Male violence, A symptom
of inequality
--Monique Perrot-Lanaud, Journalist,
France
A whole area of the relationships between
women and men is emerging from obscurity, unbearable for those on one side, shameful for
those on the other. The disturbing reality of sexual violence has been exposed in a
national survey, the first ever made in France on all forms of violence against women. The
authorities are beginning to bring a political response to an issue that is a problem for
society as a whole.
The national survey on violence against
women, ENVEFF, published in the autumn of 2000, has revealed that nearly one in ten women
reported marital abuse (physical, sexual, verbal, psychological) during the twelve months
prior to the survey and that the same proportion had suffered a sexual assault in the
course of their life. It estimates the number of women raped in 1999 at 48,000. Those most
affected by all forms of violence are women under the age of twenty-five and women who are
unemployed and in an insecure situation. With regard to sexual violence (receiving
unwanted advances, sexual assault, molestation, attempted rape, rape), the survey found
that 87.5% of victims knew their attacker.
"Rape is a crime"
46.9% of rape victims are raped by their
spouse or former spouse, 12.4% by a member of their family (father, father-in-law, uncle,
brother-especially young girls) 11% by a man whom they know ( a close relation, colleague
or someone in authority-a doctor…) Outside, more than half of rapes take place at
daytime and in busy places. For women, no place is safe: the most dangerous place for a
women in a couple is her home, whilst for those who live alone, it is public or
workplaces. It is as though the attacker felt they had rights over "their" women
as well as over single women who do not "belong" to another man. One of the
characteristics of this crime is that the victims may feel guilty.
Founded by several associations in 1985,
the "Collectif feministe contre le viol" ( Feminist Collective against rape) set
up a free-phone number for victims of sexual assault and rape, in 1986, with government
support. This number took around 3,000 calls about rapes and sexual assaults in 1999 and
in 2000—some of them concerning attacks on children, reported years later.
The Collectif gives support to victims in
their legal procedures, which according to Sandrine Arnoux, is a "battle"
between the fact that the victims have their credibility called into question and that
they can't rely on any reception center, an absolutely vital factor enabling them to
rebuild their lives after the trauma.
At the end of the line of SOS Violences
Conjugales, another community based telephone service, set up in 1992, the staff also
reiterate forcefully that "rape is a crime", recognized in France since 1990,
including rape within marriage. "Sexual violence is almost always part of marital
violence", they remind us.
What do we know about sex attackers? Very
little. The calls received in 1998 by the Collectif Contre show that they are of all ages
and come from all backgrounds, with, however, more than half of them divided between the
medical and paramedical professions (16.8%), teachers, youth leaders and people working
with young children (13.1%), managerial staff (914.8%), politics and the police (12.7%).
A category unknown to public services, the
violent man has been the subject of few studies or measures, and no ministry is taking
responsibility for him. In France we have seven reception centers, which find it difficult
to survive. Daniel Welzer-Lang set up the first of them in the 1980s. In the image of
pioneering initiatives taken in Canada—where men founded the White Ribbon movement
against male violence" "There is no typical profile", writes Daniel
Welzer-Lang. "Violence is not itself the problem, it is the symptom of a problem—domination—and
a leftover from barbarism".
Is male violence inevitable?
The psychotherapist Alain Legrand has
listened to and treated violent men for the last thirteen years. He does not feel that
male violence is inevitable. "It is the environment we grow up in that will determine
the kind of assault we will become. I have not met a single violent man who does not have
a psychological problem, but few of them are perverts in the strict sense", he
asserts. "In a violent man, when a situation becomes stressful, it revives a feeling
of loss of control and anxieties, usually relating back to scenes from his early
childhood, which assault him from inside".
Prevention would of course be the best
solution. "We should also be able to intervene when the relationships between the
parents and children are getting off to a bad start, with trained psychologists, in
maternity wards, with childminders, etc. We would have, for example, to provide widespread
education on violence for doctors, the police and the magistrates, and develop awareness
among politicians".
