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BUILDING
FOUNDATIONS FOR CULTURES OF PEACE:
SAIV provides an essential missing piece to ending intimate violence: it enlists the moral authority of spiritual leaders and religious communities worldwide to strongly condemn violence against women and children. The SAIV CD-Rom and Action Packets are designed for use by educational and social action groups to promote enduring changes in customs, religious traditions, and public policies that perpetuate violence. Why, despite countless international peace conferences and treaties, and despite the millions of people in the antiwar movement, are warfare and terrorism still daily facts of life in our world? Why do these habits continue, even in an age when advanced technologies such as nuclear and biological weapons threaten all life on our planet? How can we change this? Conventional wisdom says violence is just human nature – it’s in our genes. But what matters is the interaction between genes and experience. Our life experiences, and thus our environments and our behaviors, play a major role in who we become, including even the neurochemistry of our brains. This is particularly true of what we experience in our early years. A pioneer in the study of the neurochemistry of abused children, Dr. Bruce Perry, tells us that children who are abused are more predisposed to become abusers and their brain neurochemistry tends to become programmed for fight-or-flight at the slightest provocation. This does not mean that all children who are abused replicate these behaviors; on the contrary, some grow up to be adults who not only eschew violence but empathically work against violence. However, the psychological research shows that many people who are violent were themselves victims of violence. Human society is based, first and foremost, on relationships between the female and male halves of humanity and on their relations with their sons and daughters. Our first lessons about human relations are learned not in the public but in the private or intimate sphere. As children, in our families and in other intimate relationships we either learn respect for others and human rights or the acceptance of abuse and violence. While some people transcend teachings of violence and injustice, many carry these teachings into other relations, and accept violence and injustice as “just the way things are.” Throughout history, and cross-culturally, the most violently despotic and warlike cultures have been those where violence, or the threat of violence, is used to maintain domination of parent over child and man over woman. We see this connection in the European Middle Ages, in Hitler’s Germany, and in some so-called religious fundamentalist cultures today.. On the other hand, where the rights of women and children are protected, nations thrive. In fact, a study of 89 nations by the organization I direct, the Center for Partnership Studies, shows that the status of women can be a better predictor of the general quality of life than a nation's financial wealth. Many religious and secular leaders have spoken out against international terrorism and wars of aggression. But we urgently need to hear their voices raised against the intimate violence that sparks, fuels, and refuels international violence. Far too many customs, religious traditions, and public policies still accept, condone, and even promote intimate violence. It is time to insist that our leaders take a committed stand and join the thousands of grassroots organizations, many spearheaded by women and youth, that are forming a powerful global movement to end intimate terror and create women-and -child-honoring societies. Unless we join in this epochal task, talk of a more peaceful world will be just that – just talk. To build cultures of peace, the foundations we lay down in intimate relations must be vigorously addressed. A Legacy of Abuse and Violence It is not easy for people to come to terms with the reality, and implications, of intimate violence. It is an emotionally charged subject. But precisely for this reason, it must be addressed. The most important – and dangerous – beliefs are those that are not generally talked about. Much of the impetus for attention to violence against women has come from organized action by women, particularly during the United Nations Decade for Women (1975 - 1985) and through subsequent national and international meetings, such as the 1993 United Nations World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, which led to the 1994 United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and the 1995 United Nations Conference of Women in Beijing. Similarly, the work of children’s rights activists has finally brought violence against children global attention, bringing this issue into national and international meetings and into the United Nations, as in the Convention on the Rights of the Child and U.N. documents such as We the Children: Meeting the Promises of the World Summit for Children 2001. But there are still many who either deny the existence of this violence, or justify it on the grounds of tradition. Indeed, for most of recorded history, parental violence against children and men’s violence against their wives was either explicitly or implicitly condoned. Those who had the power to prevent and/or punish this violence through religion, law, or custom, openly or tacitly approved it. Because laws have, at least in some countries, been used to address this intimate violence, victims have begun to break their silence. But in many world regions, parents are not subject to what is still