The Montgomery Bus Boycott: The Lesser Told, Yet True Story

By Delica Storm

Most accounts of Rosa Parks tell a story that is much more simplistic than the reality of her arrest and the Montgomery Bus Boycott that followed. Many people have been taught that Rosa Parks was a tired African-American seamstress who sat in the white section of a Montgomery bus and refused to give up her seat to a white person. They know that she was arrested for her refusal. Most people are aware that, as a result, African-Americans in Montgomery stopped riding city buses for many months. The real story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott is much more complex.

In the 1950’s, the Southern United States had in place numerous Jim Crow laws. In 1863, after the Southern states (the Confederacy) lost the Civil War and slavery was abolished, many white citizens in Southern states wanted to find new ways to establish White supremacy. Southern states started to pass Jim Crow laws, which were laws that required, or at the very least allowed, the segregation of races. One of the first Jim Crow laws was passed in Florida, in 1887. The law required that railways provide separate accommodations on their trains for white and black riders. Homer Plessy, a Caucasian man who was one-eighth black, challenged a similar law that was passed in Louisiana, in the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson. The Supreme Court ruled that the segregation of races was constitutional, as long as the separate accommodations were equal. The precedent of “separate but equal” paved the way for the passing of many more Jim Crow laws. During the Montgomery Bus Boycott, nearly all Southern states, including Alabama, required the segregation of all schools, restaurants, transportation systems, and most other facilities. The accommodations may have been separate, but they were certainly not equal. 

Montgomery, Alabama, was well known for its harsh bus segregation laws. In Montgomery, it was required that the black passengers sit solely in the back rows and the white passengers sit solely in the front rows of the buses. However, that was not the only way that African-Americans were discriminated against on buses in Alabama. Jo Ann Robinson was an African-American and President of the Women’s Political Council, which was an organization of professional African-American women. In a letter to the mayor of Montgomery, she wrote, “There were several things the Council asked for: 1. A city law that would make it possible for Negroes to sit from back toward front, and Whites from front toward back until all the seats are taken. 2. That Negroes not be asked or forced to pay fare at front and go to the rear of the bus to enter. 3. That buses stop at every corner in residential sections occupied by Negroes as they do in communities where whites reside.” Along with needing to sit at the back of the bus, African-Americans were often required to pay their fare at the front of the bus and then to exit the bus and enter again at the rear. Also, buses would often not stop at every corner of African-American residential sections, although they would do so for white areas of Mongomery. That letter was written on May 21, 1954, well over a year before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. As well, it is also stated in the letter that, “There has been talk…of planning of city-wide boycott of buses.” Civil rights activists had been fighting the bus segregation laws for quite some time, and were even considering a bus boycott. However, before a bus boycott could be planned, there needed to be an event that could inspire people to protest.

On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks boarded a bus. Many people have the misconception that Rosa Parks sat in the white section, but that is not the case. Of the thirty-six seats on the bus, the ten front seats were designated for white people and the back twenty-six were designated for black people. Rosa Parks sat in one of the first dual seats of the black section that was immediately behind the white section. As the bus filled up, all of the seats in the white section became occupied. It is unknown if there were any vacant seats in the black section, but it is known that some white and some black people were standing. In order to accommodate for more of the white passengers, the bus driver asked the African-American passengers in the first row of the black section to give up their seats. Rosa Parks was among this group of passengers. The bus driver did have legal authority to expand the boundaries of the white section if there were not enough seats available for white passengers.

The three other African-American passengers moved back, but Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. The bus driver, J.F. Blake, contacted the police. Officers F.B. Day and D.W. Mixon responded to the complaint and arrested Rosa Parks. In the police report that was filed for her charge, the officers claimed that Rosa Parks was sitting in the white section. Although she was sitting in what was originally the black section, the bus driver extended the white section to Rosa Parks’ row. That meant she was technically sitting in a row assigned for white passengers, putting her in violation of Montgomery’s bus segregation laws. She was found guilty of her violation by the Recorder’s Court of the City of Montgomery, Alabama. She later appealed that court’s decision in the case, Rosa Parks v. City of Montgomery. Her appeal was unsuccessful as the Alabama Court of Appeals chose to uphold her charge.

People may wonder why Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. Rosa Parks, in her autobiography, wrote “People always say I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically…No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” Rosa Parks did not refuse to give up her seat because she was a tired old seamstress. She was person who was tired of being treated like a second-class citizen, who decided to stand up for herself.  Moreover, Rosa Parks was trained as a civil rights activist at the Highlander Folk School. Virginia Foster Durr, who was a white woman and a supporter of civil rights for African-Americans, wrote in her letter to the director of the Highlander Folk School and his wife, “When she (Rosa Parks) came back she was so happy and felt so liberated. She said the discrimination got worse and worse to bear after having, for the first time in her life, been free of it at Highlander…that had a lot to do with her daring to risk arrest as she is naturally a very quiet person although she has a strong sense of pride.”

When Rosa Parks was at Highlander, she experienced what it would be like if African-Americans and white people were equal and worked together for the greater good. After seeing what a better world it would be if things were like that everywhere, it must have been difficult to go back to being in a place where people were discriminated against just because of the colour of their skin.

 The day that Rosa Parks was found as guilty of her charge, December 5, 1955, was the first day of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In protest of the bus segregation laws in Montgomery, Alabama, thousands of African-Americans throughout the city did not ride the Montgomery buses that Monday. The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), whose president was the African-American Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, held its first meeting on the evening of the first day of the boycott. The African-American Reverend Ralph Abernathy was also involved with the MIA’s efforts to help lead the protest. In the thesis for his master’s degree, The Natural History of a Social Movement, Abernathy described how, at the first meeting of the MIA, “I was given instructions: one, to call off the protest, or two, if indicated, to continue the protest until the grievances were granted.” Originally, the bus boycott was meant to only be a “one-day protest.” At the first mass meeting of the MIA, they needed to decide whether or not to extend the boycott. The first day was very successful, and there was concern that they might fail if they continued to protest. The association decided to make their decision based on the size of the crowds at the first meeting. When King and Abernathy arrived at the local Baptist church where the meeting was being held, they discovered that seven-thousand people came to a meeting in a church that could not even accommodate one-thousand people. The applause and enthusiasm of the crowd made it easy to decide whether or not to continue the boycott. It was decided and announced at the meeting that the protest would continue.

As well, Rosa Parks was in attendance and made an appearance for the crowd at the first meeting of the MIA. Reverend Abernathy also stated in his master’s thesis, “Mrs. Rosa Parks was presented to the mass meeting because we wanted her to become symbolic of our protest movement.” In order to help make the bus boycott a success, they needed a symbol to inspire others to take a stand. Rosa Parks may not have been the first person who refused to give up their seat, but she was carefully chosen to represent the movement. On March 2, 1955, an African-American girl, named Claudette Colvin, also refused to give up her seat to a white person. However, she was pregnant out of wedlock and only fifteen years old at the time, which are possible reasons why she was not used as a symbol of the movement.

