the pain and suffering that results from environmental neglect or disaster. He also discusses how the remnants of war—land mines and the poisonous detritus of bombs—may continue to threaten people beyond the original targets. Because slow violence affects in particular those with less

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power and money, the consequences of slow violence are fundamentally unequal. Slow violence creates challenges for representation and perception— how can we see, hear, and sense violence that seems to “just happen”, without an obvious perpetrator? How should we represent and strategically act upon something that is perhaps not visible and may not be occurring clearly here and now? We address these questions by focusing not on deportees themselves but on those who are proximate to them.1 We ask how individuals close to those threatened by deportation experience the deportability of others. In what ways do they conceive of deportation as slow violence? Following the idea of bearing witness, which refers to seeing something, actively taking responsibility and acting on that basis (Zelizer 1998, 2007; Felman 2000; Durham Peters 2001; Tait 2011), we also discuss how those close to deportability have acted upon the experience of seeing slow violence done to others. Our empirical research focuses on Finland, where deportation became a publicly debated issue in the aftermath of the European refugee reception crisis in 2015 when more than 32,000 asylum seekers entered the country. After the parliamentary elections of 2015, a conservative government made up of the Centre Party, the nationalist Finns Party and the National Coalition Party significantly tightened asylum policies and procedures. The Aliens Act was revised so that international protection on general humanitarian grounds was no longer possible; instead, asylum seekers had to prove they were the target of a specific individual threat. Moreover, the government limited access to legal advice. While the Finnish Immigration Service (Migri) is supposed to be independent of the government, it nevertheless tightened its policies and implementation of the law at the same time. Migri updated its country information on Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan—the origin countries of most new arrivals—defining more areas as safe return destinations and therefore enabling negative asylum decisions based on the argument that internal displacement was available to asylum seekers. In addition, there was a decline in the number of cases in which fear of violence was accepted as a justification for asylum (Saarikkomäki et al. 2018). These changes in Finnish law and its implementation resulted in deportations at a level never seen before (Migri 2020b2 ). Significant increases

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in the EU Frontex budget and expanded Frontex rights to organize joint removal flights also contributed to increased deportations.3 One of the results of these national and international policies was that the European Court of Human Rights (2019) condemned Finland for having violated Articles 2 and 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights—the right to life and the right not to be subjected to torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment—after a returned Iraqi man was killed in Baghdad (a claim that the Finnish police later proved to be false).4 For this chapter, our research consists of 14 thematic interviews with 13 supporters of asylum seekers who received a negative asylum decision and the order to leave Finland.5 All but two of the supporters we interviewed are women and most of the asylum seekers they talked about are men. This reflects the situation more broadly as the majority of asylum seekers who arrived in 2015 were male (26,424 out of 32,477) (Migri 2020a), and also majority of rejected asylum seekers are male (Migri 2020b). The fact that the majority of our interviewees are female reflects the situation in which women tend to be more active compared to men in voluntary work assisting asylum seekers: for example, 2015–2016 in Finland the majority of volunteers of the Finnish Red Cross working in reception centers were female (Nykänen et al. 2019). The positions and occupations at the system of refugee reception in Finland are often female-dominated, which may partly explain why women have more initial contacts with asylum seekers compared to men. Katherine Braun’s research in Northern Germany found that the voluntary assistance of new asylum seekers in 2015 were largely organized by female volunteers, who were elderly with a bourgeois background (Braun 2017, p. 39). Paul Scheibelhofer (2019, p. 205) found that in Austria even in cases where a heterosexual couple “sponsored” a young asylum seeker it was the woman who had initiated the sponsorship and was more involved in the relationship. Braun (2017, p. 39) claims that the voluntary work relates to “gendered and racialized logics where the difference between the modern, emancipated female volunteer and the female, oppressed refugee plays a central role”. According to her (2017) this logic in the German case goes back to “the particular form of bourgeois femininity, which values education and takes a classically humanist view of what it

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means to be modern” (Braun 2017, p. 39). For example, the women not only cared for the basic needs or taught the German language but while doing that they often took on “mental motherhood”—a role to educate asylum seekers to behave and think like a German. Scholars have argued that such “caring communities” are useful for the neoliberal state that needs to cover up the underfinancing of social welfare institutions and legal services (see e.g., van Dyk and Misbach 2016). Nevertheless, Braun (2017) demonstrates that the inegalitarian gendered structure of volunteerism with asylum seekers was ruptured and reconfigured as the “welcome culture” developed. First, the involvement of first and second generation refugees as interpreters disrupted the hierarchy. The encounter with asylum seekers also made German volunteers to reconsider their behavior in a self-reflexive and critical way. Second, as deportatability became visible to volunteers their support shifted to a more politicized direction. Similarly, Paul Scheibelhofer (2019, p. 203) argues that the relationship between young asylum seekers and their Austrian “sponsors” became emotionally closer when the issue of deportability, resistance, and legal assistance came to the picture. Sponsorships became spaces of politization and transgression “that not only sharpen the sponsors’ view of social injustices but also motivates them to confront them on diverse levels” (Scheibelhofer 2019, p. 216). These insights are crucial for discussing gendered and intersectional dynamics in asylum volunteerism. The neoliberal framework has the danger to ignore the fact that support can transform from a humanitarian care (useful for the neoliberal state) to a more politicized resistance (critical of the state). In addition, while there might be a gendered pattern at grassroots level encounters between asylum seekers and citizens it does not necessarily lead to a feminized practice. The way in which gender plays a role in the actual activism is more complicated as we will demonstrate. While we acknowledge that the deportees themselves are most affected by deportation, our focus is on those who have witnessed deportability and deportation from close quarters as friends, teachers, or colleagues. The pain of these supporters is an unintended collateral consequence of deportation. While the participants in our research are citizens who have not personally experienced deportability, they have nevertheless acted upon the deportability of others in some public form, either protesting

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or speaking publicly against deportation. Some of the asylum seekers they have supported were subsequently granted a residence permit, while others have been removed.6 Each interview lasted one to two hours and was transcribed for thematic analysis. In this chapter we focus on moments in which interviewees address witnessing the pain of others as well as their own emotional landscapes. We analyze the kinds of emotions that result from the slow violence of deportation and examine the ways in which supporters begin to unpack incremental violence: how they act and respond so as to dismantle the violence and its consequences.

Symptoms of the Slow Violence of Deportability The significant changes in Finnish law and its implementation began to affect asylum applicants as soon as they came into effect in 2016. For many, the system changed during their asylum process. To speed up the processing of asylum applications, Migri hired new, inexperienced personnel, which together with the new limitations on legal assistance caused the whole landscape of the asylum process to become more and more unpredictable and confusing for those who had been assisting asylum seekers. Several supporters we interviewed reported that they began to be troubled by continuous changes in the system and the apparent disorderliness of the decisions. The sharp shift in the asylum process corroded their trust in the fairness of the asylum system. Several interviewees mentioned obvious mistakes in asylum decisions that resulted from poor translations or the inexperience of the official who had conducted the asylum interview—which they felt was a clear difference compared to how the process functioned prior to 2016. Moreover, many interviewees were disturbed to discover how rarely Migri found credible the individual threat posed to asylum seekers who had previously faced violence in their countries of origin. The interviewees not only described the faults they had been eyewitnesses to—the mistakes they had seen in documents or firsthand in asylum interviews—but they also recalled their emotional reactions. Through emotions they lived and experienced injustices together with

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asylum seekers, and they later acted upon them. In other words, they “withnessed” (Ettinger 2006; see also introduction in this volume) deportability, experiencing emotions by virtue of being near and with those who were the direct targets of slow violence. This is similar to what performance scholar Diana Taylor (2011, pp. 272–273) has termed, “presencing” (from the Spanish presenciar ). Taylor has argued (in the context of presencing the testimony of a torture victim in Villa Grimaldi, Chile) that being with a victim in the place an event occurred and seeing the victim’s embodied feelings and reactions when revisiting the place are central to “presencing”—witnessing by being with the person who is telling their story. However, different from Taylor who discusses events that are over and that are being recalled in the form of testimony, in our case, we examine the conjuncture of emotions and witnessing also as the violence is happening. It has not yet been articulated into a testimony but the supporters observe the symptoms as they appear. Over time, our interviewees began to notice how the restrictions the government had implemented one by one since 2016 gradually affected the asylum seekers they had become familiar with. In other words, they started seeing the human cost of restrictive asylum laws and policies. One recurring form of slow violence that many interviewees witnessed was waiting and delays in the process. Many supporters had seen countless asylum cases be processed first at Migri and later, after a negative decision, in the administrative court system, stretching out for over two years in total. We identified a variety of symptoms or behaviors that the interviewees mentioned that can be linked to the slow violence of deportation: insomnia, tiredness, exhaustion, lack of concentration, change in personality, and shame due to dehumanizing treatment. One woman in her fifties whose family had supported an asylum seeker family with small children described the changes she noticed in the family seeking asylum during the more than two years they waited for the process to be complete. “I noticed that they started to succumb to institutionalization in the reception centre”, she said. The family had arrived in Finland from a refugee camp after being forced from their home many years earlier. It was particularly disturbing for the Finnish woman to notice that the children in the family had had to live in a

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continuous state of waiting and had not been able to settle down in a proper home. A female teacher in her fourties had noticed that one of her students who was waiting for his asylum decision had started arriving at school early in the morning although he didn’t have class until later in the day. This happened several mornings in a row. She also noticed that he was tired and asked him if something was wrong. “He said he had not slept for several nights. He had nightmares and was really down in the dumps. He’s a fighter in the sense that he didn’t just stay in bed all day. He came to school where there are other people, so he could be with others.” Neither the asylum seeker family with small children nor the student had articulated their symptoms to the people around them, but by being near the asylum seekers and observing changes in them, their supporters realized that something was not right. The consequences of waiting were beginning to come to the surface, and supporters began to witness and understand the otherwise invisible consequences of deportability. In these experiences of non-happening, nothing specific had occurred. Instead, the slow violence of waiting was emerging through emotions and physical symptoms. After a long waiting phase characterized by “non-events”, concrete events such as an asylum seeker receiving a negative decision from Migri, being refused leave to appeal to the Supreme Administrative Court or being taken into detention dashed. Supporters witnessed the gradual dissolution of asylum seekers’ agency in many of these situations. Many interviewees were extremely worried about the mental health of rejected asylum seekers. Some asylum seekers had revealed suicidal thoughts to their supporters, and some supporters had even heard about suicide attempts by rejected asylum seekers, some of whom were closed to the people they supported. A woman in her sixties who worked as a volunteer in a reception center had noticed that the mental health of some asylum seekers who had at first been active and eager to learn the Finnish language and plan a new life in Finland deteriorated as they waited; once they received negative decisions, some refused to get up from bed, pulled their blankets over their heads and slept all day.

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Another woman in her fifties who had also volunteered in reception centers had witnessed the desperate decisions rejected asylum seekers may make when faced with the experience of detention. An asylum-seeking family including a mother who was eight months pregnant was taken into detention. With the help of a lawyer, supporters managed to get the family out of detention and the Supreme Administrative Court issued an enforcement ban on their deportation order. A flat was arranged for the family to stay in. However, a couple of days after the family was released, they left a note on the table in the empty flat: “Sorry, we cannot stay here.” A little while later, they sent a photo of a newborn baby who had been born in France. The volunteer’s interpretation of the situation was that detention had been such a shocking experience to the family that they could not think or act rationally: they fled to France even though their deportation order in Finland had been blocked and the mother was due to deliver her baby at any time. Interviewees who had supported asylum seekers as volunteers or worked at reception centers also noticed collective symptoms. Deportability touches the peers of the deported person who are still in the process of waiting for final decisions on their asylum cases. For example, seeing someone be detained made other asylum seekers in that same reception center realize that it could also happen to them, contributing to a collective feeling of vulnerability. News of detentions and deportations also spread within migrants’ social media networks. For example, when Iraqis arrived in Finland in 2015 they had the expectation that they would be granted asylum because Finland was a country that respected human rights. After 2016, however, forced returns to Iraq increased partly due to Migri’s strict interpretation of the law regarding what constituted a credible fear of violence (Saarikkomäki et al. 2018). A woman in her fifties who is an activist in the Stop Deportations network and had been helping asylum seekers since before 2015 explained that Iraqis “as a collective” felt exhausted because they had witnessed so many deportations taking place around them. She had observed that their initial hopefulness had transformed into collective despair. In other words, the Iraqis experienced the slow violence of deportation not only individually but also as a collective. Since 2018, when Iraq announced it would

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refuse to accept people who were being forcibly returned, this collective fear turned toward the threat of being forced to live in Finland undocumented.

The Emotions and Reactions of Supporters The slow violence of deportability is undoubtedly felt and suffered most severely by rejected asylum seekers. However, witnessing deportability without experiencing it personally can also have strong emotional consequences for the supporters of deportable people. How does it feel to witness the suffering of other people, and how do witnesses react? Witnessing asylum seekers’ emotional reactions to deportability at different phases of the deportation continuum—the wait, the negative decision, detention, and deportation—revealed to the supporters the violence that did not initially seem like violence. In the interviews, supporters often described their own emotions and reactions while with the asylum seekers and witnessing the consequences of deportability. A Finnish language teacher explained how the dehumanizing aspects of deportation became visible to her in 2017. She had witnessed closely “the horrible detention” of an Iraqi man whose asylum application had been rejected because neither Migri nor the administrative court believed the militia that had tortured him continued to be a threat. The police detained him in the middle of the night despite the fact that his case calling for an implementation ban was still in process at the Supreme Administrative Court. By the time the Finnish teacher realized what had happened and tried to contact the man, his mobile phone had already been turned off. She immediately suspected that the police had taken his phone. She contacted the police and asked them to return the Iraqi man’s phone, but the police repeatedly denied having taken it. She was ultimately unable to contact the Iraqi man during his detention. She only managed to reach him when he had already been deported to Iraq, and he confirmed that the police in fact had confiscated his phone during his detention—a practice that is prohibited. In addition to feeling sad for the Iraqi man she had tried to help, the Finnish teacher underlined that she felt extremely disturbed by the fact that the police had lied to her.

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Interviewees also shared their experiences of being tired and exhausted by witnessing the hopelessness of deportable people. One female volunteer in her thirties described her feelings of exhaustion when she saw asylum seekers’ hopelessness at Migri being unwilling to correct mistakes and the administrative courts’ apparent lack of intervention in Migri’s decisions. She said, “it is tiring and very hard to listen to people’s circumstances and to see that you cannot help and to see that they are in such bad shape.” She felt that this was caused by the authorities’ unwillingness to hear about the problems and improve the situation. Similarly, a female volunteer in her sixties described multiplying emotions related to witnessing individuals suffer, coupled with her disappointment in how the Finnish state treats people: I have managed these things pretty badly. I dream about them and they affect my mood. And what I have seen from others, too – there is fear and worry about what will happen to asylum seekers when they are crammed into airplanes [and deported]. On top of that, there is the disappointment of having lived in a constitutional state for all my life, and now people are treated like this here. The disappointment has been so deep that it is has caused trauma.

A teacher in her forties recalled that she could not sleep after reading on the Stop Deportation social media feed that there would be a deportation flight to Afghanistan during the night. While she was not afraid that her own asylum-seeking student would be on the flight, she nevertheless woke up at night and could not stop thinking, “Now they are taking them, there, and they might be young guys, they might be like my student”. The experience of witnessing her student’s struggle with deportability sensitized her to the broader issue of deportation. She began to follow stories about deportation in the news, and her mediated witnessing of the deportation of people she did not know affected her emotionally.

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Dismantling Slow Violence Through Solidarity Seeing the symptoms of individual suffering or the perceived wrongdoing of the Finnish state prompted the supporters we interviewed to take action. Rather than remaining dispassionate to what they had observed, they acted upon what they saw and knew, they bore witness (see e.g. Felman 2000; Durham Peters 2001; Zelizer 2007; Tait 2011). The first step in taking action is to share experiences and emotions with other people who have witnessed similar issues and situations. The sharing of experiences and emotions makes them collective and potentially reduces exhaustion, anxiety, insomnia, and other symptoms. We identified three different categories of solidarity acts among our interviewees, acts through which they responded responsibly to having seen the consequences of slow violence: (1) Helping —Providing concrete assistance to those under threat of deportation such as seeking out legal advice and finding ways to legally challenge deportation orders. Another example is creating jobs so that some individuals could get a work permit; (2) Publicity—Seeking mainstream media attention for individual deportation cases or protesting deportations in public demonstrations; (3) Advocacy—Advocating for change by lobbying decision makers and the authorities responsible for asylum issues. Each of these solidarity actions helped alleviate the effects of slow violence and its consequences. Specifically, these acts of solidarity made visible the slow violence that would have otherwise remained invisible. The citizenship position of supporters gave them a privileged position to reveal the invisible slow violence of deportation at different levels: at the individual level, but also more broadly at the system level and societal level. This visibility is crucial because deportability tends to isolate, silence, and make people invisible (Peutz 2006, p. 231; Peutz and De Genova 2010, p. 23; Hinger et al. 2018, p. 164). At the individual level, the sharing of difficult emotions and experiences made slow violence visible and audible. While the individual level of sharing did not always lead to attempts to change the system or to create public awareness, engagements with broader social change always included individual level witnessing and sharing of emotions. The acts of solidarity based on sharing of emotions and support were not necessarily

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(or only) “personal” or “intimate” acts for the interviewed supporters but were based on wider motives to protect human rights. The supporters refused to align with the invisible perpetrator and accept ignorance and inequality as the normal response. In the interviews the aspect of gendered roles in the supporter-asylum seeker relationships did not emerge, and we did not specifically ask about it. However, while writing this chapter we were in touch with some of the interviewees again who wanted to comment on our draft and then we asked them to reflect on the gender aspect. One interviewee, a man in his forties noted that in the group of supporters they had taken up different roles rather organically. Gender was one aspect— the young asylum seeker they supported called (with humor and irony) him a “dad”, one of his teachers a “mom” and others as “sisters” and “brothers”. However, more important in the division of support were the professional expertise of each person, age, and personal characteristics and interests. A woman in her thirties expressed frustration that gender is like “a stamp” on women who assist asylum seekers, and it is also used to dismiss their practice of volunteering or activism. She recalls hearing that “racists groups openly talk about female supporters as ‘old maids in need of a man’”. She has also faced downplaying of her critique on asylum cases by some authorities. “Sometimes authorities have openly said to me: you are too close to these people (asylum seekers)”. This has made her feel that her critique would not be valid nor based on rational thinking. Thus, while there might be indicators such as feminized professions that lead to women encountering asylum seekers through their work, or cultural social norms, such as “the modern emancipated female volunteer” discussed in Katherine Braun’s work focusing on Germany, it is also important to stress that those feminized structures and practices explain little the resistance to deportations. Supporters played an important role in sharing the emotions of those threatened by deportation because many attempted to protect family members and friends from the distress caused by uncertainty. People who are deportable are often unable to lean on those closest to them for emotional or practical support. One “detention activist”, a woman in

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her forties, explained that her relationships with people she meets in the detention center easily become very close: I mean close in the sense that a person tells me things that they have not shared with anyone else. They might call me and say “I can’t talk to my wife about these things because I don’t want her to have a nervous breakdown.” So it becomes a very close relationship, and I appreciate this trust a lot. I know it’s not a long-term relationship, it’s only during a crisis, detention, and the friendships often do not even continue, at least not with the intensity they had during that crisis.

At the system level, solidarity actions such as challenging the administrative asylum process make the slow violence of deportability visible within the administrative and the court systems. The ways in which supporters have resisted the system include seeking Supreme Administrative Court decisions that have ultimately suspended deportations and preparing new asylum applications with more convincing evidence. One anti-deportation activist in her thirties mentioned that in the span of a year “three of the people I assisted have been forcibly returned, but there are countless cases in which the deportation process has been blocked because of our resistance.” Finally, solidarity actions that involve publicity through the media or demonstrations have made the slow violence of deportability visible to the wider public. A man in his fifties who has been an activist in the Free Movement network for many years, including before the recent refugee reception crisis, claimed that in the past forced removals were conducted in “the dead of the night” and resistance against deportations had been a very marginal phenomenon in Finland. According to the interviewee, however, since 2016 and specifically in 2017, when more deportation cases were covered by the media and larger protests were organized against them, a wider audience started understanding how inhumane it is “to forcibly push people onto airplanes,” and injustices committed by the authorities “were brought into the light.”