considered interference in family affairs, and men who beat, or even kill, their spouses are also exempt from criminal prosecution. Some religious teachers still insist that punitive violence by parents against children and men against women is divinely ordained. That the subject of intimate violence is receiving some attention today reflects major changes in cultural values and beliefs as well as in the structure of social institutions, from the family and education to politics and economics. These changes toward more democratic values and institutions are part of the shift from a dominator to a partnership model of social organization as the ideal norm (Eisler 1987, 1995, 1997; Eisler, Loye, and Norgaard 1995). But these changes have been met with enormous resistance and with periodic regressions. Throughout history, regimes noted for their repressiveness and official violence have made the return of women to their "traditional" (or subservient) place in a male-headed family a priority. Even in democracies such as the United States, those who believe in the international violence of "holy wars" against “Godless enemies” oppose equal rights for women. They not only organized to defeat the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; they still oppose ratification of UN conventions to protect the rights of women and children. Such groups even lobbied for a "Family Protection" Act that would have cut funding for battered women's shelters – protecting a family structure where male "heads of household" can legitimately exercise violent and despotic control. Families where men are ranked over women, and where children painfully learn that questioning orders from above is dangerous to their physical and emotional welfare, are central to authoritarian, warlike cultures and subcultures. We see this historically and cross-culturally (Eisler 1987,1995, 2000, 2002). In the violent and authoritarian Roman Empire, the male head of household had life and death powers, not only over his slaves, but also over the women and children in his household. Similarly, under English Common Law, which developed during a time when monarchs maintained their rule through fear and force, even extreme parental violence against children was not unlawful and husbands were legally permitted to beat their wives if they disobeyed them. The connection between rigid male domination in the family and despotism in the state also helps explain customs such as the “honor killings” of girls and women by members of their own families and the stoning of women for alleged sexual offenses found among the Taliban, where terrorism against defenseless civilians is seen as legitimate and honorable. It is through the rule of terror in the family that both women and men learn to accept rule by terror as "normal," be it in their own societies or against other tribes or nations. Fortunately not all people raised in violent households become violent and brutal. But studies such as the classic The Authoritarian Personality document how individuals who participate in and/or acquiesce to authoritarianism, violence, and scapegoating in the state tend to be individuals from families where authoritarianism, violence, and scapegoating were also the norm. In other words, such studies verify what common sense would tell us: that the link between cruelty and violence in the private sphere of the family and the public sphere of the state is all too real. As psychotherapist Alice Miller pointed out, if we examine the childhoods of brutal despots such as Adolf Hitler, we see yet another link between the institutionalization of domination based on cruelty and terror in childrearing and the institutionalization of domination backed by cruelty and terror in the state. The biographies of such demagogic archcriminals reveal that their cruelty and violence, particularly their violent persecution of "inferior" or "dangerous" people, be they Jews in Germany, blacks in the American South, or members of different religious sects or ethnic groups in other world regions, is in large part rooted in the violence and cruelty they experienced as children. The High Incidence of Intimate Violence and Its Socioeconomic Costs As a result of growing recognition that violence against women and children is one of the most pervasive yet least recognized human rights abuses in the world, have come statistical studies on rates of abuse from many nations. These studies show the extraordinary cultural and economic range of this violence against women in intimate relations (see e.g., U.N. Report on Status of Women 1995). There are fewer studies comparing international rates of child abuse. However, studies of specific forms of child abuse reveal how pervasive the problem is, and how frequently female children are targeted. For example, the 1997 United Nations State of World Population Report estimated that 120 million girls have undergone some form of female genital mutilation, with another two million young girls at risk each year, particularly in regions of Africa and Asia where this practice is performed under the mantle of religious or ethnic tradition. There are data on selective female infanticide and medical neglect – a neglect that can be so severe that in India’s Punjab state, girls aged two to four die at nearly twice the rate of boys. There are also studies on the huge number of girl children enslaved (often offered for sale by members of their own families) in the global sex industry, for example, in Thailand, India, and the former Soviet Union. The United Nations estimates that two million girls between ages five and eleven are introduced into the commercial sex market each year (State of the World Population 1997). Lori Heise reported in “Violence Against Women: The Missing Agenda” (1992), that one in three women worldwide has experienced violence from a spouse or partner. 