Rosa Parks was perhaps the best person they could have chosen to be symbolic of the bus boycott. When she refused to give up her seat, she was forty-two years old. She was also happily married to her husband Raymond Parks. Moreover, she had quite a bit of prior experience in civil rights activism. Rosa Parks was trained at the Highlander Folk School, as previously discussed, and she was also the secretary to the President of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP).

The bus boycott was very successful. The initial “one-day protest” lasted for over a year, continuing from December 5, 1955 until December 20, 1956. Bayard Rustin was an African-American civil activist, who advised Dr. King and supported the bus boycott. He wrote in his diary on February 24, 1956, “42 000 Negroes have not ridden the buses since December 5.” Bayard Rustin also discussed that, initially, African-Americans were transported to work by black taxi drivers. However, on the second day of the boycott, December 6, 1955, police began to arrest black taxi drivers for “conspiring to destroy the bus company.” As a result, African-Americans needed to find new alternative means of travel. Most black people participating in the boycott relied on carpooling. They would also, in some cases, hitch-hike. If they were a servant, the white housewives who employed them might have driven them. Many others walked. Rufus Lewis, who was the director of the carpool system, introduced Bayard Rustin to a man who walked seven miles every day and a man who walked fourteen miles every day, since the boycott began. The dedication and sacrifices that people made during the bus boycott show how much African-Americans wanted things to change.

  The majority of bus riders were African-American, which is why they usually had twenty-six seats assigned to them, whereas white people only had ten seats assigned for them. Because most bus riders were black, the bus boycott put great strain on the bus system of Montgomery. The pressure on the bus system encouraged the federal district court of Alabama to rule that the bus segregation laws in Montgomery violated the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed the equality of all men before the law, and was, thus, unconstitutional. The bus boycott still continued, though, as an appeal maintained the segregation laws after this court decision. Finally, on November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court decided to uphold the district court’s ruling. Bus segregation officially ended in Montgomery on December 20, 1956.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott certainly shows what can be achieved through non-violent protest. Through daily sacrifices and the respectful refusal of Rosa Parks, African-Americans ended bus segregation without becoming the enemy through violence. This thoughtful and, at points, complicated bus boycott gained momentum from the dream of equality. The Montgomery Bus Boycott did not spontaneously begin because of Rosa Parks, but was being considered throughout years of injustice and discrimination. In conclusion, the Montgomery Bus Boycott is much more complex than commonly thought, and ended in great success.

Intimate Terrorism vs. Common Partner Violence

Unit 7 of our course includes topics, such as Developmental Psychology, Personality Psychology, and Health Psychology. This post is meant to relate to this unit, so it seems a reasonably appropriate time to talk about how Intimate Partner Violence can occur and how these situations may develop. People can have more or less adaptive and functional personalities. Similarly, relationships can be functional and healthy for both members or not. Peoples’ genetics, their environment, and their experiences determine whether they develop to be healthy, happy, and productive. Relationships may also develop in ways that benefit each member’s well-being or they may develop in ways that are damaging to one or both members.

The history of research on IPV focused on the obviously tragic cases of one member (usually the female member experiencing multiple violent assaults from the other member (usually the male member). Although it always feels like we could provide more details and go deeper in our analysis, we have discussed this scenario to a reasonable extent in previous blog posts. Researchers refer to this kind of relationship as “intimate terrorism”. It’s clearly an important social problem that should be addressed through criminal justice and mental health efforts to modify the behaviour of the violent offenders. This problem also warrants aggressive efforts to help and protect victims. It’s obvious who the culprit is in this sort of scenario and who the victim is. Most of us can easily agree about who is to blame and who needs fixing versus who is the blameless one who made a very unfortunate choice when selecting a mate.  We’ll start with a discussion of how that sort of intimate partner violence often develops.

In other instances, violence may occur in intimate partner relationships, but deciding who the victim vs. who is the abuser (or whether there even is a victim or abuser) can be much less obvious. Researchers call this scenario “common couple violence”.  In such cases, both members of a couple engage in mild violence toward one another that rarely causes any serious injury. In this posting, we will also briefly discuss how that sort of IPV develops.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF “INTIMATE TERRORISM”

Controlling Behaviour in the Guise of Romance

For the sake of efficiency, we’ll focus on the more common scenario, involving a male partner becoming physically abusive to their female intimate partner. As a couple become involved, emotions and romance is high. The male partner may tend to call a lot and present gifts and wants to constantly get updated on what his female partner is doing and where she is. The female member will often experience all of this attention as evidence for how caring her partner is. Expressions of jealousy by the male member are common precursors to “intimate terrorism”, but tend to be interpreted as further evidence of how much he cares about his partner.

Mild Violence and Passionate Forgiveness

At some point, usually under some form of stress, the male member will slap or hit his female partner. This action will tend not to cause any injury and the male member will express remorse and beg for forgiveness. The female member will then often accept this apology and forgive. They might well have passionate sex as a sort of proof as to the continued strength of their commitment to one another. Perversely, sex following a violent act can serve as a positive reinforcement for that action, increasing the probability that the violence will occur again. Moreover, the arousal from fighting itself can be misinterpreted as sexual arousal, which can also feed sexual passion. This tendency for people to misinterpret the source of their arousal can also help to reinforce these violent acts.

Gradual Escalation in Severity and Frequency

Perhaps some amount of time will pass, but the male member engages in violence again. Gradually, perhaps over months or years, incidents accumulate and the violence becomes more severe, with incidents becoming increasingly frequent. The male members’ remorse for incidents become less intense and pleas for forgiveness become less urgent and energetic. The male member begins blaming the female member for the need to get violent with her. He starts to insult her verbally. It is a fairly common strategy for people to avoid guilty feelings for their actions by blaming their victim and thinking that their victim is somehow deserving of horrible treatment. At this point, rape and other forms of sexual violence are fairly common.

Sadly, the escalation of mild violence, such as slapping and pushing, to severe beating and rape may occur so gradually that neither member may be aware of the emerging pattern until it becomes extreme and even life-threatening. Unfortunately, it is even common for the female member to only think about individual incidents and to blame herself by searching for and generating an explanation for individual incidents without considered the overall pattern of abuse that, when considered together, would clearly reveal that they are being victimized by a sick and abusive partner. Also, out of embarrassment from being regularly abused by her partner, the female member may often hide the abuse she is experiencing and socially isolate herself to avoid others discovering her situation.

The male member in this type of abusive relationship will tend to be very moody and controlling, constantly needing to monitor her behaviour. He will have problems with self-control and may even be prone to cheating, which can partly account for the tendency for such “intimate terrorists” to be very distrustful of their female partner. Thus, the male partner’s seeming romantic behaviour from early in their relationship becomes revealed as what it truly was: efforts at oppression and a jealous guarding of the female partner against the possibility that she might find another man and leave.

