Gender Justice Roots for Just Conflict

What might it mean for women and men to have deeply intimate and just relationships when, for so much of human history, relationships between men and women have been shaped by dominance, gender inequality, and violence? 

This question arose for me out of thirty years of work in the domestic violence intervention community starting with my role as a volunteer on the staff of one of the first programs in the country to do intervention with men who batter.  This program is RAVEN in St. Louis.  I was the coordinator of counseling services there for over eight years in the 1980’s.

The parent group for RAVEN developed from the planning team for the 4^th National Conference on Men and Masculinity held at Washington University in St. Louis in 1977. That conference brought together men (and some women) who were interested in discovering how our understandings of gender shaped our relationships with other men, with women, and with our children.

The planning group continued to meet after the conference and formed what was first called Brothers in Change but which was later changed to the St. Louis Organization for Changing Men. We were a collective which allowed anyone who completed the training and volunteered at least three hours a week to be a member of the staff and to participate in the consensus decision-making process. That is, anyone who was male. Women were excluded from membership.

The broader organization had multiple goals and activities. There was a monthly public meeting that explored some issue of men’s identity, often through a film and subsequent discussion. There was a group exploring the roles of men as fathers.  And there was what we called the Childcare Collective which provided childcare at women’s events. The intervention program working with men who batter was not originally an activity of the collective. It mostly arose out of a concern to figure out why men would physically assault their women partners. Some of the men on staff had themselves been violent in past relationships.

I took the training to join the staff in the fall of 1979 and started co-leading one of the groups for men who batter in January 1980. In June of 1980 I went to my first National Coalition Against Domestic Violence conference and discovered how controversial our work was. I saw us as allies with the women who work with battered women. It never occurred to me that there would be women who opposed what we were doing. Still I found that I had great respect for the women who were not impressed or encouraged by our work. Their indifference and skepticism gave me a very helpful lens through which to see what we were trying to do.

A central concern for feminism in the 70’s (and which has continued to this day) is the problem of violence against women. Much of the activism of the day was about creating support services for the victims of that violence: victims of rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence. The men who were attracted to Brothers in Change were primarily social activists who wanted to change the world. While we were not welcome to join the women in their work, we envied their zeal and the cohesiveness of their consciousness raising groups.

It was self-evident that the women who were victims were the victims of men. As men, it was our job to address those men, our brothers and at times ourselves, who perpetrated the violence. We saw ourselves as unwilling beneficiaries of men’s violence against women and we committed ourselves to ending it. While we would have enjoyed women’s thanks, it was clear we were not going to get applause for cleaning up the mess we were making.

So the Domestic Violence “Community” was actually two communities. There were the women who worked with women, and the men who worked with men. We didn’t meet together routinely. From time to time there was occasion to each present at the same event and we knew each other socially, but there was a sense that our work was different and that there was little reason to collaborate.

As men we knew that our work depended on the work that women were doing. Indeed, there is no “problem of domestic violence” in those communities where there are no services for battered women. On the other hand women considered that we were at best irrelevant and at worst dangerous. We certainly weren’t going the get the men to change and we might give their partners senseless hope which would lure them back into danger. There was no sense that we men were in a mutual relationship with the women. Some of us felt a sense of justice in this imbalanced relationship. We were atoning for thousands of years of patriarchal violence and oppression.

But by the 90’s the politics started to change. It became more and more important to model gender equality and that meant having men working at rape crisis centers and women co-leading intervention groups for men who batter. As this shift happened it also became more critical that we have a clear notion of what just and equitable relationships between women and men might look like.

This clarity has not emerged in the communities of which I have been a part. We have a pretty clear sense of what we don’t want, but we don’t have a clear vision of what healthy relationships are like. It was my wish to describe just relationships in gender neutral terms that helped prompt me to develop the ideas I present in Just Conflict.

In order to envision what healthy relationships look like in the book we consider the nature of power, kinds of relationships, forms of agreements, and tools to create and recreate accountability. In every instance it is important to take into account the effects of culture on our expectations. Nevertheless, just relationships are not shaped by the demands of gender. We must take seriously the trauma of abuse and discover ways of establishing a radical level of accountability if we are to build relationships which do not mimic the oppression that characterizes much of what is considered normal in this culture.

My personal efforts to answer these questions have resulted in the practical framework which is the vision of Just Conflict.

Rick’s Christmas

A few years back I had a man in my program I will call Rick. He was in his early twenties. He was ordered to complete the Abuse Prevention Program as a consequence of abuse in a relationship with a girlfriend. While in the program he found a new girlfriend. It was a much healthier relationship and Rick was able to understand and apply the principles of Creative Conflict Resolution in that new relationship.

Once a participant completes the Abuse Prevention Class he moves into the Practice Group.  Rick had completed the class months earlier and was addressing well the conflicts in his relationship with his girlfriend, but he had not addressed other conflicts in the group, particularly those at work. He was having trouble staying at a job.  As he interviewed well, he easily found a new one, which he would then again quit in anger.

