New Approaches To Violence Against Women

Below are two new approaches to understanding how the cycle of abuse within relationships and within families is so difficult to break.

Abuse Cycle
The Family Centre of our City uses the following abuse cycle to expand on Lenore Walker's Cycle of Violence theory of the late 1970's. This new approach identifies more clearly the behaviors and the motives of those behaviors with violent relationships.

Build-Up: Triggers or stressors (e.g., job, money, bills, etc.) start off this phase. These stressors cause feelings of powerlessness within the abuser. The abuser reacts by increasing abusive behavior toward a chosen target (e.g., spouse or partner). Isolation may increase during this phase as well. Other cycles within the abuse cycle may emerge within the build up phase. Drinking or drug abuse ma increase and cause further tension. cycles of negative thought process (e.g., blaming the world, blaming the partner - increasing the anger) may be exacerbated as well.

Act Out: The anger from the stressors alcohol/drugs and the negative thoughts are directed at the chosen target (spouse/partner). Typically the form this anger assumes is a physical assault, but not necessarily. It may be a single episode or a series over time.

Rationalize/Justify: Characteristic of this phase is the use of defense mechanisms (rationalization and justifications) to quell the shame and guilt felt by the abuser. Defense mechanisms are also used to deflect blame and prevent consequences for the violence. Proponents of this theory suggest that the honeymoon response is motivated by nd for the abuser. The abuser becomes the interpreter of the abuse and reality. The partner of the abuser begins to internalize this interpreter role and takes an active role in the rationalization and justification. Reality is being altered for both partners through this rationalization process.

Pretend Normal With the rationalization and justification firmly in place, the couple continues to portray the relationship as normal. This denial will inevitable lead to the repetition of the cycle of abuse. The cycle of abuse can only be broken of one or both of the partners reinterprets the true nature of the abuse, sees the violence as a chosen act and rightfully attributes the violence to the one committing it.

Trauma Bonding: Trauma Bonding is the process which may evolve from two critical aspects of an abusive relationship: the imbalance of power and intermittent good/bad treatment. In situations of extreme power imbalance, where a person may adopt the dominator's perspective of themselves and internalize or redirect aggression toward others similar to themselves. As the power imbalance grows, the victimized person feels more negative in their self-appraisal, more incapable of fending for themselves and is, thus, increasingly more in need of the dominator. The person in high power develops an inflated sense of their own powerlessness. This dynamic masks the extent to which the dominator is dependent upon the person with low power to maintain their feelings of powerfulness and control. An attempt to change this dynamic, for example by a woman leaving her partner, shows the dominator's real need for the person of low power and can prompt desperate attempts by the dominator to increase the use of control tactics to further keep her present. The dominator intermittently abuses the person of lower power. The abuse is off-set by expressions of remorse, promises for change and declarations of love. The victim is subject to alternating periods of fear and pain (aversive or negative arousal) and the relief or release associated with the removal of negative arousal. The situation of alternating aversive and pleasant conditions is an experimental design within learning theory known as intermittent reinforcement/punishment. This process is highly effective in producing long-lasting patterns of behavior which are difficult to change or stop. It is a process which is known to develop the strongest and most long-lasting emotional bonds.

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