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Thanks to the second wave of the women’s movement, we actually know a good deal about intimate terrorism, more than we know about the other forms of domestic violence. Because one of the major successes of the women’s movement has been to draw attention to the problem of wife beating, we have the benefit of thirty years of feminist research on men’s use of violence to control their partners.1 Most of this body of feminist research on domestic violence is based on interviews with women who were contacted through hospitals, the courts, and shelters; as I have shown in chapter 1, the women who come into contact with those agencies are much more likely to be experiencing intimate terrorism than any other type of partner violence. Thus, although this research did not make explicit distinctions among types of violence , it is reasonable to assume that the major patterns identified are those associated with intimate terrorism. Furthermore, in many cases we can do more than merely assume that the violence is intimate terrorism, because one of the major strengths of this research is that it involves a healthy mix of quantitative and qualitative analyses. Feminist researchers have not been afraid to ask women to tell their stories, which are dominated by accounts of men’s use of violence to take general control over “their” women. Intimate terrorism does appear in the same-sex relationships of both men and women; moreover, there are unquestionably some women who do terrorize their male partners. However, because intimate terrorism is perpetrated in large part by men against their women partners, and because we know so little about the intimate terrorism of lesbians, gay men, and heterosexual women, I focus this chapter on men’s intimate terrorism in heterosexual relationships, and my choice of pronouns reflects that focus. Intimate Terrorism Controlling Your Partner 2 The Basic Characteristics of (Heterosexual Men’s) Intimate Terrorism Let’s begin with a look at the basic characteristics of intimate terrorism. By “basic” characteristics I mean the characteristics that define intimate terrorism. An intimate terrorist is violent and highly controlling—by definition. Intimate terrorism is about violent, coercive control. The intimate terrorist uses physical violence in combination with a variety of other control tactics to exercise general, coercive control over his partner.2 This powerful combination of violence with a general pattern of control is terrorizing because once a controlling partner has been violent, all of his other controlling actions take on the threat of violence. A look, a yell, a quiet warning, even an ostensibly benign request can have the emotional impact of a physical assault. Catherine Kirkwood describes it like this: “The women’s descriptions of waiting for an attack, wondering about the intensity, searching their experience and resources for any method of diffusing the potential violence, all constitute a type of mental and emotional torture, and in fact their partners’ behavior has been likened to the behaviour of captors who emotionally torture prisoners of war. . . .”3 Let’s look first at the nonviolent control tactics, then at the typical pattern of violence in intimate terrorism.4 nonviolent control tactics ThreatsandIntimidation. Intimate terrorists often “lay down the law” through threats and intimidation. One of the questions asked of the wives in the Pittsburgh study was “Has your husband ever gotten angry and threatened to use physical force with you?” Ninety-seven percent of the wives experiencing intimate terrorism had been threatened; 61 percent, “often.”5 They were also asked about intimidation, which doesn’t involve a direct threat but, rather, a display of the capacity to do damage. Thus, an intimate terrorist may express his anger with his wife by directing it toward objects (92 percent in this study) or toward the children or pets (65 percent). One of the more gut-wrenching cases of intimidation at the shelter where I work involves a woman who told a colleague of mine that one day when she didn’t arrive home “on time,” her husband told her to go look out in the garage—where she found that he had hanged her dog. Sometimes the rules that the woman must follow in order to avoid punishment are quite clear. For example, one of Dobash and Dobash’s informants in Scotland told them, “We were two miles from the village. He allowed me half an hour to go up to the village and half an hour to walk back and ten minutes...

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