No one completes the program until they have met all of the goals. Because he was doing so well in his primary relationship, he challenged me on why I was saying he hadn’t completed the program. He wanted to know what he still had to do.

I asked him to identify his five most significant relationships.  This is the first question in the oral final exam for the class.  Rick had heard this question at least twenty times.

Well,” said Rick, “there is my girlfriend, my brother, her mom, her dad…” and he paused thinking if there was anyone else.

“How about your dad?” I asked.

He had told some of his family history months earlier. His dad had gone to prison when Rick was four years old for child abuse. Rick never described what his dad had done to his brother and him. As this event happened nearly twenty years ago it must have been pretty significant. After his dad’s release while Rick was a teenager Rick had trouble in his relationship with his mom and went to live with his dad. That arrangement lasted about a year and a half.

Shortly after Rick entered the program his dad had done something dismissive to Rick’s brother. Rick and his brother were really tight and Rick wasn’t going to let that stand. He went to his father’s shop to confront him. But knowing how his dad is, he tucked a gun in his belt at the small of his back.

Standing in his dad’s office with his dad seated at the desk, Rick began to tell his dad what he thought of him and what he thought he should do. Dad would hear none of it and ordered Rick to leave. Rick became more demanding and Dad opened the top right drawer. He pulled out a gun and waved it at Rick. Rick pulled the gun from his belt and they leveled loaded pistols at each other.

Fortunately neither had the poor judgment to pull the trigger.

Rick knew that his relationship with his dad was an important one for him.  He also knew he wanted to get out of the program so he started paying attention to his feelings about his dad. He was psychologically minded enough to know that he didn’t need to actually talk to his dad to address his issues with his dad.

The first thing he noticed was that he put his dad’s face on every boss he had. As soon as he had a job long enough to begin to feel comfortable in it he started reacting to his boss with the feelings he had towards his dad. Just identifying that allowed him enough distance that he stopped quitting jobs and, because he was actually pretty bright and industrious, he quickly got promoted to a place where he wouldn’t go any higher unless he got his GED. He put his mind to that and a month later passed the test.

It was early September when Rick started to work on his issues with his dad. By mid-October he was working on his GED and by mid-November he had passed it. Just after Thanksgiving he decided that he wanted to talk to his dad. He called him on the phone and, at the end of the nearly two hour conversation, his dad was in tears. They spent a couple of hours together on Christmas and they both enjoyed it.

It is not typical that participants in the program experience this kind of rapid transformation. Rick already knew the principles and had practiced applying them in his relationship with his girlfriend. What is typical is that Rick initially “knew” that he couldn’t positively impact his relationship with his dad. He “knew” that everything that was wrong in the relationship was his dad’s fault. He “knew” he had nothing to gain by even addressing the issues.

What he didn’t know was how powerful he could be in transforming his relationship with his dad simply by changing how he approached him.  When he was able to calmly identify what he needed as qualities in his relationship with his dad, and persistently act in ways that moved to create those qualities, he no longer had to change his dad or be changed by him.  He created an entirely new and healthier relationship.

The Obama Doctrine

I have read and reread President Obama’s lecture to the Nobel Prize committee and distinguished guests upon his award of the Peace Prize.  I find it to be a powerful and important statement, not just of American foreign policy under this President, but of how we as humans might learn to address and resolve conflicts.

I have been working on an essay about the principles of nonviolence Martin Luther King used in his efforts on behalf of civil rights in America so I was especially sensitive to Obama’s references. To have a President, especially one who is increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan, cite King (and Gandhi) as models to follow and to do so in a way that is coherent and carefully considered illuminates the reasons Obama got the award. That he received it saying so many things that so many of his liberal supporters find disagreeable makes it only more remarkable.

I myself didn’t agree with everything he had to say. But my disagreement has mostly to do with his use of the term nonviolence in ways that, while consistent with popular usage, limits the meaning to “a set of tactics appropriate to actions taken by oppressed persons addressing grievances against an authority which is morally sensitive.”  If we limit the term in that way then he is right, it wouldn’t have worked against the Nazis and it won’t work with al Qaeda.

But if we are looking not so much at the tactics as at the philosophy that undergirds it, and think more creatively about how conflicts can be resolved, then we discover some important principles that unite Nonviolence and the Obama Doctrine. Among them:

• We are all connected in a great web of care and concern. What affects one of us affects all of us.
• Passivity or patience in the face of oppression is not only an abandonment of our moral responsibility but is also an invitation to greater violence.
• The road to peace is through a process of relationship building with those with whom we disagree.
• Justice is not simply about the rule of law but is also about the equitable distribution of rights and resources, but such equity is not possible without the rule of law.
• We cannot allow the fact that others abandon righteous behavior to allow us to depart from the values we hold.

These are all examples of the kinds of principles which I hope to celebrate and promote through the promulgation of Creative Conflict Resolution and through Just Conflict.  I welcome your comments.