The family and the private sphere

Reading this post over at Socialist Unity regarding the media frenzy towards Gary Glitter. It also made me think how the media says little when it is sexual abuse within the family (parallels here with domestic violence). But also why crimes happening within the “private sphere” are still hidden away and remain in the shadows. In that context, family  violence is pushed into the private sphere of the family. And the family replicates and reflects oppression and the power relationships that exist in patriarchal capitalist society. The powerless are scapegoated. And child abuse, similarly to domestic violence, is about power and control that also transcends social class.

Crime  can  be  seen  as  an public  phenomenon  and  that  bad things can  only  happen  to you  in  the outside  world.  The family  unit  is  seen  as  a  ‘safe  haven’.   Domestic  violence  and  child  abuse  are  events  which  occur  in  what  can  be  considered  the  privacy  of  the  home.  Gordon  argues in Heroes of Their Own Lives  that  defining what can be  described as  unacceptable violence  and  responding  to  it  depends  upon  political  moods  and  the  force  of  current political  movements.  She also  notes  that  it  was  the  women’s  rights  movement which  was  influential  in  exposing  and  confronting  family  violence  yet  when  the  movement  was  weak  concerns  seem  to  evaporate. 

The  family is defined  as this  ‘safe intimate world’ which  regulates itself. Challenges to these assumptions  came  with  the  second-wave  of  the  women’s  movement, where  feminists  gave  a  different  political interpretation  of  the  family.  A  primary  slogans  of  the  women’s  movement  was  the  ‘personal  is  the  political’  and  that  the  ‘safe  haven’  of  the  family  should  be  thrown  open  to  public scrutiny. Another feminist criticism of   the  family  is  that  it  is not  a harmonious  united  front but  an ideology  which reflects the power  relationships  and  inequalities  in society.

While domestic violence is recorded in the  British  Crime  Survey  (1996 and 1998)  and Government’s  women’s  unit  (1999) estimate  that  one in  four  women  experience  domestic  violence  at  some  point  in their  lives. In  contrast  child  abuse  is  not  recorded  in  victim  surveys.  In  1999 the National Society  for  the Prevention  of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC)  reported that  more  than  35,000  children  were  on  the  child  protection  registers  in  England  and  Wales.  A MORI  poll  conducted  for Channel  4  suggested  that  one  in  eight  girls  and one  in  twelve  boys  had  suffered  some  form  of  abuse  in  childhood.

This  shows  that  a  high  proportion  of  women  and  children  experience  forms  of  family  violence  not  fully  in the  public domain. There  may  be  laws  to  protect  women  and  children  from  violence  (examples  includes the  Children  Act  1989  and  the  Domestic  Violence  Act  2004)  but   to  accept  them  as  ‘ordinary  crimes’  would  seriously  expose  the  ideology of the family. The  continuing  tension  between  the  preservation  of  the  family and recognising the violence that occurs within it has changed and shifted over time.