DOMESTIC STOCKHOLM SYNDROME
IN VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
by Andrés
Montero-Gómez
AMontero@sepv.org
Sociedad Española
de Psicología de la Violencia
http://www.sepv.org/
DOMESTIC STOCKHOLM SYNDROME
IN VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
by Andrés
Montero-Gómez
AMontero@sepv.org
Sociedad Española
de Psicología de la Violencia
http://www.sepv.org/
In spite of the fact that nowadays the figures about the incidence of violence against women by spouses or sentimental partners, or in the frame of other kind of affective relationships, are gradually gaining publicity with regard to previous times, it is equally true that there is still a lot of hidden reality to know.
At the same time that several have been the factors contributing to publicize the problem of mistreatment, diverse also have been the elements supporting the silence of the victim, thus posing an obstacle in the search of ways of solution for numerous cases of violence against women. Among some of the elements that keeps the woman in silence about her suffering are various behavioural paralysing process related to and generated by fear; the perception of the absence of escaping ways or ways outs for the victim; and the lack of alternative resources, about all in women with children who cannot see, due to different causes, a feasible external source of help.
However, the people working
in the search of explanations and lines of action in order to put out the
phenomenon of violence and to cut off its consequences, know very well
that some women supposedly autonomous in a personal or economic level and
even granted with the possibility to have success in several fields of
life, otherwise go on with relationship where they are suffering violence.
These type of women, who carry out activities that might give someone food
to think that they are not subjected to a
paralysis for fear or that
they have no resources to act, nevertheless seem to be incapable to report
about their aggressors, who they continue to live with, or to leave the
relationship. In the other hand, these kind of women of more independent
social profile, and the other rather more tied to a familiar nucleus, both
share the paradoxical reaction of developing an affective bond still stronger
with their batterers, defending his reasons, withdrawing police reports
or stopping judicial trial when they declare in favour of her violent
partners. These paradoxical
effects are a reality and perhaps is the time to look for its mechanisms
and for lines of intervention.
Some theorists have tried
to give light to the emergence of these paradoxical bonds between victim
and aggressor, mainly appealing to affective or emotional cues developed
in the context of the traumatic environment. Dutton and Painter (1981)
have depicted a scenario in which two factors, the power imbalance and
the intermittent good-bad treatment, generate in the battered woman a traumatic
bonding that ties her with the aggressor through behaviours of docility.
According to Dutton et al., the abuse
creates and maintains a
dynamics of dependence in the couple due to its asymmetric effect over
the power balance, being the traumatic bonding produced by the alternation
of reinforcement and punishment. However, this approach apparently
rests on the behavioural basis of the instrumental conditioning, which,
from our perspective, is valid in order to explain some aspects of the
victimisation repertoire (mainly the one referred to the learned helplessness
and the persistency of behaviour associated to alternate reinforcing) but
it fails when covering the complex psychological apparatus associated with
a paradoxical attachment. To our understanding, the uncertainty around
the thrashings, derived from the repeated and intermittent violence, is
one key element in the long way of the attachment, but not its unique cause.
Furthermore, the theory does not take into account that a kind of
power imbalance is already present in many human relationships: in the
traumatic couples seems to be not a consequence but an antecedent of the
abuse.
Another model for explaining
these paradoxical behaviours on battered women is Graham’s factorial treatment
of Stockholm Syndrome-type reactions in young dating women (Graham et al,
1995). This factorial model takes the way of a 49 items assessment scale
around a nucleus characterised by cognitive distortions and coping strategies,
and two secondary dimensions called ‘psychological damage’ and the more
ambiguous ‘love-dependence’. Graham’s factorial model, of assessing purposes,
topographic
profile and correlational
methodology, was designed to detect the appearance of the syndrome in young
women abused by their sentimental counterparts, and is based on the idea
that the syndrome is a product of a kind of dissociative state in which
the victim denies the violent part of the aggressor’s behaviour and gets
attached to the perceived positive side of the abuser, ignoring the victim
in this ways her/his needs and turning hypervigilant to the abuser’s (Graham
and Rawlings, 1991). However, while this explanation
could be valid to describe
one of the global processes implied in the syndrome, does not give a theoretical
hypothesis for its nature
beyond the description of
eventual constituent elements.