Full-Blown Intimate Terrorism

Ultimately, violence by the male member against his female partner becomes commonplace. The male member holds a contradictory disgust for his female partner and a compulsion to control her every action. Violent outbursts occur whenever the male perceives his totality of control to be under threat. If they have children, the male partner’s violence extends to them, as well. Verbal abuse is chronic, both when the couple is alone or around others, and there is devastation to female member’s self-esteem because of the constant verbal insults and physical attacks. In the female member’s mind, the abuse comes to serve as evidence of her own worthlessness, further reinforced by the male partner’s constantly expressing the opinion that she has nowhere else to go and nobody else would ever love her. Efforts to fight back against her stronger male partner will be ineffective and will tend only to worsen the severity of his attacks.

When their relationship becomes this bad, women may seek help from police or protection from a women’s shelter out of understandable fear for their own life or for the safety of their children. However, even when women victims of such intimate terrorism seek help, they frequently return to their abusive partner. Sometimes this decision to return occurs out of love for her abusive male partner and an honest desire to try to help and change him. In other cases, it is a response to the male partner’s threats to cause harm to people the woman loves, such as her children or other family members, if she does not return.

WHY DO THESE TERRORIZED WOMEN STAY?

1. LOVE for their partner, despite the violence.

2. LONELINESS and a belief that they won’t be able find someone else.

3. A FEAR OF TRYING TO GO IT ALONE and being unable to survive on one's own because of low self-esteem or lack of money.

4. A FEAR OF THE VIOLENCE GETTING WORSE for herself or other loved ones if she does not stay in the relationship.

5. A PESSIMISTIC BELIEF that a different partner will be as likely to be abusive as their current abusive partner. (This belief is perhaps common amongst women who have experienced abuse from their parents during childhood. If violence is a theme in one’s life, is there any reason to expect less violence when picking a different romantic partner? The answer is, obviously, YES (!), but it is understandable why someone’s sad history would make them pessimistic.)

WHAT ABOUT WHEN THESE WOMEN LEAVE?

Many women do leave their abusive partners and that tends to be the only way to stop the violence they experience at the hands of their intimate partners. That is, once violence is an established feature of an intimate relationship, it tends to persist as long as the relationship continues. Leaving tends to require the woman’s belief that her prospects will be better leaving than staying. Note that it is belief that is critical in this decision, not reality. People can believe that they are better off in any number of ways by staying with an abusive partner, but that belief doesn’t need to have any basis in truth and often doesn’t for women who have lowered self-esteem from the abuse they’ve experienced and who feel ashamed and blame themselves for ending up with an abusive partner. Sadly, the violence itself can provide other reasons for the woman to believe that her prospects are not better outside of the relationship, as the male member uses it to make it difficult for the female member to acquire skills through education or to prevent them from finding or keeping a job.

The reality of this “intimate terrorism” is all very upsetting to write about, people, and it’s probably not all that pleasant to read about. What it amounts to is a sort of slavery that destroys both members of a partnership. One member finds themselves in the role of slave, with all of the feelings of worthlessness, constant state of fear, and mental and physical health problems that goes along with being someone’s slave. The other member finds themselves a slave-owner, who succeeds in gaining almost total control over the individual they started out deeply in love with. Ironically, their success in achieving total control destroys all aspects of their partner that was the source of their initial passion for them, in the first place. Their natural tendency to seek justification for their own brutality also requires an active development of disgust and loathing for the person that they insist on controlling through violence, threats, and verbal abuse. In making their partner into a slave, they only have two options. The abuser must view himself as a worthless monster or must consider his partner worthless and undeserving of personal safety or freedom. In the end, he has made both himself and his female partner wretchedly miserable and, in almost all cases, the only cure for either of them is to end the relationship.

COMMON PARTNER VIOLENCE

As research on IPV has developed, it has become clear that, sometimes, women can also be violent members of intimate partnerships and not simply in reaction to violent assaults by their male partners.

By the 1980s, research on violence within intimate relationships made it necessary to recognize that sometimes violence is mutual and about equal severity within intimate partnerships. For example, a study by Straus, Gelles, and Steinmetz (1980) revealed that 27% of men report experiencing violence at the hands of their female partners, whereas only 24% of women report experiencing violence from their male partners. Anderson (2002) reported that 10% of couples reported violence occurring within their relationship during the previous year. In 2% of couples, only the woman was violent, in 1% of the couples only the man was violent, and in 7% of couples, both were violent. Frieze (2005) found that 18% of couples report violence within their relationship (4% claimed that both sides were severely violent toward one another and 5% reported that both sides were violent with one another at a low level. More men than women reported that their partner was the only violent one and more women than men reported that they were the only violent one.)

We urge some caution in interpreting these results, since violence appears to be more equal for men and women when surveys inquire about violence, in general. Surveys that orient people to criminal-level violence tend to focus them on more severe forms of assault. Those kinds of surveys reveal male intimate partners to be more prone to violent attacks than female ones. For example, with a survey focusing more on criminal behaviour, including questions about sexual assault, stalking, as well as physical assault, Tjaden and Thoennes (1998) found that 22% of women reported being assaulted by their male intimate partner at least once, whereas only 7% of men reported being assaulted by their female intimate partner at least once. Moreover, a careful analysis of violence occurring within intimate partnerships consistently reveals that, when it does occur, violence by males against their female partner is more severe and more likely to result in injury and death than violence by females against males. To illustrate, Archer (2000) did find more acts of physical aggression by women against their male partners than the reverse, but also reported that women received more injuries than men.

In any case, the point is that women can also be violent in their relationships and, when violence is a component of intimate partnerships, it is frequently mutually engaged in by both members. In general, people do tend to value reciprocity, meaning that a great predictor as to whether one member of a partnership will act violently toward another is whether their partner has acted violently toward them. It is the case that the intimate terrorism form of IPV described above is less common than often less severe, more mutual forms of IPV that fall under the heading of “Common Partner Violence”. The most common forms of this kind of IPV involve a tendency for each member of the couple to slap, hit, or throw things at one another. These sorts of violent altercations result in injuries relatively rarely and, when injuries do occur, they tend to be accidental. It isn’t exactly pretty. These are dramatic and passionate fights in which both members behave aggressively. However, neither member possesses any serious objective to cause their partner permanent harm. Nevertheless, average differences size and strength between men and women mean that women are more likely to get injured when these incidents occur. Consumption of alcohol is a very typical factor in stimulating these sorts of fights between lovers.

WHY DO COUPLES TRY TO HURT ONE ANOTHER?

1. STRESS and ALCOHOL use make people less able to inhibit their violent tendencies, so they respond more aggressively to things about their partner that offend or irritate them. Researchers have observed that couples with more children (which results in more financial and other forms of stress) and who regularly consume more alcohol are more likely to be violently aggressive with one another.

2. Mutual violence often reflects a part of a broader competition by members of a couple to try to gainCONTROL over one another. It’s all part of a power struggle that tends to occur within couples who are unskilled at expressing themselves in other ways, such as verbally.

3. When both members of a couple value their PERSONAL FREEDOM, there is a greater chance of each member engaging in violence toward the other. Two independent-minded people in a relationship will tend to fight more and that fighting will be more likely to become violent. 