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Conclusion In this chapter we have analyzed how supporters of asylum seekers in Finland bear witness and live emotionally with rejected asylum seekers, that is “withness” deportability. We have described the processes by which they have begun to see and feel the invisible slow violence done to others and how they have decided to act upon that experience. In using the term slow violence we have focused attention on the diverse and often invisible mechanisms of violence in the deportation process by paying attention to the temporality of violence and the extent of people affected by that violence. Supporters of asylum seekers were alarmed by the changes in the Finnish political context in 2016, when asylum laws and policies became more restrictive. Strong emotional reactions emerged when they witnessed the consequences of deportability for the rejected asylum seekers they had become familiar with. We argue that the slow violence of deportation manifests in particular through asylum seekers’ and supporters’ fears. Fear was visible in many ways: supporters feared what might happen to people in the future, or they were shocked by seeing what fear of the unknown did to people in the present moment. Supporters spoke not only about witnessing the fear-related symptoms of rejected asylum seekers but also about their own feelings of exhaustion, insomnia, and anxiety. The injustice they witnessed and strong emotional reactions they experienced prompted them to engage in acts of solidarity, such as helping people under the threat of deportation through concrete assistance, publicity, or advocacy. Our analysis of this engagement and the resulting acts of solidarity emphasizes the supporters’ strong personal and emotional experiences and their commitment to the act. Gender plays a complicated role in resistance to deportations. At the initial grassroots’ level encounters between asylum seekers and citizens in Finland there was a gendered pattern as most newcomers in 2015 were male but among the citizens women were more active in mobilizing for the voluntary work. However, in the process of engagement in different acts of solidarity with political aims other aspects than gender, such as values and worldviews were more important. However, the situation in which most activists are female and

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most deportees male makes activists prone to criticism and targets of downplaying of their claims. We stress that “withnessing” deportability is not only about living with the emotions of another and being empathic to those who are suffering as the direct targets of injustice, but also about the resulting responsible actions that bearing witness is essentially about. Following this line of thinking, we claim that activists, be they female or male, mobilized to make political claims on asylum seekers’ human rights because of living with the strong emotions and suffering of others. Finally, we have shown how solidarity acts by people in the privileged position of having citizenship can help dismantle slow violence. With secure citizenship status, command of the language, access to networks, and knowledge of bureaucratic processes, supporters are able to make the slow violence of deportability visible to society at large. Acknowledgements We are grateful to our colleague Satu Ranta-Tyrkkö for introducing the term slow violence to us. We also thank the editors of this book and the participants in our research for their helpful comments on drafts of this chapter. Finally, we thank the participants for sharing their experiences with us.

Notes 1. We have conducted research on experiences of people who are under the threat of deportation and written about this topic elsewhere (for example Pirkkalainen, unpublished manuscript; Horsti and Khademi, unpublished manuscript). 2. In 2015, 1897 decisions on removal from the country were made in Finland, and since then number of decisions has gradually increased. In between March 2019 and February 2020, 4819 decisions on removal from the country were made (Migri 2020b). 3. The Frontex budget grew from an initial EUR 6M for 2005 to EUR 320M for 2018. Frontex started to play a more substantial role in organizing return flights after 2016. Its sharp budget increase from EUR 142M for 2015 to EUR 302M for 2017 is directly related to the increase in deportation flights (Bremer 2017; Frontex 2020).

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4. In April 2020 the Finnish police began to investigate an alleged fraud related to the case. The Iraqi authorities had confirmed that the death certificate was fake (Yle 2020). 5. Päivi Pirkkalainen conducted 11 interviews with ten people between February 2018 and January 2019. Karina Horsti conducted three interviews in January–February 2019. 6. In administrative and legal discourse, the terms ‘deportation’, ‘forced/voluntary return/removal’, and ‘Dublin returns’ have different meanings. We follow the tradition of deportation studies and use the term ‘deportation’ to refer to all removals of asylum seekers who have received a removal order. Even the administrative process of ‘assisted voluntary return’ and a signed waiver of ‘voluntariness’ are in fact forced if the asylum seeker has no alternative. The European Court of Human Rights decided that a voluntary return to Iraq was forced in the case of N.A v. Finland in 2019 (ECHR 2019, p. 15).

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Part IV Ideological Violence

10 Humiliation and Violence in Kenyan History Brett L. Shadle

One day in 1954, Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o was walking home from a church service. A decade later, Ng˜ug˜ı had already made his mark as a novelist, but now he was a young man just finishing his primary education. Central Kenya was in a state of war. Thousands of members of his ethnic group, the Gikuyu, had fled to the forests and taken up arms against the colonial government. State officials and military flooded the African reserves, seeking anyone who might be allied with the Mau Mau. And so it was that on this day Ng˜ug˜ı was stopped by a military patrol. A white officer asked where he had been. “An open-air Christian service.” “Say ‘effendi,’ [sir]” he shouted. “Effendi.” B. L. Shadle (B) Department of History, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Husso et al. (eds.), Violence, Gender and Affect, Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56930-3_10

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Ng˜ug˜ı answered another two questions, and each time had to be reminded to say “effendi.” He answered one further question. But I had forgotten to say “effendi.” I felt rather than saw the blow to my face. I staggered but managed to remain on my feet. “Say ‘effendi’!” “Yes, effendi!” I said, tears at the edges of my eyelids. I was now a man [having been initiated]; I was not supposed to cry. But a man is supposed to fight back, to defend himself and his own, but I could not summon even a gesture of self-defense (Ng˜ug˜ı 2010, pp. 238–239).

Here we see how a verbal ritual of deference, of humiliation, was always backed by the threat of physical violence. This violence was intended both to ensure deference, but also to inflict further humiliation: Ng˜ug˜ı could not be a man if he did not respond to violence, but responding to violence would only bring further violence, very possibly death. And so Ng˜ug˜ı was forced, at this moment, to accept his lesser position in the racial hierarchy that was colonial Kenya. Elsewhere (Shadle 2012, 2015; cf. Shutt 2015 on Zimbabwe) I have examined how whites in Kenya, like this district officer, used physical violence and humiliation to create and enforce a racial hierarchy. Whites were those who could demand deference and exercise violence and humiliation; Africans were those who must show deference and suffer violence and humiliation. Here, I want to take preliminary steps toward tracing how a select group of victims understood and reacted to violence and humiliation.1 In reading works produced by a dozen Gikuyu men, it struck me how often they mentioned the humiliations and violence they had experienced. In writings from the 1950s through the several years after independence in 1963, and for Ng˜ug˜ı into the twenty-first century, authors bitterly recalled the many actions and words that struck their self-image. Humiliation they experienced as a challenge to their self-understanding as full member of a particular community, as a mature, responsible, adult man. Humiliation and violence were intensely personal experiences: it was Ng˜ug˜ı’s body that experienced the physical pain, it was his ego that was cut by the humiliation. Yet they came to understand that they belonged to a humiliated group, and that

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the humiliation suffered by any individual was shared by all. Humiliation bound Africans together as Africans.2

Gikuyu Authors on Colonial Humiliation and Violence Critical to understanding how these men experienced humiliation is to understand what it meant to them to be a man.3 Gikuyu society (at least in the late pre-colonial and colonial years) was structured by gender and by generation. Initiation, which would have taken place in the teen years, advanced one from a boy to a man (and girl to woman). These new men left behind childish things and childish ways, “acquired self-respect,” assumed a dignified public persona (Gicaru 1958, p. 135; Muoria 1994, p. 34; 2009, p. 329). After his initiation, Mugo Gatheru and other new men “would walk with great confidence, stay out as much as we could, and take responsibilities that are assumed only by the circumcised ones in Kikuyu societies” (Gatheru 1981, p. 63; cf Gicaru 1958, pp. 117– 118, 120).4 They were “men and could now make our own choices” (Gatheru 1981, p. 65). Adult men demanded respect, and could exert their authority over boys (and women) through violence (Gatheru 1981, p. 51). Gikuyu men strove for wiathi, a term that connotes self-mastery, maturity, and adulthood. Upon marriage and fatherhood, respect and authority grew: having a large and flourishing family meant increased agricultural production, which in turn helped a man build a larger family and a retinue of clients. Wiathi meant that a man had accomplished private authority (in the family) and public authority (through recognition as a wise elder). One had achieved true adulthood, one could claim respect and dignity, one was self-reliant, and was one upon whom others were dependent. Colonialism and interactions with whites meant that, for many men, they entered a world that did not treat them like adult men and cut off the possibility of achieving wiathi. One of the most explosive issues in colonial Kenya concerned land that had been alienated for white settlement. For many poorer and younger men, land hunger meant their chances to achieve wiathi had been foreclosed. Squatters could be ejected

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by white farmers at any time and then, while wandering, they could be arrested, “abused and humiliated” (Gicaru 1958, p. 30). Land alienation was unjust, but it was experienced as humiliation: landless men could not act like adult men, would not be treated like adult men. There was in addition a whole litany of ways that whites treated them like less than adult men. Starting in the 1920s, when travelling African men were required to carry registration papers in a metal tube hung around their necks. Gikuyu called it a “goat’s bell,” and to be treated like an animal was “insulting, humiliating, and discriminatory” (Gatheru 1981, p. 88). The “psychological effect,” Gicaru (1958, p. 90) wrote, was “equal to that of … a European calling a seventy-year-old African ‘boy’”. Whites claimed that Africans’ “minds are the minds of children and therefore our leaders do not qualify for wise mature leadership” (Gakaara 1988, p. 229). Colonialism negated wiathi which they had achieved or for which they strove. There were in fact many ways to be humiliated in colonial Kenya, many ways for an adult man to be treated not as an equal but as a child. Early on, the government proscribed the carrying of spears and swords; yet it was “part of the essence of manhood among the Kikuyu to carry” them (Kariuki 1963, p. 84). Waruhiu Itote recalled the humiliations of segregated toilets at the railway, restrictions on Africans entering some hotels “except as servants,” and the prohibition on the sale of certain beers to Africans. “Nairobi,” he recalled, “was full of such pin-pricks in those days” (Itote 1967, p. 21). During Mau Mau, in the sudden police swoops anyone with black skin was liable to be rounded up and interrogated, and “all would have suffered some form of harassment and humiliation” (Ng˜ug˜ı 2012, p. 73). And the “running fight [with police] was distinguished by the continual humiliation and attacks on the basic dignity of Africans living there” (Itote 1967, pp. 36–37). J. M. Kariuki (1963) listed a few of the ways to be humiliated: as an educated person, as an elder man, and as a Black person. “Many Europeans,” he wrote, “refused to talk to educated Africans in any language but their deplorably bad Swahili; old men were addressed as boys and monkeys; Africans were barred from hotels and clubs…there was a wholesale disregard for human dignity and little respect for anyone with a black skin” (Kariuki 1963, p. 49; cf. Atieno-Odhiambo 1995; Gakaara 1988, p. 230).

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Africans also felt or witnessed violence at white hands. Writing in the 1970s, Kareri (2003, p. 31) thought that “people may fail to comprehend how the whites used to beat black people.” Whether “missionaries, farmers, or government officers,” he explained, “all whites beat black people.”5 With the terrific power of the colonial state behind every white person, reacting to violence with violence could be foolhardy, deadly. Often, these authors felt helpless to respond to physical and psychological attacks on them. Kareri (2003) told of an African man who drank milk that he did not know had been reserved for a white man, who then attacked him. “After the white man got tired and his anger subsided, he left the man looking like a disabled person. The rest of us watched the spectacle in amazement, for there was nothing for us to do.” Gakaara (1988, p. 239) thought that it was “the depth of ignominy” to work for others on what had been one’s own land. “To add to this great shame,” he continued, “those of us who dare to question the justification for this state of affairs end up getting their heads bashed; the others see this and cringe in fear”. To answer violence with violence was to question white authority, and so bring down upon oneself the terrific violence of the entire colonial state (cf. Mwangi 1974, p. 20). These men offered numerous other examples of the humiliation and violence suffered at the hands of settlers and the state. In the emotionally charged moment of these kinds of interactions, the impact is intensely personal: it is my body that it is in pain, it is my standing as a mature person that is being challenged. Yet these men could not help but to situate their experiences within the larger colonial context. They were attacked less for their individual failings than for their race. Kaggia, then a clerk, was stung personally when humiliated by a district commissioner, but he soon realized that “It did not matter what position one held, what mattered was colour” (Kaggia 1975, p. 19). That is, regardless of his individual attainments—as an educated, white-collar, salaried state employee—he would always be treated as an inferior due to his race. Humiliations by a white man revealed that in colonial Kenya his blackness would always undercut his striving toward wiathi. Psychologists have argued that “humiliation in intergroup contexts has been shown to lead to inertia rather than confrontation, despite humiliation leading to a desire/motivation for violence” (Leidner et al. 2012).

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For Kaggia and others, however, having been individually humiliated because of their membership in a racial group led them to organized (and often violent) political action (cf. Callahan 2004). Gatheru (1981, pp. 55, 73–75) became “embittered” and was driven into organized politics after ruminating on why Africans were “always treated in such a humiliating and degrading fashion and always accorded the last place in what was after all, their own country.” Gakaara (1988, p. xi) was prompted to write his first political pamphlet after witnessing “the virtual slavery to which African workers were subjected, including constant physical assaults and verbal abuse by white land owners.” It was also possible to employ violence and humiliation against fellow Africans to further illuminate the nature of the racial struggle facing them. During a raid on a settler farm, Mau Mau fighter Karari Njama and his soldiers confronted a domestic servant. Njama wondered how a Black man could work for the interests of both a white man and Africans, and how any African serving a white man could truly be himself a man (Barnett and Njama 1966, p. 385): “You! Do you wear the kanzu, the woman’s frock when cooking for his wife?” I asked. “Yes, I do”, he admitted. I angrily slapped him on the face. “You woman!” I shouted. “Your master calls you ‘Boy’ and you keep comforting the European and giving them much hope for staying here!”

The domestic servant was being told that so long as he aligned himself with whites, he would be humiliated: whites called him boy, Njama beat him like a child; whites dressed him in a frock, Njama called him a woman. And thus did the personal become the political. Physical and verbal assaults struck at their status as adult men, seeking or having achieved maturity and respectability. At the moment of such assaults they felt powerless to strike back as a real man should. Yet while they felt the pain personally and internally, they came to understand that they were being assaulted not so much as individuals, but as members of a group— as Africans. As part of this group, individual humiliations must be shared

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by all. From there, a critical tool to organize Africans politically was to emphasize the individual and shared humiliations heaped upon them as Africans, and to heap humiliation on those Africans who shirked their duty to their fellows.

Ngugi on Colonial and Postcolonial Humiliation and Violence Humiliation and violence have been no less significant in shaping Ng˜ug˜ı’s identity, his understanding of colonialism and its lingering effects. For Ng˜ug˜ı, all human interactions hold the potential for humiliation. As Gikandi (1995, p. 65) notes, for Ng˜ug˜ı “words in themselves are not vehicles of meanings; rather, it is the emotions behind such words.” While words might sting, it is often the unspoken emotions— ones which are often misunderstood—that lead to his fictional characters feeling humiliated. Virtually all of his early short stories, for instance, contain discussions of humiliation (Ng˜ug˜ı 1975). In the novel The River Between, Kabonyi the elder was “full of fury” for the “public humiliation” of having been bested in debate by the young man Waiyaki, who had in fact been nothing but respectful during the encounter (Ng˜ug˜ı 1965, p. 97). A Grain of Wheat is filled with actual or imagined humiliations. Karanja and Gikonyo, for example, both believe they have been humiliated by one another, and by Mumbi, their shared love interest, and both in turn seek to humiliate her. Rarely are hurtful words themselves at the heart of these supposed humiliations, but rather glances, imputed motives, misinterpreted exchanges. Interpersonal humiliations within a community could be mended, however, in the interest of the ultimate goal of achieving unity and harmony in a post-Mau Mau Kenya. Honest words were necessary. “We need to talk,” Mumbi tells Gikonyo when he asks her to return to their home, “to open our hearts to one another, examine them, and then together plan the future we want” (Ng˜ug˜ı 1967, p. 247). The humiliations that Gikonyo had imagined Mumbi inflicting upon him, and the ones he intentionally inflicted upon her, had strained but not entirely severed their relationship. The family, the village, the

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country, could be reunited, so long as the painful humiliations of the past were brought forward and discussed. Ng˜ug˜ı was well aware of other, worse, kinds of humiliation and violence, like those other Gikuyu authors described. The entire political, economic, and cultural structures of the colonial system were shot through with humiliations. Indeed, simply to be colonized, to be a colonial subject, is to live in a constant state of humiliation (Ng˜ug˜ı 1991, p. 79). This humiliation could, in turn, awaken in African people the necessity of banding together to counter white colonialism.6 In A River Between the western-educated protagonist Waiyaki finally recognizes the humiliation the landless peasants suffer at the hands of the colonizers: “All at once he felt more forcefully than he had ever felt before the shame of a people’s land being taken away, the shame of being forced to work on those same lands, the humiliation of paying taxes for a government that you knew nothing about” (Ng˜ug˜ı 1965, p. 142). It is then that Waiyaki awakens to his duty to his people, steps outside the classroom, and joins the larger struggle for his people’s rights. Ng˜ug˜ı himself had his own awakening about the group to which he belonged, his “discovery of blackness.” This occurred not when he first glimpsed white people, but when he experienced the seeming inseparability of whiteness and power, blackness and powerlessness. The first time was during the scene that opens this chapter; the second was when he was incarcerated by a white officer barely older than he, and at whose word he saw “grown men cower.” Ng˜ug˜ı and Waiyaki alike, young men whose identity had been captured by their role in a new, educated class, found in violence and humiliation the spur to identify instead as part of an oppressed African people.7 Interpersonal relationships need not be tainted by humiliation, but relationships formed through oppression simply could not exist absent humiliation. While families and communities could open their hearts and plan their shared future, colonial oppressors would have no place in a postcolonial Kenya. The humiliations and violence they inflicted was based not on any misunderstanding between members of a shared community, but on the absence of community. For Ng˜ug˜ı, oppressors and the oppressed appear on either sides of an unbridgeable gulf: to humiliate or violate another in order to dominate them is the antithesis

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of normal human relations. (As Gakaara [1988, p. 242] wrote, “What just relationship can exist between us and people who compare us to monkeys…?”) One cannot foster communal healing when a community does not exist. The best response to humiliation by an oppressor was to eject the oppressor so that the people could return to their harmonious ways. In A Grain of Wheat, when Mugo comes to reveal information about a Mau Mau leader, District Officer Thompson is convinced he is lying. Worse: “He seemed to be laughing at me.” Laughter is, for those unsure of their authority, a challenge.8 “Suddenly I spat into his face. I don’t know why, but I did it” (Ng˜ug˜ı 1967, p. 199). For the reader, Thompson’s actions are clear. Thompson spat to humiliate Mugo and remind him of his status as a subordinate. Later, Thompson as commandant of a detention camp again meets Mugo and has him beaten repeatedly in hopes of extracting a confession; sometimes “in naked fury” Thompson whips Mugo himself, furious “that all the detainees mocked and despised him for his failure to extort a cry from Mugo” (Ng˜ug˜ı 1967, p. 133). After eleven detainees were killed in that camp Thompson was excoriated in Britain, his career in shambles. His standing as a colonial official, upon which his personal sense of self rested, was gone. He had been rejected by the institution and fellow Britons to which he had dedicated his life. Even when transferred to a new post, “the wound had never healed. Touch it, and it brought back all the humiliation he had felt at the time” (Ng˜ug˜ı 1967, p. 46). Ng˜ug˜ı asks how Thompson (and the equally violent and sycophantic Karanja) could be part of the community of an independent Kenya. The humiliations Thompson had inflicted, and from which he now suffered, were the result not of interpersonal miscommunication, but arose from his status as an oppressor, from his self-image as someone superior to Africans. And so Thompson leaves Kenya, Karanja leaves his home village for obscurity in some unknown place. Colonialism, according to Ng˜ug˜ı, took over not just land and bodies, but minds as well.9 But the mind-colonizing humiliations to which Ng˜ug˜ı was subjected differed from what other authors experienced. By the 1940s, and especially after the war, the British began to experiment with creating a new class of future collaborators. Missionaries had of