Alternatively, from our perspective, before the deficit of theories accounting more precisely for the psychological processes and dynamics of these sort of paradoxical effects, and working on a similar theoretical structure for the classical Stockholm Syndrome (Montero, 1999), we have designed a model suitable for application to the violence against women.
Out hypothesis (Montero, 2000), which has been presented under the title ‘FEATURING DOMESTIC STOCKHOLM SYNDROME. A COGNITIVE BOND OF PROTECTION IN BATTERED WOMEN’ at the XIV World Meeting of the International Society for Research on Aggression [Valencia 9-14 July 2000], tries to develop a sequential structure of psychophysiologic reactions that finally generates in the female victim a variant of the Stockholm Syndrome, one that we have named Domestic Stockholm Syndrome (DSS).
Without entering into complex
descriptions here, the DSS will be depicted like an interpersonal bond
of protection, built between victim and aggressor, in the framework of
a traumatic and stimuli restricted environment, through the induction in
the victim of a mental model (inter-situational network of mental schemata
and beliefs). The victim suffering mistreatment would develop DSS in order
to protect her own psychological integrity and to recover the physiologic
and behavioural homeostasis. DSS pathway will be
determined by a pattern
of cognitive modifications, its adaptive functionality and a terminal course
as a result of a reactive process in the victim before the traumatic context.
DSS, as a type of adaptation
disorder, would be responsible for the above mentioned paradoxical effects.
The term ‘domestic’
Montserrat Boix, Co-ordinator of Mujeres en Red, has sensibly called my attention on the semantic implications derived from the use of the term ‘domestic’ in order to qualify the variant of the Stockholm Syndrome we are analysing. Actually, the modifying word ‘domestic’ has been elected for two reasons: one of conceptual comprehensive precision and other of economy. Let’s see.
If we understand ‘domestic’
as referring strictly to the enclosure limited by the domicile, it is accurate
to say that the women are not only mistreated inside the domestic environment
and, besides, not only by their spouses but also by partners they are not
living with. The use of the term does NOT deny this reality and we do not
desire the applications of this category to elements within the phenomenon
of violence against woman not including specific features of a Stockholm
Syndrome. We suppose, though, that is
within domestic environment
where there is more probabilities for the DSS to be generated, implicitly
assuming at the same time that it can be produced in other environmental
configurations. Still, ‘domestic’ is not used here in a restrictive sense,
but accepting that the meaning is not circumscribed in a reductive way
to the physical space of the house, being understood for a extensive scope
of living experiences. It is possible to deny that in the vast majority
of the cases we might observe, the affective partner symbolically
becomes part of the domestic
milieu understood as primary ring of referents for the personal identity?.
At last, from a clinical
point of view or from a economical comprehensive perspective, the expression
points exactly to what it pretends to define: for anyone who knows what
classically means the Stockholm Syndrome, the association between ‘domestic’,
DSS and violence against women is automatic.
REFERENCES
-Dutton, DG; Painter, SL (1981).
Traumatic bonding: the development of emotional attachments in
battered women and other
relationships of intermittent abuse. Victimology: an International Journal,
6:
139-155.
-Graham, DL; Rawling, EL
(1991). Bonding with abusive dating partners: dynamics
of Stockholm
syndrome. In B. Levy (ed)
Dating Violence, Women in Danger. Seattle, WA: Seal Press
-Graham, DL; Rawlings, EL;
Ihms, K; Latimer, D; Foliano, J; Thomson, A; Suttman, K; Farrington, M;
Hacker, R (1995). A scale for identifying Stockholm
syndrome reactions in young dating
women: factor structure,
reliability and validity. Violence and Victims 10 (1): 3-22.
-Montero, A (1999).
Shaping the etiology of the Stockholm Syndrome: hypothesis of the Induced
Mental Model. IberPsicología,
5(1):4
-Montero, A (2000).
Featuring Domestic Stockholm Syndrome: a cognitive bond of protection in
battered women. Proceedings
of the XIV World Meeting of the International Society for Research
on Aggression.