4. JEALOUSY is a common motive for mutual violence within couples, such as when one member flirts with someone.

5. Some people have ATTITUDES ABOUT PHYSICAL AGGRESSION that cause them to be more willing to engage in violent acts. In particular, they may have the idea that such acts provide proof of a passionate love for their partner. Although the attitude may seem strange to us and to many of our readers, couples may slap each other and throw things at one another as a sort of evidence of their strong feelings for one another. Such differences in, let’s say, cultural attitudes toward violence plays a role in determining whether milder forms of mutual violence will occur within couples. Also, in surveys, people tend to consider violence by women toward men as more acceptable than the reverse (Slep, Cascardi, Avery-Leaf, & O’Leary, 2001). Such attitudes may account for why, when considering all forms of violence, regardless as to the severity or whether the violence resulted in injury, both men and women report that more violent acts are committed by women against their male partners than the reverse.

6. When members of a couple FEEL THAT THEIR PARTNER HAS A LOW OPINION OF THEM, they are more likely to engage in violence toward their partner, particularly when their partner expresses moodiness or irritability.

7. Some people are more naturally PRONE TO VIOLENCE than others. For example, women who are violent generally are also more likely to be violent within their intimate relationships (White & Humphrey, 1994)

8. Men and women who VIEW GENDER ROLES AS ADVERSARIAL (e.g., perceiving men and women as forming separate groups that are in opposition to one another) tend to be more violent in their intimate relationships.

9. YOUNGER COUPLES tend to be more violent than older couples.

10. Some members of couples report engaging in low-level, mutual violence because it is SEXUALLY EXCITING. The results of some studies suggest that couples involved in these milder, mutually violent relationships have sex more often than those in relationships with no violence at all (DeMaris, 1997). Other research observed no difference in relationship satisfaction between marriages with low levels of violence and marriages with no violence (Lawrence & Bradbury, 2001).  

REFERENCES

We are grateful for this outstanding resource:

Frieze, I. H. (2005). Hurting the one you love: Violence in Relationships. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

We have relied heavily on this book when putting together this blog post. We highly recommend this book for anyone interested learning more about IPV, specifically, or the causes and consequences of violence, more generally.

Archer, J. (2000). Sex differences in aggression between heterosexual partners: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 651-680.

DeMaris, A. (1997). Elevated sexual activity in violent marriages: Hypersexuality or sexual extortion?Journal of Sex Research, 34, 361-373.

Lawrence, E., & Bradbury, T. N. (2001). Physical aggression and marital dysfunction: A longitudinal analysis. Journal of Family Psychology, 15, 135-154.

Slep, A. M. S., Cascardi, M., Avery-Leaf, S., & O’Leary, K. D. (2001). Two new measures of attitudes about the acceptability of teen dating aggression. Psychological Assessment, 13, 306-318.

Straus, M. A., Gelles, R. J., & Steinmetz, S. K. (1980). Behind closed doors: Violence in the American Family. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Tjaden, P., & Thoennes, N. (1998). Prevalence, incidence, and consequences of violence against women: Findings from the National Violence Against Women survey. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice.

White, J. W., & Humphrey, J. A. (1994). Women’s aggression in heterosexual conflicts. Aggressive Behaviour, 20, 105-202.

Civil Rights History Lesson by Delica Storm

Here is Delica's thinklink about a tragic setback for civil rights in the U. S. Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson:

http://www.thinglink.com/scene/348309369089163266#tlsite

These Books

I was one of many people across the U of Manitoba community who received an email last week from the official University of Manitoba newspaper, The Bulletin, requesting a short comment about up to 10 books that have influenced me. They heard I love to read books or something, which is only kind of true. I love watching TV and I read books to change things up a bit and to have something to do when nothing is on TV. I think that I'd be better suited to writing a commentary on the sit-coms that have had an impact on my life.

The prescribed word limit for this assignment was no more than 100 words. I don't think that I can possibly write (or say) anything in less than 100 words. It's probably a disorder or a symptom of some disorder that I have, but I haven't gotten around to diagnosing it. Plus, I'm not qualified to diagnosed disorders. I'm not that kind of psychologist, people!

Well, I gave it a try and promptly generated a 700 word document. I think they might accept something as high as 250 words in length, so I have prepared an alternative version that length. I don't like it, but it doesn't matter. If my comments appear in The Bulletin at all, they will be in the form of that butchered version. That's ok, because I can post the whole thing here for everyone's reading pleasure/displeasure/neutral reaction.


The books that have identified as influencing me vary in their reputation as great works of literature. Selfishly and to save time, I prefer to describe why a few of these books have been impactful for me, rather than provide a proper description of their narratives. When I was about 12, I read a series by Lloyd Alexander about an Assistant Pig-Keeper who grew up to save the world. This theme is common in children’s literature (see also J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Roald Dahl’s Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, along with most others from his menu). It is important for people who feel small and are small to imagine themselves capable of greater significance. 

In adulthood, the two books that have been most impactful are Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland and Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut. Among other important things, Slaughterhouse 5 is about someone who has become unstuck in time. As a memory researcher, I consider being unstuck in time as a good way to think about all of us, since our past is always influencing our actions and because recollections of the past so frequently invade the present. Girlfriend in a Coma is a rich illustration as to how global civilization has progressed to ensure that events anywhere in the world will invade the more immediate world that we inhabit. In other words, we have all become unstuck in space, too. Of course, physically, we are all also tied in various ways. The challenge of being both bound and unbound is what binds these three selections together. Age and circumstance, time and space, our personalities, our experiences, are factors that restrict people. Progress in technology has also broadened our psychological limits, in terms of the legitimate possibilities we can envision. Hypothetically, we could learn more, do more, apprehend more, and imagine ourselves to be more and more, yet our physical limitations remain to infuriate us. These books have pointed me to a fundamental challenge that people face. How can we navigate all of the forces that free us and reconcile them with all of the forces that bind us? What are the psychological consequences of near limitless possibilities co-existing with the annoying constraints that reality imposes on people? What are the consequences for how people behave? I’m a psychologist, so I’m pretty interested in that sort of thing.

To add another wrinkle, people aren’t all that well equipped to determine, realistically, what binds them, what their best opportunities are, and what they should do with their opportunities. The challenge is imposed on us by limits to our perceptual abilities, so it is quite possible for us to get all of these important concerns partially, or even completely, wrong. When things get very complicated, people are flawed at sorting out truth from what merely appears to be true, but isn't. Two series of books reveal this problem very clearly. I read a number of L. Frank Baum’s Oz series in childhood and, later, Gregory Maguire’s alternative perspective on Ozian events in his Wicked series. The contrast of those two accounts of Oz’s history provides a terrific fictional demonstration as to how reality is a matter of perspective and how it can be so much darker than it appears in some instances and so much brighter than it appears in others. Careful reflection and a more thorough analysis might just reveal a witch to be a hero and a hero to be a villain. On this point, I would also add Robertson Davies’ World of Wonders to my list. This novel represents one-third of his Cornish trilogy. The narrative highlights the nastier realities that can lie behind a beautiful or sensational façade. In this case, the context is show business in the form of travelling carnival and theatre troops. Through all of these books, I have gained an appreciation for how we can expect life to contain an unpredictable and fluid mixture of frequent wonders, sometimes horrors, and an abundance of unkempt, gritty, tedious mediocrity. Sometimes you can get all of those things at the same time. Combined, all of these works have helped convinced me to accept all of the above realities and to try very hard and very persistently to have a sense of humour about it all.