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course always instructed their converts to think, dress, and act differently from their “pagan” neighbors. There seemed now a renewed effort to create Britons with black skins. These would be modern men who could fill higher (though not the highest) levels of the state, serving alongside Britons with white skins. Whites would use humiliation and violence to separate African children from their culture and teach them that they could and should be a westernized African elite. Humiliation was a means of colonizing the minds of a select few youth, creating modern men who would rise to become a loyal subaltern class. Unlike those who were humiliated for thinking themselves to be modern men, Ng˜ug˜ı was humiliated in order to make him a modern African man.10 “[H]umiliation in relation to our languages was key,” Ng˜ug˜ı wrote in 1993, to colonizing African minds (Ng˜ug˜ı 1993, p. 33). In whiterun schools, indigenous languages “were associated…with low status, humiliation, corporal punishment, slow-footed intelligence and ability or downright stupidity, non-intelligibility and barbarism” (Ng˜ug˜ı 1991, p. 18). “Thus,” he recalled, “one of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught speaking G˜ık˜uy˜u in the vicinity of the school. The culprit was given corporal punishment…or was made to carry a metal plate around the neck with inscriptions such as I am stupid or I am a donkey” (Ng˜ug˜ı 1991, p. 11). A student might be lashed until blood was spilled, and called a monkey. Ng˜ug˜ı learned “that Gikuyu was not only a forbidden thing but a thing that brought pain and humiliation” (Duke 2006). In the humiliations of the classroom, Ng˜ug˜ı believes, lay the origin of the colonized mind. Even as Ng˜ug˜ı fought against the ill effects of the colonized mind, he sharpened his analysis of the racial and class divide that continued to afflict postcolonial Kenya. White exploiters had now joined hands with Kenyan exploiters. In Petals of Blood (1977), the lawyer reflects on his lost hope for the postcolonial period: I thought I saw a new youth emerging, a youth freed from the direct shame and humiliation of the past and hence not so spiritually wounded as those who had gone before. So different from our time; so different shall I say, from those who had seen their strong fathers and elder brothers fold a kofia [hat] behind them in the presence of a white boy. I said to

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myself: here is our hope…in the new children, who have nothing to prove to the white man…and therefore can see the collective humiliation clearly and hence are ready to strike out for the true kingdom of the black god within us all. (p. 167)

Soon enough, the lawyer, like Ng˜ug˜ı, discovered that the new black oppressors were just as bad as the old white ones. Humiliation was a tool not just of colonial officials, settlers, and teachers, but of the postcolonial African elite as well. With the effects of colonial-era humiliation lingering well into the postcolonial era, and being reinforced by the acts of the new elite, Ng˜ug˜ı’s increased his call for victims to turn the tools of their masters against them. In their 1976 play The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, Ng˜ug˜ı and his co-author Micere Mugo imagine Kimathi as a man unwilling to be humiliated by his captors. Kimathi was one of the foremost Mau Mau leaders, only to be captured in 1956, tried and hanged, his body buried in an unmarked grave. In the play Kimathi sits alone in prison, recalling how his people had performed their own dances, by their own tune, but were forced by the colonial rulers to “dance the dance of humiliation and fear” (Ng˜ug˜ı and Mugo 1976, p. 37). In response, Kimathi began to organize the youth for armed struggle. Now being browbeaten by a white man, a black businessman, and a black preacher (symbols of both colonial and postcolonial oppressors), encouraged to give up his oath and his fellow Mau Mau, Kimathi remains strong. He speaks truth to power. Slapped by a white man, he stands, chained, and proposes a fair man to man fight. Tortured, he refuses to give up the cause and again be the humiliated, fearful, colonial subject. When the judge condemns him to hang Kimathi laughs, puncturing the colonial state’s claim to omnipotence. In two books written soon after Ng˜ug˜ı’s release from a year in detention in December, 1980, Ng˜ug˜ı hopes to reach a new generation of Kenyans, teaching children the bitterness of humiliation and how best to deal with it. (Unfortunately for this essay, his third children’s book has not been translated from the Gikuyu). The stories tell of a 1950s poor peasant schoolboy, Njamba Nene (or “great hero”), surrounded by wealthier, collaborationist fellow students and teachers, as well as white

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officers. Humiliation and violence are critical to the plots, and in no uncertain terms Ng˜ug˜ı instructs his young readers that they must be strong in the face of those who would humiliate them for pride in their cultures, and that violence might be the appropriate response. Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus was first published in 1982 in Gikuyu, and in English four years later. We see the boy humiliated by his teacher and fellow students both for his poverty and his refusal to submit to the supremacy of all things white. The school was established by settler Pious Brainwash, known also as Hangbelly, explicitly in order to distort African minds. “His aim was to cultivate a small group of Africans who had mouths, legs, arms, hearts, everything like those of white people” (Ng˜ug˜ı 1986a, p. 6). The teacher (nicknamed K˜ıgorogoru, or “Adam’s apple”) announces that it was undoubtedly the boy’s mother who had told him such “rubbish” that “No language is better than another”—obviously English is superior to the Gikuyu that Njamba favors. K˜ıgorogoru continues to berate him for ignoring English in favor of Gikuyu, Swahili or “some other primitive languages,” and presumably even enjoying “carrying that plaque with the words ‘I AM AN ASS’ round your neck” (Ng˜ug˜ı 1986a, p. 4). He bullies Njamba Nene for ignoring European geography for that of Kenya, for not wanting a “modern” Western name. (Ng˜ug˜ı selects some aptly humiliating western names for other pupils, like John Bull, and Fartwell for the teacher.) The boy wondered why the teacher “was always trying to humiliate him in front of other pupils. Njamba Nene used to wonder why K˜ıgorogoru wanted to make him feel small and ashamed of himself ” (Ng˜ug˜ı 1986a, p. 4). Later, when their bus crashes in the forest, Njamba Nene’s knowledge of local geography helps him save most of his fellow pupils: that is, his refusal to succumb to humiliations and worship all things white, and his appreciation for his own land, saves them. Njamba Nene’s Pistol , first published in Gikuyu in 1984, continues the theme of authentic Africans overcoming the humiliations inflicted upon them. At the end of Flying Bus, Njambe Nene had been expelled from the school for allegedly helping Mau Mau. In Pistol we find that the teacher K˜ıgorogoru had become a colonial chief and was killed by Mau Mau— little subtly there. The critical scene in the tale is a roadside screening of Africans as suspected Mau Mau, carried out by white and African

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soldiers. The people stood in the hot sun, hungry and thirsty, while the white soldiers enjoyed biscuits and meat sandwiches, water and whiskey, “as if they were mocking all the hungry people of Kenya” (Ng˜ug˜ı 1986b, p. 19). When Njamba Nene, lost in thought, ignores an order of the white officer, an African homeguard kicks him in his ribs and strikes him with a whip across the face. But something else “really annoyed” Njamba Nene. A small white boy, dressed up like a soldier, had come along and began to interrogate people. “He would slap them and knock their head with the butt of his pistol if they did not say what was expected of them. Sometimes he would spit at them or do other things full of hated and contempt” (Ng˜ug˜ı 1986b, p. 22). What could be more humiliating, a mere boy inflicting violence on adults? The white officer laughed. “‘Do you see? Mau Mau are just cowards,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you men? Accepting a beating from a mere child!’” (Ng˜ug˜ı 1986b, p. 22). Should one of the boy’s victims try to protect themselves, the home guards would grasp their hands behind them. But Njamba Nene had earlier been given a pistol to deliver to the Mau Mau. While “everyone’s attention was drawn to the spectacle of a mere boy torturing and humiliating people in their own land,” Njamba Nene crept up to a white officer and put the pistol to his neck (Ng˜ug˜ı 1986b, p. 23): now an African child asserts power over a white man and his adult African soldiers. The soldiers are tied up, and Njamba Nene joins the Mau Mau to fight for his people’s freedom. To free minds from white colonization, and to free bodies from African neocolonialism, Ng˜ug˜ı suggests that harsh means might be necessary, violence to answer violence.11

Conclusion The Gikuyu authors considered in this essay were compelled by humiliation and violence to think about themselves, about colonialism and neocolonialism, and about resistance in new ways. While they might also have made larger claims about human rights and democracy, they viscerally understood colonialism through personal bitterness over being called “boy” or being slapped. They were far from alone. Novels, memoirs, political tracts, and newspaper articles written by colonized people

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around the world locate humiliation and violence as central factors in their experience of colonialism, and in their emotional and intellectual awakening to anti-colonial resistance. Examples are easy to find. In Senegal: N’Deye Touti, who sees herself at one with French culture, turns back to her people when she is humiliated by French officials who see her as nothing but a potential sex partner (Sembene 1986). In Zimbabwe: Benjamin returns from the liberation war frontlines only to find himself still treated with condescension by a white clerk (Chinodya 1986). Algeria: Fanon (1965) wrote of the humiliation in every visit of a local to European doctors, and argued that violence is necessary to defeat settler colonialism even as it serves as “a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex” (Fanon 2004, p. 51). A global and historical exploration of how elites and common folk of different nations, genders, ages, and classes grappled with humiliation and violence would, I argue, be a positive step toward a full accounting of the impact of colonization.

Notes 1. I admit how preliminary this discussion is, and I am fully aware of how much flattening I have had to do to issues of gender, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. I can only hope that other scholars might find the topic worthwhile enough to take the time and space to draw out the issues raised here. 2. In this way, I see the study of humiliation and violence as a way to bring together the emotional, embodied, and intellectual aspects of racialization and nationalism in Africa. 3. The following draws on Lonsdale (1992). For a broader exploration of gender and generation, and especially the role of the colonial state acting as the ultimate elder, see Ocobock (2017). 4. “Kikuyu” is the British-influenced spelling; “Gikuyu” better reflects local pronunciation. 5. Kareri (2003, p. 44) gave an example of one kind white man who did not beat him in a context where most white men would have. He appreciated this kindness, yet by virtue of his whiteness this man always had the potential to commit violence and humiliation on any African.

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6. See Gikandi (2010, p. 41) for Ng˜ug˜ı’s early struggles to balance the pulls of individualism and community: “The desire for a subjectivity defined by communal affiliation, was, however, at odds with the production of the modern novel whose condition of possibility was the existence of a unique individual defined by his or her rejection of communality.” 7. The theme of the individual desires needing to be sublimated to the group runs throughout Ng˜ug˜ı’s work. 8. On laughter as a challenge to authority see Orwell (1945, p. 12) and Arendt (1969, p. 45). 9. Ng˜ug˜ı was not the first in Kenya to point this out. In their preface to Njama’s book, Kaggia and three other political leaders (Kubai, Murumbi, and Oneko) pointed to the “years of ‘brain washing’ in the ‘rehabilitation’ camps of the colonial regime … Humiliation, concentrated, continuous and consistent, was a principle element in the ‘rehabilitation’ process.” Thus the militant struggle that was in part intended to rescue Africans from their humiliation and self-doubt had instead ended with another round of highly effective violence and humiliation. These men believed that the freedom struggle had not yet ended. “Not only politics and economics,” they wrote, “but also minds have to be decolonized” (Kaggia et al. 1966, p. 11). 10. Similarly, Mugo Gatheru had been educated in mission schools in the 1930s, and in 1945 moved to the outskirts of Nairobi to be trained at the Medical Department. Gatheru chafed at instructions issued them by cinema managers: It is desirable to go to the cinema properly dressed and clean, and when you see something funny on the screen don’t laugh loudly with your mouth open as most of the ‘natives’ do. Finally, don’t turn your head about observing other customers, or go about touching other people with your shoulders. These men were told to act in a modern, civilized, way, not as do “natives.” “These instructions,” Gatheru later wrote, “made me feel that the Africans were being regarded as small children who did not know how to behave in a public place” (Gatheru 1981, p. 72). 11. Some psychologists see violence in reaction to humiliation as the actions of a person of low self-esteem. Presumably if one is self-confident and well-adjusted, one can either ignore humiliations or react to them in a peaceful way. The authors considered here may have scoffed at applying

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this idea to a colonial context. When whites refuse to negotiate a transfer of power to the African majority—as was the case in so many settler colonies such as Kenya, Algeria, and Rhodesia—these and other men saw organized and likely violent resistance to be the surest means of ejecting a racist colonialism, but also to repair the African identity. (Or, at least, the adult male identity.) Ngugi himself stated in 1967: “I do not condemn violence indiscriminately. For the oppressed have no option but to use violence” (Marcuson et al. 2006, p. 31). See also his praise of Frederick Douglass for fighting his overseer, and his condemnation of the meekness of Booker T. Washington and Cry Beloved Country (Ng˜ug˜ı 1981, pp. 15, 43, 46).

References Arendt, H. (1969). On violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Atieno-Odhiambo, E. S. (1995). The formative years, 1945–55. In B. A. Ogot & W. R. Ochieng’ (Eds.), Decolonization and independence in Kenya, 1940– 93 (pp. 25–47). London: James Currey. Barnett, D., & Njama, K. (1966). Mau Mau from within. New York: Monthly Review Press. Callahan, W. (2004). National insecurities: Humiliation, salvation, and Chinese nationalism. Alternatives, 29, 199–218. Chinodya, S. (1986). Harvest of thorns. Oxford: Heinemann. Duke, L. (2006, September 17). Kenyan novelist Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o writes truth to power, speaking a language it can understand. Trouble is, sometimes power answers back. Washington Post. Fanon, F. (1965). A dying colonialism (H. Chevalier, Trans.). New York: Grove. Fanon, F. (2004). The wretched of the earth (R. Philcox, Trans.). New York: Grove. Gakaara, W. (1988). Mau Mau author in detention (N. wa Njoroge, Trans.). Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya. Gatheru, M. (1981). Child of two worlds. London: Heinemann (Originally published 1964). Gicaru, M. (1958). Land of sunshine: Scenes of life in Kenya before Mau Mau. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

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Gikandi, S. (1995). Moments of melancholy: Ngugi and the discourses of emotions. In C. Cantalupo (Ed.), The world of Ngugi wa Thiong’o (pp. 59–72). Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Gikandi, S. (2010). Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Itote, W. (General China). (1967). “Mau Mau” general . Nairobi: East African Publishing House. Kaggia, B. (1975). Roots of freedom 1921–1963: The autobiography of Bildad Kaggia. Nairobi: East African Publishing House. Kaggia, B., Kubai, F., Murumbi, J., & Oneko, A. (1966). Preface. In D. Barnett & K. Njama (Eds.), Mau Mau from within (p. 11). New York: Monthly Review Press. Kareri, C. M. (2003). The life of Charles Muhoro Kareri. Ed. D. R. Peterson (J. K. Mu˜ur˜ıithi, Trans.). Madison: African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin (Originally written in early 1970s). Kariuki, J. M. (1963). ‘Mau Mau’ detainee: The account by a Kenya African of his experiences in detention camps 1953–60. London: Penguin Books. Leidner, B., Sheikh, K., & Ginges, J. (2012). Affective dimensions of intergroup humiliation. PLoS ONE , 7(9), e46375. https://doi.org/10.1371/jou rnal.pone.0046375. Lonsdale, J. (1992). The moral economy of Mau Mau: Wealth, poverty, and civic virtue in Kikuyu political thought. In B. Berman & J. Lonsdale (Eds.), Unhappy valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa. Book 2. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Marcuson, A., Gonzalez, M., & Williams, D. (2006). James Ngugi interviewed by fellow students at Leeds University (1967). In R. Sander & B. Lindfors (Eds.), Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o speaks: Interviews with the Kenyan writer. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Muoria, H. (1994). I, the Gikuyu, and the White Fury. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers. Muoria, H. (2009). Kenyatta, our reconciler. In W. Muoria-Sal, B. F. Frederiksen, J. Lonsdale, & D. Peterson (Eds.), Writing for Kenya: The life and works of Henry Muoria. Brill: Leiden. Mwangi, M. (1974). Carcase for the hounds. Nairobi: Heinemann. Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o. (1964). Weep not, child. Oxford: Heinemann. Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o. (1965). The river between. Oxford: Heinemann. Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o. (1967). A grain of wheat. Oxford: Heinemann. Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o. (1975). Secret lives and other stories. New York: Lawrence Hill.

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Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o. (1981). Detained: A writer’s prison diary. London: Heinemann. Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o. (1986a). Njamba Nene and the flying bus (Wang˜ui wa Goro, Trans.). Nairobi: Heinemann. Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o. (1986b). Njamba Nene’s pistol (Wang˜ui wa Goro, Trans.). Nairobi: Heinemann. Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o. (1991). Decolonizing the mind: The politics of language in African literature. Oxford: James Currey. Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o. (1993). Moving the center: The struggle for cultural freedoms. Oxford: James Currey. Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o. (2010). Dreams in a time of war. New York: Pantheon Books. Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o. (2012). In the house of the interpreter. New York: Pantheon Books. Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o, & Micere Githae Mugo. (1976). The trial of Dedan Kimathi. Oxford: Heinemann. Ocobock, P. (2017). An uncertain age: The politics of manhood in Kenya. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Orwell, G. (1945). Shooting an elephant and other essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Sembene, O. (1986). God’s bits of wood . Oxford: Heinemann (Originally published 1960). Shadle, B. (2012). Settlers, Africans, and inter-personal violence in early colonial Kenya. International Journal of African Historical Studies, 45, 57–80. Shadle, B. (2015). The souls of white folk: White settlers in Kenya, 1900s–1920s. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Shutt, A. (2015). Manners make a nation: Racial etiquette in Southern Rhodesia, 1910–1963. Rochester: University of Rochester Press.

11 Gendered Violence Online: Hate Speech as an Intersection of Misogyny and Racism Tuija Saresma , Sanna Karkulehto , and Piia Varis

In this chapter, we focus on digitally mediated violence. We analyse social media posts by two contemporary right-wing populist male politicians: Jussi Halla-aho, the leader of the Finns Party in Finland, and Donald Trump, the president of the United States. We demonstrate the ways in which these influential and powerful male politicians express misogyny T. Saresma Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] S. Karkulehto Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] P. Varis (B) Department of Culture Studies, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Husso et al. (eds.), Violence, Gender and Affect, Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56930-3_11

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and racism, twining them in blog posts and tweets that target especially women. We focus on the affective meaning-making processes of specific hatred-inciting texts and suggest that the texts are not anomalous. Rather, similar texts are issued from around the world, forming and maintaining a transnational affective community based on misogyny and racism that manifest as hate speech, hate mail, online hate, and online violence (e.g. Jane 2017; Sundén and Paasonen 2018; Särmä 2020). In the following, we argue that the type of gender-specific online hate and hostility perpetuated by Halla-aho and Trump is a new, digitally mediated form of violence and a new, affective form of misogyny in which women, LGBTQI people, people of colour, ethnic and indigenous minorities, and gender non-conforming people are targeted. As Saara Särmä (2020, p. 130) posits in her article on gendered online hate: “the more these categories intersect in any single individual, the more likely any public appearance or visible activism on their part will result in targeted hate toward that individual”. We suggest that digitally mediated violence, although a relatively new phenomenon, is an integral part of the chain of violence from intimate violence to violent societal structures. Online violence needs to be analysed as a form of violent practice that travels from the most intimate relationships to ideological and political violence. We claim that discursive expressions of hatred spread through social media are performative acts that shape our understanding of reality; they must thus be taken seriously, as they are not only violent themselves but also pave the way for an ideological readiness to use other types of violence. In our readings of the aforementioned politicians’ select social media texts, we emphasise two distinct elements. Along with analysing the way targeted women are assaulted and threatened, we focus on how the two politicians use a dual strategy of denying racism while circulating racist messages and thus enhancing the visibility, circulation, and normalisation of othering and hostile rhetoric. We start by outlining the political and ideological breeding ground of gendered and racialised online violence. We then briefly explain our take on violence as a discursive practice and discuss digitalisation and the rise of social media as significant factors in the current promotion of misogynist and racist politics; we also address the upheaval caused by the radical populist right

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as a backdrop for online hate speech. We interpret the texts as affective violent practices that aim to harm and control women and people of colour, and we suggest that the ultimate purpose of these texts is to threaten and silence their targets. We suggest that these texts should be analysed as a form of stochastic violence that positions their creators as innocent and restrains any criticism while intentionally violating their targets, which in this case are gendered and racialised others.