At the instigation of the Secretariat
d'Etat aux Droits des femmes, Office for the Rights of Women, the French government
launched, on the occasion of the National Conference on violence against women in January
2001, a largely interdependent plan of action, with a publicity campaign on the theme
" In case of violence, break the silence", the distribution of brochures to
professional people—policemen, gendarmes, social workers, health professionals—and
the reactivation of the regional committees against violence, which bring together, on the
ground, all the institutional and the community partners and which are coordinated by a
national committee.
The police is a particularly committed
partner, as is the national department of education whose campaign, launched in October
2001 against violence in schools, includes measures against sexual violence and sexism.
The report by Nicole Belloubet-Frier, on which it is based, stresses that girls at school
suffer "the contempt, the authority and the violence of boys, who look upon them as
something to be used".
Even if not all women are affected, sexual
violence dooms the efforts to achieve social equality between men and women to failure.
Text courtesy: Label France N-47, July
2002. Embassy of France, Kathmandu.
Youth Trends in Germany:
Models
Do our young people still have models?
Scarcely a day goes without some older gentlemen raising this question on talk shows. And
replying negatively, needless to say. Our world, they then grumble, and today's youth in
general, have no models. People have become individualistic, egoistic and egocentric, only
concerned about their own short-term interests and current desires. Is that really so? Or
to put it differently: Were things ever any different?
First we need to differentiate between
idols and models. An idol is what my grandmother called a heartthrob. In early puberty
this can be a cool boyfriend or an admiring girl friend, then a teenage star or a film or
pop hero of the kind generally considered fantastic by people between the ages of 20 and
25. The range is broad and even can be otherworldly: from smart looking boy groups girlie
bands to film stars and daring mountaineers to completely virtual figures like Lara Croft.
Pop culture produced idols like these off
the peg, out of a test-tube, so to speak. And they always conform to the same pattern and
the same marketing strategy, after all, a lot of money can be made with them. In Germany
at the moment, the most popular stars of this kind are multi-cultural—like NO Angels
or Bro'Sis, and are often the products of the so-called castings—for the simple
reason that they have to be "attractive" to many different groups of teenagers
and 20-year olds.. They can be just that little bit rebellious, as demonstrated by the
sprinkling of bad words in their lyrics and occasionally by their way-out clothes. On the
other hand, they convey an image of themselves as "altogether normal" –Britney
Spears, for example, plays a constant game with the "radically normal" motif—so
as to give the impression that any one could be like them. They also change more and more
quickly and so hold out that old promise: "You too could be famous overnight".
A Star of this kind is a model only insofar
as he or she represents a "role model". We would not like necessarily to
resemble the star exactly, but we would like to be admired, as beautiful, or simply as
famous. It is not so much the person of the star we are interested in as social role they
play. Star models are what the psychologists call "narcissistic projections": We
project our—admittedly—rather boring and average achievements and life-styles
onto someone who is in the limelight and leads a very exciting life. With a sigh, we allow
ourselves to be elevated in our mind's eye, and sometimes even become altogether ecstatic.
This phenomenon is neither new, nor different to in the past. It is also not just to be
found among young people. It emerged in the media culture of industrialism, and has
accelerated exponentially in our electronic mass culture, because the star and the idol
system penetrate every corner of the earth.
Models are something else. We expect
something more complexes of models. We want to learn from them, we want them to help us
expand our horizons, broaden our minds. We want to hear a message we never heard before.
In order to develop, we always require a strong personalized "beacon of change".
Mother Theresa, Christ, Buddha, Gandhi,
Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy, that is to sa, people who have become something
like "exemplary icons". At a later stage come the old heroes of pop music—the
classics, from Mick Jager to Paul McCartney. Or to put it another way, the heroes of the
older generation. And then the pope.
But other models do exist on a higher
level, as it were. In fact a model has only really "matured" when it has a
direct, concrete and active influence on our lives, and is not practicing self-sacrifice
far away in India, like mother Theresa. We are caught up in a network of possible
orientations, and more and more new "motivators" are constantly cropping up. We
should respect and acknowledge these, but not necessarily marvel at them. In a society
where life-long learning plays an integral role, our focus can no longer be on some
one-dimensional character type. Our models can and should assume the form of comperes,
scientists, sports people, philosophers, teachers, businessmen and indeed, now and then
even politicians. |