No, wait. Those are all things I learned doing home renovations. They're pretty good books though. Go check them out, if you haven't already.

The Problem of Intimate Partner Domestic Violence

Like many topics, domestic violence is not easy to write about or read about, mainly because most humans tend to feel bad when they learn about others’ painful experiences. That bad feeling is called empathy. Empathy involves experiencing, to some degree, someone else’s thoughts and/or feelings. If you’ve ever been moved by a character’s tragic or heart-wrenching experience while watching a movie or reading a book, that’s empathy. People vary on their tendency to experience empathy. For example, one of the signature traits of people with Antisocial Personality Disorder (people who are more popularly called psychopaths or sociopaths) is the incapacity to experience empathy.

Even people who have fully functioning empathy mechanisms can avoid such uncomfortable feelings in several ways. One way is active avoidance of knowledge about other peoples’ pain and perspective. A person can’t feel empathy if they don’t expose themselves to information having to do with other peoples’ painful experiences. Also, a person won’t feel much empathy if they decide to view someone else’s pain as well-deserved. Painful feelings of empathy can be halted by the (often unfair and cruel) tendency for people to blame victims for the horrible event or events that have happened to them. That way, victims of abuse get doubly-victimized: once from the assault they experienced and again through people’s lack of compassion and tendency to consider the victim as having “had it coming to them”. Victim-blamers get to sidestep their own fears and the sad feelings that come from empathy by interpreting tragedies that others experience as due to some defect in people who have been victimized.

A psychologist does not have the luxury of managing their own emotional reactions by ignoring other peoples’ pain or dismissing it as somehow deserved or exaggerated. A scientist of human behaviour could choose to only study the sweetness of humans, but they’ll be left with a very incomplete understanding of what humanity is all about. Psychology is the SCIENCE of human thoughts, emotions, and behaviour. To be fully competent, a psychologist must face the dark side of the human experience head-on, and must disengage whatever mechanisms reside within them that would otherwise make them feel better and safer about the horrible things that do happen to people on a daily basis. At the same time, psychologists must be concerned about their own compassion for victims of crime and abuse distorting their conclusions about the nature and motives of criminals, abuse perpetrators, and their victims. (For example, in defense of victims, it is possible to oversimplify abusers as just evil people. Doing so makes it more difficult to understand what causes a person to be an abuser, in the first place. Understanding that can have the useful consequence of making it possible to help abusers stop abusing people or it might help in the development of strategies to prevent people from becoming abusers before they start.) To be legitimately scientific about issues that naturally generate strong emotions, psychologists must be objective and must try, as much as possible, to base conclusions on facts; to not go very far beyond what is known to be true when generating theories about humanity. The main purpose of these posts is to give you a taste of the knowledge that psychology can contribute to making sense about a difficult, but also an extraordinarily traumatizing and costly social problem.

When some psychologist is interested in researching a topic, they need to narrow things down a bit. Suppose our main interest is in understanding the nature, causes, and consequences of violent behaviour engaged in by humans. That topic is might be too large to make any progress with, given limits on time and money. We’ve chosen to focus on domestic violence, so that emphasis eliminates acts of violent aggression engaged in by armies, street gangs, schoolyard bullies, etc. Those are all important social concerns, but we and our readers don’t have the time to deal with all of that, right now. Even the topic of domestic violence might be too big and complicated, since researchers publish thousands of research articles on the different facets of domestic violence, each year. (Part of the challenge of conducting research in an area of psychology is getting up-to-speed on what is already known and what sorts of studies have already been done.) Consequently, we’ve decided to orient mainly to intimate partner violence, which eliminates the need to thoroughly investigate the vast amount of published research on domestic violence involving the abuse of children. Can you see how painful psychological research can be? Do you feel any empathy for the psychologist who must, for practical purposes, set aside investigating the very alarming and real problem of child abuse to get a better handle on intimate partner abuse? (If it makes you feel better, reader, the pain of studying one important thing and not another is not all that comparable to the trauma of experiencing domestic violence, so don’t feel too bad.)

Stubbs and Fife (2012, p. 51) describe Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) as a “public health epidemic”. Both men and women can be victims of IPV, but an estimated 85% of IPV involves abuse of women by men. For example, in Canada 83% of spousal assaults involve attacks on women by men (Statistics Canada, 2009). There are many instances in which people assume the existence of gender differences that are actually non-existent or too small to have much practical relevance; this is not one of those instances. Risk factors for women include being unmarried, younger than 35 years old, and having an annual income of less than $15,000. These factors only somewhat elevate the risk. IPV is something that women may experience, regardless as to their marital status, age, or income. In the United States, about 5 million women are assaulted by their intimate partners each year. Intimate partner assaults directly result in the death of 17,000 people each year in the United States, and most of those people are women. To put the homicide aspect in perspective, 1/3 of female victims of homicide in the United States are murdered by their intimate partners. The cost of these assaults is financial for society, in addition to causing extraordinary physical and emotional harm to the victim of IPV. IPV-related medical and mental health treatment costs more than $4 million, annually, in the United States and costs victims of IPV (and the companies they work for) a total of approximately 8 million lost work days per year (Stubbs & Fife, 2012).

As for Canada, with 40,200 incidents in 2007, spousal violence was responsible for 12% of all police-reported violent crime. Four times as many women (51) than men (14) were killed by a current or former spouse (Statistics Canada, 2009).  

In subsequent posts, we will discuss the nature, causes, and consequences of Intimate Partner Violence from the various perspectives that psychology provides, beginning with the neuropsychological perspective.

References

Family violence in Canada: A statistical profile. (2009). Statistics Canada: Canada's national statistical agency / Statistique Canada : Organisme statistique national du Canada. Retrieved July 17, 2012, from http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-224-x/85-224-x2009000-eng.pdf.

Stubbs, D., & Fife, R. S. (2012). Intimate partner violence. In R. S. Fife & S. B. Schrager (Eds.), Family violence: What health care providers need to know. Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.

A Biological Perspective on Intimate Partner Violence

From the perspective of practically every psychological scientist, human thoughts, experiences, and behaviours derive from the human nervous system. The structure of the human nervous system, itself, depends on the genetics that each person acquires from their parents and the experiences they have. Our brains consist of millions of neurons and the moment-to-moment electrical activity of those neurons is roughly equivalent to everything we are and controls everything that we think and do. In that way, all of psychology adopts a biological perspective, but a researchers’ emphasis might be at a level that is either very close or somewhat at a distance from the actual biological processes that determine who we are and what we do. Biological psychologists stay closely oriented to the genetic and neurological processes that underlie human experience and behaviour, so we may as well begin there with our series of discussions on IPV. It is also a convenient place to start, since our PSYC 1200 course begins with an overview of the human nervous system, after some introductory discussion about what psychology is, psychology’s history, and the sorts of research methods that psychologists rely upon.