The Context of Online Violence Questions of equality and identity politics, especially those related to gender, have had a huge impact on the formation of social and power structures in ‘Western’ societies since the nineteenth century. Currently, however, these societies are experiencing a backlash: we have been witnessing a global surge of neo-conservatism and neo-nationalism that aim to diminish democracy, diversity, and equality. A radical right populist upheaval across Europe and the United States has had negative effects on, for example, policies regarding immigration and asylum seeking as well as ethnic and gender equality. The current affective intolerance of difference is unfolding in the context of global political developments and economic tensions and fractures. After the societal turn to neo-liberalism, beginning in the 1960s, and in the aftermath of economic recessions in the 1990s and 2000s, the idea of equal and inclusive welfare states open to diversity has been consistently challenged by various voices promoting rightwing extremism and racist opinions presented as critiques. This antiprogressivism is often shaped by radical right ideologies and is aggressively propagated online. The same goes for a stereotypical, traditionalist, and even misogynistic understanding of the social gender order. These notions are drawn from the alt-right and anti-feminist undercurrents of the transnational “manosphere” (Ging 2017, p. 638) and often materialise as hostile content that meets the criteria of hate speech. With an affective, aggressive tone, such content is often targeted against women and other marginalised groups, such as racialised and non-gender normative people or those who in some way challenge or do not embody

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societal norms. This also applies to digital media as a whole, and women bear the brunt of its aggressive and offensive language in the form of exclusion and online harassment (Jane 2017; Sundén and Paasonen 2018; Knuutila et al. 2019; Nurminen 2019; Särmä 2020). Furthermore, it has become increasingly difficult—and futile—to make distinctions between life’s online and offline dimensions; they are integrated, and the virtual is, thanks in large part to social media, not a separate sphere of life (e.g. Varis and Hou 2020). Our analysis of hostile rhetoric and strategies used in the online circulation of texts seeking to arouse affective responses also points to the inseparability of online and offline contexts: what happens on social media does not stay there; online speech is not contained to a distinct online sphere but leads to offline speech trajectories and repercussions.

Violent Affects: Meaning Making, Misogyny, and Populist Hate Speech Aimed at broadening the understanding of violence as a multifaceted phenomenon, this chapter regards certain verbal expressions as violence. The relationship between violence and meaning can be approached, as Silva (2017, p. 7) suggested, from at least three perspectives: first, “violence affects meaning by either making people temporarily silent and flustered or by disrupting an entire framework of signification”; second, racist, misogynist, and homophobic comments are examples of how “meaning itself can be violent”; third, meaning making produces effects: that is, the circulation, repetition, reiteration, and appropriation of violent expressions make the rhetoric recognisable, and “the circulation of stories about crime or the circulation of hate in stories make violence proliferate”. Drawing from Silva’s theorisation of the relationship between meaning and violence and Butler’s (1997) influential analysis of performativity and ‘excitable speech’, we emphasise both the violence of meaning making on a discursive level and the emotional and embodied affectivity caused by violent speech (Särmä 2020). Although the victim is not physically touched, the violence may have severe mental, emotional,

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and physical consequences (Knuutila et al. 2019; Särmä 2020), and the threat and fear of becoming a victim of physical violence is always present when encountering verbal violence. In this context, the concept of hate speech is useful. When talking about hate speech, we refer to demeaning, threatening, or stigmatising expressions often based on intolerance and hatred and targeted at a certain person or group of people based on their gender, sexual orientation, ethnic background, or race (Knuutila et al. 2019). Hate speech is a gendered phenomenon: it is mostly produced by men and received by women (Pöyhtäri et al. 2013; Knuutila et al. 2019). Hate speech has become more frequent with digitalisation and the growing popularity of social media. It also coincides with the rise of right-wing populist upheaval. Hate speech often utilises the affective rhetoric and binary logic of populism, which constructs an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ as hierarchic and adversarial groups. Depending on the definition, populism is a thin-centred ideology (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017) or, indeed, has no core message (Laclau 2005); however, it draws from and builds on the us—them division, often with us referring to the “people” and them to the “elite” (Palonen and Saresma 2017). In national populist ideology, the opposition is constructed between the people of ‘our’ nation and an enemy as a threat to that nation, be it immigrants, the European Union, or green, leftist liberals (Kovala et al. 2018; Palonen and Saresma 2019). In right-wing populist rhetoric, the others become the targets of hate speech against whom violence is justified. In justifying violence, mobilising affects such as fear and hatred is vital. In our analysis of affective populist rhetoric, we understand emotions as discursively constructed, circulated social and cultural practices, and affects as precognitive bodily sensations. Emotions and affects are not distinct but relational, and they complement each other in the shaping of feelings (Ahmed 2004, pp. 6– 9, 44–45; Ngai 2005, p. 26). We are particularly interested in how the affective mobilisation of hate targeted against others is performed and circulated on social media. Digitalisation has profoundly changed both the media and how we communicate by, for example extending content’s reach beyond the locality of its creation, including beyond national borders and cultural contexts (Valaskivi 2018, p. 3). It is exactly

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this affective circulation of misogynist and racist online content that is of interest here. When analysing online violence, we define ‘misogyny’ as interpersonal, institutional, and ideological hatred and violence against women and girls, as “feelings of hating women, or the belief that men are much better than women” (Cambridge English Dictionary), and as the hostile, demeaning, shaming, and punitive treatment of women. In practice, misogyny can be regarded as controlling women who challenge male dominance. Misogyny is a cultural system and not just a matter of individual zealotry (Manne 2017). It parallels populist rhetoric in that the homogenous us is placed against the other. In the mindset of the populist radical right, which aims to create enemies in order to strengthen the ‘us’, women are the allies of the threatening ‘others’ and deserve to be punished. It has also been argued that misogynist online hostility is often intertwined with racism (Walton 2012; Horsti and Saresma 2021). We define ‘racism’ as “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior” (Oxford English Dictionary). We argue that the two ideologies—misogyny and racism—intersect in the transnational flows and circulations of alt-right discourses and practices. In violence studies, digitally mediated violence often refers to “technology-facilitated abuse between current and former intimate partners (‘cyber-violence’)” (Al-Alosi 2017, p. 1573), such as harassment on social media and location tracking via smartphones. In this chapter, gendered digitally mediated violence is approached as a broader phenomenon than that of violence that only occurs in an intimate relationship: we ask how it is ideologically used to promote the reactionary thinking of the radical right, including its demurring of multiculturalism, gender and sexual equality, and other progressive values. By doing so, we emphasise that online hate speech is a form of verbal digital violence that is harmful in itself and simultaneously facilitates an ideological preparedness to use physical violence against those constructed as enemies. Stochastic violence is another central concept in our analysis. The term refers to the simultaneously predictable and unpredictable nature of

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violent speech and its consequences. This relationship was first conceptualised in the context of stochastic terrorism: “the use of mass communications to stir up random lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable ” (Daily Kos 2011; emphasis original). We are not limiting its meaning to terrorism; rather, we emphasise that violent, hate-inciting online speech naturalises others and the understanding of them as threats, objects of grievance, and targets of hostility, aggression, and violence. Similarly to Mulinari and Neergaard (2012, p. 15), “we are not arguing for a direct link between racist ideas, right-wing parties in parliament, and acts of terrorism” but maintain that the “normalization of societal discourses opens the door for, and legitimizes the ideas behind, acts of violence”. Stochastic violence also complicates questions of culpability; it relies on rhetoric that “inspires small cells or individuals (‘lone wolves’) to commit acts of violence, while retaining deniability for ‘respectable’ leaders and groups” (Biondi and Curtis 2019, p. 48). While the severity and consequences of violent online speech are often dismissed due to their virtual nature and, as such, are supposed to be taken less seriously or seen as separate from offline life, our conceptualisation of stochastic violence further highlights the fact that digital practices, such as blogging and tweeting, are nevertheless violent and cause violence. We use this notion of stochastic violence in our analysis of texts by Halla-aho and Trump. Halla-aho is the chair of the Finns Party, the leading opposition party in Finland, which was formerly a moderate or even left-wing populist party but is currently an explicitly antiimmigration party (Palonen and Saresma 2017). Trump’s 2016 victory was very much bolstered by alt-right online mobilisation (Love 2017, p. 263); indeed, according to Gillespie (2018, p. 9), the alt-right pursued “coordinated tactics of online harassment” against Trump’s critics both before and after the elections. Despite coming from very different contexts—one from a small Nordic country, the other from one of the most influential countries in the world—one the chairperson of the leading Finnish opposition party, the other president of one of the world’s largest democracies—their rhetorical strategies are notably similar in their communication of misogynist and racist messages.

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In what follows, we present our analyses of social media texts by these two right-wing populists known for their shared interest in and utilisation of social media. In analysing their rhetoric and tactics, we demonstrate that right-wing ideologies are transnational and utilise the same techniques, themes, and tools in persuading readers to join in affective misogynist and racist mobilisations. Our analysis also shows how violent nationalist discourses that have been circulating on social media for more than a decade have now become mainstream and how they gradually affect public opinion, even gradually justifying direct physical violence.

Halla-Aho and the Green, Leftist, Do-Gooder Women Who ‘Deserve to Be Raped’ Halla-aho is well known for his critical attitudes towards immigration, particularly humanitarian immigration, and since 2003, he has been promoting his views in his blog, Scripta: Kirjoituksia uppoavasta lännestä (Scripta: Writings about/from the Sinking West ). His blog posts are argumentatively tenacious and rhetorically effective in their persistent and repetitive proclamation of a specific message.1 Both the message and the types of argumentation that Halla-aho utilises can be regarded as ethically and politically questionable. One characteristic is his relentless confronting of the boundaries of free speech. In 2006, he wrote that attitudes towards immigration have become gendered: Men are more or less the only ones who talk about the real problem. (…) The real problem is that European women have become game for the barbaric invaders. This problem is solved only by a removal of the invaders. The majority of men would have done this a long time ago, but the European women à la Mervi Virtanen, Eva Biaudet, and Tarja Filatov, caressing their delusional nursing drive, have firmly stood as shields of these barbaric invaders. (Halla-aho 2006; all translations from Finnish to English are ours)

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The women that Halla-aho refers to were all public figures in Finland at the time of the posting. Virtanen was a leading immigration official. Biaudet was a special representative and coordinator in the fight against human trafficking. Filatov was a Social Democrat member of parliament and minister of labour at the time. The latter two were active participants in public discussion and known for their liberal values and support of humanitarian aid and gender equality. In his blog, Halla-aho pits men and women against each other. In his performative Scripta discourse, he constructs a certain type of woman by naming those who defended immigrants, which he refers to as ‘barbaric invaders’. The quote above is not only binary in terms of gender but also race as it pits also European men and ‘barbaric invaders’ against each other. His confrontational post continues: However, it is hard for me not to feel collective resentment of women (…) for blaming me, a Finnish man, for Finnish women’s feeling of insecurity after every gang rape and other violent acts against women. (Halla-aho 2006)

He constructs a collective, imaginary category of Finnish men and positions himself as their representative. These imaginary men are offended by the way ‘certain women’ blame him and fail to be grateful for the protection he offers. The idea of a man protecting his woman is part of a patriarchal logic analysed by feminist scholar Young (2003, p. 3), who views the logic as positing that a state protects its citizens the same way a man protects a woman, expecting so-called subordinates’ unquestioned obedience and loyalty as a reward. Young argues that it is characteristic of this type of masculinist logic that the leaders of family and nation “mobilize fear and present themselves as protectors”. Following the misogynist logic of punishing bad women, Halla-aho then writes: “it is hard for me to feel true sympathy for the victims of these crimes. I am tempted to think that the women get what they ask for”. The text creates a threat of violence and implies that the author wants to resign his duty of protecting unruly women. The author is still hesitant, however, because the emancipation of women could also lead

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to the dismantling of an unequal gender system, which would make men lose their authoritative position. He continues: However, I try not to think this way, since not all women are like Virtanen, Biaudet, and Filatov. Nevertheless, the amount of rape will increase. Since more and more women will be raped, I earnestly hope that the predators who randomly pick their victims pick the right females; the green, leftist ones and their voters. (Halla-aho 2006)

The fantasised sexual violence turns out to be almost a promise for those who are against multiculturalism and cultural diversity. As theorised by Wodak (2015), violent fantasies are essential to the politics of fear; a threat of violence is evoked and targeted at, for example disobedient women who espouse the wrong opinions. It is imagined that through violent fantasies, men can regain their lost status as heads of the nation and protectors of women. This violent fantasy in which the ‘right’ women are raped by a foreigner is also important in terms of xenophobic argumentation and the mobilisation of anti-immigration politics. In Halla-aho’s text, violence is not only the topic of fear but also a device with which “multiculturalism” and “disturbing differences” (Liljeström and Paasonen 2010) are eradicated from an imaginary white and culturally unified Finland; the rape images are a means of attack against cultural diversity, removing disturbing (human) material from the nation, and intensifying the atmosphere of fear. The text creates an image of an external threat, the ‘barbaric invaders’ and ‘predators who randomly pick their victims’ whom the green, leftist women naively allowed to enter—or invade—the country. The intention is to teach the explicitly named and politically active women a lesson that, in Halla-aho’s fantasy, is taught by foreign men and simultaneously acknowledged if not blessed by the protectors of a ‘pure’ nation.2 In Young’s (2003) analysis, the patriarchal logic of masculine protection requires the conjuring of an external threat, an evil man of colour who wishes to invade the white lord’s property and sexually conquer his white women. In Scripta, the racist stereotype of a Muslim rapist

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as an enemy, which is circulated widely in right-wing nationalist imaginaries (Horsti 2017; Saresma 2018), is utilised particularly often. This is no surprise, as Halla-aho is a renowned Islamophobe facing an official investigation for ethnic agitation and blasphemy after publishing derisive anti-Islamic remarks on his blog in 2008 (Supreme Court of Finland 2012). Although he was convicted of both, he has not changed his style of communication. On the contrary, by deliberately confronting the boundaries of freedom of speech, he has gained media coverage and popularity among far-right nationalists. In continuing to blog and spread his controversial message, he repeatedly attacks the mainstream media and claims that they are disparaging the people while advocating the cause of the elite and ‘withholding information’ about rape and other crimes committed by immigrants (Saresma and Tulonen 2020). Because Finland has been at the top of international domestic violence statistics for years and the perpetrators are white Finnish men (Human Rights Centre of Finland 2014; Violence Against Women 2014), intimidating and threatening women with sexual violence committed by racialised foreign men can be interpreted as deliberate misogynist verbal violence. Halla-aho has managed to circulate his message in such a manner that the phrase ‘I wish you were raped by a bunch of immigrants’ is common in hate mail addressed to women in Finland (Särmä 2020, p. 129). Halla-aho’s anti-Muslim opinions are also exemplary of a dual rhetorical strategy in which the speaker spreads an explicitly racist message while simultaneously denying racism (e.g. Halla-aho 2007, 2009). A similar strategy has been used in homophobic discourses motivated by ideologically revealing interconnections between gender, race, violence, and the ‘pure’ nation (Karkulehto 2010, pp. 188–190). Drawing on an analysis of Nordic populist radical right politicians’ blogs, including Halla-aho’s, Katarina Pettersson (2017, p. 6) suggested that platforms are ideal environments for circulating racist messages, as it is possible to simultaneously convey powerful affective messages and remain allegedly neutral. According to Diana Mulinari and Anders Neergaard (2012, p. 15), successful extreme right-wing parties “actively distance themselves from the use of violence while systematically and powerfully emphasizing the Muslim threat—a threat that Social Democrats, the left, feminists, multiculturalists, etc. (according to these

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parties) reinforce”. The strategy of creating “clear enemies (the Muslims), clear traitors (those who support them), and a clear danger of extinction for the national culture and the true people” that Mulinari and Neergaard (2012, p. 15) itemise is invariably performed by Halla-aho. The strategy produces “a world-view that makes violence a viable solution” and offers a stage to stochastic violence that does not explicitly exhort people to take direct action but nevertheless identifies the alleged perpetrator (the archetype of the Muslim rapist) and justifies sexual violence against women. In the following section, we analyse how Trump utilises stochastic violence as a device in his rhetoric.

Trump, The Squad, and Ilhan Omar Trump is a prolific tweeter, and one prominent object of his Twitter discourse has been a group of four Democratic congresswomen of colour who rose to fame in the United States in 2018 as first-term representatives: Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—also known as ‘The Squad’. Tlaib and Omar also gained considerable attention as the first Muslim women elected to the U.S. Congress. Trump has called The Squad “a Nightmare for America” (July 23, 2019). Omar is, however, perhaps the one to have attracted the most attention from Trump; her vocal criticism of Israeli treatment of Palestinians has been framed in Trump’s tweets and retweets as ‘assaulting Jews’ (April 9, 2019) and making “terrible comments” (March 5, 2019) about Israel. In a retweet, he (July 10, 2019) framed Omar as a “rabid anti-Semite”. Trump has also, in no uncertain terms, called her “America hating” (July 23, 2019) and “anti-Semitic…[and] anti-Israel” (April 15, 2019). He blamed her for “ungrateful U.S. HATE statements” and described her as “out of control” (April 15, 2019). He has also made similar claims about Tlaib, stating that “She obviously has tremendous hatred of Israel and the Jewish people” (May 13, 2019). The tweet in which Trump called Omar ‘ungrateful’ (note the similarity to Halla-aho’s grievances regarding ungrateful women) and ‘out of control’ came only a couple of days after Trump tweeted a video

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including statements by Omar taken out of context, making it seem as if she was downplaying 9/11 (April 12, 2019). In all capitals, Trump wrote, “WE WILL NEVER FORGET” to frame the video. This could be read as circulating the familiar ‘never forget’ refrain related to dramatic and traumatic national events; however, it can also be seen as invoking a different ‘we’ and a comment on the position Omar appeared to take because of decontextualisation of her statements. Trump even pinned the tweet to the top of his Twitter feed, making it immediately visible to everyone visiting his account. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi demanded that Trump take the video down and stated that she was taking steps to ensure Omar’s safety. Trump refused to yield: the tweet was no longer pinned, but nor was it deleted. Omar then published a statement noting that she had received an increased number of death threats, many of them directly referencing Trump’s tweet. “Violent rhetoric and all forms of hate speech have no place in our society, much less from our country’s Commander in Chief ” she wrote, concluding that “We are all Americans. This is endangering lives. It has to stop” (April 15, 2019). It did not stop, however—quite the contrary. In July 2019, Trump attacked The Squad again: So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly…… ….and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how…. (July 14, 2019)

Three of the women Trump told to ‘go back’—Tlaib, Pressley, and Ocasio-Cortez—were born in the United States, and Omar came to the country at the age of eight as a refugee from Somalia. Apart from framing them as fake Americans, what is also worth noting is the language of ‘infestation’ that Trump has used several times, though not without drawing ire. He has tweeted, for instance, about “Ebola infested

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areas of Africa” (September 20, 2014) and about black Democrat Elijah Cummings’ Baltimore district as “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” (July 27, 2019). The tweet attracted a lot of media attention and other circulation. From the perspective of this chapter, what is most relevant is what happened next. Three days later, on July 17, 2019, at a rally in North Carolina, Trump accused Omar of having “a history of launching vicious anti-Semitic screeds” (Parker and Itkowit 2019). The crowd booed and, in an apparent offline re-enactment of his tweet, started chanting “Send her back! Send her back!” Trump did not ask the crowd to stop, nor did he provide any verbal response—he simply withdrew from the microphone and remained silent. His active silence effectively encouraged his supporters to make (violent) demands that someone be deported; Trump’s was a performative act that condoned violent demands. In this case, the silence was violent: as Blommaert and Dong (2010, p. 47) point out: “Silences are not an absence of speech, they are the production of silence, they are very much part of speech”. The day before his performance of violent silence, Trump (July 16, 2019) doubled down on his rhetoric after accusations of racism regarding his go-back tweet, stating that “Those tweets were NOT Racist. I don’t have a Racist bone in my body!” He also tried to use whataboutism to deflect criticism, referring to the Democratic congresswomen’s “filthy language, statements and lies”, saying he “truly believe[s], based on their actions, [they] hate our Country. Get a list of the HORRIBLE things they have said” (July 16, 2019). He frames the women as foreign entities, enemies of the country, and as people who hate the United States. He also resorted to whataboutism to deflect criticism after a rally, tweeting the following on July 19, 2019: It is amazing how the Fake News Media became ‘crazed’ over the chant ‘send her back’ by a packed Arena (a record) crowd in the Great State of North Carolina, but is totally calm & accepting of the most vile and disgusting statements made by the three Radical Left Congresswomen…

Trump went on to propose that the mainstream media was in cahoots with ‘the Radical Left Democrat Party’, called Omar ‘Foul Mouthed’,

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and stated that he will win the 2020 elections in her state of Minnesota because “they can’t stand her and her hatred of our Country” (July 19, 2019). Despite widespread and loud criticism, Trump’s Twitter tirades did not end. In August 2019, he circulated a right-wing rumour that Omar supposedly married her brother to evade immigration laws (August 9, 2019; August 25, 2019), and he tweeted about Omar’s and Tlaib’s “hating Israel” and “all Jewish people” (August 15, 2019), again calling Tlaib an “anti-Semite” (August 20, 2019). He also stated that “I have watched her violence, craziness and, most importantly, WORDS, for far too long” (August 20, 2019). Trump has not spared The Squad as a whole from attacks, but he has heavily focused on Omar and Tlaib, the two Muslims, which does not appear to be a coincidence. His framing of them, which is reliant on misogyny and racism, serves several rhetorical purposes. As Muslims and women of colour, they do not only become the other who should ‘go back to where they came from’, but they are also framed as dangerous enemies because they are ‘radical’ and hate not only America but also Jews. Phrases such as ‘violent’ and ‘out of control’ added to the danger these women of colour supposedly represent, and Trump has further merged his attacks on them with his framing of the media as fake. He has also presented the women as having infiltrated and taken control of the Democratic Party. Ever concerned with polls and ratings, his statement that the send-her-back crowd was of record size implied the populist voice of a man who stands for the people, whereas Omar is represented as an unpopular, unwelcome, and dangerous source of violence. Similar to Halla-aho’s logic, women are to blame for a threat of imminent violence. In her statement regarding the 9/11 tweet referenced above, Omar (April 15, 2019) also mentioned that Violent crimes and other acts of hate by right-wing extremists and white nationalists are on the rise in this country and around the world. We can no longer ignore that they are being encouraged by the occupant of the highest office in the land. Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes in the months following the rally. And assaults increase when cities host Trump rallies.

