Vol. 13 No. 7 (July 2003)
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND THE POLITICS OF PRIVACY by Kristin A. Kelly. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. 209 pp. Paper $29.95. ISBN 0-8014-8829-X.
Reviewed by Paul E. Parker, Truman State University. Email: parker@truman.edu
“Today, domestic assault is illegal in every state. However, confusion about whether this is a public or a private problem has not disappeared.... On the one hand, the criminalization of domestic violence transforms [domestic assault] into a problem warranting intervention and even sanctions. On the other hand, very low reporting levels, police and judicial indifference, and a pattern of blaming the victim all suggest that many people, including some victims, continue to see domestic violence as a private matter” (p2). Kelly argues that our misguided notion of privacy, derived from Locke, undergirds this confusion. Drawing upon feminist theory and interviews with professionals who work with battered women, she theorizes a more nuanced version of privacy that would permit or perhaps even require public responses to domestic violence. Notably, these “public responses” go beyond legal intervention to include community forces and organizations.
In barely 164 pages of text, Kelly has re-envisioned privacy, community, and citizenship, with potentially far-reaching and far-ranging consequences. The book is well-written and accessible; her own theorizing and the synthesis of literature and topics will be of interest to feminist theorists, policy students, and those interested in civil society. Thirty pages of notes and thorough bibliographies and index complete the book. Little is offered for students of courts, and as discussed more fully below, the law itself is judged both important but horribly incomplete, since it is limited to post-violence interventions.
Chapter one, “Privacy and Domestic Violence,” serves as a short outline of her argument and a preview of the subsequent six chapters. In chapter two, “The Family as a Private Entity,” Kelly discusses Locke=s distinction of public and private. An important thread to this argument is that Locke presents two models of public and private that we conflate—one operating to separate the family from political life, and one operating to separate the individual from the state (e.g., p20). From the first model we conceive of family life as a private matter, and from the second we conceive of privacy as being left alone. Kelly argues that a family of liberal individuals, who seek to develop themselves, in part through connection to others in this primary and private unit, poses a problem. All is well when we assume a harmony of interests among family members, but Locke’s models of privacy are inadequate for helping us to conceive of responses to the pervasive reality of family violence.
Whether feminist theory can aid in conceiving more successful public responses is the subject of chapter three, “Feminist Re-Visions of the Public/Private Dichotomy.” Kelly divides feminist theories into three camps, all of which criticize liberal theory=s public/private dichotomy. In this ideological division, women are typically relegated to the private realm, thereby denying them opportunities for development as citizens, removing women=s voice from public policy decisions, and aiding the characterization of domestic violence as a private affair (pp33-34). Dividing these feminist camps is their responses to the public and private dichotomy. Radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon (1984) propose the elimination of the public/private distinction, on the grounds that the dichotomy will always lead to women’s subordination. Conservative feminists such as Jean Bethke Elshtain criticize the radical feminists for undercutting the family. Elshtain (1981) holds the family to be necessary; happily, it is also a possible site for women, through their mothering, to transform the public realm through the development of values such as compassion and sensitivity (pp38-41). While liberal feminists also reject the radical feminist project of obliterating the public/private dichotomy, they tend to focus on reducing barriers to equal participation in the public realm by women. The trouble with all three camps, according to Kelly, is that they are essentialist, treating all women alike: “The differences among feminist theorists concerning the public/private split can be traced to a fundamental disagreement among them regarding the aspect of women=s lives most in need of liberation. Is it women as mothers, women as individuals, or women as sex objects?” (p49). Kelly’s own position then emerges from the complexity of and tension between women’s multiple identities and roles.
Focusing upon only one dimension, when considering public/private distinctions and domestic violence, will necessarily derogate some aspect of women’s lives. Unfortunately, the law does not account for women in their complexity. In chapter four, “The Legal Regulation of Domestic Violence,” Kelly provides a brief history of the common law and the family, especially the doctrine of chastisement, which allowed the husband to correct his wife’s behavior (for which he was responsible). But then, “The decline of the legitimacy of legally sanctioned dominance of one person over another presented courts with a challenge: how to respond to domestic conflicts in a way that would not require excessive involvement in the family” (p67). Out of the Progressive=s faith in applied knowledge arise family courts that seek reunification of disagreeable spouses, an approach that dominated until a generation ago when the family is reconceived as a unit of individuals. In this new conception, the victim should have a right not to be assaulted and the perpetrator should be accountable for his actions.