42% of women in Kenya admitted that their husbands regularly beat them. In Papua, New Guinea, 67% of rural women and 56% of urban women had been abused by partners. A study from Lima, Peru showed that one out of every three women in the city’s emergency rooms were victims of domestic violence. According to estimates by the former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop in 1989, three to four million women are battered in the United States each year. In Bangladesh, husbands’ murders of their wives account for half of all homicides. In Bombay, India, one out of every five deaths among women fifteen to forty-four was due to “accidental burns” – that is, the infamous “bride-burnings” or “dowry deaths” that only recently attracted international media attention. Beliefs about the legitimacy of men dominating women and of parents hitting children are central to the perpetuation of this violence; it is not only related to family structure, but to the larger social structure and the prevailing system of values and beliefs. At the same time, the family is not only influenced by, but in turn also influences, the larger social structure and culture of which it is a part. What we see is a transactive process between families and cultures, with families and cultures based on top-down rankings exhibiting a high incidence of violence and abuse (Eisler 1995, 1997, 2002). The personal, social, and economic damage from this pandemic of violence is enormous. In addition to the human costs in destroyed and ended lives, suffering, and degradation of both victim and victimizer, and decreased human capacity to constructively meet the challenges of work and life, are the huge economic costs. These range from the billions of dollars in medical expenses and lost work time due to spousal abuse to the billions of costs of juvenile delinquency and later crime due to child abuse. A major, though still generally ignored, effect of intimate violence and abuse is its long-term effect on the brain. Neuroscience shows that the stress of childhood abuse often affects the very structure of the brain. As Robert Post, chief of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health’s Biological Psychiatry, writes, the impact of stress occurs on the cellular level; it cranks up levels of gene-regulating transcription factors in ways that reconstruct the brain, with long-lasting consequences for neural function and behavior (Post, 1992). As neuroscientist Debra Niehoff writes, “More constructive coping responses are lost, and the brain fixates on an increasingly smaller portfolio of counterproductive reactions. With fewer and fewer alternatives, violence, depression, and fear stop being options and become a way of life” (Niehoff, 1999: 187). These neurochemical patterns are implicated not only in cycles of violence but in reduced economic function. It is during the early years of life that neural pathways are laid influencing such critical matters as whether or not we are venturesome and creative, whether we can work harmoniously with peers or only take orders from above, whether we are flexible or rigid in our responses to challenges, and whether or not we are able to resolve conflicts nonviolently. People can and do change throughout life. But the early years are critical. If we are to have an adequate workforce for the postindustrial age, empathic and effective early caregiving must be given much more economic support. This in turn requires more support for women and massive efforts to end violence and abuse against women, as women are still the main caretakers of children. The Failure to Protect Women and Children The failure to protect women and children from abuse and violence is sometimes justified by rhetoric about noninterference in the private or family sphere. This is why the distinction I have proposed between personal and family rights is critical (Eisler 1987b, 1992). Clearly a person's right to make certain private decisions should be free from governmental interference. But that is not the same as immunizing family decisions – or more specifically, the decisions of those who wield power in a family, from public scrutiny and regulation. Protection of personal rights is not synonymous with noninterference in actions within the family. In fact, there often is a direct conflict between the two. Another familiar argument against "outside interference" in family affairs is that the family is the repository of traditional religious and/or cultural values with which neither laws nor governments, much less international agencies, should be permitted to interfere. But once again, if we go beneath the rhetoric to the realities and re-examine what is at stake, we see that the issue is not so much preserving religious or cultural traditions, but of preserving those traditions that maintain a particular form of familial and social organization. We also see that from the very beginning it has been precisely the re-examination – and rejection – of cultural and/or religious traditions that has fueled the modern movement for human rights and democracy. The whole basis of the modern human rights and democracy movements is the rejection of autocratic cultural traditions backed up by fear and force. The autocratic rule of kings was once justified, and staunchly defended, by religious authorities that claimed that kings and other "noblemen" have a divinely