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The quote draws a clear link between Trump’s rallies and incidences of hate crimes. What the examples presented above also speak to, however, is the creation of digital text trajectories. Trump’s Twitter rhetoric has made his tweets an object of requests for deletion and sometimes for Twitter to suspend his account (Varis 2020). This suggests a quality of transience to online rhetoric, as if deleting it will make it go away. What happens, rather, is Trump’s supporters pick up the rhetoric and recirculate it not only online but also in offline contexts. In the offline world, deleting is impossible, and silence remains a useful strategy, as the case of the North Carolina rally proved. Trump silently condones affective and violent rhetoric, and he later doubles down on Twitter with similar attacks on women who he others and a cast of people to whom he can assign many of the archetypes that appeal to and rile up his base (such as the ungrateful immigrant and radical leftist).

Conclusion: Transnational Online Circulation of Misogynous and Racist Violence The two cases of digitally mediated discursive violence introduced in this chapter are from different continents and times. Halla-aho’s blog texts were written 15 years ago, when right-wing populism was a very marginal phenomenon. Halla-aho was, however, able to smuggle his anti-Islam, misogynist, and racist ideas into Finnish political discussion through his Scripta and its spinoff, Hommaforum, an online discussion forum. These social media platforms were key factors in the rise of radical right populism and misogynist, xenophobic nationalism in Finland (Horsti and Nikunen 2013; Horsti and Saresma 2021). Trump’s tweets, similarly, have been recognised as very influential since the beginning of his presidency, and misogyny and racist comments were part and parcel of his electoral success. Both Halla-aho and Trump, both renowned for their skilful use of social media, utilise the rhetorical strategies and tactics of the transnational alt-right community. Nevertheless, their popularity may have come as a surprise to many. Nancy S. Love (2017, p. 264) argues that “what many political experts and ordinary citizens may have overlooked

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are the new tactics of white supremacy today”. She cites Kathleen Blee (2002), who suggests that these tactics include “apocalyptic images of a global race war; alliances between KKK, Neo-Nazi, and Christian Identity groups; sophisticated use of new technologies, including the Internet; and recruitment strategies focused on so-called vulnerable populations”. In the cases of Halla-aho and Trump, these groups include mainly young and middle-aged working-class men with a history of unemployment and frustration with contemporary multicultural society (Kimmel 2017). In mobilising them, affective rhetoric becomes central. Biondi and Curtis (2019) discuss the centrality of rhetoric for white nationalists, including the conscious employment of stochastic violence, which may inspire small cells or individuals to commit acts of violence. For Halla-aho and Trump, deniability functions through the threepronged strategy of using silence and simultaneously evoking and denying racism. In their commissions of stochastic violence, they typically naturalise others, in this case gendered and racialised people, as threats and targets of hostility and aggression in their violent, hateinciting speech, and yet, thanks to their rhetorical strategies, they maintain their innocence in the event they inspire further acts of violence. This type of digitally mediated violence thus further complicates addressing issues such as misogyny and racism. At the same time, by heightening an atmosphere of fear and aggression and creating and solidifying certain groups as others, it contributes to the maintenance of structural inequalities and forms of violence. As Biondi and Curtis (2019, p. 49) point out, it is important to keep in mind that an intersection of structural and stochastic violence is pivotal in the rise of authoritarian political movements. Radical right populism and authoritarianism also overlap in the social media appearances of Halla-aho and Trump. Both have authoritarian traits as politicians, and they utilise the above-mentioned tactics in their populist performances. They build alliances with far-right extremist groups; Halla-aho is a former member of Suomen Sisu, a nationalist organisation with fascist sympathies, and Trump is sympathetic to white supremacist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan (Osnos 2016). As we have shown, Halla-aho and Trump rely on similar tactics to circulate similar messages. In this chapter, we have presented two of the

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strategies that both of them are accustomed to using. First, they target, name, and blame women. Through affective rhetorical strategies, women are framed as both the causes and objects of violence. If women fail to display appropriate behaviour, they are violently shown their place—the punishment being either sexual violence or being sent back to ‘where they came from’. Second, Halla-aho and Trump use the rhetorical dual strategy of simultaneously denying racism and evoking it by spreading explicitly racist messages and leaving the existence and justification of racism in the air (cf. Karkulehto 2010). These strategies are efficient in inciting affects and emotions in readers. Emotions—particularly fear and hatred—have a dual role: they are used as tools to frighten adversaries and stir up anxiety and distrust among supporters. The effectiveness of a politics of fear is based on this dual role of emotions. Fear is used to sow suspicion towards others and destabilise one’s well-being by inciting unpleasant and disturbing affective states. Typically, in populist radical right rhetoric, women and the racialised others are targets of affective hate speech. The online intersection of misogyny and racism is an attempt to both silence unruly and disobedient women and, slowly, justify violence against them while simultaneously creating a favourable atmosphere for racial violence by justifying attacks against the racialised other as a potential perpetrator. In justifying violence, inciting and mobilising affects such as fear and hatred are vital. Acknowledgements This work was supported by the Academy of Finland under grants Mainstreaming Populism (decision number 309550) and Crossing Borders (decision number 308521) as well as Academy of Finland Profiling area Crises Redefined (decision number SA311877).

Notes 1. The connection of Halla-aho’s blog to the transnational radical right-wing ideologies circulating on social media and, more broadly, the transnational networking of national populist mobilisation connecting misogyny and racism is already well documented (Horsti and Nikunen 2013; Nikunen 2015; Saresma 2017; Hatakka 2019; Saresma and Tulonen 2020).

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2. See Walton (2012) on similar type of argumentation used in a ‘manifesto’ by Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian man who blew up the office of the prime minister and government buildings in the centre of Oslo and murdered 69 people at the island of Utøya on July 22, 2011. Breivik “denied guilt for these crimes, claiming that they were a political action necessitated by the real possibility of a Muslim take-over of Europe, assisted by the ‘cultural Marxists’ of the Norwegian Labour Party, and by the party’s lax immigration policies”.

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12 Violence and Harm in the Context of Brexit: Gender, Class and the Migrant ‘Other’ Marianne Hester

This chapter explores the impacts on EU nationals in the UK of living in the context of the debates and aftermath of the 2016 referendum on whether or not the UK should remain a member of the EU, that is whether to ‘Brexit’. The Brexit-related debates, policies and processes have created a context of harm involving structural violence, ‘gaslighting’, and related increases in xenophobia and hate crimes. The effects are also gendered, with women more vulnerable to aspects of the policies. The chapter explores some these issues, drawing on my own experience as a non-UK EU national, and on reports from other nonUK EU nationals living in the UK (compiled by other researchers and EU3million). I draw on auto-ethnography, using my personal narrative and situating this in the socio-cultural-political context of the 2016 Brexit Referendum M. Hester (B) School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Husso et al. (eds.), Violence, Gender and Affect, Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56930-3_12

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result to contribute to understanding of the impacts of that context (Ellis and Bochner 2000). It is a story underpinned by a number of important shifts and trends in the UK, towards a much more rightwing populist discourse and xenophobic policies fuelled by neoliberal economics (Winlow et al. 2017; Walby 2018). In the UK, the use by the pro-Brexit politicians of a concerted approach involving lies and distortion of facts has created a new right-wing norm and interference with people’s lives and reality that is possibly more hidden than the seemingly similar but more obvious extreme tweets and actions by Donald Trump in the US. My father brought my mother, my siblings and me from Denmark to live in the UK in the late 1960s. He was offered a senior job in a Danish multinational company and was thus what is described as an economic migrant, that is moving to another country in order to attain a better income and lifestyle for the family. At that time economic migrants, whether from the Commonwealth, EU countries or elsewhere, were deemed positive in policy terms as the UK required labour for the health service and other sectors, and also wanted industrialists like my father to come to the UK to create further jobs. This was the period when the UK were also inviting mass migration from the Caribbean and other Commonwealth countries for people to fill holes in the UK labour market, to work for instance as nurses and on the buses. Only later, especially since the 1990s, did the term ‘economic migrant’ come to be seen as more negative. What we have seen more recently is the shift in definition of economic migrant to ‘bad migrant who takes our jobs’, however erroneous in reality, and the possibly ‘deserving migrant’ as the asylum seeker who has had to flee their country of origin as a result of war and discrimination, with all migrants being seen in a more negative light. I came to the UK as a child in the 1960s, a time when there was much economic migration to the UK from former UK colonies, including the Caribbean and South Asia. Those who came from the Caribbean are known as the ‘Windrush generation’ because the ship that brought the first 500 Jamaicans in 1948 was called The Windrush. The Black and Asian migrants to the UK faced gross racism in the years after they arrived, ongoing and renewed racism, and more recently a ‘hostile’ environment for immigrants. However, and possibly naively, I like many

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others (EU brief 2019) did not think that the discrimination faced by those originating from the Commonwealth would in some ways be reflected in the experiences of white middle-class EU nationals. I did not anticipate the intersectional shift I would experience from being positioned as white, middle-class EU citizen to a re-positioning as ‘migrant’, and having to find ways of resistance including the seemingly ‘inverse’ resistance of ‘joining’ as citizen. This might of course be deemed especially naïve given other instances in history of increasingly right-wing governments and regimes constructing any minorities as ‘other’.

Background: Hostile Environment for Immigrants and the 2016 Referendum The UK joined the EU (European Union—then termed the European Economic Community, EEC) in 1973, with conservatives and the centre-left politicians emphasising the benefits of being part of such an expanding trading bloc. However, there has always been some unease on the right wing of the Conservative Party that the EU was encroaching on UK sovereignty and individual liberty, while those on the left wing were suspicious of the EU as a capitalist project (Batrouni 2020). Many articles and books will no doubt be written about the 2016 UK Referendum. These are likely to document how Prime Minister David Cameron agreed to the referendum in the attempt, as so many Conservative Prime Ministers before him, to appease the right wing of the Conservative Party, and how this failed, opening further opportunities for the right wing to control the political agenda. I was in the North East of England at the time of the referendum. I was doing research fieldwork in the area and arrived on the eve of the vote. Coming from Bristol, a strongly ‘remain’ area in the South West of England, I was struck by the sea of posters advertising what looked like the Labour Party. Many windows had red ‘Labour colour’ posters with similar layout to the Labour posters I had seen in Bristol—where Labour was supporting remaining in the EU. But here in Newcastle the posters did not say ‘Labour’ but ‘Leave’. It was obvious that the Leave campaign had not only hijacked the Labour colour but copied their poster layout,

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presumably so that voters in an otherwise mainly Labour area would think Labour was advocating Leave. The Leave campaign ‘guru’ Dominic Cummings later boasted that indeed that is exactly what they had done. In the event many in the North East did vote to leave the EU, also creating one of the key fracture lines in the Labour Party around policy regarding the EU. But that is another story (Batrouni 2020). While Prime Minister Cameron and his cronies were cockily sure that the outcome of the referendum would be a vote to remain in the UK, the sea of posters that met me in Newcastle made me think otherwise. I thought it likely that Leave would win, which of course they did, if only by a small margin, by 52–48%. One aspect that appears to have had scant attention so far is that the 3.5 million non-UK EU nationals living in the UK at the time of the referendum were not allowed to vote in the referendum—despite paying taxes and contributing much to the UK. If they had been allowed to vote this is likely to have swung the outcome in the other direction, to remain. It is clear that the anti-EU sentiment expressed in the Brexit referendum vote was also reflected in Government policy and wider public opinion in the years before the referendum. For instance, Pantazis and Pemberton’s (2011) review of opinion polls found public opinion supportive of a shift to authoritarianism. And the wider antiimmigration ‘hostile environment’ championed in particular by Theresa May when she was Home Office Minister was embedded from the early 2010s in a number of policies aimed at restricting EU nationals’ access to and rights in the UK under the Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition and Conservative Governments. The UK referendum in June 2016 regarding whether Britain should remain in or leave the European Union of 28 countries was a particular milestone in the UK shifts in attitudes towards and policy regarding immigration, but also the culmination of a longer period of anti-immigration sentiment and policy. The 52% of the population who voted to leave may have done so for a number of reasons, for instance, the feelings of loss and victimhood resulting from loss of empire, de-industrialisation and austerity might be deemed to have led to coping through scapegoating ‘others’ (see e.g. Ogden 1979). These problems were presented by the right-wing politicians as resulting from the seemingly ‘unstemmed’ migrants coming to the UK

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within the context of free movement across the EU, rather than resulting from their own neoliberal policies and failures. A key feature of the Leave campaign’s message was thus anti-immigration—about ‘gaining control of our borders’ and stopping migrants from taking British peoples’ jobs. The referendum unleashed anti-foreigner rhetoric and hate crime, as well as further encouraging the far-right politicians and populist groups who had pushed for the referendum in the first place. Moreover, while anti-foreigner sentiment has tended to apply to those from non-EU countries, and especially those from the global South, the referendum made it obvious how non-UK EU nationals were also being targeted within anti-immigration rhetoric and policy. In the early 2010s, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron initiated a series of legislative measures to limit access by EU migrants to jobs and welfare support, arguing against the EU principle of free movement and ‘unleashing UK nationalism’ (O’Brien 2015). The UK consequently saw wave upon wave of anti-EU migrant regulatory reform beginning from the 2013, including ‘introduction of a three-month prior residence rule for Jobseeker’s Allowance; scrapping Housing Benefit for all EU jobseekers; the withdrawing of job centre interpretation for EU jobseekers; the introduction of cut-off for Jobseeker’s Allowance; and the introduction of a minimum earnings threshold to have work classified as work’ (O’Brien 2015, p. 111). These changes not only contravened EU law because they went against the EU principles of free movement and equal treatment, but have increased pressures on EU nationals whether in work or not, as well as feeding into a ‘xenosceptic legal and administrative culture’ (ibid.).

Creating a Hostile Environment for Migrants The then Home Secretary, and later Prime Minister, Theresa May suggested that the rationale was to create what she called a ‘hostile environment’: ‘The aim is to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration’ (Daily Telegraph 2012). She used the words ‘illegal migration’ but was actually providing a hostile environment for migrants more generally, including legal migrants from the

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EU. We thus see the use of the discourse relating to ‘illegal’ migration, that built on concerns about being overrun by refugees seeking a better life in Britain, as economic migrants, towards construction of a view of migrants infused with the notion of being potentially ‘illegal’, i.e. not wanted and subject to policing and scrutiny. But migration is not inherently illegal, and instead aspects of mobility were being ‘illegalised’. As Weber and Pickering point out, Across the Global North, governments are increasingly engaged in efforts to reduce the access of illegalised migrants to public services and regulated labour markets. In Europe, Australia and North America, eligibility restrictions on the provision of essential housing, health and education services, and legal sanctions on employers who hire undocumented workers are being systematically introduced. (Weber and Pickering 2011, p. 112)

The hostile environment led to new provisions in the Immigration Act 2014 requiring landlords to check the immigration status of their tenants, National Health Service surcharges for non-EEA migrants in an otherwise free health service, and new powers to revoke citizenship for individuals deemed ‘prejudicial’ to the UK. A further immigration Act in 2016 sought to also include employers in this ‘policing’ of immigrants and identifying of ‘illegals’, and increased sanctions against landlords who did not comply in doing the checks. Although supposedly not applying to EU nationals resident in the UK, as we shall see later, these measures of the ‘hostile environment’ have in actuality been applied to EU nationals, and will do so in the future. Particularly badly affected by the general climate of ‘hostility’ was the so-called ‘Windrush generation’ of people originating from the Caribbean, who had arrived in the UK between 1948 and 1971. Although they and their children had been given leave to remain in the UK, and did not need to acquire UK citizenship, this was often difficult for them to prove and they were grossly discriminated against within the hostile environment. As a recent inspection by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate so starkly reports:

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It had become clear that the Home Office had wrongly designated thousands of legal UK [Windrush] residents as being in the country illegally. …Some were wrongly deported to countries they had left as children half a century earlier, and others were mistakenly detained in immigration detention centres. Many were sacked by employers worried they faced £20,000 fines for hiring people without the correct documentation. Some were then denied benefits, leaving them destitute. Many were made homeless, denied NHS treatment and prevented from travelling. (Williams 2020)

This scandal led to the resignation in April 2018 of the then home secretary, Amber Rudd. But the ‘hostile environment’ had become embedded, and the structurally violent policies that emanated from the hostile approach remained.