A common approach to violence, whether intimate partner violence or otherwise, is to conceive of a tendency to engage in violent behaviour as reflecting a neurological defect. For instance, many psychological problems, such as depression and anxiety, can be understood as emerging from imbalances in the chemical composition of the brain. A neuron may stimulate the firing of another neuron (or it may inhibit the firing of another neuron) by releasing chemicals, called neurotransmitters, into the gap between the axon of one neuron and the dendrite of another. That way, the availability of one or more neurotransmitters determines how the brain functions. Too little or too much of a certain neurotransmitter in a person’s brain may disrupt that person’s mental processes and their behaviour. Consuming drugs, like cocaine, marijuana or Prozac, influence experience and behaviour by changing the amount of neurotransmitters that are available to stimulate neural impulses in a person’s brain. Perhaps IPV could be explained by structural defects or chemical imbalances in a person’s brain? Unfortunately, this approach has led to some overly aggressive treatments to control the behaviour of people who are prone to violent outbursts. Several decades ago, efforts to “cure” people with violent tendencies included electroconvulsive shock therapy (sessions in which a person has an electric current passed through their brain, Eller, 2006).

The rather simplistic (and incorrect) theory that motivated electroconvulsive shock therapy was that problems with the functioning of the brain could be fixed by the ordered electrical impulses provided by a community’s electrical power grid. Another approach was to sever certain parts of the brain from other parts or cut out other parts of the brain entirely. For example, a common treatment for those prone to violence and other erratic behaviour was to sever the frontal lobes of the brain from the rest of the brain. This procedure was called a “frontal lobotomy”. The procedure succeeded in eliminating violent behaviours, but mainly because it reduced a person’s tendency to engage in any behaviour at all (Eller, 2006).

The early days of psychology are filled with very stupid ideas and the reckless application of unverified theories, which often caused much more severe problems for people than they fixed. Unfortunately, in the name of psychology, there are people who still apply idiotic theories that have no scientific merit, causing a great deal of harm to people in the process. One of the biggest problems humans face, including some scientists who are meant to know better, is that we can develop strong beliefs in the absence of any scientific evidence and then act as though those beliefs are absolutely true. Acting as though false things are true, even when a person has the best of intentions, can be an extraordinary waste of time, money, and human lives. As just one example, quite a few depressed stay-at-home mothers and even some highly energetic children were given frontal lobotomies as a supposed cure, but the main outcome for them was permanently disabling brain damage.

There are people who do appear to have such dysfunctional brains that it makes them violent and neurological defects may explain some of the instances of IPV that occur. At the moment, treatment for people who are prone to violent outbursts involves prescription of medications, such as antipsychotics, that block receptors in the brain that receive the neurotransmitter, Dopamine. To make a long story short, dopamine pathways in the brain play an important role in mental stimulation and aggressive behaviours, such as violent actions. However, antipsychotics are mainly used to treat people with a severe mental disorder, such as schizophrenia, for which violent actions are quite indiscriminate. Intimate partner violence, most often, is not indiscriminate. The violence is focused on one individual, and it’s quite personal. People who engage in IPV are frequently not violent toward people, in general. Their violence tends to be aimed primarily at the people closest to them, which will naturally include their intimate partner. Although all of human psychology originates from the activity of the brain, in most cases it is not sensible to seek a neurological defect for the cause of IPV. Instead, it is more likely that IPV emerges from neurological processes that are, sadly, quite normal in humans. From that point of view, the evolution of humans as a species may have incorporated a natural tendency toward IPV, supposing that there exists a certain combination of environmental conditions. Those who are most likely to adopt that kind of perspective call themselves Evolutionary Psychologists, which is actually a sub-category of biological psychologists, who emphasize the role of inherited, genetic influences on human psychology (Eller, 2006).

Evolutionary psychologists may address the question of IPV by pointing out that violence is a prominent component of the behaviour of many species, and humans are just another species that has a tendency to engage in violence. The prevalence of violence throughout nature suggests that the tendency to be violent is something that we have inherited from our ancestors because it must have served them some useful purpose. Many thousands of years ago, the capacity to engage in violence must have made our ancestors more successful at surviving and reproducing, thereby allowing them to ensure that their genes would get transmitted inside of all of us, all the way into 2012. Hunting is a form of violence and that capacity has had obvious benefits for us and our ancestors, not to mention all of the other species that rely on hunting. Being able to fight when threatened is a form of violence and one that is quite useful for members of a species who would prefer to survive an encounter with a predator or an assailant. When a person wants something that some other person has, there is always the option of taking it by force, which is clearly something that would have provided our ancestors with a competitive advantage. Murder has been observed in many nonhuman species from insects to birds to nonhuman primates, like macaques (Eller, 2006). A capacity for violence should probably be thought of as something that exists within each of us as biological organisms, rather than as something that could only emerge from a diseased mind. All of us can quite naturally be violent and simply await the conditions that stimulate that kind of reaction from us. But, why is violence against intimate partners such a common form of violence in humans and why are men so much more likely engage in that kind of violence?

In response to those questions, someone could argue that a tendency to be aggressive depends on the amount of testosterone in a person’s system and, in humans, men have higher levels of testosterone than females. The problem with that response is that it doesn’t explain WHY men almost always tend to have more testosterone than women. The source of that difference in hormone level is ultimately genetic, which means that human males evolved to have more testosterone than human women for some reason having to do with it being more important for males’ success at reproducing than it is for females’ success at reproducing. The driving force behind human biological traits and those of all other species on the planet is “reproductive fitness”. The more offspring that a member of a species can produce that are in good enough shape to survive and reproduce on their own, the more likely it is that the genes possessed by that member will be represented in future generations of the species.

 (To anticipate that certain folks will have a pre-existing, strong dislike for the “Evolution by Natural Selection” approach to biology, the reader might expect us to say something as a hedge, like, “from the evolutionary perspective, reproductive fitness is what matters”. We won’t be doing that because our course is about a science and the science of psychology presumes that humans and all other species on Earth appeared on the scene gradually over the course of millions of years, with the traits of species determined by their capacity to allow members of the species to reproduce more than other members of the same species. These are the guiding principles that nearly all scientists have used for many decades to understand the biological species that exist on Earth. To entertain any alternatives would be intellectually dishonest of us and would be nothing more than cheap pandering. Traits inherited genetically through the process of evolution may only get us so far in understanding humans. There's also experiences and a person's environment to consider. However, there is, by now, no doubt in the minds of scientists that understanding humans requires understanding the evolutionary processes that gave us the DNA that we all have in common.)