Thus we arrive at domestic violence as a public problem, with public intervention and sanctions. Maddeningly, however, people are often reluctant to use the power of the state in cases of domestic violence. Many victims are reluctant to report abuse, and many law enforcement and court personnel are reluctant to use their discretion and resources to pursue these matters they conceive of as private. Kelly concludes chapter four with the recognition that the law is an important resource for intervention, but it is only one resource, and given the tension between individual autonomy and social connection, we should not be surprised that legal intervention may not be appropriate for all cases. In chapter five, “The Power of Participation,” the limits of legal intervention are further explored. With the aid of her interviews, Kelly devises a conception of public participation broader and more varied and flexible than legal intervention.
In chapter six, “Reconstructing the Boundaries of Community Concerns,” Kelly modifies the liberal conception of the individual and state with her “Triangle of Political Space.” Kelly’s model comprises the Family, the State, and the Community. “The fact that what I call ‘community activities’ do not fit neatly into either category of public or private highlights the complexity and ambiguity of the two terms” (p118). The boundaries of public and private are to be defined through democratic participation and education. She acknowledges she does not articulate “a specific formula for determining when domestic violence should become public and when it should remain private”—instead, her goal is to “destabilize assumptions about domestic violence” (p133). It is up to us to reconfigure our assumptions and our approaches, a process that Kelly argues should be and will be ongoing. The ideal appears to be a participatory democracy, with “the public” constituted of the many publics: “The model is grounded in the recognition that the different actors will see the problem of domestic violence through the lens of their particular interests, capacities and constraints” (p130).
Still, some vision is provided: “Examples of activities that serve to involve the community in cases of domestic violence within the family include public education programs about how to avoid violence; provision of resources that enable victims to survive financially and emotionally without the abuser; informal actions and media-generated publicity communicating the unacceptability of abusive behavior ... and development of workplace policies for assisting employee victims” (p116). These examples illustrate two benefits of the model. First, the state is decentered – interventions can occur before violence, and with stakes lower than with legal intervention (pp120ff). Also, Kelly argues the victim is decentered: with domestic violence a public problem, not narrowly a legal or governmental problem, the onus is removed from the victim to report violence and press charges (often leading to victim blaming when women choose to stay in a relationship, a choice about which our liberal assumption of rational individualism does not allow an understanding, but on which Kelly’s focus on the tension of individual/connection sheds light).
The final chapter, “Conclusion: Privacy, Principles, and Process,” offers a reconception of privacy which can aid us in thinking about the publicness of domestic violence and a host of other social ills. Kelly recognizes that privacy is more than autonomy and being left alone, but also has relational dimensions, and she offers relaxation and intimacy to her broader conception of privacy. The final step in transforming a private problem into a public problem is a focus upon the principle of citizenship—as opposed to traditional liberal principles such as equality and liberty: “Feminist conceptions of citizenship also allow us to link citizenship and battering in new ways.... a household characterized by unequal workloads or physical and mental acts of domination is unlikely to produce citizens with the capacity to make decisions about justice in the public sphere....connecting the negative impacts of domestic violence to the all-important cultivation of future citizens serves to emphasize the ways in which this violence damages all members of a democratic society” (p157). She acknowledges the far reaching implications of her model: other social problems that affect citizenship include, “abortion, family poverty, divorce, child abuse and exploitation, juvenile crime, drug and alcohol addiction, same-sex marriage, and gender equality in the home” (pp159-60).
In this ambitious book, Kelly has made important contributions by allowing us to see in more complex and realistic ways both battered women (autonomous/connected) and our incomplete responses to domestic violence (legal intervention; victim blaming). She has also offered a useful discussion of feminist theory and the public/private dichotomy. I would have liked to see more development of the coalitions and programs that she imagines in this reconceived public. In her defense, of course, is the point that these programs, and the boundaries that support them, will be determined through democratic processes of education and participation. However, this aspect of her argument is also underdeveloped, leaving me wondering whether her notion of citizenship is too heroic. Kelly clearly sees the stakes as high: “totalitarianism can take root only in a society in which people have relinquished their power. Accepting boundaries automatically or habitually, without thinking carefully about whether they achieve our goals, constitutes such a relinquishment” (p164). This quote can be read as a form of victim blaming by the participatory democrats (why aren’t citizens informed? Why don’t citizens participate?). Kelly helps us go beyond victim blaming in the area of domestic violence, by portraying women in more complex ways. But what follows from the acknowledgment that people living within a society are also complex, and might want to be more than citizens – to use their autonomy to be left alone, or to relax?
REFERENCES:
Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1981. PUBLIC MAN, PRIVATE WOMAN: WOMEN IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
MacKinnon, Catharine. 1984. FEMINISM UNMODIFIED: DISCOURSES ON LIFE AND LAW. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
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Copyright 2003 by the author, Paul E. Parker.