The Impact of Brexit: Structural Violence and Gaslighting The politics and policies that have surrounded Brexit since 2016 have created a context of what various writers have called structural and cultural violence (Galtung 1990) and aspects of gaslighting (Stark 2007). Galtung talks about cultural violence as ‘any aspect of a culture that can be used to legitimize violence in its direct or structural form’ (Galtung 1990, p. 292), in other words cultural violence is used to normalise and render acceptable structures that further inequalities and harm. Cultural violence is thus associated with ‘illegalisation’ of migrants and the development of an increasingly hostile, structurally violent, environment, which in turn can lead to directly violent impacts. In the context of Brexit structural violence can therefore be seen to become normalised through discourses of nationalism involving xenophobic, anti-immigrant, rhetoric of ‘gaining control of borders’, British exceptionalism, the idea that Britain will be stronger without Europe, and has led to hate crimes against migrants. Indeed the 2016 referendum result led to an immediate increase in direct violence against EU nationals,

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including physical assaults, and in the immediate lead-up to the referendum a self-declared white nationalist carried out the murder of the remain supporting member of Parliament, Jo Cox. Walby (2018), in a discussion of the shift towards far-right politics in parts of Europe, provides a further lens by exploring the links between violence and neoliberalism. She argues that neoliberalism in itself generates increased inequalities, which in turn generates violence: ‘neoliberalism, while purporting to shrink the state in relation to the economy, grows it in relation to violence, producing a larger and more coercive state, not a smaller state hereby producing the things it rhetorically claims to oppose’ (Walby 2018, p. 69). Her approach enables us to understand how in a context such as the UK, where an increasingly right wing and populist, yet still neoliberal, Conservative Government continues to deepen the ‘coercive state’, it also generates violence at more meso and micro levels in terms of hate crimes fuelled by the inequities generated by that state. Following the Brexit referendum vote in June 2016, Prime Minister David Cameron, who had backed the case for remaining in the EU, resigned as Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party. In the leadership election that followed, which was held only within the Conservative Party, the final two candidates were Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom. It was clear that either would take forward a pro-Leave anti-EU, anti-immigrant approach. Leadsom, however, was politically even further to the right than Theresa May, had supported the Leave campaign and was more virulent in her call for restriction of rights. Echoing far-right politicians across Europe and the US (see Walby 2018), she favoured restriction not only of migrant rights but also women’s right regarding abortion and restriction of same sex marriage. One of her promises as leadership contender was that she would ensure the abolition of the same sex marriage legislation, which had enabled gay and lesbian couples to get married in Britain, but not Northern Ireland, for the first time in 2013 (Marriage [Same Sex Couples] Act 2013). I remember sitting on the sofa at home watching the leadership speeches on the TV with my female partner of 24 years, and realising that not only was my status as UK resident under profound attack, but that we were possibly about to lose our rights associated with gay marriage—which

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might further undermine any future rights regarding UK residence and citizenship. Further inequities and structural violence would likely result involving the intersection between sexual orientation and citizenship. We decided then and there to get married. Our ‘Brexit wedding’ took place in November 2016.1 Another type of violence, involving a form of emotional abuse where the abuser manipulates situations to repeatedly undermine their victim and make them feel crazy has been called ‘gaslighting’, following the 1944 film Gaslight (Stark 2007). Gaslighting is part of emotional abuse in undermining the victim’s sense of self and wellbeing, and creation of fear. In gaslighting the abuser uses a range of techniques with the effect of de-centring and unbalancing the victims’ reality, that may include telling blatant lies, involve denying something was said even if there is proof that it was, wearing the victim down, telling the victim one thing but doing another, creating confusion, and projecting their own faults onto the victim. Gaslighting tends to be used as something that takes place at the level of the individual, but in the Brexit context elements of gaslighting are evident against EU nationals as a group more generally. In this instance the pro-Brexit politicians and Brexit oriented state used a particular range of gaslighting techniques, especially the telling of blatant lies, denying something was said even if there was proof that it was, creating confusion and wearing down of EU nationals, with the effect of unbalancing the EU national subject-victims’ reality and creating emotional distress. As Maike Bohn, co-founder of the group EU3million, outlines, the often contradictory and mixed messages that the pro-Brexit politicians provided about the rights of EU nationals’ amount to gaslighting: … the UK government has not earned the trust of EU citizens, having spent the last three years gas-lighting our anxieties with mixed messages. Are we the much-quoted ‘neighbours, colleagues, friends’ or are we the ‘queue jumpers, benefits scroungers, unwelcome guests, draining the NHS’? (Bueltman 2020)

Despite the history of erosion of EU nationals’ rights in the UK prior to 2016, in the period leading up to the Brexit referendum one of the

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founders of the Vote Leave campaign, the main organisation arguing for people to vote to Brexit in the 2016 referendum, stated that: ‘It is irresponsible to scare EU nationals in the UK by hinting that their status might change after Brexit. No one’s suggesting such a thing’ (Danial Hannam in Led by Donkeys 2019). But this was of course not what he and his colleagues actually thought, nor were to argue once the referendum had been won in favour of Brexit. Instead, following the vote in favour of Brexit the new Government under Prime Minister Theresa May set out to fundamentally change the rights of EU nationals in the UK from having permanent leave to remain in the UK to having to apply for a new ‘Settlement Scheme’ with insecure futures. This complete undermining of what had been ‘permanent’ rights included gaslighting distortions of truth as well as creation of fear and confusion: Before the Brexit referendum, EU citizens were told they had ‘rights’ of residence. Some were even issued with documents stating they had a ‘permanent right’ of residence. They are now told these ‘rights’ were no such thing but instead were conditional, temporary and could be taken away. (Yeo 2018b)

Imagine having lived in the UK most of your life, and to be told that the place where you have your home, your family, all your worldly possessions and any means of income is suddenly a potential illusion. That you may lose your access to healthcare, housing, work and welfare benefits that you have paid into all your adult life. That has of course been the terrible experience of the Windrush migrants, with some denied crucial healthcare, being made destitute because they were no longer deemed eligible to work, and some have faced deportation to a country they may never have visited since they left as children (Williams 2020). But these concerns have also become stark possibilities, and even realities, for EU nationals in the wake of the Brexit referendum. In June 2017 the Government issued a Rights of EU Citizens in the UK Policy Paper Factsheet (Home Office 2017). This promised that EU nationals should continue to enjoy rights in the UK, and that there would be no fear of any ‘cliff edge’:

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We want to ensure EU citizens continue to not only be able to live here as they do now but also to continue enjoying other important rights such as access to healthcare, education, benefits and pensions. These rights will apply to all EU citizens equally and we will not treat citizens of one member state differently to those of another. But this is without prejudice to our special relationship with Ireland. These rights will be enshrined into UK, not EU, law, enforceable through the UK judicial system. No EU citizen here lawfully before the cut off date, which is yet to be agreed, will have to leave as a result of us leaving the EU. There will be no ‘cliff edge’ for businesses or individuals and we want to keep together families living lawfully in the UK. (Home Office 2017)

However, at the same time the UK government set about negotiating a Withdrawal Agreement with the EU, which only created further anxieties and gaslighting for EU nationals living in the UK, as formal status continued to be beyond reach. An outline withdrawal deal proposal was initially agreed between the UK and EU in December 2017, 18 months after the referendum. It showed that the rights of EU nationals were clearly being undermined. The UK and EU agreed that rights previously experienced by all EU citizens, including EU nationals in the UK, would no longer be automatic, however long they had previously been residing in the UK. Instead, EU nationals would have to apply for a new immigration status, as ‘settled’ or ‘pre-settled’. The eventual deadline for this became by June 2021. If an individual had been resident in the UK before the UK formally left the EU, i.e. Brexited, at that time thought to be 29 March 2019, and resident for five continuous years before Brexit, had paid a fee— which was later dropped, have no criminal record, and were still resident at the time of the application, then that individual would be eligible to apply for ‘settled status’. Otherwise, with fewer than five years’ residence, the less secure pre-settled status could be applied for. Settled status was to include the same entitlement to public funds and National Health Service (NHS) healthcare as British citizens, preservation of EU rules on transfer and aggregation of social security, equal treatment of EU and UK citizens and mutual recognition of professional qualifications. However, there would be loss of other rights, such as the right to vote in local elections. Moreover, pre-settled status would be only a limited

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leave to remain, with the individual granted five years to remain, with eligibility to apply for settled status as soon as they have completed five years continuous residence in the UK. If an EU national does not attain some form of settled status or is refused settled status, the individual will be faced with immediate illegalisation on Brexit. Thus EU nationals were faced with a potentially detrimental shift in status even worse than that of the Windrush migrants: The problem faced by the Windrush generation was surviving in the modern hostile environment when lawfully resident but without documentary proof. The problem faced by resident EU citizens who do not apply for immigration status is arguably worse: unlawful residence and therefore the accidental commission of ancillary criminal offences such as illegal working, renting accommodation without possession of the right to rent and driving without immigration status. (Yeo 2018b)

Theresa May faced tremendous difficulties getting the Withdrawal Deal through the British Parliament, thus creating a further context for gaslighting of EU nationals, in this instance involving the insecurity of ‘will they/won’t they’ (Parliament) vote for the deal. The problem was mainly the right wing of the Conservative Party, many of whom were ‘Brexiteers’ and did not want to vote in favour because they thought the Withdrawal Deal would continue to create too close a relationship with the EU. We were faced with the problem that there would be a default ‘no-deal Brexit’ if Parliament could not agree to the deal by 29 March 2019. For EU nationals that would mean immediate loss of immigration status in the UK and becoming unlawfully resident. There ensued months of stress for EU nationals, of not knowing whether Britain would ‘crash out’ of the EU with no-deal and thus whether we would become instantly illegal immigrants, or at least incredibly vulnerable. As Colin Yeo points out, a no-deal Brexit at that point ‘…would expose affected individuals to the “hostile environment”, meaning it would immediately become a criminal offence to work in the UK and access to services including healthcare, bank accounts, rented accommodation and more would be restricted’ (Yeo 2018b). At the last minute Prime Minister May negotiated an extension of the Brexit end date with the EU, so disaster

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for EU nationals was averted for the time being, but the ongoing stress and gaslighting effect remained without a deal being agreed or separate legislation enacted to ensure EU nationals’ more permanent settled status. There were further instances of potential no-deal outcomes in June 2019 and again in September 2019 as the Conservative Party fought a battle, largely with themselves, concerning how extremely right wing and libertarian Brexit should be. In the end Theresa May stepped down as Prime Minister on 7 June 2019 citing her regret that she had not been able to deliver Brexit. The Brexiteers got their way, with Boris Johnson, who led the Vote Leave campaign in 2016, elected as the new leader of the Conservatives and thus becoming Prime Minister. Again, the new Prime Minister was chosen just by the Conservative Party while the rest of the country had no say. The European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Act 2020 was passed by the UK Parliament in January 2020, and now sets in law the status of EU nationals, to obtain settled or pre-settled status or to become like any other immigrant to the UK if they do not obtain settled status. As the law outlines, from January 2021: As free movement ends, the UK will move away from the EU law framework of rights defined in the EU Treaties, the Free Movement Directive, and FMOPA. The EEA Regulations 2016 will be revoked at the end of the implementation period. In place of the EU law framework of residence, a domestic law framework for residence will be established based on the skills people can contribute to the UK. (EU Withdrawal Agreement Act 2020 Section 3)

Although the law applies to the status of EU nationals after 2021, when the UK is supposed to have left the EU and completed the transition period, we are already seeing increased discrimination and harm to EU nationals as a result. This has been compounded by the lack of documentation for individuals who have already attained Settled Status, where successful applicants are given an online reference number, but no physical documentation. Individuals from the EU have now been questioned regarding their access to benefits, whether they have attained

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the new settled status or not, although previous rights continue to apply. In a recent report to a UK Government consultation, the group EU3million (2020) report numerous instances of such discrimination, and the increase in vulnerability and harm suffered as a result. For instance: a Hungarian national ‘needs to claim housing benefit and the housing officer told her she needs to provide the share code for her settled status, which she cannot access’ because her domestically violent partner had applied for Settled Status for her and held the online reference number (EU3million 2020). The survey of 3000 EU nationals by Tanja Bueltman (2020) further documents the wide-ranging concerns and evidence of structural violence resulting from the shifts in EU migrant status, and how even those with Settled status now feel less secure and less integrated in the UK: …ranging from discrimination and loss of identity, to concerns over a lack of transparency and visibility and a breakdown of trust in the government’s willingness and ability to deliver a secure status for the future. (Bueltman 2020)

The survey found that 10.9% of respondents were already being asked about settled status by landlords, banks and councils even though proof of the new immigration status is not required before 2021.

Existential Issues of Identity and Belonging Since arriving in the UK in the 1960s I have retained Danish citizenship. As a child I was given ‘leave to remain as a school student’ in the UK, living with my resident parents, and a stamp to this effect was added to my passport in 1971. After 1972 there was no need for EU nationals like myself to seek British citizenship status to remain in the UK, as we all became ‘EU citizens’ when the UK joined the EU. This is also echoed in the low number of UK citizen applications by EU nationals in the years before Brexit. However, issues of identity and belonging are of course complex. In the 1980s my then partner could not understand why I did not change my citizenship from Danish to

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British. After all I had lived in the UK most of my life even by then, had attended school and university in the UK, and was now developing a career based in the UK. We had many rows about this. But what she did not understand was the attachment to identity, and that I would have lost my Danish citizenship at that time if I applied for British citizenship. I felt a strong affinity with my country of origin, not least because I had not had any choice about leaving. I felt in many respects ‘Danish’. I preferred the Danish way of plain speaking, which has however always led me into trouble as being ‘blunt’ or ‘rude’ in the UK, I like the greater focus on gender equality in Denmark, the quality of life and wellbeing. I feel at home when in the Danish landscape and speaking the Danish language. But I had of course also become ‘British’ even without naturalisation, and as a colleague recently remarked, I had become ‘as British as marmalade’. Thus, I have become an ‘in-between’ or ‘hybrid’, as so many other migrants have also described their experience (Zubida et al. 2013), with both countries having shaped who I am. The Brexit referendum result led to me having many sleepless nights and anxiety as I, along with other EU nationals, worried about future access to work, losing freedom of movement, social benefits, access to bank accounts and healthcare, and the gaslighting uncertainties created by lack of clarity about whether there would be a Brexit deal, no-deal Brexit or even no Brexit at all. By the summer of 2017 I decided I was faced with two options in order to remain in the UK with at least some continuing rights: to apply for the new Settled Status, or to go through the much more laborious and very expensive process of applying for UK citizenship. I decided the latter, to pursue UK citizenship, in order to maintain the rights I had already accrued in both the UK and EU. Interviews with other EU nationals (Yeo 2018a) indicate similar decisions: For many EU citizens we interviewed, becoming British is often perceived as the only way to preserve the status quo, keeping the same rights as before such as having the same right to work, enjoying full freedom of movement, the right to education and overall rights to social protection. In other words, by becoming British, they assure themselves that they will be treated equally to British citizens. Interviewees reported a general

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loss of trust in the UK state. In particular, the Home Office’s hostile environment policy, until recently not something that more privileged EU citizens had to worry about, is perceived as a growing threat to them too.

In 2015, prior to the Brexit referendum, the UK Government had already made it more difficult to apply for citizenship as an EU national. Previously evidence of ‘leave to remain’ was a valid reason to apply for citizenship, but was no longer the case after November 2015, when applicants instead required the new status of Permanent Residence prior to a citizenship application. I therefore had to go through the twostep process of applying for Permanent Residence, apparently based on income level,2 continuous residence for at least five years and lack of criminal record; and once that had been obtained, to apply for UK citizenship based on continuous residence for at least five years, lack of criminal record, evidence of ability to speak English, and knowledge of the UK via the ‘Life in the UK’ test. The whole process was extremely expensive, costing nearly £4000 including an immigration lawyer’s fees. Merely submitting the application for citizenship required a fee to the UK Home Office of £1330. In other words, the process involved multiple barriers regarding residence, income, ability to pay fees and so on. In interviews with 103 EU families following Brexit, Yeo noted the concerns such barriers to UK citizenship had created: The acquisition of British citizenship was not a major concern for EU citizens and family members prior to Brexit, as the relatively low numbers of applications prior to 2016 indicate. This can perhaps be explained by the enhanced security of status conferred by EU free movement law compared to other long term residents under UK law. After Brexit, the new vulnerability of EU citizens and family members to deportation under UK law compared to EU law, for example, means that barriers to British citizenship take on new significance. (Yeo 2018b)

As the first step towards attaining UK citizenship I began my application for Permanent Residence, but was soon defeated by the online forms to be filled in. As I was an EU citizen in an, at that time, EU country, i.e. the UK, the forms just kept bringing me back to the same place in an

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endless circle. I could not fill them in! Further sleepless nights ensued. By chance I then met one of my bosses, a senior member of University staff, while out shopping, and shocked her with the level of anxiety I was feeling about Brexit. She provided links to relevant resources in the University and links to a good immigration lawyer who could help prepare my application. I was thus suddenly in a very good position compared to most other EU nationals pursuing a similar route. None the less, the whole process of applying for citizenship took nearly two years and would have taken nearer three if I had not married, so my Brexit wedding was indeed useful. In November 2019 I obtained the letter saying I had been successful in my citizenship application. The final step was to attend my ‘Citizenship ceremony’, a surreal experience of being welcomed as someone newly arrived in the country—despite having lived in and contributed to the fabric of the UK for over fifty years. There were many other EU nationals at the ceremony who like me had decided, after living in the UK for many years, that an important element of individualised resistance to the increasingly structurally violent context we faced as a result of the Brexit Referendum, was to apply for UK citizenship.

Conclusion This chapter set out to express and help us understand how the context around Brexit has impacted on EU nationals living in the UK. A number of key elements regarding this wider context have been identified, related to cultural and structural violence (Galtung 1990), gaslighting (see Stark 2007), and the inequities and violence associated with neoliberalism (Walby 2018). The neoliberal economic approach involving long-term austerity measures imposed by the Conservative-led governments in the years before the Brexit referendum helped to fuel the inequities that enabled a more authoritarian far-right politics to emerge. It also fed into and enabled what may be deemed a structurally violent hostile environment against migrants, further embedded through culturally violent xenophobic discourses around ‘illegal migrants’ and British nationalism and exceptionalism. EU nationals living in the UK were caught up in

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this wider context and focused on as a key problem. Moreover, the tremendous shift in status of EU nationals in the UK resulting from these shifts and the move to Brexit: from EU citizen to insecure resident and ‘illegalised migrant’, have impacted EU nationals as emotional abuse and especially as ‘gaslighting’, through the stress of lies and perpetual threats to individual identity, citizen status and livelihoods that they have experienced. As this chapter was being finalised we were in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. None the less, rather than pausing or extending ongoing Brexit negotiations (as this is written the next final date is end of December 2020), the UK Government was continuing to threaten a ‘no-deal’ Brexit. Moreover, the Government were bringing in new immigration legislation that would formally shift the position of EU nationals to that of any immigrant—as the legislation indicates this will “see EU and non-EU migrants treated equally” and probably include minimum salary thresholds for entry to the UK. It is a crucial step in implementing the changes wanted by the Vote Leave campaign. As key Vote Leave member and now Home Secretary Priti Patel has stated, the immigration bill is historic, bringing to fruition the Australian-style points-based system first outlined by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove when they were fronting the Vote Leave campaign during the 2016 referendum, and which will in future apply to all migrants, from the EU and elsewhere.

Notes 1. Although Leadsom did not win the leadership contest and therefore did not become Prime Minister, many of the Government Ministers currently (at the time of writing) serving under Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Government have similar views and support abolition of same sex marriage and undermining of women’s rights. 2. While no minimum income is stipulated in law to qualify for Permanent Residence in the UK, an income requirement is actually applied—at least equal to the Primary Threshold for Class 1 National Insurance Contributions, currently £9500. Thus anyone not earning or earning less than this are likely to be refused PR, typically women in part time and low paid jobs, or not working but bringing up children.

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References Batrouni, D. (2020). The battle of ideas in the Labour Party: From Attlee and Corbyn to Brexit. Bristol: Policy Press. Bueltman, T. (2020). Experiences and impact of the EU settlement scheme. Newcastle: University of Newcastle. Daily Telegraph. (2012). https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigr ation/9291483/Theresa-May-interview-Were-going-to-give-illegal-migrantsa-really-hostile-reception.html. Accessed 15 June 2020. Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. P. (2000). Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 733–768). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. EU3million. (2020, April). Report to UK govt consultation regarding effect of Covid-19. Galtung, J. (1990). Cultural violence. Journal of Peace Research, 27 (3), 291– 305. Home Office. (2017). Rights of EU citizens in the UK policy paper factsheet. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/upl oads/attachment_data/file/622177/6.3545_HO_EU_Citizen_Rights_Pol icy_Factsheet_A5_FINAL_WEB_260617_2.pdf. Accessed 15 June 2020. Led by Donkeys. (2019). Led by Donkeys: How four friends with a ladder took on Brexit. London: Atlantic Books. O’Brien, C. (2015). The pillory, the precipice and the slippery slope: the profound effects of the UK’s legal reform programme targeting EU migrants. Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, 37 (1), 111–136 (2015). https:// doi.org/10.1080/09649069.2015.1005997. Ogden, T. H. (1979). On projective identification. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 60, 357–373. Pantazis, C., & Pemberton, S. A. (2011). Reconfiguring security and liberty: Political discourses and public opinion in the new century. British Journal of Criminology, 52(3), 651–667 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/AZR090. Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walby, S. (2018). Is Europe cascading into fascism? Addressing key concepts including gender and violence. Politics and Governance, 6 (3), 67–77. Weber, L., & Pickering, S. (2011). Globalization and borders: Death at the global frontier. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Williams, W. (2020). Windrush report. London: HMIC.

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Winlow, S., Hall, S., & Treadwell, J. (2017). The rise of the right. Bristol: Policy Press. Yeo, C. (2018a). The impact of the UK-EU agreement on residence rights for EU families (Eurochildren Research Brief, no. 1). Birmingham: University of Birmingham. Yeo, C. (2018b). The impact of the UK-EU agreement on citizenship rights for EU families (Eurochildren Research Brief, no. 2). Birmingham: University of Birmingham. Zubida, H., Lavi, L., Harper, R. A., Nakash, O., & Shoshani, A. (2013). Home and away: Hybrid perspective on identity formation in 1.5 and second generation adolescent immigrants in Israel. Journal of Culture, Politics and Innovation, 1 (2013). https://doi.org/10.12893/gjcpi.2013.1.6.