An evolutionary psychologist would explain gender differences in violent behaviour with reference to how the capacity to be violent provides greater reproductive benefits for male than for female humans. The idea is that the reproductive success of females is more or less the same, whether or not they engage in violent behaviour. Female humans can only have so many children, anyway, since it demands so much time and energy for women to develop children inside of them and then take care of them after they are born. In the environment we all evolved from, if a woman was physically capable of reproducing, securing enough mating partners to achieve success at reproduction is very easy. By contrast, for male humans, there is virtually no limit to the number of children they could (theoretically) father. The only required cost of producing a child, from a males’ perspective, is one tiny sperm and contributing that doesn’t really take very long. For a woman, the required cost of producing a child is an egg, sustaining the developing baby for many months, facing the health risks associated with giving birth to a child, nursing, ensuring her infant’s and her own survival needs during those very vulnerable years as the child grows and slowly becomes able to be more independent, and so on.

In the primitive world we evolved in, although the sky was the limit for males, as far as reproduction went, the downside was that it was quite possible for only a few males to monopolize all of the females, leaving the rest of the males with no mating and reproduction opportunities. This situation is common in primate species, such as gorillas, in which one alpha male can dominate all of the other males and serve as the primary mate for all of the females in the group. An alpha gorilla doesn’t get to mate with all of the female gorillas by being polite. He earns that right by being the strongest and most viciously frightening gorilla. Violence maintains his high status and this kind of desperate competition for women to mate with was also the context in which human males evolved. Among humans, males tend to be more violent than females because being violent provided men with a major reproductive advantage over other men. It is understandable why men are so much more likely to fight and kill one another than women are. Historically, about two-thirds of all murders in the United States are committed by men against other men (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2012). Even now, competition is fierce and, from the evolutionary psychology perspective, the ultimate goal for men, generally speaking, is to defeat other men for access to female mates. Evolutionarily speaking, women represent the reproductive resources that males need to transmit their genes. Once a man has attracted a woman to mate with, control over that resource is a priority and violence is one tool that a man may use to maintain that control.

There is an unease that naturally emerges when describing this evolutionary approach to understanding IPV. If such a proneness to violence embedded within the male DNA, what can we do about it? Fortunately, humans are much too sophisticated to be ruled completely by these inherited traits. Our evolutionary past means that men face a challenge that women do not face to the same degree and they must deliberately work to overcome it. Failure to overcome it risks their causing physical harm or even death to the people closest to them. The challenge for men is to overcome the tendency that evolution has instilled in them to treat women as property and to conceive of a woman’s role as to serve merely as receptacles for reproduction. A person’s experiences and social context can either facilitate the worst and most destructive parts of us humans that we have inherited from our ancestors or it can cause those traits to remain dark, primitive parts of us that we never express. A place like Canada has many mechanisms that tend to discourage IPV, relative to what humans would be likely to experience in the ancient world in which we evolved. We have a list of official crimes and punishments for those crimes that make it risky for people to violently attack their intimate partners. There are less formal risks involved, as well. We are a society that generally (or should we say “kind of”) abhors violence and many of us would shun a person for engaging in IPV.

In part, these restraints emerge from historically quite novel cultural values that favour gender equality over the more traditional view of women as property and as inherently inferior. (As one of hundreds of historical examples we may have chosen, the North Carolina Supreme Court dismissed a complaint against a certain Mr. Black for assaulting his wife in 1964 even though they were separated at the time, on grounds that “a husband is responsible for the acts of the wife, and he is required to govern his household, and for that purpose the law permits him to use towards his wife such a degree of force as necessary…” (Klein, 2004). Note that the amount of force deemed necessary tended to be left entirely up to the husband, making every male head of household his own sort of totalitarian dictator. We should be grateful to some of our most recent ancestors for dismissing these ideas and pulling us all out of the mud. The problem is that the genes remain and they support a persistence of gender discrimination and a persistent willingness by a fair number of men (not the majority, but a sizeable minority) to use violence to control “their woman”. To be fair, there is some much smaller group of women who have the same notions about “their men”. An interest in having power over others, and a willingness to use violence to maintain that power, is not exclusive to men.

Neither biological nor evolutionary psychology can provide much guidance in addressing this social problem, because they merely explain why humans are capable of violence and why some men (and even some women) will be violent toward their intimate partners. It is clear that most people can be encouraged to suppress whatever violent urges they might experience. Luckily, most people don’t assault their intimate partners, despite what their genes might encourage. That’s encouraging and suggests that a person’s experiences can be constructed in a way that will make them very unlikely to act violently toward their loved ones. Perhaps there are experiences that a person can have that would override the tendency to think about the world in a way that encourages violent action toward an intimate partner, such as viewing an intimate partner as property to be controlled by any means necessary? How experiences determine an individual’s behaviour is the primary emphasis of the Behaviorist approach to psychology, whereas the investigation of mental processes and how they guide human behaviour is the main focus of the Cognitive Psychology perspective. Those two approaches will provide the basis for our next two posts on IPV.  

References:

Klein, A. R. (2004). The criminal justice response to domestic violence. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson.

Eller, J. D. (2006). Violence and culture: a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach. Southbank, Victoria, Australia: Thomson/Wadsworth.

The Role of Learning in Intimate Partner Violence

Unit 4 of our PSYC 1200 course covers Principle of Learning and Variations in Consciousness. In this post, we will try to describe how the causes and consequences of IPV arise from known principles of learning, although learning may combine with genetic influences to cause individuals to act violently toward intimate partners. 

(Behavioural Genetics is a scientific field founded on the idea that genetic factors can make a person more or less prone to engage in certain behaviours, such as violent assaults, but that a person's experiences also help to determine whether these genetic tendencies actually lead them to engage in those behaviours and under what circumstances.)

Observational Learning

As far as learning principles go, a significant concern  is that a person's tendency to cause harm to their intimate partner will get passed down from one generation to the next through a process called observational learning (also known as social learning, Bandura, 1989). For example, if children witness incidents of violence engaged in by one of their parents toward the other, what they learn is that violence is a component of intimate adult relationships. The outcome is that there will be a greater likelihood for those children to grow up and either engage in violence toward their romantic partners or expect as a routine part of life that they will be a target of violent assaults by their intimate partner. (This process is called "intergenerational transmission of violence". Some people refer to this transmission as the "cycle of violence", because children who witness violence and experience it within their families bring the violence back around again when they are older.) 

Psychological studies confirm this link between exposure to violence in childhood and a host of negative consequences for those individuals (and the rest of society) as they develop into adulthood.  The tendency for parents to use physical punishment to control the behaviour of children is known to cause a rather lengthy list of short- and long-term problems for children. Children who routinely experience physical punishment by their parents are more physically aggressive, they tend to have lower levels of concern or empathy for others, they are less likely to follow rules and behave pro-socially at home and in school, and they have less affection and respect for their parents (Gershoff, 2002; Graham-Behmann, 2009). In adulthood, people who experienced physical punishment during childhood tend to be more physically aggressive, they are more likely to engage in criminal behaviour, they are more likely to develop mental health problems, and they are more likely to perpetrate violence against their own children and intimate partners. Boys who witness their father engage in domestic violence are more likely to engage in domestic violence as adults. Thus, as a consequence of peoples' tendency to learn through watching others, violence has a tendency of generating yet more violence (Cappel & Heiner, 1990; Corvo & Carpenter, 2000; Dutton, 1995; Hyde-Nolan & Juliao, 2012; Kaufman & Zigler, 1987; Jackson, Thompson, & Christiansen, 1999; Marshall & Rose, 1990).

