Most leaders and the press view violence against women and children as just “a women’s issue” or “a children’s issue” – in their minds, a secondary issue. But it’s not only that millions of women and children are victims of violence in their homes every year; the fact is that intimate violence provides a basic model for using force to impose one’s will on others.
When children either experience or observe violence against their mothers in their homes, they learn that it’s ok, even “moral,” to use violence to impose one’s will on others. This is why throughout history, the most violently despotic and warlike societies 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 vividly in many regions of the world that have spawned terrorists, regions where women and children are literally terrorized into submission. But the link between intimate violence and political violence is not limited to so-called “religious fundamentalists.” It was present in the European Middle Ages, in Hitler’s Germany, and in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Neither is it coincidental that in the U.S. today those pushing “crusades” against “evil enemies” oppose equal rights for women and advocate harshly punitive childrearing.
The time has come for progressive leaders to make ending violence against women and children a top priority. The good news is that the United Nations is recognizing that violence against women and children as the most ubiquitous human rights violation worldwide. Another piece of good news is that the issue of “domestic violence ” – that is, beating of women by men who say they love them – is also gaining world attention, and though more slowly, so are the sexual mutilation of girls that is practiced in many parts of Africa and the Middle East, the bride burning still common in parts of India, the global sexual slave trade, and other horrible human rights violations.
Yet many customs and public policies still condone the subordination of women and support, and even promote, intimate violence. If we are serious about social justice and peace, we must give primary attention to the formative gender and parent-child relations. Only through an integrated progressive agenda that takes into account both the personal and public sphere can we build foundations for cultures of peace rather than war.
An initiative I’m passionately involved in is the Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence (www.saiv.net). SAIV brings a strong – unconscionably still missing – moral voice to ending violence against women and children by engaging spiritual and religious leaders to make healing intimate violence a priority. This initiative is one of many we can – and must – support if we are to end intimate terror and create a more peaceful world.