13 Environmental Violence and Postnatural Oceans: Low-Trophic Theory in the Registers of Feminist Posthumanities Cecilia Åsberg

and Marietta Radomska

As Global Witness Report from 2018 indicates, in the years 2002– 2017 over 1558 ‘environmental defenders’: activists, local community members, NGOs staff, lawyers, journalists and indigenous people, fighting for the protection of land and other natural resources, were killed in 50 countries, predominantly in the global South (Butt et al. 2019). These deaths usually occurred in relation to conflicts around the C. Åsberg KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden M. Radomska (B) Department of Thematic Studies (Gender Studies), Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Husso et al. (eds.), Violence, Gender and Affect, Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56930-3_13

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extraction of natural resources by companies, other groups or individuals often without legal property rights, and perpetuating the old colonial patterns of appropriation, control, dispossession and destruction. Along with ecological disasters, like Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, these murders, accompanied by the threats towards and intimidation of activists striving to protect natural resources and landscapes, are some of the oft-cited examples of direct environmental violence taking toll on both human and nonhuman lives. It becomes clear that climate change, environmental degradation and diminishing biological diversity constitute the key pillars of an ethico-political crisis of planetary proportions. Yet, what also becomes increasingly apparent in the present epoch that some call the Anthropocene—the time when human as a species has turned into a force irreversibly altering all Earth’s systems—is that not all forms of environmental violence are immediate or ‘spectacular’ (Nixon 2011), but rather insidious on a long-term scale. As environmental humanities scholar Rob Nixon argues, there is another type of violence, that is, ‘slow violence’ which ‘occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’ (2011, p. 2). Earth’s geosphere, biosphere (including human bodies), hydrosphere and atmosphere being affected through climate change, deforestation, the loss of biodiversity, plastic pollution, wars’ toxic and radioactive aftermath and ocean acidification, among others, are all examples of slowly unfolding and frequently overlooked violence ‘out of sight’, but not without consequences for human and nonhumans alike. Simultaneously, both the spectacular and slow forms of environmental violence mobilise affective responses: not only feeling of anxiety or anger, but also grief experienced in relation to the present or anticipated ecological losses of species, ecosystems and meaningful landscapes, resulting from severe anthropogenic environmental change (Cunsolo and Landman 2017). Environmental grief is described by scholars as ‘disenfranchised’ form of grief (Doka 1989): not openly accepted or acknowledged in society. It may be experienced by individuals as well as groups or communities. Yet, as such, environmental grief has a potential for generating action and therefore, has to be borne in mind in the context of the discussion on environmental violence.

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What becomes particularly evident in the present era is that the environment is in us, and we humans are fully in the environment, physically and affectively. This makes the conventional concepts of nature and culture, as dichotomous, hierarchically arranged entities, obsolete (Haraway 1991; Åsberg 2014, 2018). Nature is no longer separable from culture; quite on the contrary, their enmeshment should be seen as a mundane site of contestation for societal power, violence and also for care, affect and coexistence (Åsberg et al. 2020). Clearly, this situation has not just theoretical and disciplinary ramifications (as nature no longer can be regarded as the sole reserve for scientists) but the stakes are high for ethics and politics at large (Neimanis et al. 2015). It matters what naturecultures get materialised and get to flourish and which ones get to suffer and die. And this is also how we approach gender and violence in this chapter, through a wide postdisciplinary critique of anthropocentric speciesism we call feminist posthumanities. The management of invasive species might be one example close at hand. Importantly, we all inhabit, embody and embed the world differently, as variously situated people, divided by national, sexual, religious, bodily and economic status, and as very variously situated nonhumans in an increasingly anthropogenic world (cf. MacCormack 2020). Gender, race, class and other power differentials, including species, which mark living bodies, render them vulnerable and prone to environmental (and other types of ) violence in very different ways, borrowing gestures from human-to-human xenophobia, sexism, racism and biological determinism. In and around the Baltic Sea, one of the most environmentally exposed and researched marginal seas in the world (e.g. HELCOM 2018), these differences between people, and between human and nonhuman inhabitants play out as multispecies politics that shape Baltic Sea futures to come. With intensified shipping and migration, waning fish stocks, oil pipes, militarism and war-time heritage, eutrophication, pollution and invasive species, the Baltic Sea transforms presently as a naturecultural domain of renewed territorialism. While mostly surrounded by land, it is connected to the North Sea through Kattegat and Skagerrak. The North Sea itself endures significant pressures from industry and agriculture, as well as extensive fisheries, intensive shipping

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and increasingly expanding various forms of mariculture, like Norwegian salmon farming. Simultaneously, ship ballast water and transport of fish and shellfish are also seen as primarily responsible for the introduction of alien species into the waters of the Baltic and North Sea. How environmental exposures get storied, what affects emerge, how values and social imaginaries get shared, and new communities forged, matter now a lot in the Baltic and North Sea region. This is why we turn our attention to the oceanic and the seaside sites of environmental violence. Grounded in feminist posthumanities (e.g. Åsberg and Braidotti 2018; Radomska and Åsberg 2020) and environmental humanities (e.g. Rose et al. 2012; Neimanis 2017) this chapter combines insights from marine science and species biology, art, history and field philosophy in order to investigate prospective multispecies futures of coexistence and care at sites of intense, but slow, oceanic environmental violence. For instance, since the end of the first two world wars major military powers dumped chemical warfare agents such as mustard gas, tabun, and Lewisite in the planet’s oceans. It was intended as a peaceful ‘farewell to arms’ and yet, as munitions, chemical warfare agents and whole ships with military waste were deliberately sunk or weaponry tossed overboard en masse, it revealed a view to the oceans as an endless medium of purification. One particularly intense site for the dumping of European stocks was the Gotland Deep, a trench in the middle of the shallow Baltic Sea. Yet, the human and nonhuman ecosystems of both the Baltic and North Sea are being refigured not only by the military waste purposefully placed in its depths, also by invasive chemicals from pharmaceuticals and fertilisers as well as new species testing the waters. It is reported that ‘Invasive alien species are listed among the most important factors threatening the aquatic biodiversity in the Baltic Sea, together with eutrophication, contaminants, overfishing and destruction of habitats’ (EC Communication 2009). Furthermore, the Baltic Sea is listed as the largest ‘dead zone’ area in the world (Diaz and Rosenberg 2008). The term ‘dead zone’ refers to a body of water where oxygen levels have been depleted, resulting in the disappearance of marine life. While hypoxia (low oxygen levels) may occur naturally, during the past century it has been significantly induced by nutrient pollution: the disposal of sewage, wastewater and dispersed

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nitrate agents into the sea. The warming waters of climate change effectuate a plethora of ecological alternations also in north and south polar seas, e.g. species migrations. In this chapter we focus on subtle ‘slow violence’ unfolding through the instances of submerged (and forgotten?) chemical weapons, so-called dead zones, invasive species and low-trophic marine ecosystems in the Baltic and North Sea regions. In the following four vignettes we zoom in on select environed bodies (Alaimo 2010, 2016), their stories of postnatural slow violence and unexpected encounters with care and hospitality in the Baltic and North Sea. We do this with the aim to unfold what we call low-trophic 1 theory for the naturecultural research on violence, affect and care (Bladow and Ladino 2018) within environmental humanities, and to engage a coexistential ethics of environmental adaptability informed by insights from the feminist posthumanities.

Vignette I: Chemical Weapons and Military Waste at Sea After the two world wars between 1946 and well into the 1960 s, several hundred thousand tons of chemical and conventional weapons were dumped and scattered in the waters. The density of military waste, including sunken, decommissioned ships filled with munitions, is particularly large outside Bornholm and south-east of Gotland in the Baltic Sea, in the Gulf of Finland and in the Skagerrak Strait of the North Atlantic, for instance outside Måseskär on the Swedish west coast and outside Arendal in Norway. Tons of metallic canisters and containers have since been corroding for some time and leaking their toxic contents into the aquatic habitat, forging a sinister heritage of military waste, nationalism and territorial proto-European masculinity at sea. Although no precise records of the clandestine operations exist, estimates suggest that after the WW2 around 10,000 tons of munitions were dumped near the Gotland basin in the Baltic Sea (CHEMSEA 2014). The allied forces and militaries across the world often disposed of the munitions and chemical weapons in deep ocean waters, but the Soviet military

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unloaded as much as 15,000 tons in the very shallow waters of Baltic Sea. Outside Bornholm, the military dumping occurred in 1946 and 1956, according to eyewitnesses, and submerged 15,000 tons of chemical munitions and over 2000 tons of chemical agents. Research on the microbiota and fish in the area reveals significantly higher levels of mustard gas tolerance. In fact, a majority of these chemical weapons consists of mustard gas, which despite its name actually is more of a viscous and gummy orange-coloured liquid than a gas. Fishermen are on a regular basis hurt by the mustard gas as it gets trapped in or stick to their nets or trawling tools. The mustard gas, modified to better fit the colder climes of the north, is often laced with arsenic, adding to the toxic pollution and environmental violence at the dumping sites. Recently, through studies of the toxic bioburden or accumulation of toxins in the nonhuman inhabitants of the areas, it has been concluded that also other chemical warfare agents like Clark I and Clark II were added to the mix to increase the noxious and poisonous effects of the mustard gas. Finfish and other species embody these heightened levels of toxicity, in the existing measurements done by scientists in EU projects like DAIMON (Decision Aid for Marine Munitions). They are living archives of military waste and slow oceanic violence, occurring on a planetary scale. While the occasional resurfacing of these chemical agents—in fishers’ nets, on the snouts of seals, on white sandy beaches camouflaged as amber—poses a toxic threat to human and nonhuman bodies, the dominant scientific opinion has been to let these munitions containing a variety of hazardous substances lie in situ (CHEMSEA 2014). Monitored, but left in place. Considering the increased use of the seabed for pipelines, electric cables and offshore windfarms, the risks of human and wildlife exposure are snowballing. Today it may seem easy for us to criticise the dumping as stemming from anthropocentric attitudes that ‘completely ignor[ed] the consequences for the environment’ (Missiaen and Henriet 2002, p. 2), but these actions may hinge on the common cultural phantasy of the dilutive power of massive amounts of water. Toxic agents can dissolve and hydrolyse in massive amounts of seawater, and the ocean’s capacity at that time was imagined to be ‘limitless’ (Alaimo 2012). Even today such attitudes are not entirely washed out.

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And yet today, the strains on the oceans accumulate manifold. How much can the sea take?

Vignette II: Dead Zones and the Baltic Sea Oxygen is crucial for the survival and flourishing of different organisms both on the land and in the sea. Low levels of oxygen lead to the migration and (literally) die-offs of fish, shellfish, aquatic plants and other organisms, which in turn may result in the disappearance of marine birds forming part of the affected ecosystems. Hypoxia is seen as a cause of major-scale mortality, behavioural responses, variations of species distributions, physiological stress and the loss of biodiversity (Zhang et al. 2013). Hypoxia may occur due to ‘natural’ reasons, that is, specific physical characteristics of a given aquatic environment, like the shape of the water body, its depth, salinity, temperature, the inflow and mixing of water, the strength and direction of wind, and whether or how it is connected with other water bodies. Yet, since the 1970 s oceanographers and environmental scientists have drawn attention to the anthropogenic causes of oxygen depletion in water bodies leading to large-scale ‘dead zones’, especially occurring along the coastlines, where marine life is particularly concentrated, on the one hand, and where waste from agriculture, factory farming and other industries often ends up, on the other. Thus, the other and dominant cause of hypoxia and, by extension, dead zones, is pollution: the inflow of nutrients from fertilisers, detergents and other substances containing high amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus. Some of the most frequently referred to examples—along with the Baltic Sea—are the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, where urbanisation and poultry industry (in the case of the former), as well as urban, industrial and factory farming waste and sewage (in the case of the latter) are primary sources of nutrients pumped into the sea. High levels of nitrogen and phosphorus lead to algal blooms or, in other words, eutrophication. In the context of the Baltic region, nitrogen oxides are produced in common agriculture from where they trickle to the sea, and in coal power plants in Germany and Poland from where

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the nitrogen oxides are carried on the wind and fall out over countryside in the form of nitrates that over-enrich the land, but also the sea. Local sewage systems, leaching from industry, forestry, agriculture and tourist sites, add to the resulting green soup of filamentous algae. While during daylight algae produce oxygen, at night they use dissolved oxygen for breathing. As they die, the algae are decomposed by bacteria, which further contributes to the consumption of dissolved oxygen in the water body, and consequently, through the processes of eutrophication, to hypoxia and the die-offs of marine life, creating thus big swats of dead zones. Dead zones may occur permanently, temporarily or seasonally. While periods of hypoxia occurred in the Baltic Sea—especially in its central deep basins—throughout the entire Holocene history, it is since early 1900s and especially 1950s that human-activity-induced eutrophication and hypoxia have significantly intensified in the coastal areas of the Baltic Sea, leading to ‘unprecedently’ acute ‘complete deterioration of the macrobenthic community’ (Jokinen et al. 2018, p. 3994). While some scientists search for geoengineering solutions to hypoxia in the Baltic Sea (e.g. Stigebrandt 2012), others emphasise the potential deeply detrimental effects of such a solution on other ecosystems and advocate for much stricter measures concerning human-induced nutrient input into the sea (e.g. European Geosciences Union 2018). Some environmental humanities scholars also draw attention to the very discourse surrounding the question of dead zones in the Baltic Sea, pointing at ways in which the ‘health’ of the sea is defined in relation to the presence of fish species important for the economy rather than local ecosystems as such (Peterson 2018). What the question of dead zones reveals is both the complexity of relations, processes and interests pressing the thresholds of liveability of the sea, on the one hand, and the pertaining imaginaries of the oceanic as that which washes away, hides and allows to forget.

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Vignette III: Invasive Species in Marine Ecosystems Alien or non-indigenous species are organisms (deliberately or not) introduced to a new habitat, where they are able to survive and reproduce. They become classified as ‘invasive’ if they demonstrate a potential for spreading elsewhere and have a damaging effect on biodiversity and ecosystems they form part of, cause economic losses, or have an impact on human health. In the marine contexts, alien (non-native) species are introduced not only through ship traffic, but also as a means of modifying local aquaculture (EEA 2015). As the data from 2012 indicates, there are 118 non-indigenous species observed in the Baltic Sea, 90 of which are classified as ‘established’, and only one as endemic (HELCOM 2012). The increased number and size of ships, their increased speed, the use of separate tanks for ballast water and introduction of new trade routes are the key factors that facilitate the voyage for non-indigenous newcomers. While some researchers point out that in contrast with many other seas, the invasion of alien species has increased both species and functional diversity of the Baltic Sea (Olenin and Leppäkoski 1999; Ojaveer et al. 2010), others emphasise the fragile character of the Baltic’s ecosystems resulting from its semi-enclosed nature and relatively low amount of species at large (Littfass 2019). As various documents issued by HELCOM underline, in the already polluted waters of the Baltic Sea, the non-indigenous newcomers often appear to have higher tolerance and adaptability to the demanding conditions than the native inhabitants of the area. Once they get established, it is practically impossible to revert their introduction (Littfass 2019). Experts argue that the best way to prevent potential damaging effects the alien species may have on local ecosystems is by precluding them from entering the Baltic basin. While the management of ship ballast water has been regulated by the International Maritime Organisation’s Convention for the Control and Management of Ships’ Ballast Water and Sediments (BWM) since 2017,2 the question of biofouling remains unresolved. Various anti-fouling means proved to be unsafe for the environment (like Tributyltin [TBT] used in ship paints, which remains in food chains for longer periods and disrupts hormonal balance

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of marine creatures). Yet, with the ever-increasing number of shipping routes and velocity of climate change, the issue of accidental species introduction to new habitats and their potential for altering these ecosystems becomes a shared concern for different legal bodies and institutions focused on marine environment protection. Simultaneously, discourses dealing with the presence of ‘foreign’ organisms in the Baltic waters and formulations they employ are reminiscent of cultural narratives and metaphors framing the questions of global migration and hospitality, as well as valuation of different actors and stakeholders involved in these processes and mobilised affects. What seems to remain insufficient in both cases (the nonhuman and human migration alike) is a new ethical imaginary that the marine naturecultures require. Needed are new modus operandi and new ways of making sense of our impure selves as blue-green planet inhabitants and companion species (Haraway 2008, 2016).

Vignette IV: Pink Sea Farming and Low-Trophic Mariculture It used to be a luxury food. Now salmon consumption is three times higher in the US, Europe and Japan than it was in 1980 and the demand is growing fast, the WWF reports. Salmon farming, a form of aquaculture that entails raising a specific strain of Atlantic salmon ‘from egg to market’ and keeping the fish in net cages in marine settings along, e.g. the Norwegian, Irish and Scottish coasts, is the fastest growing food production system in the world. While capture-fishery landings have been stagnant since the 1990s and while wild populations of finfish have been dwindling fast, the increasing demand for seafood has been met by intensified aquaculture, especially salmon farming. Without adding to land-based stresses to soil, land and fresh-water supplies, the increasing demand for food for the planet´s growing human populations has put aquaculture on centre stage. In the spotlight there is mainly the Atlantic salmon, a species genetically bred from a few Norwegian strains for faster growth and economic gain (Schiermeier 2003). Like flamingos turning pink, the iconic salmon pink hues come from wild salmon eating

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shrimps and krill, ingesting the colouring compound astaxanthin. Farmraised salmon would have a naturally grey-coloured flesh were it not for their chemically engineered feed, adding the pink colour to custommade and desired degree. The artistic duo Cooking Sections’ project on salmon as a colour oddity generated by the metabolisation of man-made substances in nonhuman bodies, describes salmon as ‘the colour of wild fish which is neither wild, nor fish, nor even salmon’ (Tate Britain: Art Now: ‘Salmon—A Red Herring’ by Cooking Sections). A postnatural species par excellence, farmed salmon hosts an array of negative impacts on the ocean and contributes to environmental violence. It adds to eutrophication and biodiversity loss as the chemicals, antibiotics and excess nutrients from food and faeces from the over-crowded net cages disturb the oceanic flora and fauna directly under and around the farms. In fact, the excessive use of chemicals, including also anti-foulants and pesticides that are banned in some countries, are to have unintended consequences for marine organisms and human health for futures to come. Parasites, like salmon lice, and viruses transfer easily inside the pen and between farmed and wild fish populations. And while escaped from its heavily regulated regime, and often weirdly disoriented, designer salmon interbreed with wild populations to alter and diminish genetic diversity (Schiermeier 2003). In essence, this is the unsustainable cultivation of high-trophic marine species that are equivalent to lions, leopards and wolves—top predators of their ecosystems—which, as sustainability science shows, implies significant energy inefficiencies and a far greater environmental footprint than is needed from a nutrition perspective. In sum, such hightrophic sea farming depends on chemicals, the suffering of fish, and contributes greatly to eutrophication and toxic pollution. From the human-centred viewpoint of sustainability, there is an urgent need to find new ways of producing nutritious food and biomass, to provide for growing populations with minimal environmental footprint (Alexandratos and Bruinsma 2012). Land, soils and freshwater resources are already hard-pressed by agriculture (EASAC 2017). One pathway to reducing pressures on land involves looking to our oceans for answers, but in a completely different register of consumption.

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Unfed low-trophic mariculture, the farming and flourishing of species such as kelp and seaweed, mussels, oysters, tunicates and sea urchins are seen by scientists as a potential game-changer in terms of the sustainable provision of food and biomass (Sapea 2017). The low-trophic registers of oceanic ecologies, unlike salmon aquaculture, mitigate eutrophication and may even act as a CO2 capturing carbon sink. Low-trophic marine companion species, like those of the kelp forests or the algaerich intertidal zones at the edge of the sea, have in fact since eons served as environmental engineers of the blue planet. The low-trophic marine zones, with kelp and other macro-algae (seaweeds), oysters, mussels and sea urchins, offer a host of benefits to various organisms, humans included, in providing many species with sanctuary and shelter while mitigating the eutrophication and diminishing species diversity of the sea. Comparing this zone to the forests on land, already Charles Darwin (Voyages, 1839) observed the sheer ‘number of living creatures of all Orders whose existence intimately depends on kelp’. And he warned of the insurmountable effects should it perish (Filbee-Dexter et al. 2016; Filbee-Dexter and Wernberg 2018). Today, kelp forests and mussel beds are receding with the warming waters of climate change. With the gradual accumulation of environmental violence, they seem to in fact slowly perish however nutritious and beneficial they are for many species (Sapea 2017). In dire times of environmental degradation and climate change, it is about time we turn our attention and appreciation to low-trophic creatures and what they can teach us in the feminist posthumanities.

