What do you think?
Rate this book
Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family
The marriage license as a hitting license, child abuse, sibling war is the powerful message of "Behind Closed Doors". The book is grounded in the unprecedented national survey of the extent, patterns, and causes of violence in the American family. Based on a seven-year study of over 2,000 families, the authors provide landmark insights into this phenomenon of violence and what causes Americans to inflict it on their family members. The authors explore the relationship between spousal abuse and child abuse as well as abuse between siblings, violence by children against their parents, and the causes and effects of verbal abuse. Taken together, their analysis provides a vivid picture of how violence is woven into the fabric of family life and why the hallmark of family life is both love and violence. This is a comprehensive, highly readable account of interest to both the professional and the lay-person on an important topic, which concerns the social well-being of us all.
332 pages, Paperback
First published April 30, 2006
1 person is currently reading
42 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 10, 2021
This is THE landmark study on family violence. Dating back from the 1970s (but which will be redone again in the early 1980s to address a few criticism as to its methodology) here's a pioneering work on a topic which, until then, had been too often taboo.
Seen though our 21st century perspective, the results exposed here, and which have been proven time and again by thousands of other studies performed ever since and all around the Western world, won't surprise the reader not brainwashed into gender dogma: family violence is more prevalent than assumed, it concerns every demographics (although being young, on low incomes, or part of certain ethnic groups increase the risks) and, above all, it is not gendered. When it comes to domestic abuse, for instance, women are as abusive as men -e.g. they are more likely to be injured and end up dead or in hospital, yet it doesn't mean they never initiate assaults; when they do, in fact, men turn out to have more serious injuries... It's also a pioneering work in that it demonstrated that intimate relationships are far more complicated that what most feminists of the time would have us to believe, in the sense that, behind closed doors, women are far from being 'disempowered'. If anything, they can be as coercive, aggressive, controlling and violent as men are. As the authors discovered indeed, about half of abusive relationship involves abuse which is mutual, what following experts came to call bidirectional abuse, or mutual combat. This last point, at the time, could have been predictable. After all, Erin Pizzey, who, across the Atlantic (in Britain) had open the first shelter ever for abused women, did recognised just that based on her first hand experience of the women coming through her refuge.
Sadly, of course, we know what happened to Erin Pizzey. She was terrorised through death threats and bomb threats by these 'feminists' who will thus take over her shelter (now Refuge Charity) and had to go in exile. Sadly too, reflecting a pattern when it comes to the toxicity of such gender feminism (radfem, if you want) the authors here also faced violence and abuse. Suzanne Steinmetz had some of her lectures cancelled following bomb threats, and Murray Straus was victim of vile attempts of character assassination trying to portray him as a wife beater. Then as now, it's not good and quite dangerous to portray women as anything but 'oppressed victims' deserving special victims status over pretty much everybody else! So much for empowerment...
Having said that, are the points being made here still relevant? When it comes to family violence as a whole (they deal not only with spousal abuse, but, also, child abuse) the authors have since then been vindicated, even if it still is not reflected in our policies (ideology having hijacked a debate it should have been kept away from; no wonder family laws and for the welfare of our children remain an utter failure for the most part...). As to explain the causes of such violence, though, their explanations can appear quite limited -they blame a violent culture, reflected through a society which condone smacking and spanking children to the death penalty, and, even, portrayal of violence in the media. Is it enough? Theirs, after all, focuses on the USA; perhaps readers from other countries won't be satisfied here.
All in all, though, this is a crucial work which, alongside that of Erin Pizzey back at the same time but across the pond should have guided our understanding of family and domestic violence. The radicalism of political fanatics calling themselves 'feminists', and which hijacked the debate through (ironically) abuse and violence, completely wrecked such endeavour, and we now know (or should!) the price being paid for it. 1 in 6 men remain abused by female partners in total impunity (as opposed to 1 in 4 women), women remain abused by other women yet have their ordeal completely overlooked for not fitting the 'patriarchal narrative' (from parental alienation to Cinderella violence), most abusive relationships are not being addressed at all, and, above all, countless children which could be saved are being abused and murdered due to the failures of a system plagued by a poisonous ideology (the nonsense 'abuse-is-gendered-men-are-the-majority-of-perpetrators' -it's everything but). Let us nail the point again indeed: more than 60% of abused children are abused by their mothers, and, as has been seen recently in the medias, far too many kids have been murdered by their mums with no one bothering to question the gendered narrative. There: the writing was on the wall back in 1975. Are we going, at long last, to un-burry our heads from the sand?
