Battle Cries. Hillary Potter
from a Black feminist criminological standpoint, the concept of dynamic resistance allows for Black women to be viewed collectively, as well as individually, particularly since there is diversity among Black women. Collectively, these women share similar experiences with racism or colorism, sexism, sexualization, and classism from society at large and within the Black community. Individually, the women experience various levels and forms of discrimination, domination, and abuse. They resist this discrimination, domination, and abuse using similar methods as well as personal, distinct strategies.
In summary, the women who opened up their lives to me embraced the Strong Black Woman identity and rarely considered the risks of embracing this identity. Most were familiar with the Strong Black Woman concept starting early in life, and all came to exhibit the characteristics of the Strong Black Woman by adulthood. A strongly positive attribute of this concept is that the women reveled in their ability to endure the many forces of domination and the consequential tribulation that consumed their lives as Black women. However, by living by the code that “Black woman” is synonymous with “Strong Black Woman,” they did not easily place themselves in a central position in their own lives. Children, boyfriends and husbands (both abusive and nonabusive), extended family, work, community or religious obligations, and maintenance of the home were placed at the forefront of their existence. The women often put their well-being on indefinite hold or considered their personal interests only after they had cared for the needs of their families. This was even the case for the small number of women who had no children; they spoke of caring for their mothers who were in abusive relationships, providing assistance with childcare of younger siblings, or attending to the needs of battering boyfriends.
The theoretical concept of dynamic resistance effectively takes into consideration not only battered Black women’s personal experiences with violence and abuse but their assigned “place” in society and the ensuing struggles resulting from life chances based on the intertwined statuses of race, gender, sexuality, and, often, socioeconomic class. The resistance that battered Black women in the United States display is due to both perceived and real beliefs about Black women’s strength, particularly in comparison with the perceived strength of White women and battered White women. The women in this study presumed that White women remained in abusive relationships longer, relied on batterers more, did not talk or fight back as much, and were not as strong as Black women. In fact, some of their presumptions have been supported by academic investigation. The women’s deductions were based on their own struggles as Black women in a White, male-dominated society that leads to their best being recognized as resisters against all forms of oppression. Indisputably, their resistance was dynamic in every sense of the word.
4 Surviving Childhood “I Learned to Stand up for Myself”
Medea endured a distressing childhood filled with abandonment and mental abuse by her parents. She did not feel that she fit in anywhere, whether it was in her home among her family or at school with her peers. As a result, Medea acknowledged, “I learned to stand up for myself.” Medea’s poor treatment by several of her family members left an indelible mark on her and, in retrospect, helped her understand how she came to be in abusive relationships and her resulting responses to the intimate partner abuse:
Using my relationship with my father as a filter, I could understand why I made the choices I made. But I also had to understand that I couldn’t continue to make those choices and the only person who could help me be whole was me. And I could get to that place, but I could not depend on having a relationship with men to get me to that place. I had to look at my life and fix what was wrong, the same as if I had a health issue. Ultimately it would be up to me.… You have to co-create the life you want.
Medea was a spirited child in spite of the neglect and isolation she suffered. Even though she found herself in a number of abusive intimate relationships during adulthood, during childhood Medea visualized her life beyond her depraved youth: “I felt like the world was bigger than that small space. I was kind of doing time.”
At the beginning of this project, I expected that, like Medea, many of the women would have childhood experiences riddled with abuse and neglect. This was indeed a sad reality, as most of the women had suffered from an extensive assortment of abusive experiences during their formative years. Taking into account all forms of exposure to abuse and violence, 33 of the 40 women underwent some type of introduction to violence during their childhood. They experienced abuse from parents, witnessed intimate partner abuse among parents, witnessed other acts of abuse and violence, and exhibited destructive behaviors. To be sure, I do not suggest that battered women cause their abuse because of their abusive backgrounds, but I do wish to move toward determining the significance of the link between childhood trauma and entry into abusive relationships and to enlighten the field of interpersonal violence regarding factors that determine these women’s reactions to intimate partner abuse. These experiences helped the women to develop at an early age their dynamic resistance as Black women in a society based in racial, gender, and class inequities.
Individuals who have been the target of intimate partner abuse have often experienced some form of abuse or violence during their upbringings, although this is not necessarily an antecedent to their being in abusive intimate relationships as adults. Researchers on intimate partner abuse have found that experience with violence in the family of origin often begets future family violence.1 That is, if an individual is raised in a violent and abusive home, some existing research maintains that she or he often learns violence and abuse as a normal event or appropriate response. Further, some scholars have reported that battered women raised in violent family homes are stymied in their ability to recognize warning signs that an intimate partner is abusive.2 These types of reasoning and findings are based on the concept of social learning theory.3 But Patricia Tjaden and Nancy Thoennes warn that this link may also be explained by differences in individuals’ propensity to disclose their experiences in surveys, because “it is possible that respondents who reported one type of victimization (e.g., child maltreatment) were simply more willing to report other types of victimization (e.g., intimate partner violence).”4
Although these prior discoveries on the abusive childhoods reported by many battered women are related to the accounts presented in this chapter, additional investigation based on dynamic resistance must be included when addressing issues of battered Black women specifically. Family dynamics within Black culture, as well as societal pressures outside the family unit, must be given considerable attention in any examination of battered Black women and their childhoods. This is concluded and proposed by Gail E. Wyatt and her colleagues, who have reported that “[f]ew studies have examined associations between domestic violence and exposure to current or past crimes and injustices in one’s home or community.… [T]here is little empirical documentation of the types of early experiences that may better predict risks for domestic violence among African American women.”5
Childhood Abuse
Twenty-three of the women in my study experienced a form of verbal, mental, nonsexual physical, or sexual abuse during childhood. Perpetrators of these methods of abuse included parents, stepparents, siblings, other relatives, and acquaintances. To better facilitate the analytic presentation of abuse during childhood, I have separated sexual abuse (9 women) from verbal, mental, or nonsexual physical abuse (20 women); the perpetrators of the latter were parents or stepparents,6 whereas those who committed the sexual abuse had a greater variety of relationships to the women. These two categories will be discussed separately. Although the women shared stories of neglectful behaviors by those outside their close relations, such as schoolteachers, their most painful, abusive, and noteworthy accounts involved the people they most trusted, who eroded that trust by employing abusive behaviors. This is not to devalue the effect of community- and societal-level violations but serves to place the focus here on interpersonal violation. Accordingly, the abuse addressed here is that committed by parents, other relatives, and family friends.
Verbal and mental abuse of children refers to abuse that degrades, insults, and humiliates for the purpose of denigrating a child’s self-worth and for which the intention is not to offer constructive criticism. There is a view, based on widely held perceptions of Blacks, that Black children suffer