Can Futures Be (Re-)imagined? On Feminist Posthumanities and Low-Trophic Theory In the context of ecology, the notion of ‘trophic level’ describes the group of organisms occupying the same level in a food chain, meaning, having the same ‘distance’ in relation to the primary energy source. Organisms that photosynthesise: algae and plants are thus qualified as autotrophs (primary producers), and those who consume either autotrophs or other consumers are described as heterotrophs (primary, secondary, tertiary,

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etc., consumers). What this ecological classification brings to the fore is the very question of nourishment and consumption, which all the living depends on. It is the matter of consumption that saturates each of the above-mentioned cases of both slowly and abruptly (on a planetary time scale) developing anthropogenic violence: the consumption of other creatures, of biomass, of space and potential futures. Yet, in the context of human cultures, consumption—in both its narrow sense of food and broader understanding of consuming the world in its every aspect—is not only about nourishment and material survival. It also amplifies and is amplified by one’s identity, belonging, culture, belief and habit, among others. It is always linked to affects. Furthermore, none of these factors remains fixed, immutable, independent from its surroundings, or innocent, for that matter. We do not live in a vacuum. Traditions or habits, even if cherished and preserved, are always performed and entangled in the social, cultural, economic and ethicopolitical conditions of a given time and place. Some of these factors are challenged every day in a world where, as consumers, by way of making choice, we also choose to remain complicit, or to resist the structures of environmental violence and injustice. Those choices are not only about the food we eat, its cost in terms of both the carbon footprint and the suffering or death it may have caused, but also every product or service we decide to buy, out of need or habit, as well as knowledges and stories we prefer to recognise, nourish ourselves with, digest and consume. There is no ‘outside’ or ‘elsewhere’: we are all differentially situated, affected and differentially responsible inhabitants of this planet and the question is rather ‘how can we imagine this world (from within) otherwise?’ Inside, and with no exit from ‘field work’ ever possible, how can we inhabit our earthly companionship with less of that slow violence hinged on human ignorance and supremacy? How can we get that shared feeling of belonging, together, responsibly? In the context of mariculture, the cultivation of low-trophic species is seen as beneficial to sea ecologies as it circumvents many disadvantages of land-based food and biomass production such as the need for fertilisers, chemicals (antibiotics and colouring agents) and irrigation (Nixon 2011). Such sustainable sea farming counteracts coastal eutrophication, stimulates biodiversity and acts as an important carbon sink.

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Coastal villages may gain value by a (re)development of maritime enterprise, and participants learn how to eat well as humans change the climate. What is needed is also a cultivation of the sense of wonder and ecological belonging, the merits of seaside dwelling to mental well-being, and a deeper understanding of how the development of sustainable low-trophic mariculture may influence our common future and interact with society. Such an approach may take seriously environmental affects: intensities or emotions emerging when bodies influence other bodies, be them human or nonhuman. While in the Anthropocene human emotional responses in the form of anger, despair, grief, longing and fatigue tend to prevail, turning to low-trophic practices and thinking may allow for a better understanding of and working with these affects. Taking an in-depth look at the low-trophic practices of local coastal communities, like seaweed foraging done in thoughtful, attuned with the processes and capacities of the ecosystems they are involved in, ways, we ask what can the concept of the ‘low-trophic’ do in terms of theory and ethics, affect and care? How can we theorise and sympathise in ways cognisant of our own patterns of consumption, potential violence, complexity and ecologies in which we as living subjects, creators and knowledge producers are implicated in? How can we—through our practices as thinkers, scholars, educators, activists, artists but also, plainly, humans—account for not only relations we enter or connections we cultivate, but also exclusions being made (Giraud 2019)? Cultural studies taught us to pay attention to the mundane matters of life, to look at them with curiosity, and see everyday life, popular culture, affect and consumption patterns not as unworthy low culture, but as the very essence of how we become who we are. If we now see multispecies studies as a form of cultural studies in the nonhuman turn, we may also consider low-trophic mariculture as sustainability practices of eating, socialising, feeling and thinking better together through an ethics of cohabitation and mutual flourishing. Thus understood low-trophic mariculture points us in a direction beyond the ‘twin spectres of sacralizing and cannibalizing’ (Bryld and Lykke 2000, p. 203) nature and its resources (of which we are part); it seeks to conceive consumption in the sustainable registers of multispecies flourishing and in an accountable response to environmental change, exploring how to flexibly adapt to

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climatic seasons and polluted periods of land and oceans. Looking closer at the entangled ecologies of low-trophic ecosystems of seaweeds, oysters, sea urchins and other creatures reconnects us with humble origins in deep time settings without a detour to a mythic paradise (lost). And they may help us reimagine contemporary oceanic coexistence in the process. Inspired by these relations, while remaining accountable for the potential violence it may be complicit with, and without an illusion of originary innocence, low-trophic theory strives to find comfort in the here and now, and respond to the present as well as potential futures. Low-trophic theory is thus a practice of thinking and theorising that requires creativity and imagination; that takes more-than-human hospitality and responsibility seriously, including accompanying them affects; that is aware and accountable for the patterns of consumption it draws in both their material and epistemological sense; and last, but not least, accountable to the complexities, entanglements and exclusions in which it is implicated. Low-trophic theory cannot undo the ongoing assault on the ‘natural’ worlds, even more so when these are ‘hidden’ and ‘out of sight’, like marine ecosystems of the Baltic and the North Sea. Yet, it opens us up towards a better understanding of our own situatedness as both individuals and entities inscribed in various institutions and systems (of oppression), complicity and complexities in which we are implicated, patterns of consuming the world and ethical imagination. Our meditation on four different instances of environmental violence seemingly slowly unfolding, submerged and ‘out of sight’, moves us in this chapter towards thinking and theorising from within and transformed by the ‘field’ (Buchanan et al. 2018).

Epilogue When we consider the potentially compounded impacts of humancaused environmental threats and violence, the work of environmental humanities scholar Deborah Bird Rose (2006, 2012) is particularly instructive. Typical life processes unfold cyclically, with organisms living and dying, returning to particles that are reabsorbed by bacteria and other microfauna, and ultimately transformed into a new life (cf.

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Radomska 2020; Radomska et al. 2019). Drawing upon James Hatley’s concept of ‘aenocide’, Rose calls ‘double death’ Anthropocenic conditions whereby these typical life-death processes are amplified and where the balance between ‘living’ and ‘dying’ is tipped. Additionally, when these amplify still further—such that the death of individuals threatens the future genetic viability or even existence of a species or of multiple species—we have what Rose (2012, p. 128), together with Hatley, identifies as ‘ecological aenocide, or the multispecies “murder of ethical time”’. Ethical time describes the reproduction of generations beyond our own, the continuity of generations (whether human or not) and all that entails about the passing on of history, stories and even evolutionary adaptations. The amplification of the amplification that Rose describes is one that radiates beyond the individual species to affect an entire ecological network. Rose (2012, p. 128) argues that we can understand this kind of multispecies amplification of an amplification as another kind of time process, one that is ‘embodied and embedded’ rather than chronological, linear and Newtonian. This frame anchors the folded temporalities of the Baltic Sea weapons dumps in the bodies of the nonhuman and human animals that bear their traces, creating an ethical obligation to the deep time future(s) of the multispecies communities of the Baltic. Drawing upon indigenous Australian eco-cosmologies, Rose argues: All living things owe their lives not only to their forebears but also to all the other others that have nourished them again and again, that nourish each living creature during the duration of its life. Metabolic processes require energy to flow across species and systems; embodied time is always a multispecies project. It follows that life depends both on the sequential processes of generational time/gift and on the synchronous processes of multispecies nourishment. These processes and patterns intersect to form dense knots of embodied time. (2012, pp. 130–131)

Rose offers us a justice-oriented way to think through the oceanic temporalities, their violence and affordances. Rather than an apocalyptic framework that highlights the spectacle of such poisons, we turn to Rose’s metaphor of a multispecies ‘knot’ of ‘embodied time’. Such a knot might

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also encompass the multivalent threats to the Baltic we note above. The weapons themselves might not have the capacity (yet) to murder generational time, but taken together with the aenocidic capacities of dead zones, eutrophication and warming waters, they might very well play a role in doing so in the future. Rose’s concept instils an ethical obligation to the multispecies communities with whom we share the Baltic and the North Sea. This obligation exists not because the death of other species could signal, like the archetypal canary in the coal mine, our own collective death as Homo sapiens, but because we share responsibility for all the bodies, stories and temporalities we inhabit and consume. Their suffering and death matter, irrespective of our own, and, as Rose (2012, p. 139) argues, ‘if suffering does not matter, then it is difficult to assert that anything’ does. The living animals in the Baltic Sea that embody military chemical compounds enact a transcorporeal spectral return of the weapons that urgently calls for our attention, as does territorial white masculinity and neo-nationalism again. The toxic embodiment of these chemicals and others in the bodies of oceanic animals do not allow us merely to theorise on the haunting of folded, nonlinear temporalities: they allow us to fully ingest, in theory and corporeal practice, the absence of purity. Yes, the presence of the chemical weapons in these animal bodies, and in our own, mixes past, present and future, making multiple temporalities material in our own embodied time and flesh. The chemicals—long left for the dead—are instead very much alive, ghosting the bodies of the human and nonhuman animals whose DNA they may slowly be altering or whose cells they may slowly be killing. As the amassed stuff of environmental violence gain new life in attracting new, unintended victims, we ask: what are our ethical obligations to our fellow species to right this wrong intragenerational scope? The living ghosts of futures to come (cf. Tsing et al. 2017) ask us to confront our past mistakes, our current violences, our voracity and the unknown harms we may be inflicting. As time folds in on itself, the hauntology of environmental violence, as lived through human/animal bodies, cannot be ignored. It lingers, and slowly we awake to its powers.

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Notes 1. The term ‘trophic’ stems from the Greek term troph¯e , meaning ‘nourishment, food’ (Harper, n.d.). It forms part of the fields of ecology and physiology. 2. See http://www.imo.org/en/About/Conventions/ListOfConventions/Pages/ International-Convention-for-the-Control-and-Management-of-Ships%27Ballast-Water-and-Sediments-(BWM).aspx (accessed May 1, 2020).

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Index

A

C

affect 4–8, 10–12, 14, 16, 18–20, 22, 33, 62, 92, 97, 136, 173, 186, 191, 224, 225, 228, 238, 267, 269, 278, 280 affective practices 4–6, 10, 12, 13, 16, 17, 115–118, 127, 128 aggression 20, 33, 43, 135, 227, 237 alien species 268, 273 anger management 99, 137 asylum policies 183 asylum seekers 16, 18, 81, 183–191, 193, 195–197

care quality 18, 158, 161, 163, 165, 169, 170, 172, 173 care work 18, 157–159, 161, 165–171, 175 care workers 18, 158, 159, 161, 163, 165, 166, 168–175 change 14, 17, 31, 34, 35, 40, 42, 43, 49, 50, 56, 60, 65, 75, 98, 103, 104, 122, 128, 137–139, 141, 143, 144, 147, 148, 150, 151, 153, 174, 183, 186–188, 192, 195, 225, 249, 254, 258, 266, 278 chastity 31–33 chemical weapons 269, 270, 281 child victims 50, 62 citizenship 192, 196, 250, 253, 258–261 collectivity 14, 30, 32, 34, 40, 43

B

blogs 20, 222, 227–229, 231, 236, 238 Brexit 19, 21, 245, 248, 251–262

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Husso et al. (eds.), Violence, Gender and Affect, Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56930-3

287

288

Index

colonialism 19, 20, 205, 206, 209–211, 215, 216 conflict 5, 18, 32, 33, 36, 38, 40, 41, 43, 57–59, 61, 66, 78, 80, 94, 125, 160, 166–168, 170, 171, 265 consumption 54, 57, 272, 274, 275, 277–279 content analysis 17, 141, 166 contesting 18, 174 corporal punishment 212 Council of Europe Istanbul Convention 35 Court of Appeal 49, 51–54, 61, 62, 65 crime 6, 14, 15, 34, 37, 41, 49–54, 56–58, 61, 64, 66, 78, 80, 224, 229, 231, 233, 235, 245, 249, 251, 252 cultural sensitivity 40–42

D

dead zone 268, 269, 271, 272, 281 deportability 18, 182, 183, 185–192, 194–196 deportation 16, 18, 181–187, 189–195, 254, 260 digitalisation 222, 225 digitally mediated violence 221, 222, 226, 237 digital violence 19, 106, 226 dignity of care 174 domestic discipline 11 domestic homicide 14, 49, 51–56, 62–66 domestic violence (DV) 6, 12–14, 16, 17, 29–31, 34, 36–38, 42–44, 49–54, 59, 63, 66, 72,

76, 77, 113–118, 120–124, 126–129, 135, 136, 138, 139, 151–153, 231 interventions 16, 116, 121, 125, 129

E

elder abuse and neglect 175 emotional abuse 253, 262 emotional labour 114, 115 emotional work 136–139, 151–153, 160 emotion focused therapy (EFT) 136, 139, 141 emotions 4, 6, 7, 11, 12, 16–18, 34, 36, 41–43, 49, 62, 66, 91–93, 95–100, 102–108, 113–122, 124, 127, 135–140, 142, 144–147, 150–153, 160, 165, 166, 186–188, 190–193, 196 encountering victims 115 environmental humanities 11, 266, 268, 269, 272, 279 environmental violence 21, 266, 268, 270, 275–277, 279, 281 ethics 21, 22, 32, 96, 267, 269, 278

F

facilitators 140, 143, 144, 147, 149–153 familial control 13, 30, 31, 34, 40, 42 family violence 14 far right 252, 261 feminist posthumanities 267–269, 276

Index

Finland 14, 20, 49–51, 54, 83, 103, 114, 118, 128, 139, 182–184, 187–190, 194, 195, 221, 227, 229–231, 236 The Finns Party 221, 227 forced removal 18, 194

289

history of crime 49, 51, 53, 55, 61, 64 history of family 54, 55, 62–65 honour-related violence (HRV) 13, 14, 30–32, 34–38, 40, 42–44 human rights 34, 36, 39, 40, 43, 44, 129, 189, 193, 196, 215 humiliation 4, 7, 19, 20, 204–216

G

gaslighting 245, 251, 253–257, 259, 261, 262 gender 5–7, 10–12, 18, 19, 21, 29, 32, 36–38, 40, 41, 44, 57, 62, 71–75, 77–79, 83, 84, 96, 97, 105, 128, 136, 140, 147, 152, 153, 157, 185, 193, 195, 205, 222, 223, 225, 226, 229–231, 259, 267 gender-based violence 51, 75, 76 gendered violence 8, 17, 22, 75, 76, 85 gender order 6, 13, 31, 44, 73, 74, 84 gender roles 13, 14, 30, 33, 36, 40, 43 Gikuyu 19, 20, 203–206, 210, 212–215 group interventions 137, 151

I

identity 21, 44, 72, 73, 100, 138, 209, 210, 218, 258, 259, 262, 277 immigration 18, 157, 223, 228, 229, 235, 248, 250, 251, 255, 256, 258, 260–262 individualist approaches to gender 72, 73 institutional practices 8, 16–19, 121, 123, 127 institutional violence 12, 16, 18, 160, 166, 171, 173, 175 interactionist approaches to gender 72 interpersonal violence 11, 12, 49, 77, 101 intersectionality 80 intra-family violence 51 invasive species 267, 269, 273

H

Halla-aho, Jussi 20, 221, 222, 227–232, 235–238 Haq, Iram (1976–) 30, 41, 42 hate crimes by men 84 hate speech 6, 19, 20, 222–226, 233, 238 hegemonic masculinities 15, 75, 78, 81, 83, 84

J

Jyväskylä model 17, 139, 147

K

Kenya 19, 203–207, 209–212, 214, 215, 217, 218

290

Index

L

low-trophic mariculture 274, 276, 278 low-trophic theory 276, 279

nursing homes 16, 158, 159, 162, 163, 165, 166, 175

O M

malignant positioning 17, 120, 121, 127–129 manosphere 223 manslaughter 52, 58 marginalised masculinities 78, 81 masculinities 15, 19, 31, 33, 36, 71, 72, 74, 75, 78–85, 95–97, 100, 101, 143, 269, 281 men’s violence against men 14, 15, 76–78, 80 men’s violence against women 14, 76–78, 80, 85 misogyny 6, 19, 221, 222, 224, 226, 235–238 moral judgement 114, 116, 118, 119 moral order 115–117, 120, 122, 124, 126, 127 multiprofessional collaboration 119 murder 50, 52–58, 62, 63, 65, 125, 239, 252, 266, 281

N

nationalism 216, 236, 251, 261, 269 nationality 21, 228, 231, 235, 237, 252 neoliberalism 21, 252, 261 newspapers 49, 51, 52, 56, 58, 60, 61, 65, 215 Ngugi wa Thiong’o 209 Nixon, Rob 9, 182, 266, 277 non-violence 17, 141, 144, 150

old people 171 online violence 6, 222, 223, 226

P

patriarchy/patriarchal 5, 6, 13–15, 19, 30, 31, 33, 35, 42, 44, 58, 65, 66, 73, 74, 78–80, 84, 85, 101, 102, 229, 230 performativity 224 perpetrators 7, 9, 14, 16, 17, 34–37, 40, 41, 43, 50, 53–59, 61–65, 75, 76, 80, 83, 84, 124, 127, 135–140, 142, 144, 145, 147, 150–153, 181, 183, 193, 231, 232, 238 politics 21, 75, 94, 100, 208, 222, 223, 230, 238, 251, 252, 261, 267 populism 20, 225, 236, 237 populist politics 221, 227, 231 positioning theory 17, 115–117 post-colonialism 209, 210, 212, 213 postnatural violence 269, 275 presence 55, 57, 116, 160, 212, 272, 274, 281 process research 136, 137, 141 professionalisation of care work 175 professionals 7, 17, 35, 39, 42, 43, 94, 107, 116, 118, 121–129, 152, 173 psychotherapy research 137, 141 public violence by men 82, 83

Index

Q

qualitative research 135, 138, 141, 159

R

race 15, 18, 20, 21, 80, 81, 157, 207, 225, 226, 229, 231, 267 racism 19, 20, 39, 218, 222, 226, 231, 234, 235, 237, 238, 246, 267 radical right 223, 226, 231, 236–238 reflection 137, 143, 145, 147, 148, 151, 152, 159 reflective work 147 resistance 42, 79, 126, 185, 193– 195, 215, 216, 218, 247, 261 responsibility 17, 21, 34, 37, 41, 74, 119, 121, 123, 125, 127, 128, 138, 144, 147, 149, 151, 152, 183, 279, 281 rhetoric 17, 20, 114, 128, 222, 224–228, 231–234, 236–238, 249, 251 right-wing populism 236

S

safety 30, 34, 42, 92, 124, 128, 137, 138, 140, 233 S¸ ahindal, Fadime (1975–2002) 38, 41 seas and oceans 267–269, 271, 273, 275, 279 service system 128 shame 4, 7, 9, 13, 14, 29, 30, 32–34, 36, 42–44, 79, 99, 139, 144, 187, 210, 212

291

slow violence 9, 16, 18, 19, 21, 182, 183, 186–190, 192, 194–196, 266, 269, 277 social constructionism 115 social control 5, 30, 42 social media 6, 20, 189, 191, 221, 222, 224–226, 228, 236–238 social workers 16, 17, 113–120, 122–128 solidarity 20, 43, 104, 107, 192, 194–196 stochastic violence 20, 223, 226, 227, 232, 237 structural approaches to gender 72, 73 structural violence 6, 15, 19, 21, 159, 161, 171, 245, 251, 253, 258, 261 subordinated masculinities 78, 81 symptoms 186–189, 192, 195

T

Taylor, Diana 187 therapeutic change 137, 143, 152, 153 therapeutic work 16, 137, 144 toxicity 270 Trump, Donald 20, 221, 222, 227, 232–238, 246 Twitter 232, 233, 235, 236

U

United Kingdom (UK) 94, 245–248, 250, 252, 254–262

292

Index

V

W

victim empathy 17, 141, 148, 150–152 victimhood 33, 34, 125, 126, 128, 248 violence 3–15, 17–22, 30–32, 35–44, 50, 55–57, 59, 61, 62, 64, 66, 71–85, 91–108, 120, 122–124, 126–129, 137, 144, 153, 175, 190, 195, 204, 207, 210, 212, 214–216, 222, 227, 229, 231, 232, 236–238, 252, 253, 261, 266 violence against women 14, 19, 35, 72, 75, 76, 101, 114, 128, 226, 232

white supremacy 237 witnessing 186, 187, 190–192, 195, 196 working conditions 18, 158, 159, 161, 163, 165, 167, 169–171, 173, 175

X

xenophobia 21, 245, 267

Y

young men’s violence 82