The Problems with Physical Punishment as a Technique of Behavioural Control

In our lectures on operant conditioning (see also Chapter 6 of the textbook, Weiten & McCann, 2013), we discussed that negative and positive punishments provide fairly effective ways to stop people from engaging in certain behaviours. The whole point of speeding tickets and prison sentences is to discourage people from doing illegal things in the future and there wouldn't be much hope of preventing people from committing those crimes without having those kinds of punishments as a threat. A problem occurs when punishments are more severe than necessary, which physical punishments tend to be, since the surprising truth is that the severity of a punishment often does not increase how successful it is at discouraging people from engaging in whatever behaviour we want them to stop doing. Also, even though physical punishment can discourage people from engaging in undesirable behaviours, the downsides should discourage anyone from relying on it as a method for controlling the behaviour of others. For one thing, anyone who experiences a physical attack will most certainly be cautious about doing whatever it was that set their attacker off, at least as long as that person is nearby. However, doing the right thing out of fear of getting hurt is not quite the same as following the rules because of their inherent value. We want people to refrain from cheating and stealing because they agree that it is unfair and wrong to cheat and steal. That's called doing the right thing for intrinsic motives; because doing the right thing feels good and doing the wrong thing gives people an uncomfortable guilty feeling. If a person's only motive not to cheat or steal is their selfish interest in avoiding physical punishment, there will be no restraint on their cheating and stealing whenever the threat of physical punishment is low. In addition, it's best if children do the right thing because they love and respect their parents and want to be like them. It is very challenging to retain affection for someone who beats you, even if they tell you that they're giving you the beating for your own good. 

Physical punishments have these potential downsides  even when parents apply them rationally and consistently and only when their children do something bad. The situation becomes a great deal worse when parents physically punish their child for bad behaviour sometimes, but then fail to react at all when the child does the same thing at other times. For example, suppose that a parent spanks their child for drawing on the wall on one day, but then ignores the same behaviour on the next day. Moreover, suppose that a parent physically punishes their child for no particular reason at all, sometimes, because they are under stress at work or for whatever reason that has nothing to do with the child's behaviour. These kinds of inconsistencies are a disaster for a child's development because it makes the child's behaviour and the consequences of that behaviour unpredictable. It can lead to two unpleasant outcomes. First, the child may stop doing anything at all, since they have no way to know what actions will provoke a physical punishment and what actions will not. Second, the child will have no motive to act in appropriate ways, since behaving badly may or may not result in a physical punishment and not behaving badly may result in the same painful consequence.

All of these comments are to establish that physical attacks are both wrong, to the extent that they cause pain and physical harm, and they are a horribly stupid way to maintain a long-term relationship with a loved one. An abusive spouse may succeed in controlling their partner's behaviour, but they may well lose their partner in the process. This outcome can occur quite literally, as we've indicated before. Physical violence can cause permanent damage or even result in death for women (and, less commonly, men) who find themselves in an abusive relationship. In other cases, victims of domestic violence will make the very understandable choice of abandoning their abusive partner in the search of a safer and less painful existence without them. Yet, even if an abused partner lives and stays, experiencing physical abuse can only harm the bond that intimate partners are meant to share and suppress the aspects of a person that originally made them attractive as a partner in the first place. Children can and will lose affection for a parent who beats them, so adults are all the more likely to experience a persistent disgust for a physically abusive partner. 

Now, we can introduce the role of Pavolovian Classical Conditioning into considerations of IPV. Experiencing positive reactions to an object (or a person) depends on the history of associations between that thing (or person) and one's own thoughts and physiological  responses. People will tend to love other people to the extent that they have a history of experiencing many more positive emotions than negative emotions during events involving that person. Once a person becomes a source of pain and danger, it is impossible for an intimate partner to feel the same affection for them. Through learning, the abusive individual will necessarily come to generate negative emotional reactions from that point onward. A victim of domestic violence might be strongly motivated to keep their partner happy, but it won't be out of an authentic love for that person. It will be out of fear for their own safety. The take-home message is: Once someone cares about your happiness because they are afraid of you, they are no longer actually your partner or your loved one. You have made them your slave. Quite appropriately, slavery is illegal in Canada. 

The idea of these kind of conditioned responses to a stimulus originated with famous studies by Ivan Pavlov in which he paired a bell ringing with presenting food to dogs again and again and measured their salivation. After establishing that association, he removed the food and presented only the sound of the bell ringing. The dogs salivated in response to the bell, even in the absence of the food. This basic (and unconscious) learning process has been used to explain many psychological phenomena, ranging from severe phobias to sexual fetishes. The expectation that experiencing physical harm from a loved one will tend to make that person less of a loved one and more of an aversive, fear-inducing stimulus is a fairly straightforward implication of classical conditioning principles.

References

(These are just for giving credit to researchers. 

We would never generate test questions based on this kind of thing.)

Bandura, A. (1989). Social cognitive theory. In R. Vasta. (Ed.), Annals of Child Development. Greenwich, CT: JAI.

Cappell, C., & Heiner, R. B. (1990). The intergenerational transmission of family aggression. Journal of Family Violence, 5, 135-152.

Corvo, K., & Carpenter, E. (2000). Effects of parental substance abuse on current levels of domestic violence: A possible elaboration of intergenerational transmission processes. Journal of Family Violence, 15, 123-137.

Dutton, D. G. (1995). Male abusiveness in intimate relationships. Clinical Psychology Review, 15, 567-581.

Gershoff, E. T. (2002). Corporal punishment by parents and associated child behaviours and experiences: A meta-analytic and theoretical review. Psychological Bulletin, 128, 539-579.

Hyde-Nolan, M., & Juliao, T. (2012). Theoretical basis for family violence. In R. S. Fife & S. B. Schrager (Eds.), Family violence: What health care providers need to know. Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Jackson, S., Thompson, R. A., Christiansen, E. H., et al. (1999). Predicting abuse-prone parental attitudes and discipline practices in a nationally representative sample. Child Abuse & Neglect, 23, 15-29.

Kaufman, J., & Zigler, E. (1987). Do abused children become abusive parents? American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 57, 186-192.

Marshal, L. L., & Rose, P. (1990). Premarital violence: The impact of family of origin on violence, stress, and reciprocity. Violence Victims, 5, 51-64.

Weiten, W., & McCann, D. (2013). Psychology: Themes and Variations, Third Canadian Edition. Nelson Education, Ltd: Toronto, ON.