YOUTH, SEXUAL JEALOUSY AND ABUSE

By Terri Stein
Young People's Press

Rosemary Gartner is Director of the Centre for Criminology at the University of Toronto. Her cross-national studies of homicide are frequently cited by researchers around the world. In 1997, she co-authored, "Woman Killing: Intimate Femicide in Ontario 1991-1994"

Experts on the topic of woman abuse come in a virtual rub-a-dub-dub of professions. Women's advocates, police, lawyers, doctors, policymakers and academics. Having come across a statistic that badly needed an explanation, I decided to speak with an academic about the subject.

It was this: The rate of wife assault among young women 18-24 years of age is four times the national average. This number is drawn from a 1993 Statistics Canada report called, Violence Against Women Survey. Dr. Rosemary Gartner was a contributing researcher for that report.

I met Rosemary Gartner deep in the middle of a January cold snap. The wind bore down from the North and the snow itself was frozen, the way it can be on truly cold days. We met in her big, warm office on the University of Toronto campus. This tall, friendly woman in black had slipped on the ice, she explained, as she limped over from her desk to the sitting area, and then lowered herself carefully into the other armchair.

She cut straight to the chase, "Young women are typically going to be hanging out with young men," she says. "And young men are the people most likely to be involved in any kind of violence."

Apparently, young men represent the group most likely to use violence to resolve conflicts in their lives. They may strike out against other men or against women, especially those they are emotionally involved with. I guess when it comes down to it, people aren't really all that complicated.

It seems like such a simple, obvious answer. But this isn't the X-files. So what then is the most common scenario for relationship violence?

"A male assaulting a female because she has indicated she's leaving him,'' Gartner responds emphatically. "Or, he suspects, oftentimes wrongly, that she's having an affair or cheating on him."

Why are young men so afraid of being left behind?

"In part, just because there's more turnover in those relationships. So, in other words, because of the greater exchange in partners at that age, and what some people call 'male sexual proprietariness', they may be feeling that more. Because women are, in fact, changing partners more."

This response really struck home. I've had lots of long conversations over coffee with girlfriends about what do you do with a jealous boyfriend. I remember one friend telling me that after a night out with friends her boyfriend was livid because he had seen her playing 'footsie' with another man. She hadn't, but his jealousy was so intoxicating that it had actually caused him to hallucinate.

"It sounds like a B-movie," Gartner comments. "But the number of times, in these hundreds and hundreds of cases that the men are heard to say, 'If I can't have them no one else can' (is remarkable)."

Most of us girls have learned that the threat of losing his partner can be emotionally overwhelming to a young man. But if that threat starts to become a reality, it may lead him to exert whatever control he can to keep his "girl."

"They've tried whatever they could to keep the woman there, and so it's the resource of last resort," she explains. "When they can't use their charm, or their looks, or their money, or other things, it's physical coercion. And sometimes we know that works. Sometimes women do stay with abusive men because they are terrified."

I ask Dr. Gartner if this means that young women are safer with older men.

"One of the studies of homicide has shown that the highest risk is to be a young bride with an older husband," she responds.

Dr. Gartner explains that evolutionary-psychologists refer to this phenomenon with the phrase, "The older the male partner, the greater the loss." And, sadly, they suggest that competition among men for an eighteen-year old woman is much steeper than it is for a forty-eight year old woman. So, if an older man loses a very young partner, he may feel that the odds of attracting another one are against him.

I admit it. I'm confused. I thought the risk for abuse comes from young men?

"This seems to run counter to the claim that women are at greater risk because they're hanging out with young men," Gartner concedes. "But I think they're not contradictory. Both can be going on. And the greater the age gap, where the man is older, the greater the risk to women."

Is it possible that young women are experimenting with all sorts of different kinds of relationships, the good, the bad, and the ugly, I enquire. Could this be influencing the numbers we've talked about?

"That's an interesting speculation," she says. "It's certainly consistent with what else we know about risk-taking behaviours in young women. They, like young men, are more likely to engage in risky behaviour. And find risky behaviours attractive An older woman might read this as, 'Bah, this is the last thing I want. You know, I don't need it.' Taking risks becomes less attractive over time. Even biological studies show the way people's physiology responds to risk changes over time."

So we have the age of the partner, sexual jealousy, and attraction to risk behaviour all contributing to the likelihood that a young woman will be abused by her partner. Are there any other ingredients in this nasty soup, I ask.

Dr. Gartner sighs. "For some younger women, [abusive behaviour] conveys to them that the guy really loves themhow deeply he feels about them," she explains. "There is, of course, a lot of political baggage, or a lot of contention around research that looks at the psychology of abused women."

One of the great values of interviewing professors is their tolerance for the half-baked question. Here it is. I ask Dr. Gartner, what makes research like that contentious?

"Because the assumption is that you're bordering on victim-blaming," she states. "You're saying there's something about these women that gets them abused. Rather than, every woman's at risk and it's the man."

She explains that research into domestic violence has changed over the years to reflect this concern. "Twenty-five, thirty years ago, until relatively recently a lot of the research was a lot of the personality testing trying to determine whether [abused women] have lower self-esteem, or whether they had masochistic personalities. The problem with that research is that you don't know what their state of mind was, their personality was, before they were abused. And so you don't know whether the abuse has made any of the effects that you're seeing."

Is there anything that can be done to reduce the incidents of woman abuse among the 18-24 set, I ask her.

"I think certainly educational campaigns are useful. The likelihood that a particular abusive man is going to be changed by education, I think, is nil. I think what education does, in the long run, is cause slow cultural changes. So it's not that I think that if we just have educational programs for abusive men that they'll suddenly go, 'Oh yes, this is wrong! And it is victimisation!'"

Eradicating woman abuse requires a radical cultural shift in the way men understand their intimate relationships with women. Change like that takes a very long time, but - and maybe I'm being hopeful - I sense we are already beginning to see it happen.

"I do think younger men now think about abuse and violence against women differently than they thought about it years ago," says Gartner. "I don't think men feel they can any longer joke about it in the locker room with their friends."

Good. That sounds promising, but it won't help my friend who's suffering at the hands of her partner today. These changes might not even come about quickly enough to guarantee me that if I gave birth to a daughter any time soon, that she will not grow up and be a victim of woman abuse.

"We tend to want quick fixes," says Dr. Gartner. "We tend to want the change in the law, the electronic bracelet, something that's going to turn things around immediately. But we can't control people's investment behaviour. We can't control whether they're going to sell the stocks, or buy the stocks, and that's why we can't predict the stock market. Now, that's very rational behaviour. Well, it's supposed to be, who knows whether it really is. But it presumably has a more rational component than does assaultive behaviour. And so why should we assume that we can predict assaultive behaviour, or control it, any more than we can control people's investment decisions?"

The interview is winding down. Does this mean that all we can do is sit back and wait, I ask her.

"I don't think that means we need to be fatalistic about it," she retorts. "But I do think it means that we shouldn't have expectations for immediate changes that are unrealistic, which can then often lead to people saying, 'Well, obviously you can't do anything about these guys. So the only solution is to lock them up and throw away the key.'"

Crossing the campus homeward I think about what I was learning about the private lives of the young men I saw breathing into their jacket collars for warmth, the young women shouldering knapsacks, and the couples holding hands. To all appearances, they looked happy and confident as they hurried on their ways through the cold.

Terri Stein is an editor at Young People's Press.