Oppressors deny their own agency and dehumanize their victims by using the passive voice. I want my students to recognize this deliberate strategy, and to look for hidden actors and dehumanized recpients of injustice. (I try to teach about active and passive verbs in a more lighthearted way, but I only bothered to photograph and caption sillly Lego scenes becuase I wanted more of my students to pay attention to an important lesson.)
Jackson Katz explains why grammar matters.
The use of terms like “battered woman” and “accuser” have absolved men from taking responsibility for their actions, says educator Jackson Katz.
“We talk about how many women were raped last year, not about how many men raped women. We talk about how many girls in a school district were harassed last year, not about how many boys harassed girls. We talk about how many teenage girls in the state of Vermont got pregnant last year, rather than how many men and boys impregnated teenage girls.
“So you can see how the use of the passive voice has a political effect. [It] shifts the focus off of men and boys and onto girls and women. Even the term ‘violence against women’ is problematic. It’s a passive construction; there’s no active agent in the sentence. It’s a bad thing that happens to women, but when you look at that term ‘violence against women,’ nobody is doing it to them. It just happens to them…Men aren’t even a part of it!”
Next, Katz used a whiteboard on the platform at Mead Chapel (giving credit to author Julia Penelope for the exercise that followed) and wrote:
John beat Mary.
Mary was beaten by John.
Mary was beaten.
Mary was battered.
Mary is a battered woman.The first sentence, Katz explained, “is a good English sentence: a subject, a verb, and an object.” The second sentence is the first sentence written in the passive voice, and according to Katz “a whole lot has happened. The focus has shifted from John to Mary. John is now at the end of the sentence, which means that John is very close to dropping off the map of our psychic plane. So it’s not just bad writing to use the passive voice, it’s also political. And the political effect has been to shift the focus from John to Mary.”
Source: The Language of Gender Violence
Every time I see a political topic now I ask “Is the person speaking actually doing the thing they’re accusing others of?”
Studies on the rates of domestic violence in couples, by sexual orientation, have shown that lesbians and bisexual women have the highest rates of domestic violence:
http://www.advocate.com/crime/2014/09/04/2-studies-prove-domestic-violence-lgbt-issue
“The CDC’s 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, released again in 2013 with new analysis, reports in its first-ever study focusing on victimization by sexual orientation that the lifetime prevalence of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner was 43.8 percent for lesbians, 61.1 percent for bisexual women, and 35 percent for heterosexual women, while it was 26 percent for gay men, 37.3 percent for bisexual men, and 29 percent for heterosexual men (this study did not include gender identity or expression).”
It would be statistically more accurate to say “Allison beat Mary”.
Studies on domestic violence have shown that a lot of it is reciprocal – an escalation between two people until it turns into violence.
“According to both men and women, 50% of this violence was reciprocal, that is, involved both parties, and in those cases the woman was more likely to have been the first to strike.”
http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/In_Brief_Domestic_violence_Not_always_one_sided
The claim is “Oppressors deny their own agency and dehumanize their victims”. Who is doing that here?
Another one:
“More importantly, when an abused man called the police, the police were more likely to arrest him than to arrest his abusive female partner. The men who called the police were arrested in 26% of cases, whereas their abusive partners were arrested in only 17%.”
https://www.nationalparentsorganization.org/blog/3972-researcher-what-hap-3972
I have seen studies that suggest a high percentage of reported abuse in lesbian domestic relationships, but there are more heterosexual domestic relationships than homosexual relationships, and in those heterosexual relationships more men are perpetrators than victims, so it’s still more likely that “John beat Mary” than that “Allison beat Mary.” I have also read that when women do hit men, the men are less likely to report an injury as a result of domestic abuse (perhaps because women tend to be smaller than men and thus don’t tend to cause as many injuries, and perhaps because men who are injured by a spouse are likely to say it’s a sports injury or a work-related injury). This “Lesbian Partner Fact Sheet” demonstrates that the problem of domestic abuse is not limited to the stereotype of men abusing women in heterosexual relationships. https://mainweb-v.musc.edu/vawprevention/lesbianrx/factsheet.shtml The BBC did a story on this topic, quoting an expert who suggests that the added social stress of being a member of a minority group, internalized negative feelings, or fear of being outed all add stress, and the stress seems to be one reason why partner abuse in same-sex relationships occurs at a higher rate than in heterosexual partnerships. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29994648
The term currently in use by experts is “battered person syndrome,” and the literature I find online often usually does make an effort not to assume the genders of either party. The older term “battered wife syndrome” made even more assumptions about the nature of the relationship.
The more limited point I made on this post, that the term “battered woman” conceals the agent, still applies; however, if my journalism students were to write an article about domestic partner abuse, I’d make sure that they avoid making gender assumptions, and that they carefully avoid passing along (through direct quotations) the gender assumptions of their sources.
Yes. I show this video to start the conversation. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hSp8IyaKCs0