Session 3: Battering, Trauma and Bystander Behaviour

Session 3: Battering, Trauma and Bystander Behaviour
Chair: Chantal Marie Cornut-Gentille

“An Insider’s Look” – A Phenomenological inquiry into the World of Battering Men and Battered Women
Dalit Yassour-Borchowitz and Eli Buchbinder
Head of Women and Gender Studies, Emek Yezreel College, Israel

In the course of our research and therapy we often seek to gain an understanding of violence from the “inside”, that is to say, how those involved articulate the violence and explain it to themselves. How do they experience their state in a violent setting – do they perceive themselves as victim or aggressor, or do they perhaps experience themselves in both states? What characterizes their emotional world and their perception of self? And in general terms, what is “their story”?
My talk proposes to introduce a number of key concepts designed to aid understanding the experience of violence as perceived by those who experience it, namely battering men and battered women. The concepts are based primarily on the phenomenological approach. The concepts I will address are: Language, Emotions and Intentionality.
In my talk I lean on research conducted by myself and others in accordance with the phenomenological tradition. Since the phenomenological approach is descriptive rather than argumentative, it provides an opportunity to understand complex situations that require a both/and approach and not only an either/or approach, hence its contribution to research and therapy in the field of domestic violence. The citations presented here were taken and adapted from various studies (some of which were conducted by myself and others in Israel, and others by a variety of researchers throughout the world) in order to illuminate and illustrate all that has been stated theoretically in a more personal and realistic manner.
The dialog with the inner world of battering men and battered women reveals the complexity of the human soul, which is not only “the head behind the striking hand” or “the emotion behind the suffering body”.

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Echoes of Trauma in Three Critical Trials
Fon L. Gordon
Department of History, University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida

This interdisciplinary paper suggests that racial violence was symbolic of the entanglement of love and violence in twentieth-century American culture; engages trauma theory to examine racial violence as a central category of analysis; and uses three critical trials in law, literature, and medicine. The trials include the State of Missouri v. Celia, a Slave (1855), Zora Neale Hurston’s “The Conscience of the Court,” published in 1950, and the State of Florida v. Ruby McCollum (1952). The essay examines race and gender in relation to the trauma of antebellum violence and the repetition of the wound in the era of the Cold War. All three cases are located within legal venues, mark the violence of miscegenation, and cite each woman as an outlaw figure.
Trauma studies examine the consequences of violence for survivors. Theorists Shoshana Felman and Cathy Caruth provide a framework for examination of racial violence in an American context as trauma and its centrality to modernity from the nineteenth century. Felman proposed a theory of legal repetition in historic trials constitutive of its traumatic content; the cross-legal nature of trial narratives and precedents; and the nexus of the legal and the political in the crisis of the trial. Caruth examined the ways in which texts of psychoanalysis, literature, and literary theory respond to traumatic experience. This paper suggests that these three trials are emblematic of the critical content of miscegenation: the entanglement of love and violence; and the paradox of miscegenation and citizenship.

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In response to evidence that bullying in schools persists in the presence of bystanders, this study sought to add to the existing knowledge about its reinforcing effects. The objectives of the study were to investigate non-intervention in bullying incidents by Year 8 high school students. The research was a multi-dimensional investigation of the emotional, cognitive and behavioural factors from the bystander’s perspective. In-depth and group interviews, participant observation, case studies and the input of a focus group of teachers formed the data collection. Students in Year 8 were chosen because this age group experiences the onset of adolescence where difficulties can readily arise, making them the most susceptible to bullying. (Pellegrini et al, 1999). Some of the students arrived at high school quite well educated about bullying, but what they said they would do in bullying situations did not translate into their actual behaviour.

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