Seen though our 21st century perspective, the results exposed here, and which have been proven time and again by thousands of other studies performed ever since and all around the Western world, won't surprise the reader not brainwashed into gender dogma: family violence is more prevalent than assumed, it concerns every demographics (although being young, on low incomes, or part of certain ethnic groups increase the risks) and, above all, it is not gendered. When it comes to domestic abuse, for instance, women are as abusive as men -e.g. they are more likely to be injured and end up dead or in hospital, yet it doesn't mean they never initiate assaults; when they do, in fact, men turn out to have more serious injuries... It's also a pioneering work in that it demonstrated that intimate relationships are far more complicated that what most feminists of the time would have us to believe, in the sense that, behind closed doors, women are far from being 'disempowered'. If anything, they can be as coercive, aggressive, controlling and violent as men are. As the authors discovered indeed, about half of abusive relationship involves abuse which is mutual, what following experts came to call bidirectional abuse, or mutual combat. This last point, at the time, could have been predictable. After all, Erin Pizzey, who, across the Atlantic (in Britain) had open the first shelter ever for abused women, did recognised just that based on her first hand experience of the women coming through her refuge.
Sadly, of course, we know what happened to Erin Pizzey. She was terrorised through death threats and bomb threats by these 'feminists' who will thus take over her shelter (now Refuge Charity) and had to go in exile. Sadly too, reflecting a pattern when it comes to the toxicity of such gender feminism (radfem, if you want) the authors here also faced violence and abuse. Suzanne Steinmetz had some of her lectures cancelled following bomb threats, and Murray Straus was victim of vile attempts of character assassination trying to portray him as a wife beater. Then as now, it's not good and quite dangerous to portray women as anything but 'oppressed victims' deserving special victims status over pretty much everybody else! So much for empowerment...
Having said that, are the points being made here still relevant? When it comes to family violence as a whole (they deal not only with spousal abuse, but, also, child abuse) the authors have since then been vindicated, even if it still is not reflected in our policies (ideology having hijacked a debate it should have been kept away from; no wonder family laws and for the welfare of our children remain an utter failure for the most part...). As to explain the causes of such violence, though, their explanations can appear quite limited -they blame a violent culture, reflected through a society which condone smacking and spanking children to the death penalty, and, even, portrayal of violence in the media. Is it enough? Theirs, after all, focuses on the USA; perhaps readers from other countries won't be satisfied here.
All in all, though, this is a crucial work which, alongside that of Erin Pizzey back at the same time but across the pond should have guided our understanding of family and domestic violence. The radicalism of political fanatics calling themselves 'feminists', and which hijacked the debate through (ironically) abuse and violence, completely wrecked such endeavour, and we now know (or should!) the price being paid for it. 1 in 6 men remain abused by female partners in total impunity (as opposed to 1 in 4 women), women remain abused by other women yet have their ordeal completely overlooked for not fitting the 'patriarchal narrative' (from parental alienation to Cinderella violence), most abusive relationships are not being addressed at all, and, above all, countless children which could be saved are being abused and murdered due to the failures of a system plagued by a poisonous ideology (the nonsense 'abuse-is-gendered-men-are-the-majority-of-perpetrators' -it's everything but). Let us nail the point again indeed: more than 60% of abused children are abused by their mothers, and, as has been seen recently in the medias, far too many kids have been murdered by their mums with no one bothering to question the gendered narrative. There: the writing was on the wall back in 1975. Are we going, at long last, to un-burry our heads from the sand?
Displaying 1 of 1 review