ordained right to rule. It was also defended by secular philosophers such as Edmund Burke – who argued that the doctrine of "the rights of man would lead to the utter subversion, not only of all government, in all modes, but all stable securities to rational freedom, and all the rules and principles of morality itself." This kind of rhetoric is all too familiar, as it is still in our time used to oppose "women's rights" and "children's rights" by some religious authorities and secular writers who claim women's and children's rights are subversive of the moral order, a threat to family and social stability, and a violation of tradition. This cry against interference within ethnic and/or religious traditions is even raised to defend genital mutilation. Due to the challenge by women's rights advocates around the world, some national leaders have condemned such practices, and a few international human rights organizations have also taken a stand. But to date no major religious leader has taken a strong stand against this barbaric form of torture. Instead, some religious leaders still speak of the practice as an important cultural tradition. Of course, every institutionalized behavior, including cannibalism and slavery, is a cultural tradition. Surely no one today would dare to justify cannibalism or slavery (which were once also traditional practices in some cultures) on cultural or traditional grounds. In is high time that the traditions of intimate violence against women and children be recognized for what they are: brutal practices to exert control through the infliction or fear of pain. It is also high time that this issue receives political as well as moral condemnation worldwide, if not for the sake of those directly affected, then because the connections between intimate and international violence today threaten us all. A Call to Action With the specter of biological or nuclear terrorism and warfare hanging over us, we must build solid foundations for cultures of peace by making enduring changes in customs, religious traditions, and public policies that condone and even support intimate violence. It should be enough to say that intimate violence must stop because of the horrible damage it causes to the millions of children and women directly affected. But it has not been enough. Nor has it been enough to point to the massive economic and social costs of this violence, even though this too has been extensively documented. It is not easy to challenge traditions, even when they are inhuman. It is often unpopular, and can sometimes be dangerous, since domination and violence in intimate and intergroup relations are encoded in some religious and ethnic traditions But if we do not address these cornerstones of violence and abuse, we will not have the foundations for a more equitable, peaceful, and sustainable future. Surely, if the connection between intimate violence and international violence becomes better understood, more will finally be done to end this terrible worldwide human scourge. The purpose of the Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence (SAIV) is to bring the link between intimate and international violence to the attention of policy makers and the public at large. Since the majority of people are religious, SAIV brings together spiritual leaders, both well-known and grass-roots, to spread the message that intimate violence will no longer be condoned. Religious leaders have moral authority. Their authority must be used to help end the epidemic of intimate violence that blights, and often takes, the lives of so many women and children, and that, unabated, will continue to undermine all efforts to create a more peaceful and just world. Intimate violence and international violence are as tightly bound together as the fingers of a clenched fist. Only if we vigorously oppose intimate violence and abuse, and teach relations based on mutual respect and caring rather than violence and domination in intimate relations, will we have the foundations for cultures of peace, as intimate violence provides a basic model for using force to impose one’s will. Riane Eisler is best known for her bestseller The Chalice and The Blade, translated into 20 languages including Chinese, Spanish, Russian, and Japanese, and the award-winning Tomorrow’s Children, applying her research to education, and The Power of Partnership, a guidebook for individual and social transformation. A constitutional law expert and attorney in family law practice prior to her work as a cultural historian and evolutionary systems scientist, Dr. Eisler is President of the Center for Partnership Studies and lectures worldwide. She taught at the University of California, is a founding member of the General Evolution Research Group, a fellow of the World Business Academy, co-founder of the Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence, and a member of the World Commission on Global Consciousness and Spirituality. She can be reached at center@partnershipway.org.
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For further readings, see the following books and articles by Riane Eisler:
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The
mission of the Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence is
to stop the global pandemic of intimate violence that blights
the lives of millions and is a training ground for the violence
of war, terrorism, political repression, and crime. This is a
background paper. Please use it to dialogue with friends and
colleagues, to send letters to the editor, to engage
organizations you belong to, and for your own writings and
talks.